Books finished in December:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Skyfaring (2015) by Mark Vanhoenacker. Book about flying by a pilot. Often engaging to hear people talk about their passion-there should have been a little more of that here. One learns many interesting things-like inertial system and the gyroscope to measure rotation (not mechanical, a laser gyro, where a light is put into a closed path in two directions, and if the two beams do not meet at the exact opposite point, it is because aircraft has rotated) and head and tail wind at takeoff (headwind beneficial, because it gets the plane quicker to the airspeed it needs to be airborne). Short article by the author based on the book at Vox. Ok.

Ratings and previous books are in the library.

Books finished in November:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2011) by Atul Gawande. Another good book from Atul Gawande. Details the usefulness of checklists in medicine, piloting, and construction work. Everyone is liable to make simple mistakes and oversights, especially under high pressure, and checklists well adapted to their users and contexts help avoid that. Recommended.

Ratings and previous books are in the library.

Books finished in October:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016) by Sebastian Junger. Tribe takes the starting point that humans are adapted to live in small communities, “tribes”, and tries to use that to explain some puzzles of modern life.
-Starts with stories from pre-revolutionary US about people from (white) settlements running off to join Indian tribes. More freedom and life better adapted. Surprising-I had not heard of this before, how common was that really?
-Only in Northern European societies and North America so many children sleep alone. And get intense relationship with stuffed animals…
-More loyalty and less fraud e.g. in tribes.
-Blitz-“psychiatric hospitals saw admissions go down” “long standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids, voluntary admissions to psychiatric wards noticeably declined, and even epileptics reported having fewer seizures” … “… suggested that some people actually did better during wartime”
-Durkheim: when European societies went to war, suicide rates dropped.
-Psychiatric wards strangely empty in France during wars, and same in civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. Depression rates declined in Belfast during the troubles.
-Theory of sociologist Charles Fritz: Disasters create community of sufferers. Therapeutic for mental illness.
-Somewhat controversial: victim status and various benefits like lifelong disability hampers reintegration into normal life for former combatants. Not encouraged or allowed to contribute to society. Society also needs to give these people a way to speak out and relieve themselves of their experiences.
-The book was particularly interesting to me since I have a paper studying increased effort/resilience in the aftermath of a dramatic, violent, high-impact event. Recommended. (Update: But see also this smart, critical review by Joanna Burke at the Guardian.)

The Nix: A novel (2016) by Nathan Hill. The following sentence in the synopsis of “The Nix” piqued my curiosity: “[…] Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he thought he knew, secrets that stretch across generations and have their origin all the way back in Norway, home of the mysterious Nix.” While it was what role Norway played in a US bestselling novel that made me interested, the rest of the sentence made me somewhat sceptical, so I was pleasantly surprised to encounter some really funny scenes in the beginning, as well as engaging non-sentimental others. However, the last half of the book conforms more to what one might expect from the quoted sentence. Ok.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in September:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries (2012) by Jon Ronson. Based on Ronson’s earlier magazine articles and interviews, but still very solid, like all his work I have read. The common theme is various strange people and events. Entertaining, but somewhat easy to forget since the pieces do not relate to each other.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2013) by Christopher Hayes. Meritocracy created insulated, partly corrupt, elites in a wide variety of institutions, elites that are out of thouch with and reach of the rest of society. There may be something to that, but I am not sure how much. Ok.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in August:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) by Frans de Waal. de Waal’s perhaps biggest point is the continuity of abilities between humans and other animals, and he makes the case well for a wide range of abilities, like memory, forward looking behavior, problem solving, tool use, various social skills, and animals (in particular apes, monkeys, birds, elephants). That is perfectly plausible to me, so I did not need convincing on that point, but I was fascinated by the ways other animals, in particular chimps, do better than humans on some traditional cognitive tasks. Examples are the extremely quick memory of chimps (short video, a little longer) and the fact that chimps may remember solutions to tasks/puzzles years later once they have learned it. A quibble: de Waal often appears unnuanced when writing about other fields, and sets up straw-men to argue against, which is not that interesting. Recommended.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in July:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Interface (2005) by Frederick George and Neal Stephenson. Political near future sci-fi thriller. Media operator Cy Ogle takes political polling to a new level, using continuous tracking of people’s emotions to fine-tune political messages. Add to that the ability to control the messenger (the politician), and he has a powerful mix to serve the interests of the Network. Cory Doctorow’s repeated endorsements were what drew me to the book in the first place. Doctorow saw the part about the politician Earl Strong as the prediction of the rise of Donald Trump. I am not so sure, Earl Strong is a minor character in the book, and, unlike Trump, is undone quite quickly in his political ambitions. We could certainly use some real life Eleanor Richmonds, however I doubt that she would have been enough to stop Trump. I liked the book, but would not go so far as Doctorow in calling it a “masterpiece”.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in May:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum (2015) by Gavin Francis. I tend to think of medicine as a depressing subject, since so much of it is concerned with something that is sick or wrong. Gavin Francis offers another perspective: “The practice of medicine is not just a journey though the parts of the body and the stories of others, but an exploration of life’s possibilities: an adventure in human being.” A doctor with wide experience, Francis has many adventures to speak of. This is not a big idea book, but a series of small, interesting stories about how the bodies we all inhabit work. Throughout there are references to history and literature, for instance when we read that the hand is less delicate than is often thought and that the palm can be perforated by a nail without interfering with the rest of the hand’s functioning, we also learn that since the palm is not strong enough to support the body’s weight (a nail would tear through), cruzification could not work by nails alone, and nailing in Roman cruzification probably was probably only through the heel. The most fascinating story, and the one which gives most hope for the future, is the one about how “benign paroxysmal positional vertigo” (BPPV) was cured. This well-known condition gives severe, debilitating nausea, and had been proposed explained in various ways throghout history. It was not until the 1980’s, however, that one John Epley came up with the hypothesis that the cause was tiny, loose particles in the inner ear. Epley’s cure was a series of movements of the head to physically roll these particles away from the problematic areas in which they were perceived as body movements. Medical progress without drugs or any invasive procedure. Unfortunately that may not be representative, though that is not the topic of this book. Recommended.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in April:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

The Affinities (2015) by Robert Charles Wilson. Near future science fiction. New methods enable mapping people into “affinities”-collections of like minds maximizing the potential for cooperation. These groups of course become rivals. Recommended.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009) by Robert Charles Wilson. Did not finish. It feels like Wilson wanted to write a clichéd, predictable, traditional fairytale/adventure in an unlikely post-apokalyptic setting (though not really apokalyptic, the world has simply come down from previous, excessive consumption fuelled by oil) as some kind of experiment, but I just got bored. Not recommended.

This Is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, the Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon (2016) by L. Jon Wertheim. Mix of solid research and more speculative stuff about various phenomena related to sports. Easy to follow, and easy to forget. Ok.

Diaspora: A Novel (1997) by Greg Egan. Forms of post-humanism. I enjoyed the parts that I could follow, which were not too many, due in large part to a crappy audiobook edition.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in March:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (2015) by Alice Goffman. Chronicle of black, poor, and mostly criminal lives in Philadelphia in the 2000’s. I knew that On the Run had met with some criticism, however, the book had also received glowing reviews, some of which from the unlikely discipline of economics (Tyler Cowen), which has a reputation for seeing all other social science as inherently inferior. Chris Blattman’s recommendation in particular drove me to read it anyway. And it is an engaging and gripping book, telling about the tough life of a community of poor, black people living on “6th Street,” squeezed between crime and gang violence on the one hand, and ruthless, immoral, and illegal police on the other. After finishing it, I looked up the criticism in more detail. It is pretty damning. Faced with charges of inconsistencies, and even data fabrication, she appears to have had very little to say. (Paul Campos 1, 2, 3). Apparently, this is a book about how things may be and what Goffman has heard or imagined. Based on true stories, but not documentably true. Alper quotes the telling description of the research project Goffman is currently working on, which ends with “The ideas come out of field notes, but most of the examples in the text come from novels and non-fiction.”

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (2013) by Oliver Burkeman. Tired of the self-helg genre’s focus on positivity in all ways, Burkeman writes a self-helt book about the power of negative thinking. Already a reality-oriented sceptic, I guess I never needed persuasion. It is nice to hear about Eipcurus, stocicism, and serious forms of mindfulness, but overall the book was not extraordinary to me. Ok.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2015) by Bryan Stevenson. Powerful account of the work of Bryan Stevenson to provide legal assistance to people wrongfully convicted, or convicted on the wrong basis. The case of Walter McMillian runs as a red thread through the book. McMillian spent six years on death row on the basis of made-up charges by the police, before he was cleared in 1993, thanks to the work of Stevenson. Everyone in the book is not innocent like McMillian, but they are all poor and unresourceful in the court system. Sentencing children as adults, prison abuse, racial bias are important themes. Recommended.

Ratings and old books are in the library.