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Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
This is the tale of Christopher J. McCandless, a young man who hated his father, but was polite to his family and did what he could to please them until he graduated with honors from Emory, at which point, having lived an ascetic life for some years, traveling extensively during breaks and vacations, he took to the road, never to communicate with his family again, eventually turning up dead in an abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail in Alaska.
Ryan Grant, a co-worker of mine at Spry, loaned me the book, and now, months later, I have finally read it. I expected much worse, especially since he seems to have died of starvation complicated by poisoning from eating potato seeds. Now, not everyone knows that eating potato seeds, sprouts, etc. is likely to get you dead from obscure alkaloids or, if you get prompt care, really really sick. Unfortunately, McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, did not know.
Some of the more interesting bits were where Krakauer, in retracing the route of the extremely charismatic young man, relates tales about Gene Rosellini and Everett Ruess, other strange young men who felt compelled for one reason or another, to leave society and wander about in the wilds for extended periods of time. While some such men are fairly clearly suicidal, many are not -- but my objection is only in part to stupidity (if you wander around on your own, the odds are greatly increased that you will die; that is, after all, why humans spend so much time together). I primarily object to what I see as romanticism, altho I have to admit the author does a good job of indicating that romanticism was just one incarnation of something that has been affecting young, unattached males for lo these few millenia now.
Maybe this is the whole point of walkabout in various cultures: an inoculation period countenanced by society, to prevent this kind of thing from happening on a large scale. It's an interesting thought, anyway.
Caldecott & Co., Maurice Sendak
This collection of reviews, short essays and speeches by Maurice Sendak is at times repetitive, but generally entertaining. I did not recognize many of the artists and writers he referred to and reviewed, but he did so in a way that whetted my curiosity -- several are on the list to look for in my usual, perfunctory manner. His longish review of Anderson was sufficiently positive to almost tempt me to try reading a bit more of his work. But I intend to be very careful, because Sendak and Travers confirmed my opinion of The Little Match Girl and The Red Shoes.
Divorce: An American Tradition, Glenda Riley
Riley says she changed her mind about the value of divorce in the course of her research, and I believe her. Much of the structure of this historical overview of divorce in America (including Colonial times) indicates Riley started out thinking divorce was bad, easy divorce worse and we should do what we can to get rid of it.
But she ultimately wound up thinking something along the lines of: Divorce laws make things worse. People are going to divorce anyway. Making the process adversarial is terrible. Child support and property divisions need more attention. Jurisdicational disputes are nasty. We need to do more counseling and make saner laws and policies to help people through a traumatic event in life.
Her prescriptions for this, however, fall short of being revolutionary. She mentions proposals to make it harder to get married, and introducing contract/term marriages, but appears to dismiss these as a possible solution. She notes the studies which show that people who live together prior to marriage are more likely to divorce (and quicker) than those who do not -- without noting that the two might have a single, third, cause, and therefore advice not to live together is fundamentally flawed. The last chapter of the book is full of nonsense like this.
Fortunately, the historical portion of the book does not suffer from such problems. She did a lot of research in some fairly imaginative ways. Her analysis is cautious (at times, one is tempted to say, unimaginative and not particularly insightful) and she shows you (most of) her data. I solidly recommend this to anyone interested in speculating on the institutions of marriage and divorce in American society. And some of the gossipy bits are really wonderful (esp. Tilton and Henry Ward Beecher). One of the more surprising revelations was the discovery that a lot of divorces via omnibus and/or cruelty grounds actually had adultery somewhere in the background, but the parties did not want the scandal, and so agreed to part and chose the grounds between them to make it as painless as possible. Makes me wonder if perhaps the adultery-only crowd is actually looking for a little fresh gossip and finds it disappointing that the good stuff tends to get buried. (Yes, I know that's brutally unfair to the sincerely pious. And I do know that such people exist -- my parents are two. I question how common it is amongst the religous right, however.)
Essentialism: A Wittgensteinian Critique, Garth L. Hallett
I have this problem with essentialism -- I think it is almost always unwarranted, and nearly as often unexamined. Hallett's book is just the thing for me. While essentialism is in bad odor in philosophical circles since the decline and fall of Russell and his ambitious plans, Hallett convincingly argues that essentialism underlies much philosophical argumentation, and proceeds to go about exposing it whenever possible. I haven't read any Wittgenstein (altho I'm getting Real Tempted, now), so I can't speak to whether Hallett accurately captures that spirit or not. I do know this paperback makes for amusing reading -- particularly where he diagnoses the main causes of essentialist practice. Tough going in spots (especially since he's picking apart excerpts of philosophers I have not read), but on the whole, worthwhile.
The Jewish War, Josepheus (incomplete)
My what a nasty little man! But definitely a survivor. He didn't want a war, but once it seemed inevitable he (sensibly) thought it better to be in charge. He tried to bail from his command with a tall tale about getting reinforcements, but wasn't allowed. So he fought it out, and managed not to die and hid during the sack of Jotopata with some other prominent citizens. When offered life in prison by the Romans, his compatriots thought it dishonorable for him to take it so he arranged to be one of the last in a suicide pact, and cut a deal with another survivor type to surrender rather than kill themselves or each other. Once with Vespasian, he prophesied he would become emperor, and lo, that did him some good then and much good later. No wonder so many contemporary Jews despised him.
The notes, as is all too often the case, have some problems. They love to point out where Josephus is in error, and if you think the ancients treated casualty statistics with a literal minded attachment to truth -- not to mention that those stats got accurately reproduced from language to language and from hand copy to hand copy, well, then, it's easy to find errors on the part of the author, er, text, er. Whatever. What annoys me are the claims that Josephus erred in saying the Jews left Babylon during the reign of Xerxes. Yes, they got permission to leave some fifty years earlier under Cyrus, but any dumb fuck who paid attention to the major prophets knows perfectly well that most of the Jews hemmed and hawed and didn't want to leave their homes and businesses and didn't leave until pressure was applied (by both sides) some years later. The error is on the part of E. Mary Smallwood -- not Josephus.
On the whole, an interesting read. I knew that citizenship was kind of a big deal to people in the provinces of the Roman Empire, but I also knew that being a citizen was liable to piss off one's neighbors. So I was a little confused why it was so desirable. No one told me it exempted one from the kind of random torture and punishments governors were allowed to commit on their non-citizen subjects. Bleah. I'm looking forward to reading History of the Jews. Later.
Divergence, Book Two of the Heritage UniverseSheffield, Charles
Still more Sheffield. This sequel to Summertide continues the adventures of Darya Lang, Hans Rebka, Atvar H'sial, Louis Nenda, Julius and Steven Graves, Kallik and J'merlia. We are introduced to the charming C3PO knockoff, E.C. Tally, an embodied computer, and several new builder artifacts. And (eeek!) we finally meet some of the dreaded Zardalu (but of course mean old humans don't give in them, oh no). Great new transportation system introduced, and other than that, just one more episode after another. Nobody acts particularly rationally, and some of the set pieces in Glister have a strong feeling of role playing games.
Toxic Sludge is Good for You!John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
It's subversive week for Rebecca, starting with an expose, to quote the subtitle, of "Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry". Everything from tobacco science to environmental sell-outs to faked up industry groups masquerading as activists make an appearance. Rampton and Stauber do a good job providing a lot of supporting details. I've sent my dollar off for a sample issue of PR Watch, and hope it will be every bit as nifty as Adbusters.
The title's a bit terrifying. Apparently the EPA has reclassified the output of sewage treatment as acceptable for fertilizer (altho hopefully not of food crops, it hardly matters -- cadmium and lead go into the water table and fecal coliform bacteria does not recognize fences). I expect this to be a big untold story of the next year, and a major scandal by sometime in 1997. Let's hope you and I don't die of heavy metal poisoning before a stop is put to this nonsense.
Rampton and Stauber devote a significant amount of space to the following: PR firms attempting to suppress books, articles, etc. perceived to be damaging to their clients; the art and science of changing people's minds for them (read: propaganda); the tobacoo industry; utility companies and the AEC and why it took so long for the truth to come out, both about the cost of atomic power and the risks; the use of PI's and ex-agents to spy on activist groups which activity extends to the occasional agent provocateur; co-opting strategies to convince activists to accept funding from their enemies and then negotiate mutually beneficial compromises with their now benefactors; the manufacturing of "grassroots" organizations by PR firms, especially for the religious right; the EPA and urban sludge mentioned above; the "greening", in image primarily, of large corporations; the use of PR firms by countries with terrible human rights violations records to improve their image and suggest that the oppressors are in fact the victims; the use of text and video generated by PR firms as news, with minimal or no editing, and no attribution, by papers and tv stations around the country; and, finally (possibly most importantly) some suggestions on why NIMBY isn't such a bad idea after all, and some examples of current activists who are not succumbing to any of the above.
Tainted Truth: the Manipulation of Fact in Media, Cynthia Crossen
An excellent -- if more optimistic, less subversive and generally more mainstream -- followup on Toxic Sludge. Crossen (James Gleick's wife, interestingly enough) is after biased science and bogus statistics. Crossen is still buying into objective numbers, and hopes we can manage to reclaim them. While she understands the rise of self-serving data to be the result of the replacement of government funding by private funding, she holds out hope we can somehow manage to resist. Good luck. Worth a read.
Crossen devotes a significant amount of space and research to: duelling studies, the lack of reproducibility, and the kind of data manipulation which falls short of misconduct but can nevertheless strongly influence the outcome of research; the lack of controlled studies of nutritional effects, and the difficulty of applying the results of nutritional studies to the human population as a whole; the pervasive meaningless of numerical results in consumer research; the tilt applied to nearly all political surveys, which tends to swamp any real results which might be measured; lifecycle environmental and other policy studies, why the technique is flawed, and how controlled the results are by initial assumptions and study structure; the problems associated by clinical testing done by drug companies in an effort to get acceptance by the FDA (and how much worse it was before FDA guidelines were mandated) and, finally, the truly hairy results of bringing all these statistics into the courtroom.
Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto
Gatto, like Illich in Deschooling Society and John Holt in Instead of Education (both of which I read back in January), thinks the public school system is inherently, structurally flawed and it's just got to go. Gatto's reasoning is subtly different, altho it shares many points of similarity. In addition to the issue of coercion (also addressed by Alfie Kohn in his numerous, always insightful, books), Gatto notes the problems of the right time and the desire to learn which are so key to Holt's and Illich's formulations.
On the subversive scale, I'd have to say Gatto is more so than Kohn, but less so than Holt and much less so than Illich. Gatto recognizes what's going on (anti-learning, keeping people in their places, coercion, training to be good little workers), and he has enough awareness of the history of education in the West to know that this stuff was intentional, Gatto is interested in replacing schools with families. While he defines family in a little prefixed note very broadly (whatever damn thing you want to call family), it is clear that he misses the days when mom was at home to raise the little children. Unlike Holt and Illich (hell -- or Pepper Schwartz), he is not actively suggesting alternative societal or employment structures which would enable parent(s) to raise children AND have independent incomes.
Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen
And Loewen is less subversive than Gatto (but wait! I have a bell hooks book in the offing -- Teaching to Transgress. That one just might beat Illich.). Loewen took 12 popular high school American History textbooks and proceeded to show how they completely mangled Columbus and the "discovery" of the "New World"; the displacement of Native populations; the Civil War and reconstruction; Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller; U.S. foreign policy in the 1950's and 1960's, and the Vietnam War. Included are misrepresentations, omissions, inaccuracies, invented stories and outright lies. But he's not just here picking nits -- his problem with these texts is the way the bore and offend many if not all students who encounter them. And he has some concrete suggestions about why this happened, what makes it keep happening, despite improvements in historical scholarship, what we might be able to do about it and why that is so important. Loewen explores subversive notions about upper class control of teaching history and dismisses them as implausible for a variety of reasons, offering instead the notion that "society" is at fault. Yeah, right. And who made the world (specifically the economic environment) the way it is, Mr. Loewen? No, not three guys at the turn of the century, but that isn't as far off as this amorphous it just happens that you can't stand as explaining any other event in history but will accept as explaining the here and now.
Also the analysis of reactions to the Vietnam War (I actually knew the answer here, but that was from reading Zinn) was a little weak. There's a four term syllogism (the most blatant logical fallacy I spotted in the book), and a ridiculous assessment of what it means to be opposed to a war when you're the most likely to fight and die in it. That is not merely self-centered cost-benefit analysis, and only an overly-educated upper class American would produce such a piece of foolishness.
However, I'm getting overly picky. Very good book, very enlightening, and a nice piece of work on the whole. Excellent notes/biblio at the end, as well. I bought it on Zinn's recommendation on the cover and I do not regret it.
Loewen devotes a substantial amount of research and space to: the bland heroification of historical figures in high school American History texts; in particular, the mythologizing of Columbus which adds extraneous details, invokes the flat earth fallacy and neglects to mention genocide; tales of the Pilgrims which fail to mention the massive plagues which wiped out whole tribes prior to the arrival of the (probably hijacker) colonists, who could then harvest the already cleared and sometimes planted fields; failure to describe the treatment of the Natives and the continuing Indian Wars; the fallacy of black corruption ending the Reconstruction following the Civil War; the failure of textbooks to adequately depict the substantial number of anti-racist, white, abolitionist groups, and the Union soldiers who became anti-racist as a result of fighting with blacks in the Civil WAr -- the myth of progress does not cope well with a return to racism, so the earlier enlightenment is instead erased; the absolute dearth of information about class in America; the attribution to the Federal government of gains resulting from activism strongly resisted by the Federal government; the failure of texts and classes to ever cover anything in living memory (or, in those rare instances, to discuss it in a way that would enable children to understand their parents and others who lived through those events); the overwhelming emphasis on progress throughout the texts, with little or no attention paid to economic, environmental or other losses (and therefore no motivation to be an active citizen and try to do something about it).
May All Be Fed: Diet for a New World, John Robbins
Robbins, son of Robbins in Baskin-Robbins, is here advocating a vegan diet for health and environmental reasons. A batch of studies are cursorily referenced to support a very low protein, low fat diet, and the health implications of eating anything else. The scholarship is fairly weak, as one might expect of this kind of advocacy, altho the references are probably worth pursuing -- much of the data referenced derives from respectable, mainstream medical journals including JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine. There's a fair amount of "I didn't want to believe it, but the evidence overwhelmed me and I could no longer deny it" replacing actual presentation of evidence, common to all evangelizing. But on the whole, an interesting read, and quite useful for its summary of the protein-calcium-osteoporosis connection.
Robbins devotes a significant amount of space to: advocating a return to the saying of grace, or some equivalent appreciation for and enjoyment of food, especially in the presence of others, but even alone; the inefficiency of meat consumption; changing ideas about the importance of protein (animal, complete or otherwise) in the human diet, and the negative aspects of excessive protein consumption on calcium absorption; the implication of fat in assorted cardiac problems and other diseases, and just how it is that the food pyramid is so skewed towards consumption of animal products; why chicken/fish/milk/eggs are not good substitutes for red meat; the evils of formula feeding, and some of the issues surrounding breast-feeding mothers who consume dairy products. Robbins also supplies contact information for a variety of activist groups, clearing houses of information on related topics, and lists of things to do to improve the situation. He supplies a lot of suggestions on how to stock a healthier pantry and an introduction to where to buy better foods without spending more money. The last half of the book is a batch of recipes from Jia Patton which embody the principles contained in Robbins' text.
True Love Waits, Wendy Kaminer
I really like Wendy Kaminer, and I'm not alone. So does the National Review, or at least someone there, who called her up to solicit an article. Kaminer, for those who don't know, is a liberal. But she's "sensible", thought her conservative caller. Ah, but Kaminer, who values self-reliance, does not demand it of children -- she's in favor of the welfare state. End of call. In a nutshell, a good summary of why I like Kaminer. I don't care for big government, and I resent the kind of institutionalized power it gives to people and organizations who have a lot of money. Power which a government with an appearance of democracy can give an appearance of legitimacy to -- and power which can outlast the money. Nevertheless, I hold out some hope that the second, even if only partially independent, political market might mitigate the inhumane excesses of the market of money.
This collection of essays and criticism includes a smattering of book reviews, some commentary of the state of feminism, and a lot of commentary of civil liberties. Unlike many civil libertarians, Kaminer is not completely comfortable dismissing out of hand the claims that the right to keep and bear arms includes private individuals, in addition to members of state militia or the National Guard. She has a fair amount to say on the subject of Dworkin, MacKinnon and their cadres of college women who want to ban pornography. Kaminer neither accepts a clear connection between pornography and sexual violence against women, nor does she think, if such a connection existed, it would justify this infringement of the First Amendment. I'm with her on both counts. What's interesting is her analysis of the people who find this issue so compelling, and the possible evils they are entertaining by conflating depictions of sex or even sexual violence with acts of sexual violence against real, live women.
The inclusions of some older essays provides a perspective on the constant elements in Kaminer's thinking over time. It's also nice to have in one volume enough passing remarks on Kaminer's parents to get some kind of glimpse into where she might have gotten her particular brand of sanity (dad was an anarchist). The final entry is a review of Donahue's The Human Animal, and would you believe it? She resists the temptation to slam Donahue and has the perception to see what it was about Donahue that enabled people with equal ignorance and opposing opinions to carry on a lively, entertaining, multi-sided debate and end with more respect for each other than when they began.
While True Love Waits lacks some of the coherency of It's All the Rage or I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, it makes for a grand read. Highly recommended.
On Freedom's Frontier: the First Fifty Years of the ACLU in Washington State, Douglas Honig and Laura Brenner
This thin (113 pages) volume describes the growth of the Washington state chapter of the ACLU since its formation between the Wars. While clearly celebratory, the authors do not shrink at describing the "1940 Resolution", which withdrew ACLU's support from organizations and individuals who adhered "to Communist, Fascist, KKK or other totalitarian doctrine". As a collection of lawyers, with no paid staff or staff counsel for many years, the ACLU-W primarily engaged in judicial protection of civil liberties, sometimes by one of its members defending, but generally by filing amicus curiae briefs. The inevitable result was a string of compromises which can probably be called victories for civil liberties, but which did not always satisfy those whose liberties were infringed in the first place.
In large issues (the establishment of accountability to civilians on the part of the Seattle Police Department; improvement of conditions in Washington state penitentiaries; Native fishing rights; limiting investigation of a rape victim's sexual history), the ACLU-W was largely auxiliary to other activist groups. But ACLU-W had wins of its own: right of women to use sick leave for pregnancy, the Goldmark case (a mixed bag: it was in part proving that it wasn't a Communist front), a variety of "haircut" cases, and it was arguably the key player in the first flag desecration case to be tried and won in the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.
I won't recommend that you run right out and buy/read this book, altho I don't think you'd be wasting your time if you did. If you don't think the ACLU ever did anything to help you, however, this volume might change your thinking, ever so slightly.
Doing What Works in Brief Therapy: A Strategic Solution Focused Approach, Ellen K. Quick
The Editorial Department at Amazon.com had this on the shelf for review or some other purposes, and the humor of a Brief Therapy guidebook written by one Dr. Quick just slayed me. It turns out to be eminently worth reading in its own right, however. This is not a self-help book -- it is intended for clinicians. I'm not at all clear on how applicable this material would be for self-help, altho the main ideas are certainly straightforward enough. Brief therapy, strategic therapy and solution-focused therapy all share a somewhat collegial approach, using information from the client, including information about what problem the client wants solved, and what solutions the client may have already tried, to direct the course of therapy. All are largely intermittant in nature, a family practice approach to psycho-therapy wherein one goes to solve a problem and stops going when it is solved to one's standards.
The structure is simple: elicit a description of what problem brought the client in. This should include a description of what it would mean for the problem to be "solved", which may be elicited by use of a miracle question (Imagine you go back to work, go home, go to bed, and in the morning, the problem is no longer a problem. Tell me how you can tell that the problem is no longer a problem -- what's different? How do you notice? Who else notices? What do they notice?) Find out what the client has already tried to solve the problem, and what the results of the attempted solution have been. Determine if any pieces of the solution are already occurring, and, if so, what circumstances to they occur under. Therapist intervention is three-part: validate the client's experience (I hear what you're saying, and I'm not surprised you're distressed by); compliment them on whatever they're doing (even so minor as being able to describe the problem in detail) to fix it; suggest a concrete piece of homework. The homework is generally either (a) stop doing the attempted solution (e.g. nagging at the unresponsive SO) (b) try a new behavior suggested by the client or therapist as a possible solution or (c) pay close attention to the problem and/or exceptions to the problem.
While the audience is intended to be practicing therapists, I have to say I greatly enjoyed reading this very readable description of a remarkably down-to-earth, collegial, and problem-focussed approach to psychotherapy. I, for one, am sick and tired of everyone's problems being buried in one's past where there's not a damn thing one can do about them and even if one fully understands what the hell went so wrong in one's earlier life, what I really want is specific advice on how to work through problems with friends, my lover, my co-workers, etc. Even if I am repeating past errors, the critical thing is to Stop Doing That -- not get all wrapped up on what about my parents or first lover or whoever made me start doing it in the first place. Doing what Works and Stopping What Doesn't seems so sane, so functional. I can't help but recommend this to others. I'm inclined to think that some kind of training in thinking about relationships and how one lives one's life would be good for everyone, but the childhood focussed approaches which are so standard are impractical and labor-intense. This strikes me as an approach that might be worth introducing more people to.
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This file recreated from The Internet Wayback Machine in January 2002. Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created July 31, 1996 Modified: January 10, 2002