The Passionate Reader

This screed, with a uniquely American perspective by a typically tunnel-visioned American journalist, was a Christmas gift from my uniquely American economist daughter. I keep hoping that she sent it my way because of my background and interests, and not because of some hunch about my near future. Like Atul Gwande’s Being Mortal and H. Gilbert Welch’s Less Medicine, More Health, Butler exposes the warped, fragmented, impossibly complex, and dysfunctional system called health care, more appropriately dubbed wealth care, in America. Based on free market economics, it prioritizes the fiscal health of practitioners, institutions, and pharmaceutical companies over true care, particularly for the elderly and debilitated. 1000 Washington lobbyists for pharmaceuticals and institutions push for ever more high tech interventions and costly toxic medications, but none advocate for discussion of realistic limitation of interventions toward the often miserable end of life. Oncologists are paid a percentage of the fee charged to the patient for their prescribed toxic medication of limited utility, but not for discussing the real futility of further chemotherapy.

The author divides the process of living and dying into seven arbitrary stages, while acknowledging that the time of anyone’s death is unpredictable. There is a lot of generalization and doctor bashing that seems to be very popular, but no acknowledgement of the fundamental flaws of a private health care system. The sacrilegious thought that any other country might have developed more compassionate fairer systems of health care apparently never crossed Butler’s mind. Thus, the generalizations are of limited applicability outside of the U.S. Even the terms ‘hospice’ and ‘palliative care’ seem to be defined differently in the U.S. than in the rest of the world.

The discussion of the pros and cons of dying at home, in a nursing home, or in a hospital is balanced and interesting. Dying is usually messy, smelly and stressful. I don’t care where I do it, provided those helping me know what they are doing and preferably are professionals and not already-stressed family members. And there are some positives to doing it alone, like the elderly Inuit nomads who can no longer keep up with the tribe and simply lie down in the snow to become bear bait, or Sir Robert Scott who sent his team on ahead and died alone after realizing that he would never make it back from the South Pole. The importance of various forms of advance directives is stressed appropriately. There is an abundance of data cited about causes of death, but I distrust much of it. Having filled out dozens of death certificates, the listed cause of death is often an arbitrary choice from the International Classification of Diseases, when several would be equally appropriate. ‘Dwindles’ is not acceptable to the keepers of Ontario Vital Statistics. Before electrocardiograms, many people died of ‘acute indigestion.’

There are also glaring deficiencies in this discussion. In spite of the abundance of deathbed humour in our culture, there is no leavening humour in this book. There is not a word about the ultimate altruism- organ donation, whether after declaration of brain death or the now accepted donation after cardiac death. The discussion of laws concerning assisted dying is limited by the complexity and limitations of these laws in different jurisdictions. There is little discussion about the value of carefully planned distribution of physical assets and real estate. My heirs will have no real estate to fight over, and I try to limit my physical assets to what is really important and useful to me. When a new item of clothing (usually courtesy of my wife) or a new book arrives, a similar older item goes to a charity or library. And my irrational fear of becoming dependent made me write my obit (just fill in the date and location) so nobody needs to dream up something positive to say about my life. The recommendation to join a support group for specific diseases can be problematic. In my experience, such groups often degenerate into little more that mutual self-pity societies.

The terminally ill Peter Schjeldahl (December 16 New Yorker) quipped that a major problem with dying is that one cannot get advice about how to go about it from anyone who has actually done it. Some people try.

This is an important, interesting book, but not particularly useful for non-Americans. The brutally honest late Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die is a better treatise on this grim subject, of wider timeless applicability.

Thanks, Andra.

I do not remember why this book was on my reading list- perhaps a favourable review somewhere, or a friend’s recommendation. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskly on the southeastern coast of the wild and isolated,1200 kilometre long, Kamchatka peninsula in far eastern Russia seems like a peculiar setting for this Brooklyn author’s debut modern novel.

The apparent kidnapping of two young girls by a mysterious man with a black SUV is introduced in the first chapter, then clues as to what happened to them are finally introduced in the penultimate chapter. Each of the ten intervening chapters covers events in consecutive months with the members of four families. Although the list of main characters at the front, and a map of the peninsula, are helpful, it is still difficult to keep the characters and locations straight, and much of the narrative seems unrelated to the main plot. That there is a main plot at all is far from clear, and there are so many loose threads that the fabric of the story is in danger of completely unravelling. The last four page chapter does nothing to tie the previous 252 pages together and can only be described as bizarre.

Some quotes may help me convince you about the abundant literary gobbledegook.

“That sick mix swirled in her chest.”

“Inside her was white and smooth, a frozen landscape, solid bone.”

“Her heart had been fragile, its chambers shifting as easily and dangerously as volcanic earth.”

“A cord of tension extended from Zoya’s eyes, her sinuses, the back of her throat, through her body, out her ribs, to the men.”

I should have suspected that this book would not appeal to me. The author is a graduate of a creative writing school, and the lavish “advanced praise” on the back cover is from seven other novelists not familiar to me and not identified as to affiliations or their own books. Is this some kind of incestuous cabal of elitist writers dedicated to promoting each other? Or am I becoming too cynical in questioning books with ‘advanced praise’? Or did I just miss the whole point of this story?

A Christmas gift, an author that needs no introduction, and a subject that everyone knows about, this short collection of poems and sketches made me break my unwritten rule to eschew poetry at all costs. When Dumpty breaks into “Some of my favourite lies” you have admire the clever adaptation from Mary Poppins.

For readers who wisely have stopped or never started keeping track of the latest Washington scandals and firings, a short explanation of the characters satirized is provided at the end of some poems. Several pages are just cartoonish sketches. The whole book can be read in under two hours even adding in some chuckle time. You should share this one by placing it in a magazine rack in the washroom.

I struggled through the first 250 pages of this Cambridge professor’s tome on espionage, counter-espionage, double agents, and military intelligence and was only up to the mid 1660s. I was ambivalent about continuing, but some of the later chapters looked interesting. The Ottawa Public Library made my decision easy by informing me that it was due, and could not be renewed as there were five ‘holds’ waiting for it.

What new information did I glean so far?

1) The classic military text The Art of War was probably not written by Sun Tzo, or any one individual.

2) Water boarding as a technique to squeeze information from captured enemies was not invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s sadists, but by the religious zealots of the Spanish Inquisition.

3) King Philip IV of Spain used Catholic Dutch-Flemish painter Peter Paul Ruebens as a go-between to obtain inside information from the English court of Charles I; by flattering the vain English king while painting his portrait, he secretly obtained information about the English intentions, during the Thirty Years War.

4) Richard Bissel’s bungled enlisting of the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro is widely used as a classic example of the failure of military intelligence, not apparently as an example of any moral failure. (This information seems out of place in the otherwise chronological discussion.)

The chapter Renaissance Venice and Western Intelligence meanders through various European courts to Cortez and Pizarro in a disjointed discussion of the importance of decryption and spying interspersed with descriptions of incredibly cruel means of extracting information about the enemy intentions, during the Thirty Years War. I am left with the impression that being a royal during the 1600s was an inherently risky occupation, and can never remember who was allied with who in the constantly shifting borders and allegiances of Medieval Europe.

I may at some point return to this book to selectively read some of the later chapters on intelligence, e.g. weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, then again, I may not. Probably a great resource for serious historians, military strategists, foreign service agents, and for anyone feeling the need to spew obscure true historical anecdotes at a cocktail party.

By 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton had assembled a crew of 27 handpicked men and financing for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition to cross Antarctica over the South Pole, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, having already lost the honour of being the first person to reach the pole. When the Endurance became stuck in ice and broke up in the middle of the 900,000 square mile Weddell Sea, Shackleton’s supersized ego combined with sublime optimism and leadership ability kept the disparate crew together for epic treks across ice floes and stretches of rough open water to ultimate rescue, while suffering frostbite, near-starvation, despair, and more shipwrecks.

I first read this tale of adventure and courage in 2016, partly while flying to Ushuaia, and then tried to finish it while being tossed around on a small repurposed NOAA research vessel crossing the Drake Passage, ‘the most dreaded bit of ocean on the planet’, to Antarctica, admittedly not the most relaxing place to read about being stranded on Antarctic ice floes. I reread it this week and enjoyed it as much the second time, but with perhaps a bit more skepticism about the hyperbole and some detailed descriptions that seemed to incorporate a bit of literary licence.

Shackleton made several near-fatal decisions including refusal to take along adequate seal meat and blubber at one point, leading to the need to kill half of their sled dogs at one point and the rest of them to be eaten a little later, but he commanded loyalty from almost all the imperilled men and he possessed an acute sense of responsibility for their survival. At great personal risk, and with what seems like incredible good luck, he ultimately did get them all to safety. It is a testament to the very human survival instinct that the men seemed to bond together when needed, and seemed to even enjoy their adventure. Sitting on a cracking ice floe, cold and wet, running out of provisions, one man wrote in his diary “It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think that we are in a precariously frightening position.” The navigation by sextant and compass will be of interest to those dedicated sailors in my coffee clutch but was very confusing to me.

The author writes with a keen sense of the dramatic suspense, though most readers already know the unlikely but lucky final outcome. The maps at the front of the book are helpful, but even with these, and having visited several of the sites mentioned, I found the geographic descriptions a bit confusing. But I fondly recall encounters with crab-eater, elephant, Weddell, and leopard seals, as well as Adele and Gentoo penguins that were all staples of the stranded crew’s diet.

First a note about the length of books. At 764 pages of text plus 84 pages of notes, an eight page introduction, and a 25 page index, this is one of the longest books I have read, perhaps outdone only by the King James Bible and Leon Tolstoy’s two volume War and Peace. I have been posting the number of pages in my reviews, as does The Economist, but The Atlantic, Harpers, Macleans, and The New Yorker do not. But the number of pages alone does not accurately reflect the length of a book. This definitive biography is published on 6’ x 9’ pages with narrow margins and average font size, few spaces, and no blank pages, and will take days to read. Perhaps the total word count, an estimated average reading time or actual listening time for audio versions would be more useful guides for potential readers. Is posting the number of pages useful at all?

Written by a Yale professor of American history, this is much more than a biography of the 19th century anti-slavery freedom fighter. It could stand alone as the reference work for a university semester-long course in Civics or American history, with striking relevance to the political and racial controversies endemic in the 21st century, usually with the roles of Democrats and Republicans reversed.

Frederick Douglass , born as Fred Bailey, sometime in 1818, to a Maryland slave mother, never saw her after he was six years old, and was never sure who his father was, although he was probably her slave master. Beaten as a child, he nevertheless showed so much potential that he was allowed to learn to read and write. Escaping to Lynn, Massachusetts, and then to Rochester, New York, he honed his oratory and writing skills to become the preeminent anti-slavery campaigner, touring tirelessly in the free states and in Europe. With frequent references to Old Testament prophets, biting satire, irony, and unrelenting consistency he exposed the cruelty of slavery, the hypocrisy of slave owner Christians and their clergymen, the folly of compromising black leaders, and the duplicity of corrupt politicians.

The history exposed in this exhaustive nonfiction is replete with names that many modern readers will recognize but not know details about. Douglass, once he became a freedman, interacted with five presidents, numerous other politicians, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, John Brown of the Harper’s Ferry raid fame, Stephen Foster, Robert Green Ingersoll, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, his eventual undisputed successor, Booker T. Washington, and a host of other familiar people. He made enemies with his militant rhetoric, not only in the Confederate states and with white supremacists but with many fellow freedom fighters because of his uncompromising insistence on total equality of the races and his reluctant eventual endorsement of violence as a tactic to end slavery.

Those who think that extreme political polarization, a politicized judiciary and ‘fake news’ are new phenomena should read about the lies and extreme politics in the mid 1800s, with the Dred Scott ruling of the Supreme Court and that court’s ruling in 1883 that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional. Judicial interference or biases in determination of election results is not new either, witness the 1876 election fiasco. And although Abe Lincoln is remembered as the emancipator of slaves, few recall that he also tried to enact legislation to forcibly move blacks in the south en masse to Africa or Caribbean islands, refused to allow blacks a commissioned position in the Union Army or provide them with equal pay, and in his first term, continued to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act to return captured slaves to their owners. Both he and Douglass supported extrajudicial killing of captured Confederate soldiers in one-for-one tit-for-tat retaliation for the killing of Union soldiers. And the U. S. government and industrialists sabotaging their own diplomats is not new either as shown when Douglass was the ambassador to Haiti, late in his career.

Douglass’s life was plagued by financial difficulties, and a demanding, dysfunctional, continuously feuding extended family. Blight provides a vivid picture of the perils of daily life in an age when many children died before their parents, semi-starvation was common, and diseases such as consumption (tuberculosis) and malaria were endemic and untreatable.

No one’s life is without some inconsistencies, and Douglass’s is no exception. Although he may or may not have been sexually unfaithful to his illiterate black first wife, he certainly was emotionally unfaithful to her and, for intellectual stimulation and female companionship, relied heavily on two fawning educated white women who spent months with him, often in the Douglass home. The great orator and writer, suffragist, and advocate of black self- improvement never bothered to teach his wife to read or write. The fighter for black equality and rights mocked native Americans and Irish immigrants as inferior to the black slaves, and believed that it was appropriate to confine Natives to forests and reserves while blacks should have no such restrictions, and he scorned all Catholics. And he blatantly used nepotism in his role as the Marshall of the District of Columbia, to employ impoverished family members. His sarcastic dehumanization of enemy Confederate warriors and southern slaveholders, comparing them to animals, is an example of the necessary first step leading good people to become torturers and commit horrendous atrocities, as Philip Zimbardo has shown in The Lucifer Effect.

Blight does not measure up to Douglass’s writing skill, but this is nevertheless an enjoyable, educational, long read, and it provides insightful context to 21st century societal conflicts and politics. It is worth the time investment, especially if you are a retired history buff. Otherwise, be sure to read about the relevance of Frederick Douglass to the future of America by the same author in this month’s issue of The Atlantic

Thanks, Cal.

P.S. I will probably not post any reviews next week, as I have just started into an equally long epic- The Secret World. A History of Intelligence.

I can claim some connection to both books that I review this week, having met the author of of one and the title hero of the other one on different social occasions.

Continue reading Introduction.

Set in the 1830s, the narrator for this story, George Washington Black, starts off his life story as an illiterate eleven year old orphaned Dahomey slave taken to a Barbados sugar cane plantation. With a knack for scientific sketching and a curiosity about everything biological or scientific, he helps the more tolerant of his twin brother owners design and then fly a dirigible off the island. Further travels include stops in Norfolk, Virginia, a remote Arctic outpost, Nova Scotia, London, Amsterdam, and Marrakesh. At times it seems that he is forever in a futile quest to escape his past.

The careful description of the sights, sounds and smells of the various places he escapes to evokes a time when those sensations were probably more important to survival than they are now with modern communications and much less contact with raw outdoor realities. His constant questioning of the meaning of his life without evoking any religious beliefs and his determination to contribute to the betterment of others are admirable qualities thwarted by his horribly disfigured face. And his yearning for recognition of his considerable scientific and artistic contributions is never satisfied by the end of the story, when he is only eighteen.

The story is tied together with some unlikely chance encounters, considering the limits of travel and means of communication in that age. But these provide just enough surprises to keep any lover of mystery novels engaged. Yet it seems to me that in 1836, even the most knowledgeable biologist would be unable to identify the limbic system in a cetacean brain.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel that I picked up at the Kanata Grassroots Grannies book exchange and breakfast, although it somehow was already on my list to read. I have not read any of the Vancouver author’s previous works.

A retired medical specialist in his early 70s, facing a slow inevitably painful death from cancer, plans his suicide to make it seem like an accident, but unforeseen occurrences foil his careful plan. If I had known about this novel when I wrote Mere Mortals, I could be accused of plot plagiarism, but I only discovered this book two weeks ago-honest. Is there something about medical professionals that makes them prone to deceptively take the easy way out? Or is this itself a fiction?

There are just enough plot twists here to keep the reader engaged, but there are also long passages of flashback memories that contribute little to the main plot. These include a whole long chapter describing in agonizing detail the protagonist’s grim experiences as an infantryman in the Italian frontline during World War ll. The very elaborate description of the geography, recreational pastimes, industries, climate, and culture of the area surrounding the Columbia River in Washington state in the 1990s as well as that of Italy in 1944, becomes tedious. It is as though author is keen to flaunt his knowledge and/or his research of these features. And some details seem very farfetched, including the successful open chest cardiac massage resuscitation of a soldier dying of blood loss in a makeshift military field hospital- in 1944! And a thoracic surgeon describes the risk of death from a mitral valve replacement operation as one in a billion!

I have mixed feeling about recommending this story. Those readers who relish flowery detailed descriptions of geography, wildlife, climate and even personalities, will love it. I have not read Snow Falling On Cedars, but Vera says it very similar in portraying excessive geographic detail in the same area of Washington State.

Set at an unspecified time in a future England, this thriller combines science fiction and a murder mystery with a dire warning about the dangers of our increasing dependence on advanced technology and artificial intelligence. After the government reassures everyone about their absolute safety and mandates that all road vehicles be fully autonomous, a mysterious Hacker, or group of hackers, hijack eight carefully selected cars and send them and their occupants, all of whom have dark secrets, on a collision course guaranteed to kill them all. (As I recently rode in a new, high tech, very talkative, Model 3 Tesla, I can sympathize with the luddites who resisted the move to autonomous vehicles in this story.) All of the drama is followed in real time by millions around the world on social media. The public, via social media, get to vote to spare one of the hijacked individuals as the Hacker exposes their secrets, gleaned from their electronic trail, including government records, and conducts video interviews each of them in turn. An idealistic psychiatric nurse with a dark secrets in her past, is intimately entwined in the drama, connected to both the anonymous hacker(s) and the government body charged with investigating any accidents involving the autonomous vehicles.

But nothing is as it seems on the surface as the lies and deceptions of the hijacked individuals, the hijackers, corrupt politicians, and the investigators are gradually exposed, and then questioned. With impeccable timing, just when you think you have the plot all figured out, a totally unpredictable twist appears, usually at the very end of one of the 70 short chapters.

I usually avoid science fiction and mystery thrillers because they are too unrealistic for my taste. But most elements here are very realistic and the warning about dependence on technology and artificial intelligence needs to be heard. Readers who enjoy thrillers and murder mysteries will love this tale, and I enjoyed it too.

I cannot remember who recommended this novel to me, or if I just read a review of it somewhere. In either case, it proved to be one of those rare books that I marched right back to the library after reading a bit less than half way through. Set in Paris in the 20s and 30s, it features a strange assortment of characters including an impoverished American journalist, an equally impoverished Hungarian photographer, an extraordinarily athletic cross-dressing lesbian (based on the real Violet Morris, a later Nazi collaborator), a lot of alcoholics and opium addicts, and a variety of other decadent misfits. Except that they all seem to fit in and there were apparently no monogamous heterosexuals or morally conscientious residents in the City of Lights in that era, or at least in this story. As I flipped through some of the later chapters, reading the first and last paragraphs, it didn’t seem to get any better, so I gave up. Besides, there is a lot of curling to watch on the tube.

The format is confusing with letters from the Hungarian photographer to his parents interspersed with supposedly researched observations by the author and other chapters narrated by a variety of other characters.

Even if the writing and the story improves dramatically in the second half that I did not read, I cannot recommend this unrealistic story, although critics have raved about its literary merit. But then again, maybe I just have underdeveloped or atrophic literary taste buds.

The Wealthy Barber was a rather unexpected hit for this Ontario financial guru when it was published in 1989. This follow up volume combines his unique corny wit with somewhat updated financial advice to Canadians regarding personal financial planning. Although even this book is now a bit out of date, and the wealthy Barber featured in the first book does not appear at all in this volume, he provided little newer advice in a sponsored public lecture we attended last week. (His oratory is not as good as his writing, with staccato rapid-fire speech that can be hard to follow, overly flamboyant gesticulations, and some self-deprecating humour that becomes a bit boring). He seems, both in his writing and his lectures, to have succeeded in resisting the Veblen effect that I discussed last week, in the review of The Theory Of The Leisure Class. Conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste, merely for the purpose of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ has apparently never been his weakness, nor is it mine, or so I like to think. But he or his publisher waste a lot of paper, with thirty two blank verso pages between chapters and even more blank lines between paragraphs, presumably to make the book seem longer than it is. How many trees should he plant to atone for this conspicuous waste?

But he is brilliant and here largely avoids the technical arcana and acronyms that permeate most writing about the world of finance. His advice about investment and saving for people at different stages of life is hard to fault and is backed up by carefully explained logic. Unlike many self-styled financial gurus, he acknowledges uncertainty where appropriate, such as when considering whether to put savings into an RRSP or a TFSA, and exposes the near impossibility of beating the market averages with frequent self-directed stock pickings. (If you insist on buying and selling stocks via your home computer, you should probably consider it as a hobby, like playing Texas Holdem poker, rather than as a plan for financial security.)

Like everyone, he undoubtedly has biases, some acknowledged, some probably unconscious. His strong recommendation to employ professionals rather than trusted relatives as trustees and executors of wills seems to me to be a blatant unacknowledged promo for the professional organizations who, after all, finance his many speaking trips around the country. Full disclosure, anyone?

This book is a valuable resource for Canadians who, like me, cannot make a priority of taking the time to deeply delve into personal financial planning-almost anything else is more appealing to me. But finding an experienced and communicative financial advisor whom you trust, and then following his or her advice is probably more valuable than slavishly following Chilton’s advice, as good as it is.

This historical novel reveals in vivid detail the controversies surrounding the 2009 and 2010 arrival of two rickety boats on our west coast, bearing more than 550 desperate Sri Lankan asylum seekers, almost all from the Tamil north. This is a largely forgotten event in our recent history which is a bit of an embarrassment to our collective psyche and self image.

Unnumbered but titled chapters relate the horrors of the long Sri Lankan civil war (an oxymoron, if there ever was one) with the southern, largely Buddhist Sinhalese finally defeating the northern, largely Hindu, Tamils. There are enough atrocities grimly detailed here to make most citizens of both factions seem guilty of some war crime. But is an auto mechanic who is coerced and threatened into attaching bombs under vehicles that he is repairing a terrorist if he sees no reasonable alternative to survive? And more to the point, is he likely to be a threat to public safety if he is allowed to stay in Canada?

The detention of the new arrivals in prisons for extended periods is reminiscent of our earlier shameful detention of Japanese residents and citizens during WW11, and this story features the daughter of a now demented Japanese interment survivor who is appointed as an admissibility hearing adjudicator by a Public Safety minister who is very biased against any immigrants or refugees. The needless complexities of the assessment system set up to decide the fate of asylum seekers is amply explored. There must be a better way than having repeated overlapping hearings to determine admissibility, release from interment, deportation, and refugee status claims.

The writing is littered with Hindu and Tamil terms and names that I found hard to understand and remember, let alone try to pronounce. (Maybe I should download the audiobook.) There are no quotation marks even for obvious quotes, making it a bit difficult to follow conversations and keep the characters straight. A map of Sri Lanka with the sites of actions discussed would have been helpful for those readers like me who are geographically challenged. The story ends abruptly with little resolution of the complex moral questions raised along the way. A five page Discussion guide at the end is not very helpful.

Refugees everywhere and immigrants to Canada will love this story, and it provides a sober reminder of the unjustified biases of the Canadian public and of those in charge of immigration in our recent past. It is very relevant to current debates about immigration here, but more particularly in the United States. Let’s not make the same mistakes over and over. But there are no easy answers either.

This book was not a fun read, but I recommend it to anyone with a particular interest in global affairs and the controversies around immigration anywhere.

I read a print edition of this old classic economics reference perhaps ten years ago, and was so impressed that I recently downloaded the Dover Thrift edition ($1.33) to refresh my memory of the main points. The keen observations of this American economist from 120 years ago remain relevant even though many of his comments now seem to reflect a misogynist and dated world view. He is best remembered for his observations about the common preference of consumers for more expensive luxury goods of a certain brand even in the face of competitive brands of equal or even greater practical utility and lower cost- the so-called Veblen effect of the importance of social signalling in our purchases. This applies to everything from handbags or houses. He also popularized the terms ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘conspicuous waste.’

The author distinguishes several stages of societal development from the savage to the barbarian to the industrial. “In the sequence of cultural evolution, the emergence of a leisure class coincides with the beginning of ownership.” He views the origin of marriage as one kind of ownership, and as with slaves, more wives and more slaves signal less need to work and greater social status in some developing cultures. In wide ranging comments on war, sports, gambling, patriotism, religion, education, lawns, art collections, jewellery and ornaments, pets, clothing fashions, concepts of beauty, titles, trophies, priestly vestments and wasteful use of resources in places of worship, he shows that conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste of resources is integral to the development of a leisure class and the transition from a barbarian to an industrial society. The lengthy discussion of the economic impact of religions reminded me of the more in-depth analysis of religions in Torkel Brekke’s Faithenomics, published 117 years later. He cannot be faulted for not anticipating the development of nuclear weapons, communism and naziism, the Internet, and the modern worsening problem of income inequality.

Looked at one way, this book reveals a damming picture of raw capitalism, 32 years after the publication of Das Kapital, although Veblen refrains from endorsing any particular economic system. Looked at another way, it just reveals timeless truths about basic human instincts. Some of the observations are clearly outdated and irrelevant, although there are still many kernels of timeless wisdom in Veblen’s observations. But I found that most of these were in the first half of the book, with ephemeral, quaintly antiquated and questionable associations clustered in the second half. If you are at all interested in modern economics, sociology, politics, and psychology, this book is worth skimming through.

Thanks, Andra.

Continue reading Saturday. Ian McEwan 2005 279 pages

I am not sure why I had this strange book on my list of books to read, but suspect that I read a favourable review of it in The Economist a long time ago. There is very limited information about the author except that he is from the Shetland Islands, lives in Africa, and is a political and war correspondent for The Economist. One of my disappointments with that magazine is that their writers are usually not identified.

The action, what little there is, swerves back and forth haphazardly between the Hotel Atlantique in France, various jihadist training camps in east Africa, and the depths of the hydrothermal vents in the Greenland Sea off the coast of Iceland. The two main characters are a male British spy posing as a water consultant in Africa (captured and tortured by jihadists) and a female oceanographer/biomathematician, his casual lover. She provides an interesting alternative to the panspermia atmospheric origin of planetary life, in proposing that life began with the organic compounds and intact thermophilic microorganisms in hot hydrophilic vents deep in the oceans. But what little plot there is is overpowered by scattered random observations on the nature of life and the role of humans in the universe, along with boring history lessons, and ostentatious quotes from the worldwide literati, poets, philosophers and thinkers, some famous and some obscure, from Milton and Donne to Tennyson, Voltaire, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and the Swede Strindberg. As well, there is extensive reference to some fictions such as the Muslim jinn legends, often mixed in with apparently real historical events to the point that the truth is hard to separate from fiction.

There are no chapter divisions and few references to any particular time, although it is obviously set in modern times post 9/1.

This book is described a a cosmic-scale evocation of the intricacies of life. I can readily admire the author’s broad literary scope and encyclopedic knowledge. But to me the book seemed to serve mainly as a means of displaying that knowledge in a haphazard way, not as a meaningful story or even a unified viewpoint on life, and the negative existential angst becomes unpleasant Not a very enjoyable read.

We are off to North Carolina shortly, so this novel is an appropriate introduction to that state, although we will not be visiting the coastal marshes where this story takes place. Set mostly in the 1960s and 70s, the central character Kya, the uneducated illiterate Marsh Girl, is abandoned at a young age by her whole family, one by one, and learns to survive and love the natural beauty of lagoons, marsh and undisturbed wetlands. Not only abandoned by family, but by all the locals and by couple of boyfriends, subsisting on the wildlife, selling mussels and befriended only by a local poor uneducated black man, she becomes an expert in the ecology of the area- and in hiding from all those who try to connect with her. Her sketchbooks fill with details of the local flora and fauna.

When a local abusive playboy is found dead in the mud by the fire tower, having fallen or been pushed off of it, she is accused and tried for his apparent murder. I won’t give away more of the complex plot, nor the surprise ending, but the reader will inevitably develop the sympathy and even admiration for the plucky girl.

The writing is lyrical with snippets of poetry interwoven into the story, but the time shift between chapters does not add much to the intrigue. The reader will require a very active imagination and gullibility to believe the preternatural skills that Kya develops for survival; the detailed description of her trial for murder makes it seem obvious that she is an innocent victim, but is she? And the trial very realistically exposes the bigotry and hypocrisy of the locals.

I probably will not watch the coming Fox movie adaptation, as it is unlikely to capture the intricacies of this captivating story. The story is already just a little too unrealistic for my taste, and Reese Witherspoon and Hollywood will likely make it even more farfetched.

This debut novel, written by an Afghani expat physician living in the U.S., before the Americans and their allies imposed their own version of hell-on-earth on Afghanistan, has aged well. The multilayered culture of pre-war Afghanistan is hardly idyllic as family bonds are strained by dark secrets and betrayals. But it seems almost heavenly compared to the incredible cruelty imposed on the natives by the Soviet invaders and later by the Taliban. The narrator, the privileged son of a wealthy Kabul businessman, develops a strong boyhood bond with the son of his servant, is haunted by guilt after secretly betraying his friend and tries desperately to make amends for his cowardice for the rest of his life.

The graphic description of the cruelty of the Soviets and particularly the Taliban, is a jolting reminder of how political and religious dogma can be used for evil purposes, but there is no overall condemnation of any political or religious belief system. Some of the uniquely Muslim phrases and sayings may seem peculiar to westerners, but really are integral to the story.

The plot is complex with many unanticipated twists and turns. Small details introduced early, like a boy with a harelip, the game panipat, and a child with deadly skill with a slingshot, seem insignificant, but much later are reintroduced and become integral to the story. The psychopath who assaulted his childhood friend shows up much later as an incredibly cruel Taliban enforcer to terrorize and maim the narrator. There are several other equal symmetries like this that ingeniously tie the narrative together.

Several memorable quotes show great insight into universal human truths.

“ Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

“…time can be a greedy thing- sometimes it steals all the details for itself.”

This is a great introduction to a culture and way of life that is completely foreign to me. I will never again be able to look at the Afghani or Pakistani (am I stereotyping?) clerk in the convenience store without wondering about what he or she has endured before coming to Canada

Thanks, Vera

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First a few random thoughts about language. The F word has ceased to have much, if any, of its original sexual connotation, and in the last few years has even ceased to carry the same shock value it once conveyed. Now, in popular usage, it seems to express disappointment, exasperation, despair, disapproval, alarm, or condemnation whether used as a verb, adjective, adverb or as a simple exclamation. But to me it still reveals some degree of vulgarity on the part of the speaker or writer. So I questioned why the author could not have titled this witty volume with something like How We Fouled It All Up, or How We Screwed It All Up. Perhaps in order to emphasize how badly, consistently, and dangerously we have collectively goofed, there is no adequate alternative wording that conveys the enormity of our collective stupidity. Like ‘screwed’, ‘fucked’ is changing its meaning as the English language evolves. What will replace these words to express shock and vulgarity in the coming years?

This writer, with dry humour British has a knack for seeing the absurd and the tragic aspects of some of the most bizarre but consequential decisions made in the history of our species. With far-ranging narrative mixed with biting sarcasm, he disparages the invention of war around 14,000 years ago, the introduction of rabbits and cane toads to Australia and starlings to New York, the bad decisions leading up to the mid-30s American Dust Bowl, and addition of lead to gasoline in the last century. In between, he cites numerous examples of many other very bad decisions by politicians, inventors, scientists and civic leaders. Some of these decisions seemed brilliant at the time and only became tragic when unintended consequences ensued. Others were so patently stupid from the start that one could only conclude that many of the influential leaders were absolutely bonkers, (King Farouk of Egypt was a kleptomaniac who stole Sir Winston Churchill’s pocket watch) and many of them, such as several of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire were clearly insane; others by modern criteria would be considered psychopaths.

While Phillips touches on the neural and evolutionary reasons why we have f…ed up so regularly, in the first chapter, a more in-depth but less entertaining treatment of this is provided in Joseph T. Hallinan’s Why We Make Mistakes.

My favourite example of stupidity from this book is the explanation of why Guam became a U.S. territory. When the U.S. navy arrived there in 1898, months into the Spanish-American War, the Spanish government had neglected to tell any of their countrymen in Guam that they were at war with the U.S., so the island’s military brass sailed out to thank the U.S. sailors for their thirteen gun salute and immediately became prisoners of war.

There is a sober message in this book, but the anecdotes also provide great trivia that you could use anytime there is an awkward lull in the conversation that you feel obliged to fill at a dinner party – just don’t mention King Christian VII’s obsession.

A good light read.

This is the account of the nine extraordinary men from varied and usually very humble backgrounds who tenaciously pursued their dreams to become Olympic champions in the world of rowing. Though interviews with a few of them in old age and many of their families as well as searching archival records more than seventy years later, Brown reconstructs a story of extraordinary perseverance, determination, and teamwork. The climax of the story is known to the reader from the start – the come-from-behind unlikely gold medal Olympic win against the favoured German rowers in front of Hitler at the Olympics, but, like most sports reporters, he manages to build suspense by carefully withholding details until the last second.

I strongly suspect that in spite of his very extensive interviews and research, there is considerable imaginative licence in relating conversations, emotions, and activities that cannot possibly be entirely accurate when related eighty or ninety years later often without a written record. Like sportscasting and sports writing always and everywhere there is much hyperbole, a load of cliches, and too many superlatives along with considerable exaggeration. For example, the coach feels the need to teach national champions “how to get an oar in and out of the water without splashing half of Lake Washington into their shell.” And the boat builder describes the rings of cedar plank that “spoke of years of bitter struggle.” Cedar trees may “struggle” to survive, but I doubt that they feel bitter about it.

Coach Al Ulbrickson’s edict that the lads forego alcohol and tobacco and that they stay in bed from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m may have had something to do with their remarkable abilities to concentrate and work as a single body, if you accept the thesis presented in my other book review this week.

In many ways, this is the remarkable story of one poor abandoned abused child whose devotion to rowing helped him to become an unrecognized national hero in an age when sports was inseparable from the worsening political tensions leading up to WW11.

My wife detected some rhythmic, almost poetic lilt in the writing as Brown described the various races, like the rhyming dipping of oars in water, but I did not pick this up.

I am not a rah-rah fan of any sports team and seldom follow any sports closely but I still enjoyed this book.

Thanks, Vera.

Accidents, addictions, ADHD, Alzheimer’s Disease, anxiety, cancer, depression, diabetes, heart attacks, infections, infertility, defective immune responses, manias, neuroses, obesity, psychoses, strokes. All of these are the result of, or exacerbated by, lack of sleep if you believe the convincing arguments presented by this very knowledgeable Berkeley sleep researcher in this his first book. With easily understood apt analogies and simple (perhaps over-simplified) schematics, he discusses our natural circadian rhymes and the brain controllers of wakefulness and somnolence. He documents, citing a huge number of studies, the dire individual, societal and global consequences of inadequate sleep quantity and quality and makes variably realistic recommendations for improving our sleep for all ages.

From the unnatural deleterious effects on teens of starting their schooling too early in the day and out of sync with their circadian clocks to the dramatically increased accident rates the day after switching to Daylight Saving Time, not all attributable to being late for work, and the dire consequences of medical trainees required to work unnaturally long shifts, his assertions are largely not disputable. Here in Ottawa the schools do the exact opposite of what would be optimal for learning, starting too late for preteens and far to early for teens. Unlike most social scientist researchers crusading for change, he seldom equates association with causation, and makes that distinction clear.

I have some concerns about this book although I accept the scientific logic and was greatly enlightened by the insights he imparts. Like many non-physician campaigners for changes in the health care educational system, he disparages the mainstream medical communities’ lack of knowledge about his particular specialty, an annoying insult to those who try their best to practice good medicine with an impossibly broad and ever increasing amount of information to absorb. He recommends that anyone with concerns about their sleep adequacy, which means just about everyone who reads his book, be assessed by a board-certified sleep specialist, a luxury available to at best a small minority of people even in the First World. Some of the assertions of links of illness to sleep deprivations seem weak, e.g. the connections between the gut biome and the brain centres involved with control of sleep. They may exist, but the old Scottish verdict of Guilt Not Proven would seem to apply. The enhancement of immune responses provided by sleep may be a two-edged sword given the increasing prevalence of autoimmune diseases and allergies. And while caffeine and alcohol are clearly absolute no-no’s for your sleep hygiene, there are some pleasures in life that are not worth sacrificing in exchange for an extra few years in diapers in a locked ward. I am not about to give up my morning caffeine jolt. His diatribes about almost all of our societal norms and institutions become a bit repetitive and annoying. And there is something cruel about blaming individuals’ illnesses on behaviour which is within societal norms.

I was disappointed that he does not even mention, let alone explain, the physiology behind that most delightful of all male human experiences with sleep, seemingly designed to frustrate women, namely the phenomenon of overwhelming postcoital somnolence.

This book is a great wake up call to address a grossly neglected healthcare and societal problem. I highly recommend reading at least parts of it. It does not have to be read from start to finish to be appreciated. Take some naps along the way.

Thanks, Andra.