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711 reviews
The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi
informative
medium-paced
3.0
Book Review
The Rational Male
3/5 stars
"This book is insightful and raw with many good turns of phrase; I have problems believing a lot of it."
*******
Of the book:
1. No editor
2. No index
3. No bibliography; NARY a cited work.
4. Could have been a carefully edited book less than 200 pages (compared to 280 sloppy, poorly edited pages)
I see why it sold a lot of copies-- in spite of the fact that it is self-published *and* the AVALANCHE of spelling errors. (If you don't know the difference between "it's" and "its," did you really go to college? Or if you did, was it accredited).
And it *is* a semi-brilliant, hidden-in-plain-sight idea to just extract ideas from a blog and turn them into a book; it's the equivalent of crowdsourcing the process of discovering and distilling insights.
But, I have several problems with the book
1. As the author himself said in this book, men who are regularly able to successfully access Women's Moist Bits in both the frequency and quantity they desire are not likely to be the ones reading this book. So how do we know that his methodology has mass? As opposed to being a marketing gimmick to the 80% of unlucky guys.
2. I think as much as we would like it to be otherwise, the world is stuck with the 80/20 rule: 20% of men will take 80% of the women and the rest will get what is left over. And the author admits as much (p 43): "Women would rather share a high value man than be saddled with a faithful loser."
a. Can a world exists in which there are 100% Alphas and 0% Betas?
And what would that even look like?
If all men internalized the techniques of "the game," then it would probably be the same distribution with a few winners and a larger number of losers, just at a higher level. (If alphas and bettas are codependent, then one cannot exist without the other; similar to "left/right" or "light /dark" pairs.)
b. Or, can the author show us some place where it *did* even out? (A lot of civilizations long ago independently discovered that that's the purpose of marriage and monogamy)
c. As you age, you have less to choose from and there is no amount of game that can get a 20-year-old into bed with a 70-year-old; let's be cognizant of the inherent limits of the situation.
3. The author talks about this concept of "plate spinning" (and black men have been calling this " ho juggling" before the author coined his neologism), and a lot of black guys do in fact do this - - and that is because the number of black men who are not in prison AND have a stomach for black women (in preference to other options) makes it such that they have a virtually captive market.
But what is the upshot?
a. 59% of black single mothers have children by multiple men (because these men don't feel compelled to commit to any of them), and of course the corresponding incarceration increase;
b. The highest STD rate of all ethnic groups in the United States (and the mechanistic details of this imbalance were dealt with by Ina Park In her book "Strange Bedfellows")--usually a factor of 5 to 6 times higher.
c. Multiple Partner Fertility is higher in black women than all others. A whopping 46% have babies with more than one person--higher than any other ethnic group.
Also, how does this work out mathematically? Black men excepted, there are equal numbers of guys and girls. So, if you have 5 women in your rotation, then you are 1 out of 5 in her/someone else's rotation by mathematical necessity. Where does "plate spinning" go at this point?
4. The author of this book has been married for 17 years, and has ONE child. He mentions (p.171) having a body count of >40. I'm not sure what to think about how exceptional that actually is. (And I look it up, about a third of guys are 10-39 and about 8% are above 40%)
So, if he has bedded all of these women, then what was the point?
(A lot of people don't realize this, but: the purpose of copulation is actually procreation--Think about it: certain pornstars like Mandingo / Danny D/Jeff Stryker each have ONE child. Peter North has ZERO. And this is in spite of shooting enough spunk on screen to fill a 55 gallon drum.)
I would venture to say that the author is a lot less well off than any member of the Quiverfull movement. Mandrae and Karissa Collins have 11 children and don't even seem to be done yet. Nothing can compare to that many children and grandchildren, even if with only one woman; not even the highest "body count" in any given county.
I live in an Orthodox Jewish community where people get married by matchmaker/CV. People talk about what they have to bring to the table BEFORE the marriage.
These marriages are generally quite successful: the average Orthodox house has somewhere between 5 and 6 children. Guys who are the best can honestly compete for the best women, and guys who are losers shop on the discount rack. (Something like 40% of American men never have children; this is compared to 1 to 2% of Orthodox Jewish men.)
Everybody gets matched without so much hostility and subterfuge.
And in fewer steps.
5. In a lot of ways, having access to unlimited amounts of Women's Moist Bits can be counterproductive; when you get married and have to be with ONE woman and raise kids with her, you have to LEARN to enjoy being with ONE person/find ways to keep it "fresh" for X nights of the year instead of X people per year for one night each. (It's harder than it seems!)
I think if you become an expert in game, you really are setting yourself up for failure.
6. There's not a single citation in the entire book. On page 134, he creates a whole chapter about speculation and then apologizes for having no sources to "site" (another one of those spelling errors!) for his information.
Verdict: I think I would have to give this book to my sons to give them an example of why the matchmaking/ shomer negiah dating system is likely the best choice, And while this is likely not the best path.
Quotes:
1. (p. 93). Reservation has made men more endearing to women; either as enigmatic poets and artists for women to figure out, or as natural stoics whose every measured expression of emotion is an event unto itself.
2. (p. 84). It's all the more ironic to read the same mothers who created this generation of man lament how their daughters are unmarried and childless at 35.
3. (p.74) The fundamental flaw of Captain Save a Hoe is that it is essentially negotiated intimacy, and negotiated intimacy is never genuine. You can fix her flat tire, fix her a nice lasagna, give her the perfect shoulder to cry on, babysit her kids, and listen to her drone on for hours on the phone, and she'll still go fuck her outlaw biker boyfriend because her intimacy with him is genuine, unnegotiated, unobligated desire
4. (p. 67) A woman's behavior is always the only gauge of her intent. (p.147) More often than not women tell the complete truth with their actions, they just communicate it in a fashion that men can't or won't understand.
5. (p. 14) Learn this now: women never want full disclosure. Nothing is more self-satisfying for a woman than to think she's figured out a man based solely on her mythical feminine intuition.
6. (p. 15) Always remember, perfect is boring. Women will cry a river about wanting Mr Dependable and then go off to fuck Mr Exciting.
7. (p.95) All the flowery crap that you read in your Hallmark card on Valentine's Day was written by someone else. It's not individual acts of affection or appreciation so much as it is the whole of what you both do on a regular day-to-day basis. It's what you and she are all about after your 300th bowl of oatmeal together on a Saturday morning while you're sitting across the breakfast table discussing which bills need to be paid first this month and how bad the law needs mowing that defines love and marriage.
8. (p. 99) Women should only ever be a compliment to a man's life, never the focus of it.
9. (p. 100) Women are dream killers. Not because they have the agenda to be so, but because men will all too willingly sacrifice their ambitions for a steady supply of pussy and the responsibilities that women attach to this.
10. (p. 105) The truth will set you free, but it doesn't make it hurt any less, nor does it make it any prettier, And it certainly doesn't absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires.
11. (p. 106) Power is neither good nor evil, it simply is, and your capacity to use power, your comforting using it, doesn't invalidate the principles of power.
12. (p. 130) It's far easier to believe that the world should change for you than to accept the truth that you need to improve yourself to get the things you want.
13. (p. 152) She wants you to get it on your own, without having to be told how... The guy she wants to fuck is dominant because "that's the way he is" instead of who she had to tell him to be.
14. (p. 157) Most of the women using online dating run the gambit from hopelessly fat to 2-drink fuckability, the one thing most had in common was an entirely overblown sense of self worth to compliment their grossly overrated self-impression of their sexual market value.
15. (p. 228) It is always time and effort better spent developing relationships with new, fresh, prospective women than it will ever be in attempting to reconstruct a failed relationship.
16. (p. 175) What's my obligation? Neglect myself in favor of a bad commitment or to the principle of commitment itself?
17. (p. 230) Our Great danger is not that we aim too high and fail, but that we aim too low and succeed.
18. (p. 241) Booty is so strong that there are dudes willing to blow themselves up for the highly unlikely possibility of booty in another dimension. There are no chicks willing to blow themselves up for a penis." (Joe Rogan)
19. (p. 246) The good girl is still looking for an Alpha, and will still stop the good girl car to get up and fuck him should the opportunity arise.
20. (p. 251) There has never been a "Rubenesque" period for men--where overweight man where considered the feminine ideal - - in history. A muscular athletic build has always been the masculine standard.
21. (p. 254) Feminization in this respect is the ultimate form of penis envy.
22. (p. 276) Women don't want a man to cheat, but they love a man who *could* cheat.
The Rational Male
3/5 stars
"This book is insightful and raw with many good turns of phrase; I have problems believing a lot of it."
*******
Of the book:
1. No editor
2. No index
3. No bibliography; NARY a cited work.
4. Could have been a carefully edited book less than 200 pages (compared to 280 sloppy, poorly edited pages)
I see why it sold a lot of copies-- in spite of the fact that it is self-published *and* the AVALANCHE of spelling errors. (If you don't know the difference between "it's" and "its," did you really go to college? Or if you did, was it accredited).
And it *is* a semi-brilliant, hidden-in-plain-sight idea to just extract ideas from a blog and turn them into a book; it's the equivalent of crowdsourcing the process of discovering and distilling insights.
But, I have several problems with the book
1. As the author himself said in this book, men who are regularly able to successfully access Women's Moist Bits in both the frequency and quantity they desire are not likely to be the ones reading this book. So how do we know that his methodology has mass? As opposed to being a marketing gimmick to the 80% of unlucky guys.
2. I think as much as we would like it to be otherwise, the world is stuck with the 80/20 rule: 20% of men will take 80% of the women and the rest will get what is left over. And the author admits as much (p 43): "Women would rather share a high value man than be saddled with a faithful loser."
a. Can a world exists in which there are 100% Alphas and 0% Betas?
And what would that even look like?
If all men internalized the techniques of "the game," then it would probably be the same distribution with a few winners and a larger number of losers, just at a higher level. (If alphas and bettas are codependent, then one cannot exist without the other; similar to "left/right" or "light /dark" pairs.)
b. Or, can the author show us some place where it *did* even out? (A lot of civilizations long ago independently discovered that that's the purpose of marriage and monogamy)
c. As you age, you have less to choose from and there is no amount of game that can get a 20-year-old into bed with a 70-year-old; let's be cognizant of the inherent limits of the situation.
3. The author talks about this concept of "plate spinning" (and black men have been calling this " ho juggling" before the author coined his neologism), and a lot of black guys do in fact do this - - and that is because the number of black men who are not in prison AND have a stomach for black women (in preference to other options) makes it such that they have a virtually captive market.
But what is the upshot?
a. 59% of black single mothers have children by multiple men (because these men don't feel compelled to commit to any of them), and of course the corresponding incarceration increase;
b. The highest STD rate of all ethnic groups in the United States (and the mechanistic details of this imbalance were dealt with by Ina Park In her book "Strange Bedfellows")--usually a factor of 5 to 6 times higher.
c. Multiple Partner Fertility is higher in black women than all others. A whopping 46% have babies with more than one person--higher than any other ethnic group.
Also, how does this work out mathematically? Black men excepted, there are equal numbers of guys and girls. So, if you have 5 women in your rotation, then you are 1 out of 5 in her/someone else's rotation by mathematical necessity. Where does "plate spinning" go at this point?
4. The author of this book has been married for 17 years, and has ONE child. He mentions (p.171) having a body count of >40. I'm not sure what to think about how exceptional that actually is. (And I look it up, about a third of guys are 10-39 and about 8% are above 40%)
So, if he has bedded all of these women, then what was the point?
(A lot of people don't realize this, but: the purpose of copulation is actually procreation--Think about it: certain pornstars like Mandingo / Danny D/Jeff Stryker each have ONE child. Peter North has ZERO. And this is in spite of shooting enough spunk on screen to fill a 55 gallon drum.)
I would venture to say that the author is a lot less well off than any member of the Quiverfull movement. Mandrae and Karissa Collins have 11 children and don't even seem to be done yet. Nothing can compare to that many children and grandchildren, even if with only one woman; not even the highest "body count" in any given county.
I live in an Orthodox Jewish community where people get married by matchmaker/CV. People talk about what they have to bring to the table BEFORE the marriage.
These marriages are generally quite successful: the average Orthodox house has somewhere between 5 and 6 children. Guys who are the best can honestly compete for the best women, and guys who are losers shop on the discount rack. (Something like 40% of American men never have children; this is compared to 1 to 2% of Orthodox Jewish men.)
Everybody gets matched without so much hostility and subterfuge.
And in fewer steps.
5. In a lot of ways, having access to unlimited amounts of Women's Moist Bits can be counterproductive; when you get married and have to be with ONE woman and raise kids with her, you have to LEARN to enjoy being with ONE person/find ways to keep it "fresh" for X nights of the year instead of X people per year for one night each. (It's harder than it seems!)
I think if you become an expert in game, you really are setting yourself up for failure.
6. There's not a single citation in the entire book. On page 134, he creates a whole chapter about speculation and then apologizes for having no sources to "site" (another one of those spelling errors!) for his information.
Verdict: I think I would have to give this book to my sons to give them an example of why the matchmaking/ shomer negiah dating system is likely the best choice, And while this is likely not the best path.
Quotes:
1. (p. 93). Reservation has made men more endearing to women; either as enigmatic poets and artists for women to figure out, or as natural stoics whose every measured expression of emotion is an event unto itself.
2. (p. 84). It's all the more ironic to read the same mothers who created this generation of man lament how their daughters are unmarried and childless at 35.
3. (p.74) The fundamental flaw of Captain Save a Hoe is that it is essentially negotiated intimacy, and negotiated intimacy is never genuine. You can fix her flat tire, fix her a nice lasagna, give her the perfect shoulder to cry on, babysit her kids, and listen to her drone on for hours on the phone, and she'll still go fuck her outlaw biker boyfriend because her intimacy with him is genuine, unnegotiated, unobligated desire
4. (p. 67) A woman's behavior is always the only gauge of her intent. (p.147) More often than not women tell the complete truth with their actions, they just communicate it in a fashion that men can't or won't understand.
5. (p. 14) Learn this now: women never want full disclosure. Nothing is more self-satisfying for a woman than to think she's figured out a man based solely on her mythical feminine intuition.
6. (p. 15) Always remember, perfect is boring. Women will cry a river about wanting Mr Dependable and then go off to fuck Mr Exciting.
7. (p.95) All the flowery crap that you read in your Hallmark card on Valentine's Day was written by someone else. It's not individual acts of affection or appreciation so much as it is the whole of what you both do on a regular day-to-day basis. It's what you and she are all about after your 300th bowl of oatmeal together on a Saturday morning while you're sitting across the breakfast table discussing which bills need to be paid first this month and how bad the law needs mowing that defines love and marriage.
8. (p. 99) Women should only ever be a compliment to a man's life, never the focus of it.
9. (p. 100) Women are dream killers. Not because they have the agenda to be so, but because men will all too willingly sacrifice their ambitions for a steady supply of pussy and the responsibilities that women attach to this.
10. (p. 105) The truth will set you free, but it doesn't make it hurt any less, nor does it make it any prettier, And it certainly doesn't absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires.
11. (p. 106) Power is neither good nor evil, it simply is, and your capacity to use power, your comforting using it, doesn't invalidate the principles of power.
12. (p. 130) It's far easier to believe that the world should change for you than to accept the truth that you need to improve yourself to get the things you want.
13. (p. 152) She wants you to get it on your own, without having to be told how... The guy she wants to fuck is dominant because "that's the way he is" instead of who she had to tell him to be.
14. (p. 157) Most of the women using online dating run the gambit from hopelessly fat to 2-drink fuckability, the one thing most had in common was an entirely overblown sense of self worth to compliment their grossly overrated self-impression of their sexual market value.
15. (p. 228) It is always time and effort better spent developing relationships with new, fresh, prospective women than it will ever be in attempting to reconstruct a failed relationship.
16. (p. 175) What's my obligation? Neglect myself in favor of a bad commitment or to the principle of commitment itself?
17. (p. 230) Our Great danger is not that we aim too high and fail, but that we aim too low and succeed.
18. (p. 241) Booty is so strong that there are dudes willing to blow themselves up for the highly unlikely possibility of booty in another dimension. There are no chicks willing to blow themselves up for a penis." (Joe Rogan)
19. (p. 246) The good girl is still looking for an Alpha, and will still stop the good girl car to get up and fuck him should the opportunity arise.
20. (p. 251) There has never been a "Rubenesque" period for men--where overweight man where considered the feminine ideal - - in history. A muscular athletic build has always been the masculine standard.
21. (p. 254) Feminization in this respect is the ultimate form of penis envy.
22. (p. 276) Women don't want a man to cheat, but they love a man who *could* cheat.
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
fast-paced
1.0
Book Review
Inheritance
Dani Shapiro
1/5 stars
"Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Personified."
*******
FIRST BIG THOUGHT:
One of the drawbacks of being an author is that you can take an event that is trivial enough to fill up a magazine article and turn it into an entire book.
Even when you shouldn't.
And that is exactly what this author did.
SECOND BIG THOUGHT:
Knowing the identity of a biological father is often not all it is cracked up to be.
Picture it: a Ghetto Bunny named "Pookie" has a baby with "Tanisha" (let's call baby "Tyrone" ) and then Pookie catches a case and goes to jail for several decades.
Tyrone knows every day of his life WHO his father is and WHERE he is, and it doesn't do him much good because the father can't show up for school events or even pay child support. (Not clear that he would be inclined to do it if he was out; but this removes all possibility.)
This author of this book had a father who was there with her every day and took her to events/doctor's appointments, and fed her and stayed with her and her batty mother until the end of his life.
But he was not her biological father and the author tortured herself to dig up the man who was--and hadn't thought about her since he dropped his sample off in a cup 54 years ago.
I don't know what benefit she thought that there was. (I thought that the book might have been about a child born of an illicit affair, but it was not.)
I don't know what sane person spends so much time thinking about another person that has never given her a thought or tried to find her.
This SEVERELY NARCISSISTIC author found out that she was conceived by a sperm donor because of her father's infertility. (As she reminded us every 10 or 15 pages, she has written nine books. Four of them were memoirs, and one of the fiction books was semi-autobiographical; Even B.Hussein Obama only needed a couple of memoirs to say what he had to say, and he actually did something that a large number of people care about.)
1. Honestly, it could have been compressed into the length of a magazine article.
2. It could have been a book about the history/ethics of sperm donation.
3. It could have been about the racial aspects of Judaism (because she gave us at least a half a dozen examples of where Jewish people did not believe that she was because she did not "look the part.")
Whatever it could have been, it was not because the authors massive ego/self-obsessed introspection was not able to get out of the way so that the story could be told. (I don't know how she could manage to conceive her own child; she aware that there was another person in the room during the act?)
The author does a lot of crazy shit (and it seems that her mother was just as crazy as she was).
(p. 215) Baking Xmas cookies because she thought it was a connection to her father?
(p. 232) Her mother wrote a two-page single space letter to camp about instructions how to handle her daughter?
(p. 66) She just has to drop in a childhood event to let us know that she knows the Kushners (This is the son-in-law of Donald Trump.) And she claims that her family was Orthodox, but she described her father coming from "Temple"?
Verdict: NOT RECOMMENDED
Inheritance
Dani Shapiro
1/5 stars
"Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Personified."
*******
FIRST BIG THOUGHT:
One of the drawbacks of being an author is that you can take an event that is trivial enough to fill up a magazine article and turn it into an entire book.
Even when you shouldn't.
And that is exactly what this author did.
SECOND BIG THOUGHT:
Knowing the identity of a biological father is often not all it is cracked up to be.
Picture it: a Ghetto Bunny named "Pookie" has a baby with "Tanisha" (let's call baby "Tyrone" ) and then Pookie catches a case and goes to jail for several decades.
Tyrone knows every day of his life WHO his father is and WHERE he is, and it doesn't do him much good because the father can't show up for school events or even pay child support. (Not clear that he would be inclined to do it if he was out; but this removes all possibility.)
This author of this book had a father who was there with her every day and took her to events/doctor's appointments, and fed her and stayed with her and her batty mother until the end of his life.
But he was not her biological father and the author tortured herself to dig up the man who was--and hadn't thought about her since he dropped his sample off in a cup 54 years ago.
I don't know what benefit she thought that there was. (I thought that the book might have been about a child born of an illicit affair, but it was not.)
I don't know what sane person spends so much time thinking about another person that has never given her a thought or tried to find her.
This SEVERELY NARCISSISTIC author found out that she was conceived by a sperm donor because of her father's infertility. (As she reminded us every 10 or 15 pages, she has written nine books. Four of them were memoirs, and one of the fiction books was semi-autobiographical; Even B.Hussein Obama only needed a couple of memoirs to say what he had to say, and he actually did something that a large number of people care about.)
1. Honestly, it could have been compressed into the length of a magazine article.
2. It could have been a book about the history/ethics of sperm donation.
3. It could have been about the racial aspects of Judaism (because she gave us at least a half a dozen examples of where Jewish people did not believe that she was because she did not "look the part.")
Whatever it could have been, it was not because the authors massive ego/self-obsessed introspection was not able to get out of the way so that the story could be told. (I don't know how she could manage to conceive her own child; she aware that there was another person in the room during the act?)
The author does a lot of crazy shit (and it seems that her mother was just as crazy as she was).
(p. 215) Baking Xmas cookies because she thought it was a connection to her father?
(p. 232) Her mother wrote a two-page single space letter to camp about instructions how to handle her daughter?
(p. 66) She just has to drop in a childhood event to let us know that she knows the Kushners (This is the son-in-law of Donald Trump.) And she claims that her family was Orthodox, but she described her father coming from "Temple"?
Verdict: NOT RECOMMENDED
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Book Review
"Slouching Toward Bethlehem"
3/5 stars
"Moderately interesting, but has not aged well"
*******
Of the book:
-238 pages/20 chapters≈11.9 pages per chapter
-Chapter length range: 4- 47 pages.
So many thoughts about this book.
1. Even though it did have (a bit of) something to say, and even though it said it (mostly) well, it's neither a book worth keeping nor returning to.
The '60s was a lost decade, and it's probably better to just let it sink into the abyss of history.
2. If you want a taste of Joan Didion at her best, I would instead recommend "The Year of Magical Thinking." One reason that that book is better than the one currently being reviewed is that the '60s were issues of moment at a particular moment, but the feelings of dealing with the death of a spouse are time-independent. (The people in this book are long dead, and a significant number forgotten.)
3. Exquisite though Didion's prose may be there are some things that are just not worth my time to try to unpack. And let's be clear that: Bored Young White People Seeking Inner Peace (and what better place to find them than 1960s California?) is the backbone of the book--the description of hippie acedia takes out 47 pages of 238 page book.
Any book about their attempts at self- actualization therapy should only (questionably) be read once, and (definitely) never twice.
*******
The book is titled after the WB Yeats poem "The Second Coming," because Didion, at that time, saw a parallel between a society entropically tearing itself apart and the chaos that Yeats described at the end of WWI.
But, I wonder: might she have more judiciously chosen the poem "Ozymandias"?
As clear and present as these events were, what do they look like to somebody reading this many decades after they have come to pass?
Few of these names that were dropped are even still alive, and even fewer are remembered: (Joan Baez is 83 years old).
Rosemary Park was a chancellor of the UCLA system about a half century ago; Michael Laski was profiled here as the head of the CPUSA.
Both have disappeared without a trace, as has Suzy Parker.
The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has been defunct since 1987 (37 years ago).
It was mentioned in a book before that the entire hippie movement ultimately turned into Whole Foods.
The Big 5 families that owned everything in Hawaii have been bought out long ago-- some of them just a few years after the publication of this book.
A less dramatic (Yeats inspired) reading of the changes that happened in this book shows them as something much more mundane: The only constant is change.
All of these happenings appear as events that increase social entropy IF and ONLY IF one imagines that there is some state to which some given fraction of humanity is headed.
But we all know that's not the case: It may have turned out this way, but there's no reason it could not have well been otherwise. ("Es konnte auch anders sein.")
And it reduces many of Didion's vivid descriptions of events into so much minutiae.
That said: "Good vocabulary is like wearing designer clothing: people may not like your style, but they will pay attention to the cut of the cloth."
The best thing to do is extract out the most pithy turns of phrase crafted by our author.
Quotes:
1. Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one.
2. It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.
3. For time passed is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the Golden Land where every day the world is born anew.
4. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it.
5. [Joan Baez] The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people; The hardest is with one.
6. Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be.
7. Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about and gets picked up by 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 [micrograms of acid] and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy.
8. 5 years old. On acid.... For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote.
9. This book is called "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.
10. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself
11. What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?
12. We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, and indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.
13. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
14. It is not that Punahou is not still the school of the island power elite; it is. But where in 1944 there were 1,100 students and they had a median IQ of 108, now there are 3,400 with a median IQ of 125.
Verdict: Weak recommendation
"Slouching Toward Bethlehem"
3/5 stars
"Moderately interesting, but has not aged well"
*******
Of the book:
-238 pages/20 chapters≈11.9 pages per chapter
-Chapter length range: 4- 47 pages.
So many thoughts about this book.
1. Even though it did have (a bit of) something to say, and even though it said it (mostly) well, it's neither a book worth keeping nor returning to.
The '60s was a lost decade, and it's probably better to just let it sink into the abyss of history.
2. If you want a taste of Joan Didion at her best, I would instead recommend "The Year of Magical Thinking." One reason that that book is better than the one currently being reviewed is that the '60s were issues of moment at a particular moment, but the feelings of dealing with the death of a spouse are time-independent. (The people in this book are long dead, and a significant number forgotten.)
3. Exquisite though Didion's prose may be there are some things that are just not worth my time to try to unpack. And let's be clear that: Bored Young White People Seeking Inner Peace (and what better place to find them than 1960s California?) is the backbone of the book--the description of hippie acedia takes out 47 pages of 238 page book.
Any book about their attempts at self- actualization therapy should only (questionably) be read once, and (definitely) never twice.
*******
The book is titled after the WB Yeats poem "The Second Coming," because Didion, at that time, saw a parallel between a society entropically tearing itself apart and the chaos that Yeats described at the end of WWI.
But, I wonder: might she have more judiciously chosen the poem "Ozymandias"?
As clear and present as these events were, what do they look like to somebody reading this many decades after they have come to pass?
Few of these names that were dropped are even still alive, and even fewer are remembered: (Joan Baez is 83 years old).
Rosemary Park was a chancellor of the UCLA system about a half century ago; Michael Laski was profiled here as the head of the CPUSA.
Both have disappeared without a trace, as has Suzy Parker.
The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has been defunct since 1987 (37 years ago).
It was mentioned in a book before that the entire hippie movement ultimately turned into Whole Foods.
The Big 5 families that owned everything in Hawaii have been bought out long ago-- some of them just a few years after the publication of this book.
A less dramatic (Yeats inspired) reading of the changes that happened in this book shows them as something much more mundane: The only constant is change.
All of these happenings appear as events that increase social entropy IF and ONLY IF one imagines that there is some state to which some given fraction of humanity is headed.
But we all know that's not the case: It may have turned out this way, but there's no reason it could not have well been otherwise. ("Es konnte auch anders sein.")
And it reduces many of Didion's vivid descriptions of events into so much minutiae.
That said: "Good vocabulary is like wearing designer clothing: people may not like your style, but they will pay attention to the cut of the cloth."
The best thing to do is extract out the most pithy turns of phrase crafted by our author.
Quotes:
1. Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one.
2. It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.
3. For time passed is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the Golden Land where every day the world is born anew.
4. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it.
5. [Joan Baez] The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people; The hardest is with one.
6. Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be.
7. Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about and gets picked up by 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 [micrograms of acid] and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy.
8. 5 years old. On acid.... For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote.
9. This book is called "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.
10. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself
11. What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?
12. We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, and indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.
13. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
14. It is not that Punahou is not still the school of the island power elite; it is. But where in 1944 there were 1,100 students and they had a median IQ of 108, now there are 3,400 with a median IQ of 125.
Verdict: Weak recommendation
This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
dark
hopeful
informative
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
This Child Will Be Great
5/5 stars
*******
Of the book:
-Prologue, plus 21 chapters (317 pages)and inaugural speech (18 pages).
-15 pages per chapter
-15 source bibliography.
Whom is this book for?
I think that the largest beneficiaries would actually be black people in the United States; Liberia is a snapshot of a common culture from a couple of centuries back. And if you look at these events, black self-government ("self-determination" is the current hackneyed expression) is nothing close to the panacea that they think it is - -AND THEY ACTUALLY RAN THAT EXPERIMENT IN LIBERIA.
It could be that "self-determination" actually ends up creating something worse. As it did there (or, Detroit, or really any place black people put their hands in the government).
I really do enjoy Sirleaf's neutral, matter of fact tone throughout the book.
And it is apparent that she is quite a bright woman: she went to Harvard, as well as heading a bank.
Unfortunately, such intellectual competence is EXTREMELY RARE on the African context. (Otherwise, they wouldn't be at the bottom of every development index for decade after decade.)
Also, I don't want to minimize Sirleaf's accomplishments, but:
1. Her election was probably somewhere between the difficulty of a mayoralty and a governorship.
The center of gravity in the country is Monrovia, and it is 75 square miles. (That's about 8.6 miles on an edge; about half the size of the city of Detroit.) Liberia itself is about the size of Tennessee: 43,000 sq. mi.
2. Her total campaign purse was US$2 million. That works out to about $0.67 per person spent on campaigning. (Compare this to $22 per person spent on the last US presidential campaign.)
3. A lot of times heads of state of small places can actually become larger than life even though campaigning in a smaller place might be logistically easier. (Singapore's 290 square miles and it produced Lee Kuan Yew.)
Sirleaf is impressive, to be sure; maybe if she had had the (genetic, other) material to work with that Lee Kuan Yew did, Liberia could have been another Singapore.
*******
I've wanted to study Liberia for quite some time. (It happens that this country showed up in a book that I was reading about a mulatto child growing up in Nazi Germany (!).)
Liberia is a settler country, but the settlers were black Americans.
And they set up a society similar to the one that they left, in which they themselves were the dominant caste and no one could marry them or hold office. (I wonder why Isabel Wilkerson didn't use this place as an example of caste.)
Here is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's description:
It declared independence in 1847 and was recognized by Britain immediately and by the United States 18 years later (right at the end of the Civil War).
"This initial settler group, and those who followed, came to call themselves Americo- Liberians.
"It was an appropriate name, for this band of hopeful immigrants was far more American than African and intended to remain that way. They had adopted the cultures, traditions, and habits of the land of their birth, and these they brought with them with them when they came.
"The colonists spoke English and retained the dress, manners, housing, and religion of the American South.
"The settlers of Modern Day Liberia decided they would plant their feet in Africa but keep their faces turned squarely toward the United States. This stance would trigger a profound alienation between themselves and the indigenous people upon whose shores they had arrived and among whom they would build their home. Alienation would lead to disunity; disunity would lead to a deeply cleaved society.
"That cleavage would set the stage for all the terror and bloodsheds to come."
*******
Really, almost all of this book is old wine in new bottles: One could just scratch out the Anglo-Saxon names (a huge fraction of the Liberians have English names, such as "William Tubman" or "Charles Taylor"), and it would be the same story with any of these other perpetually unstable African jokes.
1. Incompetence
2. Corruption
3. Violence/brutality
4. Wanton destruction
5. Looting
The progression was: William VS Tubman (died in office)--> William Tolbert (assassinated)-->Samuel Doe (assassinated)-->Charles Taylor (arrested)-->Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Some themes were revisits of more subtle observations:
1. There are some indigenous people somewhere and they only get radicalized after they go to (Western) university. (It was an accident that the author ended up at Harvard, and *that* was the time she felt it critical that "my people know their own true history.")
2. Seems like people of African descent have a very difficult time at statecraft. And all of these examples fall apart in the same way, be it in a majority black region in US or Liberia. Flint or Lagos: Essentially, whatever it is starts with goodwill and degenerates into a racketeering operation (this is on the part of the government) or come outright looting and destruction (on the part of the citizens). Or, even the African peacekeeper from other countries engage in looting (p.192).
When the government X falls to the government (X+1), usually via coup, then the officials from the former government are executed. Usually publicly (p.102). And then we have soldiers shooting everybody in sight--attacking churches with refugees and then hacking everybody else to death that survived the initial shooting (p.180).
3. The author herself notes that black Americans have this romanticized, inaccurate view of Africa, but the one people on the continent with which they have the closest connection (that would be Liberians / Americo- Liberians), are the ones in which they are either uninterested or completely unaware.
*******
A very rich history, this country.
1. 43,000 mi² (about the same size as Ohio or Virginia)
2. Started as a series of colonies in 1820 and declared independence on 1847. Recognized by the United States in 1865.
3. Is properly understood as a commonwealth, because There were colonies established by separate US states that merged together.
4. (As of 2009) has 75% of citizens that are not literate in any language.
5. The Whig party of Liberia persisted a full century and a half after the original one from the United States had dissolved.
6. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was one of the four ministers from the Tolbert government that was not executed.
7. Sirleaf managed to survive several governments just by luck, and she actually consulted with an American - - Larry Gibson - to finance and run her campaign. (This guy flew to China and had produced 850K posters, 4000K stickers 300K shopping bags, etc.)
8. The war had killed about 250k out of 3 million people.
Quotes:
1. Liberia had been a golden opportunity... And we had squandered it. We had had so much and had done so little.
2. But things never hit rock bottom, and for one simple reason: the United States held the country up.
3. We know two that Quiwonkpa himself was shot and his body put on public display at the Barclay Training Center.
4. At some point, I knew Doe would say to himself, "So what if the United States doesn't like it? Once she's dead, she's dead." As much as I wanted to stay in Liberia, I wanted even more to stay alive. It was time to go.
5. Doe had reportedly come to the headquarters for a meeting intended to secure his safe passage out of Liberia. Instead he was wounded in the legs, captured, and taken to Johnson's headquarters, where he was brutally tortured - - beating, his ears sawed off - - and eventually killed. A videotape of his torture, mutilation, and death was quickly and widely circulated throughout the country.
6. Better the devil you know than the angel you do not.
7. I suppose that's the part of me that believes in predestination. I believe that when it's my time to go, it's my time to go, and when that time arrives - - so be it. Nothing I do or do not do will be able to stop it. Until then, however, I plan to keep doing what it is I have to do.
8. Taking a page from Taylor's book, the RUF recruited child soldiers by forcing them to rape or kill their own parents before swearing allegiance to Mr Sankoh..... After one is raped and killed one's own mother, what boundaries are left to cross?
9. In many places there were no roads at all, and I would just take a canoe and paddle across the river to visit a village.
10. The hard truth is that a good number of these young former combatants - - our children, yes - are hardened criminals..... Theft and even armed robbery remain serious problems in Liberia, and these hardened former combatants are largely the source of it.
Verdict: Recommended
This Child Will Be Great
5/5 stars
*******
Of the book:
-Prologue, plus 21 chapters (317 pages)and inaugural speech (18 pages).
-15 pages per chapter
-15 source bibliography.
Whom is this book for?
I think that the largest beneficiaries would actually be black people in the United States; Liberia is a snapshot of a common culture from a couple of centuries back. And if you look at these events, black self-government ("self-determination" is the current hackneyed expression) is nothing close to the panacea that they think it is - -AND THEY ACTUALLY RAN THAT EXPERIMENT IN LIBERIA.
It could be that "self-determination" actually ends up creating something worse. As it did there (or, Detroit, or really any place black people put their hands in the government).
I really do enjoy Sirleaf's neutral, matter of fact tone throughout the book.
And it is apparent that she is quite a bright woman: she went to Harvard, as well as heading a bank.
Unfortunately, such intellectual competence is EXTREMELY RARE on the African context. (Otherwise, they wouldn't be at the bottom of every development index for decade after decade.)
Also, I don't want to minimize Sirleaf's accomplishments, but:
1. Her election was probably somewhere between the difficulty of a mayoralty and a governorship.
The center of gravity in the country is Monrovia, and it is 75 square miles. (That's about 8.6 miles on an edge; about half the size of the city of Detroit.) Liberia itself is about the size of Tennessee: 43,000 sq. mi.
2. Her total campaign purse was US$2 million. That works out to about $0.67 per person spent on campaigning. (Compare this to $22 per person spent on the last US presidential campaign.)
3. A lot of times heads of state of small places can actually become larger than life even though campaigning in a smaller place might be logistically easier. (Singapore's 290 square miles and it produced Lee Kuan Yew.)
Sirleaf is impressive, to be sure; maybe if she had had the (genetic, other) material to work with that Lee Kuan Yew did, Liberia could have been another Singapore.
*******
I've wanted to study Liberia for quite some time. (It happens that this country showed up in a book that I was reading about a mulatto child growing up in Nazi Germany (!).)
Liberia is a settler country, but the settlers were black Americans.
And they set up a society similar to the one that they left, in which they themselves were the dominant caste and no one could marry them or hold office. (I wonder why Isabel Wilkerson didn't use this place as an example of caste.)
Here is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's description:
It declared independence in 1847 and was recognized by Britain immediately and by the United States 18 years later (right at the end of the Civil War).
"This initial settler group, and those who followed, came to call themselves Americo- Liberians.
"It was an appropriate name, for this band of hopeful immigrants was far more American than African and intended to remain that way. They had adopted the cultures, traditions, and habits of the land of their birth, and these they brought with them with them when they came.
"The colonists spoke English and retained the dress, manners, housing, and religion of the American South.
"The settlers of Modern Day Liberia decided they would plant their feet in Africa but keep their faces turned squarely toward the United States. This stance would trigger a profound alienation between themselves and the indigenous people upon whose shores they had arrived and among whom they would build their home. Alienation would lead to disunity; disunity would lead to a deeply cleaved society.
"That cleavage would set the stage for all the terror and bloodsheds to come."
*******
Really, almost all of this book is old wine in new bottles: One could just scratch out the Anglo-Saxon names (a huge fraction of the Liberians have English names, such as "William Tubman" or "Charles Taylor"), and it would be the same story with any of these other perpetually unstable African jokes.
1. Incompetence
2. Corruption
3. Violence/brutality
4. Wanton destruction
5. Looting
The progression was: William VS Tubman (died in office)--> William Tolbert (assassinated)-->Samuel Doe (assassinated)-->Charles Taylor (arrested)-->Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Some themes were revisits of more subtle observations:
1. There are some indigenous people somewhere and they only get radicalized after they go to (Western) university. (It was an accident that the author ended up at Harvard, and *that* was the time she felt it critical that "my people know their own true history.")
2. Seems like people of African descent have a very difficult time at statecraft. And all of these examples fall apart in the same way, be it in a majority black region in US or Liberia. Flint or Lagos: Essentially, whatever it is starts with goodwill and degenerates into a racketeering operation (this is on the part of the government) or come outright looting and destruction (on the part of the citizens). Or, even the African peacekeeper from other countries engage in looting (p.192).
When the government X falls to the government (X+1), usually via coup, then the officials from the former government are executed. Usually publicly (p.102). And then we have soldiers shooting everybody in sight--attacking churches with refugees and then hacking everybody else to death that survived the initial shooting (p.180).
3. The author herself notes that black Americans have this romanticized, inaccurate view of Africa, but the one people on the continent with which they have the closest connection (that would be Liberians / Americo- Liberians), are the ones in which they are either uninterested or completely unaware.
*******
A very rich history, this country.
1. 43,000 mi² (about the same size as Ohio or Virginia)
2. Started as a series of colonies in 1820 and declared independence on 1847. Recognized by the United States in 1865.
3. Is properly understood as a commonwealth, because There were colonies established by separate US states that merged together.
4. (As of 2009) has 75% of citizens that are not literate in any language.
5. The Whig party of Liberia persisted a full century and a half after the original one from the United States had dissolved.
6. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was one of the four ministers from the Tolbert government that was not executed.
7. Sirleaf managed to survive several governments just by luck, and she actually consulted with an American - - Larry Gibson - to finance and run her campaign. (This guy flew to China and had produced 850K posters, 4000K stickers 300K shopping bags, etc.)
8. The war had killed about 250k out of 3 million people.
Quotes:
1. Liberia had been a golden opportunity... And we had squandered it. We had had so much and had done so little.
2. But things never hit rock bottom, and for one simple reason: the United States held the country up.
3. We know two that Quiwonkpa himself was shot and his body put on public display at the Barclay Training Center.
4. At some point, I knew Doe would say to himself, "So what if the United States doesn't like it? Once she's dead, she's dead." As much as I wanted to stay in Liberia, I wanted even more to stay alive. It was time to go.
5. Doe had reportedly come to the headquarters for a meeting intended to secure his safe passage out of Liberia. Instead he was wounded in the legs, captured, and taken to Johnson's headquarters, where he was brutally tortured - - beating, his ears sawed off - - and eventually killed. A videotape of his torture, mutilation, and death was quickly and widely circulated throughout the country.
6. Better the devil you know than the angel you do not.
7. I suppose that's the part of me that believes in predestination. I believe that when it's my time to go, it's my time to go, and when that time arrives - - so be it. Nothing I do or do not do will be able to stop it. Until then, however, I plan to keep doing what it is I have to do.
8. Taking a page from Taylor's book, the RUF recruited child soldiers by forcing them to rape or kill their own parents before swearing allegiance to Mr Sankoh..... After one is raped and killed one's own mother, what boundaries are left to cross?
9. In many places there were no roads at all, and I would just take a canoe and paddle across the river to visit a village.
10. The hard truth is that a good number of these young former combatants - - our children, yes - are hardened criminals..... Theft and even armed robbery remain serious problems in Liberia, and these hardened former combatants are largely the source of it.
Verdict: Recommended
Father's Arcane Daughter by E.L. Konigsburg
funny
informative
inspiring
sad
fast-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
A Parent's Book Review
Father's Arcane Daughter
5+/5 stars
"A book simultaneously written for parents and children; Strongly recommended"
*******
I really do love Konigsburg's books, because when you read them as an adolescent then you read one thing
But, if you read them as an adult, you will read a totally different thing .
This was one of her few that I had not read, and I decided to scratch that itch several decades later. (I remember this book because I had to look up the word "arcane" When I was about 12 or 13.)
It was $118 pages, and could be read through in about an hour and a half.
Scratching this itch was so low cost, that there was no other choice than to do it.
Themes dealt with:
1. Alzheimer's / Dementia (When people age, the memories of breakfast are in distinct, but the memories of decades ago are as clear as a bell.)
2. A Devouring Mother (A lot of times a mother will deliberately handicap her own children for personal reasons. In this case, it might be shame. In other cases, it might be fear that the child will launch and abandon them. I've seen it before.)
3. Appropriate therapy as a way to live a normal life. (Some people make a fetish out of being disabled and never live a normal life; but others are perfectly capable and treat therapy as a way to achieve normalcy.)
The book is so short, that if I gave any plot details I would be giving away the secret.
Suffice it to say, that from a parent's perspective it is a clean and kosher book for children. And it has plenty of room for parent-child discussion, and food for thought.
As is the case with all of Konigsburg's books up into this point, it is full of a rich assortment of aphorisms and generally pithy expressions.
And, of course, a new vocabulary word or two.
Included below.
Quotes:
1. When shadows are all he has, a prisoner learns to tell time by the light coming in through a slit under the door. Facial expressions were the primary Carmichael language. English was second.
2. I wanted, at last, to learn the shape of that shadow. I thought that it would grow smaller when exposed to full light. Shadows are supposed to.
3. If you're raised inside a huge shelter, one that you've never seen from the outside, how would you know that it was a prison unless you saw it from the outside?
4. There were more people who knew what to read than there were people who read.
5. Money is nice because it represents margins. Margins of time: no rushing, being able to have someone pick up the details. Margins of time and margins of space: large rooms, ample wardrobe, not having to match your wardrobe with the laundry schedule. That's what money buys."
Vocabulary:
larrup
pompon
Devonshire sandwich
cenazoic
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
galumph
golliwog
Father's Arcane Daughter
5+/5 stars
"A book simultaneously written for parents and children; Strongly recommended"
*******
I really do love Konigsburg's books, because when you read them as an adolescent then you read one thing
But, if you read them as an adult, you will read a totally different thing .
This was one of her few that I had not read, and I decided to scratch that itch several decades later. (I remember this book because I had to look up the word "arcane" When I was about 12 or 13.)
It was $118 pages, and could be read through in about an hour and a half.
Scratching this itch was so low cost, that there was no other choice than to do it.
Themes dealt with:
1. Alzheimer's / Dementia (When people age, the memories of breakfast are in distinct, but the memories of decades ago are as clear as a bell.)
2. A Devouring Mother (A lot of times a mother will deliberately handicap her own children for personal reasons. In this case, it might be shame. In other cases, it might be fear that the child will launch and abandon them. I've seen it before.)
3. Appropriate therapy as a way to live a normal life. (Some people make a fetish out of being disabled and never live a normal life; but others are perfectly capable and treat therapy as a way to achieve normalcy.)
The book is so short, that if I gave any plot details I would be giving away the secret.
Suffice it to say, that from a parent's perspective it is a clean and kosher book for children. And it has plenty of room for parent-child discussion, and food for thought.
As is the case with all of Konigsburg's books up into this point, it is full of a rich assortment of aphorisms and generally pithy expressions.
And, of course, a new vocabulary word or two.
Included below.
Quotes:
1. When shadows are all he has, a prisoner learns to tell time by the light coming in through a slit under the door. Facial expressions were the primary Carmichael language. English was second.
2. I wanted, at last, to learn the shape of that shadow. I thought that it would grow smaller when exposed to full light. Shadows are supposed to.
3. If you're raised inside a huge shelter, one that you've never seen from the outside, how would you know that it was a prison unless you saw it from the outside?
4. There were more people who knew what to read than there were people who read.
5. Money is nice because it represents margins. Margins of time: no rushing, being able to have someone pick up the details. Margins of time and margins of space: large rooms, ample wardrobe, not having to match your wardrobe with the laundry schedule. That's what money buys."
Vocabulary:
larrup
pompon
Devonshire sandwich
cenazoic
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
galumph
golliwog
Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder
funny
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review: Lost in Math
5/5 stars
"Models are not data and predictions are not evidence."
*******
This is a brilliant book, and there's so much I don't think I'll ever be able to take it all in. (And I won't be rereading it for extra gleanings.)
And this is The Difficulty with many Pop Physics Books: People like the present reader have insufficient background in the subject (only two semesters of undergraduate Physics here), but want to understand it nonetheless.
Even just to sit down and write a review and try to bring across the pertinent concepts requires the reader to be "in the zone."
How to explain such conceptually dense things to somebody like they are a 6-year-old?
The author has done a pretty good job, the difficulty of the task notwithstanding.
And I have even managed to take away several new concepts from this text--even if I didn't fully understand many of them.
This book is also about the Philosophy of Science--But the author's full-throated defense of the Standard Model is the specific vehicle employed to illustrate several broad concepts in said Philosophy. (The fact that physicists don't like standard model and keep trying to come up with more beautiful theories that are never empirically verified is this author's bete noire.)
1. If you can't test it, is it science?
2. What does it mean for a theory to be aesthetic?
3. If a theory is "ugly," but it does correspond to experimental data..... What reason do you have to reject it in favor of a theory that is more mathematically elegant but does not do the same? (As used here, "ugly" means that there are a large number of parameters in the Standard Model.)
4. "The final call is based on our success it explaining observation. But absent observational tests, the most important property of theory must have is to find approval by our peers."
Factoids:
1. The number of physicists has increased by a factor of 100 over the last century.
2. It's not quite like it was in the early days, where people waited until they had something to say to write something down. These days, it is more like publish - perish, it's the perverse incentive for proliferation of ideas for their own sake. And with a corresponding decrease in relevance per paper.
3. The difference between the energies that we could produce and what were needed to test things were about 25 orders of magnitude a century ago. These days, there's another 15 orders of magnitude to go.
We may never get there: apparently "If we wanted to reach Planckian energies, We would need a particle collider about the size of the Milky Way. Or if we wanted to measure a quantum of the gravitational field - a gravitron - the detector would have to be the size of Jupiter and located not just anywhere but in orbit around a potent source of gravitrons, such as a neutron star."
4. Since there are so many ways to build a theory -- presently estimated at 10^500--The standard model is plausibly among them. But nobody has found it, and, given the huge number of possibilities, the odds are that nobody ever will.
*******
Some of the best quotes and germane points (for me to remember as well as that a reader of the review might find interesting).
The author is talking about subdisciplines/concepts of Physics:
1. Particle physics
2. Astrophysics
3. Cosmology
4. Quantum foundations
5. Phenomenology
6. Quantum mechanics
7. String theory
8. Quantum chromodynamics
9. Calabi Yau manifolds
10.Loop quantum gravity
11. Perturbation theory
12.Quantum Gravity
Quotes:
1. The closest you will get to an answer is following the trail of facts down into the basement of science. Follow it until facts get sparse and your onward journey is blocked by theoreticians arguing whose theory is prettier. That's when you know you've reached the foundations.
2. Math keeps us honest. It prevents us from lying to ourselves and to each other. You can be wrong with math, but you can't lie.
3. For the most part, physicists and mathematicians have settled on a fine division of labor in which the former complain about the finickness of the latter and the latter complain about the sloppiness of the former.
4. We first demonstrate that a new theory agrees with the well-confirmed old theories to within measurement precision, thus reproducing the old theory's achievements. Then we only have to add calculations for what more the new theory can explain.
5. The known particles are of two different types, fermions and bosons, and supersymmetry explains how these two types belong together.
6. As a physicist, I'm often accused of reductionism, is if that were an optional position to hold.
7. Being fundamental is a matter of current knowledge. What is fundamental today might no longer be fundamental tomorrow. What is emergent, however, will remain emergent.
8. How math connects to reality is a mystery that plagued philosophers long before they were scientists, and we aren't any wiser today. But luckily we can use the math without solving the mystery.
9. I can't believe what this once-venerable profession has become. Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed. And they're not even good at that.
10. The last time we had a theory of everything was 2,500 years ago..... The world was made up of four elements: Earth, water, air, and fire. Explaining everything was never so easy again.
11. I went into Physics because I don't understand human behavior. Two decades later, what prevents me from understanding Physics is that I still don't understand human behavior.
12. My life aspirations were those of the middle class, middle European family I come from: a good job, a nice house, a child or two, a cozy retirement, and a tasteful urn.
13. How patently absurd it must appear to someone who last had contact with Physics in 11th grade that people get paid for ideas like that. But then, I think, people also get paid for throwing balls through hoops.
14. There's yet another way to postulate new Physics and then hide it, which is to introduce fields that become relevant only at very long distances or very early in the universe, both of which are hard to test.
15. Like many theoretical physicists, I once considered switching to economics in the hope of better job opportunities. I wasn't impressed by the math, but I was stunned by the lack of data.
16. The inconsistency of special relativity with Newtonian gravity gave rise to general relativity. The inconsistency between special relativity and quantum mechanics led to quantum field theory.
17. Three lessons: a) If you want to solve a problem with math, first make sure it really is a problem; b) State your assumptions; c) observational guidance is necessary.
18. 500 theories to explain a signal that wasn't and 193 models for the early universe are more than enough evidence that current quality standards are no longer useful to assess our theories. To select promising future experiments, we need new rules.
******
Verdict: Recommended at the second hand price
Additional noteworthy concepts:
1. Symmetry: If the sky looks blue in every direction, then that dependence on direction is called a rotational symmetry. "The symmetries that physicists deal with are more abstract versions of this example, like rotations among multiple axes in internal mathematical spaces. But it always works the same way: find a transformation into which the laws of symmetry remain invariant, and you've found a symmetry."
2. Apophenia: liking to discover patterns in noise
3. Irvin Yalom (1980) describes four major “ultimate concerns”: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom.
5/5 stars
"Models are not data and predictions are not evidence."
*******
This is a brilliant book, and there's so much I don't think I'll ever be able to take it all in. (And I won't be rereading it for extra gleanings.)
And this is The Difficulty with many Pop Physics Books: People like the present reader have insufficient background in the subject (only two semesters of undergraduate Physics here), but want to understand it nonetheless.
Even just to sit down and write a review and try to bring across the pertinent concepts requires the reader to be "in the zone."
How to explain such conceptually dense things to somebody like they are a 6-year-old?
The author has done a pretty good job, the difficulty of the task notwithstanding.
And I have even managed to take away several new concepts from this text--even if I didn't fully understand many of them.
This book is also about the Philosophy of Science--But the author's full-throated defense of the Standard Model is the specific vehicle employed to illustrate several broad concepts in said Philosophy. (The fact that physicists don't like standard model and keep trying to come up with more beautiful theories that are never empirically verified is this author's bete noire.)
1. If you can't test it, is it science?
2. What does it mean for a theory to be aesthetic?
3. If a theory is "ugly," but it does correspond to experimental data..... What reason do you have to reject it in favor of a theory that is more mathematically elegant but does not do the same? (As used here, "ugly" means that there are a large number of parameters in the Standard Model.)
4. "The final call is based on our success it explaining observation. But absent observational tests, the most important property of theory must have is to find approval by our peers."
Factoids:
1. The number of physicists has increased by a factor of 100 over the last century.
2. It's not quite like it was in the early days, where people waited until they had something to say to write something down. These days, it is more like publish - perish, it's the perverse incentive for proliferation of ideas for their own sake. And with a corresponding decrease in relevance per paper.
3. The difference between the energies that we could produce and what were needed to test things were about 25 orders of magnitude a century ago. These days, there's another 15 orders of magnitude to go.
We may never get there: apparently "If we wanted to reach Planckian energies, We would need a particle collider about the size of the Milky Way. Or if we wanted to measure a quantum of the gravitational field - a gravitron - the detector would have to be the size of Jupiter and located not just anywhere but in orbit around a potent source of gravitrons, such as a neutron star."
4. Since there are so many ways to build a theory -- presently estimated at 10^500--The standard model is plausibly among them. But nobody has found it, and, given the huge number of possibilities, the odds are that nobody ever will.
*******
Some of the best quotes and germane points (for me to remember as well as that a reader of the review might find interesting).
The author is talking about subdisciplines/concepts of Physics:
1. Particle physics
2. Astrophysics
3. Cosmology
4. Quantum foundations
5. Phenomenology
6. Quantum mechanics
7. String theory
8. Quantum chromodynamics
9. Calabi Yau manifolds
10.Loop quantum gravity
11. Perturbation theory
12.Quantum Gravity
Quotes:
1. The closest you will get to an answer is following the trail of facts down into the basement of science. Follow it until facts get sparse and your onward journey is blocked by theoreticians arguing whose theory is prettier. That's when you know you've reached the foundations.
2. Math keeps us honest. It prevents us from lying to ourselves and to each other. You can be wrong with math, but you can't lie.
3. For the most part, physicists and mathematicians have settled on a fine division of labor in which the former complain about the finickness of the latter and the latter complain about the sloppiness of the former.
4. We first demonstrate that a new theory agrees with the well-confirmed old theories to within measurement precision, thus reproducing the old theory's achievements. Then we only have to add calculations for what more the new theory can explain.
5. The known particles are of two different types, fermions and bosons, and supersymmetry explains how these two types belong together.
6. As a physicist, I'm often accused of reductionism, is if that were an optional position to hold.
7. Being fundamental is a matter of current knowledge. What is fundamental today might no longer be fundamental tomorrow. What is emergent, however, will remain emergent.
8. How math connects to reality is a mystery that plagued philosophers long before they were scientists, and we aren't any wiser today. But luckily we can use the math without solving the mystery.
9. I can't believe what this once-venerable profession has become. Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed. And they're not even good at that.
10. The last time we had a theory of everything was 2,500 years ago..... The world was made up of four elements: Earth, water, air, and fire. Explaining everything was never so easy again.
11. I went into Physics because I don't understand human behavior. Two decades later, what prevents me from understanding Physics is that I still don't understand human behavior.
12. My life aspirations were those of the middle class, middle European family I come from: a good job, a nice house, a child or two, a cozy retirement, and a tasteful urn.
13. How patently absurd it must appear to someone who last had contact with Physics in 11th grade that people get paid for ideas like that. But then, I think, people also get paid for throwing balls through hoops.
14. There's yet another way to postulate new Physics and then hide it, which is to introduce fields that become relevant only at very long distances or very early in the universe, both of which are hard to test.
15. Like many theoretical physicists, I once considered switching to economics in the hope of better job opportunities. I wasn't impressed by the math, but I was stunned by the lack of data.
16. The inconsistency of special relativity with Newtonian gravity gave rise to general relativity. The inconsistency between special relativity and quantum mechanics led to quantum field theory.
17. Three lessons: a) If you want to solve a problem with math, first make sure it really is a problem; b) State your assumptions; c) observational guidance is necessary.
18. 500 theories to explain a signal that wasn't and 193 models for the early universe are more than enough evidence that current quality standards are no longer useful to assess our theories. To select promising future experiments, we need new rules.
******
Verdict: Recommended at the second hand price
Additional noteworthy concepts:
1. Symmetry: If the sky looks blue in every direction, then that dependence on direction is called a rotational symmetry. "The symmetries that physicists deal with are more abstract versions of this example, like rotations among multiple axes in internal mathematical spaces. But it always works the same way: find a transformation into which the laws of symmetry remain invariant, and you've found a symmetry."
2. Apophenia: liking to discover patterns in noise
3. Irvin Yalom (1980) describes four major “ultimate concerns”: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom.
Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff
dark
informative
fast-paced
3.0
Book Review
Detroit. An American Autopsy
3/5 stars
"Fallacy of composition. Conflation of Detroit and the US"
July 25, 2015
*******
Another author (Paul Kersey) comes to the conclusion that the best way to destroy a city is to put black people in charge; He is explicit about why this is so.
LeDuff spends a lot of time making excuses, and trying to change the subject.
What the readers takes away from it is exactly the same. (LeDuff mentions that the city existed since 1701 and was, for a time, the richest city in America-- Until Coleman Young.)
***What does LeDuff say in this book (about which he should know better)?
1. He keeps obsessively talking about the auto industry (or lack of it) as the cause of Detroit's problems. There are exactly two plants within the city of Detroit (Jefferson North and Detroit Hamtramck Assembly). A quick internet search shows that the plants, respectively, employ 4600 and 1600 people. You could double the number of auto working jobs and it would still account for less than 5% of the population of the whole city.
2. There is a lot of populist economics in here: i. Detroit doesn't have an industry because of foreign trade; ii. Foreign trade is bad; iii. It's the government's fault for "allowing" companies to leave the country (p. 80)
3. LeDuff ignores the fact that there are a number of cities that border/ are within a few miles of Detroit (Oak Park, Troy, Southfield and Berkley), and all of those cities seem to find something to keep their population employed.
4. Just because some black people take over a city and (predictably) ruin it does not mean that that is what the whole country looks like. Sorry, Charlie.
***What does he offer as an explanation (other than the obvious ones explored in the books of Paul Kersey and Ilana Mercer)? Nothing but excuses.
1. It's the fault of white racism (via mortgage covenants);
2. It's because of white flight;
3. It's because of industrial policy;
4. It's because of Clinton's trade agreement that "allowed companies to leave the country" (I am not sure why Hong Kong and Singapore are centers of prosperity);
5. It's because of the UAW;
6. It's because of greedy Wall Street Robber barons.
Again: Someone else is always responsible for the fate of Detroit except Detroit. (It does come out toward the end of the book that Charlie LeDuff's ancestors were blacks who changed to white. So much for that myth.)
***Who are the cast of characters in LeDuff's book?
1. Black robbers;
2. Black murderers;
3. Inept black governments (Kwame Kilpatrick, Monica Conyers and Cynthia Hathaway)
4. Black victims;
5. Black Muslim terrorists/ gangs (Imam Luqman Abdulllahp. 240);
6. Black escapists;
7. The author's dynasty-of-white-trash family
And the thing is: You could just change the names and you would be telling the same story in Flint, Saginaw, Highland Park, Benton Harbor, Inkster (all in Michigan) or Nigeria/ Haiti/ Zimbabwe.
There are a series of books by Paul Kersey
(1.Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America's Black Metropolis
2. Detroit: The Unauthorized Autopsy of America's Bankrupt Black Metropolis
3. Black Mecca Down: The Collapse of the City too Busy to Hate
4. Guns, Blacks, and Steel: American Cities After the Civil Rights Era)
.....that have caused a lot of controversy, and this one book (that says the same thing) has sold more copies than all of those books combined because of the way that the author says what he has to say.
There is another book, Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, by an Ilana Mercer that shows (in dreadful detail) another firsthand example of what happens when black people try to run a government.
***What of the structure of the book?
1. The author's writing *is* good and pithy.
2. It is a series of vignettes that can be read one at a time. Each one takes less than 15 minutes to read;
3. The whole book takes about 3-3.5 hours to read.
Verdict: Recommended, but only at the price of $1.
Detroit. An American Autopsy
3/5 stars
"Fallacy of composition. Conflation of Detroit and the US"
July 25, 2015
*******
Another author (Paul Kersey) comes to the conclusion that the best way to destroy a city is to put black people in charge; He is explicit about why this is so.
LeDuff spends a lot of time making excuses, and trying to change the subject.
What the readers takes away from it is exactly the same. (LeDuff mentions that the city existed since 1701 and was, for a time, the richest city in America-- Until Coleman Young.)
***What does LeDuff say in this book (about which he should know better)?
1. He keeps obsessively talking about the auto industry (or lack of it) as the cause of Detroit's problems. There are exactly two plants within the city of Detroit (Jefferson North and Detroit Hamtramck Assembly). A quick internet search shows that the plants, respectively, employ 4600 and 1600 people. You could double the number of auto working jobs and it would still account for less than 5% of the population of the whole city.
2. There is a lot of populist economics in here: i. Detroit doesn't have an industry because of foreign trade; ii. Foreign trade is bad; iii. It's the government's fault for "allowing" companies to leave the country (p. 80)
3. LeDuff ignores the fact that there are a number of cities that border/ are within a few miles of Detroit (Oak Park, Troy, Southfield and Berkley), and all of those cities seem to find something to keep their population employed.
4. Just because some black people take over a city and (predictably) ruin it does not mean that that is what the whole country looks like. Sorry, Charlie.
***What does he offer as an explanation (other than the obvious ones explored in the books of Paul Kersey and Ilana Mercer)? Nothing but excuses.
1. It's the fault of white racism (via mortgage covenants);
2. It's because of white flight;
3. It's because of industrial policy;
4. It's because of Clinton's trade agreement that "allowed companies to leave the country" (I am not sure why Hong Kong and Singapore are centers of prosperity);
5. It's because of the UAW;
6. It's because of greedy Wall Street Robber barons.
Again: Someone else is always responsible for the fate of Detroit except Detroit. (It does come out toward the end of the book that Charlie LeDuff's ancestors were blacks who changed to white. So much for that myth.)
***Who are the cast of characters in LeDuff's book?
1. Black robbers;
2. Black murderers;
3. Inept black governments (Kwame Kilpatrick, Monica Conyers and Cynthia Hathaway)
4. Black victims;
5. Black Muslim terrorists/ gangs (Imam Luqman Abdulllahp. 240);
6. Black escapists;
7. The author's dynasty-of-white-trash family
And the thing is: You could just change the names and you would be telling the same story in Flint, Saginaw, Highland Park, Benton Harbor, Inkster (all in Michigan) or Nigeria/ Haiti/ Zimbabwe.
There are a series of books by Paul Kersey
(1.Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America's Black Metropolis
2. Detroit: The Unauthorized Autopsy of America's Bankrupt Black Metropolis
3. Black Mecca Down: The Collapse of the City too Busy to Hate
4. Guns, Blacks, and Steel: American Cities After the Civil Rights Era)
.....that have caused a lot of controversy, and this one book (that says the same thing) has sold more copies than all of those books combined because of the way that the author says what he has to say.
There is another book, Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, by an Ilana Mercer that shows (in dreadful detail) another firsthand example of what happens when black people try to run a government.
***What of the structure of the book?
1. The author's writing *is* good and pithy.
2. It is a series of vignettes that can be read one at a time. Each one takes less than 15 minutes to read;
3. The whole book takes about 3-3.5 hours to read.
Verdict: Recommended, but only at the price of $1.
The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews: A Memoir by Rossi
dark
emotional
fast-paced
2.5
Book Review
"Punk Rock Queen of the Jews"
3/5 stars
"Low value added bildungsroman; sociological cliché of a Jewish child with problems from neurotic family."
*******
This book was mentioned in another book that I read by an author Sarah Glass. ("Kissing Girls on Shabbat")
The book is about a 4-hour read. (321 very easy pages.)
It's moderately interesting as a characterization of New York and the crime rate in 1980s. Also, as an outside description of Lubavitch during the time that MM Schneerson was alive, in the events surrounding his death. (She makes the Mesichists appear larger than life.)
This author was not from a religious family, but there is still a lot of overlap between her and religious people who broke away and tried to find their own way.
1. In other books like this, none of the cases seemed that serious because these people's parents financed them the entire time. (Sarah Glass received $100,000 a year from her father.)
2. This was okay for a first read, but I would not recommend paying more than $5 for it for other people who purchase it. (I paid $14.64, and that was probably too much.) And it's not a book that I'm going to return to.
3. It has been said before that "if a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water." Not for no reason has that expression been around for such a long time: People like this author gravitate toward scummy, loser people (drug addicts, rapists, newly religious) and difficult situations It could have been completely avoided.
4. There were some continuity issues. We know that the father died, but she didn't say when. She implies that the sister Yaya died, but I don't think brought a proper resolution to her, either. The brother Mendel died as the book was going to press, but was he sick? Or did he just have a heart attack and that was it?
5. How long can one coming-out-story go on?
6. We knew that the family had mental problems. That's ABUNDANTLY CLEAR. But, the mother was supremely inconsistent: eating at Wendy's, and never going to services. And after all this, she disowned her child after she married an Irish Catholic?
NONE of it needed to be this way.
That said, I will just give some of the most interesting quotes from the book.
1. The only mom I ever knew was a 5-ft tall 300 lb stay-at-home mom.
2. We want Moshiach now. We don't want to wait!
3. There, behind boxes of soda, flower, and plastic cups, sitting on the floor on cushions around a large bong, with three pious looking old men.
4. Periodically, Lubavitch man would walk in and slide a 5 or $10 bill into the turnaround in the bulletproof glass. Hector would take the money and spend out a small manila envelope in return.
5. 8 years of Hebrew school and I get a slut! No decent man will ever want you! You're soiled goods!
6. "When I was in Yeshiva, the older boys were always trying to get into my ass." (This was a guy friend that she had, not the author herself.)
7. Lubavitchers are not allowed to trim their beards, they are allowed to burn them off..... Burnt Beard put his hand on the door "at least a blowjob or something? We spent a lot of money on you ladies!"
8. " Honey," he complained to me one day, "those old rabbis won't leave me alone! They want a piece of this!" He slapped his own ass.
9. Mom's hoarding had gotten so bad that the dining room now housed a mountain of flashlights with bank logos, mismatched plastic placemats, coffee mugs with real estate agency logos, hundreds of bags of stale pretzels, packs of granola bars so old they were covered in dust, old magazines, newspapers, and Sabbath candlesticks. A narrow pathway through it all provided access to the kitchen.
10. Soon, Dad moved to San Diego with his new girlfriend Natalie, and none of his children were allowed in their home.
Verdict: Recommended only at the price of $5
"Punk Rock Queen of the Jews"
3/5 stars
"Low value added bildungsroman; sociological cliché of a Jewish child with problems from neurotic family."
*******
This book was mentioned in another book that I read by an author Sarah Glass. ("Kissing Girls on Shabbat")
The book is about a 4-hour read. (321 very easy pages.)
It's moderately interesting as a characterization of New York and the crime rate in 1980s. Also, as an outside description of Lubavitch during the time that MM Schneerson was alive, in the events surrounding his death. (She makes the Mesichists appear larger than life.)
This author was not from a religious family, but there is still a lot of overlap between her and religious people who broke away and tried to find their own way.
1. In other books like this, none of the cases seemed that serious because these people's parents financed them the entire time. (Sarah Glass received $100,000 a year from her father.)
2. This was okay for a first read, but I would not recommend paying more than $5 for it for other people who purchase it. (I paid $14.64, and that was probably too much.) And it's not a book that I'm going to return to.
3. It has been said before that "if a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water." Not for no reason has that expression been around for such a long time: People like this author gravitate toward scummy, loser people (drug addicts, rapists, newly religious) and difficult situations It could have been completely avoided.
4. There were some continuity issues. We know that the father died, but she didn't say when. She implies that the sister Yaya died, but I don't think brought a proper resolution to her, either. The brother Mendel died as the book was going to press, but was he sick? Or did he just have a heart attack and that was it?
5. How long can one coming-out-story go on?
6. We knew that the family had mental problems. That's ABUNDANTLY CLEAR. But, the mother was supremely inconsistent: eating at Wendy's, and never going to services. And after all this, she disowned her child after she married an Irish Catholic?
NONE of it needed to be this way.
That said, I will just give some of the most interesting quotes from the book.
1. The only mom I ever knew was a 5-ft tall 300 lb stay-at-home mom.
2. We want Moshiach now. We don't want to wait!
3. There, behind boxes of soda, flower, and plastic cups, sitting on the floor on cushions around a large bong, with three pious looking old men.
4. Periodically, Lubavitch man would walk in and slide a 5 or $10 bill into the turnaround in the bulletproof glass. Hector would take the money and spend out a small manila envelope in return.
5. 8 years of Hebrew school and I get a slut! No decent man will ever want you! You're soiled goods!
6. "When I was in Yeshiva, the older boys were always trying to get into my ass." (This was a guy friend that she had, not the author herself.)
7. Lubavitchers are not allowed to trim their beards, they are allowed to burn them off..... Burnt Beard put his hand on the door "at least a blowjob or something? We spent a lot of money on you ladies!"
8. " Honey," he complained to me one day, "those old rabbis won't leave me alone! They want a piece of this!" He slapped his own ass.
9. Mom's hoarding had gotten so bad that the dining room now housed a mountain of flashlights with bank logos, mismatched plastic placemats, coffee mugs with real estate agency logos, hundreds of bags of stale pretzels, packs of granola bars so old they were covered in dust, old magazines, newspapers, and Sabbath candlesticks. A narrow pathway through it all provided access to the kitchen.
10. Soon, Dad moved to San Diego with his new girlfriend Natalie, and none of his children were allowed in their home.
Verdict: Recommended only at the price of $5
The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time by Yascha Mounk
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review: The Identity Trap
5/5 stars
"A very old tale: Destructive intellectuals run amok. In this case, the Manichean identity synthesis."
15 chapters/286 pps (=19 pps/ per)
*******
Good explanations are like bathing suits, in that they reveal everything by covering only what is necessary.
Such is this book.
What is the good explanation? It is a balanced, intellectual analysis of "wokeism" from its epistemic foundations, through to its influence on present society, and speculation on ways that it might burn itself out.
Or, ways that people can work to oppose it.
The author chooses to use the term "identity synthesis" in favor of the thrashed-out / loaded word "wokeism."(It is spoken of in contradistinction to classical liberalism.)
A lot of ideas get started in academia, and they spill over with extremely destructive effect - - and this explains the "identity synthesis" (An obscene hybrid of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory.)
The book is miraculous just on the strength of the fact that he manages to discuss the pertinent-to-explain-this-phenomonon Philosophy with the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary so as not to lose his reader. (We have all taken undergraduate philosophy courses, and if anyone ever perished of boredom, it was in undergraduate Philosophy.)
The book has resonances to several books (of varying degrees of influence):
1. "The True Believer," Eric Hoffer. (Interchangeability of mass movements. Intellectuals infecting "common people" with grievances that only their own superior insight can solve. Such games being played over the head of the moderate majority by extremists on both sides. And so on and so on.)
2. "The Burden of Bad Ideas," by Heather McDonald. (The destructive intellectual foundations that culminated in wokism were still only in progress--The book was written in 2000-- and the horror was not yet revealed.)
3. Radicals: Portrait of a Destructive Passion," by David Horowitz.
4. "Intellectuals," by Paul Johnson. (He gave too much detail about figures that were too obscure.)
*******
Mounk also corrects Mark Levin (and many others) that like to equate today's identity politics with Marxism. (That debunking is the first appendix of the book.)
A book like this could explain the mechanism of action by which a country tears itself apart more accurately.
And it could offer solutions to reverse/halt such things (The author does, in fact, try to do this in the last section of the book); But having a more correct explanation of the mechanism (or even providing solutions to stop the process) only helps in the same way that make up helps a corpse.
FIRST THOUGHT: Maybe it didn't have to be this way.
DEI initiatives lately are falling apart for the strangest of reasons; Patrick Boyle has noted that tech companies (that actually have to turn a profit) are cutting back their DEI departments because a high interest rate environment has revealed that they were luxury items anyway. (Does that make me want to believe that the rise of DEI is a result of extended low interest rates? Does it make me believe that keeping interest rates how long enough will be enough to quench the idiocy?)
Also, a lot of people who want beer really just want a beer. They don't want their purchase of a recreational drink to turn into an affirmation of the Transgender Hysteria.
And now that you think about it: Idiot Academics that perpetuate these destructive ideas are luxury items, because the United States has an inflationary student loan system, as well as a tenure system, and asks no questions about why trillions of dollars of student loans are non-performing.
SECOND THOUGHT: Maybe it DID have to be this way.
There is a paper trail several thousand years of societies tearing themselves apart or masses of people stuck in one particular stupid idea for a long time (supported/led by the intelligensia in that particular place), seemingly for no reason--and such banality has to have *some* beginning point.
a. China thought that all human beings were subjects of the Chinese sovereign, and that it was the center of three concentric rings of civilization. They only found out it was false in 1979, after about 23 centuries;
b. The Indian Brahmins have convinced the other 95% of the country that they are less than for at least an equal amount of time.
c. The Catholic church, at one point, was going to execute everybody that did not believe the world was flat.
*******
The critical bêtes noires by this author are:
1. Michel Foucault (skepticism about objective truth)
2. Edward Said (The use of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends)
3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (essentialist categories of identity
4. Derek Bell (public policy should explicitly depend on a person's identity group)
5. Kimberlé Crenshaw (intersectionality)
6. Ibram Kendi; Robin D'Angelo (antiracism; white fragility)
Mounk does mention that the intellectuals who did survive found that their positions took a direction that they did not anticipate or even agree with.
Second order thoughts:
1. Maybe being stuck in stupidity is actually the default human condition.
Maybe human beings have to forever alternate between the Scylla of no ideas and no progress (China, India) and the Charybdis of generating ideas, a fraction of which will be stupid and destructive.
2. Even though the author can go through and find the most influential people in this destructive cascade of ideas, I don't think that the events depend on them specifically (in the same way that an avalanche depends on the initial state of a system, and NOT on which specific snowflake was the first).
It could be that if some assassin made efficient use of 21 bullets (one in the head and two in the sternum for each bête noire), then there just would have been another seven and the result would have been about the same--and that's because the initial conditions are a country that is overfed and lacks any stressors. (Think: "The Princess and the Pea" story.)
3. This seems to be one of the (many) problems that education makes worse: Left alone, groups of people will reach some sort of equilibrium. And, as the author aptly notes: getting up and going to work is a great way to learn how to deal with all sorts of other people.
4. The '60s came and went because the movement just burned itself out. Could this be more of the same?
It has been my experience that a lot of university radicals moderate after a few years in the workforce. (When people are trying to make a living and get the house note paid, they have a lot in common; They don't want to turn everything into a critical race colloquium cuz ain't nobody got time for that.)
5. "Social media is a tool to construct identities (starting with Tumblr and continuing through everydayfeminism, Vox, and many others). also, since so much of life takes place on the internet, people live in echo chambers and don't have to learn to work with other types of people."
Verdict: Recommended.
*******
Vocabulary:
Strategic essentialism
"Retreat into a labyrinth of textuality"
wallah
Standpoint theory
Cultural appropriation
Progressive separatism
Identity sensitive public policy
Propositional vs experiential knowledge
Cultural appropriation (related problems of original ownership / group membership)
Repressive tolerance
Quotes:
1. But as shared and celebrated on Tumblr, intersectionality became an all-purpose operating system for online activism.
2. When the real target of your wrath is beyond your grasp, and the moral stakes of the moment are high, the inability to do anything useful becomes intensely frustrating. Some people who are so desperate to do something - - anything - - to keep the threat at bay then start to direct their anger at those who are under their control.
3. Bayard Rustin: "The notion of the undifferentiated black community is the intellectual creation of both whites... And of certain small groups of blacks who illegitimately claim to speak for the majority."
4. Trying to assign particular instances of culture to one group in a clean way is a fool's errand.
5. The single most compelling reason against restrictions on free speech stems from the impossibility of appointing smart and selfless censors.
6. At the time, O'Connor and Ginsburg expected that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest-approved today."
7. In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods.
5/5 stars
"A very old tale: Destructive intellectuals run amok. In this case, the Manichean identity synthesis."
15 chapters/286 pps (=19 pps/ per)
*******
Good explanations are like bathing suits, in that they reveal everything by covering only what is necessary.
Such is this book.
What is the good explanation? It is a balanced, intellectual analysis of "wokeism" from its epistemic foundations, through to its influence on present society, and speculation on ways that it might burn itself out.
Or, ways that people can work to oppose it.
The author chooses to use the term "identity synthesis" in favor of the thrashed-out / loaded word "wokeism."(It is spoken of in contradistinction to classical liberalism.)
A lot of ideas get started in academia, and they spill over with extremely destructive effect - - and this explains the "identity synthesis" (An obscene hybrid of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory.)
The book is miraculous just on the strength of the fact that he manages to discuss the pertinent-to-explain-this-phenomonon Philosophy with the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary so as not to lose his reader. (We have all taken undergraduate philosophy courses, and if anyone ever perished of boredom, it was in undergraduate Philosophy.)
The book has resonances to several books (of varying degrees of influence):
1. "The True Believer," Eric Hoffer. (Interchangeability of mass movements. Intellectuals infecting "common people" with grievances that only their own superior insight can solve. Such games being played over the head of the moderate majority by extremists on both sides. And so on and so on.)
2. "The Burden of Bad Ideas," by Heather McDonald. (The destructive intellectual foundations that culminated in wokism were still only in progress--The book was written in 2000-- and the horror was not yet revealed.)
3. Radicals: Portrait of a Destructive Passion," by David Horowitz.
4. "Intellectuals," by Paul Johnson. (He gave too much detail about figures that were too obscure.)
*******
Mounk also corrects Mark Levin (and many others) that like to equate today's identity politics with Marxism. (That debunking is the first appendix of the book.)
A book like this could explain the mechanism of action by which a country tears itself apart more accurately.
And it could offer solutions to reverse/halt such things (The author does, in fact, try to do this in the last section of the book); But having a more correct explanation of the mechanism (or even providing solutions to stop the process) only helps in the same way that make up helps a corpse.
FIRST THOUGHT: Maybe it didn't have to be this way.
DEI initiatives lately are falling apart for the strangest of reasons; Patrick Boyle has noted that tech companies (that actually have to turn a profit) are cutting back their DEI departments because a high interest rate environment has revealed that they were luxury items anyway. (Does that make me want to believe that the rise of DEI is a result of extended low interest rates? Does it make me believe that keeping interest rates how long enough will be enough to quench the idiocy?)
Also, a lot of people who want beer really just want a beer. They don't want their purchase of a recreational drink to turn into an affirmation of the Transgender Hysteria.
And now that you think about it: Idiot Academics that perpetuate these destructive ideas are luxury items, because the United States has an inflationary student loan system, as well as a tenure system, and asks no questions about why trillions of dollars of student loans are non-performing.
SECOND THOUGHT: Maybe it DID have to be this way.
There is a paper trail several thousand years of societies tearing themselves apart or masses of people stuck in one particular stupid idea for a long time (supported/led by the intelligensia in that particular place), seemingly for no reason--and such banality has to have *some* beginning point.
a. China thought that all human beings were subjects of the Chinese sovereign, and that it was the center of three concentric rings of civilization. They only found out it was false in 1979, after about 23 centuries;
b. The Indian Brahmins have convinced the other 95% of the country that they are less than for at least an equal amount of time.
c. The Catholic church, at one point, was going to execute everybody that did not believe the world was flat.
*******
The critical bêtes noires by this author are:
1. Michel Foucault (skepticism about objective truth)
2. Edward Said (The use of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends)
3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (essentialist categories of identity
4. Derek Bell (public policy should explicitly depend on a person's identity group)
5. Kimberlé Crenshaw (intersectionality)
6. Ibram Kendi; Robin D'Angelo (antiracism; white fragility)
Mounk does mention that the intellectuals who did survive found that their positions took a direction that they did not anticipate or even agree with.
Second order thoughts:
1. Maybe being stuck in stupidity is actually the default human condition.
Maybe human beings have to forever alternate between the Scylla of no ideas and no progress (China, India) and the Charybdis of generating ideas, a fraction of which will be stupid and destructive.
2. Even though the author can go through and find the most influential people in this destructive cascade of ideas, I don't think that the events depend on them specifically (in the same way that an avalanche depends on the initial state of a system, and NOT on which specific snowflake was the first).
It could be that if some assassin made efficient use of 21 bullets (one in the head and two in the sternum for each bête noire), then there just would have been another seven and the result would have been about the same--and that's because the initial conditions are a country that is overfed and lacks any stressors. (Think: "The Princess and the Pea" story.)
3. This seems to be one of the (many) problems that education makes worse: Left alone, groups of people will reach some sort of equilibrium. And, as the author aptly notes: getting up and going to work is a great way to learn how to deal with all sorts of other people.
4. The '60s came and went because the movement just burned itself out. Could this be more of the same?
It has been my experience that a lot of university radicals moderate after a few years in the workforce. (When people are trying to make a living and get the house note paid, they have a lot in common; They don't want to turn everything into a critical race colloquium cuz ain't nobody got time for that.)
5. "Social media is a tool to construct identities (starting with Tumblr and continuing through everydayfeminism, Vox, and many others). also, since so much of life takes place on the internet, people live in echo chambers and don't have to learn to work with other types of people."
Verdict: Recommended.
*******
Vocabulary:
Strategic essentialism
"Retreat into a labyrinth of textuality"
wallah
Standpoint theory
Cultural appropriation
Progressive separatism
Identity sensitive public policy
Propositional vs experiential knowledge
Cultural appropriation (related problems of original ownership / group membership)
Repressive tolerance
Quotes:
1. But as shared and celebrated on Tumblr, intersectionality became an all-purpose operating system for online activism.
2. When the real target of your wrath is beyond your grasp, and the moral stakes of the moment are high, the inability to do anything useful becomes intensely frustrating. Some people who are so desperate to do something - - anything - - to keep the threat at bay then start to direct their anger at those who are under their control.
3. Bayard Rustin: "The notion of the undifferentiated black community is the intellectual creation of both whites... And of certain small groups of blacks who illegitimately claim to speak for the majority."
4. Trying to assign particular instances of culture to one group in a clean way is a fool's errand.
5. The single most compelling reason against restrictions on free speech stems from the impossibility of appointing smart and selfless censors.
6. At the time, O'Connor and Ginsburg expected that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest-approved today."
7. In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods.
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It by Richard V. Reeves
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
Of Boys and Men
Richard Reeves
5/5 stars
"Lots of food for thought here (review of a father raising sons)"
*******
Of the book:
-183 pages of prose/12 chapters(=15pps/per)
-742 point citations (=61.8/chapter; 4.1 per page). Extremely well sourced.
-Every chapter subtitle is the best possible one-sentence synopsis of that chapter.
-Book seems like it does not need to be read in order
*******
This is a nice, readable packaging of a lot of material that's really not new.
There really is a lot of food for thought, and I can see myself rereading this book within the next year or so.
Sample thought threads:
1. George Gilder's "Sexual Suicide." (Women do not have to learn what they are, but men do; Men end up a lot worse off when there is less social structure to help them learn what they are supposed to be.)
2. Charles Murray's, "Human Diversity." (Men and women are inherently attracted to different things. The gap between the smartest and dumbest is widest in men, even though the average IQ is about the same as women.)
3. David Buss', "The Evolution of Desire." (Sexual competition is very tough for men, and there are a very few winners and a much larger number of losers.)
4. Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." (The gap between the richest and the poorest is actually getting *wider.*)
5. Valerie Hudson's "Bare Branches" (When you have a surplus of men who cannot get married for whatever reason, that is the beginning of a large number of problems.)
I have a couple of problems with the author's framework:
1. He is extremely heavy college prep, and like a lot of people who work with their head, He seems to forget that that is NOT THE ONLY WAY. With the return on investment of college educations these days, give me a good old skilled trade any day of the week -- and my kids can skip the student loans.
2. Some of his solutions are really unrealistic: He was talking about having more black teachers recruited so that the positive effects to black students of having a black teacher could be realized.
But the problem is that: We black people who live in the REAL WORLD every day realize that you have to work with people that don't look like you, and more often than not they are your boss and not the other way around.
3. STEM jobs used to be the thing of the future, and everyone thought that there was a dire shortage of graduates. That turns out to have been far from the case, and now the author is talking up HEAL jobs (health care, education, administration, and literacy), And I wonder if these are not as oversold as STEM jobs.
4. Author suggests that the government should allocate funds to encourage men into HEAL professions. (Chess piece fallacy. If it was JUST a matter of allocating funds, you could get the number of black people in medical school up to proportionate levels--And the government have not been able to do this after half a century of trying.)
If men don't want to go into social work, teaching or nursing, it just might be that they are not particularly interested in it. (I have done teaching, and it is very uncomfortable; When you live in the real world, it is very difficult to relate to children as if their life in school is representative of what's in store for them.)
5. Author is obsessed with proportionality, even though people just do different things. If there is an "excess" or "surplus" of boys/girls in one field or another, it's not necessarily a problem to be remedied.
And this author should know better.
Alternative solutions:
1. Less is more.
a. I think it would be fine if students were allowed to leave school at 16 years old, because that would be 2 fewer years of anti-male indoctrination.
b. It would also be two more years in the workforce learning how to work with ALL types of people.
c. When you go to work somewhere for 8 hours a day, that is 8 hours a day that you cannot get into trouble. (You can't get shot sticking your hand into a cop car/ peeping in somebody's windows/protesting if you are at work.)
2. I know that academics are loathe to consider it, but an ideal place for men to fit into traditional roles is at a religious community (church/shul/mosque). I see this every day: We have a very large community of Muslims next door in Dearborn, and they go through great pains to keep males and females separate and to teach boys to be boys. (And girls to be girls.)
I live in an Orthodox Jewish community, and boys and girls go to separate schools and camps and are matched to marital partners in a matter-of-fact, mechanical way. And these marriages produce many children. About 5.5 per household, on average.
Second order thoughts:
1. It has been known that the gap between the dumbest and smartest men is much wider than the gap between the dumbest and smartest women - - even if the average IQ is comparable.
Given that: what else would you expect but that a disproportionate number of men would be left behind?
2. Could it be that this becomes what it always has been? 80% of women are after the top 20% of men--and always have been.
So, the men with the best incomes will have babies with everybody, and then the ones on the bottom will just be out of luck?
Hasn't it always been this way?
3. I think that the appropriate decision making unit for this is the family, in conjunction with a community of some type. (Not the State, because native Americans and black people have been waiting on the state to solve their problems for centuries--without that much success.)
Parents need to be aware of what is happening on the ground / in real time (and not just what you read in the newspaper), but through an actual community of people.
Verdict: Recommended, but should be read with a jaundiced eye.
Quotes:
1. A study in New York found that opening a strip club or escort agency reduced sex crime in the surrounding neighborhood by 13% (p.93).
2. The philosopher Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized man was the ability to weep over a column of numbers. (p.74).
Of Boys and Men
Richard Reeves
5/5 stars
"Lots of food for thought here (review of a father raising sons)"
*******
Of the book:
-183 pages of prose/12 chapters(=15pps/per)
-742 point citations (=61.8/chapter; 4.1 per page). Extremely well sourced.
-Every chapter subtitle is the best possible one-sentence synopsis of that chapter.
-Book seems like it does not need to be read in order
*******
This is a nice, readable packaging of a lot of material that's really not new.
There really is a lot of food for thought, and I can see myself rereading this book within the next year or so.
Sample thought threads:
1. George Gilder's "Sexual Suicide." (Women do not have to learn what they are, but men do; Men end up a lot worse off when there is less social structure to help them learn what they are supposed to be.)
2. Charles Murray's, "Human Diversity." (Men and women are inherently attracted to different things. The gap between the smartest and dumbest is widest in men, even though the average IQ is about the same as women.)
3. David Buss', "The Evolution of Desire." (Sexual competition is very tough for men, and there are a very few winners and a much larger number of losers.)
4. Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." (The gap between the richest and the poorest is actually getting *wider.*)
5. Valerie Hudson's "Bare Branches" (When you have a surplus of men who cannot get married for whatever reason, that is the beginning of a large number of problems.)
I have a couple of problems with the author's framework:
1. He is extremely heavy college prep, and like a lot of people who work with their head, He seems to forget that that is NOT THE ONLY WAY. With the return on investment of college educations these days, give me a good old skilled trade any day of the week -- and my kids can skip the student loans.
2. Some of his solutions are really unrealistic: He was talking about having more black teachers recruited so that the positive effects to black students of having a black teacher could be realized.
But the problem is that: We black people who live in the REAL WORLD every day realize that you have to work with people that don't look like you, and more often than not they are your boss and not the other way around.
3. STEM jobs used to be the thing of the future, and everyone thought that there was a dire shortage of graduates. That turns out to have been far from the case, and now the author is talking up HEAL jobs (health care, education, administration, and literacy), And I wonder if these are not as oversold as STEM jobs.
4. Author suggests that the government should allocate funds to encourage men into HEAL professions. (Chess piece fallacy. If it was JUST a matter of allocating funds, you could get the number of black people in medical school up to proportionate levels--And the government have not been able to do this after half a century of trying.)
If men don't want to go into social work, teaching or nursing, it just might be that they are not particularly interested in it. (I have done teaching, and it is very uncomfortable; When you live in the real world, it is very difficult to relate to children as if their life in school is representative of what's in store for them.)
5. Author is obsessed with proportionality, even though people just do different things. If there is an "excess" or "surplus" of boys/girls in one field or another, it's not necessarily a problem to be remedied.
And this author should know better.
Alternative solutions:
1. Less is more.
a. I think it would be fine if students were allowed to leave school at 16 years old, because that would be 2 fewer years of anti-male indoctrination.
b. It would also be two more years in the workforce learning how to work with ALL types of people.
c. When you go to work somewhere for 8 hours a day, that is 8 hours a day that you cannot get into trouble. (You can't get shot sticking your hand into a cop car/ peeping in somebody's windows/protesting if you are at work.)
2. I know that academics are loathe to consider it, but an ideal place for men to fit into traditional roles is at a religious community (church/shul/mosque). I see this every day: We have a very large community of Muslims next door in Dearborn, and they go through great pains to keep males and females separate and to teach boys to be boys. (And girls to be girls.)
I live in an Orthodox Jewish community, and boys and girls go to separate schools and camps and are matched to marital partners in a matter-of-fact, mechanical way. And these marriages produce many children. About 5.5 per household, on average.
Second order thoughts:
1. It has been known that the gap between the dumbest and smartest men is much wider than the gap between the dumbest and smartest women - - even if the average IQ is comparable.
Given that: what else would you expect but that a disproportionate number of men would be left behind?
2. Could it be that this becomes what it always has been? 80% of women are after the top 20% of men--and always have been.
So, the men with the best incomes will have babies with everybody, and then the ones on the bottom will just be out of luck?
Hasn't it always been this way?
3. I think that the appropriate decision making unit for this is the family, in conjunction with a community of some type. (Not the State, because native Americans and black people have been waiting on the state to solve their problems for centuries--without that much success.)
Parents need to be aware of what is happening on the ground / in real time (and not just what you read in the newspaper), but through an actual community of people.
Verdict: Recommended, but should be read with a jaundiced eye.
Quotes:
1. A study in New York found that opening a strip club or escort agency reduced sex crime in the surrounding neighborhood by 13% (p.93).
2. The philosopher Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized man was the ability to weep over a column of numbers. (p.74).