Category: Books

Revival of the Resilient Brer Rabbit

(p. C23) When Robert Weil, the editor in chief and publishing director of Liveright, approached Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar with the idea of putting together “The Annotated African American Folktales,” the two Harvard professors responded with a mix of excitement and trepidation.
. . .
“The Annotated African American Folktales,” which came out in November [2017], contains more than 100 African and African-American folk tales as well as introductory essays and commentary to provide historical context. It draws from the rich, undersung work of folklorists from West Africa to the Deep South.
. . .
Professors Gates and Tatar . . . tackle controversial parts of folklore history, dedicating a chapter to the work of Joel Chandler Harris.
. . .
The decision to include Harris’s work in this collection produced lively discussions between Mr. Gates and Ms. Tatar. “I felt uncomfortable with it,” Ms. Tatar said. But Mr. Gates disagreed. The exchange proved to be a key moment of collaboration.
“In my house, growing up in Piedmont, West Virginia, we collected Mother Goose and Joel Chandler Harris,” he said. “My father used to tell Brer Rabbit stories to my brother and me all the time.”
. . .
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, African-Americans debated whether these folk tales were worth preserving. Some people considered the stories remnants of slavery rather than evidence of ingenuity.
The novelist Toni Morrison, however, has played an important role in validating these stories by integrating them into her writing, Ms. Tatar said.
While Ms. Morrison’s novels contain traces of innovative uses of folklore, “Tar Baby” is the most obvious and the one Mr. Gates was particularly eager to include in this collection. Not only is it one of his favorite stories but he also finds the appearance of the tar baby in many cultures “haunting.” The original folk tale is the story of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. Angry that Brer Rabbit is always stealing from his garden, Brer Fox makes a tar baby. Brer Rabbit comes across the figure and tries to start a conversation. He grows frustrated by the lack of response and hits the tar baby, only to find his paw stuck in what is a doll made of tar and turpentine.
. . .
Folk tales give us “ancestral wisdom,” they teach children lessons about compassion, forgiveness and respect, said Ms. Tatar. They take us “back to the people who lived before us.” They help us “navigate the future.”
Mr. Gates couldn’t agree more. He has dedicated this labor of love to his 3-year-old granddaughter. He wants the book to be not just for her and black children of her generation, but for all American children.

For the full commentary, see:
LOVIA GYARKYE. “Folklore Reclaimed From History’s Dustbin.” The New York Times (Fri., DEC. 15, 2017): C23.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 14, 2017, and has the title “From Two Scholars, African-American Folk Tales for the Next Generation.”)

The book by Gates and Tatar, is:
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Maria ‎Tatar, eds. The Annotated African American Folktales. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2017.

The book by Joel Chandler Harris, is:
Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1895.

Will Ending Firm Hierarchy Create “a Blissful Business Utopia”?

(p. 18) “The Kingdom of Happiness” doesn’t take place in Silicon Valley per se, but it is definitively about tech culture. Groth follows Tony Hsieh, the creator of Zappos, as he pours $350 million of his personal wealth into downtown Las Vegas with the goal of reinventing the area as . I won’t be giving away the story by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Hsieh, . . .”
. . .
When she’s sober, Groth documents Hsieh’s attempt to integrate “holacracy” into his organizations, a term that rids a company of hierarchy and titles, and instead creates an all-for-one do-what-you-want mentality. (No, I’m not kidding.) It gave me a panic attack just thinking of working in a place like that.

For the full review, see:
NICK BILTON. “Denting the Universe.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, FEB. 19, 2017): 18.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date FEB. 14, 2017, and has the title “Pet Projects of the New Billionaires.”)

The book under review, is:
Groth, Aimee. The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia. New York: Touchstone, 2017.

Kid Paid $100,000 to Skip College and Mine Asteroids

(p. 18) As I sat down for lunch at a restaurant in Los Angeles, I placed a copy of “Valley of the Gods,” by Alexandra Wolfe, on the table, and a waitress walking by stopped to peer at the cover. . . .
“It’s about Silicon Valley,” I began. “It follows this young kid, John Burnham, who gets paid $100,000 by this weird billionaire guy, Peter Thiel, whom you’ve probably heard of; he’s a big Trump supporter and spoke at the Republican National Convention?” — a blank stare from the waitress. “Anyway, Thiel pays him (and a bunch of other kids) to forgo college so Burnham can mine asteroids, but he doesn’t actually end up mining the asteroids and. . . .”
. . .
The book begins with the protagonist, Burnham (or antagonist, depending whose side you’re on), who isn’t old enough to drink yet but is debating dropping out of college to follow the Pied Piper of libertarian and contrarian thinking, Peter Thiel, to Silicon Valley. As Wolfe chronicles, Thiel, who has a degree from Stanford University and largely credits where he is today (a billionaire) to his time at that school, started the Thiel Fellowship, in 2011, which awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years old to say no to M.I.T., Stanford or, in Burnham’s case, the University of Massachusetts, to pursue an Ayn Randian dream of disrupting archetypal norms.
It won’t be giving away the ending by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Burnham.

For the full review, see:
NICK BILTON. “Denting the Universe.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, FEB. 19, 2017): 18.
(Note: ellipsis at end of second paragraph, in original; other two, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date FEB. 14, 2017, and has the title “Pet Projects of the New Billionaires.”)

The book under review, is:
Wolfe, Alexandria. Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Enforcing New Blood Pressure Guidelines May Lead to Serious Falls

(p. A23) “Under New Guidelines, Millions More Americans Will Need to Lower Blood Pressure.” This is the type of headline that raises my blood pressure to dangerously high levels.
. . .
The new recommendation is principally in response to the results of a large, federally funded study called Sprint that was published in 2015 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
. . .
A blood pressure of 130 in the Sprint study may be equivalent to a blood pressure of 140, even 150, in a busy clinic. A national goal of 130 as measured in actual practice may lead many to be overmedicated — making their blood pressures too low.
. . .
Serious falls are common among older adults. In the real world, will a nationwide target of 130, and the side effects of medication lowering blood pressure, lead to more hip fractures? Ask your doctors. See what they think.
. . .
I suspect many primary-care practitioners will want to ignore this new target. They understand the downsides of the relentless expansion of medical care into the lives of more people. At the same time, I fear many will be coerced into compliance as the health care industry’s middle management translates the 130 target into a measure of physician performance. That will push doctors to meet the target using whatever means necessary — and that usually means more medications.
So focusing on the number 130 not only will involve millions of people but also will involve millions of new prescriptions and millions of dollars. And it will further distract doctors and their patients from activities that aren’t easily measured by numbers, yet are more important to health — real food, regular movement and finding meaning in life. These matter whatever your blood pressure is.

For the full commentary, see:
H. GILBERT WELCH. “Rethinking Blood Pressure Advice.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 16, 2017): A23.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 15, 2017, and has the title “Don’t Let New Blood Pressure Guidelines Raise Yours.”)

Welch has a book that makes a similar point, though more broadly, to that made in the passages quoted above:
Welch, H. Gilbert. Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015.

For Jane Jacobs, “Self-Certainty” Was Better than a Doctorate

(p. 17) Like the critic Pauline Kael and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Jane Jacobs arrived to churn the fertile soil of American cultural ideology in the 1960s, brandishing a disciplined populist intellect and a comfort with courting enmity. All three were middle-aged mothers by the time they would shake things up. That Jacobs, nee Butzner in 1916, would force a reconsideration of the nature and purpose of cities was an outcome her young adulthood would have hardly suggested. An unexceptional student at Central High in Scranton, Pa., she later studied at Columbia before failing to gain formal admission to Barnard and abandoning the pursuit of a degree entirely. These experiences, Robert Kanigel maintains in his biography “Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs,” left her with a distaste for the academy that she carried throughout her career.
Where others had doctorates, Jacobs had a self-certainty that was manifest early on. In a chronicling of her childhood so thorough it includes the number of times she was late for homeroom during her first semester of high school (seven), Kanigel recounts an incident in which Jane was expelled from third grade for urging her classmates to dismiss the entreaties of a hygiene instructor, who asked them to pledge to brush their teeth twice a day for the rest of their lives. In Jane’s view, the promise would be impossible to keep, making the request absurd.

For the full review, see:
GINIA BELLAFANTE. “Fighting the Power Broker.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, OCT. 9, 2016): 17.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date OCT. 7, 2016, and has the title “Two New Books About Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary.”)

The book under review, is:
Kanigel, Robert. Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Sapolsky Wrong to Dismiss Hunter-Gatherer Violence

(p. 15) Sapolsky proposes 10 strategies for reducing violence, all reasonable but none that justify the notion that science is the basis for societal advances toward less violence and higher morality.
. . .
In this section Sapolsky becomes a partisan critic, including presenting a skeptical view about the supposed long-term decline of human violence claimed by Steven Pinker in “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Sapolsky asserts that Pinker’s calculations include elementary errors, and that low rates of violence among contemporary hunter-gatherers mean that warfare did not predate agriculture. His arguments here are unbalanced. He fails to note that data on hunter-gatherer violence is relevant only where they are neighbored by other hunter-gatherers, rather than by militarily superior farmers.

For the full review, see:
RICHARD WRANGHAM. “Brain Teasers.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, JULY 9, 2017): 15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JULY 5, 2017, and has the title “Insights Into the Brain, in a Book You’ll Wish You Had in College.”)

The book under review, is:
Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York: Penguin Press 2017.

The System Is “Rigged” by the “Unelected Permanent Governing Class”

(p. 10) With its broad historical scope, Eisinger’s book lacks the juicy, infuriating details of “Chain of Title,” David Dayen’s chronicle of foreclosure fraud — another instance of white-collar crime that went largely unpunished. With its emphasis on institutions and incentives, it doesn’t serve up the red meat of Matt Taibbi’s “The Divide,” a stinging indictment of the justice system’s unequal treatment of corporate executives and street-level drug offenders. But for someone familiar with the political landscape of the contemporary United States, Eisinger’s account has the ring of truth.
After decades in which Wall Street masters of the universe were lionized in the media and popular culture, star investment bankers — rich, usually white men in nice suits — just don’t match the popular image of criminals. Democrats as well as Republicans cozied up to big business, outsourcing the Treasury Department to Wall Street and the Justice Department to corporate law firms. Even after the financial system collapsed, the Obama administration’s priority was to bail out the megabanks — to “foam the runway,” in Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s words. The Justice Department became increasingly staffed by intelligent, status-seeking, conformist graduates of the nation’s top law schools — all of whom had friends on Wall Street and in the defense bar. In that environment, the easy choice was to play along, strike a deal with an impressive-sounding fine (to be absorbed by shareholders) that held no one responsible, and avoid risking an acquittal or a hung jury. (The book’s title comes from then-U.S. Attorney James Comey’s name for prosecutors who had never lost a trial.) Corruption can take many forms — not just bags of cash under the table, but a creeping rot that saps our collective motivation to pursue the cause of justice. As Upton Sinclair might have written were he alive today: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his résumé depends upon his not understanding it.
There’s just one problem. While the “unelected permanent governing class” may have been willing to look the other way when highly paid bankers wrecked the economy, many of the workers who lost their jobs and families who lost their homes were not. Outside the Beltway, the fact that the Wall Street titans who blew up the financial system suffered little more than slight reductions in their bonuses only reinforced the perception that the “system” is “rigged” — with the consequences we know only too well. Many people simply want to live in a world that is fair. As Eisinger shows, this one isn’t.

For the full review, see:
JAMES KWAK. “Getting Away With It.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, JULY 9, 2017): 10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JULY 5, 2017, and has the title “America’s Top Prosecutors Used to Go After Top Executives. What Changed?”)

The book under review, is:
Eisinger, Jesse. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

For an Autistic Boy, Siri’s Patience Is “the Gift of Common Courtesy”

(p. C6) Late in the book, as a girl in Gus’s school takes him under her affectionate wing, the reader watches it all through Newman’s trepidation, followed by the dawning recognition that her son is someone “who may never be able to be responsible for another life, but who is nevertheless capable of deep affection, caring and considering. Sure, those emotions started with machinery and electronics — trains, buses, iPods, computers — and, particularly with Siri, a loving friend who never would hurt him.”
Hence, the title – drawn directly from a New York Times article Newman wrote in 2014, about Gus’s bond with Siri, Apple’s “intelligent personal assistant,” who could endlessly answer his questions, keep her son company and express — in that flat, sweet Siri voice — the gift of common courtesy. It went viral and led to this book. Why? Because the autistic boy displayed the dream/nightmare of this era: humans bonding with machines to get what they’re not getting from flesh-and-blood interactions. In this chapter, late in the book, Newman gallops through all the continuing experiments that use technology to lift and unleash the autistic (including my own effort to build augmentative technologies).
This is fertile terrain, born of the gradual recognition that technology’s great promise may in fact be to summon, capture and display our most human qualities, both the darkness and the light, to pave avenues of deepened connection with others. Here’s where the autistic, with their search for alternatives to traditional human connection, are actually innovators.
Does it dehumanize us if tenderness is tried out first with a machine? While his hyper-aware twin is showing standard bright-future achievements, Gus tentatively feels his way through life. But make no mistake. Gus’s deft fingers — rendered with unsentimental affection by his mom — are feeling things others will miss.
At one point, Gus says, “Good night, Siri, will you sleep well tonight?” Siri replies: “I don’t need much sleep, but it’s nice of you to ask.”
Newman’s response could speak for the entire book: “Very nice.”

For the full review, see:
RON SUSKIND. “A Character Among Characters.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, Aug. 20, 2017): 13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 16, 2017, and has the title “A Family Memoir Makes the Case That Autism Is Different, Not Less.”)

The book under review, is:
Newman, Judith. To Siri with Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.

Record High Temperatures in London

(p. C6) During London’s long summer of 1858, the sweltering temperatures spawned squalor. With a population of more than 2 million, London had outgrown its medieval waste-removal systems, turning Spenser’s “sweet Thames” into an open sewer. Epidemics such as cholera and diphtheria ravaged the poor and rich alike. The stench, as we now know, was a symptom of a bacterial problem. But at the time it was believed to be, in itself, the cause of disease. The dominant medical notion of miasmas held that “noxious and morbific” contagion was carried through the air.
The heat of 1858 made the problem of London’s effluvia unignorable. At the end of May, Rosemary Ashton notes in “One Hot Summer,” the temperature was 84 degrees in the shade; there followed three months of hot days, with record highs in the 90s for the shade and well over 110 degrees in the sun.
. . .
The Great Stink, as the noisome ordeal came to be called, is a terrific subject for Ms. Ashton, the noted scholar of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes and literary London. She excels at unearthing and explaining the daily distractions of the nose-holding populace over the course of the summer: horse races, art shows, murder and divorce trials, even the breezes that, as Darwin noted, wafted thistle seeds across the English Channel from France. Ms. Ashton also convincingly uses the Great Stink as a backdrop to crisis points in the lives of three great figures of the day whose biographies rarely overlap: Darwin, Disraeli and Charles Dickens.

For the full review, see:

Alexandra Mullen. “The Stink That Sank London; As highs climbed toward 100 degrees, raw sewage roasting on the Thames created the ‘Great Stink’.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 20, 2017): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 11, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Ashton, Rosemary. One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

Socialized Medicine “Mummifies Its Doctors in Spools of Red Tape”

(p. A17) One of the reasons patients find condescension from doctors especially loathsome is that it diminishes them — if you’re gravely ill, the last thing you need is further diminishment. But the desires of patients, Marsh notes, are often paradoxical. They also pine for supreme confidence in their physicians, surgeons especially, because they’ve left their futures — the very possibility of one at all, in some cases — in their doctors’ custody. “So we quickly learn to deceive,” Marsh writes, “to pretend to a greater level of competence and knowledge than we know to be the case, and try to shield our patients a little from the frightening reality they often face.”
Over time, Marsh writes, many doctors start to internalize the stories they tell themselves about their superior judgment and skill. But the best, he adds, unlearn their self-deceptions, and come to accept their fallibility and learn from their mistakes. “We always learn more from failure than from success,” he writes. “Success teaches us nothing.”
This was a prominent theme in Marsh’s last book, and readers may have a sense of déjà vu while reading this one. Like “Do No Harm,” “Admissions” is wandering and ruminative, an overland trek through the doctor’s anxieties and private shames. Once again, he recounts his miscalculations and surgical catastrophes, citing the French doctor René Leriche’s observation that all surgeons carry cemeteries within themselves of the patients whose lives they’ve lost. Once again, he rails against the constraints of an increasingly depersonalized British health care system, which mummifies its doctors in spools of red tape. Once again, he describes his operating theater in all of its Grand Guignol splendor, with brains swelling beyond their skulls and suction devices “slurping obscenely” as tumors evade his reach.

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR. “Books of The Times; Surgical Catastrophes, Private Shames.” The New York Times (Sat., Oct. 7, 2017): A17.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 5, 2017, and has the title “Books of The Times; A Surgeon Not Afraid to Face His Mistakes, In and Out of the Operating Room.)

The book under review, is:
Marsh, Henry. Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Reinvesting Profits Enables the Scaling Up of Success

(p. A17) Muhammad Yunus has big goals: zero world poverty, zero unemployment and zero net carbon emissions.
. . .
Mr. Yunus has long been a hero of mine for his innovative faith in the resourcefulness of low-income people.
. . .
If you want to motivate support for social enterprise, a utopian promise of “A World of Three Zeros” makes for a better book title than “Helping 60 Albanian Farmers Grow Herbs.” And Mr. Yunus’s paean to entrepreneurship does indeed deliver inspiration about the power of human creativity. But problematic arguments remain, especially his imprecise criticisms of the current economic system and the implausibility of replacing the whole system with social entrepreneurship.
A major problem is one of scale. Mr. Yunus’s many social-enterprise examples are all on the same micro level as the 60 Albanian herb farmers. And while there’s nothing wrong with making a large number of small-scale efforts to help a great many people, it doesn’t qualify as a whole new system for the $76 trillion global economy. Mr. Yunus doesn’t confront the scaling problem. He could have noted, for instance, that successful social entrepreneurs, unlike successful private entrepreneurs, by definition don’t get the high profits to reinvest in scaling up successes.

For the full review, see:
William Easterly. “BOOKSHELF; How to Solve Global Poverty.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 3, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 2, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Yunus, Muhammad. A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.