Category: Books

Neurosurgical Establishment Waited Decade to Adopt Jannetta’s Cure

(p. C6) Dr. Peter J. Jannetta, a neurosurgeon who as a medical resident half a century ago developed an innovative procedure to relieve an especially devastating type of facial pain, died on Monday [April 1?, 2016] in Pittsburgh.
. . .
“This was a condition that had been documented for a thousand years: There are references in the ancient literature to what was originally called ‘tic douloureux,’ ” Mark L. Shelton, the author of “Working in a Very Small Place: The Making of a Neurosurgeon,” a 1989 book about Dr. Jannetta, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “People knew of this unexplained, very intense, episodic facial pain but didn’t know the cause of it.”
. . .
In the mid-1960s, Dr. Jannetta made a striking discovery while he was a neurosurgical resident at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dissecting a set of cranial nerves for a class presentation, he noticed something amiss: a tiny blood vessel pressing on the trigeminal nerve.
“It came to him as something of a flash of insight,” Mr. Shelton said. “He saw this blood vessel literally impinging on the nerve so that there was actually a groove in the nerve where the vessel pressed.”
What if, Dr. Jannetta wondered, this were the source of the nerve damage? Though his insight is universally accepted today, it was novel to the point of subversion in the 1960s.
“The idea that a very small blood vessel, the diameter of a mechanical pencil lead, could cause such outsize pain didn’t resonate with people at the time,” Mr. Shelton said.
. . .
If the vessel was a vein, it could simply be cauterized and excised. If it was an artery, however — a more essential structure — it would, Dr. Jannetta realized, have to be gently nudged out of the way.
He created a means of doing so that involved slipping a tiny pad of soft Teflon, about the size of a pencil eraser, between the artery and the nerve.
Dr. Jannetta performed the first microvascular decompression operation in 1966. The patient, a 41-year-old man, was relieved of his pain.
It took about a decade for the procedure to win acceptance from the neurosurgical establishment, owing partly to Dr. Jannetta’s youth and partly to the novelty of his idea.
“He convinced many, many skeptics — and there were a lot of skeptics in the early years — because it seemed so counterintuitive as to what caused neurological disease,” Mr. Shelton said.
. . .
His many laurels include the medal of honor from the World Federation of Neurological Societies; the Olivecrona Award, presented by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden; and the Horatio Alger Award, which honors perseverance in the face of adversity or opposition.

For the full obituary, see:
MARGALIT FOX. “Dr. Peter J. Jannetta, Neurosurgeon and Pioneer on Facial Pain, Dies at 84.” The New York Times (Fri., APRIL 15, 2016): A22.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date APRIL 14, 2016, and has the title “Dr. Peter J. Jannetta, Pioneering Neurosurgeon on Facial Pain, Dies at 84.”)

The book about Jannetta, mentioned above, is:
Shelton, Mark. Working in a Very Small Place: The Making of a Neurosurgeon. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Scientific Knowledge Matters More than Myth Because of Its Practical Effectiveness

(p. C6) Stories matter; knowledge matters more.
“When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space,” . . . [Carlo Rovelli] writes, “what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years.” You might tell a great campfire story about an antelope, he comments. Knowing how to track and kill one is more relevant to survival.
“Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth,” Mr. Rovelli says. “But the value of knowledge remains. If we can find the antelope, we can eat.”

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Books of The Times; A Vast Cosmos, Made Bite-Size and Delectable.” The New York Times (Weds., MARCH 23, 2016): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MARCH 22, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’ Is Long on Knowledge.”)

The book under review, is:
Rovelli, Carlo. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016.

Government: “One Vast Honey Pot with Thousands of Ants Lined Up Around the Rim”

(p. A21) Ms. Tolchin hit on the subject of patronage when Mr. Tolchin, then a reporter in the metropolitan news department of The New York Times, wrote a series of articles on the topic that several publishers urged him to turn into a book. Daunted, he turned to his wife for help.
“The political-science literature had an enormous hole on the subject,” she told The Washingtonian in 2011. “It’s such a critical part of the political process — it was wonderful virgin territory.”
Their combined efforts — he provided the reporting, she provided the scholarship — resulted in “To the Victor…: Political Patronage From the Clubhouse to the White House,” published in 1971.
In lively fashion, the book surveyed the history and examined the mechanisms of a system the authors described as “one of the occupational hazards of democracy.” They traced its influence, for good and ill, in city halls, statehouses, courthouses and, onward and upward, Congress and the White House.
The picture it painted was often bleak, presenting government at all levels as “one vast honey pot with thousands of ants lined up around the rim to get at the sweetener inside,” according to a review in The Times.
It was a rich subject to which the authors returned in “Pinstripe Patronage: Political Favoritism From the Clubhouse to the White House … and Beyond,” published in 2011. Patronage is “the major reason people go into politics,” Ms. Tolchin told The Washingtonian.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “Susan Tolchin, Scholar and Author, Is Dead at 75.” The New York Times (Fri., May 20, 2016): A21.
(Note: ellipses in original.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 19, 2016, and has the title “Susan Tolchin, Political Scientist Who Foresaw Voter Anger, Dies at 75.”)

The two books on government patronage that are mentioned above, are:
Tolchin, Martin, and Susan Tolchin. To the Victor: Political Patronage from the Clubhouse to the White House. New York: Random House, 1971.
Tolchin, Martin, and Susan Tolchin. Pinstripe Patronage: Political Favoritism from the Clubhouse to the White House and Beyond. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011.

“Liberated People Are Ingenious”

(p. C1) Nothing like the Great Enrichment of the past two centuries had ever happened before. Doublings of income–mere 100% betterments in the human condition–had happened often, during the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, in Song China and Mughal India. But people soon fell back to the miserable routine of Afghanistan’s income nowadays, $3 or worse. A revolutionary betterment of 10,000%, taking into account everything from canned goods to antidepressants, was out of the question. Until it happened.
. . .
(p. C2) Why did it all start at first in Holland about 1600 and then England about 1700 and then the North American colonies and England’s impoverished neighbor, Scotland, and then Belgium and northern France and the Rhineland?
The answer, in a word, is “liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs, subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are not. By certain accidents of European politics, having nothing to do with deep European virtue, more and more Europeans were liberated. From Luther’s reformation through the Dutch revolt against Spain after 1568 and England’s turmoil in the Civil War of the 1640s, down to the American and French revolutions, Europeans came to believe that common people should be liberated to have a go. You might call it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
To use another big concept, what came–slowly, imperfectly–was equality. It was not an equality of outcome, which might be labeled “French” in honor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Piketty. It was, so to speak, “Scottish,” in honor of David Hume and Adam Smith: equality before the law and equality of social dignity. It made people bold to pursue betterments on their own account. It was, as Smith put it, “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.”

For the full commentary, see:

DEIRDRE N. MCCLOSKEY. “How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich; The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 21, 2016): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 20, 2016.)

McCloskey’s commentary is based on her “bourgeois” trilogy, the final volume of which is:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Black Conservative Disinvited to Speak at Virginia Tech

Jason Riley, who is quoted below, has published Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.

(p. A13) Last month I was invited by a professor to speak at Virginia Tech in the fall. Last week, the same professor reluctantly rescinded the invitation, citing concerns from his department head and other faculty members that my writings on race in The Wall Street Journal would spark protests. Profiles in campus courage.
. . .
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been approached by conservative students after a lecture to a mostly liberal audience and thanked, almost surreptitiously, for coming to speak. They often offer an explanation for their relative silence during question periods when liberal students and faculty are firing away. “Being too outspoken would just make it more difficult,” a Wellesley student once told me. “You get to leave when you’re done. We have to live with these people until we graduate.”
In April [2016], I spoke at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the college Republicans who invited me took the precaution of clearing my name with liberal student groups “to make sure they wouldn’t be upset.”
We’ve reached a point where conservatives must have their campus speakers preapproved by left-wing pressure groups. If progressives aren’t already in absolute control of academia, they’re pretty close.

For the full commentary, see:

JASON L. RILEY. “I Was Disinvited on Campus; The anti-free speech takeover is so complete that now the fear of stirring a protest can determine what ideas students will hear.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 4, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 3, 2016.)

The Riley book that I mentioned at the top, is:
Riley, Jason L. Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. New York: Encounter Books, 2014.

Which Moment of Flux Do the Environmentalists Want to Preserve?

At the APEE meetings in early April, I heard a lecture by Shawn Regan in which he praised a book by Daniel Botkin. The point that Regan was making was that a key difficult issue in environmentalism is to decide, when you want to preserve and protect the environment, which moment of the environment’s constantly changing flux, do you want to preserve? With, or without, us, the natural state of the environment is constant change, not stasis.

A recent book by Botkin that makes this point, is:
Botkin, Daniel B. The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

“Progressive” Eugenicists Attacked Free Enterprise

At the APEE meetings in early April, I heard a lecture by Jayme Lemke in which she praised a promising-sounding book by Thomas Leonard. I looked the book up on Amazon and found that it describes how many of the “progressives” who advocated increasing government control of the economy, were also among the advocates of the now-discredited eugenics movement.
The book is now on my “to-read” list and I will report more when it hits the top of the list (say, in about 2020 ;).

The book praised by Jayme, is:
Leonard, Thomas C. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Forrest McDonald Defended Founders and Entrepreneurs

Forrest McDonald wrote one of the first detailed accounts of the life of Samuel Insull, an entrepreneur who helped to develop electric utility systems in the United States, and who was persecuted by the FDR administration.

(p. 20) Forrest McDonald, a presidential and constitutional scholar who challenged liberal shibboleths about early American history and lionized the founding fathers as uniquely intellectual, died on Tuesday [January 19, 2016] in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
. . .
As a Pulitzer Prize finalist in history and a professor at the University of Alabama, Dr. McDonald declared himself an ideological conservative and an opponent of intrusive government. (“I’d move the winter capital to North Dakota and outlaw air-conditioning in the District of Columbia,” he once said.) But he refused to be pigeonholed either as a libertarian or, despite his Southern agrarian roots, as a Jeffersonian.
. . .
In “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution” (1985), which was one of three finalists for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in history, he pronounced the founding fathers as singularly qualified to draft the framework of federalism. He reiterated that point when he delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture in Washington in 1987.
“To put it bluntly,” Dr. McDonald said then, “it would be impossible in America today to assemble a group of people with anything near the combined experience, learning and wisdom that the 55 authors of the Constitution took with them to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.”
. . .
Dr. McDonald wrote more than a dozen books, including biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-Span’s “Booknotes” in 1994, Dr. McDonald revealed that he typically wrote in longhand on a yellow legal pad and in the nude. (“We’ve got wonderful isolation,” he said, “and it’s warm most of the year in Alabama, and why wear clothes?”)

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Forrest McDonald, 89, Critic of Liberal Views of History.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., Jan. 24, 2016): 20.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 22, 2016, and has the title “Forrest McDonald, Historian Who Punctured Liberal Notions, Dies at 89.”)

The McDonald book mentioned by me way above, is:
McDonald, Forrest. Insull. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Former Goldman Sachs Banker Predicts “Green Bubble”

(p. R5) Sustainable investing and clean energy are hot topics, but one Danish financier is warning that people might be getting carried away.
Per Wimmer, a former Goldman Sachs banker and the founder of Wimmer Financial LLP, a London-based corporate-advisory firm specializing in natural resources, foresees a “green bubble” that could have similar consequences to the dot-com and housing bubbles.
. . .
WSJ: What are the main issues behind the so-called bubble you see forming in green energy?
MR. WIMMER: Very simply put, for green energy to be truly sustainable, it must be commercially sustainable. The reality today is that when it comes to politicians allocating subsidies, it seems like they are being allocated almost religiously across the board. As long as there is a green element, then [politicians believe] it is fine and deserves funding from tax dollars. I argue that is a little unsophisticated.
We have got to look at supporting and subsidizing the technologies that stand a chance at becoming commercially independent from subsidies within a reasonable time period–about seven to 10 years.
. . .
WSJ: In your book “The Green Bubble,” you highlight infrastructure problems involved in large-scale green-energy projects in the U.S. Tell us about those.
MR. WIMMER: There are a number of challenges that green energy faces, and one [involves] infrastructure, meaning that if you were to target, say, 20% green energy including wind farms in the U.S., you would have to build an awful lot of transmission grid, which is quite expensive.
Somebody is going to have to pay for it–the taxpayer, perhaps?

For the full interview, see:
TANZEEL AKHTAR. “Renewable Energy Is a ‘Bubble,’ Says Financier.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Jan. 11, 2016): R5.
(Note: bold and italics, in original; ellipses, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 12 [sic], 2016,)

The book mentioned in the interview, is:
Wimmer, Per. The Green Bubble: Our Future Energy Needs and Why Alternative Energy Is Not the Answer. London, UK: Lid Publishing, 2015.

Welfare System Hurts Those It Is Intended to Help

I saw part of a C-SPAN 2 presentation, originally broadcast on 3/28/16, of a new book by Harvey and Conyers that appears to argue persuasively that the current American welfare system makes it harder for welfare recipients to transition to employment. It further argues that work is an important part of the good life, usually an important contributor to happiness. As a result, the current welfare system hurts the very people that it is intended to help.

The book discussed above, is:
Harvey, Phil, and Lisa Conyers. The Human Cost of Welfare: How the System Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016.

College Students Have Been Raised to Be Fragile

In the passage quoted below, John Leo interviews John Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU.

(p. A9) Haidt: . . . Children since the 1980s have been raised very differently–protected as fragile. The key psychological idea, which should be mentioned in everything written about this, is Nassim Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility.

Leo: What’s the theory?
Haidt: That children are anti-fragile. Bone is anti-fragile. If you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break. Bone actually needs to get banged around to toughen up. And so do children. I’m not saying they need to be spanked or beaten, but they need to have a lot of unsupervised time, to get in over their heads and get themselves out. And that greatly decreased in the 1980s. Anxiety, fragility and psychological weakness have skyrocketed in the last 15-20 years. So, I think millennials come to college with much thinner skins. And therefore, until that changes, I think we’re going to keep seeing these demands to never hear anything offensive.

Source of the Haidt interview passage quote:
“Notable & Quotable: ‘Anti-Fragility in Children.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Feb. 23, 2016): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the quotes from the interview with Haidt has the date Feb. 22, 2016, and has the title “Notable & Quotable: Our Weak, Fragile Millennials.”)

For John Leo’s full interview with Jonathan Haidt, see:
http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/02/a-conversation-with-jonathan-haidt/

The Taleb book referred to, is:
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House, 2012.