June 2016 – education and deconstruction.com

As Luck Would Have It

The Book of the Week is “As Luck Would Have It” by Joshua Piven, published in 2003. This slim volume contains a series of anecdotes on lucky people, whose lives were changed in major ways by good or bad luck. A few generalizations are also provided, on the factors that generated the good luck that allowed lives to be saved in the life-threatening situations– in planes and snow, and led to success in the happy situations– the cases of the lottery winner, hit-song musicians and toy fad identifier. As an aside, this blogger was distracted by the author’s alternating verb tenses between past and present. All the stories are history, and therefore should have been told in the past tense.

Experiences of good luck do not necessarily generate happiness. But the ones that do, meet the human needs of “autonomy, competence, relatedness and self-esteem.” People can better their luck if they are prepared, keep an open mind, keep abreast of information in a given situation, make inquiries to obtain additional information, practice social and professional networking, and trust gut feelings.

Read the book to learn how the above factors were applied in the real-life stories.

The Disappearing Spoon

The Book of the Week is “The Disappearing Spoon” by Sam Kean, published in 2010.

This ebook consists of a series of anecdotes about elements of the periodic table. The author describes fundamental principles of chemistry, particle physics and astronomy; how certain elements were discovered or created, and their identifiers; and the reasons why there might or might not be life on other planets.

One bit of history thrown in, was that, during WWII, the Nazis bartered gold they had stolen– for tungsten (a valuable ingredient in weaponry) from supposedly neutral Portugal. Tungsten is a hard, solid metal that has a very high melting point.

Other elemental trivia include the facts that tantalum and niobium are used in phones for their density, heat-resistance and conductive abilities; the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained uranium and the one dropped on Nagasaki contained plutonium. With advances in computer science, Monte Carlo simulations (a mathematics model that computes probabilities) have become used more often than physical experiments in recent decades.

Read the book to learn how it was determined that cadmium was poisoning the rice paddies near the Kamioka mines in Japan just after WWII, how astronauts died in an accident when nitrogen was used in a spacecraft, what “measurement scientists” do, and much more.

High

The Book of the Week is “High” by Brian O’Dea, published in 2006. This book describes the adventures of an international drug-smuggling participant and addict between the 1970’s and the very early 1990’s.

O’Dea was the son of a brewery owner in Newfoundland, Canada. In the mid-1970’s, he and his smuggling partners secreted cocaine “… in false-bottomed suitcases at the factory in Bogota (Colombia) and muled to Kingston (Jamaica) via Lufthansa…” and unloaded the drug at Montego Bay. Other partners “… would be getting strapped up with the product on their thighs and stomachs and backs. Each person would carry between two and four kilos, worth between $100,000 and $200,000.”

Read the book to learn of the author’s Jamaica trials and tribulations with airplane mishaps, romantic subplots, prison and addiction experiences, his role in an elaborate three-continent marijuana distribution concern, and what finally became of him.

Gudao, Lone Islet

The Book of the Week is ” Gudao, Lone Islet– The War Years in Shanghai” by Margaret Blair, published in 2008.

This slim volume tells of the WWII traumas suffered by a little girl in a British/Scottish/Chinese household in the International Settlement section of Shanghai, occupied by the Japanese in 1943.

Born in 1936, the author lived in a neighborhood of expatriates originally from the United Kingdom. Her Scottish father was a detective in the British police. The political entity was not a British colony, but was a protectorate subject to British law.

In 1943, the assets and liabilities of the British sector of the International Settlement was sold via a treaty between Great Britain and China, to the Shanghai Municipal Council (i.e., Chiang Kai Shek’s political party, the Nationalists– (non-Communists, but no less corrupt and power hungry). In this way, the British government knowingly allowed its citizens to stay in harm’s way. The Japanese occupied the area that year, and the author and her family became prisoners of war.

Before and during the war, the Japanese took various martial actions that resulted in atrocities and deaths far greater than would the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the war’s end. The Axis power militarily occupied Korea, Manchuria, and committed the worst brutalities in Nanking, China. There occurred millions of deaths there (according to this book), while Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw only about 120,000 deaths. Additionally, Japanese prisoner of war camps had higher death rates than camps of other nations in the war. The Japanese never did pay reparations for its war crimes.

Prior to the war, Blair lived an idyllic life of social events and familial closeness in the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930’s. All of that was changed radically by the war. Read the book to learn of the traumas caused by the war at large, and the hardships the author faced on a day-to-day basis.