“Bookworm” of the popular blog Bookworm Room has complied her meatier essays and blog posts into e-book form, now available at Amazon.com Here’s but a sample, from the introduction:
When I was 17, and California voters passed Prop. 13, I thought it was outrageous that people should want to keep their own money when it could go to the government, which would spend it for the people’s own good, only it would do it better than the people themselves.
When I was 18, I voted for Jimmy Carter and was deeply saddened when he lost.
When I was a 20-year old student attending U.C. Berkeley, and I heard that Ronald Reagan had been shot, I agreed with my fellow students that he deserved it, a sentiment that earned me a harsh and well-deserved scolding from my parents.
When I was 21 and living in England, I wore a keffiyeh, because it was a cool fashion statement. That same year, I listened in silence as a British Arab man told a terrible and cruel holocaust joke, because I was too socially intimidated to speak up.
When I returned to America in the early 1980s, I was fascinated by MTV, and watched it obsessively, believing that somehow those videos, with their rocking beats and alternatively meaningless or crude images, could enrich my life.
Throughout my teens and 20s, I hated Christian proselytizers, because I thought they wanted to hurt me, a Jew. It took me decades to understand that they were acting out of great spiritual generosity, and that they would respond immediately and respectfully to a politely given “no.”
Also throughout my teens and twenties, I was mean. I was an awkward, geeky bookworm, with a quick wit that I used to great effect to hurt people before they could hurt me. I always had friends, but woe betide anyone who fell on the cutting side of my tongue. A physical and moral coward, I nevertheless believed that, when it came to insults, the best defense was a good offense.
I was young and I was stupid, stupid, stupid. I cringe when I look back at the things I did and thought. What’s really sad is that the only thing that stopped me from making even worse mistakes was my cowardice. I didn’t really live life. I observed it from the sidelines, and simply managed to collect a whole bunch of bad ideas as I went along.
The good news is that I grew up. During those same years, I managed to learn a lot. At Berkeley, because I couldn’t understand the Marxist cant that permeated every non-science class, and therefore ignored it, I managed to learn about history and art and literature. At law school, I learned how to revere the Constitution, respect the law and, significantly, analyze data.
Being a lawyer was also a great gift. It exposed me to activist judges, something that taught me that, without a reliable rule of law, businesses crumble and anarchy arises. It was frustrating to know that, if I was representing a bank or business in a San Francisco court against an individual, the bank or business would always lose, no matter how rigorously it followed the law, while the individual would always win, no matter how sleazy or careless. The same held true in employer/employee cases. I understood that judicial activism increased the cost of doing business, drove businesses out of the Bay Area (and California), and made it virtually impossible for business people to have reliable predictors to control their conduct.
Read the whole thing, here.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member