We also spent part of one holiday season weighing the uneaten popcorn left behind (or thrown away) after the upbeat movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and compared it with the popcorn left after the gloomy “intellectual” film Solaris. Our garbology director showed that the average buckets of popcorn left behind in Solaris had 29 percent less popcorn in them than those left behind in the happy movie.
(from Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating, p144-145)
During World War II, much of America’s domestic meat was being shipped overseas to feed soldiers and allies. As a result, there was a growing concern that a lengthy war would leave the United States protein-starved. The potential solution to this problem lay in what were then called organ meats: hearts, kidneys, liver, brains, stomachs, intestines, and even the feet, ears, and head of cows, hogs, and sheep. The challenge was how to encourage Depression-era Americans to incorporate these into their diet. To do this, the Department of Defense recruited Margaret Mead and dozens of the brightest, and subsequently most famous, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, food scientists, dieticians, and home economists in the nation. Their task: to make families rush to the dinner table for liverloaf and kidney pie.
(from Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating, p134-135 – more detailed analysis is in Wansink’s “Changing Eating Habits on the Home Front: Lost Lessons from World War II Research,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 21:1 (Spring 2002): 90-99.
The book is awesome, not the review.
I’m currently reading Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree, and he mentioned reading Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, which reminded how much several people I know loved Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, which in turn reminded me of a little science fiction (ish) novel that Lethem wrote back in 1994 which I had wanted to read. That’s the genealogy. I picked up the book last week, and I basically read it in the last 24 hours (while traveling from DC to Atlanta to Rio to Brasilia). It had me completely captivated.
A hard-boiled detective addicted to dope and flowery metaphors goes up against the institutional cops to solve a murder. And there’s a kangaroo with a gun. And a house that’s a hologram. And people getting frozen (think Han Solo at the end of The Empire Strikes Back). But before you stop, the beauty of Lethem’s novel is that it doesn’t feel like science fiction. It feels like a captivating crime noir novel. The reason is that Lethem reels you in at the first pages with the story and the character, and only bit by bit, over time, do you realize that the world is different from our own (right now). (One problem with much science fiction and fantasy is that it requires such a massive investment to start the book: the planet of what? the what-reorganizing matter machine? huh?) And the science fiction elements all feel relevant: the walking, talking animals are the result of artificial evolution processes, and everyone is taking to dope to forget their lives (think a gritty Brave New World). The crime story itself has the requisite zillion twists and turns, and Lethem leads us right up to an impressively surprising finale.
Note: Lots of strong language, a fair amount of violent, and some sexual content.
frightening, evocative, but not very sympathetic
A good friend recommended this strongly, and it won the 2008 Booker Prize, so I gave it a try. The Booker committee said “Balram’s journey from darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.” I agree with 1, 2, maybe 4, and 3 if you take off the “deeply” and even then only reluctantly.
The protagonist – Balram – is some kind of entrepreneur who is writing letters to the premier of China to tell him about the true India. Balram tells of his rise from poor village boy to tea shop worker to … well, I won’t give too much away. But Balram does not allow himself to be bound by traditional norms of morality around, say, killing. And other stuff. The power in the novel is demonstrating how poverty can breed an amorality that is chaotic and frightening. But I only came to find the protagonist sympathetic towards the very end, up until which I merely found him offputting (and scary). I don’t think, if I were to turn back time, that I would read it again.
Note on content: I don’t remember reading a book with more f-words. There is violence. There is significant sex talk. This is a dark world of crushing poverty and desperation.
I read this in about 24 hours (which is fast for me). Nick Naylor is the chief spokesman for the tobacco lobby. His boss wants him out, but after an impressive showing on Oprah, he becomes the darling of the lobby’s chairman of the board. He gets kidnapped and tortured by antismoking advocates. Corporate intrigue takes place.
This was a very fun, witty ride. Naylor is sympathetic, and he has a genuine friendship with her fellow Merchants of Death, the chief spokesman for firearms and the spokeswoman for alcohol. The satire of Hollywood, of the lobbying industry, of Washington spin, is all fun. A man next to me at baggage claim said, as I laughed out loud, That must be a great book! You haven’t put it down! He was right.
In the last quarter of the book, it starts to get even a little crazy for my generous suspension of disbelief, but I still couldn’t stop reading, and the ending is satisfying (even with a several-years-later epilogue;* it’s like watching 9-to-5 with Lily Tomlin all over again).
Note on content: Some language, some sexual content, some violence. Less language or violence (and a little more sex) than Gun, with Occasional Music (but not as good as that one either). Less of everything than the White Tiger.
The crime of fiction is worse than the crime of the flesh. After all, the crime of the flesh can be accidental, the fruit of a momentary passion, whereas no one has ever heard of an unpremeditated crime of fiction.
[from Luis Fernando Veríssimo, O Clube dos Anjos (The Club of Angels), p14; my own bad translation]
I hadn’t necessarily expected to read every word of the Lowell biography, but … it’s one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of “This is me!” [Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree, p16-17]
That is exactly how I feel about many passages in this journal of Hornby’s own reading, and I’ve only read the first ten pages! (I’ve read several Hornby books and haven’t been disappointed: About a Boy, How to Be Good, A Long Way Down. Good was the least good, but even that had value.)
On my last trip to Rio I started E. L. Doctorow’s City of God. After all, that’s the name of one of the most well known slums in Rio (and a book and movie that take place therein). Doctorow is talking about a different city though: New York. After reading ten of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels over the last year, this narrative struck me:
While I was at it, I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade … I just read the…things when I’m dpressed. The paperback detective he speaks to me. His rod and his gaff they comfort me. [p8]
Those last two sentence are classic Hercule Poirot sentence construction. (Kind of like Yoda’s but also … different.)
On my last trip to Rio I started E. L. Doctorow’s City of God. After all, that’s the name of one of the most well known slums in Rio. (Doctorow is talking about a different city though.) After reading ten of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels over the last year, this narrative struck me:
While I was at it, I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade … I just read the…things when I’m dpressed. The paperback detective he speaks to me. His rod and his gaff they comfort me. [p8]
Those last two sentence are classic Hercule Poirot sentence construction. (Kind of like Yoda’s but also … different.)
This is almost enough – in and of itself – to make me want to read this book:
The studies in this book … [have] been featured multiple times on 20/20, the BBC, and other network TV shows, and they’ve been bantered about by Rush Limbaugh and berated by Dr. Laura.
[from Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think]
My thoughts: some very interesting tidbits, but the least compelling of Gladwell’s oeuvre
I thoroughly enjoyed Gladwell’s previous two books (The Tipping Point and Blink), and I found neither convincing in its central thesis. Gladwell has a flare for making psychology and social psychology research easily digestible and interweaving it with case studies to provide a satisfying mix that is inherently interesting, high entertainment value, and insightful into how we behave. That said, in neither of the previous books did I find that this tapestry of experiments and case studies really convinced me of the central thesis.
The thesis of this newer book is that people who are exceptionally successful – outliers – are a product of their environments much more than they are individually exceptional. First, Gladwell keeps knocking down a straw man that no one really believes anyway. I think we all know that environment matters a lot, and Gladwell never really accounts for the individual elements. Yes, the Beattles got 10,000 hours to practice in Hamburg, but were there other bands that played in Hamburg every year but didn’t go big? Yes, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born at a special time and had a special set of privileges, but what about Bill Gates’s friends in his same high school computer club? What computer empire did they create? In other words, the individual element which Gladwell seems so excited to downplay still has to play a major role; or at least, Gladwell hasn’t convinced me that it doesn’t.
The most interesting part of the book deals with air plane crashes because it goes back to Gladwell’s successful formula: a mix of social science research (in this case, on cross-cultural hierarchy something something) and case studies – of major plane crashes.
Gladwell still tells a good story, but this one is much less convincing than his previous work. I listened to the unabridged audiobook, and Gladwell narrates well. At the end of the audiobook, there is an interview with Gladwell which really belongs at the beginning; it gives an intro to the book that is totally superfluous after having read it.
Note on content: There might be a swear word or two in here; and in the epilogue there is one description of slave treatment which is not pretty (but is historical), but otherwise this is innocuous sailing.
The pros’ clips are below the fold…
