Category: Books

“By Far the Biggest Risk to Global Climate Comes From Volcanoes”

(p. C9) What’s the connection between sugar and Xi Jinping? Why does the political turbulence in today’s Middle East trace back to the Cretaceous period? How did the humble potato revolutionize the world? Why did the great Mayan cities of the ninth century run out of potable water? What does the contemporary West African practice of polygyny—one man, many wives—have to do with the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Peter Frankopan raises these beguiling questions—and many others, bless him—in “The Earth Transformed,” a book that examines the entire sweep of the relationship between humans and nature.

. . .

Whereas Mr. Frankopan never disguises the fact that he is on the greenish side of the climate-change conversation, he steers clear of enviro-preaching and finger-wagging.  . . .  In words that will startle many of us, he says that “by far the biggest risk to global climate comes from volcanoes.” He contrasts the “considerable thought and attention” that have gone into planning for a warming world with the almost complete absence of planning or funding on the likely implications of major volcanic eruptions. Estimates put the chances of a mega-eruption—one that could cost “hundreds of millions of lives”—at one in six before the year 2100.

. . .

The history of the Earth is a history of large-scale transformations that have wreaked havoc in some cases and blessed us with benign climatic eras in others (such as the Roman Warm Period from 300 B.C. to A.D. 500). The most famous instance of the former was the asteroid strike in the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago in which our beloved dinosaurs were wiped out. The rise of humankind, Mr. Frankopan writes, was the result of an “extraordinary series of flukes, coincidences, long shots and serendipities” that made the planet hospitable to our existence. It was “geological chance” that gave the Middle East its oil reserves, the result of warming in Cretaceous times.

. . .

Mr. Frankopan’s thesis is that civilizations thrive best when they are resilient to shocks. Yet “hyperfragility,” he believes, is the name of the game in the 21st century—whether in response to warming, a rudderless U.S., Mr. Xi and Taiwan, Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, or a nuclear Saudi Arabia and Iran. The march of history has left such places as Uruk, Nineveh, Harappa, Angkor and Tikal in ruins, not because of climate change but because of a lack of resilience to shocks, made worse by obtuse planning and even worse decision-making. That’s the lesson Mr. Frankopan is trying to teach us.

For the full review, see:

Tunku Varadarajan. “Doom May Have to Be Delayed.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 22, 2023): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 20, 2023, and has the title “‘The Earth Transformed’ Review: Doom May Be Delayed.”)

The book under review is:

Frankopan, Peter. The Earth Transformed: An Untold History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Man Died When Pharmacist Refused to Give Him EpiPen Without the Mandated Prescription

(p. A15) Rates of hospital admissions for asthma, nut allergies in children, and prescriptions for EpiPens (used to treat extreme reactions) have all tripled in recent decades. Not only are food allergies now more common in children, but they are less likely to be outgrown with age than in years past.

The causes and consequences of this epidemic are the subject of “Allergic,” an important and deeply researched book by Theresa MacPhail, a medical anthropologist who memorably portrays the human face of disease.   . . .   Ms. MacPhail . . . has a personal connection to this subject: Her father died after being stung by a bee on the main street of the New Hampshire town where she grew up. (His girlfriend drove him to a drugstore instead of a hospital; even though he was in extremis, the pharmacist refused to dispense an EpiPen without a prescription.)

For the full review, see:

John J. Ross. “BOOKSHELF; Runny Noses, Itchy Eyes.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, May 24, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 23, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Allergic’ Review: Runny Noses, Itchy Eyes.”)

The book under review is:

MacPhail, Theresa. Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World. New York: Random House, 2023.

Milton Friedman Was a “Formative Intellectual Influence” to George Shultz

(p. A13) [George] Shultz, an unflamboyant personality once described by a college classmate as a “steady, plodding intellect,” reached the commanding heights of American government, holding four cabinet posts over his career from secretary of the Treasury to state. Shultz died in 2021 at the age of 100.

. . .

For a time Shultz was on track for a career in academia, working in the economics department at MIT and later the University of Chicago. “Chicago is what started me,” Shultz said. Milton Friedman, a formative intellectual influence and enduring friend, methodically deepened Shultz’s faith in free markets and his skepticism of government intervention in the economy. “Milton didn’t hit the tennis ball hard but it always came back,” Shultz once remarked, “which was reflective of the way he argued, too.”

. . .

. . . Shultz was hardly immune from being wrong. For example: Along with the rest of the State Department, he tried to talk Reagan out of using the line “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Shultz worried it was too provocative.

The cautionary tale is that many know Shultz from perhaps the biggest error in judgment he ever made, some 90 years into his life. That’s his association with Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley founder convicted of fraud in federal court. Shultz was one of Ms. Holmes’s first marks, and he helped her assemble a board for her blood-testing company from his Rolodex. Among the wreckage was Shultz’s relationship with his own grandson, Tyler, who early on discovered the company’s misrepresentations.

For the full review, see:

Kate Bachelder Odell. “BOOKSHELF; Subsume the Ego And Stay Loyal.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, March 7, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 6, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘In the Nation’s Service’ Review: George Shultz’s Quiet Strength.”)

The book under review is:

Taubman, Philip. In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2023.

Longevity Proof of Concept–A Jellyfish That Can Return to a Younger Form

(p. A15) When Benjamin Franklin wrote that “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” he must have thought he was stating an eternal truth. But if biotechnology researcher Nicklas Brendborg is to be believed, Franklin’s joke may need some updating. According to Mr. Brendborg, scientists have discovered a jellyfish the size of a fingernail that responds to stress by “ageing backwards,” reversing the normal direction of its development to become a bottom-dwelling polyp. This trick can be repeated over and over again with “no physiological recollection of having been older,” he explains, making this jellyfish “an example of the holy grail of ageing research—biological immortality.”

This tiny Methuselah is one of the striking examples in Mr. Brendborg’s breezy survey of the science of longevity, “Jellyfish Age Backwards,” which the author has translated from the Danish with Elizabeth DeNoma.

. . .

Short chapters built from short, declarative sentences combine with familiar material to give “Jellyfish Age Backwards” the feel of an introductory survey rather than a novel argument. Perhaps its piecewise construction is only a reflection of the disjointed state of the subject, where researchers are pulling on various threads but have not yet managed to knit them into a coherent whole. Mr. Brendborg finishes with a ringing declaration that the “noble” efforts of medical science will “eventually defeat” aging. But biology is complicated, as the author admits, and the strands of this multivariate and complex phenomenon may eventually prove to be tangled in some unresolvable knot.

For the full review, see:

Richard Lea. “BOOKSHELF; Dying Young At a Late Age.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 30, 2022): A15.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 29, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Jellyfish Age Backwards’ Review: Dying Young at a Late Age.”)

The book under review is:

Brendborg, Nicklas. Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature’s Secrets to Longevity. Translated by Elizabeth DeNoma. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2023.

Lockdowns in China Move Atlas to Shrug

(p. A1) By the usual measures, Loretta Liu had it made. She graduated in 2018 from one of China’s top universities, rented an apartment in the glamorous city of Shenzhen, and had been hired as a visual designer at a series of high-flying companies, even as youth unemployment in China was reaching record highs.

Then, last year, she quit. She now works as a groomer at a chain pet store, for one-fifth of her previous salary. She spends hours on her feet, wearing a uniform in place of her once carefully selected outfits.

And she is delighted.

“I was tired of living like that. I didn’t feel like I was getting anything from the work,” Ms. Liu said of her previous job, where she said she had little creative freedom, often worked overtime, and felt her mental and physical health deteriorating. “So I thought, there’s no need anymore.”

Ms. Liu is part of a phenomenon attracting growing attention in China: young people trading high-pressure, prestigious white-collar jobs for manual labor. The scale of the trend is hard to measure, but widely shared social media posts have documented a tech worker becoming a grocery store cashier; an accountant peddling street sausages; a content manager delivering takeout. On Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like app, the hashtag “My first experience with physical labor” has more than 28 million views.

. . .

Around the world, the coronavirus pandemic spurred people to reassess the value of their work — see the “Great Resignation” in the United States. But in China, the forces fueling the disillusionment of young people are particularly intense. Long working hours and domineering managers are common. The economy is slowing, dimming the prospect of upward mobility for a generation that has known only explosive growth.

And then there were China’s three years of “zero Covid” restrictions, which forced many to endure prolonged lockdowns, layoffs and the realization of how little control their hard work gave them over their futures.

“Emotionally, everyone probably can’t bear it anymore, because during the pandemic we saw many unfair and strange things, like being locked up,” Ms. Liu said.

. . .

When Yolanda Jiang, 24, resigned last summer from her architectural design job in Shenzhen, after being asked to work 30 days straight, she hoped to find another office job. It was only after three months of unsuccessful searching, her savings dwindling, that she took a job as a security guard in a university residential complex.

At first, she was embarrassed to tell her family or friends, but she grew to appreciate the role. Her 12-hour shifts, though long, were leisurely. She got off work on time. The job came with free dormitory housing. Her salary of about $870 a month was even about 20 percent higher than her take-home pay before — a symptom of how the glut of college graduates has started to flatten wages for that group.

But Ms. Jiang said her ultimate goal is still to return to an office, where she hoped to find more intellectual challenges. She had been taking advantage of the slow pace at her security job to study English, which she hoped would help her land her next role, perhaps at a foreign trade company.

“I’m not actually lying flat,” Ms. Jiang said. “I’m treating this as a time to rest, transition, learn, charge my batteries and think about the direction of my life.”

For the full story, see:

Vivian Wang and Zixu Wang. “In China, Young Workers Ditch Prestige Jobs for Manual Gigs.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 11, 2023): A1 & A11.

(Note: bracketed year added.]

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “In China, Young People Ditch Prestige Jobs for Manual Labor.”)

The title of this blog entry alludes to Ayn Rand’s novel:

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Russians Are Reading Book on How to Remove Dictators

(p. A24) . . . the book, “The End of the Regime: How Three European Dictatorships Ended,” is not about Russia or Vladimir Putin. It’s about three dictatorships — those of Francisco Franco in Spain, Antonio Salazar in Portugal and the colonels in Greece — and how those countries became democracies, returning to the global fold. A large number of Russians haven’t suddenly taken an interest in the history of 20th-century Southern Europe. Rather, discussions of the book have common themes: How do prolonged right-wing dictatorships end? And can Russia become a democracy?

As one might expect, the book is being widely discussed by opposition groups and those calling for an end to the war. More surprisingly, it is also being read by the Russian nomenklatura — those at the apex of the Russian state. It seems that the book has become a pretext for discussion of taboo topics, such as political transition, the health and death of the leader, defeat in a colonial war, the end of isolation and, indeed, the end of the regime.

. . .

Russian readers have found much that is resonant in the book. How the Greek dictatorship, for example, collapsed after an attempt to annex Cyprus, which it regarded as a historical part of the country. Or how the Portuguese regime caved in as a result of a colonial, imperialist war that dragged on for years. Or how Salazar, plagued by health problems, was removed from power but continued to think that he was ruling the country. (To maintain the illusion, a special newspaper was published just for him.) And then there is the story of how in Spain, the idea of a transition to democracy slowly took hold and was brought about by the ruling elite itself.

For the full essay, see:

Alexander Baunov. “Russians Are Still Asking Questions About What’s Next.” The New York Times (Thursday, April 27, 2023): A24.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date April 26, 2023, and has the title “Russians Seem Very Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End.”)

Baunov’s essay discusses his Russian-language book:

Baunov, Alexander. The End of the Regime: How Three European Dictatorships Ended.

The Growing Pain of the Working-Class

Many of the working poor are indeed suffering. The solution is mainly to reduce government regulations, to allow a robustly redundant labor market and more opportunities for free-agent entrepreneurship. (See Openness to Creative Destruction.)

(p. 6) Ever since Bobbie Wert was 8 years old, her stomach has ached. “My tummy hurts,” was her refrain as a girl, and the discomfort was accompanied by vomiting and diarrhea that kept her out of school — sometimes for half the days in the school year.

Doctors poked and scanned but couldn’t figure out anything wrong. Over the years, they cut her open and removed bits and pieces yet couldn’t drive away the pain. So doctors prescribed opioids in increasing doses — even fentanyl patches — that left her addicted. At age 43, she now is off opioids but still suffers every single day, enduring chronic pain like an estimated 50 million other Americans.

Wert is part of a vast and mysterious panorama of pain that is increasing, sometimes with no obvious physical cause. And while chronic pain is a global problem, it is particularly puzzling in America. In other wealthy countries, it’s the elderly who report the most chronic pain, which makes some sense. But in the United States it’s the middle-aged — especially the jobless and people like Wert, who did not graduate from high school — who suffer the most. It is a plague on the less educated.

All this raises the question: Is this physical suffering a canary in the coal mine warning us of larger dysfunction in our society?

Here’s what we do know: Tens of millions of Americans are suffering pain. But chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families.

. . .

“People’s lives are coming apart, and this leads to huge increases in physical pain,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who with Anne Case popularized the term “deaths of despair.” He, Case and Arthur Stone warn in a recent article that “the mystery of American pain reveals a warning for the future.”

Americans die from deaths of despair — drugs, alcohol and suicide — at a rate of more than a quarter-million a year, and the number of walking wounded is far greater.

For the full commentary, see:

Nicholas Kristof. “Why So Many Americans Are Feeling More Pain.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, May 7, 2023): 6-7.

(Note: ellipsis added. In the original last paragraph, the words “want” and “all” are in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 3, 2023, and has the title “Why Americans Feel More Pain.”)

The book by Deaton and Case alluded to above is:

Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Universities Should Teach Students to Want to Hear Their Opponents

(p. A21) On April 8, 1991, when I was a sophomore at Brown University, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came to campus to speak. Conservatives allegedly existed at Brown, but the school was as true to its left-leaning reputation then as it is now.

. . .

That April evening of Scalia’s talk, I lined up with my anti-Helms T-shirt on. I barely made it into a back row of the packed auditorium, where I awaited what would surely be a triumphant Q. and A. session. Once Scalia finished and we the righteous had a chance to speak truth to the evil one, we would rip apart his so-called originalism, his hypocrisies, his imperiousness. We were champing at the bit to have our say.

And then he wiped the floor with us. In answer to our indignant questions, he calmly cited rebutting cases. We fulminated and he reasoned, and when we seethed he lobbed back with charm. Within the hermetic bubble of my liberal upbringing and education, it had never occurred to me that even when finally presented with The Truth, someone from the other side could prevail. I’d been certain we would humiliate him. Instead, I left humbled.

. . .

According to “Brown University: A Short History,” by Janet M. Phillips, Vartan Gregorian, the school’s president when I attended, “bucked the trend of ‘political correctness’ to keep the Brown community hospitable to a wide range of views.” He invited not only Scalia but also the left-wing academic and activist Angela Davis, to “ensure a steady flow of diverse views and intellectual debate.” Gregorian, who died in 2021, Phillips wrote, “prided himself on the fact that during his tenure no speech, however controversial, was cut short by protest.”

We know universities can do a better job of preventing one form of speech from inhibiting another. The harder task, but perhaps the more important lesson, will be teaching students not to want to do so. They shouldn’t avoid opportunities to hear other perspectives but should actively seek them out and reckon with the humbling fact that what they already know — or think they already know — may not be all there is to know. Isn’t that, after all, precisely what learning is about?

For the full commentary, see:

Pamela Paul. “The Biggest Loss on Campus? Listening.” The New York Times (Friday, March 31, 2023): A21.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original last paragraph, the words “want” and “all” are in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 30, 2023, and has the title “The Most Profound Loss on Campus Isn’t Free Speech. It’s Listening.”)

The book on Brown University mentioned above is:

Phillips, Janet M. Brown University, a Short History. Providence, RI: Brown University, Office of University Relations, 1992.

Political Challenges Were Greater Than Technology Challenges in Creating Geostationary Satellites

(p. A13) After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite, in 1957, a 31-year-old Rosen was inspired to build “a lightweight satellite that, when launched into a high orbit above the equator, would mimic the Earth’s rotation and retain its relative position, like a spoke on a wheel.” Mr. Amelinckx goes on: “This geostationary satellite would provide twenty-four-hour global communications, something never before attempted. Rosen was excited.”

Indeed he was. Rosen was a brilliant electrical engineer who worked at Hughes Aircraft in California. His tenacity enabled him to surmount, over the following years, the seemingly endless number of infuriating obstacles that stood between him and his goal. There was the multitude of technical problems to be solved—from the satellite’s weight to its spin, antenna, solar panels and more. There were the questions from NASA, Congress, the Pentagon and aerospace companies about whether the U.S. should prefer low-orbit satellites or geostationary ones. (The latter would possess greater transmitting and receiving versatility, but many scientists were convinced that geostationary satellites, which orbit at much higher altitudes, were impractical and would “take years to develop.”)

Mr. Amelinckx notes that solving the political challenges proved more difficult than creating the necessary technologies. Fortunately for Rosen, President Kennedy was keen on communications satellites. And so in 1961, NASA began funding Hughes to create Rosen’s vision.

For the full review, see:

Howard Schneider. “BOOKSHELF; How ‘Early Bird’ Got the Worm.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, April 14, 2023): A13.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 13, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Satellite Boy’ Review: How ‘Early Bird’ Got the Worm.”)

The book under review is:

Amelinckx, Andrew. Satellite Boy: The International Manhunt for a Master Thief That Launched the Modern Communication Age. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2023.

Firing an Actor “Early Could Be a Motivator for the Remaining Cast”

The ability to fire at will gives the entrepreneur (and the movie director) the ability to put together the right team for a project. Keeping those employed who are not doing their jobs, can be demoralizing for those who are doing their jobs.

(p. C1) When the writer and director Mike Nichols was young, he had an allergic reaction to a whooping cough vaccine. The result was a complete and lifelong inability to grow hair. One way to read Mark Harris’s crisp new biography, “Mike Nichols: A Life,” is as a tender comedy about a man and his wigs.

. . .

(p. C5) Harris is the author of two previous books, “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” and “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.” He’s also a longtime entertainment reporter with a gift for scene-setting.

He’s at his best in “Mike Nichols: A Life” when he takes you inside a production. His chapters on the making of three films in particular — “The Graduate,” “Silkwood” and “Angels in America” — are miraculous: shrewd, tight, intimate and funny. You sense he could turn each one into a book.

Nichols was an actor’s director. &nbsp. . .  But he had a steely side.

He fired Gene Hackman during week one on “The Graduate.” Hackman was playing Mr. Robinson and it wasn’t working, in part because, at 37, he looked too young for the role.

Sacrificing someone early could be a motivator for the remaining cast, he learned. He fired Mandy Patinkin early in the filming of “Heartburn,” and brought in Jack Nicholson to play Meryl Streep’s faithless husband.

For the full review, see:

Dwight Garner. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Wit and Wigs Of a Star-Studded Life.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 26, 2021): C1 & C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Jan. 29, 2021, and has the title ‘BOOKS OF THE TIMES; ‘Mike Nichols’ Captures a Star-Studded Life That Shuttled Between Broadway and Hollywood.”)

The book under review:

Harris, Mark. Mike Nichols: A Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2021.

DEI Administrators Pose “Grave” Threat to Equal Treatment Under Law

(p. A11) Falls Church, Va.

Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.

You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”

Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”

For the full interview, see:

Tunku Varadarajan, interviewer. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 1, 2023): A11.

(Note: in original, Falls Church, Va. is in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date March 28, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)