Category: books

Fire Your Doctor!

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I came across Fire Your Doctor! How to Be Independently Healthy by Andrew Saul while searching for info on natural hygiene, mentioned in a comment. I liked this story:

I had acne . . . It peaked when I was seventeen. . . Then I went overseas to study, was more than a bit stressed, and took my already considerable chocolate, sugar, meat, and greasy-food eating habits to new heights. My broken-out skin broke out still worse. Eventually, having failed to see any improvement otherwise, I changed my diet, and the acne went away.

Of course I support this non-gatekeeper approach to health. What about the book? Pro: Well-written, a reasonable amount of evidence. Con: No discussion of actual cases. What actually happens when you treat problems this way (often with vitamins and other supplements) is very important to know.

I found nothing about fermented foods, omega-3, or sleep (neither sleep problems nor the value of sleep for health). This isn’t really a weakness of the book, which is about a certain way of doing things; it’s a weakness of the way of doing things.

Book Recommendations: Hedges, Yes, Dalai Lama, No

Seth Roberts19 Comments

Thumbs up: Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion. Hedges writes about how Americans are delusional in their beliefs about how wonderful their country is and how rich and powerful they are. One of his targets is academia, which he says turns out graduates who are far too respectful of authority. (He doesn’t mention molecular biologists, but they’re another example.)

Thumbs down: His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World. Two words: runaway serfs.

The Shangri-La Diet in Japan

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A few months ago a popular Japanese TV show ran a long (30 minutes?) piece about the Shangri-La Diet, some of which you can see here. It is very odd to see my work talked about and not know what’s being said. It’s like being a fly on the wall, taking into account that flies don’t understand English. The show is long enough that some of what they’re saying must be new to me. One of the panelists (there is a panel of one man and two women) appears to be Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, whose book Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window I love, have read dozens of times, and mention in The Shangri-La Diet — at least the English version. I first came across Totto-Chan at the Mill Valley Public Library. Even though I was living in Berkeley, I checked it out. Driving home I was so entranced I read the book at stoplights while waiting for the light to change.

Genius of Common Sense

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From Genius of Common Sense, a new young-adult biography of Jane Jacobs by Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch, I learned that Jacobs was an independent-minded young girl:

When Jane’s third-grade teacher asked the class to raise their hands if they promised to brush their teeth every day for the rest of their lives, Jane refused to raise her hand and urged the other children not to raise theirs. . . Jane was expelled from school for the day.

Where have I read that before? In Chimamanda Adichie’s The Headstrong Historian:

Her teacher Sister Maureen told her that she could not refer to the call-and-response her grandmother had taught her as poetry, because primitive tribes did not have poetry. It was Grace who would laugh and laugh until Sister Maureen took her to detention.

Genius of Common Sense is plainly a labor of love, with a great selection of photographs and a belief in Jacobs’s importance that you might say “shines through the book like a watermark” (Nabokov). The subtitle is “Jane Jacobs and the story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities” but that isn’t right: It’s mostly about how Jacobs and her neighbors fended off Robert Moses to preserve Greenwich Village. Which is a lot more visual. As I read it I kept wondering what I would have thought of it had I picked it up as, say, a third grader. I read a lot of biographies for children back then. I might have been attracted by the weird title and helped along by the high ratio (1 to 1) of picture space to word space. I would have liked the underdog aspect. Would I have appreciated the humor of

Several years later the Lower Manhattan Expressway was to raise its ugly head again. “The rule of thumb is that you have to kill expressways three times before they die,” Jane quipped.

? Probably not. But maybe I would have noticed how much the authors cared about their subject.

Edward Jay Epstein

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Edward Jay Epstein, who was a media critic for The New Yorker in the 1970s, is a great journalist. For example, Diamonds aren’t forever? and Did Madoff act alone? Here’s something he said about the Warren Commission (to look into the assassination of JFK):

Part of the job of the Warren Commission was restoring confidence in the American government. And for this he had to pick seven very respectable men, men who would lend their name and probity to the report. The problem was, any seven men he picked of this sort, they would have very little time for the investigation.

Much later, still fresh. His personal website is the best personal website I’ve encountered. The financial crisis has given him a lot to write about. He has a new book on the movie industry (The Hollywood Economist) coming out next year.

The Blue Sweater

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When Jacqueline Novogratz was a young girl, she had a favorite blue sweater. She continued to wear it after it became too small. One day a boy made fun of her for wearing it (“We can ski Mount Novogratz”). The next day she gave it away. A decade later, in Africa, she saw it being worn by a skinny young boy. Thus the title of her new book about trying to make the world, especially Africa, a better place: The Blue Sweater.

In contrast to so many books, usually by men, about helping others, which tend to be about how right the author is/was, this book stresses how wrong she was. An example is a job interview.

“Tell me why you want to be a banker,” he suggested. . . .

“I don’t want to be a banker,” I said. “I want to change the world. I’m hoping to take the next year off but my parents asked me to go through the interview process. I’m so sorry.”

“Well,” he said with a grin, shaking his head. “That’s too bad. Because if you got this job, you would be traveling to 40 countries in the next 3 years and learning a lot not only about banking, but the entire world.”

I gulped. “Is that really true?” I asked, my face completely red. “You know, part of my dream is to travel and learn about the world.”

“It is really true,” he sighed.

“Then do you think we might start this interview all over again?” I asked.

She got the job. It’s easy to see why. And stories like that made me want to read the book

What I’m Looking Forward to Reading

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In September, David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, will publish Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. Or at least that’s what the print says; the picture has a different subtitle. The book expands on this New Yorker article. Owen criticizes Michael Pollan and Amory Lovins, among others. Maybe this is an example of the insider/outsider advantage I’ve blogged about. Owen is not the New Yorker‘s environmental reporter; that would be Elizabeth Kolbert. So he can say anything, criticize anybody, without worrying about his ability to write more on the same subject. He can always go back to golf. Kolbert is not so free. In any case, Owen’s book sounds better — less predictable — than Kolbert’s book on a similar subject.
A TV show on the subject. Owen on bridge.

Poorly Made in China

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The subtitle of Paul Midler’s book is “An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game.” Midler is an American who helps American and European companies get stuff made in China. The book is about how, in a dozen ways, Chinese manufacturers manage to make manufacturing deals more profitable to them at the expense of their customer — and, often, the ultimate consumer. Most of the book is about what happens to an unnamed American company that imports “telephone numbers” of beauty products. One problem is “quality fade.” The product slowly gets worse until the importer objects. For example, at one point the fragrance put in liquid soap was changed. Instead of different fragrances for products with different labels, almond was used in every case. So a product labeled Aloe Vera smelled of almond. (I discovered I couldn’t trust flaxseed oil made in China.)

A friend of mine became a vegetarian after working at Burger King. Midler had a similar conversion:

I found myself losing faith in all sorts of products manufactured in China. I was soon careful to purchase health and beauty products that were not made by local [i.e., Chinese] companies, but by large, multinational corporations — but then I realized the body wash I had been using, while it was made by a reputable global company, was actually manufactured in a plant located in South China. . . . I knew these production managers well. . . . They believed that what a customer didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

I found myself using less body wash, eventually relying on only hot water for my showers. When no one seemed to notice the difference, I stopped using the wash altogether. And then I stopped using soap, as well. . . . Why take any chances?

The attitude of cheat your customer as much as possible isn’t a great long-term strategy, as Chinese manufacturers are learning — the situation used to be even worse. A friend of mine analyzes the situation like this: For a long time Chinese were taught Confucianism. When the Communists took over, that changed to The state is God. Now that system of morality is gone, but nothing’s replaced it. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs wrote about two systems of morality, a “guardian syndrome” and a “commercial syndrome.” The commercial syndrome, appropriate for trading, placed great weight on honesty. (The guardian syndrome, in contrast, placed great weight on loyalty.) Behind Jacobs’s classification was the implication that these syndromes had evolved because they worked better than other possibilities.

Poorly Made in China was easy to read. It has those two essential elements: it’s a series of stories, long and short; and the author feels strongly about his topic.

Ray Bradbury is Unclear on the Concept

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I completely agree with Ray Bradbury about libraries:

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Here’s what he says about a similar source of free knowledge:

“The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked . . . “Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ’To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

When I was in college (at Caltech), I didn’t find classes or books very helpful. I liked reading old New Yorker articles. Which then I got from the library but now I’d get online.

Learning To Read Chinese

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I have tried a dozen-odd ways of learning Chinese. Few of them have worked very well . . . except one: the book Learning Chinese Characters (2007) by Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews. The subtitle is “a revolutionary new way to learn and remember the 800 most basic Chinese characters” and I agree, if revolutionary means “a lot better than other methods”. The method is simple:

  1. Break combination characters — almost all Chinese characters are combinations of a few hundred simpler characters — into components.
  2. The simplest components, not divisible into others, are associated with a picture that conveys the meaning. Someone pitching a baseball, for example, when outlined makes the character for nine.
  3. Devise a brief story, a little picture, to help you remember that the components together mean what they mean. For example, the characters for white and ladle put together in one character mean of. The story is something like: “Look at that white ladle. It’s the special ladle of Chef Thomas. The book is full of drawings to help visualize the stories.

I enjoy reading it. Partly for the feeling of accomplishment — I can tell I am actually learning the characters much faster than before — and partly because the combinations are intriguing.

The book I have says “Volume One” so I eagerly await later volumes to read more of what these two writers, who are not identified, have to say. I never saw it in Beijing; I came across it in a Barnes & Noble or Borders.