The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better

by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee (Random House 2007)

This is a fascinating book.  The authors, a mother and son science-writing team, endeavor (mostly successfully) to make some of the latest developments in neuroscience accessible to the lay reader.  It is now well established that everything our bodies do, both inside (circulatory systems, &c) and outside (movement, language, &c) corresponds to “maps” in the various parts of our brains.  Poke the map in the right place, and something happens; apply the proper stimulus (movement, touch, graphic image…) and neurons in the corresponding map can be observed to fire.

In the first chapter, the concepts of maps, body schema (your perception of your body), body image (your belief of how your body looks) and body mandala (the network of body maps in the brain) are introduced.  The subsequent chapters each take up different aspects and research areas of these, such as how your body image may not correspond to reality (why you still feel fat when you’ve lost excess weight, for example), how mentally rehearsing movements and skills can be almost as effective as actually practicing them (think of athletes’ or musicians’ visualizations), and how what you wear or carry or wield literally becomes an extension of your body, as far as your brain is concerned.

Chapter 9, “Mirror, Mirror: or, Why Yawning is Contagious” was especially interesting to me.  It deals with mirror neurons, special brain cells that represent not only one’s own actions but also those of others.  These mirror neurons allow us to understand the body language of other people and thus to anticipate what they might do, because their actions are mirrored in templates in our own brains. A dysfunction in these cells is suspected in autism and may also be involved in the inability of people with nonverbal learning disorders to read body language.

Favorite quote:  “When you watch dance, your brain dances.” (p. 170)

The webpage for this book is here. It includes excerpts, links to interviews, reviews, and more.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America

by Tom Friedman.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008

I loved both The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World Is Flat, so I was looking forward to reading Friedman’s newest book.  I found it harder to read than the other two, mainly because it is quite depressing, especially in the first part where he outlines the problems facing us: first and foremost, global warming (which Friedman would prefer to call “global climate disruption” because it sounds less cozy); and this is exacerbated by “petrodictatorships” nourished by our addiction to dirty fossil fuels which are driving global warming,  a skyrocketing world population with increasing demands for decreasing energy and other natural resources, “energy poverty” for what we used to call “the third world”, and a skyrocketing loss of biodiversity.  The “flat world” described in the previous book refers to the rise of the middle class around the globe, made possible by the internet; this is turn gives rise to the problem of “too many Americans,” which does not refer to the U. S. population but to the many millions, soon to be billions, who aspire to live our lifestyle.  Who can blame them?  But the Earth is simply not big enough, and we have no place else to go.  Reading about this, as well as being reminded of the United States’ ostrich stance in the face of the threat (“We’ll deal with it when we get around to it”), depressed me. I look around my own neighborhood and observe how most of my neighbors turn on their airconditioners without even venturing outside to see if they need them.

But Friedman’s point is that instead of being depressed and pessimistic, we should be seizing the opportunity to do what America does best: innovate and lead by shining example.  In Part III, “How We Move Forward,” he provides many examples of how we could do this, but notes that without the government to pass serious legislation and set serious policy, we cannot succeed.  He was writing during the last years of the Bush administration; now we are in the first year of the Obama administration, but Obama’s government is hogtied by the economic crisis brought on by the previous administration’s addiction to tax cuts + expensive wars.  It’s difficult to see how anything can be accomplished (as I write, healthcare reform is taking a beating) in this atmosphere of partisan politics and looking the other way.  Americans want Obama to solve their problems without inconveniencing them.  As Friedman points out, 100 (or however many) Easy Ways to Save the Earth won’t cut it without the policies, laws, and regulations that seem impossible to establish.

I hope President Obama has read this book, but even if he has, and even if he wants to do the right thing, I can’t help but think it will be too little, too late.  It seems that no one has the power to make it happen.

Friedman’s site is here, with links to reviews and excerpts you can read and listen to.

The Wikipedia entry is incomplete but has many links to audio or video interviews.

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World

by Eric Weiner (Twelve, 2008)

It always amazes me how some people persuade other people (publishers?) to foot the bills for extensive travel and purchases so that they can write books or articles about them–like the person who got his publisher to pay for a horrifically expensive bottle of very old wine so he could review it (he wasn’t impressed).  Eric Weiner somehow got funding to travel around the world to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova, Thailand, Great Britain, and India (not to mention the United States), as well as to purchase a Ridiculously Expensive Pen (which he subsequently lost)–so he could reflect on that experience.  Life is tough.  I loved the book, though, so why am I complaining?

Weiner did his homework concerning research on happiness, and he asked informants in all those different places whether they were happy, how happy they were, what made them happy, and so on–not very scientific, but it makes for very interesting reading.  In the end, he sums up what he learned: Wealth does not ensure happiness, especially if Culture is absent.  Familial and social connectedness are necessary to happiness, as is trust; envy makes happiness impossible. If we think too much about happiness (or anything), it will elude us.  That last comes mainly from the chapter on Thailand, which also yields the expression, mai pen lai, or “never mind”.  If we don’t let the bad stuff get to us, if we just let it roll off our backs–mai pen lai–we can be happier.  I think I will try it (although I am pretty happy, generally–maybe a 7 or an 8 out of 10, depending on the day).

English language learners may enjoy reading the chapters about their own countries–although they may not always like what Weiner has to say about their compatriots!

I’d definitely recommend this book.

Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

by Kitty Burns Florey (Harvest 2006)

I am of the generation that was taught English grammar through diagramming.  Unlike Kitty Burns Florey, I don’t remember particularly liking it at the time.  As a matter of fact, I was not a born grammarphile; I became one after I started teaching ESL in the 1970s.  I am well aware of the research that tells us that explicit grammar instruction is not particularly helpful for ESL students, yet I persist in explicitly explaining; my students do not remember or apply the rules I try to teach them, but that doesn’t seem to stop me.

At one time, I became intrigued by the idea of using diagramming with my ESL classes, but I never actually did it.  The main reason may have been phrasal verbs.  I remembered how to diagram prepositional phrases, but what about two-word verbs?  Do you diagram “She ran into her old friend” the same way you diagram “She ran into her old house”?  Obviously not.  So what is “into” in the first sentence?  We ESL teachers would call it a particle.  I don’t think the rules of diagramming included particles.  Would Reed and Kellogg have called it an adverb, and put “friend” in the direct object position?  Or would they include it as part of the verb (my preference)?  It was these kinds of questions that stumped me, so I never actually used diagramming with my students.  But I did enjoy reading about it.  Florey also concludes that diagramming sentences does not result in better writing, but that gives students the perception that they control the sentences. Also, she claims that it’s fun!  Maybe for her it was. In any case, I enjoyed deciphering the diagrams in the book, and it was interesting to realize that diagramming, like new math, was an educational fad that I happened to experience when I was a kid in school.

Not Even My Name

by Thea Halo (Picador, 2000/2001)

Thea Halo’s mother was born to Greek parents in present-day Turkey during the Ottoman rule.  When she was ten, the Turks drove her and her family out of the village where they and their ancestors had lived for thousands of years and into the interior of the country.  Fourteen pages in the middle of the book summarize the general history and background of  Turkey’s expulsion of its non-Muslim peoples in the early twnetieth century, and the rest of the book focuses on what happened to Themia, the little Greek girl who became Thea Halo’s mother, Sano.  (The title refers to the fact that because the Assyrians she lived with could not pronounce her name, they gave her a new one, thus ending any connection to her Greek past.)   After her parents gave her up because they could not feed her, she was abused by the woman she worked for until she finally ran away.  At the age of 15, she married an Assyrian man much older than she and emigrated to the United States, where she learned English (possibly her sixth language) and raised a large family.  A kind of success story, only it is hard to imagine how she coped with the tragic loss of her entire family.  A very sad story, but one that needs to be told.

On a Hoof and a Prayer: Exploring Argentina at a Gallop

by Polly Evans. Bantam UK 2007, Delta Trade Paperbacks 2008

I like travel literature (Bill Bryson being my favorite travel writer), and I enjoyed this book, which I picked up at a discount when my local Borders closed (sob), a victim of the recession.  Polly Evans, a British writer, arranged to combine a tour of Argentina with some riding lessons on huge estancias.  She did not exactly explore Argentina at a gallop; she mostly took buses and airplanes to get around while arranging some riding activities from time to time.  Still, she’s a good writer and has a wicked sense of humor.

Her descriptive passages can be wonderfully impressive, like this one:

“What really struck me about his glacier…was its incredible, indisputable beauty.  It was more radiant by far than any glacier I’d seen in the past…. The white ice glistened.  It towered into amazingly sculpted pinnacles, and then carved itself into astonishingly glowing blue crevasses.  The depth of color was dazzling.  (explanation of why glacier ice appears to be blue)  I’d seen photographs of blue icebergs before,…but I’d always thought that extraordinary hue was due to some kind of photographer’s trick.  Now I realized that the opposite was true.  The photographs I’d seen hadn’t enhanced the color: This ice exuded a blueness that no image I had ever seen had been able to capture.  The ice quite literally shone.  From its crevasses, a thousand electric-blue light bulbs seemed to beam.  It was as though the ice itself was possessed of a tremendous energy.  In the deeper chasms, the ice appeared the color of a lurid snow cone that lightened to shimmering turquoise as each face climbed to a peak.  In places, the elements had carved these freezing mountains into seductive curves, then whipped their summits into sharply tapering spires.  Other sections fell away in sheer smooth drops, like a lustrous sorbet sliced by a knife.  And then, as the glacier rose on and up into the distance, and the peaks and gullies grew ever farther from the eye, the surface of this great expanse of ice took on the appearance of millions of sugary rosettes, the finely piped icing of a cake baked for an army of Patagonian giants.”  (Chapter 19, “On Ice”–a description of the Perito Moreno Glacier)

In addition, there are a lot of interesting historical tidbits–how so many British ended up in Argentina, the economic crisis of the 1970s, Juan and Evita Peron, Felix Aldao (“a very sanguinary monk”), Juan Manuel Rosas (whose 19th-century reign was also “sanguinary”) and Charles Darwin, the Manzaneros (“apple people”) and the savage Yamana of Tierra del Fuego, who apparently tolerated the cold of their frosty homeland without the aid of clothing but were wiped out by European diseases.  I never knew any of this (except Darwin, of course) and was fascinated.

Link to this book on amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Hoof-Prayer-Exploring-Argentina-Gallop/dp/0385341105

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama, Three Rivers Press 1995, 2004

Barack Obama wrote this book after finishing law school.  It tells the story of his life up to that point, divided into three sections: “Origins” (how his parents met and married and how they separated when he was a baby; his mother’s remarriage and his years in Indonesia; going to high school while living with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii; college; New York); “Chicago” (where he worked as a community organizer), and finally “Kenya” (where he goes to meet his relatives).  I was struck by the honesty with which he recounts his early years.  He was always smart, but not always well-behaved.  In some ways it’s amazing to think, “This man grew up to be President of the United States!”

Speaking for myself, I was most interested in his tales of Indonesia and Kenya, because I doubt that many (if any) other U.S. Presidents have had the opportunities he had to live in other countries, not as a tourist but as someone who belongs there.  (In Indonesia, he learned the language and went to school.  In Kenya, he lived with his relatives, who accepted him wholeheartedly into the family.)  This is a man who has truly had a multi-cultural life.  I was also fascinated by how he learned how to live as a black man in America, despite being raised in a white family.  I don’t think he saw himself as having any choice in the matter.

The book is well-written, although most of the dialog must have been reconstructed from imperfect memories.  Having read it, I would still like to read The Audacity of Hope.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2006)

Reading the first part of this book (“Corn”) makes me thankful that I have been a semi-vegetarian (lacto/ovo/occasional seafood) for over 30 years.  Pollan’s premise is interesting: to try to answer the question “What should I have for dinner?”  He soon refines that to “What am I actually eating?” and “Where does it come from?”  The answer is not pretty.  (In fact, it’s quite off-putting.)  Pollan writes, “‘You are what you eat’ is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too.” (p. 84)

The second section of the book (“Grass”)  is about the organic food industry (yes, you read that correctly).  It confirms what I suspected about organic food available in my local Whole Foods: it is sometimes not quite what we think it is.  But the most interesting aspect of this middle part is the description of how Virginia “grass farmer” Joel Salatin raises cattle, hogs, rabbits, chickens, and turkeys in a self-sufficient and sustainable way.  By rotating his cattle through different pastures and following the cattle with chickens that “sanitize” and fertilize the pasture, Salatin uses his animals to “do most of the work” on the farm.  The animals keep the grass healthy, and the grass in turn feeds the animals, which then feed the humans.  This is farming as it should be.

The final section of the book (“The Forest”) considers hunting and gathering.  I agree with Pollan as to the ethics of meat-eating (basically okay as long as we can really accept the fact that what we are eating is the dead body of a once living, breathing animal), and I respect his decision to hunt and kill a wild pig in California; if you want to eat animals, I believe you should be able to kill them and clean them.  (I choose not to do these things, but that is my choice, which Pollan in turn respects.)  I appreciated the honesty with which Pollan describes his ambivalence about the hunt.  I also learned a lot from the chapter on mushrooms.

Each section of the book culminates in a description of the meal consumed with the foods described in that section: a fast-food meal eaten in a car for “Corn”, a  dinner centering around Joel Salatin’s chickens and eggs for “Grass,” and a meal consisting almost entirely of foods hunted, foraged, or grown by the author and his foraging friends for “The Forest”.

Did you know that the air around us is full of yeast spores, which we can collect by setting out a paste of flour and water and then make superb bread?  I didn’t either.  This is just one example of the many fascinating facts I learned from reading this extraordinary book.  Moreover, the prose is elegant and funny.  I finished the book in about a week and was kind of sorry it was over.

The book connects with several others I have read over the past few years: My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and family; Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.

36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan

by Cathy N. Davidson.  Dutton 1993 (out of print)

This is the third time I have read this wonderful book about bridging two cultures.  In the early 1980s, Cathy Davidson and her husband Ted, American academics, went to Japan to live and teach.  Over the next decade or so, they straddled two worlds.  The book describes not only the Japanese world that they fell in love with, but also the culture shock that they experienced as they traveled between the two cultures.  This is what distinguishes 36 Views from other memoirs about living and working in a foreign culture.

The book is sometimes funny, as when Davidson describes the dinner where a Japanese couple try to get her and her husband to teach them exactly how to eat soup in America.  It is sometimes heart-breakingly sad, as when she recounts the delicacy with which her Japanese friends and colleagues helped her and her husband after the sudden death of his brother and sister-in-law in an accident.  It is always fascinating, as in her description of her visit to a sacred grove on Kudakajima, an island near Okinawa with a communal matriarchal society.  And it is unfailingly honest.  Davidson skillfully portrays her states of mind as she straddles the two cultures, never completely at home in either.  This feeling of incompleteness, of longing for the other, is something with which all who have enjoyed living in a foreign culture can identify.  It is the bittersweet price that we pay for stepping outside of the familiar and learning to appreciate new ways of doing things, of looking at the world.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  It is not particularly easy to read, but English learners who have lived in other cultures will appreciate the descriptions of learning to get along in a strange place, of struggling with the language, and of learning to adapt and disadapt as they travel back and forth between the home culture and the new culture.

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

by Carlos Eire.  Free Press, 2003.

Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 Cuban children airlifted to the United States in 1962.  At the time, neither the parents nor the children had any inkling that their separation would last as long as it did, or that Fidel Castro would remain in power for as long as he did.  Carlos Eire went on to become a historian and an academic.  He married an American, had three children, and lives in Connecticut.  But the Elian Gonzalez affair in 2000, when Castro claimed that Elian should be returned to Cuba because all children should be with their parents, triggered the gush of memories that is this book.

Most of the book concerns Carlos’ memories from his ten years as a privileged younger son of a wealthy judge in pre-Castro Cuba; a few of them stem from his later years in America.  All are written in rich prose.  Eire has a flair for sharing the sensory details of his memories: the magical, colorful cloud of parrotfish in the sea, the taste of the Chinese man’s hotdogs, the sounds of religious items being smashed by the revolutionaries, the hot light of the Cuban sun….  He also develops the many characters in the book with affection and humor, such as his father, a fat man in baggy pants obsessed with collecting art and antiques whom Eire refers to as Louis XVI, since he apparently believed that he had been the French King in a former incarnation.

I was alternately appalled at some of the things that Carlos and his friends did, and that were done to them and others, and convulsed with laughter over their antics–sometimes simultaneously.  It was really hard for me to imagine a childhood like that.

I have always been rather more sympathetic to the Revolution than to the Cuban-American population in Miami and elsewhere which has lobbied incessantly against normalization of relations with Cuba, a tiny country which could not possibly harm the United States.  It seems that they do this out of pure spite, because it makes absolutely no sense.  Even as he describes his life of privilege and luxury in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, Eire remembers the poor dark-skinned boys who dived for money in the sea.  But I think that the poor, dark-skinned people of Cuba did not, for the most part, benefit much from the change in regime which enriched some and sent others into exile with two changes of clothes and one book.

I still think that the United States and Cuba should normalize their relations, but I have a lot more understanding of, and a bit more compassion for, the Cuban Americans who have thus far prevented it from happening.  And I am really glad that I read this treasure of a memoir.