Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark

"I made tea and offered to read [Dottie] a bit of my Warrender Chase [...]

'You know,' Dottie said, 'there's something a bit harsh about you, Fleur. You're not really womanly, are you?'

I was really annoyed by this. To show her I was a woman I tore up the pages of my novel and stuffed them into the wastepaper basket, burst out crying and threw her out, roughly and noisily, so that Mr. Alexander looked over the banisters and complained.

'Get out,' I yelled at Dottie. 'You and your husband between you have ruined my literary work.'

After that I went to bed. Flooded with peace, I fell asleep."

Blood on the Risers: An Airborne Soldier's Thirty-five Months in Vietnam by John Leppelman

I could never ever have hacked it there. Reading this was an exercise in desensitization. Harrowing, riveting, and horrible, as in this relatively mild little snippet from the aftermath of Dak To:

"In the early dawn, as first light started to seep through the canopy, the brush started moving directly in front of my position. Several of us took aim on the foliage as a man staggered out, yelling at us in English not to shoot him. It was a survivor from the disaster below. As he made his way through our line, we saw that a large chunk of his skull was missing, and we could actually see his brain. He told us that after the NVA had overrun Alpha's position, they started executing all the survivors by shooting them in the head. Many men had begged for mercy but were executed. He had lain in a pile of American bodies while a gook had placed a rifle barrel against his head and pulled the trigger. By some miracle the bullet had glanced off his head, taking a big chunk of skull, hair, and flesh. He had been stunned but recovered and, once it was dark, escaped back up the mountains."

When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals by Jeffrey Masson & Susan McCarthy

"One factor in the recognition of predators may be an innate response to staring eyes. Birds have been found to be more likely to mob a stuffed owl if it has eyes. Young chicks who have never seen a predator avoid objects with eyes or eye-spots on them, particularly if the eyes are large. Wild birds at a feeder table are much more apt to flee when a design is highlighed on the table if the design resembles eyes, and the more realistic the eyes, the greater their panic."
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"When Tex, a female whooping crane hand-reared by humans, was ready to mate, she rejected male cranes. Instead she was attracted to 'Caucasian men of average height with dark hair'. Since whooping cranes are so close to extinction, it was considered vital to bring Tex into breeding condition so that she could be artificially inseminated. To do this, International Crane Foundation director George Archibald, a dark-haired Caucasian man, spent many weeks courting Tex. 'My duties involved endless hours of "just being there", several minutes of dancing early in the morning and again in the evening, long walks in quest of earthworms, nest building, and defending our territory against humans...' The effort was successful and eventually resulted in a crane chick."
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"At an oceanarium, several dolphins were trained in the skills of water polo. First they learned to put a ball through a goal, each team having a different goal. Then the trainers tried to teach them to compete, by keeping the other team from scoring. After three training sessions the dolphins caught on, all too well. Uninterested in strictures against foul play, the dolphins zestfully attacked one another in such an unsporting fashion that the training was discontinued and they were never again given competitive games."

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

"Francie went over to stand at the great window from which she could see the East River twenty stories below. It was the last time she'd see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it every day." (476)

(1943. New York: HarperCollins, 2001)

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

Loved the whole thing but this part especially struck me:

"Examples of God's failure to protect humanity are everywhere to be seen. The city of New Orleans, for instance, was recently destroyed by a hurricane. More than a thousand people died; tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions; and nearly a milllion were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurrican Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Do you have the courage to admit the obvious? These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.

Of course there had been ample warning that a storm of "biblical proportions" would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disasters was tragicaly inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Religion offered no basis for a response at all. Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of God, they wouldnt have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 percent of Katrina's survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith.

As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. These pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence: their women walked veiled before Him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God's grace.

It is time we recognized the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. It is time we acknowledge how disgraceful it is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving god, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religion's fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all." (emphasis is mine) (p.55-57)