lpm100's reviews
711 reviews

Book Review
"The Anxious Generation" 
5+/5 stars
"Required Reading for parents who want to do a good job" 
*******
Of the book: 

1. 293 pages of prose over 12 chapters (=24.4pps/chapter). 3~4 afternoons worth of reading.

2. About 420 references, as well as 587 point citations over 293 pages of prose (2.0 per page= very well sourced), and this is due to his having a full-time researcher for the book (Thomas Sowell has had a full-time researcher, Na Liu, for many books.)

This is a brilliant book. 

Maybe I'm partial, but I had every reason to expect it to be a good book: 

1. All of his other books have sold very well, and have been put out by very respectable publishing houses. ("The Happiness Hypothesis" was put out by Basic Books.)

2. Three of his other four books have been translated into Chinese. (That is the surest sign, because VERY VERY FEW Mainland Chinese people are interested in leisure books. So, ONLY if it is known that somebody has something to say will a publisher take the risk to translate it.)

3. His first book was published in 2006, and this book was published in 2024. That's about one book every 4.5 years on average, But they still sell very well when they do come out. It appears that Haidt spends a lot of time developing his ideas/waits until he has something to actually say. 

4. It taps into a lot of lines of reasoning that have been picked up by other best-selling books and that have stood the test of time. (Lenore Skenazy actually co-wrote one of the chapters of this book). "Dopamine Nation" about the damaging effects of handheld devices. "Free Range Parenting," about the benefits of a relaxed hand with parenting. "Bad Therapy" and "Irreversible Damage," about the danger of online community generated mental illnesses. "Anti-fragile" about learning under stress adaptations. "The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog," about the balance between being a child's being stressed enough to learn vs stressed enough to cause a disorder. 

*******
Second order thoughts: 

1. It's supremely ironic that a Jewish atheist (ie, the author of this book) ends up describing the benefits of normative Jewish practice: a) Community; b) marking the boundaries of time; c) face to face interaction; d) limiting the use of electronic devices. He has a secular version of something that people have been practicing for several thousand years, and even up until today. 

2. He has a lot of good *theoretical* solutions. (But then so do all books that are trying to address some such problem.)

In reality, the granularity to solve these problems is way beyond the problems of any government--except for maybe North Korea. (They're even wrestling with this problem in totalitarian China, where turning off the internet is a snap of a bureaucrat's fingers.)

It has been known for a *very* long time (Joseph Tainter, 1988, "Collapse of Complex....") that sometimes governments just reach problems that have levels of complexity that they cannot handle. (Although, individual states seem to be *slowly* catching on to limiting cell phone usage during class.)

3. I think that the appropriate decision making unit for these problems is parental. And as long as it takes for the government to figure out things, it might as well be.

We, in our home:

a. Have no television;
b. Send our kids to private school (where phone use is also restricted) 
c. Limit computer time to 30 minutes per day and 
d. Maintain that a flip phone is all that is necessary in order to be able to maintain parental contact. Some homes in this (Orthodox Jewish) community do not even have internet connections. 90% do not have television. Our family is among the 90%.

*******

Good Points:

1. Four foundational harms of phone-based childhood: 

a. Social deprivation 
b. Sleep deprivation 
c. Attention fragmentation 
d. Addiction

2. Every chapter has a recapitulation at the end.

3. These suppositions that the author makes are not floating abstractions, nor just words for their own sake. His point is to describe actual, clear data that has clear breaking points.

4. Girls use social media more than boys, and experience greater harm from same:

a. Girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons; 
b. Female aggression is most often expressed with attempts to harm relationships and reputation (boys usually just punch each other and get it over with);
c. Women and girls more readily share emotion - - and are therefore more vulnerable to sociogenic illnesses;
d. Internet is made it easier for nasty/ old/ bad men to stalk young girls. 

5. Four Foundational Reforms:

a. No smartphones before high school
b. No social media before 16
c. Phone free schools
d. Unsupervised play

6. If you are not a religious person (the author is an atheist), you can create a sense of all just by going out and contemplating nature or paying attention to your surroundings. Take a walk on a nature trail. Anything to get some fresh air and away from the phone.

I don't think there is a single bit of waffle in this book. The author knew what he wanted to say, and he recapitulated his points at the end of every chapter and several times throughout the book because the purpose was to make the reader remember and not just fill up space. 

If You appreciate Lenore Skenazy, you also love this book. (We are Skenazy disciples.)

Verdict: Strongly recommended, at the new price.

Vocabulary:

Behavioral activation system (discover mode)
Behavioral inhibition system (defend mode)
sociogenic epidemic
agency (The desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) 
communion (The desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging)
Collective action problems / social dilemmas

Quotes and notes:

1. "Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: wire up your brain by playing vigorously and often.'

2. "We might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers."

3. " Maybe it's because it's not healthy for any human being to have unfettered access to everything, everywhere, all the time, for free."

4. (Not in this book. Quote by Michael Ché. Pertinent nonetheless.) "You want this kid to pay attention in class? He doesn't have attention deficit, he's got titties in his pocket." 

5. It could include establishing family rituals 
such as a digital Sabbath (one day per week with reduced or no digital technology combined with enjoyable in-person activities).

Book Review
Survival of the Prettiest
2/5 stars
"Tons of waffle interspersed with bits of interesting trivia." 

*******
Of the book: 
-≈525 references (I did not count the number of point citations, because the format made it time prohibitive.)
247 pages/8 chapters≈31pps/chapter
*******
If you are looking for a series of experiments that discuss the way that beautiful people are treated compared to average people, you will not find them in this book. 

Two major points:

1. I don't think anyone older than 12 or 13 years old needs an entire book to recapitulate what nearly everybody already knows by that age 

a. We've all known that beautiful people are more favored. A lot of your success in life depends on a genetic endowment that you really can't control. And I have found ZERO relationship between attractiveness and intelligence.

b. Everybody likes lighter skin women, and everybody likes the white ladies.

2. This book is like so many books on evolutionary psychology/biology: long on speculative explanations, and very short on actual predictive power. (In the chapter "Feature Presentation," how many times does the author recapitulate that scientists have failed to forward engineer a face that is universally/widely agreed upon as beautiful?)

It's not necessarily a failing of the book / author/discipline, but just that things like this are inherently unpredictable. (Who's going to try to predict a chess game from first principles?)

If people cannot predict past beauty trends, what makes them think they could predict future ones? 

And then, even after all the words that make up this book, we don't know how strong any of these effects are (And if they are strong enough and stable enough, what is somebody going to use them to engineer? Does that mean you can go to a plastic surgeon and he can change Whoopi Goldberg into Beyoncé by some well developed algorithm?)

For example:

There is not a *single* graph on all 244 pages so that we can get an idea of the strength of any quantitative relationship. How many of these relationships are statistically significant but not practically significant?

So, if we read the statement (p.37): "Mann observed that by 8 months the mothers showed a clear preference for one of the twins, spending more time soothing, holding, playing, and vocalizing with her," we have no idea what that means. 

a. Does it mean that the mother spent 100 minutes per week with the least favored baby and 101 with the most favored? Or does it mean that the mother spends all of the time with the most favored and just checks to see if the least favored is still breathing once or twice a week?

b. Also, what is real effect of beauty on reproductive success? And, is it stable? Southern European women (Italian / Armenian/Greek, etc) are probably the pinnacle of human evolution. And none of those populations are above replacement levels.  

If you believe the International Sex Guide (a website that describes the sex scene in countries all over the planet), VIRTUALLY NO men are going out of their way to find black women to have sex with. But the average woman in Niger has 7 children. 

How to disentangle attractiveness effects from that, if they exist?

c. Black women have had (natural) steatopygia ever since the beginning of time, and it just recently became attractive as a result of the surgically engineered Kardashian butt. 

Do these preferences have some underlying genetic reason? And if so, why did it take until the Kardashian booty to precipitate these preferences among white guys? (Or, is it like what the author might have hinted: aesthetics are completely random.)

Given the number of books that I have read that take an effect with statistical significance, but no practical significance.... And that then stretch that effect into a 300-page book, my eye is EXTREMELY jaundiced. ("When," by Daniel Pink is just such a book.)
*******

The author gets aggravating when she goes from being descriptive to value judgments:

a (p.119): "Europeans and their descendants are unlikely to maintain their dominance forever. In the United States they will soon be outnumbered and perhaps outspent." But just a few pages back she was talking about how they are a minority in Brazil, but almost all of the upper class and 98% of magazine models.)

b. (p.147): "All of these changes reflect in internal average where Asian, African, and Hispanic faces are helping to recalibrate norms and re-envision beauty." (Don't know what that can mean; Dominicans have a lot more negroid ancestry and Bolivians probably have more indigenous.)

Some of the research is sloppy (p.129: "Among African American women with long hair, it is upper middle-class blacks who wear dreadlocks, twists, and afros, according to psychologist Shanette Harris.") The citation goes back to a single random comment in a magazine article.

Verdict: NOT recommended 


Quotes:

1. When abused children under court protection were studied in California and Massachusetts, it turned out to the disproportionate number of them were unattractive. 

2. Any man with $42 million looks exactly like Clark Gable. 

3. We say that time steals beauty.

4. Human Felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that sell them happen as by the little advantages that occur every day. 

5. I doubt that we will see a reverse transit or preference for overweight men or women, but extreme thinness is bound to go the way of the 3 ft high hair and the 8-ft wide skirt. There's nowhere to go with it: models can't get any thinner, and fashion never stays in one place. 

Factoids:

1. By 1998, there were 122,000 breast enlargements per annum.

2. The toga, the tunic, the sari, and the kimono are examples of garments that have survived for thousands of years.

3. Margaret Thatcher took voice lessons to lower her pitch after she was told that her voice sounded shrill. Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Paulina Porizkova have all taken lessons to lower it their voice pitch to sound less girlish.

4. Wedekind's research suggests that we become attracted to the people who smell the least like our family members.

Vocabulary: 

nulliparous 
farthingales
panniers
crinolines
bustles
pelage
wimple
cicatrization
presbyter
corrugator muscle
chador (hijab)
pourpoint
doublet 
jerkin
poulaine
masseter
stridulating organs
clematis

Book Review
 Do You Speak American? 
 3/5 stars
 "A few interesting points; Dated" 
 *******
 Of the book: 

-203 pages of text/8 chapters=25/per
 -201 point citations. 
 -4-5 hours of reading time 

It seems like all of these books written by linguists are variations on a particular theme, which is to say: a series of trivial anecdotes stapled together around a narrative arc. 

On the one hand, it's nice that somebody is studying and writing these things down so that future generations will have an idea of what people spoke like long ago. 

But on the other, these differences between regional American English are so small (compared to, say, the difference between Chinese as spoken in Taishan, Guangdong compared to Chinese spoken in Shantou, Guangdong) that ONLY an academic could ferret them out. 

And let's not forget that linguists can be certain of something in one generation and then certain of its opposite in the very next--This book says that Southern accents are robust and growing, but an article 20 years later says that the accent is disappearing. (NPR: "Are Southern Accents Disappearing? Linguists say yes.") 

This is forgivable, because natural evolution (linguistic, biological, otherwise) is one of those things that is perfectly explicable ex post facto, yet completely unpredictable from current circumstances. 

Some of the recurring themes are that: 

1. Regional accents are born/stabilize in one place and then go to another and remain stable. (Think: Black people developing a language over centuries in the South, and then moving it with them to the North after the Great Migration. And maintaining it.) 

2. Regional accents may recombine and create something new. (Think: Appalachian Southern and more "Gone With The Wind"  Southern merging and recombining to produce New Southern.) 

I'll just extract some of the most interesting points from each chapter. 

1. "The Language Wars" The wars between prescriptivists and descriptivists have been going on since the 1960s. Computer technology has made it possible to search through texts going back centuries and allows us to find that many words and phrases are actually much older than we thought. 

2. "Changing Dialects" Dialectic diversity is greatest on the East Coast and in the south, and least through the west. These authors deny that television and radio are homogenizing the language--although they do say that internal migration does do that. (They also seem to think that some type of vowel shift is happening in places like Detroit and Cleveland-- that I've never heard, 20 years after the publication of this book.) 

3. "Toward A Standard" The Mid-Atlantic accent was once based on the British Received Pronunciation. (Listen to FDR's fireside chats for something like this.) The postvocalic r was something that showed up *after* that. The neutral newscaster accent is called "Midland." Languages exist as "grapholects" (written forms) and "dialects" (spoken forms), which may have some divergence one from another. Some academics believe that "never before in history have so many people seriously undertaken the challenge to speak or write [American English] well." There is actually an academic journal called "American Speech." 

4. "This Ain't Your Momma's South Anymore" roughneck Scotch-Irish brought their accent with them into the parts of the South that are more geographically difficult to access, and have kept it several centuries later. Plantation South English has a different sound because it was brought by people from Southwest England who often sent their children to school in England. 

5. "Hispanic Immigration." The US had a war of two years against Mexico that resulted in 13,000 US casualties. They paid $15 million for what is most of the Southwestern United States at the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Just a century ago, every 10th American spoke German in Texas-- a higher percentage of people spoke German then than Spanish today.  We have Spanglish AND Chicano English. Author tries to put the best spin on this coming language conflict. 

6. "Bad mouthing Black English" Two theories of the reason that black people speak the way that they do: 

a. Anglicist theory, which is that it is a match to dialects from the English region of the slave owners. (There is an English dialect where the word "ask"  is pronounced "aks.") 

b. Creole theory, that black English is a descendant of English pidgin. 

27% of black people fail to graduate from high school and only 14% of them get college degrees. Respective figures for whites are 16% and 26% 

Black people are reverse migrating to the South from the '70s. Between 1970 and 1990, more returned than left from the period 1914 to 1970. 

7. "Language From A State of Change (=California)" A dictionary was actually assembled in order to write the script for the movie "Clueless." The language can be called "Valspeak." The rising voice at the end of a sentence is called "uptalk." The creaky voice at the end of sentences is called "vocal fry." 

8. "Teaching computers to speak American." 

Lots of speculation here about things that came to pass: 

a. You can choose the language/accent of your operating system, 20 years after this author's speculation. 

b. Speech to text / text to speech is now a reality. (And trivial, at this point. As well as voice recognition software that allows you to do many things.) 

Lots of speculation about things that did NOT come to pass (p.190): 

a. Chinese did not become the dominant language; 

b. The popular wave of people learning Chinese for business came AND WENT (It peaked in 2013 and then declined by 1/3 between 2016 and 2020.) 

c. English is required subject in Chinese schools, and there are 400 million Chinese learning it to this day, compared to about 400,000 Americans learning Chinese); 

c. English is actually even *more* entrenched because it's an official/neutral language for The EU (most common second language in 19 of 25 countries), and for a lot of other regions. 

d. I don't know how much black English diverged from standard English a quarter century later. The first black president did not use it to communicate with other black people, before or after office. There was the famous "lawyer dog" case In which a court finally decided that AAVE was not suitable for purposes of official communication. 

Verdict: Weak recommendation. 

1. You could probably just watch the TV series that goes with this, and pick up a more current book on linguistics with some other array of trivial points spliced together to create a book. 

2. Linguists don't help anybody when they try to legitimize AAVE: as (black linguist) John McWhorter has noted, there is already way too much anti-intellectualism and separatism within the black subculture and anything that exacerbates that does not help. 

Once the linguists open up this issue of the legitimacy of AAVE, then a *lot* of unnecessary energy will be expended trying to figure out Why it can/cannot be used in formal/written contexts. (Meanwhile, people who speak German / Arabic EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD just use High German/Modern Standard Arabic in formal situations and local German/Arabic in others.) 

Black people are already coming in from behind (assumed intellectual inferiority) In most communicative situations, and a linguistic barrier DOES! NOT! HELP! 

Quotes: 

"A society in which Maya Angelou can be thought to be a real poet of some importance is a doomed society." (p. 24) 

"Dictionary of American Regional English, of which four of the five projected volumes have been published." 

"SPELL, Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature, with headquarters in Braselton, Georgia." (p. 63) 

"One of the speakers was Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico, who commented that Mexican immigrants who continue to speak Spanish in the United States are doing their patriotic duty to Mexico. " 

"The Ohio River has always been the traditional border between Southern and Northern Speech.... The South has become the largest dialect area in the United States." 

"The Advent of the talkies meant that the movies had to settle on a form of English that would be understood and accepted all over the United States." (p. 154) 

"You're cute. What's your mix?" (p. 200)

Book Review
Shrinks
4/5 stars
"The historical background is good, but I'm just not sure that this author is an honest broker." 
*******
Of the book: 

-315 pages of prose over 10 chapters; 31.5 pages/chapter
-Indexed
-Sources and additional reading are combined (So we don't actually know how many sources he used to build this book; there are zero references - - embedded, footnotes, or otherwise) 

Background: 

Among the other disciplines within medicine, the prestige of psychiatry is not and has not been good. 

And this is because there is no clear structure function relationship between the brain and mental illness in, say, the way that there is for a cardiac surgeon to treat a blockage or a dentist to fix a tooth. (And in spite of the cheerleading of the author, structure function relationships are still largely found wanting within psychiatry.)

The author tries to fix some of the bad odor around mental health work as well as give us some idea of the history of the discipline. 

In so attempting, he gives us a blow by blow of the generation of psychology and its later being wrestled away from academics and into the world of physicians and clinical practice. (The academic psychologists believed That mental disorder was a matter of psychodynamics and the physicians believed that it was a matter of physical defects.)

The author was president of the APA and had a hand in revisions for the DSM-5. And he is clear that he is working hard here to give psychiatry some type of credibility-- so he's not exactly a neutral source.

Second order thoughts:

1. Early psychiatry (Freud, Jung et al) behaves like so many other religions: because there is NO experimental component/falsifiability, personalities drive the show and conflicts can easily spin out of hand. (Think about how Trotsky was assassinated over ideas.)

2. Subject to feedback from reality, people can believe Anything. At.All. As easy as it is to laugh at treatments that we *now* know are quackery, somebody had to be the human experiments that generated the data that could be falsified for later people to benefit from. 

And these experiments that the author describes (especially the lobotomies) are quite gruesome, but they did need to be done so that future generations can know what NOT to do.

3. Professional organizations (AMA, APA, etc) are simultaneously the cause of a lot of good AND a lot of bad. (Most Americans have only a vague idea that these are private organizations that are empowered to perform functions on behalf of the state.) 

4. It's interesting how private industry and the military bring things to a conclusion to serve practical purposes: the DSM-3 (and beyond) were needful because insurance companies needed diagnostic codes for billable treatments. The DSM itself was started because the military needed a standardized definition for whom they would reject due to insanity. (It's interesting that the military also uses cognitive ability testing in a matter of fact way, while academia can't seem to figure out what they want to do with it.)

5. Even these days, there is not such a good relationship between structure of the brain and function of drugs. Most of these drugs detailed in this book were found at random; the academic word for glorified prescription writers is "psychopharmacologists." 

6. Why is there no discussion about the process by which diagnoses are pared from the DSM between one addition to the next? Do people just stop believing in them? Is every diagnostic paring done by the same process or different processes? How did people have no clue about rapid onset gender dysphoria until last week?

7. If the past is any guy to the future, insurance companies and lawsuits are going to bring the Transgender Hysteria Industrial Complex to heel.

Other Factoids:

1. (p.26) Physicians who specialized in  disorders with an observable neural stamp became neurologists, while those who dealt with invisible disorders became psychiatrists.

2. (p.40) Most people forget that Freud was originally trained as a hard-nosed neurologist who advocated the most exacting standards of inquiry.

3. The American Psychiatric Association is the oldest medical professional organization in the United States, founded in 1844. Three years before the AMA.

4. When the DSM-3 was put out, psychoanalytic theory was permanently separated from psychiatric diagnosis and psychiatric research. 

5. There are far more psychologists than psychiatrists in the US. (The former is a medical doctor in the latter may be a PhD.)

6. CT scans are from the early 1970s. The first MRI for the brain is from 1981.

7. When the DSM is updated from one edition to the next, it's not as simple as editorial changes and minor updating. As I read here, each updating has been a significant paradigm shift with successive committees taking entirely different directions.

8. (p 293-4) A REALLY weird Korean family. They would not take their mother to get a staff infection treated for 30 years because they thought they would lose face.

Verdict: This book is worth reading at the price of less than $10. It's probably about 4 to 5 hours of reading time, and there is a decent amount of good information to be recovered.


Other books that are worth reading: 

"Snowball in a Blizzard," Hatch
"Trick or Treatment," Ernst/Singh
"Voodoo Science," Park

Terms of Quackery: 

CCVSI
Orgone
SPECT scan diagnosis of mental illness
Conversion therapy
Existential psychiatry
Calomel and butter toast 
Rotational chair and tranquilizer chair
Dementia praecox 
Pyrotherapy
Insulin coma 
Metrazol seizure therapy 
Leucotomy
trepanation
general paresis of the insane
phrenology 

Vocabulary:

Orgone
amytal (truth-telling serum) interview
Chimney sweeping / cathartic method
psychodynamic vs. biological theories
alienist (archaic term for "psychiatrist.")
The "worried well" 
chloral
etiology 
Feighner Criteria
Festschrift
tincture
digitalis
1,000 yard stare
-Representational oligonucleotide micro-array analysis
-Single photon emission computed tomography

Quotes:

1. Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

2. But Rush's preferred method for treating insanity was more straightforward: purging the bowels. He fabricated his own customized Bilious pills filled with 10 grains of calomel and 15 grains of jalap--powerful laxatives made from mercury, the poisonous quicksilver found in old thermometers.

3. But despite Freud's best efforts, psychoanalysis was inextricably linked to Jewish culture. Freud's inner circle was almost entirely Jewish, as were the vast majority of the first generation of psychoanalysts. 

4. The American psychoanalytical movement launched a new initiative: turning alienists into analysts. 

5. Psychiatry was widely perceived as a haven for never do wells, hucksters, in trouble students with their own mental issues. 

6. Freeman performed ice pick lobotomies on no fewer than 2,500 patients in 23 states by the time of his death in 1972.

7. The Nobel prize committee saw fit to award prizes for infecting patients with malaria parasites and for surgically destroying frontal lobes, two short-lived treatments that were neither safe nor effective, while passing over [electroconvulsive therapy] despite the fact that their invention was the only early somatic treatment to become a therapeutic main stay of psychiatry

8. Leucotomies spread like wildfire through the asylums of both Europe and America.

9. (David Rosenhan, he of the famous study): If sanity and insanity exists, how should we know them? We cannot distinguish the same from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.

10. There was one overt non-scientific factor that influenced the new diagnostic criteria: ensuring that insurance companies would pay for treatments. 

11. During my pharmacology class in medical school, my instructor assigned us to imbible series of medications during the semester, one dose each week..... Our assignment was to describe the effects we experienced over the following hour and then guess which drug it was..... I had guessed wrong on every single drug except for Thorazine. 

12. Psychiatry has always fared best when it managed to avoid both extremes of reductionist neurobiology and pure mentalism come instead pursuing a path of moderation that is receptive to findings from all empirically based sources. 

Book review
Mindset
2/5 stars
"Overstated/overfitted/overwrought with detail; more appropriate as a magazine article." 
*******

Of the book:

-264 pages / 8 chapters= 33/per 
-Chapters are broken into 61 chapters.

The book is repetitive, and it reads like an extended run-on sentence about the difference between growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. 

And it's not that there is not a good idea here: it's just that it would have taken about as long as a newspaper article (AT MOST) to get the idea across. 
It's a book written by a psychologist, and this author takes her pet theory and flogs it to death. 

(Because, ya know, academic psychologists do that.) 

She also seems to be guilty of overfitting. 

(Because, ya know, academic psychologists do that.) 

One example: she attributes failures of companies like Enron and Chrysler to CEOs with a "fixed"  mindset instead of a "growth"  mindset. (Enron has been mentioned in so many of these pop psychology books that it takes on a Rorschach blot type of quality.)

Another example (p.170): The Columbine shooters were guilty of having "fixed"  mindsets instead of "growth" ones, and that's what explains a lot of their actions. 
 
The book is distinctly non-quantitative. 

(Because, ya know, academic psychologists do that)

I don't see a single graph here, and that may be because the effects that she was able to reproduce  (if she was able to reproduce them) were probably too weak to be worth it.

Second order thoughts:

1. Could it be that she doesn't have enough experience in the trenches? If you have a freshman high school class of 100 Chinese American students, you can expect that there will be enough by senior year to do Calculus AB or BC. 

But, if you had a freshman class full of 100 black students, that is..... um......a lot less likely. 

You can do all of the flapping on about fixed versus growth mindsets, but in reality: The growth mindset is constrained by genetics, which keeps a lot of human dreams on a leash. 

2. Jaime Escalante did what he did with one class, but could he do it year after year? How do we know that it was not just a statistical fluke? 

3. If it was as easy as this author says, why not just take the program to all inner city schools and implemented in a matter of fact way? (She doesn't say that it is particularly expensive to do this.)

4. "Stereotypes tell teachers which groups are bright and which groups are not" (p 200). 

As opposed to what? Actual experience?
Empirical evidence?

5. There's a lot of prattle in here about how teachers should try to find the strengths of their students, but this is to be setting someone up for failure: A lot of times you have to learn things that are not necessarily fun or pleasant, and it just is what it is

Verdict: Not recommended. If you can Google a short article that she's written about the contents of this book, that would be worthwhile. But not these 264 pages.


Quotes: 

1. "..... Mrs Wilson, my sixth grade teacher..... We were seated around the room in IQ order, and only the highest accused students could be trusted to carry the flag, clap the erasers come or take a note to the principal. 

2."Mozart labored for more than 10 years until he produced any work that we admired today. Before then, his compositions were not that original or interesting. Actually, they were often patched together chunks taken from other composers." 

A very old book ("The Sayings Of Chairman Malcolm.")

One that has been sitting at my mother's house for a good 35 years. 

He has a lot of very pithy sayings. 

Here are a dozen: 

1. HOW WOULD YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPY IS if you've never been otherwise? 

2. PRETENSE invariably impresses only the pretenders. 

3. TOO FEW accomplish twice as much as too many. 

4. LIVING AND DREAMING ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS - - but you can't do one without the other. 

5. THERE ARE MORE FAKERS in business than in jail. 

6. IF YOU'VE NEVER FAILED, you won't succeed. 

7. IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO DO, it's harder to do it. 

8. WE ALL LIKE TO BE ASKED, even if we say no. 

9. OBSERVATION those who act as if they know more than their boss seldom do. Those who do, have sense enough not to make it obvious - - to the boss.

10. IF YOU SAY WHAT YOU THINK don't expect to hear only what you like. 

11. TOO MANY PEOPLE overvalue what they're not an undervalue what they are. 

12. IF YOU HAVE A JOB WITHOUT ANY AGGRAVATIONS, you don't have a job.

Book Review 
Caste
Isabel Wilkerson 
1/5 stars
"Horrid; Echoes of the Sokal hoax/postmodernism/Kabbalah."
*******
Wow, was this book a tough slog! (And i won't be able to write a complete review for the sake of brevity.)

I bought it for a couple of reasons: 

1. I read her book "The Warmth of Other Suns," and was very impressed with the journalistic work and writing.

2. It has occurred to me that the hatred of black people is *so* widespread and *so* universal (Not only in the US, but even in places like China / Japan/ Trinidad / Mexico) that it can't be an accident, and I wanted to hear some thoughts on why that might be. 

Rather than more impressive journalism or answers to my questions, what I instead got was a bunch of strained, overwrought metaphors (she puts Thomas Friedman to shame in this sense), ridiculous epistemic foundations and inapt analogies.

>>Epistemic issues

1. Animistic fallacy: Everything is some way because *somebody* planned it at one point ab initio and it didn't develop organically. And of course, if we want it to be different, then *someone else* can just plan it otherwise.

2. If any human beings are different in any way, then it must be racism. 

3. If people choose to freely associate with like-minded people, then it must be bad and it must be racism. (So, if you don't want to be mugged, murdered, or a victim of the "knockout game," and you acknowledge that that is a lot more likely to happen to you living around some black people as opposed to some Koreans, then you must be racist.)

4. Race is a "social construct" and it has no genetic reality. (So, based on this theory: if a guy prefers a wavy haired Italian brunette with chiseled features over an obese black lady with afro puffs and unpleasant vaginal odor... Then he's not really choosing anything because there's no such thing as race. Or if he DOES notice, then he is a racist villain.) She also asserts (p.65) that geneticists and anthropologists believe that it is man-made, without a single citation--and completely ignoring the fact that practicing physicians and epidemiologists know that not all populations are identical.

5. Reductive overfitting: An explanation that explains everything explains nothing. (If you read a book like this, and you happen to know that high blood pressure is higher among blacks than whites then ... You would logically attribute it to the caste system and try to dismantle that rather than studying other causative factors of hypertension.)

>>Strained metaphors. (Move over, Thomas Friedman! I'll only do the first couple of chapters because to compile all of them could be another book in its own right.):

1. Comparison of people that are relatively more friendly toward blacks with a lone Nazi dissenter during the third Reich. (Intro)

2. Anthrax being released from permafrost is the way that racism can resurface at any time. (Chapter 1)

3. Low impact earthquakes are the same as racism and they could turn into high impact earthquakes and do a lot of damage. Of course, so can racism. (Chapter 1).

4. A doctor will not make a diagnosis until he knows the history going back generations. (I'm sure the last time you had a yeast infection, the doctor did a three or four generation family history.) So, people cannot understand the cause of racism until they go back many generations. (Chapter 2).

5. The Indian caste system is the same thing as US racial groupings. (Chapter 2).

6. People encode grammar without thinking about it, therefore they encode caste without thinking about it.

7. When you buy an old house, problems need to be fixed regularly. Therefore, "America is an old house"  and it has to be fixed sooner or later. (Chapter 2).

 >>Inapt analogies:

1. (US ≠1939 Germany) 

a. The concentration camps may have been *called* "slavery," but the purpose was not to turn a profit, and the reason that we can know this is because most people who went into concentration camps did not survive. (And this all happened over the space of about 6 years.) Meanwhile, black people survived slavery for a couple of centuries, because a plantation owner will not kill his investment. (Looked at in this way, the behavior of the Nazi government would have been totally irrational if slavery was the purpose of concentration camps.)

b. 6 million Jews were killed in WWII. 2,740 people PER DAY. There were 3,446 lynchings of blacks between 1882 and 1968. 86 years. 4,472 weeks. 0.72/week. 0.1/day. 149,739 years of lynchings at that rate to clear 6 million.

2. (US≠ Indian caste system). Hinduism is a religion (with priests and holy books and professional clerics), and every Hindu temple that you go to will tell you the same thing. The caste system is also something that lasted for several thousand years, and it was not constructed to deal with the status of slaves. The social dynamics were not true at all points within the United States, but The Indian caste system survives even to this day outside of India.

Second order thoughts: 

1. Oprah's Book club has an unbroken record in identifying trash books. 

2. Conversations of this type have been going on in the black community in one form or another since the time of the Reconstruction.

To wit: Let's just wait for the ideal set of conditions (political or otherwise) to arrive, and everything will be okay. 

Or: everything *would have been* okay if the conditions had been perfect from the beginning. ANYTHING EXCEPT making a realistic assessment of current conditions and seeing what can be done within them. 

If you believe in the Lindy effect, then these conversations can go on being unhelpful as long as they have already gone on being unhelpful - - which is to say about a century and a half. 

Authors like this DO NOT HELP in finding a fresh direction.

3. There's no explanation as to why it is that some people who are emphatically not Western (e.g. viscerally anti-Western Russians / Eastern Europeans/Arabs) that despise black people. (And most of them do.) 

4. Is race the only reason that people can find to dislike each other? Hakka and Punti are both Han Chinese and they have been living next to each other locked in mutual hatred and refusing to learn one another's languages for over 1,000 years.

(p.242) Wilkerson notes that a lot of black immigrants do not like Foundational Black Americans. (I have found this to be true.) But, she refuses to consider that there are certain behaviors of the former that makes the latter dislike them. (How is, say, a Black Dominican*supposed* to feel when he shares the same race as people who have committed the latest flash mob? Does he want to gravitate toward them or distance himself from them?)

5. A couple of things are wrong, just on the facts 

a. (p.109). If enforced endogamy was the law, the United States was not very good at it. 87.1% of black Americans have white ancestry, at an average of 17%. Most of it actually did not come from slavery, contrary to popular belief. Also, people can find case law of black husbands and white wives even as far back as the 1600s. (Martha Hodes, "Black men, White women.")

b. The author gives several dramatic instances of where black people ended up on the wrong side of a white lynch mob In order to give the impression that it was something that happened nightly for some huge amount of time. 

That would be like using the OJ Simpson case to talk up the number of black murderers of white victims. (In reality, about 16% of white murders have black assailants.)

There were 7,704 white murder victims in 2022, which would have been about 1,233 whites killed by blacks.

c. 10,470 black murder victims in 2022 alone. (9,737 by other black people.)

If "eye for an eye was a rule,"  how long would it take to recover the 86 years worth of lynchings of black people by blacks killing an equal number of whites? 

3,446 murders / 1,233 murders*year^-1 works out to about 2 years and 10 months.

d. (p.161): "Given that intelligence is distributed in relatively similar proportions among individuals in any subset...." 

Just .....no. (I think James Watson was forced to retire from his job when he pointed out that anybody who has worked every day with black people knows that it is generous to assume that their average IQ is exactly the same as white / Asians.);.

6. It is a sociological cliché in The States: something works just fine (a city, a school board, a company) until too many black people participate in it, and then it just doesn't work anymore. (Baltimore, Inkster, Detroit, St Louis, East St Louis, etc.) Can this all be coincidence/explicable in terms of the caste formulation?

Here are some figures: 

In 2019, Black people made up 12.2% of the U.S. population  

.....  26.6% of total arrests
..... 51.2% of murder arrests 
..... 52.7% of robbery arrests, 
..... 28.8% of burglary arrests
..... 28.6% of motor vehicle theft arrests 
.....42.2% of prostitution arrests
..... 26.1% of drug arrests (FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, Table 43).
.... incarcerated in local jails at a rate of 600 per 100,000 U.S. residents, which is more than three times the rate for Whites (184 per 100,000 U.S. residents) 

.....Blacks are also murdered at about eight times the rate of whites -- mostly by each other (≈93%) 

Is this someone else's fault too? Can caste explain this away?

STD rates (Black: White):

Chlamydia: Females, 5; Males, 6.8
Gonorrhea: Males 8.5; Females 6.9
Syphilis: Both sexes, 1.5
HIV: Both sexes, 1.7.
HIV deaths from the disease: Both sexes, 6.7
Bacterial vaginosis: 1.7
*******
Verdict: Save your money. 

Save your time. 

This review could have actually been a lot longer to pick apart some of the abundant flaws, but it's already 2.5 times the length of a New York Times article. 

So, I will just cut it here

Book Review
The Lessons of History
1/5 stars
"Dated; there are more interesting books out there." 

Of the book: 

-12 chapters (range: 4-13 pages; average=7.6pps)
-Can be read through in a couple of hours. 
-A series of impressionistic essays 
-contains both index and citations. 
-79 point citations over 92 pages. 0.86/page (=not particularly well sourced)

It's quite a boring read, and because it was necessary for this to be so short then the examples are actually quite few in number - - to the point where the discussion suffers from the "floating abstractions" problem. (And that's already a danger when you try to write books that draw general lessons/laws from history.)

Seems like the examples are pretty heavy on Greece and Rome, during and before the time of the Roman Empire.

Synopsis of chapters

1. History is constrained by geography, climate, and other physical constraints. 

2. Human history has to have a biological substrate. Hence: 

a. Competition; 
b. Selection; 
c. Reproduction. 

3. Race does not explain any / all of the directions of civilization.

4. Thoughts on the character of the human biological substrate upon which civilizations are built. 

5. Moral codes change with the stage of history. It's impossible to know whether or not a moral change is decay or a transition to another stage.

6. Religion seems to resurrect itself in every society, and it seems that religion of some type is necessary for the survival of the society. 

7. History/time can be thought of as alternating cycles of concentration and redistribution of wealth.

8. Societies alternate between capitalism and socialism. 

9. Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones that have been tried. 

10. There are brilliant cases on both sides as to why war should/should not happen. But, most of the time it does happen. 

11. Desultory exploration of theories of civilizational decline / collapse.
12. Whether progress is real depends on how you define the terms. And with the good also comes the bad.


Second order thoughts: 

There are other problems. 

1. The book was written in 1968, and 

a. They quote Malthus as if he had anything relevant to say;

b. They quote Madison Grant's "The Passing of the Great Race." 

2. There are other historians that do a much better job attempting to draw universal laws from history. I have in mind Yuval Noah Hariri. 

3. There are other historians that have done a much more thorough job of the relationship between geography and progress. I have in mind Jared Diamond

4. Some of their predictions turned out to be quite silly. ("In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons has lessened their economic and political power; and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggests that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state governments.")

Really? 

5.  "American civilization is still in the stage of racial mixture..... After 1948 the doors of America were opened to all white stocks; a fresh racial fusion began.... When, out of this mixture, a new type is formed, America may have its own language (as different from English as Spanish is from Italian)."

6. "History offers some consolation by reminding us that send his flourished in every age. Even our generation has not yet rivaled the popularity of homosexualism in ancient Greece or Rome or Renaissance Italy."

Verdict: Not recommended

This book was recommended to me, and there were so many reviews that I thought that there would be something worth reading.

That turns out to not be true. 

Yuval Noah Hariri's book "Sapiens"  is far better than this. 

Also, far more widely reviewed.

Ditto for Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel."


Quotes:

1. There is no humorist like history. 

2. Sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both at the individual and the group.

3. Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce--except in war, where they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

4. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war. Pieces and unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.

6. On one point all are agreed: civilizations began, flourish, declined, and disappear - - or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams.

Vocabulary: 

crosier
latifundia
monodic
non omnis moritur

Book Review
Kissing Girls On Shabbat
3/5 stars. 
"Frivolous wealthy Neurotic Jewish problems"

******
This is the story of a woman who has to deal with her sexual orientation as well as her relationship to Judaism. 

One of quite a few books in this genre of "off the derech" literature.

Of the book: 

-Can be read over a couple of afternoons
-All chapters are titled after songs
-I could have done with a more suitable title. (Author did not kiss girls only on Shabbat.)

∆∆∆The first thought is that: People who try to get in the mental health field are actually more likely to have mental problems of their own.

And it has been said that if you cannot sort out your own life, then the logical choice is to try to solve someone else's problems. (For the record, the author was divorced with two kids and an unplanned pregnancy abortion by the time she was 25 years old. And then divorced *again* at 32 after she finally figured out that she was a lesbian. Is this *really* the person that should be offering life advice? What can you think to say about a woman who can allow her boyfriend to convince her to play Russian roulette / stays with him even after such a suggestion?)

Author also comes across as clueless in certain respects. 

1. Author wasn't aware that tickets have to be paid or you will lose your license? 

2. Author was not aware that "supremely wealthy" men that are willing to play Captain Save a Hoe (i.e.--taking on the burden of another man's kids *and* a woman with stretch marks and episiotomy scars put there by same) don't exactly grow on trees?

She didn't have sense enough to give Second Husband a couple of babies in order to cement the bond and then just come to some private/tacit agreement about having a woman on the side? (After a certain age, there's no need/benefit to upend your financial/family life for benefit of licking carpet.  And this is true for both guys and girls; family structure and common children are a stronger bond in a relationship than just sex.)

3. Author and her husband signed a divorce agreement and she had NO CLUE what was in it for 10 years after the divorce simply for lack of actually reading it? (This is, quite frankly, the first time I've ever heard of a Jew who didn't read. A lot of the headaches that she took on herself because of a perceived reason to lose her children could have been avoided--because none of these were conditions of the original divorce.)

4. In case you were wondering where the money came from, her father provided her with $100,000 living allowance for the first several years. (This is not a typical situation.)

∆∆∆The second thought is that: I can't establish the direction of causality here: Is it that people who go into Haredism are more likely to be mentally ill to begin with? Or, is it that living around a bunch of Haredim drove people that would have been otherwise normal insane?

This is my 10th OTD memoir (I swore to myself that I was not going to read another one, but I listen to an interview by this author and was impressed).

For the record, the other 9 were:

¶Reva Mann --"The Rabbi's Daughter" (Severe/ poorly handled hypersexuality.)
¶Julia Haart-- Brazen (severe/poorly handled hypersexuality).
¶Leah Lax--"Uncovered." (Grandiose lesbian.)
¶Deborah Feldman-- "Unorthodox"/"Exodus". (Drama Junkie.)
¶Leah Vincent--"Sin and Salvation." (Borderline personality, including self harm and hypersexuality.)
¶Abby Stein--"Becoming Eve." (Uncertain. Maybe genuinely transgender, but definitely with drama junkie tendencies.)
¶Rachel/Ruth Shilsky--"The Color of Water." (Sexual abuse. Teenage pregnancy.)
¶Shulem Deen--"All Who Go Do Not Return" (Normal guy with doubts.)  
¶Shalom Auslander-- The Foreskin's Lament (Articulate but masochistic man driven over the edge by his family and Haredim.)

There is a lot of overlap in between these books: 

1. The beginning of the end (In many/most of these cases) was that very first trip to a library or that first college course. It happened in this book the exact same way.

2. Sexual dissatisfaction was a heavy factor in most of these breakups. (4 out of 8 of the women in books above left because their sexual drive WAY exceeded their husbands' ability to satisfy. )

So, out of that sample set of 10: 

-8 out of 10 were women (I don't count Abby Stein as a woman)
-2 out of 8 females were lesbian 
-0 out of 10 of the marriages profiled failed because of abuse. 

3. None of these people were hurting for money. And not only was the money not enough to solve the problems, but it actually *magnified* problems that are much smaller for people that are trying to get all the bills paid. ("People who toil from sun up to sundown for the barest of necessities dream no dreams and nurse no grievances.")

If you're worried about getting the house note paid, you're not going to flirt over to Aruba to find yourself / have a sexual awakening.

4. On the one hand, Haredim have babies everyday without any type of sexual education.(Lots of them!) But, on the other hand, the number of people who are so clueless that they don't even know *what* goes *where* in sexual congress is astronomical. 

Some in these series of books could not even consummate the marriage for long periods of time because of this unawareness.

This author had girlfriends even from the age of 16 or so, and the only thing they could think of to do was cuddle.

Exactly ZERO of the men in any of these books had any idea that you should try to make the marital experience pleasant enough that the wife will want to come back for more. (And a lot of guys lost their women because of that.)

Other thoughts: 

1. The author also accidentally makes it appear that there is bit more mental illness than you would expect by chance within Jewish populations.

Her case was a family with 6 sisters, and out of that family--Both the mother and oldest daughter were institutionalized for significant periods of time because of mental illness. (Author did not see her oldest sister from the ages of seven until 15.)
2.  There are 7 daughters in this book (I'm surprised that the mother is the one that went crazy and not the father; I can't imagine living in a house with 8 women)

3. I enjoyed the authors descriptions of the differences between Lakewood and The Five Towns.
********
At this point, I'll just let the book speak for itself....

Quote: 

1. After a few more awkward phone passes, a call to Mrs Levenstein, and another call from the rabbi, we arrived at our answer: We had not had marital intercourse last night. False alarm.

2. They said they want to add a medicine [an epidural]. I have to call Rabbi Hanover and get permission for that. 

3. It's better to double wrap the mezuza. (This was a strategy after the author brought school books into the house.) 

4. He's adding his own rules. It's written nowhere that he shouldn't look at you for 2 weeks of each month. In fact, it is the exact opposite. That is the time he is supposed to connect with you emotionally! 

5. She confirmed what I had begun to suspect. I had been told that he'd gone out on dates with about a hundred girls who were not good enough for him. I was beginning to infer that those 100 girls were just a lot more intuitive than me.

6. He asked if you would sleep with him one more time again because he does not know when he will be with a woman again. (This was the husband's request to the wife through an intermediate before the divorce was finalized.)

7. We were under a town-wide internet ban ("Mrs Schwartz, many people find [Google] to be a strong temptation. We don't allow search engines. ") ... My children were still in daycare, but in two years it would be time to apply to local schools, and I would have to sign a contract stating that our home had no unfiltered internet connection.

8. But he didn't realize that the Jewish men who fit my dating status, diminished by the divorce and kids, that category of men expected sex. They just did. They wore kippahs and wanted a kosher home, but they also wanted to sleep with the women they dated. If I didn't give it to them, someone else would.

9. Let's play Russian roulette. (This is one of the author's boyfriends talking to her.)

10. You know, I give you about $100,000 a year. (This is the author's father talking to her)

11. That very car, though, turned out to be uninsured. One of those envelopes must have held the notice about that. Another must have held the warrant for my arrest for unpaid tickets, and the notice that my driver's license was suspended. (p.156)

12. We did not talk about the missing sister, Shani, who was locked behind the doors of yet another psychiatric unit. We did not talk about our mother, sitting in the shadows of her mind, alone in our childhood home.

13. In an effort to cement the cracks in our relationship, Eli and I decided to buy a new house and tell ourselves new lies..... In the new house, Eli wouldn't be depressed..... In the new house, I would have a fresh start after my loss. 

14. By high school, the boys were often smoking weed and hiding alcohol in the ceiling tiles of the school bathrooms. (This is in a Haredi school.)

15. ...very few ex-Hasidic parents leave their formal communities with all four of these: custody of their children, financial independence, mental health, and the ability to be "out" --as gay or non-religious. At least one was always sacrificed. 

16. She explained that their educational testing revealed that Avigdor, who was set to enter 8th grade in the fall, was on a 2nd grade reading level. (This is the level of education he got from Haredi school.)

Verdict: 
1. Recommended at the price of<$8.

2. A better book to read would probably be "Open," by Jenny Block. (She is a Jewish woman that had relationships with both men and women, and after the sex fizzled out with her husband, she took a long-term girlfriend within the context of her marriage and she in her husband both agreed on it because they understood that sexual satisfaction is separate to raising children in a stable environment.)

A Jenny Block setupmight have been an easier solution to this author's quandary. (And sexual boredom / dissatisfaction is something that happens all the time in all couples have to navigate it at some point. Even a man with a woman like the Kardashians/Tali Dova/ Odelia Halevy will eventually get his fill of her.)

Better you read about a solution that has already been developed than read about someone who was unable to solve the problem smoothly.

Book Review
Journey To Nowhere
4/5 stars
"The author spots African atavism in Guyana"
*******
The purpose of this book was to do a postmortem of the Jonestown massacre. 

A lot of his book is Naipaul trying to disentangle manufactured reality from actual reality. (True Believers are not the best source of accurate information.)

It was written in two parts over 314 pages: 

-First, the conditions in Guyana that impelled the possibility of Jonestown. 

-Second, about the conditions in the States that led up to those events--specifically, Naipaul takes us to Land-Of-Fruits-and-Nuts California and details (with Bob Newhart-like incredulity) a bunch of Loopy White People.

It seems that those two factors together are enough to explain the inanity of Jonestown.

It's not a comfortable book.

I wonder: "If a cult leader wanted to rustle up some idiots to exploit /convince to commit suicide, why would he have to choose black people for this? Couldn't he have made a colony of Chinese people?"

Was that *really* his largest source of available idiots?

Even worse: When Jim Jones knew that he was dying of brain cancer, he just convinced everybody else to commit suicide to come with him. (They really thought that this guy was the Messiah.)
*******
Based on the frequency with which things like this happen (Black Hebrew Israelites, Nation of Islam, etc), I would guess that some people really are genetically more easily duped than others. (Yes, Dear Readers, that really was his largest source of available idiots.)

Probably about 30 years ago my parents and I were watching a news clip, and there were some Nigerians rioting for some reason or another after the government was turned over to civilian rule. 

My mother exclaimed: "Damn! Is it something about nickas that's just innately BAD?" 

It's not what I came to this book expecting to recall, but this Trinidad Indian author seems to say just that-- in a nice way. (p.33-The word that he uses to describe it is "atavistic.")

 (Background: Indians are the largest ethnic group currently in Guyana, Trinidad, and Surinapme--and they have been there for centuries. In all of these places as well as parts of Africa, they've had some difficulties living with black people, and have built up a corresponding dislike--and it seems like that that is where this author is coming from.)

As I look at the events in places where there are enough black people to do damage--like Detroit, Baltimore, and East St Louis (first hand) and Countless Other Places (second hand), much of what this author writes is old wine in new bottles.

These ridiculous events *in Guyana* have a LOT of uncomfortable resonances: 

1. Derelection of duty / corruption/ incompetence (18 out of 20 of the lowest HDI countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. None of the top 50 are African or black. The highest black country is St Kitts and Nevis at position 51.)

2. Escapism ("We need to find our true heritage that has been stolen from us. As Muslims. Let's change our names to Abdul Malik Aziz, and then every good thing will follow. No, wait! We are really Africans, and we should change that names to Mwatabu Okantah and mattress all the problem. No, wait! We were really Israelites. Let's change our names to Yahawada Israel, And that should do the trick."  Here, the author quotes [p.27] that "It was Africa which is given the world law, philosophy, medicine, religion, astronomy, music, magic, and science; it was Africa which had civilized Europe, and not the other way around...")

3. Messianism ("The Talented Tenth will save us! No, it is MLK! No, it's Malcolm X! No, it is the first black president!")

4. Criminal influence in government (Coleman Young. Ray Nagin. Mobutu. Jacob Zuma. In fact: Can you think of any city/country that has been run by black people that has NOT degenerated into a racketeering operation?)

5. Looting, rioting and destruction (Black Lives Matters riots. Rodney King riots. Detroit riots. Watts riots  )

6. Social collapse (South Africa. Detroit. Sudan.) Author says as much on page 17.

7. Driving productive people from out of their midst. (Indians in Uganda and Kenya. White people out of places like Detroit/St Louis/E St Louis, etc.)

8. Making the false connection between political power and prosperity ("If we can just vote, we can vote prosperity into existence.") ignoring the fact that sovereign African countries are the lowest per capita income and the lowest human development indices in the world.

9. Aided and abetted by "liberals who fethisise black radicalism, whilst leading affluent lives." (Janet Rosenberg, Angela Davis, to name but a couple in this book.)

*******
The bad part about it is that even as roughly a as Naipaul portrays Guyana, there are other places even worse. (Currently, their HDI is 95 out of 193. Range between 0.627 and 0.739. GDP per capita is $18,200.)

Guyana in the author's words: 

1. "The first Guyanese to arrive on the scene had plundered the encampment." 

2. " The toilets were waterless. A carefully painted sign apologize for the inconvenience. It had clearly been there a long time calling the paint was yellowed with age and stained."

3. "These people won't think twice about choke and rob."

4. "Consciously, brutally, we have set about remaking ourselves in the third world image."

5. "Only 10% have passed English at Ordinary Level. Fewer still had passed the mathematics examination. None had passed Spanish. None had managed to scrape together five passes..... The machines were a standing invitation to theft. They had hired a security staff to deal with the problem, but it was becoming clear that the security people themselves have been involved in some of the thefts."

6. "In Guyana, the atavistic ideal of the Big Black Chief--the archetype so superbly realized by Idi Amin--has, despite the socialist gloss, been almost fully achieved." 

7. "After he had committed murder on his Trinidad commune, it was to Guyana that Michael X had fled."

8. " But the most notorious of Burnham's criminal courtiers is a black preacher from Tennessee calling himself Rabbi Washington. Back home, where he is known as David Hill, he is wanted by the police on charges of blackmail and violence. But in Guyana, where he resurfaced in 1972, he is a figure of consequence. He has created around himself a religious sect - - the House of Israel."

9. "By February 1978, as a result of overwork and semi starvation, conditions have become so bad that half of the commune was stricken with diarrhea and high fevers.... Jones with preaching them over the public address system for an average of 6 hours a day, sometimes much longer."

10. "In California, children had been subjected to increasingly heavy beatings. After a while was out of the refinement of placing a microphone close to the mouth of a beating child so that his screams would resound all the better."

11. " Jones had cleverly managed to insinuate himself into the San Francisco political scene. He was a masterful social worker and a great self publicist. In Guyana he had compromised local officials by providing them with the sexual services of Temple women."

12. "..... the process by which followers signed over all their assets to The Temple in expectation that they would be taken care of for the rest of their lives."

California ferment, in the author's words:

1. " Watts, the ghetto that had been the scene of some of the most violent black rioting in the 1960s. Traces of that violence could still be seen in the many empty lots once occupied by businesses that had never been rebuilt." (Wow! Just like Detroit!)

2. "Young blacks, as ever, stood on street corners, looking with apathetic intensity of nothing in particular."

3. 'I can't help thinking we black people can be very gullible'

4. "... more than half of adult blacks had not made it to the 8th grade..... one in three blacks was a functional illiterate..... of $13,600 blacks between the ages of 6 and 19, half were not in school.... 80% of crimes were committed by blacks."

5. "There was a tendency in the '60s to run on ahead. When nothing happened, many of us became bitter toward the people and turned away from them to God or whatever."

6. "[fascism and genocide] were bargain basement political terms, and nearly everyone with pretensions to a radical outlook would make use of them. Long before Jim Jones started to terrorize his following, the blacks, with the assistance of their best white friends, had been terrorizing one another with the rhetoric of mass extermination."

7. "Eldridge Cleaver, a metaphysician of rape, had returned from Algerian exile and declared himself a born again Christian."

8. "The junk people, the human waste left behind by American History, are no less negative, no less dangerous a quantity."

Verdict: This is worth the reading. Naipaul died a couple of years after the publication of this book, but had he lived he would have had a great career ahead of him. (Incidentally: he is the brother of VS Naipaul.)

If you don't want to damage/take away any remaining hope of black vertical mobility, don't read this book.

Vocabulary:

warp
fusty
tarbush 
helots
Kerista Consciousness Church
Church of Hakeem