Atomic Habits - Clear

James Clear in his truly remarkable book, “Atomic Habits” comes to me much later in life.  After I had figured out most of life's secrets through my own observations.  Trying to pass those experiences on to your kid is still not easy. If you’ve ever formed a habit, or worse, formed a bad habit, nothing changes overnight.  But if we want change, we hope we can change it overnight.  But if it doesn’t change  we are quick to give up and return right back to the older bad habits we learned.  Everyone should go to military school like that “Finklestein shit-kid”.  Quoting from Cheech & Chong Up In Smoke, if you didn’t get the reference.  Here’s another concept about military school in the movie in which Robert Duvall p[layed the Great Santini,  written by Pat Conroy..  

You may not have to go to military school if  your dad forces you to learn how to make  your bed, square your corners, clean your room.  Perhaps you never figured it out.  A military school, above all others, teaches discipline repetitively so it becomes a habit.  Polishing your shoes.  Cleaning your weapon.  Humans, as well as most animals, do repetitive things.  We form good habits. And we form bad habits.  Habits are a form of discipline.  A friend of mine  used to say, there are two types of discipline.  Your own, and somebody-else's.  Somebody-else's usually hurts more.  I’ve often wondered if his dad may have had  similar DNA to the Great Santini (An authoritarian discipline-junkie and a real prick of a dad).   Creating habits, good habits, should be the goal of good parenting.  I’m not going to judge the creation of one person's habits above another, but things like sleep hygiene and personal hygiene are probably universal.  One doesn’t need a whistle to create good habits, as Baron Von Trappe used in the Sound of Music,  but sometimes it helps.

James Clear instructions on changing habits and creating new habits are so simple we should all be changing our bad habits today.  When I first conceptualized what may be inside the book, I thought, this jackass knows what’s good for us and we have to start picking up these habits because successful habits have been studied in successful people and we want to be like them.   Ala Steven Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”.  I didn’t give James Clear sufficient credit for what he set out to do.    His book is not about “a particular habit”.  His book is a method of habit forming and habit breaking.  If you want to start a bad habit, his book is just as effective.  But it is the recipe of human nature that any program that strives to bend, mold, form, squeeze, or otherwise alter human behavior must understand before undergoing any such task.  Create that right habit, and you will have success.  To me, any psychological therapy one undergoes, should also start with habits.  Use Clear’s formula, to write down every habit, good or bad, and then figure out what habits you want to keep, which ones need to go away, and what good things you need to form. Then build the strategy to break each one and create the missing ones.  That should be the recipe for almost any human work that needs to be done.  Clear’s recipe will work.  I’ve been using most of the techniques for years without realizing it. I am certain his formula will work.   It unlocks the keys to controlling human behavior. Which, in the wrong hands, could be dangerous. 

Molding people in an ethical way is  important.  Clear stays away from any moral questions since his book is pointed at the individual for self-help. .  But if you teach habits as orthodox doctrine,  just like a military school indoctrinates young minds into the disciplines of military habit (since you can’t have insubordination in the fox hole) , so too does any fundamentalist institution.  Master the administration of habit and you can control those within its grasp.  Ten years before 9/11, Usama Bin Laden knelt down with his minions at noon everyday to pray and lecture them on the wickedness of the United States thereby  brainwashing his army of evil doers we know as Al Qaeda.  Once we’ve formed a habit, we no longer ask why we are doing something.  We “Just Do It”.  That’s a good thing, from Nike’s perspective, if it  means running for fitness and buying their running shoes.  It’s a bad thing if the habits we learn harm ourselves, others, or the world around us.

Common Sense - Beck

In his new book, "Glenn Beck's Common Sense, The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine, by Glenn Beck with Joseph Kerry, Mr. Beck chooses as a rallying cry the thoughts of some or our greatest founding fathers and  the best political thinkers of all time -- at least with regard to the appropriate governance of a republic.  If you are alive in the US today the rallying cry that our Government has failed us is an easy criticism to make.  Taking to the streets as interested citizens and banding together for the common good as political advocates for change should resonate with everyone.  Yet Beck doesn't write for everyone though he could have. Take for example his opening line, "I think I know who you are".  He goes on to list about 32 characteristics of person in the general population who is upset and would like to see political change.  I counted about 32 characteristics of this person and found I have only eight. That's about 25% percent.  So Mr. Beck doesn't know me as well as he thinks he does.  That's a problem, but not a big problem, because one my characteristics, one he does not mention, is the ability to hold, as F. Scott Fitzgerald has said, "...two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."  So I continued to read.  Whereas he did not win me at hello, and he lost me occasionally at places where, for instance, he says in the context that our Social Security and Medicare obligations are upside down that, "...you many want to rethink your current family situation and have more kids."  A stultifying statement if he seriously believes it.  Yet I read on.  His agenda, tired and well trod, includes bashing any claim that climate change is actually occurring , standing up for our right to own handguns, and railing against the cancer, as he call it, of progressivism.  Yet somehow, deep within the bowels of the book, not too deep it's only about a hundred pages long, and I can tell you specifically, "Chapter IV, the Perks and Privileges of the Political Class", he hits pay dirt. He's got about 15 pages of money here, no pun intended. So in a book where he's got me pegged about 25% he's got a chapter with 100% of what I think. In addition he's got it right with regard to our two political parties not giving us sufficient options to truly be governed by ourselves.  His call for change here is highly appropriate.  But since all of these book reviews are more about politics and less about the particular book, I will close with a counter quote to his call to revolution, even a revolution of ideas, "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" as a chilling reminder of what happens when we cannot reach a solution.  The source of this quote is left to the reader.

The Shack - Young

Six years and over 8,000 reviews of “The Shack”,  a novel by William Paul Young, appears on Amazon.  It seems like just about everything that can be said has been said.  Many say it is a great book.  Many say it is a controversial book.  At the risk of spoiling at least one surprise within it’s pages I have learned that Oprah Winfrey has been cast to play a leading role in the movie version of “The Shank” which will begin filming soon.  In the movie Oprah will be starring as the character “Papa” a.k.a God.  Yes, in this book, God, appears as a motherly middle aged African American women named Papa.  One might be able to appreciate where some of the controversy is sparked from that revelation.  But there’s more.  Both Jesus and the Holy Spirit also must be cast for this story.  I will not ruin that surprise, either in movie or book form.  But let me tell you a story…

I read this book after a  real world tragic event befell a close friend of mine.  He ran to the pages of this book for solace and asked those around him whom he loved to also read this book in order to find some piece in their own hearts.  It worked.

In the book, a father grieves the loss of his daughter, ripped from his love tragically and far too early in life. My friend also grieved the loss of his daughter.  In the book the father is called back to the place where is daughter took her last breath, “The Shack”.  So too, my friend was called back to such a place.  In this case a railway bridge spanning a scenic woodland creek.  With great strength that overcame his great fear, a strength emanating from an unknown force, the father in the book returns to find a communion with God. With great strength my friend conquered all his fear in order to ask a group of friends to return with him to the location where his daughter drew her last breath finding strength of purpose from the pages of this book.  In the book the father was taught by God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit about the power of relationships and the power of Love that drives these relationships.  The real Dad, standing on the railway bridge, spoke to his gathered friends, some forty of us,  about the last weeks of his daughter's life, of the demons that took her life, and of the quiet place she now lives her life anew. In the book “The Shack” is transformed from a place of great tragedy, to a shining piece of heaven.  In real life, the railway bridge was transformed from a place of great tragedy, to a place of quiet serenity and peace, a place all of us could now return to for reflection and communion with our thoughts and prayers.

A work of fiction cannot carry the power of such transformation unless it is touched by another power, a higher power.  Believers will believe.  Non-believers will non-believe.  Critics will cast aspersions and negativity about the dangers of the inaccuracies they found between the pages of “The Shack”.  These criticisms stemming from what they believe are inaccurate representations of Truth as it’s found in the Bible.  To those critics I can only say one thing.  The title of this work of fiction is, “The Shack”.  It does not say, “The Bible”, on it’s cover.

For the record I would like to note that there are plenty of inspirational texts out there that seek to convey spiritual truth through fictional account. Many are held to a significantly higher standard if they attempt to convey something that is Biblically based with anything other than an orthodox view.  Another book that has offered solace to those grieving that has sold millions of copies (~4 million) is called “When Bad Things Happen to Bad People”.  There can be no doubt that this book offers communion with God, although it does so in a way that ultimately portrays God, as somewhat less than God, at least not an all powerful God.  “The Shack”, gives that power back to God and still answers the same questions Rabbi Kushner had set out to explain in his book.  Wm. Paul Young prevails both in story and in sales, over 8 million as of today.  

To me, this book is helpful, it’s sincere, and the inaccuracies one might have trouble dealing with do not erase from its power.  A power, as I’ve explained, I have witness first hand.  I give this book Five stars for anyone who want’s to grieve less over any loss.  It has my highest recommendation...buy this book and give it to a grieving loved one.  But for the purposes of this review as a piece of fiction, I’ll give it four stars for the average fiction reader but will deduct one star for the Chapter entitled, “Here Come da Judge”.  Read it...skip this chapter...or explain to me this chapter...3-Stars over all...it was a privilege for me to have read it.

Fooling Houdini - Stone

 

Almost everyone has a fascination with magic.  When we were young, most of us received a cheap magic kit as a gift...and have subsequently given the gift of cheap magic to our kids..  The kit always contained a black wand with white tips from out of which you could pull 10 silk scarves.  Many kits also contained a plastic frame with a hidden compartment that could disappear a coin or split a card in half.  In the instructions, if you read them, it warns young would-be magicians to never perform the same trick twice and to never, ever reveal your secrets.  For most of us comprehending tricks inside would turn us off to magic...we realized there actually is no magic inside the box.  And maybe that’s the point...those of who want to believe in magic step away from the pursuit of a career in black arts preferring to be mesmerized by the amazing skills of the few practitioners while at the same time trying to forget the fact that in order to be mesmerized we had to be fooled, duped by the hidden secret.  Enter Alex Stone and his new book, “Fooling Houdini, Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, & the Hidden Powers of the Mind”.

The Amazing Alex Stone (he doesn't really have a stage name but all great magicians need one) is not satisfied with us simply believing in magic.  He want’s us to come to grips with the secrets of magic...to fully embrace the fact that sleight of hand and deception is the very essence of magic.  Most magicians call their tricks an illusion to avoid harsher terms.  Illusion is softer than deception.   And deception is softer than simply being a liar or a cheat.  Magicians that perform on stage are honest liars because you know where your money is going.  Magicians that perform off stage are con men and thieves who work with a few cheap tricks to separate us from our money illegally.  Ethically speaking, this is why The Amazing Alex really want’s to shed light on the profession of magic, and feels, as an honest magician, he can reveal some of it’s secrets and not destroy the foundation of magic for all time.  But that’s not the only reason he speaks to us frankly about the tricks behind the card tricks. Philosophically speaking, his recurring theme throughout the book is that if the layperson loves magic, and loves to be fooled by the trick, magicians love to be fooled even more. The crown jewels of magic are found when you are able to fool your very own, the magicians themselves, hence the name of the book, “Fooling Houdini”.  But just how do you fool the experts.  Houdini claimed no magician could fool him with the same trick three times.  In the book, Mr. Stone reveals the trick of the “Ambitious Card” which fooled Houdini seven times.  Practically speaking, it takes, not special powers, but hard work and a lot of skill.  Magicians work for years to be able to hold things in strange places, coins and cards, to be able to remember things, the order of an entire deck of cards, and to be able to shuffle, for instance, the entire deck of cards, perfectly (called a Faro shuffle), so that after the 8th Faro shuffle, every card returns to it’s original position.  That’s a skill, not unlike the skill of any professional athlete, who can magically score a goal or make a basket, Magic Johnson comes to mind.

But the Amazing Alex isn’t satisfied with ethics, philosophy, or even practical skill.  He want’s to dig deeper, into the heart of why magic works, and that search takes him into the heart of science…of all places.  Science is the antithesis of mysticism.  Mr. Stone want’s to unearth the first principles of science and tie them to the unifying theory of everything...with magic leading the way.   Mr. Stone, after all, has a Master’s Degree in Physics from Columbia.   Scientifically  speaking, then it is important to understand that while any good trick seems to defy the physical laws of nature, in can’t, and therefore must be a trick.  Levitation, for instance, or bending spoons with your mind.  But through the research of magicians trying to levitate things, trying to bend things with their mind, trying to pick the selected card out of a shuffled deck of cards, they have learned things about our physical universe and about the way the human mind works. 

These things have improved the human condition and our understanding of ethics, psychology, training, and of course science.  Magic has played a role in human development for thousands of years and Mr. Stone’s quest by giving us a glimpse behind the black curtain is simply to elevate the plight of magicians from the seedy underworld of con men and cheats and the “Three Card Monte”, or at best traveling entertainers and parlour mentalists, to highly skilled professionals providing a great service to society…which they have done, but with very little credit, worldwide, for centuries.  I’m giving “Fooling Houdini” four stars.  It was a fun and easy read, I learned a lot.  I don’t see this book having mass appeal but Mr. Stone is on to something...but he stops well short of fleshing it out. In particular his treatment of probability and information theory.  There are places he can go…my first suggestion would be to dig into “A New Kind of Science” by Stephen Wolfram.  If Mr. Stone is correct, a deck of cards is no doubt a representation of a discrete universe, potentially at the base of quantum theory, which could represent the New Science.  To jump to Mr. Stone’s punch line, spoiler alert, it takes seven shuffles of a deck of cards to fully randomize the deck...provided it’s not a perfect Faro shuffle, which would repeat.  A card deck represents in a perfectly discreet way going from order to disorder provided a flaw in the shuffle is introduced...that indeed could be the universal theory of everything.

Firmin - Savage

Can a book about the life of a rat rise to the level of great literature?  Obviously that depends on personal taste.  Sam Savage, however, has written a tremendous story that might actually be considered great by more than a few.  Written almost entirely as a narrative, experimental perhaps but highly effective because the rat, Firmin, in Savage's first novel, "Firmin, Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife", longs for some type of connection with the humans who inhabit his world.  But, alas, he is a rat.  His intellectual world is completely self contained within his narrative, the books he reads (and nibbles on), and the journeys he takes through alleys, old buildings, and the littered gutters of an older city of Boston scrounging for food.  So the dialogue is brief and we therefore spend most of our time in Firmin's head.  Which is a good place to be because Firmin is foremost an observer of life.  What Firmin sees he first names and then describes as he tries to bring sense to the world around him.  Which, because it is a multidimensional world of humans, since he cannot see too far above the two dimensional world in which he lives, even though he is a prolific reader, he has trouble making sense of it all.  Things occur outside his level of understanding and perspective.  For instance, the first human Firmin ever loves gives him a box of good tasting food to eat.  The food, of course, is rat poison.  Do we need any greater insight into the human condition?  Savage begins his story by letting us know we are in for some sad times ahead, but his stories are not exceptionally sad, or even tragic.  They are simply real, observed, and magnificently described from the lowest possible perspective--which should change our perspective if only a little.  In the end, Firmin could not escape from the world he was born into. Do we share Firmin's fate?

We Are Anonymous - Parmy

 

Most of us consider the internet to be a fascinating place to conduct business, catch up on news, talk with friends, learn, shop, and be entertained.  Being connected forms a significant portion of our lives. And unless you are specifically in the computer business as an IT professional, a programmer, or computer security specialist you probably only pay attention to the advice to change your password during your company’s annual security training.  Worse than changing your password, checking your computer for viruses typically involves fighting with programs that scan your computer which are as disruptive (perhaps more so) than the viruses we probably have silently  running in the background of our systems as we speak.  And of course we all wonder, each time we swipe our credit cards, if this will be the time our numbers will turn up for sale on some black-market list.  Most of us have heard there is a seedy underbelly of the internet, but most of us believe that we are somewhat removed from that underbelly which exists only on the other side of the tracks...the red light district where prostitutes, drug dealers, predators, and other criminals lurk.  If we simply avoid taking that turn off the information superhighway we are not at risk.

Enter Parmy Olson and her book, “We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency”.  As it turns out, the wrong turn you have to take, is no farther away that typing “4chan” into your web browser.  Instantly you are transported into the depths of depravity of the human mind for a single reason...you can remain anonymous.  4chan is an imageboard...one of the first...and within 4chan, specifically on the the 4chan/b/ index, a collective identity was formed dedicated to mischief on the internet.  In the beginning most mischief involved pranks and cyber embarrassment...literally for laughs.  Eventually this anonymous laughter, termed Lultz, required a higher level of achievement.  Eventually embarrassing individuals didn’t provide sufficient laughter and the addiction to laughs drove the search for bigger and better targets.  As it turns out, in order to properly embarrass someone (for laughs) it requires information, planning, and execution.  To be good at it the pranksters had to develop talents that coincidentally resemble the skills of a good hacker.   Individual skills in social engineering, SQL injection, the discovery of vulnerabilities, and the creation of botnet networks, were all available and the imageboard brought these talents together.  Anonymous was born.

Thousands of users accessed the 4chan imageboard...perhaps tens of thousands.  However several users known in the anonymous channels by the chat names of Sabu, Topiary, Kayla, and TFlow, became legendary characters on the imageboard.  Their early exploits developed a loyal following that permitted them to focus the direction of many of these followers to participate in the mayhem that would occur in the name of Anonymous.

Olson, although criticized by ardent computer experts for not being an expert on computer hacking, clearly reports and captures the life of these four Anonymous actors from their early beginnings, through their exploits, and onto their eventual arrest.  She paints an image of the seedy underbelly of the internet that, whereas we do not need the technical details of how it works, we need to know it exists.  We need to know there are legions of computer users who spend their lives trolling the recesses of the internet looking for open doors they can walk through, mostly to find interesting material, like embarrassing photos or credit card numbers they can post for sale.  They do this, not to get rich, but to pay for their computer drug habit (to pay their ISP, buy an new router, or upgrade their laptop), so they can continue to troll and be entertained.  Like teenagers who walk the neighborhood at night, they are bored and not looking to become hardened criminals, but will open a car door and take whatever they find inside.  The more open doors they find the more successful their midnight walk and the more encouraged they become.  This is nothing new.  We should not be surprised this behavior exists on the internet either now, when Matthew Broderick social engineered a computer to play “Global Thermonuclear War” in 1983, or during the peak of the hacking revolution in the 1990s when the “Black Hats” and the “White Hats” developed sides.

By far the random nature of the Anonymous community, while formidable behind a collective cause, should encourage us to change our passwords and not give out hints that can be socially engineered into giving up our sensitive information.  This community remains both anonymous and unorganized.  The greater threat, posed by mature and organized groups of criminal and state sponsored hackers are far more dangerous.  Unfortunately their operations are masked by the sheer number of individuals simply pulling on door handles and jumping fences simply to look in your windows.  The internet can be a mysterious and scary place because of all the anonymous strangers who lurk.  This book takes most of the mystery out of it.  4-Stars for telling a great story and for motivating me to change my password more often.

Man's Search for Meaning - Frankl

The book I just read has been translated into twenty-four languages.  Twelve million copies are in print.  And as of this morning there are over 7500 reviews on Amazon.  Is there anything more I can add to the world wide commentary on Viktor Frankl’s classic, “Man’s Search for Meaning”?  Probably not, but regardless, my intent today is to write a review in the midst of these numerous threads of thought that might perhaps edge in on something different. That said, let’s begin...

Frankl’s great book is a revelation to me in that I definitely believe, some 70 years later, his theories still have the power to transform the treatment of mental health patients. Frankl’s hard won Logotherapy, the approach he developed in the 30's and 40's, still has legs.  In particular, his belief that those with anxiety and depression can find relief by simply discovering some meaning in their lives.  Interestingly, and anecdotally, this can happen with just some basic observation and a few strategically placed words that can shift a patient's perspective directly into recovery mode.  Easier, perhaps, said than done.  In the movie "City Slickers", with Billy Crystal and Jack Palance, the role of Curly being played by Palance (who incidentally won an Oscar for his role) tried to get Mitch (Billy Crystal's character) to find the meaning in his life.  If we are not careful, we might fall into the easy trap. Curly's famous line in the movie about finding the "One Thing", seems to ring true in a book entitled "Man's Search for Meaning".  This is about the farthest from Frankl's philosophy as it can get…No offense Curly.  Yet the search may be easier than we think, just not in Curly's way, if we can lower some of our natural defenses.

Can it work?  Will it work?  Let's find out… But first, let’s understand it…and give it a try later on as I wrap up this discussion.

Imagine first, what everyone must know about the Holocaust.  Whether you’ve read about it in “The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)”, or you’ve been exposed to Concentration Camps through documentaries or movies, or perhaps you’ve visited the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, or physically been to one of the dark places,  like  Auschwitz, preserved in Europe to remember these dark times.  The first part of Frankl’s book, entitled, “Experiences in a Concentration Camp” is exactly what Frankl says. This part contains his first hand experience in German death camps.  Altogether he was in four different camps and somehow survived to write about it. It’s worth noting, as he certainly does, that blind luck had more to do with his survival more than his metal attitude. If you can imagine, one in 29, souls survived those camps.  That's Frankl's number, I didn't check actual statistics.  One does not give positive attitude any credit under those deathly odds.  And he does not credit his attitude though some have claimed with a certain insensitivity, that he has.  He is not casting undue blame on the millions who perished for being responsible for their own demise.  This is an unfair and insensitive characterization of what Frankl is telling us.  That he survived to tell his story has less to do about his actual survival and more to do about his unique observational platform.  Prior to his internment in the concentration camps he was already a psychiatrist of note.  During his informative years in Austria, over a four-year period, he interviewed more than 12,000 patients--most following their attempt at suicide.  This is the 1930’s and the fact that Frankl talked with so many patients with depression and suicidal tendencies is quite incredible.  How many therapists today have had that sort of clinical experience?  We send our family’, or perhaps go ourselves, to therapists and doctors who prescribe medications based on a textbook diagnosis. This is a sad state of affairs but that discussion is for another day.

Fast forward into Auschwitz.  If you can imagine a doctor of note with such a storehouse of human knowledge pertaining to mental health conditions as he is personally walking within the gray huts, snow, mud, and fence line of a death camp. Where everybody, including him, have been stripped of anything remotely human, as they are freezing, starving, and waiting to die, but taking mental notes of the human behavior occurring under such extreme and dire circumstances.  The fact that he was the observer is like having the prescience to send a great poet such as Whitman or Wadsworth to view the great plateau of Olympus Mons.  This is like sending a great engineer such as Tesla or Edison to examine technology on an alien world, or like sending Stephen Hawking to an event horizon to study Black Holes.   If we are not careful, we might ascribe even greater meaning to Frankl’s survival than permitted by the math alone.  Why he, among millions of others, with his observational abilities, as opposed to someone less learned in the human condition, survived?  Arguably one of the greatest emerging minds in psychology sent to a Concentration Camp.  Think about it for a second, Frankl was living and working in Vienna, Austria, as was Sigmund Freud, et al.  Vienna in the 1920s was to psychology what Paris was to the art world in the same decades. As an eminent medical scholar, he had the ability to leave Austria when it was clear the war was coming.  He chose to stay and serve his patients.  And here he was present to observe  and miraculously actually did survive on the slimmest of margins.  And not only did he survive he has given us his story.  The world is a richer place for his observations and his new insight into psychology.

Let’s start with the word Logos.  Frankl says “logos” in Latin means, "meaning".  Hence, he named his therapy, Logotherapy.  I can’t find a Latin or Greek translation that actually defines logos this way which is rather odd.  Most definitions I can find seem to relate the word "logo" to mean logic or rhetoric.   Assuming he was better in Latin and Greek than Google or Wikipedia as they currently exist, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt principally because the word “Logo” obviously must come from the same root word and it doesn’t take a huge leap to ascribe meaning to a logo...any logo...even in modern times, right?  Who doesn’t derive some meaning from their favorite sports team logo, or their family coat-of-arms, or that of the great seal of the United States?  I think, just as Frankl says, Logos means, literally, meaning.  When Christians speak of Logos, they are of course, referring to Jesus by one of His many names.  Thus again, Logos is meaning, if Jesus is your reason, or meaning, for living.  That makes profound sense.  Yet, that is not what Frankl is after.

Frankl was not observing whether or not prisoners who were at the brink of being sent to their death on a minute by minute basis believed in God.  Frankl was looking into what inner force created something more.  I'm reminded of a Far Side Cartoon.  It depicts the fires of Hell with one character pushing a wheel barrow with a heavy load through this environment. He is whistling, he is obviously happy and oblivious to the dire circumstances surrounding him.  Two devils, obviously the guards, are standing to the side.  One is commenting to the other that, "You know, we are just not reaching that guy."

Where does this inner force originate?  Again, I must reiterate, there is nothing in a person's character or attitude that would make him more likely to survive.  His odds are the same because life and death was arbitrary in the death camps.    Frankl's interest lay more in from where this attitude might emerge.  Not whether or not it would save someone from the gas chamber.

True enough one can search for the meaning in life as many have.  Cosmologist and philosophers a plenty have dedicated their lives to the study of life’s meaning…that's what they do.  Each one of us has our own world view and set of beliefs be they spiritual or other.  From this we might entertain our own meaning of life or what life means to us. Many try to impose their own meaning upon us.  But this is not the meaning Frankl is after nor what he describes in his book.  Lest we fall into that trap.  If we don’t believe in God, for instance, perhaps our life has no meaning. Thus, we must define meaning based on something different.  Perhaps "Christmas means a little bit more" as Dr. Seuss has pointed out when the Grinch's heart expands 10 times.  But even then, we will fall well short of what Frankl was driving towards with his Logotherapy.

I think if we stick to western definitions, we will continuously be spinning our wheels with regard to a search for meaning. Sure, we can find it…and will find it in many places.  But I find it odd that there is never any mention of eastern philosophies in this book.  Perhaps Frankl was more studied on eastern philosophy and wrote about it elsewhere.  The attribute of meaning that cannot manifest itself in a more western definition is that attribute that has no external origin.  That attribute that cannot be attributed to anything tangible.  I don't want to get rolled up in the cyclical philosophical arguments here…many have.  Not the least of which is the existence of God as a foundation for meaning.  But hear in lies the rub.  Where was God in those concentration camps?  Frankl avoids that search.  It's a fruitless endeavor and ends in either proving the absence of God or, as in the case of Harold Kushner in his best-selling, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People", we end up with some form of a lessor, or less than all powerful God.  We can avoid those traps by examining where Frankl takes us and to a larger extent where reliance on eastern philosophy can take us.  Logotherapy easily coexists with or without a Christian Monotheistic Omega. Yet there still exists a profound source, or origin, of meaning...this meaning...Frankl's meaning, as well as others.

In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", Robert Pirsig examines the source of this meaning as quality in our lives.  It too can be derived from externally, or from a source of higher meaning and its decomposition done with hierarchical  building blocks from which meaning can be traced, a very western activity given to us by Aristotle.  But that is not it's only source.  When you strip away all this decomposition of reality, and you are left with only the constructs of language and rhetoric, you are left with nothing but instinct.  You can't reason your way to quality or more importunately, do the right thing for the right reason, if you've left reason.  Without this form of thought we are lost. Faith must fill the gap, as Francis Schaeffer tells us in his monumental work, "Escape from Reason" which laid the foundations for new age, evangelical, Christianity.  Without something to hold onto we a lost.  Yet animals don't seem lost.  And animals know the difference between right and wrong.  They also get anxious and they also get depressed.  They certainly suffer PTSD and any number of other mental illnesses.  Yet they have no foundation of higher meaning or a rhetoric behind it to hitch their lives and their animal mental sanity. 

A dog, however, wags their tail.  When my dog wags her tail, she is not wagging based on her knowledge of her eternal salvation through the love of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But yet her life still has meaning.  The happiness in her heart is arguably tied directly to the prospect of the next morsel of food to fill her doggo tummy but yet she also seems very happy just to be with me.  Just to be close to me.  Man's best friend.  This is the quality that Frankl is driving towards.  This is the quality that Pirsig is driving towards.  What is the attribute of the moment of living that creates quality in our lives?  That is the moment of life that gives us meaning.  And that moment, that crystal clear vision of meaning, is the essence of hope that can carry us through bad times…the worst of times.  The question remains, can we find it when we need it?  And that is what Logotherapy, more than anything else, is about.

It is not about the past, in the words of the Indigo Girls, "Galileo's head was on the block, the crime was looking up the truth, as the bombshells of our daily fears explode, we try to trace them too our roots".  That is the essence of Freudian psycho-analysis…which Frankl attempts to move away from.  But yet the meaning of life the Girls grasped for was nevertheless at their fingertips.  "We look to the children, we go to the Bible, we go through the work out, we read up on revival" has us in the moment, which they also clearly reject as their source of happiness.  And instead, just want to be happy, being happy…"The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine", So they are rejecting one source of meaning and ignoring the source of meaning right in front of them...not the best philosophy but a great song none-the-less.

But I promised at the beginning of this for a practical example so let's give it a try.  So how can you find meaning at this very moment?  Not just any meaning, but meaning on such a deep level as to carry you through whatever disaster you might be facing in your own life.  This is Frankl's fundamental philosophy and contribution to therapy.  And it was, and still is, a game changer. It's is Curly's "One Thing" but as it turns out that one thing can change from moment to moment.

Happiness can be derived from the one thing that gives your life meaning at this very instant.  Logotheraphy is not about finding the meaning for your life in general but rather finding meaning as you live today.  So many searches for the general meaning of life can ask a question that has forever been too profound to answer.  The less profound answer is never-the-less no less profound.  Maybe more so.  Because it is the moment to moment solution that is the essence of what makes every life valuable.  Every life, not just human life.  It is why there is such thing as quality of life for a quadriplegic, or a patient in Hospice, or the life of a three-legged dog.  What possible meaning does any of this life make for itself if not but in the very moments of living?  Meaning is not the salvation of ones soul in the afterlife.  That may be important for other reasons.  Meaning, more so, is drawn from what you are doing at this very moment.  The sanctity of life is drawn moment to moment...not in the past and not in the future.

So let's try.  Stop what you are doing.  Look out the window.  Ask yourself one question?  Not why am I here but rather why am I looking out this window?  Look for something as simple as a cat crossing the street or a squirrel eating a nut on a tree branch.  If you don't see anything, look a little closer.  Try to focus. Try to quiet the noise from all sides.  Too much sound, too much light, too many distractions from TikTok or Tumbler.  If you must, look down at your window sill.  You need not capture any ants to hold under a tumbler on your window sill as Henry David Thoreau had done, just find the life as if exists around you at this very moment.  Your life's meaning then, at this very moment, is as an observer…your meaning is simply to observe.  If you think that's too simple, I dare you to try it…let me know what you discover.  Then do it again.  Then do it again.  And you are on your way to understanding Logotherapy...and Man's Search for Meaning...

Too Much and Never Enough - M. Trump

Fred, Freddy, Fritz.  Names we don’t hear often but the names of the three people in our current President’s past life that explain in real terms, why Donald J. Trump will go down in the book as the worst President in American history.  And, if we recover from the damage he has done to our many institutions, he will be recorded as either the most dangerous or the most destructive.  Trump supporters will immediately dismiss the new book from which the narrative of these three names become known to us without ever considering the story...and I quote “Disgruntled family member, lifelong dem, writing just to cash-in on old news”.  That quote was to describe the author of the just released, topping the book list in record sales in a single day, and arriving with all the fanfare of a federal lawsuit blocking it’s publication... just denied by a federal judge, Mary L. Trump, the President’s niece, offspring of his deceased brother, Freddy, and sister of his nephew Fritz,  has arrived so we may hear her version of Donald’s formative years.  And what created, in her words, “...the world’s most dangerous man”.  

She is definitely a disgruntled family member, and that’s fair.  And why shouldn’t she be?  As Machiavellian empires go, one might notice her worth  to the Trump family based on her unique lineage.  Donald Trump wasn't the first born. The first born honor belongs to Freddy, her father.  Donald was the second born.  In medieval times, Donald’s off-spring wouldn’t be in line for anything.  As the line of royal blood succession would go to Fritz, Freddy’s 1st  son. But as with all history, with regard to the Trump family, facts are of no value.  Thus, when Freddy passed away at 42, a broken man, broken and bullied into the ground by his own family, that branch of the family tree, that included Mary, was cut from the trunk.  Not because it didn’t continue to exist, but because, if you are a Trump, sharing something with someone else, means you get less. Thus Mary and Fritz get nothing...their dad is dead.  You don’t share with a dead man. You don’t have to believe this line of succession, that is if you don’t believe in facts. What kind of a selfish family does that to their grandchildren?  Yes, obviously there is no royal bloodline in our Country, and certainly not in the Trump family, but it’s a good example of just another in a long list of problematic decisions committed by the most selfish and arrogant man alive today.  Of course we already knew this.  It feels good, however, to hear this charge levied from on the inside of the very much not a royal family.  

Regardless whether you initially believe Mary’s version of the Trump family history, or not, the fact’s will support her version.  The family exists, the company exists, the house in Queens exists, and the many properties accumulated and subsidized by the Federal government exist.  Fred Trump built the empire that Donald Trump effectively stole from his family.  The records exist but have been long hidden.  It’s no wonder it’s been so hard to put the pieces together.  And, when the Trump financial records and tax records finally see the light of day, animus or no animus from Mary, the facts as they trickle out will shed light on the career of the most amazing fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.  Mary Trump will be charged with telling the correct version of the story.  Not the one we’ve read about in the tabloids for so many decades.  The Donald, for his ego, can be happy in the knowledge that any publicity is good publicity, and with any luck, he will avoid the embarrassment of prosecution and jail time without the hope of a Presidential pardon.  Which many will pursue, but to that extent, I would not support. This comical chapter of our Nation’s history will hopefully be quickly forgotten.

Fred, Trump’s father,:  by all accounts, was a hard worker.  SIx days a week, 10-12 hours a day, a classic workaholic.  He built the empire, but he didn’t start it.  His mother fronted him the money, and kept the books in the early days to get him rolling. Fred was henceforth able to amass a large housing construction and management business by building apartments with subsidies from the Federal Housing Administration on the heels of WWII.  It was the income from the rent charged on those thousands of units that funded the subsequent building of the empire, and later, Donald’s lifestyle.  It also bailed him out as the building ceased, and the bankruptcies caused by his incompetence mounted.  Perhaps the best story is the one about Atlantic City.  Simply put, if one casino is good, wouldn’t two, or three be better?  Maybe in Las Vegas, but in a brand new location, where there wasn’t a market.  All Donald achieved was the creation of Papa Johns, a Domino’s, and  Pizza Hut, all on the same street corner, in a City that was still eating at Taco Bell. Those are my words, not Mary’s, but that’s the analogy.  If you ever wondered why Atlantic City never caught on.  In a larger sense, Donald’s failure in Atlantic City not only took a major negative  toll on his father’s empire, he arguably doomed the City itself to failure because of the failure of these casinos.  This isn’t hate speech coming from me, This is his business record.  And it’s abysmal.  His father repeatedly had to bail him out of his bankruptcies and bad business deals.

Freddy, Fred’s first son, and aire apparent to Fred’s business, tried to break away from the looming shadow of his Father.  He longed to do something else with his life.  Not only did he obtain his business degree from Lehigh University and was President of his Fraternity, through  ROTC he obtained a commission in the Air National Guard, he  learned to fly aircraft, and on his own  accumulated sufficient hours to become a commercial pilot.  Not something easily accomplished without military flight hours. And by all normal standards of performance, demonstrated both academic and leadership acumen.  Thus it was no surprise he was hired by Northwest Airlines and flew 727s on several routes. The problem, as recounted by her daughter, was that Freddy was never good enough for Fred who hated that he would do something different with his life other than commit totally to the family business.  He believed the military to be a waste of time and thought being an airline pilot was akin to being a glorified bus driver.  As the story goes, Donald, observed his older brother doing everything his father disliked, Freddy would do everything wrong in his father’s eyes.  So Donald gained his Father’s favor by doing everything exactly the opposite of Freddy. Thus Donald fraudulently gained his father’s favor by being a charlatan and thus successfully pushing Freddy under the bus and out of  the line of succession.  And if you think, perhaps that Donald was just savvy, not a ruthless bully, his torment of his younger brother Robert was not passive..  Donald would actively hide his younger brother’s toys just to torture  him until he cried.  This torment at the hand’s of Donald was not unknown to his family thus Donald was sent to military school so peace could return to the household. 

At the end of the day, and by all accounts, there is nothing extraordinary about the Trump family and the Trump  management company that makes the Trump name anything special.   Calling it an empire is to confuse a management company with a real empire.  The only thing that makes the Trump brand, TRUMP, is it’s big letters, right alongside Donald  telling you it’s great.  Is telling you something is great enough to warrant praise?  Just like the MAGA campaign the whole idea of being told to make America great again, never resonated with those who already thought America was great.  Where did these notions come from?  Well, when a snake oil salesman is selling snake oil, he first has to create the non-existent market for snake oil. The track record of Donald creating demand for something that doesn’t exist, is perhaps his only talent.  But many, including me, would conclude it’s less the strength of Donald, and more the weakness of his targeted victims.  And Donald also knows that as well.  His primary marks, as  Mary has said, are people Donald would have only contempt outside of his political rallies. There is something to be said for positive thinking, and Fred Trump was a believer in the power of positive thinking, but his son learned from this rule book, and took it to the extreme.  Every first and second utterance from Donald J Trump fits this profile.  There is no reason to believe this well written profile of our President’s upbringing is anything but highly plausible.  I suspect that after his Presidency has ended, given Mary’s lead, much much more about the history of the Trump family will surface and the sham of both this man and his life will unravel.  Four stars for the courage it took Mary to write this book...and we should all thank her for publishing and exposing how we created the fallacy that is our current President.  

The Reason Why - Woodham-Smith

"The Reason Why" by Cecil Woodham-Smith and written in 1954 came as a recommendation through a friend of mine who is currently a major in the British Army.  My familiarity with the Charge of the Light Brigade, which occurred during the British, French, and Turkish campaign against the Russians during the Crimean War up until reading this book was lifted from visual snippets from my childhood when my dad would watch the 1936 Hollywood production with Errol Flynn, by the same name, but taking place during the wrong war for the wrong reasons with all the wrong characters, and the often quoted Tennyson poem from which the title originates.

"Their's not to make reply,

Their's not to reason why,

Their's but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

 Rode the six hundred"

I'm glad I read this book and straightened out my truly twisted sense of British history on this one.  I also learned a great deal more.  This book is a masterpiece and I will feebly attempt to explain why.  To understand what really happened during the Battle of Balaclava, Woodham-Smith starts to illustrate the political and military culture within Britain starting just after the turn of the Century and then directly after the British victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.  It is very important to understand that British officers did not attend formal professional military schools nor did they move up through the ranks, they bought their commissions and either learned in the field, engaged in self-study if they were interested in subjects such as warfare, or they lead and managed men based on instinct.  Officer ship was entrusted to and required of only the upper social strata -- those who had a stake in the country were those best fit to lead the military, and more importantly were those less likely to turn the military against the social elite, themselves.  This was how the stability of the British aristocracy was balanced and maintained -- in peacetime it works -- the military is not going to over-throw the country.  During times of war -- it also works since the military with it's sabre now unsheathed, is typically sent abroad.  When sound military leaders emerge and victories are secured, the system is self ratifying.  When defeats occur abroad, however, the facts can be easily distorted to hide the incompetence of the officer elite and then too the system ratifies itself, or the aristocracy quietly takes care of it's own.  The reason why, not the title but the reason the Light Brigade trotted ceremoniously, not galloped, into the valley of death had everything to do with why the British system of officer ship was a failure and must be changed.  The book is a masterpiece because it combines the domestic sagas of a Jane Austen's novel complete with social parties, sex-scandals, and racial prejudices into a great description of the reality of a military campaign in progress.  Not just from the tactical descriptions of the battles as they were set-up and ensued but the logistics of supporting the infantry and the cavalry to get to those battles.  After she describes in great detail the unlikely British victory at the Battle of Alma she quotes the Duke of Wellington who said, "Next to a battle lost, there is nothing more dreadful than a battle won", and from her descriptions of the pain and human suffering inflicted on both sides, the Duke was right.  Yet Woodham-Smith adds even more to this book, the pure high drama of military incompetence at it's highest as Lord Raglan unwitting observes a battle unfold from his perch deep behind Russian, the enemy, lines.  And of Lord Lucan, who want's to be in charge but is never in the right place at the right time.  And to the Charge itself, when Edward Nolan, who carried the orders to Lord Cardigan, races to the front to correct Cardigan's fatal misinterpretation of his orders and is cut down by canon fire just before being able to divert the Light Brigade's direction away from the valley of death.    High drama, battle, scandal, intrigue, incompetence, and an outcome that would forever change the way we train our military officers.  A must read for every member of the military -- grunt to general officer, for every history buff, and for those who just like to poke fun at the British way of doing business or to understand why it is they do business their way.

Beyond Earth and Sky - Zeppa

 

I don’t read many travel memoirs, but after reading Jamie Zeppa’s journal from her three and a half years in the country of Bhutan, "Beyond the Sky and Earth - A Journey into Bhutan",  I may need to read a few more...good writing helps and Zeppa has a style that makes reading her thoughts effortless.  Her insights seem brutally honest and clearly capture what she was thinking at the time, not what she could have thought through the reflections of a more  mature person looking back.  In this way she conveys her western bias and naïvety in real time as she struggles to justify the new life she found after leaving a comfortable middle class lifestyle in Canada to search for more meaning. 

To be truthful myself, part of my intrigue with her story was to discover what motivates young men and women to pick up and go abroad in this manner.    Alas, she didn’t really answer this question, and maybe that’s my answer, but we still should applaud those who do take up this challenging first step.  After the fact, one can certainly answer the question and therefore, this book, could be used to motivate other young people to step into the challenge of the Peace Corps, etc.  

Aside from a terrific  travel journal into the country of Bhutan, which by most accounts should be a must read for all those planning to travel there, Sky and Earth is both a spiritual journey and a love story.  The love story was credible and certainly the anticipated result of a young women  totally immersed in an alien world and entranced by the bewildering nature of such a beautiful place.  There can be no doubt she was under its spell...but she certainly wasn't there to throw here Western life away.    The danger of any such  quest, however, is not that we may find what we are looking for, but rather we may find something that we were not looking for...this something perhaps, is what her grandfather was worried about when she started out...finding something in the unknown that is better than the known.  Which has to be the most compelling reason for any quest.

When young people decide to go on these quests, or missions, or soul searching, something might be missing from their comfortable lives.  They want something more.  Are they running?  More than likely they are searching...and that is a perfectly valid reason to leave home, even if most choose a less exotic destination.  Although the story has been told a thousand times, young girl leaves home, struggles to survive in a place she is out of place, learns to love the place, falls in love, lives happily ever after.  The only thing missing from this story is that the man she falls in love with, doesn't turn out to be a Bhutan Prince, well at least not Royalty...but he seems to be a prince of a man.

On the Spiritual side, Sky and Earth is also an introduction into the religion of Buddhism.  By capturing the physical and mental lifestyles of the population that practice Buddhism, this memior serves as a tremendous account of Zeppa's deeper discovery of this beautiful philosophy of life, one in which all life is respected, and eventually, one to which she converts.

Sky and Earth is an exquisitely written account of someone who was all in.  The book itself appears to be written in great thanks to the Country and the people of Bhutan for what she experienced.  It is physically, spirituallly, and truthfully told and should serve as an example for all those who chose to write a travel memoir.  I'm really enjoyed this book.  I'm giving it five stars for the fearless way Zeppa tells her story.

Blind Man's Bluff - Sontag et al

 

We’ve all seen “The Hunt for Red October '', Tom Clany’s best novel and his best movie (not that he made the movie).  “One ping Vasili, one ping only”.  A role Sean Connery was made for, perhaps his best shot for the Oscar.  But did you ever wonder how true Clancy’s research may have been. It was 1984, when the novel was released, it seemed like it was ahead of its time.  One need look no further than “Blind Man’s Bluff”.  Fifteen years later we have a gauge of Clancy’s accuracy, and then some. He was accurate.  One wonders how Clancy figured so much  out when it took a  team of researchers another 15 years to divulge the true story of these undersea men. Of course “Blind Man’s Bluff” isn’t just about submarine warfare.  It  specifically addresses the use of submarines to perform intelligence operations.  Tracking other submarines, the primary subject of Clancy’s novel, is an intelligence mission.   Stealing, the Red October, becomes the primary concern of Jack Ryan, an analyst from the CIA, an intelligence mission.  So, it’s all there, yet fictionalized in Clancy’s book, but again, 15 years before broader research dropped the more pertinent facts on everyone's desk.  There was a leak somewhere.  Perhaps it was Kevin Costner who leaked the material to Clancy--nope, “No Way Out” was released in 1987.  Clancy’s sources remain mysterious. 

But this is a book review about the book, “Blind Man’s Bluff”, and the great people and machines that resulted from the work necessary to build such extraordinary deep sea machines and conduct such amazing undersea operations.    The team of researchers, led by   Sherry Songtag and Christopher Drew, journalists who reported for the New York Times, give us the lowdown.    Unlike a novel, however, Songtag and Drew don’t really tell a concise story, rather it is a collection of reports on 12 very significant undersea happenings that made news reports, but went, without exception, unexplained at the time  The motivation for submarine operations during the cold war, of course, wasn’t the stealing of a fictitious Russia submarine, but rather the stealing of electronic signals coming out of the Soviet Union that would betray the Soviet development of ballistic missile technology they had under development.  To collect these signals, our spy community had to get antennas close enough to the missile tests our adversaries were conducting in very remote regions only by sneaking up, underwater, popping up an antenna, and listening.  Hopefully, if lucky enough, during a missile test.  In the 1950’s we didn’t have satellites that could just listen overhead until Sputnik kicked off the race for space.  Without satellites, submarines that could get close to Russia test sites, were the significant motivation to do what we did, both from the technology side, and the risk of putting human’s at risk to conduct these operations.   And bad things happened.   It was dangerous business, both from the potential for loss of life, and the huge political implications of getting caught.  The idea that getting caught was not an option resulted in the draconian measure that before a captain would allow a submarine to fall into enemy hands, he would scuttle the boat (sink it) with all hands on board.  Fortunately, it appears, no American captain was ever forced to make that decision.  It also appears, no Russian Captain had to make a similar decision.  Rather, all undersea men, seemingly were kindred, in that, although they played a high stakes game against one another, they cared about the soul’s onboard their adversaries vessel.  And in one case, due to an undersea collision, when the US ship thought it was the impact that caused the loss of the Russian submarine, the guilt of perhaps contributing to the loss of those Russian lives, impacted the lives of the US men.  For which they didn’t believe or discover their true fate, in fact the Russian boat survived when the Russia Captain came forward decades later.  He was truly sad, when he discovered his US adversary had passed before they had a chance to meet swap stories.

In the course of trying to do this electronic eavesdropping, the crews of these submarines had to learn all the secrets of the trade.  How do you remain quiet? (mount everything on rubber)  How do you stay submerged for longer than 12 hours in a diesel submarine that has no air? (build a snorkel)  How do you track a Russian submarine, underwater? (stay directly behind them).  How do you retrieve things at the bottom of the ocean? (build a sub that can stay submerged and send divers out).  How do you stay underwater longer? (build a nuclear powered submarine)  How do you tap a Chinese communication cable at the bottom of the ocean? (do all of these things together).   And so, the story of all this technology has been given us.  Yes in piece parts, and with a lot missing.  If you have dirty knowledge of actual classified things, it is possible to fill in some of the holes, but not many.  Undersea operations continue to remain one of the most classified things in both the defense department and intelligence communities portfolio.

Having spent my career in the United States Air Force, and not the United States Navy, I only suspect some of the individuals mentioned in this book are legendary, such as the great legends in the USAF ala Robin Olds and John Ward.  This book was the first I’ve heard the names of Whitey Mack, the cowboy boat captain who followed a Russia sub on it’s entire patrol without detection.and John Craven who seemingly dreamed of deep sea recovery and then woke up and in invented the craft. Oppenheimer, barely gets a courtesy mention in this book, as the Navy chooses to keep him out of this research.  Strange indeed, but revealing of the politics that must have been in play at that time.

And of course, nothing can ever be fully explained, as most highly classified topics remain so, by law, for 75 years, or more.  We should start seeing some of the holes begin to get filled in as things that now happened in the 1950’s begin to see the light of day.  

I loved this book.  I don’t have as much dirty knowledge as some, so it’s difficult to read between every line.   But I’m going to pay more attention to this fascinating part of US Defense and Intelligence going forward.  Four stars for the real story more compelling than any Clancy could write.

Joan of Arc - Twain

I’ve always been a little intrigued by Joan of Arc.  Her name is common, household in fact,  but had you asked me what she really did, I would have drawn a  blank.  She is a true enigma being only remembered as a martyr and the heretic who was burnt at the stake during the middle ages...perhaps a bit more as there has been a movie or two produced surrounding generally accepted versions of her life.  If you are a Catholic, you might also know she was made a Saint...but that’s only recent history...the past 100 years anyway.  Almost 500 years passed since she was burned alive, at seventeen in 1431, until she was made a Saint by the Catholic Church in 1921.

One man, an atheist, became infatuated with Joan of Arc in the decades preceding her Sainthood.  A writer named Samuel Clemens, who wrote American novels for a living under the pen name, Mark Twain (ever heard of him?) became her historian and avid champion.   Did you know he considered his biography of Joan of Arc to be his most important work?  I didn’t...not until I read his book. Few do. And as this is only one more of eleven book reviews posted on Amazon, I find it almost an honor to have read the book and be writing one today. It also feels like I’ve slipped into a time warp.  Certainly this book was reviewed in newspapers after it was first published in 1896, but now, 116 years later, to see only 11 reviews for this book is quite telling.  When compared to 655 and 765 reviews for Huck-Finn and Tom Sawyer respectively, one could say this book hasn’t been read at all, it’s brand new, by one of the greatest writers the United States has ever produced.  Even Twain’s memoir of Ulysses S. Grant, with Ulysses S Grant, enjoys 100 reviews on Amazon. This further attests to the truth and legacy of Joan of Arc as being both enigmatic and perhaps far stranger than fiction.

Without any of this knowledge I ventured into Joan of Arc, with my vague impressions and intrigue from the past and the recommendation of a trusted friend.  It is indeed one of the most important books on selflessness, honesty, courage, virtue, and unbridled patriotism ever written.  Joan of Arc embodied them all.  I’ll would explain but Mark Twain has done a better job in his book.

Twain writes about specific things from Joan’s childhood. It’s not just that she successfully convinced the priest in her village that he was wrong to have banished the fairies, she convinced him that it was wrong to judge the fairies as evil without direct knowledge of their sin.  It’s not just that she stood brave while the other children scattered in the face a maniac with an ax, it’s that she had befriended the axe man when he had been outcast from society.  It’s not that she argued against the adults that a homeless man deserved to be feed, it’s that while the adults were arguing and finally decided feeding the homeless man was the right thing to do, Joan had already finished feeding him.

And it goes on into her life as she understood her purpose and needed the assistance of very powerful men to achieve her vision. 

It’s not that she convinced the feeble aire to the French throne that she should be allowed to command his army in order to cast out the foreign occupation, it’s that she convinced a council of learned scholars and theologians that her motives were pure.

It’s not that she was placed in command of the French army, at 17, it’s that the vastly experienced and senior general’s under her command quickly learned to trust her purpose and leadership.

It’s not that she knew she could lift the siege of Orleans within days,  it’s that she lead an army of men and a country of citizens to know that they could lift the oppression and occupation of the the 100 years war.

And after she was captured by her enemies and place on trial for her life, come some of the most captivating moments in this book, and her life,

It’s not that she was left alone to defend herself against all charges, it’s that she won every single argument never blaming how she was forsaken by those she saved.

It’s not that she was dealt every treacherous and despicable trick the most evil of human minds could produce against her, it’s that she stayed strong in character and held fast to her own values, never herself being reduced to the same elements of evil...which...since she was on trial as a heretic would seemingly have been her nature.

Finally, it’s not that she asked for the cross that was given to her, to be held higher so she could see it through the flames as she was burnt alive, it’s that the one who gave her the cross, her enemy on the battlefield, was himself believing in her extraordinary and righteous nature.

There is more...much more...to be experienced through the gifts of a writer like Mark Twain.  The mysteries of Joan of Arc are no longer mysteries. They are factual accounts, on the record, in the record,  and for the record. Faithfully place there by a great writer...I will call him Samuel Clemens.  Because surely if I were to call him Mark Twain others would have read his book.

Slights of Mind - Macknik et al

Having just read a remarkable book by the writer/physicist/magician Alex Stone, called “Fooling Houdini” a friend of mine recommended I should also read “Sleights of Mind” by the husband and wife team of Stephen Macknik and Susana  Martinez-Conde.  What started out as a potential gold mine of facts pertaining to neuroscience interlaced with the secrets of illusion practiced by magicians, turned into something quite different.  With a couple of anecdotal connections Stephen and Susanna discovered between their training in neuroscience and how magicians have been tricking the human mind for centuries, they headed off on a year long crusade to discover how the mechanisms of our brain are fooled by magicians.  A seemingly interesting topic. What results, however, fails to reveal much scientific discovery but does reveal a whole lot of magical secrets. This book would sell as a cheat sheet for those wanting to spoil magic even without any of the explanatory scientific claims that have been scattered here and there.

Apparently the scientific team, through their own sleight of mind, was able to gain the confidence of a few leading and well meaning magicians into revealing their hard earned magical techniques in the “Interest of Science”. This has to be the con of the century.  I would caution all further magicians who work with any scientific research team to fully understand the science they think they are supporting prior to revealing the secrets of their livelihood.  Particularly if their secrets are going to be published.  Remember, scientist have an overwhelming urge to publish. It’s shameful that instead of publishing science, they’ve published a book that reveals magic tricks.

Alex Stone, on the other hand, is an honest magician who provides a  fascinating story about life in the magic business.  In the process, he reveals some secrets, but those reveals are necessary for his readers to understand what constitutes the culture of magic.  It is wholly necessary and important.  Magicians, you see, love the trick, just as much as we love the trick even though we are fooled, and even though, what we perceive has nothing to do with what actually happened in our presence.  To Macknik and Martinez-Conde that constitutes something scientific to be studied.  

Take spoon bending for instance.  Spoon bending is treated in both books.  In the magic book Mr. Stone explains the craft necessary to accomplish the trick.  In the science book, our research team debunks the use of telekinesis, the method claimed by the spoon bender, solely on the fact that the spoon bending is a trick.  Basically they are saying, look, it’s not telekinesis, it’s a trick, they are not bending spoons with their mind the spoons are already bent, it’s an optical illusion and this is how it’s accomplished.  You are being fooled because your brain can’t detect that you are being fooled.  This is where I start cussing like the comedian Lewis Black…

What’s even worse about this book is that the research  team takes their science one step further...they are not forceful in their assertions but they do point out, without apology, that the phenomenon that is our consciousness,  which gives rise to our  “free will”, is the biggest illusion of them all.  So, provided what the authors say is true, magic reveals chinks in our sensory and perception system that can be exploited.  These chinks are flaws in our humanness and point to the fact that we are essentially very sophisticated and highly evolved machines.  Magic, is no different from what would occur if we were a video camera, turned on and staring at a black top-hat.  Someone then shuts us off (the camera) and then quickly places a rabbit in the top-hat.  Then, when they switch the camera back on,  behold, a rabbit is magically pulled out of a hat. Magic therefore leads directly to Descartes's, “ I think, therefore I am”  becoming “I can be fooled, therefore I am not”.  This is far from science.  In the end this book is simply a bunch of magic tricks revealed.   One star for science and five  stars because, right or wrong,  they reveal so many juicy secrets about magic.  Three stars overall.

Do No Harm - Gawande

 

If you like stories about medicine, perhaps Atul Gawande's “Better”, or other tales of medicine from the ER or operating room, you will undoubtedly like the stories from the memory of Henry Marsh, straight out of the surgical theaters in Britain, and based on his 30+ years as a prominent neurosurgeon.  The book, “Do No Harm, Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery”, was the subject of a review I read recently, which was recommended to me by my cousin, a neurosurgeon in New York State.  When he passed on the review to the family he said, “The most accurate description of what it feels like to be a neurosurgeon that I have read”.  I was compelled to buy the book and judge the full weight of the material...

Not to be taken lightly, brain surgery is serious business.  Neurosurgeons head into the profession with a rock solid belief that they are the best doctors and will do great things.  What’s not to like about having the encyclopedia knowledge of the human brain and nervous system as well as the tremendous motor skills of a top surgeon, who must perform while looking through a microscope,  to remove a tumor from a child's brain, thereby saving a young life and with it the hopes and dreams of the parents who stand nearby terrified of a bad outcome.  Well, as it turns out, as sad and unfortunate as these cases are when they turn up, they have turned up.  A brain tumor, whether it be malignant or not, is still a very grave condition.  Even the very very best in the business, do not stand much of a chance against the odds when the human brain turns against itself…  Add to an already dire prognosis, the absolute dangers of poking and cutting around in someone's brain, the final outcomes of any patient in need of brain surgery, perhaps the bad news can never be painted rosy.  A brain surgeon is not someone operating on an otherwise healthy patient who needs an appendix removed, having done so, returning said patient to 100% or better.  A brain surgeon is operating on a very sick patient, who will never fully recover, and can only get worse if a mistake is made.   Let me try this another way.  Any patient who undergoes any surgery is at risk, but more so from a mistake made by the doctor...the surgical procedure itself, can be expected to cure the patient completely and add the longevity of a person's life, after the recover.  If you happen to be unlucky enough to have a problem with your brain or spinal core, that requires surgery...very rarely if ever, should the patient expect a return to a normal life, and that is with perfect surgery.  Except with brain surgery, brain tissue is always removed...until such a time that brain tissue can be regenerated, spelled stem cell research, there is no 100% recovery.  Even then, if you regenerate brain tissue, any of what constitutes “Us” contained in said tissue, will be recovered.  Now, what if the surgeon makes a mistake, if a tiny tiny mistake?  The results are easily catastrophic for the patient.

Thus, a career of stories of life, death, and brain surgery pour forth from Henry Marsh.  Many times I felt I was reading his personal journal...a journal that should remain personal and perhaps private.  Yet, those in this business, need to communicate, if not with us, but with one another and of course with future doctors who wish to follow in this strange business of entering an human’s brain attempting to do good while at the same time attempting to do no harm.

I for one have a profound and newfound respect for the neurosurgeon...they are to be set apart from other surgeons...who can find great satisfaction in curing and healing patients...who become God like in their abilities to ease suffering.  The neurosurgeon, by contrast, lives under the dangling sword of Damocles...an ever present fear of doom that as doctors they will do more harm then good.  This produces within them the most humbling notion that they are,  all too human…hug a neurosurgeon today...they definitely need it…  Five Stars for Henry Marsh and the sharing of his candid and personal stories...and beyond the neurosurgery, the stories of medical care that confirms what we know already know about bureaucracy and the tension between running a business and saving lives.   Five stars also for the humans that go into this humbling profession…any young surgeon considering this tract has got to read this book first...

When - Pink

As birds go, I’m a morning lark as opposed to my daughter, who is a night owl.  I rise at 5 am every morning and try my best to stay awake after 9 pm so my wife doesn’t take my drowsiness personally.  She is also a night owl.  There are reasons for this type of behavior.  Daniel Pink has written an accessible--pop science--account of why there are night owls and morning larks and thus why we should pay more attention to the “WHEN” of when we do things.  As the other Byrd’s have told us, “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose, under Heaven…”.  But really that wasn’t the Byrd’s since they clipped the phrase from Ecclesiastes 3. And Daniel Pink clipped the concept from the Bible to give us his NYT’s best seller, “WHEN”, his fourth book.  This is an enjoyable romp through what we have always suspected about the value of time...and why we shouldn’t force our night owls to wake up and get their day started.  Society in general is not actually made up of night owls or the morning larks.  As a species we are more like daytime chickens. Evolutionarily speaking, we’ve only had  a few thousand years to evolve into a world of artificial light.  Like chickens, we can only see in the daylight, so what’s up with early mornings and late nights?  For hundreds of thousands of years homosapiens have risen with the sun in the east and gone to bed when it disappears in the west...just like chickens. Thus we could all learn a lot from a chicken's schedule by mimicking their behavior and time patterns. They stay safe from predators and work hard. They even adjust for daylight savings time.  But that’s a different story.

In his book, Pink has aptly captured the science surrounding when our human bodies perform the best given what we’ve known for years to be the rhythm of our physiology. Typically we choose to ignore these cycles by forcing ourselves to do things that make us wake up on the wrong side of the bed...like setting an alarm clock. Only night owl’s need alarm clocks--like my daughter which they mostly ignore when it goes off. Morning larks wake up au naturel (don’t worry I’m talking about time, not attire). That’s me saying that, not Pink.  Pink is searching for a formula to better “hack” your own body into optimal performance by staying attune to your highs and lows of energy and mental acuity during the course of the day.  For instance, if you force high school students into class early, when their brains are not awake, they will underperform.  Also, if you force these same kids to do analytic work during their off peak hours, say math in the afternoon, they will underperform.  He’s talking about our kids, for the most part, but everybody does better if they are attuned to this cycle of optimal performance.  Between chapters  he presents his formula for how to hack your own body  to sync up with it’s internal performance clock. This is a useful self-help tool if you haven’t already discovered how to do it through self observation.

Not only should you do this yourself, you should help your kids through the selection of optimal “WHEN”.  Also, we should be aware of the people around us and when they are at their optimum performance if we need them for something. For instance, the right time for elective brain surgery is not during the late afternoon.  If you are going to select for that type of procedure pick a surgical lark and go in the morning.  Pink uses the example of colonoscopy and how mistakes are made during the procedure when it is performed later in the day. Typically, that exploration is done in the numerous colonoscopy sweatshops that freckle our country.  If you’ve ever been to one of these medical locations it looks and feels like an assembly line...customer after customer.  As it turns out, and this is not contained in Pink’s research, there are not enough doctors performing colonoscopies in this country to accommodate the American Medical Association’s advice for everyone over the age of 50 to have an annual colonoscopy.  Further, if everyone chose to have their procedure done in the morning, where the doctor was at his best, the number of available colonoscopy lifeboats would be reduced by half, or the same ratio of lifeboats available on the Titanic.  So schedule your colonoscopy early in the day  so you don’t have to take that afternoon lifeboat. As an aside, here's a helpful tip for those in need of a colonoscopy.  It turns out some doctors prescribe drinking a gallon of water with a full bottle of Mirlax in preparation for your procedure.  If your doctor prescribes the standard gag inducing cocktail of magnesium citrate and water tell them to bugger-off and go find a doctor who will prescribe the Miralax solution.  You will be much happier.

As a self help book “WHEN” is a must read...at least the first four chapters.  He establishes his case for the rhythm and performance of our bodies which is pretty much an open and shut case.  It’s undeniable and you should adjust your schedule to do important things, like making critical decisions, at the right time for you.  It’s easy, once you identify your peaks and lows.  Then he walks through how to complete a project, any project, that has a natural ebb and flow starting with the natural excitement at the beginning, moving through the waning of interest and the slog of slow motion in the middle, and finishing at the end of the activity with a flourish.  All of this makes perfect sense and is as practical as any management/self-help book I have found.  Mapping your highs and lows into this type of schedule really works.   I’ve already adopted some of his techniques for getting through the slog of the middle zone.  So many things go unfinished when we encounter the mountain before us as we climb through this ugly place. Thomas Edison said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” meaning it takes a lot of work to get through this middle zone.  Thus in my mind, most of us might actually be geniuses if we could get the 99% of the activity completed.   Edison was a night owl, by the way.  Pink tells us that...it’s odd that he left out Edison’s most famous quote since it fits perfectly.

In the final section of the book, Pink takes a hard left turn and drives into a story about the delivery of Dabbawala lunches in Mumbai, India. As most of his stories go, he spins a good yarn and tells these anecdotes with very accessible prose.  However he’s no Gladwell when it comes to defining the “So What?” of his story. Gladwell is the master of answering that question.  Alas, “WHEN” will not, and cannot, become a household word as a result.  Also, try doing a Google search on the word, “when”.  It’s a bad choice...but perhaps that’s his editor's fault.  I digress.  The story of the Dabbawalas has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the book.  Totally weird.  In  this chapter he calls “Syncing Fast and Slow” perhaps he is attempting to call out to the guardian angels of Daniel Kahneman?  Pink is clearly an acolyte of the Nobel Laureate, having mentioned Kahneman several times.  But in the end, the chapter heading and the story of the Dabbawalas just doesn’t sync (no pun intended) with the topic of “WHEN” to do something important..  

I can just imagine the slump Pink was going through during the writing process and using his own tools during the writing process to move through this depression in the middle of writing this book.  Then trying to finish with a flourish he had the excitement to write the story of the Dabbawalas, which would also add meaning to his story.  He even included pictures...which was weird. Well look, it’s a good self-help book on time management and motivation.  It doesn’t have to have eternal meaning.  It’s interesting that Pink claims he has adopted some of his new found perspectives having researched this book and put those insights to use.  He came to believe he had been doing things wrong most of his life...which is a bit confusing as he has been a productive and prolific writer this being his fourth book. He already had skills that worked and many of the reviews I have read claim some of his earlier work is superior.  I’ll have to give another one of his titles a go just to see for myself.

This is a solid book, certainly the first four chapters. His writing style is conversational which makes it easy to read.  His wife, apparently from his acknowledgement, read the book aloud cover to cover...which has always been the best way to write something and make it easy to read.  Four stars for a solid book.  I have to subtract one star for a finish that I simply didn’t understand. I thought I was reading a different book.  But when it comes to the bulk of the material on “WHEN” to do, or not to do, something...don’t just do it.  For the important stuff, pay attention to the time of day when you are at your optimum and save other times to slog through the mountain in the middle of life.