This peculiar novel starts off as a fairly typical thriller/detective mystery involving the the disappearance of a small girl from a family campground park in Oregon. Suddenly, in a Pauline road-to-Damascus kind of experience, after four chapters, it suddenly veers off into mysticism and magical realism as the protagonist, on a secret visit to ‘the shack’ encounters God the Father as a cheery, chubby black woman with a southern accent, Jesus, as a Middle Eastern man, and the Holy Spirit as a wispy small oriental woman. Over two days this trinity work to enlighten him on the mysteries of the universe, and relieve the lingering burden of his grief from losing his daughter. Mystical allegory, trite aphorisms, magic realism (he walks on water with Jesus), plain magic (resurrection of the dead) and surprising theological lessons based loosely on early Christian teachings is mixed into a theological/philosophical discourse that could fill a whole semester in a theology or philosophy course. Most of these lessons would fit better into a Unitarian discourse than the sermons of dogmatic evangelical Christian clergy. Jesus reveals that he is not religious and not a Christian. The life outlook of the protagonist is forever changed for the better.
Much of the teaching from the Trinity on that weekend is an attempt to reconcile the notion of a loving omnipotent, omniscient deity with the universal human experience of physical and mental suffering. Like C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain or Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen To Good People, this attempt does not quite succeed, in my opinion. There seems to be no questioning of the existence of human free will, or of the problematic doctrine of original sin.
An ingenious twist just a few pages from the end kinda, sorta explains the earlier journey into fantasyland and at least brings the story back to earth. The story has been adapted to a 2016 movie starring Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, and Tim McGraw that I have not watched but it might be worth a peek.
There is far too much ethereal spirituality with unquestioning acceptance of the existence of a benign deity that interacts with us here for this secular humanist. But just as reading the political works of those whose outlook is opposite of your own is sometimes useful, I gained a new understanding of how deeply religious folk think from reading this book. It is better to engage and try to understand than to blindly oppose. I am sure that many even semi-religious folk would enjoy it more than I did.
The late Swedish WHO public health physician toured the world giving lectures and quizzes to executives, intellectual leaders, professional associations, educators, Nobel laureates and politicians, including the elite at the Davos World Economic Forum. He uses the responses to his multiple choice quizzes to analyze why these highly educated individuals systemically provide the wrong answers, usually doing worse than chimpanzees that pick answers at random. The correct answers are usually not disputable, being derived from large UN and WHO databases.
Of the 12 fact questions about common important problems that he starts off with, no country’s highly educated respondents on average did better than chance in their answers to any, and most did worse than chimpanzees pushing one of three buttons at random. I was quite proud of my correct response to 8, at least better than the chimps.
In the bulk of the book, a systematic analysis of ten common instincts that lead most of us away from factual realities are exposed and suggestions are made to counteract them. Although the media with their bias toward the sensational but unusual comes in for early blame, he acknowledges that journalists are just providing what sells. “I cannot see even the highest-quality news outlets conveying a neutral and non dramatic representative picture of the world… it would be correct but just too boring.” But I have a suggestion. It may be beyond government power, but news organizations could require or at least request that their outlets balance their bad news stories such as natural disasters, wars and the spread of pandemics with an equal number of good news stories, many of which could come from the upbeat data in this book. e.g. “Today, the world set a new record low for the number of people living in extreme poverty.” Or “1.6 million people flew on 145,000 commercial flights today and they all landed safely.” A great New Year’s resolution for any reporter.
The overall message, like that of Rutgers Bregman in Humankind and Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature is that the world is getting better, and of the three, this provides the best proof and is by far the easiest read. The writing is well organized, delivered with acknowledgment of the authors failings, and humorous self-deprecating anecdotes. It is little wonder that both Barack Obama and Melinda Gates have lavished praise on this work.
Brilliant, timeless, loaded with counterintuitive flawless insights and sage advice, reading this book will forever drastically change your wold view regardless of your background.
This thick volume starts off with a discussion of the rates and reasons for violence in our ancestors from the time of our divergence from other primates to Biblical times and then on to the Middle Ages, and the 20th century, including the prominent role that religious institutions and beliefs played in promoting violence and genocides. “Whether or not the Israelites actually engaged in genocide, they certainly thought it was a good idea.” The author is a Canadian-born atheist of Jewish background at Harvard.
The Humanitarian Revolution chapter veers a bit off course into long quotes from Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, Shakespeare, Emanuel Kant, Thomas Payne, George Washington, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Rene Descartes, Edmund Burke, Baruch Spinoza, and Charles Montesquieu in what seems to me to be an unnecessary effort to show off knowledge. But the conclusion that literacy, particularly the reading of novels, together with urbanization, led to abhorrence of previously sanctioned violence seems valid. Enlightenment humanism, (which I embrace as opposed to religious dogmatism), slowly evolved to emphasize our commonalities.
In trying to explain the (relatively) Long Peace following WWII, Pinker utilizes statistical modelling including Poisson distribution, power-law modelling and multiple logistic regression applied to the magnitude of wars. Statistical manipulation of derivatives of derivatives with arbitrary time frames seem at times to be designed to convince readers of a dubious conclusion. Nevertheless his conclusions that the rise of democracy, increasing international trade and organizations, urbanization, and education about other countries and peoples are potent anti-war weapons seem valid. The same statistical modelling of extensive data lead to the conclusion that civil wars, terrorism, and mass killing of political and ethnic groups (genocides), dependent on exclusionary ideologies have also dramatically declined in the last 40 years, contrary to what we usually hear from doom and gloom talking heads and politicians who oblige the terrorists by trying to scare us. In the long chapter documenting the rise of individual rights and the resultant decrease in rape, assault, domestic, child, and animal abuse, there is a superb snide discussion of the evil unanticipated consequences of efforts to ensure childhood safety.
The Inner Demons chapter is like thick molasses-far too heavy on neuroanatomy (and psychologists interpreting brain images) for most readers to digest or even wade through. And I am really tired of reading endless descriptions of experiments on social science undergrads paid beer money to participate in complicated and devious manipulations dreamed up by their professors. The division of reasons for evil into five arbitrary categories, and discussion of them is nevertheless interesting. But the fifteen pages devoted to Ideology is just an expansive documentation that peer pressure is powerful.
In The Better Angels, Pinker lays out several trends that go some way to explain why every parameter of life has, on average, never been better in the history of Homo sapiens, than at present.The Flynn effect documenting a world-wide increase in intelligence of average human beings was news to me. And the thirty-fold decrease in the risk of dying a violent death in the last millennium is striking.
After the book was written, Russia and Syria disproved his claim that no country would ever again use violence to change borders of a neighbouring one or deploy chemical weapons. And the Trump-era rise of white supremists has reversed the downward trend in racial violence documented for the previous half century. He could not have easily foreseen the rise of asymmetric warfare with drones that create moral dilemmas and inevitably will increase the temptation to start wars. Perhaps he addresses these in his 2018 Enlightenment Now that I have not read (nor am I likely to).
If the reader can get through the long catalogue of nauseating common atrocities in every stage of life, accepted as normal by our ancestors, the overall lesson from this tome is that we have never had it so good, an upbeat message that compliments the much more concise conclusion in Rutgers Bergman’s Humankind.
Scholarly and erudite, the writing is dry and humourless. There are almost 300 pages of Notes, Bibliography, and Index, along with sixty graphs. But I am in awe of the vast amount of information the professor conveys and his ability to grasp the connections from studies in diverse disciplines, and come to counterintuitive conclusions. For example, early on he is trashes Stephen Levitt and Steven Dobner’s Roe vs Wade explanation in Freakenomics for the late 1980’s crime decrease in the U.S.A., and discusses alternative, if inadequate, explanations. “The world has far to much morality….The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it.”
Who should read this book, which Bill Gates says is one of the most important books he has ever read? (My cynical nature makes me question how much of it he has actually read.) Certainly any social science researcher, professional negotiator or university-level historian. It will stay on my bookshelf as a reference volume, although I cannot say that it was a pleasant read.
This is not an easy book to review, much less to criticize. The 43rd president of the United States documents his path from an impoverished childhood to the May, 2011 successful military raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in this Volume I. (In spite of his moral integrity, he never addresses the criticism that Bin Laden should have been captured alive to face Justice in a court of law, which would have raised all kinds of jurisdictional disputes.) Along the way, dozens of high profile politicians, and world leaders who are household names come to life as he describes his interactions with them, from the flamboyant Nicholas Sarkozy to the two-faced opportunistic ultra-partisan Mitch McConnell.
Predictably, the controversial decisions he was forced to make are defended with careful reasoning that is hard to argue with, based as they almost all were on the advise of the brightest and most dedicated advisors that he recruited to work with him. Unlike his successor, he is introspective and self-questioning, agonizing over the effects of his policy decisions, not only on Americans but on other citizens of the world. He rejected a proposal to kill Osama with a drone strike on his villa because several women and children would inevitably also be killed. His hospital visits to wounded military personnel and his insistence on being present when the bodies of fallen soldiers are returned home reveal a compassionate conscientiousness that is rare in modern politicians. His efforts to provide a normal childhood for his daughters are a stark contrast to the disregard for the welfare of other family members of the current president. He is generous in his praise of others who show an ability to follow their consciences regardless of their party affiliation and scornful of those whose actions are entirely based on self interest, particularly Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Donald Trump. His grasp of the background history leading to current world political dilemmas is quite profound. This book, although long, could serve as a primer on modern world history from the 1960s up to 2011. He recognizes his tendency to wordiness and it shows in the book. “If every argument had two sides, I would usually come up with four.”
On his past ability to connect with ordinary citizens: “ I wondered if any of that was still possible, now that I lived behind gates and guardsmen, my image filtered through Fox News and other media outlets whose entire sorry business model depended on making their audience angry and fearful.”
On leadership. “Looking back, I sometimes ponder the age-old question of how much difference the peculiar characteristics of individual leaders makes in the sweep of history- whether those of us who rise to power are merely conduits for the deep relentless currents of the times, or whether we’re at least partly the authors of what’s to come.”
There are hundreds of verbatim quotes, some of which I suspect must be paraphrased, unless he has had a tape recorder strapped to his body continuously since he was a teen. I am in no position to argue with his decisions on banking reform, health care reform, immigration reform, or climate change mitigation, but there is no doubt about his sincerity and willingness to sacrifice political popularity in pursuing goals in these areas.
This is a great educational tome from a rare humble man of integrity who deserves much more recognition and praise than he has received in the last few years. I am sure that he made many errors, and he would not deny that, but can anyone seriously imagine his successor writing such an honest eloquent treatise? Can he even write a grammatically correct sentence?
Thanks, Din.
Apart from the understandable but dubious claim that the United States is the greatest nation on earth, which is not true by any meaningful metric that I have encountered, I cannot find any fault with this enlightening book. I am looking forward to Volume II.
I recently found this old classic on our bookshelf, complete with a faded St. Petersburg postcard, which indicates that I previously read it over thirty years ago. With no recollection of the details, I reread this 1966 Rosemary Edmonds translation.
Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, an aristocratic landowner seduces and impregnates the charming Katerina Maslova, a.k.a. Katusha, then abandons her. Later he spends years trying to assuage his guilt as she descends into a life of prostitution and crime. She is sentenced to hard labour in Siberia for a murder she unwittingly contributed to. I won’t give away more of the complex plot except to say that Tolstoy uses the extensive moral self-examination of Nekhlyudov to covey his late-life blistering socialist condemnation of the stratified Tsarist Russian society of the 1880s, the hypocrisy of the Orthodox Church, and the cruel criminal justice system that punishes poverty and maintains the elevated status of the real criminals in the aristocracy. If he had been born slightly later, Tolstoy would probably have been a prominent Marxist Bolshevik.
There are many great timeless observations, highly relevant today. On peer pressure: “At first Nekhlyudov made a fight for his principles but the struggle was too hard, since everything he considered right when he put his faith in his own conscience, was wrong according to other people and vice versa…”.
On human nature: ..”whatever a man’s position may be, he is bound to take that view of human life in general that will make his own activity seem important and good.”
On the organization of (Russian) society: “a society where the suffering borne by millions of people in their efforts to ensure the convenience and comfort of a small minority was so carefully concealed that those who benefitted neither saw nor could see this suffering and the consequent cruelty and wickedness of their own lives.”
Many observation such as the prisoner Simonson’s religious beliefs in panpsychism are ahead of their times and are echoed in later philosophical writings. The dangers of blindly following orders ‘from above’ are exposed long before Nazism. Although all religious dogmas are dissed, Tolstoy seems to accept as a given that some vague deity dictates rules for human behaviour, as demonstrated in the last few pages when Nekhlyudov finally finds peace and joy in rediscovering the message of Jesus in Matthew, chapter xviii, and in the Ten Commandments.
As in all Russian literature, the long unpronounceable names with multiple patronymics can be confusing to western readers, but there are fewer main characters here than in War and Peace.
In some ways this is similar and complementary to Dostoyevsky’s earlier Crime And Punishment, but I found this a more enjoyable read. Most critics rate War and Peace and Anna Karenina as Tolstoy’s best novels, but to me this later one is vintage Tolstoy at his very best.
Part memoir, part scientific inquiry into the origins and destinations of all the components of her implanted defibrillator, the young author with a genetic heart rhythm defect visits the California assembly plant of St. Jude’s Medical, nickel, cobalt, zircon and ilmenite-titanium dioxide mines in Madagascar, Busaro, Rwanda and the remnants of a Johannesburg gold mine. The Rwanda site is the source of rare ‘conflict minerals’ smuggled in from Congo and sold on into global supply chains ending up in various electronic devices and the aerospace industry. Nevertheless she concludes that small artisan Rwandan mines are less problematic than large international operations in spite of the latter’s cosmetic, negotiated remediation, restoration and mitigation projects that often ignore the priorities of the local residents.
Perhaps the most interesting sub-story for a Canadian reader is the lunacy of the American misnamed health care system. The author is constantly worried about the costs of her care, has to move across state lines and lie about he employment status, and finally gets insurance that only covers her care for specific conditions, in specific places, by specific providers and for specific time periods. “The system is not built to deliver care. It is built to maximize profit….of pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers and ‘not-for-profit’ hospitals that set high prices to pay their executives millions.” In discussing the system’s obsession with codes for specific services that may or may not be insured, she notes “Never mind that Jesus himself did not, to my knowledge, present Lazarus with an itemized bill.”
Along the way, the author unwittingly reveals her major character faults to her readers, without any acknowledgement or acceptance of them. Yes, she has been dealt a bad genetic hand, and on that basis deserves some empathy, but her whining self-pity becomes cloying, and she seems to have developed what social scientists call learned helplessness. She refuses, against medical advice, to even slightly modify her addiction to extreme exercises in order to reduce her risk of sudden death, and stops taking prescribed medication without discussion. I always tried to understand the patient’s perspective and priorities, but if she were were my patient, I would have, after discussion, politely wished her good luck, and terminated the relationship.
The writing is disjointed temporally and geographically with time shifts that just do not work. She describes her first impressions on seeing the Mayo Clinic complex before discussing the phone call from that facility while driving to it. Morsels of philosophical musings are scattered throughout the book but never ripen into anything chewable. Echos of Ernest Becker in Denial Of Death appear: “To live is to forget death long enough to move into the everyday acts of living, to believe them meaningful.”
There are glaring factual errors. The pericardium is described as “the outer muscle of the heart”. A catheter in the femoral artery is fed up the inferior vena cava! A chest tube insertion is said to be able to prevent cardiac tamponade! As she is flying from Tucson to Chicago she describes looking down on islands in Lake Erie.
In spite of the interesting thesis and the medical details that will interest lay readers, I cannot seriously recommend this book to anyone.
This is a silly, impossibly unrealistic tale of a group of idiots who cannot do anything right, including robbing a bank. None of the characters are at all like the faces they present to the world. But it is told with such wry mockery of their incompetence, biting wit, and keen insights into foibles we all share that it is an engaging and fun light read. And the plot has many twists that seem impossible until they suddenly don’t. Some of the author’s comments about behavioural quirks that we all share are quite profound. “When you’re a child, you long to be an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you’re an adult you realize that’s the worst part of it.”
Like the characters in Tyler Keevil’s No Good Brother, no one here is entirely despicable, and they can all elicit some sympathy. In my estimation, this novel is far better than Blackman’s Beartown, but not as good as his A Man Called Ove, which I loved. Those are the only other books by Blackman that I have read. But this is still a fun light read if you need some diversionary cheering up in the age of Covid.
Cleverly divided into major sections named Roots, Trunk,Crown, and Seeds this epic pan-psychic allegorical story starts off with eight seemingly unconnected tales of the early lives of unusual or even bizarre disparate American misfits. I was almost ready to give up until I hit page 114, but my daughter had assured me that the seemingly unrelated weird stories all were complementary and conjoined. Then tears of joy blurred the pages as I read the life story of the entirely fictional but fascinating Dr. Patricia Westerford and her laser-focused efforts to understand the secret lives of trees, and their means of communicating to each other, to us, and to the whole living world. Like some of the unusual dedicated scientists and preservationists on PBS’s Nature, her quaint quest is extremely endearing. She is a fictional character, but both her character and the surprising science she relays to the reader seem to come directly from the notable U.B.C. Professor of Forest Ecology, Dr. Suzanne Simard, and her TedTalk about trees.
And, sure enough, in Trunks, the ragbag misfits start to come together in what is made to seem realistic and natural ways, although you may need to go back and reread parts of the Roots section to connect all of the dots. I could not see how the crippled millionaire video-game developer could possibly fit into the story, but late in the Crown section, Powers makes it seem natural to involve him in a major role.
The writing is smoothly poetic with hundreds of stand-alone words and phrases. “High school tries to kill her. Viola, in the orchestra, the maple howling with old hillside memories under her chin.” A hugh number of startling facts are conveyed with nods to the classics in literature, folklore, sciences, mythology, and philosophy. A not-at-all subtle condemnation of unfettered capitalism in the worldwide forestry/logging industry is coupled with a less direct but equally damning critique of legal systems that support it. Dr. Westerford agonizes over the irony of writing and publishing a book promoting forest preservation that will be made from the destruction of forests. As she prepares to address an environmental group called Home Repair she muses “These people need dreams of technological breakthrough. Some new way to pulp poplar into paper while burning slightly fewer hydrocarbons….The home repair they want is just a slightly less wasteful demolition. She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free.”
This is a panoramic, profound, richly interwoven tribute to Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, cautionary, timeless and highly relevant. I cannot think of another novel with such an urgent message. Perhaps Orwell’s Animal Farm allegory comes close, with its very different message for a very different age.
I highly recommend this book. But read the e edition, listen to the audiobook, or borrow the paper one to avoid further destruction of trees.
I recall reading one of this author’s 12 previous novels featuring the more modern fictional Sherlock Holmes. I remember no details of TheBeekeeper’s Apprentice, but enjoyed it, so when my wife borrowed this one from the library, she thought I might like it. Set in 1924-25 on a cruise ship, then in Japan and Oxford, England, the venerable detective pursues international blackmailers and assorted criminals creating a black market in fake works of art.
But the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creation of Holmes has not aged well and his narrating wife, detective Mary Russell is also no master sleuth here. The plot is predictably convoluted, but very unrealistic with more loose ends than a worn-out hairpiece. It is never made clear why a particular book given to the English monarch by the de facto Japanese emperor is so valuable as to warrant theft, murder, and international scandal, nor is its site at end revealed, unless I missed that in all the revelations about fakes.
The details of the rigid, isolated, and hierarchical Japanese culture of the era are the most interesting depictions. The almost equally rigid world of upper crust England is also well displayed. “He was the sort of aristocrat in whom generations of in-breeding and privilege led to a belief that his ermine robes were not only deserved but proof of the rightness of the universe.”
Not a book that I can recommend to anyone unless you are addicted to the murder mystery genre. Even if you are, there are lots of better tales to choose from.
An alternative title for this autobiography by the globetrotting Swiss/American adventurer and photojournalist could be ‘The Westerners Guide to Japanese History and Culture’. Narrated in the first person singular present tense, she relates her attempts as a 35 year old single foreigner to embed herself in their society and learn about what makes them tick, over 12 months in 2001.
The rigid, hierarchical structure of Japanese society extends to everything, including how one is supposed to present and exchange business cards. The older women seem to accept and revel in their roles as strict matriarchs in the home, and younger women are expected or forced to quit working and marry someone of her parent’s choosing before they turn 30. The mixture of Shinto and Buddhist traditions with painful self-sacrifice on long pilgrimages to dozens of sacred temples is fully embraced by the uniquely adventurous author, sometimes with extremely amusing consequences. By the end of her adventurous year, Muller grants the Japanese a grudging respect for their way of life, even as she is thoroughly defeated in judo by an ancient frail master, even though she has earned a black belt. But she does not gloss over the negatives such as the homelessness, xenophobia, and pervasive alcoholism.
Her many social faux pas are detailed with hilarious self-deprecating humour that pervades the whole book. Her willingness to take risks especially on the arduous quasi-religious pilgrimages is sometimes hard to believe. After a meal of fresh raw seafood on a freezing beach and before a ceremonial naked midnight dip in the frigid sea: “There is a riot going on in my intestinal tract. That overly fresh dinner is clawing it’s way out. The slugs are dragging bags of sea urchin eggs like Santa Claus, and the oysters are slithering around in search of their shells. Even the squid is squirting up the aftertaste of six-week-old fermented ink.”
I am left to wonder how much Japanese society has changed in the 19 years since this adventure was undertaken, but it seems so deeply rooted in peculiar traditions that change will only come about slowly, and some changes may be for the worse.
I found a couple of clear grammar and spelling errors that the proof readers should have corrected.
As an introduction to a unique very ancient rigid society that is very different to anything in the west, this is a great enjoyable read.
I accidentally deleted my review of this from a few weeks ago, so I am redoing it from memory. This Irish father of two muses about when and how the world of human beings will end as end it certainly will. Whether we disappear suddenly due to a nuclear war, a massive unforeseen natural disaster or more slowly because of something like climate change, is unknown, as is the timeline. This could be considered as a real downer or as a call to action to at least delay the inevitable. He frets about the ethics of bringing future generations into an uncertain world and acknowledges his own guilt in contributing to the demise by flying around the world and using up scarce resources in a wasteful capitalist consumer-oriented society.
He visits and mocks the residents of the huge bunkers in North Dakota occupied by preppers who think only of their own survival, with their paranoid misogynist, anti-Semitic selfish ideology, aligned with libertarian political ideology. Then he visits a California Mars Society convention organized by equally selfish individuals who plan to escape any earthly apocalypse by colonizing the red planet. He notes that the survival from natural disasters in the past has always depended on collective selfless community actions, and that the environment of Mars is and always will be less hospitable to humans than that of Earth, even in the worst case scenarios. He visits the equally selfish huge estate that Peter Thiel of PayPal fame has purchased in New Zealand along with his purchase of New Zealand citizenship. Lastly he visits the devastated Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to see what the world without us would look like forty years on a la Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us.
The message in this is that we can collectively help to mitigate and delay the apocalypse if we each do our part, and his humorous tender interactions with his small children make it seem imperative that we do so. I, for one, even with a dwindling reservoir of altruism, would prefer to go down with Mothership Earth, than to live with the guilt of knowing that I could have helped some non swimmers to safety, and didn’t. Like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, this is a surprisingly upbeat message about enjoying the simple things in life, and a call to do what we can to preserve what we have. I really enjoyed it.
I guess that I am WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), as defined by this Harvard social scientist who spans ethnography, psychology, and anthropology. I certainly belong to a WEIRD society, although I am only one generation removed from a partially kin-based patriarchal society in which six or seven closely related nuclear families bonded and worked together in a loose, non-monetary, informal, agricultural society, and never kept score, paying farm helpers only if they were unrelated, more like an early medieval society than a WEIRD one.
The influences of a host of factors including genes, environments, religions, climate, and geography over millennia are explored in an attempt to explain how we became the minority WEIRD society in the world. An encyclopedic range of facts is cited and what seems like a few thousand observations and experiments from all of the social sciences. In many ways, this dense tome extends the work of Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, and builds on the theses of Francis Fukuyama in The Origins Of Political Order, as it relates to the development of modern institutions and legal processes.
Chapter 6 on the role of the self-serving edicts of the Church in promoting individualism, universalism and critical thinking by restricting marriage options is very perceptive and well worth reading. And Chapter 13 (of 14) presenting the reasons in cultural evolution for the late explosion of inventiveness has some fascinating insights. But some of the dozens of maps, scattergrams, and histograms, all in impossibly small print, scattered throughout the book and appendices are problematic for anyone schooled in data manipulation and statistical analysis. Although Henrich cautions the reader early on about the non-generalizability of studies of unrepresentative Western university undergrads and the hazards of equating correlation with causation, he uses such studies liberally to come to conclusions based solely on correlations, some of which may not even reach statistical significance. He uses artificial constructs such as the Kinship Identity Index and the Generalized Trust Question to derive those correlations. Mark Twain, among others, popularized the cynical observation that ‘there are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics’. How seriously should we take conclusions based on convoluted experiments on remote jungle tribespeople dreamed up by social scientists ‘over a few pints’ in a Vancouver pub? And I for one am not very interested in distinctions between the meaning of the words clan, chiefdom, tribe, fiefdom, stratified chiefdoms, state, and kingdom, given the problems of different nuances of these words translated into dozens of languages.
Henrich has reviewed a massive amount of data and is undoubtedly brilliant. The 190 pages of appendices, notes, bibliography, and index attest to the amount of work that has gone in to producing this humourless, dry, and wordy treatise. After reading this and Rutgers Bregmans Humankind, I dreamed up a recipe for a feast of optimism about the future of our species: take the overriding message here that human psychology is very malleable, stir in a generous dose of Bregman’s positive vibes about human nature, and add a dash of aged common sense.
I persisted to the end, so now you can talk about it intelligently without reading it, but I did so only by taking frequent breaks to read a chapter of an easier book, and I skipped the middle parts of a few windy long paragraphs. But I admit that I learned a lot in spite of my reservations, and probably have had new circuitry wired in my noggin. E.g. What is the origin of the word anathema? Why is my son’s wife known as my daughter-in law? And being Protestant increases your risk for suicide- not just a correlation.
Given the rave reviews this book has received in The Atlantic, The NewYorker, The Economist, and The New York Times, its spine displayed prominently on a bookshelf behind a T.V. talking head would be viewed as an asset. But it will not be on my bookshelf, even though it is a great reference source for academic social scientists-it is back in the library for someone else to struggle through. But maybe that’s because I am not just WEIRD, which is after all just a clever catchy play on words and only meaningful in one language, but also weird.
I enjoyed reading Philip Zimardo’s The Lucifer Effect, Yuval Noah Harai’s Sapiens, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil, Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. But none of these scholarly academic works escapes unscathed from the exposure and critical dissection in this Dutchman’s reassessment of the basics of human nature. His iconoclastic takedowns extend also to Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, William Golding (Lord of The Flies), most modern gurus in business, journalism, entertainment, economics, education and politics, and even Winston Churchill to a limited extent. Who does he not denigrate? His hero, Bertrand Russell.
Yet it is hard to defend any of these given the extensively researched (over 800 source references) arguments presented. The basic dichotomy discussed is between Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan’s view of humans as intrinsically selfish and evil, leading ‘solitary, poor, nasty, and short’ lives and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s social contracting, kind, altruistic man. Which is the more natural one? The former has the backing of many religions promulgating the doctrine of original sin, and is seemingly taken for granted in most of the works cited above. The issue is of great practical importance since our behaviour as social animals is predicated on our expectations of the outcome of encounters with others. If we expect others to act cruelly and selfishly, our actions will probably be self-fulfilling and make them do so. This he dubs the nocebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect. This word should become an official dictionary-defined English word.
Bregman compares the news to a drug that is “super-addictive, causes,… ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, [and] desensitization.”
Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment comes in for particular scorn, being described as a hoax and a ‘staged fake.’ Likewise, Malcolm Gladwell’s supposed documentation of the bystander effect, which left out or altered important details which would have completely destroyed his assertions about passive unhelpful bystanders. To be fair to him, his media sources also slanted the story to fit with the more sensational narrative of the intrinsically uncaring nature of humankind; that sells far better than any story about the kindness of strangers. Bregman strongly encourages us to meet and greet people from very different backgrounds, people my staff secretly dubbed ‘NOSP-not our sort of people’, to increase mutual understanding and develop compassion, which he distinguishes from empathy. Maybe some nuance was lost in translation here.
Bregman is no starry-eyed socialist dreamer. Focusing in on results of experiments on prison reforms in Norway, school reforms in Holland, police reform in NewYork City, citizen budgets in Venezuela, business management reform in France, and government fiscal reform in Alaska, all based on the principle that everyone should be thought of as kind and considerate until proven otherwise, he documents surprising improvement in a variety of outcome measures.
There is just a sprinkling of clever humour-“All too often, the sharing economy turns out to be more like a shearing economy–we all get fleeced.”
But there are so many counterintuitive insights in this book that I can’t think of anyone who would not enjoy and benefit from at least parts of it. It is a very upbeat but realistic educational gem. I will be buying this one as Christmas gifts. It is the most enjoyable nonfiction book I have read in several years, and strikes a very positive note at a time when we all need one.
The narrator of this peculiar novel addresses most of her comments to her dead male writer friend who has taken his own life. The disjointed story with hundreds of quotes from writers, most of whom I have never heard of, and mostly quotes about writing, is set, with a simple plot, at an indeterminate recent time in New York City, in the eclectic writers community of which she is a part. The link between the narrator and her dead friend, besides their writing careers, is a massive abandoned Great Dame named Apollo, adopted by the friend and then handed off to the narrator by his widow, Wife #3.
Part Six composed of musings about the miseries, jealousies and insecurities of novelists and particularly the ‘creative writing’ crowd seems, at first reading, to have only a tenuous connection to the rest of the story. The sensitivity with which she describes the devastating effects of suicides of a loved one indicates to me that she must have experience this, something which I, fortunately, have not. Her bleak assessment of the value of works of fiction on the broader community seem a bit exaggerated.
The touching relationship between the narrator and the dog, Apollo, is perhaps the most poignant part of the story as she asks the reader endless questions about what dogs understand and what they try to communicate. Dog lovers will relate well to at least parts of this story. And in the end she addresses her endless questions about life to Apollo, rather than to her dead friend. Less pleasant is the theme of the meaning of death by suicide, known to be at least twice as common among writers, particularly novelists.
Enigmatic observations about the complexities of life abound. “In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they preserve of it.” About our relationship to dogs: “They do us the honour of treating us like gods and we respond by treating them like things.”
This is an interesting and insightful, unusual story in an unusual format, which most readers will probably either love or hate. A good book guaranteed to generate a lively discussion in any book club.
True stories about what happened to ordinary and not so ordinary Americans over the day of Sunday, December 28, 1986 are related in gripping prose in this interesting book by the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter. The date was chosen at random by two children and a waitress in a D.C. diner where the author and his publisher dined as they planned the outline. With the only restriction being that it had to be between 1969 and 1989, they had agreed to accept the date and find interesting people to relate what had happened to them on that date, often interviewing surviving friends, family members, coworkers and acquaintances.
From the gripping detailed story of a pioneering heart transplant, (with an interview with the recipient) at a Virginia hospital after a murder-suicide to the more mundane, most of the stories involve tragedies or heart-wrenching decisions by tormented individual Americans. Yes, all the stories are from the U.S.A. Only one does not feature the main event in the subject’s lives as occurring on December 28, 1986- it seems as though the author felt obliged to include one story about gender switching. Several relate the experiences of different individuals in different parts of the country, on themes such as AIDS, racism, crime, immigration, politics, and the strange background of the troubled former Ottawa Senator’s forward Bobby Ryan aka Bobby Stevenson. How the nineteen main stories were chosen is a bit of a mystery that Weingarten does not divulge. He may have enough material for a sequel using a different date as a focus.
The writing is straightforward prose loaded with humorous small details, in spite of the horror of some of the events, and a keen eye for the quirky twists of the real character’s lives, some famous, but many not well known. It is well researched with over 500 interviews, and extensive searches of archival material. In the Acknowledgments Weingarten realizes that there will inevitably be errors in any work based on people’s recall of distant events.
From the last story: “We are all serving time on death row; only the length of our stay is indeterminate.” From the Acknowledgments: “ He has the sensitivity of a corduroy condom.”
A great peek into the complexity of American culture in a bygone era.
A peculiar novel by an Aboriginal native man of the Ojibwa tribe in northern Ontario, this is a gem of native literature. The resourcefulness of the Anishinaabe residents on a remote northern Ontario reservation is tested when all connections to the outside world are suddenly severed by a widespread and enduring unexplained power failure along with loss of phone and internet connections.
The past injustices that natives have endured at the hands of the white man, including resettlement to remote reserves and removal of children to abusive residential schools are all here, as is the uniqueness of the native cultures and beliefs with their peculiar intimate relationship to Mother Earth. But this is neither a finger-pointing rant about past abuse nor a sentimental nostalgic plea to restore a past that cannot be relived. That native culture is not depicted as an ideal, and the problems of alcoholism, suicides, and violence are not glossed over. Rather, this is a story of survival in the face of extreme adversity, the very individual responses to that adversity and the inevitable interpersonal conflicts that arise. As the tensions escalate and the corpses pile up, rogue white men arriving on snowmobiles, escaping the chaos in the south, create further tension and add to the body count. But this narrative presupposes the popular Hobbesian myth that our natural reaction to threats to our existence is to resort to cruel individualism rather than to cooperation.
The cause of a widespread, enduring, perhaps global, power failure is never explained and, to me, this is the weak point in the story. But the characters are realistic and the diverse reactions to unexpected adversity are insightful. There are few surprises and there should be no difficulty in remembering who is who.
A good short read with keen insights into a unique culture, and a reminder of the fragility of human existence, always subject to the unpredictable whims of Mother Earth and multiple human errors.
I picked up this murder mystery novel from Vivian’s lending library to make room in the little box on her front lawn for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Only later did I realize that this is #21 (of 23) in a series featuring Inspector John Rebus. It seems there are more murders in fictional Edinburgh, than in the real city, with four in this story alone.
By the midpoint, I was totally confused by the complicated plot twists and the multiple shady characters. (I read through to the end, but it didn’t improve.) There is some great dialogue and one-liner quips, along with dry Scottish witticisms, but these hardly make up for a very unrealistic story line and dark characters. Like the characters in Peggy Blair’s and Louise Penny’s series, the real murderers are always portrayed as the least likely suspects until late in the story. And there are always flawed crocked cops who compete with each other and keep information secret rather than cooperate. Therefore is usually a brilliant, single, eccentric investigator or retired detective modelled after Hercule Poirot who solves multiple mysteries. In Louise Penny’s series that is Quebec’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache; here it is Scotland’s Inspector Rebus; in Peggy Blair novels it is Cuba’s Inspector Ramirez. Can you spell ‘formulaic’?
Perhaps I would have been less confused and disappointed if I started with the first Rankin novel featuring John Rebus and read them in order, as apparently they all feature many of the same characters. But I am not about to waste that much time on this genre.
This short very recent autobiography by the dying long term host of Jeopardy! could easily be taken as an instruction manual for whoever succeeds him in that role. There are revelations about the show’s production schedules, many famous contestants, and the processes of production interspersed with personal anecdotes, homespun Trebek wisdom, and a sprinkling of humour. What is lacking is any significant self-pity although it is clear that the metastatic pancreatic cancer is progressing and causing a lot of mental and physical anguish.
The Trebek families relationships are described as loving and supportive in spite of apparently amicable divorces; there is no mention of marital infidelities, or family scandals, if there were any. And the charitable work around the world from their affiliation with World Vision is admirable. From the writing, it seems clear that, in spite of his wealth and celebrity status, his public persona matches that of his private life- generous, enjoying simple pleasures, and kind to everyone. The same can be said for few celebrities. Alex describes himself as neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but, without naming any politicians, criticizes those who aim to divide, ignore climate change, and spread misinformation.
One advantage of reading this as a ebook is the ability to change the print size to more clearly scan the many pictures.
An interesting, undoubtedly biased, but nevertheless enjoyable inside peek into the life of one of Canada’s favourite exported talents. Can we stop exporting such talent?
The author of The Kite Runner returns with another dark tale of the turmoil and destruction in Afghanistan in the thirty years to the early 2000s. In this one, there is even more graphic cruelty, misogyny, and domestic violence (to the point of murder) than in his former story. The pervasive hypocrisy of male Muslim sexual morality (that seems like an oxymoron) is exposed with men allowed to marry and rape children, deny paternity and banish their illegitimate offspring while women cannot even show their faces in public.
The story loosely traces the life of one such banished girl as only one of many threads, as she is married off against her will, abused, and then executed by the Taliban for killing her cruel husband as he is attempting to kill a younger rival wife in their Kabul home. That younger wife with an illegitimate son of her own, descends into sentimental nostalgia as she seeks to find some meaning in her life of deprivations and fear in the last few chapters. I won’t give away more of the complex dark plot, but none of the characters are saints, and everyone recites the Koran and observes their prayer routines as they go about killing each other. They pay lip service to the seventh commandment while ignoring all the others, not unlike many other religions which tend to equate morality with sexual restraint while killing, coveting and stealing with abandon. But Muslims here take this one step further, applying the prohibitions surrounding sex only to women. No one escapes from the author’s scathing mockery, except the originators and propagators of different branches of the Islamic faith who should bear a lot of blame for the unchecked violence.
The lunacy of Taliban orthodoxy is beautifully displayed by one episode where they demanded that an artist modify his painting of flamingos because their legs were inappropriately exposed.
The geography and the local culture of Afghanistan are well described and the liberal sprinkling of Urdu and Pasto words provide local colour while it does not interfere much with the understanding of the story.
This is an extremely bleak, depressing, but enlightening story that I did not enjoy nearly as much as The Kite Runner.
My wife insists that this novel that I recently found unread on the bookshelf, written by the late famous peripatetic Colombian Nobel laureate, was given to me by my daughter to try to broaden my interest in fiction. If so, it only partially succeeded. It relates a bizarre story of the rise and fall of the fictional isolated town of Maconda somewhere on the Caribbean coast of Columbia and of seven generations of the Buendía family. There are no firm time or place anchors, although my best guess would be that the events span the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.
There is seamless mixing of magic realism in which the dead return to haunt the living, flying carpets and sheets carry people off to their deaths, a priest demonstrates levitation, there are plagues of infectious insomnia and floods, and telepathic surgeries leave scars, with realistic characters and family tragedies. A family tree at the start does little to clarify who is who, given the overlapping multiple foreign names of most of the characters, some of whom become invisible talking mirages.
There are flowery vivid descriptions of people. “She was a large black woman with solid bones, the hips of a mare, teats like live melons, and a perfect head armoured with a hard surface of wiry hair which looked like a medieval warrior’s mail headdress.” One man is described as “…. for whom wisdom was not worth anything if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chickpeas.” But there are also run-on nonsensical sentences going on for two pages with multiple conjunctions, a feature I also recall in the author’s much more realistic Love in the Age of Cholera, which I quite enjoyed reading.
To really nitpick, I noted that the translator throughout uses the word ‘cement’ when the proper word should be ‘concrete’.
There is a whole literary genre of magic realism that appeals to a large readership (and apparently to Nobel committees). More than twenty million copies of this novel have been sold. But I am such a realist or concrete thinker that I can only tolerate it in small doses. My copy is being relegated to my ten year old granddaughter’s small lending library on her front lawn.
The Passionate Reader 