Welcome To Your Life by Roland Orzabal

Orzabal, half of the duo that is Tears for Fears, can write well. I read this book start to finish over the course of a few days. Few books do this for me.

Orzabal has had quite the life. His childhood was chaotic. Before their divorce, his mother was an exotic dancer and occasional stripper. His father managed this type of talent. They frequently moved around.
He always had a deep interest in music and was playing in bands by the time he was 17. What’s interesting is that there are no young-and-hungry years in his career. He worked hard. He made music, which introduced him to new people, who helped him make better music. Repeat until he and Curt Smith are in a duo called Tears for Fears and have an album called “Songs from the Big Chair.”

After that, there is much drama and humble pie. Every subsequent Tears for Fears album sold half as much as the one before. Yet, Orzabal and Smith were undeniably becoming better musicians and better songwriters. Reflecting on their decline, Orzabal realizes how fleeting life is at the top of the charts. Bands don’t succeed because they are the best musicians with the best songs. Many things have to align to make a hit album.

Orzabal uses much astrology to make sense of his life. Many of the chapters have a coda where he explains what was going on with the planets at that time and how it influenced his life. He doesn’t use astrology to predict. He uses it to explain and clarify. As a rational thinker, this sort of mysticism always bugs me. Yet I can’t dismiss it. Mysticism gives people a narrative to believe. People regularly ignore the facts. They always cling to their beliefs. People build narratives that let them ignore their faults and give them hope for the future. They do so regardless of what a rational analysis may conclude. Maybe Orzabal does so to avoid taking accountability for some of the poor decisions he made along the way.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

I enjoy reading about the passions of those out of the mainstream. Perhaps it’s jealousy. An answer to what I am passionate about has eluded me for decades. Sheldrake has spent his decades literally deep in muck and dirt learning about fungus and how complex it can be.

The mushrooms that we see are the fruiting bodies of fungus deep underground. The fungus itself, the mycelium network, can extend over thousands of yards and connect to hundreds of plants by mingling with the roots.

There is a fungus in Oregon  that spans more than 3.5 square miles and is thousands of years old.

Fungi are a diverse kingdom. They can farm algae and bacteria. They can be parasites or mutualists to the plants around them. This relationship (parasite or mutualist) can change week by week. We don’t yet know how or why these shifts happen, only that they do.

The book touches on magic mushrooms. Why do some fungi produce hallucinogens? Is there a benefit to the fungus? Is this an unintended side effect? These questions are still open. The book covers some of the research into magic mushrooms that tries to answer these questions.

For whatever reason, this was a book that I found easier to read back to front, chapter by chapter, rather than front to back. I became bogged down when I started reading the book from front to back, so I flipped over to the last chapter, then the prior. Some books flow more quickly when I do this. I would never do this for fiction. But why not for non-fiction?

This book was a good tour through fungus. I haven’t caught the passion for fungus, but I appreciate Sheldrake’s breadth of experience.

How to Read a French Fry

Book by Russ Parsons

I enjoy the kitchen science in this book that's along side the recipes. There is nice discussion on deep frying and how to do a great job at it. 

Bird by Bird

By Anne Lamott

Lamott’s book on how to write has five me much to think about. She focuses on fiction and takes us through the grueling, embarrassing, frustrating process of churning out a story.

Two points which make me think my blog does not make me a better fiction writer…

“New writers often make the mistake of making themselves the lead of the story “

“You are making this mistake of assuming everything that happens to you is interesting “

The Autumn Ghost

How the battle against a polio epidemic revolutionized modern medical care.

Book by Hannah Wunsch

During the 1950s, the fight against polio brought together several major shifts in medical care, all  detailed by Dr. Hannah Wunsch in her history of the 1952 Copenhagen epidemic.

Before this period, anesthesiology was often treated as a secondary trade rather than a dedicated specialty. For conditions like severe polio, tetanus, poisoning, or major surgical recovery, the primary challenge was keeping a paralyzed body alive when it could not breathe on its own. Anesthesiologists possessed the specific skills needed to manage airways, leading to the birth of the modern Intensive Care Unit.

This era also reshaped mechanical ventilation. While iron lungs had been used since the late 1920s, the 1952 epidemic exposed their limits when hospital wards ran out of machines. Doctors in Copenhagen shifted to positive-pressure ventilation—delivering air directly into the lungs through a tracheostomy tube—which proved vastly more effective and permanently changed respiratory medicine.

Progress was not always linear. In the 1930s, poorly designed vaccine trials caused paralysis in participants, setting back human trials for nearly two decades. Decades later, during the 1955 rollout of Jonas Salk’s vaccine, manufacturing flaws at Cutter Laboratories led to batches containing live virus. This incident damaged public trust and contributed to early vaccine skepticism. It also prompted health authorities to establish much stricter federal oversight and manufacturing regulations.

East of Eden

By John Steinbeck

Looking over my library history, I see that I’ve been picking at East of Eden for two and half years.  While I have a desire to read great literature, I can loose focus when the book is finally on my e-reader.

Having said that, East of Eden is a wonderfully written, multi-generation epic. It explores the idea of good, evil and choice. You must vs you may. 

AI says…

Major Themes

• Good Versus Evil: The novel questions whether human behavior is fated or chosen.
• Timshel: A central Hebrew word explored in the book meaning "thou mayest"—signifying that humans have the free will to choose goodness over evil.
• The Weight of Acceptance: The struggle of children trying to earn a parent's love and the destructive power when that love is missing.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes

By Edmund De Waal

I’m on a quest to understand the roots of antisemitism. Reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, the history of a family of secular Jewish bankers in Vienna. It showed me how integrated, needed, and influential a Jewish family could be, yet how they were always kept a little separated because of their background. 

The rise of the Nazi party decimated the family. A few escaped. Others died by genocide, malnutrition, or suicide. It was difficult to prepare for. Antisemitism had existed for centuries. The family always dealt with it. But the Nazis were different. They arrived by surprise, like a tsunami.

A few main takeaways I want to remember:

The family members who survived were the ones who left Vienna before the war started. Some destructive forces can’t be stopped from the inside. Sometimes the lesson is to get out of the way.

The Nazi state weaponized its civil service to systematically isolate and target people, even amid internal administrative chaos. Modern politics feels chaotic, but there is some comfort that today’s power structures lack that unified, weaponized momentum.