Category: Book Reviews Page 2 of 5

For much of last year my daily routine included sipping a drink and reading a book at a coffee shop in a big box bookstore.

I went thru a lot of books that way. A few standout, and Behave was the foremost among those.

When you’ve read a lot of books, you rarely read much that is new to you, but Behave told me things I didn’t know. Some were because when I learned biology and neuroscience, a lot wasn’t known. Some I’ve caught since then (brain cells do keep growing in adulthood, which the neuroscience of my childhood said was the not the case), but some I didn’t.

Behave is a genuinely comprehensive book. Too many books these days amount to magazine articles padded with another seventy thousand words, but Behave actually requires its length, so I’m going to pull out four piece of knowledge to share, but encourage you to read the book. (I have it on my “read again” list.)

The first is about the prefrontal cortex, and there’s a good chance that you know the prefrontal cortex is the part of the cerebral cortex (the outer skin of the brain which evolved last) we use to override decisions from the lizard and monkey parts of the brains.

The problem with cerebral cortex is general is that it’s slow: the lizard and mammalian parts operate faster. For the prefrontal cortex to override a decision made by the parts of the brain that are closer, as it were to the metal (run! fight! fuck!) you need to slow down. If you act instantly, it isn’t a judgment call, it’s your reflexes and conditioning working. That might be good, it might wind you up in a fight you can’t win or having sex with someone you’re going to hate after you spend two years with them.

The prefrontal cortex doesn’t finish growing until you’re 25 or so, which is reflected in automobile actuarial tables, as it happens: younger than 25, more accidents. This doesn’t mean those younger than twenty-five have no self control, no ability override the older parts of the brain, instead younger brains use other regions, such as the ventral striatum to help the under-developed prefrontal cortex.

Still adolescent and childhood impulsiveness and difficulty with self-control is entirely real and based on brain development. It’s not that they (we) don’t want more control, especially more emotional regulation, they just don’t have it.

Anyway, if you want more control, slow down. Also, fairly standard Vipassana and Shamatha meditation will give you more control over time. A couple teachers I know have sped up their perceptions so much that they can decide whether or not react to a flinch reflex.

The first “holy shit” moment in the book, for me, was about testosterone. We have been propagandized to view testosterone as related to violence.

Nope.

Oh, it can be. But what testosterone appears to actually be related to is status seeking. If violence and bullying is what a society rewards with status, then yup, testosterone is about violence.

But if hugging and caring for people will get you more status, suddenly high-T individuals are the biggest huggers and carers around.

Rather changes the question of what society types are viable, doesn’t it? Makes nonsense of the idea that society has to be nasty because people (high status men) are nasty.

And here’s the thing, in hunter-gatherer bands (note the word bands), the high status individuals are caring, wise and slow to anger. The high status caring men also spread their genes around plenty.

Then there was the simple revelation about Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, which is supposed to make both men and women more caring and nurturing. (Insert picture of man cradling baby if this was a magazine.)

It does. It does!

Er, but there’s a thorn on this rose. What it actually does is increase tribal behaviour. You act better towards members of your tribe, your people and worse towards others, because it reduces your empathy to outsiders. Oxytocin, one imagines, along with baby hugging, probably has a role in genocides and not that the groups and people who commit violence to outsiders tend to have strong internal cohesion. (This clearly isn’t the only factor, but it is interesting and suggests that ideas involving increasing our Oxytocin won’t work to solve our larger problems.)

Finally, something which younger readers probably know: the effects of many genes are turned on and off by the environment.

This sure isn’t what I was taught in biology. Back then it was “genes are one thing, the environment is another.”

What’s even more lovely, if like me you had to sit thru hours of listening to Lamarck being castigated as a fool for saying that developed characteristics could be passed on to offspring “hahahaha, what a fool, and those Soviets are obviously ideological cretins for believing it, hahahaha!” — well, it turns out that genes being turned on and off can be passed on. And yeah, genes involved in building muscle are among that group, so Arnold Schwarznegger’s kids, if they lift, probably put on muscle easier than you do.

As Sapolsky notes, the question “nurture or nature?” in light of this, is very close to nonsense. The answer is “both”. For a lot of things you need both the genes and the environment. Saprorsky hammers relentlessly on this, one example is a genetic predisposition to less sensitive mothering that occurs only if the mother herself had an adverse childhood; another increases violence only when drunk.

On top of all that, the effects of most genetic determinants of behavior were small, even when activated by the environment.

These four points are only a small part of what Saporsky offers. There may be a more comprehensive, up to date book (if you think so, drop it in the comments), but this one is extraordinary. It’s not a fast read, it’s packed with information, and I think it really will require a re-read to digest properly, but I can recommend it whole-heartedly if the question “why do we behave how we do?” interests you at all.

If I were going to advise someone to buy just one book about how societies and economies run, this would be the one.

This isn’t because it has unique or new ideas, rather the opposite. It is the most concise collection of theories about how the world, economies, cities and much more work that I have ever read. Bodri has put together, in one place, what you’d have to read literally dozens of books to learn otherwise.

This doesn’t mean everything is “correct”, though more is than not, and it doesn’t mean I endorse everything (including his commentary), but it’s all in one place.

Let’s take the society chapter as an example.

Bodri starts with Ibn Khaldun’s theory of Asabiya. Khaldun noted that desert tribes would sweep in, conquer, and 4 generations later, they’d lose power to another bunch of desert nomads. His primary principle was Asabiya, a feeling of unity and shared purpose. Tribes lived on the edge and had to cooperate, so they had high Asabiya, but when they conquered a sedentary people and suddenly had access to luxury, they would lose their unity and willingness to sacrifice for each other, along with their toughness; form factions and eventually lose the unity that allowed them to conquer and rule (think Mongols for a very high profile example.) Then a tribe with high Asabiya would sweep in and conquer them.

Bodri then moves to Gaetana Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. The insight here is simple enough: there is always a ruling class and the ruled, and ruling class, because they can easily coordinate are more powerful than the ruled, in most cases, because of this coordination. Societies break down in this model when the ruling classes start using their power to despoil the masses, the masses, losing their economic security become a mob, and try to force redistribution (bread and circuses) and the real economic base of the society decays, while the Asabiya (though neither uses the term) of the society and the elites collapses.

Next comes Glubb Pasha’s theory of empires. He noted that empires tended to last about 250 years or 10 generations, and went thru a sequence of seven stages. Being a Brit he felt Empire was good, but his argument was that each people had its distinctive excellence: they rose, spread it around and fell, then someone else did the same.

His seven stages are:

1. The Age of Outburst or Pioneers
2. The Age of Conquest
3. The Age of Commerce
4. The Age of Affluence
5. The Age of Intellect
6. The Age of Decadence
7. The Age of Decline and Collapse

A lot of this is fairly obvious, but the Age of Intellect is the “age of skeptics” as it were: it’s when intellectuals pick apart the founding myths. Think Socrates and the Sophists, for example, or German intellectuals like Nietzche.

The next theory is the “Mandate of Heaven” theory of Ancient China: each dynasty starts with a strong virtuous leader (virtue in this case doesn’t mean non-violent, obviously) and a people who have an ethic of mutual aid and community spirit. When the dynasty (which really means much more than just the Emperor and his relatives) starts over-taxing, not keeping up infrastructure, don’t protect the people and so on, the dynasty loses “the mandate of Heaven” and soon falls.

It’s clear that this is essentially the same as Mosca and Pareto’s emphasis on elites despoiling citizens and thus destroying both their own and the larger society’s Asabiya.

Bordri then goes on to use these theories to look at the rise and fall of Spain and to analyze the longevity of Chinese society.

The next chapter is on countries: the preconditions for their rise and fall, what weaker powers do and so forth. Bodri then moves on to cycles: generationa theories, Kondratieff innovation cycles and so on, and down to companies all the way to individuals.

I think I should talk about how Bodri uses the word capitalism, which seems to combine free trade and entrepreneurship. What is important is not capitalism per se (the ownership of the means of production by a few), it is that the more the mass of people are allowed to be free and prosperous and not despoiled by the elites; the more they can choose what economic activities to engage in (this includes what we now call entrepreneurship), the more prosperous the nation tends to be. This creates domestic production that is widespread and not narrow in nature.

But freedom to do what people want isn’t an absolute rule: more freedom isn’t always better. England’s rise comes from saying “no, you can’t sell raw wool overseas.” It is that decision which creates the first real industry in England but it’s not what wool producers want, since they can get more from overseas buyers: their freedom of exchange IS infringed.

Bodri understand this when  he goes on to talk about how real development works (it’s almost always protectionist if you’re larger than a city state), but elides that when he pushes free trade, which is almost always what countries do when they are hegemonic and which, over time, leads to them shipping their productive capacity overseas, and is thus, actually, part of the cycle of decline. Vigorous empires on the rise tend toward mercantalism.

Bodri also usually uses the word socialism as a way of saying that the population is no longer capable of taking care of itself tends to try and vote itself bread and circuses, and thus socialism is always a bad thing, but  taking care of each other is something he praises at various points. The socialism Bodri despises is something that occurs when the elites have despoiled the masses, and the masses have thus lost their virtue.

Bodri’s smart and wide read, and his commentary is worth reading, but the book is most useful for his summaries of theories: sometimes very practical theories like how to trade world markets and so on.

Again, if you were to want to read only one book about how the world works, this is the one I would suggest. It isn’t a book by a genius about one or a few great ideas, it’s a book by someone who is well read about dozens of great ideas, and will serve as an excellent foundation for your own thinking and further reading.

The value of this book  is that it exposes you to so much. If you disagree or agree with some theories, what is useful is to think about WHY and to compare theories to each other: which predicts what, well, when?

The subtitle is “Improvisation and the Theatre,” but this is a book for far more than people involved in theatre, and one of the most profound I have read.

Johnstone started as a teacher, and specialized in “problem children,” whom he found to be the most imaginative and bright students, rather than those students who are simply compliant with teacher.

I have two favorite anecdotes from this book. The first is that when teaching drama students, Johnstone would sit on the floor, while the students were in chairs. He would tell them that if they didn’t achieve the abilities the class was teaching it was his fault, not theirs, because he was the teacher.

By the end of his introductory spiel, they would all be off the chairs, sitting on the floor with him, because they didn’t want to be “over” someone treating them as he was.

Johnstone would try and make students feel completely safe, and he found that as people learned not to censor themselves three layers would emerge.

The first was sexual: Often wildly, inappropriately sexual.

The second was a deep fear of God (remember he was teaching more than 50 years ago now) and of Hell, combined with anger and hatred.

The third and final layer was a deep tenderness.

(This is fairly similar to my experiences with meditation. Human nature, stripped of fear and desperate desire, appears to be essentially love. Most people never strip off enough to experience more than brief flashes of this, however.)

Johnstone has a long disquisition on status which is fascinating and useful far beyond the theatre. His analysis that higher status people own more space than lower status people, and that servants own no space, is brilliant.  His breaking down of conversational domination opened up whole vistas of understanding how people talk in real life.

But this is my favourite quote from the book:

I once had a close rapport with a teenager who seemed ‘mad’ when she was with other people, but relatively normal when she was with me. I treated her rather as I would a Mask – that is to say, I was gentle, and I didn’t try to impose my reality on her. One thing that amazed me was her perceptiveness about other people – it was as if she was a body language expert. She described things about them which she read from their movement and postures that I later found to be true, although this was at the beginning of summer school and none of us had ever met before.

I’m remembering her now because of an interaction she had with a very gentle, motherly schoolteacher. I had to leave for a few minutes so I gave the teenager my watch and said she could use it to see I was away only a very short time, and that the schoolteacher would look after her. We were in a beautiful garden (where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower and said: ‘Look at the pretty flower, Betty.’

Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’

‘Ah,’ said the teacher, blocking her, ‘but this flower is especially beautiful.’

Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. No one seemed to notice that she was screaming ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!”

In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorizing, and on selecting. Actually it was crazy to insist that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expected to distort the perceptions of the child in this way. Since then I’ve noticed such behaviour constantly, but it took the mad girl to open my eyes to it.

Reality isn’t, mostly. That’s not  to say there aren’t real things, and objects and so on, most of it is filtered so heavily that we never see the world minus huge amounts of connotation and framing we picked up from other people and pass on, too often rather like a virus. A great deal of what passes for us as wrong, escalating to mad, is really just people who refuse to live in our particular reality. (Other madness is, of course, far more serious.)

There’s a vast amount of information here, of course, on how to do improvisational theatre and my theatre friends tell me it’s great, even foundational. The most important points are to always accept prompts (don’t shut down what your impro mate is doing, but run with it) and to not try to be too clever, because too clever doesn’t flow from whatever was given to you and the audience won’t buy it or get it.

But this book is one I keep coming back to because so much of it is about what it means to be human, how to retain our imagination, and how not to drown in social conditioning. It’s a fundamental book, one which deals with the deepest issues and illuminates them. Recommended for everyone.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

I thought it would be nice to share books we loved after leaving high school, or thereabouts. As with the previous post on childhood books, all off-topic comments will be deleted.

As before, I make no claim any of these books are “good,” only that I loved them.

The Spenser Novels, Robert Parker

Ostensibly first person “tough guy” detective novels, these are really extended meditations on the good life: what sort of person one should be, how one should act, what’s worth doing and not doing. Spenser has created the person he wants to be, and it’s a person that comes with high costs.

The dialogue is good, the plots are sometimes good, the characters become old friends and cliches over the length of the series. All the books are not as good as each other. Still, they were comfort food bestsellers for years.

The Burke Novels, Andrew Vachss

Also first person tough guy detective novels, but very different from the Spenser novels, except for the characters pushing hard into power-fantasy territory. Burke’s down and out, his obsession is catching pedophiles, and his world is nasty. I found these depressing when I read them in my early 20s, and I stopped reading them after the fifth, as my mood no longer went with them.

But they’re good. And the shit world they depict is one too many people live in. Start at the beginning, with Flood.

The SPQR Novels, John Maddox Roberts

I wrote a long review of just these novels. They’re fun detective stories set in the late Roman Republic. Carried a couple with me whenever I traveled for years. Highly recommended.

A Tapestry of Magics, Brian Daley

There is a place, which attracts pieces of other realities, ruled by an immortal king (who is almost certainly Conan), where much that is lost, be it armies, lovers, or vampires often wind up.

It is the story of Crassmor Tarrant, the ne’er do well son of a powerful family, and features three linked novellas about his life, showing his fall from his father’s grace and his heroics as a nearly outcast knight errant who wants nothing to do with heroics, but only to return home safely to the woman he loves.

Crassmor is delightful: He’s clever, cynical on the surface, and somewhat tired. Unlike a lot of protagonists he’s not stupid about, say, the opposite sex or how the world works: He’s a carouser and womanizer and gambler.

This book is a love letter–to Robin Hood, Conan, courtly knight stories, and far more besides. The author loves his world and his characters and it shines through. And it’s fun.

The Wizard War Series, by Andrew Offut and Richard Lyon

Offut’s one of those authors who wrote a lot, and none of it worked for me, except this one series with Lyon.  The protagonist is the pirate Tiana Highrider. She’s ridiculously overconfident, believes she never feels fear (but often does), very clever, and quite funny. In the first book, she and her foster father go on separate quests to find the pieces of the body of a deceased wizard so they can bring him fully back to life, at which point he will consume their souls and ignite a wizard war.

Her father, a black ex-cannibal, writes his part as letters to his daughter, and they are hilariously on point: Caranga may have adopted Tiana, but his character flaws are hers; she’s his daughter.

The first book sets in motion a war between the two greatest wizards in the world: Prye and Ekron, placing Tiana naturally at the center. (There’s an actual, plot-driven reason.) The second two novels aren’t quite as fun, but they’re still a gas. The world building is excellent, and the secondary characters exhibit the same sense of fun.

Sword and sandal in its feel, with Conan style magic (it’s always bad), I’ve read this series over and over and loved it every time.

The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Bujold has written a LOT of novels, they’ve almost all been bestsellers, and her longest running series is the Vorkosigan series.

I don’t think Bujold has ever written a bad story, though some are definitely weaker than others (those books primarily intended as romances tend to fall flat to me, and I don’t dislike romances).

But of all her books, and I love many, I love the Curse of Chalion the most.  The protagonist is a man broken by war and slavery. Once a noble commander, when we meet him he is poverty ridden, ill, and hoping only for a servant’s job in the castle of an old master he once loved.

That doesn’t turn out to be the case, of course. He wants only peace, but driven by love, he winds up in service to a princess at the heart of a massive power struggle in a corrupt court, whose weak king has given his power to an ambitious and ruthless man; because the family is under a great curse.

In terms of plot, this book is about the resolution of the power struggle and that curse, but what it’s really about is faith and divinity and what the Gods can and can’t do. Even though it’s a universe where the Gods definitely exist, their powers in the world are sharply limited: They can do little to nothing without the aid of mortals, who have free will, and can shut them out.

And the curse can only be lifted by the Gods, who need the aid of a mortal.

But the price of faith is high, and the Gods, even though good, do not act as mortals would have them do. Faith requires, well, faith, as it does in our world, and this book turns out to be probably the best meditation on faith I’ve read, despite its fantasy setting.

Time of the Dark Trilogy, by Barbara Hambly

Hambly’s another author I’ve loved for a long time. She’s got her obsessions, like most, and her characters tend to fall into definite types. In addition to this series, The Ladies of Mandyrign is probably her best.

This series starts off as many fantasy novels once did by taking the protagonists from our world (late 1970s California) into the fantasy world, where there is a rising threat of squamous shapeshifting horrors which float on the wind and consume mind and soul of their victims.

Civilization is shattered, the protagonists cannot be sent back and they flee towards safety. One becomes a wizard, the other a warrior, both try to survive and hope to find a way to defeat the Dark, delving into the history of their previous defeat, using the skills of the female protagonist, a doctoral student in history.

This is a bunch of things: there’s a couple love stories, both good; there’s a meditation on what it means to be a Wizard–“you must love things for themselves before they will give themselves to  you”; there’s a long story of church/state infighting and intrigue; There’s a world with politics and empires and kingdoms that make sense; there’s an investigation of what makes a good warrior and what makes someone willing and able to kill as a calling; there’s love and hate and lust for power and curiousity and magic, and; all the good stuff.

It starts a bit rough, being Hambly’s first, but roars on.

I can’t recommend everything Hambly’s written, not even every book set in this world, but the first three, the trilogy, are part of that set of books I’ve read and re-read, and carried with me on innumerable flights.

And Hambly’s interesting. Her world view is interesting. If it gets a bit tiresome by book ten, well, it’s one worth knowing.

Mairelon the Magician, by Patricia Wrede

Regency England street urchin and thief Kim is hired to find out if a traveling magician has a silver bowl. The magician catches her, and offers to take her on as his apprentice.

The catch, he’s a real mage, not just a stage magician.

This lovely book is escapade after escapade, bordering on farce. Both Mairelon and Kim are delightful, scrappy and lack much in the way of a sense of self-preservation, leading to endless scrapes.

The book ranges from the back streets of London to high society; a druid lodge, a Bow Street Runner and a country estate, with the protagonists plowing gleefully on.

It’s also charming and touching; Mairelon is a good guy, and Kim’s tough and clever. Light as angel cake, but twice as fun.

Concluding Remarks

Fiction can be about ourselves, but I enjoy it most when it’s about someone who is not much like me. I’ve been me all my life, fiction lets me see the world as someone else, and it often lets me see world’s I’ve never seen, whether they’re fantasy worlds, science fiction worlds, historical worlds, or just parts of my world that Ian will never see.

Tell us about fiction you loved as an adult in the comments.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.