Tag Archives: book review

Now, this should be required reading

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For everyone who follows the news.

Struck by Lightning by Jeffrey S. Rosenthal.

In a review in The Sydney Morning Herald, David Messer writes:

Tear up your lottery tickets. Scrap that plan to visit the casino. This easy-to-read guide to probability by Canadian mathematician Jeffrey Rosenthal quickly illuminates the folly of such activities. But it’s not all bad: as he explains, an understanding of probability will also allow us to stop worrying about plane crashes, crime rates, opinion polls, disease and maybe even spam.

The sad fact is that the media tends to feed a state of constant, low-grade anxiety. And when we’re in a state of constant, low-grade anxiety, we are less likely to get a clear read on actual threats when we encounter them.

Fear is supposed to be a gift, as per Gavin De Becker. We need to use that gift wisely, not squander it on abstractions.

From Renaissance Lit to Neuroscience

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Read a review (no longer online, sorry) of The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius by Nancy C. Andreasen. She was a Renaissance Lit professor who went on to study neuroscience. How’s that for a sweet jump?

The book is about the neuroscience of creativity.

The reviewer, Nigel Leary, offers a caveat to the assertions in Andreasen’s book: while they are backed by studies, much research remains to be done. Nonetheless, it seems likely that creativity is marked by its own, unique neural processes, some sort of momentary disorganization — free association — that while “remarkably similar” to “psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia” yields not misery but scientific and artistic epiphanies.

“A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth

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I have read Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” twice. The first time, however, was under the direction of an undergraduate Russian literature professor, so it might more accurately be characterized as having been taught “Anna Karenina” ;-)

College was a long time ago. I remember only one snippet of one lecture of that course, when the professor drew our attention to the scene early in the book that depicts the nature of Anna’s intimate relations with her husband — or rather, of his intimate relations with her:

Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing table, finishing a letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, freshly washed and combed, with a book under his arm, came in to her.

“It’s time, it’s time,” said he, with a meaning smile, and he went into their bedroom.

She’s already met Vronsky at this point, and Tolstoy uses this scene and that immediately preceding it to contrast Anna’s spontaneous and powerful physical attraction to her soon-to-be lover with her growing physical revulsion to her husband:

“And what right had he to look at him like that?” thought Anna, recalling Vronsky’s glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch.

Undressing, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of the eagerness which, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away.

It’s a heart-wrenching situation, to be sure; one can’t help agonizing for the woman, and although I can’t say for certain that my professor intended us to interpret the novel as a romantic tragedy (as per the tagline from the 1997 Warner movie: “In a world of power and privilege, one woman dared to obey her heart”) that’s how I, as a college student, did interpret it.

Then I reread it years later, and to my astonishment, discovered a completely different book.

With “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy was not arguing that women must obey their hearts; he was showing that when people let their passions drive them, they may find themselves driven to self-destruction. Granted, social convention is the cause, to some extent, of Anna’s growing unhappiness, but the love affair itself becomes a source of torment at the end. Anna gets what she wants, and it solves nothing.

My discovery was pure pleasure, too. Not that there’s anything wrong with women daring to obey their hearts, but what a pleasure to realize that the book’s themes were more complicated than “defy social convention/get yourself punished.”

It was with similar pleasure that I finished “A Suitable Boy.” (Which I discovered, btw, via A Snarkling Reading List commenter.) Again you have, as a central figure, a woman under pressure to conform to restraining social convention (in this case, the custom of arranged marriage). Again, you have a writer who uses his heroine’s predicament as a lens through which to examine the choices of other individuals connected to her through a network of family and their associated social circles. “A Suitable Boy” is also as rich with details about 1950s India as Anna Karenina is with details about 19th century Russia, its path winding freely into contemporary politics and religious ceremonies, through both urban and rural settings.

But where Anna Karenina’s story ends tragically, Lata Mehra’s does not.

When I finished “Anna Karenina” the second time, I remember thinking that such a novel could not be written today. But Seth has written a novel that is very much in the same league, and which deserves the praise its earned. It’s a big book, but a book that merits, for the most part, its 1400-page length. I highly recommend it.

40 million acres

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That’s how much of America is lawn, according to Brian Black in CS Monitor. He’s reviewing “American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn,” by Ted Steinberg.

Black admits he doesn’t care for lawns, and Steinberg, apparently, thinks they’re “an instrument of planned homogeneity.”

As Americans sought to fit in with one another during the cold war, writes Steinberg, “…what better way to conform than to make your front yard look precisely like Mr. Smith’s next door?”

Sorry, but I think that’s just silly (although not quite as silly as “we descended from savanna dwellers,” lol). If it were true, then we’d all be painting our houses the same color. For that matter, we’d all want houses built exactly alike. We’d demand cookie-cutter landscaping. But we don’t. Even in relatively homogeneous tracts, builders know to vary the color, orientation, floor plan etc. of the houses — and the longer they’re lived in, the more we alter them to make them unique.

Lawns are simply a fashion — a landscaping fashion — and like all fashion, the reason they’re popular is esthetic. People like the way they set off our homes and gardens, forming a kind of matte within the frame of road, sidewalk, or property line which borders our homes.

That’s why uniformity (i.e., no weeds) is considered so desirable. We don’t want the matte to call attention to itself. It’s supposed to be even-textured and uniform in color.

Are lawns a good ideal from an environmental standpoint? Probably not. But it’s facile to dismiss them with singsong “they’re all made out of ticky tacky” platitudes, particularly when your platitudes are tinged with condescension. Tastes change, and there’s no reason our collective eye couldn’t begin to appreciate other ways to frame our homes. But the way to get people to change is by presenting alternatives they find beautiful, not sneer at them for being mindless conformists.

Speaking of organic

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Here’s a review of a new book, We Want Real Food, by Graham Harvey, which examines the effect of the depletion of soil nutrients on the nutritional quality of our food.

To some extent, we’re able to compensate by taking vitamin supplements, but as I suggested in this post, that’s not an ideal answer, either. In the long run, we need to convert mainstream agriculture to more organic-style practices. No question about it.

“Whatever she could lay her hands on”

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I’m fascinated by the idea of transformation: the idea that a person might be born one thing, and then through intention, will, perhaps practice, become something else.

If it happens at all, true transformation is exceedingly rare, although to appreciate how rare you need to look past appearances. Consider the picture painted by this review of a biography of Ava Gardner (“Ava Gardner: ‘Love is Nothing’,” by Lee Server), online at the Literary Review. Reviewer Frank McLynn writes that Gardner

exemplified the classic rags-to-riches fable. The seventh child of a North Carolina sharecropping tobacco farmer, she was what the unkind describe as poor white trailer trash, with accent and ambitions to match. The height of her aspirations was to be a secretary in New York, but she was ‘discovered’ from a chance snapshot in a photographer’s window and whisked away to Hollywood for the big star build-up, purely on the basis of her looks.

Her physical circumstances were radically altered. Yet if you read on in the article, you learn that Gardner lived the sort of chaotic, alcohol-sodden life that you can glimpse by flicking on an episode of Cops. The changes to her life were purely superficial.

A contemporary with a somewhat similar experience is Archie Leach — aka Cary Grant. Like Gardner, Grant was born into near-poverty, went to Hollywood, and assumed a life of wealth and glamour. As part of his apparent transformation, Grant changed his name as well as his accent. But was he really transformed? I don’t know. But he seems to have had doubts himself; he’s quoted as saying, “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, unsure of each, suspecting each.”

McLynn concludes his piece on Gardner:

As she herself often admitted, she was at root a simple country girl, with a country girl’s values and attitudes, pitchforked into a world of unreality simply because of her beauty. She grabbed whatever she could lay her hands on, and after all who could blame her?

I can’t blame anyone for grabbing what is handed them. But I also can’t give up the idea that there should be more — that as self-aware beings we should be doing more than reacting to what happens to us.

Assuming, of course, that the alternative is even possible.

Rousseau’s Dog

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That post title is a book title, so of course I had to blog about it ;-)

The book is by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, it’s about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, and it’s been reviewed by Darrin McMahon in the New York Times (registration required).

The “dog” refers to Rousseau’s delusional tendencies, but he also owned a dog named Sultan, who, McMahon writes, was “the only being with whom he could find the peace of true friendship in England.”

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 . . .