Read it in two sittings! at Lost City Books in Adams Morgan :)
Recommended by Pranavi
Texts I sent to Pranavi:
nature nerd boy turns eugenicist and murderer lol QUITE the character arc
about the narrator — happy for her that she seems to have found a new partner/more positive outlook on life. kinda weird how she describes the moment she knew her wife was the “one” — when she takes off her bikini bottom?? lol i was kinda thinking about how it would be so bad if that were written by a man
big take aways that i think the author got from studying jordan: 1) don’t obsess over/idolize a person bc no one is perfect and everyone has flaws. (some have quirky flaws like eugenics and murder rawr) 2) you/i matter. 3) “fish don’t exist” — science isn’t objective/factual
it was a fascinating read! like my jaw literally dropped when i read about jordan poisoning jane stanford and also teared up reading about the women that were sterilized (so recently too!!!)
but not to sound arrogant but i don’t think the 3 big takeaways were like new or eye-opening to me
Theme that stuck out to me:
a healthy sprinkle of irrationality required for hope, optimism, and tenacity
“Their healthier patients, the ones leading easier lives, bouncing back more quickly after setbacks, getting jobs, friends, lovers, all the gold rings on the carousel of life, seemed to carry the rosy mark of self-delusion […] they found that, indeed, mentally people rated themselves as more attractive than they were, more helpful, more intelligent, more in control of chance events than they possibly could be. When they looked into their past, they remembered their successes with more ease than their failures. When they looked into their future, they voted themselves as more likely to succeed than their friends and classmates.
Those people, on the other hand, with that oh-so-hailed virtue of accurate perception? Ding ding ding, you guessed it: clinically depressed.”
Is this why narcissists seem to live longer and happier (according to their own terms) lives?
“Whatever the case, it works for him. He loses a wife, and wins another quickly. He loses a fish collection, and rebuilds a bigger one. He is promoted to higher and higher offices. The awards and medals start clattering in […] Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is just how it works in a godless system. Maybe David Starr Jordan is proof that a steady dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds.”
On Eugenics
I was quite shocked at how the history of eugenics spanned until very recent times:
“The US government has admitted to forcefully sterilizing over 2,500 Native American women in the early 1970s. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina sought out and sterilized hundreds of black women during the 1960s and 1970s. And, mind bogglingly, approximately a third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized by the US government between 1933 and 1968 […] Meanwhile, forced sterilization continues to be performed in the “quiet way” all over the country […] Over the period of 2006 to 2010, for example, nearly 150 women were illegally sterilized in California prisons, without the women’s consent and occasionally without their knowledge.”
Fish “Don’t Exist”
Well, they do, just not as a valid taxonomical/scientific category (but then again, taxonomy/science is a human invention too). We barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet. We have been wrong before and we will be wrong again. The true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.”
