Stephen Fry in America

Posted on October 4, 2010 by smellincoffee

Stephen Fry in America: Fifty States and the Man Who Set Out to See Them All
© 2008 Stephen Fry
314 pages

While I am not familiar with Stephen Fry’s work,  his reputation for humor and science advocacy  lured me me into checking this book out. Fry introduces himself as someone who has always regarded America with a certain affection, having ‘almost’ been born there and having wondered since the age of ten what his life would have been like had he been in the United States.  When invited to do a series on America, he opted to take a tour of each of its fifty states over the course of nearly a year, meeting the people and finding the ‘real’ America from the cozy confines of a black London taxi.

Fry gives the obvious tourist attractions a miss, preferring to beat the bushes and immerse himself in people’s lives and local cultures, especially music. His direct approach takes him up in a hot-air balloon, on a tour of a body farm, into a coal mine, and into the depths of a submarine.  Few tourists would make the ruined Lower Ninth Quarter or spend a night with the homeless, but Fry does — and his celebrity allows him to access people and places far removed from poverty. He chats with Ted Turner at the Turner Bison ranch, hangs around with Morgan Freeman at the club Freeman owns, and participates in making an Oscar award. Most of the landscapes he visits are awe-inspiring, and the publisher indulges its readers with two-page landscape spreads.

I checked out the book in part because I wanted to witness an outsider reacting to America as he experienced it, and Fry provides reaction in abundance; reaction is the heart of comedy. Like Mary Roach, he plunges head-first into humiliating, awkward, and sometimes dangerous situations for the experience. The book isn’t all humor and rapt awe: Fry is honestly trying to get a handle on what America is, and concludes that understanding America means understanding the regional cultures. In general, Fry finds trends in urban geography unsettling (commercial strips and chain stores ruining downtowns) and American cheese disgusting, but is constantly impressed by the nation’s energy and optimism and ends the book a bigger fan of American than when he started.

Although the book is chiefly aimed at the BBC’s audience, Americans will find plenty here to enjoy. Fry is entertaining, and his journey reveals some things I never knew myself — like that Alaska is still influenced by its original status as a Russian colony,

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Spook

Posted on October 2, 2010 by smellincoffee

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
© 2005 Mary Roach
311 pages

Having so thoroughly enjoyed Stiff last week, I visited the library this past Wednesday with the intent of reading more by the same author. I’ve walked by this book hundreds of times and even contemplated it a time or two: though I’ve never been interested in afterlives, tales of ghosts have fascinated me my entire life. I used to read books of ‘real’ ghost stories as a kid, and every time I pass by a certain building rumored to be haunted on campus, I linger to see if some trick of the light causes me to see a phantom in the window, watching me as he, the old profiteer, searches for his buried treasure*.

Mary Roach is simply curious about the subject of the afterlife, and approaches it not with hopeful credulity or intent-to-debunk. She is more a skeptic than a believer, doing Occam’s razor proud and referring more than once to what is now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and its flagship magazine The Skeptical Inquirer. The book begins in New Delhi, where Roach tags along with a man who evaluates the claims of those who remember their past lives as specific individuals.  Her methods of research go beyond reading and interviews; as in Stiff, she prefers the direct approach, enrolling herself in a class for would-be mediums and practicing cold reading .(The secret, as she finds out, is make broad statements and rely on clues from the person’s speech and dress to make more specific statements based on their environment.) She briefly considers taking a drug to induce a near-death experience, but doesn’t like the idea of people watching her eyes roll backwards in her head while she has a seizure.

Because Roach’s approach is scientific, she avoids simply telling ghost stories and focuses on cases where scientific apparatuses and terminology were used by those who attempted to find the soul or otherwise gain information about the afterlife. Some cases seem as though they would be far removed from science — particularly the 19th century phenomenon of spiritualism — but Roach reminds the reader that stories of communicating to the dead through devices surfaced in the same period that people were being asked to accept electricity and telephone conversation.

Spook is fun, replete with odd stories in the human search for finding out what might lie beyond death and supplemented by Roach’s wit and hilarious devil-may-care forwardness. I don’t think it will give the hopeful-but-unconvinced anything to truly hope for, although some approaches gave me something to think about.  Roach almost seems to want to believe in the survival of our consciousness, but can find nothing to base that hope on.  Some near-death experiences — people recounting having floated above their bodies and “saw” things while they were unconscious —  were interesting, but I have great faith in the human brain’s ability to misbehave and so, like Roach,  require studies that eliminate odd occurrence common in anecdotes.

* He buried his savings in his peach orchard at the advance of the Federal army in 1865, the story goes, and continues to search for it ’til this day. Unfortunately for him, the peach orchard is long gone, replaced by a pretty building that used to be our library.

Posted in Reviews, science | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

This Week at the Library (15 Sept – 29 Sept)

Posted on September 29, 2010 by smellincoffee

Recent reads…

  • Casino, by Nicholas Pileggi, is the rise and fall of  of two real-life Mafia associates in Las Vegas.
  • The Mao Case is a detective story with political implications set in contemporary Shanghai: Qiu’s detective is likable protagonist, so much that I’m interested in reading the rest of this series. My library doesn’t have anything else by the author, though.
  • The King of Torts is a legal thriller by John Grisham criticizing the mass tort ‘industry’/profiteering scam by chronicling the rise and fall of a public defender turned multimillionaire.
  • Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is far from deathly, abounding in interesting tales and plenty of dry humor.
  • Barefoot Boy with Cheek is Max Shulman’s satire of college life at a liberal arts college in the 1940s, often surreal
  • African Exodus is an excellent history of human evolution by Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie. 

Selected Passages:

Now we come to the most important part of writing. Except for lady poets, writers must eat. In order to eat, they must sell what they write. But how? You must remember that thousands of manuscripts pour into editors’ offices daily. Make your manuscript stand out from the rest. Attach a cake to it, or a bundle of currency, or a nubile maiden. ” (Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size; introduction.)

“I stood that day and gazed at the campus, my childish face looking up, holding wonder like a cup; my little feet beating time, time, time, in a sort of runic rhyme. A fraternity man’s convertible ran me down, disturbing my reverie. ‘Just a flesh wound,’ I mumbled to disinterested passersby. “(Barefoot Boy with Cheek, Max Shulman.)

“‘It has been reported to me, and I have seen it myself, that Asa has been observed riding in a convertible in which the top was up, the seats were not filled, and nobody was yelling., I want to say, in a friendly way, naturally, that it’s things like that that can give a fraternity a bad name. When riding in a convertible, the top must always be down, no matter what the weather, and there must be no fewer than eight people in the convertible, and they must all be yelling. “

“I moved on to Czechoslovakia, tense as this was the third anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion. There my car was emptied out all over the road, and I was interviewed for four hours by border officials who made it clear that they found a long-haired, Western anthropology student about as welcome as a hippie at a regimental reunion. ‘Your visit is of no value to the people of Czechoslovakia’, I was told in response to my pleadings that my work was of international scientific importance”. (African Exodus, Stringer and McKie)

“Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.” (African Exodus)

“We should not be overcome with a sense of our own organizational superiority, however, for it is wrong to equate survivorship with some form of worth. Extinction is the inevitable destiny of all evolutionary lineages. [..] ‘For every species alive today, a hundred now lie frozen into the rocket sediment of the earth,’ as Erich Harth, of Syracuse University, New York, puts it with some understatement.” (African Exodus)

“We sadly take our two-legged prowess for granted, says Gould. ‘It is now two in the morning and I’m finished,’ he concludes. ‘I think I’ll walk over to the refrigerator and get a beer; then I’ll go to sleep. Culture-bound creature that I am, the dream I have in an hour or so when I’m supine astounds me ever so much more than the stroll I will now perform perpendicular to the floor.'” (African Exodus)

Potentials for Next Week:

  • Barring a case of spontaneous combustion, I’ll finish off the essays of Emerson in the next couple of days.
  • I’ll also be reading with serious intent to finish The Life of Greece by Will Durant.
  • Spook: Science Takes on the Afterlife by Mary Roach is a definite.
  • Christine by Stephen King is a twofer: not only is it a challenged book, which I’m reading in observance of Banned Books Week, but it’s a horror novel that’s seasonally appropriate.
  • There are more possibilities swirling about, but I’ve been distracted from Greece for nearly a month now. Time to dig in!

Posted in Reviews | Tagged | Leave a comment

African Exodus

Posted on September 29, 2010 by smellincoffee

African Exodus: the Origins of Modern Humanity
© 1996 Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie
282 pages

“Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history…”

Ever since Charles Darwin made that first and solitary reference to human evolution in The Origin of Species, people have wondered at our history as a species. It is a history that began not by the banks of the Tigris, with the use of writing and agriculture, but elsewhere and much earlier, when creatures who were human-like became human. Who where those ancestors, and when did we become human? These are questions which have spawned contesting ideas, two of which are discussed at length in this book: the multiregional hypothesis, which posits that humanity evolved in five distinct places throughout the globe and merged into a larger combined family with distinct ‘races’; and the Out of Africa theory, which holds that humanity evolved in Africa, expanding from there throughout the globe and diversifying in various ethnic groups. Stringer advocates the later in African Exodus, a history of human evolution and an examination of evolution’s consequences for humans living in the 21st century.

After an opening chapter focused on Stringer’s graduate work (helping to establish that humans did not evolve from Neanderthals), he launches into a study of where both originated. After piecing together a history of human evolution beginning with the first hominid who took to walking upright in Africa’s savannahs, Stringer uses on fossils, DNA (particularly mitochondrial), and language studies to confirm that the epicenter of human expansion began in Africa. Time and again in reading this book, I was impressed by our species’ sheer virility. We are a people forged by hardship, who have spread across the globe so quickly that individuals from far-flung parts of the world are more genetically similar than two gorillas living in the same hundred–square-mile patch of forest. The three species of chimpanzees are ten times as genetically diverse compared to one another as all of our ethnic groups, despite the fact that we see the chimps as identical to each other and ourselves as radically different.

The ending chapters were a pleasant surprise, as Stringer wrote of the merits of evolutionary psychology. Although we continually imagine ourselves as distinct from the animal kingdom, we are animals even to our bones — and our evolutionary heritage continues to shape our behavior and our bodies’ response to living in the 21st century.  The book as a whole is quite a treat: Stringer and McKie have produced a book comprehensible to the lay reader which will undoubtedly enrich our understanding and appreciation for the history of our species. Especially interesting for me was the treatment of Neanderthals, who were as intelligent and cultured as early humans. They appear to have taken to the sedentary lifestyle before their sapiens contemporaries, but they were out-circled by the aggressive lightweights who were modern Europeans’ ancestors.

Recommended!

Related:

  • Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade
  • The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond
  • The Naked Ape, Desmond Seward

I haven’t read the latter two, but I’ve read their authors and intend to get around to those works.

And we are scatterlings of Africa, both you and I
We’re on the road to Pheleamunga, beneath a copper sky
And we are scatterlings of Africa, on a journey to the stars
Far below we leave forever dreams of what we were.
(Johnny Clegg, “Scatterlings of Africa”)
Posted in Reviews, science | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Top Ten Favorite Quotations

Posted on September 28, 2010 by smellincoffee

I forgot to post this last week, and decided to post it today instead of “Top Ten Favorite Book Couples“, which I can’t do as I don’t know that many book couples.

I drew from the books I’ve read since May 2007, since I tend to share favorite passages in the weekly review posts. I realized too late that I only included  quotations that have a point to make, rather than just being amusing. I included one of those as a bonus.

1. “It’s always easy to avoid other people’s vices, isn’t it?”
This comes from Star Wars: Yoda, Dark Rendezvous.

2. “But where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He, deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself, must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth. [..] Atheism in its negation of the gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.”  (Red Emma Speaks, 245-248.)

3. “Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it, but it divides us from truth.” (Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam)

4. “Don’t become disgusted with yourself, lose patience, or give up if you sometimes fail to act as your philosophy dictates, but after each setback, return to reason and be content if most of your acts are worthy of a good man. Love the philosophy to which you return, and go back to it, not as an unruly student to the rod of a schoolmaster but as a sore eye to a sponge and egg whites, or a wound to cleansing ointments and clean bandages. In this way you will obey the voice of reason not to parade a perfect record, but to secure an inner peace. Remember, philosophy desires only what pleases your nature while you wanted something at odds with nature.” (The Emperor’s Handbook: Book 5, passage 9. A modern English interpetation of Marcus Aurelius’ Greek)

5.  “Is life worth living? Well, I can only answer for myself. I like to be alive, to breathe the air, to look at the landscape, the clouds, the stars, to repeat old poems, to look at pictures and statues, to hear music, the voices of the ones I love. I enjoy eating and smoking. I like good cold water. I like to talk with my wife, my girls, my grandchildren. I like to sleep and to dream. Yes, you can say that life, to me, is worth living.” (The Best of Robert Ingersoll)

 6. “There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumblings of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, [and] kindness. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many where people have behaved magnificently — this gives us the energy to act. Hope is the energy for change. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live in defiance of the worst of everything around us is a marvelous victory.” – Howard Zinn, The People’s History of American Empire

7. “There is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine, or dogma. Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple. The doctrine is compassion. Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter what or who they are: ultimately these are all we need. So long as we practiced these in our daily lives, […] there is no doubt we will be happy.” (Ethics for a New Millenium, Tenzin Gyatso)

8. “The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than to destroy one’s spirit by worrying about them far in advance.” – Cicero, as quoted in Imperium by Robert Harris.

9. “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” – Spinoza, from Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things.

10. “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.” – Thomas Paine, The Crisis, quoted in Robert Down’s Books that Changed the World.

11. “But from that moment on, Hermione Granger became their friend. There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.” (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J. Rowling.)

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Teaser Tuesday (28 September)

Posted on September 27, 2010 by smellincoffee

 In the heady days before consent forms and drop-of-a-hat lawsuits, patients didn’t realize what they might be in for if they underwent surgery at a teaching hospital, and doctors took advantage of this fact. While a patient was under, a surgeon might invite a student to practice an appendectomy. Never mind that the patient didn’t have appendicitis. 

(p. 30, Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Mary Roach.)

The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself, and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich. 

(p. 104, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Love”)
Posted in General | Tagged | 11 Comments

Barefoot Boy with Cheek

Posted on September 26, 2010 by smellincoffee

Barefoot Boy with Cheek (© 1943)
From Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size © 1948
207 pages

Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lip, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face,
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
From my heart I give thee joy, –
I was once a barefoot boy!
– John Greenleaf Whittier
Barefoot Boy with Cheek is an ironic tale of college life, told from the vantage point of Asa Heartrug, an enthusiastic young freshman with an impressionable mind, eager to fill his head with facts and find a sophisticated young lady to wed. After being hit by a car while gazing in thrall at the university campus (“‘Just a flesh wound’, I mumbled to a disinterested passerby“),  Asa passes his physical examinations with flying colors and loads up on all manner of courses designed to turn him into a well-rounded individual  with no prospects but writing. 
Asa plunges into the thick of things after falling through a trap door and into a local fraternity’s clutches, becoming their only pledge that semester as well as their freshmen representative to the Student Government, attending meetings at the Subversive Elements Society (where people have names like Workingstiff and sing songs of Marx and Veblen), and wooing not one but two girls — a sorority débutante named Noblesse Oblige and a fiery young woman intent on a revolution of the proletariat. The book follows Asa through the whole of his freshman year, and possibly the whole of his academic career given that he flunks everything.
Shulman’s customary oddball humor is supplemented with thick irony in Barefoot Boy: he satirizes liberal-arts acadamia primarily, depicting the University of Minnesota’s professors as being horrified at the idea that people were coming to college to make money, and not to become sophisticated, well-rounded ladies and gentlemen who can debate the merits of Shakespeare as well as identify the eighth avatar of Vishnu. College life in general receives a sound mocking, although Shulman’s world now seems a relic. Its anachronistic charm is part of Shulman’s attraction for me, though: it’s one of the reasons I enjoyed Dobie Gillis so much. Barefoot Boy is also more surreal than the works of Shulman’s I’ve read: characters often launch into long, eccentric stories that have little bearing  on the conversation at hand, dismissing Asa’s confusion by leaving. I half-expected the Colonel from Flying Circus to stop a chapter midway by declaring it silly. Chapter heads begin with a quotation in French or Latin, although the only ones I managed to translate tended toward the banal (“My uncle is dead.”)
It is an altogether silly book, one I enjoyed reading thoroughly — and look forward to sharing quotes from on Wednesday.
Related:
  • If you’d like to read some of Shulman, his short story “Love is a Fallacy” is available to read online.
  • The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Max Shulman.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Stiff

Posted on September 24, 2010 by smellincoffee

Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
© 2003 Mary Roach
303 pages

Being dead is absurd. It’s the silliest situation you’ll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there’s not a damn thing to be done about it.  – p.11

Stiff is a lively book about the dead — odd, thoughtful, informative, and oddly funny. Over the course of a dozen chapters, Mary Roach finds out what becomes of us when we cease to be. Her journey starts in the world of science, where surgeons practice their art, drawing on the lessons of anatomists who were themselves taught by the dead. Vocational opportunities for corpses abound, particularly in testing automobile airbags and armaments.  Forensics specialists and other detectives find them particularly helpful. And then there are the odder uses people find for the recently deceased — recreating the crucifixion of Jesus, or attempting to make severed heads come alive by supplying them with oxygenated blood.

My first thought after settling in to read this was that I should’ve saved it for Halloween:  part of the holiday is making light of death and other mysterious or frightening things. My reaction to death has always been fascination rather than fear, hence my attraction to this book. Even those who find death intimidating will be able to enjoy Mary Roach’s approach: the book is saturated with dry humor, interesting tales, Roach’s occasional tangents. She prefers a hands-on approach to investigation, taking the reader into embalming studios, body farms, Chinese mortuaries rumored to be the source of “human dumplings”, and an abandoned laboratory where the first head transplants were attempted.

While readers can expect to learn quite a bit about the use of entomology in forensics,  the history of anatomy,  and the benefits of being a brain-in-a-jar, discovering how people who interact with decedents on a regular basis relate to their work fascinated me. Some objectify the dead, imagining them as a faceless mass of tissue, while others hold memorial services and give their subject bodies names. How the living relate to the dead is a major theme of the book, and another reason why I would’ve liked to read it around Halloween.

The information, humor, and musings make the book a memorably enjoyable experience, and I’d recommend it provided you aren’t too squeamish. While Roach isn’t gratuitously graphic, it’s a book about dead bodies. Don’t read the chapter on body farms if you’re within three hours of a meal. I’ll be reading more of Roach.,

Posted in Reviews, science | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Booking through Thursday: Current

Posted on September 23, 2010 by smellincoffee

Booking through Thursday asks: What are you reading right now? What made you choose it? Are you enjoying it? Would you recommend it? (And, by all means, discuss everything, if you’re reading more than one thing!)



I checked out The Life of Greece by Will Durant two weeks ago, but have made little progress in it. I’d intended to read a little every night, like I did with Our Oriental Heritage, but my  reading ground to a halt in the chapters on Greece’s colonies throughout the Med. I couldn’t get started again until last night. 


I’m also reading from The Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson: there are just under 20 essays inside, and I’ve been reading one a day. My reading is slow because I write so much down: Emerson is provacative. I’ve already recommended the book to several people on “Self Reliance” alone.


I’m also working through African Exodus, which is interesting so far, but I started reading Mary Roach’s Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers while stopped at a railroad crossing. I think it may demand my immediate attention. I spotted it while looking for a book on anatomy and physiology to answer a question for my father. For some reason he wants to  know about the connection between skin pores and sweat glands. Stiff is…oddly hilarious. 





Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Teaser Tuesday (21 Sept)

Posted on September 20, 2010 by smellincoffee

Teases on Tuesdays sometimes come in threes. Here, anyway.

Let us begin with fundamentals. The first requisite for a young writer is paper. You will find that the work will go much better if the paper has not been previously written on.  

(Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size)

Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out the window, we shall pity him no more but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all History. 

(p. 43, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Self Reliance”).

I have never been able to trace the source of my passion for fossils. Neither, to their eternal bafflement, could my family. Indeed, it was the basis for some unease that I spent so much of my childhood drawing and painting skulls — scarcely a healthy hobby for a growing boy, after all. 

(p. 1, The African Exodus. Christopher Stirnger and Robin McKie

Posted in Reviews | Tagged | 9 Comments