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 disastrous outbreak of Covid-19 infections in Canadian longterm care facilities was the stimulus for the Globe and Mail health reporter to write this critique of a uniquely Canadian problem in our health care system. From home care services to hospitals, psychiatric facilities, nursing homes, hospices, and various levels of ‘alternative care’ the fragmented, inefficient and bureaucratic systems that have developed over decades are not serving those who need longterm care well.
Picard documents the extent of these problems exceedingly well with many sobering interviews with patients and frustrated families across the country. He goes on to an unflattering comparison of the situation in Canada with that in many other countries, and closes by making sweeping if tentative and sometimes vague recommendations for reforms.
The case for ‘aging in place’ by providing more home care services is at least 35 years old but the inefficiencies in doing so, tangled up in bureaucratic rules are a challenge and few family members faced with a sudden crisis have the savvy to negotiate through the many sites and agencies that are supposedly available to provide care. And the rules in longterm care institutions, whether public or private are no better. “Models of care based on completing as many tasks or procedures as possible in a shift and ticking all the boxes are not how you deliver quality care. We need to move away from regulating the number of scoops of powdered mashed potatoes each resident receives if we want to make progress.” Not included here, but I know that in some palliative care facilities in Ontario, you will be moved out if you fail to die within 30 days. How asinine is that?
The philosophical and ethical issue of providing assistance to those sometimes very rational individuals who want to die, even if not terminally ill, is discussed only briefly. Most old codgers like me still want to at least seem to be doing something useful, and when that is no longer possible, a quiet exit may be totally reasonable. I often think of George Eastman’s (of Eastman Kodak fame) terse suicide note: “My work is done. Why wait?” From an existential point of view, his suicide is completely reasonable, even if we find it repugnant. As for myself, I would like to live just long enough to be sure no one would be too upset at my funeral.
With both personal and professional interactions with Ontario’s frustrating Community Care Access Centre with a more than 30% overhead administrative cost, and having lived and worked in both a chronic care psychiatric hospital and a municipal nursing home during my medical training, I was keen to see how much has changed in the last 55 years (not enough) and how much has remained the same. I can relate one personal example of very inappropriate home care. Just home from having had a cancer operation, I was provided the mandatory nursing visit. The nurse knew nothing about me except my recent surgery, and promptly related that I had not needed that operation, as he could have supplied me with a Mexican drug to cure my cancer. He took only a cursory glance at my surgical wound. My wife’s experience with postoperative home care visits after very radical surgery was just as useless, as no personnel with the specialized help she needed ever arrived, in spite of multiple requests.
With the strong possibility of spending some of my last months or years in a longterm care facility, I read this book with a mixture of dread and hope. I still think that dying at home is vastly overrated and being in some facility where professionals relieve family members of the messy and unpleasant necessary care is far preferable.
This is a well researched, carefully thought out documentary. Highly recommended. Unfortunately, like those of countless other commissions, inquiries and research reports, the recommendations here are likely to be ignored.
This novel features a few characters in the Jewish communities of New York City spanning a lifetime in the mid to late 20th and early 21st century. A staid stickler for proper English and celebrated professor of English at Columbia, his hippie ex-wife, his student lover cum wife, and their blended families, as well as caregivers hired to look after him when he develops early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, are all colourful and vividly described.
The plot is relatively easy to follow and there is enough graphic description of casual sexual encounters to satisfy the prurient fantasies of most readers. The geographic details provide an intimate picture of the city where the author lives and teaches at Brooklyn College.
The greatest strength of this story is the detailed description of the tragic consequences to everyone of the descent of a loved one as they become a different unrecognizable demented being, and the variety of ways they deal with or fail to deal with this loss, something that many or most readers can probably relate to on a personal level. One good quote among many: “Early on…the bad moments were made worse because she had his old self to compare him to…That was when she could rage at him, tell him to try harder…..Now, though, he was so far gone that to rage at him would be like raging at a stone.”
An interesting tale, worth reading. But if you decide on it, could I recommend the ebook? There are dozens of Yiddish words and phases relating to the Jewish faith that will be unfamiliar to most readers, and with two clicks in the ebook edition, it is easy to find a definition.
An interesting layman’s review of discoveries in the world of immunology, this well-researched tome by a New York Times columnist was a Father’s Day gift. Using almost entirely military analogies, the complex players protecting and sometimes disrupting the “Festival of Life” are attributed intentionality and the ability to calculate mathematical odds, in their efforts to protect us from infections, injuries and cancers.
The life challenges of several friends of the author who struggle with a cancer, HIV, and various diseases caused by the participants of the immune system which turn out to be traitors causing autoimmune diseases provide the framework for the discussion. The popular myth about needing to strengthen the immune system, as though it is a unitary structure, is thoroughly debunked. The popular hygiene theory to explain the rising prevalence of allergies and autoimmune diseases in western societies is given extensive support, even if it has not been indisputably proven. Like James Hambin’s Clean the critical role of interactions with beneficial microorganisms is discussed in detail. There is considerable overlap with Matt Walker’s Why We Sleep in the discussion of the deleterious effects of stress and sleeplessness, and with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes, in documenting the immune system’s rogue promotion of some cancerous growths.
Citing the findings of several Nobel laureates and interviewing such luminaries as Anthony Fauci, the research is generally enlightening. But the discussion of vaccination was unfortunately written before the advent of Covid-19 and the game-changing development of mRNA vaccine technology. And the less scientific advocacy of stress reduction, meditation, and multivitamin use in places borders on pseudoscience with the delightfully named psychologist, Dr. Malarkey discussing the harmful effects of stress without defining it.
The writing is colloquial in style and was generally quite easily understood by me. But I am not the typical non-scientific reader, as I spent years prescribing many different manoeuvres to prevent transplant recipients from rejecting their livers, including many of the drugs and monoclonal antibodies discussed here. It seems to me that the major difficulty with the whole book is that the author has failed to think about what his target readership should be in advance. Much of it is either overly simplistic or confusingly complex such as this: “CTLA-4 and CD28 both bind to ligands called B7-1 and B7-2 -also known as CD80 and CD86.”
A long digression into an introspective autobiography contributes little to the message, and calling irritable bowel syndrome an autoimmune disease is a stretch. There are spell-checker errors such as “infection point” when, in context, it clearly should be an inflection point.
Conveying many interesting insights and facets of biologic interactions, this book will be of interest to some, but just confusing to many.
The former English and Canadian writer now living in New York deviates from his usual social commentary to provide some little-known military history of WWII in this book first published earlier this year by his own company, as an audio book.
The air forces were the newest fighters at the beginning of the war and were not even recognized as separate forces from the armies and navies, and their influence on the course of the war was initially under appreciated. Following the indiscriminate bombing of London during the Nazi blitz, leaders in the air forces were divided into two camps as to their proper role. On the one side, there were those who thought that precision bombing of strategic military targets with sparing of civilians was their appropriate contribution. That capability was greatly enhanced by use of the bomb sight device newly developed by Carl Norton.
In the opposite camp were those such as Sir Frederick Lindemann, who had the ear of Winston Churchill, and General Curtis LeMay who won influence in the U.S. war machine, who advocated for indiscriminate mass bombing of German and later Japanese cities to break the morale of the enemies. In spite of the failure of that strategy to break the morale of Londoners, the advocates of mass indiscriminate bombing of enemy cities largely won out. The result was horrendous civilian casualties and such silly efforts as attempting to fly bombers from India over the Himalayas to China and then to Japan, with virtually no success. When dour uncaring Curtis LeMay replaced Haywood Hansel, a member of the ‘Bomber Mafia’ and an advocate for precision bombing, as commander of the air fleet in Guam, the result was the massive carpet bombing of many Japanese city centres with 25,000 tons of incendiary napalm bombs over four months, killing as many Japanese civilians as 100,000 Tokyo residents in a single night raid. The justification LeMay advanced for such actions was that it would obviate the need for a land invasion and shorten the war. This is the same rationale, advanced by Harry Truman for the use of the atomic bomb, as documented in Dennis D. Wainstock’s The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb, although the more important secret consideration for that decision was to prevent Russia from invading and taking control of Japan.
Curtis LeMay and Sir Frederick Lindemann may be lauded as having contributed more to winning the war, but there is no doubt that Haywood Hansell and The Bomber Mafia won the moral battle and deserve wider recognition.
This starkly dark documentary is narrated by Gladwell himself, with liberally interspersed archival interviews, sound effects and musical interludes, the latter contributing little to its value in my opinion.
Who would benefit from listening to this account? Certainly any military strategists, ethicist, or ordinary citizen who makes a point of pondering the morality of warfare. A good short history lesson.
This is, as the New Yorker staff writer author says, “a book about people trying to solve problems that people trying to solve problems have created.”
From the unintended disastrous consequences of reversing the flow of the polluted Chicago River, the ever-increasing costly efforts to save New Orleans and the Mississippi delta from inundation, the futile efforts to save the Devil’s Hole pupfish, the importation of predators to deal with unwanted imported predators, and the genetic engineering attempts to preserve coral reefs, humankind’s well-intentioned undertakings to interfere with natural processes have been fraught with unforeseen worse consequences.
Yet, in the current situation with the human-made crisis of climate warming, not intervening in nature in any way is not an option if Homo sapiens is to survive on this planet, having already created a potentially lethal situation. Kolbert globe-trots to interview scientists who are proposing or instituting a wide variety of possible methods to mitigate this pending disaster, including those working on carbon capture and storage, geo-engineering of the atmosphere, (thereby creating the white sky of the title) and solar engineering. Along the way a wealth of information and widely divergent perspectives are discussed.
The wring is in the typical NewYorker straightforward informative style I have come to expect from their writers. At first I was a bit disappointed that Kolbert never takes a stand on any of the conflicting possible courses of action. But, on reflection, as a journalist with no formal training in sciences, she is probably wise to avoid endorsing any one proposed course of action, just laying out the possibilities and strongly implying that no one solution will by itself be adequate. Yet she strongly suggests that some tech-heavy proposals will likely worsen the damage we have already caused; in particular, the case for abandoning New Orleans and relocating everyone from the Mississippi delta over a few decades and leaving it to nature’s remodelling seems compelling, irrespective of the high short term costs.
This is a very well written informative but somewhat disturbing assessment of the current challenges we all face, that can be read as bleak or upbeat, depending on your mood.
I discovered this book of wide-ranging reflections about life on our bookshelf recently and have no idea how it got there -did I buy it and then forget it, or was it an unacknowledged gift?
The Virginia-based cell biologist, socialist, social critic, and prolific writer, of my vintage provides a delicious dose of uncommonly well-thought-out common sense with a kind of skeptical or even cynical analysis of many trends in modern western culture, sciences, and even philosophy. The roots of the ritualistic modern medicine physical examination are compared with those of perhaps equally beneficial rites of tribal shamans and witch doctors. I feel obliged here to reveal one trade secret – I often did ophthalmoscopic examinations, not because I suspected any eye problems, but because it facilitated surreptitiously getting close enough to sniff the patient’s breath for alcohol or fetor hepaticus, the telltale odour betraying the presence of severe liver disease.
Her scorn for routine health examinations and screening for a variety of illnesses, including many cancers, echos that of Dr. Gilbert Welsh in Overdiagnosed and Less Medicine, More Health, and some of the concerns expressed in my Medicine Outside The Box. But her keen exposure and dissection of trends of questionable value extends to fads in fitness routines, diets, brain exercises, yoga, mindfulness and meditation routines.
Ehrenreich’s background in cell biology leads naturally into later discussion of the functions of various cell types, most notably those of the immune system, but this never gets bogged down in medicalese. The conundrum of immune system cells within us that go rogue and assist cancer cells to grow and spread raises all sorts of issues about agency, the independence of parts of us from other parts, intentionality, etc, and the philosophical debates about free will. Attributing free will to all matter down to the level of subatomic particles seems preposterous, but Ehrenreich makes the case for it convincingly. However, after considering this, it seems to me that this degenerates into a reductio ad absurdum, since molecules moved by writing or speaking this assertion would then be capable of denying it.
Later chapters delve even deeper into philosophical matters as she discusses meaning in life and death, our connections to other creatures and matter, and the nature of self. One great quote: “…with the introduction of ‘self-knowledge’ and ‘self-love’ one enters an endless hall of mirrors. How can that self be known to the self? And who is doing the knowing?”
The book is organized logically and the writing is unerringly interesting with startling metaphors and analogies, and not excessively technical. I only found one very minor possible error. Jeanne Louise Calment is cited as having set a longevity record, in spite of being a sedentary lifelong smoker, dying at age 122. But much later evidence strongly suggests that she died at age 59 with her daughter assuming her identity thereafter to avoid taxes and then dying at age 99.
This is an engaging and informative good read with unique perspectives. Four stars.
A detailed account of the serpentine connections between Donald Trump and a host of shady rich Russian and international autocrats, this richly documented story of global political shenanigans by a well-known American investigative reporter is frightening.
The interconnected world of rich decadent aristocrats discussed here include the international media mogul Robert Maxwell, thought to have been murdered perhaps by Israel’s Mossad, in 1991 because he knew too much, and his despicable daughter Ghislaine, who fed Jeffery Epstein’s insatiable pedophilia by procuring girls as young as 13 from around the world for him. Both Maxwell’s were known to be Soviet (and later Russian) informants. The list of Epstein’s friends and guests at his various luxurious hangouts include many household names and world leaders including Prince Charles, Arab sheiks, an Israeli prime minister, the Clintons, Bill Gates, George Soros, and the international arms smuggler Adnan Khashoggi. And of course, his Florida neighbour, Donald Trump. Even if some of them were not fully aware of Epstein’s Russian connections and his pedophilia, at the very least, associating with him reveals questionable judgement. Here, Epstein’s cause of death in prison from suicide is questioned because of too many peculiar features surrounding it- Unger makes a convincing case that he may well have been murdered.
Even as early as the 1970s, Trump was selling hundreds of TVs from a KGB- fronted store in Brooklyn to Soviet millionaires and laundering the enormous profits through various corrupt banks. And in return, the Russian Alpha Bank and Deutsch bank later bailed Trump out of some of his bankruptcies.
Soviet moles Robert and Bonnie Hansen, within the highest ranks of the FBI, were spared execution for treason for mysterious reasons, perhaps because they were pious members of the secretive multilayered right-wing Catholic prelature Opus Dei, along with an astounding number of Trump loyalists such as his Attorney-General Robert Barr, Kenneth Starr and Anton Scalia, the Supreme Court Justice. Opus Dei arose originally to support the Spanish fascist Francisco Franco and is a secretive society approved by the Vatican, itself not exactly a bastion of democratic principles.
More than 200 lawyers from Kirkland and Ellis LLP were appointed to the Justice department during Trump’s reign, many also defending Russians interests, Alpha Bank, Deutshe Bank, and Epstein, who was defended by Kenneth Starr, the prosecutor of Bill Clinton at his impeachment trial. Starr has been disgraced recently for failing to act on allegations of sexual abuse at Baylor, where he was president. All these appointed men (vey few were women) were dedicated to the goal of establishing a unitary executive form of government with unlimited presidential powers.
One good quote: the KGB recruitment of Donald Trump was “like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what would stick.”
The frightening close scrape with dictatorship to our south has been somewhat relieved with the election of Joe Biden. But lest they (and we as their neighbours) lapse into complacency, consider this: why is Donald Trump still golfing and planning for his presidential return in 2024, rather than languishing in a federal prison?
A scary true story and a must-read for anyone interested in the world of modern politics.
‘Bizarre’ is the best word to describe this novel by the Vancouver- based author, discussed by a friend who shall remain nameless. Set largely in Florida leading up to the launch into space of an adult thalidomide girl lacking a hand, her entirely evil relatives congregate to celebrate, knowingly spreading HIV infections far and wide with their indiscriminate sexual conquests. Even the married girl astronaut is unscrupulous, planning to conceive a baby by the married NASA mission commander while circling the earth.
There are endless time shifts even within chapters as the debauched characters reflect on their past lives. I constructed a mental family tree to try to keep the characters straight but the tangled relationships remained blurred. There are innumerable highly improbable chance encounters and the characters all survive after being shot, abandoned in alligator- infested swamps, and kidnapped by equally evil international drug dealers and baby abductors. At times the plot was so improbable as to resemble magic realism.
I persisted to the end, hoping for some memorable lines and a unifying theme but found nothing either enlightening or memorable except this ambiguous quote: “… blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos.”
Novels often benefit by inclusion of rogues, but here they abound and are not even likeable. John Irving’s rogues, such as Ketchum with his repeated exclamations of Holy constipated Christ! in Last Night in Twisted River, are at least realistic and endearing, but here they are just the incarnation of evil.
This is trashy pulp fiction at its worst. The only feature that could make it worse is graphic descriptions of the abundant sex. I cannot recommend it to anyone.
The Passionate Reader 