Do the 2008 TBR challenge

I’ve been lagging with my posting. Here’s my progress is tracked in the list I wrote at the begining. I’m reading book # 32 for the year (most, but not all of them are TBR). I’ve now read every book off of last year’s TBR challenge list.

I do hope to sit down and write some posts on the books I’ve been reading. They’ve been really terrific.

I’m reading one of two recently added books – I’ve had them on the shelves for a couple years. I started on Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources, but found I could stand a bit more background, so I dug a few oldies off the shelf.

The current read attempts to make the math less intimidating by using humor. I think it succeeds, but I’d rather just plow through something more concentrated. So this is probably good, it’s forcing me to smell more roses on this journey of words, ideas, and an expanding universe.

Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

Ever wonder why civilization can be so ugly? Why is it that as we have become more and more capable, more and more advanced, we create an increasingly hideous landscapes?

Kunstler tackles this question. He builds an answer that draws on the history of architecture, economics, zoning laws, and incented behavior. As with # 20, this is not a hippy-dippy tree-hugger book. It’s an intelligent look at the destruction of America’s rural heritage and what can be done about it.

While the book is 15 years old (the author complains about how “cheap gas prices” lead to (sub)urban sprawl), much of what he has to say is applicable today.

I have a cousin in the land planning business (he draws up master plans, gets all the necessary permits and impact statements, then sells them to developers who actually buy the land and build the houses). Although he’s never read this particular book, I see many of the principles that he has applied mentioned here. I’ve lived in two different developments that he has planned. Both were delightful suburban spaces with plenty of common space (parks and gardens and fountains and playgrounds). Kunstler isn’t just blowing hot air, he’s pretty much on the money.

Pretty much any 43Ter ought to give this book a shot. It’s well written and causes one to examine the world about them differently.

You Can’t Eat GNP: Economics as Though Ecology Mattered, by Eric Davidson.

This is a book I’ve been meaning to read since it was first published in 2001. Finally, I have. And the world has moved on. Nevertheless, the book was an important one, and one that proved to be a bit of a paradigm shifter for me.

Davidson makes an eloquent case for what he calls ecological economics. His attempts to describe this new field seem to lack something … and I’m not firmly enough grounded in economics (or axiology) to figure it out. I do know that when your economic models assume that resources are infinitely renewable (and Davidson points this out, too), your economic plan will bring nothing but destruction and disaster.

This is not an Earth First! monkeywrenching tree-hugger manual. It is an attempt to take both economics and ecology seriously. And Davidson deserves major props for his efforts.

For me the paradigm shift came when I realized that we need to balance ecological concerns with business and agricultural concerns. I believe that doing this balancing without taking the next seven or so generations into account leads to a economics of destruction, and the Easter Island Scenario would happen planet-wide.

But there are just too many homo sapiens sapiens wandering around the planet to revert to some neo-eco-hippie hunter/gatherer lifestyle. We need everything that technology can teach us to develop a sustainable lifestyle for 6, 8, or even 10 billion persons. And our economics needs to take this into account.

I also came up with a new metric for discarding broken economic approaches: If the economic philosophy values the Mona Lisa only in terms of what the market would pay, and thus allows it to be destroyed if a larger amount of cash (GNP) would be generated that way, then it is truly a broken model. Once the Mona Lisa is gone, she is gone. Period. End of art.

Our souls would be poorer, but we could survive without her. After all, what percentage of the earth’s inhabitants will ever get to see her with the own eyes?

But the this applies with much more intensity to biomes, to ecosystems, and to the marvelous balance of spaceship earth. Learning to exchange your labor for the products of mine, to exchange goods and services in a way that respects the diverse and robust environment which sustains us is the key focus of this book.

Well worth reading and pondering.

The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge, by William Poundstone

Poundstone is an excellent expositor of the mathematical, logical, and scientific. This is one of his early books, now (apparently) long out of print. Poundstone focuses on how a few very simple “rules” (either mathematical/logical or laws of nature) can be applied repeatedly to create grand complexity.

He alternates chapters between John Conway’s game of Life and chapters on cosmology. In the nearly 30 years since the book was written, Life is much more accessible and our understanding of cosmology has changed a bit.

Nevertheless, this was a very enjoyable read.

I’ve obviously miscounted. I went back to the post where I’ve been keeping my list and counted the completed books. This is either #14 (off my original list) or #18 (off my expanded list).

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History by John Barry

Once upon a time I read The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story, a book about emergent viruses like ebola, then read Stephen King’s The Stand, which painted a graphic picture of life during and after a deadly plague. I thought this was the most terrifying combination of books I could read. I was wrong.

The Great Influenza is more blood-curdling than all that. And John Barry keeps repeating “and it was just influenza.”

If we count ever single AIDS fatality and add to them ever single person infected with HIV, the count (summed over nearly a quarter century) is still less than the body count of the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Barry paints horrifying pictures of the suffering, but also develops the history of scientific medicine in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

He connects a lot of interesting dots, too, although he makes clear what is speculative. Had it not been for the influenza pandemic, there is a reasonably good chance that the German offensive during the summer of 1918 would have succeeded, and WWI would have been a bloody draw. Woodrow Wilson suffered from influenza (influenza can cause brain damage) and then reversed himself on holding out for a just peace (thereby laying the foundation for WWII).

One of the doctors who was trying to discover the cause of the flu epidemic kept digging away at perplexing problems. His research began in 1918 and culminated in the early 1940s with the discovery that desoxyribonucleic acid was responsible for transmitting genetic traits. He was up for a lifetime achievement Nobel in 1944, but that was retracted because this research was so controversial. Not until 1955 did Watson and Crick get the Nobel for describing the structure of DNA – which they could not have done without Avery’s tireless and meticulous research.

It was a great read. It’s also the last of my books carried over from last year. One thing’s for dang sure, I’m gonna be getting my flu shots each year!!!

Drugs, Addiction and Initiation: The Modern Search for Ritual by Luigi Zoja

A very interesting book, somewhat clinically oriented, but without the “prohibitionist” baggage that most psychological books about addiction carry.

I started this book in 1997, but misplaced it before finishing it. Having gotten my mitts back on a copy, I started from the beginning. I was much less enamored on this go-round than I was a decade ago, nevertheless, I found quite a bit of interesting material to stir my mind.

One of Zoja’s ideas is to consider the “spiritual problem” of addiction, but from a very different perspective than most “addiction as a spiritual malady” approaches.

Zoja sees addiction as an attempt to self-initiate that is bound to fail. Whereas initiation in traditional societies starts out with ceremonial “death” and concludes with (re)birth into the milieu of adult society, western culture has no particular initiation.

Addiction brings the celestial visionary experience first, and then the craving for more – a “death experience” later – the exact reverse of a traditional initiation. So the addict is perpetually left uninitiated and needing ever more of the drug experience.

Finally, Zoja frames western drug subcultures as mirrors of the umbrella culture as mere consumerism, the sacralization of all that might ever be sacred.

Zoja’s many references to Mircea Eliade reminded me of how much I had enjoyed his work in the past. Something to consider for TBR 2009 …

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Phillip K. Dick

A friend loaned me the book. Had I not seen PKD’s picture on the back, I would have sworn it was a Tom Robbins novel. Well crafted characters up against life, love, success, death, and meaning. But, much more fun than your average “existentialist” novel.

It is interesting to speculate how much of Episcopalian Bishop Timothy Archer grows out of the real life Episcopalian Bishop James Pike

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The title of the book comes from considering “swan” synonymous with “white.” This was the standard European concept of the world … until black swans were discovered in Australia.

The book is about how to best handle the unexpected. As much as I might enjoy mocking Donald Rumsfeld, his “unknown unknowns” was an important category. Unfortunately, the “Rumsfeld Doctrine” of using a relatively small, technologically advanced force to obtain a military objective depended on a lack of black swans. Rumsfeld ignored his own thinking and thousands of people have died because of it.

Much of the book is spent arguing that the “Bell Curve” is rarely applicable, and that the possibility of a black swan negates any calculations made on the basis of the bell curve.

Since black swan events are unpredictable (9/11 was not a black swan. Tom Clancy wrote about using a 747 as a weapon, and I (among others) had already predicted the use of box cutters as a weapon that could be readily smuggled on board a plane. The iPod is a much better black swan when viewed from the 1950’s), the best mitigation strategy is to limit exposure.

Taleb suggests that a good investment strategy, for instance, would be putting 80 – 90 percent of one’s money into rock solid investments, while spreading the remaining cash into venture capital, so that when a black swan arises, it is a positive experience.

It was an interesting book, and a fun read. Taleb is over the top at times – this is no dreary business school tome.

Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio

This book was quite deceptive. I had glanced through the first couple of chapters about a year ago. I purchased the book for the story of “Elliot,” a patient of Damasio’s who suffered brain damage after the removal of a tumor.

Elliot had been an able businessman prior to his illness. Now Damasio was being sought to help Elliot obtain disability. Regular testing of memory and intelligence revealed no deficits. It was not until Damasio tried to book a second appointment that the problem began to manifest. Elliot could recount lists of pros and cons for when the next appointment should be, but was unable to choose an appointment. Damasio had do choose for him.

It turns out that Elliot also had an extremely restricted affect. He described himself as having no emotions. Elliot was essentially unable to make rational choices because he was incapable of knowing how he would feel about their potential outcomes.

Damasio spends much of the rest of the book developing the notion of the inseparability of mind, brain, and body. The main section of the book was much more technical than the opening anecdotal material. In reading it I became impressed with how complex the brain is … even though Damasio grossly oversimplifies.

This book is required reading for anybody interested in the role of the emotions in consciousness. Damasio is a powerful writer and the research he explains here has been cited in many, many books and articles about human consciousness.

This book was not on my original challenge list, nor was it an alternate nor a “special” alternate. But it was a book that had been sitting around for a few years, waiting TBR.

Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class, by Mike Davis

Davis is usually an excellent writer. Even his dense writing in Late Victorian Holocausts can be readily parsed and understood. His book on the Avian Flu is one of the best popular treatments of the issue (and I get that from a retired epidemiologist).

But Prisoners seems to be Davis’ painting in the closet. He is inexcusably comfortable using pseudo-academic jargon until a reasonable person longs to return to pretentious post-modern analysis of quantum physics …

A second fault is Davis’ failure to include a glossary or acronym dictionary. He flings around names of obscure labor leaders, organizations, and movements without providing a reasonable amount of explanation (if you’d still like to read this book, get a comprehensive guide to the American labor movements to help you keep track of who is doing what to whom).

Those gripes aside, Davis tackles a weighty question: “Why has the United States not developed a significant Labor or Social Democrat party?”

There is a wealth of labor history in this book. Unfortunately, the epic basically ends in the mid 80’s. This vast stream of history makes it easier to comprehend how Carter’s move to the right has snowballed to the insane situation in United States politics where Hilary Clinton is considered “liberal” (virtually any time in the 20th century she would have been considered center-right).

I’m glad to have read this book. I’m glad I’ll not have to read it again. I’ve now (I believe) read all the books that Davis has written. He continues to be an important and skilled American writer … but this book doesn’t exhibit his craft in the best light.