The three books, the reading, and what everybody inherited

Describe how we all have inherited a shared history of math and science and law and politics. Indicate that I inherited that connection by blood, as recorded by the Seventh-day Adventist tradition — of the Hares (paternal, my father's family), the Whitsons (Bill Whitson, my mother's father's family), and the Wickwires (Pauline Wickwire, my mother's biological mother), each of whom had books recording their biological lineage as far back as records could verify. Not dissimilar from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, except that for Seventh-day Adventists it is a task crowdsourced by each family, with written records assembled into books every generation or so — especially for prominent missionary families like the Hares and the Wickwires who circulated the globe for generations, spreading the word of Jesus Christ to the most remote and dangerous regions, and then leaving those indigenous cultures rather than conquering them. Kinder, gentler missionaries than those sent by the Spanish and Portuguese Catholics, the French, the Dutch, the English Puritans and Anglicans — all of which spread Christianity by conquest rather than by simple evangelism. Lest we forget, the same applies to Muslims, the Hindus, the Chinese, the Khmer, the Maya, the Inca, the Zulu, the Vikings, the Swedes, the Polish, the Rus centred around Kiev, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the Hittites, the Akkadians, and many other cultures over the millennia. Military conquest, slaughter and genocide is a recurring and timeless trait of humanity going back to pre-history — and it is only with the Enlightenment that human society started its climb towards a less brutal and better way of living.

Describe how we share a complex and interconnected lineage, passed down by genetics, language, culture, through written words and oral tradition, that spans all of today's cultures and religions.

Describe how my family's religious tradition of documenting biological lineage led to a family and a boy that were self-aware of their lineage back to Charlemagne the Holy Roman Emperor, where the record was cut off by the Dark Ages — but that my love of reading and curiosity for math, science, history, anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, and the polytheistic philosophy of Ramagiri and the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation led me to study all of that: every culture, every religion, and every branch of science or myth back to the beginnings of recorded history and beyond.

I have requested my order history from Amazon to find the hundreds of books I bought and read on all these topics — with a particular focus on the history of mathematics and science, the personal narratives of the Euclids and Pythagorases and Archimedeses of the world, down through Riemann, Einstein, Niels Bohr and the rest.

My grandmother Pauline had a complete set of all National Geographic magazines back to the 1920s, inherited from her father and extended throughout her life — literally every single magazine, in bookshelves in the cold, dark, nearly windowless room at the back of her Apple Gallery, formerly a storage place for an apple orchard, converted into an artist's studio, among many other artifacts collected over a lifetime. I skimmed every single National Geographic and read the interesting articles — especially about history, archaeology, airplanes, ships, science, exploration, geology and paleontology.

This continued with reading New Scientist, Scientific American, Life, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Omni, the Economist, Business Week, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post — religiously, no matter where I was. I would buy out magazine stands so I had reading material. When travelling around the world twice, I used to hunt for the International Herald Tribune and could usually find it, but several days out of date, because it took time to arrive in lower Egypt, or in Agra, or in Rajasthan, or in Nairobi, or in Siem Reap, or wherever I happened to be.

A key point is that I began reading very young, and never stopped. I completed my first library in Three Rivers, California, where my grandmother lived most of her life, and my mother was raised when she wasn't in boarding school, or living in Heidelberg with my grandfather and June, when he was in a military-scientific liaison post in the late 50s, with rank equivalent to Lieutenant General, so that protocol could be observed during the late stages of our occupation of Germany.

By the way, my mother met Elvis in Germany. The teenage and college-age sons of Bavarian nobility fought duels — fencing, but with sharp tips — that left their faces scarred for life, while competing for my mother's attention, because that was how the Bavarians maintained their warrior traditions over the centuries. I used to hear the stories from my grandmother's German live-in servant, who moved home to America with the family, and remained my grandmother's friend until they were both in their mid-90s.