Book Review: Incognito

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"The vast, wet, chemical-electrical network called the nervous system.  The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us."

An entire book about how our conscious brain isn't really in charge, which necessitates changing our conscious thinking about who we are, the decisions we make, the art we create.

Take Coleridge.  He began using opium in 1796.  He wrote "Kubla Khan" while on an opium high.  So is the genius of that poem Coleridge's?  "We credit the beautiful words to Coleridge because they came from his brain...But he couldn't get hold of those words while sober, so who exactly does the credit for the poem belong to?"

The book is chock full of great food for thought; the blind lady who can see, creating the illusion of truth simply be repetition of lies, what a "gut feeling" really is, cognitive reserve fighting off Alzheimer's,

Perhaps the most (conscious)thought-provoking chapter was Eagleman's exploration about our penal system and how brain studies could allow us to change our ideas of guilt and capacity for reform. 

A fascinating read.  Perhaps dumbed-down a little too much but, frankly, had it been more intellectual, I would not have found it as intriguing and meaningful.

"The way we see the world is not necessarily what's out there: vision is a construction of the brain, and its only job is to generate a useful narrative at our scales of interaction.  Visual illusions reveal a deeper concept; that our thoughts are generated by machinery to which we have no direct access. Useful routines are burned down into the circuitry of the brain and consciousness seems to be about setting goals for what should be burned into the circuitry."

"The complexity of the system we are is so vast as to be indistinguishable from magic.  As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them."







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Book Review - Madam, Will You Talk?

Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When I was about 11 and living in Mandeville, Jamaica, I was wandering around the dusty bookshelves of the used bookstore run by the cancer society, where my mom volunteered periodically.  I had a couple of dollars in my pocket, probably earmarked for an Archie digest comic book, but I picked this up instead.

During the next several months, I combed the used bookstore for more Mary Stewart. I was in luck; a whole shelf full of worn paperbacks that had that wonderful smell of aged paper. I read Nine Coaches Waiting, My Brother Michael, Wildfire at Midnight and Airs Above Ground.  I liked all of them.  But none of them as much as Madam, Will You Talk?

For years, it was a go-to book every couple of months.  We didn't have a library to frequent in Jamaica and I often would sit, staring at my bookshelf, wishing for something new to read. And when I didn't have anything new, I'd invariably pick this up.  And read it again.  And again.

Eight years later, the book fell apart in my hands. I taped it together with duct tape and got three or four more readings out of it but eventually had to throw it away.  Two years after that, I found another copy, same 75¢ Fawcett Crest Book edition, idling away its time in the philosophy section of used bookstore that obviously had lax organizational requirements.  By this time, I was finishing college and my re-reading became less frequent.  But when I was 28, I had to drive from Omaha, Nebraska to Kansas City, Missouri to hop on a flight to Texas to audition for grad school.  A blizzard hit but I made the drive anyway.  I packed a coffee can, a box of 500 matches, several rolls of toilet paper, a huge down comforter, a +10 sleeping bag, a sack full of food, a couple of gallons of water, my late 90s cell phone, a flashlight, extra batteries and Madam, Will You Talk.  And the whole drive, I was found myself wishing I'd slide off the road and get stuck, just so I could cuddle up in my sleeping bag, next to a nice TP fire-in-a-can, and read while I was waiting to be rescued.

I've not read this book in over ten years.  I picked it up earlier this week because I had miraculously caught up on my New Yorker reading and didn't have anything from the library cued up and ready to go.

It's just as good as it's always been.  And maybe even better.

So off I go on an indulgent re-read of Stewart's books, starting with The Rose Cottage, which is her last book (though she's still alive and kicking at the ripe age of 96, she has not published anything in 15 years)  Her books are often classified as romances but they aren't, really.  They are about strong women who aren't so strong that they don't worry about fashion or fall in love with the wrong men.  They are the Grace Kellys and the Audrey Hepburns of fiction.  They are the women I'd like to be.  In my next life, maybe.



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Book Review: Eleanor and Park

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I will use three emails my husband wrote to Rainbow while he was reading the book as my review:

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Dear Rainbow,
I am on page 95. I think your next book needs to be more boring and have much longer chapters that start very boring.  You need to do this for those of us who have lives. You see I am going back to school to get certified to teach English to high school kids. I have real classes. And today I had a real test in a Blue Book. People have to study for tests. Even I have to study for tests. But it is hard to study when Rainbow's book is in your bag.

The problem is that your writing is the kind that sort of stops being writing and becomes just a flow. Then, boom, you hit the end of a section. Hmmm, you say, I guess I could just check out the first sentence or two. I mean, the sections are pretty short and all. Then... shit, I've read the whole thing. Effing Rainbow! I have to study!  Hmmm.  I guess I could just check out the first couple sentences of the next section.

This is a problem for me. I did get some studying done. And I did well on my test, I think. But I worry about brain surgeons or detectives or other people who need to focus on their jobs or people's brains don't get fixed or crimes don't get solved because of you.

So, in summary -- Quit writing such good books. Or at least wait until I'm on spring break or something to have them put in stores.

****************************************************

Dear Rainbow,
The hand rape line was really funny -- I need to stop reading to eat lunch now, but I may just read one more section.

****************************************************

Dear Rainbow,
Now you've screwed up a perfectly good nap window. I'm losing patience with you. I have to walk the dog now. Can't read and walk at the same time.





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Book Review: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lovely read.  A turn of the 20th century girl who longs for more than what her lot holds.  Colorful characters, light on the angst, heavy on the atmosphere of central Texas in the summer of 1899, Darwin thrown in as a sideline.  No magic.  No secret societies. No intermittent cartoon graphics.  No vampires.  No dystopian futures.  So atypical of books for children these days.  Which is maybe why I liked it so much.

In describing an ongoing altercation between a cat and a possum, where the possum always plays dead, the cat stalks off triumphantly then the possum opens its eyes slyly and slinks away;

"The scene played night after night, all summer long. Neither I nor the adversaries ever fatigued of it.  How satisfying to have a bloodless war in which each side was equally convinced of its own triumph."

I hope I can get my nine year old boy to read it.


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Book Review : Straphanger

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile by Taras Grescoe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A combination of a manifesto against the automobile and an ode to trains.  With a coda grudgingly giving credit where credit is due to the bus.

One thesis is a worn one;  we're running out of oil to power our personal automobiles and even if we go electric, most electricity comes from coal.  So it's lose lose.

But Grescoe approaches his ode not from an environmental standpoint, but from a social standpoint.  And a community structure standpoint.  And a health standpoint.  The automobile has isolated us.  Dallas-Fort Worth is as large as Israel.  People have skin cancer on the left side of their bodies more often than the do on the right.  We're fat.


We are like this by choice;  we have chosen the freeway over the light rail. We have endowed personal ownership of a car as a symbolic representation of liberty, freedom and prosperity.  We've paved everything in sight and called it progress.  We have laws that require a minimum number parking spaces per development that guarantees that transit won't have a chance.  Developers operate with a formula that people won't walk more than 600 feet to get to a parked car and build with that in mind.

But if it's hard to drive, people take transit and transit improves and more people take transit and transit keeps improving.  But if you make it hard to drive, you are ousted from office.  So how do we invoke change?

Grescoe looks at 12 cities all over the world; paragons of transit and paragons of the car.

And the history is interesting.  The first suburbs were built within easy distance of the city and connected by commuter trains.  But then the car came hiccuping off the assembly line and made the possibilities endless.

Then in the 1950s, Eisenhower built up our concrete infrastructure, not to help us go on Kerouac-esque odysseys of discovery but to make sure we could get the military where we might need them in case of an invasion and evacuate our cities in case of nuclear war.  No invasion, no nuclear war and lots of highway infrastructure = suburban sprawl and big box stores.

And that's the American way.  Public transit is for poor people.  Public transit is communist.  Socialist.  I am an American.  I work hard.  I buy my own car.  I pay my own way.  Somehow I forget how much public money is used to keep the roads upon which I'm exerting my libertarian independence in useable form.

Public transit is also dangerous.  A target for terrorists.  A killer.  Of course, in Japan, you are more likely to die from your pajamas catching fire than you are in a train crash.

I live in Kansas City.  A city completely enamored with the automobile.  Though my neighborhood is an early suburb, built with trolley and streetcar access to downtown, all of those tracks are gone.  One is now a well-loved jogging path.  A MAX bus runs on the street next to the jogging path but there is no rail.  And those who advocate rail are immediately labeled as crackpot sociopaths.

But Kansas City doesn't have gridlock.  So there's no reason to change.  So we won't change.

In Bogota (my favorite chapter of the book) the mayor championed public good over private interest.  He restructured Bogota to "show that a cyclist on a thirty-dollar bike was equally as important as a citizen in a thirty-thousand dollar car.  We were saying, 'You, with your big cars and fancy jewels, we think you are stupid, we think you are animals.  What we respect is music and sports and libraries.  For us, the neighborhood hero was the young man who played sports and read books and rode around on an old bike.'"

And it worked.  For the most part.  Until he was ousted from office.  But he plans to run again and continue molding the trend.

I wish we had a visionary like that in Kansas City.  I don't take transit.  I could take a bus.  But it's so much easier to get in my car and drive.  So I do.  And until transit becomes more than an indicator of poverty or hipster moral superiority, nothing will change.

"Every time you choose to drive you are, in a tiny way, opting out of, and thus diminishing, the public realm.  And that, finally, is the problem with suburbs and freeways.  In order to gain spurious freedom, which is in fact just increased mobility, millions of people turn their backs on civility--not just politeness, but also the process of civilization building, in which cities play such a crucial role.  Sprawl may end in cul-de-sacs and foreclosures, but it begins every time you slam a car door on the world."


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Book Review: The Beauty and the Sorrow

The Beauty And The Sorrow by Peter Englund


The whole concept of this book intrigues me;  take twenty regular people and tell the story of the war through their eyes.  Englund has done his homework; I expected swaths of pull-quotes from their letters.  Instead, he takes source material to sketch a scene and uses direct quotes from their letters sparingly.  Mostly, this works beautifully.  But sometimes, Englund's prose is obtuse and clunky and one wishes for the original voice.  For example;

"He is a keen churchgoer and the eldest of six brothers and sisters, the two youngest of whom--the twin girls Zelma and Vida--he is particularly fond of and pays a lot of attention."

I spent too many minutes trying to rewrite that sentence in my head.  I couldn't do it so then I had to back up and rewrite the whole paragraph.  One could argue that I got distracted by a minor element of poor grammar, which I should have glossed over for the sake of the beautiful story Englund was telling.  But this exact exercise happened to me often enough that I fear the depth of its ability to enlighten me was compromised.

But despite its tedious moments and the difficulty I had as a reader keeping track of who was who, Englund's concept, for the most part, worked.  Making the war real.  "The war for them is less an event to be followed than a condition to be endured."

This war made people into statistics.  This war took away basic human dignity.  This war devalued human life.  When the German seaman uses his offshore leave to go see Lohengrin he writes, "It's a pity I can't get to more occasions like this.  They make you feel like a human being rather than just a worthless beast of burden."

"And the savage in you makes you adore it with its squalor and wastefulness and danger and strife and glorious noise.  You feel that, after all, this is what men were intended for rather than to sit in easy chairs with a cigarette and whiskey, the evening paper or the best-seller, and to pretend that such a veneer means civilization and that there is no barbarian behind your starched and studded shirt front."  American Army field surgeon Harvey Cushing after witnessing shells land at the front.

Englund writes, "An ancient truth is making itself manifest again--the truth that sooner or later wars become uncontrollable and counter-productive because men and societies will tend to sacrifice everything in their blind drive to be victorious."  Peace becomes a dirty word.  Anything less than victory would mean that "all the sufferings and losses have been in vain."  So the war grinds on, causing more suffering, more loss.

"For about a fortnight they have watched battalion after battalion dispatched towards the top of Monte Ortigara and each time they have also watched the result;  first to come are the stretcher-beares with the wounded and the mules with the dead, then--after a few hours or a few days--what remains of the battalion trudges past.  That is how it works, such are the mechanics of it.  Battalions are sent into the mill of artillery fire and remain there being ground mercilessly down until they have lost the majority of their men.  Then they are replaced by new battalions, which stay until they have lost the majority of their men.  Then they are replaced by new battalions, which stay until they have lost the majority of their men.  And so on."

This war sent humans into a roiling vortex of violence that functionally achieved nothing at all.

One of the people Englund follows reads as voraciously as he can throughout the war, "...in the slightly touching way of bookish people, who always try to read their way to an understanding of the great and incomprehensible events that are affecting them..."

The inherent and never-ending conflicts--social democracy, constitutional monarchy, individual freedoms, the class system--all of this is crystallized during the war.

"The war has developed into something that few people foresaw and even fewer desired, and the class system is one of the things that has been unmasked: where decades of socialist and anarchist propaganda failed to lay bare the lies, hypocrisy and paradoxes of the old order, a couple of years of war have succeeded in doing so."


The war to end all wars, followed by the peace to end all peace.  Followed by the rise of the Nazis.

Englund ends his book with a quote from another regular person; a German footsoldier during the war; the young man is frustrated by the terms of the peace and the fall of German power and might.  He writes, "One would have had to be a simpleton--or a liar and criminal--to hope for mercy from the enemy.  My hatred grew during these nights, my hatred for those responsible for this evil deed.  During the days that followed, I recognised what my mission was to be.  I decided to become a politician."

The soldier's name was Adolf Hitler.


Other random thoughts: Paolo Monelli is a poet with a sense of language and beauty that tells the war's story in a most effective and heart-wrenching way.

Best Random Trivia Item Learned:  Tsingtao, in China, used to be a German colony.  No wonder they make great beer.


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Book Review: Thieves of Manhattan

The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, hmmm.  Hip, sly, outrageous, ridiculous, meta, snarky, fake memoir which lampoons memoirs professing to be real, the publishing industry, authors, liars, truth-tellers, the creation of literature and truth itself.

For the first 60 pages or so, I kept dogearing pages with words that made no sense to me;  "she'd been smoking vonneguts" "pedestrians clutching black poppinses" "wearing a gatsby" "covering my portnoy"

Then, while the narrator, Ian, is reading the book A Thief in Manhattan, he says "What I liked most were Roth's knowing literary references ... Throughout, Roth employed a literary sort of slang; he called an overcoat a "gogol," a smile a "cheshire," and an umbrella a "poppins."  He called trains "highsmiths," because they appeared so often in Patricia Highsmith's thrillers, and referred to money as "daisies," since in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Daisy Buchanan's voice as being "full of money."  At the end of Roth's manuscript, he included a glossary of literary terms ..."

On a whim, I turned to the back of Langer's book.  Glossary of terms.

And at some point, Ian's manuscript is too long.  He must cut it down to 250 pages.  The Thieves of Manhattan, in it's paperback published form, runs 253 pages.

And while it got a little too Da Vinci Code in the end (perhaps purposefully so?) I enjoyed it immensely and read it in one night.



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