spoiler alert, they find a vaccine for POLIO
Polio, An American Story isn’t just a book about infantile paralysis in the 1950’s, it’s a book rich with American history. While I generally am loathsome of such detail and find it distracting to the main point, I couldn’t get enough of it in this book and found the authors extraordinary detail only enlightening.
The author David Oshinsky begins by explaining that the state of the American Medical institutions in the 1900′s was dangerous, embarrassing, and severely lagging behind the European laboratories. He writes “Virtually all of the recent breakthroughs in the terrifying struggle against infectious disease such as malaria, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, and syphilis had occurred on European soil, where the pursuit of medical research had wide popular support. In France contributions from an adoring public had created the Pasture institute.” It wasn’t until the widely misunderstood John D Rockefeller lent his support (post capitalist boom), that American medical standards began to rise. In fact he has one of my favorite quotes in the book. “It is a great problem to learn how to give, without weakening the moral backbone of the beneficiary.” Rockefeller gave to the University of Chicago and started the Rockefeller Institute in NYC, and this is where much of the Polio research began.
The book then covers in great detail the presidential candidacy of President F.D. Roosevelt, how he was stricken with polio, how Dr. William Keen billed the family $600 for a house visit and recommended deep massage and exercise (the worst possible treatment) and a few days later FDR had lost all movement below his waist. The author covers how FDR’s campaign managers convinced the press to not take photos of him in a wheel chair and how by the end of the 1932 election the American people didn’t care at all about the wheel chair; they only cared about the economy, which is logical given the circumstances of the Great Depression. The book also suggests that it was because an American president became stricken with Polio that it took the negative stigma out of having it and put an urgency into curing it. FDR became a great crusader for a cure of the dreaded illness.
But my favorite person in the book by far is an unsung hero in American history named Basil O’Connor. He was FDR’s Wall Street Law partner and he reluctantly agreed to take over FDR’s Warm Spring’s Institute for Rehabilitation which later led him into his real mission in life –raising money for Polio research and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. O’Conner raised over $1,800,000 (in 1950 dollars) for Polio, you might recognize the name as “The March of Dimes”. It was with this money that O’Conner funded Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin to ultimately find a vaccine for Polio.
As a side note LADIES, a women named Isabel Morgan was actually the first researcher to successfully test a killed polio virus on a monkey in 1949 (6 years before Salk) But left her Johns Hopkins career to marry and raise a family.
I could go on and on, I only covered 1 on hundredth of this book. Suffice it to say, it was outstanding and completely deserving of the Pulitzer for History books.
Posted by Hillary March 2011
There are some great themes in literature that date back to biblical times and still resonate with readers today. Some of the
m are strife between mother and daughter, the rivalry between brothers and of course the ever present love triangle. Well thanks to Kathryne Stockett we can now add the relationship between child and maid to that list. In The Help Stockett closely examines the relationships between “the help”
, meaning the black maids, and the white people they work for. She does this through the eyes of “Skeeter” a 22 year old white girl in Jackson, Mississippi during the tumultuous 1960’s. Skeeter uses the resources and talents she has to make a statement of discontent and participate in the civil rights movement. She does this by secretly recording what the “black domestics” say about their white families. Incidentally, Skeeter knows and is close friends with most of the white families. Stockett also examines the complex help vs. white family relationship through the eyes of “Aibeleen”, who shows us what it is like to raise 17 white children and only be invited to their weddings as servers. Lastly, there is “Minny”, who shows us what real contempt there was for the “white lady” during the 60’s. Minny shows us how powerless and fearful these maids were and how hard coping with one families problems is only to go home at night and have to deal with her own.
I listened to the audio version of this book and this is the first time, in all my years of listening to books on tape or ipod, that I have ever heard the reader actually cry. It was powerful and moving, it was sad yet triumphant. I think there is more the be said about the complex relationships between domestics and the children they raise, but as I said at the beginning, Stockett has elevated this theme to the level of love triangle, daughter making peace with mother, and brother competing with brother.
posted by Hillary Feb 2010
Banker to the Poor is written by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the micro-credit lending bank Grameen. The concept of micro-credit lending and the successful organizations Yunus has created from nothing are absolutely awe-inspiring. In the 1970’s, he was a professor of Economics at a university in Bangladesh. During a horrible famine in which thousands of the poorest people in Bangladesh were literally dying from starvation in the streets, Yunus became angry. While he and his colleagues were writing economic formulas and theories on blackboards, people were dying on the steps outside their very building. He felt like academia was completely useless in fighting the extreme poverty surrounding him.
Yunus began taking his economics students with him to the nearby village of Jobra to explore the sources of extreme poverty; and he found that if the people in this village had just $20, they could buy the supplies they needed to create small, profitable businesses. Yunus writes in the book, “It was those people, with their lives of simple dignity, who had radically changed me from a bird’s-eye-view economist, teaching elegant theories in a classroom, to a worm’s-eye-view practitioner.” Thus, the Grameen concept of microcredit lending was born. From there, Yunus and those who worked with him created an organization and several sister organizations that grew to lend billions of dollars and lift millions of the world’s poorest to “dignified self-sufficiency through micro-credit programs.” Behind the micro-credit concept is the belief that access to credit is a basic human right, not available only to the successful and affluent. And Yunus’ organizations have reaped a 98% repayment rate, demonstrating that the poorest truly can be trusted with credit.
Incidentally, Yunus has found that lending to women is much more productive than lending to men. Women generally use their access to credit and the profit from their businesses to raise the standard of living of their entire household, to educate their children, and to seek healthcare services for their families. He found that men more often use the profit from their businesses to benefit themselves individually. He therefore concluded that lending to women lifts a society out of poverty much more quickly and effectively than lending to men.
Yunus dreams of a world that is poverty free, in which every person can take care of his or her basic life needs. In such a world, he states, “there would be no need for welfare agencies, handouts, soup kitchens, food stamps” or any state-run safety net program. His dream is quite ambitious and assumes people will work hard and take the initiative to support themselves, but he has seen the great power granting credit to the poorest provides. He calls for individuals who want to make a difference in the world to create socially conscious yet profitable (and thereby self-sustaining) enterprises, and he argues a well-run business can accomplish both objectives, although one objective generally must be primary over the other.
Clearly, I finished Banker to the Poor inspired and hopeful that there are positive solutions to alleviate world poverty.
Posted by Amy 1/6/10
Ben Bernanke was chosen as TIME magazines 2009 Person of the Year. He is one of those men whose past training, education, and experiences seem like they were preparation for one moment in time. And that moment for Bernanke was when the housing markets turned into the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years.
Bernanke was born and raised in Dillon, South Carolina to a teacher and a pharmacist, and his grandparents lived during the Great Depression. He recalls his grandparents telling the story of a shoe factory that closed during the Depression “leaving the community so poor that its children went barefoot”. Little Ben kept asking “Why didn’t they just open the factories and make the kids shoes?” Subsequently, he would devote his career, academic and otherwise, to that question.
Bernanke attended Harvard and earned a degree in Economics and then headed to MIT where he gained a doctorate. It seems that the bulk of his academic work was related to the subject of the Great Depression. He wrote a book of essays on the era, and before he went to Washington he was working on another book about the Great Depression called The Age of Delusion. The book is appropriately titled when you consider that he was writing about the Hoover Administration’s approach to a downturn, which is to “balance budgets and tighten belts and to consider the depression a chance to squeeze out the excess and get back to Puritan morality”. Yet Bernanke was arguing: “get people money and they can buy shoes for their barefoot kids.” It wasn’t until the Roosevelt Administration’s New Deal that the economy began to make some real progress.
Bernanke put his training to use during this crisis and flooded the markets with cash. TIME says “he conjured up trillions of dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero, lent to mutual funds, hedge funds; foreign markets, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who never dreamed of receiving fed cash.” All of this earned him the title of “the bailout guy” and “the soft on inflation guy”. Still, Bernanke would argue that it was the right thing to do and a 10% unemployment rate is bad, but a 25% rate is catastrophic and sad.
I, (Hillary), would agree with TIME that Ben Bernanke is largely responsible for a weak recovery rather than a tragic depression, so kudos to TIME for choosing Ben Shalom Bernanke.
Posted by Hillary 1/4/10
I was skeptical at first, especially after it received scathing reviews from TIME Magazine, but a friend of ours recommended it and I thought it was excellent. In a sentence or less, I would say the objective of this book is to teach yourself how to create freedom of time to do whatever you really want to do.
One of my mottos is – If you can’t do it in an hour or less, then you’re probably doing it wrong. Well, Timothy Ferriss takes it one step further and says – if you can’t do it in about 4 hours a week you’re probably doing it wrong. He goes on to explain this by forcing you, through simple exercises in the book, to focus on what is really important and what is really necessary. He asks you to answer questions like these:
Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?
If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day what would you do?
If you had a second heart attack and had to work two hours a week what would you do?
If you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing 4/5 of different time-consuming activities, what would you remove?
What are the top three activities that I use to fill time as though I have been productive?
If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?
Ferriss uses data and theories to back his assertion that working longer hours are not adding more value. Some of the theories that he covers in the book are the 80/20 Rule, which states that 80% of the outputs come from 20% of the inputs. He even goes on to say that “the ratio is often skewed even more severely: 90/10, 95/5, and 99/1 are not uncommon.” He continues to defend this notion by applying “Parkinson’s Law“, which dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
These theories and more are just the first half of the book. The second half goes into specific detail of how to minimize and how to run a business. What I liked most about this book are the quotes he uses. Just to name a few of my favorites:
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” -Mark Twain
“The blind quest for cash is a fools errand“ -Ferriss
“The ability to choose is real power“- Ferriss
“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks.” Ferriss
“The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up all the pins either.” -Ferriss
“Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.” -Ferriss
“Remember – boredom is the enemy, not some abstract failure“ -Ferriss
“What gets measured gets managed “ -Peter Drucker
“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.” -Malcolm X
Amy and I are currently reading What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point.. This book is a compilation of several of his published articles written for the New Yorker. Gladwell starts off this book by saying “Good writing does not persuade you, it engages you.” I have sought to use this quote as our standard for a good podcast, but I think the reason for this quote is that Gladwell can find an interesting story in the simplest things like catsup and hair color. The story in this book that has been the most “engaging” is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill. My only criticism is, at the end of each story I feel like saying, “therefore what?”, again, another motto and standard for our podcast.
A Homemade Life is about the stories that inspired the recipes of an amazing cook, Molly Wizenberg. I love her writing style – I almost felt like I was reading her diary or her blog rather than a cook book. And I have to admit that anyone who adds chocolate and ginger to banana bread is a hero of mine.
Posted by Hillary
