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The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl
medium-paced
2.0
"The Storyteller"
Dave Grohl
Rocker's Bildungsroman
2/5 stars
This book doesn't take all that long to read, but if you want the short version (ie, without all of the directionless prose and excessive name dropping), you can just read this review.
If you want the *really* short version you could just listen to Billy Joel's "The Entertainer."
This autobiography is probably the third one that I have read written by a recording artist in his words only (the other three are listed below), and I'd have to say that both of the other books were excellent and definitely better written than this one.
It has such a stream of consciousness feel, and he could have said everything that he needed to say in under 200 pages without much diminishment.
Some of Grohl's word- imagery is good:
--"Now my reflection bears the chipped teeth of a weathered smiled, cracked and shortened from years of microphones grinding their delicate enamel away. I see the heavy bags beneath my hooded eyes from decades of jet lag of sacrificing sleep for another precious hour of life. I see the patches of white within my beard. And I'm thankful for all of it." (Intro)
--"Everyday was a blank page, waiting to write itself." (p.121)
He comes across as a good, common, down to earth guy--if a bit of a Mama's Boy. At 20 years old (p.130): "On a collect call......., I tearfully explained my dilemma, and she understood entirely"
And a family man.
Also, the young version of him was not bad looking. (I guess all those years of pot/touring/other drugs can make any man look like the caved-in ashtray that Grohl has started to resemble.)
Another way in which this book differs from the other two that I mentioned is that: Grohl does not show us all of himself.
- Each of his marriages got one sentence. He also has us believe that he was a stoner, but somehow he managed to easily draw the line at hard drugs (said no rocker ever, except maybe Frank Zappa).
-Dave Grohl is the second wealthiest drummer in history of rock, after Phil Collins. As of today, he is worth $260 million. (For the record, that is half as much as Elton John who is twice as old and has been playing for twice as long. Unlike EJ, Grohl never went through a bankruptcy proceeding.)
How did he not end up broke? Or drug addicted?
Background:
1. Awkward kid from a divorced suburban home;
2. Discovers rock music as a new passion. (Also takes the trouble to name / notice a lot of the more obscure rock bands that he looks up to that were not as commercially successful. This seems to be a rite of passage for musicians that it made it--to give shoutouts to those who have not. Elton John idolizes/ does an album with Leon russell. Billy Joel idolizes/does a song with Ray Charles.)
3. Grohl learns his craft (he started out as and primarily is a drummer) by treating the albums of his favorite punk rockers as "play alongs" and gets his foot in the door playing for a local punk rock band.
4. Eventually, he wiggles his way into Nirvana, whom he met in California. (That land of so many hundreds of thousands of lost migratory souls. "Like it was the world's largest Greyhound bus station, people came and went through a revolving door of opportunity and demise, leaving their filth behind for the next wave of visitors to wade through in hope that they would be the next big thing."[p.126])
5. If Kurt Cobain had lived, then the band would have gone down the tried and true pathway of Breaking Up Over Creative Conflicts. But it didn't work out that way, and a year later the Foo Fighters were born. (The songs for their successful eponymous debut album were recorded over 4 days. All had actually probably been written years ago, but Grohl didn't have any creative input into Nirvana.)
Wow (p.222): 30 or 40 takes of each song on "The Color and The Shape."
6. Afterlife as a gently aging celebrity/family man. (Replete with pointless and gratuitous name dropping.)
*******
Verdict:
I'm going to have to say that this book is the least preferred of the celebrity bildungsroman, for the following reasons:
∆∆First, because so much of this is old wine in new bottles and so the events of One Musician Becoming A Star blur into those of another. (I don't know why musicians are always so overcome with anguish. Or have to go through rehab so many times. Or, want to knock themselves out to prove that they are folks AFTER they've gone through all the trouble to knock themselves out to prove that they're celebrities.)
∆∆Second, because I've already heard a thousand times the conflict between musicians--who don't understand that the music business is a BUSINESS--and music agents do have to make ends meet and turn a profit.
∆∆Third, because for every 1 person that makes it..... There are at least a million more who don't and play a whole career doing pick up jobs or in small bars. Sometimes they might be session musicians, which is a little bit better. Grohl's experience is interesting, but it is not representative.
∆∆Fourth, because we don't get that much information about the details of being in the music industry. And I don't think that the music industry today is the same way it used to be. It's likely that these events were just at the tail end of the music industry as it was before it turned into what it is today. All this is before the days of "American Idol"/ "America's Got Talent," where one (sometimes) nice looking person resings a song that was made several decades ago and gets one or two hit singles and then vanishes. (I'm looking at you, Susan Boyle.)
*******
For better writing/humor, better you read: "A Cure for Gravity," by Joe Jackson.
For more introspection and honesty, better you read: "Me," by Elton John.
For a more realistic/gritty picture of making it from ground zero and struggling as a pickup/session musician, better you read: "Redneck Woman," by Gretchen Wilson
This book is worth it only at the price of about $3--and not the $14.79 that I paid for it.
New vocabulary:
Chrysalis
"Neanderthal disco dynamic" (p.129)
bellower (p.230)
Law of Attraction (New Thought)
Small quibble (p.119): "An army of skinheads and right-wing fascists had organized and attack on the building."
Sorry about that, Dave, but fascists are actually on the extreme left and not the extreme right. No matter how many times it is repeated, that is just not the history.
Dave Grohl
Rocker's Bildungsroman
2/5 stars
This book doesn't take all that long to read, but if you want the short version (ie, without all of the directionless prose and excessive name dropping), you can just read this review.
If you want the *really* short version you could just listen to Billy Joel's "The Entertainer."
This autobiography is probably the third one that I have read written by a recording artist in his words only (the other three are listed below), and I'd have to say that both of the other books were excellent and definitely better written than this one.
It has such a stream of consciousness feel, and he could have said everything that he needed to say in under 200 pages without much diminishment.
Some of Grohl's word- imagery is good:
--"Now my reflection bears the chipped teeth of a weathered smiled, cracked and shortened from years of microphones grinding their delicate enamel away. I see the heavy bags beneath my hooded eyes from decades of jet lag of sacrificing sleep for another precious hour of life. I see the patches of white within my beard. And I'm thankful for all of it." (Intro)
--"Everyday was a blank page, waiting to write itself." (p.121)
He comes across as a good, common, down to earth guy--if a bit of a Mama's Boy. At 20 years old (p.130): "On a collect call......., I tearfully explained my dilemma, and she understood entirely"
And a family man.
Also, the young version of him was not bad looking. (I guess all those years of pot/touring/other drugs can make any man look like the caved-in ashtray that Grohl has started to resemble.)
Another way in which this book differs from the other two that I mentioned is that: Grohl does not show us all of himself.
- Each of his marriages got one sentence. He also has us believe that he was a stoner, but somehow he managed to easily draw the line at hard drugs (said no rocker ever, except maybe Frank Zappa).
-Dave Grohl is the second wealthiest drummer in history of rock, after Phil Collins. As of today, he is worth $260 million. (For the record, that is half as much as Elton John who is twice as old and has been playing for twice as long. Unlike EJ, Grohl never went through a bankruptcy proceeding.)
How did he not end up broke? Or drug addicted?
Background:
1. Awkward kid from a divorced suburban home;
2. Discovers rock music as a new passion. (Also takes the trouble to name / notice a lot of the more obscure rock bands that he looks up to that were not as commercially successful. This seems to be a rite of passage for musicians that it made it--to give shoutouts to those who have not. Elton John idolizes/ does an album with Leon russell. Billy Joel idolizes/does a song with Ray Charles.)
3. Grohl learns his craft (he started out as and primarily is a drummer) by treating the albums of his favorite punk rockers as "play alongs" and gets his foot in the door playing for a local punk rock band.
4. Eventually, he wiggles his way into Nirvana, whom he met in California. (That land of so many hundreds of thousands of lost migratory souls. "Like it was the world's largest Greyhound bus station, people came and went through a revolving door of opportunity and demise, leaving their filth behind for the next wave of visitors to wade through in hope that they would be the next big thing."[p.126])
5. If Kurt Cobain had lived, then the band would have gone down the tried and true pathway of Breaking Up Over Creative Conflicts. But it didn't work out that way, and a year later the Foo Fighters were born. (The songs for their successful eponymous debut album were recorded over 4 days. All had actually probably been written years ago, but Grohl didn't have any creative input into Nirvana.)
Wow (p.222): 30 or 40 takes of each song on "The Color and The Shape."
6. Afterlife as a gently aging celebrity/family man. (Replete with pointless and gratuitous name dropping.)
*******
Verdict:
I'm going to have to say that this book is the least preferred of the celebrity bildungsroman, for the following reasons:
∆∆First, because so much of this is old wine in new bottles and so the events of One Musician Becoming A Star blur into those of another. (I don't know why musicians are always so overcome with anguish. Or have to go through rehab so many times. Or, want to knock themselves out to prove that they are folks AFTER they've gone through all the trouble to knock themselves out to prove that they're celebrities.)
∆∆Second, because I've already heard a thousand times the conflict between musicians--who don't understand that the music business is a BUSINESS--and music agents do have to make ends meet and turn a profit.
∆∆Third, because for every 1 person that makes it..... There are at least a million more who don't and play a whole career doing pick up jobs or in small bars. Sometimes they might be session musicians, which is a little bit better. Grohl's experience is interesting, but it is not representative.
∆∆Fourth, because we don't get that much information about the details of being in the music industry. And I don't think that the music industry today is the same way it used to be. It's likely that these events were just at the tail end of the music industry as it was before it turned into what it is today. All this is before the days of "American Idol"/ "America's Got Talent," where one (sometimes) nice looking person resings a song that was made several decades ago and gets one or two hit singles and then vanishes. (I'm looking at you, Susan Boyle.)
*******
For better writing/humor, better you read: "A Cure for Gravity," by Joe Jackson.
For more introspection and honesty, better you read: "Me," by Elton John.
For a more realistic/gritty picture of making it from ground zero and struggling as a pickup/session musician, better you read: "Redneck Woman," by Gretchen Wilson
This book is worth it only at the price of about $3--and not the $14.79 that I paid for it.
New vocabulary:
Chrysalis
"Neanderthal disco dynamic" (p.129)
bellower (p.230)
Law of Attraction (New Thought)
Small quibble (p.119): "An army of skinheads and right-wing fascists had organized and attack on the building."
Sorry about that, Dave, but fascists are actually on the extreme left and not the extreme right. No matter how many times it is repeated, that is just not the history.
Diper Överlöde by Jeff Kinney
5.0
A Parent's Book Review
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Diper Överlöde
5+/5 stars
"Jeff Kinney is a talent in his own right and a true force of nature as author."
*******
I'm in the habit of reading books before I give them to my kids to make sure that they are "clean."
This book is that, and it is one of those books that functions at so many levels. (Reminiscent of how it is when you're watching Looney Tunes cartoons as a child, and you laugh at the slapstick humor. But then if you rewatch them as an adult with the benefit of a couple more decades of life experience, they are funny...... But in a different way.)
And to be an author who can write one book that is on parallel tracks for different audiences is a rare talent. (Jeff Kinney is thought to be worth $120 million as of this book review. And the Looney tunes have been running for the past three quarters of a century.)
Kinney manages to say more than Ayn Rand in 1/50th of the words.
***
Ostensibly, this is a book about an adolescent's experience working as a stage hand for an aspiring rock band; but for people who have read books about the music industry / listen to lots of music (like the present Parent Reviewer), it actually does have a depth of material:
1. It's commentary on the music industry as it exists today and as it might be seen through the eyes of people who were once in the industry and aged out of it. ("Where Are They Now?")
2. It is commentary about the type of problems that tear a band apart.
Or about the things that make it such that that they never get off the ground to begin with. (And it is true that the overwhelming majority of people who try to go into music do not succeed or make any significant amount of money.)
3. Some people are rock stars for a period of time during which they are on top of the world, and 25 years pass and they are penniless, bitter and forgotten. The victim of bad decisions and contracts that are made by Wily Lawyers to dupe Idiot Musicians
4. At one point in time, people wrote their own songs and played their own instruments and found their way to success one gig at a time. (Aerosmith. The Doors. The Grateful Dead.)
But the music industry changed in such a way that music labels would craft an idea and hire a professional songwriter and getting bodies to sing on the stage (none of who play their own instruments) is an afterthought.
98 degrees/Nsync/ The Backstreet Boys were all the commercial product of a single Wily Jewish Businessman.
5. Some musicians are businessmen (think about people like Ray Charles, who did not die broke) and others sell millions upon millions of albums and still end up in/close to bankruptcy court. (Michael Jackson ended his life with debts of nearly half a billion .)
6. Becoming a successful artist also requires that people write about things that others want to hear. A lot of bands spend several years trying to find out what they want to sound like and what their message is. (Ray Charles spent many years as a Discount Nat "King" Cole. Luther Vandross sang jingles for years until he figured how to define himself as a recognizable artist.)
7. A lot of bands are derivative of others, and where do you draw the line between staying within a genre and copyright violation? (Yes, the word "copyright" really did show up in this book.)
Verdict: Strongly recommended, both for children and adults.
It's a very funny read, both for children and adults.
PS: I can tell that this author is around my age, because he even riffs on the long forgotten Garbage Pail Kids. (p.185-6, reimagined as the "Revolting Runts")
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Diper Överlöde
5+/5 stars
"Jeff Kinney is a talent in his own right and a true force of nature as author."
*******
I'm in the habit of reading books before I give them to my kids to make sure that they are "clean."
This book is that, and it is one of those books that functions at so many levels. (Reminiscent of how it is when you're watching Looney Tunes cartoons as a child, and you laugh at the slapstick humor. But then if you rewatch them as an adult with the benefit of a couple more decades of life experience, they are funny...... But in a different way.)
And to be an author who can write one book that is on parallel tracks for different audiences is a rare talent. (Jeff Kinney is thought to be worth $120 million as of this book review. And the Looney tunes have been running for the past three quarters of a century.)
Kinney manages to say more than Ayn Rand in 1/50th of the words.
***
Ostensibly, this is a book about an adolescent's experience working as a stage hand for an aspiring rock band; but for people who have read books about the music industry / listen to lots of music (like the present Parent Reviewer), it actually does have a depth of material:
1. It's commentary on the music industry as it exists today and as it might be seen through the eyes of people who were once in the industry and aged out of it. ("Where Are They Now?")
2. It is commentary about the type of problems that tear a band apart.
Or about the things that make it such that that they never get off the ground to begin with. (And it is true that the overwhelming majority of people who try to go into music do not succeed or make any significant amount of money.)
3. Some people are rock stars for a period of time during which they are on top of the world, and 25 years pass and they are penniless, bitter and forgotten. The victim of bad decisions and contracts that are made by Wily Lawyers to dupe Idiot Musicians
4. At one point in time, people wrote their own songs and played their own instruments and found their way to success one gig at a time. (Aerosmith. The Doors. The Grateful Dead.)
But the music industry changed in such a way that music labels would craft an idea and hire a professional songwriter and getting bodies to sing on the stage (none of who play their own instruments) is an afterthought.
98 degrees/Nsync/ The Backstreet Boys were all the commercial product of a single Wily Jewish Businessman.
5. Some musicians are businessmen (think about people like Ray Charles, who did not die broke) and others sell millions upon millions of albums and still end up in/close to bankruptcy court. (Michael Jackson ended his life with debts of nearly half a billion .)
6. Becoming a successful artist also requires that people write about things that others want to hear. A lot of bands spend several years trying to find out what they want to sound like and what their message is. (Ray Charles spent many years as a Discount Nat "King" Cole. Luther Vandross sang jingles for years until he figured how to define himself as a recognizable artist.)
7. A lot of bands are derivative of others, and where do you draw the line between staying within a genre and copyright violation? (Yes, the word "copyright" really did show up in this book.)
Verdict: Strongly recommended, both for children and adults.
It's a very funny read, both for children and adults.
PS: I can tell that this author is around my age, because he even riffs on the long forgotten Garbage Pail Kids. (p.185-6, reimagined as the "Revolting Runts")
John Green the Collection: Looking for Alaska / An Abundance of Katherines / Paper Towns / Will Grayson, Will Grayson / The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
emotional
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
Book Review
3 stars
*******
Unfortunate overuse of the words "sitzpinkler"/"Jew-fro."
*******
There is a fine line between crafting readable fiction, and creating a storyline that is so supremely improbable that it defeats the purpose of trying to use it as a vehicle to explain something--and this book is tending very much toward the latter direction. (Another book that I just recently reviewed, "The Autobiography of an ex-Colored Man," was one such book that was trying to tell us something but....)
1. First things first: if you want to read a road trip+bildungsroman book, I would sooner recommend Gary Paulsen's "The Car."
2. Second is that this is the third of John Green's books that I have read (the other two were "Looking for Alaska" and "The Fault in Our Stars") and "Looking for Alaska" also won a Michael Prinz award.
Incidentally, that book was just as ... strange as this one.
"The Fault in Our Stars" was a good and memorable book, and yet: it won no such award.
And so, that is telling me that "Michael Prinz Award" is shorthand for "unrealistic adolescent fiction that has unsavory / unlikely/unrelatable characters." (Kind of the same way that Oprah's Book club books are predictably trash.)
*******
-This could have been a story about overparented children, but it just didn't seem to develop into that.
-It could have been story about children with social development issues. (And in that case, the fact that the protagonist was a genius was merely incidental. Contrary to popular belief: most children of high intelligence are well adjusted. Also: because there are so many fiction books that have been written about people with social development problems, the gimmick of a boy genius is not enough to save the cliche.)
-It could have been a Milan Kundera book for children. (There are a lot of elements of existentialism-lite. Ess muss sein/ Ess konte auch andersein.)
Practically, the book has a sort of "revenge" feel:
-A morbidly obese Arab with man breasts makes out with the hottest girl in a town. (Revenge of the fat boys.)
-A scrawny nerd with the Jew-fro gets the girl over a muscle bound football player. (Revenge of the nerds.)
-This guy who is super smart.....well he has social/emotional difficulty so he's not "really" happy. (Revenge of the idiots.)
-The girl who gets mistreated by her rakish but handsome boyfriend gets some self-respect and leaves. (Revenge of the spurned girlfriends. And I don't think anybody who lives in the Real World / might have seen "The Last American Virgin" really thinks that abusive men are ever without women. Or, that there is a certain fraction of women that cannot get enough of abusive men. If this book had been accurate, the Spurned Girlfriend would probably have doubled down on the Bad Guy Boyfriend and would have spent so much additional time fellating him that his skull would have caved in by the end of the book.)
At the end of the day, I'll just have to dismiss this as yet another among a million forgettable bildungsroman that has been written--but with a lot of neat factoids and a couple of good quotes:
1. (p.207): "And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember *becomes* what happened."
2. (p.212): "You can make a theorem that explains why you won or lost past poker hands, but you can never make one to predict future poker hands. The past, like Lindsay had told him, is a logical story. But since it is not yet remembered, the future need not make any sense at all."
Verdict: Not recommended for my kids. No morals-of-story to be taken away.
3 stars
*******
Unfortunate overuse of the words "sitzpinkler"/"Jew-fro."
*******
There is a fine line between crafting readable fiction, and creating a storyline that is so supremely improbable that it defeats the purpose of trying to use it as a vehicle to explain something--and this book is tending very much toward the latter direction. (Another book that I just recently reviewed, "The Autobiography of an ex-Colored Man," was one such book that was trying to tell us something but....)
1. First things first: if you want to read a road trip+bildungsroman book, I would sooner recommend Gary Paulsen's "The Car."
2. Second is that this is the third of John Green's books that I have read (the other two were "Looking for Alaska" and "The Fault in Our Stars") and "Looking for Alaska" also won a Michael Prinz award.
Incidentally, that book was just as ... strange as this one.
"The Fault in Our Stars" was a good and memorable book, and yet: it won no such award.
And so, that is telling me that "Michael Prinz Award" is shorthand for "unrealistic adolescent fiction that has unsavory / unlikely/unrelatable characters." (Kind of the same way that Oprah's Book club books are predictably trash.)
*******
-This could have been a story about overparented children, but it just didn't seem to develop into that.
-It could have been story about children with social development issues. (And in that case, the fact that the protagonist was a genius was merely incidental. Contrary to popular belief: most children of high intelligence are well adjusted. Also: because there are so many fiction books that have been written about people with social development problems, the gimmick of a boy genius is not enough to save the cliche.)
-It could have been a Milan Kundera book for children. (There are a lot of elements of existentialism-lite. Ess muss sein/ Ess konte auch andersein.)
Practically, the book has a sort of "revenge" feel:
-A morbidly obese Arab with man breasts makes out with the hottest girl in a town. (Revenge of the fat boys.)
-A scrawny nerd with the Jew-fro gets the girl over a muscle bound football player. (Revenge of the nerds.)
-This guy who is super smart.....well he has social/emotional difficulty so he's not "really" happy. (Revenge of the idiots.)
-The girl who gets mistreated by her rakish but handsome boyfriend gets some self-respect and leaves. (Revenge of the spurned girlfriends. And I don't think anybody who lives in the Real World / might have seen "The Last American Virgin" really thinks that abusive men are ever without women. Or, that there is a certain fraction of women that cannot get enough of abusive men. If this book had been accurate, the Spurned Girlfriend would probably have doubled down on the Bad Guy Boyfriend and would have spent so much additional time fellating him that his skull would have caved in by the end of the book.)
At the end of the day, I'll just have to dismiss this as yet another among a million forgettable bildungsroman that has been written--but with a lot of neat factoids and a couple of good quotes:
1. (p.207): "And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember *becomes* what happened."
2. (p.212): "You can make a theorem that explains why you won or lost past poker hands, but you can never make one to predict future poker hands. The past, like Lindsay had told him, is a logical story. But since it is not yet remembered, the future need not make any sense at all."
Verdict: Not recommended for my kids. No morals-of-story to be taken away.
Something Other than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It by Jennifer Fulwiler
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
I wrote this review sometime ago, and lost it after all of my reviews were deleted from Amazon by the censorship Nazis.
In any case, I recommend this book as an expansion of a famous quote by Francis Bacon:. "A Little Philosophy Inclineth Mans Mind to Atheism; But Depth in Philosophy, Bringeth Mens Minds about to Religion."
This is a well-worded story of a woman going from atheism to Catholicism in order to solve the problem of having a tried and tested moral foundation.
I highly recommend it.
In any case, I recommend this book as an expansion of a famous quote by Francis Bacon:. "A Little Philosophy Inclineth Mans Mind to Atheism; But Depth in Philosophy, Bringeth Mens Minds about to Religion."
This is a well-worded story of a woman going from atheism to Catholicism in order to solve the problem of having a tried and tested moral foundation.
I highly recommend it.
A Short History of Russia: How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin by Mark Galeotti
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
A Short History of Russia
Mark Galeotti
"A Reader's Digest version of the complex history of a troubled place."
5/5 stars
This is an interesting book, and I really do like the (Russian-speaking) author's writing style.
Russia is an enormous place, that it world take several huge volumes of history to explain such a massive empire. ( Russia only started to become as large as it is after the reign of Ivan the terrible-- Adding about 13500 mile² per annum for a century.)
They started out as a bunch of warring principalities (like China about 1300 years earlier), And later they became subjects of the Mongolian Empire for hundreds of years.
Nationhood is a thing that came many centuries later, and then only in bits and pieces-- and inconsistently. And a lot of the patterns were set up by an outside power ( This is similar to the way that a lot of India/Pakistan are what they are because of British influence.)
*******
I would have to say that there are so many historical resonances to other times and places that they all start to run together on me. (That makes it hard to think of specific examples. )
And in that way, Russia is only a unique case because of a random constellation of events that happened in this case, but are a subset of all the other random events that have happened in countless other cases. ( No, you never step into the same river twice - - but there's not really any reason that you step into *this* river as opposed to *that* one.)
Ten such random events:
1. The case of an Empire that is just too big to manage- Both because reasons of geographical distance creating even more distance between central authorities and locals on the ground. And also because large amounts of space incorporate dramatically different ethnic groups. (Such as the Roman Empire.)
2. The case of a country desperately seeking modernization and with leadership that wants it but with difficulty getting the hoi polloi to be engaged. (Egypt.)
3. The case of wars being played out over the heads of the overwhelming majority of the unreactive middle by the extremes on both sides. Also, the people people from the countryside/conservative places are cannon fodder for hare-brained schemes of would-be social engineers. (American soldiers sent to Vietnam. Iran and the Shah.)
4. A country that stays troubled for hundreds of years with no ostensible reason And no forthcoming solution. (Haiti.)
5. The case of experimentation being done on peasants and working squares. There is NEVER a time that the elite of any country put their own children on the front lines to test stupid ideas. (China and the Great Leap Forward. All of the socialist-Communist projects of the last century. )
6. The case of some people somewhere reinterpreting a mythologized past as necessary in order to create a foundation for national greatness. The author returns to the metaphor of Russia as a palimpsest, and it's so appropriate that it's almost impossible to over-use it. (Japan was a feudal society, and they seem to have forgotten that.)
7. The case of some people somewhere looking for a strong man (and making a Faustian bargain therewith) to help them reclaim national greatness/force the trains to run on time. ( Mussolini. Adolf Hitler. Chairman Mao. Xi Jinping.)
8. The strange European case of all these Royal families incessant intermarrying and swapping places in countries that are ostensibly at war with one another. (Alexandra Feodorovna started out as Alix of Hesse; The British Royal family is actually German, and their surname used to be Saxe-Coburg-Gotha before WWII.)
9. The case of a country taking hundreds of years to figure out what orbit they properly belong in-- and for some reason, this vexes the elite of the country much more than it does working squares. ( Is Russia a democratic European/Occidental country, or does it have more elements of an Asian/ Oriental despotism? Turkey has been having similar national introspection for some number of centuries, with no clear decision yet in sight.)
10. The case of completely accidental leadership. One leader will be brilliant, and the next 3 or 4 will be complete idiots. No rhyme, no reason. Too many examples to elaborate.)
*******
As fascinating as the history of Russia is, this book is simultaneously too much and not enough.
The topic is so huge that it would require an extended reading journey to unravel it--And aint nobody got time for that, so this Reader's Digest version will have to do.
But, once all of those things have been learned and then you have have a country that came together because of happenstance-- like any of the other current 195 or so on Earth.
Verdict: The number one lesson for countries' leadership SHOULD BE *neutrality and non alignment.*
I recommend this book at the 2nd hand price.
Mark Galeotti
"A Reader's Digest version of the complex history of a troubled place."
5/5 stars
This is an interesting book, and I really do like the (Russian-speaking) author's writing style.
Russia is an enormous place, that it world take several huge volumes of history to explain such a massive empire. ( Russia only started to become as large as it is after the reign of Ivan the terrible-- Adding about 13500 mile² per annum for a century.)
They started out as a bunch of warring principalities (like China about 1300 years earlier), And later they became subjects of the Mongolian Empire for hundreds of years.
Nationhood is a thing that came many centuries later, and then only in bits and pieces-- and inconsistently. And a lot of the patterns were set up by an outside power ( This is similar to the way that a lot of India/Pakistan are what they are because of British influence.)
*******
I would have to say that there are so many historical resonances to other times and places that they all start to run together on me. (That makes it hard to think of specific examples. )
And in that way, Russia is only a unique case because of a random constellation of events that happened in this case, but are a subset of all the other random events that have happened in countless other cases. ( No, you never step into the same river twice - - but there's not really any reason that you step into *this* river as opposed to *that* one.)
Ten such random events:
1. The case of an Empire that is just too big to manage- Both because reasons of geographical distance creating even more distance between central authorities and locals on the ground. And also because large amounts of space incorporate dramatically different ethnic groups. (Such as the Roman Empire.)
2. The case of a country desperately seeking modernization and with leadership that wants it but with difficulty getting the hoi polloi to be engaged. (Egypt.)
3. The case of wars being played out over the heads of the overwhelming majority of the unreactive middle by the extremes on both sides. Also, the people people from the countryside/conservative places are cannon fodder for hare-brained schemes of would-be social engineers. (American soldiers sent to Vietnam. Iran and the Shah.)
4. A country that stays troubled for hundreds of years with no ostensible reason And no forthcoming solution. (Haiti.)
5. The case of experimentation being done on peasants and working squares. There is NEVER a time that the elite of any country put their own children on the front lines to test stupid ideas. (China and the Great Leap Forward. All of the socialist-Communist projects of the last century. )
6. The case of some people somewhere reinterpreting a mythologized past as necessary in order to create a foundation for national greatness. The author returns to the metaphor of Russia as a palimpsest, and it's so appropriate that it's almost impossible to over-use it. (Japan was a feudal society, and they seem to have forgotten that.)
7. The case of some people somewhere looking for a strong man (and making a Faustian bargain therewith) to help them reclaim national greatness/force the trains to run on time. ( Mussolini. Adolf Hitler. Chairman Mao. Xi Jinping.)
8. The strange European case of all these Royal families incessant intermarrying and swapping places in countries that are ostensibly at war with one another. (Alexandra Feodorovna started out as Alix of Hesse; The British Royal family is actually German, and their surname used to be Saxe-Coburg-Gotha before WWII.)
9. The case of a country taking hundreds of years to figure out what orbit they properly belong in-- and for some reason, this vexes the elite of the country much more than it does working squares. ( Is Russia a democratic European/Occidental country, or does it have more elements of an Asian/ Oriental despotism? Turkey has been having similar national introspection for some number of centuries, with no clear decision yet in sight.)
10. The case of completely accidental leadership. One leader will be brilliant, and the next 3 or 4 will be complete idiots. No rhyme, no reason. Too many examples to elaborate.)
*******
As fascinating as the history of Russia is, this book is simultaneously too much and not enough.
The topic is so huge that it would require an extended reading journey to unravel it--And aint nobody got time for that, so this Reader's Digest version will have to do.
But, once all of those things have been learned and then you have have a country that came together because of happenstance-- like any of the other current 195 or so on Earth.
Verdict: The number one lesson for countries' leadership SHOULD BE *neutrality and non alignment.*
I recommend this book at the 2nd hand price.
A History of the American People by Paul Johnson
challenging
slow-paced
5.0
TRUNCATED REVIEW
Book Review (IV/IV), pps. 727-976
"A History of the American People"
Paul Johnson
*******
Of the book
972 pps/ 8 parts≈122 pages per
1,950 source notes ≈244/chapter, 2/page
This is the 4th (and final) review section of a book that is SSSOOOO LLLOOONNNGGG that I've had to break it into pieces.
General thoughts (recapitulated):
It's like drinking water through a fire hose, and (as often with history books) the large number of names and dates blend into an impressionistic farrago of ideas.
This book took a VERY LONG time to read (and that is after sitting on my shelf for 8 years), because of:
1. The small print on large pages, and;
2. The necessity to go back and extract the vocabulary words as well as review/re-synopsize what I had learned from each section.
Alas, I don't think it's nearly enough; for this reader, the book has the aforementioned impressionistic feel precisely *because* the sheer mass of information makes significant retention almost impossible.
A significant bad side is that with so many historical events, it is very easy to go back and reconstruct different narratives to suit the political topic of whatever generation is reading.... But I do think that Johnson puts events in their proper context.
I *do* tend to believe did this author (Paul Johnson is an Englishman) as a neutral party to American history. And that is very needful in these days where every single historical event is reinterpreted in terms of Someone's Political Agenda/Ax to Grind
This third section is interesting, because it seems to make *prodigious* use of the "ni**er" word--and I do appreciate it somewhat, because it is an attempt to portray history as it actually happened and not as a sanitized version.
*******
¶¶¶Section 7(1929-1960)
1. Chevrolet / Pontiac/Oldsmobile/Buick/Cadillac initially invented to cover five different major price brackets, each car in numerous versions.
2. There never existed anything like a proper Gold Standard in the years leading up to the Depression; Central bankers could exchange gold bars with each other, but common folk could not walk into a bank and redeem dollars for gold on demand.
3. Nothing is new, only remembered: debt super cycles / beggar-thy-neighbor monetary policy/ attempts to disinvent the business cycle/ bubble blowing central bankers go back at least a century, and nearly at the inception of the Central Bank / Federal Reserve.
4. It has been happening at least since the 1930s that politicians use the IRS to pursue personal vendettas. Lois Lerner and the targeting of conservative groups is the new thing that was not. (p.758, 871, 897).
5. Believe it or not, Roosevelt was a believer in a balanced budget.
6. Johnson seems to describe the Roosevelt administration as lawless, and he could just as easily have been talking about a lot of Democratic administrations.
Seems like all got their inspiration from Roosevelt:
i. IRS vendettas;
ii. Court packing (p.768);
iii. Executive overreach/ pardons of allies (p.761)
7. The Japanese leadership was insane. They chose to fight a war against a country that had: steel advantage, 20:1, oil 10:1, coal 10:1, aircraft 5:1, shipping 2:1, labor force 5:1, overall 10 to 1 (p.778).
8. Johnson portrays US involvement in World War II as a classic merger between the government and high technology capitalism. (Mercifully, he refrains from using the word "military industrial complex.")
9. Truman is treated here at length as an honorable man who was, ironically, a product of machine politics from Kansas. (It appears that Kansas was another Chicago.)
10. Eisenhower seems to be an overlooked figure that Johnson gives credit to. Johnson describes him as a very measured, calculating and devious statecraftsman. Comparable to Winston Churchill. He was a believer in minimum war, sound money and a balanced budget and he kept to it.
Second order thoughts:
1. With respect to the Great Depression, there are two stories: one of overregulation and the other of underregulation. Almost a century after the actual events, it doesn't seem like we are any closer to a definitive answer.
2. Roosevelt is most associated with the New Deal, but Paul Johnson is of the opinion that that actually started with Hoover.
3. Roosevelt is a classic example of the politician who wants power, and he will be all things to all people insofar as it gives him power. He was the Bill/Hillary Clinton of his era.
4. Disarmament has never solved anything, and pacifism/appeasement was a stupid idea even when the British practiced it against Germany. Give an inch, and they will take a mile.
5. (p.767). The Jewish factor in these events is obscure. They were 15% of Roosevelt's appointments, but not most of them and not enough to be thought of as the driving factor. It is interesting (as even other people like Dennis Prager have noted) that they are disproportionately represented in radical / sinister movements. But, not (exactly) causative agents.
(p.834): The people who passed atomic secrets to Russia were: Harry Gold/David and Ruth Greenglass/Julius and Ethel Rosenberg / Morton Sobell. (Extremely unusual, given the vicious anti-semitism of Russia-- historically, then, and now.)
Saul Landau was a lionizer of Fidel Castro (p.866).
Daniel Ellsberg could not wait to reveal articles about US involvement in Vietnam
6. It is amazing how often leadership in the country will start a war with someone that they *know* that they are hopelessly over-matched against and get tons of Other People's Son's killed. Japan against the US; US against Vietnam; Germany against Russia; Union against Confederacy. And then it stops, and there was no reason and the countries become allies in the very. next. generation.
¶¶¶Section 8(1960-1997)
1. The '60s are seen here as the beginning of America's decline phase; Johnson traces the corruption of media to this period, as well as the decline in governance/moral standards - - aided and abetted by a corrupt media. (p.847)
2. The Kennedy Dynasty was also the personification of venality and corruption. (p.851. Cash payments of $50 to help out at the polls. Ghost written journal articles. Hagiographies. Hookers. Thrice weekly drug/cortisone injections. p.899, raids of the homes of political enemies)
3. JFK may have been a lot of things, but a self-made man he was not (even the marriage between JFK and Jackie was actually brokered by Joe the patriarch), nor a competent statecraftsman.
4. Lee Harvey Oswald was a citizen of the Soviet union. And a Marxist. And a Castro supporter.
5. Vietnam had 8.7 million Americans performing military service. And 47,244 battle deaths. Three times the total amount of bomb tonnage dropped in the second world war. A million civilians / soldiers wounded on the Vietnam side. And all for who knows what?
6. Cambodia and Laos were created by French people, and don't actually have that long of a history (p.878).
7. "The experience of the 20th century shows that self-imposed restraints by civilized power are worse than useless. They are seen by friend and enemies like as evidence not of humanity, but of guilt and of lack of moral conviction." (p.883). Johnson puts the failure in Vietnam down to a lack of willpower and decisiveness.
8. It's amazing just how overwhelming the Reagan victory was. 525 to 13 Electoral College majority. "Great Communicator" was the title given to Ronald Reagan, and it's interesting that he started his career as an actor, then a spokesman for general electric and then finally morphed into being a politician.
9. As far back as the time of publication of this book, Congress was composed about 2/3 of lawyers.
10. The influential Gunner Myrtle was a disciple of Nietzsche and he had a profound/negative impact on racial policies in the US.
11. Since the 1965 immigration reform act, the US has become a dumping ground for immigrants from the Third world. Immigrants from Europe used to be over 50%, and now they are less than 10%.
Stats
(p.966):
-165,000 out of 10.3 million violent crimes led to convictions.
-100,000 prison sentences out of 165,000 convictions.
(p. 971):
-1920s, illegitimate births less than 3%; 30% by 1991
-1960, 73,000 never married mothers; 1990, 2.9 million
-illegitimate births by 1991: 68% for blacks, 39% for latinos, 18% for whites. 90% in Washington DC
Second order thoughts:
1. After the '60s and the Kennedy Dynasty/machine, it appears that American presidents were something close to PR technicians than proper statesman.
2. LBJ was the snowflake the start of the avalanche of out of control government spending. (Incidentally, Bill Clinton was not the first pants-dropping pervert in the white house. Nasty LBJ may have been the first, as well as other disgusting habits such as holding meetings while he was sitting on the toilet defecating.)
3. Freedom of the press is not necessarily a good idea. It has been said that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," and that is a recurring theme throughout this book: the media are most certainly not honest brokers.
And let's not even talk about the competition between New York Times and Washington Post to see who can give away the most national secrets.
4. People have questions about how much logic was behind his strategies, but the strongest suit was getting the messages across. And that works in reverse: you can have and executive with nothing to say, but as long as he can say it well he can get people to follow him. (B. Hussein Obama was a case in point example.)
5. When you have organizations that try to become too inclusive, they lose their definition. This is true as the experience of a lot of mainline Protestant churches that lost huge chunks of their membership. Karl Popper also has talked about the paradox of tolerance as a destructive force for civilizations.
Final verdicts:
1. These events (self-generation / stagnation/decline / collapse) are not unique to the United States, and in that sense the events of this book are trivial. Some people like to imagine that if there was an avalanche that if they had found the snowflake that caused that they could have prevented it.
But in reality, the point is the initial state of the system..... And if it had not been the Kennedy Machine at the beginning of US decline, then it just would have been some other.
Or, more generally, if it had not been these specific people profiled here making stupid choices, then it just would have been some other ones.
2. I'm leaning toward the conclusion that: This book is probably worth rereading at 5-year intervals in order to try to glean more pieces of this OVERWHELMING amount of information. (But, since the cycle of stagnation in decline really isn't unique, then is it really worth rereading?)
3. For everyday American people, the overwhelming majority of them are TOTALLY UNAWARE of of historical events that happened even 20 years ago, let alone centuries ago. And whatever you learn here will create many fewer people to whom you can speak.
Vocabulary:
dégringolade
pari passu
gink
satrap
clerisy
trestle
valedictory
toff
ecumenical
chatelaine
Defcon-2
factotum
grapeshot
pediment
sambo/ quadroon/ mustifini/quintiroon / octaroon (different terms to describe the degree of black ancestry a person has in use in British Caribbean colonies)
ichthyology
Seven Sisters (American Baptist / Disciples of
Christ/Episcopal Church / Evangelical Lutheran Church / Presbyterian Church / United Church of Christ/United Methodist Church)
Book Review (IV/IV), pps. 727-976
"A History of the American People"
Paul Johnson
*******
Of the book
972 pps/ 8 parts≈122 pages per
1,950 source notes ≈244/chapter, 2/page
This is the 4th (and final) review section of a book that is SSSOOOO LLLOOONNNGGG that I've had to break it into pieces.
General thoughts (recapitulated):
It's like drinking water through a fire hose, and (as often with history books) the large number of names and dates blend into an impressionistic farrago of ideas.
This book took a VERY LONG time to read (and that is after sitting on my shelf for 8 years), because of:
1. The small print on large pages, and;
2. The necessity to go back and extract the vocabulary words as well as review/re-synopsize what I had learned from each section.
Alas, I don't think it's nearly enough; for this reader, the book has the aforementioned impressionistic feel precisely *because* the sheer mass of information makes significant retention almost impossible.
A significant bad side is that with so many historical events, it is very easy to go back and reconstruct different narratives to suit the political topic of whatever generation is reading.... But I do think that Johnson puts events in their proper context.
I *do* tend to believe did this author (Paul Johnson is an Englishman) as a neutral party to American history. And that is very needful in these days where every single historical event is reinterpreted in terms of Someone's Political Agenda/Ax to Grind
This third section is interesting, because it seems to make *prodigious* use of the "ni**er" word--and I do appreciate it somewhat, because it is an attempt to portray history as it actually happened and not as a sanitized version.
*******
¶¶¶Section 7(1929-1960)
1. Chevrolet / Pontiac/Oldsmobile/Buick/Cadillac initially invented to cover five different major price brackets, each car in numerous versions.
2. There never existed anything like a proper Gold Standard in the years leading up to the Depression; Central bankers could exchange gold bars with each other, but common folk could not walk into a bank and redeem dollars for gold on demand.
3. Nothing is new, only remembered: debt super cycles / beggar-thy-neighbor monetary policy/ attempts to disinvent the business cycle/ bubble blowing central bankers go back at least a century, and nearly at the inception of the Central Bank / Federal Reserve.
4. It has been happening at least since the 1930s that politicians use the IRS to pursue personal vendettas. Lois Lerner and the targeting of conservative groups is the new thing that was not. (p.758, 871, 897).
5. Believe it or not, Roosevelt was a believer in a balanced budget.
6. Johnson seems to describe the Roosevelt administration as lawless, and he could just as easily have been talking about a lot of Democratic administrations.
Seems like all got their inspiration from Roosevelt:
i. IRS vendettas;
ii. Court packing (p.768);
iii. Executive overreach/ pardons of allies (p.761)
7. The Japanese leadership was insane. They chose to fight a war against a country that had: steel advantage, 20:1, oil 10:1, coal 10:1, aircraft 5:1, shipping 2:1, labor force 5:1, overall 10 to 1 (p.778).
8. Johnson portrays US involvement in World War II as a classic merger between the government and high technology capitalism. (Mercifully, he refrains from using the word "military industrial complex.")
9. Truman is treated here at length as an honorable man who was, ironically, a product of machine politics from Kansas. (It appears that Kansas was another Chicago.)
10. Eisenhower seems to be an overlooked figure that Johnson gives credit to. Johnson describes him as a very measured, calculating and devious statecraftsman. Comparable to Winston Churchill. He was a believer in minimum war, sound money and a balanced budget and he kept to it.
Second order thoughts:
1. With respect to the Great Depression, there are two stories: one of overregulation and the other of underregulation. Almost a century after the actual events, it doesn't seem like we are any closer to a definitive answer.
2. Roosevelt is most associated with the New Deal, but Paul Johnson is of the opinion that that actually started with Hoover.
3. Roosevelt is a classic example of the politician who wants power, and he will be all things to all people insofar as it gives him power. He was the Bill/Hillary Clinton of his era.
4. Disarmament has never solved anything, and pacifism/appeasement was a stupid idea even when the British practiced it against Germany. Give an inch, and they will take a mile.
5. (p.767). The Jewish factor in these events is obscure. They were 15% of Roosevelt's appointments, but not most of them and not enough to be thought of as the driving factor. It is interesting (as even other people like Dennis Prager have noted) that they are disproportionately represented in radical / sinister movements. But, not (exactly) causative agents.
(p.834): The people who passed atomic secrets to Russia were: Harry Gold/David and Ruth Greenglass/Julius and Ethel Rosenberg / Morton Sobell. (Extremely unusual, given the vicious anti-semitism of Russia-- historically, then, and now.)
Saul Landau was a lionizer of Fidel Castro (p.866).
Daniel Ellsberg could not wait to reveal articles about US involvement in Vietnam
6. It is amazing how often leadership in the country will start a war with someone that they *know* that they are hopelessly over-matched against and get tons of Other People's Son's killed. Japan against the US; US against Vietnam; Germany against Russia; Union against Confederacy. And then it stops, and there was no reason and the countries become allies in the very. next. generation.
¶¶¶Section 8(1960-1997)
1. The '60s are seen here as the beginning of America's decline phase; Johnson traces the corruption of media to this period, as well as the decline in governance/moral standards - - aided and abetted by a corrupt media. (p.847)
2. The Kennedy Dynasty was also the personification of venality and corruption. (p.851. Cash payments of $50 to help out at the polls. Ghost written journal articles. Hagiographies. Hookers. Thrice weekly drug/cortisone injections. p.899, raids of the homes of political enemies)
3. JFK may have been a lot of things, but a self-made man he was not (even the marriage between JFK and Jackie was actually brokered by Joe the patriarch), nor a competent statecraftsman.
4. Lee Harvey Oswald was a citizen of the Soviet union. And a Marxist. And a Castro supporter.
5. Vietnam had 8.7 million Americans performing military service. And 47,244 battle deaths. Three times the total amount of bomb tonnage dropped in the second world war. A million civilians / soldiers wounded on the Vietnam side. And all for who knows what?
6. Cambodia and Laos were created by French people, and don't actually have that long of a history (p.878).
7. "The experience of the 20th century shows that self-imposed restraints by civilized power are worse than useless. They are seen by friend and enemies like as evidence not of humanity, but of guilt and of lack of moral conviction." (p.883). Johnson puts the failure in Vietnam down to a lack of willpower and decisiveness.
8. It's amazing just how overwhelming the Reagan victory was. 525 to 13 Electoral College majority. "Great Communicator" was the title given to Ronald Reagan, and it's interesting that he started his career as an actor, then a spokesman for general electric and then finally morphed into being a politician.
9. As far back as the time of publication of this book, Congress was composed about 2/3 of lawyers.
10. The influential Gunner Myrtle was a disciple of Nietzsche and he had a profound/negative impact on racial policies in the US.
11. Since the 1965 immigration reform act, the US has become a dumping ground for immigrants from the Third world. Immigrants from Europe used to be over 50%, and now they are less than 10%.
Stats
(p.966):
-165,000 out of 10.3 million violent crimes led to convictions.
-100,000 prison sentences out of 165,000 convictions.
(p. 971):
-1920s, illegitimate births less than 3%; 30% by 1991
-1960, 73,000 never married mothers; 1990, 2.9 million
-illegitimate births by 1991: 68% for blacks, 39% for latinos, 18% for whites. 90% in Washington DC
Second order thoughts:
1. After the '60s and the Kennedy Dynasty/machine, it appears that American presidents were something close to PR technicians than proper statesman.
2. LBJ was the snowflake the start of the avalanche of out of control government spending. (Incidentally, Bill Clinton was not the first pants-dropping pervert in the white house. Nasty LBJ may have been the first, as well as other disgusting habits such as holding meetings while he was sitting on the toilet defecating.)
3. Freedom of the press is not necessarily a good idea. It has been said that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," and that is a recurring theme throughout this book: the media are most certainly not honest brokers.
And let's not even talk about the competition between New York Times and Washington Post to see who can give away the most national secrets.
4. People have questions about how much logic was behind his strategies, but the strongest suit was getting the messages across. And that works in reverse: you can have and executive with nothing to say, but as long as he can say it well he can get people to follow him. (B. Hussein Obama was a case in point example.)
5. When you have organizations that try to become too inclusive, they lose their definition. This is true as the experience of a lot of mainline Protestant churches that lost huge chunks of their membership. Karl Popper also has talked about the paradox of tolerance as a destructive force for civilizations.
Final verdicts:
1. These events (self-generation / stagnation/decline / collapse) are not unique to the United States, and in that sense the events of this book are trivial. Some people like to imagine that if there was an avalanche that if they had found the snowflake that caused that they could have prevented it.
But in reality, the point is the initial state of the system..... And if it had not been the Kennedy Machine at the beginning of US decline, then it just would have been some other.
Or, more generally, if it had not been these specific people profiled here making stupid choices, then it just would have been some other ones.
2. I'm leaning toward the conclusion that: This book is probably worth rereading at 5-year intervals in order to try to glean more pieces of this OVERWHELMING amount of information. (But, since the cycle of stagnation in decline really isn't unique, then is it really worth rereading?)
3. For everyday American people, the overwhelming majority of them are TOTALLY UNAWARE of of historical events that happened even 20 years ago, let alone centuries ago. And whatever you learn here will create many fewer people to whom you can speak.
Vocabulary:
dégringolade
pari passu
gink
satrap
clerisy
trestle
valedictory
toff
ecumenical
chatelaine
Defcon-2
factotum
grapeshot
pediment
sambo/ quadroon/ mustifini/quintiroon / octaroon (different terms to describe the degree of black ancestry a person has in use in British Caribbean colonies)
ichthyology
Seven Sisters (American Baptist / Disciples of
Christ/Episcopal Church / Evangelical Lutheran Church / Presbyterian Church / United Church of Christ/United Methodist Church)
Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life by Ira Byock
medium-paced
5.0
Book review
5 stars
Dying Well
**********
This was a good book.
I recommended it be read in conjunction with 2 others:
1. Atul Gawande. "Being Mortal."
2. Derek Humphry. "Final Exit."
What those two books offer that this one doesn't:
1. The Gawande book is more current (Byock was written in 1997), and he brings a lot more statistics to bear about average life expectancies and questions that you might ask if you were doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not to hang on.
2. The Humphry book actually talks about the nuts and bolts of assisted suicide (and neither of the other two books address this directly).
I can say the reading this book is not a waste, and that is because: if someone is himself watching a loved one die, it is not possible to do a dispassionate analysis of the situation.
The book has 12 chapters, each of which averaged about 20 pages. But, the chapters don't specify well what they talk about in the event that you wanted to read the book out of order (and you can do that).
**Introductory sections
1. Author's own personal story with his father's passing.
2. Author's starting to specialize in hospice care.
**Specific case examples
3. An example of repairing broken relationships prior to death.
4. An example of someone becoming so consumed with anger that psychiatric treatment becomes a problem in and of itself.
5. Three examples of the psychological cost of loss of dignity as a result of being a terminal patient.
6. An example of a patient that hung on just long enough to see a big lifetime event.
7. An example of a person getting in touch with his own emotions during this process of accepting his death. Also, an example of a person who leaves hospice due to new treatment.
8. An example of adjustment to a new role as a dependent.
9. An example of a parent having to let a very young child go, as well as the bonds of a family forming around the care of a young terminal patient.
10. An example of a patient suffering indescribably as a result of fighting too hard against inevitable death.
11. An example of a patient who took the death in the most natural and smooth way possible.
**Conclusion
12. Synopsis and final thoughts.
13. Frequently asked questions section.
The book is fairly well written and easy to read.
It also has some extremely memorable quotes, which are worth reproducing in full:
(p. 31). "To those who know, no explanation is necessary; to those who don't know, no explanation is sufficient.
(p. 83). The true root of suffering is loss of meaning and purpose in life...... He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how."
Verdict: This book is worth the second hand price, and it can be read over two afternoons. Recommended.
5 stars
Dying Well
**********
This was a good book.
I recommended it be read in conjunction with 2 others:
1. Atul Gawande. "Being Mortal."
2. Derek Humphry. "Final Exit."
What those two books offer that this one doesn't:
1. The Gawande book is more current (Byock was written in 1997), and he brings a lot more statistics to bear about average life expectancies and questions that you might ask if you were doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not to hang on.
2. The Humphry book actually talks about the nuts and bolts of assisted suicide (and neither of the other two books address this directly).
I can say the reading this book is not a waste, and that is because: if someone is himself watching a loved one die, it is not possible to do a dispassionate analysis of the situation.
The book has 12 chapters, each of which averaged about 20 pages. But, the chapters don't specify well what they talk about in the event that you wanted to read the book out of order (and you can do that).
**Introductory sections
1. Author's own personal story with his father's passing.
2. Author's starting to specialize in hospice care.
**Specific case examples
3. An example of repairing broken relationships prior to death.
4. An example of someone becoming so consumed with anger that psychiatric treatment becomes a problem in and of itself.
5. Three examples of the psychological cost of loss of dignity as a result of being a terminal patient.
6. An example of a patient that hung on just long enough to see a big lifetime event.
7. An example of a person getting in touch with his own emotions during this process of accepting his death. Also, an example of a person who leaves hospice due to new treatment.
8. An example of adjustment to a new role as a dependent.
9. An example of a parent having to let a very young child go, as well as the bonds of a family forming around the care of a young terminal patient.
10. An example of a patient suffering indescribably as a result of fighting too hard against inevitable death.
11. An example of a patient who took the death in the most natural and smooth way possible.
**Conclusion
12. Synopsis and final thoughts.
13. Frequently asked questions section.
The book is fairly well written and easy to read.
It also has some extremely memorable quotes, which are worth reproducing in full:
(p. 31). "To those who know, no explanation is necessary; to those who don't know, no explanation is sufficient.
(p. 83). The true root of suffering is loss of meaning and purpose in life...... He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how."
Verdict: This book is worth the second hand price, and it can be read over two afternoons. Recommended.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
medium-paced
1.0
Book Review
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
1/5 stars
"Weird, hippie academic ramblings"
*******
There are some problems with this book. I'll give specific examples (there are lots of them, so I'll only give an abbreviated listing to try to keep the review readable). Some examples are by chapter and others are by page number.
General problems:
1. I have no doubt that this author is a bright guy, but he is not an economist. He does not do his best work when he tries to use formal economic reasoning in his service and he looks even more foolish when he tries to debunk what economists have already hashed out.
2. The book really wanders off topic in more than a few chapters. WAY off topic. I had to remind myself several times that *this is a book about irrationality* (or at least that is what it was supposed to be).
3. This book was written before Daniel Kahnemann's "Thinking, Fast and Slow," but it sure does seems like a lot of psychologists quote the same experiments OVER AND OVER. There is a good bit of overlap between what Kahnemann wrote and what is covered here, and so I'll try to cover what was different in this book to the aforementioned. (Was it really such news that human beings are not calculators/ economists and that they are likely to make reasoning errors accordingly?)
4. We don't know about the external validity (i.e., how well do these things work in the REAL WORLD outside of the lab) of his experiments (1) and following that (2), how well do the experiments scale up (as in, to the scale of a whole country)? He could be blowing smoke. Already in his last book (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves), he pointed out to us that his experiments had NO external validity in explaining relative corruption across different countries.
Specific examples:
(p. 46.) Supply and demand don't really exist but prices are just anchoring and arbitrary coherence?
People don't know what an object is truly worth to them? (p. 49)
Um, I think what Ariely is talking about has already been addressed by the idea of Subjectivism. And that says that there is no inherent value to any object. The Marxists have already tried that one and been thoroughly rebuffed. Some objects are worth something to some people at some times something else to other people at other times. Full stop. And what about aggregating effects? Assume that some people value something too high (because of arbitrary coherence, like the author suggests). Isn't it statistically likely that others would value it too low. Over a large enough sample size, shouldn't these effects cancel each other out? (In a Gaussian distribution- like way?)
He also makes this entire case over, like, 3 pages.
And he is using a book on Psychology to attack the free market as a utility-maxizming device (since people don't really know what things are worth to them). He gets back to it again (p. 50). We only "think" we know what we want. I am not sure what he could be saying (although I am pretty sure what he is implying). That we don't act completely rationally and that our brain is more like a lawyer (=retroactively finding reasons) than a logician? We already knew that. (Now that I think about it, Jonah Lehrer filled a whole book with that topic. How We Decide.) I see that he is trained in Psychology and Business Administration and not Economics.
Chapter 4. This is the second book that I have read by this author this month, and I am learning to take him with a grain of salt. He sets up some experiments, and I have NO CLUE about their external validity (=how well they hold up in the real world outside of the lab), since the giveaway in his last book (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves) was that the entirety of his studies had almost NO external validity. P.90 Ariely stretches his case to talk about cuts in pensions/ benefits/ etc as transforming the social relationship between employers and employees into a market relationship. Was it a social relationship before? (Factories in Ford/ GM?) Did a social contract ever exist? By page 92, I have to give up trying to address every single point. I'll just generally say that the author is (1) committing the "Chess Piece Fallacy" (no, men can't be arranged like pieces on a chess board) and (2) making THE SAME mistake in confusing economic/ cost benefit issues with moral failings. And he might actually know this if he had studied a bit of the economics that he is criticizing. Now we get from drug trafficking to No Child Left Behind. Apparently up until now, education was a Social Norm-like thing. But this is making it a market norm-type thing. Why this is bad, he doesn't say (it's not like he gives us any comparison to countries that are doing it-- he just says that it is "bad" and leaves it at that). Then he gets into some unsubstantiated babbling about "linking education to social goals" (p.93) as "we have learned in our experiments" (no, we haven't-- no proof of external validity!).
So, do we need money? (Yes, a Jew-- of all people-- asked that.) He then gets into the details of some experiments where some individuals took larger numbers of chocolates when they had to pay for them but fewer when they were offered for free. From there, he easily and quickly glides to the notion that pollution goals must be enforced by social norms (instead of financial sanction). Of course because companies are the same as people and can be expected to behave the same. And of course because these experiments are shown to have external validity.
Chapter 6. Safe sex. Men don't like to use condoms when sexually aroused? Because they are thinking with their other head. Um, was this new? (Maury Povich has made an entire CAREER of documenting the results of this).
Chapter 9. Loss aversion. P. 196. He's up to talking about Burridan's donkey. Nice, but another philosopher has already covered that-- over a hundred years ago. Ditto for his having brought up the economic principle that two choices that are equally good are no better than a single choice. Not exactly novel. (And that this point, I am starting to wonder: "What is this book about again? Weren't we on about irrationality").
Chapter 10. The effect of expectations. Was it really such news that when we expect something to be good/ bad, then it really can become that (for us)? Was it really news that people have racial stereotypes? (And are they always and everywhere untrue?) Again, he covers the same experiments as Daniel Kahnemann. There was also the experiment about the violinist (Joshua Bell) playing in a subway covered in The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Simons and Chabris. (Doesn't it seems like psychologists quote the same experiments over and over?)
Chapter 11. The Placebo effect. We didn't know about that? What was this book about again? Irrationality?
Chapter 13. Here, he cannibalizes some of what went into making the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves. This is tangentially related to irrationality-- in the sense that people are not quite rational in their choices about what to be honest/ dishonest about.
Verdict: Save your time and money. Not recommended. Just an academic who has convinced himself that these things are useful/ real because he wrote them.
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
1/5 stars
"Weird, hippie academic ramblings"
*******
There are some problems with this book. I'll give specific examples (there are lots of them, so I'll only give an abbreviated listing to try to keep the review readable). Some examples are by chapter and others are by page number.
General problems:
1. I have no doubt that this author is a bright guy, but he is not an economist. He does not do his best work when he tries to use formal economic reasoning in his service and he looks even more foolish when he tries to debunk what economists have already hashed out.
2. The book really wanders off topic in more than a few chapters. WAY off topic. I had to remind myself several times that *this is a book about irrationality* (or at least that is what it was supposed to be).
3. This book was written before Daniel Kahnemann's "Thinking, Fast and Slow," but it sure does seems like a lot of psychologists quote the same experiments OVER AND OVER. There is a good bit of overlap between what Kahnemann wrote and what is covered here, and so I'll try to cover what was different in this book to the aforementioned. (Was it really such news that human beings are not calculators/ economists and that they are likely to make reasoning errors accordingly?)
4. We don't know about the external validity (i.e., how well do these things work in the REAL WORLD outside of the lab) of his experiments (1) and following that (2), how well do the experiments scale up (as in, to the scale of a whole country)? He could be blowing smoke. Already in his last book (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves), he pointed out to us that his experiments had NO external validity in explaining relative corruption across different countries.
Specific examples:
(p. 46.) Supply and demand don't really exist but prices are just anchoring and arbitrary coherence?
People don't know what an object is truly worth to them? (p. 49)
Um, I think what Ariely is talking about has already been addressed by the idea of Subjectivism. And that says that there is no inherent value to any object. The Marxists have already tried that one and been thoroughly rebuffed. Some objects are worth something to some people at some times something else to other people at other times. Full stop. And what about aggregating effects? Assume that some people value something too high (because of arbitrary coherence, like the author suggests). Isn't it statistically likely that others would value it too low. Over a large enough sample size, shouldn't these effects cancel each other out? (In a Gaussian distribution- like way?)
He also makes this entire case over, like, 3 pages.
And he is using a book on Psychology to attack the free market as a utility-maxizming device (since people don't really know what things are worth to them). He gets back to it again (p. 50). We only "think" we know what we want. I am not sure what he could be saying (although I am pretty sure what he is implying). That we don't act completely rationally and that our brain is more like a lawyer (=retroactively finding reasons) than a logician? We already knew that. (Now that I think about it, Jonah Lehrer filled a whole book with that topic. How We Decide.) I see that he is trained in Psychology and Business Administration and not Economics.
Chapter 4. This is the second book that I have read by this author this month, and I am learning to take him with a grain of salt. He sets up some experiments, and I have NO CLUE about their external validity (=how well they hold up in the real world outside of the lab), since the giveaway in his last book (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves) was that the entirety of his studies had almost NO external validity. P.90 Ariely stretches his case to talk about cuts in pensions/ benefits/ etc as transforming the social relationship between employers and employees into a market relationship. Was it a social relationship before? (Factories in Ford/ GM?) Did a social contract ever exist? By page 92, I have to give up trying to address every single point. I'll just generally say that the author is (1) committing the "Chess Piece Fallacy" (no, men can't be arranged like pieces on a chess board) and (2) making THE SAME mistake in confusing economic/ cost benefit issues with moral failings. And he might actually know this if he had studied a bit of the economics that he is criticizing. Now we get from drug trafficking to No Child Left Behind. Apparently up until now, education was a Social Norm-like thing. But this is making it a market norm-type thing. Why this is bad, he doesn't say (it's not like he gives us any comparison to countries that are doing it-- he just says that it is "bad" and leaves it at that). Then he gets into some unsubstantiated babbling about "linking education to social goals" (p.93) as "we have learned in our experiments" (no, we haven't-- no proof of external validity!).
So, do we need money? (Yes, a Jew-- of all people-- asked that.) He then gets into the details of some experiments where some individuals took larger numbers of chocolates when they had to pay for them but fewer when they were offered for free. From there, he easily and quickly glides to the notion that pollution goals must be enforced by social norms (instead of financial sanction). Of course because companies are the same as people and can be expected to behave the same. And of course because these experiments are shown to have external validity.
Chapter 6. Safe sex. Men don't like to use condoms when sexually aroused? Because they are thinking with their other head. Um, was this new? (Maury Povich has made an entire CAREER of documenting the results of this).
Chapter 9. Loss aversion. P. 196. He's up to talking about Burridan's donkey. Nice, but another philosopher has already covered that-- over a hundred years ago. Ditto for his having brought up the economic principle that two choices that are equally good are no better than a single choice. Not exactly novel. (And that this point, I am starting to wonder: "What is this book about again? Weren't we on about irrationality").
Chapter 10. The effect of expectations. Was it really such news that when we expect something to be good/ bad, then it really can become that (for us)? Was it really news that people have racial stereotypes? (And are they always and everywhere untrue?) Again, he covers the same experiments as Daniel Kahnemann. There was also the experiment about the violinist (Joshua Bell) playing in a subway covered in The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Simons and Chabris. (Doesn't it seems like psychologists quote the same experiments over and over?)
Chapter 11. The Placebo effect. We didn't know about that? What was this book about again? Irrationality?
Chapter 13. Here, he cannibalizes some of what went into making the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves. This is tangentially related to irrationality-- in the sense that people are not quite rational in their choices about what to be honest/ dishonest about.
Verdict: Save your time and money. Not recommended. Just an academic who has convinced himself that these things are useful/ real because he wrote them.
How the Hebrew Language Grew by Edward Horowitz
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
This is a brilliant book, and one to which I have returned time and time again.
Of course, it works fine as a book to read all the way through from start to finish.
But, it also works as a reference book for when a person is looking for deeper information about some obscure spelling/conjugation in the context of Torah reading.
I also believe that this book is helpful for professional students (Yeshiva bochurim/Kollel penguins) because even though they study this language all day everyday, very very VERY if you have them have thought about the grammatical structure of the Hebrew. (It's to the point where if somebody talks too much in the Beit midrash, you can get them to be completely silent if you ask them a question about any grammatical aspect of the Hebrew.)
Of course, it works fine as a book to read all the way through from start to finish.
But, it also works as a reference book for when a person is looking for deeper information about some obscure spelling/conjugation in the context of Torah reading.
I also believe that this book is helpful for professional students (Yeshiva bochurim/Kollel penguins) because even though they study this language all day everyday, very very VERY if you have them have thought about the grammatical structure of the Hebrew. (It's to the point where if somebody talks too much in the Beit midrash, you can get them to be completely silent if you ask them a question about any grammatical aspect of the Hebrew.)
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson
reflective
fast-paced
3.0
Book Review:
"The Code Breaker"
3/5 stars
Some interesting discussions on bioethics, but a fairly low signal to noise ratio
Of the book:
-56 chapters over 483 pages of prose
-Average of 8.6 pages per chapter (short enough to read two of them over a lunch break).
This book really didn't need to be much more than 250 pages. Randy Schilts wrote a similar blow-by-blow book of an episode in history (the beginning of the HIV crisis, in "And The Band Played On") which was actually even longer than this one, but somehow the events were more interesting, likely because they were more relatable.
This book is disproportionately about the research process and academic politics which are of interest to only a very few people.
The book did get more interesting when the author talked about some of the moral/ethical implications of genetic engineering.
1. In some ways, this book is extremely silly.
¶I would say that it could have been cut down by at least 25% just on omission of the author'
s flapping on about "how hard this is for women just because they are women."
News flash: if there is some new ground being broken by some type of people that are (initially) only there in very small numbers--whatever the reason--of course someone has to go first. (No, "Buckwheat" is not a comfortable character for us to remember but somebody had to go first.)
At one point, Isaacson talks about "the media's presentation of scientists as old white men." (p.34). If they are, then so what?
If there was some movement somewhere for black people to become competitive in Advanced Pure Mathematics (As of now, there are probably no more than a dozen black PhDs in mathematics produced per year--and that might even include people who are EdD's masquerading as real mathematicians), then most of the black students would find themselves working with mostly Eastern Asian / Eastern European colleagues and research advisors.
Also, different types of people just have different interests and aptitudes. (This has been talked about in Charles Murray's "Human Diversity" as well as the multiple times that the author mentions James Watson being run out of town on a rail for daring to observe such.)
Is that worth turning into a whole grievance book, or is it enough to just say that..... Somebody has to go first, and there will be some discomfort until it becomes a normal thing.
2. In some ways, the book is just not honest
¶(p.65): Berkeley's tripling undergraduate tuition was not a result of cuts and state funding, but a result of the fact that education is inherently inflationary because it's not subject to market forces. (It was mentioned in the book that Celera sequenced genome for 1/10 the price of laboratories--at a faster rate.)
¶Yes, it is possible to write a book about someone somewhere who just happened to be researching something interesting that was later brought to commercial fruition.
But, in reality, the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY-->99%-- of (scientific) research will be of no impact. (I don't think anyone cares about Organofluorine Chemistry, although it was once a hot area.)
¶These people easily flying from one dream academic job to another and one postdoc to another just is not representative of reality for the heavy majority of people. (See article: "The Mathematics of the PHD Glut.")
¶(p.139) It is not that the advances by Doudna were created ex-nihilo. There were other research teams that were working on similar projects, and CRISPR-Cas9 had been described before, though the enzymes not actually isolated. It is clear that Doudna wanted to publish her research, lest she get "scooped." (p.202) At one point (January 2013), five papers on the same topic were all published in a single day.
¶¶(p.294) "China has one of the world's most controlled societies, and few things happen in clinics without the government's knowledge"
Just .....no.
Chinese people have been finding ways to get around and obstructive government for several thousand years by now. The reality on the ground is not quite the same as official pronouncements.
3. In some ways, the book is not useful/informative.
¶I have been to undergraduate/graduate school and worked in the science lab, and I do know that academics start the ideas and venture capitalists bring them to fruition.
And it would have to be that way, because people who are academics are categorically not the type of people used to finding ways to turn a profit. (And that's no surprise, if you look at the circumstances in any academic institution.)
¶It is well known that a lot of research projects that ultimately bear fruit are happenstance; this group just happens to have one person that knows somebody that specializes in x-ray crystallography of biomolecules.
Second order thoughts:
1. Sure does seem like wherever happening things ARE, black people ARE NOT. The author states as much (p.461) : "But there were very few African americans, either at the conference or on the benches in the various labs I had visited. In that regard, the new life sciences revolution resembles, unfortunately, the digital revolution. If there are not efforts at outreach and mentorship, biotechnology will be yet another revolution that leaves most blacks behind."
And it is true that I think there was only one black person pictured in this book, and all of the biotech companies were started up by Jewish/Chinese/White/ Indian (p.428)/ Arab (p.426)/Armenians (p.442)/ Turks (p.441)
2. I have lots of questions about how correct it is for researchers to leverage state-funded research into companies from which they take all the profits (Ch 28: there are no less than four companies started) It's like double dipping: taxpayers fund glorified government jobs (universities) and then the best ones take all of the profits. Isaacson lets slip the example of Stanford making $225 million by granting biotech licensees to companies (p.232).
3. If you are looking for a realistic picture of academic life for the great majority who manage to even make it there, you will not find it here. (No discussion of the one body problem, nor the two body problem. Nor endless post docs.)
4. Cultural backgrounds of the participants play a big role in the way that these events played out.
-Feng Zhang/ He Jiankui are far from unusual: It is just the Chinese Way to treat information as something that needs to be hoarded and to smile in your face charmingly, and leave out as much information as possible. It would have been a surprise if he didn't try to double cross / outfox his competitors.)
-Charpentier is hardly unique:It is a common thing in places like France and Italy for people to make an entire career bouncing from one postdoc to another (because there are no full-time positions available).
5. There's a lot of discussion about what is patentable, and who can bring what to market. But, apparently there are things such as "biohackers." By making genetic technology easier to handle, it also means that there are more people who will sell people what they want to buy - - even if it may be a bit dubious.
These discoveries can also be easily turned into biological weapons, and so there's that.
6. This book unintentionally ends up being an extension on Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit": governments don't have the power to ban the invention of technology, and only limited power to decide where it goes.
And let us be clear that money will decide where this goes.
7. The case has been made that the cure to genetic engineering capability is more genetic engineering capability because scale effects can lower the cost.
8. If ethicists and bioengineers are worried about not crossing a red line, fear not: It seems like the ONE red line that nobody is willing to cross is to make a connection between race and IQ. James Watson said out loud what everybody already knows, and he lost his position as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor and was banished from almost everything else.
9. "Eugenics" is a word that gives people all heated up, and is guaranteed to turn any discussion into Reduction ad Hitlerium. But, with the big business of bioengineering: you can just get ready for it.
And people who have more money will be able to take advantage of it much faster than everybody else.
*******
Synopses:
€€Part I (3-70): A scientist starts out interested in high school, and then she completes a PhD. She's able to make strides in the field (Molecular Biology / Genetics) because she chooses to not go into an oversubscribed area. (DNA vs. RNA).
€€Part II (71-152)): Introduction to "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats." (CRISPR).
Lots of Sturm und drang about one research group trying to scoop another, and ultimately the beginnings of a tool for gene editing.
€€Part III (153-244):
Gene editing at this point was not new, but unreliable / dangerous. A very lengthy blow by blow description (including personality profiles) of a bunch of scientists trying to scoop one the other to publish information that was discoverable just as a matter of time. Of course, there is lots of academic bickering about who discovered what. Finally, this culminated in a patent lawsuit that dragged on for probably about 8 years.
€€Part IV (245-266):
A brief chapter, deals with therapeutic applications. At this moment, the treatments are cost prohibitive. Something like $1 million per patient. Although, treatments of sickle cell have led to heritable changes.
€€Part V (267-298):
A brief history of the scenarios that involved scientists coming up with agreements as to what should and should not be done as well as what can and cannot be done. Apparently, the American attitude toward genetic engineering was one of great enthusiasm, whereas the Europeans came up with Oviedo Convention ("GMO" is a bad word in Europe--Germany and Britain excepted, for some reason.
€€Part VI(299-334) The first genetically modified babies are made by a Dissolute Mainland Chinese--He Jiamkui.
He thought that he would be a national hero in China, and what he got for his trouble was actually: i)a 3-year prison sentence; ii) $430,000 fine; iii) a lifetime ban from working in reproductive science. All were imposed by the Chinese government.) At this point, the germline is no longer a red line.
€€Part VII (335-370) More moral speculation and thought experiments. The difference between treatment (let's imagine treatment for Huntington's disease) versus enhancement (let's imagine making someone taller). The difference between absolute improvement and a positional improvement. Mood disorders are also associated with creativity. So, if you find a way to engineer them out of existence, what does that mean?
€€Part VIII (371-400) Odds and ends. The author goes into a lab and does an experiment that undergraduates have been able to do for the last 30 years. He revisits James Watson, who was punished for crossing the Red Line of linking race and IQ distributions
€€Part IX (401-477) Covid! Dealing with obstructive bureaucracy, such as the FDA and CDC. (Drugs and tests are regularly finished years before the FDA approves them. Covid created some limited fast-tracking, but the problem still exists.) Dealing with idiot politicians, such as Anthony Fauci. Still more bio companies started by US academics to solve problems that the state bureaucracy cannot.
Factoids:
1. It cost $3 billion to sequence human DNA the first time around.
2. Recombinant DNA was figured out in the early 70s. (By the time I was an undergraduate in the late 90s, it was an experiment that college sophomores could do.)
3. (p.99) Before recombinant DNA, 1 lb of insulin required 8,000 lb of pancreas ripped from 23,000 pigs/ cows.
4. What is the Difference Between CRISPR and Restriction Enzymes? CRISPR-Cas system is a prokaryotic immune system that confers resistance to foreign genetic elements. On the other hand, restriction enzymes are endonucleases that recognize a specific sequence of nucleotides and produce a double-stranded cut in the DNA
5. (ZFN) Zinc-finger nucleases are artificial restriction enzymes generated by fusing a zinc finger DNA-binding domain to a DNA-cleavage domain
6. TALENs are artificial restriction enzymes and can cut DNA strands at any desired sequence.
7. Three companies featured here: CRISPR Therapeutics; Editas Medicine; Intellia Therapeutics.
--2021 respective revenue ($millions): 910, 25.5, 33.1.
--Market cap ($billions): 3.97, 0.66, 3.32
--Net operating ($millions): 371, -192, -267
8. "Biohackers" are a thing. Enter the non-binary freak "Jo(siah) Zayner," stage left.
9. Germline and somatic cells are two different things. The first being what will be inherited and present for all times in the second being cells that exist as of a particular moment for some specified and limited use.
10. The major four infectious agents are: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa.
11. Viral vaccines are of a few types. An attenuated version of the virus. Or a "killed" virus. Or a subunit of the live virus. Covid brought to the fore genetically engineered viruses.
Memorable quote (p.241): "Don't fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach."
*******
Verdict: I don't know if I recommend this book all that much. If you wanted an idea of the workings of DNA, better that you would read "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
The point of this book is about CRISPRs, and I would say it's probably better to search for another popular book without all of the literary spinach that is contained in this one.
"The Code Breaker"
3/5 stars
Some interesting discussions on bioethics, but a fairly low signal to noise ratio
Of the book:
-56 chapters over 483 pages of prose
-Average of 8.6 pages per chapter (short enough to read two of them over a lunch break).
This book really didn't need to be much more than 250 pages. Randy Schilts wrote a similar blow-by-blow book of an episode in history (the beginning of the HIV crisis, in "And The Band Played On") which was actually even longer than this one, but somehow the events were more interesting, likely because they were more relatable.
This book is disproportionately about the research process and academic politics which are of interest to only a very few people.
The book did get more interesting when the author talked about some of the moral/ethical implications of genetic engineering.
1. In some ways, this book is extremely silly.
¶I would say that it could have been cut down by at least 25% just on omission of the author'
s flapping on about "how hard this is for women just because they are women."
News flash: if there is some new ground being broken by some type of people that are (initially) only there in very small numbers--whatever the reason--of course someone has to go first. (No, "Buckwheat" is not a comfortable character for us to remember but somebody had to go first.)
At one point, Isaacson talks about "the media's presentation of scientists as old white men." (p.34). If they are, then so what?
If there was some movement somewhere for black people to become competitive in Advanced Pure Mathematics (As of now, there are probably no more than a dozen black PhDs in mathematics produced per year--and that might even include people who are EdD's masquerading as real mathematicians), then most of the black students would find themselves working with mostly Eastern Asian / Eastern European colleagues and research advisors.
Also, different types of people just have different interests and aptitudes. (This has been talked about in Charles Murray's "Human Diversity" as well as the multiple times that the author mentions James Watson being run out of town on a rail for daring to observe such.)
Is that worth turning into a whole grievance book, or is it enough to just say that..... Somebody has to go first, and there will be some discomfort until it becomes a normal thing.
2. In some ways, the book is just not honest
¶(p.65): Berkeley's tripling undergraduate tuition was not a result of cuts and state funding, but a result of the fact that education is inherently inflationary because it's not subject to market forces. (It was mentioned in the book that Celera sequenced genome for 1/10 the price of laboratories--at a faster rate.)
¶Yes, it is possible to write a book about someone somewhere who just happened to be researching something interesting that was later brought to commercial fruition.
But, in reality, the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY-->99%-- of (scientific) research will be of no impact. (I don't think anyone cares about Organofluorine Chemistry, although it was once a hot area.)
¶These people easily flying from one dream academic job to another and one postdoc to another just is not representative of reality for the heavy majority of people. (See article: "The Mathematics of the PHD Glut.")
¶(p.139) It is not that the advances by Doudna were created ex-nihilo. There were other research teams that were working on similar projects, and CRISPR-Cas9 had been described before, though the enzymes not actually isolated. It is clear that Doudna wanted to publish her research, lest she get "scooped." (p.202) At one point (January 2013), five papers on the same topic were all published in a single day.
¶¶(p.294) "China has one of the world's most controlled societies, and few things happen in clinics without the government's knowledge"
Just .....no.
Chinese people have been finding ways to get around and obstructive government for several thousand years by now. The reality on the ground is not quite the same as official pronouncements.
3. In some ways, the book is not useful/informative.
¶I have been to undergraduate/graduate school and worked in the science lab, and I do know that academics start the ideas and venture capitalists bring them to fruition.
And it would have to be that way, because people who are academics are categorically not the type of people used to finding ways to turn a profit. (And that's no surprise, if you look at the circumstances in any academic institution.)
¶It is well known that a lot of research projects that ultimately bear fruit are happenstance; this group just happens to have one person that knows somebody that specializes in x-ray crystallography of biomolecules.
Second order thoughts:
1. Sure does seem like wherever happening things ARE, black people ARE NOT. The author states as much (p.461) : "But there were very few African americans, either at the conference or on the benches in the various labs I had visited. In that regard, the new life sciences revolution resembles, unfortunately, the digital revolution. If there are not efforts at outreach and mentorship, biotechnology will be yet another revolution that leaves most blacks behind."
And it is true that I think there was only one black person pictured in this book, and all of the biotech companies were started up by Jewish/Chinese/White/ Indian (p.428)/ Arab (p.426)/Armenians (p.442)/ Turks (p.441)
2. I have lots of questions about how correct it is for researchers to leverage state-funded research into companies from which they take all the profits (Ch 28: there are no less than four companies started) It's like double dipping: taxpayers fund glorified government jobs (universities) and then the best ones take all of the profits. Isaacson lets slip the example of Stanford making $225 million by granting biotech licensees to companies (p.232).
3. If you are looking for a realistic picture of academic life for the great majority who manage to even make it there, you will not find it here. (No discussion of the one body problem, nor the two body problem. Nor endless post docs.)
4. Cultural backgrounds of the participants play a big role in the way that these events played out.
-Feng Zhang/ He Jiankui are far from unusual: It is just the Chinese Way to treat information as something that needs to be hoarded and to smile in your face charmingly, and leave out as much information as possible. It would have been a surprise if he didn't try to double cross / outfox his competitors.)
-Charpentier is hardly unique:It is a common thing in places like France and Italy for people to make an entire career bouncing from one postdoc to another (because there are no full-time positions available).
5. There's a lot of discussion about what is patentable, and who can bring what to market. But, apparently there are things such as "biohackers." By making genetic technology easier to handle, it also means that there are more people who will sell people what they want to buy - - even if it may be a bit dubious.
These discoveries can also be easily turned into biological weapons, and so there's that.
6. This book unintentionally ends up being an extension on Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit": governments don't have the power to ban the invention of technology, and only limited power to decide where it goes.
And let us be clear that money will decide where this goes.
7. The case has been made that the cure to genetic engineering capability is more genetic engineering capability because scale effects can lower the cost.
8. If ethicists and bioengineers are worried about not crossing a red line, fear not: It seems like the ONE red line that nobody is willing to cross is to make a connection between race and IQ. James Watson said out loud what everybody already knows, and he lost his position as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor and was banished from almost everything else.
9. "Eugenics" is a word that gives people all heated up, and is guaranteed to turn any discussion into Reduction ad Hitlerium. But, with the big business of bioengineering: you can just get ready for it.
And people who have more money will be able to take advantage of it much faster than everybody else.
*******
Synopses:
€€Part I (3-70): A scientist starts out interested in high school, and then she completes a PhD. She's able to make strides in the field (Molecular Biology / Genetics) because she chooses to not go into an oversubscribed area. (DNA vs. RNA).
€€Part II (71-152)): Introduction to "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats." (CRISPR).
Lots of Sturm und drang about one research group trying to scoop another, and ultimately the beginnings of a tool for gene editing.
€€Part III (153-244):
Gene editing at this point was not new, but unreliable / dangerous. A very lengthy blow by blow description (including personality profiles) of a bunch of scientists trying to scoop one the other to publish information that was discoverable just as a matter of time. Of course, there is lots of academic bickering about who discovered what. Finally, this culminated in a patent lawsuit that dragged on for probably about 8 years.
€€Part IV (245-266):
A brief chapter, deals with therapeutic applications. At this moment, the treatments are cost prohibitive. Something like $1 million per patient. Although, treatments of sickle cell have led to heritable changes.
€€Part V (267-298):
A brief history of the scenarios that involved scientists coming up with agreements as to what should and should not be done as well as what can and cannot be done. Apparently, the American attitude toward genetic engineering was one of great enthusiasm, whereas the Europeans came up with Oviedo Convention ("GMO" is a bad word in Europe--Germany and Britain excepted, for some reason.
€€Part VI(299-334) The first genetically modified babies are made by a Dissolute Mainland Chinese--He Jiamkui.
He thought that he would be a national hero in China, and what he got for his trouble was actually: i)a 3-year prison sentence; ii) $430,000 fine; iii) a lifetime ban from working in reproductive science. All were imposed by the Chinese government.) At this point, the germline is no longer a red line.
€€Part VII (335-370) More moral speculation and thought experiments. The difference between treatment (let's imagine treatment for Huntington's disease) versus enhancement (let's imagine making someone taller). The difference between absolute improvement and a positional improvement. Mood disorders are also associated with creativity. So, if you find a way to engineer them out of existence, what does that mean?
€€Part VIII (371-400) Odds and ends. The author goes into a lab and does an experiment that undergraduates have been able to do for the last 30 years. He revisits James Watson, who was punished for crossing the Red Line of linking race and IQ distributions
€€Part IX (401-477) Covid! Dealing with obstructive bureaucracy, such as the FDA and CDC. (Drugs and tests are regularly finished years before the FDA approves them. Covid created some limited fast-tracking, but the problem still exists.) Dealing with idiot politicians, such as Anthony Fauci. Still more bio companies started by US academics to solve problems that the state bureaucracy cannot.
Factoids:
1. It cost $3 billion to sequence human DNA the first time around.
2. Recombinant DNA was figured out in the early 70s. (By the time I was an undergraduate in the late 90s, it was an experiment that college sophomores could do.)
3. (p.99) Before recombinant DNA, 1 lb of insulin required 8,000 lb of pancreas ripped from 23,000 pigs/ cows.
4. What is the Difference Between CRISPR and Restriction Enzymes? CRISPR-Cas system is a prokaryotic immune system that confers resistance to foreign genetic elements. On the other hand, restriction enzymes are endonucleases that recognize a specific sequence of nucleotides and produce a double-stranded cut in the DNA
5. (ZFN) Zinc-finger nucleases are artificial restriction enzymes generated by fusing a zinc finger DNA-binding domain to a DNA-cleavage domain
6. TALENs are artificial restriction enzymes and can cut DNA strands at any desired sequence.
7. Three companies featured here: CRISPR Therapeutics; Editas Medicine; Intellia Therapeutics.
--2021 respective revenue ($millions): 910, 25.5, 33.1.
--Market cap ($billions): 3.97, 0.66, 3.32
--Net operating ($millions): 371, -192, -267
8. "Biohackers" are a thing. Enter the non-binary freak "Jo(siah) Zayner," stage left.
9. Germline and somatic cells are two different things. The first being what will be inherited and present for all times in the second being cells that exist as of a particular moment for some specified and limited use.
10. The major four infectious agents are: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa.
11. Viral vaccines are of a few types. An attenuated version of the virus. Or a "killed" virus. Or a subunit of the live virus. Covid brought to the fore genetically engineered viruses.
Memorable quote (p.241): "Don't fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach."
*******
Verdict: I don't know if I recommend this book all that much. If you wanted an idea of the workings of DNA, better that you would read "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
The point of this book is about CRISPRs, and I would say it's probably better to search for another popular book without all of the literary spinach that is contained in this one.