→ April 9, 2018
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Killers of the Flower Moon.

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is a non-fiction ‘novel’ that manages to combine a real-world mystery with noir and organized crime elements while also elucidating historical racism against a population seldom considered in modern reevaluations of our own history of oppressing minorities. Drawing on what appears to be a wealth of notes from the initial investigation as well as private correspondence, Grann gives the reader a murder story with a proper resolution, but enough loose ends to set up a final section to the book where he continues exploring unsolved crimes, revealing even further how little the government did to protect the Osage against pitiless enemies. It’s among the leading candidates to win the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction on Monday.

The Osage were one of the Native American tribes banished to present-day Oklahoma when that area was known as “Indian Territory,” marked as such on many maps of the late 19th century; Oklahoma as we know it didn’t exist until 1907, when it became the 46th state. (It always amused me to think of the ‘hole’ in the map of the U.S. as late as 1906, before Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico attained statehood.) By a fortunate accident, the plot of apparently useless land to which the federal government exiled the Osage sat on top of one of the largest petroleum deposits in the continental U.S., which made the Osage mineral millionaires. The government couldn’t quite revoke their rights, but instead ruled that the Osage, being savages, were incompetent to run their own affairs, and that Osage adults required white ‘guardians’ to oversee their financial decisions, which, of course, led to much thievery and embezzlement and, in time, foul play, such as white citizens marrying Osage members and then poisoning their spouses to gain legal control of their headrights and the income they provided.

Two murders in particular attracted the attention of authorities outside of the county, however, as both Osage victims were shot in the head at close range, so there was no question of claiming natural causes, as was often the case when victims were poisoned (often in whiskey, so alcohol could be blamed). These murders were part of a spate of dozens of killings, many of which didn’t appear at first to be connected other than that the victims were either Osage themselves or were in some way investigating the crimes; the sheer scope of this and some media coverage brought in the attention of a young, ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, who decided to put one of his top agents at the nascent Bureau of Investigation (no ‘federal’ in its title) on the case. The subsequent unraveling of the deceptions and the revelation that the mastermind of the plot was someone closer to the Osage than anyone expected included both early forensic science and dogged investigative work, leading eventually to one confession that toppled the criminal enterprise – only to have the trial twist and turn more than once before the final verdict.

Grann couldn’t have picked a better subject for the book, because these characters often seem plucked from Twin Peaks, from the Osage woman Molly, a survivor of a poisoning attempt whose sister was one of the victims killed by gunshot and who had several other family members die in suspicious circumstances, on up to the head of the scheme, a man whose greed and malice lay hidden behind a façade of benevolence toward his Osage neighbors. Killers of the Flower Moon would make an excellent dramatic film if told straight, but it would take just a little artistic license to turn it into the sort of crime tapestry in which HBO has excelled for years by sharpening or exaggerating some of the individuals’ personalities.

The story of the murders and the federal agents’ work to convict the killers is, in itself, more than enough to stand alone as a compelling narrative work, but Grann explains how the federal, state, and county authorities regularly worked to strip the Osage of their rights, fueled by outright racism and by jealousy of the tribe’s good fortune (with, it appears, no consideration of how racism and avarice drove the tribe to Oklahoma in the first place). After the verdict and what might normally stand as an epilogue, Grann himself appears, writing in the first person about his experiences researching the book and how he found evidence that the Bureau didn’t solve all of the murders, or even most of them, but assumed that they’d gotten the Big Foozle and had thus closed the case. Grann may have solved one more murder himself, but as he interviews more surviving relatives of the victims – many of whom ask him to find out who killed their fathers or uncles or sisters – it becomes clear that the majority of these killings will remain unsolved, a sort of ultimate insult on top of the lifetime of indignities to which these Osage victims were subjected.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion, although Grann never makes it explicit, that this would never have happened if any of the governing (white) authorities viewed the Osage tribe members as actual people. Dozens of killings went unsolved and unaddressed for several years before Hoover’s men arrived, and some unknown but large percentage of the killings will never be solved. What white officials didn’t do for the Osage in the 1920s continues today in what mostly (but not always) white officials don’t do today to address violence in urban, mostly African-American communities, including right near me in the majority-black city of Wilmington, nicknamed “Murder Town” for its disproportionately high rate of deaths by gun. If the governments responsible for the safety of these citizens don’t see those citizens’ deaths as important, or as equal to the deaths of white citizens, then it is unlikely that anything of substance will be done to stop it.

I listened to the audio version of Grann’s book, which has three narrators, one of whom, actor Will Patton, does an unbelievable job of bringing the various characters, especially the conspirators, to life. The other narrators were fine, but Patton’s voice and intonations made this one of the most memorable audiobooks I’ve listened to.

Next up: I just finished George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2017 and is among the favorites to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction next week; and have begun Joan Silber’s Improvement, also from 2017.

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→ March 26, 2018
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The Beak of the Finch.

Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time should have ended most of the inane arguments still coming from creationists and other science deniers about the accuracy of the theory of evolution. Weiner tells the story of the Grants, a married couple of biologists who spent 20 years studying Galapagos finches – the same species that Darwin spotted on his voyage with the Beagle and that helped him develop his first theory of adaptation via natural selection – and observed natural selection and evolution in action. This remarkable study, which also showed how species evolve in response to changes in their environment and to other species in their ecosystems, was a landmark effort to both verify Darwin’s original claims and strengthen them in a way that, again, should have put an end to this utter stupidity that still infects so much of our society, even creeping into public science education in the south and Midwest.

The finches are actually a set of species across the different islands of the Galapagos, with the Grants studying those on Daphne Major, an uninhabited island in the archipelago that has multiple species of finch existing alongside each other because they occupy different ecological niches. Over the two decades they studied these species, massive changes in weather patterns (in part caused by El Niño and La Niña) led to years of total drought and years of historically high rainfall, with various species on the island responding to these fluctuations in the environment in ways that affected both population growth and characteristics. The beaks of the book’s title refer to the Grants’ focus on beak dimensions, which showed that the finches’ beaks would change in response to those environmental changes. In times of drought, for example, the supply of certain seeds that specific finch species relied on for their sustenance might become more scarce, and there would be a response within a few generations (or even one) favoring birds with longer or stronger beaks that gave them access to new supplies of food. Many Galapagos finches crack open seed cases to get to the edible portions within, so if those seeds are rarer in a given year, the birds with stronger beaks can crack open more cases and get to more food, given them a tangible advantage in the rather ruthless world of natural selection.

Weiner focuses on the Grants’ project and discoveries throughout the book, but intersperses it with other anecdotes and with notes from Darwin’s travels and his two major works on the subject, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He incorporates the discovery of DNA and how that has accelerated our ability to study and understand evolutionary changes. He goes into the famous example of the white English moth that found itself at a severe disadvantage in the polluted world of the early Industrial Revolution, and how a single gene that determined wing color led to a shift in the moth’s population from mostly white to mostly black (to match the soot covering trees near Manchester and London) – and back again after England finally took steps to clean up its air. This one example is especially instructive in our ongoing experience of climate change, which Weiner refers to throughout as global warming (the preferred term at the time), and opens up a discussion about “artificial selection,” from how we’re screwing up the global ecosystem to antibiotic resistance to the futility of pesticide-driven agriculture (with the targeted pests evolving resistance very rapidly to each new chemical we dump on our crops).

Although Weiner doesn’t stake out a clear position on theism, the tone of the book, especially the final third, goes beyond mere anti-creationism into an outright rejection of any supernatural role in the processes of natural selection and evolution. While that may be appropriate for most of the book, as such processes as the development of the human eye (the argument about the hypothetical watchmaker) can be explained through Darwinian evolution, Weiner does overstep when he discusses the rise of human consciousness, handwaving it away as perhaps just a simple change in neurons or a single genetic mutation that led to the very thing that makes us us. (Which isn’t to say we’re that different from chimpanzees, with whom we still share 99% of our genes. Perhaps David Brin was on to something with his “neo-chimps” in the Uplift series after all.)

The most common rejoinder I encounter online when I mention that evolution is real is that we can’t actually see evolution and therefore it’s “only a theory.” The latter misunderstands the scientific definition of theory, but the former is just not true: We do see evolution, we have seen it, and we’ve seen dramatic shifts in species’ characteristics in ordinary time. Some speciation may occur in geological time, but the evolution of new species of monocellular organisms can happen in days (again, if you don’t believe in evolution, keep taking penicillin for that staph infection), and natural selection in vertebrates can take place rapidly enough for us to see it happen. If The Beak of the Finch were required reading in every high school biology class, perhaps we’d have fewer people – the book cites a survey from the 1990s that claims half of Americans don’t accept evolution – still denying science here in 2018.

Next up: David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, among the favorites to win the Pulitzer for Non-Fiction this year.

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→ March 12, 2018
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The Warmth of Other Suns.

Isabel Wilkerson says she spent 15 years researching the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 2010, and the research shows in the incredible depth of detail in this tripartite narrative about the mass movement of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the north and west from 1915 to 1970. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while working for the New York Times, interviewed over 1200 people, and focused this sweeping saga on three African-Americans who fled the south’s limited opportunities and overt, violent racism, fleeing Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana for Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Their stories are interwoven with each other’s and with other related histories of others who followed similar paths, and the tragedies of some of those who chose to stay behind.

Wilkerson gives us three characters who will accompany us through the book’s 600-odd pages (for me, 22-plus hours of audio): Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi who followed her husband, George, to Milwaukee and eventually the south side of Chicago; George Starling, a fruit picker from Eustis, Florida, who tried to organize other fruit pickers to earn better wages but fled from white landowners who set out to lynch him; and Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor from Louisiana who became a successful surgeon in Los Angeles and served many celebrity patients. The three all marry and raise children, and all find greater prosperity in the north than would ever have been possible where they were born, but all face the normal travails of any working-class life, and each carries some of the baggage of their birth and upbringing as outcasts in a racist country well into adulthood.

All three have compelling, often heartbreaking individual stories – although I think Wilkerson’s touch here is so deft that she could make anyone’s life story compelling – but none was more fascinating than the path taken by Dr. Foster, who left Monroe, Louisiana, and found success as a doctor in California both by outworking other doctors and by bringing an intense, precise sort of personal attention to his patients. Shedding his childhood name of Pershing after he moved to go by the more conventional name of Robert, Dr. Foster seems to have achieved the American dream against long odds, earning material wealth, marrying well, raising three daughters who themselves became successful, thus creating an ongoing chain of success and upward mobility from his own struggle. Yet he never seems to be able to escape the scars of a childhood (and possibly a marriage that brought him in-laws who never thought he was good enough) in a way that allows him to enjoy his success. Wilkerson illustrates him as a demanding, controlling husband who was meticulous about his own appearance and that of his wife, while he also was a compulsive gambler who clearly enjoyed how his spending at casinos bought him a form of respect at the casinos he frequented. Later in the book, Wilkerson tells of a gala Foster threw in his own honor, and how he agonized over every detail of the party, and how he couldn´t enjoy it during or afterwards because of perceived imperfections in the result.

At times a brutal, unsparing look at the treatment southern whites doled out to the black underclass as a matter of course, The Warmth of Other Suns is also deeply personal and empathetic. Wilkerson tells several stories of lynchings, including Leander Shaw and Claude Neal, the latter of whom was brutally tortured before he was hanged for a murder he may not have committed. She details the violent, racist reign of Lake County, Florida, Sheriff Willis McCall, accused at least 50 times of abusing or killing black suspects in his custody, once shooting two handcuffed black prisoners in cold blood and finally ousted from office after eight terms when he kicked a black prisoner to death. (McCall’s son, now 64, was arrested in January for molesting a young girl and possessing child pornography. He had stated in the past that his father was innocent of all charges of civil rights violations.) George Starling leaves Florida because a friend tells him local whites are going to take him to a swamp for a ´necktie party,´ racist slang for lynching. Ida Mae and her husband, also George, leave their life as sharecroppers under a benevolent but still manipulative, controlling landowner after a friend of theirs is beaten into senselessness over the theft of some turkeys that, it turns out, had just wandered off. Robert Foster isn’t driven out the same way but realizes that as a black doctor who can’t even receive admitting privileges at the white hospital, he’ll end up as just a ‘country doctor’ if he doesn’t move out of the land of Jim Crow.

The stories of violence and outright suppression are hard enough to fathom today, but the smaller indignities that the three protagonists and other African-American characters in the book faced fill in the gap and have even more impact because they’re easier to ingest today, when lynchings like that of James Byrd Jr. are extremely rare and result in actual convictions of the killers. When Dr. Foster is driving to California and can’t find a hotel room, even though some white proprietors are kind in rejecting him, lying to his face about vacancies, you can see and feel it. When Ida Mae has to take a series of temporary jobs in Chicago, where most employers will still choose only white candidates, she ends up in a situation right out of #MeToo. Even positive stories often come with a bitter reminder of what came before; George Starling, working as a porter on a north-south rail line, is told to direct black passengers to certain cars when the train passes into the south even after Jim Crow has been made illegal, and has to subtly inform these passengers of their right to say no, at risk of his own employment.

Wilkerson’s personal approach to the book does not exclude the academic research on the subject, but she instead sprinkles details and observations of experts on the timing, motive, and extent of the migration – which came in waves, and finally slowed after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and slowly implemented over the following decade. (And, of course, we now see one party trying to roll it back, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) This is a work of scholarship, yet also a labor of love, as no author could spend so much time and become so invested in a subject unless it were of abiding personal interest to her in the first place. It’s also a potent reminder of why African-Americans today remain at an economic disadvantage relative to whites, and how we are simply repeating the sins of our fathers when we deny black Americans their right to vote, or incarcerate them on nonviolent drug charges, or underfund urban schools as if they were the ‘colored’ schools of the Jim Crow era.

Next up: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 Worlds Fair.

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→ February 21, 2018
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A Fantastic Woman.

A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica), Chile’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and one of the five nominees, is notable simply for its casting: A trans woman plays a trans woman who happens to be the film’s main character. Daniela Vega delivers a tour de force performance as Marina, the fantastic woman of the movie’s title, a woman whose life is suddenly turned upside down when her cis male lover dies suddenly, putting her in conflict with the man’s estranged family – most of whom refuse to accept her for what she is.

Marina is a nightclub singer who by all external appearances is a woman, but whose status as transgender appears to be known by everyone she encounters, even characters who should be complete strangers to her. She and Orlando, a somewhat older, genteel man, have an unremarkable, romantic relationship, where she has just moved in with him and he surprises her for her birthday with plans for an exotic vacation together. This all goes right to hell when he dies suddenly and his ex-wife and son enter the picture, complete with their bigotry, hatred, and threats of violence, all of which show how they don’t even see her as human, let alone as a woman. The movie documents her refusal to surrender to them, and society as a whole, even in the face of physical attacks and a system that dehumanizes her at every turn.

Vega is remarkable in a role that demands that she go through numerous events that I would imagine would trigger awful memories for any trans person (and perhaps any non-binary person, period). Because Orlando falls down the stairs while Marina goes to get the car keys to rush him to the hospital, the authorities assume that she was a prostitute who’d fought back when a client assaulted her, or that she even assaulted him for reasons unknown. There’s an early scene where a doctor and a police officer refer to her in the third person, as if she’s not even there, using male pronouns, even though – again – you wouldn’t think she was trans even after talking to her for a few minutes. (I found this a bit confusing; perhaps the doctor looked at her neck, but that wouldn’t occur to an ordinary person.) Later, Orlando’s son, who proves the most bigoted of all, asks if she’s had “the surgery” (I think Laverne Cox made it clear to everyone that it’s not an appropriate question) and asks the most dehumanizing question of all, “What are you?” Her answer – “I’m flesh and blood, just like you” – and his inability to respond to it spell out the constant fight that trans people face in a society full of people who, frankly, are just too damn obsessed with other people’s sex lives.

This is a star-making turn from Vega, although she dominates so much of the film that there’s little room for anyone else. (Why she wasn’t nominated for Best Actress is beyond me; she’d be a worthy winner, and deserved it over at least two of the nominees.) Gabo, Orlando’s brother, played by Luis Gnecco (star of 2016’s Neruda, Chile’s submission to the Oscars last year), is the most three-dimensional of the other characters, showing uncommon empathy for Marina and the mere willingness to use female pronouns for her. The script, co-written by director Sebastián Lelio and Gonzalo Maza, doesn’t dispense with these characters lightly, but their appearances in the film are a function of their relationship to and interactions with Marina. They’re real because the dialogue feels real, because the treatment she gets at the hands of almost every single person she meets is exactly what you would expect in a majority-Catholic country that only recognized gay marriages in 2017.

Transgender characters have had extremely poor representation in film; other than Boys Don’t Cry, Dallas Buyers Club, and The Danish Girl, all of which featured cis actors in trans roles, major films that have featured trans characters have largely done so for shock value or comic effect. A Fantastic Woman features a trans character, played by a trans woman, in a story that is about everyday life as a trans person in an intolerant society – but in a way that can be interpreted more broadly, too, to capture that feeling of being utterly alone, of feeling unsafe in your own skin, and of the need to find something that helps define you for yourself as opposed to the way that others define you.

I still have Loveless and The Insult to see of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, but Sony Classics has been so slow to roll Loveless, a Russian film that won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year, that I may not catch it before the Oscars.

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→ February 9, 2018
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On Body and Soul.

On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről) is one of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the tenth time a Hungarian submission has made the final cut since they began submitting films in 1965. A film that alternates shockingly brutal imagery with a lyrical, otherworldly story about two of the shyest people you could imagine, the movie is a starmaking performance for actress Alexandra Borbély, who won the Best European Actress award in 2017 for her work here. It’s exclusively available on Netflix.

Borbély plays Maria, the new health inspector at a Hungarian cattle slaughterhouse, replacing the unseen Bori, who left early for maternity leave and appears by implication to have been a fairly lenient inspector. Maria is shy, lacks the ability to read social cues, and often seems emotionless to the workers at the facility, who make halfhearted attempts to connect with her. The factory’s CFO, Endre (Géza Morcsányi, a playwright in his first film role), is also shy and awkward, a well-meaning man who has lost the use of his left arm and keeps most of his colleagues at arm’s length. We realize before they do that the two of them are sharing the same dreams night after night, where each is a deer in a snowy forest, a fact that only becomes apparent to them when a theft at the factory leads to psychiatric interviews with all of the possible culprits. The discovery changes both of them, driving Maria to try to figure out how to relate to another person, while Endre rediscovers the sense of empathy he seems to have lost through years of disappointment.

Director/writer Ildikó Enyedi is unafraid to jar the audience with images of cattle being chained, killed, and bled, although many of these images have parallels to the strange journey of Maria and Endre, especially Maria. She has many aspects of a person with Asperger’s Syndrome or who is somewhere on the autism spectrum, although her condition is never named; these facets of her personality include extreme organization and cleanliness, which makes her perfect for her job … as long as she doesn’t have to interact with other people. Borbély, who had some TV experience and just three or four previous film roles, is marvelous in every way in this role, giving Maria both the affect-less expressions and intonations of a person who can’t read social cues or sense emotions in others, as well as the innocence, trepidation, and wonder of a child seeing or experiencing things for the first time. The role requires her to walk a tight rope to avoid Rain Man-like caricature without giving Maria too much emotion or sensibility, as if a relationship could ‘cure’ her. Even when the story hits its dramatic climax near the end, Borbély does not veer outside the character’s boundaries, reacting at one point in a matter-of-fact way to something awful that it became a darkly humorous moment instead.

Enyedi’s script offers a meditation on loneliness, especially for people who were, perhaps, not made for this world, like Maria, or who have grown tired of its letdowns, like Endre. Even with this utterly improbable link between them, the two find it difficult to communicate with or understand each other, and that disconnect threatens to leave them lonelier than they were before they discovered their shared experience. The script does lose steam a little in the final quarter of the film, because the setup is so strong – two people with no apparent connection are simultaneously dreaming the same dream, in an otherwise rational world where such a thing should be impossible. Resolving that story in an interesting way, other than simply having Maria fall into Endre’s arms, is difficult, and Enyedi gets it about halfway right. The big twist is also a bit predictable, and yet honest at the same time, because one character’s reaction to pull away from the other is understandable in the context of the film. I thought this would end up happening, but I also couldn’t tell you a more realistic resolution, either.

On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival, as did Spirited Away, A Separation, and the 2016 documentary Fire at Sea; like A Separation, it also took the Grand prize at the Sydney Film Festival, so in theory it should have a reasonable chance at the Oscar. Instead, the betting site GoldDerby gives it the worst odds of the five nominees, with A Fantastic Woman considered the favorite – although neither that nor Loveless has played anywhere but New York or Los Angeles so far. Having seen four of the five Best Actress nominees, however, I will say Borbély more than deserved a nomination – it’s not unheard of, with Isabelle Huppert getting a nod for the French-language film Elle just last year – and I’d vote for her over both Meryl Streep and Saoirse Ronan.

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→ February 7, 2018
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The Hidden Brain.

I’ve become a huge fan of the NPR prodcast The Hidden Brain, hosted by Shankar Vedantam, a journalist whose 2010 book The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives spawned the podcast and a regular radio program on NPR. Covering how our subconscious mind influences our decisions in ways that traditional economists would call ‘irrational’ but modern behavioral economists recognize as typical human behavior, Vedantam’s book is a great introduction to this increasingly important way of understanding how people act and think.

Vedantam walks the reader through these theories via concrete examples, much as he now does in the podcast – this week’s episode, “Why Now?” about the #MeToo movement and our society’s sudden decision to pay attention to these women, is among its best. Some of the stories in the book are shocking and/or hard to believe, but they’re true and serve to emphasize these seemingly counterintuitive concepts. He discusses a rape victim who had focused on remembering details about her attacker, and was 100% sure she’d correctly identified the man who raped her – but thirteen years after the man she identified was convicted of the crime, a DNA test showed she was wrong, and she then discovered a specific detail she’d overlooked at the time of the investigation because no one asked her the ‘right’ question. This is a conscientious, intelligent woman who was certain of her memories, and she still made a mistake.

Another example that particularly stuck with me was how people react in the face of imminent danger or catastrophe. Just before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the sea receded from coastal areas, a typical feature before a tidal wave hits. Vedantam cites reports from multiple areas where people living in those regions “gathered to discuss the phenomenon” and “asked one another what was happening,” instead of running like hell for high ground. Similar reports came from the World Trade Center after 9/11. People in those instances didn’t rely on their instincts to flee, but sought confirmation from others nearby – if you don’t run, maybe I don’t need to run either. In this case, he points to the evolutionary history of man, where staying with the group was typically the safe move in the face of danger; if running were the dominant, successful strategy for survival, that would still be our instinct today. It even explains why multiple bystanders did not help Deletha Word, a woman who was nearly beaten to death in a road-rage incident on the packed Belle Isle bridge in Detroit in 1996 – if no one else helped her, why should I?

Vedantam’s writing and speaking style offers a perfect blend of colloquial storytelling and evidence-based arguments. He interviews transgender people who describe the changes attitudes they encounter between before and after their outward appearances changed. (One transgender man says, “I can even complete a whole sentence [post-transition] without being interrupted by a man.) And he looks at data on racial disparities in sentencing convicted criminals to death – including data that show darker-skinned blacks are more likely to receive a death sentence than lighter-skinned blacks.

The last chapter of The Hidden Brain came up last week on Twitter, where I retweeted a link to a story in the New York Times from the wife of a former NFL player, describing her husband’s apparent symptoms of serious brain trauma. One slightly bizarre response I received was that this was an “appeal to emotion” argument – I wasn’t arguing anything, just sharing a story I thought was well-written and worth reading – because it was a single datum rather than an extensive study. Vedantam points out, with examples and some research, that the human brain does much better at understanding the suffering of one than at understanding the suffering of many. He tells how the story of a dog named Hokget, lost in the Pacific on an abandoned ship, spurred people to donate thousands of dollars, with money coming from 39 states and four countries. ( An excerpt from this chapter is still online on The Week‘s site.) So why were people so quick to send money to save one dog when they’re so much less likely to send money when they hear of mass suffering, like genocide or disaster victims in Asia or Africa? Because, Vedantam argues, we process the suffering of an individual in a more “visceral” sense than we do the more abstract suffering of many – and he cites experimental data from psychologist Paul Slovic to back it up.

The Hidden Brain could have been twice as long and I would still have devoured it; Vedantam’s writing is much like his podcast narration, breezy yet never dumbed down, thoroughly explanatory without becoming dense or patronizing. If you enjoy books in the Thinking Fast and Slow or Everybody Lies vein, you’ll enjoy both this title and the podcast, which has become one of my go-to listens to power me through mindless chores around the house.

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→ January 4, 2018
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On Immunity.

Eula Biss’ brief 2014 book On Immunity: An Inoculation takes a novel angle on the subject of childhood vaccinations by weaving the science around the subject into her personal experiences as a first-time mother hearing all of the nonsense anti-vaccine arguments out there and finding herself bombarded with information. Biss makes it clear that she is pro-vaccine and pro-science, and that she did get her son vaccinated, but her essay-like style puts the reader on the ground with her as she’s navigating the uncertainties and fears that come with parenthood, which may also give some readers a new window on how new parents get bamboozled by the many charlatans and frauds out there telling them not to vaccinate.

When my daughter was born, vaccinating was never a question for us … but we were shocked to learn that they vaccinate newborns for hepatitis B, a viral infection that is probably best known as a sexually transmitted disease but that can also be transmitted through many other bodily fluids, including blood, so it’s possible for a child to get an infection through exposure from another kid in school or day care. We made the mistake of looking online for information on the hep B vaccine, and found the website for the so-called “National Vaccine Information Center,” a dangerous anti-science group that spreads misinformation about vaccines and, of course, presented horror stories from parents who claimed the hep B vaccine harmed or even killed their babies. (We vaccinated anyway.)

Biss’ recounting of her own meanderings through the world of vaccine information and bullshit felt very familiar to me, as she obviously understands science – her father is a doctor, and she refers to him frequently in the text – but also gives real credence to the fears of the new parent, and how overwhelming all of the information coming at new parents can feel. Biss hits all of the notable cranks, from the NVIC to Andrew Wakefield to Bob Sears (who has been accused of selling medical exemptions for California kids) to well-meaning but clueless parents who talk about “toxins” or “natural” or “organic” as if those terms really mean anything when it comes to health. She walks back through the history of vaccinations, to Edward Jenner’s experiments with cowpox and previous awareness in non-European societies of inoculation techniques, and the associated history of anti-vaxers, a group that once at least had a legitimate complaint because vaccines weren’t regulated for safety or efficacy; in 1901, two separate batches of vaccines caused deadly tetanus outbreaks in St. Louis and Camden, New Jersey. Now, such groups just capitalize on the public’s science ignorance – and fear – to make a few bucks from selling books or “alternative” therapies. (Note: There is no such thing as “alternative medicine.” If it works, it’s medicine.)

Fear is just as much a theme of On Immunity as science, and Biss, unlike many writers (myself included), has quite a bit of empathy for parents who hear (bogus) horror stories of vaccine “injuries” or who see that vaccines contain aluminum (in adjuvants, which make the vaccines more effective) and waver on vaccinating their kids. Failing to vaccinate puts your kids at risk, but also the community as a whole; Biss discusses herd immunity, which was first identified nearly a century ago, and the societal cost of failing to vaccinate, as well as the risk posed to vulnerable populations who can’t be vaccinated, such as newborns, the elderly, or the immune compromised. This understanding tone makes it a better read, I think, for folks who are on the fence about vaccinations; she was essentially preaching to the converted with me, while hardcore denialists won’t bother with the litany of facts she includes or the blithe knockdowns of anti-vax tropes.

Biss is a “professor of instruction” in Northwestern’s English Department and has garnered praise both for On Immunity and her 2009 essay collection Notes from No Man’s Land; she writes here like an essayist, with a strong first-person perspective that allows her to bring the reader inside her head, so to speak, as she became a mother and experienced all of the typical anxieties and moments of panic that come along with new parenthood. It makes the brief book both readable and engrossing, almost as if Biss wanted to slip in a little education – a dash of history, a pinch of immunology – along the way. And the resulting work may do as much or more to address new parents’ fears of vaccines, fears that are unfounded, irrational, but still quite common, as direct attacks on anti-vaxer falsehoods.

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→ December 30, 2017
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Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

I’d only read one Salman Rushdie novel prior to this month, tackling Midnight’s Children back in 2010; I found it a somewhat difficult read, but brimming with imagination, big themes, and incredible prose and wordplay. What I didn’t know until very recently was that he wrote a children’s novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. It’s quite wonderful, featuring more of the wordplay and creativity that marked Midnight’s Children, reminding me in many ways of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the best children’s novels I’ve ever read (twice, in fact, once on my own and again to my daughter), and the works of Roald Dahl.

Haroun Khalifa is the young son of Rashid, a storyteller who suddenly loses his gift of narration when his wife leaves him, leaving the two of them without any means of support and Rashid without his identity. When Rashid fails to deliver at a speaking engagement, he and Haroun are whisked off to the Valley of K for his next assignment, speaking for the politician Snooty Buttoo – there are a lot of Butts in this book – only for Haroun to discover that his father has lost his ability to weave stories because Iff the Water Genie is trying to sever Rashid’s imagination. This leads Haroun to learn about the Sea of Stories, the plot by the evil Khattam-Shud to poison it and block its source, and the impending war between the Kingdoms of Chup and Gup that will determine the fate of the Sea.

Rushdie makes Haroun the hero of his own story in the tradition of children in literature who have to do something to save one or both of their parents. Haroun faces difficult choices and shows courage in the face of great odds, standing up to the various otherworldly creatures trying to steal his father’s gift or kill Haroun’s new friends from Gup or sew the lips of the Princess Batcheat shut. (He gets no help from the vacuous Prince Bolo, the antithesis of the typical prince-hero character, generally saying and doing the wrong thing or just showing no awareness of what’s happening around him.)

The text itself is replete with puns, references to Hindustani words or Indian historical figures, and even pop culture references. Iff and the Butts work for the Walrus, who employs technicians named the Eggheads, a reference I trust I don’t have to explain. Butt the Hoopoe certainly sounds like a nod to the British glam-rockers Mott the Hoople. Many names allude to characters in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, including Haroun al-Rashid, a real-life Caliph of Baghdad who appears in many of those tales. General Kitab’s name means “book” in Arabic and Hindustani, and his army comprises numerous Pages. And the fish with multiple mouths, or maws, are referred to as Plentimaws … and there are Plentimaw fish in the Sea. (The book also has a brief appendix where Rushdie explains many of the character and place names.)

It’s also hard to avoid the likelihood that Rushdie wrote this as a reaction to the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran after the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the general controversy over a portion of the book that some Muslims deemed blasphemous. In the wake of its release, at least ten countries banned the book in some form, including his native India, while many U.S. bookstores declined to sell it. There were also multiple bombings of bookstores and newspapers in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom related to the book’s sale, while the Archbishop of Canterbury called for an expansion of England’s Blasphemy Act to cover offenses against Islam. (That law was repealed entirely in 2008.) Haroun may be just a children’s novel, but it’s probably also a parable about censorship and the threat to the marketplace of ideas, showing how a society might suffer in a world without stories.

Haroun is better for slightly older kids, because the vocabulary would likely be too demanding for children below fifth grade or so, although the story itself would mostly be appropriate – Haroun’s mother runs off with another man near the beginning, but eventually returns without any real comment – and easy for any child to follow. I could see younger kids being disturbed by the threats to sew the Princess’ mouth shut, although Rushdie softens that possibility by having other characters complain about how awful her singing voice is. It’s a book for younger readers, though, so Haroun saves the day, no mouths are sewn shut, and Rashid eventually regains his talent for weaving stories. The beauty of this book is the journey, the literal one Haroun takes to this other world – I haven’t even mentioned the earth’s second moon, Kahani, which you might not have noticed because it moves by a Process Too Complicated to Explain – and the one on which Rushdie takes the reader, with puns and gags flying so fast that you might miss them on your first read. It’s a delight and a testament to Rushdie’s boundless imagination.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my reviews, but right now I’m reading Kat Kinsman’s memoir Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves.

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→ December 15, 2017
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The Body Keeps the Score.

I’ve been open about my own mental health issues, such as this piece I wrote on being anxious throughout my childhood, but am fortunate in one respect in that my childhood was also relatively free of trauma. I grew up in a loving family, didn’t lose any close family members until I was a teenager – both of my grandmothers lived to their 100th birthdays – and never had to deal with the effects of divorce or abuse, to pick just two possible traumas that affect kids. Events I might recall as “traumatic” pale in comparison to what others grew up with.

I’ve only come to learn about trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in the last handful of years, due to several close friends who suffer from it and how its effects can often include problems I’ve dealt with, including anxiety, panic, depression. Somewhere along the way I heard about Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal 2015 book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I have since learned is an incredibly influential and important book in the world of mental health professionals. Dr. van der Kolk has spent decades working with trauma victims and was one of the leading proponents of the hypothesis, later supported by fMRI and similar evidence, that trauma actually alters the brain in a physical sense rather than just a mental one, and that even minor events can still have traumatic effects on our brains, especially when they happen while we’re young.

Dr. van der Kolk spends the first part of The Body Keeps the Score discussing his own history in working with trauma victims and the difficulty he and other colleagues had in even gaining acceptance for the idea of the aftermath of trauma as a distinct medical disorder. PTSD was only recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a formal diagnosis in 1980, when it was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders‘s third edition (DSM-III), thanks to a surge in sufferers among soldiers who returned from fighting in Vietnam. Awareness of the condition dates back to ancient Greece, and is well-documented in medical and popular literature from the 1800s forward under terms like “shell shock” (whence our word “shell-shocked” derives), but people with PTSD prior to 1980 were treated as if they had a panoply of other, seemingly unrelated mental health disorders, which led to problems like overmedication and a lack of any progress back towards a normal life.

From there, the author discusses new evidence from the world of neuroscience to support his and others’ hypotheses that the brain of a trauma victim works differently than the brain of someone without PTSD. Different parts of the brain are activated in similar situations, although among trauma victims there can be varying responses, from panic to dissociation to shutdown. He also discusses the various ways we develop PTSD, often in excruciating details of childhood abuse or wartime atrocities, tying these underlying conditions to changes in methylation of genes that can even be passed on to offspring, a process known as “epigenetics,” that also explains how the brains of trauma victims end up operating on a different BIOS than those of others.

The prose here can feel a bit academic, perhaps the result of van der Kolk’s background but also that he’s a native Dutch speaker and writing in his second language. In part five, which constitutes nearly half of the book, the writing livens up as he delves into various methods of attacking trauma and retraining the brain not to panic, dissociate, or just peace out when the person is presented with a trigger. Some suggestions are obvious or well-known, like using yoga or EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but does help trauma victims), while others are novel and surprising, including participation in theater or similar role-playing activities, or using a computer program to try to ‘reprogram’ the brain not just in its fear response but all of the time. He includes EEG graphs that show patterns of attention in the brains of study participants where the trauma victims’ brain waves are less tightly connected and even diverge in the milliseconds after the subject was presented with information for the brain to process. Neurofeedback, which allows the user to regulate his/her own brain function with the help of software that displays EEG results, has shown promise for trauma victims and people with other mental health disorders to reestablish control over their brains’ betrayals. Dr. van der Kolk also goes into heart-rate variability training, self-leadership of the different parts of our personality (not quite dissociative identity disorder, but leaning that way), and the pros and cons of cognitive behavioral therapy or medication for PTSD sufferers.

If you or someone close to you is a trauma victim of any sort, even if it seems like a ‘minor’ trauma, The Body Keeps a Score will be an illuminating read that could help alter the course of your/your intimate’s treatment. Even just the final section, where he points out why things like CBT aren’t effective (discussing the trauma over and over doesn’t actually change the way the brain responds to it or other triggers) and gives numerous suggestions for other remedies, would be useful. If you can get through some of the more technical language earlier in the book, though, the entire read is worthwhile, especially as van der Kolk explains his own journey of understanding through decades of working with veterans, children, and other trauma victims to get to this comprehensive theory of how best to treat these people – often people who were considered untreatable by previous generations of psychiatrists.

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→ December 11, 2017
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Columbus.

Columbus (amazon • iTunes) wouldn’t even have come to my attention had I not heard about it from the Grierson & Leitch podcast, where Tim Grierson mentioned it at the start of its theatrical run and gave it a very strong recommendation. It’s an indie film in name and in spirt, driven entirely by dialogue and scenery, and perhaps not everyone’s tastes – but it is very much to mine, with a wonderfully written script by director Kogonada that reminded me of the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.

John Cho delivers the best performance I’ve ever seen from him in a turn that should answer any question remaining about whether he can lead a film, starring as Jin, an American-born Korean translator who has left his job in Seoul to come to Columbus, Indiana, because his architecture professor father has fallen gravely ill. Once there, he encounters Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a recent college graduate who is a bit stuck in neutral, still living at home with her recovering addict mother (Michelle Forbes), working a low-paying library job rather than pursuing her passion for architecture. The two forge a quick, intense friendship, unburdened by romantic or sexual tension, as they talk through their respective problems while touring the Indiana town’s major architectural sights.

(I was totally unaware of this town’s existence, but Columbus, Indiana, is actually a bit of a mecca for architecture fans, with a number of modernist buildings and other public art works, many the result of a foundation started by J. Irwin Miller in 1954 to help fund such efforts by paying the fees for noted architects to help design public buildings in the city. Wikipedia tells me that the American Institute of Architects named Columbus the country’s sixth most important city for architecture in 1991.)

Jin has been estranged from his father for years, and never had much connection with his father, who never speaks in the film but appears in Jin’s and his assistant Eleanor’s memories as a cold, demanding academic with a particular genius in his field. Casey has a chance to leave Columbus to study architecture, with help from Eleanor, but doesn’t want to leave her mother for fear she’ll relapse – and, perhaps, from the natural fear we all have of starting our adult lives in earnest. Their fast friendship comes across as very real, with the vicissitudes of any relationship where you suddenly spend a lot of time with someone you don’t know well, and their deep conversations are often set against stunning backdrops of the great buildings of Columbus or of other landscapes in the town, underscoring Casey’s reluctance to leave even as she’s showing Jin her passion for the subject. (She identifies several buildings by where they rank on her list of her favorite buildings in the town.)

Rory Culkin appears a few times as Casey’s friend Gabriel, an amusing sendup of the college student who’s just learned about hermeneutics and tries to introduce the jargon into regular conversation while also probably trying to get into Casey’s pants. (Spoiler alert: He fails.) The sparse script spills over into an equally scarce cast, most of whom deliver even if in limited roles, other than Parker Posey, who overplays Eleanor as a condescending materteral figure in a film defined by its understatement. The minor subplot of Jin having a crush on Eleanor when he was much younger, and possibly still harboring some of those feelings, felt similarly out of place, not least because I expected this older, worldlier Jin to see through Eleanor’s pretense.

I’m an avowed Ishiguro fan, for his stories, his intense understanding of human nature, and his gorgeous yet economical prose, all of which are in evidence here as well in Kogonada’s script. Jin and Casey speak in a slightly stilted style, a half-grade more formal than the rhythm of normal speech, but it matches the setting of buildings that seem similarly unreal, and the dialogue is thoughtful rather than clipped, with each character offering insight into the other’s emotions and the traumas that have come to define them. Columbus is just a beautiful, heartfelt film from start to finish, powered in particular by Cho’s performance, sadly overlooked already in awards voting but worthy of far more consideration than it’s getting.

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