Of Course It’s True [Except for a Couple of Lies]

Jonathan Brown

Description

This is a memoir of stories about family, life and values written with humor by a natural story teller.

This book is a collection of stories on family, life and values. It begins with a story of the author’s namesake, who came to California in 1849, in pursuit of happiness. The middle section is about a range of events in life. The final section is about beliefs – which helped guide the author’s actions. The chapters tell individual stories but when read as a whole you will recognize a life full of experiences - some important, some not so much; but all comfortably wrapped in humor. Eclectic? You bet. Boring, no. The author recognizes that some people who participated in the events described in the book will remember things differently. That’s OK with him. Memoirs are perceptions and not necessarily precise. The author asks readers who want 100% accuracy to write their own book.

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Relations familiales
• Careers
• Values
• Employabilité, métiers et formations
• Value (personal and cultural)
• Career
• Politics
• Economics
• Business
• Carrière
• Carrière & Mobilité

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 08 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665738576
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

OF COURSE It’s True [Except for a Couple of Lies]
 
 
 
Jonathan Brown
 
 
 
 

 
 
Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Brown.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
 
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
 
Interior Image Credit: Design by Coyote Press Graphics
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3859-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3858-3 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3857-6 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023902661
 
 
 
Archway Publishing rev. date: 4/25/2023
Foreword
A memoir is a personal account of certain events or people. This one is divided into three parts—stories about family; stories about life, from health to technology; and finally stories about values. The family stories are what got this project started. Family stories have always been a part of me. The person I was named after journeyed from New York to California in 1849. As I grew up I heard a lot of family stories that seemed to be contradictory on basic details. Unsurprisingly, as I discussed the stories with other family members, I found that they interpreted or told many of the stories I treasured quite differently from the way I saw them. We each watch the world through different lenses. Sure, it may be certain that something did happen on a particular date, but its effects might be seen quite differently by the various people who were actually involved in the event. As stories are retold over generations, they are also elaborated on based on a series of factors that are mostly unseen. Am I saying there is no objective history? Absolutely not. But we should accept family stories, often mediated by family members over generations, more as allegories than histories. Those stories help to define your family and yourself.
As I began to plan this book, I accumulated stories from my own memory and did some work on Ancestry.com to establish how parts of my family fit together. The bold venture of my namesake, Jonathan Archer, intrigued me. He boarded a ship in New York and traveled around the Horn in 1849 on the South Carolina to California to seek his fortune. As you read his story, you’ll see that even his motives for coming to California are in doubt. I had the benefit of having a set of letters he sent to his mother and some other documents relating to his time in California. Jonathan Archer’s story has affected me in many ways. I also discovered a contemporaneous journal from a shipmate which is in the California Historical Society archives. I discovered several other journals. The journals have at least one thing in common: they all seem to end when the argonaut gets to San Francisco or soon after. Jonathan’s journal has very little detail about life on the ship or weather conditions. But he seems great at color commentary.
As I researched Jonathan Archer, I also encountered his younger brother, Oliver Hazard Perry Archer, who stayed in New York and built up a substantial fortune. I wondered why Jonathan had felt compelled to take an arduous journey and why his brother chose a very different path. Both, in their own ways, were following Thomas Jefferson’s notion of pursuing happiness.
While I thought about this project for a long time, progress initially was intermittent. The readership for this kind of writing is limited, and getting dates and stories correct would take a lot of research. Then my daughter, Emily, intervened. For Christmas 2019 she gave me a gift of Storyworth, a web-based program that creates a book from weekly prompts offered on the site. The prompts are about life events. In some cases Emily supplied some questions. It is a far from perfect platform, but it offers the weekly discipline of a writing prompt.
I have to admit that Storyworth offered some questions that I chose not to answer. Some were issues about which I had nothing to say. For example, one question asked, “What was your bedroom like when you were a child?” I started to write “messy” but did not think that would make much of a chapter. For others, I could not think of any response that made sense. For example, “Why did you get married?” Duh? I was in love. After more than fifty years, that love is more true now than in 1969, when we were married over Woodstock weekend (in Pasadena, not in New York). But some of the questions worked to inspire my writing, and I have used them for some of my chapter titles.
The entire manuscript has been divided into three staves. The first is about family and my academic formation. The second covers reflections on a variety of topics, including work, fitness, and technology. The third is divided between chapters on our life in Mexico and some reflections on ideas that motivate me. Finally, I offer a conclusion that ties the parts together.
I believe America’s history is fundamentally positive. We formed this government to “pursue happiness.” One of the things that makes this country exceptional is the assumption that people can actually surmount tremendous odds through hard work and luck—that is what “the pursuit of happiness” is all about. James Buchanan, the Nobel-winning economist discussed throughout the book, rephrased Jefferson to “the freedom to become the person you want to be.”
After reading the stories about my family, you may come away with different impressions from mine. That’s fine; that is one of the points of this book: we all come to stories from our own perspectives, and that shapes how we interpret those stories. Friedrich Hayek called that the “knowledge of time and place.”
For a memoir, the third stave may seem out of place. As a sometime academic, I needed to spend some time thinking about principles important to my own life. When my wife read these chapters she commented that they looked a bit like my dissertation. The principles can be summarized in five broad ideas:
1. Crowds are better than experts at many things.
2. Markets are consistently better than governments at allocating resources, on most things.
3. The history of America is exceptional—we should celebrate it.
4. If you are asked to choose between James Madison and Woodrow Wilson (as the inspiration for our system)—choose Madison.
5. Values do count—but do not be so tied to your own that you are not able to recognize the values of others. Surprises are good.
In the third stave I added a chapter that mirrors an essay by Friedrich Hayek,except mine is titled “Why I Am Not a Progressive.” One theme you may see, which underlies much of the book, is a description of how my political thinking devolved. I found that while most of my ideas would put me in the political spectrum as a libertarian, I don’t rabidly follow those notions. Groucho Marx was right when he resigned from the Friars Club with the following quip: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”
In the movie Sunset , there is a continuing response to the question “Is it true?” After the question is asked, the response is “Of course it’s true, with a couple of lies.” That is the way family stories are told. We should appreciate the wisdom of that logic. It is not that we are trying to fool ourselves or others, but rather that our perceptions of events can be very different from others’.
While working on this project was solitary in one sense, in many ways it was a joint project. Two credits need to be expressed here; more formal acknowledgments are presented at the end. In 2019, I was diagnosed with lymphoma. I repurposed my blog, called Five Cent Thinking, as a way to describe the process of going through treatment. Over about a year, I wrote a series of reflections: on how to go through chemo, on why the economics of medicine is absurd, and on a host of other topics. I had a list of almost 100 readers who offered responses to those posts. They helped me work on style but also substance. When I got to actually writing chapters, I had two initial editors, Carole Eudey, who worked with me at AICCU, and Patricia Heinicke, whom I found from a friend’s recommendation. Both were able to help organize, reorganize, and reconceptualize the project.
 

 
Finally, this book has a lot of pictures. Since I was very young I have been interested in photography. Most of the pictures in this book were taken by me or a close member of the family. The only place without pictures is in the third stave, where I substituted footnotes for photos. An image of me that I have used in many places was taken when I was about 3 and living on Spruce Street in Berkeley; I am sitting on a pony. Somehow that seemed like a good representation of who I have become as an adult. At one point, I had helped endow a center for the University of Southern California in Sacramento and was asked to supply a donor picture. This is the one I chose. They decided to use a different one.