→ April 17, 2014
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Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (yes, the ‘fake’ Nobel) for his groundbreaking work in behavioral economics, the branch of the dismal science that shows we are even bigger idiots than we previously believed. Kahnemann’s work, and his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, identify and detail the various cognitive biases and illusions that affect our judgment and decision-making, often leading to suboptimal or undesirable outcomes that might be avoided if we stop and think more critically and less intuitively. (It’s just $2.99 for the Kindle right now, through that link.)

Kahnemann breaks the part of our brain that responds to questions, challenges, or other problems into two separate systems, which he calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the fast-reaction system: When you hear or read a question, or face a specific stimulus, your brain brings back an answer, an image, or a memory without you having to consciously search the hard drive and call up the file. System 2 does what we would normally think of as “thinking:” slow calculations, considering variables, weighing options, and so on. The problem, as Kahnemann defines it, is that System 2 is lazy and often takes cues from System 1 without sufficiently questioning them. System 1 can be helpful, but it isn’t always your friend, and System 2 is passed out drunk half the time you need it.

Thing 1 and Thing 2
Systems 1 and 2 in a rare moment of concordance.

The good news here is that Kahneman’s work, much of which with his late colleage Amos Tversky (who died before he could share the Nobel Prize with Kahneman), offers specific guidance on the breakdowns in our critical thinking engines, much of which can be circumvented through different processes or detoured by slowing down our thinking. One of the biggest pitfalls is what Kahneman calls WYSIATI – What You See Is All There Is, the process by which the brain jumps to a conclusion on the basis of insufficient evidence, because that evidence is all the brain has, and the human brain has evolved to seek causes for events or patterns. This leads to a number of biases or errors, including:

  • The halo effect: You like someone or something, and thus you judge that person or object or story more favorably. This is why good-looking politicians fare better than ugly ones in polls.
  • The framing effect: How you ask the question alters the answer you receive. Kahnemann cites differing reactions to the same number presented two ways, such as 90% lean vs 10% fat, or a 0.01% mortality rate versus 100 deaths for every 1 million people.
  • Base-rate neglect: A bit of mental substitution, where the brain latches on to a detail about a specific example without adequately considering the characteristics of that example’s larger group or type.
  • Overconfidence: This combines the WYSIATI problem with what I’ll call the “it can’t happen to me” syndrome, which Kahneman correctly identifies as a core explanation for why so many people open restaurants, even though the industry has one of the highest failure rates around.

Although Kahneman has crafted enough of a flow to keep the book coherent from chapter to chapter, Thinking, Fast and Slow is primarily a list of significant biases or flawed heuristics our brains employ and explanations of how they work and how to try to avoid them. This includes the availability heuristic, where we answer a question about probability or prevalence by substituting the easier question of how easy it is to remember examples or instances of the topic in question. If I give you a few seconds to tell me how many countries there are in Africa, you might name a few in your head, and the faster those names come to you, the larger your guess will be for the total.

Thinking, Fast and Slow also offers an unsettling section for anyone whose career is built on obtaining and delivering knowledge, such as subject-matter experts paid for their opinions, a category that includes me: We aren’t that good at our jobs, and we probably can’t be. One major reason is the representativeness fallacy, which leads to the base-rate neglect I mentioned earlier. The representativeness fallacy leads the subject – let’s say an area scout here, watching a college position player – to overvalue the variables he sees that are specific to this one player, without adequately weighting variables common to the entire class of college position players. It may be that college position players from that particular conference don’t fare as well in pro ball as those from the SEC or ACC; it may be that college position players who have or lack a specific skill have higher/lower rates of success. The area scout’s report, taken by itself, won’t consider those “base rates” enough, if at all, and to a large degree teams do not expect or ask the area scouts to do so. However, teams that don’t employ any kind of system to bring those base rates into their overall decision-making, from historical research on player archetypes to analysis of individual player statistics adjusted for context, will confuse a plethora of scouting opinions for a variety of viewpoints, and will end up making flawed or biased decisions as a result.

Kahneman’s explanation of regression to the mean, and how that should impact our forecasting, is the best and clearest I’ve come across yet – and it’s a topic of real interest to anyone who follows baseball, even if you’re not actually running your own projections software or building an internal decision-sciences system. Humans are especially bad at making predictions where randomness (“luck”) is a major variable, and we tend to overweight recent, usually small samples and ignore the base rates from larger histories. Kahneman lays out the failure to account for regression in a simple fashion, pointing out that if results = skill + luck, then the change in results (from one game to the next, for example) = skill + change in luck. At some point, skill does change, but it’s hard or impossible to pinpoint when that transpires. Many respected baseball analysts working online and for teams argue for the need to regress certain metrics back to the mean to try to account for the interference of randomness; one of my main concerns with this approach is that while it’s rational, it may make teams slower to recognize actual changes in skill level (or health, which affects skill) as a result. Then again, that’s where scouts can come in, noticing a decline in bat speed, a change in arm slot, or a new pitch that might explain why the noise has more signal than a regression algorithm would indicate.

One more chapter relevant to sports analytics covers the planning fallacy, or what Christina Kahrl always referred to as “wishcasting:” Forecasting results too close to best-case scenarios that don’t adequately consider the results of other, similar cases. The response, promulgated by Danish planning expert Bert Flyvbjerg (I just wanted to type that name), is called reference class forecasting, and is just what you’d expect the treatment for the planning fallacy to include. If you want to build a bridge, you find as many bridge construction projects as you can, and obtain all their statistics, such as cost, time to build, distance to be covered, and so on. You build your baseline predictions off of the inputs and results of the reference class, and you adjust it accordingly for your specific case – but only slightly. If all 30 MLB teams did this, no free-agent reliever would ever get a four-year deal again.

Thinking explains many other biases and heuristics that lead to inferior decision-making, including loss aversion, the endowment effect, and the one Ned Colletti just screwed up, the sunk cost fallacy, where money that is already spent (whether you continue to employ the player or not) affects decisions on whether or not to continue spending on that investment (or to keep Brandon League on the 40-man roster). He doesn’t specifically name recency bias, but discusses its effects at length in the final section, where he points out that if you ask someone how happy s/he is with his/her life, the answer will depend on what’s happened most recently (or is happening right now) to the respondent. This also invokes the substitution effect: It’s hard for me to tell you exactly how happy or satisfied I am with my life as a whole, so my brain will substitute an easier question, namely how happy I feel at this specific moment.

That last third of the book shifts its focus more to the psychological side of behavioral economics, with subjects like what determines our happiness or satisfaction with life or events within, and the difficulty we have in making rational – that is, internally consistent – choices. (Kahneman uses the word “rational” in its economic and I think traditional sense, describing thinking that is reasonable, coherent, and not self-contradictory, rather than the current sense of “rational” as skeptical or atheist.) He presents these arguments with the same rigor he employs throughout the book, and the fact that he can be so rigorous without slowing down his prose is Thinking‘s greatest strength. While Malcolm Gladwell can craft brilliant narratives, Kahneman builds his story up from scientific, controlled research, and lets the narrative be what it may. (Cf. “narrative fallacy,” pp. 199-200.) If there’s a weak spot in the book, in fact, it comes when Kahneman cites Moneyball as an example of a response (Oakland’s use of statistical analysis) to the representativeness fallacy of scouting – but never mentions the part about Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito helping lead to those “excellent results at low cost.” That aside – and hey, maybe he only saw the movie – Thinking, Fast and Slow is one of the most important books for my professional life that I have ever read, and if you don’t mind prose that can be a little dense when Kahneman details his experiments, it is an essential read.

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→ March 19, 2014
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Three history of science books.

I have one new post up on ESPN.com, on prep lefty Brady Aiken, the top prospect right now for this year’s Rule 4 draft.

I’ve listened to three history of science audiobooks in the last month, two of which became more relevant in the wake of Monday’s announcement of a discovery of evidence relating to the initial moments after the Big Bang. Of those three books, one was excellent, one was disappointing, and one had a little bit of both.

By far my favorite of the three was Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science, a book about the discovery of quantum mechanics and the difficulty the theory’s proponents had in convincing the advocates of the standard model of physics – a group that included Einstein and Bohr – that God does indeed play dice, at least with subatomic particles. The book is thorough, speaking as often as possible through the words of its many characters, while making a complex scientific subject easily accessible to lay readers who, like me, may not have taken a physics class in 20+ years.

The book builds up to Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, and then deals with the massive fallout (pun intended) from the theorem’s introduction and subsequent examinations within a skeptical physics community. The principle is popularly interpreted to mean that we cannot simultaneously know the location of a subatomic particle and its velocity, but that oversimplifies it a bit. Heisenberg actually argued that the more accurately we can measure the position of a particle, the less accurately we can measure its momentum. This is separate from the observer effect, also discussed by Heisenberg, which states that the act of observing a particle alters the characteristics of that particle that the observer is attempting to measure. The uncertainty principle itself is critical to the understanding of quantum mechanics and measuring the behavior of subatomic particles after the demise of the “predictable” model of classical physics. This uncertainty is an inevitable result of the fact that every particle in the universe is also a wave, which is where Herr Schrödinger comes into play.

Uncertainty has to deal with a lot of phenomena that aren’t covered in high school physics classes, and some that are but might be unfamiliar, such as the discovery that electrons do not in fact orbit the nucleus of an atom as planets in the solar system do. The book also has the best explanation I’ve come across of the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, as the physicist himself looms large in the early days of the theory and refinements of quantum mechanics. The paradox was Schrödinger’s response to the seemingly impossible claim of the quantum theorists that a subatomic particle could simultaneously exist in multiple “states.” Schrödinger’s cat existed in a box where a canister of poison would open with the release, at some arbitrary point in time, of a single particle. He argued that if quantum mechanics were true, the cat would simultaneously be alive and dead – at least until the observer opened the box, at which point the cat would clearly have to move entirely to one state (alive) or the other (dead). This paradox sidestepped the question of whether quantum characteristics of subatomic particles do or should apply equally to relatively large objects, but the paradox has led to multiple interpretations, from the slightly insane (the Copenhagen interpretation, where observing the object ends the superposition of multiple states) to the totally insane (the many-worlds interpretation, where observing the object splits the universe into two universes and I can’t even continue with this). I’ve always understood it as a probabilistic model: The cat is only “half alive and half dead” in a mathematical sense, as in 1/2(alive) + 1/2(dead). No one can seriously argue that the cat exists in two superposed states until we open the box, right?

Lindley’s greatest trick here is to present the various scientists involved in the debate over quantum phenomena, particularly Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, and Schrödinger, as full-fledged individuals, capable of insight, humor, doubt, and even pettiness. Heisenberg’s postulate threw a huge wrench into the well-oiled machine of classical physics, where the behavior of particles was thought to be predictable and well-understood. Heisenberg didn’t just say that their behavior was unpredictable, but that it could never become predictable, and that there was an upper bound on our ability to observe and understand the behavior of certain subatomic particles.

—

The second book of the three, the one on which I’d put a middling grade, was Ray Jayawardhana’s Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe*, about the lengthy and difficult question to understand these particular subatomic particles, ones that seemed to also defy conventional wisdom on how such particles should behave. Neutrinos are almost massless and can pass through an entire planet without touching another particle. They also explain the full process involved in beta decay, where an atomic nucleus emits an electron or a positron as well as electron neutrino (or antineutrino, but hold that thought). Without the neutrino to balance the scales, physicists were left with an apparent loss of momentum and energy from beta decay. As it turns out, the Italian physicist Wolfgang Pauli wasn’t just making stuff up when he posited the existence a previously unknown particle, which another Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, dubbed the “neutrino,” or “little neutron.”

* Subtitles have gotten completely out of control.

Jayawardhana starts off with a brisk history of physicists’ understanding of the atom and radioactive decay, getting us fairly quickly to Pauli and the stir that his hypothesis created in the world of nuclear physics. Undiscovered particles are always good fun in that realm, but Pauli’s subatomic idea was a naughty bit, appearing to have no mass, possibly having no charge (but having “spin,” tying to Pauli’s other great contribution to science, for which he later won a Nobel Prize), and defying decades of attempts to find it. Pauli’s guess was right, as the neutrino did exist, but wasn’t discovered until 26 years after his first paper describing it, and physicists continue to build larger and more expensive contraptions to capture enough neutrinos to try to better understand them, graduating from capturing solar neutrinos (emitted during the nuclear fusion that powers the star) to those that reach us from distant supernovae. Neutrinos also gave rise to our understanding of the weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, and are one of the handful of remnants left over from the Big Bang still hanging around the background fabric of the universe.

When Jayawardhana is explaining the “invention” of the neutrino, its formation, and the various “flavors” of neutrinos now known to science, he keeps the material moving and strikes the ideal balance between rigor and accessibility. But the last third of the book bogs down in descriptions of those enormous devices used to try to catch the little sneaks, and the lengthy efforts involved in funding those experiments and waiting for results. The discussion of why neutrinos matter suffers in comparison for its brevity, when in fact that’s the topic that deserved greater explanation. The revelation that neutrinos may actually serve as their own antiparticles is just thrown in near the end of the book, even though that’s kind of a big deal. Jayawardhana also falls into the trap of dismissing the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat by saying, without any explanation, that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead inside of the box, an interpretation that, even if you accept it, isn’t the only one out there.

Unrelated to the book itself, the audiobook was narrated by Bronson Pinchot, so if you’ve always wanted to hear Balki talk to you about double beta decay, here’s your chance.

—

The disappointment was Dava Sobel’s A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos, a description of Copernicus’s earth-shattering (pun intended) discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, not, as the Catholic Church decreed, that the universe revolves around the earth. Copernicus also pointed out that the stars are much farther away from earth than scientists of his era believed them to be. Sobel’s book paled in comparison to her wonderful debut, Longitude, but also suffers from the paucity of original source material, as Copernicus left little besides his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and after his death the work was condemned by the very church he’d once served as a canon.

To fill in the gap, Sobel resorts to a dubious technique of imagining dialogues between several of the major players in the drama, incorporating a short play in the middle of her more serious work. Historical fiction itself is problematic enough when the author puts words or actions with real historical figures, but Sobel’s device here seems unconscionable. That we know so little of Copernicus’ life beyond his magnum opus is lamentable, but it is no excuse for fabricating an entire personality for him and others involved in the story of his discovery, such as making Georg Rheticus, the mathematician who published On the Revolutions, into a pederast. Expanding the tome to discuss Johannes Kepler, who built on Copernicus’ work and discovered that planetary orbits are elliptical rather than circular, at greater length would have been a better use of the space.

—

I’ll apologize here for any errors in my descriptions of the physics explained in these books. Please submit any corrections or clarifications in the comments.

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→ February 27, 2014
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The Audacity of Hops.

Klawchat today at 1 pm ET.

Tom Acitelli’s The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution is as comprehensive a history of the topic as I could possibly imagine, sometimes to the detriment of the book’s flow (pun intended), but also a totally fascinating look at one of the country’s greatest entrepreneurial and cultural success stories. Acitelli goes back to the movement’s origins in the 1960s, when Anchor was the nation’s only craft brewer by any reasonable definition of the term, and follows it through legal challenges, the need to educate the consumer, and some truly disgraceful behavior by executives at Big Beer (mostly Anheuser-Busch) on to the present-day climate where the U.S. is by far the world’s leader in both variety and innovation in the craft beer market. If you enjoy craft beer, as I do, this is an absolute must-read.

Acitelli’s initial section, where he describes Fritz Maytag’s takeover of the floundering Anchor brewery in San Francisco as well as other early startup efforts like Jack McAuliffe’s New Albion, spoke to me more than any other part of the book because it reflected so well my own experiences with beer. I grew up thinking I hated beer; I’d had Big Beer at various times, but despised every sip – it was watery and bitter and acrid with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I thought it was what you drank to get drunk, or at least to seem older because you were drinking something forbidden, but never thought of beer as something you would drink because you liked it. When I was in college in the early ’90s, Sam Adams (the flagship beer of the Boston Beer Company, whose founder, Jim Koch, is one of the central characters in Audacity) was popular locally and was the first beer I’d tried and liked, or at least didn’t hate, although it wasn’t quite enough to convince me that I could like beer as a class of beverages. I was always a liquor drinker, rum and gin primarily, as well as the occasional hard cider (although many of those were too sweet, like wine coolers for people who didn’t want to be caught drinking wine coolers).

What I eventually learned, past the age of 30, was that I liked many styles of beer – just not the style promulgated by Big Beer, generally described as pale lagers or pilsners, but made in huge quantities from inferior ingredients. I love darker, richer-bodied beers – stouts and porters, of course, but also bocks, brown ales, amber ales, and even the lagers called Oktoberfest beers which are darker and have more complex flavors than pilsners. I started as a Guinness drinker, and still am to some degree – it’s a rare Big Beer brand I can get behind, along with Newcastle Brown Ale – but over the past six or seven years have found myself drinking more and more craft beers, as much for the adventure of trying new labels and styles as for the beers themselves.

The Audacity of Hops filled in countless gaps in my knowledge of the history of the styles and breweries I’ve enjoyed, starting with Anchor Porter, one of my favorite porters and, as it turns out, one of Maytag’s most important contributions to beer culture: Porter was dead as a style until Maytag brought it back. (Maytag’s great-grandfather founded the appliance maker, and his father founded the dairy farm that produces Maytag blue cheese makers as well. Pretty good bloodlines there.) He also served as the craft beer movement’s first apostle, although adherents traveled to him more than he did to them, and he was helped by English beer advocate and journalist Michael Jackson, who was among the first to sing Anchor’s praises. Maytag opened his doors to other would-be homebrewers, many of whom went on to start craft breweries of their own. Acitelli walks through what feels like every one of their stories, from those that folded, like New Albion, to ongoing success stories like Sierra Nevada (founded in 1980), Mendocino (1984), and Alaska Brewing (1986).

The book careens from story to story in Acitelli’s attempt to cover as much of the movement as possible, including as many startup stories, both of breweries and brewbups, as he can. Sometimes that is a necessary evil, such as his section on the founding of Delaware’s Dogfish Head brewery, the first serious “extreme beer” brewery, adding unusual ingredients to its beers or otherwise using unorthodox tricks with traditional styles – such as adding hops every minute during the hourlong brewing of its highly-regarded 60-minute IPA. But other times Acitelli mentions the openings of breweries or pubs that didn’t last and had no significant impact on the movement. A craft brewery that was the first in its particular state is not notable for that reason alone, and the book could have focused more on the leading figures in the movement – Maytag, Koch, Jackson, McAuliffe, Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery, and others – while losing some of the breadth of the coverage. Acitelli’s research work here is remarkable, given the number of people he must have had to track down for interviews, but the book takes a good 60-70 pages to get rolling because of the disjointed structure that bounces us back and forth between breweries and characters throughout the book’s length.

Next up: Back to the classics with Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, which will probably occupy me for the next two weeks or more.

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→ February 1, 2014
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The Supper of the Lamb.

Robert Farrar Capon was an Episocopal priest who, like me, had an abiding if entirely amateur interest in food and cooking, and he combined both of those passions with his love of writing in the seminal “culinary reflection” The Supper of the Lamb, a peculiar tome that isn’t quite a cookbook, isn’t exactly a book on faith, but weaves them together with some truly superb High-English prose. Capon passed away in September at 88, but this book is now back in print thanks to Modern Library.

While The Supper of the Lamb is more about food than religion, at least superficially, you’re going to get a heavy dose of one if you want to get to the other. Capon’s faith is traditional and unapologetic, and he’ll jump from comments on biodiversity and evolution to marveling over the depth and breadth of God’s creation. In that sense, it’s a narrowly themed book – Capon expounds upon God’s infinite grace, and he’s not going to stop to ask if you’re completely along for the ride.

It’s a ride worth taking even if you’re only interested in the other half, however. Looking at our world and the bounty of edible items within it with a greater sense of wonder will, or should, improve our appreciation of the plate before us, and help us reorient our thinking away from processed and packaged foods and more toward cooking with the foods available in nature. Capon’s approach is no-nonsense – while conceding a few guilty pleasures from the supermarket, he rails against the trend, already evident in the 1960s when he wrote the book, toward outsourcing home-cooking to big corporations and toward a disconnection between us and the things we eat.

The book revolves around the lamb supper of the title, an allusion to the marriage supper of the Lamb found in Revelations 19, and to the central dish of the work, “Lamb for eight persons four times,” a dish that pays homage to the meat (a whole leg of lamb) by using every last bit of flavor it has to offer, including soup made from the bones and trimmings. Capon uses this series of recipes as a departure point for his meditations on faith, grace, and useless kitchen tools.

It’s not, for me at least, a book from which to learn about cooking; if you learn anything from Capon about food, it will be about the philosophy of the kitchen and less about practical tips or techniques. I enjoyed his writing more than any other aspect of the work, though, as Capon was erudite and witty, such as in his praise of the cleaver (even now a scarcely-seen knife in home kitchens_:

A woman with cleaver in mid-swing is no mere woman. She breaks upon the eye of the beholder as an epiphany of power, as mistress of a house in which only trifles may be trifled with – and in which she defines the trifles. A man who has seen women only as gentle arrangers of flowers has not seen all that women have to offer. Unsuspected majesties await him.

Capon despises the double boiler, as does Alton Brown today, and he praises wooden utensils, as does Michael Ruhlman, although the two disagree on the utility of the wooden spoon. (Ruhlman prefers wooden spatulas for scraping, and I concur, using silicone spatulas – unavailable at the time of Supper‘s publications – in applications where a spoon might be more functional, such as scraping the bottom of a saucier.) He talks about white and brown stock, how to make them and why you need to do so if you want to cook real food and to not throw away all that flavor in the bones. (One shudders to think at what he’d say about the modern proliferation of boneless, skinless, flavorless chicken breasts.) He speaks in praise of wine and discusses the ideal corkscrew. He goes on – and on – about the making of puff pastry and its highest form of expression, the strudel dough, which seems like an inordinate amount of work even to me, who thinks nothing of curing my own bacon or making my own preserves.

Capon’s techniques were quite modern for his era, with a sound understanding of the science of the kitchen underpinning most of his suggestions, but his dishes read as very dated today. So does the chapter on hosting a proper dinner party, where Capon even argues for asking guests to come in black tie. It was a different era, I suppose, and for that I give thanks.

Next up: I just finished Jasper Fforde’s wonderful young adult novel The Last Dragonslayer, which is pretty much a regular Fforde book without all the swearing, and have moved on to George Eliot’s Adam Bede.

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→ January 25, 2014
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The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Ramanujan was one of the most remarkable and prolific mathematicians who ever lived, a self-taught prodigy who grew up in modest circumstances in south India during the time of the British Raj, rediscovering the previous 150 years’ worth of number theory while also uncovering over 3000 theorems and identities of his own. “Discovered,” in a sense, by the far more famous English mathematician G.H. Hardy, Ramanujan moved to England for about five years, where his work finally received a wider audience, but where he also contracted an unknown illness that eventually killed him at age 38.

Robert Kanigel’s biography The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan tells two main stories – that of Ramanujan himself, and a partial biography of Hardy, whose professional life was thoroughly altered by his time working with Ramanujan and to whom we owe most of the credit for what we know of Ramanujan’s life and work today. It’s a very strong, even-handed biography of Ramanujan, sympathetic without becoming patronizing, but was extremely light on its discussion of the math itself, with just a few cursory discussions of some of his findings that still bear his name today.

Born in southern India in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu, near the city of Madras (now known as Chennai), Ramanujan was a member of the Brahmin caste, the highest social stratum in the caste system, but was born into a poor family and received only a basic education. His mother was domineering and remained deeply involved in his life even into his adulthood and arranged (by her) marriage, only, according to Kanigel, supporting her son’s obsession with mathematics when it appeared it would at least bring him fame – and bring her fortune. Ramanujan failed out of university twice because he couldn’t be bothered with any coursework other than mathematics, but in that subject he was light-years ahead of his professors, filling notebooks with conjectures and equations, most of which he knew intuitively to be true, but couldn’t have published – even if he’d had access to such outlets – because he didn’t need to or understand how to develop the proofs.

In 1912 and 1913, Ramanujan, at the encouragement of some of the few Indian nationals in a position to advise him, sent letters with copies of some of his work to three English mathematicians, only one of whom responded: G.H. Hardy, at the time a professor of maths at Trinity University at Cambridge. Hardy was a purist, a mathematician who studied number theory (the study of the behavior and properties of the integers, with a special emphasis on prime numbers) for its own sake and overtly disdained any branch of “applied” mathematics – that is, math that had a practical purpose, such as the math required in physics or engineering. Hardy was open-minded enough upon seeing Ramanujan’s letter that he overcame his skepticism about an uneducated Indian clerk coming up with mathematical insights that took Western experts over a century to develop and wrote back, asking to see more of Ramanujan’s work. (There’s some irony in Hardy’s hesitation and the other mathematicians’ rejections of Ramanujan, as number theory has its own tradition in India dating back over 1500 years.) The subsequent correspondence led to an invitation for Ramanujan to come spend two years with Hardy at Cambridge, two years that turned into five before ill health sent Ramanujan back home to south India, where he died shortly thereafter.

Kanigel’s presentation of the life of Ramanujan leans toward the personal rather than the professional side, focusing extensively on his upbringing, cultural opposition to much of what he did and wanted to do with his life, and on the non-professional side of his life in England. The emotional cost to Ramanujan of traveling to a foreign country where he’d face outright prejudice but also would struggle with differences in language, weather, and, most importantly for Ramanujan, food. The devoutly spiritual and nominally Hindu mathematician was a strict vegetarian, but had great difficulty adapting his diet to the abysmal food of World War I-era England, where to cook something implied cooking it to death, where all flavor and texture was safely removed from the item to be consumed. Hardy was Ramanujan’s mentor in maths, but not in life, as Hardy does not (in Kanigel’s telling) have any close emotional ties to anyone but his sister once their parents had passed away, and with Ramanujan’s wife in India for the entire time he was in England, Ramanujan lacked for friends and for anyone who could help him look after himself. Kanigel reports on the speculation that malnutrition contributed to Ramanujan’s illness and decline, but his book was published before the 1994 report that he died of an amoebic infection in his liver common in India at the time he lived there.

I also found Kanigel’s mini-biography of Hardy, essential to the story of Ramanujan, fascinating. Hardy’s a great figure for biographers, appearing in one of my favorite books about math, Prime Obsession, for his role in attacking the unsolved Riemann Hypothesis. (Ramanujan’s pre-Hardy work was remarkable, but he did make some mistakes, one of which involved Riemann’s zeta function; Ramanujan assumed the function had only real zeroes, not complex ones, but its complex zeroes lie at the heart of the Hypothesis.) He’s also ripe for caricature, something Kanigel avoids entirely. A lifelong bachelor, Hardy was obsessed by numbers, but also had an equal passion for cricket (and, after a stint at Princeton, baseball). He was a strict atheist who once set out a goal for himself to craft a disproof of the existence of God convincing enough to convert most of the general public, and a pacifist who fought persecution of Trinity colleagues who spoke out against British involvement in World War I. Hardy viewed Ramanujan with great pride, almost as a father would view a son, someone with limitless natural talent whom Hardy could mold into one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known, and he was diligent about assigning credit to his protégé whenever possible. He brought Ramanujan to the world, yet it also seems that Ramanujan brought much more out of Hardy than we’d otherwise have had.

My lone criticism of The Man Who Knew Infinity is its scant treatment of the math in question. The reader of a book like this probably has an appetite for math, and the author has merely to explain the theorems or identities under discussion, not to teach them or prove them. Kanigel does very little of any of this, only dipping occasionally into discussions of continued fractions and some of Ramanujan’s explorations of the nature and frequency of prime numbers. Kanigel appears to have skipped the mathier material in favor of asking open-ended questions about the source of Ramanujan’s inspiration and culpability for his illness and death.

Kanigel’s epilogue discusses the final years of Hardy’s life, but it is his discussions with Ramanujan’s widow, Janakiammal, that punctuate the book’s last handful of pages. Still alive at the time of the book’s publication in 1991, Janakiammal spent a long part of her life as a widow in obscurity and poverty before she was rediscovered several decades after her husband’s passing, eventually reaping rewards, both honorary and monetary, before her death in 1994 at age 95. Her few comments evoke a great bitterness at how her husband’s legacy was underappreciated and how her own life was adversely affected by that and by quarrels with Ramanujan’s family.

Next up: The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Robert Farrar Capon, a chef and Episcopalian priest. The 1967 book is a classic of the food-writing genre and was reissued in 2002 as part of the Modern Library Food series, edited by Ruth Reichl.

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→ October 31, 2013
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The Land that Never Was.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EDT. I’ll have a Top Chef recap up late tonight or early Friday morning.

Poyais was a small, independent principality (later republic) on the Mosquito Coast of Central America, protected by mountains from invasion by neighboring Spanish territories, blessed with abundant natural resources, and, according to its Cazique Gregor Macgregor, desperate for English colonists to come populate it. Macgregor issued bonds on behalf of the Poyais government on London exchanges, and sold plots of land in Poyais to eager would-be settlers from all economic strata, desperate blue-collar workers to professional men promised positions of authority in the Poyais government. He eventually attracted 240 men, women, and children and loading them on two ships bound across the Atlantic, while he remained in England to float more debentures and recruit further colonists.

If you’ve never heard of Poyais – I hadn’t, in any context – that’s because it was Macgregor’s fabrication, all part of an elaborate fraud he used to pilfer money from investors and settlers alike. David Sinclair’s The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor And The Most Audacious Fraud In History covers this long-forgotten scam, which claimed the lives of 180 of those 240 settlers, yet for which Macgregor only served a few months in jail, eventually dying in exile in Caracas in 1845, still a free man.

Sinclair’s retelling is fairly straightforward, taking readers back through Macgregor’s history as a soldier of fortune with ambitions beyond his abilities and a talent for lying through his teeth when it suited his purposes (such as taking credit for battles or adventures in which he hadn’t fought). He depicts Macgregor as a silver-tongued confidence man taking advantage of a time when Central and South America were all the rage among English investors and reporters, an environment that was ripe for a polished scam artist who had just enough legitimacy in his credentials to pull it off. The people Macgregor fooled weren’t all rubes or uneducated citizens – many were successful professional men who bought Macgregor’s promises of government appointments in European-style cities in Poyais that just needed experienced leaders to fill out its government.

Knowing nothing about the Poyais scheme beyond what I read in Sinclair’s book, I was more struck by another aspect of Macgregor’s temporary success: He told people what they wanted to hear. The fantasy he created put an apparent physical reality to the aspirations of the middle-class men he recruited to lead the colony, and to the desperate dreams of poorer workers in search of greater economic opportunity than they found in the heavily populated, stagnating England. A century after the disastrous Darien scheme, a failed attempt to establish a Scottish colony on the northeast coast of what is now Panama, nearly bankrupted the nation’s landowners and led to their 1707 union with England, the Scots fell for a fabrication that catered to their disillusion over their last failure but promised little risk because the colony had already been established. Macgregor wrote his pamphlets in a bombastic style, sometimes under assumed names, to improve their appeal, but the audience had to be willing to receive it. Whether he was just fortunate in his timing or truly understood that he was selling something his listeners or readers wanted to buy, it was a critical element in the success of the scam.

Macgregor was eventually found out, but paid very little penalty for it, so Sinclair’s story lacks the sort of natural climax and resolution you’d expect or want in a story of a terrible fraud that cost not just money but innocent lives, including those of children. The reactions of the survivors are shocking, far more interesting than the limited time we see of Macgregor facing legal charges in France, but robs Sinclair a little of the strength of a traditional narrative – not that there’s much he could have done to improve that. Instead, the book’s greatest strength comes in its midsection, where we follow Macgregor around as he sells his nonsense and then read about the plight of the colonists when they get to Poyais and find nothing there. That alone makes it well worth a read, even if its story arc isn’t what we typically expect (unfairly, perhaps) from narrative non-fiction.

Next up: I’m halfway through Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, which is going far better than I expected given what little I’ve previously read of James’ work.

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→ September 23, 2013
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Hanns and Rudolf.

I only became aware of Thomas Harding’s new book, Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz, because of Harding’s recent piece in the Washington Post about the Kommandant’s daughter, Brigitte, who still lives in northern Virginia. The book’s publisher reached out to me after I tweeted the link to the article and sent me a review copy, which I tore through this weekend because I couldn’t bear to put the book down.

The subtitle is a little misleading, as this book isn’t so much the story of a chase as it is a pair of contemporary portraits of two German men whose lives headed in opposite directions with the rise of the Third Reich, setting them on courses that end in one hunting down and capturing the other after the war’s conclusion. The chase itself isn’t long, so most of the book is spent getting us up to that point. Harding’s achievement here is making both biographies interesting enough that the reader is compelled to keep turning the pages – and in presenting Rudolf in a neutral fashion even though he’s one of the worst monsters in our species’ history.

That Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the man who oversaw the construction of the concentration camp at Auschwitz and devised the scheme where the pesticide Zyklon-B was used to exterminate Jews and other prisoners in huge numbers, with well over a million killed at the camp. Höss’ eventual devolution into a calm, apathetic architect of history’s most efficient mass producer of death starts from early childhood – including a fanatical father who died young and a lack of any close ties to family members – but also reveals a tremendous amount about the “just following orders” mentality of so many members of the SS, the Nazi Party, and of the German population as a whole. While running Auschwitz, Höss would return home each night to his villa just beyond the camp’s walls, where he lived with his wife and five children in a luxurious house staffed with slaves drawn from the prison.

Hanns, the hero of the story and the author’s great-uncle, is Hanns Alexander, a German Jew born into fortunate circumstances that would largely disappear before he fled to the UK with his family in 1936. Left without a state after the Nazi regime revoked their citizenship, Hanns chose to join the British army, which set up a separate unit for refugees seeking to fight their former countries that allowed them to serve in non-combat roles (because, you know, can’t trust ’em). After the war ended, Hanns became a private hunter of war criminals in his spare time, eventually parlaying that into a formal role that led him to recapture the puppet ruler of Luxembourg, Gustav Simon, and to earn a command to track down Höss himself. Hanns’ own drive to fight against Germany – more than fighting for Britain or the allies – derived from the personal injustice that he underwent when he and his family had to flee from the Nazis, as well as the more general sense of outrage from the massive crimes the German state and its people had committed against the Jews and other so-called enemies of the state.

Höss’ testimony played a pivotal role in the Nuremberg trials because of his willingness to admit his own role in the Holocaust and in the chain of command that made the mass murders possible, which means Hanns himself contributed to the convictions and executions of many of the surviving leaders of the Third Reich. Höss comes across as a weirdly complex character, a loving father and family man who beat down his rare compunctions over gassing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children because he refused to show weakness to his superiors or to those under his command. Did he do this for fear for his own safety in a regime where guards who showed mercy to prisoners would be beaten or killed? Or was he simply nursing his own desire for success and praise by trying to set an example of fanaticism that others would revere?

The conflict between Höss’ work and family selves, his apparent apathy toward his victims, and his unclear motivation for his actions at Auschwitz make him the far more compelling character than Alexander, whose life is much easier to understand. Hanns watched fellow Germans pull the rug out from under his comfortable life, and his personal fury combined with that from his moral compass to turn him into a rabid Nazi hunter, yet one who declined to discuss his role in capturing these criminals for most of the rest of his life. It’s a simple narrative for a man’s life, one that’s easy to fathom. Turning into a cockroach the way Höss did is a lot harder to understand, and it’s part of why I couldn’t avert my eyes from Hanns and Rudolf until he’d been hanged.

–

I’ve been busy plowing through more titles from the Bloomsbury 100 as well, but nothing that merited a long post here. Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, which draws parallels between the swift decline of a noble Austrian family and that of the Hapsburgs’ reign, heading into the disaster of World War I that led to the breakup of their sprawling, unwieldy empire. It dragged horribly, however, with Dickensian descriptions and an absurd amount of moralizing over peccadilloes that barely merit mention today.

Theodor Fontaine’s Effi Briest, named by Thomas Mann as one of the six most essential novels ever written, was a stronger read, even though the morality play also fails to resonate today. Based on a true story from the late 1800s, Effi Briest tells the title character’s tragic history from her arranged marriage to a man much her senior through her extramarital affair with the lothario Crampas to her divorce and fall from grace. It’s far more believable than the similar Madame Bovary and less prolix than Anna Karenina, two similarly-themed novels, working more along the lines of The Awakening, another novel of adultery where the plight of the woman in a male-dominated, moralistic society takes center stage.

Eugenie Grandet is the second Balzac novel I’ve read, along with Old Goriot, both part of his Human Comedy novel sequence. It’s another tragedy, this one the story of Eugenie’s miserly father and how his parsimony destroys his wife, himself, and, even after his death, his daughter, when even a small count of generosity would have saved them all. I’ve found Balzac’s prose to be his great strength – I enjoy his phrasing and descriptions yet never find them slow or monotonous – but the story in Eugenie Grandet had less of the dark comedy that made Old Goriot a better read.

Next up: Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.

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→ May 17, 2013
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Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

I’ve got my first projection of the first round of this year’s MLB Rule 4 draft up, and chatted on Thursday.

The banana on your table or in your bag right now is a specific variety called the Cavendish, and is genetically identical to every other Cavendish banana in the world, a peculiar trait among comestibles that means that one of our most essential foodstuffs is at risk of being wiped off the commercial market by a fungal disease it can’t fight. Because most banana plants are parthenocarpic (in lay terms, sterile), producing no seeds, humans cultivate bananas by transplanting part of the plant’s underground stem, known as the corm, which means each new plant is a carbon copy of the last one – and therefore the plants have never developed immunity to common fungal diseases that ravage entire plantations. With no help from evolution, the first widely commercialized banana, the Gros Michel, became nonviable as a cash crop, and the same disease is now threatening Cavendish plantations as well.

Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World discusses how we reached this point, going back through the history of the fruit and discussing its importance to subsistence farmers in Africa as well as its economic importance in Asia and Latin America. Now, with Panama disease, a fungal disease that is resistant to fungicide and causes banana plants to wilt by attacking their roots, marching across the globe, there’s a race on to try to genetically engineer a replacement for the Cavendish, one that suits the market’s demands for a portable, sweet fruit that is also resistant to Panama disease, black Sigatoka, and other fungal maladies that can devastate a plantation.

The rise of the banana as a trade good to become the West’s favorite fruit (mangoes are more popular in the rest of the world) has had tragic consequences, from which Koeppel doesn’t shy. The company you know know as Chiquita has a lengthy history of labor abuses in Latin America, including exposing plantation workers to highly toxic pesticides and fungicides; corrupt land deals with autocratic governments that were often put in place by the United States in part to aid Chiquita; and circumventing land-ownership restrictions in former “banana republics” (not just a clothing store!) to maintain strict cartel-like control over the banana trade. The autocratic governments were responsible for oppression, torture, and even genocide of native populations, often while the U.S. stood idly by, content that our economic interests were protected. Chiquita’s sins, and those of its billionaire owner Carl Lindner – also part-owner of the Reds at the time – were documented in a massive expose’ in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1998, only to have the paper issue an apology and pay the company $10 million for illegally obtaining voice mails. Chiquita never disproved any of the paper’s claims, and only had to threaten a lawsuit for theft and invasion of privacy before the publisher folded his tent.

Banana farming in other parts of the world, such as Malaysia and Brazil, “only” led to substantial deforestation, while the blight now affecting the Cavendish and that nearly drove its predecessor, the Gros Michel, into extinction is threatening subsistence farmers in developing countries who depend on banana plants as a food source. Koeppel uses that latter point to launch into descriptions of those genetic engineering efforts, with brief thoughts on the anti-GM movement and the rather clear conundrum that our choice is to accept GM bananas or likely live with no bananas at all unless they grow in your backyard.

Koeppel does well to largely keep himself out of the narrative, only appearing to introduce certain characters or to describe his experiences tasting other varieties of bananas, most of which aren’t cultivated for export. (He has special praise for the Lacatan banana, found in the Philippines.) It’s compelling on several levels – as a chronicle of corporate greed and corruption, as the story of how a largely tropical fruit became a global commodity, and of course in the unfinished story of whether scientists can use traditional and modern methods together to craft a disease-resistant replacement for the Cavendish. I loved it because I love popular science books and also love to cook, but this book should be required reading for anyone who likes to eat.

Next up: Alessandro Piperno’s second novel, Persecution.

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→ April 23, 2013
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52 Loaves.

I’ve got a new Insider column up on possible demotions/promotions, looking at whether there’s any sense in those moves. I also recorded an extremely fun episode of Behind the Dish today, featuring Michael Schur of Parks & Recreation and FJM fame.

William Alexander’s 52 Loaves: One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust is a peculiar mix of memoir, baking how-to, and experiential non-fiction (“I did this weird/crazy thing so I could write a book about it”) that never quite hits on any of those areas until its final passage, where Alexander’s quixotic efforts to bake the perfect loaf of French country bread lands him in the disused bakery at a French monastery, teaching one of the brothers how to bake bread. It’s poorly written and just as poorly organized, yet when Alexander finally steps back and lets an actual story unfold, it makes the aggravation of the first 200-odd pages worthwhile.

Alexander’s quest to replicate a bread he’d tasted some years earlier leads to a resolution to bake a loaf of this style of bread, known as pain de campagne, every weekend for a full year (hence the title). This bread has a few key characteristics – a hard, crispy crust that shatters (in a good way) when you bite into it, and a moist crumb with plenty of air holes, sometimes a little large and irregularly shaped. It’s normally made with a levain, a wild yeast starter that can be years or decades old, and includes a blend of white and whole wheat flours. Alexander starts out from a recipe, struggles with it, and then goes out in search of expert opinions and better tools, even growing his own wheat and attempting to build an earthen oven in his backyard, while consulting people like the esteemed Peter Reinhart, whose books I regularly extol on this blog.

Alexander is fine when he’s describing these educational endeavors, from trips to grain mills and bakeries to phone and email conversations with bakers, but he’s in the book himself far too much, unfortunate as he’s not an interesting character and shares way, way too much information (especially about his sex life with his wife, who I assume has since castrated him for doing so). He’s also just not a good writer at all, verbose when he needs to be terse, and desperately unfunny, as in this description of a brief conversation with his wife:

“It was Julia’s idea,” I said clumsily.
“Julia?”
As Ricky Ricardo used to say, “Lu-ceee, you got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.”
Let’s start with Julia.
I’m referring of course, to the late Julia Child.

That’s about as hackneyed a phrase as you’ll find, followed by three mentions of “Julia” before he tells us which Julia … except that in a book about food, there’s only one Julia anyway, so why play coy?

Eventually, his bread-baking improves to the point where he’s at least churning out solid loaves, albeit not exactly up to his own high standards, so Alexander starts reaching out to monasteries in Europe in search of one that still bakes its own breads in-house. That search leads him to one that has a bakery, including a wood-fired oven, but hasn’t used it in some time; that monastery agrees to let Alexander, an agnostic, come bake in their ovens for a week or so if he agrees to teach one of the brothers how to do it so they can restart the tradition after he leaves. Alexander’s experiences there, building unexpected bonds with his protege and others in the monastery, while himself pondering some big questions (without coming to any real conclusions or experiencing a conversion), is so compelling and so well-written that it felt like it came from the pen of a different writer. The forced jocularity of the first three-fourths of the book disappears when there’s something significant at stake – he has to teach this novice how to bake this one kind of bread in a matter of a few days, using unfamiliar equipment while conforming to the monastery’s rigid schedule of prayer and services. And Alexander’s own reaction to that schedule, even attending some of the services himself and sharing meals with the brothers, gives us a much more mature picture of the man than his puerile jokes about rebuffing his wife’s advances because he needs to feed the starter do.

52 Loaves includes recipes at the end, including his method of developing and growing a levain (starter) as well as the unique recipe he developed for the monastery, adapting to the ingredients available there. (There are some differences between our flours and those you can buy in Europe, another informative section that showed Alexander can educate his readers when he wants to do so.) I have used a starter, and kept one going for about two years in Boston, but don’t bake enough bread to justify the work involved in keeping one, since the Arizona summers are so hot that we don’t want to run the oven at those temperatures for long periods of time. When the urge to bake bread strikes, I use a biga, a sort of overnight starter that begins with ¼ tsp of commercial, active yeast, allowing it to develop overnight in the fridge to get some of the flavor you’d get with a wild yeast starter – an inferior substitute, but not one most people (myself included) are that likely to notice.

Next up: In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart, presumably not the third baseman.

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→ March 22, 2013
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

I’ve got a fantasy-themed post up today, answering questions from ESPN.com’s fantasy editors about divisive players for fantasy owners in 2013.

I hadn’t heard of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down until I encountered a reference to it in Alison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, in which she mentions it as one of her four favorite narrative non-fiction titles. I wasn’t sure how compelling the story of a Hmong girl with severe epilepsy who got caught in the cultural divide between her family and the American doctors who treated her would be as a 300-page novel, but Spirit is so thoroughly researched and so perfectly balanced that it turned out to be as engrossing as any non-fiction book I have ever read.

Lia Lee is the Hmong girl at the center of the book, born with a terrible case of epilepsy that caused massive grand mal seizures, one of which led to irreversible brain damage when she was four that left her in a vegetative state for the remainder of her life. (She died in September of 2012, shortly after the book was reissued for its 15th anniversary.) The conflict at the heart of the book swirls around Lia in the time between her birth and that neurological catastrophe; in those four-odd years, the doctors tried an increasingly aggressive course of treatment that Lia’s parents didn’t fully understand and with which they didn’t entirely comply, while also pursuing traditional Hmong treatments (what many of us would consider “woo”) along with or sometimes in place of what the doctors prescribed. This clash of cultures, exacerbated by a then-unbridgeable language gap and socioeconomic factors, led one doctor to accuse Lia’s parents of child abuse for their passive refusal to administer the prescribed medications, after which she was taken from them and placed in foster care for about a year. Not long after she was returned to the custody of her parents – with full support from the foster family that took her in – she suffered the massive seizure that effectively ended her life, although she remained in that vegetative state for fifteen years beyond it.

The phrase in the book’s title is the translation of the three-word Hmong phrase that refers to the disease we know as epilepsy, as the Hmong don’t have an exact word for it. In Hmong culture, many diseases and disorders we know to have clear physical causes are treated as ailments of the soul; Lia’s parents believed that the seizures were the result of one of her sisters slamming a door, which scared Lia’s soul out of her body, after which they had to try to coax it back in using methods like animal sacrifice. Fadiman’s greatest trick in this book is providing total balance between the two sides of the debate – it would be far too easy to paint the Lees, and the Hmong in general, as animist twits believing in superstitious nonsense that modern science should have killed off a few centuries ago. Fadiman never questions the scientific reality of epilepsy, but gives credence to the Lees’ beliefs as they affected their own perspective on Lia’s illness, treatment, and the final catastrophe, while also extrapolating from that to discuss the Hmong experience with the United States in general, from their time in the CIA’s secret army in Laos to their resettlement here starting in the late 1970s. The only real villain here is our government, which was happy to sacrifice thousands of Hmong men but did little to take care of this oppressed minority after the communist Pathet Lao overthrow the country’s monarchy and began a genocidal campaign that wiped out up to a quarter of the country’s Hmong population. (Laos remains one of the world’s only communist states, and, not coincidentally, is also extremely poor.) These detours into the history of the Hmong and their experience as immigrants to the U.S. add some needed context to the story; the Hmong left behind not just their homeland but their entire way of life, which revolved around self-sufficience through agriculture and the broad support networks of extended families (called “clans”), and then were resettled into unfriendly environments ranging from Minneapolis to Merced, California, where Lia’s parents lived. Fadiman touches briefly on a deep sense of betrayal among the older generation of Hmong, who felt that they were promised things by the U.S. for their aid during the war(s) against the communists and received very little of what was pledged.

Fadiman began writing the book as a magazine article that was never published, starting her research in the late 1980s almost a decade before the book’s initial release in 1997. In addition to reviewing 400,000 pages of medical records, she went back and spoke to as many of the principals involved in Lia’s care as she could, including the main doctors who treated her, the social worker who was most heavily involved with the Lees, and the Lees themselves, becoming so involved that Lia’s mother, Foua, began to refer to Fadiman as one of her “daughters.” (Including Lia, Foua had nine surviving biological children, most of whom went on to attend college in the United States and to find jobs and incomes that evaded their parents’ generation after the migration.) The book came out at a time when the idea of holistic medicine was still viewed as a concept from the fringes, never taught in schools and barely practiced in hospitals (according to Fadiman’s accounts). Since then, it has become more popular in academia and in practice, with The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down a part of the process of teaching doctors to view the patient as a whole rather than strictly the disease or disorder. Yet I think the book’s core lesson goes beyond medicine; while many of you will read the book as I did, with an inherent bias towards the doctors who employed sound science while banging their heads against the wall of parents who refused to follow the regiment of pills that might have saved their daughter’s brain, Fadiman does a tremendous job of showing us how and why the Lees distrusted and feared American doctors and Western medicine, a gap that the doctors should, in hindsight, have worked harder to close.

Fadiman writes at an extremely high level, never talking down to the reader and avoiding inserting herself too much into the story. I did notice a few odd word choices – referring to one person as having an “exiguous crewcut,” or the frequent use of “hegira” to describe the Hmong’s exodus from Laos, an accurate word that I’d never seen before – but otherwise the book was extremely readable and moved as quickly as any novel, especially in the intense, often heartbreaking depictions of Lia’s neurological crises. Even when you know the eventual outcome is tragic, Fadiman manages to infuse the situations with tension through precision, painful passages of details that put me in the room with Lia, her doctors, and her bewildered parents. In some ways, it’s a terrible story, but one that needed a wide telling like this to help us all expand our cross-cultural understanding.

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