Nonfiction and Cult
Cult on the CW--anyone have thoughts? I watched the pilot but was severely underwhelmed.
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief: Interesting partially for its constant footnotes clearly put in to stave off defamation litigation by the notoriously litigious Church, Wright’s story is a complex one about a religion and a simple one about abuse. In its incoherent extremes, Scientology’s doctrine isn’t all that much weirder than the burning bush and drinking your savior’s blood, just younger, though the portions of the book quoting Scientologists explaining how the system was supposed to work/give them power over external events were often hard to listen to because they did resemble the statements of a person having a break from reality. As usual, it’s the people who are the problem: Wright relates convincing stories of abuse, not just by L. Ron Hubbard (who was particularly vicious to women) but by his successor, David Miscavige. He also identifies a sick institutional structure that coerces people into laboring almost as slaves-and sometimes physically barring them from escape-in terrible conditions, all the time telling them that they were the ones at fault. And many do stay because they believe it, or because they don’t think they have alternatives. An outer ring of Scientologists, including many of the celebrities who Hubbard and Miscavige courted, didn’t have much of an idea about the abuses/found it easy to close their eyes-again, an old story about abuses in the name of religion. It’s a depressing book, because the IRS gave up on going after Scientology for back taxes and it’s not clear how anyone can help many of the people involved, especially those raised in Scientology’s Sea Org who lack knowledge of the outside world and marketable skills.
James Fallows, China Airborne: Short book about China’s possibly burgeoning aeronautic industry, and the challenges and opportunities it faces/offers. Fallows emphasizes that there’s a huge amount of divergence in conditions across China, but also that there’s a great sense of possibility for improvement-something that often seems lacking in the US, where we don’t expect our government to do much that’s big. Of course, there’s plenty of cronyism and dysfunction in China; much of China’s investment in aeronautics may end up wasted as it produces planes that are too heavy and fails to innovate at the design end. Or not: Fallows concludes that anyone who claims to know what’s really going to happen in China is deluded at best. It sounds wishy-washy, but I found it a useful portrait of a fast-churning environment in which giant successes and failures are possible-and likely to have world-wide effects.
Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?: Diamond contrasts traditional and modern societies in their treatment of harms (torts or crimes, in the language of the formal state), wars, the elderly, childrearing, languages, eating, and several other major areas. I learned a fair amount about New Guinea, but this isn’t really a book with a big idea in the way that his earlier two popular works were. He thinks we should do more to integrate the elderly into the broader society, and to a certain extent children too; we should eat less and exercise more; and we should make an effort to raise children with more than one language. Here’s Slate’s view, with which I sympathize: “By the end of the book, it is impossible to tell if one has finished reading a masterpiece of rigorous analysis or a masterfully written collection of just-so stories.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief: Interesting partially for its constant footnotes clearly put in to stave off defamation litigation by the notoriously litigious Church, Wright’s story is a complex one about a religion and a simple one about abuse. In its incoherent extremes, Scientology’s doctrine isn’t all that much weirder than the burning bush and drinking your savior’s blood, just younger, though the portions of the book quoting Scientologists explaining how the system was supposed to work/give them power over external events were often hard to listen to because they did resemble the statements of a person having a break from reality. As usual, it’s the people who are the problem: Wright relates convincing stories of abuse, not just by L. Ron Hubbard (who was particularly vicious to women) but by his successor, David Miscavige. He also identifies a sick institutional structure that coerces people into laboring almost as slaves-and sometimes physically barring them from escape-in terrible conditions, all the time telling them that they were the ones at fault. And many do stay because they believe it, or because they don’t think they have alternatives. An outer ring of Scientologists, including many of the celebrities who Hubbard and Miscavige courted, didn’t have much of an idea about the abuses/found it easy to close their eyes-again, an old story about abuses in the name of religion. It’s a depressing book, because the IRS gave up on going after Scientology for back taxes and it’s not clear how anyone can help many of the people involved, especially those raised in Scientology’s Sea Org who lack knowledge of the outside world and marketable skills.
James Fallows, China Airborne: Short book about China’s possibly burgeoning aeronautic industry, and the challenges and opportunities it faces/offers. Fallows emphasizes that there’s a huge amount of divergence in conditions across China, but also that there’s a great sense of possibility for improvement-something that often seems lacking in the US, where we don’t expect our government to do much that’s big. Of course, there’s plenty of cronyism and dysfunction in China; much of China’s investment in aeronautics may end up wasted as it produces planes that are too heavy and fails to innovate at the design end. Or not: Fallows concludes that anyone who claims to know what’s really going to happen in China is deluded at best. It sounds wishy-washy, but I found it a useful portrait of a fast-churning environment in which giant successes and failures are possible-and likely to have world-wide effects.
Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?: Diamond contrasts traditional and modern societies in their treatment of harms (torts or crimes, in the language of the formal state), wars, the elderly, childrearing, languages, eating, and several other major areas. I learned a fair amount about New Guinea, but this isn’t really a book with a big idea in the way that his earlier two popular works were. He thinks we should do more to integrate the elderly into the broader society, and to a certain extent children too; we should eat less and exercise more; and we should make an effort to raise children with more than one language. Here’s Slate’s view, with which I sympathize: “By the end of the book, it is impossible to tell if one has finished reading a masterpiece of rigorous analysis or a masterfully written collection of just-so stories.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.