In 50 Years We'll All Be Chicks by Adam Carolla

From The Week of May 29, 2011

Mr. Carolla's boastful and hilarious memoir is a testosterone-saturated romp through the life of a self-made man. The co-creator of The Man Show and the host of one of the world's most downloaded podcasts, he is a wildly successful comedian, but it wasn't always thus. As he details in In 50 Years We'll All Be Chicks, Mr. Carolla grew up poor in 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles, its fame and fortune as unattainable to a career construction worker as the moon. But after taking a series of acting classes, and religiously attending open mic nights, he built a brand of comedy that's carried him to stardom.

But as much as this is a memoir of Mr. Carolla's funny and painful exploits, it's equally a cultural polemic. He decries the "pussification" of American society, digressing into memorable rants against everything from the proliferation of peanut allergies to the pettiness of security guards. But though his literary fire can sometimes seem indiscriminate, his anger has a single source, the softening of masculinity. Considering that, in America, tree women now graduate college for every two men, and in light of the fact that many of the labor-intencive jobs men have traditionally fallen back on for good careers are being mechanized, it seems like he's tapped into a serious, cultural shift.

Mr. Carolla's effort here won't win any awards; it is far too provocative for such niceties. But for guys looking for a laugh at the expense of, well, everyone else, it completely delivers. Conversely, if you're a woman who does not find value, or humor, in aggressive jock talk, this is one to skip. A successful, easy, entertaining read. (3/5 Stars)

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

From The Week of May 29, 2011

Mr. Ronson is a fascinating journalist. He has somehow married an irrepressible interest in the bizarre and the fringe with a relentless will to pursue his stories to the bitter end. This blend of admirable doggedness with less-than-healthy obsession is what gave The Men Who Stare At Goats, his tremendously successful exploration of the U.S. Military's pursuit of the paranormal, its punch. But now he has turned to a far more serious topic, one that begins with a mystery and ends with a wary eye cast over its shoulder.

In The Psychopath Test, Mr. Ronson is sparked on a journey through psychopathy after he is asked by a female academic to investigate a strange case. She, along with several of her fellows, have been receiving an odd book from a mysterious author. Though Mr. Ronson quickly solves the mystery, its conclusion causes him to wonder about the role manipulative people play in society. What follows is a thorough and gripping account of his odyssey through the world of psychopaths, from the institutions that have attempted to treat them, to the men who have tried to profile them, to the hospitals that have hoped to restrain them. Between his fascinating interviews with possible psychopaths, he relates the history of these rare and strange humans while using a now famous checklist of psychopathic traits to spot them in his midst. But while this effort succeeds in entertaining and educating the reader on the state of psychopathy, it is Mr. Ronson's investigation of how psychopathy might affect our world that lends his tale a chill not easily shaken. From fuhrers to CEOs, Mr. Ronson pictures a world where the murderous and the inexplicable are made logical by imagining that psychopaths, more often than we might expect, occupy the seats of power.

Much of Mr. Ronson's work is marked by a characteristic over-anxiousness which causes the reader to wonder if he's allowed his imagination to take him a few steps too far, but he's a journalist, not a scholar. His job is to explore and examine, not to be soberly analytical. He wants his readers to join him in peeking over the edge of the abyss, to see what might be down there. In this, he is immensely successful. This is excellent gonzo journalism, moving, creepy and thought provoking. I might not sleep well tonight. (3/5 Stars)

The Painter Of Battles by Arturo Parez-Reverte

From The Week of May 22, 2011

Photographs do not lie. Unlike human memories which are recorded only after being filtered through an individual's biases and prejudices, photographs are snapshots of perfectly preserved truth, immune from the vicissitudes of time's corrosive power. They remember events as they were. They can never forget. And it is these truths which empower the guilt, fear and nihilism in The Painter of Battles.

Driven halfway to madness by a career in war photography, decades exposed to the spiritual taint of merciless barbarity, Andres Faulques has withdrawn to a lonely watchtower to begin his masterpiece, a grand and unflinching collage of war. The watchtower's interior walls are the canvas for his painting, a series of graphic scenes drawn from atrocities he's witnessed from across countless conflicts. His sea-side sanctuary is only troubled by the occasional boatload of tourists passing by, that is until a man he's never met steps out of his past. Markovic was a young soldier captured in one of Faulques' photographs. But while the snapshot is but one of many that earned Faulques money and fame from the ghoulish West, it destroyed Markovic's life. And now he has come to exact his revenge upon the painter of battles.

Mr. Reverte's unforgiving tale is a 230 page reconstruction of the lives of two men and the instant of time that binds them together. Though Markovic intends to avenge himself on Faulques for the photograph Faulques took of him as a soldier during the Bosnian war, Markovic is unwilling to execute his mission until he, a relatively uneducated man, has puzzled out the enigmatic Faulques. For after years spent tracking Faulques down, imagining their confrontation, it's clear Markovic expected Faulques to be a spoiled and thoughtless Westerner. Instead, he finds an emotionally exhausted chronicler of human suffering, a man compelled to memorialize all that he has seen and all that man has done. In this, Markovic inadvertently becomes Faulques' historiographer, the extractor of Faulques' past, particularly the years he spent with his lover, Olvido, a fellow war photographer. And this is how Markovic comes to find that, in his own way, Faulques has sounded out depths of depravity that not even broken Markovic has had the misfortune to explore.

For such a slim novel, there is a great deal here to digest. Mr. Reverte's prose is beautifully masculine, as foreboding as it is succinct. But while he is a writer of the first-class, his pessimism concerning the nature of man is a stain on his piece. Forget heroes; in Mr. Reverte's world, there aren't even good guys, merely men distinguished by varying shades of darkness. It does not matter if you are an uneducated soldier locked into atrocities not of your own choosing (Markovic), or a highly educated, artistic elite driven by a need to capture the soul of ugly humanity (Faulques); all are susceptible to violence, to cruelty, to brutality. It doesn't matter if you hold a gun or a camera, if you rape or witness rape; it is in you, this dark capacity which whispers to be set free. This is guilty nonsense.

Mr. Reverte appears to believe that war zones are reflective of man's true nature, that it is here where man reveals his depravity. But of course man does not have a single, definitive nature. Man is fundamentally a mimic. If all about him is chaos and cruelty, then he shall be chaotic and cruel. If all about him is order and peace, then he shall be orderly and peaceful. There are always exceptions, on either side of the coin, but these are safe generalizations. We have a desire to conform to what we see about us. Mr. Reverte has taken a snapshot of man at his worst and transposed that upon man as a whole. This is a disservice to all of the billions who live without committing the crimes that Faulques and Markovic have committed. These are men who have stayed too long under the glare of cruel suns and now they know not how to sooth their burns.

This is a compelling read, but its violence is relentless. What's more, Mr. Reverte's obsession with rape is off-putting. A book that is fundamentally about atrocities must include this most cruel act, but not to this extent. Gripping, but its distorted view of man fails to convince. (3/5 Stars)

The Physics Of The Impossible by Michio Kaku

From The Week of May 22, 2011

To an extent, the whole of human civilization is based on the daring of individuals to defy the impossible. After all, every time something is invented, the inconceivable is forced to retreat another inch in our slow, arduous journey to understanding. But of course, there are different kinds of impossibilities. It would be absurd to think that any of us non mountaineers could whimsically climb Everest. And yet, with the right equipment, the proper training and the best guides, it's possible to imagine success. Let's call these practical impossibilities. If these are problems with solutions, Michio Kaku's impossibilities. Michio Kaku's impossibilities make such feats seem like walks in the park, fantastic feats of science and engineering, the manifestation of which will require technologies to be built from schools of thought that haven't even been considered yet. And yet, before the wheel was invented, it would have been impossible to imagine the wagon. And in this spirit, Mr. Kaku takes on the impossible and, in the effort, travels through the realm of cutting-edge science.

From phasers and forcefields to time travel and invisibility, Mr. Kaku, a professor of physics and co-creator of String Theory, gathers up most of the tropes imagined and distorted by science fiction and makes a genuine attempt to rank them for plausibility based on our knowledge of the universe and its myriad laws. Though none of these technologies will likely be invented any time soon, much less in the ways imagined by dramatists, they are all being researched in one form or another, to varying degrees of success. The invention which seems closest to actualization appears to be invisibility which has been demonstrated in the lab. Scientists can either choose to bend the light around an object, preventing the human eye from receiving enough data to visualize it, or by covering the object in a fabric that projects an image of its surroundings, thereby cloaking the object in plain sight. Conversely, the most far fetched trope covered here is arguably teleportation which while achievable on an atomic level, is highly resistant to being scaled up to handling larger, useful objects.

While much of Physics of The Impossible feels like a lifeline thrown by Mr. Kaku to Star Trek geeks tired of being made fun of for their outlandish beliefs, there's a surprising amount of interesting science here. Mr. Kaku uses the discussion of these technologies to inform his readers about the physical theories underpinning them. And so, while there's plenty of indulgent dreaming here, there's also a wealth of minable knowledge that can be extracted by the diligent consumer. The tone is typically optimistic and benign, but this shouldn't be mistaken for vacuousness. (3/5 Stars)

Kluge by Gary Marcus

Humans have, in less than ten-thousand years, transformed themselves from sparse bands of hunter-gatherers, who committed the whole of their short lives to just surviving in a hostile world, into a global civilization of seven billion souls that has conquered its rivals, its environment and many of its own weaknesses in an unstoppable surge towards a coherent understanding of ourselves and the universe. Everything we use we've invented, adapted. Nothing was given to us. But Mr. Marcus has no time for these inconvenient truths. To hear him tell our tale, we're nothing more than the accretion of evolution's mistakes.

The human mind, Mr. Marcus argues in Kluge is an assemblage of systems cobbled together to defend us from existential threats that no longer plague us. From our contextual memories, to our anxious emotions, to our self-centered worldviews, the reader is escorted on a tour of the mind's major processes. First, plausible explanations are provided for how memory, emotion and reasoning evolved then Mr. Marcus, a research psychologist, suggests how our minds could have functioned had they evolved differently. One example of this is his comparison of computer memory with human memory. The former is comprised of a series of logically numbered addresses, each of which contain discrete and knowable bits of information. The latter, meanwhile, is a hodgepodge of experiences which do not appear to be stored in any logical way.

Kluge makes a number of disturbing assumptions which undermine its argument. While it's true that the human mind has spent infinitely more time adapting to an ape's world of predatory threats than it has adapting to our world of human civilization, and while this may burden us with certain unnecessary weaknesses, this completely misses the point. The primary virtue of humanity is its ability to adapt to anything. Poor recall, emotional fragility, and defective reasoning are not failures of the mind, they are failures of instruction. Our civilization has not yet figured out the ideal way to teach its youngest, its clean slates, how to think, how to be emotionally stable, how to remember. We haven't come close to maximally wiring the human mind, training up its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses. What's more, it's far from clear that we are capable of handling all of the improvements Mr. Marcus so casually yearns for. Certainly, Jill Price would argue that Mr. Marcus' Postal Code memory is a quick way to drive oneself insane. More over, Mr. Marcus failed to convince me that his Postal Code memory would not deprive the human mind of the experience-based insight and intuition we rely upon to make progress in our world. Nowhere in these 210 pages does Mr. Marcus seriously consider the possible, negative consequences of his improvements. He just assumes evolution built the human mind up from the scraps it had to hand, not considering that it may have bestowed the human mind with all it could handle. He may be right, but his failure to consider any alternative explanations, much less to explore the consequences of his improvements, makes Kluge not much more than one man's gnashing over human imperfection. That's novel.

This is engaging and provocative work, but its over-eagerness to point out how the human brain could be improved leads it to breezy and shallow conclusions. (2/5 Stars)

The Elegance Of The Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

From The Week of May 15, 2011

We all hide parts of ourselves from the world, concealing our petty jealousies, our foolish grudges and our overpowering desires in an attempt to seem, to those we know and love, halfway normal. And why not? If conformity breeds success, as it so often seems to do, what's to be gained by putting oneself fully, intensely on display? Ms. Barbery deftly deploys this potent theme to drive her captivating, philosophical novel.

In an upperclass apartment building, nestled in Paris' elegant Left Bank, two remarkable souls abide in the midst of a crowd of self-important, elites. The homely Rene is the building's 54-year-old concierge. A 27 year veteran of the building, she disguises her keen intellect and her extraordinary erudition behind a bland mask of polite detachment. Recently widowed, she has only one friend in whom she shares any measure of her true self. The rest of the building's privileged occupants she holds at arm's length, petrified that they might catch a glimpse of the volcanic spirit which burns beneath her cultivated dullness. Little does Rene know that she has in the building a kindred spirit in Paloma, a 12-year-old girl with a formidable mind, a powerful will and a terrible secret. For having investigated the world around her and found there only vacuousness, Paloma has decided that, unless something interesting happens in the next few months, to convince her that life has meaning, she will kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. Though the lives of Rene and Paloma have almost nothing in common, and though each is barely aware of the other's existence, their orbits are about to collide, throwing their steering their destinies onto entirely new courses.

The narration of Ms. Barbery's compelling tale is handled equally by Rene and Paloma. Each philosopher has a distinct voice. Rene communicates her thoughts and beliefs in the present tense, intermingling her love of classical literature, her scorn for her fellow residents and her dismay over her various day-to-day chores. Paloma's voice, meanwhile, takes the form of sharp, declarative journal entries which both communicate her frustration at life's banality and convey her eagerness to find something to hook onto, to believe in. While both characters can be witty and caustic, expressing appreciation for intellectual pleasures and disdaining the superficiality of those around them, they are on distinctly different journeys. While Rene is quietly yearning for love and understanding, to find someone to see through her walls and meet her on her lofty level, Paloma is trying to pull meaning from a seemingly meaning-less universe. "Why am I here?" "What is all of this for?" Like a lonely intellect combing the stars for other intelligent life, she is waiting for a sign, a connection, from out there, to let her know that there is a purpose to existence.

This was the most difficult, but also the most rewarding of the philosophical novels I've embarked upon. Though I've never come as close as Paloma to giving up the ghost, her journey has a decidedly atheistic tinge with which I deeply empathize. When one cannot fall back on the Divine to provide meaning and order to ones existence, then one has to extract it from their surroundings. Given how banal our culture can be, how, like water, it seems to find its lowest level, extracting meaning from it can be decidedly challenging. Rene, meanwhile, evokes a wonderful sympathy. A self-taught and wholly misunderstood creature, she flourishes in private, away from a world that would misunderstand and judge her. She's confident enough to want nothing of the external world's affirmation, but lonely enough to need a connection, with someone. And when that connection comes, she blooms, escaping her scalding self-criticism for a kind of happiness that smooths out her rough edges. Ms. Barbery has painted portraits of the lives of two humans enduring life, puzzling out its cryptic messages while maintaining the reader's attention with a series of incisive criticisms of our culture and the depths to which it sinks. And though it starts slow, it comes home with a power that makes the journey all the more rewarding.

Not a perfect piece; I'd have liked to have seen Ms. Barbery engage a third protagonist who was less like her two pompous, privately suffering intellectuals. And certainly Rene's near obsession with putting herself down grew tiresome after awhile. But these are but two small flaws in what is a challenging and edifying read. (4/5 Stars)

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

From The Week of May 15, 2011

History has had its bloody periods, episodes of political, religious, and tyrannical conflict which stain our past. The Terror sparked by the French Revolution, the doctrinal slaughter of the Thirty Years War, and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot all immediately come to mind. But though all such conflicts have, directly or indirectly, impacted civilians, never have so many innocents born the brunt of a more widespread and systematic extermination than that which Germany and the Soviet Union enacted in the years between 1933 and 1945. Mr. Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, meticulously reconstructs these twelve, gory years and, in doing so, sheds light on crimes both familiar and forgotten.

Though their motives and their methods were quite different, Mr. Snyder estimates Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to have, together, slaughtered 14 million eastern European non-combatants during this period. Though Stalinist Russia got an early start, enacting a series of disastrous economic policies and cruel political reforms which resulted in the mass-starvation of millions of its own people, many of them in the Ukraine, Hitlerian Germany swiftly caught up and surpassed the Soviet total when World War II ignited their plans to exterminate what they considered to be inferior races, particularly the Slavs and the Jews. In a chilling reconstruction of these unimaginable depravities, Mr. Snyder describes a relentless march of organized killing and its peripheral costs. He begins with the near extinguishing of civilization and civilized humanity in an Ukraine forced into cannibalism and, mercilessly, ends with the grotesqueness of Nazi death camps and starvation plans which tormented Poland and the Soviet Union. His conclusion? That these two nihilistic regimes walked similar paths of tyranny. Their policies brought about catastrophes, the blame for which they aimed straight at their enemies. In doing so, they succeeded in creating a kind of feedback loop in which the more things went wrong, the more they could fan the flames of anger for the enemy, further entrenching themselves in the seats of power.

Bloodlands is a valuable but masochistic read. It describes the consequences of state tyranny and articulates how that tyranny perpetuated itself. However, it takes the reader on an implacable tour of some of the grimmest scenes in human history. There seems, at times, no end to the existential slaughter, no reprieve from the cruelty of men who largely escaped the consequences of their terrible actions. But for as challenging as this book can be to the mind and the stomach, it articulates the motives and the processes that drove and allowed these two states, ensorcelled by charismatic tyrants, to commit some of the most grievous crimes in history.

The most valuable contribution here is the filling in of Soviet history which, for numerous reasons, has been played down in the decades since the Second World War. German accountability, coupled with a desire to never again succumb to such savage nationalism, has left behind a vivid record of Nazi atrocities. But the closed nature of Soviet society, succeeded by the prideful, authoritarian governments that have followed its collapse, have, to some degree, kept the lid on Stalinist crimes. In describing these barbarities, Mr. Snyder eloquently expresses what I consider to be Bloodlands' most telling truth about human nature, that Stalin, upon being faced with the calamitous nature of his economic reforms, fixed upon the idea that, as socialism nears its goal, resistance to its implementation increases. In other words, the failures of ones plans can be self-justified on the grounds that somewhere out there someone is working against you, frustrating you, defeating your noble goals, that it's not a fault in your stars but enemy resistance. This idea is the enabler of tyranny. "I'm not wrong!" "It will work if people stop fighting me!" Until we can rid ourselves of the capacity for such justifications, we will always be susceptible to the crimes of such men.

This is a powerful, existential, and sobering read, but its unyieldingly grim view of humanity during this period, while probably deserved, left me flailing for some shred of goodness to hold onto. It offers no reprieves from its repeated, savage blows to the reader's head. And so, even while it informs, it alienates. This is a tricky balance to maintain and Mr. Snyder never quite gets it right. (3/5 Stars)

Americans In Paris by Charles Glass

From The Week of May 15, 2011

I enjoy monographs. They offer their readers incomparable glimpses of the inner-workings of great events, forsaking the big-picture view for a narrower but deeper understanding of the forces that underpin them. The risk of the monograph is irrelevancy, the adoption of such a restricted view that the reader is left to question its importance. This, unfortunately, is a disease that afflicts Americans in Paris.

Mr. Glass' 540 page history of American expatriates in Nazi-occupied Paris (1940-1944) chronicles some fascinating figures who had their careers and their lives jeopardized by war. Chief among these are DR. Sumner Jackson and Sylvia Beach, the former the chief surgeon at the American Hospital, the latter the owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Initially, the expatriate community in Paris seems inclined to weather the storm, but as the crisis deepens and French resistance collapses, many withdraw from the city, leaving behind a hard core of as-yet neutral Americans in a city swiftly conquered and controlled by the Third Reich. While Beach kept her shop open, using it as a means to disseminate information through the American community and the French Resistance, Dr. Jackson took an even bolder role by treating wounded, French irregulars against the explicit instructions of the occupying Nazis. Eventually, Beach and Jackson, like many of their fellow Americans in the City of Light were interned, some under crippling conditions which proved, for some, to be fatal.

Though Beach and Jackson are incredible protagonists who deserve every page of attention paid to them, the rest of Mr. Glass' micro history fails to launch. There are some machinations here concerning the French Resistance and some secondary Americans who float in and out of the story, but these are poorly articulated sidebars that don't integrate well into the main narrative which is the plight of the key Americans. I'm left to conclude that Mr. Glass wanted to write about this period in occupied Paris, knew he had strong characters in Beach and Jackson, and so he did his best to weld his heroes onto a basic backdrop. Not only does the welding fail to take, the backdrop does not satisfy. I needed to know more about the French Resistance. I needed to have at least one German character to give me an impression of the Nazi view of these American expatriates. I needed someone, or something, to tie all this together. Americans in Paris delivers none of these. It's only the remarkable stories of Beach and Jackson that save this piece. (2/5 Stars)

Three Cups Of Deceit by Jon Krakauer

From The Week of May 08, 2011

Mr. Krakauer possesses a rare will. Not only did he survive to write about a botched 1996 climb up Mount Everest, he's since devoted years of his authorial career to exposing religious and governmental coercion and deception. In Three Cups of Deceit, which, at 75 pages, is more a pamphlet than a novel, he trains his formidable powers upon Greg Mortenson, the famous humanitarian who transformed a failed 1993 climb of K2 into a career building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr. Krakauer wastes no time systematically and sensationally debunking Mr. Mortenson's heralded achievements by pointing out the numerous and startling inconsistencies in Mortenson's story. Drawing on interviews with figures within Mr. Mortenson's own charity, as well as individuals on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Krakauer describes how Mr. Mortenson has exploited his own charity to further his fame and advertise his books while keeping every dime of his earnings from both his published works and his speaking engagements. Worse yet, Mr. Krakauer alleges that only a fraction of the schools Mr. Mortenson claims to have built have actually been completed, with many of even the completed schools devoid of teachers.

Mr. Krakauer is not a disinterested party. He admits to donating $75,000 to Mr. Mortenson's charity before growing disenchanted with Mortenson's increasingly erratic behavior. Though Three Cups of Deceit has the rage of a man scorned, made to feel the fool, the relentlessness of Mr. Krakauer's explosive research convinced me that, at best, Mr. Mortenson has a great deal to answer for. After all, he would not be the first human to succumb to the allure of his own mythology and the power and wealth that accompanies it.

Sensationalistic and polemic, but it has the feel of a solid case. If Mr. Krakauer is right in his claim that Mr. Mortenson has even defrauded schoolchildren via his Pennies for Peace program, then it is my sincerest hope that, at some point in his life, he comes to recognize that, rather than do good, he has committed one of the gravest crimes imaginable, to selfishly profit from the credulity of innocents. (3/5 Stars)

The Town That Food Saved by Ben Hewitt

From The Week of May 08, 2011

This thoughtful, sober piece from Mr. Hewitt is hardly the first, and certainly won't be the last, to investigate the food problem -- I've reviewed several of these efforts --, but it is, perhaps, the most honest and down-to-earth examination of how far North American society has strayed from real food made by real people. It is not a polemic, nor does it offer sweeping solutions to looming catastrophes. It's an exploration of a town, its rise, its fall and its rebirth as something that may well resemble the face of food in the challenging 21st century.

Mr. Hewitt, a native of Vermont, applies a journalist's sensibilities to this, his endeavor to sound out the sustainability and scalability of local food. The protagonist of his history is Hardwick, Vermont, a boomtown which thrived on granite. When the quarries dried up, jobs and paychecks vanished, plunging the small town into an extended period of hardship and obscurity. It's subsequent rebirth seems due in part to the legacy of the back-to-the-earth movement of the 1960s and 1970s which helped to create, in Hardwick, one of the largest, most successful food co-ops in America. Since then, other localvor businesses have taken root, producing soy beans, cheese, milk and meat for distribution to local citizens, for the tables of local restaurants and for the truckbeds of interstate commerce. Mr. Hewitt, himself an interested party in the movement, interviews the key figures in all these businesses, granting his readers an inside look at the personalities and the passions which shape and drive local food which is powering Hardwick's resurgence.

Mr. Hewitt does a wonderful job illustrating the economic challenges that plague local food. He demonstrates how oversized egos and their outlandish claims have damaged the movement's credibility. But it is his talent for capturing the personalities involved that sets his chronicle apart. From socialist farmers to hard-headed, big-idea entrepreneurs, he captures the men and women who, in their own ways, are trying to find the equation that will make local food work, for everyone and for the planet. For all that he paints an edifying portrait, though, Mr. Hewitt failed to convince me that local food saved Hardwick. The movement has made me want to visit what seems like a remarkable town, but saved it? Seems a bit grandiose.

This book offers more hard-to-swallow facts than it does easy, exciting solutions, but it's this honesty which grants Mr. Hewitt's work authenticity. A must-read for anyone interested in local food, the now and the future. (4/5 Stars)

The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris And Daniel Simons

From The Week of May 08, 2011

How we perceive and interact with our world has an enormous and largely invisible impact on our lives. Every second we're awake, Our minds process incredible amounts of information: where we are, what we're doing, what's in our environment, how we are feeling. If our consciousnesses lacked mechanisms to filter out the noise of the familiar, the expected, all but the most meditative among us would be permanently lost in a sea of ceaseless distractions. Fortunately for our species, we have evolved to possess minds which are wonderfully adapted for recognizing patterns. This is how we can pay attention to what requires our focus and to discard what does not. But as Mr. Simons and Mr. Chabris argue, in The Invisible Gorilla, that system is far from flawless. In fact, it may well let us down far more than we realize.

From the foibles of human memory to the selective blindness of human perception, the authors deploy a mixture of experiments and case studies to demonstrate that the human mind believes itself to be a lot more accurate than it is in actuality. While the experiments can quickly and succinctly prove the premise here, the case studies provide The Invisible Gorilla its rhetorical backbone. From Jennifer Thompson, the perfect eyewitness who misidentified her rapist, to Joshua Bell, the violin virtuoso whose expertise was completely ignored when he played for crowds of people going to and from work, the reader is forced to confront the challenging truth that our experiences are shaped by what we pay attention to. Furthermore, what we pay attention to is based on cultural biases and personal expectations which means that none of us perceive the world the same way. This conclusion has interesting implications for both the law and society.

This is not a perfect book. As always, works of popular science depend almost entirely on the results of experiments which often have either flawed methodologies or misinterpreted outcomes. More over, the authors here seem a bit too impressed with their own research. Yet the sheer range of replicable experiments conducted to make what is a fairly demonstrable case for our attention deficits gave me confidence that Mr. Simons and Mr. Chabris have sounded out something near an understanding understanding of the way we process sensory information and how this can lead to self-delusion. Fun and thought-provoking. (3/5 Stars)

The Age Of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre

From The Week of May 01, 2011

After consuming Atlas Shrugged, I was inspired to seek out other pieces of philosophical fiction. For while Ayn Rand's classic has its problems, it has an intellectual power absent in the vast majority of popular literature. And so I settled on this fascinating and self-destructive novel from Mr. Sartre, the French philosopher and soldier in the Second World War. It's safe to say that I've never read a piece of fiction that is more profoundly a product of its cataclysmic times.

Published in 1945, after France had been liberated from the Germans, The Age of Reason returns to the more free-spirited Paris of the late 1930s to tell the story of Mathieu Delarue, a brooding professor of philosophy who, upon learning that his kept girlfriend is pregnant with his child, sets about trying to rustle up enough money to pay for her to have a safe and secretive abortion. Though Mathieu initially expects this to be a fairly simple mission, it becomes an odyssey when his friends, for various reasons, fail to grant him a momentary loan. Refusing to even consider keeping the child, Mathieu turns to his brother and his bank, but lawyer and institution both reject him, leaving him with two unappealing options: steal the money from the middle-aged girlfriend of one of his students and friends, or abandon the abortion and keep the child. Mathieu, shockingly, is far more tempted by the former than the latter. Theft is a smear on ones character, but sacrificing his treasured freedom for a child? His code will not allow it.

Though the exploits of Mathieu's friends occasionally intercede to make his life all the harder, The Age of Reason is primarily consumed by Mathieu's belief that freedom of ones mind and spirit can only come through ridding oneself of obligations and dependencies. Mathieu offends his girlfriend by not for a moment considering keeping the baby, but of course, to Mathieu, this would be an intolerable obligation, a decades-long commitment to a creature utterly dependent upon him. It's this core idea of freedom through nothingness, through the avoidance of permanent, social bonds, that gives this story shape and purpose. It is also what makes it only applicable to its time.

Mr. Sartre was writing from the midst of a period of European history convulsed by extraordinary bloodshed. He had witnessed two world wars and no doubt, as many others would have, expected a third to come soon after. Though I'm no expert on the man, it strikes me that this is at the heart of Sartre's philosophy. If the world is going to repeatedly succumb to orgies of nihilistic chaos and devastation, then true freedom can only be found in floating above that chaos, detached from it, beyond whatever ugly torments the world can concoct. The central flaw with this idea, and indeed with Mathieu's mission here, is that true freedom, as Defined by Mathieu, can only be found in death, or the total abandonment of society. Anything short of that tempts the seeker of freedom into trading away some of his precious autonomy for the seductive charms of marriage and parenthood. In other words, if this is how we define freedom, then life is a series of events tempting us to trade liberty for obligation. What kind of life is even possible with this as its core principle? Freedom should be defined by the extent to which we are allowed to pursue our joy, whatever that joy may be, inso long as realizing our joy doesn't harm someone else. At least this is an achievable goal.

This is a thought-provoking read, but the pacing is thrown off by a few too many pouts from Mathieu. Had I the opportunity to read this while part of the fabric of Europe during the inferno that was the 1940s, I would have been far more sympathetic to Mr. Sartre's case. But the passage of so much time, time in which the world has mostly righted itself from such madness, leaves the sentiment here flawed and isolated. (3/5 Stars)

The Physics Of The Future by Michio Kaku

From The Week of May 01, 2011

I have always been fascinated by the question of what our world will look like in the decades to come. Will the outlandish promises of optimistic, world-changing science fiction come to pass, or will our species' penchant for self-destruction wed technological advancement with personal indulgence to create a world saturated by empty, purposeless vice? Though both of these outcomes seem, to me, equally possible, Professor Kaku, a highly decorated physicist, and a co-founder of String Theory, makes, here, a strong case that, by the year 2100, our world will have revolutionized itself into a jewel of technological and intellectual capacity the likes of which we can barely fathom.

From energy production to magnetism, from artificial intelligence to nanotechnology, professor Kaku walks the reader through cutting edge advancements in each of his chosen fields before, with admirable clarity, laying out the progress, in theoretical and practical knowledge, we can expect from each. He manages this by breaking them down into three sections, the near future (present day to 2030), the middle future (2030 to 2070), and the far future (2070 to 2100). Though it's impossible to know if his predictions will come true, he's clearly picked the brains of the top minds in each field, informing his own conclusions with their expertise to generate a plausible framework for what's to come.

Physics of The Future is an unapologetically positive view of the future. It stubbornly refuses to take the frailties of human nature into account as it logically and optimistically charts out what's ahead for our species and our world. It may be that professor Kaku's oversights will cause his predictions to be wildly off the mark, but what if he's right? What if, in 50 years, we'll have harnessed the powers of magnetism to reduce transportation times by factors of ten? What if we can utilize nanotechnology to instantly order up the fabrication of everything from textiles to computers? What if we can put into orbit super-efficient solar panels that can capture and send down to earth all the power our civilization can use? What isn't possible in a world enlightened by such liberating marvels?

If you like to dream of a better future, this is a must-read. But if you're a cynic like I am, there's plenty of fascinating science here to maintain your attention. Idealistic? Absolutely. Exciting and inspiring? Unquestionably. (4/5 Stars)

The Wisdom Of Crowds by James Surowiecki

From The Week of May 01, 2011

Historically, the leading lights of our world have held a low opinion of the masses, dismissing them as dirty, uneducated and uncultured. But according to Mr. Surowiecki, this elitist thinking couldn't be more mistaken. It may be that individual members of the mob are dirty, uneducated and uncultured, but if the collective intelligence of the mob is tapped, it has the capacity to provide astonishingly accurate answers, in the aggregate, to questions that experts struggle to get right. How can this be? Why would a crowd understand a problem better than an even expert?

Mr. Surowiecki argues that crowds are wise because they not only filter out wildly inaccurate answers, they tap into an evolutionary truth that our brains have evolved to work optimally in a communal setting. Singly, someone might reason his way to a foolish action, but if that person is part of a crowd, he might receive advice not to commit the action, thereby moderating his behavior. Mr. Surowiecki is quick to point out that the wisdom of crowds can be deceptive. Crowds are much more susceptible to groupthink than individuals are. Not only that, they cannot solve problems that require specialized knowledge if none of their members have that knowledge. A crowd doesn't know how to do brain surgery if none of its members are neurosurgeons. And yet for all of the crowd's limitations, its powers can be exploited to unearth fascinating truths. This is no more demonstrably true than for prediction markets, which have been established to allow people to make bets on everything from electoral outcomes to terrorist attacks. The participants of these markets are a crowd and Mr. Surowiecki vividly details just how eerily accurate they can be.

The Wisdom of Crowds is a thought-provoking read which ranges from economics to human psychology, to politics in a largely successful attempt to convince the reader that there is an underutilized power in crowds. But while Mr. Surowiecki makes his case with a good balance of rationality and enthusiasm, he's forced to put so many caveats on crowd wisdom that I was left to wonder if the knowledge gleaned from crowds could ever truly be trusted. Taken as an interesting intellectual exercise, The Wisdom of Crowds is a fun and engaging read, but it feels far too ill-defined to be taken more seriously than that. The major exception to this conclusion are prediction markets, the efficacy of which are completely compelling. (3/5 Stars)

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

From The Week of May 01, 2011

Atlas Shrugged has been, for many, a revelation. Its story utilizes the ideas of liberty that underpin the American Constitution to vividly articulate the philosophy of Free Enterprise that the United States has spent the last two centuries spreading to the world. In doing so, it encapsulates the problems that have plagued every political theory (Socialism, communism, etc.,) that characterizes itself by the forced redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. But while it makes an impassioned and compelling case for the rights of every person to own their own efforts and achievements, and to direct their results wherever they damn well please, it is, at the same time, alarmist, pompous and hopelessly Hollywood.

First published in 1957 by one of the United States' most influential 20th century philosophers, Ms. Rand's 1,300 page classic chronicles the deterioration of an alternate-history America which has swapped out a president and a congress for a head of state and a national legislature, both of which open up the door to the socialism Ms. Rand wants to criticize. The story, divided into three major parts, follows the efforts of two, powerful industrialists, Dagny Tagart and Hank Rearden, to practice Free Enterprise in a country which has responded to an economic downturn by burdening the upper classes with ever-increasing regulation. Dagny, who runs her family's transcontinental railroad, finds herself embattled when her foolish brother James, the notional head of the company, kowtows to his government friends by interfering with and screwing up her beloved railroad. She's not alone. All across the country, powerful industrialists like her, inventors driven by ambition and profit, are being stifled and mooched on by an increasingly desperate government and an ever-more entitled working class. At her wits end, Dagny resigns from Tagart Transcontinental to establish her own railroad line, free of her brother's meddling. But to prove its worth, she'll need to rely upon a new and remarkable steel invented by Hank Rearden, friend and confidante, to underpin her line.

Though it's clear that Dagny has invested herself in her John Galt Line to prove to the world that greatness, genius, and hard work should be allowed to flourish, free of government imposts, it becomes increasingly clear that not even her masterpiece of engineering will reverse the tide of national sentiment for socialism. Dagny and Rearden battle to maintain what they have, but their fellow industrialists are disappearing by the day, removing themselves from a game rigged against them. Sinking deeper into despair, Dagny seems at a loss to mend the situation when hope arrives in the form of a man who may just have the will and the message to properly communicate to the people what must be done to restore America to justice. Dagny is about to find out who is John Galt.

Atlas Shrugged has one of the most powerful first halves of any book I've ever read. Dagny's feverish attempts to singlehandedly convince the world of its folly by creating an industrial symbol for the power of Free Enterprise is inspiring. Her despair in the face of hers and Rearden's failure to make the world see what socialism is doing to them, and doing to the country, is moving. But its her fear and anger at the disappearances of her fellow industrialists -- she believes them murdered by a Destroyer's hand -- that is truly gripping. There's martyrdom here, sure, but there's also the kind of passion and fidelity that causes captains to go down with their ships. Dagny's sense of betrayal which slowly gives way to her understanding of John Galt and his movement, fuels this part of the book with an abundance of spirit and emotion.

But for all of the excellence of the first 700 pages, the latter half of Atlas Shrugged is an unmitigated failure. Ms. Rand ruins her meticulous setup in the first half in an orgy of Hollywood tropes. She tries to argue that society only functions because of the handful of special intellects who prop it up with their ideas. This is nonsense. Society functions because it affords intellects opportunities to succeed. If those specific intellects did not exist, others would replace them. Ms. Rand is effectively arguing, here, that there would have never been an operating system for PCs if Bill Gates had refused to go into IT. Of course there would've been operating systems! If not Windows, someone else's creation would have taken its place. If society was as fragile, as subject to intellectual blackouts, as Ms. Rand contends, it would have never modernized in the first place. No, Ms. Rand abandons logic and rationality in order to make her caped crusaders here, her rebels for freedom, seem all the more put upon and heroic. If Atlas Shrugged were just some random piece of fiction, fine, but it's not. It has pretensions of being a philosophical argument. Therefore, it fails.

Ultimately, Atlas Shrugged is an incredible piece of literature which asks the reader to contemplate the end-game consequences of socialism. But instead of discussing socialism and its flaws rationally, Ms. Rand demonizes the former by blowing-up the latter to mammoth proportions just so she can make a point about Free Enterprise. It's a cheap, alarmist ploy and it ought to be beneath any political theorist interested in a discussion on the virtues and sins of various ideologies. But it's clear that Ms. Rand is not interested in engaging the reader in a debate. She wants to rant at the reader until he capitulates under the relentless weight of her 1,300 pages. A marvelous beginning, an awful ending, and not a placid page between. Is a book with a five-star start and a one-star conclusion three stars? I suppose so. (3/5 Stars)