First book by Jason Pargin and my god, why did I not discover this mad genius sooner.
I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is about a socially inept Lyft driver, whose whole life seems to revolve around his rideshare job, his edgelord Twitch channel, and getting yelled at by his ex-Marine father, who is infinitely disappointed with him. One day he is offered $200 000 by a mysterious cool chick for taking her and her locked road case from his hometown in California to Washington DC, on the condition they leave at once, tell no one they're going, bring no trackable electronic devices, and that he asks no questions.
Through a series of bizarre incidents and coincidences, the two misfits' journey soon catches the attention...
Book Reviews
A selection of book reviews by Forum Members.
The Great Peace – Mena Suvari
Mena writes with a sparing straightforward style, which deceptively, seems a little lightweight at first. However, then, as the book draws you more and more in: WHAM! Super powerful writing; raw, honest, incisive, like a surgeon's knife getting to the core root. Ms Suvari writes with a touching modesty and unassumingness. There are no airs and grace, there is no bragging about her fame or successful film career. Underneath the great success of American Beauty - and she is incredibly beautiful with babylike wide set eyes that convey a charming innocence - we discover that Mena was going through great pain in her life. The book is not about Hollywood and the film world but as she explains in the final...
The Surrogate – Louise Jensen
This novel had a dated feel to it, with landlines and similar featuring large. It is a coming-of-age vis-a-vis coming to terms with teenage death and first love combined with psychological thriller. There is so much going on, it is all almost too much. Lisa's twin brother, Jake is killed is a car accident (not a spoiler as that is how the novel begins as a scene setter). Lisa's best friend from school Kat - the main narrator - is desperate for a baby, being infertile (you'll find out why) and Lisa offers to be the surrogate.
The characters are all pretty stock, as are the love scenes, although I thought the character of Nick was particularly well drawn. He was the only character I cared about...
From the Bottom of the Heap – Robert Hillary King
I was delighted to receive a copy signed by Robert Hillary King himself. (Dated 6/7/12). I was inspired to read this book having read Albert Woodfox' autobiography, as one of the so-called 'Angola Three', who spent several decades in solitary confinement in a penitentiary nicknamed 'Angola' (actually in Louisiana,USA), who civil rights activists campaigned against their harsh treatment owing to their having organised a Black Panther movement within the prison, believing their treatment to be a continuation of slavery that dominated the USA until quite recently, in which the southern states still had enforced segregation well into the 1960's.
King doesn't pretend to have lived a life...
Your reviewer has read several books categorised as feminism, which may be something to do with being born into an 80% female household. This one reads like a feature length academic paper whereas many are more polemical. Kate Manne is a moral philosopher at Ivy League Cornell University and advertises her text as the first to deal with misogyny using philosophical analysis.
It is a self-masking problem, she says, which has the effect that drawing attention to the phenomenon will work to bring out more of it (or at least, not get rid of it). And the definition of misogyny according to consensus wisdom tends to chase its own tail and disappear under most attempts to identify and point out manifestations. That is why it is still a...
Human beings are social animals, according to Aristotle and Roman Emperor Aurelius. Yet, in contrast to a couple of hundred millennia of collective living, the last generation or two has uniquely been accompanied by a big rise in living alone. All adult age cohorts have involved themselves in the experiment. This includes your reviewer who has lived solo since as soon as she could afford to which was nearly twenty years ago. It doesn't (any more) include Eric Klinenberg, the book's author, a snippet probably introduced to head off notions of a sociological manifesto written by an avid and presumed biased practitioner. And the book isn't a narrow celebration of unrepresentative high-income urbanite singlehood either, though that group...
Dr. Joseph Schwarcz is a sessional instructor of Chemistry at McGill University. He is the director of McGill’s Office for Science and Society (OSS), an organization dedicated to debunking pseudoscientific myths as well as improving scientific literacy.
This book is divided into three sections (aside from the intro), black, grey, and white.
The black section of the book covers quackery that is outrageous and obviously false, such as “double helix water,” the HCG weight-loss scheme, and a guy who has made millions by staring at people.
The grey section of the book covers topics that are a bit less obvious and that the public often gets confused about. He does a great detailed dive into topics such as antioxidants and coconut oil (and...
To many introverted types the refrain "Humans are social animals" sometimes jars. But the context of Michael Bond's volume is not about hosting dinner parties or joining a bridge club; it's a powerful documentation of the extent to which we are not running our own show even if we think we are. Rather, we seem particularly hard-wired to copy, identify with and be influenced by what other folks are doing. And we really want them to accept or at least acknowledge us. This is pretty universal and invariant with respect to personality types (except that everybody believes herself to be more immune to it than average).
Biologically the explanation for attraction to social identity appears to be its superiority in respect of evolutionary...
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Your reviewer took Physics A-level in 1992 and hasn't really touched it since. Helen Czerski has written the kind of book that she wishes had been a textbook, but couldn't really be, but which helps traverse the yawning chasm between what one studies and what happens in real life around this subject. Similar books exist for other natural sciences, and maths and economics. The BBC sometimes pulls some of it into radio shows, in which this author (a physicist at University College London who studies mostly bubbles) has contributed. It would be great if this stuff was on TV too (maybe it is)
Gravity is a perpetual free force (available since before free wifi and in more places) that perhaps sometimes seems limiting because it...
Believe me, this book has made me not only a better prepared consumer, but a better prepared person when it comes to being manipulated. Sometimes you can tell you are being manipulated but you can't put your finger on it so you might let it go. Not after you read this book. You will be able to articulate the technique used on you (and there are only 6). This book is a fun read and arms you against unethical (and maybe even ethical) persuasion.
I stumbled on this book at the library one day knowing nothing about it. I was dumbfounded how much I learned and later I discovered this is the classic book on the subject.
I just looked up Cialdini and he has written much since this book. I haven't vetted them. I'm only vouching for this one.
On page 13 of this book, Matthew Crawford, writer and motorcycle engineer calls for a "right to not be addressed". This struck your reviewer as such an astonishingly good idea (she cherishes her share of not being addressed), that it will probably never catch on. Crawford is, actually, complaining about the freedom that anonymous corporate forms enjoy to treat one's attention as something to be harvested if she hasn't the skill to direct it herself. But he is also likening silence (in a broader- than-audio sense) to clean air: a commons that authority should protect. Yet because it has to a large extent been given away free, or simply appropriated and monetised, one has to pay to get it back (such as for the ad-free app, or the...
This fairly short novel tells of a few days in the life of Sonja Hansen, who feels herself an oddball, an outsider from Jutland, now residing in Copenhagen. Forty and single, her attempts to learn to drive provide a prop for Sonja’s introspective flow of consciousness about her life, her past and where she is going. Whilst the story is told in the third person and the driving lessons narrative is linear, in conventional story-telling style, her thoughts and reminiscences are wonderfully non-linear – even circular – as she tries to ‘go back’ to a time she sat in the rye fields or watched whooper swans across the plains.
There is a melancholic ruefulness as Sonja ruminates about her difficult relationship with her sister...
Tom Vanderbilt attempts rather well to demonstrate that, contrary to some received wisdom, there is accounting for taste. His book is an account for it. Moreover plenty of it is logical, or at least predictable, given a modest background in behavioural quirks that seem entertainingly daft, but which are mostly honed by evolutionary stuff. It's quite hard to get past the quadruple-decker ice cream cone on the front cover of the paperback, because there are no such pictures inside.
incidentally the reason why ice cream or chocolate dessert is demanded at the end of dinner: that's when the diner is fullest. Food has to work harder than other times to get intake. So morsels rich in sweet lovelies are what make the cut.
Taste--likes...
It is sometimes assumed that in today's modern age it is far easier than before to spend a day not meeting anyone in person, or even speaking to anyone, without feeling lonely and without cutting oneself off, thanks to online connectivity. Indeed a case often made is that modern media have made things easier for chronically shy types, introverts or those with autism. Susan Pinker, a Canadian psychologist, disagrees with almost all of this. The internet is no substitute for face to face interaction and "meatspace" social bonds, she says, and where it does become substituted anyway it makes people unhappy, ill and less likely to live as long. In one of many references to "female effects", Ms Pinker argues that the longer life...
Although published 1950, some 67 years ago, this remains a fantastic read. I selected this as I wanted to understand how the reformation unfurled in Europe. This tells of Mikael Karvajalka (the original title in Finnish) translated as Michael Furfoot, born in Turku-Åbo, circa 1503, and who is orphaned after a Danish raid. He is then fostered by a middle-aged spinster who manages to secure him a scholarship with a priest and he rises up to become a tutor. However, he longs for ordination, but is denied this due to his being illegitimately born.
The period at the start of the book - which goes through ten chapters - is that of the Kalmar Union with the Danish King Christian at its head. Several bishops in Swedish-Finland and Sweden...
Arrival City is Doug Saunders' own term. Others that are used to describe the same places include slum, shantytown, favela, banlieue, ghetto, ethnic enclave and plattenbau, which Mr Saunders believes mostly misunderstand and misrepresent their true nature. This book is a fix for that, as well as a brilliantly colourful tour of several of these places, usually located as close as they can get (given market or policy constraints) to large urban centres both in the developing world and the rich west. One of the most enduringly successful arrival cities according to the (Canadian) author is around Bethnal Green in London, 3km from where this reviewer lives, less than one from where she works and quite often where she can be found running...
This thread concerns the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CQYAWRY/
From the blurb:
"In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI's Holy Grail—human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine."
For the record, I have strong doubts about "as little as a decade". But I do think it's possible. For the most part this was a good book, minus some technical errors. For example, the weights...
Aziz Ansari is a comedian by trade and makes some effort to help the reader remember this every few pages through "Modern Romance". His lighthearted study of searching, flirting, dating, cheating and marrying is part-powered by academic Eric Klinenberg who also wrote Going Solo. Your reviewer recognises the title of Ansari's book as the name of a British boy-band energetically lip-syncing to "Best Years Of Our Lives" on TV when she was very young. Mr Ansari isn't old enough to have had them in mind, she thinks.
The book has quite a lot to say about the role of mobile phones in romantic endeavour (and still calls them "smartphones" quite a lot, which feels a bit last-decade to this reviewer). But it also tries to take a slightly...
NIck Cohen won a polemic award for this 2013 attack on censorship. Your reviewer found it to be dignified and salutory. One-sided for sure (you get what you buy), and narrower in focus than she expected in respect of the author's targets, which are principally the demands for silencing that come from zealous Islam, western corporations, and wealthy individuals. According to Mr Cohen the first of these three has cowed former proponents of liberalism into fear that masquerades as disingenuous group identity politics that betray the values liberals supposedly champion. The second exploits an anachronism of command-control that has lain far too unchallenged in the make-up of firms, even as the same has been extensively dismantled in public...
Despite some quotes on its cover, books about being a committed single woman are probably something of a niche. For context this reviewer--like Kate Bolick--has never married, is childless, and in somewhat retro-fashion likes to prefix herself as Miss where applicable. Bolick (in her 43rd year when "Spinster" came out in 2015) goes one better and attempts to reclaim her book's title as a badge of honour. And in an echo of one of Miss Bolick's personal recollections, your reviewer spent her student days dreaming of and plotting how to arrange things so that she could live alone in the city as soon as possible. She (reviewer) is still living that dream a couple of decades on, and the dream hasn't changed and probably won't. Miss...
Immigrants are regular folks whose lives don't fit neatly within national boundaries. Your reviewer is one of the quarter billion (the number doesn't include illegal migrants) living outside her country of birth, and counts herself fortunate to have lived for more than a few months in three other countries as well. She has dual citizenship of New Zealand and the United Kingdom and has often wondered why it isn't easy for people to accumulate many nationalities at will should they wish to. So fair disclosure--she is not an opponent of immigration.
Philippe Legrain's 2007 text is a compelling case for this kind of thing to be far more widespread, and as such it goes against the tide of contemporary popular consensus on the left and...
Fresh water is the ultimate renewable resource. And in large parts of the world it is the ultimate common resource too. The former is reason to be optimistic about future water security. After all, the world has an awful lot of the stuff. But most economists would raise a red flag of pessimism in respect of the latter. Fred Pearce, a British science writer and (ultimately) an optimist, does so too. The world would appear to be running out of water.
A problem with the renewable attribute of fresh water (97% of the planet's H2O is salinated and essentially poison) is that it doesn't necessarily get renewed in the right place or at the right time. Aquifiers (underground reservoirs, the largest sources of fresh water on Earth) do not get...
This reviewer agreed with almost everything she read in this 2011 book; Fred Pearce, a British science/environment writer, has managed to very closely replicate her views on population, fertility, causes, the role of policy and immigration. That's remarkable (hence the remark). It also told her plenty she didn't yet know.
Such as this: worldwide fertility (average number of children per female) actually peaked more than half a century ago. Not that world population is shrinking yet (that may be 25+ years off, and more than 70 million people are still being net added to this planet annually), though there have been days when it has shrunk, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The rate at which population grows by a billion has started...
This is the third Gary Klein book your reviewer has read, and is the second one that she perceives to be a general assault on the love of rules and data-based decision making that permeates business life, government and much professional activity. Klein asserts he is not the enemy of such ideas, but that the boundaries at which they stop being any good (and actually get dangerous) are not that wide. And the areas where one needs something else are what he calls the shadows, rather than under the streetlight: complex situations that are disorderly, or unfamiliar, have ambiguous goals, lack observational data, or time, or clear feedback. According to Klein this covers the bulk of situations, akin to the sub-surface portion of an...
This isn’t a self-help book, though it looked to this reviewer as if it was inside the cover of one. Rather, Professor Gilbert of Harvard University writes about supposed deficiencies of the human brain, though always within a context of how vital these are to survival. And survival is probably the end-all, but it may not be the be-all.
Human beings manufacture futures, in ways no other creature does, and it’s why we get to wear high heels and not just splash around on lily pads or dig burrows or spin webs. We use our frontal lobe to do this and we’re the only species that has one each. Phineas Gage surgically removed most of his with a tamping iron in 1848 and survived, but didn’t have the ability to plan any more. But with this...
This reviewer loves cities. She has lived in three since leaving her native New Zealand, visits dozens of them a year, and makes her home of 16 years in the middle of London. Edward Glaeser, a second generation immigrant economist at Harvard University, loves them as well. Your reviewer found a great deal to like in his book, though wonders whether readers of more rural leaning would be so enthused.
Cities are the absence of physical space between people. They exist, and typically thrive, because although distance is dead thanks to technological development, proximity, paradoxically, matters more than ever. Concentration of ideas, talent, innovation, discovery into geographical clusters has never been disrupted, ever since human...
Evidence abounds of the existence of behaviour which is contrary to material best interest, stuff that one would be better off not doing, either altruistic or all-round destructive, and sometimes described as irrational. Such behaviour is sufficiently common that few are surprised by it. And many explanations put forward to account for why self-sacrifice prevails have gained acceptance. This book sorts and organises these explanantions, notes that they fail to account for all self-sacrificing behaviour, and fills in the blanks with the elegant "commitment model", in which emotions serve useful purpose and deliver evolutionary superiority. Even in non hunting/gathering times.
Some altruism theories are religious (essentially, god is...
Atul Gawande's title may have been a gamble in respect of this book's success, because as he says on page 173 "We don't like checklists". Not (just) because they are not much fun, but because someone whose skill lies in performing complex or difficult tasks probably also regards them as beneath her. Standard operating procedure implies rigidity and mindlessness. But the value of checklists according to Mr Gawande, a general surgeon in a US hospital, is the opposite: to take the stuff of dumb routines out of the way of skilled minds so that they don't have to focus on this.
This is important because complexity has increased, and seems sure to continue to do so as if on a one way street. Know-how and expertise is cumulative. And...
The future is very female according to Hanna Rosin. And so is the present too, more than is generally appreciated. She claims to be neither feminist (for trumpeting women over men) not anti-feminist (for suggesting the struggle for equality is over), but her choice of title will ensure that she is labelled as both, in spades. Probably that is OK for the bottom line.
Many of this book's observations are not revelations. Women's dominance on university campuses in most countries of the world is well documented. Similarly with secondary education. This manifests in more PhDs, masters, bachelors in law and medicine, and not quite but trending that way in science, engineering and business . . . going to girls.
Many professions are more...
Container ships are the "invisible industry that brings you 90% of everything"--a reference to the fraction of trade that moves by sea. Rose George, a writer and journalist, became the last officially allowed passenger on a British flagged merchant vessel of Maersk, a Danish company whose ships burn more oil than Denmark does, her mission being simply to make it more visible to those who want to see, but don't go to sea.
The Maersk Kendal, a mid sized box carrier, took Ms George from Felixstowe to Singapore over 39 days in 2011, via the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, Gulf of Aden (the danger point that has stamped out the business of carrying passengers since), and the Indian Ocean. Along with her it took twenty one crew and six thousand...
Dambisa Moyo's book is about economics, specifically growth, and is adorned with brush strokes that paint a rising China (followed by the other three BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India) overtaking the west (or just the US) in size, clout, and several kinds of agenda-setting. Such prognostications are neither new nor scarce, and this reviewer never finds herself gripped with fear by them (as she often suspects she is supposed to be) and they fall into the uninteresting category. Likewise so does supposedly rousing end chapter about how this situation can be turned around. To be fair the author is a bit restrained at framing things as zero sum, but she seems rather focussed on the matter of who is "winning" as well.
Partly due to the...
The world is a competitive place. Species perish, organisations fail, and stuff kills folks. On the upside, some people excel, some firms flourish, and societies make permanent advancements. Examining part of how the latter side happens is the quest of Gary Klein, a research psychologist. Performance improvements can be thought of via dry algebra: the solution to the problem of minimizing errors and maximizing insights. Much focus in life is on the first term, due to prevalent risk aversion, and to the relative ease of reaction compared to action. Not only does this neglect the maximand term, it actively suppresses it, because the two things conflict with each other to an important extent, such that the progress of each of them turns...
Hi all. It's been a while since I posted here last. I've completed a review of Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus" and put it on my website here:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/gakuseidon/Carrier_OHJ_Review.html
I've given a short extract of my review below. Any comments welcomed!
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While Carrier's book 'On the Historicity of Jesus: Why we have reason to doubt' (OHJ) presents a fully developed 'Jesus Myth' theory for consideration, it is really the second of two books in a series, the first being 'Proving History'. In 'Proving History', Carrier reviews the criteria of authenticity used by modern Bible scholars and shows that there are major issues with their applicability. He also...
The sub-title that Debra Satz, a professor of ethics at Stanford, gave to this was copied by Michael Sandel, similarly employed at Harvard, in "What Money Can't Buy" a year or so later. Your reviewer loved the latter, and this steered her to the present volume, which is more encompassing and more demanding. In short, it is excellent.
Satz emphasises that the text is normative (philosophy, ethics) not allocative or explanatory (efficiency, economics). However she misleads a little with this, because the two quickly get inter-twined. The type of allocative mechanism used to distribute something changes its moral standing in highly predictable and durable ways. And this rebounds on the economics, causing the equilibrium distribution to...
There is a spoiler at the end of the prologue to this, which is that humans are predictable when they try to be random. Though, this reviewer was more intrigued in the opener to learn of Claude Shannon's 'Ultimate Machine', which she swiftly you-tubed. She's a fan of that already. Anyway, there are a couple of useful truths in this book (which is alternatively titled "Rock Breaks Scissors") Both of them are deceptively simple, and both have generally wider implications and usefulnesses than . . . well, wider than merely intriguing the nerd quotient who would tend to show interest (this includes your reviewer).
The first truth is that however hard people try, they find it very difficult to simulate randomness. In a cute rotation of...
Catherine Hakim, a British social scientist, refers to "erotic capital" as the fourth personal asset. The first three are economic capital (money, wealth), human capital (expertise, education, intelligence) and social capital (slightly ill-defined networking and influencing capability, or "who you know"). Your reviewer wouldn't mind betting that erotic capital might have been the author's first choice of book title, but that second thoughts prevailed.
Hakim's case is that erotic capital is not efficiently used. And that when it is used then various groups set out to demean and devalue it, out of self-interest (patriarchal interests, she often just says "men"), or out of wrong-headedness (muddled feminism, which Hakim charges with...
More than a bit reminiscent of "Being Wrong" (by Kathryn Schultz) to this reviewer, but predating it by a while, this book offers a theory for why mistakes get not just made but entrenched. Or rather, the incidence of mistake itself is not much touched, as if it were a random outcome. But the investment of commitment and ego in it is. The bottom line is that if something goes wrong, it's going to stay wrong.
Which is bad. If an innocent person is believed to be guilty of a crime (by the appropriate folks), the window quickly closes through which they have any chance of not being convicted. Once people have a prejudice, they do not easily drop it.
So far, so bad. But there starts a chain reaction, or ratchet effect of behavior and...
Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice for over a decade, and gets to do it at an Ivy League business school. Your reviewer didn't know this before she bought the book. She would have chosen it anyway.
Which gets to the start of several well-researched aspects of the subject at hand. Although the insistence that more choice is always and everywhere better can sometimes seem ideologically blind and dogmatic, it is a general finding that it is preferred by humans, from infant onwards, and also by animals. This manifests even when there is no ex-ante advantage coming from autonomous selection. Similarly if choice is removed but provision remains identical (such as is the case for zoo animals, or at the Hotel California), displeasure...