Another couple of books

The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives ~ by Naoise Mac Sweeney, 2023, history, 448 pages

The author debunks the myths and origin stories that underpin the history we thought we knew.  Told through fourteen figures who each played a role in the creation of the Western idea — people like Herodotus, Francis Bacon, and Phillis Wheatley — this history will reshape the way you see the world around you.  Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed.

This is Maphead's choice for her Big Book Summer Reading Challenge.  It looks interesting, but I'm not at all sure I want that challenge right now — even after reading most of what Amazon shares of the book online.

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All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things ~ by Robert Fulghum, 1986, philosophy/stories, ix + 198 pages, 10/10

Fulghum engages us with musings on life, death, love, pain, joy, sorrow, and the best chicken-fried steak in the continental United States.  The book is brimming with lots of significance found in the smallest details.  He learned a lot in kindergarten.  It has lots of fun things to ponder, like these that I marked as I re-read this book after many, many years.

• Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts (p. 20).
• "I might be wrong" (p. 48).
• ... the power (and the price) of imagination.  "Imagination is more important than information."  Einstein said that, and he should know (p. 137).
• And even further up toward the beginning of the list of things I don't understand are the real big ones.  Like why people laugh and what art is really for and why God doesn't fix some things or finish the job.  And at the top of the list is why is there life, anyway, and how come I have to die? (p. 148).
• ... all things live only if something else is cleared out of the path to make way.  No death; no life.  No exceptions.  Things must come and go.  People.  Years.  Ideas.  Everything.  The wheel turns, and the old is cleared away ... for the new (p. 149).
• Does the giraffe know what he's for?  Or care?  Or even think about his placd in things?  A giraffe has a black tongue twenty-seven inches long and no focal cords.  A giraffe has nothing to say.  He just goes on giraffing (p. 159).
• Besides the giraffe, I saw a wombat, a duck-billed platypus, and an orangutan.  Unreal.  The orangutan looked just like my uncle Woody.  Uncle Woody is pretty unreal, too.  He belongs in a zoo.  That's what his wife says.  And that makes me wonder what it would be like if samples of people were also in zoos (p. 160).
• There's a morning in the summer of 1984 I'd like to live over just as it was (p. 180).
• Picasso said, "Everything you can imagine is real."  And I understand that (p. 184).
• "We can do no great things; only small things with great love" (p. 192).
• My favorite book ending is no ending at all.  It's where James Joyce leaves off in Finnegans Wake, in midsentence, without punctuation or explanation.  Some scholars belive the last phrase connects with the incomplete sentence that begins the book, implying an unending cycle.  I hope it's so.  I like that.  But Joyce never said.  You are free to draw youg own conclusions.

When asked what he does, Robert Fulghum usually replies that he is a philosopher, and then he explains that what he likes to do is to think a lot about ordinary things and the express what he thinks by writing or speaking or painting, whichever seems appropriate (p. 197).

Deb at Readerbuzz hosts The Sunday Salon.