…I’ll admit, it’s nerve-racking to find yourself in a foreign country, in a classroom full of expectant students, trying to teach a language that’s supposedly your mother tongue. It’s more complicated than you’d think. It was my first time in front of a class.

While many of these powerful people believe that they are the best and the brightest, that simply isn’t true. I look no further than George W. Bush to invalidate that premise. Many of the best and brightest are living simpler lives, focusing on healing themselves and others in a spiritual tradition of love, compassion, equality, soulfulness, and creativeness, thereby not raping the environment or one another…

How difficult and lonely, the writer’s life. And how much more difficult it is made by asinine editors and bloggers and reviewers who choose to belittle rather than offer real, engaging discussion. Freese is obviously a writer, one of those rare people who writes to write, but then also works damn hard to get his stuff out there, to be read, to get an audience. ‘I am not averse to hawking my books,’ (p.49) he says.

Unloved, she continues. Beaten, she continues. Raped, she continues. Forced to convert from Christianity to Islam, she continues. Watching her friends tortured and killed, she goes on. Watching her husband killed and made to go back to prison, she goes on. Released into sorrow and insensitivity, she continues. This woman has an incredible will to live. And she doesn’t just continue or…

With the almighty power of hindsight, I realise this book is more about slow progress and steady determination over an extended period of time, polar to the world of flashing lights and speed into which it first plunged me. Perhaps the juxtaposition of styles between the first two chapters was intended to highlight this difference between the Las Vegas lifestyle and that of the scientists attempting…