Book Club: The World Until Yesterday

The World Until Yesterday

Jared Diamond

Penguin, 2013

"What can we learn from traditional societies?" is the subtitle of this book by the author of one of my favourite books of all time, Guns, Germs & Steel. Dr. Diamond is a biologist and geographer employed by the University of California, Los Angeles whose fieldwork has included decades of interactions with members of traditional societies, particularly in Papua New Guinea.

Unlike an anthropological investigation, the subtitle's question is not "learn about traditional societies" and invites us - those of us who don't live in a traditional society - to take what we can from lessons of observation. The book is divided into sections that cover major ways in which traditional societies differ from civilized societies, such as child-rearing practices and settling disputes and conflicts.

The term "civilized" may be controversial and Dr. Diamond mostly avoids using it (I use it in the literal sense; the word means "city builder"). He defines "traditional societies" not in opposition to those of us who live in cities and nation-states with books and processed food and tall social hierarchies, but simply as societies that closely resemble how all people lived until the dawn of agriculture. Hence the main title, in reference to the fact that something like 99% of the time of human existence has included no agriculture and no cities. He repeatedly makes the point that the very broad diversity of traditional societies and how such people accomplish basic human universal tasks represents a natural experiment; we can observe the 'results' of these experiments and gain useful knowledge to improve the organization and daily life of our own societies.

The enormous diversity of traditional societies makes it difficult to draw broad generalizations except by defining the term against non-traditional societies. Dr. Diamond describes a hierarchy or social-development pathway (while reminding the reader that societies can and have moved in the opposite direction) from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to nations, separated by increasing levels of population size, subsistence, political centralization, and social stratification. Most currently-extant traditional societies are very small, qualifying as bands or tribes, because most of the world is owned by nations. The categories grade into each other rather than having firm boundaries, so it could be argued that some of the smallest modern states or sub-state nations (I'm thinking of the semi-autonomous republics of the Russian Federation here) are chiefdoms, but the historical pattern has been one of nations annexing or destroying smaller societies.

The basic idea of the book, to present examples of ways in which various traditional societies may do things like care for the elderly and then attempt to apply some of those methods to our own societies, is intriguing and I think useful. There isn't one optimal way to live, and there is a wider array of choices than most people may be aware of. On the other hand, many of the things that traditional societies do that we might wish to emulate are embedded in a drastically different culture. Simple things, like carrying a small child so the child's face is close to the adult's eye level, facing forward and able to observe the world while in physical contact with a parent (or "alloparent", a non-related adult caregiver) may be easy enough to implement. Dr. Diamond is a little pessimistic about that example, suggesting that social disapproval in a modern society may lead such adventurous parents to abandon these attempts, but among the parents of young children I know, caving to social pressure like that doesn't seem particularly likely.

I either disagreed with or was apathetic about many of Dr. Diamond's suggestions for changes to modern society. Many of his examples, comparing how some particular traditional society did something to what he's seen in Los Angeles seemed to me to be maximized differences by comparison to LA or the broader culture of the United States; comparison with other modern societies such as Canada or various European cultures might not make the difference seem so stark.

Other examples ignored one of the most important differences between traditional and modern societies - the risk of death at any age. It's facile to compare causes-of-death between the two categories of societies and imply that intertribal warfare or infected wounds have simply been replaced, one-for-one by modern car accidents and heart attacks. Yes, those are the leading causes of death in most modern societies - and Dr. Diamond does devote considerable text to the questions of non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and diabetes - but the every-day risk of dying in an automobile collision is drastically lower for a member of a modern society than any potentially-corresponding hazard faced by traditional societies.

The consequence of our modern lack of death is dramatically different demographics. Unfortunately, Dr. Diamond does a very poor job of describing these differences. He relies heavily on the often-misunderstood concept of expected lifespan. Given his scientific training, I do not think Dr. Diamond fails to understand this concept, but he fails at clarifying it for his readers.

The most commonly cited measure of life expectancy, period-specific life expectancy at birth, is based on a number of factors and does not apply in many situations that many people try to use it in. For example, in his book Alone Against the North, modern-day Explorer Adam Shoalts discusses hypothetical, historical aboriginal populations in northern Canada as having a life expectancy of less than 30 years, and therefore there would have been no elderly people at all in those societies. THAT'S NOT WHAT IT MEANS. Sorry, I get frustrated by this stuff. A life expectancy of 40 years, to use an example that appears several times in The World Until Yesterday, does not mean that nobody much older than 40 is to be found in that society. It's an AVERAGE, a mean value based on counting how old each person was on the day they died. The period-specific part comes in when discussing societies that experience PROGRESS, which I'm going to define as the long-term improvement in human lives driven by intentional and accidental changes to human societies through time. Traditional societies, more or less by definition, do not experience progress - every day is much the same as every previous day, stretching back through thousands of years - so the different life expectancies of modern Canadians born in 1950 vs. in 2000 are not relevant here.

A life expectancy of 40 years at birth could be created through a wide range of factors, but the most common among humans is a high death rate for infants and children combined with a lower and fairly steady death rate for ages higher than early childhood. Extreme values - those that are far from the mean - have high 'leverage' because they have a large influence on the value of that mean. A population in which large numbers of people die shortly after birth but those who survive typically do not succumb until much older will have a mean life expectancy that few people would be expected to actually die at. A society with a life expectancy of 40 years probably has many people much older than 40 and many dead children, who conveniently get swept out of sight and out of mind. Societies with many dead children also probably have many living children, hence observers tend to miss the fact that in the absence of child-killers like periodic famines and the various diseases that cause catastrophic diarrhea there would be twice as many children teeming in those quaint villages as what you see. A life expectancy of 40 means an individual is expected to live 40 years on the day they are born. A year later the dice have already been rolled for many, many events that could have but did not kill that 1-year-old. This is true for everybody still alive, so their subsequent life expectancy is considerably higher than the at-birth population level expectancy, especially in societies where children die at much higher rates than adults - which is all societies, though modern societies have considerably reduced that difference (see Progress, above).

These demographic factors mean that modern societies differ from traditional societies in a few fundamental but apparently invisible ways - we expect our children to grow up, even premature babies and others with (sometimes severe) risk factors present on the day they are born. We expect to become old, to retire from our jobs or careers and then enjoy some time alive beyond that point. Obviously, retirement is a concept largely absent from traditional societies because their older people continue to "work" even if they're not walking a zillion kilometres a year through the bush. And we moderns famously have little experience of death, despite the trivially obvious fact that everyone dies. But with our low death rates at every age, the only civilized people who have much experience of dead and dying people (besides medical professionals) are the very old, whose memories compress the deaths of everyone they've known through their long lives into a short subjective period. Yes, everyone you knew is dead - but that process took decades. For a child without playmates because of a sweep by cholera, that process took weeks.

Getting back to the concept of progress, it is that which I believe separates modern societies from not just traditional societies but also separates us from pre-scientific societies in history. I struggle with a concept I call the "Wall of History" - I find it very difficult to empathize with or comprehend the lives of people who lived before effective cures for diseases or the ability to travel long distances and then return existed. I constantly think about how tomorrow will be different from today, but a pace of change fast enough to make that relevant (i.e., significant changes within an individual's lifetime) was missing from everywhere until approximately the Industrial Revolution. That's just me, I'm sure, but when I read Dr. Diamond's suggestions for improving modern societies by picking and choosing aspects of various traditional societies I stumble over objections based on microbiology, macroeconomics, or engineering. There are certainly some good, or even great ideas here, but I need more convincing.

Lab Girl

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren

Alfred A. Knopf, 2016

Hope Jahren is a scientist and a professor and has a blog (www.hopejahrensurecanwrite.com) that I started reading a couple of years ago. Mostly she blogs about her life and her work, which includes plenty of rants about sexism in science and related subjects – she’s a woman scientist, and this isn’t an easy thing to be. This book is her autobiography, potentially Volume I of a series because she’s far from the end of her career and/or life at this point so I assume there are many more stories to be told. But Hope sure can write so I’m quite optimistic that she’ll keep us updated as she sees fit.

This was a highly-anticipated book among the other bloggers I regularly and semi-regularly read. It was also an anticipated book among many of the people I know in real life, who may or may not have their own blogs but many of whom are women and scientists and women scientists. I bought this book in the Chapters in West Edmonton Mall in May; I was at #WEM with my post-doc advisor, Dr. Maria Strack and when I showed her my purchases I promised her I’d loan her the book when I had finished reading it myself. I’ve just loaned it to Charlie so Maria will have to either wait or buy her own copy.

I read Lab Girl in a single weekend. I haven’t read an entire book start-to-finish in a weekend like that for a long time – the last time I’m sure I did that was with Jurassic Park, and I was about 16. I think there’s something about some books that just hooks me at the right age; when I was 16 that hook was in Jurassic Park, when I’m 38 that hook was in Lab Girl. So my opinion of Lab Girl is very positive. But Book Club blog entries have never been about just reviewing a book, they (should) always be about other ideas that flow from reading a book. Such as this idea of age-dependent hooks in books (rhyming is good and fun). Oddly enough, Lab Girl was certainly not written for me, so the hook in it that got me counts as by-catch.

I say that because there is so much in Lab Girl that’s inspiring as a scientist, that gets right at what I want to do as a scientist. More than once, Dr. Jahren describes walking out into an ecosystem, and just letting the environment and her mind interact at some subconscious level until she comes up with a Research Question (capital letters denote things that are more permanent than the daydreams I romp through almost continuously). She kneels in a peat bog in Ireland until an Hypothesis regarding ecohydrology occurs to her, then she starts collecting specimens. She helps a colleague unpack samples and then spends half a decade running fossil carbon through her mass spec. But while I love those stories, they’re not for me – they’re for somebody like me but who has experienced things I have not, things like sexism and manic-depressive mental illnesses interacting with pregnancy.

Having said that, there’s actually less sexism and discrimination and injustice in Lab Girl than I was expecting based on my reading of Dr. Jahren’s blog. My impression of her blog is that she is angry – completely justifiably! – about the institutional sexism and high-level bullshit that infests academic science. That anger is present in Lab Girl, but it’s very much in the background. She may have made her blog about it, but she didn’t make her life about it. Her book, in other words, is not a product of her blog; both her book and her blog are products of her writing, which is itself a product that passes through many filters and checkpoints on its way from her life and her mind. At least, that’s my meta-impression of what of hers I’ve read. I intend to read her scientific papers (well, some of them – at one point in Lab Girl Dr. Jahren mentions a mid-career total in the neighbourhood of 70 peer-reviewed papers) for another look at her overall writing but also because I find myself in a related field. The parts about water-use by plants is especially interesting at the moment.

There are a couple of small errors, and while I really really like Lab Girl, I feel like I need to point them out. The most glaring is a description of DNA and chromosomes as protein. She’s describing the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, that workhorse of plant genetics, and in two separate paragraphs talks about the length of protein unraveled from each cell. No. Chromosomes do include plenty of protein, but genomes are made of DNA.

In another part of the book, a shocking (to me) casual negligence toward automobile seatbelts is described. Look, just wear your damn seatbelts, OK? Every. Time. Complaints about “Grizzly Adams” field scientists not taking her seriously are much less impressive after reading her laissez-faire attitude towards field work. If you’re going to tell me you don’t feel safe around that creepy post-doc, don’t follow it up with multiple stories of car crashes and heads bouncing off windshields. The creepy post-doc might have legitimately been terrifying, but he didn’t give you a bloody nose and a concussion the way bad car decisions did.

The last thing in Lab Girl I didn’t like – and in a discussion like this I feel I need to remind myself that this is a really good book, like top 10 lifetime books I’ve read GOOD – is a description of what amounts to a “teachable moment”. After her misadventures in Ireland, which culminated in all of her meticulously documented samples being disposed of by an Irish customs agent (Get a permit. It’s not that hard. But I digress), Dr. Jahren has come up with a test of new graduate students that aims to simulate that crushed distress upon having one’s recent hard work destroyed. She describes an exercise in which a new student, somewhat insultingly referred to as a “noob” (LOL OMG BBQ) is made to carefully label a large number of sample vials in anticipation of an upcoming field trip. Then Dr. Jahren and her long-serving research partner (that’s a relationship for a separate Book Club, it’s too big to tackle here) play a game of “Good Cop-Bad Cop” that ultimately results in the entire set of vials being unceremoniously dumped in the trash. This is, on a certain level, a simulation of the end of their Irish trip. But the intent is entirely different, and intent matters.

The intent of the Irish customs agent was to enforce the law, a law that Dr. Jahren should have known about, and Dr. Jahren should have had a permit to export plant material from Ireland. There was a bit of an aside in there about checked vs. carry-on luggage and I don’t think she learned any lessons there; she did claim to have learned the lesson about permits, even if only at the “I’m sorry I got caught” level rather than the truly “I’m sorry for what I did” level.

The intent of Dr. Jahren and Bill in their test-the-noob exercise is to see if an A+ student is really an A+ student or is really a B+ student. The difference, and this is my taxonomy not hers, is that the A+ effort includes something well above-and-beyond expectations, some action that counts as Outstanding. She slyly describes a student who “passed” this bullshit secret test by pulling the vials out of the trash and cleaning them, making them potentially useful for another field trip. There’s so much wrong with that, but I’m going to just focus on the stupid bullshit of a secret test – and that’s all a “teachable moment” is. I went through one or two during my time as a grad student and they were always completely unjust and unfair. If you need me to do something, I’ll do it. If you need me to learn something, I’ll learn it. But don’t “cleverly” combine the two and ruin both. Please. Please, Dr. Jahren, please stop doing that label-vials / good-cop-bad-cop exercise. It shows considerable contempt on your part towards your student, and is a violation of trust. Cut it out.

I would be very happy if pretty much everybody I know could read Lab Girl. It’s a damn good book, a series of great stories told with considerable skill and pushed together into something much bigger than the sum of the parts. I especially want a handful of individuals I know to read Lab Girl; I’m looking forward to presenting this book, this individual copy of a mass-produced hardcover to Maria. And I want to buy more copies for other people. It seems like a mild violation of privacy to describe any of these other future-gift-recipients by name here, but I can plug the wonderful, horrifying, terrifying, fantastic writing of my internet-friend Elise the Great here, and Elise, please read Lab Girl. I’ll send you a copy or an Amazon gift code or something.

Book Club: Near Death in the Desert

Near Death in the Desert
True Stories of Disaster and Survival
Edited by Cecil Kuhne
Random House, 2009

I picked up this book in a used bookstore not long ago, realizing the useful niche between fiction and long-form non-fiction a set of short non-fiction stories like this occupies in my reading-for-entertainment habits. Cecil Kuhne has also edited a series of apparently similar volumes, listed in the front matter of this book with titles like "Near Death in the Arctic".

I assume Cecil Kuhne, in addition to choosing stories to include and separating out parts he wished to include from longer works (i.e., the work of assembling this volume) wrote the 1-paragraph texts that introduce and post-script each story. He does a very poor job at this, over-sensationalizing all of the stories (as much as the title does - few disasters are involved anywhere) and, more seriously in my opinion, opening one story with a bit of frankly racist nonsense. The oldest story fragment here is from the account by J.W. Powell of the 1869 expedition to explore the Colorado river and a part of the Grand Canyon. Kuhne states "Major Powell set out from Green River, Whyoming, to explore territory and rapids never before viewed by human eyes." (emphasis added by me) The story, which I can only assume Kuhne read, includes multiple mentions of the discovery by Major Powell of the remains of native American habitations, and plenty of description of such artifacts found overlooking the river as abundant broken pottery and the outlines of house foundations.

Overall, this wasn't a great read. The variety of voices was a strength, certainly, but despite covering adventures separated by more than a century (the most recent story takes place in the early 1980's) I found more in common among these authors than their voyages across hot sand and rock: none of them were particularly likeable or relatable. I think it's probably a hazard of this kind of extreme travel-writing that the author-adventurers start out as people of a tiny minority, who feel such a strong wanderlust that they set out on near-suicidal and deeply uncomfortable voyages (the squidgiest part of this book for me was the description of attempts to remove lice from clothing). They don't relate well to most "normal" people in their home societies, so they don't come across as particularly relatable in their day-to-day concerns or their long-term goals to most "normal" people, either. I don't consider myself particularly "normal" in this sense, and I like to imagine that I am actually closer to these authors along some hypothetical "stay-at-home / see the world" spectrum, but I don't like them. Perhaps I'm subconsciously worried that I will fall into some of their more unpleasant habits as I pursue my own adventures (lice aside, there is a general acceptance among these authors of some pretty blatant human-rights violations happening around them. Sure, what can a foreigner do, especially alone in a strange culture? But, that to me does not extend to slavery).

I'm leaving this book in the informal library at the hostel I'm staying at in Munich this weekend, perhaps one of my fellow travellers here will enjoy it more than I did.

Book Club: War: A Crime Against Humanity

War: A Crime Against Humanity

Roberto Vivo

Editorial Hojas Sel Sur S.A.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2014

I was sent this book by an agent of the publisher after a brief email exchange in late summer last year. Because I was without a real fixed address until November, I arranged for it to arrive at my friends' home in Kitchener before I arrived in mid-October. Shamefully, I have since neglected to review this book until now.

I was sent this book because I had previously reviewed God's Hotel, a book I was sent by an agent of that publisher because of previous book clubs; somehow, somebody has actually been reading this blog. Weird. In subsequent emails, I assured the person who had sent me War: A Crime Against Humanity that my review would be posted here "within a few weeks"; this was back in November. I am sorry about my tardiness.

The main reason my review is so late is the disappointment I felt reading this book; this is not going to be a positive review.

When I first received the initial email, describing the book and asking if I would like to read it (for free!), I was already of the opinion that war itself could be described as a crime against humanity, in addition to the various war crimes committed during wars and other conflicts that already count as crimes against our entire species. I was expecting - and hopeful regarding - a book that constituted a full-length argument supporting this thesis. The various bits of you-should-read-this-book - the back jacket, on-line brief reviews, etc. - contributed to this feeling that this book would provide a foundation for future arguments condemning wars, warfaring, and the callous disregard for peace exhibited by some people.

The disappointment stems entirely from the singular failure of this book to provide that coherent, well-supported argument.

The structure of this book is four major chapters, each divided into a number of sections. The front matter lays out this structure clearly, and describes the history of various ideas and sections. The book was born from the author's sincere desire to explore and explain the origins and consequences of war, both as a recurring (and frequent) historical event and as a catastrophe each and every time it happens. Again, this laudable goal raised my expectations and hopes for this book!

The first chapter, "Violence and Man" is introduced as a kind of essay to discover whether war is something inherent in humanity and thus will always be part of our societies, or something that we might conceivably rid ourselves of, with the analogy - continued throughout the book - that we have successfully rid ourselves of several other historical horrors including slavery* and torture.

Unfortunately - and establishing a pattern for the rest of this book - the opening paragraph of Chapter 1 does not actually introduce the real topic of the chapter. First, we get a series of statements regarding the unjustifiable nature of war, the ways in which wars corrupt those who engage in warfare, and the immense damage inflicted on all societies and people by wars. The conclusion one draws from this - aptly stated by the author - is that no quantification of warfare, no meaningful comparison between wars or battles or strategies can take place because a single death a result of war is itself a crime against everyone. This absolute stand by the author is excellent! But then he goes and ruins the whole thing by proceeding to list wars by their deathcount, to distinguish between civilian and soldier deaths, and to explicitly rank history's greatest monsters! This is shortly after he states (pg. 44) that "the events related here are not comparable to one another" - then he rants about Hitler, Stalin, and Mao! and compares across millenia between the Mongols and the 20th century! If even 1 death is a crime, then how is one million deaths any more or less a crime than 10 million?

Then we get a paragraph at the end of Chapter 1 that tells us that we've just seen that war is not inherent in humanity. Wait, what? It feels like an entirely different essay was written and all I got to see was the first and last chapters, with the middle completely replaced by something else.

Chapter 2 is titled and introduced as a counterpoint to Chapter 1, as a chapter about the history of the world from the point of view of Peace where Chapter 1 was a history of war. Unfortunately, other than a brief, pointless list at the beginning of the chapter, it is no such thing. There are big chunks of Chapter 2 that constitute an apology for religion, including such ridiculous notions that when a religious authority or text declares itself to be devoted to peace, we can assume that's actually the case. Major world religions are described by their self-description as peace-bringers, and states (pg. 99) that "Buddhism has been transmitted to the present day without there existing at any time in history evidence of holy wars or violent colonisation of any kind whatsoever in the name of this tradition." If this were true, South-East Asia, where Buddhism runs into Hinduism and Islam (among others) would be expected to be the most peaceful region on earth. Do I really need to point out the violence in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia... ? Go tell the Rohingyas that Buddhism has never been violent. Go tell the Tamil Tigers about non-violence.

And then there's some filler that includes the requisite insult to atheism (by quoting a theologian) and lots of mindless blah blah blah about God and Mystery and Spiritualism. Mr. Vivo even mentions Peace, Justice and Hammurabi in the same sentence as the Old Testament (pg. 114) - the OT is just a story of blood, blood, and more blood!

Chapter 3 places various (mostly contemporary) societies along an axis of openness and closed-ness, with mature modern democracies such as Canada considered "open" and such nasty places as Belarus considered "closed". So far, so much in line with so many other writers I've encountered. These concepts clearly link to other concepts such as Liberalism and Radicalism, and these relationships seem to have led Mr. Vivo to contradict himself. Whereas he stated in Chapter 1 (and to some extent in Chapter 2) that no war could be justified, that war itself was unjustifiable, he describes in Chapter 3 how Liberalism helped to defeat "absolutism, fascism, and totalitarianism" in the World Wars of the 20th century - which to my reading counts as justifying the most destructive conflicts in history because they ended with greater devastation among the fascist and totalitarian regimes than among the democracies.

When a democratic country declares war on a dictatorship, that's a justifiable war, Mr. Vivo? So why do you spend so much of Chapter 4 on the American (Democracy) invasion of Iraq (Dictatorship) in 2003?

Sorry, I'm getting a bit out of order here (much as Mr. Vivo does in several paragraphs, discussing later events before earlier events without clear distinctions other than post-hoc-stated dates). The first part of Chapter 4 is a discussion of the other widely-recognised crimes against humanity, Slavery, Torture, and (institutional, national-level) Racism. This part is not really problematic, though at one point Mr. Vivo downplays the (pivotal, central) role of slavery in the American Civil War (it was about slavery. Full stop. Don't believe me? Read the articles of secession by each Southern state that formed the Confederacy. It's all right there, in their own words.).

I feel like the point that war fits the definition of a crime against humanity, right up there with Genocide, or the recruitment of children as soldiers (there are others, I'm not going to defend including or excluding a particular bit of awfulness on a list) is fairly easy to make. Every war is devastating to both the aggressor and the defender, every war kills huge numbers of people, both civilians and soldiers. Wars are built on the worst human emotions, with factors such as xenophobia and the dehumanisation of one's ideological opponents allowing otherwise non-violent individuals to kill and destroy on a large scale. Most of the crimes against humanity that have been identified are intimately tied to war, with wars providing both the opportunity and the motivation - and often the means - for the darkest side of humanity to rise up. Thus, it makes sense to include war itself as a war crime.

Mr. Vivo barely makes this point, and certainly doesn't make this case. He spends too much of the book fawning over irrelevant or counter-productive notions such as the announcements of peaceful intent by religious authorities (while they simultaneously call their followers to arms), and not enough time on the actually good parts of this book. Right at the end he does provide some reasons to be hopeful, in two areas: international justice and global trade.

There's a pretty good description of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the latter parts of Chapter 4, along with some interesting suggestions for improving its reach and effectiveness. He seems confused about the definition of sovereignty - having a country's national courts carry out an action after requests from the ICC is not really different from those courts carrying out those actions on the orders of the ICC - but I am convinced by his arguments that this organisation represents a strong push in the right direction on world peace.

The second argument, regarding world trade, is weaker. Wars destroy trade, both internationally - obviously between warring states, but third-party countries, too - and within nations. Trade matters. International and within-national trade is a pretty good working definition of the world economy, and major disruptions to trade cause hardship and suffering - and deaths! - even in the absence of wars or warfare. And reminding potentially war-mongering politicians about the financial costs of war may help to avert violent conflicts. But Mr. Vivo barely makes that point, and instead discusses the usual mindless "teach the children!" answer to pretty much every issue ever. Does nobody ever consider what teachers are doing already, and what they would have to stop doing to fit in a love-thy-neighbour curriculum, as worthwhile as that might be?

The other good point made is that "pacifist" is not to be confused with "passivist" (pg. 290). Peace is not simply the absence of war, but an active PROCESS of history in which conflicts and disagreements are resolved by dialogue and other non-violent means, and people are enriched and enlightened by interaction with other people from different cultures.

Overall, this book is a disappointment, written only moderately well (blame the translator here if you've read the Spanish-language original) and missing too many opportunities to really make a great point.

My opinion is apparently in sharp contrast to other bloggers, and is the minority opinion.

The Gal in the Blue Mask more-or-less repeats the glowing words printed on the outside of the book.

Smashwords calls it "exceedingly well-researched and documented", which makes me wonder if I we were sent the same book.

The reviews on Amazon.com are 6/6 for 5 stars

Forewordreviews gives it a more believable 4 stars (and apparently got paid for that review!)

Blueinkreview calls Mr. Vivo a "cooly elegant writer". Maybe they read his original words, rather than a translation?

And here's the webpage for the book, go see for yourself: http://www.robertovivo.com/the-book/

* OK, just to avoid a derailment regarding slavery - what I mean by our successful abolition of slavery, and what Mr. Vivo means, is that in no country on Earth is the ownership of other human beings officially legal within that country. Yes, there are still slaves today, in many places, but legally, at least, such practices unequivocally constitute crimes in much the same way that murder, rape, robbery, etc. still occur everywhere but are universally condemned as crimes. Similarly, torture and racism are nowhere officially sanctioned by laws and governments, but are still with us as crimes.

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I hope this Book Club entry does not prevent other agents of this or other publishers from contacting me in future. I really enjoy reading and I feel like I should do it more - and having somebody expecting my reaction to a particular book is great motivation to get my ass back onto the couch. So far, I have received books FOR FREE twice, which is mind-blowing and awesome. Thank you!

Book Club: The Lunatic Express

The Lunatic Express
Discovering the World... via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes
Carl Hoffman
Broadway Books, New York

Last Friday, having spent most of the day plowing through the revisions to my PhD dissertation as suggested by members of my examining committee, I took a break and went to the Starbucks coffee shop in the Murray Library (the main library branch) at the University of Saskatchewan. Charlie gave me a gift card a while ago that I've been refilling every so often for my froofy pseudo-Italian coffee beverage fix; go ahead, call me names because I unironically say the phrase "Grande Latte, please" on a somewhat regular basis. Hey, the uni library isn't as intolerably yuppie / hipster as what I used to do, which was drive my BMW to the Starbucks on trendy Broadway Avenue and order a Grande Latte. 


Pictured: BMW, Anachronistic Yuppie-ness. Not pictured: Latte, Starbucks, Fax Machine.

Where was I? Oh, right, in line at the university Starbucks. To take advantage of the captive audience in the queue for caffeine, the staff of the Murray library have (excellently) installed a set of bookshelves near where one stands when the line is particularly long, as it was on Friday afternoon. Onto these shelves they place the newest books the library has just acquired, and a selection of books through the SPL on Campus program. The SPL is the Saskatoon Public Library. Public libraries, unlike university libraries, tend to focus their acquisition efforts (and budget) on books with mass appeal; best-selling novels and popular non-fiction are much more available at a public library than at a typical university library. Obviously, a decent university library will not only also have those best-sellers (in single copies compared to the public library's half-dozen or more per branch) but also access to esoteric academic materials, including broad swathes of the scientific literature and obscure, long-out-of-print materials that never rose to the leve of "classic". 

I was feeling a strange need to read for fun to balance the intense proof-reading I'd been doing pretty much all week. This book was standing up in a small metal bookstand on top of the SPL on Campus shelf unit, and I picked it up and started reading while I was standing in line. I made it to page 20 by the time my latte was ready, so I checked it out and took it home.

Mr. Hoffman is an experienced travel writer and it shows in this book. According to the micro-biography in the back, he's a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveller and Wired - and while I like most things National Geographic, Wired has always struck me as pretentious and excessively neophilic. Some parts of this book read a little like a Wired article, with essentially common experiences or not-particularly-interesting events presented as stunning revelations about life, the universe, and everything. Fortunately, such episodes are few and far between.

I enjoyed this book, and this is a Book Club so I won't really review it. I will note that the match between the text and the map at the front of the book is not close - Mr. Hoffman simply does not talk at all about large segments of his journey around the world. I assume the passage from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Nairobi, Kenya, by way of Johannesburg and Dar es Salaam by air and from Tanzania to Kenya by bus, was not interesting or dangerous enough to describe. This omission is a little strange, like the editor decided this book had to come in under 300 pages (the Appendix - regarding communication with an insurance actuary - starts on page 281) and so cut some of the slightly less hair-raising adventures. 

The theme of the latter half (or so) of the book is about loneliness and interpersonal connections. Mr. Hoffman, it emerges in slow parts, is separated from his wife, mainly for reasons of his constant travel and his wanderlust when at home in Washington, DC - at least, according to him. His experiences among the less-than-affluent, especially in South America, Indonesia, and India strike him with a mixture of feelings regarding the Unity of Man and the Need for Connection and other such ennui. I believe him when he describes his own feelings, of course, but it was difficult for me to sympathise. Perhaps if I had also thrown myself into a project that necessarily included episodes where "the very idea of silence was unheard of" (pg 88, Kenya) or if I'd stood "in a line next to roadside stalls, a trillion insects flying and buzzing in the lights, pissing into a trench that had years of plastic water bottles, plastic wrappers, toilet paper"... (pg 203, India) I might be more inclined to identify with his crisis of traveller-mindset and his apparently intense realization that what is missing from his life is strong human contact. Mostly, though, I read about his escapades with the kind of fascinated dread normally associated with graphic depictions of violence.

The book mentions his blog, but all I found was his website - http://carlhoffman.com/ - and his twitter feed - @lunaticcarl - I think I'll follow him, he doesn't tweet very often and when he does there are often pictures. He travels widely and writes clearly and very well, even if (to me) he comes across as a bit emo sometimes.

Book Club: Mind of the Raven

Mind of the Raven
Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds
Bernd Heinrich
Harper Perennial
New York

I picked up this book from a discount bin at a local bookstore; I like ravens (Corvus corax) and I wanted to learn more about them. This book provides lovely information about raven life-history and behaviour, so I succeeded there. Book Club entries here are not supposed to be book reviews, I will say I enjoyed this book and I would recommend it.

The author is a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Vermont; he is an ecologist by training, with some specialization in ornithology though I don't think he would describe himself as an ornithologist; his interests are too broad for one vertebrate class. At several points in this book I was struck by the evidence of his career as a scientist, such as when he talks about his model of raven behaviour being congruent with the observational data, and his frequent references to the trouble he's had getting some papers published. I have been criticised in the past for not providing a summary of my project or proposal that was written for an "interested non-scientist" or having too much jargon in my attempt at such a piece. It's very difficult to write about science for a non-specialist audience without coming across as condescending or dumbing it down too much. I don't know if Dr. Heinrich succeeds, because I have enough training in ecology to skip right past the words and phrases that presumably lead non-scientists to pause and scratch their heads (or roll their eyes). 

I enjoyed this book, so I think I'll try again to find some more science writing that I can read and evaluate for a different audience (i.e., different from me).

Book Club: Crawling from the Wreckage

Crawling from the Wreckage
Gwynne Dyer
Random House, 2010

This book is a collection of Gwynne Dyer's columns - syndicated in many, many newspapers around the world - from 2005 to the end of 2009, re-organized into thematic chapters such as "South Asia" (chapter 8) and "Nukes" (chapter 17), each containing 3-5 essays ranging in length from about two pages up to about five. He also includes introductory or post-script remarks before and after almost every essay, where he points out changes that occured since he wrote that essay (i.e., between the time of the essay and sometime in 2010), emphasises certain points, or says things he thought he wouldn't be able to get published in a newspaper but fit into the book - most of these have to do with direct insults to various individuals (a former deputy Prime Minister of Japan is called "old and stupid" for example), or greater emphasis of his opinions regarding religion (he's not a fan, generally speaking).

I quite enjoy Gwynne's writing, he maintains a simultaneous tone of both exasperation and sarcasm at just a light level that works well to combine cynicism with, surprisingly enough, optimism. The theme of the book is that despite the overwhelming bad news generated daily - wars, poverty, crime, et cetera - the signs of progress are there if you're willing to look for them. He's a supporter of international organizations such as the U.N. dedicated to preventing wars and promoting human rights and expansion of democracy, and many of the essays centre on victories, minor and otherwise, of such organizations.

This was a good read, a series of thought-provoking short works arranged logically. I suspect I would have enjoyed this book even more if I'd read it shortly after it came out. Chapters dealing with Ukraine and Russia, for example, are fairly optimistic, having been written years before the current crisis. Similarly, the predictions regarding parts of the Arab middle east - Syria, Egypt, and Morocco are each mentioned specifically several times - were all written before the "Arab Spring" of 2011 and the Syrian civil war. Presumably, Gwynne has updated his long-term predictions accordingly, and I'm looking forward to reading his new opinions.

Book Club: Arguably

Arguably
Essays by Christopher Hitchens
12, 2011

I picked up this book because it was in one of the bargain bins at McNally Robinson - not the end-of-the-line cart, but one of the shelves in their reduced-cost area. Anyway, I'd been meaning to read some Hitchens for a while, and I bought this not long after his death; I think it is the last book he wrote, though perhaps there's a technicality there because very little of this book is new material written in 2010/2011, it's nearly entirely essays, reviews, and similar short pieces previously published in such places as The Atlantic, Salon, Slate, or Vanity Fair.

Hitchens was an excellent writer. Even if one disagrees with every last one of his opinions, it is impossible to avoid the realization that he knew, very well, his way around a keyboard. He was also a monumental reader, and equiped with the kind of memory that can keep the important details of an entire library of books, fiction and nonfiction, ready at hand to build unexpected connections between disparate concepts. Many of these essays begin with a few paragraphs that seem utterly disjointed from the main topic of the essay, until he provides a bridge from, say, contemporary Iranian literature to a controversial piece of Russian literature. That bridge from Reading Lolita in Iran to a review of a new-at-the-time discussion on the works of Nabokov (author of the original Lolita) is merely the first of many that stood out to me as a kind of signature of Hitchens' writing style.

Another style point of Hitchens' was his attention to authors of the mid-twentieth century. I admit I know next to nothing about P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, or Graham Greene, but Hitchens spends about 1/4 of this book on essays describing such people, their effects on later writers, their opinions and troubles when such opinions clashed with those of others, and occassionally reviewing a book that presents new or rehashed information about these people. The section "Eclectic Affinities", running from page 139 to 387 of this 750+ page tome was thus barely comprehensible to me. The fault there is entirely the result of my own interests not overlapping with Hitchens in those cases. It was a bit of a slog to get through that part, is what I'm saying. But your mileage may vary.

Much like "The Moth", among this large collection there were only a few pieces I didn't like. There are the I-don't-know-enough-about-this-to-have-an-opinion parts, as mentioned above, a great many very, very good essays, and (skimming the table of contents) only one essay I positively disliked: Why Women Aren't Funny, starting on page 389 (and wedged between quite good essays about the Harry Potter series and Steig Larsson).

Why Women Aren't Funny originally appeared in Vanity Fair in January of 2007; at the time I was aware of Hitchens as a writer mainly because of his prominence as an atheist. That essay sparked considerable discussion, aluded to in the introduction of Arguably with:

"... not quite saving me from the most instantly misinterpreted of all my articles, concerning the humor deficit as registered by gender."

I admit that despite keeping that point in mind - that much of what was said and written about that essay in early 2007 constituted a collection of mistakes - I was unconvinced that some deeper and interesting and important point was lurking under the essay as it appears. The main point is a fairly hamfisted interpretation of evolutionary psychology, itself a dreary and adled discipline, in the narrow field of funny people. The glaring assumption, never addressed in the essay, is that there are far more highly successful male comedians than female, and that one is much more likely to laugh at a story told by a man at a social gathering than one told by a woman, and other such signs of greater funniness among men, is that current patterns in American society are representative of 100 000 years of global human evolution. Bullshit. No other cause for such patterns is seriously explored, and the result is an essay with a huge WTF? metaphorically hanging over the page as I read it. Blergh.

But, one dud out of more than 100 essays is pretty good ratio. And it's useful to be able to point at the exception that proves the rule, here using the correct definition of "prove" in this context, that of a test, and the rule being "Hitchens is a damn good writer".

Other essays made me laugh out loud, including the insults leveled at Gore Vidal, the elaborate punishments for rude waiters who interrupt stimulating dinner conversation, and the strange things sometimes said to Hitchens at various functions. Other essays brought a chill to my spine, especially Imagining Hitler, in which the image is painted in my mind of a fed-up Austrian construction worker booting the young Adolf off of a high scaffold and thus usefully diverting history.

Steven J. Gould was another great essayist. Christopher Hitchens acheives, in my view, the same high level as a writer of the short non-fiction piece. There are tremendous differences in how each wrote, in the topics they chose to cover (to simplify, Gould on baseball, Hitchens on Kingsley Amis' circle of friends circa 1950), and in public response to their writings, but the overall sense of utter mastery of the form comes through.

I've read a fair bit of Gould, and now a little Hitchens. I understand that there are considerable differences in skill required for a full-length book compared to a 5-page essay, and I think I need to evaluate both writers on their longer works as well.

One final cautionary note from Hitchens, though: the ultimate essay in this book is Prisoner of Shelves, a lament on the troubles associated with owning books, books, so many books! I own several hundred books, and I can relate.

Book Club: The Moth

The Moth

50 True Stories

Edited by Catherine Burns

I first encountered The Moth, a kind of storytelling stand-up travelling event, when I clicked on a link to a youtube video (this one, if I remember correctly) from a forum thread about interesting videos. The story was well told, and the format had some polish to it that suggested production by skilled people. A little while later I saw another Moth video, and it’s stuck in my mind for a long time without me doing much with that knowledge there’s this interesting thing out there on-line.

While shopping for christmas presents together, Charlie picked up this book and told me she was going to give it to somebody in my family. I was mildly annoyed (in an amused kind of way), because I’d seen the book and wanted it for myself, but I was adamant that I was not to buy any books for myself at the bookstore, especially not from the ever-too-easy-to-rationalize bargain bin. At McNally Robinson, there are layers of bargain bins, different categories of price-reduced books that end with a cart near the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section filled with out-of-print, discontinued, and otherwise not-going-to-be-sold-no-more books. The Moth was on this cart, for some ridiculously low fraction of its cover price.

UPDATE: I failed to accurately describe the outcome of that shopping trip: Charlie was being sneaky and tricksy and lovely and wonderful, and gave The Moth to me! 

Book Club has never been for book reviews, but for discussions spawned by the book in question. It’s hard not to start a larger discussion when talking about The Moth so I’ll break with tradition around here and tell you what I thought of this book: it’s pretty good! Out of 50 stories, told by 50 different people, I was unhappy with only two. Both stories I didn’t like were told by religious people about experiences that were directly tied to their religions.

The first was by a preacher who told a story I found rather unbelievable, involving a group of possibly-criminal bikers at a roadhouse in Texas who had no inkling of the easter story – I simply do not find it at all plausible that any English- or Spanish-speaking person in Texas in the 1960s would have been utterly unaware that a central tenet of Christianity is that Jesus was crucified, buried in a cave, and resurrected three days later. It’s basically the most important part of the overwhelmingly dominant religion in that part of the world, in that time and place. The story reeks of Tall-Tale, a cultural tradition of lying by exaggeration I find highly irritating.

The second was by a young Mormon woman describing her experiences living in New York city, and dating an Atheist. Her blinkered ignorance to anybody else’s beliefs or opinions combined with her complete refusal to confront any part of  her own belief system just pissed me off and made me very much not able to empathise nor sympathise with her played-for-laughs story. She just came across to me as an airhead religious fanatic that suckered attention and money out of fools fooled by her “Can you believe it!?!?” act.

OK, now I’ve devoted two paragraphs to bad stories. The other 48 ranged from “good” to “goddam amazing”. Some people are very talented storytellers. Some people have very interesting experiences to tell about. And some people, some of whom did not tell any of the stories here, are very, very good at putting those two things together in one person, and editing and producing their stories to a very high shine.

The Moth is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it for not only a good read but also as an entry-point to broader discussions about story-telling, the role of story-telling in modern entertainment, and how to tell a good story.