Tag Archive for: review book

Book Review: Gods of the Upper Air

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Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists
Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century,
by Charles King (Doubleday, 2019)

Reviewed by Anne Newins

Anne Newins

Many of us may remember a class that changed our world view.  In my case, it was a cultural anthropology class taken during my freshman year of college. Even though I was raised in a highly diverse environment, I had not thought about how much behavior and values were dependent on one’s culture. In four short months, I became much more tolerant and accepting of others’ viewpoints.

Gods of the Upper Air allowed me to revisit those heady days. Charles King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, has taken a thought-provoking side trip. King’s absorbing account is about the development of cultural anthropology as an academic discipline, but it also is part adventure story and part biography. The book profiles the father of cultural anthropology, Franz Boas, and a number of his protégées, including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria.

Since the field examines cultural variation among humans, cultural anthropology often  relies on fieldwork that take place in far flung locations. The researchers must develop productive working relationships with their study subjects, while trying to decide if what they are learning from their informants is accurate or highly subjective. Obviously, this is not easy to do and takes enormous time, patience, and strong observational skills.

These lively and energetic scholars often had to cope with personal poverty, disease and danger during their fieldwork. They were confronting historical opinions that were racist, sexist, and frequently unaccepting of women in academia. Among others, of their major adversaries was Madison Grant, a well-known eugenicist of the time.

Most have heard of Margaret Mead and her groundbreaking work in American Samoa and New Guinea. Ruth Benedict was a lover, and most importantly, her mentor at
Columbia University. African American Zora Neale Hurston is famous for fiction writing, but was noted for her work about American folklore. Ella Cara Deloria, of Dakota Indian descent and linguistically fluent, conducted complex work about the Sioux.

Reviewer Anthony Clemons describes the book as “creative storytelling with rich historical detail to show the reader that facts contradicting established norms rarely outmatch the willingness of the masses to cling to those norms, leaving the potential for ideological change to the tyranny of time.”

A copy of the book may be found at the Rogue Manor Library.

Book Review: Power Couple

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Book Review: Power Couple by Alex Berenson
(Simon & Schuster) Feb 2021

Reviewed by Bonnie Tollefson

Bonnie Tollefson

Alex Berenson is the author of 12 fast paced books in the John Wells series but Power Couple is one of his stand-alones. Brian and Rebecca Unsworth are in Europe on a trip to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. Rebecca is a lawyer turned FBI agent working the Russian counterintelligence desk. While her career has stationed her in Alabama and Texas, she now works in Washington DC. Brian in the meantime was at first a stay at home dad then had various computer related jobs before he ends up in DC on a crack team for the National Security Agency. Traveling with them in Europe are Kira, their 19 year old first born, and her younger brother, Tony. One evening in Paris, Kira and Tony meet a good looking French graduate student named Jacques. Kira is attracted but unfortunately, the family is leaving for Spain the next day. Jacques offers to follow them to Spain and meet Kira in a famous bar he knows of. Jacques is not what he seems and things go downhill for Kira. No spoilers here, but this story has more twists and turns than a curvy mountain road and somebody ends up dead. It is available in large print at the RVM Library as are two of the John Wells series.

Book Review: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

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Last May, resident Sally Densmore also submitted a review about “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” which she encouraged others to read.  We feel that the following review neither negates nor duplicates Sally’s, which was written on a more personal basis.  Taken together, they supplement — or we should probably say, complement — each other in focusing attention on a critically important topic.  Indeed, others have been appreciating the book as well as the other books referenced at the end of this article, and we hope that multiple reviews in the Complement will inspire yet more people to engage with the issues.

Leslie      Schettler

Reviewed by Leslie Schettler and Anne Newins.  

Anne Newins

Legendary Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was famous for saying “all politics is local.”  Bill Gates, one of the world’s wealthiest men and mega-philanthropist, understands that in the case of addressing climate change, all politics must necessarily be global, along with corporate innovation and investment, research and development.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates (Alfred Knopf 1921) is an optimistic book, but Gates acknowledges that the necessary steps will be complicated, hard and expensive.  This short volume is intended for the readers who may not have a strong science background.

Gates says there are two numbers one needs to know about climate change.  One is 51 billion and the other is zero.  51 billion is the number of tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.  Zero is what we need to aim for, in order to stop the warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change.

There are five “takeaways”:

  1. We have five sources of carbon emissions, all of which need to drop to zero:
    making things; growing things; getting places; plugging in; keeping warm and cool.
  2. Progress is a good thing, but it means increasing greenhouse gases. Many developing countries are just now experiencing the industrial growth that is already a part of the rich world.  Gates wants to find ways to continue to improve their prosperity, while still addressing carbon emissions.
  3. We need to drive down the “green premiums” in every sector, i.e., the difference in cost between choosing the existing option and upgrading to an emissions free (or emissions-reduced) option, such as an electric car. Gates provides a number green premium estimates, such as switching to biofuels for aircraft.  In some cases, the premiums are high, in other cases less so.  He is optimistic that some premiums may reduce over time as innovations are improved and more widely incorporated.
  4. The technology we need has yet to be invented; in this area Gates argues for nuclear power as the most efficient energy source because it supplies clean, reliable energy 24/7. He also discusses wind and solar energy, direct air capture and point capture (trapping pollution where it starts).
  5. We need to adapt to and prepare for existing warming while planning for zero.

Gates follows these discussions with a chapter on the importance of government policies, a plan for getting to zero, and a summary of what each of us can do.

At the end he shares a quote from Hans Rosling, author of Factfulness (also available in the RVM library), “When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.”

Reviews of the book have been generally positive.  In a New York Times review, Bill McKibben, author of the highly regarded Falter, credits Gates with addressing the issue and his numerous philanthropic investments. At other times, McKibben is more critical.

Gordon Brown, in a review in The Guardian says that “Gates’s most important proposals involve new technologies,” and that he “is right about the scale and urgency of the problem.”

Besides Gates’ and McKibben’s books, several other related books might interest residents and also are available in the Manor library. The Gates book is also available in large print. Other books include Drawdown by Paul Hawken, and Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Beloved naturalist David Attenborough has recently published A Life on Our Planet, and a copy will be made available in the library by late July.

Book Review: The Wisdom of Psychopaths

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Book Review: The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers can Teach us about Success.  Kevin Dutton (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)

Reviewed by Bob Buddemeier

Dr. Kevin Dutton is a research fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. He is an affiliated member of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy, and a best-selling author.

A word about a word — “wisdom” in the title is a bit misleading, implying as it does some integration of knowledge and understanding, whereas psychopaths are defined largely in terms of hard-wired negatives (lack of empathy, remorse, responsibility).  The thesis of the book, however, is that under some circumstances aspects of the hard-wired system can produce outcomes superior to those resulting from the actions — and especially the mental decision-making — of “normal” people.

This is hard to discuss with available terminology.  “Psychopath” has become generally identified with the more explicit “criminal psychopath” to the point where it is difficult to communicate about benefits or good qualities associated with psychopathy.  Fallon (The Psychopath Inside) uses the term “pro-social psychopath,” but that still leaves much to be desired.

In addition – another word about another word – “psychopathy” is not recognized as an accepted diagnostic term in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).  The DSM includes psychopathy within its definition of Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), which Dutton alludes to as one of “the empirical and diagnostic combat zones of clinical definition.”

It’s both a strength and a weakness of Dutton’s book that he comes close to bridging the terminology gap — but doesn’t quite make it.  He introduces us to the basic models and conclusions in the first few chapters, with the following sections presenting examples, details, alternatives or explanations.  He makes the point that there are a number of characteristics that go into the making of a total psychopath, and that any or even all of these may be present to some degree in non-psychopaths.  It’s just when all of the switches are “on,” all of the knobs are full clockwise, and all of the sliders are fully to the right that the dashboard is set for Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy.  Ultimately, however, he never gets us to the Rosetta Stone that somehow couples the four psychopathic “factors” (his fig. 2.6) with the four Myers-Briggs personality types.  It’s probably just as well.

                    Probability of Success

A moderate mixture, with only a few strong characteristics, can be very advantageous.  Figure 1 is a conceptualized plot of probability of career success — whether as a criminal or a law-abiding citizen — as a function of relative psychopathy.  Psychopaths are unusually sensitive to the vulnerability of potential victims; in law enforcement, an intuition for guilty behavior is a parallel.  Con men and violent criminals are bad; if they are on our side, the rather similar spies and Special Forces Commandos are good.  The cold-blooded decisiveness of a deadly knife-fighter finds a parallel in the skills of an expert surgeon.

Starting from these rather undeniable parallels, Dutton moves on to a more detailed examination of psychopathy, which does not exactly flow to an integrated conclusion, but which I nonetheless found interesting, informative, and even entertaining.  The author writes informally in the first person, with an evident sense of humor and a “just one of the boys” style.  A lot of his professional interviews seem to take place in bars, with the occasional crude expression reminding us that this is not an academic treatise.

We learn about the PPI (Psychopathic Personality Inventory) for assessing trends in the general public, the PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist — Revised) for forensic application in prisons and hospitals, and the B-scan (for assessing psychopathy in a business context).  Even more interesting are the tests, games and experiments designed to develop and apply these various measurement tools — and some of the results.  In a situation where there is a choice between sacrificing a few people and allowing a large number to die, the desirable utilitarian result is much more likely to be achieved by a psychopath than by a normal person — who is too reluctant to kill at all.

In addition to meeting some chilling (or merely disgusting) psychopaths, we get some feeling for both the “good psychopaths” and for the researchers on psychopathy, who try to use an arguably somewhat normal mind/brain to describe and understand one that is nearly outside the bounds of human recognition.  All are fascinating, and the combinations especially so.

Toward the end of the book Dutton comes up, in a very understated way, with the explanation for the title:  “I label the skill set the Seven Deadly Wins — seven core principles of psychopathy that, apportioned judiciously and applied with due care and attention, can help us get exactly what we want; can help us respond, rather than react, to the challenges of modern-day living; can transform our outlook from victim to victor, but without turning us into a villain:

  • Ruthlessness
  • Charm
  • Focus
  • Mental Toughness
  • Fearlessness
  • Mindfulness
  • Action”

The key — criminal, or “bad” psychopaths may possess all of the principles, but usually cannot avoid villainhood because they lack the willingness, or perhaps the ability, to apportion judiciously and appl[y] with due care and attention.

The Seven Deadly Wins can enhance most capabilities, but the outcome depends on the accompaniments – add compassion, humility, and faithfulness, and you get a saint.  Add narcissism, manipulativeness, and cold-heartedness, and you get Elmer Gantry – or Jim Jones.

…..

Post-script:  In “The Wisdom of Psychopaths” we meet Andy McNab, who scores very high on the psychopathy rating scale, and whose social roles have included those of highly decorated hero of the SAS (British Special Forces) and successful author – a “good psychopath” if there ever was one.
After writing the review, I came across the following:  “The Good Psychopath’s Guide To Success:” How to use your inner psychopath to get the most out of life, by Dr. Kevin Dutton and Andy McNab, MCM, MM.  Apostrophe Books, 2014.
I haven’t read it, but the opportunity is clear – put away your chainsaw and open your brokerage account, and the sky is the limit.

Book Review:  Three Hundred Cups of Tea and The Toughest Job

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by Asifa Kanji and David Drury, D. Drury and Sons Publishers, 2015
Reviewed by Joni Johnson:

It’s rare for me to love a book.  I loved this one.  It wasn’t because they are friends of mine and live here at the Manor.  It wasn’t because I too was in the Peace Corps. It’s because some of it took my breath away.  The book is divided into two sections.  Both of them refer to the Peace Corps experience that Asifa and David had as mature adults in Mali in West Africa at the edge of the Sahara Desert.  When they talk about living with the debilitating heat of 120 degrees Fahrenheit on and off for four months of the year, we can finally appreciate what that really means.  I think one day of 115 degrees was quite enough and that was with air conditioning.  They had none.

 

Asifa and David and their head of training at                                        their swearing in in Mali

Asifa writes the first book, Three Hundred Cups of Tea. The second half, The Toughest Job, by David, is about the same subject sort of but describes his job and his experiences from a male point of view. Asifa, as you may know from her writings here in The Complement, is both beautifully descriptive and very honest emotionally. I felt as if I were there in Mali with her.  I felt her moments of exultation, her moments of despair, her feelings of frustration viscerally and how important her relationships with the people of Mali were to her.  In addition, with her great sense of humor, there were many times she made me laugh. David not only shared many of his experiences both in terms of training and his job, but he also gave us the more scientific approach to life in Mali.  He spent time discussing the language they spoke, Bambara, that is in no way connected to any Indo-European language we know.  And he included a great explanation of the shaming game between joking cousins, which, as he explained, was a wonderful way to keep peace and harmony between groups.  So while both books explored the same period of time in Mali, they were very different in scope and style and subject matter.  Asifa’s job became an effort to train the Malians to grow Moringa, a miracle tree whose leaves cure whatever it is that ails you including malnutrition and arthritis. This was to be done, as Asifa says, all in a simplified Bambara. And David’s task was to help promote and improve a radio station 20 minutes away by bicycle, speaking French (which David had learned long ago but hardly remembered).

 

So through their two books, we really got the feel of what it was like to live as mature Peace Corps volunteers in Mali.  The secondary phrase on their cover says it all – Riding the Peace Corps Rollercoaster in Mali, West Africa.  And a rollercoaster it was. Somewhere in their second year, a new political group took over the Malian government by force.  With gunfire and a coup d’état, the Peace Corps evacuated their volunteers almost immediately and suddenly.  There was hardly a chance or no chance to say goodbye.  As Asifa wrote in her postscript, “Sixteen months later, I live to tell you that those were some of the most fulfilling and exciting months of our lives.  We jumped off the cliff and we did learn to fly.”  And if you read this book, you too will jump off the cliff and fly with them.

 

Their book is available in paperback and kindle at Amazon and directly from Asifa and David as well. All royalties go directly to Jackson County’s United Way for the fire victims still struggling with survival.  There is also a copy in the library.

Book Review –  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

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  by Bonnie Tollefson

Book Review –  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, Laura Imai Messina, The Overlook Press, 2021

A few months ago a fellow resident said to me with a subtle curl of the lip and a wrinkle to the nose, “Eww, you read series fiction.”  Yes I do.  I enjoy the continuing story of the characters and reading books that feel comfortable.  Sometimes the characters develop and occasionally the author does.  Series can be found in almost every genre of fiction, so it is not as tho I read only mysteries.  However, in recognition of her tastes, this quarter I went to the RVM library to find a book to review that was not part of a series or by an author known for series work, and I found a gem.  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina is a novel set in Japan, written in Italian, translated into English.  The author is Italian, born and raised in Rome, who went to Japan to improve her Japanese.  Fifteen years later she still lives in Japan with a husband, two children and a job teaching Italian.

Yuri, a main character in the book, became the host of a call-in radio show in Tokyo after losing her mother and young daughter in the March 11, 2011 tsunami.  She hears one evening about a garden with a phone booth where one can talk to the dead.  The Wind Phone helps many people deal with the loss of loved ones.  This is a book about grief, a book about hope, and a book about love.  It can be a quick read or savored, but it contains something for everyone.  The author includes the information on research conducted on how many hugs are required in a day for survival, as well as acknowledging that the truth is “that love is a miracle.  Even the second time around, even when it comes to you by mistake.”  I won’t include a spoiler about what happens to Yuri, but since hope and love are components of the story you might guess. Near the end of the book “Yuri came to understand that there was always joy somewhere within unhappiness.”

The March 11 tsunami was an actual event just as the Bell Gradia garden and the Wind Phone are real.  In the author’s note Laura Imai Messina says “For me the Wind Phone is mainly this: a metaphor that suggests how precious it is to hold on tight to joy as well as pain. That even when we are confronted by the subtractions, the things that life takes from us, we have to open ourselves up to the many additions it can offer too.”  An important lesson for us all.

The book can be found at both the RVM library and the Jackson County Public Library.

Fuzz – a book review

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by Anne Newins

Anne Newins

A new book by Mary Roach is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. Author of six other intriguing books, including Bonk, Stiff, Spook, Gulp, Grunt, and Packing for Mars, Roach has an unusual ability to bring humor, science, and readability into one package. Her penchant for picking off beat topics adds to the fun.

Fuzz examines how various plant and animal species get into conflicts with humans, and in turn, how people try to control their predations. Spoiler alert: this is not a book for the squeamish. Animal control efforts often are barbaric. It also does not discuss the effect of climate change on animal populations.

Much of the book describes the efforts of professionals who attempt, almost always unsuccessfully, to control natural predators. Roach points out that humans often exaggerate the risk of dreaded species, noting that one’s odds of being killed by a cougar are less than being killed by a filing cabinet, and snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzlies.

She quickly embeds herself with a wide selection of authorities across the world, including the Himalayas (leopards), India (macaques), Canada (Douglas firs), the Vatican (gulls and rats), New Zealand (invasive species), as well as numerous locations in the United States. Plant poisons, especially ricin, are described at length.

Many, many, many efforts are made to attempt to control many, many, many animals, especially in the United State—the list is too long to include here. Some countries, particularly Asian ones, are more philosophical and try to come to some level of acceptance of animals that move into their towns and cities. On a more positive note, there seems to be a growing effort to deal with the situation more humanely in the West.

Of course, I wanted to see if she researched some of our more perplexing Manor wildlife. I could not find anything about wild turkeys. But in a chapter subtitled “futile military actions against birds” she recounts an Australian effort to eliminate rampaging emus. In 1932, the Australian Minster of Defense dispatched machine gunners to Western Australia, where the emus quickly got the best of them. After six days, the machine gunners left in defeat, and “emus appeared in huge flocks along the road” to watch them leave. Somehow, this sounded strangely familiar.

Some of us have had unhappy experiences with ground squirrels this summer. Evidently, this is not new. During World War I, ground squirrels were portrayed as enemy sympathizers, and in a California squirrel eradication campaign, posters featured them in tiny spiked German helmets. The effort does not seem to have worked.

Fuzz is a more serious book than some of Roach’s others, although it can be side-slappingly funny. She is sympathetic to the animals and abhors the cruel methods used to control them. On the other hand, she recognizes that it is not realistic to simply ignore the problems they may create. Describing herself as a “vertebrate pest,” she is respectful of the efforts being made by the many scientists, wildlife officers, and others who attempt to cope with the challenges our fuzzy friends create, as well as their willingness to share knowledge and, often, their terrain with her.

A copy of Fuzz may be found at the RVM library as well as the County library. Many of her other books also may be borrowed from the County library.

Book Review: Owls of the Eastern Ice

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by Bonnie Tollefson

 

Editor’s note: this review was originally released with authorship mistakenly attributed to Jan Hines.  The Complement apologizes to Bonnie, Jan, and our readers for the error.

Subtitled: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl, by Jonathan C. Slaght, Center Point Large Print, 2020

The first thing I learned from this book was – Don’t make life decisions while hiking in the blazing sun in a bug infested bog – you could end up spending years freezing off valuable body parts. That is what Jonathan Slaght did. He had fallen in love with the Primorye region of Russia. For those of you as deficient as I am regarding Russian geography, that is the area to the East of Siberia. It is bordered by China, North Korea and the Sea of Japan. Jonathan spent 3 years there during his time in the Peace Corps and also did a Masters project for the University of Minnesota on the effect of logging in the area on songbirds. As he was trying to decide on a subject for his doctoral dissertation, it came down to aiding the conservation efforts for two birds – the hooded crane and the fish owl. Since that hot buggy bog was prime hooded crane habitat he decided to study the fish owl. Never heard of a fish owl? It is the largest of the owl family being over two feet tall with a six foot wingspan and scruffy brown feathers that blend very well into their forested habitat. Their primary food source is fish and frogs so their hearing is not as good as other owls. The easiest time to locate them is February when they leave their distinctive tracks on the side of rivers and make their eerie duet calls during mating. These facts led Slaght to spend five winters in the forests of the Primorye as he located nest trees, studying habitat, and captured live owls. He took measurements, finally discovered how to tell apart the male and female (it’s more white tail feathers), banded birds and, on a few owls, placed expensive GPS transmitters to determine flight patterns. In spite of bears, tigers, and temperatures well below 0, Slaght and his Russian research assistants were able to work out a conservation plan for loggers and others to protect this owl found only in Russia and northern Japan.

The book is available thru the Jackson County Public Library and as Large Print from the RVM Library.

The World Ten Years From Now

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a book review by Connie Kent

Guillén, Mauro F. 2030. St. Martins, 2020. Available at the RVM library

The world as we know it is changing. Guillén makes a compelling case that many of the rules we learned in order to succeed in the world will no longer be appropriate by 2030. During the seven years before the book was published in 2020, Guillen gathered information and projected trends to see what our world might be like in ten short years.

No longer will babies be plentiful; there will be more grandparents than grandchildren, and retirees will outnumber workers. The middle class in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will outnumber the middle class in the US and Europe combined. Non-Western consumers will drive the global economy. Women will own more of the wealth of the world than men. Cities will grow, exacerbating inequality and pollution, inching us closer to potentially catastrophic social and climate crises.

We are seeing technology disrupt the status quo by changing the concept of products (cellphones are replacing telephones); the way products are made (a robot can displace five or six workers); how it is sold (think Amazon); who uses the products (1.5 billion people in the world own or share a cellphone but must relieve themselves in the open or go to a shared outhouse); and how people interact with each other (think of FaceTime and Zoom meetings).

Artificial Intelligence, Guillén claims, will bring about epochal change. As an example, truck drivers constitute the largest occupational group in twenty-nine of our fifty states. They are at risk of losing their jobs as a result of autonomous vehicle technology. Another example: surgeons are beginning to use robots to assist with delicate operations.

Most intriguing to me is the potential impact of what’s called “blockchaining.” The technology began with crypto currencies. But its potential applications include government services, intellectual property, trade transactions, counterfeit regulation, gun control, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection.

In a postscript, Guillén speculates that Covid-19 will accelerate such trends as declining fertility and use of technology. In order to survive 2030, we must challenge received wisdom, rather than honoring inherited assumptions and ways of thinking. We will not survive the changes unless we challenge our traditional mindset.

Guillén, Mauro F. 2030. St. Martins, 2020. In RVM library