This week at the library: bikes, Greeks, stuff, and eeeeeevil

Dear readers:

September's winding-down for me has been busy for me, and especially today. All three meals were taken with friends while out and about; it was a day filled with a country drive and a long walk through beautiful old neighborhoods in my college town, ending with a trip to the library and my exchanging one pile of books for another. I have good, sturdy messenger bag for the toting. This month's haul:

• Bicycle: the History, David Herlihy 
• The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels
• Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization,  Bruce Thornton
• A Consumer's Republic: the Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, Lizabeth Cohen
• The City in History, Lewis Mumford
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson
• The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Human, G.J. Sawyer & Viktor Deak

Reviews are pending for Uncommon Carriers and Crabgrass Frontier. I'm also considering reading Robert Harris' The Fear Index, but now it's competing with a book on shipping containers. It's gonna be a tough call.

Happy reading, everyone!

Field Grey

Field Grey
© 2011 Phillip Kerr
384 pages

Bernie Gunther survived Hitler's Germany and a Soviet prison camp, so when he's forcefully detained by the American  Navy on the open seas and interrogated, he's not too much impressed by their attempt at viciousness. Sure,  he had the bad luck to be traveling with an attractive lady who happened to be wanted by the American government for assassinating a cop in Cuba and fomenting revolution, but he's had worse luck.  Back in the 1930s, he once saved the life of another cop killer who is now one of the most powerful men behind the Iron Curtain: Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi. Did I mention Gunther is a detective who actually doesn't like cop-killers?  The US Navy would like to know why Gunther was running around the Caribbean with an assassin and a lot of money -- and the Central Intelligence Agency is even more curious as to his association with the head of the Stasi.  Mockingly thrown into the very prison cell that housed Adolf Hitler, the man who destroyed his country and whom he hated, Gunther is made to tell his own story.

 Field Grey is a tangled political thriller set in  Germany as Hitler came to power and drove it to ruin, but set also in the Germany of the Cold War: a Germany divided by the victorious allies, now scheming against one another in equal measure.  Bernie Gunther is no Nazi, but neither is he a good communist or a reconstructed German: he's a proud, jaded Berliner, and the story he tells is one calculated to guard his most precious secrets from the treacherously friendly Amis.  Field Grey impresses with its pacing; the plot moves forward steadily with a few bends here and there until a hairpin at the end: it doesn't rely on confusing the reader to thrill. Although Gunther is your standard-issue world-weary cynical detective, he has a wicked sense of humor which he uses to good effect to irk enemies and allies alike.  Despite technically being a member of the SS (which absorbed criminal investigations), he's sympathetic yet realistic:  not a Nazi, but not a knight in shining armor, either.  Field Grey is one of numerous Gunther novels by Phillips Kerr, which I selected to read first because it ranged through so many years.  It will not be the last! Look for this if you've an interest in detective mysteries, historical fiction, and Cold War intrigue.

Oh!  And there's romance, naturally. Can't have a detective story without beautiful women..

Related:

• Fatherland, Robert Harris. Likewise a detective novel with a German lead,  this work is also one of alternate history, for it's set in a Europe where Hitler is celebrating his 70th birthday,  presiding in triumph over Europe and a broken Russia, hoping to reach detente with the Americans. Unfortunately for him,  a murder investigation leads to the facts of the Holocaust being unearthed.
• Garden of Beasts, Jeffery Deaver.  Gunther is a proud Berliner, claiming the city as his more readily than anything else, and Beasts is set in 1933 Berlin.  An American reporter shows up during the Olympics and realizes that Hitler is up to something other than building highways. 

Home Economics

Home Economics
© 1987 Wendell Berry
192 pages

The term economics originally referred to household management, and to Wendell Berry, that's what it should remain still. Home Economics collects essays on the meaning and relation of economy to human life. In it, he deplores the cancerous growth of massive, unwieldy structures like agribusiness, globalization, and the state which destroy culture, communities, and the land, reducing the human experience to economic inputs. He ruminates thoughtfully on the value of more traditional ways of life, and advocates for an approach which is much more finely-grained For Berry, the humane society is one built to a small scale, built on local economies wherein people, not institutions, are the primary actors, and where the relationships between people and the land are respectfully maintained.

Berry is a fascinating author. At first glance, he's manifestly romantic and old fashioned, advocating for the same kind of agrarian  Republic of citizen-farmers that Thomas Jefferson yearned for. Though he's grounded in the past, quoting freely from classical poets and the Bible life, he's not mired by it: he does not despise cities as Jefferson and other agrarians did, and writes that if we wish to preserve the wilderness and farms, we must preserve our cities, too.  Though he doesn't outline his reasoning, it may be similar to that of David Owen's, who sees energy-efficient cities as the best hope for combating climate change. It's certainly a better  hope than car-dependent suburbia, which Berry despises (however much a gentle and aging scholar-farmer can despise something).   Berry urges readers to consider a return to localism not just because it's better for the environment (his veneration for which is religiously inspired), and not just because the new institutions are oppressive and destructive but because Nature has a way of correcting the unsustainable. That which cannot sustain itself will not: eventually it will fail. We will not persist living as we do now forever: our choice is in how and when we change.  In the hereafter, Berry writes, we may ask forgiveness for the crimes Nature has judged us for, but God has never shown any inclination to overturn her just sentences.

At times a warning, the vision of Home Economics is not dire.  In elaborating on the weaknesses of industrialized and globalized modernity,  he affirms that the ongoing desecration of human life and the planet will not long endure -- and in articulating what was lost, he makes clear to modern readers what it is they miss without being able to describe; the bonds of family and community life, attachment to place, and the sense of a life of meaning and purpose. His holistic vision offers to restore those powers laid waste in getting and spending.

Related:
Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin. Salatin advocates some of the same ideas, at least in terms of farm ecology. He's more cheerfully manic and provocative, though.
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey (on the virtues of the wilderness)

The Working Poor

The Working Poor: Invisible in America
© 2004 David Shipler
352 pages

"Like my daddy used to say -- 'Son, life's hell to pay for when you're poor -- cause  always just outside the door's another Hard Time.'"    (Jerry Reed)

The United States is simultaneously one of the richest and poorest countries in the world, a land marked by both obscene waste and desperate poverty. Explanations vary as to the cause of the widening income gap; some blame a deteriorating culture, others globalized free trade, and still others maintain it's a classic case of exploitation.  Poverty may be endemic to economics, but the great tragedy is tragedy's juxtaposition with the American dream of success: work hard and you will prosper. Reality is more complicated than that. In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David Shipler shares the lives of people who, despite long shifts, can't get ahead.  They are black, white, Hispanic and Asian; some have lived here for generations, others are newly arrived immigrants. The reasons for their quicksand desperation are complex and varied: although many mire themselves in self-destructive cycles of behaviors, others are truly and continually ensnared by cycles of poverty -- poor housing that leads to bad health that leads to spotty employment and debt that lead to poor housing.  It's not as if they don't try, but the odds are against them: even a small hiccup, an unexpected dilemma, can completely derail hopes of progress.

  Shipler's work doesn't propose any grand national agenda like the War on Poverty, and his account demonstrates how problematic proposed solutions have been so far.  Welfare offers intrusive, obtrusive bureaucracy and distorted incentives;  public education for impoverished areas is largely a failure, and while there are a great many incompetent teachers, whose talent is less about communicating with children and more memorizing what Has to be Taught,  the reality of poverty is that it isn't just material. There's a greater cultural poverty present that Shipler details as well: a loss of hope, of ambition. Some of the stories here are outright depressing in demonstrating how failure can run in a family, with unparented children growing up to have babies who grow up likewise unparented. They lack not just the data accumulated in twelve years of schooling, but ordinary life skills.  There are also hopeful stories, like the single parent who embraced poverty of the material kind by refusing to work two jobs, deciding that devoting time to her children, giving them the attention and instruction they need, was more important than a financial cushion.  Though raising two children on a single  wage was hard, her children were success stories who later escaped poverty.

The Working Poor is a valuable book, demonstrating that there is more to financial security than simply working hard -- and more to insecurity than bad personal choices. Although Shipler is probably more sympathetic to the progressive, he's by no means convinced that government can be a decisive solution here. His work illustrates how complex the problem of poverty is, communicating to the reader that it would take more than a money dump in one program or another. The problems of poverty -- dismal education,  the costs of healthcare and housing, access to transportation, availability of jobs, the shattered status of a family life -- are all connected, and there is no Gordian solution.  As grim as it can be, the book is girded with hopeful stories of struggle and resilience. Based on extensive interviews and Shipler's own research (including  time spent observing schoolrooms), it's as close to a comprehensive understanding of working class poverty as one will find without living it.

Related:

• Nickle and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenrich. This is the author's account of attempting to live on minimum wage in three different states, with little success. Her experience demonstrated many of the problems here (the costs of housing and expense of transportation, especially)  though family life was not an issue and she never had to deal with state welfare offices. 
• Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser, which also shone a light into the dirty business of migrant agricultural labor. 

Free to Choose, Born to Buy (and Left to Die)

In the past two weeks I've been reading a series of books which connected together despite being on disparate subjects. Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, published in the 1970s, argues for a completely free market -- that is, one with no regulations, tariffs, government licenses, public financing, etc. Friedman follows initial chapter on the power of markets with sections that compare the effects of government attempts to improve safety,  protect consumers against defective products, raise wages, etc.  Time and again he made good points about market efficiency,  but the general attitude advocated is extreme. Friedman is not nearly as extreme as other free marketeers: he respects the potential power of monopolies and advocates for free trade so that potential monopolies are always disrupted from outside, and  (staggeringly, for the 1970s) acknowledges environmental hazards.  Although I'm often tempted to agree with him on principle, in practice caution is warranted. While Friedman is correct in pointing out that people who buy defective products will not be likely to purchase them again,  consumer-driven corrective measures aren't always the best. What would he make of malware, for instance, which invades people's computers and then pretends to be an anti-virus program, which will rid the obvious infection for a fee?   On the whole, this work makes the same arguments as Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, but Sowell was far more thorough.

A much different view was taken by Juliet Shor, whose Born to Buy examined the commercialization of childhood. After providing a history, an overview of the tactics, and an examination the consequences, Shor argues -- pleads, as a parent -- for regulation and taxation to reign in the corporate invasion of schools, the ubiquity of product placement in television, the insidious attitude in advertising that encourages kids to not only seek approval by buying things, but to assert their coolness by badgering their parents into buying them the latest and greatest -- advertising that blames the parents for being  mean and the cause of their child's misery if they don't. Released in the same year as Susan Linn's Consuming Kids,  Shor's work contains more concrete data, but is not quite as helpful:  Linn focused on especially destructive themes and counseled parents on how they could make decisions in their household and in conversations with their children to counter consumerism and premature sexualization.  Shor largely passes by  media sexualization and only looks at government regulation to reign in the abuse. Considering that the Supreme Court regards corporation as people who can dump however money they'd like into elections,  I would not count the US government as an ally in this fight.   Born to Buy is still very much worth reading, though, just for the numerous interviews with marketing execs, many of whom (parents themselves) left the business when they could no longer reconcile their work with their consciences. (With good reason:  their usurpation of child psychology and carefully planned invasions of home and school borders on villainy.)  A quotation from one:

"Banks [,a marketing agent], believes buzz practitioners are just getting started.
'We'll have ten or fifteen more ways of encircling the consumer in ten years [...] surrounding almost every move you make, that would be the ideal.' Asked about consumers who didn't like being marketed to, Banks didn't hesitate. 'Covert messaging. Use their friends.'"

Born to Buy was published in 2004. Nine years later, 'Banks' must surely be pleased with the ubiquity of facebook, which converts our friends' passions into ads for us, projected across the internet via plugins.

And lastly there was The Working Poor: Invisible in America, which profiled the millions in America who do their damndest to fulfill the promise of the American dream, but cannot seem to escape poverty.  David Shipler attempts to find out why, and realizes the answer is...complicated! Yes, shockingly, a societal problem has nuance. Poverty cannot be reduced to bad character nor oppression inherent in the system. Instead, it's a little of both. More extensive comments on this piece will follow this week.

The Sky is Not the Limit

The Sky is not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist 
© 2004 Neil deGrasse Tyson
203 pages

          How does a young black kid from the Bronx become a world-famous astrophysicist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and the second coming of Carl Sagan?  The Sky is Not the Limit is Neil deGrasse Tyson’s semi-autobiographical account of how he came to be seduced by the study of the  night sky,  one that doubles as a light work of popular science, promoting informed, critical thinking and asserting that yeah, science is cool.   Subtitled Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist, Tyson’s memoir reveals that anyone can take joy from studying the stars, even if their view of the sky is washed out from city lights and their ambitions discounted by everyone they meet. The biography-turned-essay collection is Tyson’s most effective attempt so far to convert his gift for communicating science in public lectures into written form. Though his being seduced by heavenly bodies takes center stage, one essay ("Dark Matters")  sees Tyson make a rare comment on race. Although he received support from his parents and guidance from remarkable individuals like Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, Tyson had to overcome the obstacle for race: at every step along the way of his education people questioned his choice of occupations, from patronizing whites doubting his intelligence ("Why don't you just play basketball?") to patronizing blacks who thought astrophysics was too white and that an intelligent black man should be helping the race by  being a social activist instead. He persevered, however, and eventually became a celebrity scientist, the first black man (to his knowledge) to be interviewed on television and asked for his professional opinion on something outside of race or civil rights. The Sky is not the Limit covers astrophysics, math, skepticism, telescope stargazing as a first date (not successful), and September 11th, 2001.  Those looking for an entertaining science read should find this attractive. 

Related:

• Dr. Tyson hosts a weekly podcast called "StarTalk Radio", which is ridiculously awesome. He always hosts with a comedian, includes interviews, and fields questions from listeners about science and popular culture. The last show featured an interview...Buzz Aldrin, one of the first two men on the moon. Tyson has also spoke with Dr. Ruth (that "Dr. Ruth") and frequently features authors like Mary Roach and Neil Chaikin.
• An interview with Dr. Tyson about the book on Point of Inquiry

         

          

The Disappearance of Childhood

The Disappearance of Childhood
©1982 Neil Postman
177 pages

Television is killing your children -- conceptually. In 1985, Neil Postman penned Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he, building off of the lesson in Technopoly that technology changes our culture without our knowledge, examined television’s malevolent effects on political, civic, and religious discourse. The Disappearance of Childhood, published in 1982, is an earlier form of this argument, and one which focuses only on the effects of television on childhood.  In it, he asserts that childhood is a social construct, not a biological fact; that it sprang into being with the advent of the printing press and the need to instill widespread literacy; and that the rise of easy-accessible information through the television (and by extension for modern readers, the internet) has killed the innocence of youth. Although its historic claim about childhood is dubious,  concerns about the diminishment of modern childhood remain valid, and the connection between the two, the idea that technology is not value-free, but in fact shapes us as we use it, is as fascinating as ever.

Postman's initial bold claim that childhood is an invention of the middle ages is staggering in its audacity. With hundreds of thousands of years of history behind us as a species, we cover the globe in a seemingly infinite mosaic of sharply different cultures. Yet for all this diversity, there is not one semblance of childhood as special outside of medieval Europe and the cultures it influenced? To be sure, there are avenues of thought that make the thought understandable: modern children have far easier lives than their predecessors of any age. The demands placed on children in earlier epochs meant they had to participate in the life of their household, on the farm or at work, early on.  But does this translate to nothing about children being regarded as special at all? The  claim is simply too broad to go down easily.

That a side, this preview of Amusing Ourselves to Death, which casts childhood as the first victim of the communications revolution that later claimed public discourse, education, and our peace of mind, remains noteworthy. That revolution, writes Postman, spelled an end  of childhood as a special time in which children are protected from the burdens and full knowledge of the world, allowed to frolic in leisure outside the schoolroom, while inside it being good students learning to navigate their literary world.  Before widespread literacy, writes Postman, knowledge was primarily transmitted orally, and children learned the secrets of the world fairly easily. After the printing press made written communication the primary means of cultural transmission, however, not only did the knowledge being transmitted become 'secret' in that one had to learn to read to take part in it, but literary culture so broadened the intellectual capacity of the human race that the ideas being discussed became far more complex. To learn the world meant committing to a course of training and study, and that meant school. School was the potter's house in which young clay was molded into tall, strong vessels of knowledge. and ready for the responsibilities of adulthood.

The coming of mass communication, especially the television, ruined all that. While once courses of study were designed so that people -- children -- were gradually introduced to adult ideas as they grew older, the nightly news now exposes children to the adult world all at once. Within twenty minutes,  young minds can witness the horror of war,  be subjected to lessons about how buying things leads to happiness (and how being ignorant of the right shampoo will mean being forever alone because women recoil from dandruff), and learn a host of interesting words like 'incest' and 'erectile dysfunction' to ask mom and dad about. Because television requires virtually no prior knowledge, no training, no work to be entertaining or 'enlightening',  adults who spend much of their leisure time basking in its blue glow will be rendered infantile, easily manipulated and incapable of sustaining their attention in anything worthwhile. Although most of the book is a serious treatment of technology and society, toward the end Postman sounds a teeny bit crotchety. 

Although The Disappearance of Childhood has a questionable start and loses focus toward the end, the pages between raise a question worth considering for modern parents. Regardless of Postman's historic claims, both parents and child psychologists entertain worries today about 'age compression' or 'kids getting older younger'.  Though Postman muses in 1982 that computers might be a saving grace for literacy, if they continue to require programming language to set up and use (thus requiring another kind of focused education) a recent  article by The Atlantic wondering if it's unhealthy for toddlers to spend so much time on smartphone applications indicates that such hope is absurd.  Although Postman was primarily concerned with television, the internet makes TV look innocent. There's virtually no knowledge concealed from a child with a search engine and a curious mind, and the knowledge revealed won't just be a line of text: might well constitute a graphic video.  Knowledge is a powerful asset, and the danger that today's children are being exposed to too much, too soon,  warrants attention.