Meeting the stranger in oneself (Books - Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan)

The subject matter of a book is often what determines whether or not I read it.  Who and what it is about leads us to anticipate our interest in its events or identification with its protagonist.  The more we read, the more experienced we imagine we become at such predictions, but then every so often we get a surprise. I picked Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me off the recommended books table at a favorite bookstore a week back only to find out it is about an Oxford educated Catholic priest engaged to lead a parish in an economically depressed village in Scotland.  That was not at all what I was interested in for my next read and yet this novel about encountering strangers - particularly the stranger in oneself  - turned out to be the most involving, probing, and beautifully written novel I have read this year.

Collect data, test, revise theory, repeat....

Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist and author (The First Scientist) is excellent on how science works at Edge.

Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking, at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; it's not certain. In fact, not only it's not certain, but it's the lack of certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are sure, but because they are the ones that have survived all the possible past critiques, and they are the most credible because they were put on the table for everybody's criticism.

Collect data, test, organize results in a theory, collect more data, test, revise theory, repeat.

Unlive a little.

Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips (On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane) a sensible and erudite thinker about the human mind its products has a new book out: Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life and so is profiled in the Guardian. 

"I'm not on the side of frustration exactly, so much as the idea that one has to be able to bear frustration in order for satisfaction to be realistic. I'm interested in how the culture of consumer capitalism depends on the idea that we can't bear frustration, so that every time we feel a bit restless or bored or irritable, we eat, say, or we shop."

He's great at where culture meets feelings.  And there is a picture of his bookshelves.

Hat tip: Bookslut

The adventure of filling the gap (Books - Remarkble Creatures by Sean B. Carroll)

Molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll wrote Remarkable Creatures (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) to both capture the excitement of scientific discoveries and communicate their meaning within the context of evolutionary biology. In relating the journeys of scientists in this National Book Award finalist, he acknowledges a debt to authors C. W. Ceram - Gods, Graves, and Scholars, a classic work about archeology - and Paul de Kruif - Microbe Hunters, mini-biographies of pioneers in microbiology, a work to which I owe my initial love of science.

Remarkable Creatures is a clearly written and passionate account of how field science gets done.  Its subject may not seem as relevant to the average reader as popular works about healthcare or how our brains learn, but one could say it is of even greater significance

Building a forgotten identity one word at a time (Books - New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani)

Language is identity, according to Diego Marani's New Finnish Grammar (2000).  It was originally written in Italian, recently translated into English by Judith Landry, and short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.  Dr. Petri Friari, a neurologist aboard a German hospital ship in 1943, discovers a man barely alive with no memory and no language.  Wearing a Finnish navy uniform jacket with Sampo Karjalainen embroidered on it, Dr. Friari identifies his patient as Finnish.  It is difficult to say whether it is the evidence that convinces him or the fact that Dr. Friari is himself a Finnish exile and for this reason has taken his patient's case very much to heart.  At any rate, the Dr. teaches him some language basics and ships him back to Finland advising him that in learning the difficult language he could reclaim his memory and, thereby, himself.

The costs and incentives of doing science (Books - How Economics Shapes Science by Paula Stephan)

The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, has been trying to lure a top university to create a school of engineering and applied science in NYC.  In fact, he sweetened the deal by offering $100 million, claiming that the investment is worth far more in future start-up businesses and the jobs and products they would create. Is this project really going to spawn the creation of a new silicon valley in NYC or is Mayor Bloomberg overstating the impact of one school?  Paul Stephan's new book How Economics Shapes Science is a thorough, data-rich analysis that can help us consider such questions.

Jazz and betrayal in occupied Berlin and Paris (Books - Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan)

Half-Blood Blues, by Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, is a jazz musician's memory of his youth in Berlin and Paris on the eve of World War II.  Occasioned by the screening in 1992 of a documentary film about his one-time collaborator, trumpeter Heironymous Falk, bassist Sid Griffiths must unearth old and difficult feelings about art-making and duplicity among friends. 

Edugyan moves the action between 1939 and 1992 as her cranky narrator tries to hold back the past from encroaching on the present.  The voice she has him sing in, for it does evoke music,

A battle for connection (Books - Solace by Belinda McKeon)

Perhaps I am influenced by having just revisted Howards End, but I read Belinda McKeon's debut novel Solace as a portrait of two men, father and son, who wage a battle to connect.  This is not merely a portrait of the generation gap as Mark and Tom Casey are separated by more than their ages.  Tom, the father, farms while Mark, his son, earns a doctorate in 19th century English literature at Trinity College, Dublin.  They are separated by their work, their geography.  Tom is taciturn, Mark more emotionally accessible.  It is across the abyss of tragic loss that they finally must reach out toward each other, but simultaneously the reader can observe the other kind of connection about which Forster writes. How in their struggle to accept the other person these men become more whole themselves.

An aspiration toward wholeness in a fracturing world? (Books - Howards End by E. M. Forster)

E. M. Forster exhorts us to 'only connect' in his great novel Howards End.  I re-read this old favorite every few years.  This time through I was struck not just by the way in which his plea asks us to connect in the sense of building bridges with others, but also by pulling together the apparently disparate parts of people.  If the Schlegel sisters Helen and Margaret represent, as Forster says, the passion and the prose, then true apprehension of a person, including oneself, is connecting all that exists in him or her.

A cruel hand laid upon American citizens (Books - The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander)

According to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the "War on Drugs," was not waged in an effort to dispense justice to dangerous criminals, but rather to control black men by putting them behind bars and relegating them to permanent second class status upon their release.  Her book is damning accusation that the execution of the drug laws has effectively continued the marginalization of black men that began with slavery, proceeded to the Jim Crow laws.  The difference today is that, since many presume we have reached the colorblind nirvana dreamed of by Dr. King, this is carried out through procedures masquerading as law and race is never mentioned.  Alexander's book reads less like a typical account of current affairs than a passionate case argument, a form that will come as no surprise considering her career as a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar.

Get out of the lab: scientists communicating with the world (Books - Am I Making Myself Clear, Don't be Such a Scientist, Escape from the Ivory Tower)

As I approach the home stretch of a PhD in neuroscience, I find that that the audience I most enjoy writing for about this cutting edge field is the general non-scientist reader. I read three books recently about scientists communicating with non-scientists. Am I Making Myself Clear by Cornelia Dean, Don't Be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson, and Escape from the Ivory Tower by Nancy Baron have in common a belief that most scientists do this poorly and, ironically, that they should do it more often. Too long winded, too technical, and too many qualifications are the main criticisms, and each volume offers advice on how to be more effective.

Michael Gazzaniga, Father of Neuroscience, Speaks on Brain Science and Free Will

I covered neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga's talk on the brain and free will at Cooper Union for Capital New York, hence the resounding silence here. Check out my piece at the link below.

“Probably 99.999 percent of what goes on in the brain is automatic and unconscious. I have no idea what my next sentence will be, and sometimes I sound like it,” Gazzaniga began in his unassuming way. “We think the other stuff, the ‘me,’ the ‘self,’—we think that’s really important. We think there is somebody in charge—somebody pulling the levers.”

In promoting the book Who’s In Charge, Gazzaniga has learned that this is a subject on which everyone has an opinion.

Can we have free will, if the brain's actions are automatic? A scholar makes the case | Capital New York

Orwell's inherently human contradictions embraced (Books - Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens)

I decided to read the late Christopher Hitchens's Why Orwell Matters less because I have a driving interest in political essayist and novelist George Orwell than because I had never read a book by Hitchens and many a sharp reading friend had praised his work. I was vaguely aware of Orwell being lauded and derided alternately by the left and the right. I knew he had become a hero of the neo-cons and I didn't know why. There's no reason to read at all if you're only going to stay in your ideological comfort zone, so I picked up Why Orwell Matters this weekend to see what they were all about.

This slim volume is not a biography. It is a corrective polemic of others opinions of Orwell - either critics of him, or those who idolized Orwell by appropriating

A drama of social injustice in the Mumbai slums (Books - Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo)

Award-winning journalist Katherine Boo has spent two decades, according to her bio, writing about how societies distribute opportunity and, consequently, who is defined as poor. The last three years of that time she spent reporting on India, and in particular, an illegal squatters' slum near the Mumbai airport and luxury hotels known as Annawadi. Although Boo writes non-fiction, her prose in Behind the Beautiful Forevers transforms poverty from a socio-political abstraction into something one can taste and smell and whose consequences upon real people we experience deeply.

What use is history? (Books - In Europe by Geert Mak)

There is no use fixating on past mistakes, some advise. Stay in the present, say the gurus. But these approaches are anathema to the human nervous system. Even basic nervous systems use sensory equipment - eyes, ears, antennae, pressure sensors - connected to a few dozen nerves to adequately serves an organism which wishes to avoid danger, find food, or reproduce. But one advantage of having a brain is that we can accumulate information about common patterns of stimuli existing in our environment, using it to anticipate what we encounter in the future. Our brain's visual system makes

Dastardly art about the forces that spur vioence (Film: Inglourious Basterds (2009) by Quentin Tarantino)

Quentin Tarantino's use of violence in films like Pulp Fiction is supposed to be commentary on violence in film and television, but I have found them merely exploitative. This is not because media does not glorify violence, but because Tarantino's use of self-referential gestures and cute trademarks while using slaughter patently as entertainment is too cavalier. We already live surrounded by bloodshed - take the last 48 hours: with the murder of seven victims by a militant in Southwestern France and the outrageous shooting of an unarmed 17-year-old in Florida by a man claiming he was feeling threatened - I find the irony too disrespectful of lost lives. What the hell is so funny? So my own positive assessment of his film Inglourious Basterds (2009) surprised me.

Who says reading is in decline?

I was struck in reading today's New York Times that the number of pieces on reading and books must have reached some sort of critical mass. Or perhaps it was only the Times's effort to assert its own relevance?

The online edition has begun a series called Draft. It concerns the art of writing and its maiden voyage was a riffy, elegiac essay by Jhumpa Lahiri on the pleasure she finds in sentences (the written not the served kind). This was flanked in the Sunday Review by two more essays. One by Dwight Garner where the message was on the medium - what sort of reading calls for e-readers, iPads, or the printed page, he asks? He cited the recent New York Review of Books essay by novelist Tim Parks (speaking of books in the news) which championed electronic reading media as

Heir apparent to Dasheill Hammett (Books Nineteen Seventy-Four - Book I of the Red Riding Quartet by David Peace

The first volume of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, Nineteen Seventy-Four, is a violent thunderclap of a novel. It details the search of a rookie crime journalist, Eddie Dunford, for the murderer of a school girl in Yorkshire during the week preceding christmas. It becomes apparent to Eddie that the murder may be one of a string of crimes and Eddie begins connecting the dots between them and powerful people in business and law enforcement. Despite the fact that he has only just buried his own father, or perhaps because of it, Eddie begins a stubborn search for the truth in a world of savagery and exploitation that is way beyond his ken.

Navigating time across the abyss of loss (Books - Purgatory by Tomas Eloy Martinez)

I have often wondered what it is about living in South America that leads writers to adopt the form of magical realism. Having read Purgatory by Tomas Eloy Martinez, recently translated into English by Frank Wynne and published by Bloomsbury USA, I think that I understand.

Since the 1930s, Argentina experienced more than 30 political coup d'etats. In 1975, a military junta seized power from Juan Peron. From 1976 until 1983, in government-instigated acts of terrorism, an estimated 15,000 persons were

Richard Powers - where fact and fiction collide (Essay - What Does Fiction Know?)

One of my very favorite writers, Richard Powers, who writes at the intersection of fiction and science, has written an inspiring essay about the city of Berlin, the unreliability of storytellers, and the place where fiction and fact collide. It is inspiring for the way it mixes personal experience, data, and artifice. It appeared in last summer's Design Observer and I link it here.