Author: thepassionatereader

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.”

This thoroughly researched historical novel covers only four days in late 1938. Hitler has threatened to invade and annex Sudetenland to expand the Third Reich. British, Italian, French and German leaders with their diplomatic staff meet in Berlin in a desperate effort to avert war. So far strictly factual. Two junior diplomats, one German and the other British, and both Oxford graduates, working independently at first, and then together try desperately to sabotage the process, more alert to the dangers of appeasing Hitler than the leaders (not so factual). Squabbling and scheming diplomats abound. Sir Neville Chamberlain becomes the hero who appeared to save the world from what seemed like certain war, at the last minute. His speech announcing that the leaders had reached an agreement ensuring “peace in our time” later became the main reason historians have betrayed him as a weak and foolish leader. It is always easier to judge leaders with knowledge of the consequences of their decisions, than to consider their decisions in the context in which they were made.

The plotting of the strategies and the character development is realistic and entertaining. And this is a timely cautionary tale about the dangers of yielding any ground to egotistical lying devious would-be dictators

Almost every time I took a break from this book, I found my wife watching a cooking show demonstration of how to concoct some delicious decadent complicated huge meal.

Deborah Cohen is a public health physician in California, now working for the Rand Corporation, a large think tank. She is certainly knowledgeable and passionate in her efforts to deal with what she describes as the epidemic of obesity in America. She advocates using the public heath measures that were used in the past to reduce the harm from poor sanitation, uncontrolled alcohol use, and tobacco to fight this blight.

Almost the first third of the book is devoted to an uncritical analysis of over one hundred social science studies that fairly convincingly show that modern obesity is not the result of poor self control on the part of individuals. It is rather the result of our unchanged evolutionary survival instinct to eat as often and as much as we can, combined with a changed “food environment”. The latter includes increased outlets for food (think vending machines, gas stations, food trucks, Costco), aggressive marketing of unhealthy but delicious foods, and coupling of these same foods with other pleasures in the media and movies. About thirty percent of grocery sales is of generally unhealthy items displayed at the end of isles or at the check out counter. And allegedly most grocery store chains make more profit from charging wholesalers for prime display sites than they do from retail sales. Appropriate comparisons are made to the devious and sometimes illegal marketing strategies of the tobacco industry in the past. As I read about the effectiveness of display site marketing, I began to question whether or not my reading choices were being subtly manipulated by the shelf placement of books at the Beaverbrook Library. None of us are immune to subliminal nudges.

I will not detail all of Cohen’s recommendations to remedy this situation, some of which seem realistic, some pipe dreams and some that seem quite silly to me. There is a heavy emphasis on draconian legislation, as one might expect from a public health guru. Dictate that all vendors standardize the size of some common items such as hamburgers? Require licensing for all food outlets and limit their numbers geographically? Force grocers to display healthy food choices in prime sites? Perhaps the silliest recommendation is to require licensing for waitstaff and busboys in restaurants. We do not need more restriction on the job opportunities for uneducated and unskilled workers by self-serving licensing boards. But there is a precedent with tobacco for limiting or banning advertising of harmful products. Could we ban all-you-can-eat advertising and the bundling of different foods together as combos which is a very effective strategy in the fast food industry? If I had to order the fries separately from the burger, or the eggs, toast, bacon and home fries all separately, I might decide that I didn’t need the fries or the bacon. But protests about bundling retail products together have not altered the business plans of Rogers, Bell, or Shaw. Should the Toblerone join the cigarettes out of sight behind the counter- still available but not in temptation’s path? There is a dearth of suggestions on how we might be ‘nudged’ as per Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge, as opposed to being forced to make healthy choices.

The discussion of the environmental impact of food choices is interesting. In Europe, an estimated 31,000,000 tons of food waste rots in landfills annually, contributing vast amounts of methane pollution to the atmosphere. Raising animals for food is not only inefficient energy usage, it also is environmentally harmful. Animals, especially ruminants, belch and fart vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere. I get a faint twinge of guilt when I cut into a sirloin. But if we eschew methane-producing foods, we need to cut out rice too, as the paddies also spew vast amounts of methane.

Some recommendations seem to lack any scientific backing. Eschew bananas and other products shipped from afar because of the environmental harm of shipping? Not according to Mike Berners-Lee in How Bad Are Bananas? The carbon footprint of everything. Get lots of sun exposure to avoid vitamin D deficiency? Not wise, according to most dermatologists.

The writing style is a bit dry, pedantic, preachy and repetitive although she relates personal anecdotes that readers will find interesting. There is one major unwarranted assumption that underlies all the recommendations, i.e. that we know what a healthy diet consists of. There are hundreds of contradictory dietary recommendations even from experts, not counting the celebrity-endorsed quacks, and the experts have a long history of backing the wrong horse. Dr. Robert Lustig (Fat Chance), Nina Teicholz (The Big Fat Surprise), Gary Taube (The Case Against Sugar) and Helen Bishop MacDonald (The Big Fat Misunderstanding) all convincingly show that the recommendations of the heart-health and cholesterol-obsessed gurus with tunnel vision in the last half of the last century contributed to the epidemic of heart disease, obesity and diabetes, rather than reducing them. Helen Bishop MacDonald (full disclosure-she is an acquaintance and neighbour) even recommends that we enjoy the mutton fat and marbled beefsteak fat from those belching and farting ruminants because of the favourable ratio of different omega fatty acids therein. Phew! Now I feel better about my love of red meats.

Economics is said to be the dismal science, but perhaps nutrition science should win that label. Or psychology, with its penchant for contrived experiments on university students and its frequent confounding of correlation with causation. Cohen draws on all three of these fields to not-entirely-convincingly explain the increasing problem of obesity, and to provide less than entirely realistic solutions. In spite of recommendations to reduce its use, this book should be widely read-but with a pinch of salt.

Next week- another great historical novel and an insight into prison life.

This extensively researched book by the well-known Pulitzer Prize- winning Washington Post journalist does a thorough job of conveying to the reader the disorganization and chaos of the Donald Trump presidential campaign and the first 14 months of his presidency. More than that, it conveys the shallowness, egotism, ignorance, arrogance and vindictiveness of the president. But almost anyone who has not been living under a stone and has a brain has had multiple other sources of information that would lead to the same judgement. Apart from historians looking back on this time period and trying to make sense of it, who else needs more details about this example of chaos theory in action?

It is difficult for the average reader outside of the D.C. beltway, at least this average reader, to keep track of the dozens of acronyms, the ever- changing job titles and the revolving door personnel in the White House and the Pentagon. A list of acronyms, major personnel, and a time line with the dates of major events would have been very helpful to readers who don’t make a living analyzing politics.

The last date mentioned in the book is March 12, 2018, and the book was published by Simon and Shuster on September 11, 2018. That should have given the author, publisher, and intermediaries adequate time to get it polished into something coherent, with logical flow and decent grammar. Yet the flow is anything but logical with individual chapters jumping randomly from foreign policy, to immigration, to economics to environmental concerns and the interminable internal bickering, and jumping back and forward in time. The lack of proofreading is glaring- “By any reasoning, the exercise was serious preparation, but it was at this point, one available contingency on the shelf being practiced.” Although Woodward hints that when he uses quotation marks it conveys actual direct quotes, at times the use of these seems almost random. It seems obvious that this was a rush job by a journalist and a publisher with a tight self-imposed deadline, well aware that there would be a very short time interval in which to sell the story- and the book.

Definitely not worth $30.00

I read this memoir in about 24 hours and really enjoyed it-initially. Two young serial entrepreneurs decide to start a book club for inmates at Collins Bay medium-security prison near Kingston and this is the author’s documentation of what happened as a result.

There is a paucity of evidence that getting convicted criminals to read and discuss a lot of books alters their behaviour and reduces recidivism, but the idea seems intuitive. My wife pointed out to me one paper she found addressing this- a pathetic 2015 Ph.D. thesis paper of a student in Toledo that doesn’t stand up to critical analysis and to me seems to be just pseudo-science. It seems that most of the literature on this issue concerns juvenile offenders, not adults, and certainly not female offenders, and is full of social science gobbledegook. Obviously a lot depends on the choice of books and the skills of the leaders of the endeavour. I doubt that there has ever been a better need for and opportunity to do a scientifically rigorous double-blind controlled trial in social sciences than one to assess this effect.

I had not read some of the books that the prisoners discussed, but I knew the themes of most of them. I once read a how-to essay on how to impress others and appear to be intelligent and well-read by referencing and discussing books that you have not read. With online reviews perhaps including mine herein, that has become very easy.

The book provides an interesting insight into the culture of prisons and shatters the stereotype of prisoners as a homogeneously incorrigible lot of bad actors, with no morals or conscience. This may be its major virtue.

It is not clear to me whether the inmates or the two upper middle class women leaders benefitted the most from the experience, either psychologically or financially. One of the instigators wrote a book about the experience, and the other, as a result of this undertaking became the CEO of what has become a large charity, no doubt drawing a good salary.

The author’s flaunting her wide knowledge of English literature becomes a bit annoying, frequently citing books that are not on the book club agenda, and she seems to hold the view, common to many literati, that knowing a lot of literature will automatically make one a better person, which is a bit of a non-sequester. Is it better to be a philosopher or a pig? The problem with that question is that only the philosopher can answer it.

It is clear that from the start that at least part of the author’s motivation for getting involved was to eventually write a book about it and presumably to make money doing so. It is telling therefore that she ceased to be involved as soon as she had enough material for the book.

Still, a very enjoyable read, not to be taken too seriously.

Less Medicine, More Health. H. Gilbert Welsh. 2015. 194 pages

Dr. Welsh is a brilliant professor of family medicine at Dartmouth. He and I have exchanged emails about our previous books, his Overdiagnosed and my Medicine Outside The Box which have a lot in common although I will never match his writing skills. We share many iconoclastic views about modern medicine. So when I saw this later book in the library, I knew I had to read it.

In a scholarly compelling treatise, laced with numerous anecdotes and humour, Dr. Welsh destroys seven myths about modern medical practices: all risks can be lowered, it is always better to fix the problem, sooner is always better, it never hurts to get more information, action is always better than inaction, newer is always better and, it’s all about avoiding death. His anecdotes sometimes relate real tragedies, such as the orthopaedic surgeon who developed life-threatening and difficult to detect chromium poisoning as a result of choosing the newest hip prosthesis for himself.

This book is an easy compelling read that should be of interest to anyone who is ever a patient, i.e. pretty much everyone. There is considerable overlap in the information with that in Overdiagosed. If forced by time constraints to choose one or the other, I would recommend Less Medicine. More Health.

Now for one negative. In the introduction, he relates the story of a man who almost bleed to death after having a liver biopsy of a mass that was found on imaging while investigatingD an unrelated problem. The mass was an innocuous hemangioma. I happen to know a bit about this subject and why anyone would ever biopsy a liver mass that turned out to be an hemangioma is beyond me. The imaging characteristics of the very common liver hemangiomata are diagnostic, and there is never a need for a biopsy. This was not a good example of feeling the need for more information but rather an obvious medical mistake. Apart from this poor example of the messages he is delivering, I cannot find any fault with this book.

When I noticed a rave review of this new book in some magazine, I knew that I had to take a closer look. I had so thoroughly enjoyed reading his biography Long Walk To Freedom that I was sure this one would be educational and enjoyable. I then made the mistake of mentioning it to my wife, and a few days later the book showed up in our mailbox. Buying this book was a big mistake.

To begin with, the format of the book is far from reader-friendly. The letters are logically laid out chronologically for the whole time he was incarcerated, from 1962 until 1990. But a quick glance at any book that includes a Foreword, an Introduction, and a ‘Note on the Letters’ at the start, very extensive footnotes in impossibly small print on almost every page taking up to 1/2 of the page, with those footnotes in turn referring to an eighteen page Glossary at the back, and an eight-page small print index should alert potential readers that this is not going to be an easy read.

An easy read, it certainly is not, but is it educational or worth the effort?

It sheds a bit more light on the great man’s humility, (he vows in one letter to never write an autobiography -(“…through me the Creation intended to give the world an example of a mediocre man.”), idealism, family loyalty, stamina, determination and morality than does the earlier biography, but not by a lot. And it exposes the cruelty and deviousness of the apartheid regime in detail. Most of the letters were never delivered and remained out of the public’s reach until the diligent editor found them in various archives. And it is certainly not his fault that the letters are often addressed to or discuss numerous relatives, friends, acquaintances, tribal chiefs, administrative officials, and fellow freedom-fighters all referred to with peculiar multiple unpronounceable names in several different local languages. His use of names, words and phrases in isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, and Bantu may justify some of the footnotes, but were still distracting to this anglophone. The average reader will find it impossible to keep track of the hundreds of names. I counted up thirty unfamiliar names in one two page letter, but I was impressed with the number of people Mandela must have known personally and the huge social network he maintained. There are many letters that relate exclusively to family matters that will be of limited interest even to historians. Other letters are duplicated in both (often illegible) handwritten and typed formats.

In spite of the careful editorial work and notes between some of the letters setting out the background, there are some peculiar inconsistencies. In a letter to the Minister of Justice dated February 12, 1975, Mandela discusses in the past tense a conversation they had had on December 27th, 1975. And in a letter to Winnie dated Sept 1, 1976, he refers to her letter of September 29th, and then one paragraph later notes that on September 26th she will be turning 42.

I struggled though this book, tolerating only small doses a few times a day, looking for nuggets. But the best nugget was on the dust cover of the hard copy, a quote that I had earmarked within the text before discovering that someone else had also dug out this gem: “A new world will be won not by those who stand at a distance with their arms folded, but by those in the arena, whose garments are torn by storms and whose bodies are maimed in the course of the contest.” The following prescient insight was in a 1971 letter to a friend. “The trouble, of course, is that most successful men are prone to vanity. There comes a time in their lives when they consider it permissible to be egotistic and to brag to the public at large about their unique accomplishments.”

For academics researching the history of apartheid, this book will be an invaluable resource. But I am disappointed that the editor and the publisher have crassly capitalized on the great man’s name to pitch this book to the general public. There is a deceptive Barrack Obama quote praising Nelson Mandela on the back cover as though he was praising the book, which he probably has not read. And at least some professional book reviewers, who may not have read it in its entirety either, seem obliged to play along. Don’t be, like me, deceived by this hype into buying this book; but be sure to read The Long Walk To Freedom

I was browsing in the fiction section of the library when I recognized this author’s name on the jacket of this book, from her stories in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, so I signed it out. I am glad I did. This epic first novel is a treasure of extensively researched historical fiction, a War and Peace for modern times. Set in New York, Moscow, Washington, and numerous other places, the complex plot covers the era of 1933 to 2008; families are torn apart by blind loyalty to political beliefs, best friends are betrayed amid the paranoia, duplicity and distrust of the Stalinist purges, and moral dilemmas, family loyalties and eternal truths are delicately explored.

An idealistic young educated American woman leaves what she sees as the corrupt U.S.A. in the 1930’s for the utopian Soviet Union. In spite of deprivations, deceptions, loss of family ties and almost losing her life in a Siberian labour camp, she ever wavers in her loyalty to Marxist ideals. Life in the cruel, paranoid, antisemitic world of the Stalinist era U.S.S.R. is graphically depicted. In many ways, this reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. But the plot is much more complex, including the abandonment of U.S. citizens in Moscow by the U.S. government, the fate of U.S. prisoners of war in the Korean War, the convoluted relationship of U.S. entrepreneurial industrialists with corrupt Russian oligarchs as they plan to cooperate in developing oil fields in the Barents Sea after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the problematic relationship between Russian Jews and the birth of the state of Israel.

Each of the 43 chapters starts with an official-looking slightly smudged stamp of the year and the location. The chapters are not sequential, jumping back and forth between 1933 to 2008, and from Moscow, New York, and Washington D.C. to Siberia. Nor is there one narrator- some chapters are related in the first person singular, others from the viewpoint of a disinterested third person. This makes it a bit of a challenge for the reader to keep the characters and their relationships straight, as does the usual Russian practice of using multiple names for individuals, depending on the circumstances. The first few chapters need to be read slowly and carefully (or reread, as I did) in order to keep track of who is who in what follows.

There is a lot of introspective analysis of motives and moral problems by various characters, but this never comes across as sappy sentimentality; rather it infuses the story with depictions of universal human weaknesses and dilemmas.

Among many memorable lines, I chose two. “A memory is a difficult thing to judge from a distance” and, in relation to the unfairness of life, “Fair is a place where pigs win ribbons.”

Inevitably, this work will be compared to A Gentleman in Moscow, which I reviewed last week. This story’s plot is much more complex, and there is much more suspense and intrigue. I am ambivalent as to which one to recommend if you only have the time or the inclination to read one Soviet-era historical novel, but on balance I would recommend The Patriots, which I just finished this week. I changed the order of the reviews I had planned to post this week, in the hope that readers will enjoy this book as much as I did. And no, I have no relationship to the author or the publisher. This is not a paid plug.

A Gentleman in Moscow. Amor Towes  2016  480 pages

In 1922, an aristocratic count from the tsarist era is accused of writing a poem critical of the newish Bolshevik government, and a Soviet tribunal sentences him to house arrest in the famous and luxurious Metrpol Hotel on Red Square across from the Kremlin for the rest of his life. The description of his adaptation to this restriction over the next forty years by maintaining his dignity, tolerance, loyalty, and good manners is striking and heartwarming. The changing lives of various guests and workers at the hotel, and the pervasive political atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue and fear as they interact are central features of this epic historical novel. 

Do not read this book for the action or suspense-there is very little of either. What there is is a powerful depiction of one human being’s resilience and adaptability. The ability to find some tiny exquisite pleasure in the midst of extreme hardship, betrayal, and persecution may be a feature of the Russian character, or just those portrayed in Russian historical novels, but it is carefully portrayed here. In this respect it reminded me most of Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and his The Gulag Archipelago, and Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, among others.

There are many memorable quotes in this beautiful story. Among my favourites it this:  ‘For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.’ Or perhaps:  ‘If patience wasn’t so easily tested, then it would not be a virtue.’ Or even ‘It is a fact of human life that one must eventually chose a philosophy.’ 

The author has pointed out that the doubling of the time intervals between chapters in the first half of the story and the halting of them in the second half is a metaphor for the way we seem to experience the evolution of our lives. This was lost on me until he pointed it out, although it is, in retrospect, very apt.

Amor Towes’s background as a former New York City investment banker makes him an unlikely novelist. He has said that the inspiration for this book came from his familiarity with the lives lived in luxury hotels around the world in his former occupation. Unlike most novelists who turn to writing in midlife and turn out a bestselling debut, his first novel, Rules of Civility is quite bland and unimaginative compared to this one, his second. 

Kenneth Branagh is to produce and star in a movie adaptation of this story. I will certainly watch it when it arrives, although I have often been disappointed in film adaptations of great novels. Do not wait for the movie, but be sure to read this beautiful story.

A Higher Loyalty. James Comey. 2018. 277 pages

This book gives the reader a very enlightening, informative perspective on recent U.S. politics, from a high profile dedicated Republican insider. I struggled to find any meaningful criticism, but I usually can win that struggle. I was not amused by his conclusion early in the book and apparently early in his life that he could do more to benefit society by becoming a lawyer than as a doctor.

The characterization of many public figures who are household names is interesting, particularly Cheney, Ashton and Mueller, though he says little about Rumsfeld and seems to have blind spot for George W. Bush’s many faults. His comparison of Trump’s modus operandi to that of the Mafia dons he previously prosecuted is particularly apt. The best quote among many good ones is “The most dangerous place in New York is between Rudi Giuliani and a microphone”.

He seemingly adequately explains his reasoning as FBI Director in reopening the investigation into Hilary Clinton’s email usage close to the 2016 election, although I suspect that there is in this and some of his other tough decisions, a bit of post hoc justification. And others have argued that he was influenced by a campaign of Russian disinformation in the first place to override protocol and make public announcements about the email investigations, rather than leaving that decision to the attorney-general, Loretta Lynch.

Now for some negatives that I did manage to dredge up. Like most U.S. authors of nonfiction, he rarely acknowledges that there is a world beyond their borders. He never divulges any personal guiding life philosophy or anchor for his ethics. Is it based on some religious creed, secular humanism or some inborn moral compass without any unifying philosophy of life? Does it matter? Probably not, but It would be of interest to readers to know. His reverence for the U.S. constitution, a deeply flawed document, is common to almost all Americans but is hardly justified in my opinion. He seems to accept without reservation that more and better laws will automatically lead to a better society, a far from obvious relationship. To quote Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, “the law is an ass.”

The unfortunate fate of this book is that no hard-line Trump supporter is ever likely to read it.