Welcome to my commonplace blog

The goal of this blog is to preserve a few ideas and quotes from books I read. In the old days when books were not so readily available, people kept "commonplace books" where they copied choice passages they wanted to be able to remember and perhaps reuse. The idea got picked up by V.F.D. and it's common knowledge that most of that organization's volunteers have kept commonplace books, and so have Laura and I.

I'm sure there are many other Internet sites and blogs dedicated to the same idea. But this one is mine. Feel free to look around and leave comments, but not spam.

10 July 2012

The Tiger (John Vaillant)

Fascinating and exciting ecological thriller, set in an area of the world that is so remote that it might as well be another planet. My only complaint is that the author spends way too many paragraphs telling and explaining just how messed up Russia is. I felt like saying "i get it! Russia is messed up! can we talk about tigers now?"

Read in Glen Arbor, MI


Quotes:

Between 1992 and 1994, approximately one hundred tigers—roughly one quarter of the country’s wild population—were killed.

In his professional capacity as senior inspector for Inspection Tiger, Trush acted as a medium between the Law of the Jungle and the Law of the State;

Tigers go by several different names here, and one of them is Toyota—because, during the 1990s, that is what you could buy with one.

After studying the files of Stalin’s political prisoners, historian Roy Medvedev concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes.

In 2008, nineteen of the world’s one hundred richest people were Russians.

Ongoing in the debate about our origins and our nature is the question of how we became fascinated by monsters, but only certain kinds. The existence of this book alone is a case in point. No one would read it if it were about a pig or a moose (or even a person) who attacked unemployed loggers. Tigers, on the other hand, get our full attention.

“Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”

Jewish Autonomous Region, a little known creation of Stalin’s intended to serve, oxymoronically, as a Soviet Zion for Russian Jews.

At the beginning of the last century, it is estimated that there were more than 75,000 tigers living in Asia. Today, you would never know; within the fragile envelope of a single human memory 95 percent of those animals have been killed—for sport, for beauty, for medicine, for money, for territory, and for revenge.

On a daily basis, Trush manifests the verity that faith is a physical act.

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