So my boyfriend, sister, sister's best friend, and I started a long distance book club together. Initially, my boyfriend and I were doing one together because we are so far apart, and then my sister got excited and pulled her friend in. This is the first book the four of us are reading together, and this was my first email about Part 1.
Note: since I read on a kindle, I have locations instead of page numbers (and my kindle is old, so it only has locations).
By Erik Larson
Part I: Frozen Music
Chicago 1890-91
"The Black City"
Women able to leave home alone for the first time in modern history, work, and live away from home.
"Anonymous deaths came early and often"
"Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot one another by accident."
How is this similar or different to today? On one hand, I think there would be less random and reckless deaths based on how deaths are described as so common with trains etc, but then again we still have plenty of accidental deaths and dangerous crimes. I'd be curious to know how those compare as a percent of population between now and then. Which society was "safer" from that standpoint?
Location 238
This book makes me curious about psychopaths/killers in that I wonder if their sensory experience is different so that smells we find offensive are pleasing to them, for example, and not because they enjoy killing per say but the actual smelling experience.
Location 259
Windy city because of political talk - same as today (everywhere)
Location 282
France's set up of its exhibition and organization vs America's:
Pleasure in a unified and intentional design; and the benefits of that still in showing one's strengths
Location 296
Chicago spirit, civic pride as tangible
Unifying culture after tragedy and crisis -to what degree can a large society feel that they are a group with an "other" to compete/contrast with or a crisis/tragedy to endure together (modern: 9/11, sandy, sandy hook shooting, Osama bin laden, etc)
Also it says more powerful in Chicago - is it tied to it being an underdog city? Are there other qualities that create this type of an environment and attitude? (collective pride: Boston, NYC, Chicago, Texas, etc)
Location 355
Chicago fire took 18,000 homes and left 100,000 homeless: was it the largest scale tragedy at that point in history besides a war?
Location 415
Meals men ate in 19th century prevented them from walking up stairs - how does this compare to modern meals?
Location 491
Miasma of smoke... Description of city is bleak, cold, gross, dark, foul
Location 555
Whitehall Club
Really? So creepy and gross and morbid. What did they really do?
Location 607
His nature broke common decency rules yet was appealing because of it. Is this always true for people? Are we attracted to whatever breaks contemporary rules? Why? What evolutionary benefit did we find in pursuing the ones who diverge from society's paths, whether it's within a small range or extreme enough to be dangerous. Is it always a sexual attraction? Why is sex and rule breaking so intoxicating and attractive to humans? There must be benefits otherwise it wouldn't be such a common trait. Do those traits parallel other traits that are beneficial so it's just a coincidental/linked benefit that helps reproduce both traits and attractions?
Location 636
Related to my previous comment/question as to whether psychopaths find the sensory experience different or if it's just symbolic of their misguided/twisted desires.
Location 648
The descriptions of doctors 100 years ago made me really curious as to when doctors became more credible and well educated. The corollary to that is to wonder to what degree they have made significant improvements. I'm not really trying to say that I don't believe that doctors aren't well educated at all or aren't doing their best (or that the vast majority aren't). I'm more interested in whether we have a similar blindness as to the real limitations of our current knowledge and methods that parallels what they did at the time. While we have certainly made great strides and discoveries and improvements, how can we really assess where we fall on a greater spectrum of the full knowledge and best practices for health. I'm not at all an expert either way, so I can't really give my own opinion with any confidence in its accuracy, but my guess is that we overestimate and have overconfidence in what we know and the medicines we prescribe and treatments we use.
Location 1242
The attention to details like that is probably better understood and more familiar now, but even so perhaps we don't pay attention to the right details or allow ourselves to determine correctly which details will really matter and to what degree. And as a solution, we pay too much attention to too many details and waste time and resources on things that don't truly warrant it.
Location 1413
"besides his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath."
This sort of shocked me because, as a loose definition, it made me wonder how many psychopaths I knew. (more on this later perhaps, just sort of wanted to finish up at this point)
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