Where John Green Schools Us by Breaking Our Hearts

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Green does an amazing job with this topic. 5 stars.

The notion I thought was central to the book--how tuberculosis has affected society throughout history, in strange and unexpected ways--is present here, and interesting, and tragic, but the book really is about how systems work and the failure of the wealthy part of the world to solve a problem with pretty clearly-established solutions. It's not a college essay or bloodless recitation of facts. It's more like a jeremiad, a loud cry from a prophet trying to awaken the sleeping nations that could end this plague, showing where and how and why we should take action to save the million and a quarter people who die from this disease every year.

(He's humble. He keeps calling his celebrity a "megaphone" that he lucked into, and expresses his desire to use that megaphone well, drawing our attention to needs awaiting society's intervention, trying not to speak over other voices that are more deserving or informed or urgent than his own. That's okay. He can be humble--it suits. I'll still call this book prophetic in the most positive sense.)

Of course he does a good job giving us the numbers and explaining the standard therapies and costs and various acronyms pertinent to the discussion--but more significantly, he humanizes the disease with the true stories of sufferers, including those he personally knows or was related to. As he says, more than 100,000 people die each month of the disease, but that's hard to comprehend. "I've been in a stadium with a hundred thousand people," he writes, "but I didn't know each of their families. I didn't know about the people they've loved, the heartbreaks they've endured, their constraints and encouragements... But I can, just barely, fathom Henry."

Henry's story, woven through the book, illustrates much of what happens to TB sufferers in poorer countries, how they can do everything in their power and still fail, often still die, and might only survive through the actions of others (like you and me). Henry--with some others--puts a face on the illness. He personifies the resilience of many fighting the disease as well as the cruelty of our indifference--when little effort from us, from our government, from our thought leaders, could end the worst of the misery.

For me, looking as he does like any number of students I've taught over the years, Henry represents all the hope I felt when facing likely young people trying to make a future for themselves and the grief I felt when some of them were too weighed down by personal or systemic difficulties to finish their schooling. As important as education is, though, TB is literally life and death. How much more does it motivate and mobilize us to make these connections?

Sure, we should do everything we can for others without knowing their stories; that's what saints do. But most of us aren't saints. John Green recognizes that it's personal connection that puts most of us into motion, and this book creates that connection. I don't know if I am invested enough in TB, overall, to take much action. But I want to save Henry, and I want to lift the weight his mother has been carrying, and I want to see them live normal, happy lives.

That's what this book supplies, the human context necessary for us to feel what's happening. And that's why it's important to read and share it.

It's a quick, engaging read, worth a look for that reason alone. Additionally, it's an important book. Highly recommended.

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Where the Universe Just Keeps On Getting Bigger

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A nice book about the universe and stuff in it. Well worth reading.

NdGT is a pretty good popularizer of astrophysics and sciences connected to it. His essays are light, generally, and have a very gentle learning curve. That makes sense; his whole persona is that of middle school science teacher with a dad-joke sense of humor, trying to reach bored kids with some profound knowledge. In writing as much as on a talk show, he tends to be jocular and upbeat, but his science still has weight to it. And once in a while, he turns out a pretty deep and affecting bit of prose that gives the whole thing more heft.

His essays are usually pretty straightforward--one on dark matter, another on dark energy, one on the reason big things tend to be round, one telling the history of the discovery of "light" above and below the visible spectrum, and so on. I found many of the essays to be largely filled with things I already knew pretty well, but invariably he adds something that is entirely new in my experience, so that I always found it rewarding and time well spent. Other essays were even more revelatory, adding a lot to my store of knowledge.

My point is that even though other science writers often lean more toward the "technical science for sciency readers" end of communication, and Tyson leans more toward the "make it accessible for a broad audience" end, it's still filled with good stuff worth reading. But he's capable of even more. In the final essay, he's talking about his wish for a future where all of us, especially global leaders, take a broader view of our place in the world, our responsibility to the rest of creation, and though it's about science, it's really about saving ourselves. The essay is a sobering effort, and starts with him recognizing the privilege that allows him to travel the world looking at celestial events:

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day--every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth--people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma...

His call for a broader way of seeing the world and our responsibilities toward it and its inhabitants, with us as stewards, isn't itself new, but placed in the context of not just earth but the full universe, with us a minute part, made up of elements forged in ancient stars, it's very affecting. He takes a big swing and I feel like he connected.

It's a little book, but I liked it, and I recommend it.

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Where Neil Schools Us on Some Stuff

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This has been my before-sleep short read for a few weeks. With forty-two short essays, many of them just 6 or 7 pages long, it's ideal for the sleepy brain. I liked it quite a bit. 4 stars.

These meditations on the big bang, on black holes, on the spaces between stars, and many other physics and astronomy questions are conversational little tidbits that don't break a lot of new ground (especially as I'm reading it 20 years after it was published), but I still found something in literally every essay that was new to me or made me think about something a new way. A scientifically literate reader will already know most of this, and I think I'm pretty well along on that scale, but there are still things he brings into each of his essays that inform me and amuse me and make the reading meaningful. The best fun in non-fiction like this is learning new things.

His voice comes through perfectly clear in the whole thing (which is a plus or minus, depending on the reader's take) and his tone is almost always light, joshing, and, IMO, pleasant. That's the right approach for this kind of popular science. It's not the deadly earnest, erudite tone of Richard Dawkins (who writes great books but is hardly tolerable in person--and has made himself disagreeable the same way JKR has). Nor is it the wide-ranging, surprising, and wandering musings of Stephen Jay Gould (who is greatly missed). Neil deGrasse Tyson is a very smart man in his own right, but he takes a different tack in media, including this book, and I think it's very successful. He wants to explain things to a broad audience in a way that entertains while it educates. He keeps the learning curve very gentle here, the cognitive demand relatively low, but that was his intention, and the way he makes it work may be his genius. In another's hands, this could be a much tougher and much less engaging read.

The only place the author gets a little sharp--deservedly so--and a little less charitable is when he's protecting science from fuzzy religious thought, like creation versus the big bang and similar topics. I think he's earned the right to be just as firm on the topic as he wants. And I don't think it detracts from his amiable, laughs-at-his-own-jokes tone that he gives us though almost every page.

If this fails to dazzle, it nevertheless amuses, and it's full of good science information. I learned a lot more than I would have guessed in these essays on familiar topics. Easy 4 star rating. If you're in the mood for non-fiction but want just bits here and there, just a chunk per day, this is a good choice to put on your bedstand. And if you're lucky like me, you'll find it at a little bookstore for a couple dollars. A steal.

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Where She Makes a Good Case

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm rating this as a book. From that perspective, it's about a 3, IMO. Moderately entertaining. Competently written.

As an introduction to the person, as a textbook on the subject "Kamala Harris," I'd give this a higher score, a 4 or 5. Good information here, well presented. I found out things I didn't know, which was actually a disappointment. I wish her recent campaign had shown how she cared about some of the things she clearly really does care about. It feels like the message was narrowed down for party reasons, because I think the version of Kamala found in this book is better than the version presented on TV. (I thought she was okay there, but she's more focused here, more detailed, more personally invested. The version of her in the book might have done better in the election than the DNC-moderated version did.)

I'm not a consultant. I wasn't asked.

In a way, this is really more of a long speech than a book. It's breezy and anecdotal and focused on issues more than on biographical details, constantly making points to build an argument. That's a good idea in a speech meant to introduce yourself to voters, but it's still kinda weird in a book. The whole time I was reading it, I imagined her speaking from a lectern, reading this aloud. As a speech, though, it's pretty good.

In sum: I like the person, I rather like the speech, but I only kinda like the book.

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Where I Learned a Lot About Very Little

The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English by Henry Hitchings
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this about 10 years ago, stretched out over a long period of time. Didn't much like it, but I finished it. Gave it 3 stars.

Then I forgot I read it. Zero memory of the book. Bought it again at a thrift store. Paperback, this time. (To be fair, I'm a bit of an idiot. Also, I've read tons of books about the origins of English. One of my favorite subjects.)

So now, I read it again, all the way through, and guess what?

Didn't ring any bells. None of it. And I still didn't like it. Yes, many little stories within are interesting, like a series of clever blog posts, but his purpose is so scattered and varied that I don't know what the big picture is meant to be. I never got it.

Here's my review: the author gives a thousand word origins, offering hundreds of opinions, making hundreds of claims on many topics within the general history of English. With the author, we meander through the centuries, across the globe, seeing pieces of the story of English, and many curious sources for random bits of vocabulary, and are treated to a discussion of many cultural forces that had an impact on the language. Nothing, however, is done in a thorough or exhaustive way. It feels like English is a whole broad landscape, and it would make sense if we looked up and described it in a holistic way, but we don't see any of that because we're keeping our eyes down, looking at random shells and stones and insects he's pointing at because he thinks they are curious and fun.

I really wanted some introductory paragraphs. Maybe a topic sentence here and there with the main idea. We don't get that. Every page and every paragraph can be about a different thing.

Every chapter I asked myself, "What is his point?" In its absence, I kept hoping there would be a summary at the end, maybe a conclusion drawing it all together. "Here with these thousands of bits of data," I hoped he'd say, "we can make this sweeping generalization, or these five important points that make sense of all that information." Nope. None of that.

Instead, the book is just a thousand separate points, like "Here are some words that came from Dutch." It's interesting when we learn that words from mining, like cobalt, quartz, shale, gneiss and zinc, all come from German. Cool. Good to know. But then he also tells us that's also the source for bergschrund, thalweg, and geest.

Excuse me?

He did that many times. For example, some cool words came from the Great Exhibition of 1851, like saxophone, lorry, and hydromechanics. But other words from that same event that didn't catch on are dhoop, hyawaballi, and jusi.

I don't get it. Why tell us that? It cost me some energy trying to fit his information into some kind of schema, and I'm annoyed because I just couldn't do it.

At times, he expresses strong opinions, mostly one-offs at the end of paragraphs that he never returns to, like a professor in a lecture throwing out his opinions to an audience that will never demand he prove his points because he's already gone on to something else. A few times, he went further than that. For example, he makes a more concerted effort to rail against the language of "political correctness," which he claims is about demonstrating moral purity more than about accomplishing anything useful. He goes on to say:

This cultural sensitivity, which tends to be most visible in academia and social work, can mutate into patronizing tokenism, a licence for political ineptitude or inertia, and a grotesque repression of personal freedoms. At its most extreme, political correctness is capable of destroying family life and rewriting history.

What? How? What in the world are you talking about?

He doesn't explain. He just leaves it hanging out there.

In general, I could not figure out where he was going. What is the main point? It felt like he aimed at more than anecdote, at something more significant, but I'm not getting it.

And I tried two times.

(Check with me in 2035 or so. Maybe third time's the charm.)

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Where Fate Intervened

1066: The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Very useful little book.

I've read a few books lately set near the time of the Norman conquest, and what I never could understand was how? How could the whole country be conquered in that way, by the leader of a fairly small part of another country? What happened?

This book goes a long way toward answering that question. In places, the author confesses that some details may never be known, but offers the most likely conjectures. In other places, we understand more than I realized.

The story is kinda crazy. King Harold did almost everything right all summer, including fighting off the invasion from Norway about a week before the battle of Hastings. But a whole bunch of things suddenly go against him--the wind turns for the invasion fleet after most of the men have been sent home, assuming the window for fighting was past. Harold didn't wait for enough of his troops to join him when he faced his second enemy in the span of just a few days. There were some structural differences in the army that told against them--no mounted fighters, no archers--but his warriors were, apparently, good fighters. They had some chances when they could have pushed the small invasion force into the sea, but Harold didn't have a good way to communicate his orders.

And so on. There's a lot of little things that worked against them, including, probably, the belief that the pope was on the Norman side. So they lost a battle they should have won and didn't have anyone sufficiently powerful to draw together another army, even though it should have been possible to still greatly overwhelm the Normans. It just went wrong in so many ways.

Excellent look at the history. It's told in clear language with, for me, the right amount of complexity.

Highly recommended for those with questions like I had.

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Where Everything Will Kill You

What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like the first one, this book is awesome. Funny, informative, scientific--what else you want in a book?

A former NASA employee who knows a lot of sciency stuff, the author responds to ridiculous questions with serious (hilarious, but still serious) answers based on math and physics. For example, "What if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?" That idea, like a lot of them in this book, sounds pretty awesome, but the final result (spoiler, kinda) is a runaway greenhouse effect, boiling oceans, and the end of all life. Check it out--it'd be super bad. He has receipts. The whole book is kinda like that.

He's good at science, but he's also a good writer, and his tone cracks me up. The book is full of stuff like this: "The Earth is big, [citation needed]..." or a reference to the "swinging blade of death" equation, or his reply to a strange question with "Why if? Deeply ungrammatical answers to unanswerable philosophical questions." But it's all in the service of intriguing science, like how tall a swing can be that a person can still power by pumping their legs, or what would happen if you constructed a laser that vaporized incoming droplets, or whether you could make a lava lamp out of real lava. Taking goofy ideas seriously turns out to be pretty fun.

So this is a science book, and you could read it for the learning, but I enjoyed it most because it's also laugh out loud funny, which is super rare [citation needed].

Recommended.

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Where I Lost Confidence In the Author

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel like he offers a couple of good ideas, a couple good ways to approach some things, and I appreciate those helps.

But overall--this is pretty much just the thoughts of a guy with no particular expertise and no deep insight. I was buying it all at first, and then he delivers some clunkers and some right-wing cliches and... nope. Just a dude talking out his ass. Mostly.

I finished the book, though, and I thought he succeeded in making some good points. I also rather liked the conversational tone and only kinda-ironic use of a rough, curse-filled colloquial register. It makes the discussion feel more real. And I agree with the main thesis that I--we--everyone--should care more about what matters and leads to happiness and less about dumb stuff in order to have a happier, healthier life. (Not new--Ecclesiastes covered all this pretty well a few thousand years ago.) I just wish he'd had more practical advice on *how* to change your brain. Maybe it's in there; I didn't find it.

So--not as deep as I hoped. Not as helpful. YMMV.

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Where I Look For a Call To Action

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a useful and necessary book that I wanted to read for a long time. It lays out the way in which the plutocrats (and those who work with them and on their foundations) use beneficial investing and direct giving to help alleviate suffering around the world, thereby looking benevolent and inoculating themselves against criticism of their other activities.

I enjoyed it and learned a great deal about a world I am completely separate from, but I wish the argument and its ramifications had been made more forcefully. Some of the major ideas are stated pretty directly, but others have to be interpreted, and I found myself working hard to make some of those connections. We see that it's dishonest for a billionaire (for example) to take credit for relatively small donations while racking up huge economic wins at the expense of others--though what exactly that entails is mostly left up to the reader to imagine. I guess we kinda know, but I would have preferred more clarity. We see via numerous anecdotes that bright, idealistic young people head for some of the most progressive arms of finance hoping to make a difference--being told they would make a difference--without seeing the benefits they hoped for. They often just ended up rich, distracted from their original goals, and a little embarrassed. They begin to see that the market dream of win-win--"we continue investing and making money and you, small person, get a little bit of benefit"--is mostly a scam used to cover up corporate greed. But the reader may wonder what they should have done. What did they do wrong? The clearest answer to that seems to be "They (and their companies) should fix the harm they are doing first."

I agree with that. Again, the exact harm isn't spelled out (except in general terms, like inequality and pollution), but the difficulties in combating it are. Many are quoted as basically saying that capitalism and the market are just too big for any person or handful of people to make a dent in, so they just do what they can within the system.

I get it. All these foundations, all of these supporters of the Clinton Global Initiative, all these TED talkers and philanthropists, add up to a shiny bauble used to distract the public, or perhaps a narcotic that numbs us and keeps us from taking action against the plutocrats who continue to impoverish the world and destroy the environment. The problem is that we can't blame the criminals for being criminals. You can't say that they should be nicer. They won't. Evil deed-doers gonna do evil deeds. (Or as the author says elsewhere, plutes gonna plute.) So instead we have to get mad at those who might know better, those in charge investing foundation money in young female entrepreneurs in Africa or something, and hold them to account for being part of a sleight of hand.

But other than that--I don't get what we're supposed to do. That's the part of the argument I'm missing.

Lots to chew on. I shoulda read this with a group or something.

Anyway, recommended. Take notes.

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Where Timur Emerges a Bit from the Shadows

Tamerlane: The Earth Shaker by Harold Lamb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had previously read a couple of his novels--Omar Khayyam and Nur Mahal--and thought this was another novel telling the fictionalized life of a historical figure. It isn't. It's actually a biography, and so has a very different feel. There are few scenes that feel intimate or genuine, since little of that survives in the historical sources, and it's a shame. I was disappointed.

Naturally, as a biography, the book is largely summarized narrative. Although it's well done, complete, concise, and as clear as such a complex story can be, and although it's much more compelling than a textbook or wiki article or other typical non-fiction source, it still isn't as engrossing as his novels. So: good--4 stars good--but not quite as fun as a novel might have been.

Oh well. It's all good.

I've learned to trust Harold Lamb's fairness and scholarship when approaching his books set in Asia and the Middle East. His attitude, as always, is surprisingly modern and inclusive for a white guy writing in the 1920s, writing as much as possible from the perspective of the people and cultures he's dealing with. This is clearest in the surprisingly even-handed way he treats Timur, a historical figure I'd always considered merely brutal without any positive qualities beyond making himself a successful conqueror. However, Lamb focuses just as much on Timur's personal bravery, quick thinking, economic programs, and relentless labor to build wealth and develop the lands of his empire as he does his bloody record. All those things are true about "Tamerlane."

In a note in the end matter, Lamb says:

"In this volume no attempt has been made, consciously, to ignore the cruel side of Timur's character, or the destruction he wrought. He has been presented to us so often in the past as an architect only of pyramids of skulls, and as a barbarian destroyer, that an effort must be made to realize what the man actually was."

A little later, he says:

"We find the European princes of his day little more inclined to mercy--the Black Prince made a shambles of Limoges, and Charles of Burgundy killed like a wolf among sheep at Dinant. At Agincourt the English killed French prisoners in order to be rid of them for the final phase of the battle; at Nicopolis, the English, German and French crusaders massacred the Serbian and Turkish prisoners before the battle. The massacres ordered by Timur differed only in being on a vaster scale."

Without excusing his brutality, a reputation he surely earned, we see it at least put it into the context of the time, allowing us to consider other details worth knowing.

This is entertaining non-fiction, and I learned a lot. The final 60 pages or so of notes and sources is also informative and worth reading. His section addressing the terms Tatar, Mongol, and Turk, along with some related words, is the clearest I've found on that confusing topic. (And it's almost 100 years old!) In fact, that may be his genius--making the history and lives and culture of distant people, remote in time, comprehensible to a western audience.

I'm confident there are superior histories written since this book came out, filled with newer scholarship, but I doubt any are as entertaining and instructive. Recommended.

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How Language and the Voice Emerged

This Is the Voice by John Colapinto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A very readable book about language and the human voice.

A fellow ESL/English teacher sent me this book out of the blue, and I'm glad she did. It touches on many interests we have in common, especially language acquisition, the science of language in the brain, and the history of language. And it doesn't disappoint--lots of interesting information on these topics. Right up my alley.

The author connects us with a lot of recent research on the topic of voice in particular, sometimes supporting the opinions of linguists and sometimes pushing back. He's pretty hard on Chomsky and Pinker, a little more supportive of McWhorter, and not necessarily right in his arguments--I mean, I dunno for sure--but he has good support for his takes. I think he may be a bit reductive in what he states as Chomsky's position regarding "deep grammar" in the human brain, but it leads to an interesting discussion and leaves room for others to continue the conversation.

Quite a bit of this was utterly new to me and very entertaining, though it's presented more at a popularization of science level than at a professional scientific level, so if that's what you're hoping for, you may not profit much by it. However, for those casual non-fiction readers interested in the topic, along with all those amateur or semi-professional linguists, [clears throat], this is highly recommended. :)

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Where the Act is Wearing Thin

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As something to read before bedtime, this is very readable. Probably a four out of five stars. I like the way he breaks up and juxtaposes various stories. Effective. He's a good writer.

But this book is more about information, and I find his information increasingly suspect.

When I read The Tipping Point, every element of it was new to me. He was the guru on a topic I had never heard of and it was really cool. Several books in, I'm less impressed and more skeptical.

Some of the topics he writes on in here I know something about, or I've read more sophisticated treatments of, and I realize his framing is a kind of sketchy. (He seems to be unaware of the drop in crime virtually everywhere from the 80s to the present, although he comes close to it at one point.) He arrives at what I consider the right conclusion on three strikes laws, but frames it like a thing that shouldn't be true but is. The violence in Northern Ireland gets the same treatment--naturally, he says, the government must use some violence, but if it exceeds a certain amount it stops working. He keeps arriving at the conclusion that radicalizing people through state action is counterproductive, and keeps being surprised at that result.

He also never attempts to unpack the absurd supposition that this university is "better" than that one, the idea that they can be ranked like sprinters at the line. He takes it for granted without evidence and proceeds. Why does he believe that? Do the professors at Harvard enunciate better? Have access to better textbooks? Terrify their students into greater compliance? Assign better readings? He doesn't bother about that because it's an implicit assumption.

The comparison of top students at state schools versus those at elite schools does yield an interesting result--a good student may have greater career success if they are academically at the top of a state school rather than the bottom of an elite school--and he's impressed with that, attributing it to powerful emotional effects, but he seems to be unaware that he's also proven that the "worse" school still had to teach well for that to be possible. (Is the takeaway that more top students should go to "average" universities or that universities should stop messing up the brains of 18- and 19-year-old kids?)

I guess after reading several of his books he has started to strike me as a conservative who, after reading a great deal of research about how things actually work, is slowly on a path to being a progressive and yet is still shocked every time he finds out another unfounded belief turns out not to be true.

Stop being so surprised. We're not surprised.

Anyway--a four for the charming anecdotes. A three for the condescension. Marginally recommended.

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Where I Didn't Like It at All

Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Maya by Dick Teresi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took me over a year to finish. Sometimes a page a week.

I swear, the central conceit of the book--"The ancient roots of modern science"--is right up my alley. I love this stuff. And there were some excellent chapters in the book. The part on science and math was great.

But there were some long, dull sections that have almost no point. Super well researched, full of awesome detail, but mostly sound and fury. The chapters on cosmology and physics seem so pointless I almost got mad at the book. Okay, I did get mad. The author connects early scientific thought from different cultures to modern concepts in physics, but he does it in about the same way that you can connect children playing "Red Rover" to black holes or evaporation or something. "Many ancient cultures had inklings of quantum theory," he writes. "Where did this come from?" I dunno--ancient astronauts? (Eye roll.) The combination of granular detail and incredibly suspect correlations was frustrating and off-putting. If myths from Oceania suggest a Big Bang origin of the universe and Sumerian tradition suggests a plasma universe, what are we to conclude but that the author is messing with us because it's kinda nonsense?

It's a shame, because so much of the book was interesting and grounded in history and reality. The ancient Chinese inventions like paper and gunpowder and amazing devices for measuring earthquakes and such were very exciting and worth learning about. That was good. My opinion? (Why stop now?) A book 1/2 or maybe 2/3 as long could have been great.

I learned some things, but I didn't enjoy reading the book. Let's call it even.

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Ancient History as Revealed by DNA

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this a very useful, very informative book. Recommended.

In a way, it's three different books. The main part of it is, for me, a home run. The other sections are good, but less fun.

I'll elaborate.

The central them of the book--the biggest slice--is about our current state of knowledge in human ancestry based on complete DNA sequencing is outstanding. The author is a key figure in that field, which is rapidly changing, and he talks from the perspective of an insider with more knowledge and authority than just about anyone in the world. The details he reveals about different groups of people, the mixing of people, the movements of people, is amazing and exactly what I came here for. I'm up for the story of how the research came about, too, and we get that. I won't summarize what we learn about human origins--it's a complex story--but it's fascinating, and I'm eager to see every new discovery as it is made.

Secondarily, the book deals with the political situation regarding the gathering of DNA samples, including relevant laws, especially here in the US. It's not surprising that some groups--Native Americans and African Americans, mostly--have become wary of researchers and their promises. I understand on the one hand and hope it gets ironed out on the other. The discussion here is a good primer on the topic, though it's not my particular interest.

The third part of the book discusses the sensitive nature of research into DNA when comparing people of different ethnicities around the world. Some researchers, as the author shows us, are attempting to use DNA research to support old, ugly prejudices and stereotypes. While he argues on the one hand that they are getting the evidence wrong, making claims that are not supported by the facts, he does agree that continued research along these lines will inevitably reveal actual differences between groups of all sorts which might be used to further racist arguments and division. In spite of that, he believes that the benefit of research, especially with regard to developing treatment for health challenges specific to widely separated human lineages, far outweighs the potential for mischief. And, he argues, the coming knowledge is practically inevitable.

This part is somewhat interesting, but it's a very different topic than the rest of the work, and might have been developed into its own book. IMO.

Considered all together, it's a wonderful book, a must for anyone interested in the history of human groups and their movements in deep time.

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Hopeful, helpful, enlightening

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell's books, and I enjoyed this one. Truth is, though, it was losing my interest; much of this read like an interesting but overlong Buzzfeed article. (Not that there's much wrong with that.) However, the last two chapters were worth the price of reading the rest. If you're feeling TL;DR, just read the last two chapters.

The thesis of the book is that we often know things in an instant without knowing how we know. Secondarily, we do a bad job of interrogating these intuitions, and trying to explain or explicate them leads us farther from the truth, not nearer.

Pretty good. Useful.

But there's also a great deal in here that's more expected, like how our flashes of insight are often wrong and lead to problems. The key, it seems, is learning when we can trust ourselves to make snap judgments--a narrow range of things--and knowing all the other times when it will lead us into error.

That's what's great about chapters six and seven. It talks specifically about countering our intuitions, or unconscious reactions, when they're likely to be wrong.

Chapter six is about the kind of thinking error that leads cops to view POC with undue suspicion, subject suspects to unnecessary violence, and employ deadly force when it wasn't called for. What I found most interesting in this discussion of research and examples was the way human stereotyping can be accounted for using proper police technique, reducing or eliminating these kinds of errors. In other words, we don't have to just throw our hands up and say that policing is difficult and dangerous and shit happens; we can demand proper training and proper technique to help prevent tragedies.

And chapter seven is about the difficulty symphony orchestras have had removing gender bias in decisions like hiring and pay. I didn't realize how misogynistic orchestras were; I though women had been integral to them for decades. Nope. Turns out, until they started evaluating musicians from behind a curtain, it was nearly impossible for women to break through, especially if they played trombone or French horn or other "masculine" instruments. Once they started using blind auditions, things changed. Women who had been dismissed as average by directors and others who should have known better proved to be exceptional when gender bias was accounted for. (It took additional fighting and unionization, though, to keep up the momentum.)

Interesting, enlightening, helpful, hopeful, stimulating--that's how I saw the end of the book. Parts of it didn't impress me, but all of it was instructive, much of it was entertaining, and some of it was must-read good.

Worth taking a look.

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Where We Learn Some Amazing Things about Government and Some Horrible Things about the Trump Administration

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a short, brisk read that is both entertaining and informative. Highly recommended.

The purpose of this book is to do two things: first, to highlight some of the most effective and under-appreciated programs and agencies in our government, especially within the departments of energy, agriculture, and commerce; and second, to show how naive, ill-informed, inadequate, and unprepared the Trump administration was when it took over those agencies (and how quickly they turned to corrupt practices). Or, more succinctly: how government can function when working well, and how it suffers with Trump in office.

Much of this is told as personal stories or as part of the give and take of an interview. The author is part of these stories as he recounts how he heard them, which gives this book the breezy feel of long-form journalism. It turns out to be the best way to understand the government, seeing it as we do from the perspective of many individuals, learning from their experience, getting a feel for the important work they do, usually without any of us knowing about it. We see, in the first instance, government and its agencies serving the people, improving continuously, and then we see government being corrupted to serve to the private interests of Trump and his cronies. Ironically, it isn't their corruption that is most shocking and disheartening but their incompetence.

The author recounts the experience of several different agencies which each, individually, went to considerable trouble to prepare the incoming administration for the huge job of running enormous programs. They set up trainings, created binders of documents, wrote memos, arranged tours, and the like, but all had the same disappointing experience--no one from Trump's campaign showed up. For days and weeks. The Department of Energy, for example, cleared thirty desks, arranged for thirty parking spaces, readied giant 3-ring binders, and waited for Trump's people to arrive after the election so they could train them up as Bush's people had done (effectively, it is reported) for Obama's. No one came. Two weeks later, a Koch lobbyist was named to head up their "landing team," but still didn't show up until a full month after the election. Then he came alone, for an hour.

This incompetence, this negligence, was repeated in real life (and in some detail in this book) over and over, in agency after agency. Then we see efforts to undermine those agencies, including stories familiar from the news as well as things most readers probably had never heard of. I didn't know about most of it.

For me, one of the biggest takeaways from the book was learning that there are so many agencies filled with so many dedicated public servants doing so much important work, work that I had never heard of but fully support once I know about it. The stories of individuals and how they came to be involved with such work is really encouraging. And the way Trump and his corruption threatens to destroy so much of it is really disheartening.

The author does well to write such an engaging, readable account of what probably should make for dry reading. I not only feel informed but better equipped to understand the work our government does for us and fight for it to complete that mission.

Well done. You should take a look.

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Where I Learn Some Stuff and Unlearn Some Other Stuff I Didn't Know Wasn't So

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Whenever I read Reza Aslan, I always think he does so many things well. I am particularly impressed by his scholarship, his clarity, and his evenhandedness, all of which are very much in evidence in this book.

As always, he has excellent command of his subject matter. Aslan speaks authoritatively on the history of Islam and religion in general, on the origins and development of various sects, and the broad range and unique character of many different modern Muslim communities. I found both his narrative and his analysis informative and reliable.

For a novice in the area of religion, this book is a useful guide. Aslan writes in a way that assumes the reader is intelligent but largely uninformed. (Me... also me...) He starts at the beginning, explains the content in plain and straightforward language, including sensitive matters of deep spiritual significance, and trusts the reader to keep up thereafter. I found he offered just about the right amount of support to make the material comprehensible and digestible. An added benefit of such clarity is that the book is entertaining, which is not a given with the subject matter. Sometimes it's a pleasure just to learn things, and I felt like I was learning.

Key to the success of this book is the sense that the author is not slanting his presentation; regardless of his personal feelings, he praises what most readers would find praiseworthy (IMO) and condemns what most would condemn. He writes as objectively about the many disparate elements of Muslim society and history as he does Christian or Hindu, and always with a view to inform, not persuade. I do feel informed, and I appreciate that. I don't feel propagandized, and I appreciate that, too.

There's a lot to learn here, and I feel like this books helps the reader make a good start. In addition, the book is engaging, and it models excellent behavior. I wish it were more common to speak so rationally, objectively, and yet passionately about religion. If more of us could develop this ability, we could do a much better job of spreading peace rather than war, acceptance instead of intolerance, inclusion rather than hate.

It's a pretty dream.

Recommended.

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Where I Like the Author but Didn't Enjoy the Book. Don't Rat Me Out

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't love it.

I can't speak to the scholarship. Tom Holland (still not Spider-man) seems to know a great deal on the topic. He says a lot of smart things. I just didn't like reading this very much. (And I have enjoyed other books by this author in the past, like Persian Fire.) I found it a slog. Still, I made myself finish, a few pages a day, over a long stretch. And here we are.

The story here is narrowly focused on the fortunes of individual politicians (a cast of thousands, actually, most of them with names starting with C, like Crassus, Catulus, Cethegus, Caesar, Cato, Catiline, Cicero, Clodia, Clodius, Curio, Caelius, Cinna, and others--and though I can't blame the author for this, it really was poor planning by History) and who's up today, who's down, who's making an alliance, who's double-crossing an ally, and so on. It may be real life, but as far as the the story goes, it reads like summary of a soap opera. I mean that in the "I can't follow this story" kind of way. The "I can't remember who Clodia was" kind of way. (As well as the "Weren't they enemies?" kind of way.)

For me to understand the story better, I needed to see a bigger picture, get more of a bird's-eye view of events and less of a nose-against-the-TV view. However, as always, YMMV.

And yet, despite all that, despite my bad attitude, I still learned a lot about Rome and its people and society. In fact, in terms of knowledge about Rome, I'm probably a lot closer now to where I should have been before I attempted the book.

I suspect those with greater background knowledge will enjoy reading this more than I did.

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A Well-Known Religious Person (WKRP) Blows My Mind

God: A Human History by Reza Aslan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you want to find an engaging book about religion written with clarity, objectivity, and audacity, find this book (or any other) by Reza Aslan. He does not disappoint.

God: A Human History is fairly short book, with almost half of its pages given to notes, but it is filled with big ideas, and it tells a story about religion in a way I've never seen before. I don't think anything here is original scholarship (thus the lengthy notes) but the book does a wonderful job of imposing narrative order on the chaos of the story of human religion. It explains the universal tendency toward certain spiritual beliefs, and the trajectory from seeing gods in all of nature to gods representing qualities or realms to, eventually, a single god--from animism to polytheism to monolatry to monotheism, by stages. It shows how pantheons are created, how gods rise and fall, how one god or another becomes preeminent among a people and even eliminates all others, and it all seems so obvious after he as explains it.

The description of the way gods are humbled when the people who worship them are defeated by another people worshipping another god was instructive; seeing how the Israelites, defeated and carried away into Babylonian captivity, overcame that setback by seeing their god a different way, a bigger way, was revelatory. (I remember learning about the Deuteronomic history of Israel way back in college, with punishment and reward for the nation depending on its righteousness, but this finally lets me take a step back so that idea makes sense to me historically, not just theologically.)

Though the author is a well-known religious person (WKRP), he writes with an academic's objectivity. His summaries of the stages of development in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are so direct and clear and unflinching, unhampered by hand-wringing or apologies, that they not only answer questions I didn't realize I had, but they do so in a deeply satisfying way. Stories out of the Old Testament (for example) that I always understood in a poetic or metaphorical way now make sense in a literal way; Aslan shows how they can represent an earlier stage of thought, one superseded by later teachings (from monolatry to monotheism, or the blending of Yahweh and El, for example), and once they are seen that way it all adds up. Religion, like politics and economics and every other aspect of society, is understood then to exist in a historical context, telling a story of change over time.

There is a lot here that is new to me, new information which I found interesting and entertaining, but what I like most is the way he has made the history of religion into a coherent story. There is a clear trajectory (I removed "progression," because of its connotations) in the religious thought of humans, one that is driven by our makeup, and having it analyzed and spelled out is very illuminating and very satisfying.

Recommended for eye-opening clarity.

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Get Your Writing Styled Here

Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like many, I suspect, I enjoyed Benjamin Dreyer's clever, opinionated, charming, informative tweeting before I ever got to read his book. I hoped to find more of the same here, and I was not disappointed. If you've followed him on twitter, you have a pretty good idea of what you'll find here. You're not wrong, but it's better than that.

This book is filled with useful, specific, detailed information for writers of all kinds. If it was only that, it would be worth any writer's time and money. Dreyer gives hundreds of ways to improve one's writing, from capitalization to word choice to style, and it's excellent, practical advice.

More than that, this book is entertaining. Yes, it's a style guide, but it's straight up fun to read. I laughed often enough my wife had to find out what I was reading, so I'd share bits with her. The author's voice--thoughtful, generous, and warm--comes through in every word, only partly disguised by his curmudgeonly tone. He doesn't take gratuitous shots or punch down, but he skewers some folks, and you can only laugh. It's okay; he's on your side. (I hope.)

Here is a typical example:

With all the nodding and head shaking going on, I'm surprised that half the characters in modern fiction haven't dislocated something. By the way, characters who nod needn't nod their heads, as there's really not much else available to nod. And the same goes for the shrugging of unnecessarily-alluded-to shoulders. What else are you going to shrug? Your elbows?

No comment necessary.

I appreciate his approach to grammar. I don't believe in strict prescriptivism, and he certainly does not either, though he shows many cases when it does no harm to follow the rules. Save yourself from unnecessary conflict. More often, he shows when you can safely dispense with old rules (split infinitives, sentence fragments, and the like) for greater clarity or smoother prose or some other authorial purpose. It is a practical approach to usage and one I happily support. I also benefitted from his humility, such as the cases where he confesses he still consults reference materials (and suggests you do too) and the complicated grammar terms he dispenses with because they're easily confused, not helpful, and hard to keep straight. He knows a great deal; his advice is good; he has all the relevant experience; but even he refreshes his understanding when he needs to. It's a relief (speaking as an old English teacher) to not have to pretend to know all the things.

But do look it up. No mercy once it's in print.

This book clarifies a number of questions I've had, and it drew my attention to flaws I hadn't noticed. (I'm gonna avoid the "letting out of the breath you didn't even know you were holding." Apparently that's a thing, and I've stepped in it before.) I won't lie--I'll need to reread parts. But I'm pretty sure this is a book I'll return to often, anyway, so it's all good.

Highly recommended. Even if you just want to read it and don't intend to do any writing. I think you'll enjoy it.



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