Category Archives: Non-fiction

Book review, Non-fiction, popular science, psychology, Tali Sharot

The Influential Mind, What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others, by Tali Sharot, 2017

As a break from the recent relentless Pratchettery I have managed to finish this book of popular science written by Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist who also wrote ‘The Optimism Bias’. This is timely because the paperback version comes out on 2 August in the UK, and I suspect you will see piles of this book in your local bookstores.

The author is a serious scientist: she is a Ted talker, director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and a Wellcome Trust Fellow and has been published on various topics including the neuroscience of optimism, emotional memories and cognitive dissonance in journals such as Nature. In other words this is more than just one of those light hearted copy and paste books on science that tell you little more than you will find on Wikipedia – this is a review of the literature and science of influence, albeit presented in an accessible fashion. Why influence? Well it’s key to understanding why people behave the way they do, and surely this world needs a bit more understanding and empathy at the moment.

‘The Influential Mind will make you gasp with surprise – and laugh with recognition. Many of our most cherished beliefs about how to influence others turn out to be wrong; Sharot sets them right. Packed with practical insights, this profound book will change your life. An instant classic’ Cass R. Sunstein, bestselling co-author of Nudge

 

No it won’t, no they aren’t, and no it isn’t.

It is understandable that the publishers chose this review to illustrate this book’s entry on their website and adorn the hardback edition’s front page. This is a classic case of log-rolling – two minutes on Google told me that Sunstein has co-authored papers with Sharot – but it is also an extreme example of hyperbole. The only way this book would change your life is if you tripped over it at the top of a stairwell. I have no recollection whatsoever of gasping as I read it – maybe the occasional slow nod of recognition at a point well made – and there are few if any laughs in here either. This is a serious book, and it really does it no favours to pretend it is life-changing or ground breaking – it is no more nor less than a thoughtful review of the existing research into this subject, presented in an accessible fashion. Popular science in other words, perhaps not at its finest but no worse than the rest of what is becoming a crowded field.

The most striking example the author cites when discussing the importance of understanding how influence works relates to the vexed topic of hand washing in hospitals. A study of how frequently doctors and nurses in US hospitals wash their hands found shocking failure rates, leading directly to infections. Monitoring the staff remotely via video had no impact – as long as they knew they weren’t going to face any punishment they simply did not change their behaviour. What had a dramatic impact however was publishing hand washing rates in real time on a screen in the staff restroom. Rates shot up. Sharot speculates that this was because positive feedback on performance was perceived by staff as a non-pecuniary reward. In other words, rewarding people can influence their behaviour. Who knew? So far as I know there were no similar punishment trials where people had a % of their salary deducted each time they failed to wash their hands, but I guess it would have had the same results.

 

Elsewhere this book hits more topical and predictable targets. Trump and his power to persuade based on emotion rather than logic, the anti-vaccine movement and how to counter it (don’t try to address the lies in the anti-vaxx case, just emphasise the positives of vaccination i.e. the avoidance of death) and the times when the wisdom of crowds can be misleading. This is all packaged in an engaging and relatively short book which you will find interesting if you are looking for an introduction to this topic.

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Book review, Marx, Non-fiction, Terry Eagleton, Why Marx was Right

Book review: Why Marx was right by Terry Eagleton

Or, irritatingly on the front cover of the book (published by Yale University Press in 2011) “why marx was right” – as if this was some e.e.cummings poem! Anyway, overcoming that minor grievance, I was pre-disposed to like this book. That the ideas of Karl Marx have been too easily dismissed or overlooked since the end of Soviet communism in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s is undeniable. A well written demolition of the more prevalent myths about Marx was long overdue. But this isn’t it. In fact, I struggled so much with this that it joins the very short list of books I have tried to finish but failed.

The principal reason for this is Eagleton’s style. I am sure that what he was attempting to do was engage his audience and make the subject matter accessible, but his use of humour to do this is so wooden, at (most) times so inappropriate, so misjudged, as to make this almost unreadable. I started underlining some examples when I was still perserving with this book, but the pages soon were covered in lines. Here’s some random examples:

“Inequality is as natural to capitalism as narcissim and megolomania are to Hollywood” (pg 78)

“Change …is not the opposite of human nature; it is possible because of the creative, open-ended, unfinished beings we are. This, as far as we can tell, is not true of stoats.” (pg 81)

“If babies could get up and walk away at birth, a good deal of adult misery would be avoided, and not only in the sense that there would be no bawling brats to disturb our sleep” (pg 85) (Unpleasant turn of phrase there).

And so on and on relentlessly, “joke” after “joke” without any genuine humour at all. These may go down well as practiced asides in the lecture hall, but on the page they didn’t work at all. Neither do the constant popular culture, man of the people references to football or going down the pub – we all know Eagleton prefers cricket and white wine. We can spot a phoney a mile off.

Eagleton has clearly read every word of Marx, and huge numbers of other thinkers, critics and commentators, who are endlessly name-checked. Take this for example:

“As the philosopher John MacMurray comments,”Our knowledge of the workd is primarily an aspect of our action in the world.” “Men”, Marx writes in Heideggerian vein in his Comments of Wagner “do not in any way begin by finding themselves in a theoretical relationship to the things of the external world” (pg 142)

Hope you got that, because there will be a quiz?

Marx wrote a huge body of work, and in the course of his life obviously refined his position on many issues. If you have the time and energy therefore you can find support for most arguments somewhere in his writing. Eagleton’s job here wasn’t to manipulate that work to support a narrow view of Marxism, but to preserve the key ideas which needed repeating. But there’s the rub – if Marx’s ideas really needed translating, saving or defending by Eagleton, aren’t they in deep trouble already? Perhaps “why marx was right” is wrong?

Incidentally, when I first started reading this book one thing struck me, and that was the confidence of the title. Typically academics write in a far less direct way – Why it could be argued that in most respects Marx was correct”. No such hesitation here, Marx was right, others are wrong, and I’ll punch anyone who disagrees. I liked that – such a shame that the book goes so far off course.

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Book review, Collapse, Jared Diamond, Non-fiction

Collapse by Jared Diamond, 2005

Collapse – How Societies Choose to fail or Survive

Jared Diamond (2005)
An amazing book, which may well have finally cured me of my aversion to non-fiction. I am told it has since been made into a TV programme (or series) but not one which I caught.
In brief, this is, as the title suggests, a study of how societies collapse. There are several very detailed case studies, including the Mayan civilisation in Mexico, Easter Island, the Norse settlement in Greenland, and American Indian civilisations. There are contrasted with similar civilisations that have persisted (although the reference to Iceland’s prosperity in comparison with Greenland is a bit of a sick joke post-bankruptcy in 2008/9) despite very challenging environments. The chapter on Easter Island (2) is a particularly interesting part of the book – it is argued compellingly that this extraordinarily mature and complex civilisation committed ecocide. Most of the collapsed civilisations studied here existed in marginal, challenging environments, and the sources of their collapse can be traced back to environmental destruction of one kind or another, whether it be deforestation, salinization of the soil, or soil erosion.
I wrote positively about Diamond’s earlier work, Guns, Germs and Steel in a previous entry. This book could easily have been alternatively sub-titled “Trees, Soil, and Water” given the central role these ingredients play in the survival or otherwise of civilisations. But Diamond’s choice of sub-title here, and especially that verb “choose” is both controversial and illuminating, and I keep coming back to that choice. His central thesis is clear – the survival of societies is not simply a matter of a natural rise and fall over time, but a result of the decisions and choices societies make. That’s not to say those decisions are easy or obvious, but nonetheless with the benefit of hindsight we can see how some societies prosper in almost impossible circumstances – he cites the example of the island of Tikopia in the Pacific which is less than two square miles in area, but on which people have survived for around 3,000 years – while others disappear more or less suddenly.
This is a hugely controversial topic or battleground, and of course Diamond’s cultural and academic perspectives come into play. His analysis of the massacres in Rwanda, attributing them in part to over-population, will be distressing to some, but he arrays a formidable amount of evidence to support his position.

Diamond is usually scrupulous in acknowledging when he is entering a field of potential or actual controversy – he recognises the existing debate, without hesitating to offer his own judgment or perspective. Which makes it all the more surprising that when discussing the use of infanticide as a method of population control, he does so in a quite chillingly dispassionate way, without giving the slightest nod to the possibility that there may be readers who do not accept that this was ever used in the way suggested. I have no doubt he has evidence to support his contention – presumably archaeological – but this is not cited or referenced.  


Diamond is handling some big themes here, so inevitably his work has attracted a fair amount of controversy. He anticipates some of this in his original text (so far as I can tell – the edition I read was a 2011 reprint, and there has been some revision and updating of the text). Firstly, the suggestion that native inhabitants of the Easter Islands and elsewhere could have wilfully destroyed their environment, leaving it uninhabitable, is seen by some as at best counter-intuitive, and worst simply racist. He stands accused of underplaying the role of slave traders and European illnesses in depopulating the island, where, it is claimed, indigenous peoples survived and prospered long after the largest trees were harvested. The counter thesis is that statue carving and erecting did not end with the felling of the largest trees, and the stone masons’ tools lie abandoned in the quarry not because people just walked away to participate in the collapse of the culture, but because they were attacked by slave traders.

Another controversy has centred on the puzzling question as to whether the Norse Greenlanders ate fish or not. The evidence of the animal bones in Viking rubbish studied by archaeologists suggested not, but other evidence of Viking bones themselves (and I admit I am not sure how analysing the chemical composition of people’s bones can tell you with much confidence how much fish they ate) claims that fish played an increasingly important part in people’s diets. This particular debate seems a bit of a non-issue to me and symptomatic of critics wanting to take chunks out of Diamond and taking any opportunity to do so – hence another “missing the point” article elsewhere claming that Australia’s agriculture is doing very well thank you very much. 

Diamond’s central thesis is actually very simple and in many ways unarguable. Over the course of human history some societies have prospered and survived, and others have collapsed. The survivors have certain characteristics that we can learn from, as do those which collapsed. The main learning point is that we should look after our environment, either by central Government taking the initiative (e.g. on forestry management), international co-operation (e.g. on climate change) or by “bottom-up” change initiated by local people and the choices they make e.g. lowering consumption, recycling. All of these actions will be fairly pointless if we don’t do something about population. I think we all know that population is increasing exponentially across the planet, and what we do about that is a subject that wouldn’t fit into Diamond’s analysis – he touches upon the issue but not in anything like the depth it requires. This is the Green political analysis, and it is well put, but I don’t see it as the whole answer, (of course).



Some minor complaints. At times this is a poorly edited, dull and self indulgent book, despite all the fireworks elsewhere. The opening chapter on Montana is a false start – Montana is in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, and this chapter reads as if Diamond is writing a postcard from his holiday home rather than opening an analysis of societal collapse.

Another grumble is on the absence of photographs/plates, which have been removed from this edition, presumably to save money (although £10.99 isn’t cheap for a paperback!) The references to the plates in the text have not been edited out. I found this disproportionately frustrating – each time the author reference to a plate he must have had reason to do so – the image or photograph would have illustrated a point that he doesn’t need to further elaborate. Basically it was just cheap of the publishers.
At the end of what was a bit of a marathon I feel very virtuous, having made it to the end, and what is more I want to know more – I have already followed up with various articles and Wikipedia entries – which is always a good sign.
 
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Non-fiction

Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond

I am reading Jules Verne’s “Mysterious Island” at the moment, but it is hard going (I know it sounds like I am reading the originals of a series of bad movies, what with “George of the Jungle” and “Lost World”), so I am going to write about a book I read earlier in the year, namely Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel; a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years”.

The title and the cover of the paperback is a little misleading, in that it suggests this is a work of popular science, but it is a more academic, heavyweight text than the presentation suggests. It addresses a fundamental question raised by the author’s experiences in field anthropology – why did European nations come to dominate the world in the second half of the second millennium? The simple answer is given in the title of the book – they had guns, germs and steel, and therefore were able to dominate militarily the nations they “discovered”. Sometimes the diseases they introduced removed the need for military conflict altogether; at other times small forces of European invaders were able to beat large armies of indigenous people, most notably in the extraordinary tale of the defeat of a native American army of 80,000 warriors by 168 Spanish soldiers in 1532. But each answer leads to a fresh question – why did the Europeans have guns and steel, and immunity to disease that the indigenous peoples did not? Why had their civilisations developed a particular degree of sophistication in metallurgy for example, when other nations had not even invented the wheel? I was amazed to read that one South American civilisation had in fact discovered the wheel, but saw no particular use for it – this is largely explained by their terrain, and that they had not domesticated a beast of burden suitable for haulage.


Ultimately, the answer given is that it all comes down to geography. Civilisations arose in and spread from places where there was a conjunction of factors that allowed settlements to develop. These factors included suitable plants that could be farmed, beasts that could be domesticated, the right climate, etc. The explanation is clearly much more complex than this, and Diamond shows amazing scholarship in how he charts the progress from small tribes to ancient and modern civilisations. His breadth of research across disciplines is equally impressive. A chapter towards the end of the book struck me with particular force as he charts how some civilisations “uninvented” certain technologies – they made sometimes puzzling but nonetheless conscious and usually Government led decisions to remove some technologies from their societies – I just didn’t know that had ever happened, and it undermines the argument sometimes used about nuclear technology – ie that it can’t be uninvented.


I really enjoyed this – parts were challenging – but the effort was very much worth it, and it has led me into another arena of reading, which has got to be good.
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Jon Ronson, Non-fiction, The Psychopath Test

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

by
Ten years ago the number of non-fiction books I read in a year could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Biographies in particular were a subject of scorn or impatience – arrogantly I argued that no biography had ever appeared on the syllabus of a Literature degree course. I still read biogs very rarely – they seem to inhabit a space (in the worst instances) where writers throw them together using a few wikipedia searches and cut and paste. Genuine insight or original writing is often missing even from heavyweight biographies. I read Roy Jenkins’ Churchill last year, and despite wading through over 700 pages (I haven’t counted, it just felt that long) I ended up feeling that I did not know much more about the subject than I had before, and that the insight into his character and motivation was sadly missing. Nothing new had been discovered or revealed despite what was clearly a monumental research effort.



But since my children turned secondary school age, and feeling the need to keep up with them in History, Science, etc, and no longer being able to rely on what I studied at O levels decades ago, I have started to pick up the odd book of “popular” non-fiction. Last year I read a book and a half on the Nazi’s rise to power, as well as “When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-Inflation” by Adam Fergusson on – well you can probably guess. I had been having a long running debate with my eldest about the role of Hitler in the rise of the nazi party – I was trying to persuade him round from the seductive “Great Man” theory of history (for more see  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory) and I needed some more ammunition.


The most recent non-fiction I have read, as recommended by my wife, is Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test”, sub-titled “A Journey through the Madness Industry”. Ronson occupies a well defined niche in modern journalism, in which he explores quirky or unlikely events, people, or things, and includes the journey of discovery/investigation as a key part of the text, regularly supplemented with anecdotes and stories of the unlikely. I left this book feeling I had passed a pleasant few hours in the company of an interesting story teller, but what I had learned about psychopaths was very limited – they are nasty people, they can’t be treated, they are highly manipulative, but not all are criminals. Much of the text was a retelling of well known stories, such as the Rachel Nickell/Colin Stagg history, and while there was some original investigative journalism, not enough to merit a whole book (let alone the film rights that Men who stare at Goats led to). I shouldn’t complain though because as I explained earlier, my appetite for anything too heavy is very limited, so criticising Ronson for keeping things light – especially given the subject matter – would be a bit hypocritical (or should I say psychopathic?)

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