BookEnds

Everyone knows ‘A Christmas Carol.’ The tale of the frightfully avaricious Scrooge, the impecunious Bob Cratchit and his effervescent Tiny Tim is all but inescapable during the holidays. There have been countless stage productions and films, including the new Disney version, and everyone has heard a thousand and one times the famed exclamation from the crusty old codger: “Bah, humbug!” Indeed, I don’t believe any single word has ever been so wholly and incontrovertibly connected with one character as ‘humbug’ is with Scrooge. ‘A Christmas Carol’ is ubiquitous come December, and with good reason – nothing encompasses the spirit of the season in quite the same way.

But when was the last time you actually read ‘A Christmas Carol’? That thought struck me about two weeks ago, as I was stuck sick in bed, feeling miserable and decidedly un-festive. I’ve been in a very Dickensian mood lately and, between re-reading ‘Great Expectations’ and starting ‘Nicholas Nickleby’,  I fished out my copy of ‘A Christmas Carol’ and re-read the story very swiftly — it’s quite short, particularly by Dickens’ standards — marveling as I did so. Because of the book’s familiarity, we often forget it’s power, which is no less potent now than it was upon first perusal some 166 years ago.

My initial impression was of the story’s eeriness — I believe Dickens somewhat missed a calling as a writer of macabre fiction in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. Marley’s clanking ghost is far more chilling in print then he could ever be on film or stage, his appearance tinged, of course, with the innately Dickensian hint of bizarre comedy. The spirits of Christmas are vividly described — I found I’d completely forgotten what the Ghost of Christmas Past even looked like — and the scenes of Christmases both past and present are so sharply evoked that I newly appreciated the loveliness of Dickens’ prose:

“…they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses: whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms…The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.”

- Chapter 3, The Second of the Three Spirits

The strength of the book, though, is of course in its message, which still leaps out and grabs the reader by the throat with a surprisingly strong grip, even if you’ve heard the tale a hundred times. Each of us, despite all the good we may do or feel, can most likely identify the odd Scrooge-like moment in our own lives, and Dickens meant us to squirm a little with guilt as we read. Yet, there is of course redemption for old Mr. Scrooge at the end and so, the author intimates, redemption for us too, for whatever small failings we have accrued over the year. The story is, ultimately, one of transformation, and of the power of good locked within even the crustiest and most irredeemable hearts.

As with much of Dickens’ work, there are natural parallels we can always draw to the present. The author lived in a time of extraordinary poverty and exceeding avarice, an era of swindlers and dupery, when the poorest were left to wither in the mud and fog of London’s streets and the debtors were locked securely behind iron bars – a fate Dickens knew all too well from his own past. His novels and stories are littered with morality, the triumph of good in the face of the wicked, the struggle of the oppressed against their detractors, and ‘A Christmas Carol’ is perhaps the most thickly laced with meaning. G.K. Chesterton once said, ‘a good novel tells us the truth about its hero’ and Dickens’ tale does just that, leading us with cathartic intent to find in ourselves the fundamental qualities, both good and evil, of Ebeneezer Scrooge. It’s an optimistic reminder of our own humanity, and how easy it is to reclaim it through even the simplest and most insignifcant acts of good. Dickens intended to drive home a clear message with his tale of holiday and humbug and I believe that he succeeded more wildly than he could have ever imagined in 1843.

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.

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.