Nonfiction
Kio Stark, When Strangers Meet: Advocates for talking to strangers as a way of reinforcing, and surprising ourselves (and our interlocutors) with, the humanity of other people. Suggests that voluntary encounters with strangers can be deeply intimate and rewarding in ways that encounters with people we already “know” often aren’t because of the surprise of the encounter. Has a bunch of cautionary language about unwantedness and differential access to public space; says that the virtue of encounters with strangers is cross-cultural but I wondered to what extent that was true.
George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: Stories from the retrospective study of the lives of a cohort of Harvard men who were there just before WWII broke out. Among the big lessons: we keep changing a lot over a lifetime; having a good childhood is protective but having a bad childhood does not guarantee a bad outcome; alcoholism is the cause of a lot of problems that are attributed to other things.
Hana Schank and Tara Dawson McGuinness, Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology: My spouse thought that this book disingenuously ignored that often powerful government officials don’t want government to work better, but I didn’t think so; as it said, every system is really good at doing what it was actually designed to do, and often enough that is to suppress complaint and enrich consultants. What should people do if they in good faith want government to deliver services that people need with the help of technology? Perhaps surprisingly, their answer is first to spend a lot of time asking the recipients and the ground-level workers delivering the services what they need, and then use the technology available to make that as simple as possible. The most powerful anecdote involves having lawmakers try to fill out the complicated forms for getting public assistance in Michigan while sitting in a hallway filled with recorded noise from an actual public assistance office. When they couldn’t come close to doing it, they had to admit that there was a problem.
Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The story of the Sackler family, from the patriarch who invented modern pharma marketing (including for Librium)-with a big order of lies and corruption of FDA officials-to the children who oversaw the rise of the opioid crisis in the US and then pivoted to exporting it elsewhere once they’d done so much damage here as to be undeniable. And then Trump’s DOJ mostly let the family off the hook, though the story isn’t quite over. Massachusetts AG Maura Healey is one of the book’s heroes. In the earlier parts, with Arthur/his brothers’ story, I kept thinking how they probably at least knew people who knew my doctor grandfather-also raised in the NY area by working-class immigrants, also excluded from most med schools because he was Jewish (Arthur dodged this by being just old enough to go through before the policies were firmly in place, but his brothers didn’t), also even worked as a soda jerk in a pharmacy to earn the cash to go to med school, but he chose radical politics and seeing patients instead of advertising drugs and now my name is not synonymous with callous greed.
Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less: People often overlook the benefits of removing things, choosing instead to add and make them more complex. Lots of examples here and some useful advice about framing subtractive changes in ways that don’t trigger loss aversion as easily, though I didn’t need the end lecture about climate change.
James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: Close readings of specific productions/films, including Shakespeare in Love and the Trump-evoking Julius Caesar that triggered right-wing outrage in recent years.
Mehrsa Baradaran, How the Other Half Banks: Although banking has always been entwined with government objectives, in the current US system the government supports bank profits while not requiring much from banks in return: Nearly half of the population is unwanted by traditional banks, and thus forced to turn to high-fee check cashing and lending services. Baradaran gives a capsule history of banking in the US and argues for a resurrection of postal banks, which could help the unbanked and provide modest amounts of credit without the life-destroying interest rates that current lenders to the poor charge.
Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Sherwin says that when he set out to write this history of nuclear confrontation from WWII to the Cuban Missile Crisis, he thought he was going to disprove the claim that nuclear war was avoided only by luck; by the end, though, he was absolutely convinced that luck was the only explanation. With a kind of literary rack focus, he starts with some details of the crisis itself-orders to launch missiles on both sides, given by low-level officials, that were only overridden due to the luck of the draw of who was listening to them-and then pulls back to give a history of nuclear doctrine after WWII and then a policy history of the crisis, in which Kennedy plays the role of pushing for a political solution over the desires of most of his Cabinet to go to war. Adlai Stevenson shows up as a disliked but valued counselor who also doesn’t want a war. I really enjoyed the book, though I can see where someone wouldn’t like the organization; the connections between the policy and the near disasters on the ground could have been explored in greater detail.
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning: Essays on racism, the author’s Korean-American identity, friendships, artistic development, and Richard Pryor (among other things). Striking: “One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame.”
Anne Harrington, The Mind Fixers: History of how psychiatrists and other doctors kept returning to a search for physical sources of mental illness, even during the age of Freud; the brain keeps being rediscovered as the problem instead of the mind, even as particular theories of why tend to fail in various ways and have historically supported various forms of discrimination.
Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: History of Indian slavery in North America, focusing mainly on the Spanish but in the later chapters discussing the US adaptation to this other slavery. Women and children were apparently preferred as slaves and different groups became sources of enslaved people or enslavers as political alliances changed. Spain’s rulers tried to ban slavery relatively early on, but it was nonetheless reinstated as peonage, which the author argues provides some lessons in the flexibility and relentlessness of exploitation today.
Gerda Lerner, Living With History: Lerner became a PhD historian in her forties and fought for the recognition of women’s history as an important field. These essays detail her accomplishments and some rules of thumb for how to think about recognizing women’s lives and contributions in historical contexts.
David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: After the Cold War/post-Sputnik boom, physics programs got so many people that they stopped trying to teach and ask the big philosophical questions in favor of problem sets that could be graded quickly. Then, the bottom fell out of physics programs in the late 70s/80s as the government stopped funding basic research. The people who were asking big questions about things like whether time travel was possible, or whether instantaneous communication was possible, got shoved to the side and spent a bunch of time interacting with people who believed that psychic powers were real or possibly real. Although they were generally wrong, Kaiser argues that they posed the questions whose answers-or rebuttals-paved the way for modern physics and things like truly secure encryption.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: Stories from the retrospective study of the lives of a cohort of Harvard men who were there just before WWII broke out. Among the big lessons: we keep changing a lot over a lifetime; having a good childhood is protective but having a bad childhood does not guarantee a bad outcome; alcoholism is the cause of a lot of problems that are attributed to other things.
Hana Schank and Tara Dawson McGuinness, Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology: My spouse thought that this book disingenuously ignored that often powerful government officials don’t want government to work better, but I didn’t think so; as it said, every system is really good at doing what it was actually designed to do, and often enough that is to suppress complaint and enrich consultants. What should people do if they in good faith want government to deliver services that people need with the help of technology? Perhaps surprisingly, their answer is first to spend a lot of time asking the recipients and the ground-level workers delivering the services what they need, and then use the technology available to make that as simple as possible. The most powerful anecdote involves having lawmakers try to fill out the complicated forms for getting public assistance in Michigan while sitting in a hallway filled with recorded noise from an actual public assistance office. When they couldn’t come close to doing it, they had to admit that there was a problem.
Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The story of the Sackler family, from the patriarch who invented modern pharma marketing (including for Librium)-with a big order of lies and corruption of FDA officials-to the children who oversaw the rise of the opioid crisis in the US and then pivoted to exporting it elsewhere once they’d done so much damage here as to be undeniable. And then Trump’s DOJ mostly let the family off the hook, though the story isn’t quite over. Massachusetts AG Maura Healey is one of the book’s heroes. In the earlier parts, with Arthur/his brothers’ story, I kept thinking how they probably at least knew people who knew my doctor grandfather-also raised in the NY area by working-class immigrants, also excluded from most med schools because he was Jewish (Arthur dodged this by being just old enough to go through before the policies were firmly in place, but his brothers didn’t), also even worked as a soda jerk in a pharmacy to earn the cash to go to med school, but he chose radical politics and seeing patients instead of advertising drugs and now my name is not synonymous with callous greed.
Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less: People often overlook the benefits of removing things, choosing instead to add and make them more complex. Lots of examples here and some useful advice about framing subtractive changes in ways that don’t trigger loss aversion as easily, though I didn’t need the end lecture about climate change.
James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: Close readings of specific productions/films, including Shakespeare in Love and the Trump-evoking Julius Caesar that triggered right-wing outrage in recent years.
Mehrsa Baradaran, How the Other Half Banks: Although banking has always been entwined with government objectives, in the current US system the government supports bank profits while not requiring much from banks in return: Nearly half of the population is unwanted by traditional banks, and thus forced to turn to high-fee check cashing and lending services. Baradaran gives a capsule history of banking in the US and argues for a resurrection of postal banks, which could help the unbanked and provide modest amounts of credit without the life-destroying interest rates that current lenders to the poor charge.
Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Sherwin says that when he set out to write this history of nuclear confrontation from WWII to the Cuban Missile Crisis, he thought he was going to disprove the claim that nuclear war was avoided only by luck; by the end, though, he was absolutely convinced that luck was the only explanation. With a kind of literary rack focus, he starts with some details of the crisis itself-orders to launch missiles on both sides, given by low-level officials, that were only overridden due to the luck of the draw of who was listening to them-and then pulls back to give a history of nuclear doctrine after WWII and then a policy history of the crisis, in which Kennedy plays the role of pushing for a political solution over the desires of most of his Cabinet to go to war. Adlai Stevenson shows up as a disliked but valued counselor who also doesn’t want a war. I really enjoyed the book, though I can see where someone wouldn’t like the organization; the connections between the policy and the near disasters on the ground could have been explored in greater detail.
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning: Essays on racism, the author’s Korean-American identity, friendships, artistic development, and Richard Pryor (among other things). Striking: “One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame.”
Anne Harrington, The Mind Fixers: History of how psychiatrists and other doctors kept returning to a search for physical sources of mental illness, even during the age of Freud; the brain keeps being rediscovered as the problem instead of the mind, even as particular theories of why tend to fail in various ways and have historically supported various forms of discrimination.
Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: History of Indian slavery in North America, focusing mainly on the Spanish but in the later chapters discussing the US adaptation to this other slavery. Women and children were apparently preferred as slaves and different groups became sources of enslaved people or enslavers as political alliances changed. Spain’s rulers tried to ban slavery relatively early on, but it was nonetheless reinstated as peonage, which the author argues provides some lessons in the flexibility and relentlessness of exploitation today.
Gerda Lerner, Living With History: Lerner became a PhD historian in her forties and fought for the recognition of women’s history as an important field. These essays detail her accomplishments and some rules of thumb for how to think about recognizing women’s lives and contributions in historical contexts.
David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: After the Cold War/post-Sputnik boom, physics programs got so many people that they stopped trying to teach and ask the big philosophical questions in favor of problem sets that could be graded quickly. Then, the bottom fell out of physics programs in the late 70s/80s as the government stopped funding basic research. The people who were asking big questions about things like whether time travel was possible, or whether instantaneous communication was possible, got shoved to the side and spent a bunch of time interacting with people who believed that psychic powers were real or possibly real. Although they were generally wrong, Kaiser argues that they posed the questions whose answers-or rebuttals-paved the way for modern physics and things like truly secure encryption.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.