Author: thepassionatereader

This Was Not The Plan Christina Alger. 2016, 337 pages.

It must be difficult for a young female novelist to narrate a complex story in the first person singular of a 35 year old widower with a five year old son and a highly dysfunctional family, but Alger does this with aplomb and humour. A discontented high powered workaholic litigation lawyer working in a big NYC firm makes a drunken highly inappropriate speech at a company party, and gets fired instead of being promoted to partner. This sets him off on a strange new quest for self discovery and work/life balance. The plot thickens as he gradually sets new priorities, tries to break free of the scripted life he had envisioned having, meets a lot of eccentric characters far removed from his previous circle of New York high society duplicitous acquaintances and friends, and learns to appreciate different values, priorities, and family loyalties. There is little that is entirely predicable in the complex plot, including in the final chapter set more than a year after the main events.

Some of the dialogue seems strained with unrealistic, mushy, sentimental speeches, but the prose flows beautifully laced with startling humour, and all of the character somehow seem realistic. The depiction of New York high society is far from flattering, given their dedication to showing off conspicuous wealth, crass materialism and making the right connections. I hope this is an exaggeration of the shallowness of the upper crust, but I have no way of knowing for sure. Likewise I am not the appropriate person to even comment on the right balance between work and family life, having never found that balance.

The humour shines through; “She raises her eyebrows: no mean feat given her obviously deep commitment to Botox.”

This is a light fun read that I thoroughly enjoyed. No prize-winner, but good relaxation.

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I saw this title at the library, read the back cover, and checked it out. I have always been interested in the mind-brain conundrum and the fascinating lessons learned from the study of various types of brain injury. This is a documentary of the most extensively-studied memory-deficient patient ever, written by the grandson of the neurosurgeon responsible for the damage, but it is much more than that. It is also a documentation of the changing and, by modern standards, primitive state of the art of psychiatric treatment and “psychosurgery” until very recently. The esteem of the Nobel prize in medicine is forever tarnished by the awarding of it to Egas Moniz in 1949 for his development of the frontal lobotomy.

H.M. underwent ablation of part his normal temporal lobes by a pioneering neurosurgeon in 1953 in an effort to treat his epilepsy, in turn the result of previous brain trauma. The resulting complex memory problems were very extensively studied by many researchers over four decades until his death in 2008, resulting in hundreds of papers, and in a complete change in the theories regarding how we process, store and retrieve information and memories.

The list of psychologists, psychiatrists and neurosurgeons involved with H.M. is extensive and include many famous names, including the eccentric flamboyant Dr. William Scofield, who was so convinced of the value of frontal lobotomies that he performed one on his psychotic wife. Their biased attitudes and enthusiasm for their own approaches to problems in the era before controlled trials, and the damage resulting from this is very well documented. Their personality conflicts, eccentricities, unjustified enthusiasm, and ambitions are at times frightening, although I can assure readers that there is no shortage of eccentrics with blind ambition, hypertrophied egos and personality conflicts in modern academic medicine. In this menagerie of egotistical researchers, Wilder Penfield, the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute stands out as the most cautious ethical, methodical man of the lot. He never did or advocated frontal lobotomies. One psychologist seemed to think of H.M. as her household pet, controlling access to him, and not bothering with such mundane matters as informed consent for the research she and others did on him. Most of the story takes place in Hartford Connecticut or at the Yale New Haven Hospital. I realized that I probably crossed paths with some of the researchers during my three years of training at Yale, but, appropriately for a discussion about memory research, if so, I have forgotten.

What has hopefully changed since the 1950s is the societal tolerance for experimentation without proper ethical constraints and review. The use of various forms of frontal lobotomy to treat a wide variety of mental problems, with little regard for informed consent continued until at least the 1980s and at one time it was even used to ‘treat’ homosexuality. The sliding scale of unethical experimentation by doctors ranging from the atrocities of those in Nazi concentration camps to electroshock therapy is discussed, but only superficially. The modern reader may think that electroshock treatment is cruel and condemn those who applied electrodes to non-consenting subjects to induce convulsions but it is still being used occasionally, although it has been subjected to only limited randomized controlled trials, and is being gradually replaced by focused magnetic brain stimulation. I assisted in ECT a few times in the late 1960s. (At that time, I lived in the now defunct London Psychiatric Hospital for two years as an impoverished medical student, getting free room and board in exchange for some questionably appropriate services.) It is easy to forget that there were very limited options for controlling violent psychotic patients in the days before the extensive array of chemical straightjackets now available. And it is very easy to condemn the ethical standards of our forbearers by applying the standards we now use to them. Will our grandchildren condemn our unethical pollution of the environment which we will leave them?

The unseemly fights between various institutions for possession of the brain of H.M. following his death in 2008 dramatizes the blind conviction of those involved that the study of it is going to forever solve the mystery of how Homo sapiens collect, store and retrieve memories. The hyperbole about the important information to be gleaned from the study of one brain is grating. How useful can the study of one brain be, particularly one that came from a man who died after developing severe dementia on top of his pre-existing brain injuries.

The author intersperses stories of his personal eccentricities and adventures, sometimes with a tenuous connection to the theme, such as his bullfighting in Mexico and his illegal climbing of the Great Pyramid. There are some glaring lapses in copy-editing and proof-reading. “…they laid open men whilst alive-criminals received out of prison the king- and while they were still breathing…”.

This book is enlightening for those readers interested in the history of medicine, and particularly the history of psychiatry, but otherwise not a must-read.

Having designed a few randomized controlled trials, participated in others, and sat on a safety review board for another in my previous life, I thought this up-to-date scientific review of the methodology and its applications would be a good exercise for my old brain. I was not disappointed. Starting with the very early crude randomized trial to determine the best treatment for scurvy, Leigh reviews the many applications of randomized controlled trials in medicine, social sciences, public policy implementation, politics, and philanthropy with many surprising results.

I was not surprised to learn that, when subjected to good scientific study, many assumptions we never question are false. Knee surgery for a torn meniscus is no better than a sham operation. Neighbourhood Watch programs do not make neighbourhoods safer, and Scare Straight programs designed to frighten high risk youth out of a life of crime produce more criminals. Providing micro-finance loans to impoverished third world women does not help to lift them out of poverty. But over 1000 randomized controlled trials were used effectively to increase the educational value of Sesame Street programs for toddlers. As I stroll through a drug store, it strikes me that few of the thousands of products on display have been assessed in any meaningful scientific study, let alone the gold standard of a double blind randomized controlled trial. We have a long difficult task ahead of us if we are to replace anecdotes and endorsement by charismatic pushers with vested interests in selling useless or harmful products and treatments. In this regard, highly relevant to recent Ontario debates, I can find no randomized controlled trials of any treatments for autism that have yet reported results, although several are in progress. Why can we not wait for the results that show what, if anything, actually works before participating in street protests about the lack of funding for treatments that may not work at all? And the recently completed Apple Heart Study using Apple watches to diagnose cardiac arrhythmias enrolled 420,000 participants but no controls to determine the health impact if any. My hunch is that it probably just increased the anxiety of participants. This was a wasted opportunity, funded by Apple and Stanford.

It is in the realm of marketing and political persuasion that I have some concerns about the use of randomized controlled trials. When huge corporations with tons of data about all of us can use randomized highly targeted marketing trials to persuade us to buy products we don’t need, and cynical political operatives can use this powerful marketing tool to make us believe their lies, should there not be some controls imposed? But by whom?

Even ardent supporters of randomized controlled trials need to acknowledge some limitations to their use. A recent long insightful essay in The New Yorker bemoaned the lack of evidence of how to best wean patients off of various psychiatric drugs. As most trials of drugs are heavily reliant on funding from the pharmaceutical industry, it is not surprising that there are no randomized trials to determine how to stop taking prescribed drugs. And even in the early days of liver transplantation when the immediate mortality was 50 %, faced with a youth in the iCU in coma from untreatable chronic liver disease, it would have been unethical for me to use a coin toss to determine whether or nor to put her name on a list for transplantation. Some such decisions do not need to be informed by a randomized controlled trial. The real difficulty is to determine which ones do.

This book is a very useful primer for anyone interested in how good science can help inform decision-making in medicine, public policy implementation, education, politics and philanthropy. And an easy enjoyable read.

The interesting question this novel address is certainly worth asking: to what extent is someone responsible for the consequences if they know or suspect that a family member, friend or acquaintance is in mental distress, or dangerous, but fails to act on that knowledge or hunch? A loner Maine university student writes a dark and sinister essay for his English Composition course, and four years later walks into the local mall with an AR-15 assault rifle, kills four and then shoots himself. Recriminations and finger-pointing ensue and are massively amplified by social media, resulting in lost friendships and jobs, exacerbation of anxieties and depressions in many members of the university town community. The plot thickens as alliances and friendships are disrupted and realigned. I hope that the vividly described drunken debauchery and casual hookups of university students is exaggerated, but I do not know.places

Elsie Juska is a creative writing teacher in a Pennsylvania university and a lot of the writing is indeed creative, but also obscure, and some of it, to me, seems to be simply silly. In places, it seems as though Juska wishes to impress the literati who write erudite book reviews and may like such descriptions as “The heat crept under her hair.” By the time I got half way through I began to collect some phrases and sentences that seemed to be pure gobbledegook.

“A light snow of panic flurried in her brain.”

“She absorbed the article in fragments, like flashes of an X-Ray machine.”

“Her pulse was tripping in her veins.”

“The sky was purple, soft, foggy.”

” The shadows of the trees yawned across the lawn.”

“A loud sound, a buzzing, climbed into her ears.”

“Bare maples…..looked like naked lungs.”

“She had rivers in her veins.”

” Then she looked at her another beat.”

Where was the copy-editor and proofreader to correct the impossible assertions and nonsense syntax? At one point the words “Two thousand one hundred and seventy one” stand alone in the middle of a paragraph with no reference to anything. A man’s beard is said to need trimming, although at most it is 30 hours since it was trimmed. A girl drinks a 40 calorie vodka and Diet Coke. (A shot of vodka is 96 calories.)

The story is interesting but endless introspective self-analysis by most of the characters, the pretentious writing style and absent proofreading and editing grated on me. A good plot damaged by poor writing. But then, I am not part of the literati.

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Having found myself in Salem one Halloween evening earlier this century with a group of friends, for a re-enactment of one of the witch trials of 1692, when I noticed this documentary in the library I signed it out. On that visit I was a bit surprised that the dark reality of the town’s past was being exploited as a source of amusement and tourist’s dollars.

This exhaustively researched book is the definitive history of the witch trials, but it is far more than that. It is also a vivid portrait of the harsh realities of life for Puritans living in small-town Massachusetts, surrounded by French, Indian, Catholic, Anglican, Quaker, and Baptist enemies. Adhering to strict interpretations of the Bible, with the apocalypse believed to be imminent, they nevertheless were a feuding and dysfunctional, often inbred society with almost no recognized authorities to establish order. The roles of clergy, lawyers, judges, and politicians overlapped with no universally recognized standards. What was universal was acceptance that a very real devious Satan could possess anyone, even without their knowledge, and wreak havoc. With frequent early childhood deaths, starvation and all manner of unexplained natural calamities, it was easy to find Satan responsible for anything that was otherwise inexplicable. Add to this the surprisingly frequent heavy drinking (men only) accepted by the clergy and laity alike, and the drudgery, and deprivation of the subservient women, and and something had to give.

Enter a few teenage girls without any outlet for their frustrations, facing a bleak future, lacking any attention, and the stage is set. Very late in the book, Schiff speculates along Freudian lines that the girls, and a couple of slaves suffered from what was then called hysteria and would now be called conversion reactions. But she seems to be unduly concerned that many of her 21st century readers still believe in a personal devil and never counters that possibility. It is, however, not a great stretch from believing in miracles and angels to believing in devils and witches- Trump frequently claimed that Mueller was on a witch hunt. The accused often confessed to schizophrenic-like hallucinations-“If you could save your life by admitting that you flew through the air on a pole, wouldn’t you?” In any case, the teens level all kinds of accusations of witchcraft and devil devotion, complete with apparently magical signs to prove their allegations. Men accuse their wives and daughters, daughters accuse their parents and no one is immune, not even clergymen. After a panel of judges and jurymen, often with scores to settle with the accused, have completed their deliberations, twenty people, including one clergyman, and only one who confessed to witchcraft were hanged as witches, and another man was trampled to death under planks.

The aftermath has parallels with other similar sad episodes. Some locals apparently still hold grudges and refuse to discuss the trials at all. This sounds very much like the residual effects on the local population of the slaughter of the Black Donnelly’s in Lucan, Ontario in the 1880s.

The prominent players in this sad saga often have modern relevance. Fledgling Harvard University figures prominently. Clergymen Increase Mather, at the time, was the president of Harvard, and his son Cotton Mather and he were both intimately involved and supportive of the judges. The chief prosecutor endowed a considerable sum to Harvard and has a dormitory there named after him. The clergyman who was hanged as a witch was a Harvard grad. Many prominent citizens even into the twentieth century have ancestors that were involved in the trials, or are descendants of the witches, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Disney, and Lucille Ball.

For all the carefully researched erudite analysis in this humourless pedantic book, it is not an easy read although educational and cautionary. Unless you live in Massachusetts, are a dedicated history buff, or suspect that there are witches hiding in your family tree, I cannot recommend it.

A friend loaned me her autographed copy of this Ottawa novelist’s earlier novel after discussing my review of her 2014 novel Tell. I am not sure if my mood changed, the author’s writing skills improved dramatically, or I just didn’t like this story and format as much, but this one was a major disappointment for me.

In 2006, a small town Ontario widow is chosen at random to share in the 80th year birthday celebrations of Queen Elizabeth ll at Buckingham Palace only because they share the same birth date. On the way to the airport her car hits loose gravel and careens over a cliff into a ravine and she is thrown from it and severely injured, landing where she is invisible from the road above. The entire story from page six is her reminisces of her life and relations, as she drifts in and out of delirium and tries to stay alive and focused on possibly being found and rescued, by recalling the names of bones from her previous studies of a 1901 edition of Gray’s Anatomy.

There are touching recollections of what life was like in the small towns of Ontario in the whole of the 20th century, all very vivid, many of which I can relate to. The characters in her family and acquaintances are realistic if sometimes pathetic, funny, eccentric or sad. But for me the emphasis on nostalgia and the introspective sentimentality of the recollections became overwhelming and led me to hope that she would soon be rescued, still make her flight to London and dine with Her Royal Highness. She never does. Too bad.

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Any reader’s assessment of the 49 short essays in this memoir from our longtime parliamentarian and former prime minister will be tainted by his or her political position, especially in these days of extreme political polarization and rigid party loyalty. But no one who has paid any attention at all to Canadian politics over the last half century can dispute that “the little guy from Shawinigan ” was and is a colourful, loquacious, humorous and talented raconteur.

Like most political autobiography, much space is taken up here with self-congratulatory justification for the considerable accomplishments in his forty year life in politics, and there is scant mention of the more questionable and controversial decisions made or problematic personalities within the Liberal establishment. The invoking of the War Measures ACT during the FLQ crisis of 1972 is never mentioned, the name Margaret Trudeau does not appear even once, and Chretien’s Liberal nemesis and successor, Paul Martin is mentioned once-in a list of cabinet ministers. But there are great insights into the personalities and quirks of numerous world leaders and public figures, as seen by a close observer with a keen sense of humour. Inevitably there are biases but the reader will become nostalgic when reading about politicians of a forgotten era from different parties with very different objectives and political philosophies who could nevertheless work together and even become good friends. Joe Clark wrote the Foreword with kind words of praise for the author.

Chretien’s wry sense of humour comes through in numerous anecdotes he relates. A Quebec cop stopped him for speeding on his way to John Diefenbaker’s funeral in August, 1979. Jean explained that he wanted to get there on time to see for himself that Diefenbaker was truly dead, and the cop let him off without a ticket!

This is an enlightening, light, selective, insider’s history lesson, and a contrast to the boring or sensationalized current events stories we were fed at the time of the related events. A fun read.

My daughter in Kentucky recently gave me this hilarious novel. As she is a university teacher and formerly a program chair whose program has been cut by a severe reduction in state funding, I can understand why she recommended it. The theme is eerily similar, although the setting is in a fictitious small university town in Pennsylvania. The English Department, already severely dysfunctional with faculty that all seem to hate each other, is driven to extremes by rivalries, personality conflicts and unfulfilled ambitions- and by looming cuts in funding to the whole university. There are no straight men, (in the dramatic sense, not the sexual one) although the narrator, the cartoonish Wm. Henry Devereau Jr., seems, by the title, to regard himself as the only sane person in the whole university. This is in spite of the fact that he has an uncanny proclivity for making enemies and is a dedicated hypochondriac who could easily satisfy all the criteria for a number of mental disorders. In the course of one week he gets his nose smashed and pierced by an angry colleague, suspects his wife of infidelity with the Dean, threatens on public TV to kill a goose a day until he gets his budget, and exposes the eccentricities of the faculty, students and staff alike.

This is a great mockery of professorial stuffiness. A dog named Occam sniffs the crotch or humps the leg of anyone who comes near him and seems to be the only creature to understand and apply the principle of Occam’s Razor. There are drunkards, womanizers, and deadbeat tenured professors who happily bed down their graduate students in exchange for passing grades, and openly covet their colleagues’ wives. But this was written in the mid 1990s before the #Me-Too movement, and it comes across as both sad and funny. Everyone&, it seems, has ambitions to become a famous author, but no two of them can agree on what constitutes good writing.

I was not familiar with Richard Russo’s previous writing but this one is a light fun read and a great sendup to the pretensions of academic life in the arts. Some day when I need something light, I may try Nobody’s Fool or the more recent Everybody’s Fool.

I have to start this review with an embarrassing confession. I picked this one up at the library but it was only when I got to the description of William’s Syndrome on page 65 that I realized that I had read it before, and even now I am not sure how long ago that was. But there is enough intriguing information that I read to the finish again, and even so I would fail an exam on some of the neuroanatomical, neurotransmitter and genetic information.

Dr. Jordan Smoller is a Harvard psychiatrist and research scientist with broad-ranging knowledge about the brain/mind mechanisms behind both normal and abnormal human behaviour. His argument that there is no sharp demarcation between normal and abnormal seems intuitive, and belies the ever-expanding arbitrary criteria for mental illnesses. The false nature/nurture dichotomy is compellingly exploded by many examples of interaction between the two. This book is just modern enough to provide some examples from the exploding field of epigenetics i.e. the influence of (often random) environmental factors on the expression of various genes, leading to the intriguing suggestion that we may not only inherit some of our grandparents genes but also some of the environmental influences on their behaviour.

There is extensive discussion of many neural pathways involved in a variety of conditions ranging from autism to psychopathy to ‘reactive attachment disorder’ and PTSD. Most of these pathways and the various neurotransmitters involved will be less than memorable to most readers, including this one. Some of the evidence for differences in neuroanatomy and connections leading to specific psychological and psychiatric effects are convincing and backed by animal experiments; others are mere correlations that may not indicate causation. It is encouraging though, that treatments such as dopamine for autism, or propanol for PTSD, are being developed based on some theories that have been formulated from animal studies.

There is, as in most social sciences writing for the general public, some meaningless psychobabble that can be annoying and distracting. “Mothers create a sense of trust in their children by that kind of administration which in its quality combines sensitive care of the baby’s individual needs and a firm sense of trustworthiness within the trusted framework of their community’s lifestyle.”

In the Prologue, Dr. Smoller states emphatically that ‘it would be absurd to claim that we can explain or describe every mental phenomenon in material terms.’ Throughout the book he carefully avoids any suggestion that the mind exists only as a product of physical phenomenon, while simultaneously documenting more and more of those physical explanations for mental activities. This blind faith in Cartesian dualism is somewhat akin to the clerics who invoke a deity to explain the gaps in our knowledge- the ‘God Of The Gaps’, an ever diminishing role for a diety. And many serious scientists and respectable philosophers do assert that there is no such thing as a mind outside of the physical brain. But the author’s designated specialty of psychiatry depends on the belief that the mind is separate from the brain, even as modern imaging makes that distinction hazy. Will psychiatry some day become a subspecialty of neurology, such as movement disorders are now?

Not a must-read, unless you are a neuroscientist, a mental health worker or a worker in early childhood development.

I have to start this review with an embarrassing confession. I picked this one up at the library but it was only when I got to the description of William’s Syndrome on page 65 that I realized that I had read it before, and even now I am not sure how long ago that was. But there is enough intriguing information that I read to the finish again, and even so I would fail an exam on some of the neuroanatomical, neurotransmitter and genetic information.

Dr. Jordan Smoller is a Harvard psychiatrist and research scientist with broad-ranging knowledge about the brain/mind mechanisms behind both normal and abnormal human behaviour. His argument that there is no sharp demarcation between normal and abnormal seems intuitive, and belies the ever-expanding arbitrary criteria for mental illnesses. The false nature/nurture dichotomy is compellingly exploded by many examples of interaction between the two. This book is just modern enough to provide some examples from the exploding field of epigenetics i.e. the influence of (often random) environmental factors on the expression of various genes, leading to the intriguing suggestion that we may not only inherit some of our grandparents genes but also some of the environmental influences on their behaviour.

There is extensive discussion of many neural pathways involved in a variety of conditions ranging from autism to psychopathy to ‘reactive attachment disorder’ and PTSD. Most of these pathways and the various neurotransmitters involved will be less than memorable to most readers, including this one. Some of the evidence for differences in neuroanatomy and connections leading to specific psychological and psychiatric effects are convincing and backed by animal experiments; others are mere correlations that may not indicate causation. It is encouraging though, that treatments such as dopamine for autism, or propanol for PTSD, are being developed based on some theories that have been formulated from animal studies.

There is, as in most social sciences writing for the general public, some meaningless psychobabble that can be annoying and distracting. “Mothers create a sense of trust in their children by that kind of administration which in its quality combines sensitive care of the baby’s individual needs and a firm sense of trustworthiness within the trusted framework of their community’s lifestyle.”

In the Prologue, Dr. Smoller states emphatically that ‘it would be absurd to claim that we can explain or describe every mental phenomenon in material terms.’ Throughout the book he carefully avoids any suggestion that the mind exists only as a product of physical phenomenon, while simultaneously documenting more and more of those physical explanations for mental activities. This blind faith in Cartesian dualism is somewhat akin to the clerics who invoke a deity to explain the gaps in our knowledge- the ‘God Of The Gaps’, an ever diminishing role for a diety. And many serious scientists and respectable philosophers do assert that there is no such thing as a mind outside of the physical brain. But the author’s designated specialty of psychiatry depends on the belief that the mind is separate from the brain, even as modern imaging makes that distinction hazy. Will psychiatry some day become a subspecialty of neurology, such as movement disorders are now?

Not a must-read, unless you are a neuroscientist, a mental health worker or a worker in early childhood development.

Applying any adjectives or descriptive nouns to the late Mr. Hitchens while he was alive would run the risk of receiving a sharp sarcastic rebuke from him. He complains in this autobiography about even good friends shortening his first name to Chris. He rejects the labels of contrarian, dissident, gadfly, and rebel being applied to himself although it seems to me that all of those were accurate description of his character.

Before picking up this memoir, I was most familiar with his name as one of the “four horsemen” of modern atheism and the author of the sentinel polemic God is not Great. However, he was a also a witty and erudite journalist, a deep thinker and a fearless adventurer. Terrified of becoming bored, he sought adventure around the world, thrilling to hearing a bullet whizz past his ear in northern Iraq, and illegally entering and exploring North Korea. My great fear, in contrast is being stranded somewhere with nothing to read.

The list of people that he had contact with is impressively long and included many heads of state, prominent poets and writers, diplomats and luminaries. He managed to get his butt slapped with the parliamentary order paper by an annoyed Margaret Thatcher. His distain for Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Theresa, Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict, Gore Vidal, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contrasts with his loyal friendship and support for Salman Rushdie, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush along with many socialists, Marxists and Trotskyites. In his early career as a journalist he was a Trotskyite, a founding member of International Socialists, and a frequent contributor to The New Statesman. To say that he held his political convictions firmly would be a gross understatement. But to say that they were consistent would seem to be a lie. To be fair, he recognized and worried about his tendency to want to ‘have it both ways.’ For evidence of this duplicity, he reveals that when he was told that he was a Jew, in 1987, he was a ‘non believing member of two churches.’

This brings me to one of the major problems with this memoir. There is no consistent linear time line as one reads through it. He jumps back and forth from his days as an Oxford undergrad to his later adventures and writing.There is scant mention of his two marriages and no mention whatsoever of their beginnings or endings, nor do either of his wives warrant being named or even acknowledged in the text or the acknowledgements, nor are his son and daughter. One is left with the inescapable conclusion that none of them were important to him. He clearly was a womanizer although he never reveals much about his sexual proclivities. He took pride in his enjoyment of sensual pleasures including smoking for most of his life and regular overindulgence in alcohol. (These proclivities may have contributed to his death in 2011 from complications of esophageal cancer, although it would be cruel to ‘blame the victim.’)

Another major difficulty I had with this book also involves his wide-ranging friendships and familiarity with a vast amount of literature. Unless you are familiar with the poems of Kingsley Amis and many others and the writings and views of dozens of others, you are likely to get confused. He takes as a given that the reader will be familiar with the views and writings of Peter Ackrod, Theodore Adorno, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rashid Ali, Perry Anderson, and Anne Applebaum- I took these names from the first page of his 11 page index, as an example. Perhaps it is my relative illiteracy that is a problem.

There are some memorable quotes of a philosophical nature. Among my favourites is this: It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live ones everyday life as if this were so.

Overall this book is an erudite educational commentary on many facets of late twentieth century social and political events from a keen observer with a contrarian bent, more than a memoir of that observer’s life in spite of the subtitle.

This Duke University psychology professor has made a distinguished career out of analyzing irrationality, deceptions and quirks of human behaviour. This book, a layman’s guide to much of his work, is notable for a few surprise research conclusions, the main one being the apparent propensity of all of us to cheat just a little, but not a lot, thereby being able to maintain a self-image as totally honest, via self deception. The factors that seem to determine the boundaries of our dishonesty are carefully teased out.

There seem to me to be some major caveats before accepting his sometimes sweeping conclusions. First, most of the research studies have been done with university students as the research subjects in highly artificial laboratory settings- their psychic makeup may deviate significantly from that of the broader population. If nothing else the probably narrow age range (he never mentions the age ranges of his research subjects) make generalization from the studies problematic. I doubt that the boundaries of my propensity to lie, cheat and deceive others and myself now are the same as I had when I was 25. Secondly, I am well aware of the very major problem, particularly in social sciences, of non-reproducibility of research studies. I found the design of the studies at times to be quite ingenious, though bright young suspicious university psychology students might well be on to the subterfuge of some of them and be quite pleased to lie and thereby sabotage their professor’s research.

The writing style is fluid and keeps the reader interested, with some very personal anecdotes and some wry humour. In the latter category, before giving the obvious answer, he speculates about what makes the period just before deadlines for term papers and final exams so lethal for the grandmothers of university students, particularly those students who are doing poorly.

One caveat of my own. I have not reviewed the extensive original research publications in the scientific literature that he summarizes in this book and uses to draw his conclusions, and can’t comment on the statistical validity of those findings.

Are we as a society becoming more or less honest? I don’t see any answers to that question in this book, and realistically, it would require longitudinal studies over decades to answer that.

question. With the Liar-in-Chief now in the White House, my hunch is that western society as a whole may be less honest than in past generations. A blurb in the March Atlantic claims that minor workplace theft by employees has doubled in the last two decades. Most of the research discussed in this book concerns being dishonest in social and monetary interactions rather than in the verbal realm. The examples of dishonesty usually relate to what most of us would consider to be minor lapses such as not correcting a retail clerk who gives you too much change, reporting dubious work-related expenses, or claiming to have finished the crossword without peeking at the upside-down answers. And if a border guard in a booth asked me what I thought of Donald Trump, (it happens), I would be tempted to lie to avoid being indefinitely barred from visiting my daughters in the U.S. But I would probably say that he is a dangerous, racist, egotistical, incompetent idiot and then point out that some in his inner circle have used far worse adjectives to describe him

A recent debate in The New Yorker about care for demented people makes a strong case for compassionate ‘therapeutic lying.’ I would not want any man to be repeatedly reminded of the death of his wife if he could not retain that truth and kept asking where she was. Would it not be better for his caregivers to simply agree with him that she must have gone shopping? And when I was leaving a dear friend whom I knew was slowly dying of cancer, not sure if she knew her grim prognosis, she whispered to me as we hugged at the airport “You don’t need to pretend that you will see me again.” “Of course I will” I lied. Was that dishonesty justified?

This engaging novel is a companion to the British author’s earlier novel, Life After Life, about the tragicomic lives of the Todd family from 1925 to 2012. Some of the characters are extremely eccentric and others, such as Teddy, the wartime pilot of a Halifax bomber, are damaged by what would now be labelled post-traumatic stress disorder.

The unnumbered but dated chapters start with 30 March 1944, then proceed to 1925, 1980, 1947, 1939, 1993, 1951, 1942-43, 1982, 1943, 1960, 2012, 30 March, 1944, 2012, 2012, and 1947. The jumbled order seems to be a characteristic of her writing; it is as though she wrote a linear account of events, then scrambled them randomly, with frequent use of flashbacks and insertion of snippets of the future, some of which the reader will have already encountered in earlier chapters. I am sure that many readers enjoy this age-old time-shift literary device, but others, including me will find it confusing and frustrating. Perhaps I am at fault in just thinking of time as being too linear, even though I accept that space-time is warped.

There is a lot of abstract but eloquent discussion of the ultimate meaning of time and of death. The impending death of one character dying of a brain tumour is described as being “…..subtracted from time altogether.” The insight into the horrors of war are graphic and in keeping with why surviving fighters, including some of my oldest relatives and friends who fought in Europe in WW2, never talked about what they had experienced. How could anyone ever forget or describe adequately the horror of seeing a young member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, while bicycling around the perimeter of an airfield, being decapitated by the broken propeller flung from a returning damaged Halifax bomber? When Teddy reached her “….the wheel of her bicycle was still spinning.” Or the final farewell to a comrade who could not be pulled out of the rough waters of the North Sea when a downed Halifax was sinking in it, and the dingy with the other crew members was already dangerously overloaded.

The writing style is fluid with abundant startling metaphors and sometimes obvious and sometimes obscure references to classics of English literature, many of which were lost on me- several characters become aspiring novelists and one becomes a very successful writer.

I have not read any of this author’s other books. Perhaps I should, but I am not sure that I will. This one was good in small doses, but paradoxically needs to be read over a short period of time to avoid losing the thread in the fog of one’s own memory.

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Today the Lexington schools were closed as the poorly paid teachers travelled to Frankfurt to protest the state’s questionably legal reduction of their pensions. So… on short notice I grabbed this book from a bookshelf at Alana’s to spend 4.5 hours on grandfather duty at Lexington’s Urban Ninja Project gymnasium while she went to work and the twins burned off an incredible amount of energy-just enough time to imbibe this peculiar little gem of a novel.

A bearded young Pakistani in Lahore notices an uncomfortable American businessman in a public square and tries to reassure him and guide him around while pouring out his life story of being raised in Pakistan, educated at Princeton, and working for a New York City based international valuation company around the globe. The story is narrated entirely in the first person singular-all of the American’s responses and actions are inferred from the narrator’s discussion. As his life history unfolds, the appropriately named Changez reveals that he has become disillusioned by the world of finance, and with America generally after 9/11, and has had a tragic romantic relationship with a fellow Princeton grad who is obsessed with the death of her earlier boyfriend. She probably has committed suicide, although that is never certain. At the end, on being accompanied back to his luxury hotel, the enigmatic American still seems uneasy in the Pakistani’s company but the final action is left to the reader’s imagination. Was there a murder?

The title is a bit misleading as there is almost no discussion of religion. If there is any fundamentalism involved at all, it is the fundamentalism of extreme patriotism. And I am not sure how much of this story is autobiography- the author grew up in Lahore and graduated from Princeton, but now lives in London, not back in Lahore.

A six page “Questions for Discussion” at the end is a guide for a school literature class or an adult book cub discussion. My favourite quote in relation to the ‘war on terror’ – “ A common thread appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was a small coterie’s concept of American interests, which was defined only to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers.”

This is a timely documentary about the predatory practices of the online Trump University from an insider who worked there for much of his career. Allegedly educating ‘students’ on the ins and outs of the world of real estate entrepreneurship, the ‘university’ ‘faculty’ consisted largely of con artists and motivational speakers, some of them convicted criminals with little or no real estate experience, who succeeded in bilking honest ‘students’ out of their savings while promising them riches from investing in real estate and inducing them to pay for ever more expensive courses that never delivered much beyond hype. Some of the advice the leaders gave was simply illegal-(why is no one surprised?) and very few of the enrolees ever recouped their costs.

The author fails to justify his prolonged stay with this shady institution, except with late-breaking retrospective insight into its true purpose- to line the pockets of a billionaire at the expense of poor folk anxious to become educated and self-sufficient. He seems as mesmerized by the real estate guru as any of the duped students. But at least he seemed genuinely motivated to help the enrolees.

Not a very surprising revelation given what we know about the character of Donald Trump, but nevertheless an interesting read.

I read this book several years ago, and just reread it to refresh my memory. Analyzing about 90 objects or choices we make for their impact on the climate, the author applies rigorous scientific principles to come up with many starling conclusions. He is careful to note the many areas of uncertainty and the frequent assumptions of climate scientists.

The basic unit that is used in all of the calculations is the carbon dioxide equivalent, a measure that takes into account the effect of other emissions such as methane, nitrous oxide and hydrofluorocarbons. He aims to show how what we do daily can affect the goal of achieving an average of ten tons per year of CO2 emissions per person per year, the ‘ten ton lifestyle.’

Some of the choices of objects to study are of little general interest and not readily modifiable.

Others carefully analyzed lead to counterintuitive conclusions, and the comparison of different actions with similar effects is sometime ingenious. e.g an 18 mile intercity train ride has the same effect on the environment as eating a cheeseburger.

A high pressure unheated air hand drier is better than a paper towel.

Using a cheeseburger to fuel a bicycle ride is no better than two people using an average car to make the same trip.

Disposable diapers are more eco-friendly than reusables.

The use of paper bags for produce is likely to be worse for the environment than using plastic ones.

Plastic grocery bags contribute far less than 1% of the environmental adverse effects of the groceries in them.

Belching ruminants (mainly cattle and sheep) contribute huge amounts of methane, and raising them is also very harmful to the environment because of deforestation to grow them and their inherent poor food conversion.

Moving produce by air is 100 times worse than by sea from a climate viewpoint.

Rice production is associated with high CO2 production.

Mackerel seems to be the least harmful seafood in terms of CO2 production associated with its production and processing to market.

Cremation may be worse than simple burial in a wicker coffin, but burial at sea is the best exit from an environmental viewpoint.

The decision to reproduce has a huge negative impact on the climate, and providing birth-control information and services is good for the environment.

The limited environmental benefits of use of hybrid and all-electric vehicles is discussed but was not as surprising to me as many of his other conclusions.

The writing is a bit arcane at times but the analysis is broken into short essay-like segments making it easy to skip over things that don’t interest you. My favourite quote -on the environmental impact of spending a dollar- “We could do with less charging around earning as much as we can to buy things we don’t really need.”

So how bad are bananas? Not bad at all, and far better than hothouse tomatoes. And about five times as good as producing a single red rose.

Why, oh why is there not a city map of Tehran and one of the twenty-seven acre American Embassy compound as it existed in 1979 included in this history lesson? That would have obviated the need for pages and pages of geographic description and provided much needed clarity for readers. And perhaps a map of the Middle East centred on Iran, for those of us who are geographically challenged.

History, at least as taught in my school days, usually consisted of rote memorization of date’s and facts as deemed important by the teacher. It was far from my favourite subject, although I recall getting good marks for an essay in I wrote in ?1962 regurgitating standard drivel about the evils of Fidel Castro’s overthrow of Fulgencio Batista, for the modern history class. I am now old enough to realize that I failed to recognize the importance of many critical historical events as they were happening, blithely oblivious to the dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the importance of the launch of Sputnik, the birth of Bangladesh, the rise of the Polish Solidarity movement, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I even knew no details about 9/11 until 9/15, being sequestered in the wilds of northern Ontario, happily fly fishing for big salmon. I recall the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, but never knew much about the Canadian involvement in that. This book certainly enlightened me about that.

Robert Wright is a history professor at Trent University in Peterborough. His exhaustively researched account of the hostage crisis, the exemplary but unconventional actions of the Canadian ambassador, Kenneth Taylor, and the many other players involved provides a quite unique insight into the infighting in the early days of the Islamic Republic, the earlier corruption and cruelty in the Shah’s regime, and the manipulative actions of the U.S. government in the internal affairs of a foreign country. (I was friendly with an Iranian postdoctoral fellow at Yale in 1975, but we never dared to discuss politics or religion, and I now wonder what happened to him when he returned to Iran.) The undercover world of espionage with participation by various branches of various governments, often working at cross purposes, is worthy of a John le Carre novel. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the details because relevant documents are still classified, but there are nevertheless many new revelations-at least new to me. William Sloan Coffin, the controversial Yale chaplain whose sermons I enjoyed listening to, was a CIA operative. The KGB issued forged documents to discredit Iranian government officials, one of whom was promptly beheaded. Canada maintained a secret link between the Iranian government and that of Israel.

There are deficiencies in this analysis. Nowhere is there any discussion of what about the Shi’ite brand of Islamism as practiced in Iran allowed the clerics to take complete control and overrule decisions by elected government officials. As in most history books, the portrayal of some players seems slanted. Jimmy Carter is conscientious but weak and vacillating. Flora MacDonald and Joe Clark could do no wrong, but Pierre Trudeau was duplicitous and unprincipled.

I am sure that this book is a valuable resource for history buffs, and it is very educational. But it does little to entice those already turned off of history to turn on to it.

I read a rave review of this little book in The New Yorker so I picked it up at the library. Valeria Luiselli is a novelist living in Harlem and originally from Mexico City. But this is a documentary, not a novel. The subtitle of this essay is “An Essay in Forty Questions” and it is based on the 40 questions on a form that children applying for asylum in the U.S. have to fill out. Luiselli worked as a translator for those children in the immigration court while awaiting her own delayed green card. She freely admits that she has no answers to the problems of dealing with the flood of child immigrants that arrived in the U.S. in 2014, nor the problems these children face, but spares no criticism of a broken system, including of the Obama administration’s response. She documents the intertwined nature of the violence and poverty those children are trying to escape in various Central American countries and American foreign policy. The MS-13 and Barrio 18 drug gangs that many of the children are fleeing originated in Los Angeles and were spread to Central America by the U.S. “war on drugs” coupled with arms sales and support for corrupt Central American dictatorships supported by the drug trade. And those gangs now have metastasized to where the children are in the big U.S. cities. “Gang deportations became more of a metastases than an eradication.” And all of this is fed by the American’s insatiable appetite for illegal drugs.

I did not realize that U.S. Immigration courts are civil, so there is no Miranda guarantee of legal representation, and most of the legal representation (usually women) they manage to get is pro bono. Kudos to those lawyers. A coda written after the 2016 election just adds to the sense of despair that it seems everyone feels in dealing with this global issue.

A sobering and thoughtful educational read, well worth the three or four hours it will take to read it.

I picked up this novel by an Ottawa resident from the small lending library at a bridge club, and later learned that it was shortlisted for a Giller prize. Set in 1919 and 1920, largely in Deseronto, west of Kingston, the lives of all of its inhabitants are altered by the effects of WW1 on the returning soldiers, by consumption (tuberculosis), diphtheria, and family conflicts and secrets.

This is not a thriller and there are few sudden twists or dramatic surprises in the plot. Its beauty is in the superb use of the subtleties of the English language, the vivid portrayal of the shattered lives of the injured veterans, the struggles of parents dealing with the deaths of children, and the intricacies of small town life in that era. There are sexual indiscretions, but like everything else here, they are related with sensitivity and nuance and there is no explicit pornography. It would be suitable for a grade school literature class.

The first chapter seems disconnected from the rest of the story until the last chapter, although I guessed, almost correctly, at the relationships a bit before that last chapter, by rereading the first chapter part of the way through. In keeping with the author’s experience as a poet, she deftly weaves in poetic snippets and the detailed development of classical musical talent in the small town residents. Even I, with absolutely no musical talent, found this interesting.

Skating in moonlight on natural outdoor ice, watching and helping my mother make soap from lye, lard and water, playing Fox and Goose in fields covered in deep snow, hiding in old decrepit neighbourhood barns- I have fond memories of these vividly described activities from my rural youth, although that was 30 or more years after the characters did them. Fortunately, I have no firsthand experience in dealing with the emotional devastation of the death of a child, and on that basis, I cannot fault the extreme pathos of how it is described. But if your eyes are dry after reading about a couple burying their young children’s bodies in a snow bank to await spring for a proper burial, you either have no heart or no lacrimal glands.

A great literary work, almost on a par with A Gentleman In Moscow, and by a Canadian.

A friend at the curling club recommended this documentary about the epidemiology of the cholera outbreak in London in 1864, and I am glad he did. I vaguely recalled this story from epidemiology classes more than fifty years ago, but this book is a well-written refresher course that goes into far more detail and background and puts the story into the context of its enabling of the subsequent development of cities worldwide. Dr. John Snow, the first British physician to use ether and chloroform, almost singlehandedly deduced that cholera was waterborne, not transmitted through the air, and proved his theory by mapping the outbreak to a single well on Broad Street in SoHo, before the existence of the Vibrio cholera bacteria was known. Ironically, in the same year, an Italian physician, Philippe Pancini, described the microscopic appearance of the culprit bacteria, but this discovery was ignored for thirty years by a medical establishment convinced that contagious diseases were always transmitted through foul air, ignoring the earlier proof of the waterborne transmission of typhoid fever by Dr. William Budd.

But like most medical discoveries, this was not ultimately the work of a single genius working alone, and the curious clergyman, Henry Whitehead, who contributed greatly to the proof has not been yet been given due credit for his part in the discovery, nor has the the work of the Registrar General who complied ‘Weekly Returns’ reporting on the distribution of the cholera deaths in the city, that allowed Snow to map the lethal epidemic.

John Snow is rightly feted as a hero of eighteenth century medicine, doubly so because he sought no fame or recognition. But like most important scientific discoveries, his breakthrough would probably soon have been made by some contemporary of his, perhaps by Dr Budd, if not by him, given the convergence of the different pieces of evidence. A little later a fierce race was on between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to be the first to establish credit for the description of evolution. Watson and Crick, and Banting and Best raced with competing researchers to establish credit for their discoveries. It is sad that more often than not, modern medical research is driven by big egos, anxious to be recognized, but I’ll admit to being caught up in that competition in my past life. Even in my less-than-stellar, stunted, part time career as a medical researcher, I and collaborators were twice preparing to publish our observations about two new diseases, one genetic and one acquired, only to read in a journal that someone else had made the same discoveries, and beat us to publication of a first description.

The Epilogue provides a very speculative assessment of the future of urbanization. Like Edward Glaeser in Triumph of the City, Johnson details the economic, social and environmental benefits of packing hordes of people into dense cities, but also assesses the risks- the ability to kill thousands or millions of people with a new altered microbe, a nuclear bomb, or a disruption of complex and crucial infrastructural interconnections.

I have a couple of quibbles about this well-written informative book. Throughout Johnson uses ‘statistics’ to describe what is really ‘data’ and they are very different by definition. And a minor dispute that I can’t resolve – Johnson describes bacteria as the largest biomass on earth, but during a trip to Antarctica, researchers on The Ushuaia told us that that honour belonged to saltwater krill. Who is right about that? Does it matter?