The Passionate Reader

In this, the second edition of this book (first published in 2005) this Maryland family doctor draws on 18 years of practice as well as visiting at more than 400 schools around the world and an extensive literature review to support the conclusions he comes to. This goes a long way to disprove the popular and growing assertion that gender is a social and cultural construct, without a scientific basis. He addresses such issues as why computer science is dominated by men whereas the arts and biological sciences are dominated by women.

In the second chapter alone he shows convincingly that women’s sense of smell is more acute than men’s and that it improves 1000- fold with repeat exposure whereas men’s do not, and explains the anatomical basis for this. (This may explain why my wife frequently orders me to take a shower.) Girls also see things differently using bright colours and soft objects when asked to draw anything, whereas boys typically draw moving objects and violent confrontations. This too seems to be hardwired. And girls have better hearing than boys over a broad range of frequencies, that also appears to be innate.

The chapter on sex is perceptive in teaching boys how to be sensitive and nonviolent in their relationships (and less violent and risk taking in general, although he recognizes the peer pressure to generally take more risks than girls do, and does not condemn that.) Much of this chapter’s observations, although not its recommendations, can be summed up by Billy Crystal’s astute observation that “Women need a reason for sex; men just need a place.”

In later chapters, Sax discusses exceptions to the general tendencies, including atypical male “sissies”, “tomboy” girls, gays, lesbians and transsexuals, all in a non-judgemental way, for example, by comparing gay men to being left-handed.

“The explosion in the proportion of people who believe that they are transgender may well represent a failure to understand that gender is two-dimensional, not one dimensional. If you are a man who has some (or many) feminine qualities, or a woman who has some (or many) masculine qualities, it doesn’t mean that you are transgender. It means that you are a human being.”

“Sex differences in childhood are more important than sex differences in adulthood.”

This great advice for parents came too late for me as my children are now mature adults, but fortunately they seem to have survived and thrived in spite of the many mistakes I made.

9/10.

Thanks, Alana

In the first section (70 pages) the native Cree, born in 1977, follows a common path into a life of violence, abuse, theft, prostitution, alcoholism, and debauchery as his single mother moves from the reserve in northern Manitoba, to Winnipeg, Brandon, Dawson Creek, Spirit River, and, Terrace B.C. By the time he turned 17, he had served time, and become a house guard for the Manitoba Warriors, a criminal gang that even intimidated the Hells Angels.

There is a lot of perhaps justified finger-pointing at the colonists who disrupted the lives of the Natives, confined them to Reservations, and separated families by forcing children to attend abusive residential schools and unashamedly practiced systemic racism. But there is no recognition that the much later programs to reeducate aboriginals in their former cultures, though often lead by aboriginals, were usually funded by federal white politicians, albeit belatedly and under pressure. Throughout the book, there is abundant very foul language, which, to me, usually indicates a paucity of linguistic skills.

The fight over the Alberta tar sands provides some devastating data about how destructive they are. They have replaced 170 square kilometres of arboreal forest with toxic liquid waste that leaches 11 million litres into the Athabasca River every year. The author and many other Native leaders are leading the legal battle to put a stop to this, claiming violation of hunting and fishing rights.

His religion combines sweat lodges and Sundance lodges, ritual sacrifice, some vague belief in an after-life, at least occasional use of psychedelic drugs, and ancestor worship. He continued to drink, use cocaine and other drugs long after he was an ambassador change. These contradictions seem to combine with a strange form of Mormonism into which he was baptized, and is so puzzling to me as to become meaningless.

The Aboriginal culture is presented largely as a unity, while the reality is that there is frequent violent discord that continues, and infighting undermines their important message.

“Uncle Alex got two years in Stony Mountain for doing the right thing.”

“One of the mysteries of creation is how closely saving the world and saving yourself are linked.”

There is no doubt that his intentions are good. But the anger is all-consuming, and it seems at times that he protests for the sake of protest, without thinking through the consequences.

6/10

Thanks, Goodreads.

In the first half of this rant, the American/Canadian journalist documents in excruciating detail the massive wildfire that largely destroyed the city of Fort McMurray in 1917. Using the recollections of many people who experienced it, it was unprecedented at the time. He also details the background of the huge tar sands development extracting bitumen, covering many square miles from the green land, replacing it with a toxic wasteland. This had the enthusiastic support of the Bible-thumping Alberta premier, Ernest C. Manning, whose weekly radio broadcast Back to the Bible Hour I was subjected to for years as a child. Then he documents similar fires in Great Slave Lake and in Chisholm and similar fire in Australia. Tasmania and Greenland have experienced wildfires for the first time in the last few years.

There is a distinctly pessimistic and alarmist tone to this part, claiming for example, that the latter, at it’s peak, released more energy to the atmosphere and stratosphere per minute than did the Hiroshima bomb, and producing hurricanes. But perhaps we need to be alarmed to take appropriate action.

Then he steps back to reflect on mankind’s relationship to fire from its discovery and controlled use. What I found most interesting was that there were prescient warnings about the devastating effects of climate change as early as the 1950s, and those were acknowledged by such conservative politicians as Ronald Regan. But government support for the fossil fuel industry has continued apace. Our federal government spent $450 million to buy out the Kinder Morgan pipeline, while recognizing that the extraction from bitumen is the most inefficient and toxic means of obtaining crude oil. It ranks near the last of the OECD nations to divest from this industry, even while also recognizing that renewables, have been shown to be economically and environmentally cheaper and cleaner and providing some limited support. Many investment companies are now divesting themselves from the tar sands in particular and fossil fuels in general. But is it too little too late?

In many ways alarming, this is nevertheless an important work.

8.5/10.

Thanks, Jackie.

The writer in residence at New York University details an extremely vivid story of the lives of the mixed community of blacks, immigrants, and Jews in the fictitious Chicken Hill suburb of Pottstown, Pa., in the twenties and thirties.

The very complex plot with a host of characters with peculiar nicknames like Monkey Pants, Big Soap, and Fatty is unpredictable, but captures the life of the very diverse denizens of the small town very well.

With my limited ability to visualize described scenes, I had some difficulty visualizing the exact layout when the deaf child Dodo is watching, hidden from view, on the ladder to the cellar, as the dreaded Dr Roberts enters the store aiming to capture him and send him to the institution in Pennhurst, but other than that the narrative is reasonably straightforward and it is not too difficult to keep at least the main character straight.

A good quote among many will give you a sense of the abundant humour and the quirky characters: “ Nobody outside of Pottstown had ever heard of Antes, of course, in part because he wrote trumpet sonatas that nobody played, and in part because the John Antes Historical Society’s Cornet Marching Band, which was composed of forty-five souls -numbskulls, pig farmers, heavy smokers, bums, drunks, cheerleaders, tomboys, bored college students, and any other white American in Montgomery County who could purse their lips tight enough to blast a noise through a trumpet- sounded like a cross between a crank engine trying to start on a cold October morning and a dying African silverback gorilla howling out its last.”

9/10

Thanks, Vera

In this short fictional story by the Toronto native, Ambrose Zephyr an advertising agent of some ilk gets married to Zappora (Zipper) Ashkenazi, a part time writer and literary editor of a fashion magazine; they travel extensively together. Unanchored in either time or place, there are abundant non-sequiturs. The tense of many chapters changes and although there is a loose reference to the letters of the alphabet, many made no sense to me. Much of the book does not even consist of proper sentences, and a large portion of it consists of conversations, but there are no quotation marks.

This book won the Commonwealth literary prize, which serves to remind me of the vast chasm between what literary reviewers and many others appreciate and my very limited literary tastes.

For me, the best feature of this book is it’s brevity.

2/10

Thanks, Michelle.

A few weeks ago, I listened to a talk at our weekly Friday Luncheon Discussion Club by this Queens University Environmental Studies Professor on the problem of microplastics, and was sufficiently impressed that I requested this book from the OPL.

In the first few pages alone, the reader learns several startling counterintuitive and iconoclastic facts such as that more than 98 percent of municipal waste comes, not from households, but from the manufacture of goods for those households, and that Canada leads the world in municipal waste production at more than two tons per capita annually. And that is just the starting point.

The example of Kingston’s waste management is used extensively to great effect, as it is representative of a bigger problem. When they recycle, much of it travels to North Bay via fossil-fuel burning trucks, where it is compressed, and from there to Korea; much of it is then delivered to landfill sites or made into such consumer goods as picture frames and then shipped back to Canada. This has lead to what she refers to as the recycling cult. Recycling paper involves using toxic chemical like chlorine to remove the ink, which contaminates the water and paper can only be recycled once or twice. It also produces “sludge that it more difficult to remove than paper.” One of my books is on recycled paper. Several private companies make a handsome profit along the way, while emitting greenhouse gasses to transport it with perverse incentives to increase rather than than decrease the supply of garbage to be recycled.

A long list of chemicals is listed as the legacy of the DEW (Distant Early Warning) military establishment in the far north when they began to close sites over many years, and that contaminated manny rivers and lakes. Most notable are high concentrations of PCBs. The Giant Gold Mine near Yellowknife produced 237,000 tons of very toxic arsenic trioxide that is still just sitting there, leaking into groundwater. But the author does not provide much advice about solving this problem. And while the treatment of the native Inuit culture and their animals, is deplorable, it doesn’t fit easily into any discussion of the big picture when it comes to waste management.

In the next section, Hird waxes philosophical with a metaphysical discussion of landfills and other forms of waste in the bigger picture of the Anthropocene era, and our relationship to bacteria and other forms of life. This left me feeling even more insignificant than usual. The later part of this chapter left me, as a concrete thinker, confused, puzzled, and scratching my bald head.

In the penultimate chapter, Hird returns to Iqaluit for a very enlightening discussion of the spontaneous fire at the overfilled local landfill; that spewed dioxins and furans into the atmosphere and Frobisher Bay in 1995. There is a unacceptable double standard for those in the north with levels that are considered safe twice as high as in southern Canada. Throughout the book there is harsh criticism of a” neoliberal, capitalist economic and political system” and experts such as public health authorities and fire chiefs.

Years ago, I read somewhere that there are several practices that we should give up. One was mandating bicycle helmets because it leaves the impression that biking is dangerous and therefore fewer people take up biking. Another was curb-side recycling, pointing out that the city of Houston has only one truck pick up garbage, (once every two weeks) with workers doing the sorting at the dump or landfill; one fossil-fuelled truck rather than three prowling the streets. But even that is a minuscule solution to the bigger problem of ever increasing upstream overproduction of consumer goods.

In the Epilogue the author remains pessimistic but emphasizes that to meaningfully at least reduce the problem, we need to address the upstream capitalist efforts to forever increase production, accept zero or negative economic growth, and pay more attention to how what we really need is packaged.

This book is full of insights that run counter to everything that we are taught by governments and private enterprises alike. Parts of it are superb, but in other places I was completely lost.

8/10

 

This scientific exploration by the Cambridge Nobel laureate molecular biochemist is not a duplication of Sherman Nuland’s 1993 classic How We Die, although there is considerable overlap. Citing Gompertz’s Law that probability of mortality increases exponentially with age and the relationship of body size to longevity across species, he focuses early on on exceptions. The question as to whether or not there is an inevitable upper limit to human longevity is bitterly disputed. 

The author uncritically accepts that Jeanne Calment was the oldest documented human at 122, but a detailed study in The New Yorker in 2022 concluded that her daughter Yvonne assumed her identity when she died in 1934. And they are not alone. 

The very detailed discussion of DNA, chromosomes, mutations and the tumour suppression gene p53 and their roles in aging were just understandable to me with a scientific education, but will probably just confuse those readers from the arts. And considering a gene as a sentient being that senses and believes is a poor metaphor, but perhaps necessary. I was aware of the role of telomere shortening in cell senescence, but not the science of trying to lengthen it with the attendant increased risk of cancers, at least experimentally. And I was  aware of DNA methylation as a means of turning off expression of genes, but not of the largely reverse effect of histone acetylation both seemingly important determinants of aging and modifiable by environmental factors.

The chapter on cellular debris recycling is easier to understand with its very apt metaphors about personal and municipal recycling. The author is more cautious about recommending any of the various intermittent fasting regimens to prolong life than many others, pointing out that what we eat, when we eat, maintaining a healthy weight, exercise, and how well we sleep may be more important. The convoluted and confusing study of rapamycin and its possible effect as an anti-aging agent confused me even as one who prescribed it extensively to inhibit organ rejection. The supposed benefits of metformin in non-diabetics as a life prolonging agent seems iffy.  There is no mention of the possible beneficial effect of supplementing the amino acid taurine to improve quality and possibly quantity of life, in spite of some strong hints that it may do so. Confession time: I do consume supplements of taurine, even though there is no hard evidence of benefit. It is cheap and at least it seems to be harmless, and it was recommended by a friend and former colleague, whom I trust. If nothing else, it is a safe placebo. It would be easy to do a large double blind study of it’s effects, but no big pharmaceutical is likely be interested as it is unlikely to be profitable. Similar claims, with what seems to me to be less evidence, are made by the thriving health food industry for a huge number of other supplements, including nicotinamide ribose.

The chapter on worms as a fit subject to study aging and longevity is confusing with only tentative conclusions, particularly about the touted benefits of resveratrol found in red wine. There is nothing here to hint at the possibility of immortality. Likewise, the chapter on reactive oxygen species, antioxidants and free radicals, along with the role of decreasing mitochondrial damage and repair is confusing and beyond comprehension for many readers, including me, and ends up with no firm conclusions. 

The chapter on cryogenics and trans- humanism is refreshingly clear and trashes a huge amount of dreamy research. “These enthusiastic rich billionaires are mostly middle-aged men (sometimes married to younger women) who made their money very young, enjoy their lifestyles and don’t want the party to end. When they were young, they wanted to be rich, and now that they are rich, they want to be young. But youth is the one thing that they cannot buy, so, not surprisingly, many of the celebrity billionaires – such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Yuri Brenner, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, have all expressed an interest in anti-aging research. And in many cases they are funding it. The one exception is Bill Gates, who realistically believes that the best way to improve overall life expectancy remains addressing the serious health care inequalities in the world.”

It was disappointing to note that we are still increasing the period of morbidity before dying rather than decreasing it. I have no wish to obtain immortality but to paraphrase the anti-aging guru Rick Klausner, I would like to die young in my sleep after a long life, perhaps at 95 or 100. But that seems increasingly unlikely- I am much more likely to have a long period of severe morbidity, before welcoming death. 

In the last chapter,  Ramakrishnan carefully documents the major downsides for society if we were to achieve anything approaching immortality. Ultimately it is a selfish goal. 

This book documents an active area of research, but is dense and loaded with scientific data that many readers cannot realistically be expected to understand.

6.5/10

Thanks, Book Browse.

Cam

I started into this doorstopper and got to about page 100 but I would be lying if I claimed to understand much of it to that point.  So I took a break to read something lighter before going further. But I seldom give up on a book, and did finish it in stages between reading snippets from my late mother’s daily diary which she kept writing over many years from 1954 to 1984. I am missing many and just recently discovered 15 years worth. 

The author is the well-known former Governor of of the Bank of Canada (2008-2013), and the Bank of England (2013-2019) and is now with Brookfield Asset Management, an eco-friendly investment vehicle. He was also the Chairman of the then new Financial Stability Board following the 2007-8 crisis. Some of my friends believe that he will become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, after Justin Trudeau implodes in the upcoming election.

After reading another 110 pages, I knew more about the unseen causes of the 2007-08 financial crisis, and even recognized many of the acronyms that are used in the macroeconomics field. And I could appreciate and understand most of the efforts being developed to guard against it happening again. But to pretend that I understood most of the wordy erudite language would still be a lie. 

The discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic and the varied response to it was relatively easy to understand and the varied ways of putting a cost on a life was fascinating. I was quite familiar with the concept of Quality Adjusted Life years, but the author discusses it’s limitations as well. Written and published in 2021, apparently when Covid lockdowns were still being widely applied, and before widespread vaccination programs were even foreseen, much of the discussion about the possible reopening after Covid seems almost irrelevant now. “Scientists have made a business of warning the world of high-impact events from pandemics to meteor flares to volcanic eruptions. Humanity has made a business of ignoring them.”

The two chapters on the climate crisis are more understandable to me than the rest of the book. In them, he shows how far we are from achieving the goals of the Paris agreement, and the shrinking time line we have to achieve any meaningful goals. He clearly favours carbon taxes over cap and trade schemes and the need for predictability. But even in those chapters, several graphs seemed rather meaningless to me.  

The section on the theories and qualities of effective leadership in times of crisis draws on extensive literature but seems erudite and almost entirely theoretical. There is also a hint of  self-congratulation. He spends many pages devoted to decisions made by the Bank Of England when he was Governor, doling out pithy bits of advice on how to lead effectively.  All of his readers will know of his several leadership roles, and he may as well be describing himself as the model leader. To be fair, he does admit to making leadership mistakes while at the bank, and perhaps rightly claims that daily meditation and yoga help to keep him focused and humble. And  In the final chapter, he discusses the insignificance of any one life.

The 35-page chapter on How Purposeful Companies Create Value highlights the different roles of shareholders and stakeholders in different jurisdictions and goes some way to explaining why so many large companies are registered in Delaware, but is detailed, wordy, and optimistic, given the short time frame that rules the electoral cycle for most politicians, although pressure from the public may force them to change that. 

In Investing in Value(s), Carney once again confused me with a plethora of acronyms surrounding Environmental, Social and Governance measurements for firms, their many divergent ways of being measured, and the caution needed to interpret them, and not the least confusing were the charts. 

The 65 page penultimate chapter, How Canada Can Build Value For All, is a little easier to understand than most of the book, except for the charts and grafts. It reads like a wordy future political platform that needs to be simplified and put into slogans. The author is fond of point forms and enumerations to wax eloquent on a host of problems.

I have been critical of this book in this review, but I greatly admire the author -his undoubted brilliance, integrity, altruism, perspective, critical thinking and, yes, his values. I was forewarned that this would be a tough read, but I didn’t really appreciate how tough. But I would probably vote for him if he ever entered politics.

7/10

Thanks, Ian A. 

This is a very different book from the one I was expecting from the title and subtitle. I expected a rant about the Trump-supporting Republican evangelical Church from an agnostic or an atheist. But the Michigan author is a very pious devoted Christian journalist and the son of an evangelical preacher. Just reading the Prologue felt like I was reading a conservative sermon, and there is sermonizing in all of the twenty-one chapters. But it still is a sort of a rant, from the inside. And perhaps as an insider, he had access to sources that would be denied to a nonbeliever.

It seems that his interviews are almost exclusively with people who like me, answered an altar call in their early teens or even as young as five, but unlike me attended seminaries that I had never heard of and became right wing clergy, usually just like their fore-bearers. Richard Dawkins has described this indoctrination of young children into a restricted world view before they have developed the capacity to think logically for themselves or develop and experience a wider worldview, as a form of child abuse. Those who are brainwashed at an early age to believe that Jonah survived days in the belly of a whale and numerous other miracles are often set up for the rest of their lives to believe the scientifically impossible.

The shenanigans and devious actions of many true believers as they fight for power belie their true motives, even if it involves cognitive dissonance. There is an extremely pervasive paranoia about the diverse moment; that greatly facilitates the ready acceptance of all manner of unquestioned conspiracy theories, especially to those who have never known the wider world.

Apart from a chapter discussing how Putin and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have used religion to justify the invasion of Ukraine, the book is entirely focused on the American Church.

“Religion and politics are natural enemies: both provide a sense of self-actualization and belonging. Tension between the two is healthy and necessary. When one appropriates the other, history shows that oppression-leading to death and human suffering on a woeful scale is the inevitable result.”

There are many verifiably false conspiracy theories discussed. Perhaps the most ludicrous of them all is that the former First Lady, Michelle Obama, is actually a man. It is hard for me to believe that anyone would seriously believe this but apparently thousands of people do. Nor should anyone believe that the three sons of Noah were the forerunners of the European, Asiatic, and African peoples, respectively. And then the second son brought the Corona virus and the third son brought Black Lives Matter protests.

The rot at the top, the pervasive sexual abuse and cover-ups and the self-dealing financial scams detailed, particularly in the Southern Baptist Convention and in several prestigious Bible Colleges, make Al Capone seem virtuous by comparison. And the sexual scandals surrounding the Catholic priesthood begin to seem dwarfed. The rigid tightly controlled atmosphere of Liberty University with Jerry Falwell Jr. as supreme leader are particularly appalling given the fact that he has now been disgraced as a longterm sexual predator.

The blinkered world view of the author, seemingly caused by his upbringing, appears to prevent him from considering larger issues. To me, the threat of the climate crisis, never even mentioned, is far more important than disputes over homosexuality, abortion, immigration and even the management of the Covid pandemic. But if you believe that “loving the lord” whatever that means, is all that matters to get you to heaven, the earth is of no importance.

There is a slight holier-than-thou tone to the whole book, for all the author’s claims of humility. Although I found the book well-written, informative and frightening, it would have benefitted from a broader perspective if he had enlisted someone from the left to collaborate with.

6/10

Thanks, The Economist, The Atlantic.

The San Francisco author uses a very unique literary device to provide entertaining and scientifically solid advice on 15 different topics- he pretends that you are actually in, or time travel to, the dangerous places he outlines. The advice often seems counterintuitive, but is made to make sense as he describes the details.

The science can become quite complicated. He describes the square-cube law of our relationship to gravity that may make it possible to outrun Tyrannosaurs Rex. I had to read the climate science of tornadoes twice to grasp at least some of it.

“…the Midwest hosts more than 75 percent of the world’s tornadoes because its long flatlands provide a unique unobstructed pathway from Mexico to Canada. As a result, collisions play out on a continental scale. Every spring, when the winter jet stream still blows with enough force to create a strong low-pressure vacuum, and the skies over Mexico warm, but it remains cold over Canada, the Midwest hosts the atmosphere’s greatest demolition derby.”

Even without the fanciful personalized touch of pretending to be there, the science of some stories is interesting, such as the geography of the sacking of Constantinople and the many mistakes leading to the worsening of the devastation of the 1906 San Fransisco earthquake and fire. The then current myths about the cause of the Black Plague are detailed, and the refusal of many sailors to believe the solid evidence of the cause and easy cure of scurvy lead to thousands of miserable slow deaths.

A very enjoyable read.

9/10

Thanks, Rhynda.

By far the most difficult and complex book that I have read in years, and perhaps ever, I persisted only because after about 200 pages, the Oxford professor of history was finally up to the years designated as A.D. and I thought it would get better. It did in some respects, but not in many. After another 90 pages we were only up to 1250 A.D and after yet another 100 pages up to 1800, and at least some names of places and people became familiar to me but many still did not.

The atrocities of the slave trade, and its lasting effect on global economics is described in detail, albeit scattered over about 50 pages in three chapters, along with data about diseases, climate change, volcanoes, trade, and migration. In fact, one of the problems I experienced with this wordy dry book is that the time frame and all of the topics keep shifting, seemingly randomly. The Great Wall of China is mentioned only in passing in one sentence and the Terra Cotta soldiers which I have marvelled at, not at all, nor is Machu Picchu. The Crusades merit a one sentence mention. The invocation of many religions to justify horrendous acts of cruelty is a recurring theme.

There are thousands of unfamiliar names of places and people as borders and names continually change. Twelve pages of maps of the world as it changed over many millennia are never referenced in the text. There are several confusing charts in the text that sometimes seem to be unrelated to the topic being addressed. The author sees irony frequently using the word Ironically every few pages, sometimes where I can see no irony.

On the positive side, quoting Amatra Sen, the author notes that famines are not the result of lack of availability but of pricing problems, in particular affecting those who cannot afford food at times of sharply rising prices and hoarding by the rich. And as a part time regenerative farm volunteer, I was intrigued by the discussion of potatoes as as a highly nutritious high-yield crop, but the horror of the1845-52 Irish potato famine from blight (imported from South America) showed the folly of monoculture.

The last three chapters mostly covering the time I have lived is definitely more familiar to me but I was previously unaware of many of the events discussed, such as the covert cloud seeding that took place in Vietnam and the U.S.S.R, and is still being used covertly in several places. I lived in the U.S. for three years under three different presidents (you figure what years that had to be) but was largely dependent on mainstream news outlets and if it didn’t involve U.S. politics, troops, or money, it just was not reported.

The last chapter is particularly bleak in its projection of the many challenges and the refusal of most politicians to address them in in a meaningful way. To read this is to conclude that we are doomed. I like books that present challenging problems and then offer solutions, such as Sir David Attenborough’s A Life on our Planet. This one only presents the challenges, except for a weak attempt to show an optimistic side to things in the conclusion.

A quote from part of a single paragraph illustrates the density and opaqueness of the entire book: “Splenothem data from Balum Cave in Belize, along with lake sediment cores in northern Yucatan and titanium content from the Cariaco Basin in the southern Caribbean all point to to a protracted period of drought in the mid-ninth century that lasted for several decades. Average rainfall levels dropped by around 50 percent and occasionally by as much as 70 percent with these shifts likely the result of changes in solar activity, volcanic eruptions, or both. This exacerbated problems cased by rapid deforestation that has been linked to the dual need to expand agricultural land and to obtain wood for fires required in order to bake calcium carbonate from shell or stone into quicklime.”

In a much more readable and enjoyable form, much of the history of humankind, politics, culture and religion can be obtained in either Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel or Francis Fukuyama’s 2011 The Origins of Political Order, both of which I enjoyed, although they lack the emphasis on conservation.

There is a bleak fatalistic tone to the whole book, but I am in awe of the incredible amount of global information the author delivers. I suppose it might make an interesting and appropriate text for a class to study in an advanced university history or ecology course.

As a work of reference, this may appeal to a select few historians, epidemiologists, archaeologists, and ecologists, with its 26 page index, but I can’t recommend it for the general public.

1.5/10

Thanks, The New Yorker.

It strikes me that including the number of pages in the heading for an ebook is sometimes not very useful as it depends on the format, the font and the size of the type you choose. Better is to disclose how long you take to read it available on some platforms. In this case, they said I only spent 5 hours and 46 minutes to read it. But that also depends on whether you are a fast or slow reader; I have been told that I am a fast reader, but have nothing to compare it to.

This novelist calls herself Canadian, but has lived in Britain since I 969. She seems to have started her writing career late with this novel at age 56, with five since then. This is set in the fictitious small community of Crow Lake, hours north of New Liskeard Ontario, and spans many years sometime in the mid 20th century. A family of four children is orphaned when the parents die in a car accident. They stay together in spite of poverty, and the oldest boy sacrifices his chances for an education so the second son can get one.

The farm life and culture is described in vivid detail with events and values that I can readily relate to. The characters are colourful, and although there is considerable conflict, the good Presbyterians refrain from showing any emotion, keeping everything inside. There is a constant struggle to balance the value of higher education with the joys of being rooted in a community, valuing nature and hard work. For them the eleventh commandment was “Thou shalt not emote.” This describes my childhood accurately.

Among many colourful quotes: “…she hauled me up to her bosom, just as she used to do, just as she always will. It shows the state I was in that for the first time in my life, I almost wanted to accept that bosom for what it really is- a pillow to cry into. A great giant soft warm pillow into which to unload all your sorrow and regret, safe in the sure knowledge that Mrs. Stanovich will pass it directly on to Jesus.”

It is a bit peculiar that after 440 pages in 24 chapters, entirely narrated by the young Katie, the story comes to an abrupt end followed by the “Author’s Note” which is then followed by a 60 page prologue of the author’s next novel seemingly set in a town near Crow Lake and narrated in the third person. So this novel really is only is about 440 pages long.

I look forward to discussing this story in our book club, but I don’t think I want to read any more stories of deep hidden emotions. Perhaps that is a reflection of my “Thou shalt not emote” background.

8/10

This short old classic allegory is coming up for discussion in our book club. I have included the insightful 10 page Introduction by the late Christopher Hitchens in the pagination. This is a reread for me having first read it many years ago. I had forgotten how imaginative and brilliant it is. It is even more so since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its partial replacement by the lying Putin regime.

Set in Orwell’s Britain at an unspecified time, the animals rebel and establish an  «Animal farm » where everyone is supposedly equal. Pigs are supposedly smarter than other animals and gradually take over complete control over all the others, who are worked to death and starved while being deceived by the pigs and dogs into believing patently false lies about farms run by humans. The increasingly ruthless pig named Napoleon, clearly modelled after Stalin, comes to live a life of luxury, while the hard-working, loyal, but not very bright horse, Boxer, works ever longer hours to make the farm a success only to be rewarded by being shipped off to the glue factory, when he could no longer work. The pigs and dogs claim that it was an animal hospital.

An enduring caution about being deceived by dictators, this book is perhaps more relevant now than when it was first published.

10/10

A former New York Times reporter specializing in global pandemic threats ranging from COVID -19 to Zika virus presents his take on a wide variety of issues. He is critical of the various early warning systems in place around the world, and points out huge discrepancies in the resulting death toll, when various agencies or political operatives fail to act in a timely manner.

The wide-ranging topics covered include the Zika virus outbreak, Ebola, influenza, syphilis, HIV, and extensive coverage of COVID-19, including continuing speculation about its origin. McNeil never reveals why he left the New York Times in March 2021, so one can speculate. In spite of broad-ranging experience and knowledge there is just a whiff of “I told you so” superiority about the book. His complaints that others deceived him when he published some information that proved wrong, may be true, but do not flatter him.

The natural tendency of pathogens to mutate to become more infectious but less lethal is dismissed with one paragraph, pointing out only one apparent exception, the mutation to the Delta variant of the Corona virus that dominated briefly and was replaced quickly by the Omicron variant that clearly followed the rule. And the rule seems to have applied to other situations, including syphilis, and most flu outbreaks. When a high percentage of hosts are killed as in Ebola, and SARS, the virus basically becomes self-limiting, too lethal for its own good. But this rule perhaps only apples if Homo sapiens is the primary host and not some other species where it can be milder, as in rabies.

Part Four, on what we need, comprising the last 77 pages is wide-ranging including foreign aid, a history of some great successes and some failures, politics, and a lot of common sense, which seems to be in short supply particularly in current U.S. politics. The recommendation to rate outbreaks on a double 5 point scale for infectivity and lethality rather than using emotionally burdened words like emergency, lethal, and even pandemic makes a lot of sense. So does elimination of the religious exemption for vaccinations. We have an obligation, as citizens of the world to protect our neighbours as well as ourselves.

Never mentioned is the possibility that a warming planet could release a viable sporulating pathogen from Arctic permafrost that has been dormant for millennia. This has already happened with an outbreak of Siberian anthrax that killed a 12 year old and thousands of reindeer in 2016. We may not even know that they exist until they strike.

7/10

Thanks, The Economist.

I got this book when I noticed it in the library to pick up another one, because I really liked Great Small Things a previous novel by Picoult. It is written entirely in the fist person singular. But after 46 pages of utterly incomprehensible confusing discussion about the archeology of ancient Egyptian tombs containing the said named book along with numerous Egyptian myths, I was almost ready to give up. The next chapter is back in Boston where she is married with a daughter and working as a death doula, a kind of councillor to the dying in a hospice. Then it is back to Egypt in 2017, after 15 years to search in the the tomb of Djehutynakht with her Yale professor. It appears that they are intermittent lovers and at other times enemies and that everything comes as pairs- two tombs, two lives, at least two Books of Two Ways, and two aspirations for herself. It becomes like the electron in the quantum physics course that her husband teaches at Harvard. It is simultaneously in two places with two different spins. Or it may be like  Schrodinger’s cat that is simultaneously alive and dead. To me this just emphasizes our profound ignorance about how the universe works, in spite of the advances of modern physicists. She muses about the multiverse or many parallel universes of quantum theory as she listens in on one of his lectures. Free will is reduced to the direction of spin of an electron. The row of Egyptian tombs becomes a parallel universe to her life in Boston, each with an unfaithful partner. Dark matter becomes the fill-in explanation for what would otherwise be a mystery.

The plot becomes significantly more complex in the last part of the book, with a surprising paternity revelation, a plane crash, and an undelivered letter to an illegitimate son as his mother is dying.

I could never develop a clear mental picture of the layout of the Dig the site where archeology students primarily from Yale dig out the tombs and read the accompanying hieratic and hieroglyphic texts. And although the writing is superb, all of the characters are too introspective, forever undergoing self analysis, sensitive to perceived insult, and emotional for my taste. The endless myths of dozens of Egyptian gods that change from one form of life to another do not endear me to them at all. The obsession with sex and death are at times overpowering. 

I was a bit disappointed in this book. 

6/10.

For me, this is a quick reread as I read it years ago, but didn’t recall the details. That was on the recommendation of a nurse in the transplant unit who praised it, while we watched helplessly as a patient was dying.

A computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, Randy Pausch was at the height of his career at 47 in 1987, when he was diagnosed with terminal metastatic pancreatic cancer. He had a loving wife and three children under seven. He decided to give a last lecture to a crowded audience about what he had learned about living. It is available on line and is very touching and surprisingly upbeat. I listened to it after rereading the book which is not the lecture per se but all about living life to the fullest, fulfilling your childhood dreams, and helping others to do the same, with absolutely no self-pity.

The lecture itself is also very upbeat and filled with some quite extraordinary humour. There is little religiosity to it and no mention or hope for any afterlife except this wonderful line about his roommate: “If I am going to hell, I will request 6 years off for time served.”

Unlike me, he was grateful that he knew that he was dying as it gave him time to prepare his family, offer sage advice and make sure everything was in order for a life without him. I would much prefer to have no warning and die suddenly and painlessly, but I am not 47.

A couple great quotes:

“He was proof that, sometimes, the most impenetrable brick walls are made of flesh.” (Of a certain dean.)

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

This is a great book, but my retrospective advice is to view the YouTube video of the actual lecture before reading it for the best experience of this remarkable man.

9.8/10

I don’t know who recommended this book and didn’t even have it on my list of books I want to read, but it suddenly showed up on my ‘ready to be picked up’ list at the OPL. I’m glad it did.

The author is almost as dispersed as many of the plants she discusses. Born in Canada of Taiwanese and Welsh parents, she has lived in Vancouver, London, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Taipei, London, England, Cambridge, and Berlin, the latter twice and currently. She has a PH.D from Cambridge. The personal stories of her adventures are interwoven with the documentation of the many plants and few animals that she discusses. Her wanderlust probably contributes to her sense of belonging in no fixed place. The conversations with her newborn daughter as she is forced to move back to Berlin because she can’t afford to live in Cambridge are touching and philosophical.

While recognizing the harm done by many species as they migrate to new territories, she takes issue with the whole concept of invasive species and points out that plants have always been and always will be on the move in the battle for survival. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been responsible for introducing 80,000 species to that country, and even cherry trees were not part of the American ecosystem until the Japanese gifted them to the president.

In 14 chapters, she discusses the deliberate or unintended introduction of many different species such as soy, citrus trees, pine, heath, tea, and mosses, often with major economic impacts such as the introduction of citrus trees to Florida. Some achieved nationalistic symbolism and have had a major impact in the literature and culture of countries, e.g. introduction of tea to Britain. The genetics of constantly evolving plants responding to climate change is mentioned but not a major feature in this work.

There are now 1,700 seed banks around the world that serve as a repository of genetic material that can be studied by scientists.

This is a beautiful book. I read it in one day, stopping only to eat dinner and go for a short walk, in the forest as I contemplated the varied species I encountered there.

10/10

 Bob Dylan was born as  Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941. There is scant mention of his childhood, before he took up the bohemian lifestyle of a 60s folk singer in Greenwich Village, among other places. He only briefly attended the University of Minnesota. 

The 82 page analysis of the song Blowin’ in the Wind, published in 1963, and its lasting impact, becomes a bit tiresome with the many versions and many singers who sang the protest song over many years in many countries.

The second chapter supposedly on The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol (32 pages) has almost nothing to do with that song and a lot about a host of other singers and songwriters many of whom I was unfamiliar with. That includes the nonsensical Dan Tucker who “died with a toothache in his heel.” Thankfully the following chapter, Ain’t Talkin’ is  shorter. But the Jim Jones (not the cult leader nor the rapper/songwriter) chapter, at 47 pages, mentions Bob Dylan only in the last 11 pages when he discovers old poem about a perhaps mythical murderer exiled to Australia, which he then plays and discusses. This chapter is contains run on sentences going for half a page and hundreds of names, most of whom I had never heard of.  

To call this book by the American music critic, a biography at all is a stretch. There is no discussion of Dylan’s lovers and wives, his drug use, his family, either parents, siblings or children or his critics, of whom there are many. I have rarely been as disappointed in a book. 

Thanks, but no thanks , The New Yorker. 

No rating.

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy. Jamie Ford. 2022. 36 Pages. (Hardcover.)

I have included the author’s note and the unusually long acknowledgments at the end in the pagination of this work as they go some way to explaining the meaning of this unusual book. I thought that it was Linda who recommended it but now seriously doubt that.

This Montana novelist’s stories range from 1836 to a futuristic 2086, exploring the similarities of an extended family beginning with Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman who escaped from an arranged marriage to New York. She worked as a singer in night clubs and subsisted in boarding houses arranged by her managers. Others include Greta, who joined a feminist dating app in 2014 that went viral, then imploded when it was revealed that their major funder was an abusive billionaire playboy. Her daughter, troubled Dorothy in a dysfunctional marriage in 2045 undergoes epigenetic therapy to restore memories that she has never experienced, but that other unknown members of her ancestry have. Thereafter, by the time we get to her daughter in 2086, epigenic therapy companies have proliferated.

There is a lot of speculation about transgenerational epigenetics particularly of PTSD from past trauma, determinism, and free will, all woven into a very puzzling novel. To follow and make sense of the story, one needs to keep the year, the person and the location identified at the start of most of the chapters in mind as one reads it. Otherwise it can become very confusing, and even doing so, I remained confused. Once I was finished I went back and tried to connect the dots, but it did not help much.

3/5