This Aussie’s debut novel is narrated by the ten year old protagonist, Rae, who is left with no family or close friends after her mother just disappears. We never hear anything about her father nor any other fathers for that matter It is set in an unspecified but modern time and in a suburb of Melbourne.The fate of her mother is gradually revealed to the reader although without much description of her personality. But everyone else is kept in the dark until late in the story as the protagonist succeeds in concealing the truth using various lies and deceptions-until Day 49 of the 55 days covered by the story.
Readers will have no problem keeping track of the few colourful characters, including a very eccentric elderly hoarding widow, Lettie, a nosy boy neighbour, Oscar, who tries unsuccessfully to befriend Rae, and her delightful big mongrel dog named Splinter. The language is true to that of any bright ten year old with short phrases and sentences and conversations that are true to the way that age group talks. There is nothing that is beyond the realm of possibility except for the forgivable description of impossible physiological responses to various emotional states. Olfaction plays a major role in the whole story.
What makes a house a home, the varied reactions to mental illness, and coping with loss are themes that recur but are never addressed directly.
This could be read as a dark, sad story of loss and grief or as a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the ingenuity of even ten year olds to cope with adversity. I chose to see it as the latter, and quite enjoyed it. It would be a good one to discuss at a book club.
A veteran political staff reporter for the very liberal The New Yorker magazine provides an exceedingly detailed account of the manipulation of U.S. politics by the billionaire Koch brothers Charles and David. In the name of philanthropy, with the help of many other billionaires, they have established countless opaque front organizations to advance a political agenda that benefits their diverse business interests and libertarian political philosophy. These include efforts to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency, and allow their companies to continue to produce toxic wastes, decrease taxes on the 0.1 % richest citizens, dismantle social support programs, oppose health care reform, cast doubt on climate science, and avoid criminal charges by the Justice Department (in the name of criminal justice reform).
The non-profit tax-exempt organizations include such think tanks as the Cato Institute, The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Americans For Prosperity. After the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United, allowing unlimited corporate donations for political campaigns, their influence increased dramatically, to the point of even establishing higher education programs to promote their extreme libertarian agenda. Semiannual powwows of the secretive donors arranged for an ever-increasing number of opaque so-called charities intertwined with the moguls of the Republican Party. The major donors include the DeVos family of Amway fame, the American Chamber of Commerce, financial institutions, the owner of Home Depot, the Las Vegas Sands casino conglomerate, various hedge fund managers and billionaires from the oil and gas industry. By 2015, the voter database of the secretive organizations supplanted that of the Republican National Committee and they had effectively determined who ran in various electoral districts, as well as controlling the efforts to gerrymander electoral maps for the GOP.
Unfortunately the book was published before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and before the death of David Koch, but the dirty tricks, deceits and outright lies of the far right libertarians clearly preceded Trump, and many familiar names of his era are discussed in this book.
The writing is humourless and it will be impossible for any but the most dedicated political scientists to keep track of all the players. The account may be a bit unbalanced as the dirty tricks are not limited to the libertarians and the Republicans and there is almost no discussion of foreign policy issues. But readers will at least learn to distrust the spewing from deceptively named think tanks and some so-called charities. (The Economist is particularly fond of quoting the reports from think tanks without revealing their funding sources.) If nothing else the documentation here will go a long way to disabuse anyone who still thinks that the U.S. is a democracy.
I certainly would not have read this ethereal fiction if it had not been for the recommendation of a friend who often shares my literary tastes. The Toronto author has had three books of poetry published and there are many places where this vague story could be considered to be poetry.
What little plot there is centers on the life of Jacob Beer, an orphaned Warsaw Jewish boy who escapes the Nazis to Greece, spending four years in hiding, then emigrating to Toronto, narrated in the first person singular. However the last 100 pages are narrated by a literary friend of his in the 1990’s as he searches for meaning in the lives of various characters, including the late Jacob Beer, their ancestors, and various other peripheral characters in the world of literature and music.
The time setting is constantly changing and I had some minor difficulties keeping the peripheral characters straight. However my main disappointment was the excessive sentimentality, introspection, and nostalgia and the vague often meaningless interposition of poetic schizophrenic gibberish such as:
“Complicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant.
To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved by repetition.”
or
“Tavern, oasis, country inn on the king’s highway. Way stations. Dostoyevsky and the charitable women in Tobol’sk. Akhmatova reading poetry to the wounded soldiers in Tashkent. Odysseus cared for by the Phaikians on Sheria.”
The latter quote is inserted in the middle of the description of the narrator’s exploration of the ancient streets of Athens.
Perhaps readers with an imagination that lets them make connections that are beyond those of us with more concrete ways of thinking could enjoy this book, but I cannot recommend it.
I recently reread (this time as an ebook) this gripping biography with a new Foreword from 2017, complete with almost 30 photographs. The title is supposedly the fifteen-year-old author’s answer to the inquiry of a Taliban terrorist seeking to find her and kill her. And it was all because she and her equally determined father were untiring advocates of education for the girls in her oppressed homeland.
The shooting on October 9, 2012, on the school bus taking her home, lead to critical brain injuries and a prolonged recovery as the whole world rallied to save her life and her cause, including skilled neurosurgeons in both Pakistan and Britain. It also lead to international recognition for her and her cause, the awarding of the Nobel Peace prize to the youngest person in its history, the Malala Foundation supporting education of children worldwide, and speaking engagements for her, including to the United Nations General Assembly. Her laudable work is ongoing. Her father is given due credit for her accomplishments but seems content to avoid the limelight.
Even with a British journalist co-writer, the writing is straightforward and like that of many other bright teenagers. And, remarkably, there is no braggadocio or sense of self-importance.
It is difficult for this anglophone to master the complex foreign names of people and places, and to understand the cultural norms, particularly with the frequently-inserted Urdu and Pashtun words and phrases. I suspect that many readers also share my difficulty in understanding the vast varied geography (although a map is included), the constant tribal rivalries and the dysfunctional ever-changing politics of her homeland. But the story is more relevant than ever as the Taliban take over neighbouring Afghanistan with inevitable cruel repression of women and girls.
I found only one clear error. Abraham is said to be told by God to sacrifice Ishmael, not Isaac. There are some seemingly unusual features. “The first [shot] went in through my left eye socket and out under my left shoulder.” Much later, a man is shot with a bullet that supposedly went in through his neck and out through his nose. What postures would allow that?
She constantly prays to and thanks Allah with the abbreviation PBWH (peace be with him) always following any mention of his name, and is apparently so indoctrinated into Muslim ways of thinking as to, in spite of her clear brilliance, never question why her prayers are never answered. I realize this form of cognitive dissonance is not confined to Muslims. And it disturbs this secular humanist physician that she heaps more praise on Allah for saving her life than the very skilled neurosurgeons who did all of the work.
This teenager whose brain had not yet even fully developed is a remarkable example of the power of one individual to better the world for all. I suspect this book will become as durable and important as The Diary Of Anne Frank, written by an equally remarkable teenage girl.
As a debut novel by a former flight attendant, this one is firmly seated in the thriller genre. A plane carrying 144 passengers from LAX to JFK is commandeered by suicidal Kurdish nationalists, while a co-conspirator forces the wife and children of the too-good-to be-true superhero pilot into suicide bomb suits while holding the detonators, back in their Los Angeles home. The pilot is given the choice of either crashing the plane into an iconic site of national importance that is not revealed until late in the tale, or choosing the option of having his whole family killed. Needless to say, neither endpoints the terrorists have carefully planned ensues-in such stories, unlike in the real world, the good guys always win.
I will not reveal more of the rather ingenious plot, with many unpredictable twists and false leads. Some of the fast-paced action is very realistic, and some is just so bizarre as to be laughable. Much of it seems like an rather too obvious attempt to build suspense in the reader, with the emphasis on time lines that seem impossible.
The author builds on her ten-year experience as a flight attendant to provide unique insights into the lives of flight crews, air traffic controllers, and the operation of commercial jets that few readers would otherwise learn about.
There is one feature here that is uncommon in thrillers- the lives of the terrorists are revealed in detail and the reasons for their actions are given a fair hearing. Their grievances with the U.S. abandonment of their former allies, the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, to Turkish and ISIS forces with the resultant hundred thousand deaths (a historical detail most U.S. citizens will have never known or forgotten) is given a sympathetic treatment and some degree of understanding. The government of the U.S. does not escape unscathed. Although the president and the military get involved and the action is obviously set in the last year or two, no names are mentioned. (And, no, the Yankees have not won the World Series since 2009.) Most of the FBI agents are portrayed as almost clownish in their incompetence.
My inability to suspend analysis of realistic possibilities limits my enjoyment of such tales, much as I admire the imaginative possibilities of their authors, but for lovers of the thriller genre, I suspect that this is about as good as it gets.
A driven, overachieving, controlling, opinionated, self-assured and self-righteous Yale professor of law uses her own family biography, including her parents, siblings and two daughters to contrast the parenting style of Oriental cultures with the permissive Western philosophy of child rearing. An alternative title might well be “The Chinese Method of Ensuring That Your Children Never Have Any Fun”, although both daughters now insist that they had a happy childhood and express appreciation and love for their parents. Their Jewish law professor and author father clearly played a minor role in raising them. I note that a relative with Down syndrome is mentioned only once and worry about the Chinese attitude to and treatment of those who are constitutionally unable to attain the straight A grades they so value.
The description of the absolute control of the author over every aspect of her daughter’s lives, the shouting matches, and the abuse, and the gruelling drills in piano and violin demanded of the girls is foreign to all Western ideas of letting children choose their own paths and develop their own strengths. Although thanks to the author’s absolute dictatorship, the girls became celebrity child prodigies in music, I note that there is no mention of music at all in either of the girls’ most recent social media posts. They are both now Harvard students, following in their parents’ footsteps, probably into Ivy League appointments.
The media reaction to the book’s publication was harsh and perhaps a bit unjustified, and the author in numerous media interviews backtracked a bit, describing it as a self-parody.
Throughout the ages, adults, and elderly grandparents in particular, myself included, have railed against the child-rearing styles of younger parents. It strikes me that some balance between Western permissiveness and Oriental harshness is necessary, and the most important aspects of child rearing are consistency and setting a good example. On both accounts, I probably failed as a parent, but I doubt that any of my children would have found the fulfilling and meaningful work and roles they now excel in had I followed the controlling Chinese model of parenting.
This is an interesting and educational read and provides a lot of food for thought.
The first 120 pages are a mishmash of unconnected gibberish mostly consisting of schizophrenic conversations loaded with non-sequesters, as diverse demonic or angelic characters plan for Armageddon and the end of the world. It doesn’t get much better thereafter, although the fantasies of the four 11 year olds in a gang called The Them are at least entertaining and a bit more realistic. The search for the missing Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter (in indecipherable Olde English) and the magical antics of some of the demons are just plain silly, although there are some great one liners.
The entire book is a less-than-entertaining comeuppance of everything British, but not nearly as enjoyable as Monty Python and the the Holy Grail. If you like reading about the communications of demons plotting evil acts, Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis is far better, although he obviously meant it as a serious defence of Christianity.
This book has become a cult classic or more properly an occult classic with film and T.V. adaptations, but to me it is mostly meaningless gibberish. Although some reviewers describe it as hilarious, what humour there is is too slapstick for my liking. Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion has much better wry humour.
I would not have read through to the end if it were not on the list for our book club discussion next month. I may need to revise my opinion of it after that discussion if someone can point out some redeeming features of it.
This unique new novel by the British Nobel laureate (The Remains of The Day), is set in some indefinite future in some anglophone country that is not England, and is narrated in the first person singular by Klara, a solar-powered AF (artificial friend) robot sold as a toy to a sickly young girl with a poorly defined illness. The various sentient, mobile, observant models of AFs are able to talk, learn, and experience deep human emotions, but most of their owners seem to have lost much of their human social skills. Klara addresses everyone, even herself, in the third person proper in stilted English, usually calling them by their occupation or some characteristic rather than a name.
When Klara’s teenage owner becomes deathly ill, Klara appeals to an anthropomorphized Sun that is capable of granting requests for healing and answering prayers. The limitations of AFs are demonstrated by their restricted speech and Klara’s vision which is often is broken into discrete boxes or overlapping pictures. Unlike later models of AFs, she lacks any sense of smell. There is some vagueness in the plot twists and ethereal musing on the part of Klara as she attempts to understand and help the real humans around her.
I referred to the vagueness of the setting and dates. Although there are references to Wisconsin and California, the scenes with cars appear to be in some country with the drivers on the right side, a la British and Europeans, and there is nothing to indicate that cars have become autonomous.
As science fiction, not my favourite genre, this is as good as it gets. Some aspects of the story are not far from where artificial intelligence has already taken us, witness David Nussbaum’s realistic, life-sized, 3-D, talking hologram-like reproductions of real people on his Portl. platform.
Set largely in a fictitious small town in the deep south just as the American Civil War ended, this Texan’s debut novel is chuck full of realistic interesting characters and depicts a community deeply divided by the arrival of Union soldiers and the legal end of slavery. The hesitant suspicious former slaves seem lost with their new-found freedoms and inevitably bigotry and discrimination remains rampant. A black lad falsely accused of murder escapes from prison with the help of a loyal white friend who was a Confederate deserter and flees to the North to work that is little better than that of a slave.
I won’t give away more of the plot which is not very complex, although there are a few interesting twists. But the beauty of the story is in the characterizations including a kind and non judgemental prostitute, a touching almost accidental forbidden homoerotic love tryst, and an enigmatic hardworking farmer who can’t seem to express any emotion, with fantasizes of hunting down a mysterious animal that may exist only in his imagination. The writing is truly poetic and loaded with quirky metaphors. “His eyebrows twitched like a tickled caterpillar.”
The author seems to have heeded the old writer’s adage that the decision on the title should be the last act of completing a novel- this title is enigmatic and only tenuously connected to the story.
I listened to the audiobook. (No one can read an audiobook). The male narrator does a fine job of conveying the varied idiomatic talk of the male characters, but I wish a woman had taken over when the women were speaking, as his attempts to imitate them falls flat.
This is a very pleasant read and an introduction to a unique time and place.
In a preface, this Chapel Hill scholar of everything related to Christianity relates his childhood indoctrination into evangelical Protestantism, and in an Afterword, he delivers the reasons for his current rational agnosticism, a path that I can certainly relate to. For him now, death is just reversion to the nothingness of everyone before their birth.
In between these personal notes, he provides a very erudite, detailed, scholarly analysis of the development of ideas related to what happens to individuals after life on earth, from the earliest writings of Gilgamesh through to Plato, Jesus, Paul, the Gnostics, and the early Christian communities around the Mediterranean. With careful analysis of the teachings of Jesus, complete with all the contradictions in the Gospels and ancillary ancient documents such as the Gospel of Thomas, he makes a convincing case that Jesus never taught anything about a life in paradise or hellfire after life on earth, predicting (erroneously) instead the eminent Day of Judgment upon the Second Coming and the last days of earth’s existence. This was modified by subsequent early Christians, most notably Paul, when the second coming of the Son Of God failed to materialize during their lifetimes. The integration of the evolving Christian beliefs with the imaginative and often gruesome mythologies of the ancient world was extensive, and the dating and authorship of the ancient texts, whether included in the Bible or not, is discussed extensively.
There is a lot of discussion of the controversies about rewards and punishments being doled out immediately on dying vs delayed to some later final Judgement, the duality of body and soul, and the lack of any proportionality for rewards and punishments in many belief systems, given our deeply imbedded yearning for justice. The early martyrs welcoming the anticipation of being pulled apart by wild animals in the Coliseum because of the greater reward in the hereafter is hard to comprehend, but is a bit akin to the beliefs of modern Muslim jihadist suicide bombers. It strikes me that taking any action in this life because you believe it will be rewarded in a hypothetical next life is ultimately a form of base selfishness founded on faulty logic. The concept of purgatory as a holding ground until some later date for final judgement was a late addition to Catholic Christian theology, added only in the 14th century.
I recall reading Ehrman’s When Jesus Became God several years ago, in which he shows that this transition from itinerant rabbi to God was largely due to Paul’s reinterpretation or misinterpretation of his teaching. I appreciated his scholarly approach in that tome. This book is equally well researched and detailed, but some of the details, such as extensive discussion of the bizarre beliefs of pre-Christian societies seemed to me to be a bit overdone and pedantic.
Narrated by a 12 year old girl on a North Carolina cotton farm in 1955-56, this is a fictional depiction of that era in the author’s home state. My wife laughed at me me for picking up a coming-of-age novel (a genre I generally avoid) that I found in my granddaughter’s front lawn lending library, assuring me that I would hate it. But actually I found it rather light and enjoyable, a reminder to me of what life for rural children in that era was like everywhere, and a pleasant contrast to the more serious books I have been reading lately.
In the first half of the story I was brought back to the simple life I experienced as an 11 year old on a farm in 1955, although there are a lot of differences between a Southern cotton farm and an Ontario mixed farm, but also a lot of similarities. The latter include the strict gender roles of the era, the universal anxiety about weather and bad crops, the hard labour, friendly and sometimes not so friendly sibling rivalries, and divining for water with a willow stick, which our neighbours did unsuccessfully.
The differences include the graphically depicted cruelty and torture administered by the KKK and personified in the bigoted egotistical Frank Fowler. Perhaps naively I never recall any of that, but that may have been only because we were never exposed to minority races or gays, at least as I remember that period.
The plot is not complicated and is delivered in straightforward chronological prose loaded with delightful southern jargon. The characters are generally believable although the narrator’s father seems too perfect and her stepfather is unrealistically personified as ultimate evil.
There may be a limited readership for this story, but if you grew up on a farm anywhere in the 1950s, it will bring back fond memories.
I am not sure how or when I heard about this book and put it on Hold at the OPL, but I am am sure I was not drunk at the time. The UBC professor of Philosophy, a self-described hedonist, gives a very balanced and well-organized account of the role that alcohol has played throughout the history of Homo sapiens.
Likening the role of the cold, rational, calculating and late developing prefrontal cortex of our brains with the logic of Apollo and the more emotional and pro-social older areas of our brains with the hedonistic Dionysus, Slingerland fits alcohol (and other intoxicants) into the history of civilizations and documents it’s critical role in promoting creativity, culture and community. Drawing on extensive literature, evolutionary science, psychology, and anthropology, he makes the convincing case that we, as life forms uniquely cursed by self-awareness, would never have developed communities of trust, creativity, collaboration, and unique institutions without the help of intoxicants like alcohol to temporarily take the prefrontal cortex offline, and allow us to develop social bonds.
“Although they did not enjoy the benefits of modern neuroscience or social psychology, cultures throughout time and across the world implicitly understood that the sober, rational, calculating individual mind is a barrier to social trust.”
Far from an unapologetic proponent of drunkenness, the vast harm that alcohol use and abuse does is detailed and put in a longterm perspective, and the views of abstainers are carefully respected. The dangers of the relatively modern developments of distillation of high-alcohol-content spirits and drinking separate from socialization are emphasized. Alternative means of achieving the endorphin highs that ethanol induces such as high energy charismatic religious rites or meditations are extensively discussed.
There is no discussion of the medical concepts of differentiating the physiologic harms such as alcoholic liver disease from the concepts of addiction and dependency. In my past life, I dealt with many people who developed alcoholic liver disease because of high susceptibility (for some women, two standard drinks per day is a risk) but would not be considered to be alcoholics and conversely, many alcohol abusers to the point of risking withdrawal symptoms who never developed significant liver disease. There is no mention of the rare autointoxication syndrome when some teetotallers can become drunks because of fermenting microorganisms in their stomachs. I am not a neuroscientist, but I suspect that the description of the human prefrontal cortex as a brake on creativity, culture, and community development is an oversimplification, given the enormous complexity of neuronal connections.
I vaguely recall one of my pharmacology professors discussing the results of his experiments with offering lab rats various flavoured alcoholic drinks more than fifty years ago. If I recall correctly (a big IF), he concluded that at least some strains of lab rats chose their drinks by taste rather than by alcohol concentration. I like to think that the taste is the main reason I occasionally can spend three hours in our balcony lounge chair with a good book, two fingers of a peaty single malt Scotch and a few drops of water. (Oh, and two frozen whiskey stones.) Pleasure for pleasure’s sake is not a sin, and, anyway, some pleasures are not worth foregoing for a few extra years drooling in diapers in a locked ward.
This book is a delightful, informative, thought-provoking, easy read. Highly recommended.
When you shake your family tree and no one of lasting historical significance falls to the ground, what do you do next to preserve the tree? If you are this modern introspective, post-Soviet, Jewish Russian writer obsessed with making some sense of her ancestry, you wax poetic about the detritus in the form of possessions, diaries, photographs, and now social media postings left to you by those forgotten insignificant people, with endless obscure analysis of the relationships between the living and the dead. This is the essence of this whimsical search by the author of this peculiar work, that is part fiction and part memoir.
Some of the writing is so opaque as to lose all meaning for me. Of a modern Alexi Tolstoy, Stepanova writes “Tolstoy’s text is very talented…arranged to give his interest the appearance of respectability, something along the lines of a ethically sprung mattress, allowing the author to recoil from the reader’s enjoyment as soon as he even begins to concern himself with what is actually happening…to the person whose Russian language you are tasting in your own mouth.”
There is abundant literature concerning the distortions of memories and how we remember our ancestors. Some folk, by the vagaries of nature, are burdened with famous or infamous forbearers, but most of us are the products of rather easily forgotten ordinary folk, for better or for worse. And there are distinct hazards in researching your genetic pool- you may discover slave owners (I think there may have been some among my ancestors) and highway robbers that you would rather not share a name with. There must be some balance in honouring and respecting one’s past family members and the way they lived their lives out without undue nostalgia and distortion, but this book did not help me find that balance.
The English translation of this Russian novel was published just this year. It was given a laudatory review in The Economist, but I admit to being disappointed and giving up half way through it. After scanning the first and last paragraphs of subsequent chapters, I returned it to the library.
After reading the seven page prologue to this Dutch novel, I thought of George W. Bush’s comment about Donald Trump’s inaugural speech: “Well, that was some weird shit.” The dialogue between characters, none of whom appear to be human or earthbound, makes the Book of Revelation seem like straightforward narrative. Fortunately, the story steadily improves with real life believable characters interacting. But the same plotting deities appear again later and their schizophrenic conversations and plots recur several times, including one long monologue by a hermit talking to a crow, and Lucifer dictating books of self-fulfilling prophesies to Francis Bacon. The deities who work for “the Chief” apparently are not all-powerful , but do manage to evaporate a drunk astronomer in the middle of the night with a meteorite strike when he is dangerously close to finding the singularity of the Theory of Everything, uniting quantum physics with relativity via string theory.
Set mainly in Holland in the 1960s to 1980s, Max Delius an orphaned Jewish Dutch astronomer and Onno Quist, a flamboyant egotistical socialist/Marxist aspiring politician become bosom buddies after a chance meeting in spite of gaping differences in their outlooks. The latter’s unanchored vague spirituality and mysticism is the polar opposite of Max’s worldliness but they develop a tight bond, even sharing the love of an ill-fated concert cellist. Death stalks many characters in their prime.
Paradoxes, metaphors, symbolisms, and analogies pop up in long soliloquies and conversations, with many bleak themes of meaningless existentialism; there was no entity called time before the Big Bang so that could not have occurred at any point in time; God who created himself from his creation had to exist before he created anything. Elliptical allusions to ancient classical literature, music, astronomy, mathematics and architecture and their interconnectedness seem at times to simply serve to show off the author’s vast obscurantist classical knowledge, as do the many pages taken up in describing the history, geography and symbolism of dozens of tourist sites in Venice, Florence, Rome and Jerusalem. The quest for interpretation of the Phaistos disc writing remains unsolved. In the final 150 pages, Onno and Quentin, who may or may not be his son, reach for heaven by a scholarly search for the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets of the Ten Commandments in the Sanctus Santorum in Rome, but that quest ends with the visual hallucinations of a raving lunatic in Jerusalem
The few main characters are easy to keep track of and colourful but the many secondary players can become confusing. The plot is ingenious-at least the parts that are made for real characters- but there are far too many highly improbable coincidences.
I completely lack the intellectual equipment to appreciate or understand much of this story, although the human characters are realistic and some of the insights are interesting. But if there is some profound universal truth hidden here, I completely missed it. Good luck to anyone trying to plumb it.
Thanks, Linda, but you overestimated my capacity to understand and enjoy this one.
A noted UBC forest ecologist conveys her infectious enthusiasm for the outdoor life and the scientific study of forests as she relates her discoveries in this unassuming and delightful autobiography. The very misogynist culture of the forestry industry was late in accepting the validity of randomized controlled trials, and, in the early 1990s refused to accept results of her experiments with these, which contradicted old conventional wisdom, and implied that their methods of forest management were doing massive needless harm to the forests and to the broader battle to combat global warming.
Using modern scientific methods, she almost singlehandedly proved that trees communicate with each other, provide mutual aid in times of stress and that the communication is mediated in large part through vast networks of underground fungi of many different types. Later experiments with numerous collaborators that she does not hesitate to acknowledge showed that the communication is not limited to trees of the same species and is often similar to neural networks in our brains, but perhaps even more complex. Both neural networks and mycorrhizal (fungal) networks transmit information molecules across synapses. Dying mother trees selectively send nutrients through the mycorrhizal network to her offspring. Douglas firs in a mixed forest even warn adjacent ponderosa pine trees of an impending pine beetle infestation, allowing them to up-regulate the genes of their defensive mechanisms!
The scientific methods used are described in language that should not be difficult for anyone with a high school education in biology to understand. The stories of discoveries are interspersed with personal details of her life that are variously comic or tragic; her persistence in seeking scientific truths in the face of fierce dogmatic opposition is admirable.
The author is the clear model for Richard Powers’ Dr. Deborah Westerford in his delicious novel, The Overstory. Her extensive research with far reaching implications is worthy of the Nobel prize that she will never get because of the powerful vested interests of the financially lucrative logging industry.
A must-read for anyone remotely interested in almost any branch of science, and our coexistence with other life forms. You will never walk through a forest again and not recognize the connectedness of all life after reading this story.
A globe-trotting New York writer indulges in a thought experiment as to what would happen if we suddenly stopped buying things we don’t need and lived simpler lives with only essentials. A strong condemnation of consumerism and the culture of ever increasing acquisitions, this treatise is loaded with keen thought-provoking observations spanning philosophy, psychology, history, and economics.
Decoupling ever-increasing consumerism from the effects on carbon emissions is unrealistic, but is the aim of all efforts to reduce our carbon footprint. It is simply not possible to continue to use earth’s resources at a greater rate than they can be replaced and still maintain ‘sustainability’. Yet no politician is likely to ever encourage less spending or the deliberate precipitation of an economic recession.
The garment and fashion industry comes in for particular scorn as we are driven by the psychology of keeping up with the Jones’s to buy cheap products that are rarely used rather than conserve and repair clothing that provides the basic necessities of comfort and utility. Advertising and marketing drives us to “spend money that we don’t have on things that we don’t need to create impressions on people we don’t care about.” This is perhaps the best description of the Veblen effect, named after Thorstein Veblen whose 1889 classic The Theory of The Leisure Class, is a still- relevant condemnation of unfettered capitalism and materialism. The faulty measure of human progress represented by the need for ever increasing GDP growth of nation is thoroughly trashed.
I found the discussion of “downshifting” movements and seeking personal ‘authenticity’ to be etherial and bordering on pop psychology, and the discussion of moving the consumer culture online is highly theoretical.
I try to ignore the ubiquitous messages urging me to spend, with limited success. But my wife and I recently traded two fossil-fuel-powered vehicles for one all-electric one. I long ago adopted a policy of discarding or recycling an equivalent item of clothing if I purchase or am given a new one. Besides the exercise benefit of climbing the stairs to our twelfth floor apartment a couple times a day, there must be a savings of about 1700 foot pounds or 2300 joules of energy not used by the elevator, per trip, not counting how far it travels up or down before and after lifting me. Trivial, perhaps, even cumulatively, but I makes me feel I am doing something.
Like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, this is a thought-provoking but highly theoretical thought experiment about the future. But it is also humourless and needlessly wordy. Not for everyone.
A combination of Demography 101, Epidemiology 101 and a hefty dose of the history of medicine, along with actuarial science, there is a lot of rehashing of historical events and discoveries that will be familiar to most readers. But there are also a lot of insights into the background milieus of those discoveries and the people who seldom made solitary breakthroughs, and a few historical landmarks that I was completely unaware of. Such was the poisonous milk from lower Manhattan cows fed exclusively swill from distilleries in the 1850s, and the adoption of widespread chicken farming for meat rather than for egg production, purely because of a typo in the delivery of 500 rather than 50 chicks to one New Jersey farmer. The unsung heroine Frances Kelsey who first alerted the world to the horrors of thalidomide, the role of penicillin in the European victory in WWII, and the campaigners for seat belts and air bags are all interesting. Such delectable tidbits are what kept me interested.
The 20,000 extra days of life cited over and over are based on changes in actuarial life expectancy at birth over centuries and relate largely to control or elimination of lethal childhood diseases such as polio. The Epilogue is full of wildly speculative predictions about future trends in human longevity that need to be taken with a large dose of skepticism.
An interesting read, but not as good as Johnson’s earlier The Ghost Map, in my estimation.
A globetrotting polyglot reporter based in Toronto planned an extended world tour to visit ailing relatives and friends in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Germany just as COVID-19 infections were spreading around the globe. The result is this rambling autobiographical travelogue.
There are some interesting anecdotes and insights, but there is nothing profound and much of it is mundane, bordering on boring. I doubt that many readers care where he was stranded because flights were cancelled. And he was back in Canada recording his musings by May, 2020, before the development of vaccines or a second or third wave, so the book is seriously outdated. There are too many sentences that start with the pronoun I. There is nothing new here that would not be both known to and of interest to anyone who keeps up to date with current global affairs. I cannot recommend it.
I read a glowing January 30th review of this book in The Economist where the author once worked, and decided to read it, although I was concerned that I am reading too many books that simply reinforce the world views I already have, and the title alone makes it clear that it is not about the risk to locals from large numbers of migrants. Such reinforcement of views already adopted is a major problem in an increasingly polarized world, and I sometimes deliberately seek out reading material from very different viewpoints to counterbalance the danger of occupying a “thought silo”. I even have the billionaire libertarian Charles Koch’s Believe In People on my ‘to read’ list although I will probably disagree with everything in it, as I did on reading George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility.
Filled with thousands of data points to the point of overload, much of it derived from public polling of citizens around the world, and with blue sky speculations about future possibilities, this analysis completely demolishes many of the xenophobic nationalists’ myths about immigration, emigration, refugees, and asylum seekers and movement of people across arbitrary borders for whatever reason. The net effect of accepting more in western countries is undoubtedly positive whether measured in economic, cultural, or demographic parameters. Eight chapters outline the dividends from immigration; conveniently, but artificially, they all starting with the letter D: Dynamism, Diploma, Deftness, Diversity, Drudgery, Demographic, Debt, and Development, with a lot of redundancy, and examples of emigrants who have had a positive impact on communities. Canada comes in for considerable praise for its treatment of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, compared to the U.S., the European Union, and Great Britain.
The British author has worked as an advisor to the president of the European Commission, the London School of Economics, the World Trade Organization, and the international think tank, The Open Political Economy Network. He has written other books about migration, that I have not read. His observations and data are hard to argue with, and are backed up by 44 pages of notes and references to source materials and a 22 page index, although he may have been selective in choosing his source materials to mesh with his preformed opinions.
Unfortunately, the writing style is, preachy, bordering on pompous, repetitive and absolutely humourless. The only memorable quote I found is “The saying ‘Two heads are better than one’ is true only if the two heads think differently.” The more common less interesting observations often express truisms that hardly need stating such as “Language skills tend to improve over time.”
While I absolutely agree with the central thesis of this book, and hope others will as well, and it is very informative, I fear that most readers will find it useful mainly as a sedative.
First a note about the length of a book. My downloaded library edition of this one is listed as an intimidating 1736 pages! But that includes close to 700 pages that are not text-i.e. dedication, 165 pages of endnotes, a 220 page index, and at least 70 pages of colour photographs. So I calculated that there are about 1059 pages of text, to give my readers a rough idea of the time they need to set aside to read it.
The author, a Tulane professor of history, has written biographies of such public figures as Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin, and here focuses on the life of the 2020 chemistry Nobel prize winners, Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, and to a lesser extent her Pasteur Institute French collaborator who shared the Nobel prize, Emmanuelle Carpentier. But it expands to include many others who work in the same fields of genetics and the biochemistry of DNA, RNA and the codes of life on earth, including such forerunners as James Watson, George Church, and a host of other notable researchers and innovators around the world who collaborate and compete to unravel the secrets of life.
The major focus is on the 2012 discovery and subsequent applications of the awkwardly named CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) that bacterial DNA uses to fight off attacks by viruses. The far-reaching potential applications of these complicated genetic systems include the human gene editing ability to treat various genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia and Huntington’s Disease. But it also has the potential to modify almost anything about our genetic makeup, with the ability to cut and splice our DNA with precision to enhance certain traits and eliminate others. The prospect of doing so in germ cells within embryos leads to the prospect of parents choosing to design babies with characteristics they deem to be desirable. Such a manoeuvre by the disgraced, now jailed Chinese researcher He Jainkui led to universal condemnation, but there is no doubt that the ease of using CRISPR technology will be applied in the future in many controversial ways. The author quickly learned to do CRISPR gene editing using readily available materials, implying that almost anyone could do so with good or evil intentions. The discussion of the use of genetic engineering to combat Corona viruses and similar threats is enlightening and highly relevant.
I cannot claim to understand all of the biochemistry and technology detailed here, but it is relatively easy to grasp the potential consequences. When used in somatic cell lines, CRISPR methods have the potential to ease the misery of thousands of sufferers who have lost out in the gene lottery. When used in germ cell lines in embryos, it could permanently remove some traits from our gene pool, potentially decreasing diversity and increasing inequality as rich parents design their offspring. Such controversial topics are analyzed in thoughtful philosophical thought experiments. In the July 3rd issue of The Economist’s annual What If speculations, by 2029, a worldwide group of biohackers are using designer RNA molecules on themselves to enhance alertness, prevent baldness, increase intelligence, muscle strength and endurance, and to even experience transient drug highs. Such possibilities are not now totally beyond the pale.
The author interviewed many scientists working in this field around the world. He is laudatory of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Carpentier but also provides a balanced portrait of most of the other researchers, some of whom were bitter foes in patent wars, and races to be first to report discoveries. The no-filter bigoted musings of octogenarian James Watson are balanced by acknowledgement of his past accomplishment in working with Francis Crick and the less acknowledged Rosalind Franklin to determine the structure of DNA.
This book will instil awe of the complexity, intricacy, and fragility of the natural world in even the least scientific reader. A brilliant close friend, Dr. Al Dreidger, always gives me similar feelings of awe with his monthly Brainworm musings, his latest being about how only one genetic switch activated on day 36 of embryonic life, providing a methyl group to one end of one particular protein is the only thing that results in any babies being morphologically male. But for a strategically placed CH3 group one day in the fall of 1944, I could have been a super strong XY female athlete.
This is a difficult read, but well worth persisting with.
The Passionate Reader 