BookEnds

I finished Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, last week but, with the president’s visit and increasing election coverage, haven’t had time yet to give you an update.

So here it comes, though I’m not going to review it, per se. As you may know, the book’s stirred some controversy because the scientist quoted in the final chapter on climate change told a climate blogger that he was misrepresented in the book. That’s a really serious charge against the authors, one of whom, Dubner, is a journalist. And many other scientists have come out against the conclusion in the book that geoengineering is the best way to combat climate change.

I don’t think the chapter would have stirred so much controversy had the authors not appeared so certain about topics outside their realm of expertise, which is what the book is doing in the first place. Perhaps it would have worked better had the idea that geoengineering is a better approach to curbing global temperature increases been approached as a question rather than presented as an uncertainty. In general, the authors can seem openly hostile to ideas that don’t fall within the book’s point-of-view. For ex  ample, you don’t get the sense that these guys think much of government at all. The follow excerpt was the kind of aside that was typical:

The Department of Homeland Security recently solicited hurricane-mitigation ideas from various scientists, including Nathan (Myhrvold) and his friends. Although such agencies rarely opt for cheap and simple solutions — it simply isn’t in their DNA — perhaps an exception will be made in this case, for the potential upside is large and the harm in trying seems minimal.

How efficient government agencies are is certainly open for debate, but to assert their anti-efficiency so baldly is a bit heavy-handed.

My bigger problem with the book, as I’ve said before, is how liberally they borrow from other writer’s discoveries. Whether you think Malcolm Gladwell is good or not, he at least presents you with research you might not have encountered before much of the time. But I had read about Myhrvold before in the New Yorker, in a piece by Gladwell. I’ve written on the blog before about how I encountered two of the big ideas — those of Sudhir Venkatesh and Joseph De May — in other venues. They also clearly read Atul Gawande’s Better, because that’s where I first read about Ignatz Semmelweiss, who plays a significant role in Chapter 4. It’s completely fine for authors to learn about something from another writer and  then do their own research and writing on it. It just seemed to me that Dubner and Levitt had been reading the same things I’ve read.

Either way, it’s destined to be a blockbuster.

While Jeff Morganteen has gone off to France to get his carte vitale, I can tell you that after I read T.R. Reid’s efficiently informative book I grabbed “Every Patient Tells a Story,” by Connecticut physician Dr. Lisa Sanders. Sanders does not dive into the health care debate. Instead, she details the topic she consults for on the popular Fox show House; diagnosing disease.

Sanders highlights first what we all know, that patients and doctors like the idea of black and white tests that tell you exactly what’s wrong. And then she spends the rest of the book breaking that down and telling us something that might be hard to hear; that many times a diagnosis is really a doctors best guess after he or she takes into account all of the tests and the results of seemingly-shamanistic rituals like palpating your stomach or listening to your heart. That being a good doctor is sometimes really low tech.  In his books, Atul Gawande tell us the same thing.

This idea reminded Jeff and I about what Reid’s American doctor wanted to do for his sore shoulder; he wanted to replace it entirely with a new one. We even imagined the sound effects and graphics that could go with it, like an Extreme Makeover show. Almost no other doctor in any other country wanted to do that, and ultimately Reid did not. That highlights one of the problems with health insurance as it exists here that the smart folks at Planet Money got into when they talked about health insurance. If it’s fancy, and i exists, we probably want it. Usually we get it, because someone else pays for it. What Sanders says is that these things probably aren’t always necessary.

Perhaps its because I’m an Anglophile, but I always like to keep an eye on the Man Booker Prize, England’s prestigious annual literary award. Past winners have included Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and, one of my favorites, Ian McEwan, and the shortlist always provides an interesting look into fiction of note for the year. I’m still trying to make my way around to last year’s winner, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, but the lure of the 2009 list has proved, yet again, irresistible. This year’s prize was awarded on October 6 to Hilary Mantel for her clever rendering of the enigmatic and infamously cunning Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s controversial right hand man.
I’ve always been deeply fascinated by historical fiction, so Mantel’s novel presents a tantalizing prospect. Cromwell was one of the key players in helping Henry VIII break away from the Catholic Church and has often been reviled by history as the dastardly antithesis to the saintly Thomas More. Mantel says she strove to view the much-retold aspect of Tudor history from Cromwell’s eyes, arranging the familiar facts and characters as he would have seen them and thus presenting what might seem to be a more sympathetic portrait of a difficult man. It seems a fascinating concept and, as I have to admit my Tudor history has grown a bit shaky, I’m hopelessly intrigued.

The other Booker pick that’s caught my eye is one of the shortlisted novels, A.S. Byatt’s “The Children’s Book.” Byatt won the Booker in 1990 for her famed “Possession” (yet another book I want to read!) and she, like Mantel, has delved into the past in her newest installment. “The Children’s Book” is set in the late Victorian era and follows the fortunes of two intersecting families, the Wellwoods and the Fludds, right up to the trenches of the First World War. Olive Wellwood is a popular fantasy author whose fantastic imaginary worlds wreak havoc on her real-life children. The story explores the sometimes dangerous quality of artistic creation and seeks to vividly capture the era; eminent figures of the period like J.M. Barrie and Oscar Wilde apparently have walk-on appearances.

As usual, there’s more books of interest to read than there are hours to read them in, so I’ve once again found myself in a dilemma — which do I choose first? Perhaps another Barnes and Noble visit is in store.

I’m still working on finishing SuperFreakonomics and offering my take, but I wanted to weigh in on one thing quickly: I’m not sure what this book offers that’s new.  Unfortunately for the authors, their own success might be the problem. I’ve mentioned their blog before, but they have also helped launch the writing career of the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, who’s been writing somewhat regularly for Slate. This was especially true for his work on prostitutes, which he was everywhere talking about after the Eliot Spitzer scandal. All of that exposure limits the success of Levitt’s and Dubner’s chapter on the work of Venkatesh regarding prostitutes. They also borrow from one of my favorite books from last year, Sin and the Second City by Karen Abbott, for a history of prostitution. So there are few pages with ideas I haven’t already encountered in that chapter.

For their chapter on apathy and altruism, the authors also introduce us to Joseph De May, a Kew Gardens, Queens, attorney who’s investigated the Kitty Genovese legend and, with those pesky facts, countered the idea that 38 people watched her die and did nothing. But I already met De May and listened to his take on “On the Media” earlier this year.

It doesn’t mean that there’s nothing interesting in the book, or that you shouldn’t pick it up. But if you’re an avid reader of the Freakonomics blog, an avid listener of public radio and an avid consumer of quirky nonfiction, you might have already encountered a lot of it.

The Darien Library is holding “One Page Poetry Circle“, a monthly poetry discussion group at 7 p.m. on Wednesdays October 21, November 18, and December 16, during which anyone is welcome to bring a poem for reading and discussion. Madge McKeithen, a faculty member of The Writing Program at The New School, mediates the discussion and this week’s theme is “Poetry and Masks.” I attended last month’s session for the first time and I enjoyed the atmosphere thoroughly; it’s a chance to voice your thoughts, opinions and interpretations about poetry without the pressure of graded scrutiny. Ms. McKeithen maintains a wonderfully relaxed, open feeling during the meetings and I loved hearing the selections of the other participants, whether revisiting poets I know and love, like T.S. Eliot, or discovering the work of new authors I’m yet unfamiliar with.

A couple of weeks ago, I got my hands on an advance copy of SuperFreakonomics, the follow-up by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner to their 2005 bestseller.

I wanted to have a review for you by tomorrow, when it’s due to go on sale, and I’m oh-so-close to having it done. First, I wanted to point out how common a genre, we’ll call it social science lite, this has become. There may be few adults in the country who read this type of non-fiction, but among them books like this are increasingly popular, witness: Nudge, also by two economics who explore areas where behavioral economics and public policy meet, Malcolm Gladwell’s popular distillations of the latest thinking in sociology, and books by economists like Paul Krugman. And there are more books in which economists discuss the perils of non-rational humans, versus the supposedly rational homo economicus.

When Freakonomics came out, it might have been the first time non-economists saw economic techniques applied to everyday questions, but now I wonder if nonfiction readers are too used to the idea for the sequel to make a big splash. In addition to all these new books, Levitt and Dubner have a blog at The New York Times. In fact, they mentioned they had to leave out discussion of one topic they introduced in the Times about birthdates and the relative advantages they carry in sports because Gladwell, and others, have covered it so well.

Most importantly, you’ve probably already heard about a bit of a controversy on the fifth chapter about global warming. I’m not going to weigh in yet, except to say that controversy is probably what you get when non-scientists weigh in on science.

Image by Tom Palumbo, circa 1956, from Wikipedia

Next Wednesday, Oct. 21 is the 40th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac. For a retrospective on Kerouac’s seminal work, On the Road, please read the essay from our guest blogger, Roy J. Nirschel*, below.

In the spring of 1968 as Paris burned and protest filled the streets of  America, including my hometown of Stamford. I traded a Joe Cocker album for a dog-eared copy of On the Road.  In a fortnight I was transfixed, reading about a life I would never lead.

Four decades later I still read Kerouac, buy copies of the book for friends, attend lectures on the Beat generation and make pilgrimages to his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. I even run (although I use the term loosely) in the annual 5k road race in his honor that raises funds for a scholarship for a budding local writer. I ask myself why?

What is it about On the Road that compels me to return to it each year, like a homecoming that is both familiar and new with each reading?  Why did Time Magazine consider it “one of the best hundred English language books of the twentieth century?”

On a base level it is a love story; two men exploring the possible on the open road that was America, before the Interstate highway system or the Internet superhighway. Kerouac and Neal Cassidy (Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity in the book) embark on a journey filled with spontaneous joy as  well as conflict; purposeful and purposeless.  Sal is looking for kicks and finds his muse in Dean, a grown yet still juvenile delinquent.

They travel to see girlfriends and wives that do not welcome them (Dean has women coast to coast as well as male “friends”). They visit lost acquaintances and make new ones. They connect with Bull Lee (William Burroughs) in New Orleans, squabble over their affection for Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg) in New York and fail in their Denver quest to find Dean’s wino father; “Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found.” Paradise, like life for the real Kerouac, always managed to be find in the suburban comfort of his mother’s world.

On bus rides, hitchhiking, trains and stolen cars, Dean and Sal meet hucksters, train brakemen, Mexican laborers, black jazz musicians and drifters. They are wide-eyed innocents abroad; marveling at the simplicity of it all in a pre-Cold War America yet haunted by a personal restlessness.

On the Road is distinctive too in style.  Kerouac, high on caffeine and allegedly Benzedrine (though that claim was later discounted), spent several  non-stop weeks at the typewriter using a teletype roll of paper that he had taped together into one, continuous page. (I saw the iconic “scroll”, now owned by Indianapolis Colts owner Robert Irsay, when it toured last year). While On the Road sat in his backpack and was rejected as too explicit, Kerouac continued to write, although neither Town and the City or Subterraneans were commercial hits. It took nine years for Viking, to publish an  edited On the Road in 1957.

Kerouac believed that all his writing was one continuous story he would connect as his magnum opus.  Alcohol, depression and death intervened on October 21, 1969, when he died at the age of 47. He was with his mother in St. Petersburg Florida, watching Graham Kerr’s “The Galloping Gourmet” on television.

On the Road tapped into a spirit of liberation when a stale, grey, post World War II uniformity reined. It spawned the short-lived “Beat Generation whose writers still resonate today. Perhaps surprisingly, though, Kerouac was a patriot and a man of faith, however unorthodox. He had human flaws and a voracious appetite.  While I did not embrace his appetite, I did his love for language, his descriptiveness, even his internal conflicts, which were intensely human.  Like Kerouac many of us of the generation of ‘68 searched for roots, even while pushing against them. We saw the open road as an invitation to the possible and a warning sign, and craved kicks while returning safely to mother in suburbia.

I do not know what became of Joe Cocker, or whether my high school friend Michael Waters kept the album or scratched it beyond recognition.  I do know what became of Kerouac and what On the Road has meant to me and countless others who keep this story on the popular seller list generations later.

*For more on Nirschel, read his bio box on the bottom right of the blog’s main page.

Still on the search for a fix for his sore shoulder, Reid leaves Canada before the end of the book to visit India and pay out of pocket at an ayurvedic clinic. I’ll save you the suspense: After weeks spent eating healthfully, relaxing, and being intensely massaged, Reid’s shoulder felt better and had a better range of movement.

You probably don’t have to believe in prana or doshas to understand that paying such intense attention to your body may serve you better than pills or surgery. But the out-of-pocket model doesn’t do one thing very well, Reid says, and that’s address any sense of fairness. Most of the world’s poorest countries don’t provide health care, and people are left to pay for the care they can afford. Reid points out that that usually means that poor people go without any care at all, and the poorest in the poorest countries can expect today before their 40th birthday.

Reid points to an Institute of Medicine study to show that about 22,000 Americans die each year from otherwise treatable ailments because they can’t afford insurance. He tells us that about 85 percent of Americans believe health care is a fundamental right. So what’s to be done? Reid says we have to decide the moral question first, commit to universal health care, and then worry about how to pay for it. He argues that framing the issue as an economic one was one of the problems in the reform effort of then-President Bill Clinton in 1993, while at the same time Taiwan and Switzerland passed universal health care. That’s because Taiwan and Switzerland framed the issues in ways that resonated within their cultures — national pride and solidarity — Reid says.

Part of what he wants to do in the book is combat some common misconceptions: that every other country has socialized care with wasteful bureaucracies and sacrifice free-market style choice. But the prescription contains elements that may be a hard sell for Americans. Everyone — rich and poor, young and old, healthy and sick — is in it together in countries that make health care universal. That means that the rich subsidize the poor and the healthy subsidize the sick. But it also means the healthy version of yourself subsidizes the version of yourself that inevitably needs medical care. That’s what insurance is meant to be, a bulwark against bad luck.

It also means that in most countries no one makes a profit from health care insurance. That  might have been the biggest obstacle all this time: that really entrenched interests benefit from our current system.