Favorite Lyric:
Editor’s Note: I have strong feelings about immigration though I don’t speak much about it. That’s why I read this book; I want to know more before I speak with others. Luiselli is a young Mexican/South African immigrant to the USA. Her time as a volunteer translator in NYC’s immigration courts adds to her own experience and that of her husband, two children and niece who also went through the process. This brief and moving “essay in 40 questions” taught me a lot about what children, specifically from central America go through to get here and then stay. Did you know “La Beastia” is how most undocumented immigrants get here? It’s the freight trains that children climb on and ride through Mexico to reach our borders. Did you know they seek to be arrested rather than flee from Border Police? Right, me neither. The best part of “Tell Me How It Ends” is that it is fact-based yet moving without being a screeching rage against the machine. It’s instead a documentation of the reality of our broken system.
The big idea is elusive, at best, and can take years to develop. So, the best organizations develop a consistent pattern of small gains and progress while they’re looking for the big idea. This is the key to progress.
Editor’s note: That Samuel Clemens was a genius writer and humorist is without a doubt. That he was also cantankerous, narcistic and opinionated is proven more clearly than ever in this his own authorized and self-written biography. I now understand why he waited 100 years from his death (published in 2010) to release these notes (and I mean stream of conscious notes – rather blog-like, actually) since few are left unjudged, including himself. But the things he experienced and the times he lived in took me to a far-away place. And watching for it, as I knew to do, his hyperbolic humor often overtook me, as in my favorite excerpt below.
"The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
In the early 1980s, my advertising client convinced me that when a restaurant adds a menu item, they should subtract one at the same time. Their irrefutable logic was that a new product has a better chance to be a winner if you drop one that’s selling poorly. Everyone’s resources are limited, they said, so focus is essential.
