Mount TBR #5

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction - Mary Sojourner

The shocking results of November, 2016 has driven me to read books about cognitive psychology, so that I can mull over the question, why do people do irrational things against their own interest? One reason is addiction.

This well-written self-help book is about compulsive gambling, which is an addiction because it messes with brain chemistry and renders arguments about “moral failings” and “will power” irrelevant and unhelpful. Not comforting is the fact that among all the addicts of this and that, gambling addicts are the most likely to relapse.  Sojourner herself is in recovery from compulsive gambling, so obviously her own experience brings insight to the research that she reports.

The book is mostly taken up by the dreadful stories told by members of the support group called Scheherazade’s Sisters. These women have been through the mill, experiencing physical, mental, and financial hardships brought on by compulsive gambling. I daresay that people who have had similar experiences will have many head-nodding, “youbetcha” moments when they read these narratives.

Sojourner takes the role of the teacher and facilitator of the group, providing them and us the readers with information about physiological, emotional, and social factors contributing to the behavior. She also describes the morally disreputable tactics of the gaming industry to get people in the chairs, especially in front of the slots. The smartest people in the world work devise ingenious ways to extract money from certain types of people utilizing the effect of behaviorist psychology on the chemistry of the brain. It’s sobering that human beings can be so cynical and avaricious as to screw with people’s brains like this.

As a self-help book, it is not written for hard-core readers like us. Instead, it is written for people who don’t usually read. So to reach the majority who see reading as an unavoidable ordeal and boring chore, the prose style is extremely easy and direct. For instance, the relatively difficult information about brain chemistry and psychodynamics is listed in bullet points.

European RC #2

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

The Devils of Loudon – Aldous Huxley

We remember Huxley nowadays for the dystopia Brave New World. But he wrote many other fiction and non-fiction books, one of which was this history of religious and sexual obsession in 17th century France. Huxley’s theme is that that the evils we ascribe to religious intolerance are instead a product of human nature. That political bosses in any society manipulate ideas - fear, superstition, self-interest, patriotism, etc. -  and their dissemination in order to maintain their power and access to the other goodies like prestige, offices, awards, travel, prostitutes, and luxury food.

… Few people now believe in the Devil; but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number. In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism and true religion.

So the Communists are consigned to the trashcan of history but other hobgoblins - liberals, inflationists, the Federal Reserve, Blacks, Muslims, terrorists – are invented and utilized to scare the rubes.

Huxley gets across what a weird century the 17^th was, with regard to its mix of devout religion and unbridled sexuality. In 1632 an entire Ursuline convent in the village of Loudun was apparently possessed by the devil. That is, hysteria was contagious and the fame and wealth that came from all the attention was congenial. The girls and women accused a priest, Urban Grandier, of being in league with the devil. A village cabal hated Grandier. They trumped up the charges to get him tried and burned at the stake. I had to skip the dozen of so pages that detailed his torture before he was consigned to the flames for witchcraft.

While proving that his message of the danger of the powerful oppressing the vulnerable is still relevant in an election year of 2016, Huxley inserts essays about many other topics of interest, such as Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (“an absurd and charming book”); bovarism, the glamorized estimate of oneself; and the shift of  the way of thinking of the medieval world to our more recognizable modern world.

When I read Huxley, I feel I am with a knowledgeable and witty but down to earth thinker. I don’t mind running to the dictionary about every other page. His ideas about Vendanta and Zen went rather over my head, as I don’t think I have the kind of mind to be an adequate mystic. For me, Huxley is rather too broad-minded about ESP and PK, too.

Top 5 Must-read Nonfiction

1. Ethics, Aesthetics: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

2. War: With the Old Breed at Peliliu and Okinawa - Eugene Sledge. Best WW2 memoir ever

3. Laughter: My Life and Hard Times - James Thurber

4. Scholarship, Love of Family, Friends, and Colleagues: Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary - K.M. Elizabeth Murray

5. Travel, History: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West

The Road to Ubar

The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands - Nicholas Clapp

An Emmy award-winning documentary film maker is intrigued by stories about Ubar, a lost city in what is now Oman. He persuades NASA that he's a serious researcher so they take shots of the area from space. This data collection provides evidence for backers who pony up for a 1991-92 expedition.

This book presents a narrative of desert travel and archeological dig in the matter-of-fact style and enthused tone of a Nat Geo article. Some parts do ramble and the fictionalizing didn't work.

But this is well worth reading for those with a passing interest in travel stories, the Middle East, or pop archeology

Running the Amazon

Running the Amazon – Joe Kane

In this travel book by Joe Kane, a multi-national team raises the funding to locate the source of the Amazon in order to follow it from the snowfields of its origin in the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic Ocean. What makes this travel book exceptional is that the personal and inter-cultural conflicts among the 11 team members are much more interesting than the usual egomania and fatigue-based sniping and carping that mar other travel narratives. The writing style is restrained even when Kane is dealing with dangerous white water, extreme geography and weather, bugs snakes and germs oh my, and Shining Path guerrillas. Well worth reading.

Stalin & His Hangmen

Stalin and His Hangmen - Donald Rayfield

It is easy to see why this book in used in poli sci courses about highly repressive political regimes. This book will give an insight in the reality of repression when the gangsters in a society occupy the highest positions of power. The concise biographies of Stalin himself and his scorpion-like henchmen are especially interesting. The only drawback is that we don't get a sense of the psychology of coercive persuasion: who were the jailers, the torturers, the executioners and what buttons did their superiors have to push to turn ordinary slobs and brutes into evil war criminals. It's not enough to imply that they did evil deeds out of fear of the consequences of non-compliance.

Nonfiction RC Wrap-Up Post

I read these books for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

Wrap-up post.

Click the date to go to the review.

1 Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence – Garry Wills

Post: Friday, July 4

2 Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War – Tony Horwitz

Post: Friday, July 11

3 Travels with Herodotus - Ryszard Kapuscinski

Post: Friday, August 1

4 And the War Came: The North and Secession Crisis 1860-61 – Kenneth Stampp

Post: Friday, August 8

5 The Blue Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveller to Lifer at Mitsubishi – Niall Murtagh

Post: Monday, August 18

6 Annie Oakley and the World of Her Time – Clifford Lindsey Aldermann

Post: Friday, September 5

7 The Look of Architecture - Witold Rybczynski

Post: Friday, September 12

8 Darwin & The Science of Evolution - Patrick Tott

Post: Friday, September 19

9 The Globe Encompassed – Glenn J. Ames

Post: Friday, September 26

10 In the Wake of Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made – Norman F. Cantor

Post: Wednesday, October 15

11 Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s – Frederick Lewis  Allen

Post: Friday, October 24

12 The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War – Drew Gilpin Faust

Post: Friday, October 31

13 In the Land of the Blue Poppies: The Collected Plant-hunting Writings - Frank Kingdon-Ward

Post: Wednesday, November 5

14 Dream Lucky : When FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat... – Roseanne Ogill

Post: Monday, November 10

15 The Naturalist in the Amazons – H.W. Bates

Post: Wednesday, November 26

16 Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America – Frederick Lewis Allen

Post: Friday, December 5

17 A Handbook of Pickwick Papers – Logan Clendening

Post: Friday, December 12

18 Marlon Brando – Patrician Bosworth

Post: Wednesday, December 17

19 Unbeaten Tracks in Japan – Isabella Bird

Post: Friday, December 19

20 Adventures in Japan – Evelyn Kaye

Post: Wednesday, December 24

Nonfiction RC #21

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

The Pursuit of Personal Happiness - Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis (1913 - 2007), a psychologist, developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).  Central to this approach is Hamlet’s idea, “There is nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” That is, our beliefs and judgments about events bother us, not the events themselves. By disputing our irrational beliefs and judgments, we reduce the intensity of negative emotions and thus think more clearly and skeptically, increase the frequency of positive emotions, and feel more satisfied with life. 

The basic message is that we can pursue happiness rationally. When we are fearful, anxious, frustrated, or angry, we had better convince ourselves that it's not "logical" to be angry over this issue. When something goes wrong, we had better feel disappointment or regret, otherwise stoking our own anger or demanding the impossible will just keep us overgeneralizing, seeing things as worse than they are (the cruel world fallacy) and unable to tolerate ambiguity or frustration.

I don’t read much in the self-help genre. For one, the same ideas are repeated time and again throughout the book, though as a teacher I realize the importance of repetition in the business of changing behavior. What I like about Ellis is his challenge to use logical evidence to strike down irrational beliefs. I like his faith that we can challenge our thinking through self-questioning and positive thoughts.

Of downsides, we live in an imperfect world indeed. Lots of self-help advice just seems like common sense. Defeating the natural human tendency to be irrational also seems as far-fetched as loving one’s neighbor as deeply as one’s self. Assuming the problem always lies within ourselves also lets a screwy world – especially the world of work – off the hook. I once attended a safety and security workshop in which the presenter mantraed that I had a personal responsibility to know what to do in case a shooter starting blasting away in my workplace. I thought, how weird that I, the master of my own fate, become the irresponsible one if I’m unlucky enough to be caught in the lobby, where there’s no door to lock and barricade, and get my negligent ass riddled with bullets.

As Johnny Cash sang, “I don't like it but I guess things happen that way.”

Nonfiction RC #20

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye, 2000

The 1990s saw many travel books of the “in their footsteps” variety, in which a writer would trace the route of a famous traveler. In this case, travel writer and journalist Evelyn Kaye followed the tracks of Isabella Bird in the Tohoku (northeast) and the island of Hokkaido in Japan in 1998.

On the upside, her writing is enthusiastic, endearing in a solo female traveler who has never been to Japan before and does not speak the language. Everything is new to the writer, the pretty scenes, the easy transportation, the tasty food. Everybody is nice, willing to go out of their way to help her have a nice time. She quotes judiciously from Bird’s Unbeaten Tracksin Japan (1878), which I read in tandem with this one.

On the downside, she seems to belong to the “if you can’t say something nice” school of travel writers, so we have to rely on the Bird quotations. This, on the culture of the Ainu:

The glamour which at first disguises the inherent barrenness of savage life has had time to pass away, and I see it in all its nakedness as a life not much raised above the necessities of animal existence, timid, monotonous, barren of good, dark, dull, “without hope, and without God in the world…”

Another quibble I have is that the Japanese words are rendered in a way that we would expect somebody who doesn’t speak the language would render them. For drinking water, we get “okiya” for ohiya and for generic water, we get “misu” for mizu. Kuruma is given over and over again as “kurama.” Nor was she well-served by her translators. For the proverb about Nikko, “Never say ‘splendid (kekko)’ till you’ve seen Nikko,” we get “content” for “splendid.” 

But I still recommend this short introduction to regions of Japan that receive little press. Her description of resorts brought back nice memories of the summer of 1992, which I spent teaching in Niigata, which has many hot springs to enjoy.

Nonfiction RC #19

I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014.

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko – Isabella Bird

Miss Bird is known as the most famous Victorian lady traveler. Published in 1880, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan was the result of her first East Asian journey, one made after her sojourn in the US, which produced the memorable A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. She was an accurate observer, had a keen eye for plants, and had interest in public sanitation and medical care in hospitals.

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is a selection of the letters she sent to her sister during her seven months in Japan in 1878. She began her trip in Yokohama and Edo (then newly named Tokyo). With her 18-year-old guide Ito, she made her way through the prefectures of Tochigi (Nikko), Niigata, Yamagata, Akita, and Aomori. Luckily it was summer when she passed through mountainous snow country. Then she crossed the Tsugaru Strait to Yezo (now called Hokkaido), where she learned about the culture of the Ainu, an indigenous people of Japan and Russia.

In the northeastern part of the country, she was definitely the first foreigner that local people had seen in their lives. Imagine such a sight for country people, living narrow lives, toiling in unmitigated drudgery, eating a monotonous diet, never seeing strangers. Miss Bird was mistaken not only for a man but also for:

Near a large village we were riding on a causeway through the rice-fields, Ito on the pack-horse in front, when we met a number of children returning from school, who, on getting near us, turned, ran away, and even jumped into the ditches, screaming as they ran. The mago ran after them, caught the hindmost boy, and dragged him back—the boy scared and struggling, the man laughing. The boy said that they thought that Ito was a monkey-player, i.e. the keeper of a monkey theatre, I a big ape, and the poles of my bed the scaffolding of the stage!

Generally she found people well-mannered though nearly naked, "lamentably dirty and swarming with vermin." That she tolerated amazing discomforts and privations on her rough journey is impressive. She lived off eggs, rice, tofu cucumbers, and the occasional chicken. Of course, she’s a lady of her time with the opinions about food, evil smells, dirt and squalor of poverty that we would expect in a country parson’s daughter.

Happily, not all that frequent are remarks in which she names names like “These preliminaries being settled, Mr. Tomatsu Aoki, the Chief Director, and Mr. Shude Kane Nigishi, the principal teacher, both looking more like monkeys than men in their European clothes, lionised me.” She also observes, like many foreign employees that came after her – like me – “An enormous quantity of superfluous writing is done by all officialdom in Japan, and one usually sees policemen writing. What comes of it I don't know.”

I admire Isabella Bird and thus recommend her book, at least as realistic counter to the gushing of, say, Lafcadio Hearn. Any reader with interest in determined women, travel narratives, or early modern Japan should read this book.