Category Archives: Book Reviews

From ape to . . . theologist

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At the London Times, John Carey reviews Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert.

Given the growing muscularity of both neuroscience and evolutionary biology, it’s no surprise that some would reduce spirituality to a product of biological evolution. From the article:

Surveys suggest that religious people are happier, more optimistic, less prone to strokes and high blood pressure, more able to cope with life’s problems and less fearful of death than the irreligious. It follows that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage, and our ability to have such beliefs must, Wolpert deduces, have been partly determined by our genes.

Carey writes that the book has a chicken/egg conundrum; Wolpert fails to clarify which came first: the “causal thinking” that allowed us to become sophisticated tool-makers, or was it tool-making that led to our forebears selecting for causal thinking? Says Carey, “He can be found saying both things in different places . . .”

But there’s a parallel difficulty that Carey doesn’t call out, but is implied in the sentences that follow the excerpt above:

Religious people might rejoice at that, concluding that God has wired us up to believe in him. But for Wolpert, the wiring is no more divine than our guts or toenails, or any other part of our evolved anatomy.

No more divine — or no less?

Oooooh boy, another list of books

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Via Miss Snark, the news that The New York Public Library has compiled a list of 25 books from 2005 that we’re all supposed to remember. And read, presumably.

I haven’t read any of them, so I’m heartened that many of the commenters on Miss Snark’s blog, who tend to be an erudite bunch, haven’t read any of them, either.

Anyway, I still qualify for a snob, I think. Off the top of my head, I know I read Fielding’s Tom Jones last year. And London, A Biography, by Peter Ackroyd, and 1491 by Charles Mann. And after I picked up (and read) an amazing 1932 edition of A Shropshire Lad in a junky antique co-op, I bought a copy of The Name and Nature of Poetry and Other Selected Prose by Housman, only I didn’t read all of that. So, half a snob, then.

Hometown hero (if you are into Greek history, anyway)

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A University of Rochester emeritus professor of history, Perez Zagorin, has written a book on Thucydides titled Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader.

Here’s a review, the author of which, James P. Holoka of Eastern Michigan University, says the book will “be most useful to an audience of undergraduates and other ‘intellectually curious people,'” and that Zagorin

is to be congratulated for his well-informed, evenhanded, readable, and eupeptic presentation of a formidable ancient historian.

“Eupeptic.” I had to look that one up to be sure. It means “having good digestion; cheerful, optimistic.”

Peter Stothard reviewed the same book last month for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), writing

“Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader” is a useful book. Yet as Mr. Zagorin himself recognizes, a great historian claimed by so many generals and politicians in so many struggles over so many years cannot always be understood through the minds of others. Mr. Zagorin calls for his own readers to become readers of Thucydides and to judge for themselves whether, for example, the Peloponnesian War was truly inevitable or might have been avoided by better diplomacy.

Oh, for a few more hours in the day . . .

Extinctions of Yore

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Well, the Permian extinction of yore. If you can’t recall it, that’s perhaps because it happened 250 million years ago, and you’re not a geologist, or both.

There’s a book on it out, now: Extinction, by Douglas H. Erwin, a Smithsonian paleobiologist. It’s been reviewed here in a Washington Post piece by Joshua Foer.

Wrestling the angel

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In a New Yorker review of two books about happiness, John Lancaster argues persuasively that for ancient man, happiness was a matter of luck. Life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and individuals had very little control over whether they achieved what we, today, call happiness.

He quotes from “Happiness: A History,” by Darrin McMahon:

As McMahon points out, “In virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for happiness is cognate with luck, fortune or fate.”  In a sense, the oldest and most deeply rooted philosophical idea in the world and in our natures is “Shit happens.” Happ was the Middle English word for “chance, fortune, what happens in the world,”  McMahon writes, “giving us such words as ‘happenstance,’ ‘haphazard,’ hapless,’ and ‘perhaps.'” This view of happiness is essentially tragic: it sees life as consisting of the things that happen to you; if more good things than bad happen, you are happy.

Then came the Enlightenment, and with it the notion that the world is a rational place, governed by laws that, if mastered, do give us a measure of control over our lives.

Manchester then plunges, as have we all ;-) into the modern world’s examination of happiness, with its increasingly sophisticated science, including neuroscience and positive psychiatry. He notes that some researchers have concluded that each individual has a happiness “set point” that is little influenced by external circumstances. From “The Happiness Hypothesis”  by Jonathan Haidt:

“It’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. . . . Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.”

Yet even David Lykken, the behavioral geneticist who came up with the set point idea (“trying to be happier is like trying to be taller”) went on to suggest things people can do to be happier.

Manchester does, too — read the article for the details, but being socially connected is important, as is spending your time in work you find absorbing.

The fact is, we’re all of us wrestling with the angel.

And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Genesis 32:24-28

We’re wrestling with the angel, and demanding that he bless us; yet if you think about it, even the chance to enter the match is its own blessing, isn’t it?

Bah to book overhype

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I recently picked up a paperback because its cover sported a glowing blurb by an author whose work I enjoy.

The book was a resounding disappointment, and, no dummy, I, I made a mental note to never trust a blurb in quite the same way again.

I’m comforted to learn that I am not alone. Heck no, I’m part of a trend, according to Damian Horner on Bookseller.com, who says that readers have become cynical about the rave reviews and gushing quotes that accompany so many book launches today.

I suspect we will soon see publishers working much more closely with bloggers and reading groups. They will run ongoing focus group panels and maybe some will even follow the Miramax model and ruthlessly target awards and prizes.

They already are. In an interview with conservative blogger/radio pundit Hugh Hewitt, for instance, Robert Ferrigno talks about how the publisher of his new political thriller, Prayers for the Assassin, spent “six figures” on website and blog marketing. (The website lets fans enter, virtually, the futuristic world of the novel.) Ferrigno predicts that in five years, “publishers will not be advertising in print media, except in very rare cases.”

These tactics work by generating word-of-mouth, which has credibility because the Mouth generating the Word tends to be a peer–a reader, just like you are, who has no vested interest in praising something that’s no good.

The weakness of this tactic, however, is that an amateur’s recommendations can be worthless, as well. Fifteen minutes scanning the reviews on Amazon is all you need to convince yourself of that ;-)

No royalties necessary, a bit of biscuit is fine

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Joe Woodward, at Poets and Writers, explores the narrated-by-critters genre, which (he notes) started with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and in the past few years has grown to include Timbuktu, by Paul Auster; Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez; and The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

Woodward then goes on to review this year’s newest additions, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, Verlyn Klinkenborg (February, Knopf) and Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage (next month, Coffee House Press).

The article doesn’t mention Paul Gallico’s The Silent Miaow. But that was, strictly speaking, non-fiction, insofar as it was a how-to manual for stray cats. So the oversight is understandable.

More on plots

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Not to be confused with moron plots. We’ll leave that topic for another day.

This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Monkey Love, Brenda Scott Royce, Feb. 2006, Penguin, given the face-up treatment royale on the “new releases” table at my local bookstore chain.

So I’m reading it (because why not have four or five books going at once?) and as I’ve been thinking about plotting, I notice that in the first chapter (19 pages) no less than four major plotlines are introduced: a girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy; another girlfriend’s professional shennanigans; the protagonist’s preparation for an upcoming stand-up comedy gig; and the protagonist’s first encounter with he-who-will-emerge-as-the-love-interest.

Advantages:

1. Fast pacing? You betcha. You can’t have that much going on in under 20 pages without having . . . a lot going on.

2. Major interest grabation. Take your pick, there’s so much happening here, you’re bound to want to know how at least some of it works out.

3. Comedic effect. A caught-in-the-headlights straight man is a comedy staple. Plot breaking out right and left is a useful device for propelling a hapless protagonist toward that lite, happy ending nirvana we’re all rooting for-o.*

Disadvantages:

1. There’s a thin line between “madcap” and frenetic.

2. Pacing isn’t pacing unless it’s modulated from time to time. When the balance tips too far toward “hard plot” and too far away from the protagonists interior life, things start to feel downright speedy after awhile.

So what’s the answer. Dunno. But if the pendulum has swung toward “plot ’til you’re punch-drunk” (and I’m by no means sure it has btw — I have exactly one data point upon which to base this) I hereby Predict it will Swing Back.

*The “o” is so that I won’t be using a preposition to end that sentence with-o

Believe it

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In a post last December, the Argyleist (named as a featured blog on Technorati last night, which is how I happened to find this post — congrats, Argyleist!) raises the subject of faith:

I’m not necessarily talking about faith in a god specifically, but faith in anything. Believing in something without any real solid proof.

My take on this is that people err when they compartmentalize “faith” as exclusive to religion or spirituality, something that can’t be applied to the compartment that is governed by “proof.” So this morning, Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy put up a post about The Ethical Brain, by Michael Gazzaniga, which has a chapter on religion, and writes:

One interesting point he makes in passing is that it turns out that scientists are just attached to their particular theories as religious believers, and in fact, scientists are just as reluctant to surrender their beliefs about science when confronted with contrary evidence as are religious believers.

Exactly.

The simple fact is that “faith” or “belief” is an intimate aspect of our cognitive experience. We like to claim that there are some things that are objectively “true” because they can be experientially proven, but that’s not the case — things we “know” will happen are actually just pretty solid guesses. To use a somewhat absurdist argument: the Earth has circled the sun every day for some 5 billion years. That doesn’t mean our beloved orb will rise daily in the east forever. Granted, it would be a waste of time to plan for a contingency in case the sun fails to make its appearance tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t taking morning on faith.

This all sounds too esoteric to be useful, and when it comes to the sun it probably is, but parse it out in the more intimate workings of our lives and we find it can be useful indeed. Faith “in the substance of things not seen” is the cognitive equivalent of walking, which as Laurie Anderson observed so smartly lo those many years ago is actually an act of falling:

You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it,
But you’re always falling.
With each step, you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you’re falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
At the same time.

We can’t make a move without faith, so as I wrote last night, the real question is not “to believe or not to believe” so much as “where does my belief lead me?”