In 1917, Ore’s mother was sold to a wealthy Chinese businessman by her opium-addicted father. Rather than becoming a concubine, she was educated as a doctor and assigned to the man’s oldest son whom she married and bore three children. When the Japanese invaded Hong Kong in 1941, the mother’s courage and skill saved her family.

Rest of the synopsis and also sample chapters, the Song of the Azalea lyrics and other songs.

I had heard beforehand that it might be crowded .

Malcolm Gladwell must have been mesmerizing. I’m amazed there were no tough questions.

There were no tough questions put by the audience who were clearly eating out of his hand.

However, Malcolm did say he’d been criticized for not going into greater depth on the workings of the sub-conscious. To this, his reply was that not even Freud could have come up with a comprehensive study on the subject.

[...]

Incidentally, one of Gladwell’s ace traits is his meticulous courtesy in summarising each question so the rest of the room can hear. In some of the cases, the summary was clearer and better phrased than the original.

He even answered the big question I would have tossed at him after seeing different headshots of him used in publicity.

Someone even raised the question of his hair which he explained thus

* He’d originally cut it short to please his mom. When he realised he was older and no longer needed to keep her happy in quite such detail, he let it grow out.
* The incident with the police involved being pulled in for his resemblance of a rapist.
* As Gladwell told us he pointed out, it was only the hair he had in common with the suspect: in all other respects, he was more slender, younger, and better looking.
* Gladwell also explained that, back in the days when his hair was short and mom-pleasing, he was called a dork. With his bushier frizz, he is regarded as ‘cool’, a heady experience MG is unwilling to bring to a premature end.

Hmmm…an interesting personal experience on market research…

The details Chris shared added flavor, helping me imagine how cool and relaxed Gladwell was in person.

MG looking particularly relaxed and cool in a track suit top with orange piping.

His public speaking voice has an abrasiveness which lends to audibility, and he’s enough of a showman to modulate tone, mood and changes of pace as well as spot when a joke is working and milking it to full effect.

I read the book but I somehow wasn’t aware that Gladwell saw intuition separate from rapid cognition. I agree with Gladwell’s opinion that polling is a waste of time and I think Chris did too.

As one who has worked in market research, I was struck by Gladwell’s pointing out that such polling is largely a waste of time since getting a “truthful” answer is a “cognitive impossibility”.

[...]

I’ve not finished the book, but I wonder if I’d have spotted that nowhere does the word “intuition” appear. Gladwell does not believe it has any connection with snap judgments or “rapid cognition”.

How well can we know ourselves? Can we tell the difference between our own intuition and cognition? I understand from Chris’ posts that the author wanted only to start a discussion and claimed that the observations in his book could not be explained, even by Freud. If we can’t understand it and it is unreliable at times, then how can we improve this blink?

Regarding Gladwell’s next project, Chris reported that it has something to do with ketchup…

Chris’ coverage was so thorough that I only found one sentence in the newspaper’s article that was new to me, the last sentence in this description of his hair.

It’s heady celebrity for a guy who said he only stopped being considered a dork when he let his afro-style hair grow longer. The attention hasn’t all been positive, he said. He was stopped by three police officers because they said he looked like a criminal they were seeking.

That experience, however, hasn’t diminished the shock of suddenly being considered “cool.”

“This kind of mid-life transformation is so intoxicating I just can’t give it up,” he said.

Mid-life transformation stories encourage and inspire others too. I do believe – or hope – that Mr. Gladwell is referring to more than the change of his hairstyle. Going from dork to cool is intoxicating at any age. Maybe he could write a book describing these powerful transformations. Or maybe he could describe the power of trying to please one’s parents and its impact of mother’s hairstyle opinions on society…

The author of Blink is now in Austin at SXSW. I won’t be seeing him there either but I can use Technorati to find a wacky picture of him at a party. Since he will be giving a keynote, I imagine he’ll be receiving more links this coming week.

This week I also discovered that Chris is an talented poet. I love his Waiting for the Ferry which begins:

Killing time waiting for a fog-bound early ferry
I saw a heron on the Eagle Harbour flats.

He also sings and performs with his guitar.

Perhaps Chris will be doing his own tour someday…or appearing at SXSW…

I found myself caught up in these swirling currents in the early 1980s when the faculty of Harvard College asked me to teach a course on Jesus in the newly introduced Moral Reasoning division of the undergraduate curriculum. The faculty had created this program after deciding that the university could no longer ignore a growing embarrassment. Why were we hearing so much about insider trading, sleazy legal practices, doctors more interested in profts than patients, and scientist who fudged the data? Worse, still, why were some of these culprits our own undergraduates? Why were so many well-educated people doing bad things? Was something missing from the education we were giving our students?

We knew we were equipping them with a good command of the humanities and the sciences [...] But we began to see that we were giving them virtually no preparation for how to apply their educations in a morally responsible manner. They were becoming experts on facts but novices on values. So the faculty decided that henceforth every student would be required to take at least one course in moral reasoning in order to graduate…[...]

I had my doubts about the idea. I wasn’t sure that morality was something one could teach in a classroom.

- from the Introduction, When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today by Harvey Cox

After seeing a review in the Seattle Times (which I can’t find now to link!), I reserved Harvey Cox’s book When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today at the local library. I was curious. As an Ivy League graduate and as someone who wrestled with her faith both in college and through the years since then, I wanted to know what had been happening at Harvard.

Within the first few chapters, I discovered that Harvey Cox and I are not on the same page spiritually. My first reaction to these differences was to think that I would be uncomfortable as a student in his class. He and I would disagree.

However, as Harvey Cox described the class he created, the students who came and the syllabus they discussed, I liked the man more and more. I liked Harvey Cox. And I found I liked Jesus more after getting a glimpse of him through the professor’s eyes.

This book had the potential to become an academic thesis crafted with abstraction and criticism. Instead Harvey Cox chose to share his own personal spiritual journey as he taught students at Harvard about Jesus. He shared his fears and doubts as a person and as a professor. He shared his own experiments of his soul, such as using his imagination in meditation. The stories he put on the page, as well as the pieces of himself, made the book an easy read and drew me into the classroom and into the mind and soul of Cox himself.

Chapters cover topics such as what it means for human beings to inhabit a body and Jesus and his family as refugees. One of my favorite illustrations was the trial of Jesus with Alan Derschowitz as defense, Professor Cox as Pontius Pilate, and the students acting as his advisory council. Even with Derschowitz as his defense, Jesus was still condemned to death.

The author often said he was afraid to introduce certain issues from the life of Jesus, for example healing, money and resurrection, but again and again it seemed he found himself surprised by his students’ reactions and even eagerness to discuss these highly-charged but applicable aspects of the gospel story. What I gained most from the book was a view of Jesus as a rabbi, in the context of his time, with the Bible and history of his day, also contrasted to Muslim beliefs and modern beliefs. The Jesus Harvey Cox saw in the Bible was a radical political Jesus, a rabbi, a storyteller, someone challenging the status quo but allowing people to choose their response to him. Another powerful and timely chapter centered on the trio of reason, emotion and torture.

Reading Harvey Cox’s book about Jesus made me think what it would be like to read books others had written about someone I loved. For example what if I read a pile of books describing Ted, written by everyone from his parents to his first grade teacher to his college roommate. How much another’s perspective adds to our own and how precious the difference can be. How all the portraits combined create a rich composite. When I read Harvey Cox’s portrait of Jesus, I loved Jesus more for who he is in Cox’s eyes and in my own. And I began to love Harvey Cox too, for who he is.

Below I’ve typed a collection of favorite quotes from the book. A particular aspect I appreciated was the role of Jesus as storyteller. I believe stories have power and so does Cox.

We need a present day equivalent for the ritual settings in which the classical narratives were once sung, enacted, and interpreted. But given the altered cultural context, today’s equivalents must welcome a degree of sorting and selectivity rarely found in the older ones, and encourage people to exchange their personal accounts in the light of the larger narrative. p. 44

With this kind of scandalous stuff inside the covers of the Good Book, who needs to waste money on true romance magazines? p. 54

Now years later I still carry on imaginary conversations with the rabbi from Nazareth. It has become my principal form of meditation. p. 99

We mistakenly sever the question of “Who am I” from the question of “What must I do?” The two belong together. p. 101

No one hearing Jesus’ message could have thought that he meant you could do nothing and just wait for it to happen. The need to respond, one way or another, was integral to everything he said and did. p. 160

Like the parables he told, the healing stories told about Jesus not only defied the ideas about health and healing that circulated in his day, they defy ours as well. p. 184

One of the most powerful elements of the Jesus story is that even after two millenia, retelling it plunges any honest hearer into confronting some issues we normally avoid. p. 219 (palm Sunday)

All in all, I have come to share Bonhoeffer’s suggestion that Jesus’ agonized cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the most important verse in the Bible and the most decisive moment in Jesus’ life.
[...]
How can God feel abandoned by himself? But the fact we cannot fully grasp such an idea does not make it any less powerful. It merely deepens the mystery of just how God was present in Jesus, and how God continues to suffer the grief and heartache of human existence. p. 266

Postscript

After decades of writing, thinking and teaching about him, I can honestly report that I still think of Jesus as a friend, but I find him ever more elusive and impossible to pin down. Every so often he takes me by surprise. I catch a glimpse of him sometimes on wintry afternoons strolling through Harvard Yard; chatting with sophomores, Ph.D. candidates, and faculty members, dunking doughnuts in coffee with the maids and janitors; helping the students who run the homeless shelters in the church basements to make up the beds for another cold night. Sometimes I see him as one of the shivering homeless men or women who wander into those shelters. But why should I be surprised? He is where he always was, doing what he was always doing: teaching, chatting, eating and drinking without regard to rank. Today, like then, he meets the same mixture of welcome and hesitation, skepticism and rejection. He runs the constant risk of real trouble with both the religious and political establishments. But he gently forces people to look at life differently and maybe live it differently. p. 302

_________________

Call it a benefit of blogging: the other day I received a postcard announcing a new show at Bainbridge Island’s gallery Fraga by Josie Gray with an appearance by poet Tess Gallagher Friday March 4 from 6 to 8 pm. Why did I receive a personalized invite with a handwritten note? I have reason to suspect it was because I blogged about Josie Gray’s show last year… quoting from the newspaper in my post Partners in passion: how does it happen?

Malcolm Gladwell is scheduled to be at the island’s Eagle Harbor Bookstore Monday night March 7th from 7:30 to 9 p.m.. I haven’t yet written my review of his latest book Blink since I was waiting to coordinate it with Ted’s. Here’s a quick summary: Although the social aspects of the blink-like rapid intuition Gladwell described, including marriage analysis and face-reading (as noted by Jon Udell) fascinated me, yet after finishing the book, I decided that I didn’t like it enough to make the enormous effort to go see him on Monday evening. However, I hope someone posts a report!

The first five chapters of the book are the strongest, where Surowiecki tries to ferret out the principles and situations in which groups of people are wise/smart/effective. After that (over half the book), I felt that he kind of lost focus on the topic. While many of the anecdotes in the rest of the book are interesting, I felt a little shortchanged by the end.

Go read the rest of his review, complete with many quotes.

My previous post on the topic has received some interesting comments. Dr. Ernie shared his definition

Relative value
is best determined
by honest collaborative inquiry
into competing alternatives

Richard left me a thorough comment: I had forgotten that The Wisdom of Crowds was his favorite book of 2004!

He wrote:

If Surowiecki were to address your examples of people parking cars or teens, he would point out how heterogeneous they are. (Car-owners. Teens. That said, your first example is a better example than the second.) Also, with regards to people driving in cars, his book sort of addresses your objection by effectively giving up on explaining why traffic patterns are so dumb. His hold chapter on the subject could have been summarized by saying “you know, traffic isn’t something that the Wisdom of Crowds theory explains very well”.

Surowiecki would also address your objection that the human need for leaders and experts is false need, that leaders have been successful in convincing us that they are better decision makers or better with facts because they possess attributes (charisma, size, etc.) that are irrelevant. Also, he would probably say that we may *want* experts and leaders, but that we *shouldn’t* want them.

Anyway, the point of the book is that there are dumb crowds and smart crowds, and that the smart crowds can not only be identified but the conditions for a smart crowd can be created.

Thanks, Richard for your critique of my critique. Your summary helps me. Since I published my post, read your comment and talked to Ted more, I have been considering why I didn’t like the book and have come to these conclusions.

1. I don’t disagree with Surowiecki’s conclusions – I agree with most of them – but I don’t think he needed to take 500 + pages (in the large print edition) to get there. The writing could have been more concise and clear… and made the same points. Richard, I like your summary of the traffic chapter; I found myself wondering what it was he was trying to say.

2. I picked up the book hoping to find some direct answers to questions in my mind regarding the way crowds, or even two strangers, can behave. I think I felt frustrated because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in the book.
3. Richard also mentioned The Tipping Point in his post on favorite books of 2004, saying that Gladwell and Surowiecki both attack conventional wisdom in an accessible way.. I read Tipping Point five years ago and I remember it. Malcolm Gladwell’s book was easier for me to understand and apply to my life. I remember how amazed I was to learn about the creation of Blue’s Clues, for example, or to try to figure out whether I was a “maven” etc. I could relate to it. I could see myself living in Gladwell’s theories.

   Surowiecki’s book leaves me wondering what to do. Most of my crowd experiences in my daily life at the moment are *dumb* ones, to use Richard’s summary term. While Surowiecki outlined what would be required to create a smart crowd, I think that it is not often possible to have all of those conditions. As I noted, I fear as a culture we are becoming less willing to listen to diversity. The Wisdom of Crowds seems more a collection of observations, or someone taking a theory and seeing how it fits or doesn’t fit here and there. What he highlights about group dynamics are true. I know from my experience. But I don’t feel I know what to do now in my daily life with what I’ve read.

Then Lucy added the comment

Sure, there are dumb crowds and smarts crowds and the conditions for smart crowds can be created. However, WILL they be created?

I think this is the key question to ask after reading The Wisdom of the Crowds.

In other words: I was disappointed by this book. After reading Liz Lawley’s piece social consequences of social tagging (including this quote On the other hand, I don’t share the optimism that so many of my colleagues in this field seem to have that the collective “wisdom of crowds” will always yield accurate and useful descriptors.) I was eager to discover James Surowiecki’s thesis and to know why the many are smarter than the few as the subtitle of his tome The Wisdom of the Crowds claimed.

His theme was a simple one. Here’s my summary: Crowds are wise when people are independent thinkers, people have diverse perspectives, and when everyone can participate in the decision process. Of course, these groups will make wise choices. But as I walk through downtown on a given day and try to negotiate the parking lot or see a group of teen guys jeer one of their own, I don’t agree that the many are smart. I confess I read the book quickly, even skimming some of the end section. But Surowiecki’s book seemed to be an attempt to prove his hypothesis true in a variety of different situations. It felt a bit to me like bending. It was a confusing read for me.

I liked the chapter on science, examining how collaboration has been established and beneficial. I did appreciate his pointing out that CEOs are worshipped because we believe experts have answers. It was also interesting to see how having one dissenting voice in a group would change how others reacted. We impact each other because we are sensitive to each other’s decisions and also to other’s perceptions of ourselves. However if one is committed to being an independent thinker, this book will only reinforce that belief.

I do believe that this book has implications for blogging, especially if bloggers only read those who have similiar opinions, or if bloggers drown out other smaller voices. The Wisdom of Crowds convinced me to continue reading those with whom I don’t agree and to try to look out for voices that may not be as loud as others.

What Surowiecki failed to include in his calculations, I believe, was the human need for leaders and experts. I think people often want a leader, one man or woman, in many situations. People want to trust one person not a group. Would we vote for multiple people to be our president? I think this is an innate psychological wiring reinforced by experience.

How can we change society to work in wiser groups rather than as individual experts? How can we change our mindsets for what we desire? And do we even desire to have groups that are diverse and listen to each other rather than making assumptions? My fear is that as a society we seek comfort and confirmation in homogenity; we no longer value diversity or listen to the smaller voices. My fear is that we’ve lost our ability to be wise as crowds.

Quotes:

the important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable. …
…Having even one other person in the group who felt as they did made the subjects happy to announce their thoughts, and the rate of conformity plummeted.
Ultimately diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think.
p 76

Independence doesn’t mean isolation but it does mean relative freedom from the influence of others. If we are independent, our opinions are, in some sense, our own. We will not march to death in a circle just because the ants in front of us are doing so.

….Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keep the mistakes that people make from being correlated…..[...]…Second, independent individuals are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data everyone is familiar with. The smartest groups then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other…..p.80

Paula Stephan quoted “Scientists who collaborate with each other are more productive, often times producing “better” science than are individual investigators.” p 316

A similiar study by Harriet Zuckerman, which compared forty-one Nobel laureates with a sample of similarly placed scientists, found that the laureates collaborated more often than regular scientists. p 317

What allows this strange blend of collaboration and competition to flourish is the scientific ethos that demands open access to information. This ethos dates back to the origins of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century….

If anything, in fact, the more a piece of knowledge becomes available, the more valuable it potentially becomes, because of the wider array of possible uses for it.
p 324 – 325

NASA employees today are far more likely to have come to the agency directly out of graduate school, which means they are also far less likely to have divergent opinions. That matters because, in small groups, diversity of opinion is the single best guarantee that the group will reap benefits from face-to-face discussion…..

This doesn’t mean that the ideal jury will follow the plot of TWelve Angry Men, where a single holdout convinces eleven men who are ready to convict that they are all wrong. But it does mean that having even a single different opinion can make a group wiser….p. 358

What Keynes recognized is that what makes the stock market especially strange is that often investors are concerned not only just with what the average investor thinks but with what the average investor thinks the average investor thinks. And the truth is: Why stop there? Maybe what you need to think about is what the average person thinks the average person thinks the average person’s view is. p 484

Tweet

]]> http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1648/feed 4 http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1669 http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1669#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2005 08:45:24 +0000 jjl http://www.julieleung.com/wordpress/?p=1669 Renee Altson is one of my favorite bloggers for the way she lays her soul out transparent for all to see. I admire her for her continued wrestling with faith and pursuit of God despite the intense pain in her life. Rape, betrayal, abuse, anger and sorrow all play a part in her story, described both in her book Stumbling Toward Faith: My Longing To Heal From The Evil That God Allowed and in her blog, ianua. Often after reading one of her posts, I find myself overwhelmed with my own emotions, unable to do anything for a while.

Reading her book ( website) is a different experience from her blog. A book is bound. It is set and fixed. While Renee’s blog changes with her, chronicling her feelings or recent activities, a book is static. The blog provides a glimpse into what is happening in her soul from day to day. The book provides a bigger picture, how Renee is beginning to make sense of her life from where she is. I admire Renee for her bravery and her beauty: thank you for sharing who you are.

I’d recommend Stumbling Towards Faith for anyone who has wondered where God is in the midst of atrocities, anyone who has wrestled with faith in the face of evil, anyone who has been disappointed or hurt by organized religion, anyone who longs for healing and hope.

Favorite quotes:

i resist because the god i am seeking, the god i am slowly finding does not live in that christian bubble, he does not dwell among the petty scripture quotations and the “be thankful” in everythings” and the pat answers that bring nothing but guilt and shame and confusion, rather he lives in every “why?” i ask, in every moment i am afraid, in every part of my heart that dares to be honest with him, in every part that even dares to question his very existence. page 98

in the darkness of much of my life, there have appeared many tiny sparks of light. in the midst of being infected by poisonous people, there have always been people with good hearts trying to guide me, people who saw enough in me to acknowledge that there was pain, people who encouraged me to push forward in spite of it, although much of my relationship with christianity has been negative, and although many people joined together to dismiss much of who i was and what was going on in my life, there also have been people who were willing to separate out from the others and treat me with kindness. in my angriest, most despairing moments i know i forget about them, but they are there, and they are a part of why i am still pursuing god in any fashing, why i am still able to say that i want to believe.

as i reflect on my journey, i see that the offerings each of them gave me were only understood to the depth that i was able to accept them. page 102

i am finding myself engulfed in a love that simply will not let me go. i am discovering that the grace and the hope that i have wanted so desperately, that i have ached for, is beginning to emerge in little things i never noticed. sometimes it takes a big thing to smack me upside the head – a magnification of a lot of little things – “look here, dork, ” it says, “i’ll give you a lot of detail so you can see how much of it you’re missing. then, when you’re feeling despair, you can look for the little things and see them as magnificient.” page 154

isn’t it something that these stories matter? that my story and his story and your story intertwine and met, and that god makes something lovely and beautiful and meaningful out of our wretched, halting words? p 173

Tweet

]]> http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1669/feed 0 http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1668 http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1668#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2005 08:30:41 +0000 jjl http://www.julieleung.com/wordpress/?p=1668 The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander also was listed as a favorite book by the Fedor family Christmas letter (specifically Katherine). I read it on a weekend for an escape; it was fast and fun. I haven’t read many books in this genre, and (so perhaps naturally?) this one reminded me a bit of Lord of the Rings, although the Gollum figure in this novel is sweet not sinister, begging for crunchings and munchings. Also this novel is not as thick or as heavy, literally and metaphorically, as Tolkien. Cute characters, insightful dialogue, intense adventure – and lots of giggles. Perhaps I should pick up another one in Alexander’s series?!

“Why? ” Dallben interrupted. “In some cases,” he said, “we learn more by looking for the answer to the question and not finding it then we do from learning the answer itself. This is one of those cases….” page 9

“I have studied the race of men, ” Medwyn continued. “I have seen that alone you stand as week reeds by a lake. You must learn to help yourselves, that is true; but you must also learn to help one another. Are you not, all of you, lame ants?” p 121

“It’s silly,” Eilonwy added, “to worry because you can’t do something you simply can’t do. That’s worse than trying to make yourself taller by standing on your head.” p 150

Tweet

]]> http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1668/feed 5 http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1667 http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1667#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2005 08:27:05 +0000 jjl http://www.julieleung.com/wordpress/?p=1667 I haven’t seen Martha Brockenbrough since our high school graduation. While in school we spent time together, especially running on the cross-country and track teams. I liked Martha. Many people liked Martha. She was witty and cute. She was smart. She was generous and kind. She had many talents.

So I’ve been happy to hear of her success. For years Martha has written a column for Encarta. When I heard she had written a book, I knew I had to read it.

It Could Happen to You is Martha’s diary of her time during and after her pregnancy with daughter Lucy. Like her Encarta columns it’s filled with information and also her sense of humor. The tone of her book felt a bit like a blog, personal and thoughtful, reflective and funny, chapters written in the moment. I’d recommend it as a great antidote to all the what-to-expect books. While Martha didn’t cover medical conditions, she did describe some of her own struggles, including what it was like to deliver Lucy. I also appreciated her honesty as she revealed what she thought about work and life after motherhood. This book is Martha, both the Martha I knew years ago, and a new Martha, a mom and a friend to many.

Another great feature of this book was that Adam, Martha’s husband, wrote some of the chapters. I haven’t read many pregnancy/baby books from daddy’s perspective; Adam’s pieces fit well with his wife’s, true and funny.

Some favorite quotes:

But once you are a parent, accepting other people – and the world – as they are is not always so easy. All you want is for your child to be loved by everyone and safe at all times. Two impossible goals. Too much to ask, but you do it anyway. page 108

It’s moments like this that I’m starting to realize where the best parts of life can be found. They’re the corners, the turning points. It’s like when you go outside on a sunny day and take a deep breath and realize it’s not summer air you’ve taken in. There’s a snap to it, and you realize that summer has given way to fall, and you’re suddenly overwhelmed with happiness at the change, for it symbolizes simple, new pleasures to come: cups of cider, crackling fires and cozy sweaters.

Lucy’s first smile is like this. It’s a forerunner to her first laught, the first taste of future joy. It’s like the horiaon swallowing the sun on a glorious, canatloupe-colored evening. It’s naked bliss. It overwhelms me. p 117

And what if I didn’t feel it? What if doves didn’t wheel overhead when Lucy emerged? What if angels didn’t sing, and – worst of all – what if I didn’t think she was cute? Did that mean I didn’t love her and therefore, wasn’t a proper Mom? I got a helpful piece of advice from someone who already had children. “Don’t expect to love them right away, ” she said, “It’s okay if it takes a while.” p 136

To touch life like this, to feel it bloom in front of you – this is the only kind of magic that is real. p 192

Tweet

]]> http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1667/feed 0 http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1666 http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1666#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2005 08:17:46 +0000 jjl http://www.julieleung.com/wordpress/?p=1666 Through a Christmas letter sent by the Fedor family (including Katherine), listing everyone’s favorite books of the year, I discovered French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork and Corkscrew by Peter Mayle. This read is a foodie’s dream and anyone’s delight. Traveling around France sampling culinary adventures from frogs to snails to chickens to truffles to wine to spas – what could be more fun?! I learned a lot about food, about frogs, about France and about human nature.

A few favorite quotes:

…I was going to attend the annual messe des truffes in Richerenches, a village northeast of Orange. Thsi was to be a sacred event, under the patronage of Saint Antoine, at which thanks would be given for the aromatic, mysterious and breathtakingly expensive black truffle. What’s more, such are the blessings that reward the devout, there would be lunch after the service. A lunch that included truffles. page 24

Greeks and Romans are often given the credit for making gastronomic discoveries, but perhaps this time it was a prehistoric entrepreneur from farther east. Maybe that was it: the early, tentative stirrings of the Chinese Connection. An honorable ancestor of Mr. Chan or Mr. Wu, having sampled his firt juicy dozen somwehre in the snail-rich fields of coastal China and finding them delicious, might have sensed an export opportunity: Escargots de Shanghai…Alas, we shall never know. page 124

(from time in a French Spa)
But here, my daily responsibilities were limited to turning up on time at the thermal farm and raising an eager knife and fork twice a day in the restaurant. I was doing absolutely nothing and enjoying it, something that had never happened to me before. p 200

Tweet

]]> http://www.julieleung.com/archives/1666/feed 0