Evan Fife

Category: Books

  • Crossing to Safety

    By Wallace Stegner

    Crossing to Safety on Amazon

    Review

    Crossing to safety is a book about greatness, chaos, and the fibers that bind people together. It follows the relationship between two couples, Larry and Sally Morgan and Sid and Charity Lang, and the quiet but deep relationship that they develop over decades of friendship. It is a book about what makes life worth living, especially within the bonds of marriage and friendship, and what makes life hard.
    Crossing to Safety impressed me with its juxtaposition of the desire for order and the chaos that consumes life. The two couples started off hopeful for a life filled with meaning, but economic and health setbacks make their goals difficult to attain. Despite this, the lack of order didn’t damage the relationships, if anything, they simply exaggerated the characteristics that were present before. Love, compassion, and industry grew alongside contempt, friction, and control.

    My Favorite Quotes

    xviii

    Largeness is a lifelong matter, you grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn’t, its teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you’re large because you can’t stand to be small.

    pp. 191

    Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.

    You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, wikthin hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

    pp. 98

    Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else – pathway to the stars maybe.

    I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

    pp. 207

    “Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?” I said. “We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.”

    pp. 239

    “… Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.”

  • The Boys in the Boat

    Daniel James Brown

    This is a book about character, connection, and how they interact to create greatness. It tells the story of the 1936 American olympic 8 man crew, and how they grew into one of the greatest crews that has ever rowed. As the book follows the life of the number 2 oar, Joe Rantz, we gain a window into the character of the boys that rowed as they became men.

    I wasn’t expecting this book to be so philosophical, but I appreciated the quotes about character given or inspired by George Pocock. Brown does a fantastic job of illustrating role of physical and mental strength needed to achieve greatness in athletics. From the beginning, the Pocock liked the boys in the boat:

    And it wasn’t just their physical prowess. He liked the character of these particular freshmen. The boys who had made it this far were rugged and optimistic in a way that seemed emblematic of their western roots. They were the genuine article, mostly the products of lumber towns, dairy farms, mining camps, fishing boats, and shipyards. They looked, they walked, and they talked as if they had spent most of their lives out-of-doors. Despite the hard times and their pinched circumstances, they smiled easily and openly. They extended calloused hands eagerly to strangers. They looked you in the eye, not as a challenge, but as an invitation. They joshed you at the drop of a hat. They looked at impediments and saw opportunities. All that, Bolles knew, aded up to a to of potential in a crew, particularly if that crewe got a chance to row in the East. (page 94)

    Their rough lives gave them the strength, the predisposition, to succeed physically, but it was their character, and the bonds that forged as a result of their goodness, that gave them the opportunity to be great. I don’t know if they recognized the significance of their efforts initially, but it was clear that they knew the gravity of what they were attempting to undertake. They started racing for their school, progressed to racing for the west, and ended racing for their nation, and everything that she stands for. And they almost shrank in front of this challenge:

    All along Joe Rantz had figured that he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been added to the boat last, he’d often struggled to master the technical side of the sport, and he still tended tto row erratically. But what Joe didn’t yet know–what he wouldn’t in fact, fully realize until much later, when he and the other boys were becoming old men–was that every boy in the boat felt exactlly the same that summer. Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in teh boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and tht at he might fail the others at any moment. Every one of them was fiercely determined not to let that happen

    In the end, it was this desire, the desire to be one with their crew mates, that brought them to victory. Buy surrendering themselves to the whole, rowing with abandon, and giving everything they had, they overcame seemingly insurmountable odds. While we probably won’t ever row in an olympic level crew, we can still learn from the examples of their characters and heed the call to greatness.

    Get the Boys on the Boat on Amazon

  • Just Mercy

    Brian Stevenson

    Just mercy is a fantastic book about the power of mercy and hope in the face of immense suffering and injustice. Brian Stevenson recounts his experience as a young Harvard law graduate trying to make an impact in the lives of people condemned to die by society for the crimes they did and didn’t commit.

    I was moved by his commitment to a mission that most wouldn’t consider worthwhile to undertake. Why defend those who violated the social contract enough to have their right to life taken from them? Because, as Stevenson concludes, “Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion.” And beyond saying this aphorism, Stevenson fills this books with humanizing stories of the paths that lead his recipients of his mercy to death row.

    At one point, he recounts:

    I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations – over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lves, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst things we’ve ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.

    It’s an interesting concept. We are more than our actions, we have value beyond what we can do or have done. Accepting that is difficult because it’s easy to recognize the humanity in someone who has a character that we can applaud, but it’s not so easy to do that when the person behind the eyes we’re looking into seems to be less than human. It’s the paradox present in the whole book: those who really need and can benefit the most from mercy are those who seem to deserve it the least.

    Yet Stevenson forces us to confront our own biases and recognize the humanity of the marginalized. Recounting tragedy after tragedy, he paints a portrait of a system that unfairly put(s) people on death row, and the lives that his “clients” lead to get where they were. Each story felt like it’s own tragedy, but sown together by the mission of a man seeking to save those people, they shed light on a system that was totally broken. The only way to fix it, is to recognize that we are all broken, and move on.

    Get Just Mercy on Amazon

  • When Breath Becomes Air

    Paul Kalanithi

    Words have a longevity I do not.

    It has been a long time since I’ve read an entire book in one day, but when you read a book this good it’s not like you have a choice.

    This book helped me to understand the weight placed on the shoulders of medical professionals. While simple to understand, implementing the Hippocratic dictum to “do no harm” is incredibly difficult. Dr. Kalanithi’s broad understanding of living meant that “do no harm” extended to all spheres of a patient’s life:

    Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, adn the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.

    Thus, sometimes saving the life of the patient that he served meant recognizing that the life that they once had was already dead. His transition from the idealism of a young medical student to the maturity of a head resident was amazing. He recognized the need to sacrifice, to truly live, in order to have an impact. He recognized that a life worth examining meant dedicating it to communities and people that were around him.

    There is no way I could sum up this book in a single review. But I think that the best attempt was done by Dr. Kalanithi’s widow:

    Paul’s decision to look death in the eye was a testament not just to who he was in the final hours of his life but who he had always been. For much of his life, Paul wondered about death – and whether he could face it with integrity. In the end, the answer was yes.

    I think we can just hope to live like him.

    Get When Breath Becomes Air on Amazon