My reviews of books in reverse chronological order (i.e. most-recent-first) of date-of-review (which is not necessarily the same as the date-read).
Title: Fat Land
Author: Greg Crister
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 13 March 2003
The problems of the modern world are peculiarly different from those of even the recent past. For most of human history and prehistory, the greatest dietary danger was one of malnutrition and starvation. Human beings have evolved an entire array of genetic mechanisms to help them cope with hunger by developing instincts to gorge during (what would have been historically rare) moments of plenty.
However, unleash those untamed instincts in the modern world, where the agricultural revolution, global transportation, and industrial food processing, have made goodies available all year round, at unbelievably cheap prices, and in unlimited amounts, and you get fat land.
Greg Crister's book Fat Land takes us on a tour of the last few decades of the 20th century when a combination of: global trade in agricultural products, the liberation politics and victimology fallout of the 60s, and the increasingly sedentary lifestyles of Americans (too much TV, too many cars, too little exercise) all led to the now well-known fact that Americans are among the most obese people on the planet.
Even more interesting is the fact that obesity is significantly more prevalent among the poor and middle-class than it is among the rich (who have the time and money to pursue medical, dietary, and exercise means to reduce their fat). Obsesity is on the increase even in young children, and is fast becoming the precursor to a host of health problems that go way beyond such platitudes as body image and societal disapproval.
Crister (wisely) does not offer dietary advice (that is not the purpose of the book anyway), but does a great job of chronicling the slow steps by which matters of health and well-being become politicised and debated in today's society.
An excellent read.
Title: Mendeleyev's Dream
Author: Paul Strathern
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 23 February 2003
What a disappointing crock.
A book of 300 pages purportedly dealing with Mendeleyev and his discovery of the Periodic Table of Elements, starts off, and goes on and on and on for 200 pages about nothing to do with chemistry at all.
First, we are subjected to a core dump, and a choppy, chaotic, episodic one at that, of Greek philosophy (most of it horribly false, and yet treated as prescient gospel by author Paul Strathern).
Medieval alchemy, which comes next, and which one might assume has at least some historical relevance to the subject of modern chemistry, becomes nothing more than a description of the peripatetic proclivities of European alchemists. I fail to understand why knowing that some German traveled all over Europe has any relevance whatsoever to the state of chemistry before, during, or since his lifetime.
Only in the last 100 pages or so does Strathern deal with the modern notion of chemical elements: how scientists even came to realize what an element is, how they identified substances as elemental or not, how they discovered new elements, and what eventually led to the Periodic Table.
I have read far better books on this subject by Isaac Asimov (for one) and various other authors. There is just no excuse for writing such dreck in this day and age.
Title: Watching Sex
Author: David Loftus
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 23 February 2003
In Watching Sex, David Loftus reports on the first-hand accounts of some 150 men on why they watch/read pornography.
The subject has long been dominated by feminazis making extraordinary claims (without proof, as is the norm for feminazis) about the motivations of the consumers of porn, and the supposed ill-effects this has on the consumers and the supposed "victims" of the market generated for the manufacture of the stuff.
Loftus's compilation of the accounts of actual consumers of porn tells a much different story. Almost all users of porn fail to fit any of the feminazi stereotypes, and while their own ideas have many internal conflicts and contradictions, almost none of the supposed ill-effects of porn use: increasing violence, decreasing respect for women, sexual abuse, conflation of reality with illusion, seem to be prevalent or even existent on these men.
Yet another bastion of feminazi theory destroyed by empirical fact.
Title: The Blank Slate
Author: Steven Pinker
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 6 November 2002
A core dump does not a book make.
Steven Pinker has written a truly wonderful collection of words, sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters, but a truly horrible, incoherent book.
The Blank Slate is subtitled, quite appropriately, The Modern Denial of Human Nature. That in itself should have constrained Pinker's ambitions for the scope of the book. To wit, it should have been about the idea of the human being a "blank slate" into which society writes its contemporary biases, and that human actions should be evaluated and judged (whether in personal, public, or legal domains) by taking into account these influences as mitigating circumstances.
Yes, it is true that the blank-slate doctrine is so pervasive in popular thinking today that it would be difficult for people to image a time (as was the case about 100 years ago) when the anti-thesis of the blank-slate, i.e. biologically-influenced human nature, was all the rage. The horrors of the two World Wars and the rapacious genocides of the 20th century have swung the pendulum of popular opinion to what we see around us today. Combine this with the deeply ingrained anti-intellectualism of American society, and you have feminazism and post-modernism and religious fundamentalism running rampant.
However, The Blank Slate should have been about: (1) the psychological and historical origins of the blank-slate idea (i.e. the horrors of past misuse of biological innateness arguments), and (2) why the idea continues to remain appealing to the common person (the fear of what the denial of the blank-slate will lead to).
Pinker, to his credit, does a masterful job in this section of the book. Part III is about the various fears that people have in accepting biological innateness, the fears of: inequality, imperfectability, determinism, and nihilism. Pinker argues, quite persuasively, that (1) none of these fears are warranted or implied by biological innateness, and that (2) a belief in a false doctrine like the blank-slate is actually detrimental to humanity achieving egalitarian goals.
However, what is screaming out for recognition throughout this book, and what is barely mentioned in passing, is the naturalistic fallacy---the belief that what occurs in nature is somehow morally correct. Hume destroyed such an argument once and for all, but an intellectual refutation alone obviously does not change minds.
The rest of Pinker's book is a rambling (some might charitably call it wide-ranging) hodge-podge of neuroscience and evolutionary research showing how much of human behavior is innate and the various universals in the human condition that transcend culture. None of this makes any sense in a book that is about and against the blank-slate doctrine and is extremely distracting. In fact, quoting research on identical twins and the heritability of behavioral characteristics as somehow destroying the deep current of blank-slate doctrines suggests that the person making such a claim is really arguing against a very immature and naive formulation of the blank-slate. It would take a serious blank-slater hardly any time to demolish Pinker's arguments (and thus, by association, seem to demolish even the good parts of the book).
What is worse, Pinker commits a reverse naturalistic fallacy. In his enthusiasm for arguing that the above 4 fears are not warranted, he attempts to placate and console the reader with rationalizations about how a biological view of humans (as opposed to a socially constructed blank-slate view) can provide solace in our hour of darkness and despair. A fallacy is a fallacy, regardless of the nobility of its intentions and the direction in which it is committed.
As long as humans attempt to use science and empirical truths to justify moral stances, and attempt to confuse truth with what feeels good and comforting, we will be fighting these pointless intellectual battles about blank-slatism and biological-innatism, with the pendulum swinging to the wild extremes in either direction, for all eternity. I predict that in 50 years, someone will be arguing for the return to a blank-slate view of humanity by quoting (perhaps out-of-context, but perhaps not) choice passages from Pinker's own book. This would be just desserts for Pinker's own out-of-context quotation of many passages from people who support the blank-slate argument but these quotations are so starkly juxtaposed as to make these people sound like idiots (which they obviously are not).
All of these misunderstandings stem from the naturalistic fallacy. Pinker, I feel, has missed a rare opportunity to write a timely book (when he has the public imagination and attention) telling people to never depend on science to provide a moral compass, and has instead wasted everyone's time and and even dangerously misled people into thinking that science can provide a moral compass, only one different from that provided by the blank-slate.
Read just Part III of this book, and throw away the rest.
Title: Lullaby
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Category: Fiction
Review written: 20 October 2002
Chuck Palahniuk embodies what is great about modern fiction: (1) he offers something stylistic in his use of language that would be way out of place in a non-fictional genre, and (2) he explores themes so bizarre that one really needs the mental freedom that fiction offers us to truly explore his stories and characters. Not many people are capable of doing this (witness the fact that most fiction published today is of the I-came-from-a-fucked-up-family-Oprah-read-my-book variety of crap).
Lullaby takes as its theme the power of mere words. Carl Streator, the protagonist of the novel, discovers that an obscure African "culling" poem published in an even more obscure book of rhymes has the power to kill the person whom it is directed against---even thinking the poem at someone, when done with sufficient rage and vengeance, can kill them, Streator then teams up with a real-estate agent, her assistant, and the assistant's boyfriend to set out on a journey to find and destroy every copy of the book, and thus save the world from annihilation.
No matter how the story ends, Palahniuk's facility with language, in particular, his use of repetition: not just of words or phrases, but of themes and cadences, make this a wonderfully engrossing novel to read.
Yet another brilliant and disturbingly entertaining fiction from a superb writer.
Title: Complications
Author: Atul Gawande
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 14 October 2002
No profession in the history of mankind has been accorded more worshipfulness than the medical profession. And within medicine, surgeons rank highest in the degree of reverence they garner from patients. There is a memorable line in the movie _Malice_ where Alec Baldwin's surgeon-character proclaims, even as he is being investigated for negligence, that he is not merely like a God, but that he is God.
Atul Gawande, just out of his surgical residency, has collected a series of personal stories and medical history in Complications, and it is a glimpse into the other side of the operating room curtain.
Becoming a good surgeon requires a great deal of practice (and not much intelligence), but more important than that, it appears, the ability to make mistakes on live-humans. Gawande organizes his book into 3 sections: (1) Fallibility (how surgeons learn their craft over time), (2) Mystery (which so much is still unknown in medicine), and (3) Uncertainty (how finding a good balance between patient choice and physician insistence is extremely difficult).
Writing with a flair and empathy worthy of an Oliver Sacks, Gawande keeps us fascinated with a look into the lonely life of a surgeon, and allows us, as current and future potential patients, to appreciate how hard-won the victories of medicine are, and why, despite stories of malpractice and supposed incompetence, we should be glad of what modern science has provided us in terms of disease care.
A superb book.
Title: The Economics of Life
Author: Gary Becker, Guity Becker
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 11 October 2002
For many years, Nobel-prize winning economist Gary Becker wrote a column for Business Week magazine. The book The Economics of Life is a collection of most of these pieces, organized by subject.
The organization by subject is a good idea; unfortunately, none of the pieces have a datestamp on them. So, it is difficult to tell when they were written and what the political/economic climate were at that time---this makes the Beckers sound rather idiotic in some circumstances.
800 words (the Business Week limit for each of these essays) is also woefully inadequate for any reasonable discussion of policy. Becker makes for great reading when the column is about economic analysis, but when he discusses policy, he has to scramble to make his points in the last paragraph of a column that spends most of its length just introducing the problem at hand.
The Beckers are also, clearly, Republican fuckwads, and the book is full of columns criticizing Democrats and praising Ronald Reagan. These pieces have nothing of value to add whatsoever to anyone except other Republican asswipes.
The one thing to take away from this book, though, is a very valuable lesson in the way an economist is trained to think: People respond to incentives. What most discussions of human behavior and policy relating to such behavior seem to ignore is that intentions, even explicitly stated, are not enough to bring about changes in what humans do---they almost always respond to the incentive structures that are implicit in the policy. Reading this subset of the columns gives even a non-economist a good introduction on how to think, in non-mathematical terms, about good and bad policy.
The Beckers also make the case, albeit very implicitly, that most policies and laws should come in pairs---one providing an incentive in one direction and the other providing a disincentive in the opposite direction. Failure to do so, as exemplified by their many case studies, leads to undesirable outcomes.
A good book, provided one skips over all of the Republican shit.
Title: Puzzles of Finance
Author: Mark P. Kritzman
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 15 September 2002
Almost everyone who has studied higher math has come across the relation that the arithmetic mean (of a set of quantities) is no-less than the geometric mean which is no-less than the harmonic mean. Most would consider this an odd curiosity to be filed away in the back of one's mind, to be brought out only for math exams.
No. As Mark Kritzman shows in his delightful little book Puzzles of Finance, the failure to correctly distinguish between the various means can cause a lot of confusion and can even be hazardous when dealing with the field of finance and investment.
Kritzman selects 6 puzzles---statements of what seem like either magic, or patently false, or patently true, and then proceeds to show with a combination of numerical examples and formulae, that the seemingly puzzling statements are all manifestations of our faulty intuition. Rigorous mathematics, freed from hand-waving English statements, clear the crap and lay the problems out in full, unambiguous detail.
The puzzles range from exchange rate "anomalies" to investment risk to option pricing theory. In addition to the puzzles themselves, Kritzman includes a short-short introduction to finance and investing that is a must read for anyone interested in the field, or anyone who has ever even considered investing money in capital markets.
A superb book worth multiple readings.
Title: Naked Economics
Author: Charles Wheelan
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 2 September 2002
Reading a market-oriented popular book on economics is always great fun. The elegance, simplicity, and power of the arguments are fascinating, and such books tell us about why there is no such thing as a free lunch, how humans always respond to incentives in predictable (and yet, unaccounted for) ways, and how economics helps us make rational choices in a world of constraints and tradeoffs.
Charles Wheelan is a writer for The Economist, and his book Naked Economics shows signs of the strong writing tradition of the magazine. Without using any figures or equations, Wheelan takes the reader on a grand tour of economics as it relates to almost every aspect of modern life, and tells us how what we might naively assume are good or bad behavior is not really all that. Consumer behavior, politics, when markets work and when they don't, information and information asymmetry, trade: domestic and international, are all discussed in a manner that makes this book a more exciting read than a Michael Crichton novel.
A superb introduction to thinking like an economist.
Title: Wealth and Democracy
Author: Kevin Phillips
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 27 August 2002
Wealth and Democracy is 400 pages of densely argued fine-print. The summary of the book is: wealth and democracy ain't mutually compatible.
Kevin Phillips is among the growing cadre of former Republicans so disgusted with their party that they start writing books repudiating their former stances. Phillips, however, is of a different class than Kristol or Brock.
The book attempts to tackle what is decidedly a complex subject. Phillips deals with 4 main aspects of the American rich:
Phillips spends a lot of time on the first and last of these points: documenting the various statistics indicating the growing disparity between rich and everyone else in America, and talking about the economic history of Spain, Holland, and England (3 other countries that have enjoyed the same arrogance of economic supremacy and wealth concentration only to see their number-one status erode). This, I think, makes the book less readable than it might otherwise have been.
The typical argument here seems to always fall along the lines of a philosophical or moral dislike for income/wealth disparity, and a seemingly irrational dislike for finance (combined with a love for more honest professions like farming and manufacture). Unfortunately, the real problems with wealth are in the other two points mentioned above: disparity per se is not bad, but disparity at the cost of not lifting the living standards of everyone is; and, the rich are not merely satisfied with what they have but build and consolidate their status by exploiting the poor.
Phillips could have spent more time in the book documenting these two aspects of wealth concentration.
Still, Wealth and Democracy shows us that history has never been kind to those societies that do not share their fruits fairly. With Republican fuckwads now running rampant, we may have finally come to witness the beginning of the end of American domination.
Title: Spin This!
Author: Bill Press
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 22 August 2002
Bill Press's Spin This! is a whirlwind tour of spin (that vast wasteland between truth and outright lie) in American life: politics, sports, culture, law, and inter-personal relationships.
While the book is quite funny, it fails to be as ruthless and uncomprimising in its message as it could have been. Press, for example, points out multiple times that spin is a good thing because too much honesty is not suitable for humans. That is the kind of thinking that has brought us so much spin.
Naturally enough, politics and politicians feature prominently in this book. More so, except for Bill Clinton, Republican fuckwads are the biggest bullshitters around, and the biggest of them all is the thief-in-chief mofo moron Dubya. The fact that he was and is being allowed to get away with his shenanigans and illegalities is evidence that democracy presupposes rationality, and thus, cannot work for humans.
Title: Dot.con
Author: John Cassidy
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 7 August 2002
It is extremely frustrating to read John Cassidy's Dot.con because one has to wade through 300 pages of waste to get to a 20 page epilogue that, by itself, is insightful, tightly written, and should have remained an essay or article in a magazine. Instead, by attempting to expand that essay into a book, Cassidy has produced a bunch of utter nonsense.
First off, Cassidy does not seem to have a clear idea of what exactly he is writing about. Although the book purports to be about the dot.com economy, he spends the first quarter of the book talking about the evolution of digital computers and the Internet---all nice and good, but this history is so out of context with what is to follow that it is pointless.
Cassidy also fails to separate the various aspects of the dot.com phenomenon: (1) the increasing prevalence of computers and the Internet in work environments, from (2) the increasing use of computers and the Internet at home, from (3) electronic commerce, from (4) developments on the World-Wide-Web, from (5) the Web as a knowledge system (a la Google), from what seems to be the real purpose of the book (6) ridiculing the specifics of the dot.com economy and its promise to make a large number of people extremely wealthy for almost no input of effort and for very little risk.
By wasting time about the other aspects of the dot.com phenomenon, Cassidy wastes the opportunity to talk about exactly what happened during the dot.com economy.
The book also stinks of 20/20 hindsight---every statement ever made by any dot.com CEO or investment banker, even those made in jest, is taken in isolation and presented as an example of the zeitgeist of voluntary stupidity that characterized the years from 1995-2001. Every little fluctuation of the stock market is explained by Cassidy as the immediate consequence of a statement or act by a person or company---an attitude so silly that it destroys all value for the book.
The academic, efficient market perspective on the dot.com economy is entirely absent---perhaps because Cassidy thinks he knows so much about bubbles that the whole thing should be obvious to anyone.
A careful, thoughtful, insightful analysis of what exactly happened with dot.coms, and why the stocks of these companies were so volatile in price (note that I am not talking about valuations) and whether any of this was justified by efficient markets, will have to wait for academics. Journalists and historians have had a near perfect track record of completely missing the point of such analyses since time immemorial---I don't expect them to do any better here.
Even the movie startup.com offers far more insights than this dung-heap of a book.
Title: Facing Up
Author: Steven Weinberg
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 6 August 2002
Steven Weiberg, the Nobel-prize winning physicist, takes a somewhat different tack with his current book Facing Up than he does in his previous popular writings (which have all been about specific aspects of fundamental physical theories and ideas). To wit, Facing Up is a collection of short essays about physics, philosophy and history of science/physics, the role of scientific thinking in society, and the utter opposition between religion and science.
I was constantly thumping the book in roaring agreement with Weiberg as I read the essays. His unapologetic defense of reductionism in science, the role of elementary particle physics as the most fundamental of sciences, the objective reality of facts discovered by science (as opposed to the crap that postmodernists talk about), are all statements that I hold to be utterly true and valid.
Weiberg also does not hold back in slamming religion as a load of codswallop that has nothing useful to offer in our understanding of the physical world, and is almost as useless for our moral lives as well. Bravo, Steve, bravo.
Facing Up is a delightful book to read in these times of stifling political correctness even among scientists to be friendly and conciliatory about various topics, even to the point of apologizing for the impersonal aspect of scientific truth. Bull!! The Universe is the way it is---those who don't like it can go elsewhere.
An excellent read.
Title: A Trial By Jury
Author: D. Graham Burnett
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 3 July 2002
So it finally had to happen. An intelligent, well-read, scholarly man trained in logic, philosophy, and history, gets on the jury for a criminal trial, and then writes a book about his experience.
It seems almost miraculous that D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science, would get on a New York murder-trial jury---after all, lawyers do not want thinkers on any case whatsoever. But Burnett did get on the jury, and went on to become the foreman, and kept notes on the events surrounding the trial and the deliberations of the 12 people on the jury.
The book reads better than a fast-paced John Grisham thriller, and yet, it is all true. The story also points out the sorry state of affairs of the legal system that seeks the high-minded ideal of allowing the accused to be judged by a jury of his peers, but which in reality means being judged by a panel of morons. Most of the members of this particular jury could not make a syllogism to save their own lives, much less that of another person.
Burnett is very polite and gentle about his fellow jurors, but the lesson of the book, for me, is:
A superb book with excellent lessons and thought-provoking writing.
Title: Oh, The Things I Know!
Author: Al Franken
Category: Fiction
Review written: 1 July 2002
Al Franken is a rare breed among comedians: someone who, funny as he is in person, is far more funny in print. All of his books have made me roll on the floor with laughter, and his latest, Oh, The Things I Know!, a ruthless parody of self-help and advice books written by celebrity morons, is no exception to the rule.
All of the chapters have titles following the template Oh, The Foo I/You('ll) Bar, and consist of unbelievable anecdotes, jokes, satire, parody, and the occasional straight (and real) advice all mixed up in a non-stop barrage of laughter.
An excellent, fun, book.
Title: The Four Pillars of Investing
Author: William Bernstein
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 1 July 2002
Bill Bernstein can be a reasonably entertaining, even educational, writer when he deals with history and with new ways of looking at (supposedly) widely known data. This is what makes his online Efficient Frontier journal interesting reading.
However, his new book The Four Pillars of Investing, written supposedly for the morons who could not understand the arithmetic in his earlier book The Intelligent Asset Allocator, is mostly personal finance advice. It is painful to wade through 70% crap about "add REITs and precious metals to your portfolio" in a book supposedly written for beginners.
What is more, Bernstein talks utter rubbish when he makes claims like "rebalancing increases portfolio returns while reducing portfolio risk"---that alone consigns this book to the dung heap.
Skip it and go back to Malkiel and Bogle.
Title: How to Build a Time Machine
Author: Paul Davies
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 20 June 2002
So how does one build a time machine? High (near-luminal) speeds, high gravitational forces, wormholes, negative energy, [...] and you have the makings of viable time travel.
I have fond memories of reading Paul Davies's book on Quantum Mechanics when I was a teenager, and being fascinated and delighted that I was actually able to understand the math.
In this tasty 100 page morsel of a book, Davies once again demonstrates his consummate skill in writing for intelligent lay audiences. He gives us a whirlwind tour of how special and general relativity treat time, and shows the various methods one can use to travel through time, while avoiding all of the many well-known (and some not-so-well-known) paradoxes associated with the very idea.
Start reading this book on an hour long bus journey and you will find yourself to have travelled the distance in no time at all. Excellent.
Title: Troublemaker and Other Saints
Author: Christina Chiu
Category: Fiction
Review written: 15 June 2002
Christina Chiu's short-story collection Troublemaker and Other Saints is about the Chinese immigrant experience. The first generation of immigrants to the US find that their children are getting away from them---marrying into the "wrong" race, expressing and living homosexual preferences, not going to the right schools, committing suicide or robberies, and in most other ways behaving in a manner that the parents consider scandalous.
And yet, at some level there is nothing remarkable about the teen angst and the problems faced by adolescents, and their experiences transcend any notion of race or culture. Perhaps then, the defining feature of the American way of life is that it brings out the same behavior from its teens, behavior that might otherwise not have been seen or expressed in other environments.
Chiu's stories are well-written, entertaining, and thought-provoking. The same characters show up time and again in these tales, but each story is told from the point-of-view of a different person---so the narrator of one story becomes just another person in another story. Chiu writes first-person narratives of males and females, young and old, with equal facility.
A nice, easy read.
Title: The Bush Dyslexicon
Author: Mark Crispin Miller
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 30 May 2002
Democracy, as the saying goes, is the form of government that gives the masses the leaders they deserve.
Unfortunately, as demonstrated by the traitorous actions of the SCOTUS, Dubya Fucking Moron has been annointed Thief-in-Chief, and has begun, in earnest, the rape of the country.
Mark Crispin Miller's book The Bush Dyslexicon is not, as one might initially expect, a mere compilation of the Fucking Moron's stupidities. In fact, Miller takes for granted Dubya's fucking moronicity, it being too obvious to belabor. Instead, Miller asks his readers to take a look at the deeper evil in Dubya, on display during the few times of clarity in that depraved, deranged, scrambled mind.
Miller also focuses on how such an undeserving fucking moron got nominated (the election, of course, having been stolen) and then continued to get a free ride from the so-called press and mainstream media in this country.
The book is a superb critique of how much society has dumbed itself down, playing right into the sound-bite mentality of TV, and thus leading to the emergence of Dubya Fucking Moron.
Title: The Vampire State
Author: Fred L. Block
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 21 May 2002
As a sociologist writing about economics, Fred Block is laboring as a practioner of a much ridiculed and obscure profession taking on the role of an outsider in another equally ridiculed and obscure profession. However, his book The Vampire State makes for interesting reading.
Block's primary subject matter is the deficit of the US government. As Peter Bernstein and Robert Heilbroner wrote in their classic The Debt and the Deficit, Block provides all of the classic economic arguments for why it is not a disaster for a national government to run a deficit, and why, even under present circumstances, the conventional measures of GDP and debt/deficit may be misstating the case against the government.
Block, being a sociologist, and along the lines of Donald/Dierdre McCloskey's If You're So Smart, also tries to analyze the origin of this pervasively mistaken and yet conventionally accepted "wisdom"---he puts the blame on the Protestant ethic of personal moral virtue. This leads to the classic fallacy of composition---what is good for a person or household (savings, austerity, frugality) cannot be automatically extended to being good for an entire economy, simply because it would prevent all forms of risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and infrastructure building (activities whose risk can be absorbed by an entity as large as a national government). Block also identifies, quite accurately, that modern economies have become so productive that the task of basic survival can be accomplished by a fraction of the population working a small number of hours---what then is the role of a large population, except to diversify into the realm of pleasure goods and services.
Block also talks about inefficiencies and failures of financial and global markets, but these sections of the book do not mesh well with his primary theme and serve only as a distraction.
The conclusion of the book, where Block makes his recommendations for how society as a whole can evolve to being less axiomatically market-driven (i.e. if the market produces a state of affairs, that state must be good because the market produced it) is where he gets really radical. Block calls for a world with low number of working hours, a great deal of occupational mobility, a large welfare net for the majority of the population, and of course, transfer of wealth to fund this society. Can such a utopia (as he himself calls it) come about? There is a powerful psychological argument that communism failed because it failed to take into account human greed---it may be that capitalism will also meet its demise in human greed, only by not being able to control and eliminate the greed that leads to the vast inequalities, corruption, fraud, and rapacious quest for ill-defined progress.
A good, readable book with broad economic and sociological themes.
Title: Conversationally Speaking
Author: Alan Garner
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 20 May 2002
Alan Garner's newly revised edition of Conversationally Speaking is a guide to those who (1) have trouble conversing with and forming relationships with other people, and (2) (and this is an important point I will touch on later) wish to change status quo.
Garner provides a number of suggestions, with examples, of how a person can improve their conversationaly skills:
Each of these suggestions is well-illustrated and motivated.
However, and this is the flag I raised above, all of these suggestions presume that a person is actually interested in pointless conversation with people. Good, productive conversation does not depend on any of the above skills, and the supposedly lost opportunities for conversation and friendship that might occur in a quiet and morose person are exaggerated. Further, many of these suggestions are triggers into the non-rational behaviors of humans---particularly, Garner suggestion to combine statements with one's emotional reaction to a situation (instead of just stating the facts and opinions) is merely perpetuating the touchy-feely nonsense that much present-day communication has become.
Conversationally Speaking is a good book for improving conversational skills that one already has, or for gaining a better understanding of why a person's existing intuitively-employed conversational skills work. In this sense, it is a guide to the rational understanding of irrationality among humans. However, it is not a rational guide to rational communication. Would a rational person want to behave in irrational ways merely to communicate with other irrational people. I think not.
Title: Dr.Hirsch's Guide to Scentsational Weight Loss
Author: Alan R. Hirsch
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 18 May 2002
Dr.Alan Hirsch, the sultan of stink, the overlord of odor, the premier of pee-yuu, is back with more smell-research. This time it is about weight loss and the role of smell in modulating appetite.
There are a couple of good things about this book:
This leads to a plausible mechanism for appetite control via smell. And almost paradoxically, pleasant food odors do not necessarily always trigger increased appetite, nor do unpleasant bad smells reduce the craving for food. Repeated inhalation of simple smells like those of banana, green apple, or peppermint (in Hirsch's study) served to reduce appetite, most likely by causing the brain to think that enough food has been consumed merely from the smell cues.
If the book had stopped at that, it would have made for interesting reading. However, there are lots of bad things about this book:
Mercifully, the book is quite short and can be read/skimmed in a couple of hours. The significant neurological mechanisms of the satiety center are described in separate chapters (which makes the process of skipping over the crap easier).
As with his other book about the role of smell in passion, Hirsch squanders the opportunity to write a good scientific book in lieu of pandering to Oprahtic dumb-fucks.
Title: Blinded by the Right
Author: David Brock
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 7 May 2002
How does a gay, socially liberal, otherwise nice man become a hack for Republican fuckwads? Blinded by the Right tells us one possible route.
David Brock came into national prominence as the author of The Real Anita Hill, a smear-job on the woman who came forward with allegations of sexual harassment against SCOTUS traitor Clarence Thomas. But Brock's life with the conservative movement started when he was a student at Berkeley and saw how campus political correctness went against everything the liberalism of the 1960s stood for---free speech, individual liberty and responsibility, and mutual respect and civility.
He began to drift into the conservative movement, first as a member of the young, neo-conservatives (whose lack of strong ideological principles distinguishes them from the previous generation of theoretically-grounded conservatives), and then into the hard-core Republican party pols. On the way, he found he had to suppress everything he believed in and follow the party-line in perpetrating a level of hatred and sleaze not before seen in national politics---the campaign against Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Finally, Brock's second book (about Hillary) was not the smear job his editors and publishers and Republicans wanted, and he found himself a pariah. Blinded by the Right is Brock's apologia and confession.
There are a number of good things about this book:
First, it makes it clear that there really is a vast, right-wing conspiracy with the most despicable agenda one can imagine. The campaign that started with the Reagan years, and which intensified during the Clinton years, has finally come to fruition as the systematic Republican rape of the country began with Election 2000, and which continues unabated to this day by Dubya, the fucking moron, and his cronies. Many of the same people who plotted, undoubtedly illegally (for anyone who thinks that law and justice play any role in politics), against Clinton are now holding and wielding power in Washington. We also get introduced to the backroom players like Richard Mellon Scaife and the Moonies (who fund right-wing think-tanks and publications). Needless to say, we see the shamelessness and hypocrisy of the Republican dickheads when it comes to furthering their agendas or giving vent to their hatred of anyone even perceived to be on the left (after all, Clinton's greatest legacy was that he was the first Republican president of the Democrat party).
There are also a few not-so-good things about this book:
Brock has a strange writing style. He introduces a character (usually by giving a little background about them), and then, a few pages later, reintroduces the same person (again by giving little vignettes about their life and background), and then, a few pages later, introduces them again. By the end of the book, we have been introduced to almost everyone at least 10 times. This may work for readers with severe attention-deficit disorder, but any alert reader would find that it breaks the pace of the book (in addition to making it about 50 pages too long). Combine this with the fact that the book does not have an index (which would have been much better in allowing quick reference and navigation), and you end up with a book that is not as useful as it could/should have been.
But more seriously, Brock's move away from conservatism and Republicanism is similar to the loss of faith by Catholics who say that their move away from the church was because they were beaten by nuns in math class. The end is not justified by the means. There is so much wrong with right-wing, conversative, Republican ideology that to break ranks because of being badly treated for one's sexual orientation and failure to smear is missing the point.
In the final analysis, Brock's book would make for good reading, but only by liberals. He is sure to be trashed and bad-mouthed by conservative SOBs, and he is unlikely to change anyone's mind about anything.
Title: Secret Knowledge
Author: David Hockney
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 5 May 2002
Vast tomes have been written about the evolution of European art during the Renaissance: growing realism, perspective, color, light and shadow, texture, pigments, and media.
Very recently, artist David Hockney created a major buzz in the art history world by putting forth the audacious thesis that the old masters of the Renaissance used optical aids (mirrors, lenses, projections, etc.) to help them draw their masterpieces. Secret Knowledge is Hockney's book-length version of the argument.
Hockney makes his claim based on a number of points:
In keeping with the dictum that a picture is worth a thousand words, Hockney uses wonderful examples in glossy color photographs to make his points. Giotto (early 14th century) seems to have been the last major master to draw without optical aid. Concave mirrors seem to have come into use between 1420-30 by the Duth masters, while Caravaggio probably introduced the use of lenses for projection. The use of optical aids seems to have persisted until the invention of chemical photography---an event that coincided with the Impressionistic rebellion against realism in art, a trend that has persisted and evolved to this day.
In addition to his basic argument, Hockney makes superb philosophical points about art history itself. Painters who were contemporaries and students of the same school have been studied together, but often, some of them used optical techniques while others did not. Looking at the old masters with the awareness of optics lets us group together traditionally different artists, and split up contemporaries.
The book also points to the inexorable power of science to explain everything and obviate all else. Naturally enough, the anti-science art-fart world has not welcomed Hockney's analysis with open arms. But then, who cares.
Whether or not you buy into Hockney's thesis, Secret Knowledge is a superb introduction into the art history of the Renaissance, and to why the old masters deserve that appellation. A must read book for both the expert and the novice.
Title: Disclosure
Author: Michael Crichton
Category: Fiction
Review written: 2 May 2002
Disclosure is Michael Crichton's tribute to the success of feminism---finally, after centuries of alleged discrimination and ill-treatement, we have finally "progressed" to the point where women in positions of corporate power are just as harassive and abusive as they have accused men of being toward them.
The early 1990s movie based on the book was good enough, but it starred Michael Douglas who was a bit too sleazy and tough for the role of the harassed; and Demi Moore who was a bit too incompetent for the role of the harasser. Crichton's book develops the plot with much more nuance and depth.
Tom Sanders is a manager at a high-tech firm in Seattle who finds one morning that his long-awaited promotion not only does not materialize, but that his new boss is an old girlfriend, Meredith Johnson. Even worse, he finds that she comes on to him that very evening, and accuses him of sexual harassment the next day (quite the reverse of what really happened the previous evening). In an exciting page-turner, Crichton weaves together both the legal/psychological aspects of sexual harassement and discrimination law, with corporate intrigue as to why exactly Tom is being set-up by Meredith. And unlike many of Crichton's other novels, this one has a satisfactory ending with all loose-ends tied.
A very enjoyable novel.
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