Category: Books

Guns, Germs and Steel makes a primary argument that Eurasian societies were able to dominate American and southern societies because of advantages in geography and climate — not because of genetic superiority.
What I liked best about the book, though, wasn’t this thesis. It was the amassing of a broad, integrated picture of the development of human culture, using evidence about food, language, migration, and disease, from a range of historical disciplines including archaeology, genetics, historical linguistics, and synthesis of historical sources. It was breathtaking to see a single animated picture across the 10,000 years of the spread of human culture since the emergence of agriculture, like a time series animation of an lunar eclipse or the flowering of a rose.

There are special pleasures in reading with a net-connected computer handy. Often, when I’m reading a fun book, I’ll use the net to look up references and research side topics. If the book is recent, you can often find online book tour interviews. So, when I was reading the Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, I found this NPR interview. Readng The Birth of the Mind by Gary Marcus, I found this radio interview.
The radio interviews have only the highlights and greatest hits of the book. But it gives some context to the book, to hear Menand’s reflective tone and Marcus’ cascading enthousiasm.

Jared Diamond’s latest book is superb. Collapse tells the story of civilizations that collapsed as a result of environmental destruction (Easter Island, the Maya), and societies that avoided a similar fate with prudent decision making (Japan).
The book surpasses earlier books covering similar cautionary material, including
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations
Here’s why the book is so good.
In addition to stories about civilizations that collapsed as a result of environmental degradation (Easter Island, the Maya), Diamond also tells the story of societies that managed to avoid environmental distruction through prudent and farsighted decision-making (the Japanese Tokugawa shogus decided to stop logging and reforest; Tikopia, the Pacific island that decided to stop raising pigs because the pigs were destructive to the island’s fragile vegetation, though pigs were prestigous in Polynesian culture. Diamond provides examples of societies (including Japan) that made decisions to protect their environment by top-down command, and societies that made similar decisions through bottom-up processes (like the New Guinea Highlands).
Diamond does comparative analysis, assessing various environmental and geopolitical factors, showing, for example, how Easter Island’s ecosystem was more fragile than other Polynesian colonies, and how Greenland’s environment was less appropriate for Scandinavian customs than other Norse colonies. He shows how environmental initial conditions interacted with cultural practices and decisions to facilitate decline. The comparative approach lends credibility to the analysis of contemporary cultures (Australia, China) threatened by environmental degradation.
The treatment of the environmental records of big businesses is another area where Diamond’s balance give’s the book credibility and usefulness. For example, Diamond compares the record of Chevron, which maintained a meticulous record of environmental responsibily in its Indonesian oil drilling, with the reprehensible record of Pertamina, also drilling for oil in Indonesia. He compares the grudging acquiescense of Arco at cleaning up polluted mines in Montana, with the evil record of Pegasus Gold, which left its Montana mines leaking cyanide, took $5 million in bonuses for the board of directors, and declared bankruptcy to avoid cleanup responsibility
Diamond also provides valuable perspective on the best places for citizen activism to have leverage. For example, the drive for sustainable wood harvesting has been led by big consumer-facing companies, including Home Depot and Kinkos, which are huge buyers of wood products, and are highly sensitive to public opinion. The logging companies that supply them don’t care about habitat or individual consumers — but they do care about the bulk purchases of Home Depot.
Diamond avoids the hyperbole of doom used by some environmentalists as a rhetorical strategy. And he shows how some societies managed to make good decisions, in time to successfully reverse decline. Therefore his assessment of the risk faced by our interconnected global civilization, and the responsibility faced by leaders and citizens, is more persuasive, and more chilling.
It’s early January, but this may be the best book to read all year.

The Metaphysical Club joins the list of my favorite nonfiction books.
The book tells the story of four thinkers who helped create the intellectual foundation for modern America — Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey.
These thinkers, in Menand’s analysis, responded to two challenges to conventional 19th century certitudes. The writings of Charles Darwin destroyed faith in the determinist hand of the Deity in history, and also in the determinist clockwork of enlightenment science. The bloody US Civil War, in which the combination of modern weapons and premodern tactics caused horrific carnage, cast doubt on the purity of prewar sanctimonious convictions.
The response — expressed differently in the lives and works of the main characters — was American pragmatism. For Holmes, a judicial philosophy that valued circumstance above absolute principle. For Peirce, a philosophy based on probability rather than certitude. For Dewey, an educational philosophy based on the integration of thinking and doing. For James, the death of religious and scientific determinism led to an experiential take on religious experience, where the value of faith is its benefits for the mental health of the believer.
Menand tells the stories of the main characters in the context of their personal and professional biographies, with plenty of colorful, telling, and gossipy anecdotes. Peirce, who was the least successful in his lifetime, and most obscure because of the lack of institutional success, was acoholic, drug addict, depressive, and sometimes violent. Holmes held the race, gender and class preferences of his day, and helped exclude women and black students from Harvard. James took years of vacillation to make personal and professional decisions (but despite that had a dramatically successful career).
The main characters pursued their careers at a transitional time for American intellectuals. They were the last generation of semipro thinkers. They shifted between disciplines, and between university and practical life, with a flexibility lost to later generations, while they helped to build the structure of siloed, professional academia that gave scholars a measure of professional security and independence, while confining them to narrow topics and cloistered resistance to practical life.
This trajectory is similar to other charismatic figures in the early years of American modernity; John Wesley Powell, the self-educated geologist whose expeditions mapped the American West and whose institutional prowess helped create the US Geological Survey; and Frederick Law Olmsted, the self-educated pioneer of American landscape architecture who designed Central Park and helped create the field.
One of the curious omissions in the book is money; the industrialization that reshaped of the American economy during the time covered by the book; it is omitted except for the reaction of John Dewey to the Pullman strike. In the book, Dewey’s story is mostly about the development of his ideas and academic career; a different picture might emerge from a fuller review of his work. Dewey sees and responds to the creation of an American proletariat; the rest of the characters live in an insulated, upper-class world, transitioning from family money to professional academic prestige and comfort.
By contrast, the work of Henry Adams, a contemporary in the social circles of the Holmes and James families; whose autobiography is full of resentment of the nouveau riche businessmen and enterprising professionals of his generation; and the masses of immigrants crowding American cities, staffing the factories and urban stores. Adams doesn’t like industrialization, but he sees it.
The Metaphysical Club traces the rise and fall of pragmatism across American history. The contingent and qualified worldview went into eclipse during the Cold War, where aggressive certainty was seen as necessary to combat world communism; and during the triumphs of idealistic liberalism in the 1960s, when civil rights and women’s rights movements made progress because of their rejection of conventional social compromises. Pragmatic thinking rose again briefly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and is occluded again after September 11, when doubt-free confidence is in favor once again.
The core ideas of the pragmatists; pluralism, the need to protect diversity of thought, the social nature of meaning, are fundamental to American liberalism, at a time when liberal thinking seems to be eclipsed by confident, militant conservatism, which seeks to return to a pre-Darwin world of cheerful imperialism and militant moral certainty.
Menand’s training is in literature, where the mantra is “show but not tell”. This is a strange attribute for nonfiction; where the conventional principle is to explicitly state and then support a hypotheses. Compared to typical nonfiction, Menand emphasizes storytelling and de-emphasizes argument; his analysis and conclusions grow on the reader, on later association and reflection.

Interface is an election-year sci-fi novel about a candidate who is remote-controlled by a biochip in his brain. Published in 1994 by “Stephen Bury”, a pen name for Neal Stephenson and his uncle, the novel is a timely satire of the campaign and media symbiosis that renders elections vulnerable to manipulation.
The best scenes have campaign consultants watching video, predicting and creating winners and losers by lighting, camera angles, and background images. Watching an African-American woman verbally demolish a neo-Nazi candidate at a Denver mall campaign stop, the crew of pollsters predict she’ll be a future president, watching only the images, and not hearing a single word.
There’s a wonderful chapter on a scandal involving the child of migrant workers turned away from surburban hospital treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning. The press flocks to the heart-rending drama. Headlines scream “BIANCA, MIRACLE GIRL.” Meanwhile, the reporters ignore the deep underlying system scandal — migrant workers routinely denied metical treatment, private justice dispensed by connected ranchers. The press coverage is vulnerable to manipulation by the politicos and pr folk who know how to create images for TV.
The sci-fi technology is moderately interesting — a biochip heals a politician incapacitated by a stroke, and wires him directly to the emotional responses of a 100 demographically representative citizens wearing biofeedback wristbands.
The thriller plot is paint-by-numbers. A shadowy network of trillionaire investors seeks to control the presidency to rescue their investments from the US national debt. The novel builds tension with several thoroughly predictable chase scenes that do little for the story, and are clearly designed for the authors’ fantasy film treatment.
Ten years after the book is published, the mass media campaigns are more expensive, at least as distracted by wedge issues and gaffes and horse race coverage.
The sinister plot is deciphered by a few heroes and antiheroes, including the “economic roadkill” in the wired-up focus group, but all the antihero has to talk back are letters to the editor and a Columbine plan.
This time around, he’d have a blog, but would it make a difference? Will peer communication yield more information to move the boulders of distortion, or simply be turned into rivulets of spin and counterspin? Some of both, I think.

Women Don’t Ask leads with an elegant little study showing that a striking $4000 salary differential between men and women masters graduates was explained by women’s reluctance to negotiate.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine called to ask for advice. She’d been offered a job she wanted. She asked me if it was appropriate to ask for a higher salary and to negotiate start date. She wondered if asking might lead them to rescind the offer.
Men are more likely to see negotiation as an enjoyable game, according to surveys reported in the book — they look forward to negotiating. Women more likely see negotiation as an uncomfortable experience. Women see negotiation in the context of a relationship, and are concerned that pushing too hard will damage the relationship.
Another reason that women are reluctant to negotiate is that women are more likely to believe that the other party has already taken her interest into account. The book recounts stories where women didn’t receive promotions — they assumed that the boss had a good reason not to offer them the better job. When the woman finally asked, she got what she wanted, and the boss wondered why it took her so long to ask.
A survey in the book shows that most men don’t think they’re responsible to start with the other party’s interest in mind, and most women do. So, if a man gives an unnattractive offer, it’s not necessarily because he’s trying to screw the other party, he just hasn’t thought the party’s interest through, and doesn’t think he needs to.
The bad news is that women are in a bit of a bind — if they’re aggressive like men, they’re branded bitches and dragon-ladies. When women are perceived as tough, they’re disliked. Assertiveness doesn’t keep men from being liked.
So women need to walk a fine line — we need to be a little self-effacing, a little self-deprecating, even while negotiating with our interests in mind.
The good news is that with training and encouragement, women can learn to negotiate more often, and achieve better results. And, because women are better on average at seeing “win-win” solutions, we’re really good at negotiation once we overcome the initial reluctance, and learn to be persistent without being abrasive.
The book has some chapters with familiar and unoriginal arguments about the differences in socialization between men and women. The substance of the book is good research and analysis on gender differences in negotiating behavior.
Of course, gender differences are tendencies, not rules. I know guys who are reluctant to negotiate, and women who are masters of hardball. Gender is a useful lens, not the only one.
Summary: I recommend this book strongly to women, to men who interact with women, and to people of any gender who are reluctant to negotiate.

Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio recounts experimental neuroscience that is revealing the physical sources of emotions in the brain. Damasio brings evidence supporting a theory of human consciousness having its source in the human body. The book proposes a mechanism where emotions are an emergent phenomenon of many chemical gradients within the body, and conciousness is an emergent phenomenon based on the brain’s ability to map the physical state of the body.
My favorite experimental results in the book are in Chapter 4, where neurological patients with damage to brain regions used for certain classes of emotions are perfectly able to analyze social and ethical situations in the lab, and come up with the “right answers”. Yet these patients lack empathy and normal affect. Without emotional capacity, they are consistently unable to make good decisions and consistently break ethical norms and cause social damage in real life. Emotions are an important component of human intelligence, playing a critical role in “good judgment.”
These anecdotes shed light on the “trolling” problem — there are some individuals with a pathological lack of emotional capacity; no amount of reasoning or compassion will restore the capacity they lack. It is also possible that the physical distance in online communication fails to trigger in some individuals the empathy that restrains them from social pathology in 3d.
It is fascinating to watch modern neuroscience approach proof of mind/body integration, and yet it is less surprising than Damasio makes out, given the Cartesian mind/body dualism that Damasio takes as his straw man. Damasio makes no mention of supporting ideas from other domains: contemporary cybernetic system theory, in which higher levels of abstraction have emergent properties different from the properties of substrates in silicon and elementary logic; and eastern traditions in which the mind makes use of its integration with the body to develop an astonishing level of influence over emotions and basal bodily functions.
The Spinoza contrast to Descartes is less dramatic as a philosophical ground for embodied mind, and more intriguing as a counterfactual to the intellectual development of modernism, given that Cartesian dualism emerged as enlightenment conventional wisdom, and that Spinoza’s writing is a partially occluded source of modernism. Perhaps more of the missing threads in this argument are connected in Damasio’s earlier book: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
I need to reread this book, and read some of Damasio’s earlier work, to figure out if I still agree with these conclusion upon further reflection.

In response to Prentiss’ comments about the review of Ladies’ Auxiliary:
I’d love to read a review of Ladies Auxiliary by a gentile who’d grown up in a small southern town, with a culture of clan loyalty and fear of strangers; who was able to untease the aspects of the book that were commmon to southern small-town culture, and those that were distinctive to the Jewish culture in the story.
Yes, I read For Relief of Unbearable Urges for a book club. There were similarities in the themes — characters tempted both into and out of traditional Judaism. For the teenage girls in “Ladies Auxiliary”, the attraction is a combination of cultural freedom and sexuality — longing to have a prom, wear tantalizing dresses, have parties with boys and alcohol; the classic American dream of driving away. In “Unbearable Urges”, the yearning is named in the title — the urge to break out of the pattern of life — a WASP stockbroker driven by the urge to be Jewish; a wigmaker obsessed with the desire to to obtain the beautiful hair of a delivery man, to make a wig that would make her young and sexy again.
Englander is obsessed with discontinuity; Ladies Auxiliary lingers at the borders — the woman who wears culottes to tweak the “skirts-only” rule; the woman who keeps shrimp salad in the freezer, the woman who is not observant but makes Jewish food on holidays in an appeal to be considered a community member. The convert in Ladies’ Auxiliary leaves her secular life, but brings her beliefs in art and personal spirituality with her.
And yes, books are very different in tone. Englander’s comedy has a dark core; he writes from a spirit of modern literary alienation. The core relationships are broken; the wasp stockbroker convert and his uncomprehending wife; the wigmaker alienated from her husband, the mentally ill man whose wife runs out of forbearance. The Ladies Auxiliary comes from a tradition of sentimental women’s novels; and is full of little melodramatic subplots saturated in social context; the unconsummated attraction between the convert and the Rabbi’s son; the convert’s mentorship of the rebellious girls; the climatic ladies auxiliary meeting; the compassion of the Rabbi’s wife for the young stranger.
England is literary in a way that Mirvis is not; it’s hard to say whether that says something about the quality of the books, or about current segmentation of high and low culture.

On my cousin Nina’s recommendation, I read The Red Tent. The Red Tent is a best-selling historical novel telling the story of the biblical Dinah, the daughter of Jacob who’s a marginal character in the Genesis story.
The Red Tent is a novelization of now-familiar feminist readings of Genesis, found in quasi-scholarly works like Sarah the Priestess, by Savina Teuval; decent scholarly works, like In the Wake of the Goddesses, by Tikvah Frymer-Kensky; and contemporary traditions developed in communal, non-academic settings.

Continue reading “The Red Tent”

Recently reread Eugene Onegin (Johnson’s translation on the shelf).
The language is still captivating and charming; I still think it would be worth learning Russian to read the original. When I read Onegin as a college student I was intoxicated by the poetry, even in translation.
I don’t get quite so drunk by the music, but I understand more of the prose. Reading Onegin, one can guess that the poet didn’t have a great desire to live past forty. The attraction of life is the thrill and passion of adolescence; nothing of value in grownup life but boredom and decay.
With fancier clothes and riskier sports, it’s the American teen ballad; the middlebrow 70s/80s versions I know are Brenda and Eddie; Jack and Diane; feel free to cite the originals that I know the copies of.
I understood and liked the conclusion better. Tatyana, at least, has grown up. She chooses to keep her bargain with adult life; she picks integrity and social status over passion. More than that, she understands in retrospect the mismatch between her innocent passion as a girl and Onegin’s rakish flirtation; and the favor Eugene probably did her by turning her down. Yet, she doesn’t give Eugene any credit for learning anything in the intervening years. Not that there is any evidence that Onegin has learned anything; the same self-absorbed fop, fallen victim to a traditional and perverse cupid.
The irony is that Tatyana has diagnosed Eugene’s character from the marginal notes scrawled on the books in his library; yet the literary poses bear the same relationship to essence (if such a thing exists) as the clothes and social drama. Does she assume that the literary poses are the real Eugene, or does she simply choose not to take the risk of measuring the alignment between private writing and reality.
So much for analysis, this still makes me shiver…
Dawn comes in mist and chill; no longer
do fields echo with work and shout;
in pairs, their hunger driving stronger
on the highroad the wolves come out;
the horse gets wind of them and, snorting,
sets the wise traveller cavorting
up the hillside at breakneck pase;
no longer does the herdsman chase
his beasts outside at dawn, nor ringing
at noontime does his horn resound
as it assembles them around
while in the hut a girl is singing
she spins and, friend of winter nights,
the matchwood chatters as it lights.