Tag: Nebula Award

Sterling K. Brown, Kindred, He Got Game, Oprah Winfrey, and Dhammapada 21

Sterling K. Brown, Kindred, He Got Game, Oprah Winfrey, and Dhammapada 21

Published by Drew Alexander Ross on June 19, 2022

Sunday Supplement #58 (June 19th, 2022)

Below is another Sunday Supplement with a quote worth sharing, a book worth reading, a movie worth watching, brainfood worth consuming, and a spiritual passage worth pondering.

I hope you take something away from these recommendations that enriches your week ahead!

Quote of the Week:

“Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.”

– Sterling K. Brown

Book of the Week:

Kindred – Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler was a bestselling author with multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. She became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995.

Kindred is a standalone novel telling the story of a young African-American woman, Dana, as she inexplicably finds herself forced back and forth through time from present-day 1976 California to antebellum Maryland.

Dana’s first trip back in time puts her in the situation where she decides to save a drowning white boy from drowning.

Dana’s subsequent trips back have her encountering the same young man. Her trips to the past become longer, and she must face difficult choices to ensure survival and return to her own time.

Butler’s Kindred brilliantly traverses race and gender issues, the history of slavery, and prospects of future egalitarianism.

Kindred is one of Butler’s most famous books and well worth checking out.

Movie of the Week:

He Got Game

Spike Lee is a legendary director and writer. His output as a filmmaker is phenomenal, and his Spike Lee “Joints” catalog contains many brilliant films and powerful stories.

Lee’s love of basketball is prolific, from the sidelines of New York Knicks games to commercials with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant’s documentary Kobe Doin’ Work.

However, one of Lee’s most prolific contributions to basketball might be his film He Got Game.

He Got Game tells the story of Jesus Shuttlesworth, the number one high school prospect in America, as he contemplates what college to ply his trade.

Jesus’s decision is preyed on by almost everyone who knows him. An unexpected influence comes from his absent father, Jake.

Jake Shuttlesworth is serving a long-term sentence for the death of his wife. He gets released on parole for a week to try and persuade his son to play for the governor’s alma mater in exchange for a reduced prison sentence.

The story is beautifully told with standout performances from Denzel Washington as Jake and the young Ray Allen as Jesus.

Lee’s themes of acceptance, family strife, and the struggles of Black families living in the projects shine throughout.

There is much to appreciate in Spike Lee’s He Got Game, and it should be on any film lover’s or basketball fan’s watch list.

Brainfood of the Week:

Oprah Winfrey: The Secret of My Success

Oprah Winfrey spoke at Stanford Graduate School of Business’s View From The Top speaker series in 2014. This is a clip of Oprah answering a question about the secret of her success.

Oprah begins by explaining that her doing comes from her being. Compassion, willingness to understand and be understood, and wanting to connect make up her being.

Later, Oprah talks about the importance of her work on consciousness.

The video finishes with Oprah explaining that the core of her success was in the connection and understanding of her audience.

These are brief highlights of the video. The clip is five minutes, but the full video is worth checking out as well.

I’ve featured Oprah Winfrey in a few other Sunday Supplements. Her SuperSoul Sunday program is an excellent source of information on self-care and self-improvement.

Closing Spiritual Passage:

“Watchfulness is the path of immortality. Unwatchfulness is the path of death. Those who are watchful never die. Those who do not watch are already as dead.”

– Dhammapada 21

This verse from the Dhammapada reminds me of the importance of being open to view outside your own narrative.

Often we find ourselves filtering all our experiences through our own perspectives and passing judgments based on our viewpoint.

Keeping an open eye and observing without judgment is the key to welcoming a fresh perspective and leaving room for growth.

Our judgments and perspectives are often used to protect ourselves from foreign experiences and can be dangerous.

However, we are limited to our surroundings when we stay in our shells. We don’t let in any new sights and lose opportunities to grow.

The Dhammapada verse depicts how watchfulness allows us to love, experience new things, and continue growing—closing ourselves off does the opposite.

Observe without judgment, be open to new experiences, and have a blessed week ahead!

Comments closed

Rachel Wolchin, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Last Duel, The Art of Improvement, and Proverbs 24:16

Rachel Wolchin, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Last Duel, The Art of Improvement, and Proverbs 24:16

Published by Drew Alexander Ross on March 13, 2022

Sunday Supplement #44 (March 13th, 2022)

Below is another Sunday Supplement with a quote worth sharing, a book worth reading, a movie worth watching, brainfood worth consuming, and a spiritual passage worth pondering.

I hope you take something away from these recommendations that enriches your week ahead!

Quote of the Week:

“It’s not how we make mistakes, but how we correct them that defines us.”

– Rachel Wolchin

Book of the Week:

A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin was an American novelist whose career spanned from the late 1950s until her death, aged 88 in 2018.

Le Guin was the first woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel for her work The Left Hand of Darkness.

A Wizard of Earthsea is the first novel in her classic Earthsea Cycle series. It tells the story of Ged, the greatest wizard in the archipelago of Earthsea, when he was a reckless youth known as Sparrowhawk.

In his quest for knowledge and power, the young Ged meddles with dangerous dark secrets and releases a wicked shadow upon the land.

The novel then follows Sparrowhawk as he journeys forward to master the words of power and eventually face the shadow he loosed upon Earthsea.

There are other novels in the series worth reading, but the first one can be read as a standalone and is worth checking out.

Movie of the Week:

The Last Duel

Ridley Scott came out with two films in 2021. While House of Gucci received more attention at the box office, The Last Duel came and went without much notice or praise.

The movie tells the story of Sir Jean de Carrouges’s duel to the death with his squire Jacques Le Gris after Carrouges accuses Le Gris of raping his wife, Marguerite.

The Last Duel gets broken up into three chapters. The first tells Carrouges’s version of events, the second tells Le Gris’s, and the third tells Marguerite’s.

Oscar-nominated writer Nicole Holofcener and Oscar-winning writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon penned the script for this medieval tale.

Adam Driver, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck all put in brilliant performances, and Jodie Comer stole the show in the final chapter as Marguerite.

While this film didn’t make much of an impression upon its release, it was one of the best films of the year, in my opinion. It told a simple story in a clever way.

If you’re interested in a lengthy period piece, put the film on your to-watch list.

Brainfood of the Week:

This is How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure | The Art of Improvement

The Art of Improvement is a YouTube channel that makes videos on self-care and self-improvement techniques. I’ve previously featured the channel’s videos in Sunday Supplement #30 and #34.

In this video, the topic is how to overcome failure. The video starts with a story about Picasso sketching on a napkin. A woman sees him about to throw it away and says she’ll pay for it.

When Picasso says the napkin will cost her $20,000, the woman protests how can he charge that much for something that took him two minutes to draw. Picasso responded that it took him 60 years to make.

The lesson of the story is that mastery takes time. The video then explains how we need to be able to make mistakes without giving up to move forward with a practice.

Failure ultimately becomes something people can fear. The comfort of the known becomes a safety net that we adapt to avoid trying new things that could prompt failure.

The video later explains the Stoic philosophy around the sphere of choice. Broken down, it falls into the categories of things we can control (internal) and things we can’t control (external).

We must learn to focus exclusively on the internals and let go of all things we cannot control.

There are more tidbits in the video that I do not cover here. It’s only seven minutes and worth the watch to pick them up.

Closing Spiritual Passage:

“For the righteous fall seven times and rise again.”

– Proverbs 24:16

This bible passage makes me think about how we respond to our mistakes. I think it’s easy to view the quote as a simple reminder never to give up, but it can say much more.

I’m drawn to the word rise when I read this verse. When I searched the meaning of the word rise, I found the definition of moving from a lower position to a higher one.

For me, I think that means more than getting up when you fall. It means to rise above where you were before you fell.

I think that we can learn much from our mistakes. Even if all we can do is move on, not worry about the past, and look to the road ahead, we have made progress and have risen.

How we handle our falls shapes our perception of our lives. I’m working on seeing the opportunities to rise when I encounter my trip-ups.

Find the opportunity to rise from a perceived fall, and have a blessed week ahead!

Comments closed

Desmond Tutu, Cloud Atlas, Jerry Maguire, David Goggins, and a Buddhist Saying

Desmond Tutu, Cloud Atlas, Jerry Maguire, David Goggins, and a Buddhist Saying

Published by Drew Alexander Ross on January 9, 2022

Sunday Supplement #35 (January 9th, 2022)

Below is another Sunday Supplement with a quote worth sharing, a book worth reading, a movie worth watching, brainfood worth consuming, and a spiritual passage worth pondering.

I hope you take something away from these recommendations that enriches your week ahead!

Quote of the Week:

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”

– Desmond Tutu

Book of the Week:

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

David Mitchell is a multiple award-winning British author listed in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007. His writings have been adapted into critically acclaimed films, and he has gone on to work on screenplays with the Wachowskis’. His novel, The Bone Clocks, was praised as one of the best novels of 2014 by Stephen King.

Cloud Atlas interlocks six different stories over six different time periods. The novel starts with an American notary traveling from the Chatham Isles to his home in California in the 1850s. The action moves over to Belgium in the 1930s and follows a disinherited composer who finds his way into an apprenticeship of an infirm maestro.

The novel then explores a troubled reporter in the 1970s who stumbles upon a story that threatens her life. In modern-day England, there is another narrative that follows a vanity press publisher hoodwinked by his brother. And the final two stories are set in a Korean superstate in the near future and a post-apocalyptic Iron Age set in Hawaii during the last days of history.

Cloud Atlas is a whopper of a novel, but it is one of the most brilliantly constructed narratives I’ve read. The book works its way through each story, setting up the characters and the drama, then works its way backward to conclude each narrative.

Mitchell’s novel was nominated for the Nebula Award of Best Novel, the Booker Prize, the Locus Award for Best SF Novel, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. This book doesn’t always receive the highest praise, but it is worth checking out.

Movie of the Week:

Jerry Maguire

Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire won one Oscar and made over $270 million worldwide on a $50 million budget.

The film follows super sports agent Jerry Maguire, as he has a moral epiphany about his line of work and gets fired for expressing his feelings in a mission statement. Maguire then decides to put his new philosophy into practice by starting an independent agency with the only athlete who stays with him and a former colleague.

Cuba Gooding Jr. won the lone Oscar for the film in the category of Best Actor in a Supporting Role. His performance was brilliant but shouldn’t have been the only one recognized at the Oscars. Tom Cruise received a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role but didn’t win, and Renée Zellweger got snubbed entirely.

Jerry Maguire tells an entertaining story with great depth. The themes involved around redemption and love are expertly explored. The film also provides many laughs and a few tear-shedding moments. More likely than not, you’ve heard some of the famous lines from the movie quoted in your life, whether you’ve seen the film or not.

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, it’s worth adding to your list.

Brainfood of the Week:

David Goggins interview on the Rich Roll Podcast

Rich Roll’s podcast is a long-form interview with thought leaders, high performers, and positive change-makers all across the globe. The conversations are designed to help unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves.

I featured a Jesse Itzler episode from the Rich Roll Podcast in Sunday Supplement #3. A cool connection between Itzler and David Goggins is that Itzler asked Goggins to live with him for a month to help him achieve new levels of mental and physical toughness.

Itzler’s book about the experience, Living with a SEAL, hit #1 on the New York Times and LA Times bestsellers lists.

David Goggins is the only member of the US Armed Forces to complete SEAL training, US Army Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical air controller training.

After several of his friends died in Afghanistan, Goggins set out to honor their memory by taking on the ten most difficult endurance challenges on the planet. He did this to raise funds and awareness for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which gives college scholarships and grants to the children of fallen special-ops soldiers.

In the interview with Rich Roll, Goggins talks about his experiences overcoming physical, academic, and emotional problems, his Navy SEAL background, and his endurance challenges.

The discussion between Goggins and Roll has many gems and is a perfect source of motivation and thought-provoking prompts. Check out David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me autobiography/self-help book if you like the interview.

Closing Spiritual Passage:

“Conquer anger with non-anger. Conquer badness with goodness. Conquer meanness with generosity. Conquer dishonesty with truth.”

– Buddhist Saying

In Sunday Supplement #13, I mentioned Teddy Roosevelt’s quote about doing what you can, with what you have, where you are. When I came across the Desmond Tutu quote, I remembered Teddy Roosevelt’s words and this Buddhist saying.

Tutu’s words build on Roosevelt’s advice in relation to how we can contribute to the good in the world. For me, the Buddhist quote is a how-to guide in following up on Tutu’s quote.

I don’t think it’s easy to always be at your best or in a good state, but I believe practicing the ability to control your actions is crucial to building a better way of life.

We can’t control what other people do, but we can control how we respond to different situations and others.

Take a breath in difficult times, choose how you want to respond, and have a blessed week ahead!

Comments closed