Happy Day! My German Language Anecdote is Read on German Podcast

Very happy day for me, and I'll jump to the punch line.  A paragraph-long anecdote I wrote in German, about a snowy midnight in Berlin when I suddenly encountered Angela Merkel, was read aloud to an audience of thousands in April 2020. 

How this happened, I'll give a few bullet points of background and then show the anecdote in English.

______

• For several years, Kari Schmidt in Berlin has run a YouTube channel, Easy German,  They now have over 600,000 subscribers and are supported by ads and by the donation service Patreon.  It's a lively series of ten minute videos (in German, with English subtitles) aimed at intermediate German listeners.
• Easy German YouTube homepage here.
• Since 2019, they've added a weekly one-hour German podcast (with hosts Kari and her colleague Manuel and sometimes her colorful Polish husband Janusz) - Easy German Podcast.  The podcasts are edited and are released with transcripts, vocabulary, etc. 
• Easy German Podcast homepage here.
• The all-German conversations are just a bit slowed-down, just a bit clearer-pronounced, to aid learners.
• Under COVID, they've added frequent 15 minute daily updates, chatting, unedited, called Zwischdings (the in-between-things).
• Zwischdings has recently had a regular feature, Merkel Updates, what interesting or amusing noise about the Chancellor there might be.

OK.  Regarding Merkel-Updates, I wrote and sent in a paragraph story in German about an encounter with the Chancellor, a few inches from me, suddenly, on a snowy midnight in 2013.   

My heart nearly stopped when, the next day, a Zwischending was released with the title - "Ein Mercedes im Schnee" - Mercedes in the snow - it had to be my anecdote. 

Kari and Manuel joked they were now getting personal "Merkel News" even from listeners overseas, and introduced mine as "From our listener Bruce in California," and read the whole thing.  They may have corrected a mistake or two as they read, but it was basically what I wrote.  As a life-long German hobbyist, this was a peak experience for me.   

####

The Anecdote

Merkel Anecdote - Merkel in the Snow

I live in California, but in February 2013, I spent a week in Berlin.  One night I saw a rare documentary ("Dresden, Come Together, 13 Februar") at Kino Krokodil, with about 3 in the room.   Another night, I went to a lecture at Deutsches Historisches Museum/DHM by Museum Island.   Walking home at 10 pm, in light snow, up the empty middle of am Kupfergraben.  On my right, a black Mercedes sat quietly.  Less than a meter from me, a woman inside the car on a cell phone.  Merkel!  Our eyes met for a moment, I continued walking in the snow, up the street, to my hotel.

##

Almost exactly as read on the podcast:

Ich lebe in Kalifornien, aber im Februar 2013 habe ich eine Winter-Woche in Berlin verbracht. Eine Nacht, sah ich im Kino Krokodil/Prenzlauerberg einen seltenen Dokumentarfilm (heisst "Dresden, Come Together, 13. Februar") mit ungefähr drei Personen im Raum. An einem anderen Abend besuchte ich einen Vortrag im Deutschen Historischen Museum / DHM bei Museum Island. Um 22 Uhr nach Hotel zu gehen, bei leichtem Schnee ging ich die leere Mitte des am Kupfergrabens Strasse hinauf. Zu meiner LLinken, ein stiller schwarzer Mercedes. Weniger als einen Meter von mir entfernt sitzt eine Frau darin, auf einem Handy. Die Merkel! Unsere Augen trafen sich für einen kurzen Moment, und ich ging weiter im Schnee die Straße entlang zu meinem Hotel.

###

Footnote.  Why I Know German

When I began my pre-med freshman year, at Creighton University, my Jesuit advisor let me know that he understood, if you major in biology or chemistry, it was good to take German.  So my class list included German.   Somewhere along Thanksgiving, I noticed there were 500 students in Chem 1010, 500 in Biology 101, and only one of them in German.   When I transferred to Stanford, I took some more German classes, lived in the German theme dorm, and kept it up in residency in neuropathology.  When a disease was named after a German doctor from the 1880s, I would look up the old German paper and struggle through it.   In the past 5 or 10 years, I've become a Berlin-lover, with multiple weeklong trips, and my German has gotten much better (at age 60!) with the abundance of Youtube videos and podcasts at your fingertips.

Joan Didion Essay Two: From Bishop Pike 1969 to Nob Hill 2020

1969

When I was about ten years old, on a farm in rural Iowa, the magazines we got filled with stories about the death of Bishop James Pike.   I remember them clearly - I may have liked the morbidity of it.   In 1969, Bishop James Pike and his wife rented a car in Israel, drove into the desert, and their car stalled.  They had no water, and of course no radio, and the nearest human lay in an unknown direction and distance.   His wife went on a long, nearly hopeless hike for help, and was rescued.  Pike, a lifelong chain-smoker in weaker health, waited for some period, then walked, and died from a fall and from dehydration.

Didion 

I remembered this story, but had never looked it up as an adult.   In March 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I booted up the audiobook of Joan Didion's The White Album.  Didion is famous for her essays on California in the 60's and 70's.   In The White Album, in the chapter "American Republic," she tells the story of Pike.

For Didion, Pike was one of the great charlatans, narcissists, and self-promoters of his era.

Born in 1913, he was raised on the East Coast, then in Los Angeles, and darted around several colleges (the Jesuit University of Santa Clara, then USC and UCLA) before ending up in law school at Yale in 1938.   After working for the Securities and Exchange Commission, he showed up in Divinity School.  His ascent was fast - to St John the Divine in New York City, and quickly thereafter Bishop of California, seated at Grace Cathedral at the top of Nob Hill.  Pike was on the front edge of every social issue, while for an Episcopalian leader he developed far-off-the-chart theological views (he doubted "The Trinity").  One biographical article noted he recovered from alcoholism through AA and spoke highly of twelve-step programs.   He was booted out of his Grace Cathedral post by about 1966. 

Didion's essay on Pike leaves little room for sympathy, at least from Didion.  In Israel in 1969. he was only 56, but was with his third wife, nearly thirty years younger. 

Nob Hill 2020

I work in biotechnology consulting, partly where I live in Los Angeles and partly in my San Francisco office, at WeWork, at the Golden Gate Theater building, at Sixth and Market.  This is the edge, or closer than the edge, of the Tenderloin.  When I am there on Wednesdays, it is about a fifteen minute walk northbound up Taylor Street from Sixth and Market, past the Union Square area, and to the peak of Nob Hill.   In only a few minutes, this walk takes you from where $1 is a lot of money, to where $1M is a typical point of discussion.   On Nob Hill, you have the Huntington Hotel and the Mark Hopkins, and the magnificent Grace Cathedral, an edifice that stands high and glorious like Westminster or Notre Dame.  In the quadrangle, which reminds you of an Oxford cloister, on Wednesdays at 630 pm there is an AA meeting of about fifty people.   I wonder now if it has been there since the Bishop Pike held the pulpit on Sundays, in the kaleidoscopic city of San Francisco in the 1960s.

_____

The LA Times on Joan Didion - December 2021 - here.


 

Joan Didion Essay One: Joshua Wolf Shenk and the LaGuardia Shuttle

(Disclaimer - this short essay is based on my memory of reading The Opposite of Cool in the collection Slouching Towards Los Angeles, not on direct quotes from the essay.)

In March of 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I read the new book of essays about LA and about Joan Didion - Slouching Toward Los Angeles (entry point here, Amazon here.)  I love Los Angeles - I came here in 1990 for four years at age 30, met my wife here, and we moved back permanently in 2003.   I also love knowing details here - this is where Mae West lived, this is where Buster Keaton's studio was, this is how you take the subway to the light rail to Pasadena, this is where Joan Didion lived on Franklin Avenue, near the beautiful Runyon Canyon hiking park, currently closed due to COVID.

For me, the most wonderful moment in reading Slouching Towards Los Angeles came in an essay by Joshua Wolf Shenk.  Shenk is an author who's lived in New York, and Los Angeles, and eventually settled in Las Vegas (website here, Twitter here).

In 2005, Shenk had published his first book, and was at LaGuardia for the shuttle to Boston, where he was giving a book reading at Harvard Square in a few hours.  The person in line ahead of him was - Joan Didion.   She was going to Boston to talk about "The Year of Magical Thinking," her book on the death of her husband and its aftermath.   Shenk struck up a conversation.   He gave his own talk that evening, and one of the organizers there was on her way to the Didion talk nearby, and Shenk went along.  Afterward, the line for autographs from Didion was very long, and Shenk asked the assistant to help get his own signed copy. 

A few days later, the copy arrived in New York, To Josh, From Joan Didion - followed by a completely illegible scrawl.   Shenk returned to the page again and again, and the extra words eluded him.

Time goes on, and Shenk is teaching a college class on literature and highlights the idea that every author has some keynote, some motife or theme, through all their work.   For Didion, the class decided, it was specificity of place.   It's not John Roberts in LA, it's John Roberts, driving his light blue BMW down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  It's not going to church - it's going to church at St. John the Martyr, on Pine street, where it meets Sixth Street on the corner with the big oak tree.

Suddenly, as the class continues, Shenk opens the front page of the Didion book and the autograph is legible for the first time.  It is, "To Josh, From Joan Didion, from the shuttle."


___

The LA Times on Joan Didion, December 2021, here.
 

An Amazing College Commencement Speech - How It's Brought to Life

Surfing on YouTube, I ran across a really amazing and relevant college graduation speech from the 1960s - and I add some thoughts on different forms of media conveying the "same information."

##

To start with, the index event for me was finding a 13 minute YouTube video in which Irish actor Andrew Scott reads "Choose One of Five" - a commencement address, largely forgotten, at a small Illinois college in 1965.   It's jaw-droppingly good.

See the video here.

Scott is a well-established theater actor who's also known for his television roles in BBC/Sherlock and Fleabag.  He presents "Choose One of Five" slowly - it's 13 minutes long (the speech is only 1300 words). 

The speech itself, although it's fifty years old and (as far as I can tell) nearly forgotten, is stunningly contemporary.  Except for a phrase or two, "Choose One of Five" could have been written today. You can see the written speech here.

Who Wrote It?

The speech was presented at Illinois State College in Naperville on May 30, 1965.

The speaker was Edith Sampson, who had a remarkable life (Wikipedia here.)  Living from 1898-1979, she overcome many barriers and adversities to eventually go to law school, be admitted to the bar (another series of barriers), and by the 1950s become a judge in Chicago.   In the 1950s she was also part of the US delegation to the United Nations.   Read more about her here as well.

Why Do We Know About It Today?

Islington is the borough of London just north of central London.  There you'll find the Almeida Theatre, which has an active website and active YouTube channel.

One of the series at the Almeida is "Figures of Speech," where top British actors (such as Scott, and Ian McClellan) present usually not-too-well-known speeches from history.    Somehow, Choose One of Five was selected as a pivotal historical speech, for this series. 

See the YouTube home of Almeida Theater here.  The Figures of Speech homepage is here (lengthy; scroll downward).

Insights

The speech is jaw-dropping, I think, as presented by Andrew Scott.   I was in the process of sending both the speech (link) and the video (link) to a friend, and I stopped to read the speech more slowly.

Here's the insight - The speech on paper is good; it must be; it's the text and the ideas.   But I probably wouldn't have even read the whole thing had I not had seen the text brought into life by the actor.   Once you've seen the actor's work, you can't re-read it without seeing and feeling the power of the speech and its ideas.

###

January 2024, a Chat GPT 4 interpretation.

Edith Simpson's 1965 commencement speech, "Choose One of Five," can be perceived as moving and inspiring for several reasons:

Relatability and Timelessness: The speech addresses a universal and timeless theme – the choices we make in life after achieving a milestone, such as graduation. This is a relatable subject for anyone who has faced or will face a turning point in their life.

Provocative Choices: The five choices Simpson presents range from apathy and conformity to intellectual engagement and social involvement. These choices force the listener to reflect on their own life path and the societal norms they might unconsciously follow. The stark contrast between the ease of conforming and the challenges of continuous learning and engagement is thought-provoking.

Critique of Conformity and Apathy: Simpson's critique of conformity (choices one and two) and her satirical tone when describing them can be inspiring as they challenge the audience to think critically about the passive acceptance of societal norms and the dangers of intellectual stagnation.

Encouragement of Continuous Learning and Self-Improvement: Choices four and especially five emphasize continuous learning, self-improvement, and active engagement with the world. This advocacy for a life of intellectual curiosity and social responsibility resonates with listeners who value personal growth and societal contribution.

Emphasis on Individuality and Moral Courage: The fifth choice, which Simpson finds most challenging yet rewarding, advocates for maintaining one's individuality, moral courage, and the pursuit of knowledge. This call to be one's "unique best self" and to engage thoughtfully with the world is particularly inspiring as it encourages personal integrity and social responsibility.

The Speech's Context and Simpson's Own Life: Knowing Edith Simpson's background – a trailblazer in law and public service – adds weight to her words. Her accomplishments as a woman in fields dominated by men during her time exemplify the principles she advocates in her speech, making her message more powerful and authentic.

In summary, the speech's moving and inspiring nature lies in its call to introspection, critical thinking, and active engagement with the world, coupled with Simpson's own life as a testament to these values.

"Germany's Master Plan" (1943, Borkin, Welsh, Thurman Arnold) vis-a-vis "China Rx" (Gibson, 2018)

Somehow I ran across the podcast series Pandemic - which is part of the longstanding Stephen K. Bannon podcast War Room - maybe after an appearance by Bannon on Bill Maher on February 14.

Within the Pandemic series - about coronavirus - they had author Rosemary Gibson, who I learned wrote a 2018 book called "China Rx" about the high proportion of drugs that either come from China or are synthesized from chemical backbones made in China.   Similarly, this weekend Washington Post highlights the dependence of US hospital masks on China suppliers, in a WaPo article about the one remaining US mask manufacturer (here) - a topic featured a couple days earlier on Bannon.

The story of China monopolizing drug manufacturer and mask manufacturer reminded me of a much earlier book, "Germany's Master Plan: The Story of an Industrial Offensive," published in 1943 by Borkin and Welsh and with an introduction by Thurman Arnold.

Germany's Master Plan has slipped into the sands of history - it has one (and negative) review on Amazon.  While that Amazon reviewer says that Borkin and Welsh published a "biased interpretation of the facts," surely a lot of the facts are real and for me it was a fascinating read.

Also, the point of the Borkin's book about German industry in the 1930s clearly has parallels to Gibson's main point about the Chinese pharma industry in the 2020's.

You can get second-hand copies of Germany's Master Plan for as little as $4 on Amazon. You can also find the whole text free online.

Some resources for Germany's Master Plan:

• $4 up on Amazon, here.
• Contemporary 1943 review at Foreign Affairs, here.  
• (Access with contemporary subscription to Foreign Affairs.)
• Contemporary 1943 review at Journal of Political Economy, here.
• (View page 1 of a longer review.)
• Contemporary 1943 review at JAMA (!), paragraph review, here.
• Full free text in multiple formats at Archive.org here.
• Text, PDF, Kindle format, etc.

The brief reviewer at JAMA wrote, 

Long before the beginning of World War II, German industry had been endeavoring to set up a system for worldwide control over electrical equipment, drugs, chemicals and basic war materials. Many of the facts regarding this system of control are here made available by writers who have been in intimate touch with the investigations on the subject. Joseph Borkin was for many years economic adviser to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Some of the facts regarding the relationship of the German drug industry to some portions of the American drug industry will come as revelations to American readers and indicate the need for control over international agreements of this type in the future.

Encounters with M. Emmett Walsh

Although I first saw this actor in a movie back in 1985 in Portland, OR, I had several unexpected and memorable encounters with the legendary character actor M. Emmett Walsh in the past few weeks.

Cameo in Knives Out

The now-84-year-old actor has a cameo role in the holiday suspense/comedy movie Knives Out, where he plays an elderly security guard in charge of a grainy surveillance video that the plot hinges on.

That led me to download a copy of the first film I saw him in, the Coen Brothers' first film Blood Simple, a dark indie classic from the mid-80's that glitters with stabs of comedy.   I saw Blood Simple (and I can recall the theater and the girlfriend of the time) in the middle of my medical school years, during the year I lived and did research in Portland, OR.  The Coens' went on to bigger hits like Fargo.

Podcast with Gilbert Godfried

What makes this worth writing about, around the same time these past weeks, I stumbled on a podcast series that has been running several years by the eccentric comedian Gilbert Godfried, where he interviews ... very old celebrities (Dick Cavett, Buck Henry, Emmett Walsh....), what they jokingly call the "they haven't died yet" podcast.    It's called Gilbert Godfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - here.   He interviewed Walsh a couple years ago. 

Three Quotes

Walsh was born in 1935 and was raised in far upstate Vermont, and attended Clarkson University, graduating in 1958.  He had a degree in business administration.   His filmography begins ten years later, in 1969-70, with a small roles in "Alice's Restaurant," "Midnight Cowboy,"  "Little Big Man," and "Cold Turkey."

Although he looks his age, perhaps deliberately playing-frail in Knives Out, Walsh is wonderfully sharp and articulate in his podcast interview (May 2018).

Here's the first memorable quote from the Godfried interview.  He had majored in business, and taken accouting classes, which he was very proud of, and he said it gave him a big advantage in his life as an actor, because he was always able to manage money and income-average, handling the cash that came in spurts of activity, which he observed most of his actor colleagues did not manage well.  He was very proud of his business classes in college, and attributed much of his working success as an actor to them.

The second memorable quote is that thanks to his college classes in business, he always understood his place as a character actor.   "When I walk into that audition," he said, "The casting director has twelve problems.  If I can fit that role for him, then he only has eleven problems.   That's my role in getting the movie made. Period." 

The third memorable quote we hear in the voice of one of his characters, in a movie of his I'd never heard of, the little-known 2007 film Christopher Plummer, "Man in the Chair."  Plummer plays a washed-up forgotten director and Walsh a sad, washed-up screenwriter, who are brought together and given a purpose when a cocky high school kid needs them to help him make a student film. 

Walsh delivers this quote beautifully:  "The film industry is a money trench, where thieves and pimps run free down plastic hallways and where good men die like dogs."   (pause)  "There's also a negative side."    The quote is from Hunter S. Thompson.

###

I also recall Walsh from his comic role as a crazed assassin in Steve Martin's The Jerk (1979), his role in the Coen Brothers' comedy Raising Arizona (1987) and as the AA sponsor in the Michael Keaton movie Clean and Sober (1988). 

Although I discovered Godfried's long-running podcast series just recently, in 2019 there was also a full length documentary about Gilbert Godfried himself - here.

BOOKS AND FILMS - CY2019

For my business strategy blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, click here.

For earlier book lists, see 2015 here, 2016 here, 2017 here, 2018 here.

PDF of this blog in the cloud - here.

Technology and Business

  Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and their Lasting Impact.  Vaclav Smil.

  Fifty Inventions that Shaped the Modern Economy.  Tim Hartford.

  Getting (More Of) What You Want: Secrets of Economics and Psychology.  Margaret Neale, Thomas Z.Lys.

Smil has the theme that the most profound and impactful inventions of 1700-2000 were mostly born in a few decades in the late 1800's.  (See similarly Northwestern's Robert J Gordon.)   It takes some twisting to get there - for example, he pegs the discovery of something to those years, such as the airplane (Kitty Hawk in 1903 fits his epoch of peak industrial discoveries, with the 747 just a later development!)  Despite this logical yoga he pulls off, I found it an interesting read.  Names we know as nouns from science class - Ohm, Joules - made discoveries that at the time were absolutely pivotal to the creation or evolution of things like electric motors.  And discovering nearly everything as hard - Edison's lightbulb was tied up in patent wars for 20 years, and Diesel's invention of the oil engine got so bogged down during commercialization that Diesel committed suicide.  

A breezier book is Fifty Inventions, with a deliberately eclectic cornucopia of topics, from "The Plow" to "Barbed Wire" to "The Bar Code" in short chapters.   (If you like this, one of my very favorite books of recent years was Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now, with six topics; also a PBS series).  

Getting (More Of) is one of hundreds of books on negotiating, but I found it an entertaining and worthwhile read on an airplane this year.

  

Biography From The White House Today

   Anthony Scaramucci, Trump, the Blue-Collar President

   George Sorial, The Real Deal 

   Chris Christie,  Let Me Finish:  Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey

   Genl. James Mattis, Call Sign Chaos

I'm back and forth from home in Hollywood to Washington twice a month, and buzzed through these on some of the redeye flights.  Scaramucci is probably the most entertaining, Sorial (a longtime, now-retired Trump Inc. attorney) the most hagiographic.  Mattis barely mentions his year in the White House; get this only as a biography of his military career.  

Chris Christie's book, while no doubt partly ghostwritten, has the breezy entertainment value of watching Christie on Bill Maher.   It's the page-turner from this set and fun as an audiobook as well, read to you by Christie himself.

Books on the Constitution and the South

Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, by Steven Luxenberg.  Includes a rich view of US and southern history of the 1800s; can be paired with the PBS series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War by Henry Louis Gates.   

I've also read parts of The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era by Stanford Law's Gienapp and Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution, by Harvard Law's Lawrence Lessig and I'm sure these are worthwhile, but slower going. 

Second Creation describes how there were countless mysteries and degrees of freedom in setting up a legislative and an executive branch in the first several years after the Constitution was penned.  (Think by analogy: How the Medicare program developed, or the FDA, and continues to evolve, relative to the sometimes sparse language of the actual statute that creates them.)   Fidelity and Constraint talks about the constant tug of war between judicial literalism and social and political dynamics.   

A different view than Separate is provided by Spying on the South, by Horwitz.  Frederick Law Omsted - the architect whose works include Central Park, Boston's parks, and Stanford's campus - started his career as a journalist with long travelogues about a Yankee's view of the South ("The Cotton Kingdom.")  Horwitz, a prolific international traveler and author, retraces the 1855 journeys of Omsted, today.   Pair with: while it's not a great movie, I enjoyed the quirky indy movie Sword of Trust with Marc Maron.

 A Few Films from 2019

The HBO dramatization series on Brexit with Benedict Cumberbatch.

Reconstruction, the PBS series with Henry Louis Gates.

A whole list of good biographical film documentaries again this year:

Citizen Jane, about urban activist Jane Jacobs, and Moynihan, about the Harvard professor, U.S. Senator, and ambassador.  Add Raise Hell! about journalist Mollie Ivins, and the multi-part PBS documentary about Bill Gates.  Meeting Gorbachev by German filmmaker Werner Herzog and Where's My Roy Cohn?   Saw Mike Wallace Is Here during its one-week run in an audience of about 4 in Beverly Hills, but enjoyed it.  Finally, The Brink, a interesting and up-close movie about Steve Bannon. 

2019 also brought us a film drama based on a biography, Can You Ever Forgive Me, with Melissa McCarthy and screenplay by one of my favorite writer-directors Nicole Holofcener; life of author and forger Lee Israel.  And still two other films-from-real-life:  These are the holiday Netflix film based on real people, The Two Popes, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, and the holiday film Bombshell, based on real-life events in 2016 at Fox News.

I enjoyed re-watching the 1980s film Being There, Peter Sellers' last film, finding something interesting going on in every scene.  On a truly idiosyncratic note, maybe somehow the Two Popes movie reminded me of an old-school 1960s Catholic comedy with Haley Mills called "The Trouble With Angels."  It turns out there is a revisionist feminist viewpoint (!) on this nearly-forgotten comedy; see a Youtube short film here, I wrote about it in an essay here. 

_________________

*   *   *   *   

Footnotes

*   *   *   *   

Money Laundering!

Enjoyed a couple books about international fraud and money-laundering:

    Moneyland, Oliver Bollough

    Lying for Money, Dan Davies

These can be paired with the Netflix movie Laundromat, in which an all-star cast ranging from Antonio Banderas to Meryl Streep looks at the Panama banking scandal.   On the topic of global finance, looking forward to the upcoming documentary Citizen K, about oligarchs in Russia, by noted filmmaker Alex Gibney (he did Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room, 2005.)

*   *   *   *   

Biography

I get more biography from film documentaries than books, but I enjoyed Robert Caro's memoir about his working life, "Working," and I stumbled across a 1930s book that was an interesting read, Edith Wharton's largely forgotten autobiography "Looking Backward," which brings the 1880's and 1890's in New York and New England back to life.  

Also stumbled across Jessica Pan's memoir of a year in her life, "Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come." About life as a young ex-pat, freelance author, living with her new husband and settling into life in London, built around the theme of adventures in becoming more extroverted and overcoming shyness.  For me, both Working and Sorry were page-turners I finished in a day or two,

*   *   *   *

The 1930s

I am fascinated by the 1930s, ever since I ran across a book called Squire in the White House (1940), by Joe Flynn, a best seller in its day by someone who hated FDR.   A lot of people hated FDR - we forget.   And contemporary books from the 1930s, if they were popular then, are often a dollar or two on Amazon.  So I've developed a book shelf of both US, English, and German books written in the 30's.

Clustered together, on a friend's recommendation I FINALLY got around to In the Garden of the Beasts and really enjoyed it - a page turner.  About the American ambassador in Berlin in the mid 1930s.  Hint: I just invested in the eBook and paired audiobook, after having left the big hardcover book, a Christmas gift, untouched on the shelf for three years.

Also read the new book 1931, by Swiss economist Tobias Straussman, about the national and international decisions that shaped the awesome economics and politics of the early 1930s.

As a 1930s hobbyist, I dug up and read three 80 year old books that were all written "as it was happening" during the period, Darkness Over Germany (by a Brit traveler in Germany), Nazi Means War (by an American journalist in Germany around 1934) and Germany's Master Plan (a contemporary US analysis of what Germany was doing and how) and  a fast-reading work of fiction, Katherine Kressman Taylor's book, Address Unknown, a novella which builds to a plot twist worthy of an O.Henry story.  

*   *   *   *   

Local Color (LA)

Really enjoyed a book on the history of Los Angeles, focused on three inimitable, eccentric, and impactful characters from the early 20th century, The Mirage Factory by Gary Krist.  See also The Library Book (about LA and the old and modern history of its LA public library) by popular author Susan Orlean.  And over the holidays I finally finished a Christmas book from a year ago, Dear Los Angeles, a cornucopia of extracts from letters and diaries 1750-2018.

Reading Time?

In part, I logged 120,000 miles on airplanes, which at 400 mph is 300 hours - almost 8, 40-hour work weeks.  A fair part working on a laptop, but part reading.  Anyway, between two to three nights in a hotel and six hours on a plane a week, a few hours at a gym or hiking, and often a matched copy of the audiobook at 2x speed, I can often get through one book a week.

*  *  *  *  

Tee'd Up for 2020

A new book, Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It, by Christopher T. Robinson; Harvard Press, here.   Along with the late Princeton economist, Uwe Reinhardt, posthumous book Priced Out! about the US health system. 

Debating Modern Medical Technologies: Politics of Safety, Effectiveness, Patient Access. Karen Maschke, Michael Gusmano. 

Beyond The Prototype: Roadmap for the Fuzzy Area between Ideas and Outcomes, by Douglas Ferguson.