by David Graeber & David Wengrow

Where to begin reviewing a book weighing in at nearly 700 pages from title page to end of index?

We open and close with a lot about freedom. Our first section is totally arresting, as we delve into how the Americans who preceded Europeans on this continent viewed European culture: with disbelief and disdain at our lack of freedom. While we Eurocentric people have always tended to view ourselves as being quite free, our “formal” freedoms were as nothing compared to the “substantive” freedoms found in America.

More on that in a moment, but notice my avoidance of terms like “indigenous people” or “Native Americans”. They were Americans. They lived here. I love the radical respect that the authors give to those people who lived in this place before us. And those Americans who engaged in thoughtful substantive debate with their European interlocuters, they rightfully refer to as philosophers, even “philosopher-statesmen”.

So about those freedoms: we theoretically have the right to travel, but if we haven’t got moolah, we effectively must stay put. Many of the earlier American societies had kinship networks far and wide, and people really could travel whenever and almost wherever they wanted, knowing they would have kin that would have their backs. We formally have the freedom to do whatever we like, but we have authorities we must obey. North Americans the Europeans first contacted often did not. Their chiefs had no real authority to make anyone do anything. In a great turn of phrase, the authors say “the Wendat [Huron tribe of native Quebec] had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms.”

And so the book continue with more of its radical upendings of our typical outlook on things. Pre-historical societies experimented with vast, vastly different ways of self-organizing. We weren’t just “bands” (they always put that word in quotes) of ape-like hunter-gatherers, living in one particular default way, until bam, finally agriculture changed everything. We weren’t always all the same and agriculture didn’t all of a sudden change everything everywhere.

One item I couldn’t help but bookmark: “There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much.” I’m sorry, why isn’t this called out more often? Most of us, given the slimmest of chances, will get as far away from our families as the train tracks will take us. Not that I have an axe to grind on this particular topic.

I’m sorry I can’t do justice to more of the book, because there is much, much more. But these were my takeaways.

by Weike Wang

In the middle, it can feel rather depressing. The first-person protagonist, who I believe remains unnamed, had horrible parents, can’t finish her PhD, and can’t commit to the boyfriend who wants to marry her. There’s a quote which I’m afraid I didn’t bookmark, but which I think I got right: “The optimist believes the glass is half full. The pessimist believes it is half empty. The chemist believes it is full, half with liquid and half with gas, both of which are probably poisonous.” That’s the protagonist’s attitude all the way through.

You think she must have redeeming qualities which are not on display, this being written in the first-person depressive. Because why does Eric stay with her? She sounds relentlessly negative. But he is devoted to her; plus, she has a very warm relationship with “the best friend”. This is like the main character of Joan Is OK – she’s an oddball but things don’t quite go where you think they’re going to. These oddballs aren’t total losses. They function and have relationships. They are just human.

I want to shout out that the author has degrees in chemistry and public health as well as an MFA. Yay for scientists writing books!

by Octavia E. Butler

Such wonderful theology, such a wonderful main character. I wish it hadn’t been embedded in such a horror movie.

Cannibalism, burning people alive, relentless killing. It reminded me in that sense of Geraldine Brooks’ YEAR OF WONDERS, which was about the plague. There you had people suffocating in pig manure, someone carrying around a dead baby till its head fell off… same kind of thing, has me reading with steel guardrails around my brain so as not to actually internalize anything.

So about the good parts! Theology! God is change. Your job is to do your best to mold that God to serve your ends.

Main character! It’s all led by a supernaturally strong young African American woman. She is the sower. She calls her religion Earthseed. Each chapter begins with some of her “verses”. “The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” “Create no images of God… The universe is God’s self-portrait.”½

by John Kay & Mervyn King

How did I like this book? Well, I’m not certain.

HA HA HA. It was OK, but it sure seemed to be saying the same thing over and over again for 433 pages and a lengthy appendix: Most situations in life involve a radical uncertainty, rendering them unsuitable for statistical modeling or probabilistic forecasting.

Of all the chapters basically saying the same thing from different perspectives, my favorite was “Evolution & Decision-Making,” which leads with a quote attributed to SF author Bruce Sterling: “Computation is not thinking… You are much more like hour house cat than you are ever going to be like Siri.”

To quote further the beginning of the chapter, “Behavioural economics has identiifed a raft of ways in which humans depart from axiomatic rationality. These behaviours are described as ‘biases,’ signs of human failure… It is as though God had given us two legs so that we could run or walk, but made on leg shorter than the other so that we could not run or walk very well… We are not defective versions of computers trained to optimise in small-world problems, but human beings with individual and collective intelligence evolved over millennia.”

That’s basically what it’s about, although this is the only chapter with an evolutionary bent; it’s all about how ‘real-world’ problems are nothing like ‘small-world’ problems that researchers come up with in the lab.

So take heart! You aren’t a broken machine. You’re an exceedingly smart house cat!

Also memorable, in the chapter “The Use & Misuse of Models,” was a brief historical overview of the collapse of the cod industry in Newfoundland. “The [Dominion] Fisheries Office developed complex models on which its recommendations [for total allowable catch] were based. But cod stocks continued to decline. For the year 1992, the total allowable catch was set at 145,000 tonnes. That proved to be the last year of commercial cod fishing on the Grand Banks.” The authors do not lay responsibility for this solely with the modelers, of course, but maintain that their ‘evidence’ ended up justifying the policy of “greedy fishermen and mendacious politicians” rather than actually protecting fish stocks. This example of mismanagement by model struck me enough to read up on the subject in Wikipedia, where the sad story can be read in more detail: “Over 35,000 fishermen and plant workers from over 400 coastal communities became unemployed… Newfoundland has since experienced a dramatic environmental, industrial, economic, and social restructuring, including considerable outward migration.”

Something of a detour from the main idea of the book; but one example of how the illustrations and anecdotes chosen by the authors are very powerful and well conveyed. Sorry to detour on the detour, but listen to a “No More Fish, No Fishermen,” a song on this topic I heard long ago on public radio and never forgot.

by Elizabeth Bowen

Dense, talky, thinky. I hardly ever understood what was going on. It’s about Ireland.

by Paul Freedman

Kind of dull. The kind of non-fiction I dislike, just one fact after another. Where’s the narrative arc? The vox pops? The biting humor?

by Dr. Carl L. Hart

I did write a review of this last year for Library Things, which I’ve dug up here for your reading pleasure and for contrast with Never Enough.

To describe this book in one word, I’d maybe choose “scandalous.” Dr. Hart uses heroin & has no intention of stopping. It’s a harmless hobby, like having a drink. “Grown-ups” can responsibly take heroin, and opioids, and meth – there is no drug that should be off limits. Now there’s the general libertarian argument for that, which Dr. Hart espouses; but as a tenured professor of psychology at Columbia specializing in neuropharmacology, he’ll also argue authoritatively that none of these drugs will necessarily harm you, if used responsibly – so it’s not simply a matter of “you should be able to legally destroy your life if you choose”. It’s also that, if you’re a “grown-up” about it, you won’t.

Dr. Hart wrote this risky book to come out of the closet, in the hopes others would follow. I think he will likely find himself forever in the minority. I’ve never read any account of someone in such a prestigious station in life coming clean about so much casual, ongoing drug use (he’s tried everything). But now I have – & I guess he’d say that’s the point of the book.

And I know he’ll say that this is more evidence of how badly the book is needed, but hearing him justify his heroin use and explain how NOT an addict he is made me wonder how long it might take for the inevitable shoe to drop – where will Dr. Hart be a year or more from now? Still a happy user insisting he’s not an addict? Will it be true? I believe it to be true of him now. I do believe his accounts and all the evidence he presents; but being brainwashed by our anti-drug society I just can’t help but wonder…

One constant point of his that I appreciate is this: drugs feel good, and that’s reason enough to take them. He gets really uptight around LSD users because they tend to try to justify their drug use as “different” from others – they’re doing it for mind-expanding reasons or whatever, not to get high. “What’s wrong with getting high?” he cuts one guy off mid-sentence. I love that. The right to pleasure… not currently enshrined in the Constitution, but should be, as Tom Lehrer put it decades ago. He was talking about pornography, not drugs, but the principle’s the same –

“Obscenity. I’m for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on – but we know what’s really involved: dirty books are fun. That’s all there is to it. But you can’t get up in a court and say that I suppose. it’s simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the constitution unfortunately.”

by Judith Grisel

Informative book about addiction by a neuroscientist – and former addict.

Grisel wrote her thesis on the mechanism by which morphine is more addictive in familiar contexts than in novel contexts; a kind of Pavlovian effect triggers an anticipatory process in the brain. This process, dubbed “the b process”, is the brain’s effort to maintain stasis in response to “the a process”, the effects of the drug itself. This is the key to Grisel’s model of addiction, the graph of which she would get tattooed on her body if she ever wanted to get a tattoo. A drug floods the brain with a certain effect, and the brain in response tries to fight back, to counterbalance it. After more and more instances of taking the drug, the “b process” becomes stronger, lasting longer and kicking in sooner. So think of the drug’s effect as “the good feeling”; this means you’re going to get more and more “bad feeling”, sooner, heavier, and lasting longer, until you’ve got a case of classic addiction: you’re no longer taking the drug to feel good. You’re taking it not to feel bad.

The chapters each deal with a different category of drug, based on how it achieves its effects. I read the chapter on alcohol with interest, as I dabble sometimes with the idea of stopping drinking altogether. The more I think about it, the more I feel that regular imbibing is really not such a good idea. Counting alcoholism as one of her past addictions, Grisel is strong in her condemnation of it, and heavy are her lamentations of its ubiquity and heavy advertisement. But I feel she’s remiss in not discussing its central place in so many cultures for so many centuries – people have practically bathed in the stuff, and continue to do so, all over Europe and beyond. Wine accompanies every meal as a matter of course. Is this stuff really so bad for you? Why has it persisted? And she doesn’t discuss its value as a social lubricant. She deals with it merely as a depressive, a downer, and wonders why people want to get depressed and “dimmed” whenever it’s time to celebrate something. But booze is only technically a downer. For me its value is in the way it greases the wheels of interaction with other people. She never mentions this.

Poor Grisel. You really do feel for her… her addiction is still a real living thing. She misses pot so much, and she is so jealous of people who can drink one or two drinks and stop. They absolutely confound her. She sees her husband peruse a menu of microbrews, which lists the alcohol content of each, and can’t understand why it isn’t an easy choice of picking the most alcoholic one. A coworker mentions leaving an event after only two drinks because she has to work in the morning, and Grisel can’t fathom what one thing has to do with the other. I mean, of course she understands these things on an intellectual level, but she can’t make them jibe with her own experience. When she was a drinker, she DRANK.

Meanwhile, I wonder how Dr. Carl L. Hart of Drug Use for Grownups is doing these days…

Funny, I read that book in October of last year, but never posted a review of it. On purpose? Was I afraid of having such a book on my blog?

by David Sedaris

Funny.

Sunday I went to Crow Bookshop for a transfusion. I went with two sacks of books that I really didn’t need sitting on my shelves. I came home with two much-wanted books and over $30 credit leftover. I gave them some really prime stuff. I started something of a hardcover habit during the pandemic.