lpm100's reviews
711 reviews

Book Review
Voluntary Madness
1/5 stars
"If a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water."
*******
This lady is an idiot.

It's clear that she wanted to capitalize on the success of her book, "Self Made Man" and I think she wanted to strike while the iron was hot.

That had the unfortunate result of her writing a book before she actually had anything to say.

Not a good idea. Never a good idea.

But, she did do it and here we are with a memoir about time spent in three different hospitals. (It was 34 days, by the way, and NOT a year, as it says in the subtitle.)

Vincent had a lot of commentary about the mental health system (much of it negative), and she was exceedingly generous in sharing her superior insight. But, the thing is that: she ended up dying by assisted suicide in Switzerland because she thought that the pain of depression was just too much to bear.

Early on, she says that "I had gotten to that age when all well loved children of the upper middle class begin to discover that the world is not made for them."

Fancy that. 

So, when you have a Stereotypical Bored White Person Seeking Inner Peace discover that for the first✓time✓ ever✓(!), it is enough to drive her to insanity.  

And, even worse, she does what Stereotypically Bored White People Seeking Inner Peace tend to do---which is to turn every✓ single✓ topic✓ into something about them/ a chance for self-actualization therapy to solve these trivial-yet-blown-up emotional issues.

I think the expression in Yiddish is: "If a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water."

Authors such as Jonathan Haidt have noticed that when people live lives that are too cushy, they keep defining what is "stressful" downward - - with the end result that if you just curl your lip at one of these people, they will diagnose themselves with PTSD.
*******
Institution #1. A state mental hospital in the Inner City. (≈$14,500 [2006 dollars]for 10 days.)

Institution #2. Private hospital in a lily White city. There was exactly one half black person that showed up during the whole stay. ($14,700 for 10 days).

Institution #3. A private institution. Run by a hippie occultist psychologist (you know, the ones that cannot prescribe medication?). She learned "process therapy" and a lot of physical fitness. ($6, 000 for 2 weeks.)
******* 
Among many other errors, Vincent commits the fallacy of composition: State hospitals are not the same thing as private care; her experience in a state hospital is not typical. Many of the people in state wards are indigent / homeless/refractory cases. (Remember, not all cases of mental illness can be resolved anymore than all cases of cancer. And refractory cases of mental illness have to go somewhere.)

In reality, there are a finite number of psychiatrists and they just cannot give unlimited time to each patient AND be a therapist to each one.

As I'm familiar with the mental health game, I will just choose the most egregiously stupid things that she wrote and correct them from an insider's perspective.

1. (p.86) "discernment can be hard to come by in psychiatrists..... The human touch is not very often there strong suit. Nor is true empathy."

CORRECTION: Psychiatrists are physicians and NOT therapists, and the relationship is not meant to be therapeutic and NOT personal. They see symptoms and attempt to medicate them and the patient will keep coming back until the symptoms become tolerable or the side effect profiles get too bad. Is anybody expecting a surgeon to be all warm and fuzzy?

2. (p.34) "of how thoroughly corrupt the drug development and approval processes are in this country." 

CORRECTION: The US drug supply is the safest in the world and a lot of medications are approved for use outside of the US years before they make it through the FDA process. If you have enough people take medications in the country of 320 million people, there will just be some bad results by dint of statistical force.

3. (p.59) "... was on Haldol, among other things, a moldy old neuroleptic first used in the 1950s and developed on the basis of an entirely unproven theory that....."

CORRECTION: Haldol is a typical antipsychotic, and it is not commonly used nor a first line drug of choice. It is used for people that are very sick and for whom the substantial side effects are worth the cost of improvements in quality of life. Also, "theory" is some part of drug development, but the acid test is the effectiveness against placebo, in which case the "theory" is IRRELEVANT.

4. (p.65) "They're giving you Seroquel to sleep? That's an antipsychotic. Really. That's hardcore. Just hold it in your cheek and spit it in the toilet."

CORRECTION 1: Seroquel is an atypical antipsychotic, with low risk of side effects. It is given over a very large range of doses and a low dose (25-100 mg) is a mild sedative for insomnia.

CORRECTION 2: It's not like on TV. When they give you medication psychiatric inpatient, they do check to see if you have swallowed.

5. (p.130) "....being tagged is a gross insult to your dignity. It makes you feel like property, or a corpse, a body not a person."

CORRECTION: Wristbands are used in all hospitals always and everywhere--and not just the psychiatric ward. Indeed, if psychiatric wards did not use wristbands, they would be the only part of the hospital that did not use them. It's helpful to scan when nurses are giving medications and procedures are being done so that there are no mix-ups. Nothing personal.

The author was too old to be surprised by some of these things.

1. Inner City/black people= Urban Decay and deterioration in the quality of services. What did she think she was going to get in an inner city state funding mental hospital?

2. There is a subculture that treats mental illness as a way of being (I have an uncle who has been a ward of the state since 1982 even though he is perfectly healthy. He just preferred living in mental hospitals to going out and getting a job. I think the line from the movie "Trainspotting" was "We would have injected Vitamin C if they had made it illegal.") 

Is it any surprise that if she became part of that culture, it might self-generate the mental illness? 

3. The author observes that each 10-day hospitalization cost just under $15,000, and it would have been cheaper to go on a vacation.

But, what does that look like? 

You say to your insurance company "I'm feeling stressed out. Can you send me on vacation with a $10,000 allowance?"

How does anyone think that would work out?

I'm pretty sure that that problem is easier to solve than it is to manage.

*******

Quote from the female author (p.233): "I've had pretty violent fantasies about raping men - - always people who royally deserved it, mind you......In the fantasy I'm a prisoner of theirs and they've had me for weeks, starving me, torturing me. At some point I break free, or more likely, I'm liberated in some trade or forced hostage relinquishment..... Then I yanked down his pants, still clutching his hair and pulling back his head as far as it will go, and then I shove my dry fist up his ass, or as much as it will fit, and as I'm ripping up his insides I say 'This is how rape feels.' the whole world is watching this, mind you."

AND

"I was molested as a kid. I had a venereal disease before I was 10.."
*******

Verdict: Save your time. She went through this whole babbling book, and ultimately she concluded what I did about the man drowning in a spoonful of water.

Just understanding that one sentence would have saved you this whole book.

Book Review
Lost in Transnation
5+/5 stars
"A great book, and a keeper; Instruction manual how to not get caught up with Strange White People Insanity/Inanity."

********

Of the book:

-229 pages of prose over 13 chapters plus one conclusion works≈16 pps/chapter.

-Another 55 pages in appendices dealing with the topics: i) Biology 101, ii) Key scientific papers, iii) Dealing with schools, iv) Dealing with CPS, v) Finding a therapist, vi) Guide to internet accountability tools, viii) Responses to international parent survey.

-NOT carefully edited. Occasional spelling mistakes. (Overall organization is still pretty good, in spite of that.)

-1-1.5 days of reading time (≈5 hours)

*******

I learned / recapitulate many things from this book. Selected observations:

1. If you have Strange White People indulging in some silliness, it takes a lot of leg work to NOT get involved in their stupidity.

2. Diagnoses in the DSM only depend on what people believe, and not necessarily any hard clinical/biological evidence.

3. Another purpose of the DSM is to create Insurance billable codes for diagnosis. So, Gender Identity Disorder-- > Gender Dysphoria --> Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. (Remember that only 0.02% of people have clinical gender dysphoria.)

4. Once gay marriage became a thing in 2015, you had a lot of lobbying organizations that no longer had jobs. Transgender lobbying was a logical next step.

5. Early Onset Gender Dysphoria (Jazz Jennings)≠ "Rapid Onset" Gender Dysphoria. Rapid onset can reverse just as fast as it comes on. 80 to 98% of young kids will later experience desistance (p.121).

6. The cases of Bonnie Manchester and Jessica Tapia show that it is not only in deep blue school districts that teachers are obligated to lie to parents about their children's gender identity.

7. The surgical elements of this transitioning are pretty gruesome (it ain't what it looks like on TV!). Especially for the "bottom surgery." If you have a faux vagina made, you can get ready for a lot of time spent dilating and a lot of infections. If you have a faux todger made, you can also get ready for a lot of infections and very slow (≈10 minute) urination. When Jazz Jennings had her bottom surgery, it was made to look all cute for TV--but in reality, there were lots of surgeries that had to be done and redone. Sample stories: ("Seven surgeries, pulmonary embolism, and induce stressed heart attack, sepsis, 17-month recurring infection, 16 rounds of antibiotics, 3 weeks of daily IV antibiotics, arm reconstructive surgery, $1 million in medical expenses......." [p. 180] AND "Dilations? Awful! Why do I have to feel that my anus is about to disintegrate? Why does the labia have to burn so much every time I dilate? And every six hours every day?" [p. 176]).

8. A phalloplasty meta-analysis found that over three quarters of patients had complications, and almost a third experienced urethral fistulas, and a quarter experienced urethral stricture (p.182).

*******
It has elements of other books that I have read:

1. "Big Fat Surprise." This is the case where you have somebody who is a very forceful advocate for a position that turns out to be wrong, and that position ultimately becomes mainstream when it is received by some government officials. So, Ansel Keys= John Monsey= Iago.

2. "Irreversible Damage," Abigail Shirier. Transgenderism these days is an epidemic of (bored, white, upper middle class) teenage girls.

3. ("True Believer" by Eric Hoffer/ Countless other books/ day to day experience). This is the case where you have Strange White People turning the entire world into a self-actualization project. So, John Monsey has problems with his sexual orientation and goes about the business of transforming the world.

4. ("Antigfragile"/ "Coddling of the American Mind") Some members of civilization somewhere are too comfortable and they generate conflicts to tear themselves apart.

5. ("When Harry Became Sally") it covers much of the same ground, but it lacked the insider's perspective of a physician and the gory details of transgender surgery.

6. ("Burden of Bad Ideas"). It happens quite frequently that academics' stupidity spills out of academia into the real world and with DISASTROUS effects.

******

Second Order Thoughts:

1. I can see this going in one of two ways. The first is that enough lawsuits get pressed by detransitioners and liability/malpractice insurance brings these butchers to heel. 

Or the second is that it will go down as a fad that just (mostly) wears itself out-- like Multiple Personality Disorder / Bullshit Freudian Psychology. Some medical mistakes have been very purposely forgotten (Tuskegee experiments, thalidomide, lobotomies to cure mental illness--which, apparently, received a Nobel prize [p.225].)

2. What is my strategy:

a. My kids go to a parochial/ religious school, and we don't have to deal with that bullshit there. That situation has already arisen in our school (some girl decided she wanted to be a boy) and it was summarily dismissed from the school, even though its mother was an attorney. (For the record: It only takes a one sentence declaration to convert to Islam, and I don't think you even have to be Catholic to go to Catholic schools. Homeschooling is a nuclear option.)

b. No television in the house, and Xbox is limited to one hour per day 6 days a week.

c. Sometimes if you have kids, then no matter what you do they just turn out wrong--and so more is better so that if one is not recoverable, then you have others to focus on. We have a sufficient number of sons that if one of them played the "Dead Son, Live Daughter" game with me, then I have no problem with putting him out and no regrets if he really followed through with the suicide threat. (If he was that nuts, it would probably be the best thing for him anyway.)

3. This author does not make it part of the book, but it is pretty clear that she is an Orthodox Jew--with all of the verbal and intellectual elegance that one would expect with that designation.

The first clue was (p.108) where she created an imaginary dialogue between a parent, a Trans Crusader Physician and a Trans Crusader Therapist. (This is a very old Talmudic thought technique.)

What really let the cat out of the bag  was the gematria-flavored commentary, complete with the words "אמת" and "שקר".

4. The best expression that was used in this book over and over again was "We Don't Know." And it is true that everybody talks about something as being settled science when there are no papers that talk about it (such as [p.119] the long-term effect of social affirmation on people with "rapid onset gender dysphoria" , or how pausing puberty affects the development of the child's prefrontal cortex / amygdala / any other part of the brain [p.71]).

5. What is something that kids get from deciding to be trans? "I am listened to. I'm special. I'm getting so much attention at home and school. Adults are making big changes for me" (p. 120).

6. Damn (!), Jennifer Pritzker is ONE. UGLY. HUMAN. BEING.

Quotes:

-(p.106): "The hospital will crystallize Oliver in Emma's mind, instead of focusing on the cyberbullying, emotional dysregulation, and other issues that lead to her self-injury."

-(p.63): "One teenager came to us when he was 17 years old and living in a lockdown facility because he had been sexually abusing dogs. Somewhere along the way, he expressed his desire to become female, so he ended up being seen at our center."

-(p.195): "Too many believe this is all about compassion, respect, and rights. That's a cover. The goal had always been the breakdown of norms. To push the limits further and further. How does the endpoint look? That's the point - - there is no endpoint. The thrill is in pushing beyond the acceptable."

Vocabulary:

Psychosaexual neutrality
paraphilia (=neutral term for "perversion")
minority stress model
desistance (=grow out of it)
runaway diffusion
thermal synchrony

Book Review
Civilization: The West and The Rest
4/5 stars
"An answer to neurotic Western oikophobia by a respectable historian"

******
Over some amount of time, so many events happen that historians have to abstract certain characters and happenings for focus and exclude others. 

And so of course the same book is never written twice, but even when different books are written-- the books don't necessarily add that much value because not every single event in history is necessary to explain present times.

This author's conceptual framework is to reduce the success of Western countries to 6 "killer apps": competition, science, property, medicine, consumption, work. And no small purpose is to rebut Western academic oikophobia. ("Eurocentrism" is a rhetorical epithet to dismiss out of hand any serious analysis.)

The six killer apps each have a chapter, but not all chapters are about what they say they are about - - sometimes there are very lengthy detours. (For instance, his chapter on work is actually a history about the role of Christianity in Western affluence.)

Historical Recapitulations:

1. China squandered a very large lead because of hubris. (Any other book on Chinese history for the past 500 years will tell us this.)

2. Europe had geographic advantages in that it had navigable waterways and harbors that created kingdoms that were not so large as to be monolithic and uncompetitive (à la China), but not so fragmented has to be unable to take advantage of scale effects to support large projects-- à la Africa. (Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Thomas Sowell's "Cultures" trilogy)

3. Resource Curse: the English settlers in North America set up to build institutions for purposes of land distribution. The Spanish crown was interested to get the most gold and silver for its Treasury, and not to build institutions. (Francis Fukyuama, "The Origins of Political Order.")

4. Speculation on the possible Christianization of China. (Other people have noticed this. Including at least one author that is quoted in the book. David Aikman.)

5. The consumer Society was created in some part by the techniques of mass production learned during the world wars.

Characters/events brought into focus:

1. Frederick the Great, the architect of the clean Prussian bureaucracy.

2. Kemal Ataturk, the modernizer of Turkey.

3. Debate between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.

4. French Revolution vis-a-vis the American

Factoids:

1. The main Chinese collapse saw the Chinese population reduced by 40% over a period of 70 years.

2. Brazilian slaves were much larger in number than North American ones, and they had the power of manumission. (Most Brazilian slaves didn't live longer than a year, though.)

3. French and Napoleonic wars between 1792 and 1815, 3.5 million dead. 20 times more dead than Americans that died in the US revolution. (4435 people, and 2,260 for the War of 1812.)

5. Germans perfected their concentration camps actually much before WWII - - in what is now Namibia. Between September 1906 and March 1907, a total of 1,032 /1,795 prisoners on Shark Island died. Before the uprising, the Herrero had numbered 80,000; afterward only 15,000 remained. There had been 20,000 Nama; fewer than 10,000 were left when a census was conducted in 1911. Only 1 in 10 Nama prisoners survived the camps.

6. China has been cheap labor for a long time. For a period of about 3 centuries, their wages raised from 3 g of silver per day to 5~6g. That's a doubling time of over 200 years (p.211).

7. The Jewish inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Singer, had a total of 24 children by 5 different women and had to flee the United States because of bigamy.

8. If we believe the author's quoting David Aikman, Jiang Zemin said that he would like to issue "a decree to make Christianity the official religion of China" (p.287).

9. Trade brings people together and consumerism is a slow but powerful tool in creating and homogenizing people because of their consumption patterns.

Second order thoughts:

1. This book was published long enough ago that some of the author's assertions can be tested. 

a. Ferguson was expecting that China was going to become the biggest economy in the world in the next decade, and then the current financial crisis happened. It's essentially a real estate crisis, and those take quite some time to sort out.

b. Also, the current Chinese emperor (Xi Jinping) is trying to destroy indigenous Christianity and is taking China back in the direction of totalitarianism. 

c. No (p.312) US governments budget deficits did not get smaller, but have exploded.

d. Chinese Trade balance is the same as a percentage of GDP from 2011 and almost twice as big in dollar terms; "consume more/import more/invest abroad more/innovate more" DID NOT happen.

e. Belt and road initiative has been shown to be a money loser and is falling apart even as we speak.

f. No, mathematics scores don't have a consistent relationship to economic growth. Japan has had great ones for decades and they have been stagnant just as long.

2. "If you build it, they will come." But that which is built will not last. Western Civilization will have its moment, and through some series of missteps, it will be no more. And that has happened many other times. Maybe it will be slow. Maybe it will be fast. And the details will be different, but everyone gets their turn in this farce. Even very long lived civilizations go through repetitive collapse.

3. There are many different theories about the degeneration of some given civilization. That could have been a book in its own right, although Ferguson did give us a taste in the conclusion.

4. It seems like when Western people get things right, they don't even believe in what they have built. (Total fertility rate is below replacement all over the West.) Meanwhile, Africans can't manage a state (or anything else, really) for any reason, and I think they have a total fertility rate of about 7.0. (The author is very aware of Jewish intellect. And Jews in America live in security, and it seems like they have lost interest in having babies: same population numbers for the past 50 years and 1.86 children per women.)

5. Maybe prosperity/Western Civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enough prosperity creates a class of academics that can sit around and generate problems and turn people against each other. ("Hey ho hey ho, Western civ has got to go.")

6. It has been known for a long time that democracies destroy themselves. Maybe with increased democracy in what is the "West," the same thing is happening again? It is also been asserted before - - about 40 years ago - - by Joseph Tainter that: civilizations reach complexity levels until there is no further benefit from the complexity and then they collapse again.
 
Verdict: it does not hurt to read this book, and I believe that it might be a keeper--at least until another of these panoramic history books comes along to update it.
Vocabulary:

Eight legged essay
Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism
pathic
catamite
fee simple
fee tail
freehold
copyhold
palatine
cazique
headright
leet-men
coruscating 
subaltern
punkah wallah
equipoise 

Quotes:

"A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace."

"Christianity was stuffed with miracles kind of contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it ans some imbeciles actually believed it." (p.76, Frederick The Great).

"No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible." (p.101)

".... First demonstration in the Modern Age of the grim truth that revolutions devour their own children." (p.153)

"Western civilization was about to encounter its most dangerous foe: itself" (p.181).

"Each European power had its own distinctive way of scrambling for Africa. The French... favored railways and health centers. The British.... built mission schools. The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast slave state. The Portuguese did as little as possible. The Germans..... for them, colonizing Africa was a giant experiment to test, among other things, a racial theory." (p.176).

"The slaughterhouse of the Western front was like a vast and terrifying laboratory for medical science, producing significant advances in surgery, not to mention psychiatry. The skin graft and antiseptic irrigation of wounds..... The earliest blood transfusions. For the first time, all British soldiers were vaccinated against typhoid, and wounded soldiers were routinely given anti-tetanus shots.

"If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change." (p.215- Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa)

"There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army." (p.244)

Book Review
Girls of Riyadh
4/5 stars
"A characterization of Saudi Society in 27 quotes"
*******
I thought I would pick this book up because I'd never before read a characterization of everyday Saudi/Arab society.

This is a story of four upper class women in Saudi Arabia - - and it may not be representative of even a large fraction of people, but it is (somewhat) interesting nonetheless.

The book was 51 chapters over 281 pages. 5~6 pages per chapter, and it could probably have been 50 pages shorter with no loss.

I will skip all of the character/plot analysis - - firstly because I'm probably not qualified to do character analysis (I only read a handful of fiction books per year) and secondly because the machinations of the plot are too complicated for anybody to keep track of.

The most valuable part of the book is that it gives us an idea of what some fraction of Saudi life is like - - although I suspect that this is probably not true for the vast majority of working squares. 

It is only wealthy people who have enough time to find things like these to torture themselves with; "Those who toil from sunup to sundown for the barest of necessities dream no dreams and nurse no grievances." 

The quotes that stand out the most are the ones that give me a sense of the Arabs, and maybe they could do the same for another potential reader:

1. The sheikh says "fingerprint, not signature." The men are the only ones who sign their names.

2. The list of contraband items was long and included: photo albums, diaried, perfume bottles, romantic novels, music cassettes, and videotapes.

3. Our Saudi Society resembles a fruit cocktail of social classes and which no classes mixes with another and less absolutely necessary, and then only with the help of a blender.

4. The photo finally mixing with the opposite sex was a grand dream for many, many students - - guys and girls alike. Some join these colleges primarily for that reason, even if the mixing that they anticipated so eagerly was heavily restricted.

5. From Beirut, she would bring books on the signs of the zodiac.

6. That was before the religious police banned anything that might remotely suggest a celebration of the holiday of love, St Valentine's day, as in Islam there are only two holidays.

7. Saudis started celebrating Valentine's Day in the late 90s after they heard about it through satellite TV channels broadcast from Lebanon and egypt.

8.....to study psychology under The guiding hand of Sigmund Freud, aided by the books that she had brought with her. 

9. If all else fails, pregnancy was the only way to ensure that a marriage continues. Notice that I say "continues" and not "succeeds."

10. The slap landed on her right cheek, and the sound of it echoed in her head..... The second slap came and she failed to the floor, sobbing painfully. -->(This guy was smacking his wife because she insulted his Japanese girlfriend.)

11. So, like countless mothers before her, she resorted to the oldest trick in the book: "Quick, son! Get up, hurry, get me my blood pressure medicine! My heart, oh my heart! I think I'm dying."

12. Among the different subclassifications of Saudi society, there are the tribals and the non-tribals. Between these two classes there can be no marriages. A tribal family is one that can be traced to one of the well-known Arabic tribes.

13. "Gd burn your heart to ashes and the heart of your mother, too, Rashid, like you've burned up my heart over my little girl." -->(this is not the first book I have read where it has shown the Arabs as *extremely* theatrical.)

14. Everyone considers me a bad girl just because my mother is American!

15. In general, everyone understood that Saudi girls were more at ease mixing with men who were not Saudi.

16. .... And more important if he hadn't been Shiite, she might actually have fallen in love with him.

17. She tried tender motherly persuasion and she tried firm motherly thrashing, but nothing worked...... The father heard things by way of the neighbors, though, and what he heard put him into a fury. Bursting into Nuri's room one day, he began to pummel and kick his son. The boy suffered fractures in the rib cage and a broken nose and arm. Following the incident, the father left the household to move in entirely with his second wife, permanently distancing himself from this house and this faggot boy who was such a freak of nature.

18. Or will we disguise Saudi boys to take on the roles of young women, and thereby lose the audience?

19. Gamrah began to tremble when she heard The sheik's interpretation of her dream.

20. "Now as you know very well I'm a Bedouin and a soldier, and I ain't interested in makin' clever little chit chat with you fancy city folk. I heard your niece has a little boy from her first husband. So the fine print as I see it is, the boy stays here with his grandmother. To clarify, here, I am not gonna  raise a kid who is in my own, he is not welcome in my house."

21. "Aquarius men are really awful, they're snobbish and they think they're always cool. And the worst part is, some Libra girls make it easy for them!"

23. But Jumana was in love with one of her relatives who she intended to marry as soon as he finished his MA in England and returned home. --> (Cousin marriages range between 10 and 67% in the Middle East.)

24. Saleh was happy to come, and would throw on his miniature black woman's abaya, which Gamrah had cut and hemmed to his size after he demanded that she buy him one exactly like hers.

25. .... having earlier agreed with her three friends that she would try to throw the wedding bouquet in their direction...... After a lot of pushing and shoving and kicking and hitting, Gamrah got hold of what was left of Lamee's bouquet.

26. ..... he would take her out to a restaurant or shopping without the slightest anxiety or embarrassment about the possibility of running into one of his friends while his wife was at his side (a hang up many Saudi men have).

27. .... Tariq had not forgotten to bring her the Burger King double Whopper meal she liked.

Other good quotes:

1. He who grows up doing something grows old doing it. (Arabic proverb.)

2. They make mountains out of mole hills, or, as we say, a dome out of a seed. (Arabic proverb.)

3. Marriage was like the watermelon on the knife, you never knew what you were going to get. (Arabic proverb.)

4. "Don't wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to bitter reality." (Mark Twain)

5. "Nothing is harder than the life of a woman who finds herself torn between a man who loves her and a man she loves." (Gibran)

6. "Those who want us, our souls resent them; and those whom we want, fate refuses to give to us." (Female Saudi poet.)

Verdict: recommended at the price of about $3.

Book Review
Galileo's Middle Finger
5/5 stars
"Resonances of Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church in the actions of corrupt scientists"

*******
This is a fascinating, narrative and easy reading book. (It could have been about 50 pages shorter, but it was not so waffly that I had to take off a whole star.)

It's also a great cautionary tale:
Many like to read the story about the Catholic Church and Galileo as a tale about the dangers of religion.

The point is not the truth, but instead the power dynamics in one person trying to claim a monopoly on some type of knowledge, and the fact that it was the Catholic Church and Galileo was coincidence: it could be / has been one professional organization against a scientist or some cabal of scientists against another.

The exact same dynamics were (and are) at play in the current transgender hysteria. 

*******
This centers around half-a-dozen-or-so very ugly stories of religious zealots masquerading as scientists/seekers of "truth":

1. Michael Bailey affair: he demonstrated that auto-gynephilia is a condition that looks like transgenderism, but it is not. Hate campaign death threats and fake sexual sodomy-of-his-own-kids calls to CPS by three Men Dressed in Women's Clothes. (I guess these creatures--Andrea James /Deidre McCloskey/Lynn Conway--identified as transgender and this concept of auto-gynephilia interfered with their perceived identity.)

2. RandyThornhill and Craig Palmer: These guys had the temerity to suggest that sexual attraction may play a role in rape. (What is it that so many young, attractive, fertile women are raped? But never baby elephant women.....) More death threats and police getting involved.

3. Napoleon Chagnon/J. Neel. An honest portrayal of Yanomamo Indians (rather than as the Peaceful Noble Savages that Fabulous White People like to imagine) has a bunch of false claims and comparisons to people like Joseph Mengele spread about and the career of a disinterested scientist ruined.

4. Rind/Tromovich/Bauserman. These authors studied in a quantitative way the damage experienced by children that were sexually abused, and they concluded that most children came through okay. Somehow, that finding was construed as supporting/giving carte blanche to NAMBLA. 

5. Alice Dreger (author). A multi-year long battle to expose a corrupt/unethical pediatric endocrinologist - - and it was ultimately unsuccessful. Also, the fight against unnecessary genital surgery on intersex children.

6. E.O. Wilson. He coined the concept of sociobiology, and he was promptly smeared as a nazi/cryptonazi by people like Steven J Gould and Richard Lewontin.

There are also a couple of cameos from other hoaxes:

1. "Recovered" memories.
2. The purging and rehabilitation of Margaret Mead based on her studies in Samoa. 
*******

I would have to say that this is a nice packaging of heuristics that most people should have in mind.


1. Medicine is a discipline that proceeds by falsification / via negativa: the only reason that medical science has some idea of what does work is because enough people have suffered through learning what does not work.

2. "Science" is not enough, and scientific things can be repurposed as religious movements (complete with unquestionable priests and heretic non-believers). It is emphatically not enough to say that something is "scientific", to remove all human mental deficiencies from a reasoning process.

3. (p.158): For people who are in the habit of going back and counting references, a lot of times huge numbers of citations are put there as padding. They may not cite what they claim to cite, or even point to a non-existent page in a book.

Second order thoughts:

1. "Academic freedom" is something that's really questionable:

a. Because it is practiced in institutions that are glorified government jobs.

Things have a way of being ruined when political actors get involved with them (you need look no further than the missteps taken during the initial years of HIV and similar missteps taken during the Covid Hysteria).

b. Because a lot of their products are damaging ("Burden of Bad Ideas," Heather MacDonald) and if so, the government can generate as many of these stupid ideas as they are willing to finance.

This adds up to MASSIVE moral hazard implications.

2. This is an example of an extremely specific institutional failure by government (these government bodies missed a lot of awful mistakes). If something with such a small number of highly educated people could go this wrong, what does it mean about institutional failures at much higher levels with larger numbers of people?

3. The fact that something is a "scientific consensus" as of a given moment could be coincidence. There's no reason that the consensus might not change.

4. The author talks about the vitiation of the "Fourth Estate" (journalism) by the internet--investigative journalism takes money, and the internet has made running such investigative departments financially unfeasible. It's interesting that Dreger lived through a time when newspapers were less than 150% false. (Whatever time that was--if it was-- it has been so far back that I myself can't remember.)


Verdict: Recommend
*******


Quotes:

(p.129): "One identity card after another was thrown down - - which only made sense in a feminist room where you win by simply having the most identity cards. I found myself thinking that women's studies is about as sophisticated a game as Go Fish 

(p.156): ".....number one rule in making shit up: make it so unbelievable that people have to believe."

(p.137): "only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what is true........ could think that guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than by facts.

"... Industrial strength Catholics."

Book Review
2/5 stars
Questionable practical applicability
*******

I like this book, but for some reason it is extremely difficult for me to organize my thoughts on the topic--and that is for both philosophical and practical reasons. 

Described below. 

∆∆∆Practical: 

The cases that Voss describes are just too limited / unusual in nature to be of much assistance to Everyman. 

For us working squares, how often do we have a chance to actually apply these principles? 

The situations that the author describes are ones where he is in a position of great strength. 

For example, walking into a car dealer to pay cash for a car that he wanted. (Meanwhile, the rest of us only purchase a new car when the old one goes out and we most likely finance it.) 

In the very last chapter, Voss talked about coaching someone through a deal for a $3.6 million property that he was acquiring. (We purchased a house just a few years back --using a mortgage, and not cash-- and there were 20 bidders for every single house and we just happened to get lucky because of a good rapport with the selling agent.) 

And what possible way could we have approached our situation from a position of strength? 

Much of the same story is the case with people who work and get paid by the hour: it is NEVER the case of one single applicant "negotiating" a good wage. 

It's more like: X number of dollars per hour is allocated for this position, take it or leave it. 

(This author was a hostage negotiator - - something very very few of us will have the chance to be.) 

Another Big Question is: how limited is the applicability of his negotiation style and observations in the case where the stakes are low enough to create a vicious conflict? (I think this has been very precisely/aptly formulated as Sayre's law.) 

Every single one of these cases that Voss mentions are about things where the actors have something significant at stake. But, rabbinic / academic politics are extremely vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. 

∆∆∆Philosophical: 

What about the ethics of making use of all of these tactics. ("That which is hateful to you do not do unto others.") 

I am emphatically DO NOT appreciate it when people try to "slick talk" me or "read" me. (I do not use any "urban dialect," and yet it happens all the time that "certain people" think that they can create an instant bond by throwing in a  "bro" / "bra"/"yo.") 

I have been in the situation countless times while teaching abroad where some prospective employer did not want to hire black people (like the present writer), or they did not want to accept me as a religious conversion (Geirut) candidate, or, they were not keen to have me participate in all parts of a synagogue service (Torah reader, shliach tzibbur, etc). 

And so, my requests were met with non-committal answers or stalling for time (tactics that are encouraged in this book), when ultimately the answer was "no." 

If they had just said to me at that time "Sorry, bub, but we just don't want black people for [insert pertinent situation]," they could have saved both of our time and I would not have been the least bit offended. 

There is nothing more aggravating than dealing with somebody who cannot tell you a direct YES or NO.
******* 

Of the book: 

It is a very interesting and easy to read book that is essentially about the alchemy of negotiation. 

247 pages of prose over 10 chapters, for 24.7 pages per chapter. (Lots of white space and fast reading.) 

Voss is extremely sparse with his references:  I count 23 books that he refers to over the entirety of his book, and there is almost no pointing back to specific chapters/pages within his sources. (23 books is not that great of a number; I just finished reading a book about kashrut that was just as long as this one that had 369 different references) 

Nor do I see any peer-reviewed articles.  (The author did establish that academics don't really live anywhere on this planet with respect to negotiating skills, so that might not be that big of a handicap.) 

And, in spite of the sparseness of the citations....Voss does seem to draw on a lot of research that has stood the test of time: 

1. Daniel Kahneman's System 1/System2 and Prospect Theory. 

2. Anchoring (in negotiation) 

3. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. (A lot of people will refuse a $99 to $1 split of some money, even though they would be at least $1 better off by accepting the bargain and no better off by refusing a bargain that they felt impugned their honor.) 

********
The author makes us want to believe that being able to read/understand people is something that can be learned. 

But, I just really wonder: We all know men who are able to successfully bed dozens of women because they have a preternatural ability to read a woman's thoughts just by noticing subtleties. (If you ask them to sit down and write five pages explaining how they do what they do, they probably could not.) 

And if it was the case that that *was* a learnable skill, wouldn't ALL men be lining up to learn it so that they could tuck into more sets of moist and available loins? 

Meanwhile, this skill also doesn't seem to depend on native intelligence: I have met people that are Talmudic scholars that have the personality of a cattle prod (or wet sand), and even after several decades of studying they did not learn to develop the same. 

So, since these skills don't depend on raw intellect, is it something more....... Intangible? 

*******
Voss also mentions in the first chapter (which, by the way, feels a bit self-aggrandizing) that academics have one notion of human interaction and people who are practitioners - - such as FBI negotiators, like the author--have a completely different perception of reality. 

But to be quite honest, you can pick ANY topic of ANY type and you will find that academics are the last ones to be aware Some Particular Phenomenon exists in reality (because they think that it does not) or that Another Particular Phenomenon does not exist in reality (because they think it does). 

There has to be a reason that Marxists only exist in American universities and people who are capable of building business empires don't stay in academia.

But, if we take him at his word as an expert.... How do we really know that he knows what he is talking about? (Anthony Fauci has been an idiot for several decades--and even as far back as the beginning of the discovery of HIV/AIDS, even though he purports to be an expert.) 

******* 

How profound is a lot of this material really? 

For people who sell certified pre-owned cars, their modus operandi is to get you to pay as much as they can get out of you for a car. 

And the skills that they need in order to do that are specific, but finite. (It appears to me that most car dealerships have an extremely high turnover rate, and selling cars is not something that you have to be broken out with brilliance to do.) 

If there is something that you do everyday (and part of it is dealing with some class of people), is it a specific and limited skill in its own right that you learn as needed for everyday use,  or is it something that you can abstract/improve based on what you learn in this book? 

I'm just not certain. 

Verdict: Cautious recommendation.

Book Review
"The Warmth of Other Suns"
Isabel Wilkerson 
5+/5 stars
Unputdownable
******
For starters: There were just a couple of minor problems here.

The first is that there were no pictures here. Not a single one of all of these interesting characters through the many printings. (Although with net searches some of the pictures could be found.)


The second is the book was a little bit wordier than it probably needed to be (although the prose was extremely light and fast reading).

*******
Sometimes books that discuss historical events are made much more believable by a well-chosen narrative arc -- which this author has provided. (Although this creates a tighter restriction of range than a history book has.)

Most blacks who grew up in the North (such as the present writer of this review) are also ancestrally from the South --in my case about 3.75 generations ago.

There were three main tributaries:

1. Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia up the Eastern seaboard to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston.

2. From Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the industrial cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh.

3. Louisiana and Texas to the entire West Coast.

What are some of the other things that we learned? (Selected listing, because the book was jam-packed with information):

1. Segregation is something that happened in the 1890s and after the Reconstruction (that is the conclusion of this author, although that point has been controversial). And the Civil Rights Act was signed a full century--5 generations --after the Emancipation Proclamation.

2. We learned a lot of details of the daily humiliations of specific people under the Jim Crow system. The people who grew up under that system (my grandmother, for the first 16 years of her life -- who is now 98) actually have very little to say about it. Movies dramatize this, but they are not written by people who are actually there, nor do we know how much artistic license they may have taken.

3. This is a specific case of something that happens, and has happened countless times throughout history: Some people from one place migrate to another, and in the process of migration stabilize and create a different culture. In this case, it is Southern Blacks transplanting their uncomfortable Southern, hickish behaviors to Northern cities (Thomas Sowell has mentioned that these blacks lived around uncouth white Southerners for centuries in his book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" and acted EXACTLY like them). 

A similar process happened 1,000 years ago in the transplant of Han Chinese from around Henan to stabilize as "Hakka People" ("guest people") locked in mutual hatred against the Cantonese/Yue people for virtually the entire time.

French farmers and Dutch sailors became, respectively, Quebecois and Afrikaners--with all the corresponding, centuries long conflicts.

Of the six main characters in The Book, I count that three were sent back to the South to be buried. (George Starling; Alice Foster; Inez Starling)

4.  The scale of the migration: the Dust Bowl moved about 300K people in the 1930s, the California Gold Rush moved about 100K in the 1850s. But, the black migration went over six decades and moved 6,000K people(!).

5. The lynchings that Wilkerson describes are graphic, but they need to be put into their proper perspective. From 1889 to 1929, there were about 3,600 lynchings. One every 4 days (p.39). 

-2740 Jewish people killed PER DAY in the Holocaust 

-Black on black murders last year were 2,574. (That's about one year and 5 months to kill more black people than were lynched in the entire South over a 40-year period.)

6. "Ships at a distance carry every man's wish on board." The Paradise that the migrants thought would be on leaving the South was not.  

Some of the Southern whites came along and continued the dislike. 

Some Irish already didn't like black people. 

Some other white people that were there and got put out of a job by black strike breakers liked them even less. 

Some of the local whites just could not deal with such a huge influx of people with unfamiliar customs.

7. The most isolated black cities (the ones that the white people ran out of most quickly) were all receiving stations of the Great Migration. In increasing-segregation order: Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Newark, Gary, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Baltimore, St Louis.

Second order thoughts:

1. The author mentioned many cities here that became majority black as a result of the Great Migration, and every single one of them has had reduced quality of governance / other urban decay.

Detroit was a city that functioned on the river for 3 centuries---until they had enough black people there, and it just did not function anymore.

And Chicago. And Baltimore. And New Orleans. And Gary, Indiana. And so on and so on.

As much as the author wants us to believe that black people were innocent victims of this exclusion, it seems very uncomfortable that these problems did, in fact, come after they arrived.

2. What is the truth? The Thomas Sowell version of events (2005, "Black Rednecks.....") Or the Isabel Wilkerson version that talks about self-selection creating a better population of people (p.261)? Or could it be that the southern transplants were the best of a group of people that are even sorrier? (And therefore nothing to write home about.)

3. (p.290). Someone is always looking for another person that is beneath them. Northern blacks over Southern blacks. Earlier arrivals over late arrivals. Even in current times, Eastern Europeans and Arabs over black people. These other ethnic groups (which may be non-White) need not be assumed to be an automatic source of allies for black problems.

Unanswerable questions:

1. The State was unaware that these Jim Crow and various abuses were happening for almost 3/4 of a century, and it took them that long to figure out a game plan. Why would anybody rely on the state? Why are black people so married to the concept of an active state?

2. I don't know if learning history makes the problem better or worse? 

Keep talking about these past events and keep revanchism alive? 

Or to not remember them, but then not formally create some sense of closure and forgiveness in order to move on? (Very few foundational black Americans pick up books and read about their history; the concept of feeling aggrieved is there, but concrete reasons for feeling aggrieved are nebulous. Everybody has heard about Jim Crow, and maybe a few people know about Rosewood.)

3. What is the appropriate role of the state in population management? (With smarter government, it didn't need to be this way.) 

Is it a problem of limited federalism? 

Subsidiarity?

Places like Japan and China have a cultural meat grinder to make it such that everyone comes out the same (people in China have been mixing freely for many thousands of years), and they don't have this type of ethnic conflict. India and the Middle East do not, and they DO have this type of conflict. (In fact, the Chinese government freely relocates the Han ethnic majority to far out places in order to facilitate the mixing--and has been doing so for a LONG TIME.)

4. Where to draw the line between human beings that are shaped by their environment as opposed to those who really do have some agency and can make choices? People use the glib catch all explanation of "racism" to explain every disparity. 

But, in reality, people do get shaped by their environment (and some historical cases have demonstrated that the first 2 decades can be the same as the next 2 millennia). 

5. Is this part of bringing closure? Jews have suffered a lot more murders/pogroms over the past 20 centuries or so, and they are all consolidated into one commemorative day (Tisha b'av) so that the sense of victimhood does not bleed into everyday life. In fact, 70% of Jews marry Gentiles stateside.

Verdict: Strongly recommended.


Vocabulary:
peplum hat
bergamot wave 
Stingy brim hat
portico
balustrades 
Claude Neal/Lola Cannidy
Willie James Howard
Arrington High
Willis V. McCall (investigated 49 times with no convictions!)
Northern Paradox (Gunnar Myrdal)
root doctor


Quotes:

(p. 285): "I was a Southerner, and I had the map of Dixie on my tongue." (Quotable Zora Neale Hurston.)

(p.339): "Win had been blowing on the bulb until he was almost out of breath. 'Win, you can't blow it out. You got to turn it off.'"

(p.528, black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier): "Masses of ignorant, uncouth, and impoverished migrants flooded the city and change the whole structure of the n/Negro community."

Book Review
Lifespan 
David Sinclair
2/5 stars
"A somewhat silly book; full of a lot of the author's political opinions"

*******
Of the book:

-310 pages of prose/ 9 chapters + conclusion. (x-bar= 31/chapter)

-393 reference citations (=1.26/pages; well sourced)

I really don't see so much of what this author is telling us that we didn't already know. He coins the term "Information Theory of Aging," but we all know that, given enough time, enough mistakes will accumulate in DNA/various parts of the human body to make it such that we just don't live anymore--and it seems like he is splitting hairs about WHY it happens in order to come up with a unique definition THAT it happens, along with speculation about what his research will lead to--given enough time.

Even for all of the great bulk of words, it seems like much of this book is a restatement of that long known / knowable fact (about accumulation of DNA damage=eventual death).

The Elixir of Life is something that people have been searching for for a long time. I think the First Emperor of China spent all of his final years searching for said elixir --and died anyway.

Those events were 2,300 years ago, and if you believe in the Lindy effect..... If something goes on for x years, then there's no reason it cannot go on for another x. 

So, too, with this quest to eliminate aging.

I guess there's just enough life left in this idea to write *yet another* book.

*******
The information herein takes three tracks:

∆Track 1...What we already know: eat less (caloric restriction), exercise more, don't smoke.

∆Track 2...Things that are true in human beings in some limited/trivial sense, or that work well in rodents.

Example: The author goes through also a very long list of drugs and the format is something like: "Drug x reduces cancer types a, b, &c by 4% each over a lifetime." 

-But, how many pills are we practically talking about per day to affect practically significant change?  50? 100? And then, do the side effects make it such that it's not worth it?

-And even if this works for cancers a, b and c, we might still have another several dozen to go on which this medicine has no effect

Example: Resveratrol. This book talks it up, but a quick Google search of 10 random papers ALL say that it is quite overhyped and has no practical significance.

Dasatinib: this is a chemotherapeutic agent for leukemia. And, it works in mice, and this author is saying that if you're feeling old you could just go in for a shot of chemo for a week. But, it has been known for some time (by rheumatologists) that chemotherapeutic agents can calm down improperly dividing cells - - which is why it has been used for lupus and arthritis for decades by now. (As frequently as these things are used, wouldn't somebody have noticed that they had senolytic properties by now?)

A VERY OLD STORY. 

There is lots of the game about how this-works-well-in-rats-and-yeast - - but it doesn't necessarily in humans. (Maybe it's not bioavailable; Maybe it takes impractical amounts, such as >750 glasses of red wine per day to get comparable amounts of resveratrol.) 

∆Track 3.....Things that are speculatively true: IF X, THEN Y. And these things *must* come true, given enough experimental research. And they're just a few years away (kinda like nuclear fusion) . 

Second order thoughts:

1. What benefit is there to do research into this area? Not a few times have human beings developed technology *way* faster than they could figure out the way to handle it. (Antibiotics. Nuclear weapons.)

Without editorializing, I can say that if this "problem" is chipped away at........ The practical results are likely going to be worse than anybody can foresee.

There exists to such thing as a virus supercycle-- of some disputed periodicity-- (Laurie Garrett, "The Coming Plague"), and microbes outnumber human beings by ≈10^9:1 and have a generation time that is about 10^6 faster....

2. Part of "progress"/evolution is that things must die off in order for there to be selection. 

Both in the sense that people who hold some stupid idea (let's say foot binding, for example, which was practiced in China for 10 centuries) just have to die off in order for people to move on AND in the sense that less genetically fit organisms have to die in order for there to be a better final end product.

In the event of a long lived civilization that is EXTREMELY slow learning (China/India), if you create more long lived people does that slow down an already glacially-slow learning curve? Instead of 1~2 new ideas per millennium, we now have people that can take up 1~2 new idea every 100,000 years? (The life expectancy was about 32 years all the way from the Qin dynasty until probably a half century ago. Three generations per century with almost zero net gain of knowledge.)

Dianne Feinstein just died the other day in office at 90 years old. What would her job have been like at 120? Or 150?

If you disturb this 1.2 billion year equilibrium of people dying off at a certain rate to make room for more genetically fit ones, what is likely to happen?

3. If people get to the point where they could have minute to minute medical data, who keeps track of it? What do they do with it? 

Does anyone even know?

4. Has this author been living in academia too long?

- (p.250)" 70-year-old students sitting in the classroom with 90-year-old teachers to be retrained? (My 98-year-old just gave up her smartphone and reverted back to a flip phone because the technology was too much for her. My grandmother-in-law could not use an ATM at the age of 80. They were/are  both perfectly healthy people.)

-(p. 233): "Unless we act to ensure equality, we stand at the precipice of a world in which the Uber-Rich could ensure that their children, and even their companion animals, live far longer than some poor people's children do."

-(p.272): "The quality of our medical Care should not be predicated on age or income. A 90-year-old and a 30-year-old should be treated with the same enthusiastm and support."


5. Zora Neale Hurston quote,: "I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death."

*******
I don't know if the Fool's Gold of "all people being equal" keeps being that because it is some innate human desire, or if they are just enough people who keep repeating it enough to keep it alive.

Also, you can just define something as a "right"  and then that magically means that enough will exist for everyone (p.277). Yawn.

Verdict:  Maybe if I could manage to read 60 books per year, this would be one of them. If I only read 30, this would not be one of them. 

Weak/guarded recommendation.

Vocabulary:

xenohormetic
sirtuins
senolytic
NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide)
quercetin
dasatinib
senomorphic
Horvath clock
Hayflick limit
skillbatical

Quotes:

1. "On average, members of the US Congress are 20 years older than their constituents" (p.226).

2. "Males don't just differ from females at a few sites in the genome; they have a whole other chromosome." (p.182).

3. "There is simply no economic model for a world in which people live 40 years or more past the time of traditional retirement" (p.230).

Creepy: (p.161) Barbra Streisand ordered up a clone to replace her dog sammy, a curly haired Coton de Tulear.

Book Review
Ummatched
3/5 stars
"It's hard to draw information from a book that pisses you off to the fullest."

*******
Quote 1 (Yiddish proverb): "If a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water."

Quote 2 (Corey Holcombe, comedian): "If you are a woman of a certain age.. let's say 35 ... and you still in the dating game talking about how men ain't no good [pause]. It's you baby. The enemy is in the mirror."

I had to temper my anger at reading this book against the information that can be drawn from it. (It is a book with excruciating detail about a woman's failure to match over some number of decades. It starts before the days of caller ID and during the time when they were pay phones on the street and continues to present times.)

The situation is that:

1. The author of the book is a Jewish woman, and that is one of the hottest things on the dating market. 

I would say that if I normed the set of all white women to be a 5.0 on a 10-point scale, then the subset of Jewish Women would be an easy 7.0. Maybe 7.25. (Lots of good hair. Lots of good eyebrows. Lots of good skin. Frequent "other" Kardashianesque blessings.)

If you are a woman with this ethnic background, and you are not spoiled for choice, then you are either VERY unlucky or VERY unperceptive.

2. The author expressed an interest in black men (they showed up a couple of times in this book and took up a disproportionate number of pages). As a lot of Discount Rack White Ladies know (not suggesting that this author is on the discount rack), then you can open yourself up to a humongous market if you have a stomach (affinity?) for black men.

The story of some white lady scraping a black guy off of something to turn him into a husband happens so often that it borders on sociological cliché at this point.

And I say this as somebody who was, 16 years ago, on the other end of a dating market that really is difficult (I am an always employed black guy with an education / no criminal record/no outside children, and even the ones of us that are intelligent/articulate are not competitive in "certain" dating markets), and yet I still managed to pick from what was available and now I have a house full of children.

If somebody such as our author could have such an easy time, and still finds/creates difficulty: it's hard for me to assign fault anywhere except with the "victim." It really can't be that everybody else in the world is wrong.

And in point of fact, people have been getting married in less than ideal circumstances since the beginning of time. They have been getting married with a minimum of discussion since the beginning of time. They have been choosing from what is available in a matter of fact way since the beginning of time.
*******

Of the book, it is an easy 206 pages, also with a nice glossary.

It could be read over the course of a single Shabbat (and that is what I did, and I'm glad I could do it because it's not worth more time than that).

There are a total of 74 vignettes here, each of them ≈3 pages. And with two men, on average, per vignette. For a total of ≈150 dates

*******
This is the third of these books that I have read, and the least informative of the three.

1. "End The Madness," Chananiya Weissman.
2.  "ShidduchCrisis," by Penina Shtauber.

The first book mentioned talked about some of the details as well as some of the philosophical issues surrounding the dating scene. And the second was a series of 30 short representative stories about why people have difficulty getting matched.

*******
In the end, I'm just not sure what this book was about.

1. Was it about shidduch crisis?
2. Was it about mental health? (The author was in tears on every other page. Maybe Borderline Personality Disorder? Approach-avoidance?)
3. Was it about mind blindness/lack of awareness of surroundings?
4. Was it about anything at all?

I'm leaning toward the final one: Again, if you are white lady with clean Jewish blood and you are willing to consider a black person as a partner, and after all that you STILL can't find a match, then my only question is "How do you *beep* that up? HOW?!?!"

It could have been a matter of finding a black guy and doing the children and marriage first, and working on his conversion a bit later. (Not having Jewish status is easily fixable thing, and Jewish courts are very easygoing about converting a non-jewish partner if he is with a spouse with Jewish blood and they have a family together.)

I noticed that the author also brought up the topic about 4 times (not even halfway through the book) about how people thought that she was gay. 

Was that projection? And even if it was that she had an alternative sexual orientation, that has nothing to do with conceiving and having one's own children. (The famous Jewish inseminator, Ari Nagel, has probably about 160 children by now and his focus is on black lesbians. Also, lesbians who were earlier married to men that they had children with and are now raising with their current girlfriend is another sociological cliché.)
*******
The advice that I can offer the erstwhile readers is:

1. There are at least a couple of other books that are better than this (cited);

2. John Allen Paulos the mathematician has come up with an optimal dating strategy. If you imagine that you could reasonably expect to have x number of relationships during your fertile years, then your best bet is to reject the first half of the partners and then take the most attractive that comes along after number x/2;

3. Read this book as a cautionary tale that: 
The sun will set without your assistance. (This is another Yiddish proverb, by the way.) And so you can spend as much time as you want bullshitting, but fertility will ultimately cease, and death and senescence will come whether or not you expect them.

4. The case of people who say that they want a match but then use up all of their chances can be summarized in one sentence. (And, really, we have all seen this before.) I don't know if it's necessary to have a narrative Arc about what can be synopszed in one sentence.

Verdict: Not recommended.

Book Review
"Sotah"
5/5 stars
Naomi Ragen
"Required reading for geirim/Ba'alei teshuvah"
*******
This book takes 8 hours to read, and it could be probably finished over the course of a single Shabbat (which I did).

There is information in this book to be learned, but a couple of qualifications have to be made:

1. It was published 30 years ago, and things may have changed. (That is 1.5 generations in Haredi time.) 

On the one hand, people have been observing at least for several decades that it is not possible for them to have a sustained population that consists of people that will not work and don't know their multiplication tables up to 12.

On the other hand, that is just what is happening even this very day-- and the breaking point always be in the future.

2. It takes place mostly in Israel, and even though Haredim are noisome in the United States, I have heard that they are positively off the wall in Israel-- and these Israeli cases might be far outside of the range of possibilities Stateside. (Modesty patrols? Is this book set in Israel or Iran?)

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I think the audience of this book that can take the most out of it are the ones that I mentioned before, Ba'alei teshuvah and geirim. 

When people decide they want to convert, a lot of times they decide to go with a community that "looks" the most authentic and is furthest from their everyday experience. (Been there, done that.)

And part of this fallacy is idealizing blackhat/Haredi communities and mapping onto them a reality that exists nowhere except in your head. (Been there, done that.)

And almost always, this ends in tears--with some people leaving Judaism entirely and others moving into more (humane/Modern/"Open") versions of Orthodoxy. (Been there, done that.)

If such a person reads this book, they will find a very harsh, intolerant, judgmental community that is not made for outsiders. And it might save them a lot of tears in real time. (Wish I had done that.)

And if somebody still wants to move to one of those communities in spite of all that, they might likely be mentally ill. (Bernice Weiss, "Choosing To Be Chosen" has written about conversion, and more often than not people who convert are trying to sort out some trauma from earlier in life.)

The conceptual space is very familiar to me (after living here for years, but I don't think it will be familiar to the uninitiated): Men avoid work and study religious texts and women get pimped out to go to work and bear all of the children (all 15 of them) and manage the house. But, the most desired men are the ones who are scholars, and there is self-selection and self-organization based on family lineage and scholarship.

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I will let the book tell its story in some of its own quotes.

(p.148): "It was very hot, the kind of day that Haredi men dreaded. For, unlike most people, their wardrobe made no concession to changes in weather. The dress code, established in European villages 200 years ago, had been transplanted with almost ludicrous accuracy, ignoring geographic and climactic realities."

(p.141: "Were all of them so thick that you needed an industrial strength drill to bore a few ideas into their heads.....all day he learned. All day. And yet what did he know?"

(p. 92): "Two things are harder than parting the Red Sea- - finding a mate and earning a living. So being a matchmaker, which involved both, was a few hundred times more difficult."

(ibid): "While marriages did occasionally take place between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, they were considered intermarriages and usually mourned by both groups..... Or they were, very rarely, the result of a family of Mitnagdim losing its mind and consciously deciding to join some Hasidic sect or another. Rarely, however, did it happen that Hasidim became Mitnagdim. In Reb Garfinkel's experience, once a Hasid lost his faith in his Rebbe, he usually lost faith in Gd too and went over to the secularists altogether."

(p.90): "Although the bitter wars between the Hasidim and Mitnagdim had ended over 200 years ago, and each group had grudgingly accepted the other is faithful soldiers in Gd's increasingly beleaguered army against such real enemies as Conservative and especially the unconscionable and objectionable Reform Jews, no love was lost between them."

(p.48): "A man wasn't allowed to marry a woman with the same first name as his mother."

(p.93): "It was considered perfectly politic for the daughter of the rabbi of Gur to marry the son of the Rebbe of Belz, in the same way that the warring kings of France and England often mated their offspring."

(p.175): "In the name of purifying the community's morals, they [Modesty Police] were not above putting you in the hospital. Or worse. Haredim didn't believe in going to the Zionist police force, didn't want the secularists involved in their private lives."

(p.173): "He says that a married couple can do anything they want, except that the man shouldn't kiss 'that place'/"we're taught not to touch anything. A man should kiss his wife's face and that's it. Also, there's only one position that's acceptable, and the room has to be totally black. It's also preferable to wait until midnight, when you won't be distracted by voices in the street which might lead a man to think of other women."

(p. 96): "They were suspicious people, the type that hired private detectives to check on family trees 10 generations back.  The kind that wanted medical reports and would ask for the maximum financially."

Verdict: Worth the time.

Other books to read on this topic:

Fiction....

1. "Hush," Eishes Chayil
2. "A Seat At The Table," Joshua Halberstam

Non fiction.....

3. "Unorthodox," Deborah Feldman
4. "Brazen," Julia Haart 
5. "All Who Go Do Not Return," Shulem Deen

New Vocabulary:

inveigle
Shayna
ben Zikkunim
tenaim
tachlis
lukshen
menuval
tuchteral