Mount TBR #28

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Double for Death – Rex Stout

Solid, briskly-paced whodunit from 1939. Stout himself supposedly thought this was one of his best-plotted mysteries.

Millionaire Ridley Thorpe lies in his bungalow, murdered. He was shot dead and PI and bon vivant Tecumseh Fox has to save his friend Andrew Grant, whom the police consider the killer, from the prosecutor's clutches.

It seems almost as if Stout is toying with the current conventions of the whodunit with multiple victims, scads of suspects, forces of motives, pairs of guns. Stout has his hero stick his thumb in the eye of the police and prosecutors, an irreverent tone he always used in the Nero Wolfe books for hero vs. authorities confrontations.

Tec Fox has foibles but they don’t make him distinct from Stout’s other non-Nero experiment with Alphabet Hicks or Doll Bonner or Inspector Kramer. Readers into this one: Stout completists, fans of Golden Era Whodunnits, fans of high society mysteries, seekers of entertainment, and 1930s buffs.

Mount TBR #27

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Thirteen Gun Salute – Patrick O’Brian

This is the thirteenth volume of the internationally successful best-selling series of Royal Navy life in the early 19^th century against Bonaparte. Patrick O'Brian writes with his usual class, humor, and nautical mumbo-jumbo for us landlubbers who read the novels for his great characters.

Captain Jack Aubrey puts his run of bad luck behind him when he is finally reinstated in the Royal Navy. Immediately he takes his extraordinary abilities back to official service.

He and his friend, the ship's surgeon and secret agent Dr. Stephen Maturin, are dispatched on a particularly sensitive mission. While his old ship Surprise is purported to be under Aubrey's command and  after whalers, pirates, United States ships in the China trade, and all French ships crossing its course, Aubrey, in fact, sails under camouflage, so to speak, on Diane, a former French ship cut out previously by Jack. His real mission is to go to the South China Sea to bring a British envoy to Pulo Prabang, an island off present-day Malaysia. The envoy’s mission is to cut a treaty with the local sultan, muscling the French out of the way (recall that at the time the French were still rivals in India).

So instead of the exciting sea battles of the other novels, this one is more a tale of political-strategic jockeying than maritime action. Still, it’s O’Brian’s wit, imaginative scene-setting and incident, and his wonderful cast of characters that are the attractions. Maturin’s journey to the hidden monks of Kumai is adventurous and impressive. The reader whose travelling days over feels almost jealous of the quirky doctor as he hangs out with orangutans and gets chased by two rhinos. And the customs and intrigues of the sultan, his favorite, his family and court are examined at a remove but still fascinating. Exciting are the meetings with the traitors Ledward and Wray, the bastards. This novel – the 13^th  in the series, remember - will appeal more to the people who’ve read the first 12 than a novice or casual reader. Completist fans will hate me for saying so but novices can start on #3 HMS Surprise.

I like these books very much. They are entertaining and highly recommended for fans of serious historical novels. They have more literary heft and philosophy than naval books by Kent or Forester.

Mount TBR October Check-in

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

I've read only 25 out of my goal of 48. The classics challenge has really taken up my reading time: Classic Crimes, Brave New World Revisited, Shakespeare, Mansfield Park, and A Study in Scarlet. 

My favorite character so far has been Bertha Cool in Bats Fly at Dusk, a mystery by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair. I was shocked that a publisher rejected the second Cool/Lam novel, The Knife Slipped, on the grounds that Bertha was too unlikable. In fact, not being a good egg or a toughie with a heart of gold make her a great whodunnit series character.

As for opposites in reading, let's go for city and country. The Trail to Ogallala was about a cattle drive and virtually all the others were set in cities. Curious, I should do something about the urban/rural divide in my reading.

At least the western was the longest one I read; I don't like doorstop mysteries. It was a western I would suggest even to people who think they don't like westerns.

The Trail to Ogallala lead me to Lord Mullion’s Secret about The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde. Her Bats Fly at Dusk over The Power House, pointing out The Corpse in the Snowman, a Freak that teaches The Simple Art of Murder to Women Sleuths who use dangerous knowledge for professional development.

Click the date to go to the review.

The Trail to Ogallala – Benjamin Capps
Posted: July 13

Lord Mullion’s Secret – Michael Innes
Posted: July 25

The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde – Erle Stanley Gardner
Posted: July 31

Bats Fly at Dusk – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair
Posted: August 12

The Power House – William Haggard
Posted: August 20

The Corpse in the Snowman – Nicholas Blake
Posted: August 28

Freak - Michael Collings
Posted: September 5

The Simple Art of Murder – Raymond Chandler
Posted: September 13

Women Sleuths - Various
Posted: September 25

Mount TBR #13

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Letter of Marque – Patrick O’Brian

This novel is the 12th of 21 about Jack Aubrey and his friend Dr. Stephen Maturin of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era – when exactly we don’t know, since O’Brian keeps years obscure. The title refers to an official commission which authorizes a private ship to attack and capture merchant vessels from a hostile power. Before 1856 when an international agreement ended the practice, a ship operating under a letter of marque was known generally as a "private man-of-war" or "privateer," both of which were terms Navy men disliked.

This novel is much less dark than the previous The Reverse of the Medal. I detest spoilers so all I can say is that because Maturin has become unexpectedly rich, he buys Aubrey the decommissioned Surprise for privateering. Maturin keeps up his contacts in the intelligence service, with the ultimate goal of a mission to South America. Jack, who feel bereft since being disgraced out of the Navy, has two stunning successes that bring about favorable results.

As usual episodes and continuing saga make the reader marvel. I was excited by the cutting out of the Diane – O’Brian builds tension effectively. Both Maturin and his countryman Padeen battle opium addiction, as Maturin also develops too strong a liking for coco leaf. Maturin is also addicted to the worthless Diana Villiers, who likes him all the better now that he is rich. On the Surprise, Aubrey has to deal with religious issues with the enigmatic Sethian crew members. There’s comedy: Aubrey’s kids, raised around sailors, talk like sailors; Killick is Jack’s semi-rebellious servant, always muttering; wealth goes right to Stephen’s head, making him feel entitled and miserly.

Read them all in order and keep the Kleenex handy. The Aurbrey-Maturin books make me happy to be alive, to be able to enjoy such stories.

Mount TBR #11

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Reverse of the Medal – Patrick O’Brian

This novel is the 11th of 21 about Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Dr. Stephen Maturin of the Royal Navy in the late 18th century. The title is a 17^th century expression that means the opposite and usually less favorable aspect of an affair or question.

Once nicknamed Lucky Jack Aubrey for his outstanding success in service against HM’s adversaries, in this novel Jack suffers a downturn of fortune. Like many sailors an innocent babe on land, Jack is set up to be the patsy in a massive scam of the stock market. Sent to trial, he is unlucky enough to be the object of political passions in that both the ruling party and the judge (a member of the Cabinet, no less) are against him. Jack himself is a high Tory but he must pay for the sins of his chiseling father who is a loud disliked Radical in the Parliament.

Friend Stephen Maturin and his mentor in the secret service Sir Joseph Blaine suspect that the intricate financial swindle was cooked up and bankrolled by powerful interests. Stephen hires a PI and crack lawyer to defend Jack. But the lawyer fears that without witnesses for the defense Aubrey's being fined, imprisoned, and pilloried are about certain.

But this novel is not totally dark, however filled we loyal readers are with consternation that our favorite characters are facing disgrace and the ruin of their careers. In fact, it opens with a great sea chase that takes about a third of the novel. Plus, there are humorous situations and scenes. In Jamaica, Jack meets Sam Panda, his natural son by Sally, the woman for whom he got in trouble deep when he was a mid. Sam resembles his African mother, but otherwise calls to mind his father for anybody that knows Jack. For Jack, the fact that Sam is becoming a Catholic priest is not nearly so alarming as the inconvenient fact that he has met Jack’s wife Sophie, who takes a dim view of behavior that produces natural children.

In an immensely satisfying set piece, Stephen twists the nose of an officious bureaucrat. In another, familiar friends like Bonden and Killick help Jack spruce up Ashgrove Cottage before Sophie returns from a trip. In a bright change of foturne, Stephen, upon becoming rich, becomes a sharp man with the pounds and pence, unlike his former distracted poor scholar self. How O’Brian makes sailors doing a house-cleaning poignant and fun to read is a tribute to the writer’s power as a storyteller.

The climax, too, will make the sensitive reader bawl, being moved by the loyalty of Jack’s men.

Read the books all in order and keep the Kleenex handy.

Mount TBR 2018 Sign Up

For the  Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge I will go for Mt. Ararat (48 books) from my TBR pile because I barely made Mt. Kilimanjaro (60 books) in 2017.

Mount TBR #58

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.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy – William Irvine

So many people today seem to believe that meaningful and satisfying lives can be achieved only if they have bought the latest version or feel that they are not missing out on something. But they quickly get past the rush of purchase or being in the know and soon begin seeking the next best thing. So feeling satisfied much less serene or fulfilled is but a dream as they spend all their time working and buying the latest fashionable stuff.

To jump off the treadmill of getting, buying, having, wanting, we could read this book by a college professor in philosophy. It begins with simple arguments that advocate the need for a philosophy of life, or at least an orientation to work, love, friendship, civic duty, etc. Irvine argues that we can develop such a way of thinking with Stoicism, one of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophical schools.

The Stoics emphasized the development of the four virtues: bravery, prudence, wisdom and fairness. One goal of the Stoics was to live frugally since the more shit we have the more we have to take care of, thus distracting us form what is really important, like living with integrity. Another goal is to use our reason to maintain tranquility. The more involved we are in other people’s business - like working overtime so the company can simply make more money, like volunteering too much and spreading ourselves too thin - the more tumultuous our lives will be. They believed that using our reason was the key to freedom from fear, lust, anger, and greed. In our days of non-stop rage and upset fed by social media and bots from the devil knows where, this stoic advice about anger really strikes home.

Readers into Albert Ellis or cognitive behavioral therapy will be attracted by the encouragement to determine what is “up to us” – i.e. what we can control (our approaches and responses to inevitable trials and tribulations). Furthermore, we had better stop being anxious about with what we can’t control (our health, wealth, reputation, promotions, the Dotard, etc.), since obsessing and fretting become bad mental habits not to mention stealing joy. Irvine uses examples from his own experience which makes his ideas easy to connect with for readers with health challenges, aging parents, and demanding colleagues.

The lucid prose is easy and a pleasure to read. It presents various useful devices for the toolbox. Developing compassion and gratitude are in my toolbox for the coming new year.

Mount TBR #36

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.

A Guide to Rational Living – Albert Ellis and Robert A. Harper

Therapists in rational-emotive therapy (an early name for cognitive behavioral therapy) believe that people who want peace of mind had better control their emotions with their reason. This book is an attempt to teach people how to put into perspective emotions that don’t help them. They emphasize how people can challenge their irrational ideas, which are the following. Note demands for perfectionism, not pride, will lay a person low.

1. You must have love or approval from all the significant people in your life.
2. You absolutely must be thoroughly competent, adequate, and achieving in all important areas.
3. Other people absolutely must never act obnoxiously and unfairly, so when they do, you should blame and damn them, and write them off as bad, wicked, or rotten individuals.
4. You have to judge things as being awful, terrible, and catastrophic when you are seriously frustrated or treated unfairly.
5. You must worry and fret when you have pressures and difficult experiences because you have little ability to control, and cannot change, your own disturbed feelings.
6. You must obsess about hard situations and difficult people and frantically try to escape from with alcohol or drugs. Or TV or chocolate. Or sports or politics. Or cleaning or yardwork.
7. You can eat, drink and be merry today - and every day - and still lead a highly fulfilling existence.
8. Your past remains all-important and because something once strongly influenced your life, it has to keep determining your feelings and behavior today.
9. You yourself, other people, the whole world must be better than they are at present; it is an awful and squalid world since you cannot change life’s grim facts to suit you.
10. You can achieve maximum serenity and felicity by inertia and inaction.

The authors argue that when we feel anxious or sad, one or more of these irrational beliefs is at the bottom of our disturbance. We can – and had better – think in order to dispute these irrational beliefs and improve our tranquility. They grant that some of us are too slow to dispute our own irrational beliefs convincingly and consistently , so they advise us to keep in mind slogans such as Hamlet’s “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so” or Epictetus’ “Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.”

The authors readily admit that none of this is easy and takes a lot of practice. I’ve been taking this way of thinking seriously since late 2015. There’s still a part of me – call it “the flesh” - that balks at making straightforward thinking and employing reason a habit. I am prey to crooked thinking, unwarranted assumptions, half-digested information, lame prejudices, silly default settings. It’s hard for me to control my thoughts, fears, hopes, frustrations. But lately I’m a lot better at not letting traffic and other drivers get my goat. Second, I’m more patient with co-workers than I used to be. Third, I’m much tougher, hard-boiled, when dealing with health care merry-go-round of appointments, tests, waiting, confusion, anxiety, preventable medical errors, which is a good thing for my own sake and for a significant other’s.

I read the original 1961 edition of this book, which uses the helping verb “should.” Ellis later assiduously avoided this absolutist word, preferring to use “had better.” This 1961 version also uses forms of the be-verb, such as “had been” and the passive voice.  The authors revised this book in the middle 1970s, using exclusively the e-prime style which eliminated all forms for the verb “to be.” This 1961 version does not have forms to do cognitive behavior homework, but these worksheets are available here and there on the web. This book gives only a passing mention of the ABC method, which are better sketched out in later books.

So I would advise this 1961 edition only to those readers who know CBT already and either want to examine the roots of the therapy out of curiosity or want to review the method for the sake of periodic refreshers. I try to read or re-read one Ellis book a season, to keep the ideas and methods fresh. Backsliding is all too easy, but that’s the way it goes!

Other books about CBT

·         How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything - Yes, Anything

·         Optimal Aging: How to Get Over Getting Older

·         A Guide to Personal Happiness

·         Anger: How to Live with it and without It

·         The Pursuit of Personal Happiness

Mount TBR #24

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.

Optimal Aging: Get Over Getting Older – Albert Ellis & Emmett Velten

Albert Ellis (d. 2007) founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in the 1950s, the pioneering form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Ellis wrote dozens of self-help books that pitched the same basic techniques of REBT to special audiences such as alcoholics, procrastinators, patients with fatal illnesses, and folks with anxiety. Dr. Velten (d. 2011) worked as a psychotherapist in private practice who taught at UCSF.

The authors readily agree with Bette Davis’ famous maxim, “Old age is not for sissies.” To deal with grief, regret over dashed aspirations, health scares, money worries, and the desert of retirement, they recommend we take time and care to examine our thoughts. Our own opinions make or break our lives. We are responsible for the things we believe and tell ourselves. Events not terrible in themselves occur, but we choose to feel disturbed or we blame ourselves, other people or the world for perceived misfortunes. As Hamlet said, “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Change the thoughts, change the feeling and mood. The authors advise that we can recognize our own harmful thoughts by asking ourselves three questions. Does this response help me or hurt me? Does this response square with the facts? Does this response seem logical and reasonable? The next time something gets up the nose - try it.

The authors suggest another technique: negative visualization. I close my eyes. I imagine the worst thing that can happen in a situation. A 30-something snot humors me. She leaves me after 35 years, telling me that she wishes she could be around to see my life fall apart. Lily’s cancer has spread to her seven-year-old bones, needing 350mg per hour of fentanyl as well as 15mg of dilaudid every two hours to get her pain down to “8: utterly horrible.”  Feel it and realize that I can feel healthy feelings of sorrow, regret, and sadness, not unhealthy depression or useless rage at a universe where these things happen daily. Imagine the worst and make myself healthfully sorry. I can do it. And I can feel better, healthfully regretful.

The authors make a very strong argument against the stereotypes of ageism. People hold such prejudices so deeply that it takes a lot of forceful, vehement disputing of these prejudices to dislodge them from inside our own heads. The authors don’t deny changing our attitudes takes a lot of work, practice, persistence, and plain old thinking but they believe that people can choose to happy, that they can fight off habits of mind that make themselves unhappy. They present many anecdotes about ordinary people who applied the three questions above systematically and cultivated attitudes that fought low frustration tolerance and contributed to unconditional acceptance of one’s self and even others, flexibility, and self-respect.

I found motivating the stories of people who persevered when confronting disabilities. We all must get older and many of us have no choice but to face injury, pain, suffering, disfigurement, debility and disability. The authors argue that we ourselves must take responsibility for the attitudes we accept in response to these trials. The people with a disability in this book accepted their disability and felt determination to lead a fulfilling life.

Anyway, I recommend this book to people 30 and over that want to avoid becoming an aging cliché.

Other reviews of Albert Ellis’ books: I read or re-read an Ellis book about once a season. Reviewing his main messages prevents backsliding.

·         How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything - Yes, Anything

·         A Guide to Personal Happiness

·         Anger: How to Live With it and Without it

·         The Pursuit of Personal Happiness

Mount TBR #15

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.

Man Disconnected: How Technology has Sabotaged What it Means to be Male - Philip Zimbardo and Nikita D. Coulombe

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo is most well-known for the Stanford Prison Experiment and his work on shyness. In this 2014 book, he and a colleague examine the perturbing state of young males in post-modern society all over the world. Discussed here are studies showing that boys are disenchanted with an educational system that doesn’t teach in modes that boys prefer.  Along with reading, boys put the whole educational enterprise into the bucket labelled “a girl thing.” Another growing tendency is for boys to be attracted to and maintain association with exclusively male-dominated social groupings. Guys are a lot more predictiable and thus safer; girls stand in the middle of social minefields.

Other alarming symptoms are the tendency for boys to be alone in their rooms too much, spending too much time with video games and online porn. Doing so, they consume and create nothing. Living at home with their parents, they don’t even help with chores because, as males, they feel entitled to be waited on.

I think the best part of the initial part of the book is the summary of research examining what happens to brain chemistry when boys play video games and click through hundreds of online pornographic images. 13 hours a week with video games is the average for teenage boys; by the time they are 21 the average boy has spent 10,000 hours with video games, the time it takes to get two bachelor degrees at a university. The values of videogames are about domination and competition, which males like.

The average for porn is two hours a week, usually consumed as a break from gaming. Zimbardo describes “arousal addiction,” in these terms:  “in order to get the same amount of stimulation, you need new material, seeing the same images over and over again becomes uninteresting after a short time. The key is novelty of visual experience.” Given the frightening endlessness of internet porn, millions of hot babes beckon. Porn also induces ED because averagely-endowed males compare themselves with huge-peckered porn stars and then worry about their ability to last a half-hour like the porn dudes seem to. Basically porn is poison for the brain.  

The researchers point to many reasons for these troubling signs. Too many families have parents that work all the time, leaving teenage boys without their father’s advice or even physical presence. Boys talk to father only about 30 minutes a week on the average, while spending hours in front of screens. Millions of boys are living without fathers at all, which causes many problems for mothers and sons (at least) when boys hit adolescence. Boys are dealing with myths of the patriarchy (boys must be strong at all times, boys must lead at all times) versus post-modern expectations for boys to be caring, empathic and always taking” no” to mean “no.” Intractable unemployment and shrinkage in the number of jobs where males can use their hands along with their brains have not helped boys find a place is society either.

The final third of the book tells what government, schools, men, and women can do to improve the problems that young males face in our culture. I thought the book was worth reading as a description of the problems. Much interesting research was cited, which was a plus. On the other hand, various experts like George Carlin were cited and hobgoblins such as “political correctness” were invoked as explanations. As always, keep the critical-thinking cap on. Firmly. 

Mount TBR #7

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.

The Natural History of Nonsense - Bergen Evans

Like Martin Gardner’s classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, this 1946 book debunks a range of folk beliefs, old wives’ tales, revolting prejudices, and cockamamie ideas held by both the expert and lay members of modern society on topics concerning flora, fauna, race, physiology and a host of other subjects. The organization and content are lucidly written; the tone smart, urbane, witty. Many of these pieces in fact were written for the literate readers of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker and the sophisticated readers of Vogue and Town and Country. Evans was an English professor at Northwestern and clearly committed to plain writing and logical thinking. “[D]emocracy is essentially anti-authoritarian,” he says, “it not only demands the right but imposes the responsibility of thinking for ourselves.”

Mount TBR #6

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.

Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads - Joel Best

The author defines “fads” as institutional vogues, not crazes such as pokemon go or juju on the beat. So readers that work in schools at all levels may be interested in his observation that administrators in education don’t feel like “real managers” so they are susceptible to fads from the private sector. 

The search for the one true panacea for deep-seated educational problems leads to a dissipation of energy and effort in the schools, not to mention a significant waste of time and money. Such waste and resulting demoralization and apathy due to management fads often occur in the private sector, but “failure has no father” so we don’t hear obituaries about Six Sigma, business process reengineering, matrix management, management by consensus, total quality management, core competency, management by objectives, and searching for excellence. 

It is because educators don’t know about the skeletons in the management fad closets that they feel like amateurs compared to the steely-eyed captains of the private sector. Anybody with any sense stops listening when they hear some rich man who wants to be king is going to “run government like a business.”

Best argues from examples that there are three stages to institutional fads. First, a problem is identified and a new solution devised, both forming a TED Talk-type narrative  story to be sold by slick promoters to sell books and extrovert careerists within the organization looking to get ahead. After all, there are livings to be made in the advancement of fads. Second, momentum builds as the narrative spreads, because of endless American-style optimism and fear of the career-sinking reputation as a stick in the mud and not a team-player. Third, after countless hours and dollars, the narrative is let go because of disappointing results, staleness, or the next big thing comes along.

Best provides the basic advice that we Doubting Thomases already know, either by temperament or bitter experience. Don’t forget what happened last time and remind other people – tactfully – of lessons learned. Demand astonishing evidence for astonishing claims. Always insist on persuasive evidence. Don’t fear being left behind. Be alert, especially to signs that people are jumping off the bandwagon.

Readers who will like this book include teachers and staff in education and students in fields like communication, sociology, anthropology, history, and, of course, English, because English majors should know a little about everything and cultivate a skeptical frame of mind.

Mount TBR #4

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.

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens – Susan A. Clancy

When mass delusions overcome the population – see November, 2016 – I run to the solace of cognitive psychology in order to think about why otherwise smart, kind, harmless people act in ways against their own interest, much less everybody else’s. So in the alien abduction context, given the derision they will face and the possible risks to their reputation and perhaps even employability, why would people claim that they were kidnapped by aliens?

In this slender summary of her research written for a lay but intelligent audience Dr. Clancy gives plausible reasons. She says that people don’t examine weird bruises after a night of troubled sleep the next morning and suddenly conclude that they were kidnapped by little grey men. It sometimes happens that the experience comes out of a dream or the terror that results from sleep paralysis. At other times, people who already kind of believe aliens exist and kidnap earthers for experiments are applying the scientific method: they explain their weird bruises, troubled sleep, and vague unease with the theory they were kidnapped by aliens. This fits the facts for them. Clancy also lucidly discusses the malleability of memory and how hypnosis and other “memory recovery” techniques can, and often do, create false memories that feel very real for the abductee.

She also discusses the kind of person who gets abducted. They are not attention hounds, nor are they bonkers. They are normal people, whose only oddness is their belief about being kidnapped by aliens. Tests indicate, however, that they are more imaginative and fantasy prone than the general population. They are also more creative (if indeed you believe that creativity can be reliably measured by surveys). They also score high on a trait called “schizotypy” which simply means that they are prone to odd beliefs and eccentric ways of thinking like magical thinking.

Oddly enough, in the last chapter she talks about how abductees were glad to have had their experience. They say it made them feel part of bigger universe and feel it gave their lives meaning. She makes the point that when scientific explanations are pitted against people’s notions of what feels right a.k.a their intuition or gut feeling, science loses. 

This is well-written book with personal asides, some dry humor, and comprehensible arguments. I recommend this to readers with an interest in skepticism, clear thinking, reason and logic, and expertise (i.e., into things so much out of fashion these days).

Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2017

I will read 60 books (Mt. Kilimanjaro) 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.

Last year I read almost 70 books for this challenge, giving me the chance to pass on books I've read. I give them to libraries for their UBS's. I also leave them on a campus cart whose people can leave books - though people leave old magazines and CDs and video tapes (as if anybody has a VCR anymore).

This challenge has enabled me to de-clutter, though part of me protests at regarding books as clutter.My goal is to own as few books as possible and depend on libraries.

Mount TBR #49

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Master Mariner: Running Proud – Nicholas Monsarrat

This historical novel has a unique premise. For an act of cowardice during a battle against the Spanish Armada, an English sailor is condemned to live forever. This gives the reader the opportunity to enjoy sea stories set in different eras. The times and settings are: exploring with Henry Hudson in 1610; piracy in 1670; clerk for Samuel Pepys in 1682; fishing on the Grand Banks in 1720; navigating the world with Capt James Cook in 1759 and fighting with Nelson in 1790. The mini-biographies of Hudson, Pepys, Cook and Nelson brilliantly convey the qualities and achievements that made them great. The set pieces contain rousing battle sequences and pirate horrors of torture and rape. Monsarrat’s theme is basically the hardships of men at sea – that men could endure struggles against officers and adversaries while undergoing privations of food, comfort, and ordinary companionship boggles the mind.

Mount TBR #46

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything - Yes, Anything – Albert Ellis

I re-read books by psychologist Albert Ellis (1913 - 2007) when I want to brush up on the basic advice of cognitive behavioral therapy. With the school year coming up, I thought it would do no harm to read this classic of self-help.

Ellis gives the ABC model. It helps me to calm down by understanding how my thoughts, feelings and behavior interact. Let’s say I attend a meet and greet, which here is the A, the activating event. I approach somebody I don’t know and introduce myself. They smile, say nothing, and look over my shoulder, seeming to look intently at something or for somebody.

Next, I form B, my beliefs about what just happened in this activating event. I think I’m being disregarded. High-hatted. Ignored. I don’t have any evidence that this is true, but in fact my response here happens so fast, I’m not even aware how I’ve gotten to such and such a belief.

Then, I get my C, the consequence, the result of my belief about what just happened. This can include what I feel about what just happened and what I do then. I feel hurt, snubbed. I might even leave the meet and greet in a huff. This consequence might have ripple effects too: people might notice my leaving mad, I put myself down for being touchy.

Ellis argues that it my belief that I’ve been disrespected that leads to my upset feelings. I make myself upset, not other people, not the world as it is. Ellis would advise that I use D, disputing my irrational thoughts, by asking myself, ‘Just what is the evidence that this stranger snubbed me. I don’t know what was going through his mind.” Or, “Even if he did snub me, where is the law of the universe that says everybody I meet has to be friendly, talkative, and all round overjoyed to talk to scintillating me?” Ideally, I use reason to develop and support disputing ideas. And I focus on what I can control: my own responses, my own will, the one thing that I have power over, the one thing that cannot be taken from me.

Finally, E are the cognitive and emotional effects of my revised beliefs. By being rational, by thinking things through, I feel better. “Maybe that guy was having a distracted day, had something on his mind, somebody to talk to so he was not so interested in talking to anybody else. Nothing personal.” So, Ellis used to call his therapy “rational emotive therapy.”

Ellis’ advice is that I had better replace irrational self-talk with more realistic and evidence-based self-talk. A statement like "I fear I will clutch at the meet and greet" can be acknowledged as true enough, but I can follow this up with, "But I will nevertheless attend, talk to some new people, who are just as antsy about being there as I am and I will probably do OK." This leads to a calmer, more rational assessment of the situation and a healthier response to what happens.

Mount TBR #42

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Sound of the City - Charlie Gillett

This informative survey is a history of rock ‘n’ roll and other kinds of popular music from the late Forties to the early Seventies. The author has written many books and lists related to the topic. His opinions are sound and intelligent, never outlandish. The best way to read the book is to read and then to listen to the songs online. It is a way to discover amazing “new” artists such as Esquerita, Ella Mae Morse, The Delmore Brothers, and countless more. The usual problem with survey like this is if one reads too much the parade of names, group monikers, song titles and styles and influences rather numbs the mind. But this is a reason to keep the book to return to it and conclude that the only reason I found a copy at a used book sale is that its owner died and his widow donated it. But while we are still around we’re never too old to change our opinion of the Del Vikings upon listening to the them for the first time in 30 years.

Mount TBR #27

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory - David W. Blight

In  paper read before the American Historical Association's annual meeting at Charleston, December 29, 1913, historian W.A. Dunning reminded his learned compeers that, in many cases, “influence on the sequence of human affairs has been exercised, not by what really happened, but by what men erroneously believed to have happened.”

This book examines how African Americans and white Americans on both sides remembered the causes and effects of the Civil War in the fifty years after the conflict ended. Blight analyzes commemoration speeches, newspapers, magazines, memoirs, sermons, novels, letters, government hearings, and autobiographies as contributors to the profound processes and costs of remembering and forgetting the Civil War. How we remembered the war through pop culture, politics, and public rituals, has had a deep effect on the present in which we live.

Blight makes a strong argument that in forging national reconciliation after the Civil War, white Americans basically forgot about justice for African Americans and allowed the South to become exclusive custodian of popular memory on its own white supremacist terms. In America, we reconciled the nation in the 50 years after the war at the expense of the former slaves, at the cost of racial justice. To replace the institution of race-based chattel slavery, we created another kind of racial regime, American apartheid. Jim Crow, the state and local laws enforcing racial segregation, was an invention of the south, at the tacit agreement of the north that was quite content to allow states to run their counties as to civil and political affairs.

Blight’s thesis is that struggles over how to remember the causes of the Civil War and how it transformed our country were associated with whether an emancipatory or racialized reconciliation would shape influence policy and social life and dominate national discourse. Memory is social knowledge that influences how societies allocate resources. What we remember, what we think are facts, influence how we vote, who we hire, where we live, who we approve to marry our kids. Blight points out differences in memory among people in the North and the South; white and black Americans; Plantation School writers of Uncle Remus and intellectuals who supported racial justice; Confederate and Grand Army veterans; and Radical Republicans and states rights' Democrats. For instance, Blight reports instructive points about post-war Frederick Douglass' reaction of nausea in response to Robert E. Lee idolatry.

I can’t recommend this book enough to us readers who are finally waking up from the fog of The Lost Cause notion that has beguiled our romantic, mawkish culture since the last couple decades of the 19^th century. Ashley Wilkes, my red Indian ass.

PS: I moderate comments to this blog. If I get any  puke, nonsense, or bilge I will, without remorse, trash them. 

I promise. 

Mount TBR #14

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Lincoln and The Civil War - John Hay

In his diary and letters about working closely with Abraham Lincoln, John Hay comes off as wise beyond his early twenties. His formal title was assistant to secretary John G. Nicolay. Hay spent much time with Lincoln, going with him to hospitals, battlefields, and ceremonies. It’s strange that he handles very lightly an event that looms large in our imaginations. This, on the trip to Gettysburg in November 1863 to dedicate the Soldier’s Cemetery:

Mr. Stocton [Thomas H. Stocton, chaplain of the U.S. Senate] made a prayer which thought it was an oration and Mr. Everett spoke as he always does perfectly and the President in a firm free way, with more grace than is his wont said his half dozen lines of consecration and the music wailed and we went home through crowded and cheering streets.

The Gettysburg Address as another day in a crowded schedule. It’s just odd, that’s all. And wonderfully human.

Hay was a partisan of Lincoln. He calls him “the Ancient,” “the Tycoon,” “the Chief,” and “the Premier.” In these pages he never second-guesses Lincoln’s decisions or policies. He never questions Lincoln’s tendency to be patiently long-suffering with the arrogance and dimness of others such Meade and McClellan. Hay, on October 18, 1863, wrote of Chase:

I gave him my impression of the unmanly conduct of Mr. C[hase] . . . . He [Lincoln] said 'it was very bad taste, but that he had determined to shut his eyes to all these performances: that Chase made a good Secretary and that he would keep him where he is: “if he becomes Presdt., all right. I hope we may never have a worse man. ... I am entirely indifferent as to his success or failure in these schemes, so long as he does his duty as the head of the Treasury Department.”

Lincoln played the long, long game, seeing moves ahead of both supporters and detractors. He was willing to give up pawns for larger fights ahead.

In later life, besides being a diplomat, he was a long-form journalist, novelist and poet. This inherent literary skill is obvious in the diary and letters. This from September 29, 1863:

Today came to the Executive Mansion an assembly of cold-water men & cold water women to make a temperance speech at the President & receive a response. They filed into the East Room looking blue & thin in the keen autumnal air; Cooper, my coachman, who was about half tight, gazing at them with an air of complacent contempt and mild wonder. Three blue-skinned damsels personated Love, Purity, & Fidelity in Red White & Blue gowns. A few Invalid soldiers stumped along in the dismal procession. They made a long speech at the President in which they called Intemperance the cause of our defeats. He could not see it, as the rebels drink more & worse whiskey than we do. The filed off drearily to a collation of cold water & green apples, & then home to mulligrubs.

I would recommend this collection to anybody who is deeply interested in Lincoln and tumultuous Civil War era.

Mount TBR Unofficial Checkpoint

I missed the deadline to post the checkpoint, but here it is anyway. Click the date posted to go to the review.

1/ The Case of the Silent Partner – Erle Stanley Gardner

Post: Saturday, January 16

2/ The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini – Ruth Brandon

Post: January 24, Sunday

3/ Nightless City - J.E. de Becker

Post: January 26, Tuesday

4/ The Pew Group – Anthony Oliver

Post: February 7, Sunday

5/ Johnny Underground – Patricia Moyes

Post: February 21, Sunday

6/ From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes 1919-1937

Post: February 23, Tuesday

7/ Silent Thunder – Loren Estlemann

Post: February 25, Thursday

8/ Hedy Lamarr – Ruth Barton

Post: February 27, Saturday

9/ The Case of the Dangerous Dowager – Erle Stanley Gardner

Post: March 2, Wednesday

10/ For the Thrill of It – Simon Baatz

Post: March 8, Tuesday

11/ Pick Up Sticks – Emma Lathen

Post: March 22, Tuesday

12/ The Hider – Loren D. Estleman

Post: April 25, Monday