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lpm100's reviews
711 reviews
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess (Book 19) by Jeff Kinney
adventurous
funny
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
5/5 stars
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess
A parent's review: modest, kosher, funny
*******
All of these books have multiple themes, so the ones that I extract from this are:
1. Family members getting on each other's nerves. (Highly relatable.)
2. Sibling rivalry
3. Teenage relationships come and go and are not that serious. (Years later you won't even know where they are.)
4. Sanitized version of Captain save a Hoe
5. YouTube/internet celebrities.
6. Free range parenting versus helicopter parenting.
7. Senescence of grandparents. Possible Alzheimer's/ dementia.
The whole book doesn't even take an hour to read, so For such a small investment it's worth it to be aware of what your kids are reading / as a palate cleanser.
5/5 stars
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess
A parent's review: modest, kosher, funny
*******
All of these books have multiple themes, so the ones that I extract from this are:
1. Family members getting on each other's nerves. (Highly relatable.)
2. Sibling rivalry
3. Teenage relationships come and go and are not that serious. (Years later you won't even know where they are.)
4. Sanitized version of Captain save a Hoe
5. YouTube/internet celebrities.
6. Free range parenting versus helicopter parenting.
7. Senescence of grandparents. Possible Alzheimer's/ dementia.
The whole book doesn't even take an hour to read, so For such a small investment it's worth it to be aware of what your kids are reading / as a palate cleanser.
The Jewish Mind by Raphael Patai
Book Review (Part 1 of 2)
The Jewish Mind
Raphael Pattai
5/5 stars
"Great historical overview"
*******
Of the book:
-541 pages over 18 chapters and a conclusion. 28pps/per
- 1,115 point citations, 2.1/page (=well sourced)
-Many of the chapters are broken up into 125 subsections/small essays that are between 2 and 10 pages to make it such that one concept can be finished in one sitting.
-Overall book is in three parts (definitions, historical encounters, description of the Jewish psyche.)
*******
This is actually two books bound into one, and I think that the author put them together for convenience.
It has some elements of "The Arab Mind," along with a lot more Jewish history. (It makes sense, because the Jewish history is much longer and also a lot more literary.)
Six major external influences on the Jewish mind:
1. Contact with Canaanites;
2. Hellenism;
3. Arab conquest;
4. Renaissance Italy;
5. Eastern European Jews and Christian sectarian movements;
6. Jewish enlightenment/Haskallah
*******
Actual historical details not withstanding, the basic formula is that:
Jews / Israelites (because they have been different things at different times) lived in place X. They came in to contact with and were influenced by ideas X1, X2, X3.
After they figured out how to Judaize the idea, the upshot is XJ1, XJ2, XJ3.
So, one example is:
1. Israelite culture has a nomadic desert substructure with the influence of settled Canaanite people.
2. Israelite sacrificial ritual was adopted from Canaanites, except to ONE Gd instead of multiple. Even though there are vestiges of the sacrificial system, it must be clear that Rabbinic Judaism did not spring fully formed from prehistory.
Another example is:
1. Hasidim lived in Russia, and it was a deeply Xtian place that was in the process of religious ferment because of schism between different groups. And so certain elements were borrowed from the church and various fringe groups, but re-adapted.
2. Polish Catholics rank their clergy, so of course Hasidim could rank their rebbes. Confession is a big thing with the Catholics, so of course Hasidim could go and confess and speech to their Tzaddiqim. (p.213).
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. The events in the book were both too numerous and too shocking to do justice by even listing a small fraction, and even that much would expand the review to unreadable lengths.
The best that I can do is try to summarize the takeaway messages:
a. The insular nature of the shtetl was not the case for all of Judaism, and there were very long periods where there was contact with neighbors and therefore influence.
As much as I would like to believe in the complete impermeability of Judaism to any surrounding influences, that belief went from "difficult to sustain" before this book to " impossible" afterward.
b. The shtetl was not even enough to prevent any type of inflow from the surrounding cultures. Hasidism is extremely Christologically awkward in many respects. (Reincarnation. Confession. Spiritual leaders in an intercessionary capacity. Loopy mysticism.)
The Chabad Mesichists did not come out of the blue, and there is a direct line from Jews living around churches to..... that.
c. This two-way borrowing is several thousand years old. It is disgusting for Hanukkah to be repurposed as the "Jewish version of Xmas" (gift-giving, "Hanukkah bushes," etc.)---and it is for this exact reason that I don't give Hanukkah presents
Be that as it may, it has several thousand years of precedent.
2. I thought that this book would be read once and done, but apparently there's so much information that it should be reread maybe a year or two after the first reading to try to extract as much information as possible. (How easy is it to separate the concepts of ethno-history versus inner history?)
3. This book talks about certain topics that were included in the Paul Johnson tome "A History of the Jews," but it is substantially more readable.
4. The Hasidim of today are emphatically not the same thing as their forbearers. The collective unconscious is not a reliable source of the way that things actually were.
5. Hasidism are an example of how:
i. If you want your belief system to survive, it's better that you have plenty of babies and try to influence them than to try to influence people that have nothing to do with you.
ii. You can become mainstream if you merely stand your ground. (I wonder if Open Orthodoxy is the Hasidut of yesterday. If they stand their ground, they just might be.)
6. The Vilna Gaon:
a. Actually studied grammar and cantillation--in contrast to the proud and defiant ignorance of today's Haredim.
b. Wrote dozens of rabbinical books, and none were published in his lifetime. (p.256).
c. Did have an interest in Kabbalah, in spite of his incandescent hatred of Hasidim.
7. East European Talmudism (The focus on the study of Talmud to the exclusion of anything else) is something that came from one particular period, and was not always the norm.
8. Before I read this book, I thought that the rate of Jewish people who converted to Xtianity was on the order of one out of a million. But, this book makes me believe that it is a lot more common than that. (50,000 in Spain converted and 200,000 left. [p.150])
9. Jews have been selling their brain power for a very long time. In a lot of different empires.
10. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in Israel: This is the first time in a couple of thousand years that modernists and traditionalists have had to sort out the relationship between themselves, without an outside power imposing a solution. Amos Oz has suggested that when / if Israel tears itself apart, It will go back to the status quo of Gentiles stopping Jews from being at each other's throats. Pattai observed this half a century earlier about events from 1796.
Vocabulary:
autocephalous
synarchy
quiddity
eo ipso
epispasm
ephebion
petasos
musive (style of writing)
dionysian
ecumenism
antinomianism
nostrum
ethos/logos/pathos
quadriga
apotropaic
terzina
sestina
cazona
canzonetta
madrigal
horatory
neofiti
Paris Sanhedrin
adytum
salon
salonnardes
Quotes:
(p.44) Each of these processes can be considered an example of the Jewish intellectual facility to make a virtue out of necessity, to acquire a vernacular from the Gentile environment, and to 'Judaize' it intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally.
(p.266) With the Enlightenment, the Jewish unity came to an end. A wide gap opened up between those who continued in their old, traditional Jewish way of life, and the increasing number of those who acquired Enlightenment, and whose cultural orientation there upon turned away from religious Judaism toward secular Europe.
(p.263) In East Europe, where most of the Jews lived and where the culture of the gentile environment had little attraction, the traditional concept of Jewish peoplehood underwent an inverse modification to that it evinced in the West.
(p. 258) Therefore any change which impinged upon it [Judaism] must be opposed and combatted; all innovation had to be fought simply because it was innovation
(p. 254) The general tendency was toward more and more stringent restrictions; that is, the area of the forbidden was gradually enlarged - - this was always considered sound and safe Rabbinic practice - - while even the most outstanding rabbi would never presume to declare allowed something that had been forbidden of old.
(p. 253) The conflict between modernist and Orthodox Jews, which began about 1775, has not ended to this day.
(p. 248) These [German Jewish] salons were frequented by Prussian officers, diplomats, and courtiers, who often entered into dalliances and love affairs with the lovely daughters of Israel.
(p. 243) Mendelssohn and his coworkers for the Haskallah we're mainly responsible for launching the Jewish people on the perilous road to assimilation which led a sizable portion of German jewelry to conversion to Christianity - - among them four of Mendelssohn's own six children, and most of the rest into the Twilight zone of cultural assimilation from which for several generations many Jews continue to pass over into the majority religions.
(p. 182) The first student of Hasidism who commented on the non-Jewish influences it absorbed was SJ Hurwitz, a bitter opponent of the movement, whose purpose in writing a booklet about it was to attack and to heap ridicule on Hasidic leaders and followers alike.
(p. 150) ..... also led to a magicization and demonization of life. With the passage of time and the growth of religious ignorance among the Jewish masses in 17th to 18th century East Europe, this magic element became a dominant characteristic of traditional Jewish life.
******
(Part II)
******
This book was so lengthy that it took about 6 months to read, and fits and starts.
In spite of the fact, this is not going to be an easy book to get rid of because it seems like there is just so much linkage to the authors and data that characterize the ideational rhizomes that make Judaism what it is today.
I've already reviewed the first half of the book (linked).
While there were some interesting thoughts/data in the second half, it was a bit of a comedown compared to the history of the first half.
1. The data that he uses to quantify Jewish people were written down a half century ago, and much of the data was even a quarter century before that. A lot of the psychological / psychiatric concepts of that day are recognized to no longer exist. (How many versions of the DSM have we been through since then?)
In reality, sequencing genomes has become cheap enough that these questions are beginning to be studied more rigorously--therefore obviating all such pseudoscientific psychological speculation / claptrap.
2. The rate of intermarriage for Jewish people has been about 70% for many decades at this point, but Jewish people have not disappeared - - all of the anguished hand-wringing notwithstanding.
3. A lot of these points are rendered moot by future developments. So, for example, he talks about inter- ethnic distinctions within the context of Israeli marriage. But, several decades after this book has been written marriages between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are so common as to be unremarkable. (That is with the notable exception of the Neanderthal Haredim; They are what they are.)
4. Some things that he talks about may have had some statistical mass, but they don't square with this author's experience of reality. So, he talked about Jewish alcoholism (p.443), overeating (p.447) and drug abuse (p.453). I have lived in a good sized Orthodox Jewish community for about 11 years as of the time of this review, and I have met ONE alcoholic the entire time, ONE former drug addict, and probably no more than 20% of (genetically) Jewish (American) persons are overweight--compared to about 73.6% of non-Jewish Americans.
*******
A lot of this is preaching to the choir:
1. It has been known for a long time that Ashkenazi Jews have an IQ that is, on average, higher than all other ethnic groups.
2. It has been known that certain mental illnesses are a lot more common among Jews than others. (The author notes rates of Insanity of Jews that are 4.6 times higher than their neighbors. [p. 414].) The concept of the "neurotic Jew" still exists, even though being neurotic (in the Freudian sense) is something that people stopped believing in long ago.
*******
The chapter on Jewish antisemitism was quite enlightening. The hackneyed Freudian expression "internalize the hatred of the oppressor" is one that I'm reluctant to believe *specifically* because Freud said it was true.
But, this author actually attributes Jewish antisemitism to the Enlightenment, and with the imbibing of Western philosophy/modes of thought, Jews begin to see themselves through the (anti-Semitic) eyes of their much more numerous Gentile neighbors.
And *that* is the origin of Jewish antisemitism that has never been resolved.
What is sauce for the goose can be sauce for the gander: When Israel was reunified, a lot of Sephardim/Mizrahim began to internalize self-rejection because they saw themselves through Ashkenazi eyes (p.478), which saw them as having "aggressivity, undesirable personal trades, lack of culture, dirtiness, and bothersome children.
Verdict: Recommended
Quotes:
(p. 461) The negative features in this self stereotype can be so strong that they assume the character of self-hatred.... In low status minority groups, the desire arises for the respect and rewards enjoyed by the higher status majority.
(ibid) One of the greatest effects of the enlightenment was.... Intensifying the negative features in the Jewish self-stereotype.
(p. 479) My own experience with Oriental Jewish adults and youths in Israel was that frequently they were ashamed of their origin and tried to appear as if they were of Ashkenazi extraction. For example, if one asking North Africans you his place of origin, one would typically get the answer "Paris" or "France." Several further questions would be needed until one elicited the admission that he was, in fact, from Algeria or Morocco.
(p. 480) The curious phenomenon of Jewish supporters of black anti-Semitism could be understood as their acceptance, or rather demand, of a 'share of guilt for the enslavement of the African in America. A way in which they tacitly assert their membership of the dominant even if guilty majority.'
(p. 499) Every rabbinic scholar exercised authority to the extent to which his decisions were accepted by others.
(p. 501) But without the Evil Desire, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children (Bereshit Rabba
9:7)
challenging
informative
slow-paced
5.0
Book Review (Part 1 of 2)
The Jewish Mind
Raphael Pattai
5/5 stars
"Great historical overview"
*******
Of the book:
-541 pages over 18 chapters and a conclusion. 28pps/per
- 1,115 point citations, 2.1/page (=well sourced)
-Many of the chapters are broken up into 125 subsections/small essays that are between 2 and 10 pages to make it such that one concept can be finished in one sitting.
-Overall book is in three parts (definitions, historical encounters, description of the Jewish psyche.)
*******
This is actually two books bound into one, and I think that the author put them together for convenience.
It has some elements of "The Arab Mind," along with a lot more Jewish history. (It makes sense, because the Jewish history is much longer and also a lot more literary.)
Six major external influences on the Jewish mind:
1. Contact with Canaanites;
2. Hellenism;
3. Arab conquest;
4. Renaissance Italy;
5. Eastern European Jews and Christian sectarian movements;
6. Jewish enlightenment/Haskallah
*******
Actual historical details not withstanding, the basic formula is that:
Jews / Israelites (because they have been different things at different times) lived in place X. They came in to contact with and were influenced by ideas X1, X2, X3.
After they figured out how to Judaize the idea, the upshot is XJ1, XJ2, XJ3.
So, one example is:
1. Israelite culture has a nomadic desert substructure with the influence of settled Canaanite people.
2. Israelite sacrificial ritual was adopted from Canaanites, except to ONE Gd instead of multiple. Even though there are vestiges of the sacrificial system, it must be clear that Rabbinic Judaism did not spring fully formed from prehistory.
Another example is:
1. Hasidim lived in Russia, and it was a deeply Xtian place that was in the process of religious ferment because of schism between different groups. And so certain elements were borrowed from the church and various fringe groups, but re-adapted.
2. Polish Catholics rank their clergy, so of course Hasidim could rank their rebbes. Confession is a big thing with the Catholics, so of course Hasidim could go and confess and speech to their Tzaddiqim. (p.213).
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. The events in the book were both too numerous and too shocking to do justice by even listing a small fraction, and even that much would expand the review to unreadable lengths.
The best that I can do is try to summarize the takeaway messages:
a. The insular nature of the shtetl was not the case for all of Judaism, and there were very long periods where there was contact with neighbors and therefore influence.
As much as I would like to believe in the complete impermeability of Judaism to any surrounding influences, that belief went from "difficult to sustain" before this book to " impossible" afterward.
b. The shtetl was not even enough to prevent any type of inflow from the surrounding cultures. Hasidism is extremely Christologically awkward in many respects. (Reincarnation. Confession. Spiritual leaders in an intercessionary capacity. Loopy mysticism.)
The Chabad Mesichists did not come out of the blue, and there is a direct line from Jews living around churches to..... that.
c. This two-way borrowing is several thousand years old. It is disgusting for Hanukkah to be repurposed as the "Jewish version of Xmas" (gift-giving, "Hanukkah bushes," etc.)---and it is for this exact reason that I don't give Hanukkah presents
Be that as it may, it has several thousand years of precedent.
2. I thought that this book would be read once and done, but apparently there's so much information that it should be reread maybe a year or two after the first reading to try to extract as much information as possible. (How easy is it to separate the concepts of ethno-history versus inner history?)
3. This book talks about certain topics that were included in the Paul Johnson tome "A History of the Jews," but it is substantially more readable.
4. The Hasidim of today are emphatically not the same thing as their forbearers. The collective unconscious is not a reliable source of the way that things actually were.
5. Hasidism are an example of how:
i. If you want your belief system to survive, it's better that you have plenty of babies and try to influence them than to try to influence people that have nothing to do with you.
ii. You can become mainstream if you merely stand your ground. (I wonder if Open Orthodoxy is the Hasidut of yesterday. If they stand their ground, they just might be.)
6. The Vilna Gaon:
a. Actually studied grammar and cantillation--in contrast to the proud and defiant ignorance of today's Haredim.
b. Wrote dozens of rabbinical books, and none were published in his lifetime. (p.256).
c. Did have an interest in Kabbalah, in spite of his incandescent hatred of Hasidim.
7. East European Talmudism (The focus on the study of Talmud to the exclusion of anything else) is something that came from one particular period, and was not always the norm.
8. Before I read this book, I thought that the rate of Jewish people who converted to Xtianity was on the order of one out of a million. But, this book makes me believe that it is a lot more common than that. (50,000 in Spain converted and 200,000 left. [p.150])
9. Jews have been selling their brain power for a very long time. In a lot of different empires.
10. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in Israel: This is the first time in a couple of thousand years that modernists and traditionalists have had to sort out the relationship between themselves, without an outside power imposing a solution. Amos Oz has suggested that when / if Israel tears itself apart, It will go back to the status quo of Gentiles stopping Jews from being at each other's throats. Pattai observed this half a century earlier about events from 1796.
Vocabulary:
autocephalous
synarchy
quiddity
eo ipso
epispasm
ephebion
petasos
musive (style of writing)
dionysian
ecumenism
antinomianism
nostrum
ethos/logos/pathos
quadriga
apotropaic
terzina
sestina
cazona
canzonetta
madrigal
horatory
neofiti
Paris Sanhedrin
adytum
salon
salonnardes
Quotes:
(p.44) Each of these processes can be considered an example of the Jewish intellectual facility to make a virtue out of necessity, to acquire a vernacular from the Gentile environment, and to 'Judaize' it intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally.
(p.266) With the Enlightenment, the Jewish unity came to an end. A wide gap opened up between those who continued in their old, traditional Jewish way of life, and the increasing number of those who acquired Enlightenment, and whose cultural orientation there upon turned away from religious Judaism toward secular Europe.
(p.263) In East Europe, where most of the Jews lived and where the culture of the gentile environment had little attraction, the traditional concept of Jewish peoplehood underwent an inverse modification to that it evinced in the West.
(p. 258) Therefore any change which impinged upon it [Judaism] must be opposed and combatted; all innovation had to be fought simply because it was innovation
(p. 254) The general tendency was toward more and more stringent restrictions; that is, the area of the forbidden was gradually enlarged - - this was always considered sound and safe Rabbinic practice - - while even the most outstanding rabbi would never presume to declare allowed something that had been forbidden of old.
(p. 253) The conflict between modernist and Orthodox Jews, which began about 1775, has not ended to this day.
(p. 248) These [German Jewish] salons were frequented by Prussian officers, diplomats, and courtiers, who often entered into dalliances and love affairs with the lovely daughters of Israel.
(p. 243) Mendelssohn and his coworkers for the Haskallah we're mainly responsible for launching the Jewish people on the perilous road to assimilation which led a sizable portion of German jewelry to conversion to Christianity - - among them four of Mendelssohn's own six children, and most of the rest into the Twilight zone of cultural assimilation from which for several generations many Jews continue to pass over into the majority religions.
(p. 182) The first student of Hasidism who commented on the non-Jewish influences it absorbed was SJ Hurwitz, a bitter opponent of the movement, whose purpose in writing a booklet about it was to attack and to heap ridicule on Hasidic leaders and followers alike.
(p. 150) ..... also led to a magicization and demonization of life. With the passage of time and the growth of religious ignorance among the Jewish masses in 17th to 18th century East Europe, this magic element became a dominant characteristic of traditional Jewish life.
******
(Part II)
******
This book was so lengthy that it took about 6 months to read, and fits and starts.
In spite of the fact, this is not going to be an easy book to get rid of because it seems like there is just so much linkage to the authors and data that characterize the ideational rhizomes that make Judaism what it is today.
I've already reviewed the first half of the book (linked).
While there were some interesting thoughts/data in the second half, it was a bit of a comedown compared to the history of the first half.
1. The data that he uses to quantify Jewish people were written down a half century ago, and much of the data was even a quarter century before that. A lot of the psychological / psychiatric concepts of that day are recognized to no longer exist. (How many versions of the DSM have we been through since then?)
In reality, sequencing genomes has become cheap enough that these questions are beginning to be studied more rigorously--therefore obviating all such pseudoscientific psychological speculation / claptrap.
2. The rate of intermarriage for Jewish people has been about 70% for many decades at this point, but Jewish people have not disappeared - - all of the anguished hand-wringing notwithstanding.
3. A lot of these points are rendered moot by future developments. So, for example, he talks about inter- ethnic distinctions within the context of Israeli marriage. But, several decades after this book has been written marriages between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are so common as to be unremarkable. (That is with the notable exception of the Neanderthal Haredim; They are what they are.)
4. Some things that he talks about may have had some statistical mass, but they don't square with this author's experience of reality. So, he talked about Jewish alcoholism (p.443), overeating (p.447) and drug abuse (p.453). I have lived in a good sized Orthodox Jewish community for about 11 years as of the time of this review, and I have met ONE alcoholic the entire time, ONE former drug addict, and probably no more than 20% of (genetically) Jewish (American) persons are overweight--compared to about 73.6% of non-Jewish Americans.
*******
A lot of this is preaching to the choir:
1. It has been known for a long time that Ashkenazi Jews have an IQ that is, on average, higher than all other ethnic groups.
2. It has been known that certain mental illnesses are a lot more common among Jews than others. (The author notes rates of Insanity of Jews that are 4.6 times higher than their neighbors. [p. 414].) The concept of the "neurotic Jew" still exists, even though being neurotic (in the Freudian sense) is something that people stopped believing in long ago.
*******
The chapter on Jewish antisemitism was quite enlightening. The hackneyed Freudian expression "internalize the hatred of the oppressor" is one that I'm reluctant to believe *specifically* because Freud said it was true.
But, this author actually attributes Jewish antisemitism to the Enlightenment, and with the imbibing of Western philosophy/modes of thought, Jews begin to see themselves through the (anti-Semitic) eyes of their much more numerous Gentile neighbors.
And *that* is the origin of Jewish antisemitism that has never been resolved.
What is sauce for the goose can be sauce for the gander: When Israel was reunified, a lot of Sephardim/Mizrahim began to internalize self-rejection because they saw themselves through Ashkenazi eyes (p.478), which saw them as having "aggressivity, undesirable personal trades, lack of culture, dirtiness, and bothersome children.
Verdict: Recommended
Quotes:
(p. 461) The negative features in this self stereotype can be so strong that they assume the character of self-hatred.... In low status minority groups, the desire arises for the respect and rewards enjoyed by the higher status majority.
(ibid) One of the greatest effects of the enlightenment was.... Intensifying the negative features in the Jewish self-stereotype.
(p. 479) My own experience with Oriental Jewish adults and youths in Israel was that frequently they were ashamed of their origin and tried to appear as if they were of Ashkenazi extraction. For example, if one asking North Africans you his place of origin, one would typically get the answer "Paris" or "France." Several further questions would be needed until one elicited the admission that he was, in fact, from Algeria or Morocco.
(p. 480) The curious phenomenon of Jewish supporters of black anti-Semitism could be understood as their acceptance, or rather demand, of a 'share of guilt for the enslavement of the African in America. A way in which they tacitly assert their membership of the dominant even if guilty majority.'
(p. 499) Every rabbinic scholar exercised authority to the extent to which his decisions were accepted by others.
(p. 501) But without the Evil Desire, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children (Bereshit Rabba
9:7)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
dark
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
0.5
Book Review
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1/5 stars
"Never judge a book by its number of Amazon reviews."
*******
This book is definitely overrated.
Remember that feeling when you went to high school/undergraduate and the instructor gave you a book that was so boring that you thought you weregoing to *perish* before you got to the end?
And then the the instructor told you that you needed to read this because it is "good" literature. (Stephen King or Lee Child are infinitely more readable, but they are not "good" literature.)
That's exactly the way I felt reading this book (it sold tons of copies, had 34,000+ Amazon reviews, and even had a movie made about it).
Only the inclination to finish what I started made me finish *this* book.
Problem 1: It seems like the suspense is dragged out wwwaaayyy too much; one oblique hint, forward 10 or 12 pages, and then another.
Problem 2: The characters slip into all of these emotional states for which we don't have any reason. And since it is just one fiction book among tens of millions of others, I don't want to invest that much time trying to speculate what is the subtext of what Ishiguro is trying to tell us.
For example: The character Tommy has all of these rages that are exposited frequently, and I'm still clueless as to WHY?
Problem 3: Can we get some time devices here? We keep hearing times such as "years later" and "years ago." Are we talking about 20 years? 50 years?
Problem 4: 1001 unanswered questions.
-How do they select who should be cloned for?
-Does anybody else in the entire country know about this?
-Why does the will to live not make these people want to run away?
-If they could be engineered to be sterile and technology was in such a level, why not just biologically engineer organs for needed recipients? (It's a hell of a lot cheaper than supporting an entire human being.)
-The organs that can be transplanted are: heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, and intestines. But the thing is, you can't live without any one of these (Well, maybe, one kidney.) So, how are these clones living after two donations, let alone three and four? Not really do they live, but they also have full sex lives (p.238).
-Has the issue of rejection medication been solved?
-These characters must not have normal emotional states, because they couldn't if they would just allow themselves to have organs harvested with no resistance. So, what is the point of all of these pages of the characters (in the protagonist in particular) trying to sort out their emotional states, when we wouldn't expect that they would be like normal human beings anyway?
Problem 5: A couple of footnotes would have done for the American readers. (Let's remember that there are at least five times more speakers of American English than British.)
rounders? (≈baseball)
drafts? (=checkers)
bluebottle? (=Blow fly)
The penny dropped? (=it clicked)
stage whisper? (=under one's breath)
Wellingtons? (=rain boots)
hoarding? (=billboard)
******
Proof positive that the book is no good is the fact that they couldn't even make a profitable movie out of it. (Let's remember that "Dune" was a decent book and even when pieces were chopped out of it and spliced into many different movies, they still made money.)
A $15 million dollar budget (enough to hire a bunch of nice looking young white people with English accents) and a $9.9 million box office take.
Even though the same dystopian novel is never written twice, they all have similar perfume about them.
-Nancy Farmer. "House of the Scorpion." (If you know that someone is being harvested for organs, do you react to them with disgust? Contempt? )
-Lois Lowry. "The Giver" (Distancing language from death. Lowry recalls it "being released." This book calls it "completion." Lowry's book as professional "nurturers" and this book has professional "carers." )
Verdict:
Not recommended. Save your time. It was actually more fun to read certain other reviews that blowtorched the book than the book itself.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1/5 stars
"Never judge a book by its number of Amazon reviews."
*******
This book is definitely overrated.
Remember that feeling when you went to high school/undergraduate and the instructor gave you a book that was so boring that you thought you weregoing to *perish* before you got to the end?
And then the the instructor told you that you needed to read this because it is "good" literature. (Stephen King or Lee Child are infinitely more readable, but they are not "good" literature.)
That's exactly the way I felt reading this book (it sold tons of copies, had 34,000+ Amazon reviews, and even had a movie made about it).
Only the inclination to finish what I started made me finish *this* book.
Problem 1: It seems like the suspense is dragged out wwwaaayyy too much; one oblique hint, forward 10 or 12 pages, and then another.
Problem 2: The characters slip into all of these emotional states for which we don't have any reason. And since it is just one fiction book among tens of millions of others, I don't want to invest that much time trying to speculate what is the subtext of what Ishiguro is trying to tell us.
For example: The character Tommy has all of these rages that are exposited frequently, and I'm still clueless as to WHY?
Problem 3: Can we get some time devices here? We keep hearing times such as "years later" and "years ago." Are we talking about 20 years? 50 years?
Problem 4: 1001 unanswered questions.
-How do they select who should be cloned for?
-Does anybody else in the entire country know about this?
-Why does the will to live not make these people want to run away?
-If they could be engineered to be sterile and technology was in such a level, why not just biologically engineer organs for needed recipients? (It's a hell of a lot cheaper than supporting an entire human being.)
-The organs that can be transplanted are: heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, and intestines. But the thing is, you can't live without any one of these (Well, maybe, one kidney.) So, how are these clones living after two donations, let alone three and four? Not really do they live, but they also have full sex lives (p.238).
-Has the issue of rejection medication been solved?
-These characters must not have normal emotional states, because they couldn't if they would just allow themselves to have organs harvested with no resistance. So, what is the point of all of these pages of the characters (in the protagonist in particular) trying to sort out their emotional states, when we wouldn't expect that they would be like normal human beings anyway?
Problem 5: A couple of footnotes would have done for the American readers. (Let's remember that there are at least five times more speakers of American English than British.)
rounders? (≈baseball)
drafts? (=checkers)
bluebottle? (=Blow fly)
The penny dropped? (=it clicked)
stage whisper? (=under one's breath)
Wellingtons? (=rain boots)
hoarding? (=billboard)
******
Proof positive that the book is no good is the fact that they couldn't even make a profitable movie out of it. (Let's remember that "Dune" was a decent book and even when pieces were chopped out of it and spliced into many different movies, they still made money.)
A $15 million dollar budget (enough to hire a bunch of nice looking young white people with English accents) and a $9.9 million box office take.
Even though the same dystopian novel is never written twice, they all have similar perfume about them.
-Nancy Farmer. "House of the Scorpion." (If you know that someone is being harvested for organs, do you react to them with disgust? Contempt? )
-Lois Lowry. "The Giver" (Distancing language from death. Lowry recalls it "being released." This book calls it "completion." Lowry's book as professional "nurturers" and this book has professional "carers." )
Verdict:
Not recommended. Save your time. It was actually more fun to read certain other reviews that blowtorched the book than the book itself.
Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
Heaven on Earth (The Rise, Fall and Afterlife of Socialism)
Joshua Muravchik
5/5 stars
"393 pages of Communism's fatal design flaws and failed efforts to create a New Man."
*******
-393 pages/13 chapters≈30/chapter
-1008 point citations/393 pages=2.56/page.
VERY well sourced.
-≈12 hours of reading time.
Verdict: Recommended.
The author is clear that each of these 13 chapters is chosen to characterize an archetypical person in the socialist dream.
A lot of times people may speak for or against Socialism, but they don't have that much concrete material to say one way or another.
Reading a book like this will help solve that problem--or at least as much as you can remember from this book's massive bulk.
Big takeaway lesson from this book (Eric Hoffer quote): "The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless."
If somebody comes along trying to lead you in revolution, it is more likely than not that you are their self-actualization project/emotional therapy.
*******
1. Robert Babeuf. The first socialist was a product of the French Revolution; as in many cases, these socialist revolutions start out as the plaything of intellectuals - - as opposed to people that work everyday in a factory.
2. Robert Owen. The kibbutz / commune idea is not new: here is a case of it being proven to not work a full two centuries ago. (40 years before the American Civil War.) Neither is the belief in tabula rasa that would make it all possible.
3. Karl Marx ("Scientific Socialism"). Marx was a trifling bum. He never held a job a *single* day in his life. From 1851 to 1860, Engels transferred £55/annum to him--twice the yearly income of a British worker. During his lifetime, his own work was ignored and The fact that there's any memory of him is because of Engels popularization of his work.
4. Eduard Bernstein (and Vladimir Lenin). He lived long enough to see the ideas of Marx and Engels falsified by history, and at this point the question is whether or not they are treated like any other writer or as scripture. Bernstein believed the former, and Lenin believed the latter, which ultimately won out.
5. Vladimir Lenin ("Real Existing Socialism"). Details of his ascent to power and immediate pivot to brutality and suppression.
6. Mussolini+ some Hitler ("Fascism"). Fascism is his brainchild, But it is actually a product of the left and not the right (as is commonly thought these days). Mussolini started out as a socialist / anti-clericalist, and found nationalism later as a vehicle to power. Quiet as it is kept, Nazis were National Socialists.
7. Clement Atlee ("Social Democracy"). Fabian socialist. In the mold of Bentham, Mill and Owen rather than Marx and Engels. Strategy was piecemeal reform..
8. Julius Nyrere ("Ujaama"). "One party. One man, one vote, one time." He started out declaring self-reliance, but ended up being Africa's largest per capita recipient of foreign assistance. (Tanzania's GDP per capita is about $1,200 today.)
9. Samuel Gompers ("Union Card"). Gompers saw that radicals (socialists/communists/ etc) tended to co-opt labor movements for their own ends, and put as much distance between the American labor movement and the socialists as possible - - a situation that has persisted.
10. Deng Xiaoping/Mikhail Gorbachev-The first an example of successfully economic reforms, and the second an example of unsuccessful ones leading to collapse. Snippets of the brutal political conditions from the Mao years and beyond.
11. Tony Blair ("Party of Business"). Tony Blair is credited with having brought the Labor to party back to the right after successive electoral defeats. Labor à la Tony Blair≠ Labor à la Clement Atlee.
12. Israeli kibbutzim. Even the Jews couldn't make them work.
13. Afterlife. Jeremy Corbyn. Venezuela. Hugo Chavez. Xi Jinping.
Neat factoids:
1. The metric system is the only part that survived of the French attempt to decimalize everything, including months days and hours.
2. Socialism spread farther and faster than any religion. From the 1820 coinage of the word socialism until 1970, 60% of the Earth was living under socialist rule of one type or another. (Contrast this with Xtianity claiming the loyalty of 1/3 of Earth after about 20 centuries and Islam claiming about 1/4 after 13 centuries.)
3. As an example of how socialism is just another religion: When Robert Owen found out that his various collectivist projects were not going to work, he just recreated something very similar to a church. (They sang hymns and held Sunday services;They paid missionaries to missionize and called them "socialist bishops." They held seances.)
4. 58 third world states declared themselves "socialist." 7 in Asia, 13 in Latin America / Caribbean, 3 in non-African Middle East, and 35 in Africa (p.206).
5. Das Kapital had 4 volumes. The first written by Marx himself. The second and third written by Engels. And the fourth written by Eduard Bernstein.
6. Syndicalism is a variant of socialism.
7. (p.325) Tony Blair ran on a platform of "change" that was not sharply defined. In that way, B. Hussein Obama was an imitator.
8. (p.343) Amana appliances started out as a German Protestant communal sect in Iowa in the 1800s.
Second order thoughts:
1. These mass movements are also the brainchildren of wealthy people WAY more than spontaneous movements by workers.
It is amazing how many of these "revolutionaries" were either supported by their parents (Rosa Luxembourg. Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx. Leo Jogiches. Bernie Sanders.) or from wealthy families (Clement Atlee. Beatrice and Sydney Webb. Jeremy Corbyn.)
2. "And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page."
a. You have some indigenous people somewhere that have to get educated by Western/white people to become idiots. (Pol Pot. Julius Nyrere, et al).
b. You have some people somewhere co-opting of movement representing people that they themselves don't know. (Karl Marx. Robert Mugabe.)
c. You have some people in a hurry to take over a country from colonial authorities that they promptly run into the ground. (All of Africa.)
d. Socialism --> Totalitarianism as sure as night follows day. ("We just have to make this program work come even if it's at gunpoint.)
3. Socialism is not the panacea that a lot of black people think it is, most notably in its failure to do anything in Africa. Even the early labor movements (AFL-CIO) initially did not want any part of black people. (That was part of Asa Phillip Randolph's gripe.)
4. The two party system is not such because of any shadowy conspiracy. In Britain, as in the United States each party has to rediscover its message over time. Once you stop losing elections is when you know that you've gotten the message right. (It took six consecutive elections with less than 40% of the vote before Labor got it together.
5. Socialist expenses increase the further a country goes left. In the case of Russia, it was rectified without right collapse. In places like the United States/United Kingdom, people like Bill Clinton/Tony Blair presided over cutbacks of various types to social insurance.
6. With enough churn, Labor can become the "party of business" in Britain. Or how "socialism with Chinese characteristics" can be substituted for Communism. Or, how the Republican party can become the party of working people and multi-ethnic while the Democratic party becomes one for wealthy white people.
8. In a nutshell, the Enlightenment discrediting of Christianity left Europe hungering for a new faith (p.355) which they promptly used in a lot of destruction. Engelks and Marx recast it into a compelling religious faith.
Vocab:
opéra bouffe
calumnation
doughty
parastatals
trundle bed
Knights of Labor
phthisical
stinting
voluptuary
denizen
bearded
provenance
Third Way
fillip
apposite
Quotes:
(p.67). Karl Marx: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist."
(p 79). Mark's asked him to ghostwrite the articles. Engels dutifully accepted the burden, coming from his day job at the firm, where he earned money to help support Marx, to spend his evenings doing Marx's job.
(p.88). Unlike the Torah, the New Testament or the holy Quran, all of which are studied asiduously by believers, capital fulfilled his purpose just by existing. Believers could assure themselves that it contained profound evidence that their worldview was more correct than any other.
(p.220). Western socialists looked upon the Africans like parents hoping to fulfill their dreams through their children.
(p. 165) A socialism liberated from the Democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism as a well-made glove fits a beautiful hand. (Charles Maurass)
(p. 166) They were reminders of Mussolini's point that fascism was a heresy of socialism - - very much the same relationship as Christianity to Judaism or other heretical schisms.
(p. 241, S. Gompers) "I saw how professions of radicalism and sensationalism concentrated all the forces of organized society against a labor movement.... I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds have been woven the experiences of earning their bread by daily labor. I saw the danger of entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that the experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life."
(p. 252) Around 70 [Gomper's] health began to fail, forcing him to reduce his cigar consumption to 25 a day.
(p. 269) Not only did American labor contribute more than its share to the downfall of Communism, it proved to be one of the great obstacles to the global advance of socialism in any form.
(p. 277) One group of local party leaders was paraded through a village street, each man led by a rusty wire that penetrated his testicles. At the village Square all were shot. "
(p.313) Socialist ranks were fortified by erstwhile Communist who hastened to realign themselves as social democrats.
(p.318) In the British system, there are no primaries; candidates are chosen in a series of meetings.
(p. 333) The mainstream Left may pour the cream that lightens the coffee of capitalism, but they are not offering any other beverage.
(p. 354) In Jewish believe the focus of messianism is not on eternal reward but on progress toward moral perfection.
(p. 355) Most anthropologists agree that religion is universal; they have yet to discover a civilization of logical positivists. (They're 5,300 members of the American humanist association and 16 million of the Southern Baptist Convention.)
(p. 359) Part of the power of Marxism was its ability to feed religious hunger while flattering the sins of being wiser than those who gave themselves over to earn unearthly faiths.... The socialist narrative turned history into a morality play without the morality.
(p. 387, Clemenceau) Any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and any who is still a socialist at 40 has no brain.
Heaven on Earth (The Rise, Fall and Afterlife of Socialism)
Joshua Muravchik
5/5 stars
"393 pages of Communism's fatal design flaws and failed efforts to create a New Man."
*******
-393 pages/13 chapters≈30/chapter
-1008 point citations/393 pages=2.56/page.
VERY well sourced.
-≈12 hours of reading time.
Verdict: Recommended.
The author is clear that each of these 13 chapters is chosen to characterize an archetypical person in the socialist dream.
A lot of times people may speak for or against Socialism, but they don't have that much concrete material to say one way or another.
Reading a book like this will help solve that problem--or at least as much as you can remember from this book's massive bulk.
Big takeaway lesson from this book (Eric Hoffer quote): "The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless."
If somebody comes along trying to lead you in revolution, it is more likely than not that you are their self-actualization project/emotional therapy.
*******
1. Robert Babeuf. The first socialist was a product of the French Revolution; as in many cases, these socialist revolutions start out as the plaything of intellectuals - - as opposed to people that work everyday in a factory.
2. Robert Owen. The kibbutz / commune idea is not new: here is a case of it being proven to not work a full two centuries ago. (40 years before the American Civil War.) Neither is the belief in tabula rasa that would make it all possible.
3. Karl Marx ("Scientific Socialism"). Marx was a trifling bum. He never held a job a *single* day in his life. From 1851 to 1860, Engels transferred £55/annum to him--twice the yearly income of a British worker. During his lifetime, his own work was ignored and The fact that there's any memory of him is because of Engels popularization of his work.
4. Eduard Bernstein (and Vladimir Lenin). He lived long enough to see the ideas of Marx and Engels falsified by history, and at this point the question is whether or not they are treated like any other writer or as scripture. Bernstein believed the former, and Lenin believed the latter, which ultimately won out.
5. Vladimir Lenin ("Real Existing Socialism"). Details of his ascent to power and immediate pivot to brutality and suppression.
6. Mussolini+ some Hitler ("Fascism"). Fascism is his brainchild, But it is actually a product of the left and not the right (as is commonly thought these days). Mussolini started out as a socialist / anti-clericalist, and found nationalism later as a vehicle to power. Quiet as it is kept, Nazis were National Socialists.
7. Clement Atlee ("Social Democracy"). Fabian socialist. In the mold of Bentham, Mill and Owen rather than Marx and Engels. Strategy was piecemeal reform..
8. Julius Nyrere ("Ujaama"). "One party. One man, one vote, one time." He started out declaring self-reliance, but ended up being Africa's largest per capita recipient of foreign assistance. (Tanzania's GDP per capita is about $1,200 today.)
9. Samuel Gompers ("Union Card"). Gompers saw that radicals (socialists/communists/ etc) tended to co-opt labor movements for their own ends, and put as much distance between the American labor movement and the socialists as possible - - a situation that has persisted.
10. Deng Xiaoping/Mikhail Gorbachev-The first an example of successfully economic reforms, and the second an example of unsuccessful ones leading to collapse. Snippets of the brutal political conditions from the Mao years and beyond.
11. Tony Blair ("Party of Business"). Tony Blair is credited with having brought the Labor to party back to the right after successive electoral defeats. Labor à la Tony Blair≠ Labor à la Clement Atlee.
12. Israeli kibbutzim. Even the Jews couldn't make them work.
13. Afterlife. Jeremy Corbyn. Venezuela. Hugo Chavez. Xi Jinping.
Neat factoids:
1. The metric system is the only part that survived of the French attempt to decimalize everything, including months days and hours.
2. Socialism spread farther and faster than any religion. From the 1820 coinage of the word socialism until 1970, 60% of the Earth was living under socialist rule of one type or another. (Contrast this with Xtianity claiming the loyalty of 1/3 of Earth after about 20 centuries and Islam claiming about 1/4 after 13 centuries.)
3. As an example of how socialism is just another religion: When Robert Owen found out that his various collectivist projects were not going to work, he just recreated something very similar to a church. (They sang hymns and held Sunday services;They paid missionaries to missionize and called them "socialist bishops." They held seances.)
4. 58 third world states declared themselves "socialist." 7 in Asia, 13 in Latin America / Caribbean, 3 in non-African Middle East, and 35 in Africa (p.206).
5. Das Kapital had 4 volumes. The first written by Marx himself. The second and third written by Engels. And the fourth written by Eduard Bernstein.
6. Syndicalism is a variant of socialism.
7. (p.325) Tony Blair ran on a platform of "change" that was not sharply defined. In that way, B. Hussein Obama was an imitator.
8. (p.343) Amana appliances started out as a German Protestant communal sect in Iowa in the 1800s.
Second order thoughts:
1. These mass movements are also the brainchildren of wealthy people WAY more than spontaneous movements by workers.
It is amazing how many of these "revolutionaries" were either supported by their parents (Rosa Luxembourg. Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx. Leo Jogiches. Bernie Sanders.) or from wealthy families (Clement Atlee. Beatrice and Sydney Webb. Jeremy Corbyn.)
2. "And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page."
a. You have some indigenous people somewhere that have to get educated by Western/white people to become idiots. (Pol Pot. Julius Nyrere, et al).
b. You have some people somewhere co-opting of movement representing people that they themselves don't know. (Karl Marx. Robert Mugabe.)
c. You have some people in a hurry to take over a country from colonial authorities that they promptly run into the ground. (All of Africa.)
d. Socialism --> Totalitarianism as sure as night follows day. ("We just have to make this program work come even if it's at gunpoint.)
3. Socialism is not the panacea that a lot of black people think it is, most notably in its failure to do anything in Africa. Even the early labor movements (AFL-CIO) initially did not want any part of black people. (That was part of Asa Phillip Randolph's gripe.)
4. The two party system is not such because of any shadowy conspiracy. In Britain, as in the United States each party has to rediscover its message over time. Once you stop losing elections is when you know that you've gotten the message right. (It took six consecutive elections with less than 40% of the vote before Labor got it together.
5. Socialist expenses increase the further a country goes left. In the case of Russia, it was rectified without right collapse. In places like the United States/United Kingdom, people like Bill Clinton/Tony Blair presided over cutbacks of various types to social insurance.
6. With enough churn, Labor can become the "party of business" in Britain. Or how "socialism with Chinese characteristics" can be substituted for Communism. Or, how the Republican party can become the party of working people and multi-ethnic while the Democratic party becomes one for wealthy white people.
8. In a nutshell, the Enlightenment discrediting of Christianity left Europe hungering for a new faith (p.355) which they promptly used in a lot of destruction. Engelks and Marx recast it into a compelling religious faith.
Vocab:
opéra bouffe
calumnation
doughty
parastatals
trundle bed
Knights of Labor
phthisical
stinting
voluptuary
denizen
bearded
provenance
Third Way
fillip
apposite
Quotes:
(p.67). Karl Marx: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist."
(p 79). Mark's asked him to ghostwrite the articles. Engels dutifully accepted the burden, coming from his day job at the firm, where he earned money to help support Marx, to spend his evenings doing Marx's job.
(p.88). Unlike the Torah, the New Testament or the holy Quran, all of which are studied asiduously by believers, capital fulfilled his purpose just by existing. Believers could assure themselves that it contained profound evidence that their worldview was more correct than any other.
(p.220). Western socialists looked upon the Africans like parents hoping to fulfill their dreams through their children.
(p. 165) A socialism liberated from the Democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism as a well-made glove fits a beautiful hand. (Charles Maurass)
(p. 166) They were reminders of Mussolini's point that fascism was a heresy of socialism - - very much the same relationship as Christianity to Judaism or other heretical schisms.
(p. 241, S. Gompers) "I saw how professions of radicalism and sensationalism concentrated all the forces of organized society against a labor movement.... I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds have been woven the experiences of earning their bread by daily labor. I saw the danger of entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that the experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life."
(p. 252) Around 70 [Gomper's] health began to fail, forcing him to reduce his cigar consumption to 25 a day.
(p. 269) Not only did American labor contribute more than its share to the downfall of Communism, it proved to be one of the great obstacles to the global advance of socialism in any form.
(p. 277) One group of local party leaders was paraded through a village street, each man led by a rusty wire that penetrated his testicles. At the village Square all were shot. "
(p.313) Socialist ranks were fortified by erstwhile Communist who hastened to realign themselves as social democrats.
(p.318) In the British system, there are no primaries; candidates are chosen in a series of meetings.
(p. 333) The mainstream Left may pour the cream that lightens the coffee of capitalism, but they are not offering any other beverage.
(p. 354) In Jewish believe the focus of messianism is not on eternal reward but on progress toward moral perfection.
(p. 355) Most anthropologists agree that religion is universal; they have yet to discover a civilization of logical positivists. (They're 5,300 members of the American humanist association and 16 million of the Southern Baptist Convention.)
(p. 359) Part of the power of Marxism was its ability to feed religious hunger while flattering the sins of being wiser than those who gave themselves over to earn unearthly faiths.... The socialist narrative turned history into a morality play without the morality.
(p. 387, Clemenceau) Any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and any who is still a socialist at 40 has no brain.
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr
medium-paced
2.5
Book Review
The Secret Life of Groceries
3/5 stars
"Relative proportions of information and agitprop"
*******
I almost wanted to believe a lot of this book, but it is a little bit on the sensational side.
I think he is the Barbara Ehrenreich of the grocery industry. (By "Barbara Ehrenreich," I mean somebody who came in with his own pre-existing perspective and just used working people as props to support a book that had already been written in the author's mind--before a single interview--as an emotional self-actualization project.)
And I learned this when I read his chapter on truck drivers. (Over 38 pages, I counted 11 things that were factually false and another few things that were misrepresentative. Some of this might be expected when you research a book in 2015 and then actually write it 5 years later, when conditions are not the same.)
So, how many errors are in the other pages / chapters? (I know this because I'm a trucker.)
Misrepresentative:
1. He chose to show us a woman whose teeth had rotted out of her mouth and who chose to urinate in a bag in the back of the truck rather than go to a bathroom 25 ft away.
As if she is typical.
2. He showed us the way that a driver can gross $200,000 per year but have only $17,000 take home pay. But, lease purchase and owner operator are scams that
trucking companies run on people who CHOOSE NOT TO BE company drivers. (There's a sucker born every minute, so why not?)
The rate for over the road company truck drivers is about 65 cents per mile. A leisurely 46 weeks out (home 2-2.5 days per week and off 6 weeks per year) at 2,500 miles per week is a $75,000 salary. 50 weeks out (home 2 days per week) at 3000 miles per week is more like $97,000 per year.
Let me just go through some of the things that the author put on paper that were frankly false. (Only for this chapter.)
1. (79) "A trapper keeper serves as her logbook."
NO. Paper logs have been finished for several years. It's all electronic now.
2. (82) ".. pressure in your landing gear, or the temperature of your brake lines."
NO. There is no pressure in your landing gear. Hence no gauge for it
3. (82) "... The unwillingness to get out of the cab to stroll around."
NO. No truck driver needs to be encouraged to go out and get some fresh air.
4. (85) "... boasting the highest total number of deaths per year of any job."
NO. Logging workers have 101 deaths per 100,000. Truck drivers have 30.4 per 100,000.
5. (90) ".... quarter tank Lynne estimates she loses when we idle overnight."
NO. Trucks burn about 3/4 of a gallon of diesel per hour when they idle. 10 hours is 7.5 gallons. A quarter of a tank would be 67.5 gallons. At the rate of $4 per gallon, all trucking companies would put their drivers in hotels overnight to save on fuel. (They could put you in a $200 room and still end up way ahead.)
6. (95) ".... Trainer at one of the larger companies.... When describing his attempts to weed out substance abusers."
NO. All CDL holders have urinalysis drug testing as a condition of getting their license, and every time you hire a company you have to take the same test, and you can expect to be tested between 4 and 12 times per year. Failing any one of those tests is grounds for immediate loss of job.
7. (98) "..... After the 8th week, they shift to team driving"
NO. When you go out with a trainer, You can expect the training to last about 6 weeks and you get paid and progressive jumps every 2 weeks. Probably start at $500 and finish at $750 these days
8. (100) "Half the time there is a blowout, a fist fight, a brawl in the cab And they leave the freight in the middle of nowhere."
NO. All trucks and trailers are GPS tracked, even back then. Nothing can be left anywhere.
9. (103) "DAC report."
NO. 90% of companies don't use it, and the ones that do are training ones.
10. (103) "... hundreds of miles away from help or cell phone reception."
NO. Can you tell me a single place in the United States that is "hundreds of miles away" from cell phone reception?
11. (105) "Every woman I spoke with had a story of an abusive trainer, one who assaulted them, harassed them, threatened to rape them, or did one of those things to a friend."
NO. Women are NEVER sent out with male trainers, and have not been for at least the 20 years that I have had my license.
Second order thoughts:
1. The rubber has to meet the road at some point. Price of labor (or any other price) can exist at market clearing levels; if the price is too low you'll get a scarcity, and if it's too high you'll get it shortage.
It's nice that the author tries to turn this into a morality play of Big Evil Corporations/ Heartless Industries against Valiant Workers..... But all these things are more parsimoniously / non-normatively explained by basic Economic concepts.
If a customer sees milk at Walmart for $2.25 and $2.99 at Kroger, then all the information that he needs to know about ALL details is contained in those prices.
2. Questionable information quality notwithstanding, the book unintentionally shows the reader that from conception to successful execution of a product requires many steps with actual risk. And that the silent evidence of the people that do not succeed is overwhelming.
3. (224) "The trade-off is one we accept almost unconsciously. After all, as the cliché goes, out of sight, out of mind." This phrase seems to be a rehashing of Marx's "theory of worker alienation." But the question is: if you purchase 20 things per week and each of them has a thousand steps... How many do you need to understand? 1,000? 5,000? And once you do understand the steps, then what?
4. Even Paul Krugman knows this: Jobs at low wages are better than no jobs at all.
So, the chapter about the Burmese migrants could be reinterpreted to explain the incentives of the working men from a country that is war-torn and unstable finding that their best options were on Thai fishing boats.
Verdict:
Recommended at the price of about $5. Not worth keeping. Not worth rereading.
Vocabulary:
sophrosyne
vista
daps and pounds
pinner joint
chthonic
SKU (shop keeping units)
benthic
trawl
thanaka
peeling shed
aquaculture
Factoids:
(134) 20,000 new products hit the shelf each year. 89% of those fail within 18 months.
(138) The cost of national rollout for even a single frozen SKU [product] is about $1.5 million.
(?) Profit margins at grocery stores≈1.5%
(9) The average store has 32,000 SKUs. The biggest have 120,000. (70) A typical Aldi holds only 280.
Minor quibble
(p.55) "He studied fair trade regulations like it was midrash, digesting thousands of pages of law, case law, and legal commentary... "
NO. When people study case law (in a Jewish context, since that context was presumably the purpose of his throwing in the word "Midrash"), what they study is Mishna / Gemara.
The Secret Life of Groceries
3/5 stars
"Relative proportions of information and agitprop"
*******
I almost wanted to believe a lot of this book, but it is a little bit on the sensational side.
I think he is the Barbara Ehrenreich of the grocery industry. (By "Barbara Ehrenreich," I mean somebody who came in with his own pre-existing perspective and just used working people as props to support a book that had already been written in the author's mind--before a single interview--as an emotional self-actualization project.)
And I learned this when I read his chapter on truck drivers. (Over 38 pages, I counted 11 things that were factually false and another few things that were misrepresentative. Some of this might be expected when you research a book in 2015 and then actually write it 5 years later, when conditions are not the same.)
So, how many errors are in the other pages / chapters? (I know this because I'm a trucker.)
Misrepresentative:
1. He chose to show us a woman whose teeth had rotted out of her mouth and who chose to urinate in a bag in the back of the truck rather than go to a bathroom 25 ft away.
As if she is typical.
2. He showed us the way that a driver can gross $200,000 per year but have only $17,000 take home pay. But, lease purchase and owner operator are scams that
trucking companies run on people who CHOOSE NOT TO BE company drivers. (There's a sucker born every minute, so why not?)
The rate for over the road company truck drivers is about 65 cents per mile. A leisurely 46 weeks out (home 2-2.5 days per week and off 6 weeks per year) at 2,500 miles per week is a $75,000 salary. 50 weeks out (home 2 days per week) at 3000 miles per week is more like $97,000 per year.
Let me just go through some of the things that the author put on paper that were frankly false. (Only for this chapter.)
1. (79) "A trapper keeper serves as her logbook."
NO. Paper logs have been finished for several years. It's all electronic now.
2. (82) ".. pressure in your landing gear, or the temperature of your brake lines."
NO. There is no pressure in your landing gear. Hence no gauge for it
3. (82) "... The unwillingness to get out of the cab to stroll around."
NO. No truck driver needs to be encouraged to go out and get some fresh air.
4. (85) "... boasting the highest total number of deaths per year of any job."
NO. Logging workers have 101 deaths per 100,000. Truck drivers have 30.4 per 100,000.
5. (90) ".... quarter tank Lynne estimates she loses when we idle overnight."
NO. Trucks burn about 3/4 of a gallon of diesel per hour when they idle. 10 hours is 7.5 gallons. A quarter of a tank would be 67.5 gallons. At the rate of $4 per gallon, all trucking companies would put their drivers in hotels overnight to save on fuel. (They could put you in a $200 room and still end up way ahead.)
6. (95) ".... Trainer at one of the larger companies.... When describing his attempts to weed out substance abusers."
NO. All CDL holders have urinalysis drug testing as a condition of getting their license, and every time you hire a company you have to take the same test, and you can expect to be tested between 4 and 12 times per year. Failing any one of those tests is grounds for immediate loss of job.
7. (98) "..... After the 8th week, they shift to team driving"
NO. When you go out with a trainer, You can expect the training to last about 6 weeks and you get paid and progressive jumps every 2 weeks. Probably start at $500 and finish at $750 these days
8. (100) "Half the time there is a blowout, a fist fight, a brawl in the cab And they leave the freight in the middle of nowhere."
NO. All trucks and trailers are GPS tracked, even back then. Nothing can be left anywhere.
9. (103) "DAC report."
NO. 90% of companies don't use it, and the ones that do are training ones.
10. (103) "... hundreds of miles away from help or cell phone reception."
NO. Can you tell me a single place in the United States that is "hundreds of miles away" from cell phone reception?
11. (105) "Every woman I spoke with had a story of an abusive trainer, one who assaulted them, harassed them, threatened to rape them, or did one of those things to a friend."
NO. Women are NEVER sent out with male trainers, and have not been for at least the 20 years that I have had my license.
Second order thoughts:
1. The rubber has to meet the road at some point. Price of labor (or any other price) can exist at market clearing levels; if the price is too low you'll get a scarcity, and if it's too high you'll get it shortage.
It's nice that the author tries to turn this into a morality play of Big Evil Corporations/ Heartless Industries against Valiant Workers..... But all these things are more parsimoniously / non-normatively explained by basic Economic concepts.
If a customer sees milk at Walmart for $2.25 and $2.99 at Kroger, then all the information that he needs to know about ALL details is contained in those prices.
2. Questionable information quality notwithstanding, the book unintentionally shows the reader that from conception to successful execution of a product requires many steps with actual risk. And that the silent evidence of the people that do not succeed is overwhelming.
3. (224) "The trade-off is one we accept almost unconsciously. After all, as the cliché goes, out of sight, out of mind." This phrase seems to be a rehashing of Marx's "theory of worker alienation." But the question is: if you purchase 20 things per week and each of them has a thousand steps... How many do you need to understand? 1,000? 5,000? And once you do understand the steps, then what?
4. Even Paul Krugman knows this: Jobs at low wages are better than no jobs at all.
So, the chapter about the Burmese migrants could be reinterpreted to explain the incentives of the working men from a country that is war-torn and unstable finding that their best options were on Thai fishing boats.
Verdict:
Recommended at the price of about $5. Not worth keeping. Not worth rereading.
Vocabulary:
sophrosyne
vista
daps and pounds
pinner joint
chthonic
SKU (shop keeping units)
benthic
trawl
thanaka
peeling shed
aquaculture
Factoids:
(134) 20,000 new products hit the shelf each year. 89% of those fail within 18 months.
(138) The cost of national rollout for even a single frozen SKU [product] is about $1.5 million.
(?) Profit margins at grocery stores≈1.5%
(9) The average store has 32,000 SKUs. The biggest have 120,000. (70) A typical Aldi holds only 280.
Minor quibble
(p.55) "He studied fair trade regulations like it was midrash, digesting thousands of pages of law, case law, and legal commentary... "
NO. When people study case law (in a Jewish context, since that context was presumably the purpose of his throwing in the word "Midrash"), what they study is Mishna / Gemara.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
2.5
Book Review
Three Body Problem
3/5 stars
"Yet another banality from the invasion literature genre"
*******
Yes, variations on this theme have been written so many times that there is an entire genre called "invasion literature." (War of the Worlds. Independence Day. Dune. Planet of the Apes.)
One thing that I've learned from this reading is that: when a book is advertised to be an award winner of some type, you should probably check and see some of the other books that have won the award so you will know what type of company you are keeping. (No matter how many copies have been sold or how popular the title is.)
Oprah's Book club recognitions, for example, are near perfect predictors of trash books. (That sell a lot of copies and are popular because of Oprah's branding.)
The Hugo Award has been given since 1953, and of the list of 51 books to date I've read one other ("Dune") in addition to the book being reviewed.
"Dune" was a three-star book, that had too many abstruse references for all but a very few to recognize. (קפיצת הדרך links up to a bunch of Jewish sources that even probably 95% of Jews don't know about). At the end, the author's son gave something like a decoding essay to explain the symbolism / concepts.
And after you have labored through such a plot (either that book or this one), what do you have except for something that never existed in reality but is wrapped in a bunch of scientific-like concepts? (That you may or may not have understood, and that may or may not have some basis in reality.)
It's a lot of old wine in new bottles for this book.
1. There is a lot of discussion of the Chinese emperors and famous figures
Qin Shi Huang shows up in chapter 17
I have yet to meet a SINGLE non-Chinese person who knows who that was, let alone how brutal he was; But if you do know that, then you know that he can scripted huge amounts of corvee labor to do his various projects, and the game with creating the computer using 30 million subjects could probably have only been done by him.
2. There are a lot of proverbs that only make sense to someone with familiarity of the Chinese language.
-(215) 焚書坑儒 "Burn the books and bury the scholars" is quoted as "When you buried all those scholars alive after you unified China, it's a good thing you saved these ones!"
-(215) 圖窮匕現 "When the scroll is unrolled, the dagger is revealed" is quoted as "Wang's chest tightened, remembering the legend of the assassin who hid a dagger in a map scroll that he then displayed to the emperor."
-(229) 顛倒黑白 "You're standing reality on its head" comes as "You're calling black white and white black"
-(132) 一根直肠通到底 "I'm a straight shooter" comes out as "Look down my throat and you can see out my ass."
3. There is a lot that ONLY makes sense in light of the Chinese conceptual space: some civilization somewhere making the same mistakes OVER AND OVER and being fully aware of it. Even though millions of years pass from one of these civilizations to the next, and it is a few decades, at most, from one Chinese dynasty to the next.
4. Study of the Cultural Revolution is a thing in its own right; To expect people to know a lot about this hysterical, brutal, pointless, shameful 10-year episode in Chinese history (1966-1976).... It's kind of a lot to ask.
*******
For the life of me, I can't understand why this book sold as many copies as it did; on the other hand, I don't really understand why "Dune" did the same - - though it sold fewer copies than this book.
Second order thoughts:
1. If it is done well, a book can have several layers / subplots, and different readers will notice different things. Such that two people can read an entirely different book.
But, the topics have to be approachable enough for that to happen, and I just don't see that here.
2. Is the game that: "Wow! I can recognize certain of these esoteric concepts, so I must be a really important guy!"
And that is what hooks the reader - - even though he may have only picked up on 1 or 2 out of 100 symbols/allusions?
3. Does anybody expect a reader to track down the other 98-99, and do all that leg work? And, just, ain't nobody got time for that?
4. Several possible (allegorical) readings of this book:
a. The way that educated/wealthy people are completely out of touch with the other 99.9% of the world. The most destructive mass movements (Communism, Mohism, Transgender hysteria, etc) ALWAYS start with the cognoscenti and the costs are borne by the hoi polloi. (Eric Hoffer has said that: "Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams." )
b. A political / religious movement auto-generating with the purest of intentions and degenerating into a bunch of squabbling factions.
c. Yet-Another-Apocalypse will lead us to Utopia. The world is irredeemably spoiled and we will arrive at Utopia once everything is torn down and the New Man makes it all new. (The Marxist. The Nazis. The Islamists. Etc.)
5. How accurate is the science? Most people are not physicists, and most physicists are not of this type - - so how plausible is it really?
I have only an extremely inchoate understanding of some concepts of particle physics. No way to know one way or another How much of this is observed versus speculation.
Verdict: Not recommended
*******
Quotes:
(218, Qin Shi Huang) Europeans criticize me for my tyrannical rule.... But in reality, a large number of men yoked by severe discipline can also produce great wisdom when bound together as one.
(395, author postscript) There's a strange contradiction revealed by the notification and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: on Earth, human can can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite. Let's turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth.
(393) The great flood of August 75... In a single day, 100.5 centimeters of rain fell in the Zhumadian region of Henan. 58 dams of various sizes collapsed, one after another, and 240,000 people died in the resulting deluge.
Vocab:
syzygy
princeps
Three Body Problem
3/5 stars
"Yet another banality from the invasion literature genre"
*******
Yes, variations on this theme have been written so many times that there is an entire genre called "invasion literature." (War of the Worlds. Independence Day. Dune. Planet of the Apes.)
One thing that I've learned from this reading is that: when a book is advertised to be an award winner of some type, you should probably check and see some of the other books that have won the award so you will know what type of company you are keeping. (No matter how many copies have been sold or how popular the title is.)
Oprah's Book club recognitions, for example, are near perfect predictors of trash books. (That sell a lot of copies and are popular because of Oprah's branding.)
The Hugo Award has been given since 1953, and of the list of 51 books to date I've read one other ("Dune") in addition to the book being reviewed.
"Dune" was a three-star book, that had too many abstruse references for all but a very few to recognize. (קפיצת הדרך links up to a bunch of Jewish sources that even probably 95% of Jews don't know about). At the end, the author's son gave something like a decoding essay to explain the symbolism / concepts.
And after you have labored through such a plot (either that book or this one), what do you have except for something that never existed in reality but is wrapped in a bunch of scientific-like concepts? (That you may or may not have understood, and that may or may not have some basis in reality.)
It's a lot of old wine in new bottles for this book.
1. There is a lot of discussion of the Chinese emperors and famous figures
Qin Shi Huang shows up in chapter 17
I have yet to meet a SINGLE non-Chinese person who knows who that was, let alone how brutal he was; But if you do know that, then you know that he can scripted huge amounts of corvee labor to do his various projects, and the game with creating the computer using 30 million subjects could probably have only been done by him.
2. There are a lot of proverbs that only make sense to someone with familiarity of the Chinese language.
-(215) 焚書坑儒 "Burn the books and bury the scholars" is quoted as "When you buried all those scholars alive after you unified China, it's a good thing you saved these ones!"
-(215) 圖窮匕現 "When the scroll is unrolled, the dagger is revealed" is quoted as "Wang's chest tightened, remembering the legend of the assassin who hid a dagger in a map scroll that he then displayed to the emperor."
-(229) 顛倒黑白 "You're standing reality on its head" comes as "You're calling black white and white black"
-(132) 一根直肠通到底 "I'm a straight shooter" comes out as "Look down my throat and you can see out my ass."
3. There is a lot that ONLY makes sense in light of the Chinese conceptual space: some civilization somewhere making the same mistakes OVER AND OVER and being fully aware of it. Even though millions of years pass from one of these civilizations to the next, and it is a few decades, at most, from one Chinese dynasty to the next.
4. Study of the Cultural Revolution is a thing in its own right; To expect people to know a lot about this hysterical, brutal, pointless, shameful 10-year episode in Chinese history (1966-1976).... It's kind of a lot to ask.
*******
For the life of me, I can't understand why this book sold as many copies as it did; on the other hand, I don't really understand why "Dune" did the same - - though it sold fewer copies than this book.
Second order thoughts:
1. If it is done well, a book can have several layers / subplots, and different readers will notice different things. Such that two people can read an entirely different book.
But, the topics have to be approachable enough for that to happen, and I just don't see that here.
2. Is the game that: "Wow! I can recognize certain of these esoteric concepts, so I must be a really important guy!"
And that is what hooks the reader - - even though he may have only picked up on 1 or 2 out of 100 symbols/allusions?
3. Does anybody expect a reader to track down the other 98-99, and do all that leg work? And, just, ain't nobody got time for that?
4. Several possible (allegorical) readings of this book:
a. The way that educated/wealthy people are completely out of touch with the other 99.9% of the world. The most destructive mass movements (Communism, Mohism, Transgender hysteria, etc) ALWAYS start with the cognoscenti and the costs are borne by the hoi polloi. (Eric Hoffer has said that: "Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams." )
b. A political / religious movement auto-generating with the purest of intentions and degenerating into a bunch of squabbling factions.
c. Yet-Another-Apocalypse will lead us to Utopia. The world is irredeemably spoiled and we will arrive at Utopia once everything is torn down and the New Man makes it all new. (The Marxist. The Nazis. The Islamists. Etc.)
5. How accurate is the science? Most people are not physicists, and most physicists are not of this type - - so how plausible is it really?
I have only an extremely inchoate understanding of some concepts of particle physics. No way to know one way or another How much of this is observed versus speculation.
Verdict: Not recommended
*******
Quotes:
(218, Qin Shi Huang) Europeans criticize me for my tyrannical rule.... But in reality, a large number of men yoked by severe discipline can also produce great wisdom when bound together as one.
(395, author postscript) There's a strange contradiction revealed by the notification and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: on Earth, human can can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite. Let's turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth.
(393) The great flood of August 75... In a single day, 100.5 centimeters of rain fell in the Zhumadian region of Henan. 58 dams of various sizes collapsed, one after another, and 240,000 people died in the resulting deluge.
Vocab:
syzygy
princeps
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
hopeful
informative
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Atomic Habits
5/5 stars
"The 2018 version of Covey's '7 Habits.....'"
*******
This book is already sold 15 million copies, so I don't think I can add much more to the 134,000 plus reviews that have already been posted on Amazon.
Just a few general points:
This book reminds me of "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" - - to the point of being even about the same topic (habits).
It also has resonances to that book in the fact that ZERO information here is new, but this old wine is repackaged in beautiful new bottles that make it all the more palatable.
This book is not one that needs to be read and gotten rid of right away.
I have a colleague who has actually read this book three times.
The first time is probably to get a first pass grip on the ideas.
The second time would be to map the strategies onto some habits that you want to correct.
And the third time would probably be to check and see how well your project went and where there is any leakage.
Of the book:
-20 chapters over ≈240 pages of prose
-estimated about 240 points citations (Well sourced)
-Very easy reading. Great writing and Great narrative arc.
Verdict: Strongly recommended.
Atomic Habits
5/5 stars
"The 2018 version of Covey's '7 Habits.....'"
*******
This book is already sold 15 million copies, so I don't think I can add much more to the 134,000 plus reviews that have already been posted on Amazon.
Just a few general points:
This book reminds me of "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" - - to the point of being even about the same topic (habits).
It also has resonances to that book in the fact that ZERO information here is new, but this old wine is repackaged in beautiful new bottles that make it all the more palatable.
This book is not one that needs to be read and gotten rid of right away.
I have a colleague who has actually read this book three times.
The first time is probably to get a first pass grip on the ideas.
The second time would be to map the strategies onto some habits that you want to correct.
And the third time would probably be to check and see how well your project went and where there is any leakage.
Of the book:
-20 chapters over ≈240 pages of prose
-estimated about 240 points citations (Well sourced)
-Very easy reading. Great writing and Great narrative arc.
Verdict: Strongly recommended.
Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Leonard Sax
dark
informative
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Boys Adrift
Leonard Sax
5/5 stars
"Some dated things; Some time-independent wisdom."
*******
This book is the second of this topic that I have read (the first being "Of Boys and Men," by Richard Reeves). And it is pertinent to me because I have a house full of sons.
∆The first thought is that if I could raise responsible, self-directed alpha sons, then the market is WIDE OPEN for them. (The author quotes [p.172] David Gilmore that "culturally defined competence.... leads to reproductive success.")
I know an alpha-male type black guy (he is a master builder). He has 7 children by 5 women. (All white.) I have a white coworker who has 6 children by 6 women. (All black.)
It would be better if my sons did it the "right way" and got married and raised a house full of children; it is more important that the grandchildren get here than that they get here correctly.
∆The second thought is that the situation has metastasized far worse than the author could ever have dreamed when he wrote this book about 18 years ago: these days, we can't even define what a boy / girl is, *let alone* work forward from the definition to address problems.
If I had to choose the most important points, they would probably be:
1. Parochial school is not only not a bad idea. It may, in fact, be essential. (Ideally, single sex to account for the different learning styles that a lot of young men have.)
2. It is necessary for young men (and young women as well) to have proper role models, as well as rituals that create a proper breaking point between childhood and adulthood.
The author himself writes one chapter for each major factor:
1. Single sex school
2. Lay off/severely curtail the video games
3. Use ADHD medication judiciously, if at all
4. Be careful of toxins in plastics
5. Make use of cultural constructs that are longest lived.
Factoids:
1. If a child has ADHD, it is worth considering what type of medicine one uses. Does one use a stimulant, which has the possibility of side effects much later? Or does one use something like Strattera?
2. People have known about environmental estrogens for some time, but more due diligence is necessary.
Second order thoughts:
1. This author is one of these American intellectuals for whom All Things Good And True are in Europe (p.28,189, etc). But, in spite of all of this, governments over there don't seem to be able to get their citizens to have children in order to fill up the schools. (EU Total Fertility Rate: 1.46; US: 1.78; Finland: 1.26; Germany: 1.35; Switzerland: 1.39.)
I don't know what it means to say that "they WOULD have the perfect education system if they could just convince people to have babies to send to school"?
2. Western civilization such as it is is very experimental. And many other authors have brought forward the "Lindy effect" (most notably Nassim Nicholas Taleb): something can be expected to survive as long as it has survived. So, the concept of Social Security (that upsets the extended cooperation of families over several generations) is only a century old, and much shorter lived than more traditional arrangements. ADC / welfare is about half a century old, and it was known In the United States by the time of The Clinton Administration that it had to be pared back.
If something is experimental then, by definition, it has to be falsified by catastrophic failure. And this is neither good nor bad; it just is.
4. The author observes (p.168) "There is no enduring culture in which cowardly men are esteemed, or in which brave men are held in contempt. There is no enduring culture in which lazy men are celebrated while hardworking men are despised."
But that is just the situation that we have in the West. (Thomas Sowell: "Those who produce are demonized. Those who refuse to produce are subsidized. Those who complain are canonized." Same author has also mentioned the downgrading of the military as a profession.)
Is the author telling us that Western civilization was an experiment that's run its course, and there's nothing we can do about it?
Is there anything that we could do about it if we wanted to? You cannot explain these concepts to more than 1 person out of every 100,000.
5. The best use of this book is as a cautionary tale: to try your best to make sure that this does not happen to you and your children. Or, maybe if it didn't work out too well for you, this is your explanation as to why.
6. We actually already have a lot of this stuff down by dint of following a tradition. (Orthodox Jewish.)
No TV? ✅
No video games? ✅
Computer time is limited to 30 minutes per day? ✅
Private school? ✅
Sporting events/activities? ✅
Encourage in person social interaction? ✅
7. The author says that a lot of boys imagine that sitting in class is "stupid." In the years since this book has been published, the scam is up about higher education.
Start boys in school 2 years later, they graduate college two years later than girls the same age, and then find out two years later What girls already knew? (That college degrees are toilet paper.)
Verdict: recommended at the second hand price.
Quotes:
1. (197) A good place to talk with your son is in the car, with you driving and your son In the passenger seat: shoulder to shoulder, not face to face.
2. (172) Culturally defined competence leads to reproductive success.
Boys Adrift
Leonard Sax
5/5 stars
"Some dated things; Some time-independent wisdom."
*******
This book is the second of this topic that I have read (the first being "Of Boys and Men," by Richard Reeves). And it is pertinent to me because I have a house full of sons.
∆The first thought is that if I could raise responsible, self-directed alpha sons, then the market is WIDE OPEN for them. (The author quotes [p.172] David Gilmore that "culturally defined competence.... leads to reproductive success.")
I know an alpha-male type black guy (he is a master builder). He has 7 children by 5 women. (All white.) I have a white coworker who has 6 children by 6 women. (All black.)
It would be better if my sons did it the "right way" and got married and raised a house full of children; it is more important that the grandchildren get here than that they get here correctly.
∆The second thought is that the situation has metastasized far worse than the author could ever have dreamed when he wrote this book about 18 years ago: these days, we can't even define what a boy / girl is, *let alone* work forward from the definition to address problems.
If I had to choose the most important points, they would probably be:
1. Parochial school is not only not a bad idea. It may, in fact, be essential. (Ideally, single sex to account for the different learning styles that a lot of young men have.)
2. It is necessary for young men (and young women as well) to have proper role models, as well as rituals that create a proper breaking point between childhood and adulthood.
The author himself writes one chapter for each major factor:
1. Single sex school
2. Lay off/severely curtail the video games
3. Use ADHD medication judiciously, if at all
4. Be careful of toxins in plastics
5. Make use of cultural constructs that are longest lived.
Factoids:
1. If a child has ADHD, it is worth considering what type of medicine one uses. Does one use a stimulant, which has the possibility of side effects much later? Or does one use something like Strattera?
2. People have known about environmental estrogens for some time, but more due diligence is necessary.
Second order thoughts:
1. This author is one of these American intellectuals for whom All Things Good And True are in Europe (p.28,189, etc). But, in spite of all of this, governments over there don't seem to be able to get their citizens to have children in order to fill up the schools. (EU Total Fertility Rate: 1.46; US: 1.78; Finland: 1.26; Germany: 1.35; Switzerland: 1.39.)
I don't know what it means to say that "they WOULD have the perfect education system if they could just convince people to have babies to send to school"?
2. Western civilization such as it is is very experimental. And many other authors have brought forward the "Lindy effect" (most notably Nassim Nicholas Taleb): something can be expected to survive as long as it has survived. So, the concept of Social Security (that upsets the extended cooperation of families over several generations) is only a century old, and much shorter lived than more traditional arrangements. ADC / welfare is about half a century old, and it was known In the United States by the time of The Clinton Administration that it had to be pared back.
If something is experimental then, by definition, it has to be falsified by catastrophic failure. And this is neither good nor bad; it just is.
4. The author observes (p.168) "There is no enduring culture in which cowardly men are esteemed, or in which brave men are held in contempt. There is no enduring culture in which lazy men are celebrated while hardworking men are despised."
But that is just the situation that we have in the West. (Thomas Sowell: "Those who produce are demonized. Those who refuse to produce are subsidized. Those who complain are canonized." Same author has also mentioned the downgrading of the military as a profession.)
Is the author telling us that Western civilization was an experiment that's run its course, and there's nothing we can do about it?
Is there anything that we could do about it if we wanted to? You cannot explain these concepts to more than 1 person out of every 100,000.
5. The best use of this book is as a cautionary tale: to try your best to make sure that this does not happen to you and your children. Or, maybe if it didn't work out too well for you, this is your explanation as to why.
6. We actually already have a lot of this stuff down by dint of following a tradition. (Orthodox Jewish.)
No TV? ✅
No video games? ✅
Computer time is limited to 30 minutes per day? ✅
Private school? ✅
Sporting events/activities? ✅
Encourage in person social interaction? ✅
7. The author says that a lot of boys imagine that sitting in class is "stupid." In the years since this book has been published, the scam is up about higher education.
Start boys in school 2 years later, they graduate college two years later than girls the same age, and then find out two years later What girls already knew? (That college degrees are toilet paper.)
Verdict: recommended at the second hand price.
Quotes:
1. (197) A good place to talk with your son is in the car, with you driving and your son In the passenger seat: shoulder to shoulder, not face to face.
2. (172) Culturally defined competence leads to reproductive success.
The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
"The End of Race Politics"
Coleman Hughes
"These things are not new, but bear repeating"
*******
Verdict: Recommended.
Of the book:
-6 chapters over 181 pages.
-A couple of afternoons of reading
-4 appendices (observational vs experimental studies/review of expert testimony in Brown v. Board of Education/ Why the word "post-racial" is avoided in this text/ basics of population genetics.)
*******
I read this book because I wanted an introduction to the mind of Coleman Hughes--an impressive, articulate up-and-coming conservative--who has great guests on his podcasts.
Hughes reminds me of a young Thomas Sowell --almost nothing that he states is not something that I have not read in one or another of Sowell's many books. (And if not him, then Eric Hoffer.)
To be sure, he is a disciplined thinker in the way that both of them are--And he does admit to getting feedback from many very good minds (Sam Harris / John McWhorter/Jonathan Haidt/Nile Ferguson/Douglas Murray, among many others.)
A couple of novel things that I DO get from this book are that:
1. Freedom of speech of today is NOT the same thing as free speech of two centuries ago because of the internet. It has been said that "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," But that really is the case given that the transmission of information is almost instantaneous and does not have to go through any filters.
2. A synopsis of the series of fallacies that neo-racists commit.
a. The disparity fallacy. Racial disparities provide direct evidence of systemic racism
b. The myth of undoing the past. New acts of racial discrimination can undo the effects of past racial discrimination.
c. The myth of no progress. American side is made no progress combating racism since the Civil Rights movement.
d. The myth of inherited trauma. Black people who are alive today inherit the trauma that was inflicted on their enslaved ancestors.
e. The myth of superior knowledge. The knowledge that people of color have about racism is superior to any knowledge about racism that a white person could have.
f. The racial ad hominem. You can dismiss any claims about race and racism that white people make simply because they are white.
*******
If I had to reduce this book to two sentences, they would be something like:
1. (p.177) "If racism were eliminated from society, neoracists would be out of a job: They'd no longer have anyone or anything to accuse; their agenda would lose social relevance, and they'd no longer be able to garner the cultural power they crave. It's only by perpetuating interracial hatred - - by continuing to make old racial wounds seem fresh.... that neoracists can continue getting what they want."
2. "The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them." (Mark Twain) So, I guess the radical thing maybe from the time of Reconstruction up until The Affirmative Action Era was color blindness. Now the national obsession with race has made it such that color-blindness is actually a conservative idea.
Second order thoughts/questions:
1. Given the IQ difference between whites and blacks, the latter may never achieve income parity. What are we going to do with this? Will neoracists have jobs in perpetuity?
2. It has been known for a long time that "What the intellectual craves in his innermost being is to turn the whole globe into a classroom and the world’s population into a class of docile pupils hanging onto the words of the chosen teacher." (Hoffer). My question is: Why do such people always go looking for black people as dupes? Their actions really make one believe that they have doxastic commitment to the idea that blacks are low-hanging fruit/easy prey.
3. If you have a country tear itself apart that's already very racially mixed, what does that look like? A Civil War? A bloodless divorce, like Czechoslovakia? A Chinese style decline of several centuries?
Can this be arrested? Or is it inherent? (I hope to hear some thoughts about this question in a Yascha Mounk book that I have sitting on my shelf about the same topic.)
*******
Factoids:
(128) The KKK had about 3,000 members nationwide in 2016, compared to a million a century ago. For comparison: the flat Earth society has a membership of 3,500 people.
(133) Beginning with the conquests of Muhammad, Arabs enslaved as many as 14 million Africans over a period of about a thousand years. To this day, a common colloquial word for black person in Arabic is "slave."
(112) 80% of the world's pianists are Chinese. There are many chess grandmasters from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but none from Japan.
(117) Chinese earn $1.18 on the median white dollar, while Hmong earn $0.52 - - even though they are both Asian. Asian Indians earn $1.50 for every dollar earned by white Americans, and Bengalis earn $0.65--Even though they are both South Asian Indian.
Quotes:
(132) Normally when someone demands an apology, they actually want one. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes the ability to continue demanding the apology is worth more than the apology itself. Sometimes the debt is worth more paid than unpaid.
(123) We can end current systems of injustice. We can compensate living victims of injustice. But we're not omnipotent. We can't undo the past or compensate the dead.
(176) I dread the possibility of black identity becoming tied to a rehearsed sense of victimhood.
(167) The original vision for affirmative action was forward to serve as training wheels on the path to a color blind society.
(161) Equity by fiat is merely the illusion of equity.
(158) Cycles of ethnic violence around the world show us again and again that a society doesn't overcome injustice by creating new forms of it.
(150) If we are considering wealth to be a proxy for economic power, then we must contend with the fact that the majority of Americans of every race have basically no economic power whatsoever..... How do you, as an individual, benefit from the fact that people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos belong to the same race as you?
(145) Neo racists depict black people as being emotionally fragile - - almost like children.
"The End of Race Politics"
Coleman Hughes
"These things are not new, but bear repeating"
*******
Verdict: Recommended.
Of the book:
-6 chapters over 181 pages.
-A couple of afternoons of reading
-4 appendices (observational vs experimental studies/review of expert testimony in Brown v. Board of Education/ Why the word "post-racial" is avoided in this text/ basics of population genetics.)
*******
I read this book because I wanted an introduction to the mind of Coleman Hughes--an impressive, articulate up-and-coming conservative--who has great guests on his podcasts.
Hughes reminds me of a young Thomas Sowell --almost nothing that he states is not something that I have not read in one or another of Sowell's many books. (And if not him, then Eric Hoffer.)
To be sure, he is a disciplined thinker in the way that both of them are--And he does admit to getting feedback from many very good minds (Sam Harris / John McWhorter/Jonathan Haidt/Nile Ferguson/Douglas Murray, among many others.)
A couple of novel things that I DO get from this book are that:
1. Freedom of speech of today is NOT the same thing as free speech of two centuries ago because of the internet. It has been said that "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," But that really is the case given that the transmission of information is almost instantaneous and does not have to go through any filters.
2. A synopsis of the series of fallacies that neo-racists commit.
a. The disparity fallacy. Racial disparities provide direct evidence of systemic racism
b. The myth of undoing the past. New acts of racial discrimination can undo the effects of past racial discrimination.
c. The myth of no progress. American side is made no progress combating racism since the Civil Rights movement.
d. The myth of inherited trauma. Black people who are alive today inherit the trauma that was inflicted on their enslaved ancestors.
e. The myth of superior knowledge. The knowledge that people of color have about racism is superior to any knowledge about racism that a white person could have.
f. The racial ad hominem. You can dismiss any claims about race and racism that white people make simply because they are white.
*******
If I had to reduce this book to two sentences, they would be something like:
1. (p.177) "If racism were eliminated from society, neoracists would be out of a job: They'd no longer have anyone or anything to accuse; their agenda would lose social relevance, and they'd no longer be able to garner the cultural power they crave. It's only by perpetuating interracial hatred - - by continuing to make old racial wounds seem fresh.... that neoracists can continue getting what they want."
2. "The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them." (Mark Twain) So, I guess the radical thing maybe from the time of Reconstruction up until The Affirmative Action Era was color blindness. Now the national obsession with race has made it such that color-blindness is actually a conservative idea.
Second order thoughts/questions:
1. Given the IQ difference between whites and blacks, the latter may never achieve income parity. What are we going to do with this? Will neoracists have jobs in perpetuity?
2. It has been known for a long time that "What the intellectual craves in his innermost being is to turn the whole globe into a classroom and the world’s population into a class of docile pupils hanging onto the words of the chosen teacher." (Hoffer). My question is: Why do such people always go looking for black people as dupes? Their actions really make one believe that they have doxastic commitment to the idea that blacks are low-hanging fruit/easy prey.
3. If you have a country tear itself apart that's already very racially mixed, what does that look like? A Civil War? A bloodless divorce, like Czechoslovakia? A Chinese style decline of several centuries?
Can this be arrested? Or is it inherent? (I hope to hear some thoughts about this question in a Yascha Mounk book that I have sitting on my shelf about the same topic.)
*******
Factoids:
(128) The KKK had about 3,000 members nationwide in 2016, compared to a million a century ago. For comparison: the flat Earth society has a membership of 3,500 people.
(133) Beginning with the conquests of Muhammad, Arabs enslaved as many as 14 million Africans over a period of about a thousand years. To this day, a common colloquial word for black person in Arabic is "slave."
(112) 80% of the world's pianists are Chinese. There are many chess grandmasters from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but none from Japan.
(117) Chinese earn $1.18 on the median white dollar, while Hmong earn $0.52 - - even though they are both Asian. Asian Indians earn $1.50 for every dollar earned by white Americans, and Bengalis earn $0.65--Even though they are both South Asian Indian.
Quotes:
(132) Normally when someone demands an apology, they actually want one. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes the ability to continue demanding the apology is worth more than the apology itself. Sometimes the debt is worth more paid than unpaid.
(123) We can end current systems of injustice. We can compensate living victims of injustice. But we're not omnipotent. We can't undo the past or compensate the dead.
(176) I dread the possibility of black identity becoming tied to a rehearsed sense of victimhood.
(167) The original vision for affirmative action was forward to serve as training wheels on the path to a color blind society.
(161) Equity by fiat is merely the illusion of equity.
(158) Cycles of ethnic violence around the world show us again and again that a society doesn't overcome injustice by creating new forms of it.
(150) If we are considering wealth to be a proxy for economic power, then we must contend with the fact that the majority of Americans of every race have basically no economic power whatsoever..... How do you, as an individual, benefit from the fact that people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos belong to the same race as you?
(145) Neo racists depict black people as being emotionally fragile - - almost like children.
Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult by Mary Margaret Olohan
dark
informative
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Detrans
5/5 stars
"Old wine in new bottles; Readable and interesting"
*******
I would consider this book as a continuation of two other excellent books about the transgender hysteria:
1. Abigail Shrier's "Irreversible Damage" detailed the way in which it is a social contagion: 99% of people that wanted to change gender before were males, but now the number of males and females are roughly equal. But, this book talks about three specific females instead of abstract, faceless ones.
2. Miriam Grossman's "Lost in Transnation" detailed the fact that there are actual medical procedures that make this true. Things that require surgery and anesthesia, and therefore involve some amount of risk. This book talks at greater length about the gruesome experiences of three actual females that did this.
*******
The events in this book seem new, but really they are just so much old wine in new bottles.
Theme 1: Figuring out what is a medical treatment. (Lobotomies used to be a standard medical treatment for many types of mental illnesses. Bone marrow transplant used to be indicated for HIV. And any number of other gruesome examples.)
So, the topic of the hour is gender transition. And they will have to be another people who realize that it's not like it appears on TLC and enough lawsuits will have to be pressed before the procedure is realistically understood. All three of the subjects of this book have open lawsuits, and I really believe that the court system IS going to be the final arbiter of this.
Theme 2: People join some type of mass movement because they want to be free of an unwanted self. Hoffer observed this about seven decades ago. ("On the other hand, a mass movement..... appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self.)
So, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE you have all of these people with various types of mental illness (particularly autism) that think that if they just change their gender, on the other side of that transformation will be the person that they want to be. (There are resonances to black jailbirds who decide that they're going to convert to Islam/ Hebrew Israelism/ Hotepism because they will leave behind their low IQ / criminal nature and on the other side of that transformation then they will be respected and successful people.)
Theme 3: Bored/over-pampered white people killing themselves / each other in service of some bizarre idea. (What was The Inquisition about? For that matter, what about the First and Second World Wars?)
Honestly, I see this at least twice a day just in real life. So, I'm pretty anesthetized to it at this point. (What CAN'T be turned into self-actualization therapy for Bored White People?)
In this way, the book doesn't add that much value.
Theme 4: Word redefinition / bowdlerization.
So, here, vaginal atrophy/hormone induced rage / side effects from the creation/maintenance of a faux vagina are all redefined as "gender confirmation surgery." Of course, puberty is a " disease" to be treated.
(It's kind of The way that a baby is redefined as a "fetus" or abortion is "health care.")
Apparently, anything can come into existence in reality if you just define it that way!
Theme 5: Before we know what medical treatments work, those that don't work have to be falsified by experiments involving human lives. And it is usually poor/less fortunate people that are the experimental material.
The Tuskegee experiment was done on black people.
Yesterday.
This experiment is being conducted mostly on vulnerable/mentally ill people.
Today. (It's just that it is the Washington University Transgender Center at St Louis Children's Hospital in lieu of Tuskegee. So be it.)
Theme 6: Medical establishment corruption. This has been shown to be the case in best selling books such as Nina Teichholz's "Big Fat Surprise" or Jason Fung's "Code" books. Or, really any book that details the way that false ideas become entrenched through professional societies.
*******
Verdict:
Recommended
The book is expensive, but it is worth the read. And it does give business to a conservative publishing house that will say what others will not.
*******
Of the book:
-11 chapters over 227 pages. 11 pages/per
-The whole book can be read in an afternoon
-326 references (56 were phone interviews; 64 "ibid" citations) It works out to about 1.5 sources per page, and that is forgivable because this is meant to be documenting something that happened in real time and through the words of the subjects.
Detrans
5/5 stars
"Old wine in new bottles; Readable and interesting"
*******
I would consider this book as a continuation of two other excellent books about the transgender hysteria:
1. Abigail Shrier's "Irreversible Damage" detailed the way in which it is a social contagion: 99% of people that wanted to change gender before were males, but now the number of males and females are roughly equal. But, this book talks about three specific females instead of abstract, faceless ones.
2. Miriam Grossman's "Lost in Transnation" detailed the fact that there are actual medical procedures that make this true. Things that require surgery and anesthesia, and therefore involve some amount of risk. This book talks at greater length about the gruesome experiences of three actual females that did this.
*******
The events in this book seem new, but really they are just so much old wine in new bottles.
Theme 1: Figuring out what is a medical treatment. (Lobotomies used to be a standard medical treatment for many types of mental illnesses. Bone marrow transplant used to be indicated for HIV. And any number of other gruesome examples.)
So, the topic of the hour is gender transition. And they will have to be another people who realize that it's not like it appears on TLC and enough lawsuits will have to be pressed before the procedure is realistically understood. All three of the subjects of this book have open lawsuits, and I really believe that the court system IS going to be the final arbiter of this.
Theme 2: People join some type of mass movement because they want to be free of an unwanted self. Hoffer observed this about seven decades ago. ("On the other hand, a mass movement..... appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self.)
So, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE you have all of these people with various types of mental illness (particularly autism) that think that if they just change their gender, on the other side of that transformation will be the person that they want to be. (There are resonances to black jailbirds who decide that they're going to convert to Islam/ Hebrew Israelism/ Hotepism because they will leave behind their low IQ / criminal nature and on the other side of that transformation then they will be respected and successful people.)
Theme 3: Bored/over-pampered white people killing themselves / each other in service of some bizarre idea. (What was The Inquisition about? For that matter, what about the First and Second World Wars?)
Honestly, I see this at least twice a day just in real life. So, I'm pretty anesthetized to it at this point. (What CAN'T be turned into self-actualization therapy for Bored White People?)
In this way, the book doesn't add that much value.
Theme 4: Word redefinition / bowdlerization.
So, here, vaginal atrophy/hormone induced rage / side effects from the creation/maintenance of a faux vagina are all redefined as "gender confirmation surgery." Of course, puberty is a " disease" to be treated.
(It's kind of The way that a baby is redefined as a "fetus" or abortion is "health care.")
Apparently, anything can come into existence in reality if you just define it that way!
Theme 5: Before we know what medical treatments work, those that don't work have to be falsified by experiments involving human lives. And it is usually poor/less fortunate people that are the experimental material.
The Tuskegee experiment was done on black people.
Yesterday.
This experiment is being conducted mostly on vulnerable/mentally ill people.
Today. (It's just that it is the Washington University Transgender Center at St Louis Children's Hospital in lieu of Tuskegee. So be it.)
Theme 6: Medical establishment corruption. This has been shown to be the case in best selling books such as Nina Teichholz's "Big Fat Surprise" or Jason Fung's "Code" books. Or, really any book that details the way that false ideas become entrenched through professional societies.
*******
Verdict:
Recommended
The book is expensive, but it is worth the read. And it does give business to a conservative publishing house that will say what others will not.
*******
Of the book:
-11 chapters over 227 pages. 11 pages/per
-The whole book can be read in an afternoon
-326 references (56 were phone interviews; 64 "ibid" citations) It works out to about 1.5 sources per page, and that is forgivable because this is meant to be documenting something that happened in real time and through the words of the subjects.