Author: thepassionatereader

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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?

Each year since 2011, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where my daughter is a professor in the business school, designates one book as the Go Big Read book of the year which all faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to read. The selection process is a mystery to me, but the last two, Evicted, (about life in the slums of Milwaukee) and The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (about the St. Lawrence Seaway project) were certainly interesting and educational documentaries. It seems I am now included in the group expected to read them as I usually get a book from my daughter for Christmas. But what I got from Wisconsin this Christmas and mistook for this year’s pick, Triumph of the City is thankfully not the pick for the university-it would put the whole campus to sleep. It is written by a Harvard economist, which does not entirely explain why it is arid, humourless, and disorganized. There are a host of interesting historical facts, tons of data and keen observations, but no assessment of what the statistical significance of the data is and correlation seems to be equated with causation. Nevertheless, I am sure my daughter finds a lot of the data very useful in her teaching and research in real estate economics.

The stark and arbitrary contrasts of cities with rural areas seem to me to be only partially justified and some are inconsistent with my experience. I spent the first 18 years of my life on a hardscrabble mixed farm, then the rest (so far) in three very different cities, in student residences, a mental hospital and a nursing home (free room and board as a debt-ridden budding doc in exchange for some menial services), rental housing, four apartments and five single family homes. I now live in a large high-rise apartment complex in Canada’s largest city geographically- larger than Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver combined, not including the adjacent city of Gatineau across the Ottawa River. But fully ninety percent of the land area within the boundaries of the city of Ottawa is rated as rural. If I lived on a 100 acre farm within the city limits, growing cash crops or livestock, would I be considered a country bumpkin or a city slicker for the purpose of comparing urban and rural societies? Any data about Toronto as a city will fail to take into account the contiguous urban areas stretching from Oshawa to Hamilton that remain separate entities only because of arbitrary boundaries. City boundaries are, by political necessity, arbitrary, but the demographic borders of cities, unlike the legal ones, are often are very fuzzy.

Glaeser makes a strong argument that urban slum dwellers worldwide still have much better prospects than their rural counterparts, that it is better for them to migrate from poor farms to urban slums than to stay in the countryside, and that building dense cities with more skyscrapers rather than sprawling suburbs is better for all societies. In this latter assertion, he seems to contradict the early arguments of Jane Jacob’s in The Death and Life of Great American Cities” while praising her “remarkable intellect” and describing her book as a “great masterpiece”, even as he refutes every argument she made about city planning. And he makes a very convincing case for more dense vertical urban housing as an eco-friendly way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with the resulting reduced car travel and less need for energy for heating and cooling, especially in temperate California. But California does more than most states to promote sprawl and restrict density. And he adequately documents the adverse unintended consequences of NIMBYism and enthusiastic preservationists. This is highly relevant nearby as the city of Ottawa, Clublink, and locals debate the plans for the future of the failing Kanata Lakes Golf Course about one km away from us.

There are some very jarring lapses of copy-editing and proof-reading. What is conveyed by “Frank Sprague was, like Henry Ford, a brilliant mind, collected by Thomas Edison.”?

Economists and urban planners no doubt are keen on this book, but parts of it are so dry I am keeping it away from anything flammable, lest it undergoes spontaneous combustion.

It is hard to categorize this bizarre story. There are so many unpredictable, improbable but hilarious events that it reminded me in places of the best of Terry Fallis’s novels. But other parts of the story are pure pathos that will make you cry. The intricacies and limits of family loyalties are delicately explored even in families that include hardened criminals and drug addicts as well as hard-working honest citizens. There are no heroes and most of the characters are gangster criminals or their accomplices, some of whom are nevertheless made likeable. And there are few loose ends, but facts introduced in the first few chapters are often held in suspense until the explanation comes along much later.

If you can conjure up a plan to steal a prize race horse from one Vancouver stable owned by an international criminal gang and transport it, on a stolen fishing boat (plan B after Plan A goes off the rails), to a Washington state ranch owned by another international gang based in Vancouver, perhaps your imagination is almost as vivid as Keevil’s. But you would also need to imagine a challenge to a round robin game of crokinole as a serious means of settling scores in the criminal underworld. Such improbable twists are somehow made to seem very logical.

The writing style is straightforward chronologically with a first person singular narrator describing, in 44 short chapters, how he got caught up in the criminal escapades of his brother, and there are just enough hints at the final outcome along the way to keep the reader engaged. After a dozen situations where you will ask yourself “O.K. How are they going to get out of this jam?” you just have to keep reading to find the improbable answer. But even the final outcome has complexities that cannot be predicted in advance.

This is a unique, wild, and improbable but wonderfully engaging story.

Cordelia Fine, originally from Toronto, is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, Australia. This book is an iconoclastic, extensively researched counterpoint to the widely held belief in the evolutionary scientific community that biological sex is a major determinant of personality and behaviour in humans. She provides more information than most readers would ever feel a need to know about the sexual behaviour and the roles of males and females in societies of dung beetles, cichlid fish, hedge sparrows, bush crickets, laboratory rats, fellow primates and Homo Sapiens around the world. Some measure of the extent of the underlying research is the fifty pages of reference notes, and the sixteen page index.

The basic premise is conveyed in one sentence in the introduction: “There are no essential male or female characteristics.” Differences in brain activity, interests and abilities in males and females is shown to be largely not due the effect of XX or XY chromosomal combinations or even due to the effect of hormones. Risk taking and aggression in men, nurturing and domesticity in women, etc, are stereotypical behaviours resulting largely from culturally ingrained and reinforced expectations and the effects of these on the highly adaptable developing brain.

Fine reserves her most scathing comments for the sex-segregated toy industry, advertisers, and marketers who play the part of reinforcing the myth of innate differences in the interests and abilities of boys and girls. But it seems to me that even ads directed at adults are guilty of reinforcing stereotypes, although perhaps less so than in the past. I have never seen an ad featuring a man dancing with a Swiffer, nor a woman at the controls of a New Holland prairie grain harvester.

“Biological sex can’t have nearly as potent an effect on behaviour as it does on anatomy.” is the bottom-line conclusion in the last chapter. But as I consider the personalities, interests and talents of my three offspring and the developing personalities and interests of my two granddaughters and two grandsons, I still have some doubts about this radical premise. Have I been guilty of subtlety reinforcing differences based on gender rather than on genetics, without intending to? Probably.

This is a very scholarly thought-provoking book whose conclusion deserves careful consideration by anyone interested in early childhood development or cultural anthropology. I am too unfamiliar with the complexities of either field to either endorse the conclusions or to refute them, but I find the premise interesting.

The War on Science. Shawn Otto, 2016. 426 pages

There is a lot of interesting and useful information in this polemic, and the problems discussed are carefully and exhaustively researched. I enjoyed parts of it immensely. But it is also pedantic, humourless, preachy and needlessly long. Otto is a founding member of ScienceDebates.org an outfit dedicated to making public officials and politicians answer questions about their stances with respect to evidence-based scientific realities, a highly laudable project. The book was published in 2016 but before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which election has obviously lead to the greater denigration of facts in political discourse.

The author goes through an extensive history of science and its relationship to authoritarianism and politics from Galileo to the present, and can seemingly find an explanation for every social movement within the context of the science vs anti-science controversies, some of them quite a stretch. The scientific development of the atomic bomb led to deep distrust of science in the general public, resulting the Cold War and the ‘military- industrial complex’ which lead to the flight to the suburbs and the extensive interstate highway system, etc. Much of this is based on some facts but other influences affecting these trends are largely ignored.

The postmodernism of Jacques Derrida and some philosopher’s doubts about the existence of any absolute truths is discussed in detail as it relates to the common erroneous belief that all opinions are equally valid. The Eric Hoffer comment that “All active mass movements… strive to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world” seems very accurate in this context. Journalists’ insistence on balance harms the dissemination of verifiable truth, often aided by vested interests, religious dogma and veiled business interests inculcating doubt about such established facts as evolution, smoking’s link to lung cancer, climate change reality, and the efficacy and safety of modern vaccination. Otto describes the postmodern journalists need to find debate to sensationalize their stories as “journalistic porn.”

Nietzsche questioned the existence of objective truth and proposed perspectivism, which leads to the conclusion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid, even those that are contrary to verified universal observations. Cardinal Ratzinger defended the heresy conviction of Galileo on the basis of cultural relativism.

There are some great insights as Otto describes the common misconceptions about the basic antiauthoritarian essence of the scientific method. Newt Gingrich’s abolition of the Office of Technology assessment in 1994, is described as a Congressional lobotomy. The failure of scientists to explain their work to the public and the common attitude of scientists that it is beneath their dignity to do so resulted in the rejection of Carl Sagan’s application for membership in The National Academy of Sciences because he spent too much time explaining science to the general public.

But as Otto points out “Atmospheric CO2 is the same whether measured by a Somali woman or an Argentinian man.”

Some consequences of ignoring scientifically established observations would be laughable if the consequences were not so tragic. Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, made roughly $1 million, by advocating for abstinence as the only acceptable means of birth control for singles, contrary to all scientific data about effective birth control, ironically after her first unplanned out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and before her second. North Carolina lawmakers have refused to allow sea level projections derived from climate scientists’ best guesses to be used for building and zoning laws.

There are some grammatical errors from lack of proof-reading e.g. “infections from bacteria-resistant bugs.”

I have a personal hang-up about the title and much of the text that puts the issues into military terms, jargon, and analogies. Any social issues that are described with military metaphors- the war on drugs, poverty, terror, battles over this or that, etc., sets the stage for an uncompromising insistence on total surrender by one or the other side. This is hardly the best means of making incremental progress. Far better would be to deploy the art of persuasion and kindly education with an attempt to understand the other side’s view rather than strident finger-pointing. Unfortunately, most scientists are not interested or capable of explaining what they are up to.

This is a timely fact-filled rebuttal to those who promote ‘alternative facts’ and fake news. Worth reading.

Behold The Dreamers. Imbolo Mbue 2016, 382 pages.

A young Cameroonian man overstays his visitor’s visa in New York City, intent on seeking asylum and living the American Dream, escaping a life of poverty and an overbearing father-in-law in Limbe, Cameroon. With connections in the Cameroonian exile community, he succeeds in bringing his wife and son to Harlem, and lands a dream job as a driver for a senior Lehman Brothers executive and his family. But the life of luxury of Wall Street bankers is not what it appears to be and the relationships in both the families unravel as the financial crisis, and rampant corruption destroys Lehman Brothers and deportation threatens. I won’t spoil the enjoyment of the read by giving away more of the plot, but the family secrets, deceptions, and fears make the American Dream seem more like a nightmare.

This is a work of fiction? It is always fun to check the “ About the Author” blurb, and I do that before delving into a book. Imbolo Mbue is a young Cameroonian immigrant living in New York City for the past ten years (to 2016), according to the “About The Author” blurb in this book, and this is her first novel. That alone makes me wonder how much of this story is autobiographical. Add to that the fact that there is no information in “About the Author” about how a single? woman from Limbe in Cameroon succeeded in moving to live in NYC, and the detailed description of the workings of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it seems likely that this is more like a fictionalized autobiography or at least a story about real people in the author’s circle of friends. As she has degrees from Rutgers and Columbia, can we assume that she, like me, originally arrived in the U.S. on a student visa, like one of her characters, but unlike me, just stayed?

Whatever. The story line is gripping and the characters seem very real. The contrasts between the daily lives and the values of the poor immigrants in Harlem and the New York socialites of the upper west side are striking.

This is a great light read for a snowy day when you don’t want anything too heavy.

It would be extremely arrogant on my part to criticize any book by Yuval Noah Harari. But it would be almost as arrogant to claim that I understand everything he has written in this and his two previous books, Sapiens and Homo Deus. He is a brilliant Israeli historian, thinker and philosopher with encyclopedic knowledge, an ability to look beyond facts and see connections in disparate trends, and a skeptical frame of mind.

Sapiens, his first book is an expansive history of Homo sapiens from the Big Bang to the present, with detailed discussion of major developments along the way. As such, it is an expanded and updated version of Jacob Bronowski’s 13 part, 1973 BBC series The Ascent Of Man, which was made into a book by the same name. There is little speculation but a ton of interesting facts about our common ancestors in that book. Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by contrast, although equally scholarly, are chuck full of predictions and speculations about our collective future.

The best way to give you a sense of the breadth of the topics discussed in relation to what may happen in this century, is to list some chapter headings- Work, Liberty, Civilization, Religion, Immigration, War, God, Justice, Post-Truth, Secularism, Education, and Science Fiction. In the long penultimate chapter, Meaning, Harari gets wound up like a watch spring into a pressured-speech rant about the meaninglessness of life and a host of current ‘stories’ that we invent to give it meaning.

In some detailed discussions about machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, algorithms and brain-computer interactions and connections, the philosopher Harari comes close to espousing a hard determinism and a denial of free will. “Feelings are not some uniquely human quality and they do not reflect any kind of free will. Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms.” This reflects the monist theory in philosophy that the mind and soul do not exist except as neuronal firing patterns determined by genetics and random environmental influences. However, in the last chapter Meditation, which reads like an advertisement for a particular brand of meditation, Vipassana, he seems to conclude that the human mind exists entirely separate from the human body. And in the chapter on Liberty, he suggests that we may finally have found a practical use for philosophers, in programming self-driving cars to follow either the deontological ‘categorical imperatives’ ethics of Emmanuel Kant or the consequentialist ethics of John Stuart Mills. Will you choose the egoist Tesla that will kill the child running into the street or the altruist model that will kill you by veering into the oncoming transport? But that question implies the existence of your free will.

Harari is very concerned about the development of intelligent beings from artificial intelligence, computer- based decision-making and bioengineering that may outperform and override our unassisted brains. However, the term AI is undefined and used loosely in current parlance-any computer program that has a four- node decision tree can be called artificial intelligence-and most human brains are capable of taking more than four sequential decision points into account in deciding on the best possibility of achieving a goal. Some of the concerns about the effects of AI seem unlikely to me. How likely is it that Homo sapiens will split into two different species by the end of this century? If Darwin was right, that split may eventually happen, but in the next eighty years? And the assertion that “consciousness might even be severed completely from any organic structure and surf through cyberspace free of all biological and physical constraints” seems farfetched to this Luddite.

Niels Bohr is credited with the witticism popularized by Yogi Berra: “Predictions are hard-especially about the future.” The truth of this is amply demonstrated by the poor track record of past predictions throughout history as documented by David A Wilson in his 2000 book The History of the Future. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers and Nicholas Taub in The Black Swan,

both show that completely unforeseeable one-off events can derail all predictions, a possibility that Harari would readily acknowledge, although like all futurists, he argues that this time will be different and his predictions will be accurate.

This triad of books by perhaps the most scholarly erudite original thinker of our time make for great reading. If you only have the time for one of them, I recommend Sapiens, but all three are educational and thought-provoking. And in spite of the serious topics, the writing is generally very easy to follow with mostly pithy short sentences, and startling turns of phrases. My favourite quote, from the latest book, in the chapter on secularism: “Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”

This tome is a struggle. Although I managed to read through to the end, it would be lying to assert that I understood much of it. As a card-carrying humanist, I have been interested in what determines our thoughts, beliefs and actions for a long time. I have dabbled in the literature of modern philosophers such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens, but I cannot keep track of the different beliefs about free will by more remote thinkers, dozens of whom are featured in this book. I have listened to debates about this issue at humanist meetings and on different podcasts and radio programs. Perhaps my interest in this was first tweeted by reading Philip Zimbaldi’s classic The Lucifer Effect which showed how easy it is under various circumstances to make morally upright people into the embodiment of evil.

There are dozens of isms discussed in this encyclopedic work. To grossly oversimplify, the ‘scandal’, is that on one side there are hard determinists who argue that everything we think, believe and do is determined entirely by physical and chemical reactions in our brains, which are in turn determined by evolution since the Big Bang, as modified by chance experiences; therefore we are slaves to those processes. On the other side the compatibilists like Daniel Dennett try to reconcile our everyday experience of seeming to make choices and be responsible for our thoughts and actions with those brain physical and chemical actions that accompany them. The difficulty, from my simplistic viewpoint is that while there is no hard scientific evidence for anything determining our actions other than those brain activities, (we will never discover a soul or mind through science), the logical conclusion from hard determinism seems superficially to be that such concepts as responsibility, choice, good and evil, justice and punishment, become meaningless. I listened to a debate about this between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and became even more confused. (Full disclosure- in the past I have supported Sam Harris financially because I enjoy listening to his podcasts.) I have difficulty reconciling Sam Harris’s moral outrage on various issues (which I admire), with his insistence on hard determinism. If everything he believes is predetermined by the evolutionary processes that caused his brain to function in a certain way, how can he logically be enraged about it?

Perhaps the most useful way to look at this scandal is to doubt that we really have any free will, but to function on a day-to-day basis as though we do. This is not an original idea of mine (hard determinism would seem to deny that I or anyone else could have an original idea), but one that is universally scorned by academic philosophers and cognitive scientists alike as devious self-deception.

Sorry for this gross oversimplification, but that is all that I can get out of this book.

The Shoe On The Roof Will Ferguson 2017, 364 pages.

First a confession. I picked this book up from the library due to a misunderstanding. Years ago I read and enjoyed a book called Onyx John by a Mr Ferguson, whom I remembered as the brother of Reverend Rod Ferguson, my friend, pastor and spiritual advisor for many years when I was a Presbyterian; now I am just Presby(old). But on checking, that was by Trevor Ferguson, probably no relation to Will. I also fail to see any real connection of the plot to the story of the cardiac arrest patient’s out-of-body experience related on the dust jacket and responsible for the title. Perhaps this just emphasizes the important marketing value of the title for any work of fiction.

Will Ferguson is probably is well known to most Canadian bibliophiles as the author of many books including three that have won Leacock awards for humour and one that has won the Giller Prize, but I have not read (or have forgotten) those. I may now have to check some of them out.

This is my kind of story, combining extensive neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, religion, romance (and some fairly graphic sex) and philosophy into a fast-paced unpredictable thriller. And there is abundant humour, but also great insights into the essence of what it means to be human. The fuzzy borders of sanity are blurred, and the characters that are portrayed as mad provide some of the best insights. One remarkable quote among many, from a psychotic patient who is absolutely certain that he is Jesus Christ: “I think society needs people like us to define what normal is. The mad serve a useful role-always have. If madness didn’t exist we would have to invent it. Some might say we have.”

This story is set in Boston at an unspecified time in the past, the only real time clue being the recent publication of the Third Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which would place it somewhere in the 1980s. But, as this was referred to throughout as the SDM 3 not DSM 3, and was supposedly produced by one of the characters, we cannot be precise about the time, and a lot of the neuroscience is of more recent discovery. I presume the obfuscation is deliberate, possibly because the real authors of the DSM would not be amused by its characterization.

There are not a huge number of characters to confuse the reader, but almost all of them seem to border on insanity at some point. A medical sciences student working in a neuroscience laboratory devises a devious plan to become famous by locating god within the human brain and curing three very different psychotics who are all absolutely sure they are god or Jesus, using only cognitive therapy and no pharmaceuticals. Ultimately he is forced to enlist the help of a fellow researcher and then his famous father who is the lead author of the SDM3. The characterization of psychotics within an institution reminded me my time spent living and working at a mental hospital and rings true to me. (I was not a patient there, but might well have qualified for admission.) One of the delusional psychotic Jesus characters even pulls his right eye out obeying the Biblical commandment “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.” A psychiatric nurse friend told me, long before this story was written, the true story of a patient who did just that. How much more realistic can fiction get?

I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.

The Feather Thief. Kirk Wallace Johnson 2018, 248 pages.

If there was ever a need to defend the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction, this book would provide definitive proof. As the convicted thief told the author in an interview “You can’t make this stuff up.” It is the real-life bizarre story of a 2009 break-in at the British Museum of Natural History to steal bird skins and feathers. Furthermore the thief was a talented aspiring young American musician at the Royal Academy of Music in London. And the story may never have been told in any detail were it not for an off-hand comment by a fly fishing enthusiast waist-deep in a California river, to a stressed-out ex-soldier and refugee advocate.

Johnson details the history of collecting specimens of animals and birds from all over the world for museums and private collections from the time of Wallace and Darwin in the mid 1800s to the multimillion dollar market for feathers in the fashion industry in the late 1800s to the present black market in endangered species. Only in the early 1900s did the Audubon Society and similar conservation groups begin to pressure governments to restrict the trade in exotic feathers and furs. Unfortunately my favourite pastime of tying flies and fly fishing has got a bad reputation in this field with expert tiers of Victorian-era salmon flies spending thousands of dollars for skins of endangered Resplendent Quetsal, Indian Crow, Flame Bowerbird, Bird of Paradise, Blue Chatterer, and Jungle cock, and openly trading them on eBay in defiance of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. You can still watch U-Tube videos of many of them demonstrating how to tie the exotic feathers on to a hook. And they are like a secret society clamming up when asked about the missing museum specimens and the origin of some of their materials.

Walter Rothschild’s Museum of Natural History in Tring, England houses close to 700,00 bird skins and 17,000 whole birds from around the world, of enormous value to scientists. The thief (or thieves, since it is still not clear whether or not he acted alone) stole close to 300 of these in one night, for the express purpose of satisfying his obsession with flies for fishing. His crime was not solved for fourteen months and he was then given a light sentence because of an almost certainly false claim by his lawyer that he had a controversial psychiatric disorder.

I have been a member of two different fly fishing clubs and have been to a few fly fishing conventions and watched some professional tiers in awe of their skills. But the Victorian salmon flies that often are featured in tying contests (and are the ones most likely to require feathers of exotic birds) bear little resemblance to the salmon flies amateurs like me are likely to tie. They are art forms that may take hours to tie and are far too expensive to ever risk losing in a stream-side tree. Amateurs like me are more likely to use cheap but practical materials, often not from the tackle shops at all. If you spot someone plucking feathers or clipping fur from the roadkill, you can be sure he or she is an amateur fly tier. A friend recently called to tell me that he had shot a deer and asked me if I wanted a piece of tail! I declined.

On reading this book, I recalled one incident that seemed strange at the time but now makes sense. About the time of the feather theft, I crossed the border from Sarina to Port Huron on my way to our annual week of salmon fly fishing in a remote secret site in northern Ontario. I was the designated fly tier for the dozen or so men in our camp, and had perhaps 400 flies in boxes and trays in my vehicle. (A few of my creations in boxes and a closer look at a few are shown below). Quite proud of myself for figuring out how to import these photos). The border booth guy asked me what was in the boxes, asked to see them, then asked if any of the flies were made from the fur or feathers of endangered species. He seemed satisfied when I told him that I got all of the material from reputable tackle shops. I realize now that I did have several flies with jungle cock cheeks.

This story was recently topped in weirdness by a story of seventy live Guyanese finches, worth up to $10,00 each, seized by customs agents at Kennedy Airport, hidden in hair rollers. They were supposedly destined for illegal singing contests, and were kept quiet for their flight by being given rum.

I might be accused of a bias because of my hobby, but I highly recommend this well-written stranger-than-fiction story.

Death row humour. “What does capital punishment mean? It means a guy without capital gets punished”. This is just one of many memorable quotes from this remarkable autobiography of a poor black Alabama labourer who, from age 29 spent thirty years in prison, mostly on death row, for two murders that it is obvious from the start he did not commit.

I love reading biographies but generally shun autobiographies with their almost inevitable self-aggrandizement and ego boosterism. But there is little of that here, as Hinton readily acknowledges making poor choices in his life before his death sentence, including stealing a car, writing bad cheques and extensive womanizing, and makes no excuses for those bad decisions. But the truth that he tells is of a corrupt, inept, incredibly complicated and racially biased system that is quite willing to kill innocent people in the name of justice and maintaining the myth of being tough on crime.

In school, and as long as she was alive, Ray Hinton was a mamma’s boy, and he often quotes her homespun admonitions in droll southern black vernacular. He was also a talented athlete who, in a just world might well have become a Major League Baseball star. Instead, because he was poor, black and lived in Alabama, he went to work in a coal mine where his father had been crippled for life. Going down into the mine “felt like climbing into your own coffin every day”.

Life on death row is vividly depicted with the alternating hope and despair, the wry gallows humour, and the friendships and unwritten cultural rules that develop between men confined to adjacent 5×7 foot cages every day for years. Hinton developed a strong friendship with a white supremest KKK killer, mourned with him when the man’s father died, and cried when the man was electrocuted a few feet outside his cell. He heard the generator start there for 54 electrocutions and smelled death with them all. According to one myth, one secret that never escaped from Pandora’s Box was the date of one’s death as no one could live with that knowledge. But these men were told exactly when they would die weeks before.

But Hinton also had a vivid imagination and dreamt of visiting exotic sites, playing for the Yankees (he fired an appointed Boston lawyer, joking to fellow inmates that he didn’t want to be defended by a Red Sox fan) and marrying in succession, Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock, and then Kim Kardashian. He prayed and read the Bible, but it is not clear what his religious beliefs were, and at one point questioned the existence of God. What is not said in a biography is often as interesting as what is said; he never mentions any visitors to him on death row from members or leaders of the evangelical church he had attended regularly. He tried to start a book club on death row-“it was a gift to spend time in your mind away from your own reality”- but the prison officials cruelly nixed that escape.

The title derives from the only words Hinton could think to say when he walked out of prison as a free man in April, 2015, with media cameras flashing all around him. He admits to having difficulty adjusting to a life of freedom, and now works for the Equal Justice Initiative and his lawyer, whose persistence was the only thing that spared him from the electric chair. Will he maintain his equanimity and forgiving nature as a celebrity advocate for abolition of the death penalty in years to come? Celebrity has torn the moral fabric of many who achieved it, but I doubt that it will change this humble wise man who never wanted publicity.

This is a true story that must be told, and no one can do that as well as Anthony Ray Hinton. It is not always a pleasant story- it will make you cry as often as you laugh, but I encourage you to read it, and share it.

One last quote: “No one can understand what freedom means until they don’t have it.”