Books Read This Month

Reading / /

The Zorg by Siddharth Kara
Wow. I’d never even heard of the Zorg before, let alone understood its role in sparking the abolitionist movement in England and the United States. In 1781, the crew crammed the ship with 442 enslaved people on a voyage to Jamaica. After a series of events—bad weather, navigational errors—the ship veered off course, and supplies began to dwindle. What happened next is almost impossible to comprehend. In an effort to “save lives,” they began throwing people overboard, starting with women and children. Shackled together, often in pairs, people were dragged to the edge of the ship, screaming and begging for their lives, and thrown into the ocean to drown. It was the systematic murder of 133 people. Why? Mostly money. The slaves had been so malnourished and mistreated that they would likely sell for far less than expected. And because they were insured “property,” they’d be worth more dead than alive. When news of the massacre spread, it forced people to confront the true brutality of slavery. True to form, pro-slavery activists used the Bible to defend it. Reverend Raymond Harris “asserted that, ‘the slave-trade . . . appears in perfect harmony with the principles and decisions of the word of God,’ and that Jesus ‘never once condemned, reproved, or even hinted the least disapprobation of the practices of slavery . . . not even in his divine Sermon on the Mount.’” Another slavery supporter, William Gregson, argued that financial catastrophe would occur if slavery was abolished. To which I wrote in the margins: then you be a slave. It’s a hard book to stomach. But the storytelling and historical detail make it readable and unforgettable.

Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In by Louis Zamperini
My good friend recommended this, and I’m so glad she did. Most people know Louis Zamperini’s story on the surface: Olympic runner, World War II bombardier, prisoner of war. What he endured is almost incomprehensible. What I loved about this book—a collection of advice written near the end of his life—is how he remained cheerful through it all. He laments how you can’t watch sports today without seeing someone lose ungraciously. He talks about hatred and, like Etty Hillesum, believed hatred was a ruse. “You hate and hate and hate, and think you’re getting even by hating.” But you’re really just destroying yourself. That’s the trap. After everything he went through, maybe the hardest part wasn’t surviving. Maybe it was deciding what to do with it all: Carry it? Or put it down and free yourself? And maybe that’s what “not giving up” really means—not just surviving what happens to you, but like Etty—refusing to let it turn you into someone you don’t want to be. Refusing to let jerks turn you into a jerk. Really, really great book.

Football by Chuck Klosterman
Oh my goodness, this book was so much fun. This guy is one of the weirdest, most interesting thinkers I’ve read. He overthinks everything in the most entertaining way. He takes football and uses it as a launching pad into bigger questions about time, culture, and what we choose to value. This isn’t really a book about football. It’s a book about how we think about football. And from there, how we think about everything else. This guy has thought about football in pretty much every context you can imagine. He even argues—convincingly—that Jim Thorpe was a greater football player than Tom Brady. And there’s not even video footage of Thorpe playing football!He said NFL football will continue to grow in the U.S. over the next 15–20 years, but eventually it will become too big. And when that happens, it will break. As obsessed as Americans are with football now, he suggests that in 50 years, it will probably be irrelevant. This sounds ridiculous at first, but he has valid points. And this got me thinking. If something as massive as football can eventually fade into irrelevance…what does that say about everything else we chase? Fame. Legacy. Being “the greatest” at the expense of our happiness. Not only will you not be able to enjoy your legend status because you’ll be, you know, dead, but the people who think of you as a legend will in turn be dead themselves. The next generations probably won’t even know your name, let alone what the thing was that you were great at. This is all to say: nobody cares what you do. So do things that are meaningful to you. Spend time with your parents. Take the vacation. Explore. People talk about hustling 24/7 like it’s a good thing. They hustle just to do more hustling! (Usually it’s because they don’t know what else to do with themselves.) It reminds me of something Marcus Aurelius wrote: “You’re afraid of death because you won’t be able to do this anymore?” In other words, what you do matters, but not nearly as much as how you live.

What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
This war memoir is epic. I couldn’t put it down. It’s so well-written that I had to order another book of his, Matterhorn. Marlantes warns about what war does to a person internally. He argues that we do a great job physically preparing soldiers for war, but a terrible job giving them the tools to survive mentally and spiritually. He talks about the guilt and anger and confusion of trying to reconcile being a “good person” with the atrocities the war enables one to commit. I just love how brutally honest he is. And while I didn’t agree with everything he said, I still think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s raw, insightful, full of action, and reflective. I think you’ll love it too.

This is the main thing I learned in CPR training—and it applies to everything else

Life, Philosophy / /

A few weeks ago, my wife, Courtney, stabbed herself.

She meant to stab the sweet potato in her hand, but missed. The point of the steak knife plunged into the meaty part of her left palm, above her wrist, and a geyser of blood shot across the kitchen island.

I went from innocently peeling the shell off a hard-boiled egg to feeling absolute terror in a matter of seconds.

Courtney—who never even tells me when she has a headache, let alone goes to the doctor for anything that isn’t absolutely necessary—pushed a dish towel into the gash and calmly said, “We have to go, now.”

I didn’t know where she’d cut herself—if she’d sliced open her wrist or hit something important. All I could think was that the human body only holds six pints of blood (which I now know isn’t true; it’s closer to ten) and that she was bleeding badly.

I ran to the garage and yelled, “Get in the car!” I had the wherewithal to grab her ID, but that was it. I didn’t even put shoes on. I flew out of the driveway and broke approximately fifteen traffic laws in the two miles between our house and the ER.

I slammed the car into park at the entrance and rushed her through the sliding doors. Shaking and out of breath, I asked a nurse in the lobby to take a look. As she pulled off the towel, I warned her to be careful; blood might still be squirting. I cringed as I looked to see how bad it was and… it actually didn’t look too bad. The dish towel was soaked end to end in blood, but the bleeding had stopped.

Maybe I had overreacted.

A doctor saw us within twenty minutes, cleaned out the wound, patched it up, and sent us on our way.

When we got home, I replayed everything in my mind. Why had I run around like a chicken with its head cut off? Why was I so unprepared? I felt guilty. I decided never again would I feel so helpless. There’s no excuse for not being prepared. So I watched videos on the Heimlich maneuver, bought a LifeVac travel kit, a second fire extinguisher, and hemostatic gauze, and signed us up for a CPR/First Aid class at the Red Cross.

The class was three and a half hours long, and there were nine other students. On a wall-mounted TV, the instructor played the first video: how to properly wash your hands. Courtney turned to me and whispered, “You owe me for this.”

After that, the instructor briefly discussed the material we would learn. She warned that if you save someone’s life, don’t let them repay you with, say, a steak dinner. This could lead to a lawsuit. Courtney grabbed the pocket journal I brought to take notes and wrote, “Do not accept steak dinners.” I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.

The next video showed an elderly woman having symptoms of a heart attack. “Honey, what’s wrong?” her alert husband asks. “I’m having chest pains,” she replies. “No, no, no, this isn’t happening,” he moans. Just then, their son—clearly the hero—enters the room.

My journal open, pen at the ready, I leaned forward. Here we go. The secrets of how to save a life were about to be revealed and I, Emily Yaskowitz, would henceforth be prepared to do just that—save lives. What’s the son going to do? I thought. What at-home machine has he invested in that will now pay off and save her life? What tricks would he perform?

The son asks his mom what’s wrong. “I’m having pain in my chest,” she winces. Turning to his dad, the son says, “Call 9-1-1.” He turns back to his mother. “Here,” he says, “chew these aspirins.” The woman chews and rubs her chest while they wait for help. When the first responders arrive, they load her onto a gurney and send her away in an ambulance. The dad is overwhelmed with gratitude. “Son, I don’t know what I would have done without you.” The video ends.

By this point I wanted my money back.

Forty-five minutes in and we’d learned not to accept gifts and to call 9-1-1 in an emergency.

Over the next few hours, though, we practiced CPR on dummies, tied tourniquets, and learned what to do if someone is having a seizure or going into shock. Still, most of what we talked about wasn’t new. By the time the class was over, I realized that was the whole point.

I recently read that Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell briefly played quarterback in the NFL. He threw six passes as a New England Patriot and was cut after one year. He then signed with the Lions and was traded five days later. He auditioned for teams constantly, and it rarely went well. As Seth Wickersham writes, “He always wanted to create ‘the wow factor,’ […] an exceptional throw that would make a team believe. ‘I learned that’s the last possible thing you should do,’ he says now.”

He learned that good quarterbacking involves taking care of the mundane. “He watched Brady and Joe Montana execute game-winning drives in the Super Bowl. What stood out was how unspectacular they were when the stakes were the highest. ‘If they called the same play in the middle of spring practice, they would have executed it the same way,’ [O’Connell] says. ‘They weren’t trying to do anything other than just play the position consistently at a high level.’”

That’s what I learned in the CPR class. It’s about executing the basics—preparing and practicing.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations,” the Greek poet Archilochus said. “We fall to the level of our training.”

It’s not about dramatic heroics, but consistent steadiness.

That’s true in the ER, and it’s true everywhere else.

No matter how many influencers or life hacks there are, I’ve yet to find a better prescription for a good life than this: go to bed early, get up early, journal, read, exercise, do the right thing, care about others, and eat decently.

Do these things consistently and in a few years you’ll be a different person.

But that’s the thing: we already know this. The problem is that it’s terribly unsexy. It’s boring. That’s why there’s always a new life hack or mud cleanse or cage-free yoga class or whatever.

It’s why someone will attend a self-help seminar or watch motivating YouTube videos and still never change. The important stuff is often so straightforward—like calling 9-1-1 or calmly applying pressure to a wound—that it can be easily overlooked.

We know we should save and invest—that fortunes aren’t made from windfalls but from small, consistent savings. We know we keep our job not because we have a revolutionary idea, but because we show up each day and stay steady. “Your teeth don’t not rot because you go to the dentist twice a year,” Simon Sinek said. “They don’t rot because you brush them for a couple minutes every day. It’s the little things adding up over time.”

Four years ago I could barely run half a block without stopping. Last week I spontaneously ran a 4.5 mile route—one I’ve never run before—in a little over a half hour, and I could have kept going. And I’m not saying that to sound impressive, because it’s not impressive. What else is supposed to happen when you run three to four miles a day, four days a week, for four years, while gradually increasing your speed?

I fell to the level of my training.

Bob Dylan didn’t wake up one morning and write “Blowin’ in the Wind” because genius struck. “These songs don’t come out of thin air,” he said. “If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—if you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written, ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.”

He sang the same old songs so many times that when he began to write his own lyrics, he felt like he “was just extending the line.”

He fell to the level of his training.

Feeling confident in an emergency is less about skill than preparation. You don’t need to know how to perform an emergency thoracotomy, but you should have the Heimlich maneuver down pat. You should be prepared enough that if an emergency happens, you can keep your head and assess the situation calmly—exactly the opposite of what I did when I showed up at the ER in my socks.

This matters in big things and small ones. Brilliance and willpower are unreliable.

We fall to the level of our training.

That’s true in an ER lobby. It’s true in your finances, your career, your whole life.

It comes down to doing the most important, basic things consistently.

Go to bed early.
Get up early.
Journal.
Read.
Move your body.
Tell the truth.
Do the right thing.
Go easy on the sweets.

Simple.

Far from easy.

But simple.

Books read this month

Reading / /

Moral Animal by Robert Wright
I love evolutionary science, and this book deepened that love. It reinforced what I first learned in Wright’s other book Why Buddhism Is True: our genes don’t care about our happiness; they care about getting into the next generation. So many of our “choices” are driven by wiring we can’t see. It’s unsettling how unaware we are of the forces shaping us. But it’s hopeful too. Once we see our blind spots, we can question our impulses and make better choices.

C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing by Corey Latta
I loved this book. It builds on the advice collected in On Writing by C.S. Lewis but goes deeper. Latta doesn’t just share Lewis’s writing principles—he explores the conditions that made Lewis’s writing possible. What shaped him? What fueled that kind of output? How did he actually work? One of the biggest takeaways for me was how widely and deeply Lewis read. As a young boy, he devoured books in the attic of his family home, wandering through myth, history, poetry, and story. By adulthood, he was one of the most well-read writers of his generation. Like Bob Dylan, C.S. Lewis’s genius didn’t come out of nowhere. He read book after book… and then he extended the line.

Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia
My good friend recommended this a while ago, and I’m finally reading it. Oh man, this book is so good. I’m only halfway through, but I’ve already made changes to my diet. I even stopped eating cupcakes and ice cream on the weekends (and me and cupcakes and ice cream were like this 🤞). When a reputable physician writes his magnum opus and page after page details the dangers of poor metabolic health—how it underlies nearly every major disease of aging—you sit up and take note. And you make changes. It’s only been a few weekends since I cut out my excessive sugar intake, and I’m determined to keep it up. This quote by Henri Amiel has been helping: “Every desire abates, and every vice grows after it is satisfied.” I’ve also been thinking about what Leo Tolstoy said—that all behavior stems from thoughts. So if you want to improve your behavior, first work to improve your thoughts. Please read this book. You really have to.

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Corey Latta said this is Lewis’s best literary fiction, so of course I had to read it. It’s not my usual go-to genre, but I ended up really liking it. A favorite takeaway is the meaning behind the book’s title: we can’t expect God to meet us face to face “till we have faces.” Until we’re honest with ourselves. Until we get clear about who we are. Until we move past the tangle of thoughts and get to what’s truly in our heart. Becoming our real selves is uncomfortable, but it’s the prerequisite for transcending ourselves.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Okay. I knew C.S. Lewis was a genius, but I didn’t know he was a genius genius. This book blew my mind. (By page 68 I’d already written “Wow!” or “omg” 72 times.) I’m putting it in my top 10 favorite books of all time. I remember reading parts of this book as a teenager and loving it, but I never finished it. Thankfully, I picked it back up this month after learning, in C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing, why Lewis wrote it. The premise is brilliant: a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his nephew, advising him on how to subtly steer humans away from God/what’s best for them. The wisdom in this book surpasses almost any other book I’ve read. I’ve also ordered more of Lewis’s books, including Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Weight of Glory, and Surprised by Joy.

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