David Brooks. The
Social Animal. It might be misleading to say this book got
mixed reviews, without adding that some reviewers loved it, and some really hated
it. I pulled it off the shelf at the
library because Brooks is the author, but as I started to read it, it was hard
to believe that it was the same David Brooks who writes for the New York Times. He invents two characters, Harold and Erica,
as vehicles for describing how our unconscious and conscious minds develop and
change through a lifetime. I thought
this was O.K., but I was turned off when he invented a Democratic president, so
that Erica could be on his staff. His
analysis of the stages of Harold and Erica’s development over lifetimes of more
than 70 years is all done within the values of this century, which I also
thought was O.K., because he makes no pretense that they are real people. He simply uses them as reference points to
discuss current research on how the mind works.
Early in the book, he makes a point about poverty that interested
me. Numerous studies have tried to
determine which elements of poverty cause lower IQ’s. The answer is “all of them,” because no one
has succeeded in isolating individual elements as being more significant. The basic theme of the book is the division
of labor between the unconscious and the conscious mind. He says the unconscious mind is better
equipped to solve really complex problems involving ambiguity and multiple
variables and that it is the development of the unconscious mind in humans that
is the more important factor in differentiating us from other animals. The book is a potpourri of ideas and
anecdotes, but it held my interest, and I can recommend it – with some slight
reservation. May 2013
Neil Gaiman. Anansi
Boys. Fat Charlie, who hasn’t
been fat since he was 14 but can’t escape the nickname, is a bookkeeper for a
talent agency in London headed by Graham Coats. At his father’s funeral in Florida, one of
the old neighbor ladies from his youth suggests he get in touch with his
brother. Fat Charlie didn’t know he had
a brother, and when he asks her how to get in touch with him, she says “Ask a
spider.” It’s ridiculous, but when he
gets back to London he asks a spider and the next day his brother, named
Spider, shows up. Fat Charlie’s father, Mr.
Nancy, was the spider god Anansi, and Spider has inherited some of his
powers. Spider impersonates Charlie and
gets him in trouble at work and steals his fiancee, Rosie. Fat Charlie asks the old ladies in Florida
how to make Spider go away and that opens up a whole new set of problems
involving West African myths and witchcraft carried to a Caribbean island and
then on to Florida. Meanwhile Coats,
already worried because Spider, impersonating Fat Charlie, has uncovered
certain accounting irregularities, murders one of his clients who has had the
temerity to ask where her royalties are, and departs for the island of St.
Andrew in the Caribbean, where he has stashed the millions he has embezzled
from his clients and established an alternate identity. Soon the entire cast of characters, including
the ghost of the murdered woman, shows up on the island for one reason or
another, and everything works out for everyone except Coats. Fantasy may not be your thing but give this a
try. April 2013
Erik Larson. In
the Garden of the Beasts. In
1933 FDR appointed Chicago University professor of history William Dodd as
ambassador to Germany. Dodd served until
1937, when his growing revulsion at the monstrousness of Hitler’s regime got
him into trouble with the Nazis, who declared him persona non grata; with the “Pretty Good Club,” which ran the State
Department and wanted to get along with Hitler and collect the debt from WW I;
and with the isolationists, who wanted no part in European affairs. Dodd was far from perfect and certainly was
not ahead of his time in rejecting anti-Semitism, but he was a down to earth
Jeffersonian Democrat of modest financial means, who tried his best to
represent American values and express dismay at the excesses of the Nazis, even
when he had not been instructed to do so.
After his return to the US from his assignment in January 1938, he
became a leader in efforts to alert the American public to the growing threat
in Germany and made speeches all over the US until his death in 1940. This is a fascinating story all the way
through. Of particular interest is the
description of the events of June 30, 1934, when Hitler murdered his SA
colleagues. Larson spends a lot of time
on the activities of Dodd’ daughter, Martha, and could almost have made this
into a separate biography. Martha was 24
when she got to Berlin and in the process of getting divorced from her first
husband. To say she was promiscuous would
be an understatement. Among her
conquests were Rudolph Diels, head of the Gestapo in 1933-34, and Boris
Vinogradov, First Secretary at the Soviet Embassy and an NKVD agent. Martha was initially impressed with the Nazis
and then moved toward the Soviets in her sympathies. They tried to recruit her, but it’s not clear
to me if they succeeded. She did get in
trouble with the McCarthy in the 1950s and had to live out her life in Prague,
which she came to hate. May 2013
Frank McCourt. Angela’s
Ashes. This is McCourt’s autobiography from his first
memories in Brooklyn at age 3 or 4 to his return to the US from Ireland when he
was 18. It’s a story of poverty,
ignorance, disease and child mortality, dishonesty, alcoholism, infidelity and
thought control by Jansenist trained Irish priests. When McCourt was about 7 the family moved
back to Ireland in hope of a better life.
McCourt’s father couldn’t hold a job in Brooklyn and did no better in
Ireland. He would drink up his week’s
pay Friday night and fail to show up for work on Saturday morning, which always
got him fired. The family lived on money
from the dole, when Angela, the mother, could get it before her husband drank
it up, and on donations from the St. Vincent DePauw Society. I guess McCourt thought his readers would want
to know about his obsession with masturbation, but I don’t think it added
anything except to bring out the church’s obsession with sex. His loss of virginity to a girl who died of
consumption was more interesting. McCourt
saved enough money to book passage back to the US by working at all sorts of
jobs, including writing threatening letters for a loan shark, and by stealing
whatever he could. The book was a
miserable experience, but it certainly renewed my interest in alleviating
poverty. As I read, I tried to recall
what I learned from Michael Harrington’s The
Other America, but after almost 60 years, I couldn’t come up with any
specifics. Time for a trip to the attic. April 2013
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