I initially planned on doing "extensive" book reviews, but extensive book reviews are time intensive and require that bothersome task of tracking down citations and being "accurate." Solution: paragraph book reviews, where citations, context, and thoughtful analysis are not required.
The Dead Hand - David Hoffman
Account of the Soviet Union's nuclear and biological weapons programs.
Takeaways:
1. The Soviet Union spent some 30% of its GDP on defense (at the height of the Cold War the US only spent some 6-8%), which produced a military significantly inferior in nearly all aspects to the United States', in addition to the waiting lines for toilet paper and shoe laces.
2. The Soviet Union continued its biological weapons program all the way up through Yeltsin, despite signing a treaty for abandoning such research. The US stopped its biological weapons research under Nixon.
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
I swore after reading Suite Francaise that I would never again read a book solely upon the rave reviews of critics. Alas, I did not learn my lesson, and read this book solely because there exist critics who think this is book is swell. This book is not swell. Not worthy of further comment.
Mere Christianity - CS Lewis
Excellent book. Accessible to the learned and the lay alike. In my experience, this is the clearest and most parsimonious treatment of Christianity and Christian morality that I've come across. The section on the trinity is probably the weakest link in the book. Lewis' insights on human behavior are profound. I'm confident that one day Lewis will be recognized as a better psychologist than all the Ainsworths, Bowlbys, and Skinners of the 20th century.
From my view as a psychiatrist, I find it interesting that as the views of Freud and Erickson (in addition to the rest of the dustbin of theory based psychologists) have been ignored and/or rejected, the evidence based psychotherapy of our day, namely in the form Beck's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, confirms most of the psychological guesses and hunches that CS Lewis jotted down in 1940.
Why is this important? Prior to the slow rise of evidence based medicine in the past 50 or so years, psychotherapy was largely theoretical. There were no randomized controlled clinical trials. No placebo or control groups. No inter-observer reliability ratings. No meta analyses. No peer review of the data or the findings. Psychotherapy primarily consisted of the "psychotherapists" working from a theory that was developed ostensibly to explain human behavior that ultimately came from data sets slightly larger than a handful of case studies. It is a remarkable commentary on the inexhaustible supply of hubris that nearly the entire learned community of university professors of psychiatry and psychology, in fifty years following Freud all believed in theories that have now been empirically falsified; that one Cambridge Don untrained in psychogloy, repeating little more than folk wisdom from the vulgar masses should put forth explanations of human behavior that he hurriedly wrote down for a 1940 radio broadcast that now have far more empirical support than anything that the great learned professors believed put forth over a total of fifty years.
The basics of evidence based medicine: What do I know and how do I know it? What reason do I have to make a certain diagnosis? What reason do I have to prescribe a certain treatment? Why do I believe what I believe?
Anyhow, I apologize for the four paragraph book review. All following book reviews will be one paragraph.
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Bryan Caplan
I detest libertarianism. Not libertarians mind you, it seems most of my good friends are libertarians. Every now and then I read a libertarian book. Why? Because libertarianism is the pornography of economics. Initially exciting and appealing, but with dreadful consequences later on. This disclaimer aside, libertarian economist Bryan Caplan has written an unsettling and alluring book. His thesis is that adoption studies of monozygotic twins (The type who are genetic copies of each other) have decisively shown that the traits parents care about - intellect, future earning ability, personality - are primarily (but not exclusively) determined by genes and not parenting. Caplan claims that amongst the middle class, parenting actually has very little influence over these issues. Caplan's conclusion: thus, since your kids will largely turn out as they do despite your parenting (as long as you don't molest or abandon them), parents should relax, not stress about TV or the SAT, adopt hands off, less stressful parenting, and enjoy the ride. Since excellent parenting requires nowhere near the amount of investment that most parents think, have more kids! The payoff is huge 20 years down the road. The book is alluring because it absolves parents of guilt if their kids don't get into fancy schools and make money. The book is disturbing since it sometimes gets close to biological reductionism.
A History of the Jews - Paul Johnson
I've always been curious as to how such a small ethnicity, having endured incredible persecution for, oh, some 3500 years nevertheless somehow is able to remain an ethnic group for 3500 years and along the way give birth to Monotheism, Christianity, and Islam (according to various historians, hotly disputed by other various historians), and overcome the persecution and pogroms to disproportionately represent themselves in all academic and business endeavors. Johnson doesn't really answer those questions, but I came away even more impressed with Judaism that before (except for Trotsky, Marx, Freud, and Spinoza. Screw those guys.) Johnson writes in an engaging style, as always, and I highly recommend him to the lay man interested in history. One cannot read this book without coming away impressed with the history of the Jewish People.
Dr. Faustus - Marlowe
Marlowe's take on an old German folk tale. Faustus is a worldly professor, the devil offers him unlimited worldly success in exchange for his soul (I hear this is the same thing that happened to Jimmy Page), and Faustus agrees, because he doesn't believe in the supernatural, and, anyway, what could be more sweet than earthly pleasures? So...hmmm, excuse the lame Joycean moment, but I read this about 6 months ago and I can't quit remember what happened. I think that in the sad version Faustus goes to hell for seducing women and signing the contract and in the happy version the soul of his girlfriend that he betrayed pleads with God to forgive him, he repents, and is forgiven and snatched from hell to heaven. Moral of the story is best summed up by the line at the end of that immortal movie, Patton: "All glory is fleeting." Yep.
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