Daniel
Coleman. Focus. © 2013
This is a book about how the brain works. I enjoyed it, but most of the information
about the brain was already familiar and most of my notes seem to be anecdotal
like the author’s example of social dyslexia:
When Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip are met at the airport by the
president of Nigeria in his flowing robes, Phillip says “You look like you’re
ready for bed.” I don’t think I learned
a lot. Several times previously I have
read about the experiment where kids are left alone with a marsh mellow and promised
a second marsh mellow if they can wait ten minutes before they eat the first
one. I guess I learned that a reader’s
mind wanders 20% to 40% of the time and that the 10,000 hours it takes to
become a professional athlete means 10,000 hours of continual adjustment under
the supervision of a seasoned coach. We
evolved to be wary of the immediate threat of tigers, and we still instinctively
avoid them, but we are less and less aware of the natural environment around us
and unfocused on the long term dangers of the degradation of that environment. His most interesting topic is SEL training
for little kids. SEL stands for social and
emotional learning. He recounts an experiment at PS 112 in NYC in
which a class of at risk kids were given a break each day during which they lay
down with a stuffed animal and listened to a tape that guided them through some
breathing exercises. This class was
perfectly behaved and better equipped for learning except on the rare days when
they had to skip the break. Then many of
them acted out. The book is a good
companion piece for Scarcity by Sendhil
Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir, which is discussed below. April 2015
E.L.
Doctorow. Andrew’s Brain. © 2014 I didn’t like this and quit after the first
of 4 disks. Doctorow chose to read this
himself and that may be part of the problem.
Charles
McCarry. The Shanghai Factor. © 2013
The narrator, an unnamed American officer who was wounded in Afghanistan,
joins the CIA as an undercover agent and is sent to Shanghai to perfect his
Mandarin. A girl named Mei crashes her
bike into his. He assumes she is an
agent of Guoanbu, the Chinese intelligence
agency, but figures it doesn’t matter and lives with her for 2 years while she
teaches him Mandarin. Then she
disappears. He’s offered a job in a
Chinese company with international operations.
He works there for about a year and has an affair with a coworker and
then is suddenly fired. When he returns
to Langley, he is assigned to counter intelligence. McCarry spent 10 years as a CIA undercover
agent, and he uses his knowledge of tradecraft to spin out an incredible plot
which has elements of the Dreyfus conspiracy.
One reviewer calls his earlier book, Tears
of Autumn, the best spy novel ever.
I haven’t read it but I will.
It’s hard to see how it could be better than this one. As the narrator goes along, he has some
amusing asides: “I wonder if Mr. (Woody)
Allen knows how much better his movies are since he stopped casting himself,”
and “the only northerner who ever crossed the Potomac into Virginia without
getting lost was Ulysses S. Grant.” The
reader of this recorded book is fine except he has the narrator at the Met
looking at a Tichen instead of a Titian.
March 2015
David
McCullough. The Great Journey, Americans in
Paris. © 2011
Somehow I never got around to writing up my notes on this book, one of
the best things I’ve read recently. Here’s
a quote from the NYT review and the link to the whole review: “David McCullough has stressed France’s pre-eminent role in
American history for years. We would not, he has argued, have a country without
the French, who have permanently and profoundly shaped us. ……With ‘The Greater
Journey: Americans in Paris,’” he explores the intellectual legacy that France
settled on its 19th-century visitors. The result is an epic of ideas, as well
as an exhilarating book of spells.”
.
I had not
realized that so many 19th C Americans had lived and studied in
Paris and used the experience not only to develop their own talents but also to
validate them. The main subjects were medicine
and the arts. They found it a most
hospitable place and culturally and intellectually stimulating. “Even the children speak French.” James Fenimore Cooper spent many years there
writing novels about North America. Balzac
wrote that in Cooper’s hands the art of
the pen has never come closer to the art of the brush, a painter in prose. Cooper developed a close friendship with
Samuel F. B. Morse and went to the Louvre every afternoon to talk with him as
he painted “The Gallery of the Louvre,” (1831-1833). Soon afterwards Morse returned to America
with the idea of the telegraph in his head after observing the French visual
system. Later in Paris Morse met Daguerre and brought
his method of photography back to the US.
The American painter, James Healy, who had studied with Antoine-Jean Gros,
established such a reputation as a portraitist that he was asked to paint the
King of France. Among the many Americans
who came to study or just to visit were George Catlin, Richard Rush, Elizabeth Blackwell
--- the first American woman doctor, William Welles Brown --- the first black American
novelist, Mary Cassatt, Harriet Beecher
Stowe --- who spend a full hour in front of Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” Nathaniel Hawthorne --- who visited in 1857
after his tour as Consul in Liverpool and found the paintings rather tiresome, John
Singer Sargent, and Charles Sumner --- recovering from the attack by Preston Brooks
after delivering a 102 page speech attacking slavery. Acording to McCullough, about the only well known
New Englander who didn’t visit was Henry Thoreau. McCullough spends a lot of time with Augustus
Saint Gaudens , the sculptor who used the skills of the artisans of Paris to complete
may of his American commissions. He made
his name with his “Farragut” for Madison Square and later did a notable equestrian
statue of Sherman, the Shaw Memorial in Boston and the National Gallery and the
enigmatic Adams memorial in the Rock Creek cemetery. December 2014
.
Sendhil
Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir. Scarcity. © 2013
“If ants are such hard workers, how come they go to all the picnics?” How does scarcity affect us? How does it Change how we feel? Change how we
think? Change what we notice? Change how we decide? Yesterday I read a short article in the Washington Post, “To Live Well 40 Winks
Isn’t Enough.” It seems studies show
that poor people get less sleep than people who are better off financially,
perhaps because they are working multiple jobs to make ends meet. I was just finishing Scarcity, which speaks to exactly this point. I wish the book could be reduced to a half
page of talking points and then read by every politician in America, because it
has insights into poverty that I had never seen before, not in Michael
Harrington’s The Other America, not
in the works of Ammon Hennacy published by the Catholic Worker, and not in
anything Daniel Patrick Moynihan was writing when I was a lowly intern watching
him in action at the Labor Department.
The jacket blurb on the recorded version says “In the blockbuster
tradition of Freakanomics, a Harvard
economist and a Princeton psychology professor team up to offer a surprising
and empowering new way to look at everyday life, presenting a
paradigm-challenging examination of how scarcity, and our flawed responses to
it shapes our lives, our society and our culture.” In his review in the Guardian, Tim Parks notes that many of the ideas in the book have
been around for a long time, and mentions the work of Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky. The problem has long been that economists
expect rational behavior, but psychologists find we all have an almost comical
inability to understand risk and reward and do what is best for us. This time an economist and a
psychologist working together have been able to pull these ideas together. While it’s true that this book has something
for everyone, what is really important here is its explanation of why the poor
stay poor and why they make what seems to us like bad decisions over and over
again. The answer is scarcity. There is no slack or latitude in their
lives. Every day is a struggle to make
ends meet and put food on the table, to get the kids to daycare, to get to work
on time, to get the car fixed, to pay the doctor and the electric bill. If anything goes awry, it’s a disaster. It’s stress like most of us never experience. Tim Adams review in the Guardian summarizes
it better than I can:
“The
cost is an undue focus on the necessity at hand, which leads to a lack of
curiosity about wider issues, and an inability to imagine longer-term
consequences. The effect of this scarcity-generated "loss of
bandwidth" has catastrophic results in particular in relation to money.
While the poor have a much sharper idea of value and cost, an obsessive
concentration on where the next dollar is coming from leads not only to poor
judgment, a lessened ability to make rational choices or see a bigger picture,
but also to a diminishing of intelligence (even "feeling poor" lowers
IQ by the same amount as a night without sleep), as well as a lowering of
resistance to self-destructive temptation.
“This
"scarcity trap" provides an explanation for unpalatable truths, the
authors argue. It shows why the "poor are more likely to be obese… Less
likely to send their children to school… [why] the poorest in a village are the
ones least likely to wash their hands or treat their water before drinking
it." And the explanation is this: "the poor are not just short of
cash. They are short on bandwidth." When an individual – any individual –
is primed to think about his money troubles, his ability to perform tests and
tasks is measurably reduced. Reminded that they are poor, individuals
"showed less flexible intelligence, less executive control. With scarcity
on his mind, he simply had less mind for everything else."
What any
reasonable person would take away from this book is that we need to rethink our
whole approach to poverty. The first
thing would be to stop blaming the people who are poor. Read this book. April 2015
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