Smith, Lee, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, Doubleday, 2010, 256 pp.

Strong Horse is a series of conversations, observations and recollections of the author’s experiences in the Middle East over the last decade … focusing on Cairo, Beirut, Israel and Damascus. Living in Brooklyn, Smith took the events of 9/11 as a personal challenge to study in the region. That led him to discussing the political and social culture of the Arab world with individuals as varied as Sufi scholars, Koranic recitators, Lebanese Druze warlords, and Cairo doormen … engaging as well with more famous names such as Naguib Mahfouz (Egyptian Nobel Laureate in Literature), Edward Said, Omar Sharif, and Natan Sharansky.

As the title of the book suggests, Smith feels the conflicts of the Middle East are largely an internal clash of Arab civilizations and involve the “captive” peoples (Copts, Druze, Christians, Jews, Sufis, Shia, etc.) who must somehow survive with Sunni majorities and governments in the region. The spillover of violence into the West, while constant, is therefore largely a secondary effect. The key question, the author believes, is over “who’s the real Muslim?” Since that bloody debate, by definition, doesn’t extend to the infidels, violence in the non-Muslim world is usually some form of manipulation in benefit of domestic agendas. The evidence of the last decade suggests the Arabs reserve the lion’s share of their bile and violence for each other. Though they provide unrelenting warnings about the dangers of inciting further violence by Muslims (through American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan), such concerns never seem to translate into a lighter hand by authorities within the region. It is this observation which leads Smith to propose that “strong horse” politics was, is, and will be, a enduring principle in the Middle East … and widely supported by Arabs of every persuasion.

For Smith, Arab antagonism to Americans and Westerners is fundamental, being as they are neither Muslim nor, more importantly, Arab. The various Arab tribes and sects who feud endlessly amongst themselves do not permit any profound reconciliation with the Other, either across the religious and ethnic boundaries or within them. Muslim willingness to leverage Western allies against other Muslim powers is built right into Islamic history, as outlined with methodical effort in Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism: A History, reviewed earlier on chicagoboyz here.

The author’s conclusion after his travels and conversations over the last decade is that “overthrow, domination, and eventual collapse” is a political pattern long established amongst the Arab tribes, largely reinforced (not introduced) by Islam, recognized for over half a millennium by Arab historians, and it shows little or no sign of change in the 21st century. The strong horse is the model for successful political change in the region. It was not chosen as a metaphor by Osama Bin Laden on a whim. And it resonates deeply within Arab culture. It is the aspiration of all participants in the political process in the Middle East, in Smith’s belief … and any discussion of peace (as opposed to interim truce) is a form of cultural betrayal. And punished accordingly. Despite the fact that this cultural habit reiterates destructive cycles without end, it cannot be relinquished without giving up a fundamental cultural narrative. The toxic results are self-evident to modern Arabs but if Smith is to be believed, they are caught in a situation where all they can do is “double down” on the model of political change that has served them very poorly in the past. Struggling to cope with the impact of two centuries of Western technology and culture, the Arab hope is that an Arab Strong Horse will arise. The reality is that it is the United States, and inadvertently Israel, that have found themselves in the role of Strong Horse in the Middle East. The burden of the role is that all parties in the region look to gain favor and/or manipulate the destruction of their domestic and regional competitors by playing games with the Strong Horse. As Smith quotes in passing, Arabs are better at feuding than warring. At the point at which they are able to escalate conflict to war, inevitably it is their culture and self-regard that pays the price. What was true of Napoleon in Egypt is now true of America in the Middle East.

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Groopman, Jerome, How Doctors Think, Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

This book is several years old but deals with timeless subject matter that might be of interest to cb readers. In the past decade or two, a major initiative called evidence-based medicine (EBM) has tried to improve how medical research is conducted and how it is used in everyday clinical practice. It’s the application of the scientific method (with all its strengths and weaknesses) to confirming how we know what we know about medical practice. Some examples of such efforts “organized improvement” were covered in a book I reviewed earlier on cb called Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. Like Dr. Gawande, Dr. Groopman writes extensively for the New Yorker. The resulting quality and clarity of his writing in How Doctors Think stands out. Either he or his editors are very good.

In How Doctors Think, the author looks at a very different avenue of medical improvement. Deductive, evidence-based, medicine necessarily involves many patients and the careful collection of information about how a treatment works for large numbers of people. This is the foundation for proving the efficacy of particular treatments for particular populations, and winnowing out cases where doctors are “fooling themselves” about their treatment. Not fooling ourselves, as physicist Richard Feynman once pointed out, is one of the great challenges of science. The folks doing EBM research always give themselves a good laugh by evaluating the mathematical and statistical skills of the average GP. Interpreting the scientific medical literature is a real skill. One that needs to be taught and reinforced. As a baseline, we can aspire for a medical profession that can dependably read, critique, and interpret its own research.

The inductive process of forming a diagnosis and executing treatment with a specific patient benefits mightily from the disciplined research of EBM, but it by no means replaces the services of skilled physicians. Checklists or AI applications in medicine can reduce egregious errors, but human judgment, matched with experience and rigorous thinking, are necessary components of health care. And that’s the focus of Groopman’s book.

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Easterbrook, Gregg, Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed, Random House: 2009, 243pp.

Sonic Boom falls within the genre of the quick-reading airport business book. Using a series of places as exemplars (Shenzhen, Waltham MA, Yakutsk, Erie PA, etc.), the author shows how a globalized economy can create prosperity from swampland, and restore prosperity to Rust-Belt and 19th century industrial hubs. The writing is crisp and smooth. The manner is often witty, and occasionally wise-ass. It’s anything but turgid … which is a great relief from many of the “big think” books which come and go on the bestseller lists.

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About six weeks ago, I wrote a brief post about the dismal trailer for the movie Avatar, which made it clear that the movie was going to recycle Dances with Wolves. In other words, a turgid, adolescent paean to the Noble Savage, carefully white-washed to eliminate the less savoury elements of hunter-gatherer existence and to emphasize every stereotypical flaw in white men. “Fade to black” before the farmers and ranchers show up. Yawn.

Well, Avatar has just passed the $400 million mark in box office gross income after less than a week in theaters. I caught a late-night showing yesterday and I contributed my $15 (Cdn) to the pile. My wise-ass prediction from the earlier post, that the protagonist would bite the bullet tragically, didn’t come to pass. Foolish me. What was I thinking?

Not “SEQUEL-SEQUEL-SEQUEL” apparently.

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I’m late, late, incredibly late on four books that authors gave me to review. That doesn’t mean that I can’t give credit where credit’s due … in plenty of time for the book-buying frenzy before the holidays. With luck, I’ll finish off the full reviews in December but since *I’m* buying copies of these books for friends and family, maybe one or more of them might fit someone on your list. All recommended for the categories of people headlined.

Economists, Physicists, History of Science buffs

Newton and the Counterfeiter describes Isaac Newton’s multi-year battle with one of London’s most successful counterfeiters. No surprise who wins in the end, but it is surprising how well Levenson provides background on the protagonists … without overwhelming the reader. Recommended for students or professionals with an interest in the history of money, finance, or just a fascination with what the great Newton did after he polished off the Principia. The counterfeiter’s “colourful” life precludes giving this book to a pre-teen but all others will find it, like the earlier-reviewed The Ghost Map, a fascinating snapshot of life in London.

Japanophiles, Asian culture fans, World History Buffs

I’m years late on this one but Through the Looking Glass is highly recommended for anyone wondering how Japan ended up with such a different culture … and why their adoption of Western technology at a breakneck pace in the late 19th century was so successful. Thought-provoking and such a good summary of Japanese culture that I’ve struggled for over 50 hours to epitomize in writing what the author has written in hopes of getting a full book review out the door. I’ve failed, but I’ve also bought more than a half-dozen copies of this book for friends on two continents with an interest in Asian culture.

Entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 cube jockeys, Economics students, Anglosphere buffs

Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson picks up where his Long Tail finished. The halving of computation, bandwidth, and data storage costs each year has made a new generation of businesses financially feasible. The freemium service (like Flickr, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) where basic services are free and a small set of customers pay for additional features, has become so common that it is now unremarkable. Anderson looks at the history of the word, the different definitions of free in the context of culture and business, and the gap in the academic literature in understanding the new generation of businesses that leverage “free” in profound ways. My book review will, like my earlier review of Long Tail, look at why the Anglosphere has been the source of so much “free” over the last couple of centuries and why it leads the way in both charitable and profitable businesses that leverage the idea. A “must have” for anyone thinking of starting a business. People under 30 will think “d’uh” but Anderson still offers a lot of context and some very good background on the history of “free” in business in the 20th century for younger readers. And a fun, even revolutionary, read. I’m buying copies for nieces and friends with an interest in media.

Ambitious NCOs, Military Officers, World History buffs, Prognosticators of the American future

Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is a grand summary of the culture of the steppes, from the time of the domestication of the horse and the appearance of lactose-tolerant humans (see 10,000 Year Explosion), to the 21st century suppression of the Chechens, Tibetans, and Uighurs. A fascinating source book on the ebb and flow of culture across the “ocean of grass” and the firm focus these cultures had on trading with the great empires on their periphery. Trade with us … or die. Most of these cultures, and the direct influence they had on world history, has been largely unknown except to a handful of scholars. In Empires, the author brings all this background information together in one place, draws on the most modern scholarship in linguistics, history, and archaeology, and provides a ground-breaking introduction to the general public. The striking parallels with the European nations that built empires based on liquid oceans becomes clear only by the end of the book … as is the tentative nature of Russia and China’s hold on the vast interior steppe (triggered by the introduction of firearms, and only solidified in the final massacres of the Junghars by Qing China in the mid-18th century). Anyone with an interest in Russia, the Middle East, or China will learn a great deal about the role of the Central Asian Culture complex on these areas in the last 4,000 years. Nowadays, military folk posted to the ‘Stans or places like Mongolia will find this book invaluable … firstly as a brisk introduction to the cultural roots of the place, and secondly as a reference book to read and re-read in future years to grasp “the big picture.” If you have friends or family that are ambitious for learning about the continent (let alone the region), start them off at the beginning. Anyone senior to Captain should buy this book simply to have it ready when needed. Because it will be needed. You can’t understand the Chinese and Russians without understanding the “enemy” they faced for centuries and the echoes that continue in their territorial obsessions. Highly, highly recommended. My full review will comment on the author’s more personal assessments but his account of Central Asian history is a entirely straight-forward, well referenced, and real service to the English-speaking public. I’ve bought copies, again, for friends in Europe and North America.

Director James Cameron, of Titanic and Aliens fame, has been working away for the last decade developing new technology for a film called Avatar, to be released in mid-December. It will combine digital extrapolations of humans and filmed actors in a 3D projection format. Talk is that it’ll cost $500 million dollars by the time that marketing costs are factored in. News that Rupert Murdoch was “excited and moved” by a sneak peek doesn’t necessarily bode well for adults looking for something more than vision quest fodder for teenage boys.

Trailers have been appearing with increasing regularity as the release date approaches. The latest here on Youtube has an appropriately exotic and violent set of clips to whet interest. For the first time, however, it telegraphs enough of the plot to actually reduce my desire to see the movie.

Let me reach for my psychic hat and do my own “spoiling” after having read little, and seen less, of the promotion for this movie.
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Gallagher, Winifred, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Penguin:New York, 2009, 244 pp.

Rapt is a wide-ranging and elegantly written summary of what scholars, authors, and a few mystics have to say about human attention and the role that it plays in our emotions and our day-to-day actions. Written in a very polished and literate style, it finds a nice balance between the author’s personal reflections on the role of attention in her life, quotations about focus and attention by authors such as William James and Thoreau, and interviews with leading psychologists and medical professionals. There’s perhaps a bit too much meat on the book’s bones to warrant selection for Oprah’s book club but fans of her TV show will find much to like and enjoy with Rapt.

In some ways, the book could be considered a skillful Boomer reflection on a subject that was grabbed with adolescent abandon by the same generation in the Sixties. The Power of Positive Thinking can’t quite match a world with many more religious, philosophical, pharmaceutical, and therapeutic choices in dealing with our unhappiness, or our endless distractions, or our frustrating procrastinations. Gallagher’s book makes a serious effort at surveying what we now know about particular habits of thought and focus. Anyone surrounded by colleagues wedded to their Blackberries, or by hordes of teenagers flogging their multi-coloured cellphones, has paused to wonder whether all of this is really “good” for people.

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Cochran G. and Harpending, H., The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Perseus Books, NY, 2009.

In an earlier cb review of a book on the role of culture and education on American intelligence (Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It:, I mentioned a hypothesis by physicist and iconoclast scholar Gregory Cochran suggesting a genetic basis for Ashkenazi intelligence scores (slightly less than one standard deviation above the American population’s average). Nisbett noted that this slight difference in average IQ translated into massive differences in the distribution of individuals at the very highest IQ levels (140+).

Cochran, and anthropologist Henry Harpending, have now written a fuller discussion of their Ashkenazi hypothesis within the context of a much wider contrarian, and occasionally irreverent, book on the new discoveries in human genetics affecting our understanding of the evolution of modern humans. The authors explicitly reject the convential wisdom that human evolution largely stalled with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens as the sole hominid species on the planet.

With new techniques for examining the human genome, it’s possible to give approximate dates on the major recent changes to human physiology triggered by migrations into new environments or the adoption of new economic lifestyles (such as pastoralism or agriculture). Key physiological adaptations such as lactose tolerance, resistance to diabetes or obesity, Vitamin D absorption through skin, malarial protections (subject to recessive genetic disease such as sickle-cell anemia), high-altitude occupation, and the aforementioned Ashkenazis’ IQ, now have associated dates and timetables … and new research promises to nail down the timing and nature of similar genetic changes amongst the world’s populations. The impact of such genetic changes, and associated vulnerabilities, on the human occupation of Europe, North America, and Africa/Asia for the last 50,000 years are the focus of this book.

In contrast to most authors in the biological and social sciences, Cochran and Harpending believe that significant and influential human evolution has occurred in the recent past and that the pace of such evolution continues and even accelerates as selective pressures on modern populations intensify. The larger population pools in turn make it more likely that valuable mutations can spread widely and relatively quickly … often in ways that are completely independent of the X and Y sex chromosomes first used to map human genetic history. For example, Cochran and Harpending suggest that there may well have been an exchange of advantageous genetic mutations (through “introgression”) from Neanderthals to Cro-Magnon/H. sapiens sapiens without any associated impact on the paternal or maternal lines of genetic material associated with our species.

By looking back into post-Neanderthal human prehistory with new genetic data, scholars can track the movement of humans out of Africa and into Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. They can also begin to hypothesize about the role that genetic change played in the relative reproductive success of Upper Paleolithic hunters, the first agricultural communities in Eurasia, and the Indo-Europeans who left their cultural and linguistic imprint on roughly 3 billion of the people in the world today.

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McDougall, Christopher, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009, 287pp.)

I’m a miserable runner, and apart from a brief time in graduate school, I haven’t run since high school. Walking has been my exercise alternative. Nonetheless, a childhood spent in the Boy Scouts and a youth spent doing prehistoric archaeology have given me an abiding interest in the discipline of hunting, especially the role of dogs in human culture and the tradition of persistence hunting practiced by the !Kung bushmen. In Born to Run, magazine writer McDougall has managed to bring together a tale of endurance running, sports capitalism, evolutionary biology, and Mexican ethnography to create a compelling reading experience. Maybe, just maybe, it’s an insight into who we were.

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Stanton, Doug, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, 2009, 393 pp.

“Horse Soldiers” is a straight-forward account of the CIA/Special Forces (SF) efforts in Afghanistan from October through November 2001, culminating in the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif to the forces of the Northern Alliance, and the prisoner revolt at nearby Qala-i-Janghi fortress. The latter led to the death of Mike Spann (CIA paramilitary officer) and the discovery and capture of John Walker Lindh (”American Taliban”).

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Return to part 1/2

Chapter 8

(Advantage Asia?) is a 180 degree turn from the previous chapters. The author switches from looking at kids facing the toughest of odds in getting effective education and a supportive environment for the enhancement of IQ, to the racial group most identified with brilliance in modern US education. Talking about Asian cognition is also a return to Nisbett’s scientific specialty as a cognitive/social psychologist.

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Nisbett, R.E., Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, Norton, 2009. 304 pp.

[The publisher kindly provided a copy of this title for review]

Jump to part 2/2

Warning: 10,000+ words.

One of my side-interests is cognitive psychology, particularly cognitive biases in medical decision-making. Back in 2006, I stumbled over some research on how Asians and Westerners place very different emphases on objects when evaluating the world. The material was intriguing enough that I bought and cb reviewed) a copy of U Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…And Why (2003). Since then I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the history of science in East and West, and I found “Geography” very useful as a basis for thinking about past and future trends in global scientific culture. The subject showed up again indirectly in a cb review of Shutting Out the Sun.

My purchase of “Geography” earned me a pre-publication nudge from Amazon on the Professor’s latest book, which is different in subject matter from his earlier publication. Intelligence is a cognitive/social psychologist’s look at the educational and social environment leading to success in current American culture. It appears to be a plain-language summary of his NIH/NSF-sponsored research work on IQ/race and education. A less sexed-up title for the book might therefore be “The Role of Environment in American IQ and Accomplishment.”

Needless to say, the topic is massive so Intelligence spends a great deal of time recounting earlier research on the topic of IQ and race, academic achievement, career accomplishment, and the success of American secondary educational programs. In its academic variant, my guess is that the material was larded with footnotes and statistical detail. In Intelligence, the author take pity on the reader and adjusts the book’s content to describe research in plain English, and the impact or influence of potential activities on IQ scores in terms in of SD (standard deviation) or percentiles of student achievement. Appendices handle statistical definitions, a professional-level discussion of race and IQ, and a consideration of multivariate analysis. As noted, however, the book covers at lot of territory so my goal in this review is to mention the book’s topics (to tweak reader interest) rather than try to reiterate the author’s careful summaries and lucid assessments of the scientific literature. In other words, don’t take my word for it when it comes to the subtleties of research on particular subjects. Read the original, and the underlying articles.

The challenge, as with all social science research, is identifying the “confounding factors” that can muddy the results of research on IQ and subsequent individual success. The effective use of “controls” in a research program will improve confidence in the results. Otherwise, scientists are comparing apples and oranges without reaching any useful conclusions. Nisbett goes out of his way to give a sense of whether the research he reviews is misguided, inadequate, or merely suggestive without sufficient followup.

The Acknowledgements section of the book mentions John Brockman and Katinka Matson. This is a very good sign.Those two individuals are literary representatives for a stellar cast of scientists currently writing for the general public. Intelligence, despite being an overview of a vast amount of social science research, is very well written and edited. You’ll not find a better use of introductory, summary and concluding materials in each chapter to keep the reader oriented and motivated.

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Book Review – Chua, Day of Empire

Chua, Amy, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Power and Why They Fall (2007 Hrdbk, 2008 ppbk. 396 pp.)

A paperback of this title was kindly provided by the publisher for review.

Warning: 9,000+ words ahead!

While drafting a 2006 chicagoboyz review of Yale Law Professor Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), I was very impressed with the value of the concepts she introduced and her superior writing style. I had heard of her more recent book but the pace of the past few years had largely halted my book reviewing.

So I’m late to the game with Day of Empire (DOE). The publication of the paperback version of the book triggered one of Amazon.com’s oft-fatal “As someone who has purchased or rated X, you might like to know that Y has just been published …” notices in my In-Box. Based on World on Fire and Amazon’s summary blurb of the more recent book, it seemed well worth reading. I’ve purposely avoided reading any reviews of the book by other writers.

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Marchant, Jo, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer–and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, Da Capo Press, 2009, 328 pp.

Defining the Word “Anachronism”

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the sponge divers of Greece lived through a technical revolution … the appearance of the diving helmet. After many centuries of free diving to harvest local sponges, the new equipment suddenly allowed access to much more of the Mediterranean sea floor and previously unexploited sponge beds. The industry boomed. Inadvertently, the diving helmet also led to the discovery of a shipwreck off the coast of the small island of Antikythera. Amidst the spectacular bronze and marble statues at the wreck site was a strange lunch box-sized lump, covered in a limestone coating from centuries of immersion and distorted by the effects of decomposition and corrosion. Here and there were visible bits of wood and corroded bronze, faint inscriptions of ancient Greek and what appeared to be thin loops or gears.

Compared to the glamorous artworks it was found with, the “lump” was rather unprepossessing and, indeed, it spent most of the 20th century in obscurity. Not knowing what it was, the curators made little effort to preserve the object, and increasingly, it broke into a more and more fragments in the storage rooms of the Athens’ National Archaeological Museum. The early 20th century descriptions made their way into the hands of a physicist and historian of science named Derek De Solla Price. In the 1950s, he made serious efforts to fully explain what it was, culminating in a 1974 book Gears From the Greeks. And it was partly through his efforts that people as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Jacques Cousteau, and Richard Feynman took an interest in the enigmatic archaeological find.

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Stephenson, Neal, Anathem, William Morrow, 2008, 937 pp.

Author Neal Stephenson has forged a substantial body of fiction in the last 15 years by combining elaborate narratives and witty, humourous dialogue with a more serious consideration of scientific and philosophical issues. Having covered nanotechnology, cryptography, and the early stirrings of Newtonian science in his more recent books, Stephenson turns now to cosmology and the nature of human consciousness in Anathem. The biggest of big pictures.

Set thousands of years in the future, Anathem is an adventure story that fits perfectly into the science fiction genre. The conflict between science and culture has led to intermittent but repeated civil conflicts, resolved finally by isolating the scientific and mathematic minds into the equivalent of walled medieval cloisters (maths). Outside the walls society waxes and wanes, prospers and collapses, while inside the walls the life of the mind continues, year after year. Comparisons with the famous 50s science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz are inevitable.

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Just a note that combat blogger Michael Yon has made arrangements with his publisher to offer his book Moment of Truth: How a New ‘Greatest Generation’ of American Soldiers is Turning Defeat and Disaster into Victory and Hope free of charge to soldiers through the Soldier’s Angels organization.

You can purchase Michael Yon’s book online, directly from the publisher, and the copies will be given to soldiers as a gift. It’s hard to imagine a book that would be better received and more thought-provoking for soldiers in the field. Michael Yon is one of the few voices committed to putting in the time to learn what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported only by citizen-contributors.

To quote Michael:

This project is dependent entirely upon private donations. Without your help, it won’t happen. For folks who wish to put one book in the hands of a soldier, it’s just $10. For five books, it’s just $40. Ten copies are $75. A donation of $150 will put a copy of Moment of Truth in Iraq in the hands of 30 American soldiers; that’s just $5 a book.

As a Canadian who’s donated to Michael’s efforts directly in the past, I’m particularly appreciative of the fact that he’s starting to report on the efforts of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. Those guys are getting far too little credit for their courage and skill over the last seven years (Canadian special forces and snipers were engaged since the beginning). In any event, I’m hoping that Michael gets a chance to interact with the Canadian troops as he did with the Brits in Basra. Their story needs telling.

And in the wider context, putting an exciting insightful book on Iraq into the hands of a soldier for Christmas, seems like a really good idea. I’ve chipped in $150 from the Great Non-White (just yet) North.

For the direct publisher link, please go here.

UPDATE (for commenter Seerov): Great White North is a term of endearment used by Canadians for their country, first appearing in a skit on the comedy program SCTV. It refers to snow. Being as it’s early September in Alberta, we have snow on the tops of the Rockies, but not “just yet” in the foothills … not yet, but soon.

Sykes, Bryan, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland, Norton: New York, 2006. 306 pp. [published as The Blood of the Isles in the UK]

Oxford University professor of human genetics, Bryan Sykes, follows up his best-selling popular books on recent European DNA studies with a book specifically about the “Isles” — England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Casting a wide but useful net, he provides a grounding not only in the geography, climate history and human prehistory of the two islands … but describes the mythology about, and early scientific investigations into, the origins of the people there. These are far from just academic preoccupations. In past centuries, English kings made their claims for sovereignty based on tales of Trojan settlers and Arthurian prowess. Every medieval commentary and discovery was followed with intense royal interest. Well into the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the rights of kings were linked to ancient origins. Not surprisingly, later Victorian efforts at phrenological and morphological interpretation of the island’s peoples (the shape of their skulls and features of their bodies) comes in for some hard knocks in this book. But Sykes gives those pioneer scientists full points for effort, thoroughness, and a methodical approach. Their efforts might now be dashed upon the rocks of genetic information, but their tables, charts, line drawings and descriptions of hair colour, skin tone, and body shape across the British Isles reflect the sincere interest of generations past, attempting to answer the question “who are we?”. In many ways, Professor Sykes continues their efforts.

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Gawande, Atul, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2007. 273 pp.

Several years ago, Dr. Gawande published a best-selling book on his experiences as a young surgeon called Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. In the intervening years, he’s written a number of elegant essays on medical topics for the New Yorker while maintaining a surgical practice at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In a further embarrassment of talent, he was a MacArthur Fellow in 2006 and now also teaches at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School for Public Health.

Notably, he’s a rare voice of humility amongst his profession in reflecting on the day-to-day practice of medicine. Not just on the larger issues of “what we don’t know” or “what we can’t do” but on the oft-overlooked issues of “what we do poorly, every day, merely out of habit.” That honesty adds particular strength to his writing. In his latest book, he’s assembled his essay-chapters into three larger themes (diligence, doing right, ingenuity) all tied around his reflections on how he wants to improve his own practice as a doctor.

The results are fascinating. As befits a writer for the New Yorker, Gawande makes good use of anecdote and the background research for each topic covered. He writes well and writes for a general audience. A few months ago I listened to a podcast interview with the author and he mentioned that it’s a real struggle for him to get writing done because of his professional obligations. To some extent, that time limitation is reflected in this book. The subject area, improving individual doctor performance, could cover a lot of ground. Gawande doesn’t pretend to do so exhaustively. Instead, we have a series of vignettes on the limitations and successes of medical practice. For any reader interested in a particular chapter’s topic, the results are excellent. Those interested in the “gaps” between chapters may need to head for the academic literature and something closer to a textbook. More’s the pity.

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Oren, Michael B., Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present, Norton & Co., New York, 2007. 778pp.

History, at its most useful, steadies the nerves and provides perspective on the events splashed daily across TV screens and PC monitors. It should also give us a feel for the problems amenable to solution and those that are permanent (or, at the very least, enduring).

By these criteria, Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy is a history book that should be on the shelf of most American homes … and available at every public library.

The author has made an explicit attempt to write a history of America’s relations with the Middle East that serves the general reader rather than just an academic audience. Practically speaking, this means drawing more extensively on biography and the popular culture of each period of American history to illustrate relations with the Middle East. To better organize the book’s contents, he employs the three themes listed in the title. Power references American trading initiatives, commercial interests, and security concerns. Faith refers to the Christian and Jewish religious interests in the Middle East (as home to Holy Places, putative location for Christ’s reappearance, potential source of converts, and national homeland for the Jews). Fantasy describes the American representations of the Middle East, first triggered by the anonymous 1706 English translation of the Arabian Nights, and elaborated in subsequent years in many books, exhibitions, social fashions, and movies.

Oren weaves the impact of these three themes through the different eras of American history … from the turbulent post-Revolution, pre-Constitution time up to our own. Post-WW2 American involvement in the Middle East is already very thoroughly documented in English, so Oren provides a quick summary of the most recent period in his book. It’s a worthwhile coda but primarily serves those not already familiar with the details. The bulk of Power, Faith, and Fantasy focuses on the period 1776 to 1950.

Risking gross over-simplification of a very large and careful summary, I’d like to highlight the historical phases in America’s relations with the region, as presented by the author.

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Zielenziger, Michael, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, Doubleday: New York, 2006. 340 pp.

While Michael Zielenziger was the Tokyo bureau chief for the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers during the 90s, he learned of an unusual pattern of reclusive behaviour in young Japanese men — the so-called hikikomori (literally, “pulling away, being confined“). Numbering in the thousands, they were shutting themselves off in their rooms — from friends, family, career, and society in general — for years at a time. As a Western journalist he found himself largely alone, at the time, in taking an interest in the subject. It was all but ignored by the Japanese media.

In talking to Japanese sociologists and health professionals, Zielenziger found that this behaviour seemed to be a relatively new phenomenon. It didn’t appear in the global bible of mental health disorders (the DSM IV). Its particular set of symptoms didn’t appear in Western countries, nor in Japan’s Asian neighbours. Japan’s increasing affluence in the 70s and 80s seemed to correlate roughly with a baffling new behaviour afflicting those most likely to benefit from the country’s economic success. The economic downturn of the 90s seems to increase rather than decrease the incidence of hikikomori.

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