Erik Boisen

I likely would never have read a biography on Benjamin Franklin, if not for Walter Isaacson. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed his biographies on Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo DaVinci, I felt compelled to give this one a shot. It did not disappoint. I learned a great deal about Benjamin Franklin as well as a great deal about the formation of the United States.

Growing up in America when I did, the only stories I heard about Benjamin Franklin were that he was involved with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and that he flew a kite in a thunderstorm. Hooray for public grade schools! I did often wonder why a guy who was never president, made it on the face of a $100 bill and a half dollar coin. There must be more to his story. There is in fact, much more.

Franklin was born in what is now Boston. It was also called Boston when he was born, but it was in British America. Franklin had an older brother named James who was a fairly successful printer. As a youth, Benjamin was to apprentice with his older brother. His brother taught him the trade for a couple of years, but Franklin yearned to publish his own work. His brother did not allow this, so he fled to Philadelphia. Leaving an apprenticeship at that time was somewhat illegal. It was, however, also difficult to track someone down during that time. Franklin arrived in Philadelphia at 17 and used the skills acquired from working at his brother’s printshop to gain work. He then went to work in a printing shop in London for a few years before returning to Philadelphia.

Printing is where Franklin received his initial wealth and notoriety. He printed the Pennsylvania Gazzette and the Poor Richard’s alamanac. He often wrote stories and articles for his publications using assumed identities. His persuasive and often humor-laced writing was as responsible for his success as his printing and business skills. I found it quite interesting that one of the issues at the time of Franklin’s newspaper publishing was that of vaccination. Smallpox was taking many lives at the time. Franklin’s only legitimate son, Francis, died of the disease at only four years old. There was debate in Franklin’s newspaper and the competing papers of the time as to whether to vaccinate against smallpox. This appears to parallel our recent Covid controversy.

Franklin’s success in publishing afforded him the time and resources to pursue his varying interests. One of his prime interests was creating a better life for his fellow man. He created an organization called Junto to help that aim. Its members gathered regularly to do what they could to aid society. The result was public libraries and volunteer fire departments. That’s right, Ben Franklin invented the public library. He had a voracious appetite for reading books. He had very little formal education, but was a very intelligent man – especially for his time.  His knowledge gained through reading books opened up opportunities for him and he felt that others should also benefit. A book was likely quite a luxury to the common man of his era, so it is probably incalculable the impact that this single creation of a lending library had on the world. Other than personal experience, there was no other way to learn about the world at that time. He is also the primary founder the University of Pennsylvania.

Franklin was constantly tinkering. Pondering the properties of waves in the ocean and lightning in the air. Back in his time, very little was understood about electricity. Franklin came up with the first theories of current flow. If anyone has ever taken a circuits theory class, you are told to follow the current path from + to -. This is not actually correct as the much lighter electrons (negatively charged) actually flow towards the protons (positively charged) particles, but there was no way to know this at the time.

This convention still works in DC circuit analysis and is employed in all electrical engineering courses taught today, despite the actual flow being counter. This stems from his famous kite experiment, through which Franklin came up with the lightning rod that is still employed on homes and buildings to this day.

Franklin, like many people, needed eyeglasses to see properly. At one point he had a set of glasses for reading and another for when he was going about his daily activities. Being a practical man, he instructed his eyeglass maker to cut the lenses of each in half. He put the top half of his regular use glasses above the half lense of his reading glasses. When he looked forward, he was looking through his regular glasses and when he looked down, he was looking through his reading glasses. This is how he invented the world’s first bifocals.

Franklin became one of the first postmasters in America. He devised methods for considerably shortening delivery times of mail and also benefitted his publishing business by controlling its delivery system. He eventually sold the rights to his publishing business and could have lived a very nice life without another day of work. This, however, would have gone against his nature. Franklin certainly enjoyed his leisure time, but remaining idle would go against his personal motto of living to improve himself and his fellow man. Given the time he lived in, he felt as though he would be a good intermediary between the colonial states and England. At the time England was increasing taxes at almost every opportunity. He saw that things were reaching a boiling point and spent significant time in England trying to smooth things over and prevent a war. With England unwilling to compromise, Franklin saw that war was imminent. At this point, he could have lived a gentleman’s life in England, but instead he recruited the French to help with the pending war against Britain. He secured funding, troops, and ships from the French. There was probably no way the colonies would have won the war against England without this.

As England realized they were going to lose the colonies, Franklin again negotiated Independence for the United States and peace between England, France, and the US. He did this as an 82-year-old man with gout and kidney stones. If he was a younger man, perhaps he would have been the first US president. His is the only signature on all the documents responsible for creating the United States – the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Alliance, Amity, and Commerce with France (1778), the Treaty of Peace between England, France, and the United States (1782), and the Constitution (1787). He also helped draft both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

I was struck by how much time the American-born Franklin spent in England. He spent two jaunts of 10 and 15 years living there, including the last 15 years of his marriage. His wife passed away after not having seen her husband for 15 years! He did not even attend her funeral. It seems that Franklin was master at maintaining friendly relationships, but quite disastrous at maintaining close, personal relationships. He left his brother Jame’s apprenticeship, which created a rift. James died at just 38 years old. His relationship with his son William was extremely strained for most of their adult lives. Franklin basically left him nothing in his will and barely communicated with him in the last years of his life. They also choose opposite sides during the Revolutionary war, with William being imprisoned for his taking the side of the British. Franklin only seemed to keep a close personal relationship with one person. Temple was the illegitimate son of Franklin’s illegitimate son William. He did maintain a lifelong relationship with his daughter Sarah, but she maintained his household after the death of his wife, so it may have been out of practicality that he maintained it.

Franklin saw a world based on the middle class and drafted the Constitution with the aim that people earn what they are entitled to based on work and merit, not on birth rite. He was born from almost nothing and ended up being a founder of the most powerful country on earth. He was the exemplification of what it should mean to be an American and that is why his face appears on the $100 bill.

 

This is another book that my childhood friend and former neighbor, Randall, recommended. It is a very interesting read. The gist of the book is that we are all one. Dishonesty, hate, and underhandedness ultimately effects everyone. The purpose of life is to live for others. The principles of this book marry neatly with most religions. I am not an expert on religions, but I do not see where any of the teachings create a conflict with the basic principles of any established religions. It does suggest, however, that some of the biggest religions have been somewhat corrupted over time and some of the original teachings have been somewhat distorted. I cannot really argue with that. Televangelists, cult leaders, and religious extremists have certainly done damage to society under the guise of the supposed word of God.

The basics of this book are aimed at improving society. There are instructions in some of the chapters that outline techniques for establishing truths and assigning scores to people and things. Scores less than 200 are perceived as detrimental to society, and scores greater than 200 are perceived as beneficial to society. The scale is described as ranging from 1-1000, and is said to be logarithmic. This scoring system made me question some passages in the book. This book was originally published in 1995 and the copy I have was printed in 2012. It has had several additions, yet there are some glaring mathematical errors in it. I would think they would have been discovered by now.  The author shows “three-hundred to the tenth power” in figures as ten to the three hundredth power. There are also “scores” for famous people, many of whom are deceased. I may have missed something, but I do not understand how someone, like Einstein, for example, can be assigned a score forty years after his passing.

I also find it a little strange that the author rates certain music, such as heavy metal, as detrimental to society. Everything categorized as heavy metal is bad for society? The book details how to actually score, or using the author’s terminology, calibrate, people and things. This act requires a partner. I have yet to try it out. I do like much of what I read in this book, but am pretty skeptical about the calibration process. I have not actually tried it, so I will not officially knock it until I have.

Overall this book is great for promoting positivity over negativity and for promoting living your life in a moral and just manner. Spread joy, love, and compassion. It has an endorsement from Mother Teresa herself, on the back cover. I found the science mentioned in this book to be a little hand-wavy, but the overall message is so overwhelmingly positive, that I recommend it as a good read.

This is the third Walter Isaacson biography I have read. The previous two were Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. All were extremely well-written and I found them quite easy to read these books for long periods of time.

Everyone seems to be familiar with Leonardo da Vinci. Many often just refer to him as da Vinci. This is not really proper. His name was Leonardo and he was from Vinci – a municipality of Florence, Italy. Da Vinci just means from Vinci in Italian.

Many are familiar with his painting of the Last Supper.

Many may or may not be aware that this is painted on a church wall and is approximately 28 feet x 15 feet. It was done at a time when a painter had to make his own paint. Making suitable paint was part of the art form.  At the time Leonardo painted this, he was not accustomed to painting on plaster, which is what the wall this was painted on was surfaced with. The oil-based paint that Leonardo preferred, did not adhere well to it and he was face with many challenges, not just in designing and painting this enormous scene, but also on getting it to adhere to this unfamiliar surface. Leonardo typically preferred to paint on walnut planks.

There is a very amusing story related to this painting.  Ludovico Sforza  was the Duke of Milan who was financing Leonardo’s work. Leonardo was well known to procrastinate on many of his commissions and one of the head Monks at the church began to berate Leonardo about his lack of progress at one point. Leonardo explained to the Duke that the creative process can be lengthy, and even when it appears he is not working, he is contemplating the painting. He said that he was currently contemplating the face of Judas to be used and he suggested that the next one to hound him will have his likeness used for Judas. The Duke found this quite humorous and the monks found this to be an adequate deterrent to further hassling Leonardo.

Leonardo is of course also known for painting the Mona Lisa.

This painting resides in the Louvre and is painted on a poplar panel. If it were sold, it would likely be valued at close to a billion dollars. At first glance, it is just a woman in an armchair, but the more you look, the more you see. The background is actually a beautiful outdoor scene with mountains, trees, and flowing rivers. Her hair has very detailed curls and she is wearing transparent veil. Her clothing and face imply a light source to one side of her. Her clothing has every stitch, pleat, and wrinkle, flawlessly represented. There is also something about the expression on her face that makes you wonder what she is thinking. It is rumored that Leonardo had entertainers present while she was posing so that her overall mood was jovial and attentive. The unusual story of this painting is that it was commissioned by a silk merchant and Lisa is his wife, or wife-to-be. The silk merchant was not a pauper, by any means, but when this painting was started, Leonardo was known to have declined commissions from very wealthy royals. Why has he chosen to paint the wife of a silk merchant? What is even stranger, is that he never gave this painting to the silk merchant. He carried it with him for many years, constantly updating it. It was still one of his possessions when he passed away.

Leonardo’s next most recognizable piece of art is the Vitruvian man.

This work is a product of Leonardo’s exhaustive study of the human form. Leonardo was fascinated by human anatomy and spent years studying, drawing, and measuring bodies. At first, it was believed that he was just trying to get the most accurate representations of the human form in his paintings, but it became more of medical study. Leonardo dissected many bodies and made highly detailed drawings of bones, nerves, organs, and muscles.

Of all the body parts, the heart seemed to fascinate him the most. He analyzed it in deceased humans as well as in live pigs. He was fascinated with how the valves of the heart operated. After a lengthy analysis, he determined that the upper valves of the heart operated by utilizing the swirling currents of blood to open and close the valve. Up until 1960, the operation of the upper valves of the heart was not believed to be connected to swirling currents, but simply to the presence or absence of blood in the chamber. In 1960 experiments were devised to precisely determine how the heart valves worked. It turns out Leonardo was correct. Leonardo died in 1519. It took medical science over 400 years to catch up to his knowledge of how the heart worked. Leonardo created hundreds of incredibly detailed drawings and studies of the human anatomy, but he never published any of them!  Many of his discoveries had to wait hundreds of years until someone else discovered them to become part of human knowledge. Had he published his works, he likely would have advanced medicine by many decades.

It is probably well known that Leonardo was left-handed. During his time as an apprentice artist and his time as a master with his own apprentices, he often collaborated on work.  This, coupled with the fact that no one signed their work back in Leonardo’s time, makes identifying some of the artwork from his era difficult to attribute. Being left-handed makes it easy to rule out paintings done by right-handed painters. Experts can readily identify which hand was used to paint by the brushstrokes.  There is one painting that has virtually equal numbers of experts claiming it is by Leonardo’s hand and experts claiming it is not. La Belle Ferroniere is a beautiful portrait that was certainly created by a left-handed painter in Leonardo’s lifetime. To me, everything appears to use his technique and style, with the exception of the hair. Leonardo would normally put much more detail into a model’s hair. Perhaps Leonardo painted the majority of the painting and an apprentice completed the hair? It certainly would help to simplify things if artists signed their work in Leonardo’s time! This painting is owned and displayed by the Louvre, which attributes it to Leonardo.

Leonardo spent the last years of his life as the royal painter, engineer, and architect for King Francis I, who was said to have adored Leonardo. It is reputed that he died in the arms of the king.

 

 

 

 

A Tale of Two Cities, other than the Bible, is probably the oldest book I have read. It was originally released a chapter at a time in a serial publication in 1859. It is broken up into three “books” and is set during the time of the French revolution. The first “book” was very captivating and well-written. The characters are not too numerous and they are described in amazing detail.

The story starts with an 18 year-old woman (Lucie) being informed that her father, whom she has never met and believed to be long dead, is alive and has been in captivity for nearly the entirety of her life. He had been held in a dark recess of Bastille and was forced to make shoes for his entire captivity. When first found, Alexandre Manette, has lost all ability to socially interact. He had previously been a physician prior to his incarceration, but no longer bears any resemblance to his former self. The author does an amazing job of describing the doctor, the place he is found, and his mannerisms. It is some of the best writing I have ever read.

The doctor is then brought back from France to England to recover. He lives with his daughter Lucie and makes very good progress at regaining his former self. Beyond the first book, the author begins adding characters without enough development and makes large jumps (five years) in the timeline.  Lucie also appears to have a daughter named Lucie. It took several times of re-reading passages to distinguish the two whenever the name “Lucie” was mentioned in the second half of the book. The author makes almost no attempt to give the reader a means to distinguish the two and at first I thought “little Lucie” was a reference to Lucie in a flashback.

In the end Lucie finds a husband who is brought to trial twice and is eventually sentenced to death for being an aristocrat. At the last moment he is replaced in his jail cell by a character named Sydney Carton who has offered to die in his stead.

The first “book” is worthy of all the praise Dickens, the author, has gotten for his work. The rest I found almost unreadable. It was very difficult to finish the last two thirds of this book. The subject matter is all bleak, the characters are just tossed in, one after another, and timelines jump without reason. If this novel interests you, read the first book.  Reading the rest is an exercise in endurance and painful, at best, to finish. It is a shame, because it showed so much promise for the first third.

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that my father has passed away. I wrote about him in a recent article and mentioned that he was ill. His obituary can be found here. Please make every effort to let your loved ones know how much they mean to you. I was fortunate in that I was able to spend a short time with my father before he passed. My father was a lifelong artist, musician, playwright, and author. He spent the last decade of his life devoted to teaching music to others – particularly children. If you wish to make a donation in his honor, please do so here: https://www.savethemusic.org/

My dad lived for music and was teaching and performing well into his 80’s.

Thanks for everything dad.

I very much enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs, so I bought his biography on Einstein. I was not disappointed. Isaacson seems to have found a pretty good niche as THE writer of biographies. Obviously, this is not a textbook on modern physics, but it is impossible, I feel, to do a proper biography on Einstein without delving into some of the scientific work that brought Einstein to prominence. It appears as though Isaacson shared the same sentiments. He does as good a job, as I think is possible, to make the nature of Einstein’s work understandable to most readers. He does this while also showing the very human side of Einstein. Although a rare genius, Einstein, at times, struggled with relationships and finances just like the rest of us.

Einstein was born in Germany, but was turned off by its militant attitude throughout his life and did most of his studying and best work in Switzerland. The biggest personal statement made about Einstein in the book is that he was a non-conformist and despised authority. This sometimes caused clashes with academics and politicians and likely kept him out of a teaching post after graduating from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in 1901. This led him to the patent clerk position in Bern that allowed him time to ponder and write his most famous papers on light quanta and relativity.

Einstein was unrivaled at creating thought experiments. He would create a scenario in his head, for example, of what a person would observe if he was standing in a closed, windowless box accelerating upward, from the person’s perspective, through space with a small bouncing ball versus what that same person would observe if he were in the same box that was stationary on earth. If the acceleration of the box was identical to the 9.8 m/s² gravitational constant experienced on earth would the person in the box be able to tell the difference between moving through space and sitting stationary on earth? In the same box would a person be able to distinguish between floating in space versus falling due to gravity? The answer to both questions is “no” and it may seem somewhat intuitive, but this simple thought experiment helped Einstein create his General Theory of Relativity. He recognized that there is no difference between inertial motion and gravitational force. From this simple thought experiment, Einstein recognized that gravity warps spacetime. He then was able to create the math to back this assertion up.

Most of his theories started with similar thought experiments that he was then able to generate mathematical explanations for. None of his best known theories were generally acceptable at face value, however. Proving them correct often involved elaborate and expensive experiments. These experiments were usually conducted by other scientists as Einstein did not seem to have an interest in carrying them out on his own. He was proven correct time and time again and his theories changed the way physicists view and understand the universe.

Einstein’s most profound papers all came out in the same year – 1905.  He wrote papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and the famous E = mc² equation. He wrote all of these while a patent clerk in Bern. Each on its own was worthy of the highest praise. Four in one year is almost absurd and it came from someone outside of academia. Given his “outsider” status at the time of publication, some scientists were dismissive of his papers, but the ideas were so profound that they could not be ignored. Eventually, experiments were performed proving each theory correct. Einstein was awarded the Nobel prize for his work on the photoelectric effect where he asserted that photons that make up light are formed from discrete packets called quanta. He was not awarded the prize until 1922. It comes with a substantial monetary award which Einstein deferred to his first wife in exchange for a divorce that was granted years earlier.

It seemed odd to me that it took that long to award Einstein the prize. All of his papers in 1905 were probably worthy. I am guessing antisemitism may have played a role in delaying it. His papers did, however, get him noticed enough to earn him a PhD from the University of Zurich and a teaching role in the University of Bern.

Einstein remarried and seemed to enjoy life in Switzerland, but was offered a well-paying teaching position in Berlin at the Prussian Academy of Science. He remained there until the Nazis began assuming control of Germany, whereupon he left his birthplace never to return. A 1933 raid by Nazis on his summer home in Caputh was convincing proof that he was not safe in Germany. He eventually settled in Princeton, New Jersey and, outside of one trip to Bermuda, he never left the United States. Einstein was never very religious, but the situation in Germany made Einstein very aware of his heritage and awakened a kinship in him with fellow Jews. He used his celebrity to warn President Roosevelt of the Nazi intention to build a nuclear weapon. This triggered the US into building its own nuclear weapons. Einstein, often a pacifist, was believed to later regret his influence on bringing nuclear weapons into the world even though, beyond his work that led to the E = mc² equation, he took no part in the actual design and building of the atomic bomb.

Einstein outlived his second wife by nearly two decades. For a great deal of that time he was officially retired from Princeton, but still kept an office and spent much of his time attempting to develop a unified theory. He was not successful in doing so and ultimately felt that such a task may not be achievable. He did feel that it was his responsibility to hunt for a solution. His thought was that a younger scientist needs to focus on more pragmatic problems because they need to prove and establish themselves. Wasting time on a problem that may not have a solution could cost a young scientist his livelihood. Einstein said he was satisfied with his legacy, his life was secure, and he had ample time to “waste” on endeavors that may not be fruitful. He felt it was his duty to do so.

Einstein eventually passed away shortly after his 76th birthday from a burst aortic aneurysm . Even on his deathbed he was scribbling formulas attempting to find a unified theory. His death made the front page of newspapers all over the world. To put a bizarre twist on Einstein’s story, during his autopsy, the medical examiner took it upon himself to extract Einstein’s brain. Apparently he did this without anyone else’s consent or instruction. He did not reveal he had done this until more than a decade later. He eventually gave out cross sections to those wishing to do research on it. To my knowledge, nothing meaningful has come of this research and fragments of Einstein’s brain still exist.

I did not seem to find a good place to put this information in my essay, but I thought it was also important to note that in addition to being a great scientist, Einstein was quite a good violinist and very much enjoyed listening to and performing music.

This book was recommended to me by a friend I have known since third grade. He was also my neighbor for most of my childhood.  We both shared an interest in computers and science back in high school, and thanks to the wonders of the internet, are still able to keep in touch.  Randall, known as Randy back in the day, told me he had read this book several times since discovering it in college.  I was a little puzzled, given the topic, why one would be inclined to read such a book multiple times.  Most non-fiction, which this book is, rarely warrants more than one read.

I quickly understood why he read it so many times.  I took a fair amount of math classes in college – calculus I,II, and III, differential equations, combinatorics and linear algebra. I even took modern physics as an elective after taking the physics courses required for my engineering degree.  I taught algebra and geometry at Mt. Zion High School in Georgia for a year.  I am not a mathematician by any means, but I have a strong background in math. This book had me re-reading pages and questioning concepts I had previously taken for granted.  In calculus it is common to find the values of equations as the value of a variable in that equation approaches infinity.  I just accepted that infinity was a really huge number.  I never considered that one infinity could be bigger or smaller than another infinity or that there could be dispute over whether something could be infinitesimally small.

This book describes the infinitely small and large in great detail, its practical applications and how these concepts historically came into being.  The author spends a great deal of the book discussing the mathematician Kurt Gödel, specifically.    The author even had visited with Gödel on more than one occasion.   Gödel was known for his Incompleteness Theorem.  The practical application of this theorem basically discounts that there can ever be an all-encompassing “theory of everything”.  Its application to an infinite universe basically points to the truth that it is not possible to know everything about such a universe.  Physicists since Einstein’s time have been searching for this Universal Theory.  If Gödel’s theory is applied to our universe as we understand it, such a theory will never be found.

My dad spent considerable time writing this. Although my dad has written a couple of novels for public consumption, I do not believe this was written with the intention of being published. He is getting older and wanted to pass on information about himself and his family before that information was lost to time.  My dad is 77 in the picture above and getting ready to perform in the pit band for his musical ,”The Drowsy Chaperone”.

The book describes very humble beginnings. When my dad was young, he lived in Chicago with both his parents, his sister, his brother, and his grandmother – all in a one bedroom apartment.  He worked delivering meat for a local butcher as kid. This allowed him a little bit of spending money.  When he got a little older, his family moved to a two bedroom house that also had a basement. My grandfather, who worked for many years as a carpenter, later added a level to this house which had an apartment that my parents and I lived in when I was born.  The house is still there, but no one in my family owns it anymore.

My father was a musician for most of his life, so much of the autobiography centers around music and musicians he worked with.  He discovered the saxophone in his teens and devoted most of his early years to mastering it. He has some old 78 rpm records he played on after just 18 months of practice.  Being a decent musician may have saved his life. Before he was to be drafted, he auditioned for the army band and was accepted. He still had to do boot camp like everyone else, but army bands aren’t known for taking much enemy fire.

He finished his military obligation, which allowed him to see much of Europe, and entered college. He worked as a musician and used the GI bill to pay for college.  Around this time he also met my mother who was fairly new to the United States. She grew up in Switzerland and moved to the US with her mom, knowing no English, when she was 19.  My dad and his army band buddy, who happened to be named Buddy, hosted a party in the apartment they shared. My mother lived in a neighboring apartment and attended the party. I am told it was love at first sight.  They married a few years later and my mom gave birth to me a few years after that.

My dad earned his degree in French during that time.  If you are wondering what sort of an occupation is available to someone with a French degree, the answer is, “I don’t know.”  My dad substitute taught at a high school and worked for a while selling instruments to school music programs. He had no insurance when I was born, but my mom did. She worked at a camera store. Despite my mother having insurance, the expense of my birth was not covered. Only the insurance of the father could pay for the birth of a child at the time.  You can’t make this stuff up.  I think I was, “paid for”, when I was about five at which point my parents also had my sister.  My dad continued to work as a musician on nights and weekends, but got a regular job at the post office.  This afforded the whole family insurance and a stable income.

My father worked at the post office for 32 years. He played “gigs” on evenings and weekends.  I rarely saw my dad on Friday or Saturday night.  It seems normal when that is your life, but looking back, it was sort of an odd way to grow up.  When my dad was home, he was always practicing his instruments – he added flute, clarinet, harmonica, and keyboards to his repertoire, in addition to the saxophone.  I found it annoying at time when I was growing up. I could not watch a tv show or talk on the phone without live music playing. Now I look back fondly on those times. My childhood had an actual soundtrack.

After my dad retired from the post office he began devoting most of his free time to writing, musicals, plays, songs, and novels.  He had about a dozen musicals and plays produced locally.  He still feels as though he has never “made it”.  As DJ’s became much more prominent at parties and weddings, my dad’s opportunities to earn money playing dried up quite a bit.  The majority of his work in the last two decades was split between two bands – Jazz Spectrum and the Melodaires.  The Melodaires have become defunct, but Jazz Spectrum still plays fairly regularly.  My father, up until recently, has also taught music a couple of days a week to keep himself busy.  He is now 86 years old.  He has recently had a medical event and is convalescing. Prayers are welcome.

 

Here is a powerful quote from the book:

The present system has enabled capitalists to make laws in their own interests to the injury and oppression of the workers.
It has made the name Democracy, for which our forefathers fought and died, a mockery and a shadow, by giving to property an unproportionate amount of representation and control over Legislation.
It has enabled capitalists . . . to secure government aid, inland grants and money loans, to selfish railroad corporations, who, by monopolizing the means of transportation are enabled to swindle both the producer and the consumer. …
It has allowed the capitalists, as a class, to appropriate annually 5/6 of the entire production of the country. . . .
It has therefore prevented mankind from fulfilling their natural destinies on earth—crushed out ambition, prevented marriages or caused false and unnatural ones—has shortened human life, destroyed morals and fostered
crime, corrupted judges, ministers, and statesmen, shattered confidence, love and honor among men, and made life a selfish, merciless struggle for existence instead of a noble and generous struggle for perfection, in which equal advantages should be given to all, and human lives relieved from an unnatural and degrading competition for bread.

The above was written by the Workingmen’s party in Chicago in 1876.

The following quote is from  Henry Adams in 1887 regarding President Grover Cleveland.

We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved. . . . But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to
discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.

Unfortunately, not much seems to have changed.  The problems the country faced 140 years ago are still around.

This book provides all the US history that was likely missing from what you were taught in an American grade school or high school. It starts with the bizarre celebration of Christopher Columbus. This “adventurer” and “discoverer” was treated pretty well by most of the indigenous people he encountered in the Americas. In return, he enslaved, tortured, and stole from them. Columbus, despite popular historical references, was nothing more than a slave trader and plunderer sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain.  His sole purpose was to gather as many slaves and as much gold as he could to make his explorations profitable to himself and his sponsors.  Hard to understand why he has a holiday. He was not even the first European to travel to the Americas. Leif Erikson reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus.  This has been known since evidence of this was found in the 1960’s with excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, but the public schools were still teaching the Columbus version of events when I went to school in the 1980’s. Why?

The book, at over 700 pages, takes quite a while to read. It fills in the real reasons for most of the conflicts and wars the US participated in. There is a recurring theme in these motives – all hinge on keeping overseas commerce healthy for large corporations.  The book also describes the systematic mistreatment of native Americans and other minorities by the government.

The final chapter of the book is somewhat shocking. It outlines how the government is used by the wealthiest members of society to create turmoil between the middle and lower classes, so that those two classes focus their anger and attention on one another while the wealthy control most of the resources and garner little attention.  The book basically calls for citizens to overthrow this government in favor of one that distributes the abundant resources more fairly.  The author, Howard Zinn held a PhD in history and taught at both Spelman College and Boston University.  He was asked to leave Spelman after administrators feared he was radicalizing students in the 1960’s.  I have a feeling he may have been doing just that, but it may just be down to semantics – was he “radicalizing” or just educating students to the slanted way the government was working against most of his students?  Zinn also served as a bombardier for the US Army during World War II, bombing targets in Berlin, Hungary, and France.  He had a very anti-war stance in his later life and learned that one of his bombing missions in France had wiped out a small, but ancient city and killed over a thousand French civilians.  Zinn described how the bombing was ordered—three weeks before the war in Europe ended—by military officials who were, in part, motivated more by the desire for their own career advancement than in legitimate military objectives.  This was likely the start of his distrust of the military and government.

The Stranger in the Lifeboat is an interesting work of fiction and a pretty easy read.  The story is mostly set in the present day with flashbacks to different points in the main character’s life.  For most of the book, the main character, Benji, is adrift on a lifeboat released from a sinking mega yacht that was loaded with leaders of industry and famous artists, actors, and politicians.  The yacht was on the final day of a week-long cruise intended on having the greatest minds meet and come up with world-changing ideas.  The raft contains both the elite former passengers of the ship as well as some of the staff.  Benji is one of the staff.  Shortly into their time adrift, the lifeboat picks up a passenger from the sea who does not appear to be from the sunken yacht.  This passenger claims to be the Lord.

As time on the raft passes, the passengers have differing views on the Lord.  Some see him with disdain.  If he is the almighty, why does he let us suffer so?  Others are grateful that he provides a short rainstorm as they run low on water.  Some see him as delusional and others see him as a con-man, but no one can explain how he arrived on their raft.  After drifting a short time, they also find a small, silent girl, Anna, and the owner of the mega-yacht Jason Lambert.  At one time, there are as many as ten people on the life raft.  As time passes, they begin to succumb to different ends.  When there are just four remaining, Jason Lambert loses his mind, slashes the Lord’s throat, tosses Anna overboard, and attempts to kill Benji.  Benji manages to eject Lambert from the boat and retrieve little Anna, who suddenly begins to speak, “I am the Lord.”  Benji spends his remaining days on the raft with no one else.

Later it is revealed that Benji had intended to blow up the boat and its passengers with a limpet mine.  He never actually set off the device, but he did bring it on board, so he assumed it had inadvertently triggered and caused the yacht’s sinking.  Anna, as the Lord, later reveals to Benji that the mine was not to blame and he can relieve himself of the guilt he was feeling.

The idea behind this story is fabulous, and the book is good, but it is not great.  A couple of things turned me off right away.  The yacht is filled with leaders of industry, including someone purported to be the inventor of the first electric car.  Presumably this is supposed to be an Elon Musk type character, but Elon Musk did not invent the electric car.  He is simply the first person to successfully bring it to market.  The first electric car predates this novel by more than 100 years.  A simple Google search would have revealed this.  The yacht is also said to be made of fiberglass.  The limpet mine is described in the book as a naval mine that attaches to a ship magnetically.  How was a limpet mine supposed to adhere to a fiberglass boat?  It turns out the boat was sunk by angry whales who rammed holes in the thin fiberglass hull.  These holes allowed water into the engine room which then caused an explosion.  I kind of doubt water in an engine room has ever caused a yacht to explode.  Mitch Albom is good at telling a story, but he really needs to be mindful of history and physics when he does so.  If this is going to be made into a movie, I hope they correct these portions of the story in some way, because it was too much for me to look past.