Little Bee

by Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster 2008)

Little Bee is the name taken by a Nigerian teenager who has fled to England after her village is destroyed and her family murdered by people who want to drill for oil in that place. After escaping from the burning village with her older sister, Bee had a chance encounter with a British couple on a Nigerian beach.  The wife sacrifices a part of herself to save Bee; the husband cannot bring himself to do the same for the sister. Upon their return home, they can neither discuss nor forget the horrific incident on the beach. When Little Bee is accidentally released from the (fictional) Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre, where she has been incarcerated for two years since arriving in the U.K. as a stowaway, she finds her way to Sarah and Andrew’s home outside of London and changes their lives forever.

In some countries, I have heard, people do not rescue strangers because this puts the rescued one in their debt forever.  That is what happens to Little Bee and Sarah: they rescue one another, and they are in each other’s debt. The story is narrated by both of them in alternating chapters. The reader is inexorably drawn into the story of the refugee girl, the professional woman, her husband, her lover, and her little boy, who was based on the author’s own son.

It’s a quick read (hard to put down) but a depressing one because it reminds us of how many places there are where people do really terrible things to others, and how the developed countries where we live turn away and refuse sanctuary to the refugees. Little Bee is a wonderful character: smart, brave, innocent but not naive, generous and practical. You really want to know her, and by the end of the book, you can only wish her well.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

by Dan Ariely (Harper 2010)

The sequel to Predictably Irrational is similar to its predecessor but focuses more on the positive aspects of irrational behavior, as the title says. Part 1, “The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at Work,” covers why the larger the bonus, the worse we perform (especially at mental tasks); how we work not only for pay but also for meaning, and if our work is meaningless or unappreciated, our desire to do it dissipates; the IKEA Effect, or how we love what we create ourselves; the Not-Invented-Here Bias, which is basically the IKEA Effect of ideas and inventions; and revenge, which may be one of our more basic needs (when we get it, the pleasure/reward center of the brain becomes active). As with the first book, this is about the same things I am learning about in Professor Ariely’s MOOC, A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior, so it all seems very familiar when I read it. I am not totally sure why these things constitute the upside!

Part 2, “The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at Home,” focuses on the ways we adapt to both positive and negative things in our lives; whether the same people are attractive to everybody, and if so, how the “aesthetically challenged” among us (who, me??) deal with having to settle for someone possible less attractive than they would have liked; how online matchmaking works (and fails to work); why we are more likely to donate to a person than to a generic cause (a starving child vs. an organization that tries to help millions of starving (but faceless, nameless) people; and finally, how a decision made under the influence of positive or negative emotions can have a very long-lasting impact on our lives. In the closing chapter, Ariely reminds his readers that we are not the objective, rational, logical beings we like to think we are, and since our intuitions often fail us, we should “test everything”–not, perhaps, a very realistic piece of advice, but at least we should try to remember not to trust our gut feelings.

I’ve already begun the third book in the bundle, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. Look for a post about that one soon.

Ethics for the New Millenium

by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama (Riverhead Books, 1999)

The fifteen chapters of this book are neatly divided into three sections of five chapters each, followed by “An Appeal.”  The first section, “The Foundation of Ethics,” is about the universal quest for happiness/flight from suffering. The author claims that he has “No Magic, No Mystery,” no special ability to solve the world’s problems; but he calls for a spiritual (not a religious) revolution. He leads the reader through an explanation of what he means by spirituality: love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of harmony. All these things can bring happiness, both to oneself and to others. It is the placing of others’ welfare and happiness above our own that will paradoxically bring us happiness.

The second section, “Ethics and the Individual,” discusses the ethics of restraint, virtue, compassion, and suffering, and explains the need for discernment, or “adjusting the ideal of non-harming to the context.” Ethical precepts can guide us to form good habits, so that when we need to make a decision quickly, we will be more likely to make the right (most compassionate) choice.

The third and final section, “Ethics and Society,” discusses “Universal Responsibility,” “Levels of Commitment,” “Ethics in Society,” “Peace and Disarmament,” and “The Role of Religion in Modern Society.” By universal responsibility, he means that everyone should be concerned about everyone (and everything) else, so that when we see an opportunity to benefit others, we will use it; for their interest is also our interest. He chides those who become rich on the backs of the poor and gently observes, “the lifestyles of the rich are often absurdly complicated. . . .  I do not see how living like this adds anything to anyone’s comfort. As human beings we have only one stomach. There is a limit to the amount we can eat. . . .” One after another, he tackles the great issues of the day: the environment, education, the media, economics, politics, war, nuclear weapons, religious strife–and quietly, modestly suggests that we can all do better if we only respect one another and have compassion for one another.

The final few pages appeal to us to use our time well, because there is no second chance. We should live responsibly and compassionately–and this is what will make us happiest anyway. “This, then, is my true religion, my simple faith” he writes. “There is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine, or dogma. Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple. The doctrine is compassion. Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter who or what they are: ultimately these are all we need. So long as we practice these in our daily lives, then no matter if we are learned or unlearned, whether we believe in Buddha or God, or follow some other religions or none at all, as long as we have compassion for others and conduct ourselves with restraint out of a sense of responsibility, there is no doubt we will be happy.”

Good advice.

Tomorrow, I have the good fortune to have a ticket to hear His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama deliver the Sadat Lecture for Peace at the University of Maryland. I plan to go a few hours early to try to get a good seat. If you don’t have a ticket, you can go to http://www.umd.edu/ and click on the link to listen to the event streamed live over the Internet.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

by Dan Ariely (original publication date 2008; revised and expanded edition published in 2009; Harper-Collins)

This book has been on my to-read list for a couple of years–so when I learned that Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke, was offering a massive open online course (MOOC) called “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior,” I hastened to enroll, discovering to my dismay that it was a six-week course already in week four–or five–I’ve lost track. So quite irrationally, I decided to enroll anyway, and I also ordered Ariely’s Irrational Bundle of this and two other books for my Nook. Then I spent all of last week trying to listen to all of the lectures and take the lecture quizzes, while at the same time reading the book (mostly on the bus). Finally, this morning, I was caught up and beginning Week 6 with everyone else. (I confess I am not trying to complete the readings or the quizzes based on them or to complete the writing assignment–but since I am not looking for credit, that’s okay.) The course and the book complement and reinforce each other; they are about the same things and describe the same experiments, so I often find myself wondering if I have already read a chapter or listened to a lecture, because the material seems so familiar! Sometimes I even feel like I’ve encountered the same material three times (perhaps because I have already started the second book, The Upside of Irrationality)!

Basically, the idea is that classical or “rational” economics presumes that people make rational decisions, whereas behavioral economics presumes no such thing; as Ariely points out, our decisions are often irrational and non-intuitive. For example, we get stuff we neither want nor need if it’s free; we spend lots of money on other stuff for no good reason; we hate to lose money more than we love to get it; the higher the bonus, the worse we perform; we marry for all the wrong reasons; and so on. Some things were surprising; others were not. The book is written in a clear and interesting way. The lectures are even better! I am really enjoying the MOOC.

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War

by Peter Englund (translated by Peter Graves) (Knopf Doubleday 2012)

Peter Englund took the diaries, letters, and memoirs (some published, some not) of twenty people who lived through (or died during) this war and integrated them into a chronological account of the war. Each year is accorded its own section, which begins with a chronology of major events and battles; this is followed by summaries and some actual quotes from the source material, starting in January and ending in December. There are ample notes to provide context and clarification.

The twenty people include a German girl who comes of age during the war in a small town; a French functionary who spends the war years in Paris; an American neurosurgeon and the American wife of a Polish nobleman; several women who volunteer to serve as a nurse, an aid workers, and an ambulance driver; and soldiers/seamen/pilots fighting on both sides–a Hungarian, a Venezuelan, an Australian, an Englishman, a Russian, a Frenchman, an American, an Italian, a New Zealander, a Belgian, a Dane. I suppose that the choices depended on the availability of primary sources, but Englund did a good job of selecting people who represent a diversity of war experiences. Many viewpoints remained unrepresented, such as those of the Turks and Africans. It would have been impossible to include everyone who participated in the global calamity that was the Great War.

I was appalled at the sheer stupidity of this war which dragged on month after month, year after year, as the soldiers fought endlessly over bits of land and unfortunate villages, while in the big cities far from the fighting, life went on pretty much as usual. (Is that so different from today, where we live our lives not thinking much of what our soldiers are undergoing in Afghanistan?) The arrogance of the officers who lived well while the men in their command were starving and dying sickened me.

It seems that the war finally just petered out because those who were fighting it simply refused to continue fighting–sometimes an entire country (Russia), but at the end, fighting men on both sides the conflict just would not, or could not, go on. As in one of the battles in which both sides conceded defeat, it would seem that nobody won this war; everybody lost.

I really liked the book, and I learned a lot from it. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning more about what it actually felt like to live during that terrible time.

I read the book on my Nook, which was very frustrating. It’s the kind of book where you have to keep moving between the list of characters at the beginning, the year’s chronology, and the notes (which, infuriatingly, were all marked either * or # instead of being numbered, making finding the one you want challenging). I don’t know whether it’s just my Nook (Simple Touch) or whether they are all like this, but navigating around inside the book is a real pain in the neck. To go from the page I was reading to a note and back again could take 10-20 taps on the screen, and heaven help me if I forgot what page I was on, because then I would have to guess and look through page and after page until I finally found it again. To find a particular page, you have to tap the center of the screen, select “Go To,” choose “Go to page,” tap out the page number, tap “Go,” tap on the x to close the navigation bar, and tap through the selected page because one page in the book occupies multiple screens on the Nook, depending on the font size chosen. Sometimes there is a Back button, but sometimes there isn’t; sometimes the Back button appears on the page where the note begins, but if you have to go to the next screen to finish reading the note and then back again, the Back button has (sometimes) vanished. Once I wanted to go back to reread something I had already read; but there is no way to find something, the way you can flip through a paper book. When I finished the book and wanted to look at the photographs of the people in it again, it was impossible to find them: I would have had to scroll through the entire book to find them (531 pages, which is misleading, because depending on how large you set the font, one page can be many screens). I gave up. (An entry for the photographs in the Table of Contents would have been great.) Finally, the screen seems overly sensitive. Sometimes a gentle tap advances to the next screen, but at other times, it advances two screens, forcing me to go back. All in all it’s inconvenient. That said, it beats carrying a heavy book when traveling, as I was for part of the time I was reading this.

The Mind’s Eye

by Oliver Sacks (Knopf, 2010)

Oliver Sacks doesn’t disappoint. I love his writing and try to read all his books, but somehow, I missed this one three years ago.

Most of the seven pieces that make up this book deal with vision in some way, such as what can go wrong with it (suddenly losing the ability to read, for example, or being unable to recognize faces) and how our brains react to its loss.  ”Sight Reading” is about on alexia (inability to read) and alexia sine agraphia (inability to read without a corresponding inability to write). This can happen suddenly or gradually. The piece focuses on Lilian Kallir, a 67-year-old pianist who lost not only her ability to read books but also her ability to read music. Still, she managed to continue to teach at a music college and was able to learn and perform music from memory.

“Recalled to Life” recounts the story of a woman who suffered a hemorrhage in the brain which resulted in a loss of speech (aphasia). Although she did not regain her speech, Patricia H. learned to compensate for its loss in a variety of ways, eventually leading a full and joyful life after her hemorrhage.

“A Man of Letters” is about alexia; it describes how Howard Engel, creator of the detective Benny Cooperman, managed to resume his writing career despite his complete inability to read anything.

“Face-Blind,” perhaps my favorite piece in the book, is about prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces)and its frequently co-morbid condition, topographical agnosia (inability to get around without getting lost). Oliver Sacks himself suffers from these conditions, so his descriptions are particularly empathetic. He tells several funny anecdotes about his problems with faces and places. The ability to distinguish faces and recognize places are apparently governed by a part of the brain called the “fusiform gyrus” (or the “fusiform face area”). This essay is full of interesting factoids, such as why all Asians (or Africans, or white people…) look alike to someone from a different culture (by three months, human infants are already narrowing their idea of faces to those they see most often, which raises the question: if American babies are exposed from birth to all kinds of faces, will they be able to differentiate the faces of all kinds of people when they grow up?).

“Stereo Sue” deals with stereopsis, or stereo vision. This is something I had always assumed one has, or doesn’t have, but I learned that some people (Sacks among them) have an unusually intense form of stereoscopy; that is, they perceive the world more clearly as being three-dimensional than do the rest of us. Other people, because of eye problems or the loss of sight in one eye, lack this ability to see in three dimensions; to them, the world seems flat. We read about the case of Sue Barry, a neurologist, who spent the first 40 years of her life without the benefit of stereo vision but was able to develop it in her late forties, thanks to vision therapy. She found her life changed by her new ability.

In “Stereo Sue,” Sacks describes his own acute stereo vision and his lifelong interest in stereoscopy.  (He actually belongs to the new York Stereoscopic Society! Who knew there was such a thing?) So the reader can feel his dismay when in “Persistence of Vision,” he describes a frightening brush with a melanoma in the eye which ultimately robs him of binocular vision. Much of this piece consists of the diary that he kept during the period of his diagnosis, treatment, and (partial) recovery. As with his earlier book, A Leg to Stand On, his frank treatment of his own experience makes very compelling reading.

The final essay, “The Mind’s Eye,” deals with blindness and how people respond to their loss of sight.  Sacks tells how the brain sometimes responds to the loss of external visual stimuli by ramping up the internal ones. Some blind people develop the ability to function almost as if they were sighted, relying on their other senses to navigate through the world with confidence. He tells about one blind man who fixed his roof by himself, another who fought in the French Resistance, another who learned to play sports and chess by using clicking noises, like a dolphin.

While some parts of the book were a bit too technical for me to understand completely, I found it a fascinating read.

How to Be an American Housewife

by Margaret Dilloway (Berkeley 2010)

Immediately after World War II, Japan is in tatters, and many Japanese take any opportunity to escape–among them young women who married American soldiers. Margaret Dilloway’s mother was one such woman, and so is the protagonist of this novel, Shoko. Shoko is beautiful, bright, and talented, but she risks her family’s good name by becoming involved with an Eta, a charming young man who belongs to a kind of untouchable caste. Shoko’s parents urge her to find an American GI to marry. She dates some soldiers, brings her father their photographs, and lets him select one. Then she asks the chosen one to marry her. He is willing, and she leaves Japan for the United States, already pregnant with her son Mike. Years later, she longs to return to Japan to make peace with her brother, from whom she has been alienated all those years, but a bad heart prevents her from traveling. She convinces her daughter Suiko (Sue) to make the trip for her, and Sue takes along her own daughter, 12-year-old Helena.  Sue actually finds Shoko’s brother Taro, who has become a Konkokyo priest, like their father. And she discovers in herself a love for her mother’s culture that she did not anticipate.

Shoko describes her relationships with her husband and children in the first part of the book, as she recounts the story of her first love, how she met and married her husband Charlie, and how she learned to survive in America.

In the second part of the book, Sue narrates the story of her and Helena’s trip to Japan to find her uncle.

It’s a great story and a fast read. I think high intermediate to advanced English language learners would enjoy it, especially if they are Japanese.

Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir

by Marina Nemat (Free Press, 2007)

In 1982, when Marina Moradi-Bakht was fourteen years old, she was arrested and imprisoned in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison for having had the temerity to ask her calculus teacher to teach calculus; when the teacher ordered her to leave the classroom, her classmates followed her out, and soon her entire school was on strike. Imprisonment followed, and interrogations and beatings. She somehow found the strength to resist, and one of her interrogators, a man 14 years her senior named Ali, fell in love with her.  The other interrogator ordered her execution, but Ali was able to rescue her. Eventually, he proposed (although she was a devout Christian), and when she did not want to marry him, he persuaded her by promising to take revenge on her parents and on the young man she loved. She converted to Islam, and she married this man. But she was eventually able to return to her family, to marry her love Andre, and to emigrate to a “normal” life in Canada. She wrote this memoir to try and purge herself of the horrific memories of the two years of her imprisonment and forced marriage, and to bear witness to the things that happened to her and to the other people she knew and loved, many of whom did not survive.

It’s a pretty incredible story, but Marina Nemat tells it convincingly and honestly. She writes about her ambivalent feelings for Ali, her husband, and about the guilt she felt for having survived, and beyond that, for betraying herself and her friends by taking the ticket out of Evin that Ali was offering her.

It is awful to imagine that Evin is still probably filled, thirty years later. with innocent people. Many of the “political prisoners” Marina Nemat encountered during her incarceration there were just children. What kind of monsters believe that arresting, beating, and murdering children can ever be justified? And yet, strangely, Marina’s story of Ali reminds us that those we call monsters are sometimes just ordinary people like ourselves. While there are those who seek pleasure in overpowering and inflicting pain on those who are powerless against them (like Hamehd in this memoir), most are probably more like Ali, who despite his threats and his creepy obsession with Marina, really did treat her like a queen, even though she never hid the fact that she did not return his love.

An excellent book, short, which will expand a reader’s understanding of Iran both past and present.

 

The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

As I noted in my last post on an Isabel Dalhousie book (The Lost Art of Gratitude), I needed to catch up in this series. I’ve since looked for The Charming Quirks of Others on a couple of occasions, but it has never been on the shelf, and I confess I did not place a hold on it. Finally, last week I borrowed this one and the next (latest) one, The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds. I’m pretty obsessive about reading books in order but it just didn’t happen this time, and no reference was made in the book alluding to any momentous event in the last one, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

I started the book on the bus going to work this morning and finished it before dinner. It’s fairly innocuous. Isabel helps a fellow philosopher to find information about her birth parents, and Isabel and Jamie finally tie the knot at the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh. Isabel makes a killing on the stock market and gives it all away. Charlie, now 2 1/2, still has a taste for olives and now likes mashed sardines. It’s pleasant reading, but forgettable. Still, I read on.

I thought I had blogged about most of the books I’ve read since I started the blog in late 2006, but this series was launched in 2004 (and I didn’t read them right away), yet I find only one previous post.  Here’s a complete list. I’ve read them all except the aforementioned Charming Quirks. And I do like them–though not as much as The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series!

The Sunday Philosophy Club Series

also known as Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries

• 2004 The Sunday Philosophy Club
• 2005 Friends, Lovers, Chocolate
• 2006 The Right Attitude to Rain
• 2007 The Careful Use of Compliments
• 2008 The Comfort of Saturdays (UK title) or The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday(American title)
• 2009: The Lost Art of Gratitude
• 2010: The Charming Quirks of Others
• 2011: The Forgotten Affairs of Youth
• 2012: The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (published 23 Oct 2012 in UK)

(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_mccall_smith)

The Testament of Mary

by Colm Tóibín (Scribner, 2013)

When I read this review by Ron Charles in the Washington Post back in November, I was intrigued enough to put this on my To Read list. Then last week, I happened on it in a library display of new books. It’s very short, only 81 pages, and I just discovered it was originally written as a a play (or monologue). I think it would have been better to watch/listen to it than to just read it, but it was an interesting read, nonetheless.

Jesus’ mother, living out her final years in Ephesus, is the narrator. She recounts the raising of Lazarus and Jesus’ rescue of his disciples by walking on water. She is disgusted by her own cowardice in fleeing the scene of the crucifixion before Jesus died. She considers Jesus’ disciples pitiful (a “group of misfits”) and the redemption of the world not worth his gruesome death.

I wonder what Christians who read this think about it. Tóibín certainly takes liberties with the saintly image of the Virgin Mary. I found an interesting interview of Tóibín by Sally Quinn of the Post, in which he claims to love the Catholic Church very much; he seems to have had no intent to denigrate Mary, yet I suspect that the book might offend many believers.