“Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” Ken Boulding.
The past CEO of the consumer goods company Unilever and a business economist, thinker and writer together address the wide-ranging ancient philosophical question of what the purpose of a business is in this tome.
There is a positive optimistic tone about the future in the Blow Up Boundaries chapter. No one should deny that the campaign by Lifeboy, the oldest of Unilever’s 130 personal care products, to teach half a billion people the importance of hand washing has been a net positive for humanity. The Embrace The Elephants chapter provides a lot of counterintuitive advice for business leaders about abandoning short-term goals and Friedman economics in favour of loftier sustainable goals that benefit the company and the broader society rather than just shareholders. The nine point Stockholm Planetary Boundaries model that Sir David Attenborough discussed in A Life on our Planet is again referenced. I must try harder to understand it.
There is also a lot of mushy psychobabble about purpose, taken from the personal to the corporate level. There are hundreds of acronyms that can be confusing to readers who are not fluent in business lingo. There is a slight whiff of hypocrisy in the final chapter’s advice to challenge the supremacy of consumption and growth, from the ardent advocates for consumerism and business growth; that is difficult to work around although they try and partially succeed. It is loaded with all the business jargon that could possibly be dreamt up.
I can imagine this book being used as a primer for any business school M.B.A. course on sustainability, using Unilever as a case study. Although there is no doubt that Unilever is a world leader when discussing ethical business practices, much of this writing reads like a book-length ad for the global behemoth.
Good food for thought, but dry and certainly not for everyone.
The English Civil War and the roundup of the regicides of King Charles I after the Cromwellian “roundhead” parliamentarians are routed and the royalty was reestablished in the person of the nefarious whoring Charles ll forms the backdrop to this historical novel. Much of the action takes place in New England where the Puritan regicides Colonels Ned Whaley and Will Goffe have fled and are sought for return to England to be hanged, drawn and quartered, a process that is described in gruesome detail.
Every development seems to be interpreted as an act of God, with constant reference to biblical verses, often quoted out of context. John Davenport, a strict Puritan preacher and founder of New Haven, Connecticut, where the colonels sought refuge for a time, designed it as the home for Christ’s second coming in 1666, when by his unshakeable conviction, He would establish his Heaven on earth in America, as he interpreted various Old Testament and Book of Revelations texts. What must be Sleeping Giant Mountain, north of New Haven, within a couple of miles of where I lived for three years, is the site of one of the many cat-and-mouse narrow escapes for the regicides as they elude their pursuers, although it seems clear that many of these close encounters are far from factual. But the distances cited from their hideout to downtown New Haven, the harbour, and Long Island Sound are shorter than those lodged in my memory fifty years ago. However, the controversial attempt to establish New Haven as a chartered territory separated from Connecticut was real. If the Puritan founders had prevailed against the Crown, we would now probably have a separate New England state of New Haven, or perhaps a separate country, had the Revolutionary Army not defeated them 110 years later.
But the Dutch control over New Amsterdam (New York) was a distraction that had to be dealt with as did the latter battles with the Dutch in Britain.
The Black Plague and the Great Fire of London, following in quick succession are interpreted by the Bible-quoting Puritans as sings of the last times, as predicted in the Book of Revelations, and every event, for better or for worse, is seen through the cognitive dissonance of a benevolent Good with evil and hardship attributed to His working in mysterious ways, a non-explanation still prevalent in some circles.
An interesting and entertaining novel. Although the chronology of the major political events is doubtlessly accurate and has been carefully researched, this one seems to me to be far more fiction than history, and the author would probably agree. But reading it in 2022, with changes in Buckingham Palace raises new questions about the durability of the British monarchy. Not an historian, I nevertheless quite enjoyed reading it.
Flipping back and forth from the slavery-powered world of horse racing in Lexington, Kentucky, and cotton picking in Mississippi and Louisiana in the mid1800s and that of art curation and archeology at the Smithsonian Institution in 2019 makes for interesting cultural clashes in this new novel by the acclaimed Australian/American writer. The posh life of New York aristocracy, horsemen, and art connoisseurs and dealers over the ages is presented in detail; there is a Canadian connection as the slave groom of the famous horse eventually finds freedom and family life in rural Ontario.
Most of the story, though described as fiction, is based on facts, with the names of the characters, both human and equine being real heroes or villains of the sometimes corrupt monied horse racing community, and even the mystery of the skeleton that was found abandoned at the Smithsonian and is now at the Lexington International Museum of the Horse is factual.
The provenance and value of old paintings of a racehorse and a colt that had been lost and found several times forms the linking backbone of the plot which is intricately interwoven with tensions within a slave-owner/emancipation-advocating mixed family in Lexington, and of the chase to return a slave groom fleeing to the north on the prized steed he so loved. One painting is eventually found in the hands of a naive New York maid and is evaluated by the billionaire Mellons and Jackson Pollock, which seemed to me to be a somewhat contrived plot twist to include and discuss the lives of the rich and famous, but is apparently factual. The author has researched this story carefully. She also manages to weave the infamous Jesse James into the party of murderous Union horse thieves.
The equine hero of the story after a stellar but short racing career, became the famous ancestor of many real famous race horses, including General Robert E. Lee’s steed and even some recent famous racehorses. The disruption of many relationships and the alienation of friends by the Civil War is dramatically described, and the continuing racism is dramatized by the shooting of an unarmed star black Yale arts student by a cop in 2019.
The butchery of the English language in the lingo of the illiterate southerners is captured colourfully and the writing reflects the complex communication style of the times. The feverish excitement of the crowd of bettors in the grandstands, which I have witnessed at Keeneland in Lexington, but could not get enthused about, is memorably described. All of my early memories of horses were of Monty and Mollie, a team of black utilitarian Percheron farm horses pulling the sleigh with the big tank through the maple sugar bush to which we carried pails of sap, or taking the whole family wrapped in horsehair blankets to town in the cutter when the snow was too deep for cars, or pulling various farm implements not yet adapted to the tractor. But recreational bareback riding was not to their liking and I was thrown off more than once; horse races were only for the town fall fair.
The unwritten bond, communication, and love between horse and groom is heartwarming and well described with the slave groom choosing to remain in that role rather than buy his freedom and be separated from his steed.
An immense improvement over the author’s earlier rather self-contradictory Nine Parts of Desire, this tale is, in my estimation, right up there, in a totally different context, on a par with Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt and Jodie Picoult’s Small Great Things, when it comes to giving readers an account of the sordid history of slavery and continuing troubled race relations in America with deep insight into the elite snobbish world of thoroughbred horse racing added in. Well deserving of the Fiction of the Year award that Book Browse reviewers awarded it.
A gift from my daughter, this short book documents the striking loss of biodiversity on earth caused by human activity, in a somewhat alarmist tone. But none of the facts are deniable and they are delivered in the same almost poetic lilting style that is so endearing about the now 96 year old’s television narration’s. I can almost hear the deep voice I recognized on BBC television, as I read on.
While Sir David addresses global warming with the same basic information as many other scientists have done, his emphasis, logically given his background as a globe-trotting student of all kinds of life forms, is on the loss of biodiversity as the reason to be concerned if not outright panicky. He introduces the Planetary Boundaries model with its nine components needed to maintain or restore earth’s stability, four of which we have already exceeded, a graphic depiction which was new and confusing to me. And in Part Three, he introduces the even more confusing nine component Doughnut Model also needed to restore earth’s sustainability adding an inner circle of societal and political changes to the Planetary Boundaries compass. I need to study these concepts in more detail to perhaps get close to understanding them, as they seem to be important.
The stakes for the future of Homo sapiens could not be higher if we fail to heed the warnings and sage advice in these pages, now also available on film
There is no need to introduce the author of this book. This is not really the second part of her memoir so much as a self help advice book based on her own experience in coping with stresses, disappointments, and uncertainties. By the end of reading the introduction, I was disappointed as it seemed she was about to dish out almost 300 pages of trite aphorisms and fuzzy psychobabble a la Dale Carnegie, Mehmet Oz, or Oprah, comparisons I am sure she would not appreciate. But as I read on, I realized that even if it is read and interpreted as a self help book, it is by far the best one I had ever read or heard of, infused as it is with the unique brilliant insights of a remarkable woman. In places she plays the roles of parenting and marriage counsellor, but does it better than Dr. Spock or Ann Landers; she relates that she and Barrack, the public image of an ideal loving couple, have used the services of a marriage counsellor. And it would be very inappropriate and arrogant of me to dismiss her advice, having never experienced any of the discrimination, fears, and outright hate that has lead to her self-doubt, introspection, and sense of not belonging, shared by millions of others.
There is little of the political commentary and insights I was hoping for; nothing about her predecessors or successors as FLOTUS, not one word about her take on the Clintons, and far too much introspection and self analysis for my liking. She writes about living with a separate being called her fearful self and arguing with her. The abundant metaphors become a bit obscure.
“Rage can be a dirty windshield. Hurt is like a broken steering wheel. Disappointment will only ride sulking and unhelpful, in th back seat. If you don’t do something constructive with them, they”ll take you straight into a ditch.”
I can relate to the discussion of her parents, particularly her mother, but in the opposite way- I cannot recall my parents ever showing any public displays of affection nor praising any of our various accomplishments, although there is no doubt that they loved us. And although she does not name it as such, much of her adult self doubt seems to relate to the “imposter syndrome”, the conviction that, from her background, she is not deserving of her remarkable accomplishments, a feeling I have also experienced.
Much as I admire this remarkable woman, by far the most influential First Lady in living memory, I was a bit disappointed with this book. For me, it is not nearly as good as her earlier Becoming.
A young New England writer here documents the long and convoluted history of the clothing industry in four chapters named Cotton, Silk, Synthetics and Wool
I found the detailed documentation of the four-way back-and-forth tussle between India, Africa, Europe, and America, for domination of the growing, spinning, weaving, bleaching, knitting and dying with toxic chemicals, and marketing of cotton over 500 years a bit hard to follow. Cotton growing in the U.S. south was linked to slavery, then sharecropping, and moving west to Texas, it is now depleting soil and the Ogallala Aquifer that runs from North Dakota to the Mexican border. Growing the thirsty plants, and harvesting them with cheap largely undocumented immigrant labourers and with added chemical fertilizer, it is a major cause of the massive dead zone of algae bloom in the Caribbean Sea, all so that we can buy cheap, nondurable cotton clothing. The interrelationship between the massive Chinese cotton industry in the Xinjiang Uyghur west and the forced labor and human rights abuses there are carefully exposed. On startling claim that seems like hyperbole “….it takes twenty thousand litres of water to make a pair of jeans.” Much of that water becomes polluted in the process and not reusable.
The chapter on Silk was easier for me to understand as we have visited a silk factory in China and our guide explained the ancient process of growing the worms and extracting the finer from their larvae. Silk clothing has been used since prehistoric times to signal social status as best documented by Thorsten Veblen in his 1899 The Theory of the Working Class, one of my favourite old nonfiction books . The Veblen Effect or Veblen Choice effect relates to the phenomenon whereby raising the price of certain consumer goods beyond any possible utilitarian value will increase sales because of the signal it confers of social class. It applies not just to clothing but to jewelry, accessories household decor and even pets. Think of of Rolex watches, Hermes handbags, etc. Veblen is not mentioned here.
In Synthetics, only Rayon or viscose, and Nylon or polyamide, both twentieth century inventions are discussed in detail, but DuPont dominated in the production of both along with acetates, fluorocarbons, polyesters, Spandex, Lycra, Orlon, and Dacron, all derived from petroleum products or coal. Rayon production is based on plant fibres but involves extensive use of the very toxic carbon disulfide, also used in vulcanization of rubber, exposing thousands of workers to the risk of fainting, psychosis, and often death, especially in southern United States nonunion factories. The toxic exposure continues to this day, although the acceptable exposure limit of 20 parts per million in the U.S. has been lowered to 2 ppm in China, where much of the rayon industry has been outsourced to cheaper labourers.
In the Regan era, Taiwanese, South Korean and Hong Kong companies used Caribbean sweat shops paying below subsistence wages to produce garments for J.C. Penny, The Gap, Saks Fifth Avenue, Calvin Klein, Victoria’s Secret, Christian Dior, Eddie Bauer, J.Crew, Kmart and other American retailers. Those shops also pollute local rivers and seas with toxic dyes and massive amounts of microfibres, especially from polyester production. The same companies develop an ever-accelerating fashion cycle to stimulate unnecessary consumer demand a la Veblen effect. Meanwhile U. S. politicians, the World Bank, and USAID boasted of supporting the Caribbean economies and their right wing dictators through the tariff-free Export Processing Zones, while insisting that they use only U.S. raw materials. The real agenda was usually to prevent any socialism or communism reaching the West. Such hypocrisy!
The chapter on Wool brought back fond childhood memories to me. One of my earliest memories is of my father dipping his Shropshire sheep and those of several neighbouring farmers one at a time in the sheep dip filled with green malodorous fluid, undoubtedly some toxic pesticide, holding them back from the exit ramp with a long crook and using it to immerse their heads. And I watched my uncle deftly holding a ewe between his legs as he sheared her and put the intact one fleece in a large bag. The assertion here that wool production is a net benefit for the environment with manure and wool sequestering carbon in the soil must be partially or completely negated by by the fact that sheep, being ruminants, belch and fart methane. The discussion of the cruel persecution of native Navajo weavers of rugs and tapestries while interesting, seems peripheral to the subject of clothing, and several other such digressions make the book much longer than it needed to be.
As a lifelong severely wardrobe-challenged senior, (possibly only outdone in that category by Gordon Lightfoot and Ronnie Hawkins who were known to host 1960s parties in their birthday suits) I enjoyed reading this well researched and very educational and thought-provoking book. In profound ignorance, I had not previously thought of textile workers and garment workers as separate forces, but this book shows how important this distinction is in history, demographics, skills, and location. The natural byproducts of rayon are often used to make sausage casing.The etymology of dozens of common words and phrases related to clothing is delineated.
Will reading this change my wardrobe choices in the future? Not in the least. My wardrobe committee (my wife) often vetoes my choices and if I get a new piece of clothing, I always discard or preferably donate an equivalent piece to a charity.
This is the most famous and durable of the prolific Ukrainian-born Polish/British novelist and short story writer’s works. The copy I borrowed is a 1996 edition in booklet form in inexplicably small print, accompanied by the earlier short story Youth, (also narrated by Marlow) and the later novel The End Of The Tether, with which it was published in a 1902 edition. It was not as popular as the latter two during Conrad’s life. I cannot recall who recommended it to me other than that it was lavishly praised in Salmon Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton.
The single-named seaman Marlow narrates the tale to his fellow adventurers as they await the high tide to sail down the Thames on their next adventure. He was somehow assigned to operate a steamboat for the Belgian “Company” between stations on the Congo River. After many delays including gun battles with shore-bound natives, and taking on cannibalistic natives as crew, he reaches the last station where the also single-named Kurtz has resided, trading in plundered ivory and murdering natives who nevertheless are in awe of him and worship him as a god. Marlow observes of his crew “Fine fellows-cannibals-in their place.” Kurtz also produces a document for the Company called “Suppression of Savage Customs.” His charisma is so overpowering that everyone seems to admire him. The ruthless plunder of the pristine land and the murder of native Congolese is described graphically but so is the allure of the uncertain and dangerous life in the jungle for single adventurous white men.
The plot has many twists but is not difficult to follow. For me, the beauty of the story lies in the vivid description of the characters, scenery, and cultures. A quote to illustrate this:
“ His head was as bald as the palm of my hand, but his falling hair seems to have settled on his chin, where it prospered, as his beard reached his waist.” As Marlow reaches Kurtz’s station, the latter is very ill and he dies en route with Marlow as they sail downstream to return to England.
The last few pages describe Marlow’s philosophizing about the nature of human loyalty and the meaning of his life. He sees both sides of Kurtz’s life but can’t help but admire him and feel some loyalty to his memory. A year later, on visiting Kurtz’s betrothed in London he describes him in superlatives and lies about his double life and his last words.
The primitive violent nature of the jungle natives is detailed but so are the horrors inflicted on them by the would-be white empire builders, with equal moral condemnation.
This tale has been loosely adapted to film three times including Apocalypse Now, starring Marlon Brando.
This is the definitive history of the earth’s evolution from the Big Bang to the present in eight chapters by a Harvard professor of Natural History. Scholarly and detailed but dense.
Neither the Oxygen Earth chapter on when the earth first acquired oxygen through the proliferation of Cyanobacteria nor that of Animal World about the first arrival of animals did much to enlightenment me. While obviously important their confusingly detailed and speculative nature is probably of little interest to most of the general public. Knoll scornfully dismisses the panspermia hypothesis that life on earth came first from another planet, which some other scientists take seriously, which just shows how little we really know for certain about where and how life started.
The distinctions between eons, eras, periods, and ages in the evolution of the earth are arbitrary and also impotant but I can never remember how far back one must go to make these distinctions, even after reading this book, and I doubt that I am alone in this.
Over 50 black and white photographs, many of fossils and and rock formations taken by the author do little to clarify details. The sparse charts are a bit more helpful.
The final chapter, Human World is a pessimistic but probably realistic recital of the ever accelerating damage we are doing to the earth since our arrival and proliferation but with an interesting addition I had not head of before. By citing analysis of carbon isotope ratios in earth’s atmosphere, Knoll claims that almost all of the carbon dioxide being added to the air since the onset of modernity comes from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, not other sources, a finding that, if true, deserves emphasis.
Emphasizing the ever changing nature of our home, there are abundant facts to cite at a cocktail party to impress someone, such as alligators once roaming the Arctic and the distance between Boston and London shrinking by an inch every year, but they hardly make up for the unfamiliar and forgettable names of species.
One memorable quote: “Earth writes it’s history with one hand and erases it with the other.”
Outside of to the rarified world of research natural scientists, encompassing cosmologists, geologists paleontologists, anthropologists and perhaps a smattering of general biologists, I cannot recommend this book. For the rest of us it’s chief redeeming feature is it’s brevity. (Too be fair, I am not sure the author wrote it with the general public readership in mind, in site of the reviewers comments)
A long recent analysis of the book and discussion with McEwan in The Atlantic drew my attention to this, his latest novel.
Poet, talented musician, and restless manual labourer Roland Blaines and his son, Lawrence are principle characters in this British and German tale. It begins in 1986 when Roland’s wife Alissa leaves them to become a famous novelist. (A subtle underling theme throughout concerns the inherent conflict of highly ambitious professionals between achieving fame and advancing in a career and the inevitable sacrifices one has to make to properly raise children.) But the story then reaches back several decades and forwards to mid 2021. In his youth, Roland, like McEwan, is sent by his military family in Tripoli to a strict English boys boarding school in Ipswich, which makes me wonder how much of the rest of the story tale is also autobiographical. Later, Roland also works to free a East German couple and their two girls from the tyrannical punishment of the Stasi for saying something intolerable, and particularly grieves over the punishment of the children.
Roland’s criminal seduction at age 14 by his female piano teacher, Miriam, (hence the title) has lasting long unrecognized psychic effects that make him into a sex-obsessed misfit who can never find satisfaction in other activities or with other women, and she is portrayed as a very manipulative, controlling nymphomaniac.The description of the many sexual encounters is unnecessarily pornographic and the frequency of their gymnastic sex is a also bit unrealistic. Exploitation of children and their vulnerability is a recurring theme in McEwan’s novels and made me wonder if it is also reflects his personal experience. (The Atlantic article refers to this book as his anti-autobiography.)
Roland’s muddled bemused understanding of the modern physics of time, space, light, matter, gravity, quantum mechanics, wave theory, the alternate or multiple universes theory, and the thought experiment known as Shrodinger’s cat reflect my own limited comprehension of such complexities.
The slow painful death from cancer of Roland’s late wife is described with too much sentimentality for my liking but it also constitutes a passionate and compelling plea for legalizing medical assistance in dying. The deathly fight between Roland and her ex over where to scatter her ashes is entertaining and imaginative.
The fluid engaging writing rescues this book from any risk of boring readers. It includes memorable descriptions from the culture, history, and customs of 1950s including the rigid rules of British boarding schools, being at Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate when the Berlin Wall fell, the fear gripping the world during the Cuban missile crisis and the Chernobyl meltdown, Thatcherism, but also overly vivid descriptions of the many sexual encounters of the characters. Some of McEwan known atheistic nihilism appears in Roland’s musings. Roland “….”steps out of ordinary existence to be reminded…that he was an insignificant being on a giant rock rolling eastward at one thousand miles per hour as it hurtled through the emptiness among the remote indifferent stars.” Onhuman existence: “How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life in a succession of reactions to events.” Of the views of children in the 1950’s: “ They were not beings in their own right….transient proto-humans endlessly, year after year in the graceless act of becoming.” Roland is slow to acknowledge his mother’s descent into dementia until he discovers a bar of soap in her refrigerator and the decline thereafter is described in realistic detail. Her surprising activities during WWll is revealed only after her death. Roland’s bleak assessment of the current world situation in the last chapter hints at a future book about dystopian 22nd century.
The convoluted story includes the overused tropes of writing about novelists and novels within novels, and includes discussion of several dozen novels and old music pieces, which seems like a kind attempt of the author to prove that he belongs to the literati and intelligentsia. There is at least one blatant anatomical error: “Her irises were pinpricks.”
In the Introduction this explanted Canadian professor of Economics and Political Scince at the University of Chicago defines war very differently than does Richard Overy in Blood and Ruins. For him, war is any prolonged, violent, conflict between groups of people whether they be nations, religious sects, or Chicago street drug gangs.
In part I, he lists five factors which he sees as contributing to the likelihood of war- unchecked interests, intangible incentives, uncertainty, commitment problems, and misperceptions. Some of these rather fuzzy concepts are clarified by numerous examples from wars throughout history, by his observations from everyday life experiences, and from social science studies. The latter are often limited by inclusion of only unrepresentative undergraduate university students as subjects. His pie diagrams of two rival groups with a shifting bargaining space between them is used extensively but works best as a concept when there is rivalry only between two groups.
Chapter 5, entitled Committment Problems, purports to explain the reasons for the Peleponesian War (along with a very confusing map), WWI, genocides, the American invasion of Iraq, and the long Columbian civil war. It coveys a lot of factual information but I found it also vague and confusing.
Part II, titled The Paths To Peace, also comprises five chapters, discussing interdependence, checks and balances, rules and enforcement, interventions, and wayward paths to war and peace. In the latter, some myths about both the causes and the supposed benefits of war are exposed. The assertion that “….the solution to world peace is universal cognitive behavioural therapy.” seems like a gross oversimplification.
The concluding chapter titled The Peacemaking Engineer is composed of trite Ten Commandments for everyone on how to contribute in some small way to world peace that reads like common sense, which seems to be an uncommon commodity in the world of politics.
I am ambivalent about recommending this book for the general public but it will be of value to international diplomats and negotiators. There are interesting historical facts from around the world and some fresh concepts and perspectives. But there are also long barely relevant diversions such as the history of Henry VIII’s successors in an attempt to answer the question of whether women leaders are more or less bellicose than men- with the conclusion that we do not know. Almost none of the wars and potential wars he discusses are current such as that in Ukraine and the tension between America and China over Taiwan. And the writing style is unimaginative and bland; it is also much too wordy, and humourless.
Almost exclusively addressing the part of the huge fitness industry aimed for women, this begins as a negative rant about what the author considers to be the misdirected modern trends in self-care and relieving stress, from yoga in all of its forms to jogging and meditation, not that these are harmful but because they are only partial solutions to underlying deep rooted uniquely American societal problems.
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Exaggerating the stresses imposed on of modern young American women’s lives, Chapter 1 has a whining personal negative tone with almost no proffered solutions and a distinctly man-blaming undercurrent. It also conveys a anti-capitalist hint about the underlying societal causes of workplace stress.
Chapter 2 delivers an equally negative but more logically argued assessment of the multibillion dollar diet and weight control industry, largely promoted by market specialists with no nutrition expertise or celebrities with expertise limited to self-promotion. The unscientific body mass index comes in for justified scorn, based as it is on limited old data from studies of white adult males.
Chapter 3 focuses first on the huge recent industry devoted to looking after your skin with a huge array of products, then switches to express the many ambiguities and the false dichotomy between natural and chemical products. The author does not doubt the need for almost any skin care products, as does James Hamblyn in Clean.
In Gym as Church, details of the limitations of the entrepreneurial business model of charismatic stars such as Oprah of SoulCycle, pastors of exercise believers, strengthening faith muscles and replacing the older roles of religious communities are exposed. There are limits to how much exercise and meditation clans can relieve the loneliness of modern American society detailed in Robert Putman’s Bowling Alone, filled in the past by faith groups and institutions like the Women’s Institute in rural Canada, Britain, and South Africa (but not the U.S.A.)
Goop conferences, Gwyneth Paltrow and the huge unregulated alternative medicine industry get an uncritical hearing in A Plea to Be Heard, even as some of the practices are shown to be bizarre, ludicrously expensive, and totally unproven or even harmful. Their success is based on clever, but lucrative marketing and dissatisfaction with traditional medicine, more than any scientific evidence,(and on a regulatory failure to restrict false advertising). Voodoo witchcraft of rose quartz crystals under the hardwood floor seems harmless by comparison, even if a waste of money and resources. But the trashing of traditional medicine as a paternalistic, uncaring, misogynistic, male domain seems a little overdone, as now more than 50% of medical school students in the U. S. identify as female as do 37% of their practicing physicians. The vast gap in knowledge, research funding, and standards development between men and women is attributed solely to gender bias in the medical establishment, without acknowledging the unique challenges that potential pregnancy, pregnancy, cyclic hormone fluctuations, birth trauma, and lactation presents to those trying to design proper scientific trials.
The Nutritionmania chapter provides the best, most accurate, balanced information in the whole book, in my opinion. Ancel Keys in the 1950s probably did more than anyone else to throw confusion into the world of nutritional recommendations, and his advice remains influential. The resulting uncertainty opened the door for Big Food’s $14 billion advertising budgets and popular stars such as Vani Hari (Food Babe) with no nutritional science background to further pseudoscientific eating habits such as irrational avoidance of gluten by people without celiac disease and the shunning of GMO foods. For the huge supplements and health food industry, such terms as “clinically proven”, boosts, supports, enhances, renews, rebuilds, revitalizes, rejuvenates, and restores are exposed for what they are- meaningless buzz words but very effective marketing tools that prey on grocery shopper’s anxieties.
The chapter on the burgeoning new spirituality discusses the phenomenon of mostly young well-off white American women who feel unfulfilled indulging themselves from a menu of meditations, astrology, reiki energy cures, Christian Science, alternative medicine, and selective bits and pieces of traditional religions along with visits to psychics, mystics, and “Manifestation experts”. This must lead to fragmentation of societal cohesion and deepening of a selfish inner focus, as the author acknowledges. For me, these practices seem as zany as outhouse flies. But I do not have a magic formula to get people to become less self-centred and to refocus on bigger issues. The same shaming marketing strategies and the same self-focus outcomes apply to the numerous Fitbit-addicted “fitfluencers” providing “fitspirarion” toward deliberately set unattainable goals. Most of these are celebrities with no expertise in exercise physiology, but are expert at doling out a kind of toxic positivity of expectations with simplistic reductionist advice.
Some of the unscientific flashy “bio hacking” trends such as “atmospheric cell training” to “massage your cells from the inside out” seem totally whacky to me, but as Raphael points out, do give people a perception of control which has its own scientifically proven benefits. But do not count on these to delay your encounter with the Grim Reaper, and they potentially can delay or deny use of proven treatments that do just that.
Raphael points out in the closing chapters that scientist have historically done a very poor job of communicating facts about fitness and health and that that deficit leaves the advertisers and self promoting quacks free to fill the gap with nonsense. That needs to change. For my part as a scientist, my advice is accept that life is rife with unfairness and uncertainties, to exercise vigorously, monitor every body function, gobble supplements, restrict your diet, meditate etc, only if it gives you pleasure or is recommended by a knowledgeable health care expert. And don’t bother with the gluten free shampoo. (Yes, it is a real product sold in Walmart.)
It might seem from my negative comments above that I did not like this read, but I really did enjoy it. The writing is laced with humour, personal anecdotes and quirky metaphors as the author, a Los Angeles journalist, indulges in many of the practices she studies and tries to understand. She interviews many of the leaders of these and more scholarly academic experts.
Her approach combines insight into the psychology of the trends she studies with an open mind, although from a limited female American perspective.
It took me more than a month to plow my way through this richly documented history tome by a professor at the University of Exeter. It is the only book that I have borrowed from the library this year that became due before I finished reading it, with 39 people waiting for it! I had to borrow it a second time months later to read the last 200 pages. By any measure, it should become one of the definitive modern reference texts on World War II and the events leading up to it and consequent to it. Now I feel a need to convince my readers that I actually read to the end, with a proportionately long review.
Commonalities of hundreds of years of wars- the political leaders’ perceived need for space for their ethnically, culturally, and racially homogeneous populations to expand, extract resources and prosper are explored in the Prologue and the first chapter entitled Nation-Empires and Global Crisis,1931-40. Even the British attempts to preserve their vast empire with suppression of native cultures and peoples is likened to Hitler’s invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland in that regard. The hyperbole of Randolph Churchill’s 1940 rant illustrates this: “… if we lose our empire, we shall become, not a second-rank, but a tenth-rank power. We’ll have nothing. We will all die of hunger.” Ironically, the defeat of the Axis powers lead directly to the worldwide anti-empire nationalist uprisings that lead to the downfall of British, Dutch, French, Belgium and Japanese empires following the war, as related in great detail in the last chapter. Earlier intense competition between the Axis countries to grab the French, Belgian, Dutch and British colonies around the world developed while their defences were weakened by the need to defend the homelands.
In some ways the Nazi eastern campaign against Russia seems like the earlier British settler’s of the Americas in their treatment of natives but even far more heartless, massive, and deliberately cruel. In discussing the 1942 attempts to expand eastward a German senior commander is quoted as saying that “Among the peoples of the occupied East, 85 % of Poles, 50% of Czechs, 50% from the Baltic States, 75 % of Belorussians and 65% of Ukrainians are ‘expendable.’” This was a total of 47,925,000 racial aliens to be expelled or eliminated, not including the Jews, most of whom had already been murdered.
In the 138 page chapter titled The Death of the Empire State, 1942-45, detailed documentation of dozens of battles around the world are provided with an astounding amount of precise bits of data (some inaccurately called statistics) on almost every page. In the 1944 ‘Operation Olive’ alone against the Adriatic end of the German ‘Gothic Line’ “German forces had 8944 meters of tank ditches, 72,517 anti-tank mines, 23,172 anti-personnel mines, 117,370 metres of wire, 3604 dugouts, 2375 machine gun posts, and 479 anti-tank units.” The squabbles between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt are discussed as are those between Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. The final few pages of this chapter turn the conventional explanation of the reasons for Japanese surrender following the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (intended for Kokura) on its head and reveal the very messy process of surrender and rebuilding of a no-longer-imperial Japan.
Macroeconomists and trade union leaders may be interested in the 59 page chapter Mobilization for Total War and the later 58 page War Economics: Economies at War. Much of the later is devoted to discussion of the impact of America’s Lend-Lease program of aid to Britain, Russia, and Nationalist China among others. Again here abundant very precise numbers of questionable accuracy are provided, although some are referenced to sources in the notes. “[German] Air Ministry calculations made in late 1941showed that no more than 5 per cent of Britain’s rapidly expanding war production was lost as a result of the bombing campaign….The effort to disrupt British stocks of oil and foodstuffs was equally limited. Only 0.5 per cent of stored oil was lost, 5.5 percent of flour- milling capacity, 1.6 percent of oilseed output and 1.5 percent of cold storage facilities….. The cost to German was substantial ….between January and June, 1941, 372 bombers were destroyed… and 496 damaged. By May, the Bomber arm had 769 serviceable bombers….For the British side the heaviest cost was the death of 44,652 men, women and children in 1940-41..” These very precise numbers seem questionable to my sceptical mind. How can anyone be sure that the NKVD ‘blocking agents’ on the Soviet front prevented precisely 657,364 soldiers from escaping from the front line and that precisely 10,201 of these were executed? In other contexts relating data such as tonnage of bombs dropped, casualties, economic costs, ships sunk, etc., numbers are suspiciously rounded off with two, three, or four zeros at the end, with nary any acknowledgement that these numbers are estimates or approximations. I am sure there must be contradictions in some of the data stated as facts, but it would take a powerful computer analysis to find them all. The documentation is supported by 76 pages of notes, and a 47 page Index, not included in the number of pages of text that I have calculated.
The Fighting The War chapter with discussion of communications, use of deception and captured prisoners as double agents may be of interest to technicians in telecommunications, military strategists, and fans of spy novels. The differences between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’, two words often used incorrectly, are never expounded; this prompted me to undertake an internet search, where the terms are mostly distinguished in the context of corporate planning.
In Just Wars? Unjust Wars?, Overy clearly espouses the view that almost all individuals participating in WWII were motivated by sincere beliefs in the justice of the cause rather than by fear of reprisals from dictatorial leaders, regardless of the bizarre lies those dictators fed them. This assertion is unsubstantiated for the most part and insults the ability of at least a substantial minority of people to reason for themselves.“Fitness to colonize” was, and still is in some senses, seen as the preserve of rich white peoples in Britain, America, and some Western European nations (and now Russia and China).
This read emphasizes that national borders and names of countries are fickle and at the mercy of ruthless leaders. As Canadians, we should be grateful that the name of our country and its borders have changed little in over 150 years.
The long chapter on the role of the civil defence mobilization of nonmilitary civilian fire fighters, rescue workers, paramedics and resistance fighters in occupied territories shows up the artificiality of the distinction between military and civilian populations at least in places where bombing and shooting was occurring.
The equally loquacious discussion of the emotional reactions of fighters to danger, deaths of comrades, and killing is dense with euphemisms and attempts to dress psychiatric illness up in the more acceptable terms for physical ailments, and the approaches differed dramatically in the American, British, Russian, Japanese, and New Zealand military forces. The stigma of seeing mental illness as a moral weakness was even more powerful in the 1940s but still persists.
The chapter on Crimes and Atrocities documents the grossest most heart-wrenching documentation of anything I have ever read, worse than anything in the fictional Silence of the Lambs. Acts of cruelty of both military and civilian personnel on both sides, around the world and throughout the war make a mockery of the various Hague and Geneva conventions and their numerous vague unenforceable updates. They made any subsequent multilateral agreement on what constitutes a war crime or a crime against humanity almost impossible, a tragedy we are still living with, although there were a surprising number of convictions. The very widespread slaughter of Jews in the Baltic states, Romania, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Slavic states, and the Soviet Union with no help from Germany was a bit of a surprise to me. (This chapter also contains the only misspelling I found- use of ‘dystrophy’, where the author obviously meant ‘dysentery’.)
The massive movement of people following the war, some to be repatriated, some to newly created countries, some voluntary and some mandated is a facet of the war that is often neglected in standard texts but is discussed in detail in the final chapter. Canada, by 1951, is said to have accepted 157,000 displaced people of various previous ethnicities and nationalities displaced but the war. The defeat of expansionist Axis powers also forced reconsideration of imperialism and the beginning of disassembly of the existing exploitive empires of the conquering Allies, with the new United Nations playing a major role. This chapter also provides readers with a concise summary of the the complex negotiations leading to the establishment of the state of Israel and a summary of the rise of the Chinese Communist state. Only the continental conflicts in South America are largely left out in what is a concise summary of later twentieth world history in this chapter.
As a reference work of modern history, this is a comprehensive valuable guide. Consumed in small nibbles on the dense leaves, between snacks of lighter, tastier fare and lots of fluids (it is extremely dry) this provides an impressively informative, global, revisionist perspective on all modern wars of conquest including Russian’s invasion of Ukraine. Good brain food, but my antique brain is now ready for something lighter.
This is the autobiography of a young, immature, thrill-seeking, peripatetic, Tunisian-born, Princeton arts student as she relates her harrowing struggles, beginning at age 22, with acute myeloid leukaemia on top of myelodysplastic syndrome, and the hundreds of complications and dozens of hospitalizations over almost four years.
The details of her medical treatments, including a bone marrow transplant will prove interesting and new to readers with no medical background but were largely familiar to me, having worked with transplant patients for many years. Terms such as febrile neutropenia and GVHD (graft-vs-host disease) are accurately explained.
Her first symptom was disabling, diffuse, mysterious itching which she describes in the agonized pleading language I heard hundreds of times in my previous life, though I never encountered it in association with leukaemia. (I spent many years researching with limited success the mysteries surrounding this peculiar symptom that often precedes any other hints of certain types of chronic liver disease, and a few other systemic diseases by months or years.)
She details the devastating psychic effects of facing premature death and watching other young oncology patients and friends die, and then the very real almost equal difficulties of adjusting to being healthy and reestablishing healthy relationships and perspectives. Her grief is lasting but she displays some selflessness as she sneaks the ashes of her best friend Melissa into the Taj Ma Hall as per her wishes once she is well enough to do so. The toll of caring for her on family and friends is described in detail. A loyal boyfriend’s sacrifices are remarkable but inevitably her extreme neediness strains their relationship to the point of breaking.
The devastating cost structure of the American health care system is largely elided over as her well off relatives and friends contribute to much of her accommodation costs and she is eventually paid well for getting her blow-by-blow account of her progress accepted as serial articles in the New York Times, and later as the subject of public speeches.
The Two Kingdoms of the title refers to the states of near-fatal illness and the almost equal emotional turmoil she experiences as she tries to reestablish a healthy state of mind and normal relationships after recovery. The yellow vehicle represents the vehicle which she took on a 100 day tour around the country to visit with her new connections from the correspondents who connected with her in the cancer centres or from her reports in the New York Times.
It seems to me that the extremely rough emotional rollercoaster ride she relates- self-pity, rage, guilt, despair, and blame, to euphoria and manic hyperactivity-may relate at least as much to her underlying “premorbid” personality as to the effects of the disease and it’s treatment. Certainly not all patients who face prolonged life threatening illnesses express such extremes of emotional responses. Stoics do exist.
One nit-picky quibble. She makes the common mistake of using “data” and “statistics’ interchangeably.
A few notable quotes.
“We call those who have lost their spouses “widows” and children who have lost their parents “orphans,” but there is no word in the English language to describe a parent who loses a child……To witness your child’s death is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. Words simply collapse.”
“Life is a foray into mystery.”
“Melissa painted self-portraits from bed; I wrote self-portraits from bed. Watercolors and words were the drugs we preferred for our pain.”
Not for everyone, but a good read.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
P.S. On checking recently, it is reported that her leukaemia unfortunately relapsed earlier this year, after six years of remission.
In this memoir Robertson tracers his life from a troubled childhood with a lobotomized mother and a rail-yard worker father in Stratford, Ontario to a part time job with a local radio station to various jobs with radio stations in Stratford, Windsor, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Toronto before moving into the new medium of television with the CBC. After this he moved to the pinnacle of the news world as anchor of the news desk at CTV in 1976. Along the way he discusses the intricacies of newsrooms and the personalities of their denizens who became the household names of the purveyors of what was happening in the world and for entertainment for millions of Canadians of the era.
The petty rivalries between the union-restricted, top-heavy CBC and the private more, open more efficient CTV that lured Robertson to abandon the “”Mother Corp” had wide repercussions but gave him more freedom to act as a commentator and journalist rather than just a reader. He comments on the quirky personalities of some of those household names, both here and in the U.S. Ever a gentleman, he seems to have never held a grudge or stooped to the questionable antics of some in the business.
Although much of his narrative is self-deprecating and he seems to be truly humble and appreciative of the breaks he got, his chapter on meetings with various members of the royal family seems to have a whiff of elitism, as in “See who I got to hobnob with.” Hobnob with the upper crust of society he indeed did -politicians, business leaders, sports heroes, etc-as an integral part of the job. His musings about the importance to the royals in Canadian’s lives seems a bit exaggerated as does his rah-rah patriotism during his coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics as his career was nearing it’s end.
His take on the personalities of various public figures and their attitudes to the media are interesting, as are his long deliberations or dithering (depending on your viewpoint) about the right time to retire while still competent. He only yielded the news desk chair at CTV to Lisa LaFlamme, she who was recently fired for dubious reasons by Bell Media who now own CTV,
In late 2011, when he was 78. The right time to fade away is something many whose work can have a major impact on the lives of others is a question for which there are no easy answers.
His humble background, integrity and modesty adds to this interesting read. Although I could quibble with the emphasis he put on various stories, I end up admiring him, unlike many others writing their memoirs, including fellow newsman Peter Mansbridge whose autobiography is hubristic and disappointing.
The proliferation of news sources, their competitiveness, and the increasing biases of some of them make finding the real story in the news difficult. I am no news hound and detest the terms “breaking news” and “fake news” equally. On the rare occasions when I have been privy to the background facts of stories making newspaper headlines or airing on national broadcasts, I have wondered if they were covering the same facts that I knew. I guess this just emphasizes the important role for those heroes digging for the background facts. It is said that the importance of any medical ‘breakthrough’ is inversely related to its publicity. At least we still have media that are not yet in any major way refrained from telling us the truth as they see it. For that we should be very grateful and protective.
The intriguing long title of this book along with its equally enigmatic subtitle of And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World captured my curiosity when I read a review of it on BookBrowse.
This wide-ranging rambling commentary on everything from psychedelic trips to ancient history, literature and philosophy, to mathematics and cosmology is by an Italian theoretical physicist who is brilliant and articulate. In 46 essays previously published in academic outlets between 2010 and 2020, his insights into the way the world works range from the problem of free will, the poetry of the Epicurean Lucretius, Dante and Milton and the attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics to relativity. He discusses the contributions of such luminaries as Stephen Hawking, Joannes Kepler, Roger Penrose, Nickolas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei.
Some of this is away beyond my simple comprehension, and he lost me completely in discussions of paradoxes such the three essays about black holes from which nothing can supposedly escape nevertheless emitting heat, and a future collapsed universe where time ceases to exist. The Big Bang origin of an expanding universe which was cosmic gospel truth until recently has now been largely discredited, a development which he could not have foreseen when he wrote the densest essays of cosmology in 2014.
The positive life-affirming essay “Why I am an Atheist” could well be adapted and adopted as the manifesto of the many humanist societies around the world. The analysis of the philosophical enigma of free will is as lucid as any I have read.
The author is not only an observant scientist and communicator, he is also a remarkably brave intrepid individual wandering alone through hunter-gatherer villages and tribes in Senegal and Kenya with fearless infectious curiosity to learn about radically different cultures from his own.
As I read these essays, it struck me that they are so diverse that they could readily be divided into two books, one expanding the horizons of simpleton concrete thinkers like me on how the real world works, and another for dedicated to cosmologists and related deep thinkers and scientists.
This is the first nonfiction book by the Virginian novelist, attorney, and activist, the true controversy surrounding factory farming in the agricultural eastern plains of North Carolina.
The central issue is the harm done to the neighbouring farmers and their families, mostly Black, by the stench of hog waste drifting far and wide from the barns, the trucks carrying dead hogs, and the spraying of hog waste far onto neighbour’s property, and even on to their houses, and contaminating water sources and wildlife, as well as inflicting cruelty to the pigs. In 2020, after losing four multi-plaintiff cases and well over half a billion dollars in compensatory and punitive damages and losing in an appeal to the District Court of Appeals, the defendant firms agreed to settle the many more pending suits for undisclosed amounts and either cleaned up their operations or vacated them.
The laudatory descriptions of the personalities of the local, mostly black original farmers and their dedicated lawyers are unnecessarily long and detailed while those of the ambitious factory farmers with their unscrupulous law firms invading the area with integrated hog operations are uniformly and perhaps appropriately derogatory. Laudatory superlatives dominate in the lengthy descriptions of the plaintiffs seeking redress from the multibillion dollar multinational greedy conglomerates of Big Ag, some like Smithfield Foods owned by Chinese companies, in turn controlled by the communist government.
Vitriolic threats, intimidation, jury tampering, legislative capture, and publicity campaigns filled with known falsehoods are all used by the huge factory farm conglomerates and their supporters, some of whom are elected members of the state and federal governments.
Similar but mostly less complex problems have sprung up in many jurisdictions where multinational conglomerates have taken control over the business of growing our foods. All animal farms smell, as I can attest to having spent my childhood on one, but I am not aware of any traditional family farmer in Canada creating such a stink as to warrant a multimillion dollar lawsuit by neighbours.
There is no doubt about where the author’s sympathies lie. The plaintiffs before the judges smile and deliver “orations” whereas the defendants of the factory farm practices scowl, obfuscate and “bloviate”, seemingly one of the author’s favourite words. Byzantine law suits and counter suits in local, state, and federal courts and equally convoluted intertwined lopsided contracts with local family farmers with hidden racial bias overtones are described in unnecessary detail. We readers got your point 100 pages ago.
This is a meticulously researched true David vs Goliath battle in the U.S. agriculture industry, but it is unnecessarily long and a bit pedantic with pages-long descriptions of the personalities and emotions of the people involved. Dare I suggest that the author should stick to novels?
Set largely in Vancouver, the author’s hometown, and Florida, this fast paced thriller is populated by a host of misfits and kooks, most of them originally from Canada.
Quirky turns of phrases and metaphors, like “He looked like a bin of Salvation Army remnants” or , (in a sleazy restaurant) “Tinny generic-sounding Spanish music squeaked out of the wall panels, as though mice were partying inside.” abound.
Just when you, the reader, will think that nothing worse can befall the violent and chaotic Drummond family of five, it does, for all of them, thanks to the author’s vivid imagination. A bullet fired at their son by Janet’s ex-husband, who is sharing a bimbette with him, passes through him and in to her sternum, infecting her with AIDS from the promiscuous son. The astronaut daughter, with a missing hand thanks to her mother’s prenatal use of thalidomide is betrayed by her husband as her mother resorts to illegally imported use of thalidomide again, to treat her mouth ulcers from HIV, which also infects most of the family, one of them pregnant as a would-be surrogate mother. The astronaut has an affair with her Flight Commander, while her husband has an affair with his wife.
There are far too many chance encounters to be realistic, and I found it impossible to follow the sudden time and place shifts and the often non-sequester hate-filled encounters and conversations as the plot got more and more twisted and weird. Although medical science has progressed immeasurably since I was in that racket, and much of the science presented about HIV is remotely feasible, some is pure science fiction. But pure realism is probably not intended by the author.
As comical, light, diversional therapy, this is a witty farcical tale. Serious literature it is not. Good for anyone needing a laugh.
This memoir by a Hungarian/American Jewish clinical psychologist, now aged 94, is not a pleasant read. Rather it is a horrifying documentation of the incredible cruelty meted out to her and thousands of others in Auschwitz and other sites across Europe and later similar cruelty of Communists in the changing border areas between Hungary and Slovakia that she called home as a child, where she is convinced early on that her quarrelling Jewish parents and her two older sisters regretted her very existence. But it’s also ultimately an uplifting testament to the human survival instinct and spirit and the ability to see positives in the direst circumstances and forgive.
Chapter 14, when she is 40, in Jungian therapy and seeking a divorce, is filled with a bit too much introspective self-analysis and self-doubt for my liking, as though she is suffering from the imposter syndrome, the feeling that she doesn’t deserve the remarkable progress she has made in life. And two years later, she remarried her ex.
Forty years after her harrowing year at age 16 in Auschwitz, she returned there and experienced crippling guilt over her use of one correct word (mother) vs another incorrect one (sister) that, unbeknownst to her at the time, condemned her mother to the line of Jews destined for the gas chambers. For me, this lingering powerful guilt demonstrates the dramatically durable power of negative emotions to overpower weaker rational thinking, which she is certainly capable of.
There is abundant good advice for everyone in dealing with emotional pains, griefs, losses, disappointments, guilt and self-doubt feelings that we all experience, but much of it is common sense, a commodity apparently in short supply. There is no doubt about her intelligence, deep insights and positive influence on thousands of others as she reveals her life story to audiences around the world and even to her psychology patients.
The writing is mostly in short, snappy, arresting sentences and phrases such as: “… victimhood is optional” in the Introduction, and “My transgression is life. And the beginnings of cautious joy.” Or “A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside of yourself, when you look for someone else to blame for your present circumstances or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.” But she also condemns self-blaming, while advocating for taking responsibility for your decisions. Such nuanced distinctions without a meaningful difference befuddle me. Throughout the book there is a lot of psychobabble, far too much for this reader to enjoy. My wife loved the booked and pointed out that our different takes on it may in part be because historically women have had far fewer choices in controlling their lives than men have. Perhaps because I have led a very lucky and fulfilling life full of choices (to this point), without experiencing much deep emotional trauma or open lasting conflicts, I had a bit of difficulty relating to the lives of people like the author and the patients she describes, much as they deserve everyone’s empathy. Perhaps psychiatrists and psychologists have unflattering words to describe me and my ilk. Shallow, out of touch with their emotions, or callous comes to mind. Stoical would be more flattering.
The Passionate Reader 