If You Look Long Enough Into the Micro Reviews, The Micro Reviews Begin to Look Back
Or, Micro-Reviews, non-fiction edition.
Whenever I go home for the holidays, there are invariably three things waiting for me in my room: the mail that has gathered in the interim, all the Globe and Mail Saturday cryptic crosswords accumulated in my absence (carefully torn out and folded by my father), and the Globe and Mail Holiday Books section.
I deal with this the way I deal with all new lists of exciting books — by circling the ones that interest me and then putting them on hold at the public library. This year, it backfired, and I came home to about 10 holds ready for me to pick up and more on the way.
With that in mind, here’s something completely new for these micro-reviews. All the works I’m about to go over are (gasp!) non-fiction books for adults.
Do I get to level up in maturity? (After asking that question, probably not.)
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks, 2009 (non-fiction book) – Thanks, Laura, for lending this book to me*! The title is somewhat self-explanatory, although it becomes clearer when you learn the author is a physicist and science writer detailling what he thinks are the most exciting anomalies and unsolved questions in modern science. The tone alone is worth the cover price: Brooks is able to question accepted scientific theory and practice without denying its validity, pointing out that challenges to what we think we already know are the lifeblood of science and lead to new research and important breakthroughs. His comments on mysteries of physics are particularly interesting, given his own specialty.
More Money Than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College Is Crap, and Idiots Think They’re Right (Laura Penny, 2010) – The author takes a hilarious sarcastic tone to explore the forms and consequences of what she argues is the pervasive anti-intellectualism of contemporary North American culture. While anyone who’s ever run university tutorials will find a lot to agree with, it’s disappointing that she focusses more on zingers and bon mots shooting down her ideological opponents than on developing the positive aspects of her argument. I agree that economic usefulness isn’t the only measure of worth, but that’s the easy part: how exactly can we describe the sort of worth the humanities and the pure sciences have?
War by Sebastian Junger, 2010 (non-fiction book) – This first-person memoir of time spend with front-line soldiers in Afghanistan is sometimes confusing to follow, since the action of the book is as convoluted as the real-life war it describes, but its portrait of men living through such a changing experience is gripping and moving enough to make you not care. It’s hard to believe that you’re reading about real people. Living in a country like Canada where the realities of warfare are half a world away, it’s difficult to remember what’s really going on in the human side of things, and although it would be silly to say someone merely reading a book can come away with a sense of “how it feels,” Junger provides as much insight as is possible through words on a page.
A Year of Living Generously: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Philanthropy by Lawrence Scanlan, 2010 (non-fiction book) – I’m still not sure how I feel about this book in which the author details his experiences volunteering with a different charitable organization each month for a whole year. On one hand, it’s stomach-squirmingly eye-opening, with particular resonance for those who, like me, have lived in Kingston and Toronto, two cities where Scanlan spends a lot of his time. On the other, although the author does his best to combat the cynicism with which one might raise an eyebrow at his motives, it’s tough not to ask the questions that his book neverthless brings to mind: are his efforts meaningful and good? If not, what is?
The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children — and Its Aftermath by Susan A. Clancy, 2009 (non-fiction book) – This slim volume is disturbing but engaging — I read it all in a single sitting. The author argues that by characterizing sexual abuse as always traumatic (in the physiological and DSM senses, not the regular sense where we use the word to mean something had negative effects on someone) for the child at the moment it happens, psychologists are unwittingly excluding and stigmatizing the majority of sexual assault victims, for whom the real damage occurs later, when they begin to understand what happened to them. Whether you agree or not, Dr. Clancy makes her case and explains her evidence very well, and she’s one of the few practicing scientists I’ve read who makes reference to philosophers of science in intellectually appropriate contexts.
The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather To Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases by Michael Capuzzo, 2010 (true crime mystery) – Yeah, it gets stocked in the fiction section, but it’s about the three founding members of the real-life Vidocq society (before I finished the first chapter, I had to spend at least an hour on the Internet being like, ok, is this real true crime or just some annoying artistic thing where the author is trying to pull a Lemony Snicket but is too subtle for that to be clear?), the club of elite detectives who solve cold cases over their meetings. It’s just as cool as it sounds, but for me, the most interesting part was seeing how the author used the tropes of mystery fiction to tell real-life stories — and how that made me react in ways not supported by the facts as given. For instance, some of the cases mentioned finish with, “And then the smart guys we’ve been talking about argued over whether it was suspect X or suspect Y, but the last one to speak was pretty sure it was Y. But there was no evidence and nothing anyone could do, so everyone dropped it again,” which made me feel like, yeah, suspect Y totally is guilty, but nobody can pin it on him… except, wait, even the detectives disagree, and nobody actually knows what the “real” answer is.
The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science by Douglas Starr (non-fiction book, 2010) – This true-crime historical study follows one of the first French — well, to be anachronistic, we’d call him a serial killer, a vagrant worker named Joseph Vacher who killed over a dozen young men and women near the turn of the century. It seems well researched and put together, although of course, it being out of my field of expertise, I really couldn’t say. In any case, the author does a great job of making the reader take a second look at all the administrative technologies and legal precedents that we take for granted today — insanity pleas, fingerprints, interprovincial cooperation, etc.
Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre (non-fiction book, 2008, 2009, 2010) – Of all the “here’s how people misunderstand science or believe wrong things” books that seem to be popular lately, I think I like this one the best, both for Goldacre’s ability to discuss why he believes other opinions are wrong without insisting that the people who hold them are stupid, ignorant, and/ or irrational and for his careful explanations of how he evaluates statistical arguments in his working life. Very readable and funny, this book goes into several current health public controversies — such as the effectiveness of homeopathy and the purported vaccination-autism link — with the ultimate goal of showing how the popular media misrepresent all sorts of health issues to the public due to their inability to properly interpret the statistical studies key to evidence-based medicine.
* Admittedly, I’ve been telling some people that Hamlet** lent it to me, both to save on explanations, and also secretly in the hope that I might be asked what it’s about, to which I could cleverly reply, “Words, words, words.”
** Dear those of you who aren’t involved with Socratic Theatre: this makes sense in real life, I swear.