BookEnds

I picked up Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood this summer and slowly worked my way through most of it, only to leave it lying unattended by my bedside for months.

Not that it isn’t a gripping tale. The non-fiction, which details the murder of a family of four in rural Kansas, often has the same appeal as a good horror flick. Before the bloody deed is done, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the suspense: the only question is how the victims, Mr. Clutter and his family, will be snuffed out.

My problem came after Kansas detectives bag Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, Mr. Clutter’s twisted assailants. Perhaps my disinterest can be blamed on having seen Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliant turn as the author in the 2005 film Capote. Unfortunately, I know how this story is going to end.

That aside, I’ve got a bigger bone to pick with Capote, and it has to do with good old-fashioned journalism. Capote’s claim to fame was his ability to conjure vivid, true-to-life scenes from actual events. The author himself called In Cold Blood a “nonfiction novel,” and laid claim to its total veracity.

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Plenty of critics have assailed the authors of SuperFreakonomics for their take on climate change in the fifth chaper. Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for The New Yorker, brilliantly turned their own take on horse manure in the book’s beginning against them.

Perhaps the best takedown and analysis of the furor is over at Foreign Policy, and I highly recommend reading Clay Risen’s piece here.

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.

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.

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.

I’m often embarassed by the paucity of fiction books on my shelves. I don’t know why I care. But while many I know suck down the latest Oprah book or books at the top of bestseller lists for weeks, like The Kite Runner and anything by Nicholas Sparks, I find out about a new Andrew Jackson biography and I’m distracted again to a non-fiction wasteland where I can discuss what I’m reading only with my former history teacher.

I like what I like, but I’m trying to correct for this. When I picked up our most recent book club choice, I spotted a few fiction gems on a buy 2 get 1 free table, so I took advantage of the deal and got Angela’s Ashes and Olive Kitteridge.* Now a colleague, staff editor Robin Watson, has recommended The Gargoyle by debut novelist Andrew Davidson. But don’t think this in any way is enough to round out my to-read list. So, suggestions welcome.

*The third, I must admit, was this.

I’m not a huge audio book fan, but I often find myself driving between 6 and 8 on Saturday evenings. That might not mean much to you, but to me it means tyranny: every public radio station between New Haven and Brooklyn — at least the ones I’m aware of — play only “A Prairie Home Companion” during those hours. No offense to Garrison Keillor — who’s an icon, I know — but I turn away as soon as I hear the chimes heralding American Public Media. I need to listen to something on the way down, so occasionally I’ll download an audio book.

Recently I was entertained by David Plotz’s new book, “Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.” Plotz is an editor for Slate and began reading and blogging the Old Testament, from alpha to omega, a few years ago.

Plotz also reads for the audio recording, and I’ve heard his voice so often on Slate’s Political Gabfest that he feels like an old friend. While the book was a pleasure, I’m fairly certain it was more fun reading as an ongoing blog than listening to as an entire book. Still, I learned more about what’s in the Bible than I knew there was to learn.

Most interesting, though, was a point Plotz keeps coming back to again and again. You run through a lot of different tribes in the Old Testament, tribes against whom the Israelites war and with whom they intermarry, but we don’t know much about them. It’s not clear what happened to them all, but Plotz’s point is that he thinks the Jews survived as a people and a religious group because they wrote a book. They wrote their traditions down, and Plotz writes about how moving it can be to practice ancient rituals and know the same rituals were performed in ancient times. That really struck me: survival through book writing.