Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Hardcover, 339 pgs, Pub Sept 18th 2018 by Knopf Publishing Group (first pub August 2nd 2018), ISBN13: 9780525521426, Lit Awards: Man Booker Prize Nominee (2018), Scotiabank Giller Prize (2018), Governor General's Literary Awards / Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général Nominee for Fiction (2018), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2019)

I finished Edugyan's third novel in a fog, reading the last hundred pages completely engrossed in the strange unreal world and story Edugyan had created, about a former slave, physically damaged from years in captivity but involved in the science of creating an indoor aquarium in London—something never done before.

If at first—and I have seen such criticism—the story seemed derivative of Jules Verne with wondrous and far-flung adventures, Edugyan pulled it off. There were wondrous adventures when naturalists and people of science began to turn their attention outside their own environments to the larger world. Anything they could conceive of was about to be tried…travel to the Arctic, say, or to the bottom of the ocean, or ballooning long distances. The story is an absolute feast of imagination.

Race is an important component of the story in that we have an abolitionist white scientist who chooses a young slave boy to be ballast for his balloon adventure. When the white master discovers his black ballast has exceptional drawing skills, the boy’s role changes. Though the two become close, there is always a power differential in their relationship that keeps the friendship from meaning as much to the white man as it does to the black man.

Edugyan sketches this kind of unconscious racism so clearly, and points to it, that one can hardly walk away from the book with one’s vision unchanged. We can put words to a feeling of distance or alienation we may have seen or felt before but weren’t able to express.

It turns out the history of the world’s first public aquarium is much as is described in this novel, though I was unable to discover whether a very young black man was the first to come up with the idea and design of the tanks for public display of sea creatures in the mid-nineteenth century. It seems perfectly likely, as does the fact that such a man would never be acknowledged, his history expunged as a matter of course.

Edugyan is Canadian, which is not obvious. She sets a portion of the novel in Newfoundland, but otherwise the characters travel far and wide on nearly every continent. She adds an intriguing love interest for George Washington Black, the main character and former slave from Barbados. We presume Black is originally from Dahoumey in west Africa because that place name is buried deep in his subconscious and is resurrected when his life is in danger.

Black’s love interest is a mixed-race island woman of great beauty and intelligence and a rounded sense of her own potential. Her father, also a scientist, did not encourage her to develop her physical charms. One day he allowed her to purchase a few small concessions to beauty that she craved: red lipstick, a diaphanous dress, an emerald clasp. She discovered that people noticed her more but saw her less. This lesson all women must learn and decide whether to exploit or not.

The start of the novel was not particularly convincing and had the feel of a young adult novel, but it began as it meant to go on, and by midway I was involved, suspending belief, rapt, curious. There was something about the way the role of the one-time slave was progressing that held some hope that his potential would be developed. And the history of race is not yet finished being told, since we write it every day.

It's a wonderful novel. Edugyan has written two other critically-acclaimed novels and at least two collections of stories. She has taught creative writing and has won several international awards for her work.





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Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate by Jennifer A. Mather, Roland C. Anderson, James B. Wood

Hardcover, 208 pgs, Pub May 21st 2010 by Timber Press, ISBN13: 9781604690675

This detailed and useful book was published in the U.S. in 2010 by Timber Press and authored by three long-time North American experts on cephalopods. James Wood maintains his own website, called The Cephalopod Page. This collection includes 38 color plates, and the discussion is for the non-specialist. It includes recent developments in the field and offers information in a way that is inviting.

No one knows how many octopus species exist, but it is estimated there are 100 members of the genus Octopus. Octopuses (not octopussies, everyone) are found at every depth in the ocean and while some are very large (up to 80 lb), most can be measure in millimeters at hatching. And yes, octopuses lay eggs.

Many variations in observed habits are discussed here, but the important thing is that octopuses don’t generally have a long lifespan—usually around two years, though the range is six months to four years, depending on the species. Sexual activity takes place towards the end of the lifespan, the mother often dying shortly after the eggs have successfully hatched. During gestation the mother typically doesn’t eat, neither attracted to food nor interested to attract possible predators to the cave in which she is holed up with a bunch of developing eggs. Her last days are spent spurting oxygenated water over the eggs attached to the walls of caves.

Much of what we know about the octopus is that they are great escape artists: they squeeze into tight spots, change color, and will lose an arm to evade capture. They can also put on a dazzling camouflage called ‘Passing Cloud,’ which is designed to confuse potential prey, not predators. This display makes nearby prey think something large is passing over their environment casting a moving shadow. It is thought the intent is to startle a motionless prey into revealing their location so they can be captured by the octopus with spread arms and web.

One of the things I like best about this book is that the information is delivered painlessly and in a conversational tone. The authors freely seed the work with ravishing stories, like the one about finding ‘a cuttlefish singles bar’ on a small rocky reef in South Australia in 2002—a huge aggregation of giant cuttlefish (41,000 estimated, about one per square yard) ready to reproduce, four males for each female, all trying for courtship, changing skin displays & waiting for a guarding male to get distracted. It’s just hard to wrap one’s mind around. This is determined, thinking behavior. Isn’t it?

Anyway, this book reminds me of the kind of book many of us read as pre-adolescents, obsessed with dinosaurs or airplanes or something, and reading whatever we could find on the subject until… until we were teased out of our expertise or the lure of the opposite sex scrambled our brains. Even a child could enjoy reading this book.

The authors have side comments on argonauts (yes, the ones the Greek playwrights mentioned), cuttlefish, squid and specific individual octopuses that made a difference in the lives of countless scientists. This is a terrific gift for the not-yet-specialist.



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Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky

Hardcover, 400 pgs, Pub May 8th 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN13: 9781632863829

Kurlansky is justly famous for his earlier works about Salt and Cod, among other things, so when I saw this 2018 Bloomsbury Publishing nonfiction about Milk, I was interested. I was particularly interested to see what he would say about humans consuming milk after infancy, when approximately sixty percent of the world's human population appear to lose their tolerance for and ability to digest lactose. Europeans, Middle Easterners, North Africans and some of the Indian subcontinent appear to lack a gene which shuts off production of lactase--an intestinally-controlled enzyme which digests lactose present in all milk.

In 2006 Cornell University's T. Colin Campbell published his thirty-year study on the eating habits of Chinese people called The China Study. The findings of Campbell's study blew me away, one of which was that consumption of milk products can cause osteoporosis in adults, a finding exactly opposite to what we have been told here in America. Kurlansky does not mention this startling information, sadly. But that study made me look closely at where the promotion of milk products was coming from—the industry itself, and lobbyists targeting government scientists, commercial attachés, and spokespeople.

Kurlanksy does remark on lactose intolerance briefly at the beginning and again in the section on China. He indicates that while there is a growing tolerance for dairy products gradually in China among the wealthier and more worldly citizens, it fights with the notion that the Chinese are genetically lactose intolerant. It may be that livestock was discouraged in a country which needed all possible land for food production, and that reintroducing dairy stimulates the production of lactase.

Kurlansky mostly elucidates the uses of milk in the part of the world that uses it daily, giving recipes that have survived the ages, showing some changes in those recipes over time. And certainly coincidentally but with a weird synchronicity he discusses breast-feeding throughout the world and throughout history. Breastfeeding has come and gone in popularity, with scientists in the past forty years generally concluding that until clean water and sterile bottles and low pricing for formula could be achieved throughout the world, perhaps breast milk was superior to any industrial formula.

It is now de rigueur to pump breast milk, offering convenience and nutrition. Pumping breast milk induces lactating mothers to produce more than they need, which has led to an oversupply. Some entrepreneurs have endeavored to sell soap made with breast milk; those selling breast milk ice cream in London found they couldn’t keep up with demand. Some sell breast milk on the internet to athletes who believe it makes them stronger. Some people buy it when they are ill, believing it has medicinal qualities. Some testing internet purchases found 10% of the time cow’s milk was mixed in, while 75% was contaminated with bacteria and/or pathogens.

It turns out that yogurt made from yak milk makes that made from cow’s milk seem boring and tasteless due to the high percentage of fat in yak’s milk. Consumption of milk in the United States has declined almost 40% since the 1970s, and now large scale industrial farming is the key to survival of the industry. At the end, Kurlansky takes another quick trip around the world to look at how dairy farms manage and what problems they are encountering now, including some of the profit calculations small producers are making.

Kurlanky is a wonderful writer of nonfiction who manages to take on big subjects and make them intelligible to the non-specialist. If you are looking for specific information, this book may simply be too diffuse, but Kurlansky is a wonderful host for a general reader.



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Dawn of the New Everything by Jaron Lanier

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub Nov 28th 2017 by Henry Holt and Co., ISBN13: 9781627794091

The ideas in this book are so refreshing, thrilling, amusing, enlightening, and sad that they had me eagerly looking forward to another session with it whenever I got a chance. I found myself fearing what was to come as I read the final chapters. If I say I wish it had turned out differently, it wouldn’t make much difference. I am just so relieved & reassured that such people exist. We share a sensibility. I suppose such people forever be shunted aside by more talky types, louder but not more capable. Anyway, this kind of talent shares a bounty that accrues to all of us.

Everyone knows Lanier was exceptional for his ideas about Virtual Reality. He created, with others, an industry through the force of his imagination. What many may not recognize was that amid the multiple dimensions that made his work so special was his insistence on keeping the humanity—the imperfection, the uncertainty…the godliness, if you will—central in any technological project. It turns out that slightly less capable people could grasp the technology but not the humanity in his work, the humanity being the harder part by orders of magnitude.

It was amusing, hearing such a bright light discuss ‘the scene’ that surrounded his spectacular ideas and work in the 1980s and ‘90s, the people who contributed, the people who brought their wonder and their needs. He gives readers some concept of what VR is, how complicated it is, what it may accomplish, but he never loses sight of the beauty and amazing reality we can enjoy each and every day that is only enhanced by VR. Much will be accomplished by VR in years to come, he is sure, but whether those benefits accrue to all society or merely to a select few may be an open question.

While ethnic diversity is greater now in Silicon Valley than it was when Lanier went there in the 1980s, Lanier fears it has less cognitive diversity. And while the Valley has retained some of its lefty-progressive origins, many younger techies have swung libertarian. Lanier thinks the internet had some of those left-right choices early on its development, when he and John Perry Barlow had a parting of ways about how cyberspace should be organized. It is with some regret that we look back at those earlier arguments and admit that though Barlow “won,” Lanier may have been right.

Lanier was always on the side of a kind of limited freedom, i.e., the freedom to link to and acknowledge where one’s ideas originated and who we pass them to; the freedom not to be anonymous; or dispensing with the notion that ideas and work are “free” to anyone wishing to access it. he acknowledges that there were, even then, “a mythical dimension of masculine success…that [contains] a faint echo of military culture…” Lanier tells us of “a few young technical people, all male, who have done harm to themselves stressing about” the number of alien civilizations and the possibility of a virtual world containing within it other virtual worlds. He suggests the antidote to this kind of circular thinking is to engage in and feel the “luscious texture of actual, real reality.”

In one of his later chapters, Lanier shares Advice for VR Designers and Artists, a list containing the wisdom of years of experimenting and learning. His last point is to remind everyone not to necessarily agree with him or anyone else. “Think for yourself.” This lesson is one which requires many more steps preceding it, so that we know how to do this, and why it is so critical to trust one’s own judgment. There is room for abuse in a virtual system. “The more intense a communication technology is, the more intensely it can be used to lie.”

But what sticks with me about the virtual experience that Lanier describes is how integral the human is to it. It is the interaction with the virtual that is so exciting, not our watching of it. Our senses all come into play, not just and not necessarily ideally, our eyes. When asked if VR ought to be accomplished instead by direct brain stimulation, bypassing the senses, Lanier’s answer illuminates the nature of VR:

“Remember, the eyes aren’t USB cameras plugged into a Mr. Potato Head brain; they are portals on a spy submarine exploring an unknown universe. Exploration is perception.”

If that quote doesn’t compute by reading it in the middle of a review, pick up the book. By the time he comes to it, it may just be the light you needed to see further into the meaning of technology.

Lanier is not technical in this book. He knows he would lose most of us quickly. He talks instead about his own upbringing: you do not want to miss his personal history growing up in New Mexico and his infamous Dodge Dart. He talks also about going east (MIT, Columbia) and returning west (USC, Stanford), finding people to work with and inspiring others. He shares plenty of great stories and personal observations about some well-known figures in technology and music, and he divulges the devastating story of his first marriage and subsequent divorce. He talks about limerence, and how the horrible marriage might have been worth it simply because he understood something new about the world that otherwise he may not have known.

All I know is that this was a truly generous and spectacular sharing of the early days of VR. It was endlessly engaging, informative, and full of worldly wisdom from someone who has just about seen it all. I am so grateful. This was easily the most intellectually exciting and enjoyable read I've read this year, a perfect summer read.

Here is a link to a conversation with Jaron Lanier conducted by Ezra Klein for his podcast The Ezra Klein Show, available on iTunes or Stitcher.

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Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opioid Epidemic by Sam Quinones

Hardcover, 384 pgs, Pub Apr 21st 2015 by Bloomsbury Press (first published April 15th 2015), ISBN13: 9781620402504, Lit Awards: PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Nominee for Shortlist (2017), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Current Interest (2015), National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (2015)

The spectacular public service reporting Sam Quinones does in this nonfiction is so detailed and many-faceted that it left me feeling a little voyeuristic, not having been visited by the scourge of opioid addiction myself. Good lord, I kept thinking, so this is what we are dealing with. I knew something was different, I just didn’t have any conception of the size, scope, method, and means of this problem.

Quinones starts his story in the early 1980s when the first ranchero Xalisco marketers came up from Mexico with an innovative method for just-in-time drive-by selling of drugs to rich white kids in the suburbs. They explicitly avoided cities and black people because they admitted they were afraid of them, their violence and their gang activity. Besides, the thinking went, blacks never had any money. They’d just as soon steal from a dealer as pay him. The white kids had money and wanted convenience above all.

At almost the same time, and a cultural habitat away from small-time drug dealers of black tar heroin from Mexico, a drug company owned by the Sackler medical empire released an opiate derivative in pill form meant to alleviate pain. Early on, it is possible that creators, marketers, and prescribers of this plague did not know what they had unleashed. But within a couple of years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that great numbers of people within and without the company sold the product in full knowledge of its wicked potency and addictive properties.

Quinones has been researching and reporting on this topic for a couple of decades, and lived in Mexico for ten years, observing the supply-side. Before having a comprehensive understanding of the subject, Quinones thought the heroin problem began with U.S. demand for drugs. After researching the situation in the heartland United States, he has decided that our problem now with heroin and fentanyl overdoses was paradoxically caused by a huge supply of opioid pills, prescribed by doctors in legal clinics, and condoned at every level of society and government in our country.

The story Quinones shares is un-put-down-able and truly remarkable, particularly his discussion of the marketing techniques for black tar heroin used by the small farmer-seller systems first set up by residents of Xalisco. Their method of growing-packaging-selling expansion into the heartland of America should make us sit up and pay attention. Ground zero for the meltdown of middle America is identified by Quinones as Portsmouth, Ohio, a middle class town at the center of a web of major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh. The first known vector of the opioid infection was an unscrupulous doctor who overprescribed pills, knowing they were addicting his patients. Aided by ordinary well-meaning doctors who listened to marketing spiels by the drug makers, and who believed the pills to be non-addictive, the infection spread rapidly. Quinones tells the tale as it unfolded, involving Medicaid scams and cross-state purchases and sales.

What Quinones tells us gives us lessons for many other supply-side problems (marijuana? guns?) we may face in our society, now or in the future. When asked in an interview why restrictions on Class A prescription pills or opiates of any sort would produce the better outcomes, Quinones points out that when prohibited liquor was once again allowed to be sold openly, it was classified as to strength and sold differently. He warns that we are rushing to sales of marijuana with potency levels unknown fifty years ago and may wish we’d instituted some restrictions or controls before it becomes socially acceptable.

This nonfiction is dispassionate enough to allow us time to adjust our thinking around the problem of young people—entire families, really—losing their place in a productive society, with almost no way out. Now, with the recognition of the problem being forced upon our politicians, teachers, medical personnel, and law-enforcement officers, some changes are being instituted which may help after the fact of addiction, never a good time to try and solve a problem. With discussion and buy-in by ordinary citizens it may be possible to attack this problem before it begins.

There are at least seven interviews with Quinones free on Soundcloud, ranging in length from 15 minutes or so to an hour and a half. You have to hear some of these stories. It's mind-blowing. I listened to audio version, very ably read by Neil Hellegers, and produced by Bloomsbury. It is a must-read, must-listen.



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The Death & Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan

Paperback, 384 pgs, Pub Apr 10th 2018 by W. W. Norton Company (first pub Mar 7th 2017), ISBN13: 9780393355550, Lit Awards: Helen Bernstein Book Award Nominee for Excellence in Journalism (2018), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for History (2017), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Science & Technology (2017), J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award (2015)

Egan separates a couple of salient facts by the length of a book, but I here eclipse the space between them:

※ The Great Lakes are the largest expanse of freshwater in the world.

※ The Great Lakes are in the midst of a slow-motion ecological catastrophe begun by opening to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic.

※ Freshwater is the world's most precious natural resource.

※“The intuition is that a very large lake like this would be slow to respond somehow to climate change. But in fact we’re finding that its particularly sensitive.”

After the last election I became laser-focused on Wisconsin. I watched as a traditionally blue state voted red, and kept Governor Scott Walker and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in office through severe gerrymandering that could not be reversed even by mandate from federal judges. The Wisconsin gerrymandering case was forced to our country’s highest court, and SCOTUS's decision on the fairness of such twisted districts should be heard before the November 2018 election. But decisions made by the severely gerrymandered Republican legislature has been allowed to impact and will continue to impact Lake Michigan’s watershed at a time when it needs urgent attention.

A proposed $10 billion investment in Paul Ryan's District #1 by Taiwan's Foxconn, maker of touch screens for the iPad, was inked in 2017. Foxconn will use 7 billion gallons of water from Lake Michigan per day, five billion of which will be used outside and not returned to the lake's watershed area. By the end of Egan's book, contracts like this and that made with Waukesha city, a suburb of Milwaukee also outside the watershed area, take on far greater meaning.

Lake Michigan and the rest of the Great Lakes have been under pressure from invasive species through the Seaway to the north and from the south through the Sanitary & Ship Canal to the Mississippi. Just when scientists managed to tackle the problems caused by one devastating species, they would encounter another, even more overwhelming, until we arrived where we are now, with toxic algae blooms regularly threatening the water supplies of major cities that use lake water for drinking water.

Besides that, we discover the increases in the lake’s winter temperatures means increases in the lake’s summer temperatures, encouraging evaporation and shrinkage of water area. This, along with pollution of existing supplies and inevitable demands from rapidly drying areas of the country who have gone through their aquifers is increasing the pressures on scientists to refresh and preserve this enormously important natural resource. It requires attention and political support, and one fears what would happen should business-influenced politicians force through compromises that have short-term gains for the few and long term consequences for the many.

Dan Egan is a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and has been researching and reporting on the Great Lakes for at least a decade. He has done something we rarely encounter: he has made science and history come alive. As I did my own research into the political conditions in Wisconsin, I thought it would be important to learn more about Lake Michigan which plays such an important role in the life and economy of the state but I expected Egan’s book would be struggle to read. Instead I found it completely riveting and hard to put down. When was the last time you said that about a science/geography/history book?

A few years ago I read another nonfiction title, Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown that was similarly involving. Although the history of the Washington crew team competing in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany is long over, Brown made the book completely propulsive and un-put-down-able. That is the way I feel about Egan's book.

One threat to the lakes follows another, and our hearts squeeze as we hear of dangers and disasters in the last couple of years. It feels absolutely critical that we pay attention to the resource--fresh water--scientists have been telling us for half a century is in limited supply and which has everything to do with life on earth.

I can’t recommend this title more highly. Egan should definitely be on award lists for this title, and indeed has already scooped a couple. The W.W. Norton paperback came out last month (April 2018) and the Random House Audio production is likewise terrific, narrated by Jason Culp. Below please find a clip.





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Creekfinding: A True Story by by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, Illustrated by Claudia McGehee

Hardcover, 36 pgs, Pub Mar 7th 2017 by Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN13: 9780816698028

This inspirational child's storybook for ages 5-9 features the beauty of the natural world plus animals and big earth-moving equipment! Even parents are guaranteed to enjoy this one. The story is true, of a scientist who had heard the land upon which he lived once had a creek but had been bulldozed flat to make larger corn fields. The mind boggles at the necessity for this travesty.

He found photographs of the land in the time before and when an old man told him he'd fished the stream for brook trout, the scientist decided to try to find the creek. If it had been there since time immemorial, perhaps it was just waiting to be found.

The gorgeous full-color woodcuts by Claudia McGehee add immeasurably to the exciting story of discovery created by Caldecott winner Jacqueline Briggs Martin. The scientist dug the field, found the creek, built a bed, planted the sides, repopulated the waters that flowed from the head of the spring.

The actual events in this story take place in northeast Iowa. Thanks to the University of Minnesota Press for putting so much effort into making this the most beautiful and inspirational storybook published in 2017, surely. Brilliant job, everyone!

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Good Night Stories about Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo

Hardcover, 212 pgs, Pub Dec 1st 2016 by Timbuktu Labs, Orig Title: Storie della buonanotte per bambine ribelli: 100 vite di donne straordinarie, ISBN13: 9780997895810, Series: Storie della buonanotte per bambine ribelli #1, Lit AwardsWaterstones Book of the Year Nominee (2017)

The subtitle of this collection is 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women, and it is beautifully done. The short passages cover every continent and every race, religion, and sexuality…that is, the stories are about girls and women with lesbians and transgender individuals identifying as female included. It is ravishingly interesting.

Each short passage is a tightly written biography suitable for 9-14 year-olds, informative, and inspiring. Many unusual job descriptions and lifelong purpose are described, expanding our horizons about the scope of what is possible. As an adult, I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did nor enjoy it as much.

This book is about rebels. It challenges us to think again about what we admire and what we don't...and why. It is a fantastic teaching tool. I can imagine a mother reading an entry alongside her preteen (of either sex, by the way) and discussing it for a short while so that the implications of each success sink in: "Why would that person be considered a rebel?" "What do you think about what that person did?" "Do you know anyone who has done things like this?" The mother is going to recognize some of the names and so can add whatever backstory is not in the book.

A few examples from the stories are

✦ Inventor Ann Makosinski, a fifteen year-old Canadian who won first prize in Google Science Fair for inventing a flashlight that doesn’t need batteries, wind, or sun--just body heat.
✦ Amna Al Haddad, weight lifter from the United Arab Emirates. She was a journalist and discovered she really enjoyed exercising! She began to work out in a gym with weights for the first time in her life as an adult. She was good at it and began training for the Olympics.
✦ Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was murdered for reporting on the truth of what she saw in the brutal civil war in Chechnya.
✦ Jane Goodall is among the women to emulate for having her own mind and studying a subject so deeply that she became the expert.
✦ Hayshepsut was an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled Egypt long before Cleopatra became Queen. Records of her were destroyed after her death, but archeologists were able to piece together a record of her successful rule, the first (and only?) female pharaoh.

Included with each biography is a full page color representation of the subject, and a quote of something they said or wrote. Next to the short bio of Misty Copeland, for instance, is a drawing of her in flight during a ballet performance with a quote that reads, “Dance found me.”

The authors, Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, studied in Italy and the United States where they founded Timbuktu Labs, a children’s media innovation lab. What’s that? you may well ask. The authors define the mission of Timbuktu as committed to “redefining the boundaries of children’s media through a combination of thought-provoking content, stellar design, and cutting-edge technology.” They designed the first iPad magazine for children. The start-up has created mobile apps and creative content for users in more than 70 countries.

It’s more than just new. It’s exciting. The first edition of this book was published in 2016. Since then it has gone through multiple reprintings, and in 2017 Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 was published. There are apparently also coloring books, temporary tattoos, and posters that go along with the books and can be purchased separately. It’s become an industry, with good reason. If you have a girl in the family in the target age range, check it out. Just when you thought your girls were too old for bedtime stories, this may bring it all back.



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Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble

Hardcover, Expected pub: Feb 20th 2018 by New York Univ Press, ISBN13: 9781479849949

Noble began collecting information in 2010 after noticing the way Google Search and other internet sites collect and display information about non-white communities. Her results dovetail with other work (e.g., Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil) positing that algorithms are flawed by their very nature: choosing & weighting only some variables to define or capture a phenomenon will deliver a flawed result. Noble wrote this book to explore reasons why Google couldn’t, or wouldn’t, address concerns over search results that channel, shape, distort the search itself, i.e., the search “black girls” yielded only pornographic results, beginning a cascade of increasingly disturbing and irrelevant options for further search.

In her conclusion Noble tells us that she wrote an article about these observations in 2012 for a national women’s magazine, Bitch, and within six weeks the Google Search for “black girls” turned up an entire page of results like “Black Girls Code,” Black Girls Rock,” “7-Year-Old Writes Book to Show Black Girls They Are Princesses.” While Noble declines to take credit for these changes, she continued her research into the way non-white communities are sidelined in the digital universe.

We must keep several things in mind at once if the digital environment is to work for all of us. We must recognize the way the digital universe reflects and perpetuates the white male patriarchy from which it was developed. In order for the internet to live up to the promise of allowing unheard and disenfranchised populations some voice and access to information they can use to enhance their world, we must monitor the creation and use of the algorithms that control the processes by which we add to and search the internet. This is one reason it is so critical to have diversity in tech. Below find just a few of Noble's more salient points:

※ We are the product that Google sells to advertisers.

※The digital interface is a material reality structuring a discourse, embedded with historical relations...Search does not merely present pages but structures knowledge...

※ Google & other search engines have been enlisted to make decisions about the proper balance between personal privacy and access to information. The vast majority of these decisions face no public scrutiny, though they shape public discourse.

※ Those who have the power to design systems--classification or technical [like library, museum, & information professionals]--hold the ability to prioritize hierarchical schemes that privilege certain types of information over others.

※ The search arena is consolidated under the control of only a few companies.

※ Algorithms that rank & prioritize for profits compromise our ability to engage with complicated ideas. There is no counterposition, nor is there a disclaimer or framework for contextualizing what we get.

※ Access to high quality information, from journalism to research, is essential to a healthy and viable democracy...In some cases, journalists are facing screens that deliver real-time analytics about the virality of their stories. Under these circumstances, journalists are encouraged to modify headlines and keywords within a news story to promote greater traction and sharing among readers.

An early e-version of this manuscript obtained through Netgalley had formatting and linking issues that were a hindrance to understanding. Noble writes here for an academic audience I presume, and as such her jargon and complicated sentences are appropriate for communicating the most precise information in the least space. However, for a general audience this book would be a slog, something not true if one listens to Noble (as in the attached TED talk linked below). Surely one of the best things this book offers is a collection of references to others who are working on these problems around the country.

The other best thing about this book is an affecting story Noble includes in the final pages of her Epilogue about Kandis, a long-established black hairdresser in a college town trying to keep her business going by registering online with the ratings site, Yelp. Noble writes in the woman’s voice, simply and forthrightly, without jargon, and the clarity and moral force of the story is so hard-hitting, it is worth picking up the book for this story alone. At the very least I would recommend a TED talk on this story, and suggest placing the story closer to the front of this book in subsequent editions. For those familiar with Harvard Business Review case studies, this is a perfect one.

Basically, the story is as follows: Kandis's shop became an established business in the 1980s, before the fall off of black scholars attending the university "when the campus stopped admitting so many Blacks." To keep those fewer students aware that her business provided an exclusive and necessary service in the town, she spent many hours to find a way to have her business come up when “black hair” was typed in as a search term within a specified radius of the school. The difficulties she experienced illustrate the algorithm problems clearly.

“To be a Black woman and to need hair care can be an isolating experience. The quality of service I provide touches more than just the external part of someone. It’s not just about their hair.”

I do not want to get off the subject Noble has concentrated on with such eloquence in her treatise, but I can’t resist noting that we are talking about black women’s hair again…Readers of my reviews will know I am concerned that black women have experienced violence in their attitudes about their hair. If I am misinterpreting what I perceive to be hatred of something so integral to their beings, I would be happy to know it. If black hair were perceived instead as an extension of one’s personality and sexuality without the almost universal animus for it when undressed, I would not worry about this obsession as much. But I think we need also to work on making black women recognize their hair is beautiful. Period.

By the time we get to Noble’s Epilogue, she has raised a huge number of discussion points and questions which grew from her legitimate concerns that Google Search seemed to perpetuate the status quo or service a select group rather than break new ground for enabling the previously disenfranchised. This is critically important, urgent, and complicated work and Noble has the energy and intellectual fortitude needed to work with others to address these issues. This book would be especially useful for those looking for an area in the digital arena to piggyback her work to try and make a difference.

Below please find a 12-minute TED talk with Ms. Noble:



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Habibi by Craig Thompson

Hardcover, 672 pgs, Pub Sept 20th 2011 by Pantheon, ISBN13: 9780375424144, Lit Awards: Harvey Awards Nominee for Best Graphic Album-Original, Best Artist (for Craig Thompson), Best Cartoonist (for Craig Thompson) (2012), Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist (for Craig Thompson) (2012), IGN Award for Best Original Graphic Novel (2011)

In an interview Craig Thompson told his audience that artists must become vulnerable if their work is to mean anything. This dark and agonized work has a great deal of nakedness in it, both literally and figuratively, and a lot of staring directly at human experience and trying to make sense of it. It also looks with a colder, more dispassionate and assessing eye at the overlap in the religious teachings of Christianity and Islam.

This is Thompson’s fourth published work, and one glance inside gives some idea why it took six years to complete. The graphic work is fantastically detailed and patterned, which over more than six hundred pages becomes claustrophobic and oppressive with patterns repeated again and again in different combinations. This is partly due to the size of the pattern, which seems to become more and more compressed as the story progresses, and the more-black-than-white palette.

The patterns are beautiful, and may represent mathematical principles that sustain the progress upon which the world is built, but by the end I got the distinct impression Thompson was asking us to question even that progress: is it good? Who is it good for and how can it be modified to suit a different world with better outcomes? One is not accustomed to such weighty questions in the work of graphic artists.

Thompson is unique in many ways, but certainly the source of his questioning may come from his fundamentalist Christian upbringing in rural Wisconsin, an upbringing he explores in his second graphic novel and the first large-scale project of his career, Blankets. Thompson freely admits he still believes in God, but he is less sure now how best to worship him.

That his father was a plumber Thompson credits with the understanding that water is precious. This book is plumbed through with references to the primacy and importance of water in our world, our lives. This aspect of the book was another piece that elevated the story-telling to something essential.

Some discussion among reviewers condemns the sex, violence, and numerous representations of the naked human form depicted in this work as gratuitous. I will argue that is not the case. There is no question that the storyteller in this case is frightened by and ashamed of his powerful sexual feelings, but his arousal is well within the bounds of normal male sexuality and should, in fact, educate readers about the conflicted emotional trauma that can accompany the physical manifestations of desire.

In the years Thompson worked on this book, he learned to appreciate and to write some Arabic script, but never learned to speak. His translators and friends in the endeavor to understand Islam—its culture, science, and art—reviewed the story he created to check for realism and racism. In the end, any understanding readers take away about the religion or culture of the region belong to Thompson alone, but I suspect he feels confident in his depiction.

Simply sketched, the story is as follows: a light-skinned girl and a dark-skinned boy find themselves orphaned in the desert. They make a life and grow up together for a period of years before they are violently separated. They spend a long period of time hoping to find one another again and then one day, they do. The story has an impetus and emotion even without the later personality-defining moments of coercion and despair depicted with the same pitiless camera-eye that captured their earlier life.

If I say that there are many complications and observations along the way, it will give you scant warning for the deluge that is to come. This work is huge, covering enormous ground, picking up and putting down again many topics worthy of examination and discussion. It is overwhelming, as it undoubtedly was to write. I have never determined how an editor deals with slimming the opus of an auteur. The only thing I can think of is that cut pages or threads could be sold separately once the work has been published to acclaim.

Thompson’s willingness to look closely at who we are evinces in me admiration and gratitude, not censure. I look eagerly forward to what he decides to do next, whether it be drawing, writing, or something else of his choice. He is extraordinary in every way.



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What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience by Gregory Berns

Hardcover, 320 pgs, Pub Sept 5th 2017 by Basic Books, ISBN13: 9780465096244

Berns uses what he’s learned about human cognition and emotion in the title of this book, which promises insights into the understanding of the dog brain. To be fair, the book does discuss experiments and findings involving what happens in a dog’s brain while commands are given and associations are made. But the book goes far beyond the dog to discuss cognition and sentience in animals of many kinds, principally by using evidence from MRI and fMRI brain scans. It is a fascinating look at the study of neuroscience on animals.

Despite the density of terms required to study neuroscience, Berns guides us easily through the basics, allowing us to understand the principal goal of their studies on dogs: to determine how dogs process information. I will admit to a degree of awe to think they could manage to get a dog to voluntarily crouch within a noisy MRI machine and stay immoveable long enough to be scanned while the scientists perform tests. Georgia dog trainer Mark Spivak was given a shout-out at the end of this book for his insights and indefatigable efforts to this end.

The decades-long work of Peter Cook of the pinniped labs in Santa Cruz, CA is highlighted for several chapters beginning with “Seizing Sea Lions.” Berns and Cook worked together to determine the effects of domoic acid toxicity on normal patterns of connectivity in the brains of dead sea lions. Domoic toxicity caused by agricultural runoff was determined to be the cause of a wave of malnourished sea lion strandings during El Niño years.

After the sea lions come dolphins, a discussion of how echolocation manifests in the brain, and some indication how dolphin brains resemble and differ from other mammals. Then back to dogs, where studies have shown a real possibility that rats and dogs may experience regret: regret for choices that do not turn out as desirable as anticipated. Berns acknowledges it is difficult to imagine regret in a rat, but he suggests that our word for it does not limit the experience of the emotion to those who understand the word. From here he moves from “what do words mean to animals”?

The detail in his discussion of dog training with words and visual cues may lead other scientists to suggest tweaks that may lead to even greater understanding of the emotional responses of animals. Enough work has been done now on a variety of mammals (and even crows!) to show emotions are a part of their brain activity and daily life. But what appeared to be almost a failure of dogs to recognize words led to a new insight:

“It may be that in a dog’s semantic space, actions and things are very close, which would explain why it was so difficult to teach the dogs the names of things. The semantic representation for ‘squirrel’ might be to ‘chase and kill,’ while ‘ball’ becomes ‘chase and retrieve.’…Human represent the world with nouns…it might require a shift in perspective—in this case, from a noun-based worldview to one based in action…In an action-based worldview, everything would be transactional.”

In one of the final chapters, called “A Death in Tasmania,” Berns tries something completely different. He writes of his experience traveling to Australia to view the habitat and scan the brain of an Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial mammal species thought to be extinct. As an experience and as a piece of research, it is as different from his earlier work as studying the brains of placental mammals and marsupial mammals, two animals who evolved differently over millennia. Berns uses narrative nonfiction techniques to situate us visually, historically, physically in “one of the last great wildernesses on Earth…utterly unique and worthy of protection.”

The chapter on Tasmania really highlighted Berns’ special skills as a scientist—his ability to look beyond the lab to the wider meanings of neuroscience “for the rest of us,” as he emphasized in his final chapter on the “Dog Lab.” Working for so long on understanding the extent of animal cognition, consciousness, sentience, or self-awareness has led him to animal advocacy, if only for our own selfish reasons. “We, Homo sapiens, might soon be an animal in the eyes of our successors…” given our tinkering and experimentation with the human genome. One day unmodified humans may be considered undesirable, inferior.

Berns has skill in involving us, allowing us to follow his work. He would like to map the brains of the Earth’s megafauna with the best science and equipment available today.

“The WWF estimates that two-thirds of many species’ populations maybe gone by 2020. Apart from the ecological catastrophe, scientific opportunities may be lost forever. It is imperative that we begin the archival process for all species, and especially for megafauna…”

Is 2020 a misprint? I surely hope so.



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Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Hardcover, 338 pgs, Pub May 9th 2017 by Dey Street Books, ISBN13: 9780062390851

Maybe everyone does lie. But they don’t lie all the time. Stephens-Davidowitz makes the good point that asking people directly doesn’t always, in fact may not often, yield true answers. People have their own reasons for answering pollsters untruthfully, but it is clear that this is a documented fact. People sometimes lie to pollsters.

Stephens-Davidowitz was told by mentors and advisors not to consider Google searches worthwhile data, but the more he looked at it, the more he was convinced that Google searches contained the best data for determining what people are concerned about. He has uncovered some interesting trends that are not apparent through direct questioning because people are sometimes ashamed of their fears, feelings, prejudices, and predilections.

This book was better read rather than listened to, though the production by HarperAudio and the narrator, Tim Andres Pabon, were excellent. Stephens-Davidowitz gives charts, graphs, data points that obviously cannot be represented in the audio version. These usually help me to grasp things easily and maybe bypass pages of material that is not as interesting to me. It wasn’t that his material was hard, it was that I oftentimes did not like what he was talking about. He had a tendency to focus on deviant behavior, e.g., sexual predators, abuse, porn, etc. One might make the argument that these behaviors are important to understand and therefore worth looking at. Possibly. However, if ‘everybody lies,’ one might make the argument that we do not have to look at deviance to find untruthfulness.

What we discover is that to test Stephens-Davidowitz’s thesis that ‘everybody lies,’ we have to spend quite a lot of time with statistics and creating studies, which is fine. Stephens-Davidowitz argues that 'big data' is the source of the insights, not the insights themselves. This is kind of important and may overlooked. The true point he makes about lying is that big data probably irons out discrepancies in the reasons for our Google searches, e.g., that it is not me that is interested in the herpes virus, it is my brother, because in the end it doesn’t matter why we did the search; what matters is that we did the search. Besides, maybe I’m lying about my brother having the virus, but my interest in the topic is not a lie.

Stephens-Davidowitz has made a career so far out of the study of big data, showing us ways to slice and dice it so that it is useful to our view of the world. Only thing is, I am not as interested in what big data tells us as he is. He’d trained as an economist, and towards the end of the book he hit a couple of areas I did find more interesting, like the notion of regression discontinuity, a term used to describe a statistical tool created to measure the outcomes of people very close to some arbitrary cut-off.** S-D talks about using this tool on federal inmates, discovering criminals treated more harshly committed more crimes upon their release. But S-D also studied students on either side of the admissions cut-off for the prestigious Stuyvesant High School: those who attended Stuyvesant did not have a significant performance difference in later life than students who did not.

Apparently Stephens-Davidowitz went into data science because of Freakonomics, the bestselling book by Steven D. Levitt. He believes that many of the next generation of scientists in every field will be data scientists. I did finish the audiobook, another study he took note of in the last pages. Apparently few readers finish ‘treatises’ by economists. He believes this is his big contribution to our knowledge base, and there is no doubt his contrariness did highlight ways big data can be used effectively.

If I may be so bold, I might be able to suggest a reason why many female readers may not be as interested in the material presented, or in Stephens-Davidowitz himself (he was/is apparently looking for a girlfriend). Stay away from the deviant sex stuff, Seth. It may interest you but I can guarantee that fewer women are going to find that appealing or reassuring conversation material.

An interesting corollary to this economists’ data view is the question of whether the truth matters, which is how I came to pick up this book. Recently on PBS’ The Third Rail with Ozy, Carlos Watson asked whether the truth matters. At first blush the answer seems obvious, and two sides debated this question. One side said of course truth matters…but most of us know one man’s truth to be another man’s lie. The other side said ‘everybody lies.’ It got me to thinking…I do think the two ways of coming to the notion of lying dovetail at some point, and one has to conclude that truth may not matter as much as we think. What matters is what we believe to be true.

Finally, it appears Stephens-Davidson agrees to some degree with Cathy O'Neill, author of Weapons of Math Destruction, in that he agrees you best not let algorithms run without human tweaking and interference. The best outcomes are delivered when humans apply their particular observations and knowledge and expertise along with big data.


** S-D describes it this way:

“Any time there is precise number that divides people into two different groups, a discontinuity, economists can compare, or regress, the outcomes of people very very close to the cut off.”

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Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

Hardcover, 790 pages Pub May 2nd 2017 by Penguin Press ISBN13: 9781594205071

Whatever your discipline of study, this book has some degree of relevance, considering as it does human biology. I wish to convey that this book is aspirational for everyone, even the author himself. He readily admits to gaps in his/our knowledge about human biology, but he tries to give us, in this mighty interdisciplinary work synthesizing a lifetime of observation and thought, the current state of knowledge and points to areas for further study.

Don’t be intimidated by its size or erudition. The author is amazing but he has always been approachable. Just flip through, stopping where something catches your eye. You will find yourself absorbed, amazed, provoked. Notice the chapter headings: the last several chapters are about humans doing the right thing…or not. The first several chapters reference those later chapters, showing how what he is telling us is related.

What we do and how we act is related to our biology..all of it…like neurobiology, endocrinology, genetics, the relevance of which he attempts to be very careful and specific about explaining. He goes back in time, bringing in examples from our ancient history to show how things have changed and how culturally conditioned our reactions and responses are to stimuli. Each chapter ends with a summary, and the book ends with insights he has developed over years of study.

Skim these to see if there is something more you wish to pursue. The studies he discusses in each section are referenced by authors focusing on different aspects of human knowledge and you may already be familiar with them. The concepts explored underpin much of what we understand about human behavior and morality. The work of Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist and currently professor of psychology at Harvard, is described by Sapolsky as “monumental” and is given its own critique late in this book.

Sapolsky is not arrogant. He writes this book not to show off his knowledge, but to share his knowledge, which is why he tries to make it as readable as possible without dumbing it down. It is a work to be grateful for. One of the more moving moments in the work comes near the end, after over 600 pages of science and Sapolsky is talking about doing the right thing. He introduces us to Anglican cleric John Newton, born in 1725.

Newton composed the hymn “Amazing Grace” but that is not what Sapolsky wants to tell us. Newton is remembered as an abolitionist, mentor to William Wilberforce who worked through parliament to outlaw slavery in the British Isles. But he didn’t start out that way. Read the story for yourself--plan to read the whole back-end of the book because you won’t be able to stop with Newton—about individuals, ordinary individuals making a difference and doing the right thing.

Sapolsky may be a great scientist, but he is great writer and a great teacher. He makes us think and challenge our own assumptions. He tries to answer questions as they arise and he does not intentionally obfuscate. He does not dodge and only occasionally dismisses, and only then when an argument falls of its own weight.

If you wish you had the background to soak up everything he says but do not, go for one of his earlier books which he wrote as a younger man, less burdened by all he has studied. They display his trademark intelligence and humor and are as much fun as a barrel of monkeys book on baboons.



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Woolly by Ben Mezrich

Hardcover, 304 pages Expected publication: July 4th 2017 by Atria Books ISBN13: 9781501135552

Mezrich picks interesting topics, I will concede that. Readers may already have heard some years ago that a Harvard lab was working on de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. Mezrich brings us up to date on this project; indeed, the first and last chapters in this nonfiction are set in the future.

If you are familiar with Mezrich’s writing, the author weights the concept of narrative nonfiction heavily on the narrative and fiction sides, ostensibly to stoke momentum and get folks interested. The only problem is that his very good instincts about what is intrinsically an interesting story fights with his method. Sometimes the reader has to thrash through pages of invented dialogue to reach a critical conclusion, a real buzz killer if there ever was one.

But this story works on many levels, and while we are following his careful step-by-step thrust with one eye, our mind is busy on the operations of a lab and the implications of the study for medicine, for wildlife, for every aspect of our visible and invisible world. Mezrich eventually addresses many of these key issues in the text, usually making the science sound responsible and considered.

I started to grow more uncomfortable towards the end of the book, when we are reminded that the science has progressed so far so fast that genomic modifications have escaped the lab environment and can be undertaken in a made-over garage for relatively small costs, and that billionaires of every stripe are lining up to make their money count for something big.

The real excitement of this story is in our imaginations, and what the skills and knowledge of present-day scientists can allow us to imagine. Mezrich places us in fund-raising meetings with billionaires, allowing the most humble among us to enjoy the same stories and sense of excitement that fuels movers and shakers. If the glamour of the whole thing begins to seem suspect at some point, I think you’ve caught my sense of unease.

Mezrich shares the history of the project, including the work by Nikita Zimov in Northern Siberia, determining that woolly mammoths seemed to have played a role in preserving the permafrost levels of the tundra, by upturning the soil and exposing lower layers to the freezing temperatures. His father, Sergey Zimov, apparently theorized that reestablishing animal herds that roamed Siberia earlier in human history might play a role in keeping escaping carbon and methane, now sequestered in permafrost, from accelerating the speed at which the earth warms.

The fact that woolly mammoth remains are discovered regularly now in thawing and melting ice and snow of the north is something I had not known. The ancient ivory from the tusks is not protected and is therefore an important source of income for hunters, sold in lieu of protected elephant tusks, for the same reasons, to the same buyers.

The scientists involved in the story at one of the Church labs at Harvard are fascinating individuals in their own right, each with a backstory that only fuels our interest. The project has been going on long enough now that the twenty-something personnel involved at the beginning of the project are turning it over to others, younger ones still, to ensure continuity of skills on such a forward-looking project. The whole concept and execution of the mammoth idea is sufficiently…mammoth…and complex enough to make readers feel as though they have been subtly changed by the experience.

The real life story ends with woolly mammoth DNA implanted in an elephant cell. Dr. Frank Church, the originator of this project, to his credit, decides not to use elephants to gestate the beast that might develop, but to construct a synthetic uterus. That is currently underway. Stay tuned.

Due out July 4th.



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Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Hardcover, 240 pages Expected publ: March 7th 2017 by Riverhead Books ISBN13: 9780735212176

People are on the move in Hamid’s latest book, south to north and east to west. This strange small novel definitely has the feel of a season of sense8, the Netflix Original production about shifts in consciousness, space, and time. Hamid’s characters, Nadia and Saeed, experience the bending of time and place, as when they leave their own war-torn country on the Asian subcontinent, a "passage both like dying and like being born."

Hamid’s female character Nadia, who insists on being draped in a black cloak or abaya, is more risk-taking and forward-thinking than Saeed. Nadia, not religious, wears the abaya to deflect attention, and it works, usually. Sometimes she does draw the anger or ire of men, when she is riding a powerful motorcycle or working in a store, but she doesn't back down, staring at the men steadily, aware and awake but not showing fear.

Perceptions of the abaya change in the course of the novel. Once a means of conformity and of escaping notice, in the west and in the future the abaya becomes a statement of nonconformity and defiance. Nadia likes this gesture even better.

Saeed, on the other hand, is good, kind, compassionate, nonviolent: he does not enjoy a tangle and avoids rather than confronts. He’d learned to pray from his father, much as one is taught to think critically or handle difficulty. Praying became “a lament, a consolation…a hope” that steadied and centered him.

Throughout the novel these alternate approaches to life gently grate on the two young lovers who had not decided to spend their lives together until they found they had no option. The genuine love they feel for one another feels like displacement, since the families of each are lost.

The refugee life, landing on Mykonos and somehow being smuggled to London, is hazy in process, but not in content. The danger, the hunger, the uncertainty, the resistance from light-skinned natives…these feel some years in the future, despite our current history, because electricity is becoming scarce, and times are harsh. Time in this novel is intentionally fluid and hard to reckon.

One day when Nadia sees on her phone a woman in a black abaya reading something on her phone, “she wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news and be this news.” Time was bending around her: she might be from the past reading about the future or she might be from the future reading about the past. She might be two Nadias…going in different directions.

Hamid also dislocates the reader in space, in one paragraph describing Nadia and Saeed in London and in the next describing a family in Mexico, just miles from the Pacific on the U.S. border, facing a paradoxically dry environment so close to water. No explanation is given for this wild shift west, as far west as one can get before entering again the east.

What happens in the novel is that time moves away from us. Hamid imagines our future, folding time and location. Remember Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being in which time is folded? Ozeki makes a statement about physics, love, and life on earth, and I think Hamid might be pointing to this also. His characters love one another, but the stresses of their needs wear them out. They find sometimes that it is just easier to try to slide through the cracks alone, though sometimes one wouldn’t survive alone. Think electrons. Think quantum theory.

The lifetime Hamid describes in this novel feels like it could be now and also a long time in the future: a Muslim country torn apart, population movement via smugglers, a Greek island, Europe. But interspersed we are also getting news from Japan, South America, Northern Africa. Something big has happened. The policies of control at first are harsh and then loosen, so we suspect a big event. Borders are no more and groups of people try to decide the best way to govern, to protect, to provide.

In one of the narrative shifts, Hamid points to a woman of advanced years and Asian descent living in Palo Alto. The woman lives in the same house she’d lived in since childhood, the house having passed to her from her parents. She’d been married more than once, had children, all while living in the house and yet now she felt distant from her neighborhood. Everything had changed around her while she stayed still. She was a migrant, too, Hamid suggests, because time had made her own insular unchanging world anachronistic. "We are all migrants through time."

This was a difficult book to understand through listening. I had the Penguin Random House production read by the author (thank you PRH Audio). Hamid read the book as though it were poetry, with stylized stops and breaths and some distance from the material. At times I felt totally involved, understanding it cognitively, but his sudden shifts to different parts of the world seemed intentionally dislocating.

The final quarter of the novel really threw me. I listened to it five or more times and within a few sentences my mind was wandering each time. There must be something in there that sends me off, not computing. I downloaded a print copy (Thank you Riverhead & Edelweiss). This work is a good candidate for Audible's Whispersync option.

This novel breaks new ground for Hamid. You are going to find yourself mulling his meaning as you examine our recent past, live through our near term, and contemplate our future. Below find a clip of the audiobook.





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Bellevue by David Oshinsky

Hardcover, 384 pages Published Sept 20 2016 by Doubleday ISBN13: 9780385523363

Many Americans, even those who have never lived in New York City, have heard of Bellevue Hospital, certainly of some patients, and probably some of its doctors. Its storied history captures our imagination: it has fearlessly and insistently treated epidemics for centuries, as well as the widest range of disease in our nation’s largest city. For most of its history, Bellevue was a teaching hospital associated with two IV League medical schools, Columbia and Cornell, along with that of New York University. In 1966, Columbia and Cornell turned over their commitment to NYU, who produced distinguished physicians trained on some of the world's most difficult and unusual cases.

Land situated on the banks of the East River, about 3 miles from downtown Manhattan, called Bel-Vue, was leased in 1795 to serve as a hospital for those afflicted with yellow fever. It could be reached by boat, on horseback, or by carriage. It was meant to enjoy cooling breezes and yet be far enough away from the city to avoid spreading infection. Ever since that time, Bellevue has served as a public hospital open to handle the contagious cases for which there is no cure.

"I don’t think there is a disease in Osler’s Textbook of Medicine that I didn’t see," said Bellevue medical intern Dr. Connie Guion in 1916.

Bellevue was the center of the AIDS epidemic in New York beginning in the 1980 and in 1990 Bellevue’s Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Fred Valentine was instrumental in finding a cocktail of drugs that would keep the infection from progressing. Most recently in 2014, Dr. Craig Spencer, a volunteer with Doctors without Borders, arrived in Bellevue to be treated for Ebola, New York’s only Ebola patient. Aggressive treatment and early diagnosis helped to assure his survival, and he was released three weeks later.

The story of Bellevue is in many ways the story of medicine in the United States, plagued by lack of understanding of the role of sanitation in perpetuating disease, and discovering how lack of family or opportunities might lead to poverty, madness, and despair. Almost from the start, Bellevue had patients unable to pay for their care or explain their malady, and yet they could not be turned away. It has always been a refuge for those who had no where else to go: the homeless, the indigent, the immigrant. Today Whites rank last in ‘patient race.’

Bellevue not only handles disease, but has always handled catastrophic injuries from the city and environs. Oshinsky describes the aftermath of the 1863 Conscription Act riots, riots which began because the poor were drafted to serve in the Union army: the city erupted in mob violence, poor on rich, white on black, native on immigrant, Catholic on Protestant. More than one hundred died, and injuries were grievous.

"This is war zone medicine," a Bellevue emergency room doctor observed in 1990. "You'll never go anywhere in the world and see something we haven't seen here."

In 2001 Bellevue ramped up to take victims of the World Trade Center attack, only to discover an unusual sense of helplessness when few treatable injuries resulted from the incident.

Oshinsky is careful not to whitewash Bellevue’s history. His descriptions can be shocking in what they tell us of conditions there throughout the years. Never particularly well-funded, this public hospital was at the mercy of state budgets and political jockeying, and yet it attracted outsized medical talent by dint of its size, location, and affiliation. The worst bits--doctors operating before antibiotics or anesthetics, or psychotic homeless camping in unused closets—cannot keep the reader from finishing this read in absolute awe of the place.

Bellevue has been rebuilt several times, the latest ribbon-cutting in 1973 after two decades of construction to the tune of $200 million. Twenty-five floors for patients, each an acre or more in size, with stunning views of the river or the Manhattan skyline. Twenty elevators service the space, and the 1200 patient beds. The I.M. Pei-designed (Pei Cobb & Fried) atrium completed in 2005 connects the old buildings with the new.

Bellevue has had famous patients (including exposé-writing journalist Nellie Bly), and famous doctors (Dr. Andre Frederic Cournand and Dr. Dickinson Richards won the 1956 Nobel Prize for their work on cardiac catheterization). The ambidextrous surgeon Dr. Valentine Mott "performed more of the great operations" at Bellevue "than any man living," in the words of Sir Ashley Cooper, England's leading surgeon at the end of the eighteenth century.

Any day at Bellevue is positively epic in scope, novelistic, operatic even. When Oshinsky talks about NYC's Office of Medical Examiner being headquartered at Bellevue in the early part of the twentieth century and managed by Bellevue's chief pathologist, the powerful combination of politics, criminality, medicine, and forensics feels explosive. This is Life writ large, in all its manifestations, and Death, likewise. It is a gigantic, voracious story.

For those interested in the history of medicine, this is a must-read. The heroic pieces of the story are difficult to resist. David Oshinsky won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for History for Polio: An American Story and knows how to tell a big story. There can't be that many who could do what he has done with this magnificent effort.



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The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

This nonfiction is unlike others Michael Lewis has offered us. In this he tries the trick of explaining confusion by demonstrating confusion, but near the end of this work we appreciate again Lewis’ distinctive clarity and well-developed sense of irony as he addresses a very consequential collaboration in the history of ideas. Lewis did something else he’d not done before as well. By the end of this book I was bawling aloud, in total sync with what Lewis was trying to convey: why humans do what we do.

Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. What is remarkable about that statement is also what is remarkable about Lewis’ attempt to explain it. Lewis made us feel the chaos and the unlikelihood of such a success, in this case, of ever finding that one person who complements another so perfectly that the two literally spur one another to greater accomplishment. From a vast array of possible choices, opportunities, and directions come two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who together add up to more than the sum of their parts.

One thing became clear about the groundbreaking work done by Kahneman and Tversky: despite the curiosity, drive, and iconoclastic talent each possessed, their moments of greatest crossover relevance came as a result of the involvement of the other. This could push the discussion into an examination of the importance of pairs in creativity, but Lewis resists that thread to follow what he calls a “love story” to the end, to the breakup of the two men. Once the closest of friends and collaborators, the reason for their breakup is as instructive as anything else Lewis could have chosen to focus on, and it makes a helluva story, full of poignancy.

Kahneman was an idea man, throwing up new psychological insights constantly, beginning with his early work recruiting and training Israeli soldiers for the front line. Tversky was a widely admired mathematical psychologist, iconoclast, and skeptic who challenged accepted thinking and in so doing, provided new ways to look at old problems. Just by asking questions he could lead others to find innovative answers. Both Israelis were teaching at the University of Michigan in the 1960s but their paths didn’t overlap until later, back in Israel. In one of the classes he taught at Hebrew University Kahneman challenged guest lecturer Tversky’s discussion on how people make decisions in conditions of uncertainty.

In this instance Kahneman became the iconoclast, the skeptic, pulling the rug from underneath Tversky. The challenge got under Tversky’s skin, but instead of falling prey to anger, Tversky was galvanized. Colleagues who saw him at this time recall his unusually intense period of questioning. Again, after a period of time, the men came together again, and thus began one of the richest and most rewarding periods of intellectual collaboration in modern times.

Together, both men were able to isolate some important pieces in the thinking sequences of humans who were presumed to maximize utility in rational, logical decision trees. It took many years to isolate what struck them as incomplete or incorrect in the accepted thinking of others, but what they concluded revolutionized the thinking in several disciplines, including economics (and baseball).

Lewis’s earlier book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game discussed how an algorithm assigning different weights to individual characteristics of baseball draft picks could by-pass the errors human tend to make when looking over a list of potential players. This is related, in a distant way, to the illogic discovered in the decision trees Kahneman and Tversky discussed, and unfortunately Lewis decides to revisit the breakthrough in his own understanding at the beginning of this book. Describing that tangential result of the men’s essential discovery unnecessarily complicates and obfuscates Lewis’ central thrust in this book—the relationship between two men who supercharge their achievements when they are together. Once Lewis settles into the real subject of his book, his writing becomes familiarly crystalline, filled with science and emotion, describing a singularly fascinating tale.

Particularly interesting is Lewis’ attention to how ideas develop. Lewis tries in several instances to get to the moment of insight, and then to the moments of greater insight which might lead finally to upturning accepted beliefs about how one thinks the world must work. Happiness and regret both came under the microscopes of these men and it was hugely insightful for them to discover that regret was the more impelling emotion. People often made decisions to minimize regret rather than maximize happiness. This led to the ‘discovery’ that the value of positive ‘goods’ decreased after a certain level of attainment, while the value of negative ‘bads’ never lost their bite. Which could be another way of describing the apparently supreme need to minimize loss rather than maximize gain. Which led to the discovery that people often gamble against what had been perceived as their own interests.

The two men were opposites of one another, Kahneman a heavy smoker whose office was messy and disordered, and Tversky, who hated smoking, had an office so well-organized it looked empty. For a period of almost twenty years, during the years of their greatest output, they could often be found together, talking, or writing one another if apart. They published hugely influential papers and became the toast of several continents. The closeness of the two men appeared to have no discrepancy until gradually over time, Tversky became better known and more popular in scientific and academic circles. The equilibrium of the relationship was thus unbalanced and a period of estrangement led the men in different directions.

The entire story, in Lewis’ hands, is wonderfully moving. If you can thrash your way through the thicket of ideas at the entrance to the main repository of ideas in this book, prepare yourselves to be utterly delighted.




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