Set in the 1830s, the narrator for this story, George Washington Black, starts off his life story as an illiterate eleven year old orphaned Dahomey slave taken to a Barbados sugar cane plantation. With a knack for scientific sketching and a curiosity about everything biological or scientific, he helps the more tolerant of his twin brother owners design and then fly a dirigible off the island. Further travels include stops in Norfolk, Virginia, a remote Arctic outpost, Nova Scotia, London, Amsterdam, and Marrakesh. At times it seems that he is forever in a futile quest to escape his past.
The careful description of the sights, sounds and smells of the various places he escapes to evokes a time when those sensations were probably more important to survival than they are now with modern communications and much less contact with raw outdoor realities. His constant questioning of the meaning of his life without evoking any religious beliefs and his determination to contribute to the betterment of others are admirable qualities thwarted by his horribly disfigured face. And his yearning for recognition of his considerable scientific and artistic contributions is never satisfied by the end of the story, when he is only eighteen.
The story is tied together with some unlikely chance encounters, considering the limits of travel and means of communication in that age. But these provide just enough surprises to keep any lover of mystery novels engaged. Yet it seems to me that in 1836, even the most knowledgeable biologist would be unable to identify the limbic system in a cetacean brain.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel that I picked up at the Kanata Grassroots Grannies book exchange and breakfast, although it somehow was already on my list to read. I have not read any of the Vancouver author’s previous works.
A retired medical specialist in his early 70s, facing a slow inevitably painful death from cancer, plans his suicide to make it seem like an accident, but unforeseen occurrences foil his careful plan. If I had known about this novel when I wrote Mere Mortals, I could be accused of plot plagiarism, but I only discovered this book two weeks ago-honest. Is there something about medical professionals that makes them prone to deceptively take the easy way out? Or is this itself a fiction?
There are just enough plot twists here to keep the reader engaged, but there are also long passages of flashback memories that contribute little to the main plot. These include a whole long chapter describing in agonizing detail the protagonist’s grim experiences as an infantryman in the Italian frontline during World War ll. The very elaborate description of the geography, recreational pastimes, industries, climate, and culture of the area surrounding the Columbia River in Washington state in the 1990s as well as that of Italy in 1944, becomes tedious. It is as though author is keen to flaunt his knowledge and/or his research of these features. And some details seem very farfetched, including the successful open chest cardiac massage resuscitation of a soldier dying of blood loss in a makeshift military field hospital- in 1944! And a thoracic surgeon describes the risk of death from a mitral valve replacement operation as one in a billion!
I have mixed feeling about recommending this story. Those readers who relish flowery detailed descriptions of geography, wildlife, climate and even personalities, will love it. I have not read Snow Falling On Cedars, but Vera says it very similar in portraying excessive geographic detail in the same area of Washington State.
Set at an unspecified time in a future England, this thriller combines science fiction and a murder mystery with a dire warning about the dangers of our increasing dependence on advanced technology and artificial intelligence. After the government reassures everyone about their absolute safety and mandates that all road vehicles be fully autonomous, a mysterious Hacker, or group of hackers, hijack eight carefully selected cars and send them and their occupants, all of whom have dark secrets, on a collision course guaranteed to kill them all. (As I recently rode in a new, high tech, very talkative, Model 3 Tesla, I can sympathize with the luddites who resisted the move to autonomous vehicles in this story.) All of the drama is followed in real time by millions around the world on social media. The public, via social media, get to vote to spare one of the hijacked individuals as the Hacker exposes their secrets, gleaned from their electronic trail, including government records, and conducts video interviews each of them in turn. An idealistic psychiatric nurse with a dark secrets in her past, is intimately entwined in the drama, connected to both the anonymous hacker(s) and the government body charged with investigating any accidents involving the autonomous vehicles.
But nothing is as it seems on the surface as the lies and deceptions of the hijacked individuals, the hijackers, corrupt politicians, and the investigators are gradually exposed, and then questioned. With impeccable timing, just when you think you have the plot all figured out, a totally unpredictable twist appears, usually at the very end of one of the 70 short chapters.
I usually avoid science fiction and mystery thrillers because they are too unrealistic for my taste. But most elements here are very realistic and the warning about dependence on technology and artificial intelligence needs to be heard. Readers who enjoy thrillers and murder mysteries will love this tale, and I enjoyed it too.
I cannot remember who recommended this novel to me, or if I just read a review of it somewhere. In either case, it proved to be one of those rare books that I marched right back to the library after reading a bit less than half way through. Set in Paris in the 20s and 30s, it features a strange assortment of characters including an impoverished American journalist, an equally impoverished Hungarian photographer, an extraordinarily athletic cross-dressing lesbian (based on the real Violet Morris, a later Nazi collaborator), a lot of alcoholics and opium addicts, and a variety of other decadent misfits. Except that they all seem to fit in and there were apparently no monogamous heterosexuals or morally conscientious residents in the City of Lights in that era, or at least in this story. As I flipped through some of the later chapters, reading the first and last paragraphs, it didn’t seem to get any better, so I gave up. Besides, there is a lot of curling to watch on the tube.
The format is confusing with letters from the Hungarian photographer to his parents interspersed with supposedly researched observations by the author and other chapters narrated by a variety of other characters.
Even if the writing and the story improves dramatically in the second half that I did not read, I cannot recommend this unrealistic story, although critics have raved about its literary merit. But then again, maybe I just have underdeveloped or atrophic literary taste buds.
The Wealthy Barber was a rather unexpected hit for this Ontario financial guru when it was published in 1989. This follow up volume combines his unique corny wit with somewhat updated financial advice to Canadians regarding personal financial planning. Although even this book is now a bit out of date, and the wealthy Barber featured in the first book does not appear at all in this volume, he provided little newer advice in a sponsored public lecture we attended last week. (His oratory is not as good as his writing, with staccato rapid-fire speech that can be hard to follow, overly flamboyant gesticulations, and some self-deprecating humour that becomes a bit boring). He seems, both in his writing and his lectures, to have succeeded in resisting the Veblen effect that I discussed last week, in the review of The Theory Of The Leisure Class. Conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste, merely for the purpose of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ has apparently never been his weakness, nor is it mine, or so I like to think. But he or his publisher waste a lot of paper, with thirty two blank verso pages between chapters and even more blank lines between paragraphs, presumably to make the book seem longer than it is. How many trees should he plant to atone for this conspicuous waste?
But he is brilliant and here largely avoids the technical arcana and acronyms that permeate most writing about the world of finance. His advice about investment and saving for people at different stages of life is hard to fault and is backed up by carefully explained logic. Unlike many self-styled financial gurus, he acknowledges uncertainty where appropriate, such as when considering whether to put savings into an RRSP or a TFSA, and exposes the near impossibility of beating the market averages with frequent self-directed stock pickings. (If you insist on buying and selling stocks via your home computer, you should probably consider it as a hobby, like playing Texas Holdem poker, rather than as a plan for financial security.)
Like everyone, he undoubtedly has biases, some acknowledged, some probably unconscious. His strong recommendation to employ professionals rather than trusted relatives as trustees and executors of wills seems to me to be a blatant unacknowledged promo for the professional organizations who, after all, finance his many speaking trips around the country. Full disclosure, anyone?
This book is a valuable resource for Canadians who, like me, cannot make a priority of taking the time to deeply delve into personal financial planning-almost anything else is more appealing to me. But finding an experienced and communicative financial advisor whom you trust, and then following his or her advice is probably more valuable than slavishly following Chilton’s advice, as good as it is.
This historical novel reveals in vivid detail the controversies surrounding the 2009 and 2010 arrival of two rickety boats on our west coast, bearing more than 550 desperate Sri Lankan asylum seekers, almost all from the Tamil north. This is a largely forgotten event in our recent history which is a bit of an embarrassment to our collective psyche and self image.
Unnumbered but titled chapters relate the horrors of the long Sri Lankan civil war (an oxymoron, if there ever was one) with the southern, largely Buddhist Sinhalese finally defeating the northern, largely Hindu, Tamils. There are enough atrocities grimly detailed here to make most citizens of both factions seem guilty of some war crime. But is an auto mechanic who is coerced and threatened into attaching bombs under vehicles that he is repairing a terrorist if he sees no reasonable alternative to survive? And more to the point, is he likely to be a threat to public safety if he is allowed to stay in Canada?
The detention of the new arrivals in prisons for extended periods is reminiscent of our earlier shameful detention of Japanese residents and citizens during WW11, and this story features the daughter of a now demented Japanese interment survivor who is appointed as an admissibility hearing adjudicator by a Public Safety minister who is very biased against any immigrants or refugees. The needless complexities of the assessment system set up to decide the fate of asylum seekers is amply explored. There must be a better way than having repeated overlapping hearings to determine admissibility, release from interment, deportation, and refugee status claims.
The writing is littered with Hindu and Tamil terms and names that I found hard to understand and remember, let alone try to pronounce. (Maybe I should download the audiobook.) There are no quotation marks even for obvious quotes, making it a bit difficult to follow conversations and keep the characters straight. A map of Sri Lanka with the sites of actions discussed would have been helpful for those readers like me who are geographically challenged. The story ends abruptly with little resolution of the complex moral questions raised along the way. A five page Discussion guide at the end is not very helpful.
Refugees everywhere and immigrants to Canada will love this story, and it provides a sober reminder of the unjustified biases of the Canadian public and of those in charge of immigration in our recent past. It is very relevant to current debates about immigration here, but more particularly in the United States. Let’s not make the same mistakes over and over. But there are no easy answers either.
This book was not a fun read, but I recommend it to anyone with a particular interest in global affairs and the controversies around immigration anywhere.
I read a print edition of this old classic economics reference perhaps ten years ago, and was so impressed that I recently downloaded the Dover Thrift edition ($1.33) to refresh my memory of the main points. The keen observations of this American economist from 120 years ago remain relevant even though many of his comments now seem to reflect a misogynist and dated world view. He is best remembered for his observations about the common preference of consumers for more expensive luxury goods of a certain brand even in the face of competitive brands of equal or even greater practical utility and lower cost- the so-called Veblen effect of the importance of social signalling in our purchases. This applies to everything from handbags or houses. He also popularized the terms ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘conspicuous waste.’
The author distinguishes several stages of societal development from the savage to the barbarian to the industrial. “In the sequence of cultural evolution, the emergence of a leisure class coincides with the beginning of ownership.” He views the origin of marriage as one kind of ownership, and as with slaves, more wives and more slaves signal less need to work and greater social status in some developing cultures. In wide ranging comments on war, sports, gambling, patriotism, religion, education, lawns, art collections, jewellery and ornaments, pets, clothing fashions, concepts of beauty, titles, trophies, priestly vestments and wasteful use of resources in places of worship, he shows that conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste of resources is integral to the development of a leisure class and the transition from a barbarian to an industrial society. The lengthy discussion of the economic impact of religions reminded me of the more in-depth analysis of religions in Torkel Brekke’s Faithenomics, published 117 years later. He cannot be faulted for not anticipating the development of nuclear weapons, communism and naziism, the Internet, and the modern worsening problem of income inequality.
Looked at one way, this book reveals a damming picture of raw capitalism, 32 years after the publication of Das Kapital, although Veblen refrains from endorsing any particular economic system. Looked at another way, it just reveals timeless truths about basic human instincts. Some of the observations are clearly outdated and irrelevant, although there are still many kernels of timeless wisdom in Veblen’s observations. But I found that most of these were in the first half of the book, with ephemeral, quaintly antiquated and questionable associations clustered in the second half. If you are at all interested in modern economics, sociology, politics, and psychology, this book is worth skimming through.
I am not sure why I had this strange book on my list of books to read, but suspect that I read a favourable review of it in The Economist a long time ago. There is very limited information about the author except that he is from the Shetland Islands, lives in Africa, and is a political and war correspondent for The Economist. One of my disappointments with that magazine is that their writers are usually not identified.
The action, what little there is, swerves back and forth haphazardly between the Hotel Atlantique in France, various jihadist training camps in east Africa, and the depths of the hydrothermal vents in the Greenland Sea off the coast of Iceland. The two main characters are a male British spy posing as a water consultant in Africa (captured and tortured by jihadists) and a female oceanographer/biomathematician, his casual lover. She provides an interesting alternative to the panspermia atmospheric origin of planetary life, in proposing that life began with the organic compounds and intact thermophilic microorganisms in hot hydrophilic vents deep in the oceans. But what little plot there is is overpowered by scattered random observations on the nature of life and the role of humans in the universe, along with boring history lessons, and ostentatious quotes from the worldwide literati, poets, philosophers and thinkers, some famous and some obscure, from Milton and Donne to Tennyson, Voltaire, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and the Swede Strindberg. As well, there is extensive reference to some fictions such as the Muslim jinn legends, often mixed in with apparently real historical events to the point that the truth is hard to separate from fiction.
There are no chapter divisions and few references to any particular time, although it is obviously set in modern times post 9/1.
This book is described a a cosmic-scale evocation of the intricacies of life. I can readily admire the author’s broad literary scope and encyclopedic knowledge. But to me the book seemed to serve mainly as a means of displaying that knowledge in a haphazard way, not as a meaningful story or even a unified viewpoint on life, and the negative existential angst becomes unpleasant Not a very enjoyable read.
We are off to North Carolina shortly, so this novel is an appropriate introduction to that state, although we will not be visiting the coastal marshes where this story takes place. Set mostly in the 1960s and 70s, the central character Kya, the uneducated illiterate Marsh Girl, is abandoned at a young age by her whole family, one by one, and learns to survive and love the natural beauty of lagoons, marsh and undisturbed wetlands. Not only abandoned by family, but by all the locals and by couple of boyfriends, subsisting on the wildlife, selling mussels and befriended only by a local poor uneducated black man, she becomes an expert in the ecology of the area- and in hiding from all those who try to connect with her. Her sketchbooks fill with details of the local flora and fauna.
When a local abusive playboy is found dead in the mud by the fire tower, having fallen or been pushed off of it, she is accused and tried for his apparent murder. I won’t give away more of the complex plot, nor the surprise ending, but the reader will inevitably develop the sympathy and even admiration for the plucky girl.
The writing is lyrical with snippets of poetry interwoven into the story, but the time shift between chapters does not add much to the intrigue. The reader will require a very active imagination and gullibility to believe the preternatural skills that Kya develops for survival; the detailed description of her trial for murder makes it seem obvious that she is an innocent victim, but is she? And the trial very realistically exposes the bigotry and hypocrisy of the locals.
I probably will not watch the coming Fox movie adaptation, as it is unlikely to capture the intricacies of this captivating story. The story is already just a little too unrealistic for my taste, and Reese Witherspoon and Hollywood will likely make it even more farfetched.
This debut novel, written by an Afghani expat physician living in the U.S., before the Americans and their allies imposed their own version of hell-on-earth on Afghanistan, has aged well. The multilayered culture of pre-war Afghanistan is hardly idyllic as family bonds are strained by dark secrets and betrayals. But it seems almost heavenly compared to the incredible cruelty imposed on the natives by the Soviet invaders and later by the Taliban. The narrator, the privileged son of a wealthy Kabul businessman, develops a strong boyhood bond with the son of his servant, is haunted by guilt after secretly betraying his friend and tries desperately to make amends for his cowardice for the rest of his life.
The graphic description of the cruelty of the Soviets and particularly the Taliban, is a jolting reminder of how political and religious dogma can be used for evil purposes, but there is no overall condemnation of any political or religious belief system. Some of the uniquely Muslim phrases and sayings may seem peculiar to westerners, but really are integral to the story.
The plot is complex with many unanticipated twists and turns. Small details introduced early, like a boy with a harelip, the game panipat, and a child with deadly skill with a slingshot, seem insignificant, but much later are reintroduced and become integral to the story. The psychopath who assaulted his childhood friend shows up much later as an incredibly cruel Taliban enforcer to terrorize and maim the narrator. There are several other equal symmetries like this that ingeniously tie the narrative together.
Several memorable quotes show great insight into universal human truths.
“ Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
“…time can be a greedy thing- sometimes it steals all the details for itself.”
This is a great introduction to a culture and way of life that is completely foreign to me. I will never again be able to look at the Afghani or Pakistani (am I stereotyping?) clerk in the convenience store without wondering about what he or she has endured before coming to Canada
Humans: How We F….ed It All Up. Tom Phillips. 2018, 343 pages
First a few random thoughts about language. The F word has ceased to have much, if any, of its original sexual connotation, and in the last few years has even ceased to carry the same shock value it once conveyed. Now, in popular usage, it seems to express disappointment, exasperation, despair, disapproval, alarm, or condemnation whether used as a verb, adjective, adverb or as a simple exclamation. But to me it still reveals some degree of vulgarity on the part of the speaker or writer. So I questioned why the author could not have titled this witty volume with something like How We Fouled It All Up, or How We Screwed It All Up. Perhaps in order to emphasize how badly, consistently, and dangerously we have collectively goofed, there is no adequate alternative wording that conveys the enormity of our collective stupidity. Like ‘screwed’, ‘fucked’ is changing its meaning as the English language evolves. What will replace these words to express shock and vulgarity in the coming years?
This writer, with dry humour British has a knack for seeing the absurd and the tragic aspects of some of the most bizarre but consequential decisions made in the history of our species. With far-ranging narrative mixed with biting sarcasm, he disparages the invention of war around 14,000 years ago, the introduction of rabbits and cane toads to Australia and starlings to New York, the bad decisions leading up to the mid-30s American Dust Bowl, and addition of lead to gasoline in the last century. In between, he cites numerous examples of many other very bad decisions by politicians, inventors, scientists and civic leaders. Some of these decisions seemed brilliant at the time and only became tragic when unintended consequences ensued. Others were so patently stupid from the start that one could only conclude that many of the influential leaders were absolutely bonkers, (King Farouk of Egypt was a kleptomaniac who stole Sir Winston Churchill’s pocket watch) and many of them, such as several of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire were clearly insane; others by modern criteria would be considered psychopaths.
While Phillips touches on the neural and evolutionary reasons why we have f…ed up so regularly, in the first chapter, a more in-depth but less entertaining treatment of this is provided in Joseph T. Hallinan’s Why We Make Mistakes.
My favourite example of stupidity from this book is the explanation of why Guam became a U.S. territory. When the U.S. navy arrived there in 1898, months into the Spanish-American War, the Spanish government had neglected to tell any of their countrymen in Guam that they were at war with the U.S., so the island’s military brass sailed out to thank the U.S. sailors for their thirteen gun salute and immediately became prisoners of war.
There is a sober message in this book, but the anecdotes also provide great trivia that you could use anytime there is an awkward lull in the conversation that you feel obliged to fill at a dinner party – just don’t mention King Christian VII’s obsession.
This is the account of the nine extraordinary men from varied and usually very humble backgrounds who tenaciously pursued their dreams to become Olympic champions in the world of rowing. Though interviews with a few of them in old age and many of their families as well as searching archival records more than seventy years later, Brown reconstructs a story of extraordinary perseverance, determination, and teamwork. The climax of the story is known to the reader from the start – the come-from-behind unlikely gold medal Olympic win against the favoured German rowers in front of Hitler at the Olympics, but, like most sports reporters, he manages to build suspense by carefully withholding details until the last second.
I strongly suspect that in spite of his very extensive interviews and research, there is considerable imaginative licence in relating conversations, emotions, and activities that cannot possibly be entirely accurate when related eighty or ninety years later often without a written record. Like sportscasting and sports writing always and everywhere there is much hyperbole, a load of cliches, and too many superlatives along with considerable exaggeration. For example, the coach feels the need to teach national champions “how to get an oar in and out of the water without splashing half of Lake Washington into their shell.” And the boat builder describes the rings of cedar plank that “spoke of years of bitter struggle.” Cedar trees may “struggle” to survive, but I doubt that they feel bitter about it.
Coach Al Ulbrickson’s edict that the lads forego alcohol and tobacco and that they stay in bed from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m may have had something to do with their remarkable abilities to concentrate and work as a single body, if you accept the thesis presented in my other book review this week.
In many ways, this is the remarkable story of one poor abandoned abused child whose devotion to rowing helped him to become an unrecognized national hero in an age when sports was inseparable from the worsening political tensions leading up to WW11.
My wife detected some rhythmic, almost poetic lilt in the writing as Brown described the various races, like the rhyming dipping of oars in water, but I did not pick this up.
I am not a rah-rah fan of any sports team and seldom follow any sports closely but I still enjoyed this book.
Accidents, addictions, ADHD, Alzheimer’s Disease, anxiety, cancer, depression, diabetes, heart attacks, infections, infertility, defective immune responses, manias, neuroses, obesity, psychoses, strokes. All of these are the result of, or exacerbated by, lack of sleep if you believe the convincing arguments presented by this very knowledgeable Berkeley sleep researcher in this his first book. With easily understood apt analogies and simple (perhaps over-simplified) schematics, he discusses our natural circadian rhymes and the brain controllers of wakefulness and somnolence. He documents, citing a huge number of studies, the dire individual, societal and global consequences of inadequate sleep quantity and quality and makes variably realistic recommendations for improving our sleep for all ages.
From the unnatural deleterious effects on teens of starting their schooling too early in the day and out of sync with their circadian clocks to the dramatically increased accident rates the day after switching to Daylight Saving Time, not all attributable to being late for work, and the dire consequences of medical trainees required to work unnaturally long shifts, his assertions are largely not disputable. Here in Ottawa the schools do the exact opposite of what would be optimal for learning, starting too late for preteens and far to early for teens. Unlike most social scientist researchers crusading for change, he seldom equates association with causation, and makes that distinction clear.
I have some concerns about this book although I accept the scientific logic and was greatly enlightened by the insights he imparts. Like many non-physician campaigners for changes in the health care educational system, he disparages the mainstream medical communities’ lack of knowledge about his particular specialty, an annoying insult to those who try their best to practice good medicine with an impossibly broad and ever increasing amount of information to absorb. He recommends that anyone with concerns about their sleep adequacy, which means just about everyone who reads his book, be assessed by a board-certified sleep specialist, a luxury available to at best a small minority of people even in the First World. Some of the assertions of links of illness to sleep deprivations seem weak, e.g. the connections between the gut biome and the brain centres involved with control of sleep. They may exist, but the old Scottish verdict of Guilt Not Proven would seem to apply. The enhancement of immune responses provided by sleep may be a two-edged sword given the increasing prevalence of autoimmune diseases and allergies. And while caffeine and alcohol are clearly absolute no-no’s for your sleep hygiene, there are some pleasures in life that are not worth sacrificing in exchange for an extra few years in diapers in a locked ward. I am not about to give up my morning caffeine jolt. His diatribes about almost all of our societal norms and institutions become a bit repetitive and annoying. And there is something cruel about blaming individuals’ illnesses on behaviour which is within societal norms.
I was disappointed that he does not even mention, let alone explain, the physiology behind that most delightful of all male human experiences with sleep, seemingly designed to frustrate women, namely the phenomenon of overwhelming postcoital somnolence.
This book is a great wake up call to address a grossly neglected healthcare and societal problem. I highly recommend reading at least parts of it. It does not have to be read from start to finish to be appreciated. Take some naps along the way.
This autobiography presents a challenge to review objectively. The restless, Canadian-born, young adventurer, photographer, film-maker, scientist, and naturalist has made a career out of cave diving in some of the most remote challenging environments on earth, including under Arctic Ice, into deep unexplored Mexican underwater caves, and in clefts in huge Antarctic icebergs in the Ross Sea. She has won international acclaim for her contributions to the science of water conservation but really devotes little time here to that science. Her driving force always seems to be the need to conquer her fears and challenge herself to overcome ever increasing odds of dying by taking on new risky adventures. She describes at least a dozen situations where the odds of her survival were at best 50-50, unless she is grossly and consistently overstating the dangers. No one will ever sell her life insurance and she does not shrink away from discussing the very high mortality rate of the whole community of cave divers. Danger seems to be an addiction to many of them.
As a pioneering woman in a male-dominated world of adventure cave divers, she faces barriers that reflect common societal misogynist perspectives. She resents being considered as her husband’s ‘latest girlfriend’ and insists on being recognized for her own accomplishments. Some misogynists would describe her writing as showing neediness and insecurity, and her complaints about not being acknowledged for her work may seem a bit peevish. But there is a fuzzy line between insisting on acknowledgment of one’s accomplishments and being seen as a whiny egotist and I acknowledge that there is still a very real problem of male reluctance to acknowledge remarkable women’s accomplishments. Insistence on recognition of one’s accomplishments is entirely different than a sense of entitlement. Although ‘entitlement’ and ‘recognition’, are somewhat related, the former has some legalistic connotations that the latter does not.
In the next to penultimate chapter the author discusses the genetic basis of people’s propensity for taking risks. She implies that she carries the DHD4-7R allele of the dopamine receptor gene which has been linked to addictions, ADHD and risk-taking behaviours of all kinds. It has been dubbed ‘the Wanderlust Gene’ and it seems likely that this genetic trait has influenced her choices in life. This genetic trait may help to explain the risk-loving nature of people like the author, and Kate Harris who documented her love of risk-taking in Land Of Lost Borders. This raises again the thorny issue of nature vs nurture that I will not discuss further here.
The irony is apparently unrecognized when she preaches about knowing when the risks are too high to continue a pursuit but is herself the best example ever of ignoring that advice.
The description of the geography of the deepest canyons and rivers in Mexico were confusing, and I could not conjure up an imagine the terrain.
One great quote: “We decided that it was more important to live rich experiences than to get rich.” Advice that will stand the test of time, but is not very popular.
This book will appeal to anyone who has ever done any scuba diving, but describes a world that this risk-averse (at least relative to the author) landlubber has difficulty understanding.
This autobiography is both a chilling story of hardship and cruelty in one of the most repressive countries on earth and a stark lesson about the ability of political leaders to warp and completely control the minds of entire populations. Few novelists could ever imagine a story so filled with danger and deception as are depicted in this true story. Raised in the North Korean town of Hyesan, across the Yalu River from China, the Lee family father was killed by the security agents of the Kim dictators, but the mother and two children still firmly believed that they were living in the greatest nation on earth. Surviving by engaging in illegal trade with their Chinese neighbours, bribing officials, and obediently worshipping the Great Leader, they were totally isolated from the outside world and from the truth and were taught and believed a history that bore no relationship to reality.
When the author, as a teen, almost by accident, crossed the Yalu to China and realized that she could not return without jeopardizing her life and that of her mother and younger brother, she bribed Chinese officials to get false documents, travelled under constant danger through China and eventually ended up in Shanghai, and then, years later, in South Korea. But only gradually did she recognize that everything she had been taught about the world outside of North Korea was a myth. In constant danger of being betrayed and sent back, she changed her identity a total of seven times, hence the name of the book. Missing her family and her home, she eventually returned to the Chinese border town and persuaded her reluctant mother and brother to join her in a perilous multi-country trek to freedom in Seoul. Romantic liaisons were fractured by the necessity of false pretences, lies, and deceptions for survival, and her personal sense of an identity was constantly questioned.
This story is largely written in short sentences with no over-dramatization. Some readers may have trouble with the meaning of some Korean terms, such as songbun, the Korean equivalent of the Indian caste system, and the unfamiliar names.
There are lessons here for everyone who values freedom and their rights, and those of others. Our basic humanity demands that we find some place of safe political asylum for people such as the author. Many North Koreans may have long-lasting effects from childhood starvation, but they are neither stupid nor uniquely susceptible to political indoctrination and beliefs that bear no relationship to reality. Democracy is under threat almost everywhere and seems to be a fragile, almost illusory system of government that is endangered by would-be dictators spreading lies and deceptions everywhere. We are all susceptible. Fortunately we can and should educate ourselves and vote.
This San Diego emeritus professor of philosophy delves into the motivation controversies about why we have developed altruism, what motivates us to do almost anything, and what neurological mechanisms are at work when we decide to do a and not b. With wide-ranging knowledge of evolution, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, psychology, sociology and psychiatry, as well as very different schools of thought in moral philosophy, she conveys an abundance of information in clear prose. I have some concerns that some of the extremely complex social science experiments she cites may not be reliable or reproducible.
Detailed discussion of what is known and what is unknown about the neurological mechanisms accompanying moral decision-making is backed-up with complex neuroanatomy sketches that may be at times quite confusing to non-medical readers. The latter parts of the narrative use compelling arguments to dismiss Kantian pure reason, utilitarianism as per Peter Singer, and determinism as per Sam Harris as adequate explanations for our ‘moral intuition.’ The Bernie Madoffs of the world are not excused of responsibility, although the degree to which psychopaths with their apparently genetically defective neural wiring should be held responsible for their cruel actions is not made clear. Not addressed here is the enigma of who to hold accountable when anti-Parkinson’s medication apparently causes harmful sexual deviant behaviour. The dire legal and societal implications and results of the deterministic view that there is no such thing a free will are discussed in detail. Although I get confused by the nuanced arguments about free will, I think Churchland’s stance is close to the compatibilism of Daniel Dennett.
I was surprised to see that the well established selfish gene evolutionary doctrine of Richard Dawkins is nowhere invoked as at least a contributing factor in the development of human altruism, given the evidence that altruism does provide some survival advantage, at least for some of our genes, if not for whole organisms.
A great quote: “ Conscience is a brain construct rooted in our neural circuitry, not a theological entity thoughtfully parked in us by a divine being. It is not infallible, even when honestly consulted.”
This book is not for everyone, but is a thoughtful primer for those who like to dabble in moral philosophy and get thoroughly confused.
I have not read any of Kingsolver’s previous award-winning novels, documentaries, or poetry, so her unique style of writing was entirely new to me. In this 469 page 2018 novel set in the real Vineland, New Jersey, the action alternates in the 18 chapters between the 1870’s and 2015, with the last few words of each chapter becoming the title of the next one. But there is not a lot of action-the beauty of the story is in the meticulously sculpted prose and the vividly realistic cast of quirky characters as the main dysfunctional families struggle with poverty and uncertain futures in spite of having well-educated members and higher education teaching positions.
The author has obviously researched the area and the history well, carefully describing the life of the lonely naturalist, Mary Treat, with her correspondence with Charles Darwin and with the father of botany, Asa Gray. The resistance to the world view implied in Darwinism is well described, with its dire consequences within families and within 1870’s society.
There are places where the author seems to use the characters to deliver sometimes preachily sentimental and at other times insightful social, philosophical, and political commentary through the dialogue, with a distinctly socialist message. The protection of the environment and the carbon conservation record of Cuba is contrasted with the rank consumerism and throw-away culture of the United States, and is made to seem ideal, even if it is something Cubans have no choice about. Although Donald Trump is never mentioned by name and only referred to as a 2015 Republican primary candidate, almost everything he has stood for or accomplished is thoroughly and savagely disparaged.
Two of many typical lyrical lines of simple prose. At a funeral of a young suicide: “The officiating minister, a round-faced woman in owlish glasses, was crooning her way through a one-size-fits-all prayer.” And “They passed a field where two horses stood staring at their long shadows in the dusky light, and she wondered what else they did for fun.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this story. If there were not so many other great modern novels to read, I might take time to read Kingsolver’s earlier works, such as The Poisonwood Bible.
The writing of this Boston general surgeon has been widely praised by people I admire such as the late Oliver Sacks, and for good reason. His writing is informative and straightforward, delivering a sober second opinion on issues in modern medicine and American society, opinions that often challenge ‘conventional wisdom’.
The subtitle of this book, Medicine and What Matters in the End, gives the reader a hint- it is all about dying and the failure of modern medicine and modern society to adequately prepare the elderly, the infirm, and the obviously terminal for the inevitable, and to take into account their priorities and wishes. That is not exactly a fun topic to read about but is an important one to think about. Calling up personal experiences with his patients and his family, he documents the inadequacies of the usual approaches in modern medicine and the harm that often results from denial, unrealistic prognostication, and over-treatment, particularly in the oncology field. A strong advocate for the specialty of geriatrics, hospice care, and allowing the dying to remain at home, he shows by example the harm that often comes from hospitalization, overly optimistic treatment recommendations and denial of the obvious by patients, physicians and families alike. This rings true with my own experience, not only with patients, but with colleagues and acquaintances. He correctly points out that for most of human history, death came unpredictably, usually rapidly, and without hospitalization. Only within the last few decades have we delegated the care of the elderly and the infirm to anyone outside of the home and the extended family. Growing up, it seemed natural that my frail grandfather lived with us rather than in a distant institution, and I have vague pleasant memories of him (and sometimes hid his dentures.)
The late Shep Nuland was one of the first in the era of modern medicine to discuss death in frank terms in his 1993 documentary book How We Die, breaking with the long-standing Western tradition of avoiding this unpleasant topic altogether, as shown by the late Ernest Becker’s Denial Of Death. But even the words ‘the late’ seem to me to be a form of euphemistic denial- they are both dead, not just late.
I have some reservations about this book. Surgeons came late and reluctantly to appreciation of the double-blind controlled trial as the gold standard of all kinds of treatment. Gawande cites only one controlled trail of care delivery, and that was designed and conducted by a geriatrician and predictably showed better outcomes for those cared for by geriatricians. Too many studies are designed to benefit those who design them. And even an old agnostic like me noticed the absence of any significant discussion of spiritual matters in palliative care, recognizing, as I do, that religious beliefs can be a very important source of comfort for the dying.
A couple of quotes. “We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love. That remains the main problem and paradox for the frail.” “Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater as well.”
With all this discussion of dying, and with an unknown personal expiration mode and date, I am still ambivalent about dying at home, as I would prefer to have paid professionals doing the messy unpleasant work, rather than my family. And I dream of being shot dead by a jealous husband, but only if it was justified and not any time soon. Many relatives would be appalled, but even more would chuckle.
This Aussie native has travelled widely, having lived in Australia, Britain, the U.S., and Canada, and it shows in this very different kind of novel. She also is a graduate of a creative writing school, and that also is obvious from the lyrical, meaningless literary gobbledegook that is scattered throughout this novel.
Most of the story is told in the first person singular by a thirty-something single mother who is also a lawyer and the proprietor of a New Age Sydney cafe. She is singularly introspective and insecure, goes through a series of affairs, and joins a mysterious group who are invited to an island to be taught how to fly, after corresponding with the leader of what seems to resemble a secret cult, over years. The back of the cover of the book is loaded with superlatives in its praise from other authors that I had never heard of.
There is an abundance of very dry humour, deceptions, keen insights, apt metaphors, and some interesting twists here that kept me reading. The correspondence and meetings of the “Flight School” group of gullible misfits who are promised that they can learn to fly keeps the troubled narrator from reading any self-help literature for years, but when she finally turns to these sages to guide her through life, she finds no comfort from them and savages the trite jargon-loaded Dr. Phil psychobabble with biting sarcasm and wit.
A few quotes may clarify what I mean by ‘meaningless literary gobbledegook’. “There was rain falling, music playing quiet.” “The number three bounced around my vision, flashing lights and pixels.” “The absence of knowledge reared from behind me, .. an absence of children loomed ahead of me. The two reached out and tugged at each other.” But there also are some keen observations. “…if women write about love, it is chick lit or, at most domestic drama. Novels about love by men, on the other hand, are just plain novels, or possibly masterpieces.”
I cannot seriously recommend this novel, but I can understand why it will appeal to many readers. I am developing an aversion to books by graduates of Creative Writing courses and schools, but that is just me. And I must become more sceptical of praise written by people I have never heard of, but not to the point of tunnel vision and tunnel choices. Perhaps Moiarty should return to her previous genre of books for children- their imaginary worlds more readily mesh with the real world.
This very experienced and knowledgeable Princeton, New Jersey journalisthas covered conflicts and political uprisings around the world for The New York Times. Perhaps that background goes some way to explaining his extremely negative portrayal of his home country in this screed delivered in language that could have been lifted directly from Karl Marx or Fidel Castro. Long on carefully identifying worsening political, economic and cultural problems in America, he is very short on offering any workable realistic solutions. In chapters on Decay, Heroin, Work, Sadism, Hate, Gambling, and Freedom, he describes his interviews and interactions with the downtrodden, the unemployed or underemployed, the angry, and the disillusioned as he tours the country. Many of these subjects are clearly hardened criminals by anyone’s criteria. Much of their sometimes justified anger leads to contradictory recommendations for remedies. He carefully avoids documenting the lives of anyone who had ever experienced any prolonged success.
Hedges conveniently forgets to reveal, even in About The Author thathe is a Harvard graduate
an Ivy League teacher, and an ordained Presbyterian minister, putting him indisputably in the elite class that he thoroughly castigates. He seems to conclude that Americans are all fated to either go to hell, or to experience hell on earth. There is certainly no acknowledgement that any secular humanist such as myself could possibly be conscientious, concerned about the very legitimate societal problems he identifies, or offer any meaningful solutions.
In the final few pages he self-identifies as a socialist who believes his country is doomed to become an autocracy ruled by the corporate capitalist 1% who exploit and oppress the rest of us for monetary gain. He concludes that only a radical, perhaps violent, revolution has any chance of saving democracy. (He seems to hedge, as his name suggests, on advocating or condoning violence.) There is a lot of truth in his insights into the plight of those he encounters, but he denigrates almost anyone who has had any success in the mainstream of society, including the mainstream press that he belonged to, and all university professors, who are depicted as subservient to the capitalist elite, even as he advocates for universal free tuition and wider access to higher education. Even Barack Obama is scorned as a pawn of the corporate capitalists.
The chapter on gambling is perhaps the most revealing in uncovering the cold, calculating exploitation of the unsuspecting, particularly by one Donald Trump and his Taj Mahal casino. And the detailed documentation of the cynical psychological, monetary, and physical abuse of the unfortunate in the private prison system makes a mockery of the word Correction in their names.
To put my critique of this work into perspective, perhaps I need to acknowledge my own privileged position in a much less autocratic western country, as a lucky, relatively wealthy, healthy, and happy retiree after a long very satisfying career. But I found the tone of this book to be so gloomy and the predictions so bleak that it made me wonder if the title was some sort of personal cry of despair, or even a veiled suicide note. Although I learned a lot, I cannot seriously recommend this book for the general public. But it would be a great resource for a Sociology 101 course.
The Passionate Reader 