Today is your final chance to win a free drink and book by participating in the Second Annual Black History Month Quiz!
UPDATE:
Defending champion David Russell is staking his claim to defend his title.
Can anyone beat him? The deadline is midnight tonight.
ORIGINAL POST:
Today is the end of Black History Month, and thus the final day to participate in the Second Annual Black History Month Quiz.
I posted the questions on February 25 and 26.
A book and a drink are on the line!
Chile has just been battered by one of the most powerful earthquakes the world has seen in a century.
The death toll is already above 200 and, I am quite confident, will only climb upward from there.
I have never been to the country, but would love to go there.
Here are some books I have read about this suffering nation:
My Invented Country, by Isabel Allende. The niece of the Chile’s assassinated president, Salvador Allende, Isabel is one of Chile’s most famous novelists of recent decades. In this book she writes about the country where she spent much of her childhood and from which she left shortly after her uncle’s murder.
They Used to Call us Witches, by Julie Shayne. This academic text examines the community of left-wing Chilean exiles in Vancouver. The title draws its name from a magazine they produced. The prose can be a bit jargon-laden, and Shayne’s admiration for the women shines through her writing. She writes approvingly about the role emotion played for these women as they work unceasingly to improve conditions in their homeland. Unfortunately, they now will have much more to do.
Tapestries of Hope, by Marjorie Agosin. The incredibly prolific Agosin writes here about the arpilleristas, those women who defied the Pinochet regime and wove tapestries that named their loved ones who had been “disappeared.” Agosin showed her own mettle with this project, as she smuggled out the tapestries over a number of years.
The Condor Years, by John Dinges. Columbia University journalism professor Dinges exposes Operation Condor, an antiterrorist alliance in the 70s and 80s that involved the Pinochet government and others carrying out, with U.S. complicity, brutal action in Latin America, Italy and even the United States. An outstanding work of investigative journalism that draws heavily on declassified documents.
100 Love Sonnets, by Pablo Neruda. Chile’s poet laureate shows his versatility in expressing his feelings of love in this moving collection that includes the following poem Dunreith and I included as part of our first two wedding ceremonies:
Sonnet XVII (100 Love Sonnets, 1960)
I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.
The people of Chile will need love, poetry and lots of helps from exiles and the international community during the upcoming weeks and months.
We are thinking of them during this time.
The Second Annual Black History Month Quiz continues today.
For those who are entering the contest today, welcome to the Second Annual Black History Month Quiz.
You have until the end of the day Sunday, February 28, to answer these and the questions posted yesterday.
The winner gets a free drink and their choice from some of the books I’ve written about recently on the blog.
Good luck!
1. Who is the first black American ever to have won an individual gold medal at the Winter Olympics? How many gold medals has he won?
2. Which book about racial passing has been featured in this blog since the beginning of this year? What was unusual about the protagonist’s passing?
3. How many migrations does historian Ira Berlin argue have shaped black America in The Making of African America?
4. Who was the first black U.S. Senator elected after Reconstruction? To which party did he belong?
5. Name five black Americans who have won at least three Grammy Awards.
6. What is the name and mission of the university Booker T. Washington founded?
7. Name two novels by black authors that have been set in Chicago?
8. What was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery? When did it take that action?
9. Name two black newspapers that many say played a significant role in encouraging black people to move from the South to the North in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
10. Which black American said, “Power concedes nothing without a struggle. It never has, and never will.”
The Second Annual Black History Month Quiz begins today!
Here it is: the long-awaited, second annual Black History Month Quiz!!!
Last year’s winner was David Russell, and his prize was a drink of his choice with me.
This year a drink will still be at stake as well as a copy of a book I reviewed recently here on the blog.
Here are the rules.
The quiz will have 10 questions today and 10 questions tomorrow.
Participants have until the end of Black History Month, i.e. Sunday, February 28, to submit answers to the questions posted today and tomorrow. The contestant with the highest number of answers wins.
Good luck, and thanks for participating!
1. Who is America’s first black president?
2. Who did Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison call “America’s first black president”?
3. Which basketball coach was the first to lead his team to junior college, NIT and NCAA championships?
4. What is the name of the book based on the murder of Henry Marrow? Who wrote the book? Which former NAACP head emerged as a civil rights leader during the time after Marrow’s murder?
5. Name four black winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. At least one must be from the United States.
6. Which black historical figure was nicknamed Moses? What did she do to earn that name?
7. Name three black winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction besides Gwendolyn Brooks.
8. Which African-influenced musical form and organization started in Brazil’s favelas?
9. For how many years was Nelson Mandela imprisoned? In which prison did he spend the most time?
10. When and where did Mandela make the following statement: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.“
Lisa Dodson's book brings out how ordinary Americans subvert the unfair economy.
It will come as news to absolutely no one that the economy remains in terrible shape-the names for the period have ranged from “The Great Recession” to “The Second Great Depression”-but Lisa Dodson’s book points to a little-chronicled but widespread response: subversion.
Dodson’s The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy is a fascinating look at how people in different industries and rank find ways to support each other and, individually and collectively, to undermine ever so slightly the existing order.
Thanks to dear friend and uber-connector Danny Postel for yet another informative and enjoyable book reference.
Dodson makes it clear that, contrary to others’ assertions that these actions constitute a new “underground railroad,” these people are not coordinated and mobilized.
But she does write in the introduction that she, “did come upon an array of secret and sometimes illicit ways people push against unfairness.”
This, she decided, was a story worth telling.
Frances Norwood's book explores the controversial topic of euthanasia in the Netherlands.
ED LOWENSTEIN COMMENT: What struck me about the book is the difference about the entire mindset of citizens of the Netherlands and those of the US, for which she presents a historical context. Because they needed to keep away the sea to retain and recapture land, and because this took prolonged and concerted effort, the Dutch had to trust their collective effort and gave the government power and trust. The US has been almost the polar opposite. With respect to the medical system, it has been organized for continuity and trust; again quite to opposite of the US. Because of this trust, the physicians could effectively respond to their patients’ wishes and advocate for a final stage of life that potentially could avoid the worst suffering of “social death,” a concept that was new to me but seems very powerful and valid. IN the US, the fight has been AGAINST the presently distrusted medical establishment.
The chapter about her experiences with her mother and father after returning to the USA put much of this into focus.
ORIGINAL POST:
My father has seen a lot of death during the half-century since he graduated from medical school in June 1959.
In part because of what he has witnessed, and in part because of his deep commitment to providing ethical care to patients, Dad has, in the past dozen years or so, developed an intellectual and personal passion for end-of-life care issues.
His concern has practical and philosophical dimensions.
In the United States, a highly disproportionate amount of medical resources that people consume occurs within the very last stages of their lives, often at times when the possibility of a meaningful recovery and accompanying high quality of life is all but nonexistent.
In addition to seeing this as a form of medical rationing, Dad has more recently come to the view that these resources could be more effectively and ethically allocated to addressing the social causes of poor medical outcomes.
Beyond this, Dad believes firmly in a patient’s right to determine the course and even experience of his or her inevitable death, and to do so with dignity.
He has acted on his beliefs in a variety of ways: studying the issue closely; writing an evaluation of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act for one of medicine’s most prestigious journals; and serving on a board of an organization that supports his beliefs on this issue, among others.
It is controversial territory, and perhaps particularly so given Dad’s personal history as a member of the Kindertransport program and our family’s Holocaust history. During its murderous reign, the Nazi government implemented an enormously active and wide-ranging euthanasia program to kill millions of people because it deemed them “life unworthy of life.”
Given this complicated background and our ongoing discussions on the issue, the arrival of Frances Norwood’s The Maintenance of Life: Preventing Social Death through Euthanasia Talk and End-of-Life-Care-Lessons from The Netherlands last night intrigued me.
David Magee writes about Toyota's rise in happier days for the company.
It may be hard to remember these days, with the recall of millions of vehicles and internal memos boasting of saving $100 million in one of those recalls becoming part of the Congressional record, but Toyota reached the summit of the car world just three years ago.
In How Toyota Became #1, David Magee traces the company’s roots as a loom company and the values and practices that propelled the fledgling car company to its lofty position before its recent stunning fall from dizzying heights.
Magee claims that this work is not corporate hagiography, but his assertions are not very convincing.
The company’s commitment to long-term solutions, the humility of its leaders and its willingness to seek out, take responsibility for and solve problems are all identified and extolled in this remarkably positive work.
Joe Navarro shows us that nonverbal communication speaks louder than words.
Ex-FBI agent Joe Navarro’s book Louder Than Words contains a relatively simple pair of messages about nonverbal communication:
Your nonverbal communication often matters more than what you say.
The cues are right there in front of you to be read; learning how to do so can help improve your career.
These straightforward ideas anchor Navarro’s quick, accessible and illustrated work.
In contrast with others who have explored this topic, Navarro does not confine himself to physical nonverbal communication.
Rather he explains that noverbal communication comes through in how you present yourself, how you keep your desk, how your storefront looks and even how you talk with people on the phone.
Tiger Woods' apology has elicited sharply divided reactions; books about Michael Jordan and Joe DiMaggio may shed some light on Woods' tattered image.
Tiger Woods’ 13-minute apology yesterday has elicited sharply divided reactions.
Some, like ESPN’s Gene Wojchiechowski, see it as a first step back from the incalculable damage-although I am sure some enterprising reporter has already tried to calculate the cost of Woods’ many affairs-he caused his family, friends, sponsors, parents who looked up to him, and, of course, himself.
Others, like Bill The Sports Guy Simmons, aren’t buying Woods’ performance, calling it robotic, contrived and controlled.
As many have noted, Woods is just the latest in an increasingly lengthening line of celebrities, politicians and other public figures who have come forward to atone for their private transgressions.
Whatever one thinks of Woods’ speech yesterday, a near unanimous consensus exists that Woods has irreversibly damaged his earlier, carefully cultivated reputation as someone with impeccable talent on the golf course and high integrity and sterling character off of it.
Woods has courted his status as a corporate icon from the very day he turned pro-an act that Nike announced that the famous “Hello, world” commercial that included strains of a capella voices mingling with messianic drums beating before the question, “Are you ready for me?” appeared and Nike’s Just Do It slogan appeared.
For the following dozen years he enhanced that status with each successive major victory and seemingly inexorable climb toward Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 majors, with the foundation he created with his late father Earl, and with each additional brand he endorsed.
Woods is not the first sporting titan either to have assiduously cultivated a positive public face or to have later found that image battered through actions in his personal life.
Close friend Michael Jordan advanced his corporate-friendly and racially transcendent image starting in college, we learn in David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made.
Like Woods, Jordan kept mum about things political, refusing to endorse Harvey Gantt in his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Jesse Helms in his native North Carolina-”Republicans buy sneakers, too,” he told Sam Smith-and not speaking out against worker abuses in Nike plants.
Sam Smith’s The Jordan Rules started to leak unflattering details about Jordan who once taunted a teammate playing in his hometown by displaying the dozens of tickets he had at his disposal and set about to destroy the confidence of teammates like Stacy King and Brad Sellers whose desire or toughness he questioned.
Michael Leahy’s account of Jordan’s final comeback advanced this storyline, portraying Jordan as an egocentric bully, while lawsuits and other stories brought out his infidelity and gambling, respectively.
And Jordan won himself little additional favor during his Hall of Fame induction speech, which many saw as displaying some of these same unappealing traits.
Before Woods and Jordan, though, there was Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper whose 56-game hitting streak has stood for close to 70 years and who was seen to embody grace, class, sportsmanship and humility.
Richard Ben Cramer’s The Hero’s Life shows DiMaggio striving to build his legend from very early in his career and showing in excruciating detail DiMaggio’s excessive ego and venality.
Time will tell whether Woods’ apology contributes to preserving what is left of his family life and if Jordan will come to a more humble and less competitive stance toward the world, but both would do well to take note of DiMaggio.
One of the more poignant section in Ben Cramer’s book comes toward the very end of DiMaggio’s life. The hospitalized legend is not surrounded by friends and family, but by avaricious adviser Morris Engelberg, who tries to coax nearly illegible signatures out of the dieing ballplayer.
It’s a chilling scene, and one that seems based in a lifetime of having lived to be admired, rather than in mutually intimate relationships.
For now, Woods returns to more therapy and an uncertain golf future.
We will watch the story with interest.
Bob Clyatt tells us how to reach and enjoy semi-retirement.
The endless crush of activities got you down? Feeling the days slipping by without connection to purpose? Just tired of it all?
If so, Bob Clyatt has two pieces of news for you.
You’re not alone.
And it doesn’t have to be that way.
Clyatt points the way out of this crazed existence and into a life more driven by meaning in Work Less, Live More, a primer on how people of all ages can comfortably transition to what he calls semi-retirement.
