BORN THAT WAY: GENES, BEHAVIOR, PERSONALITY by William Wright

With every new generation of college freshmen there comes the list of things they never saw. My freshman year, 2007, was one of those "landmark" years, underscoring just how far the world had come and just how many more grays you have in your hair: I wasn't born for the Cold War, that entire fifty years of history that provided the world with, among other things, Mutual Assured Destruction, Robert Ludlum novels, the Space Race, and Dr. Strangelove. As if that experiential omission weren't enough, the science-oriented know that I missed another war, too, one that arguably came closer to going "hot" than any conflict between Capitalism and Communism: The Nature-Vs.-Nurture War. The basis of the conflict revolved around whether behavior was caused by inborn characteristics or environmental influences, and it started the closest thing to a World War in the sciences, beginning in Psychology and Anthropology and eventually sucking in Biology and Genetics, too. Philosophy was involved, and at the end, even Political Science took its shot. And, in rigid similarity with the Cold War, everyone who witnessed it started writing about its history and implications before the ink dried on the peace treaty.




In the Nature-Nurture war, the peace treaty exists in a scientific atmosphere that still bubbles with academic reputations staked on one side or the other, and while most scientists conceded the inevitable--nature and nurture interact, and both have a place in understanding human behavior--old feuds still resurface and Nazi comparisons still abound. In this book, written around 1996, Wright attempts to chronicle the Nature-Nurture War with the perceived advantage of having "no published positions to defend, no scholarly reputation to protect, no academic toes to fear trampling." That said, it's clear from the get-go that Wright is far from unbiased. Academia's manaical devotion to "behaviorism," which attributed all human behavior to environmental conditions, drove Wright away from Psychology as an undergrad at Yale in the fifites. Human motivations may be many, but I had the feeling Wright's motivation in writing this book was only one: REVENGE. Unfortunately for a book rightfully trying to defend genetic causes behind behavior, that "there-will-be-blood" attitude compromises its credibility.

In eighteen medium-length chapters, Wright interviews prominent behavioral geneticists, scientists searching for the genetic basis to behavior in both humans and other animals. The major study he cites is a now-famous study at the Univeristy of Minnesota by Tom Bouchard of identical and fraternal twins "reared-apart," meaning adopted into different homes shortly after birth and not reunited until many years into adulthood. Since identical twins are nature's original clones, their genes are carbon copies, and this, combined with their different rearing environments, makes "teasing apart" environmental and genetic causes of personality and behavior a little easier. Unsurprisingly, the study found strong correlations in the reared-apart identicals as opposed to the fraternals, especially in the loaded area of IQ and and in extraversion/introversion. Despite different families and environments, most identical twins shared baseline character traits; if your identical twin, who you just met, is chatty, there's a good chance you are, too, for example. Observations of the twin sets involved also revealed Twilight Zone-ish eccentricities between the identicals who were meeting for the first time, including two identicals coming to their first meeting both wearing seven rings on seven fingers.

This study, along with many other twin studies and animal studies, prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there is some genetic components in behavior, something that, as Wright points out, breeders have known since the beginning of animal domestication when they bred cows for their docility and dogs to fetch hunted ducks (or squeaky toys). And, like it or not, Richard Dawkins and his atheistic gang are right when they say that humans are, at the base of it, just a peculiar sort of animal that happened to produce Confucius and Nietzsche.

The discovery of these innate chemical balances (or inbalances) contributing to everything from criminal tendencies to altruism crashed a decades-long party for socialists, progressive "activists," and other social reformers whose ideologies focused on what Wright calls "tabula rasa," or the idea of a the human as a blank slate. Wright quotes behaviorist John Watson's statement that, given any newborn, he could make him or her into whatever he wanted: good or evil, doctor or mechanic, murderer or do-gooder. Various genetic heritability studies proved this simplistic assumption entirely unfounded. The terms "activists" and "reformers" however, don't imply people who take challenges lying down, and the various "tabula rasa"-oriented groups didn't. Many, as Wright documents with rabid fury, still don't. He interviews one of them, Leon Kamin, who has publicly said IQ may have "zero heritability," disregarding mountains of evidence to the contrary.

In fact, throughout the years, the "radical environmentalists," a term social scientists use to refer to people who still believe genes play zero part in behavior, have used highly dubious and entirely irresponsible tactics against anyone who dared suggest a genetic basis for a trait. Sadly, Dodd's Corollary to Godwin's Law, stating that anyone who invokes Hitler or the Nazis in a debate has conceded the argument, isn't a law of nature, and some of the comparisons of behavioral geneticists with fascists stood without contest from level-headed observers. Fair questions were attacked rather than answered. For instance, why do only SOME inner-city blacks, in fact a very SMALL number, commit violent crimes despite their shared environment of racism and poverty? And, on the other hand, why do middle-class white kids like Ted Bundy, whose family ate dinner together each night in the petty-borgeois paradise of the suburbs, go on killing sprees? Wright is careful to point out that social factors are a huge part of behavior, just not the ONLY part, and this simple perspective was, for years, one of the most academically dangerous ones to hold in the United States.

Part of the modern stigma of this view stems from a notorious 1969 assertion by psychologist Arthur Jensen that the lower IQ scores consistently reported in black children relative to white children were due not to social factors but to genetic differences between blacks and whites. Although almost no behavioral geneticist agreed with him, the "Jensen furor," as Wright calls it, was the public face of behavioral genetics in the media for years after, and still is to an extent today, mining the territory of the field with accusations of racism and discriminatory social policy. The field is also laden with associations with the "eugenics" disaster of the early twentieth century, when otherwise-intelligent people started advocating sterilization for the mentally retarded and the criminally insane, among others.

Of course, modern behavioral geneticists don't support eugenics, and both the environmentally-oriented crowd and the genetically-oriented crowd (they're just "oriented" now--the war is over, but squabbles continue) include both political liberals and conservatives in their ranks, most united in believing that "knowledge is neutral," and that the public policy that may derive from that knowledge should not hinder the research into it. In other words, they all support academic freedom, in direct contest with campus radicals who believe they alone should decide what's researched. Wright describes instances of attempts at academic intimidation involving behavioral geneticist Dean Hamer, and, even more poignantly, describes witnessing protestors break into a behavioral genetics conference to shout down the speakers with blind exaltations of "genetics conference you can't hide, you're promoting genocide!" It's later revealed that sympathetic members among the conference-goers, the ones invited to provide their opposing views to the discourse, opened the doors for the protestors. This sort of perversion of civil disobedience, justified on so many campuses for the opposition of almost any cause deemed "dangerous," is among the most discouraging trends in American scholarship and debate today, and Wright's descriptions of it make a point far beyond the limited aspects of the behavioral genetics controversy.

Even with all this justifiable frustration, Wright goes a little far in his demonization of the opposition to genetic influences, sometimes treating them with the same snobbery he claims to abhor. The text sometimes reads like a Pat Robertson polemic, referring to behavioral geneticists as "the faithful" and describing the "conversions" of former environmentalists. Wright describes one author of a book about evolution as "a civilian Joan of Arc leading a handful of seasoned generals...[shattering] the fortress of behaviorism...."

Even worse are his characterizations of research by behavioral geneticists as "heroic," and descriptions of certain people as "carrying the torch" of the field through the days of environmentalism. At its worst, it was reminiscent of late-eighties Soviet propaganda, around the time Brezhnev caught his "cold," with all the empty references to "glorious heroes" of the "revolution." The rhetoric was distracting and unncessary. And for all the condemnation Wright lays on "the critics" about their "ad hominum" attacks, he takes a few swings that this method himself when he repeatedly chastizes respectable dissenters as practicing "dishonesty." He even goes so far as to call them "genophobes," invoking the specter of the label "homophobe" stuck to every unfortunate person guilty of suggesting gay marriage may have downsides. At the risk of sounding like an overplayed single off the Bush Derangement Syndrome soundtrack, the book was very us-versus-them. Read with skepticism.

One final aside before I come to the strangest chapter of the book. I'll just come out and say this: The writing was terrible. Wright frequently and confusingly changes topics right in the middle of a paragraph, and some of the arguments are so mired in grammatical convolution that they're harder to "tease out" than the very influences Wright is describing. Also, the tone of the text starts to fall into a low drone of blandly presented facts (when it's not exploding with near-religious passion). As an editor, I was constantly rewriting awkward sentences, and some I had to mentally restructure just to understand. In a world full of bad writing, it was a minor annoyance, but be prepared for it.




Finally, in the last chapter, called "Conclusions," Wright indulges in a science-writing tradition and plays around with some of the concepts he's covered, conjecturing about their possible meanings and uses. He correctly points out that public policy application of research is a "value question," not a scientific one, and should not inform scholarship. Instead, scientists should do the research first and then discuss and debate conclusions. With this disclaimer, I was willing to forgive the creepy suggestion that the government should intervene psychopharmaceutically with people at genetically "high risk" for crime. After all, this was only Wright's opinion, and he admitted it was up for debate. I could not forgive his extended metaphor about the link between genes and specific behaviors involving the abortion debate. He posits that "the pro-choicers' reasons--maternal rights, children's welfare, benefits to society--could be colliding with a gene in a portion of the population that says simply, 'killing fetuses is wrong.'" He then says that "if the antiabortionists...could see their stands as grounded in their biochemical makeup, rather than as moral convictions swathed in religious majesty, they might be more amenable to persuasion and compromise." This goes further than the obvious counterargument that the PRO-abortionists' stance may be gene-related, also. For someone who had an entire chapter entitled "Oh So Political Science," in which he argued that--you guessed it--science shouldn't be political, Wright engages in blatant hypocrisy here, certainly no better than behavioral genetics critic Richard Lewontin who says that "'Science is not and cannot be above "mere" politics.'" Wright exposes himself to the same political biases he accuses the critics of harboring. As it turns out, nobody's free of those very human motivations that inform so many of our decisions, including the writer a book about those very human motivations.




As a whole, the book was a good read, but the witch hunt mentality came very close to spoiling it. The shoddy writing didn't help, either. If you're a behavioral geneticist fresh off an attack from campus radicals or a radical environmentalist seeking a confrontation, you've found your holy grail. If, like me, you're looking for an unbiased account of the history and future of the Nature-Nurture War, you may have to search elsewhere.




VERY CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED

MY FRESHMAN YEAR: WHAT A PROFESSOR LEARNED BY BECOMING A STUDENT by Rebekah Nathan

I think it was the night that my roommate came home drunk and broke my fishbowl at three in the morning that I first seriously considered the sort of questions Rebekah asks in this book. I'll spare you the full story, but needless to say, it was a LONG night, one that required escorting my (angry) drunk roommate to the bathroom, cleaning up a fishbowl and pulling a fish from the jaws of death on my shag carpet, lining possible puke cans with plastic bags, and listening to a lot of incoherent ramblings, none of which she would remember in the morning, and all of which I would. Although not one to need a religious eight hours of sleep, I was exhausted after this all-nighter and, just as a side note, in great pain due to my own medical condition. Despite having done a fair amount of homework the night before, I had a full load of readings, tests, and group projects to manage for the next day, an agenda through which I would have to labor, like it or not.




As I tried to decide which side of my double vision was least blurry as I attempted to read my Philosophy assignment, I wondered what my professors were doing at that moment. There was an outside possiblity that they'd had an even worse night involving a drunk spouse, but most likely they were at home, preparing for their lectures and stimulating "discussions" (all college students know that "college discussion" is an oxymoron) that would go on in class the next day. In other words, I would walk in, having done the reading, give them the right answers, take notes studiously, and walk out, and my professors would have no clue about the drunkscapade that I was privy to only a few hours earlier. NO CLUE.






This generational and occupational gap is what motivated anthropology professor Cathy Small, AKA Rebekah Nathan, to do what, to her colleagues, was openly unthinkable: Go undercover as a student at her own university, albeit as an older "returning" student. She went through the ritual "summer of the envelopes," a tradition almost as static as freshman year itself, when each lucky student wheelbarrows in registration mail that demands decisions. She had to chose a meal plan and dorm living options (yup, she even lived in the dorms). She also had to attend what is almost definitely the most hellish part of the entire college experience: "Previews" and "Welcome Week" activities for incoming freshmen. If you've blocked it out of your mind, allow me to rekindle the reclaimed neurons: Bean bag games with complete (eighteen-year old) strangers, "name games" where everyone goes around the circle and says something about themselves ("uh, hi, I'm Jenny from Michigan, my major is elementary ed, and I like strawberry ice cream" x twenty), and "ice breaker" activites, which Cathy admits was the dominant type of activity through her entire first two weeks of classes. Cathy, clearly an extravert, seemed to borderline enjoy this medieval gamut, though, which slightly disappointed me.





Cathy presents her experiences in seven chapters, which are admittedly vague in particular details for the sake of privacy and ethics. In the dorms, however, she does immediately notice something old people always notice about young people today: We have a DAMN lot of STUFF. While Cathy has only some modest necessities with a few luxuries, she notices that her newfound peers have "joysticks, couches, mountain bikes, ski and sports equipment, guitars and keyboards, large and elaborate sound systems, multiple-layered electronics shelves holding TVs, VCRs, DVD players, refrigerators, tables, cabinets, floor and pole lamps, overstuffed throw pillows, as well as coffeemakers, slow cookers, and illegal sandwich grills." The Affluent Society indeed.






But it's more than that, Cathy notes, and she then proceeds to make an observation about her 1940s-built residence hall that I noticed during my own first month of freshman year: Almost none of it is used. Her hall has a spacious lobby with a TV and lots of chairs clustered around, an activity room and communal kitchen, and lounges on each floor with a TV, VCR, and tables where people can eat and socialize together. All of these loftily-designed community "togetherness" spaces are ghost towns most of the time. The place is a black hole of wasted space. During Super Bowl weekend, Cathy ventures into the lobby, where, advertisements plastered on every bulletin board squawk, there will be a get-together to watch the game on the communal TV. Seven people show up. As Cathy walks back to her room, she can hear the same game blaring from every room in the hall. Everyone is watching the game together, all right, but in their own rooms, with their own TVs, and with popcorn popped in their own microwaves. Cathy withholds judgment, but the implication is clear: The Affluent Society has lead to The Alientated Society.





This leads Cathy to an anthropologist's watering hole: the subjects of "community" and "diversity." Before personal computers and televisions were the common fare of every college student, "community" had at least a dab of self-interest. If you wanted to watch the Super Bowl, or type up a sociology report, or grill up your own sandwich, you were pretty much forced to use community facilities (I'll avoid the word "communal" here for its association with things like the Cultural Revolution), and as long as you have to be around other people, you might as well get to know them. Now, of course, five families in Nigeria could live off all the food students keep in their rooms, and dorms come with internet jacks in every corner. This certainly discourages community-by-self-interest and, for better and for worse, there's not much more than self-interest to create community on a college campus in the United States. "Community" may be a popular buzzword for administrators but, as Cathy notes, "requiring common experiences is vastly unpopular." And, as with other things, anything not required is quickly swept under the rug, mostly out of necessity but also out of a sense of "individuality" inherent in American culture, a sense of "don't tell me what to do." International students Cathy interviews observe this trend as well.





"Choice" runs heavily in American culture, and while students may have fifty choices when they go to an electronics store to buy their new combination TV-DVD, they have fifty THOUSAND choices when it comes to structuring their own schedules. With all the variables involved--course, time, and major--with scheduling classes alone, there's a minimal chance that students at a state university (where Cathy teaches) will ever even run into each other, never mind form "community" bonds. And that's not even including off-campus jobs (which an increasing number of students have) and clubs and activities. As Cathy shows using some activity journals collected secretly (so as not to blow her cover) from four students in her hall, almost all their schedules are packed. But that's not all. She discovers that these students, like many she talks to, have solved the problem of the missing "campus community" by constructing their own tiny "communities" of a few close friends that they interact with almost exclusively. And--SURPRISE!--these networks tend to consist of people within their own ethnic, religious, and gender groups. Whites with whites, minorities with minorities, Christians with Christians, Muslims with Muslims--these are all strong association groups.





I'm sure Cathy's right--this DOES affect "diversity" on campus--but in this part she's probably the most judgmental, and her political colors start to show (guess what side of the aisle she's on?). As Cathy (reluctantly) whines about Generation Y's "blindness about racism" and "sexism," she reveals herself as a bitter Baby Boomer still aching to fight the battles of the Sixites. Take it all with a grain of salt.







Somewhere between setting up a dorm room, going to ice cream socials, rushing a sorority, working at a bar, and reconfiguring a laptop, students eventually have to swat at a pesky little bug called CLASSES. As a professor, you could tell that the biggest revelation to Cathy was just how little academics figure into what students affectionately call "the college experience." One of Cathy's volunteer projects in her dorm is to maintain little signs posted in the stall doors of the womens' bathroom, where quirky, sometimes funny anonymous questions are posed and anonymous answers given. When Cathy posits some all-in-fun questions of her own on these sheets, she finds that "very few students ranked class activites as constituting more than 50 percent of what they learned in college," a statistic with which most college students would readily agree. So why go to college? Some responses: "Who wants to be in the real world anyway?"; "College is too fun. Granted classes get in the way a bit but it's all worth the experience! I'm having a blast."





Academics do figure in somewhat, though. Although Cathy mentions that Generation Y students are very career-oriented and occasionally manipulative to achieve their own ends (an observation she isn't the first to make), she also notes that there are certain "classroom conventions" that students follow, a general attitude that she quotes fellow researcher Michael Moffatt as calling "Undergraduate Cynical." And it's true. VERY, very true. Doing well is fine, even admirable, Cathy notes, as it will get you the "good job" that the modern college student desperately, desperately wants (their parents probably won't keep buying them cell phones and TVs once they're off the "dependent" list on the tax forms), but you'd BETTER do it quietly. And for each "A" you get, you owe your fellow students some under-the-table insults about the professor, the class, or the university system in general. "Sure, I got an 'A,' but only because I practically sucked his dick during his office hours" or "Man, that class is so fucking easy, I practically slept through it and still got an 'A.'" It's not the best students, Cathy notes, but the most engaged discussion leaders who are the outcasts.





When the dust settles from this experience, Cathy admirably decides to restructure her own Intro to Anthropology class around some of the things she observed. Generation Y doesn't do "time management," they do "college managment," and that includes skimming of whatever work isn't absolutely necessary in order to accomodate packed schedules. Cathy decides to severely restrict her required reading to only what she really wants her students to know, and to design required, graded activites around them. She also realizes that scheduling is a matter of skill and luck, and if the scheduling gods aren't smiling on you this semester, you'll probably end up having five minutes to walk from one end of the campus to the other. With this in mind, Cathy gives her students some leeway about tardiness.





All in all, Cathy stresses that the number one lesson she learned from her experience was "compassion" for her students and all the hurdles they have to jump--social, economic, and academic--to achieve their dreams of a good education and a great job. Her willingness to study this world with the eye of an anthropologist is admirable. Maybe if students stood in their professors' shoes (especially during those silent "discussions"), they may have a little more compassion for them. That's an experiment I'd like to see.





HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

THE LEARNERS by Chipp Kidd

Some people take up art as a hobby, but what's your hobby when you're an artist? If you're Chip Kidd, famed book cover designer, the answer is WRITING. And unlike most hobbies, writing has the potential to be at least somewhat profitable, especially if you're already in with all the publishers. Chip's first book, The Cheese Monkeys, was a quick read, and you could tell (for better and for worse) that it was a fun little side project for him, a sort of halfway-edited NaNoWriMo novel, with some of the rough edges being cute and some being...well, rough.

For the sequel, though, it looks like Chip's getting better with practice. The story, set in the early sixties, follows Happy out of Penn State and into the workforce at a small ad agency in New Haven (AKA Yalesville). I'm still slightly miffed that Chip REFUSES to reveal Happy's real name (it's explicitly a nickname), but I'm (pretty) sure that annoyance was Chip's intention, so I'll chalk it up to artistic license. Those who read the first book will probably be disappointed that Chip didn't bring Happy's teacher, Winter Sorbeck, back into the narrative (maybe he's saving it for Number Three???), and that Himillsey Dodd, Happy's friend from school, kills herself off so quickly. But the message is clear: This is about Happy.

Chip's characters were MUCH more believable this time around, and more complex (and therefore exciting). Chip's little asides on graphic design were interesting, too (merging a little work with the hobby?). But my favorite part of the book was Chip's inclusion of the Stanley Milgram experiment, in all its historical detail. Happy, the fictional character, designs the ad that Milgram runs for the experiment at Yale, and eventually participates, discovering himself capable of unimagined cruelty. If you've never heard of it, crawl out from under your rock and look it up.

This was meant to be short and sweet--I don't want to give too much away. I will say that I will definitely be picking up Number Three, if it's ever out there. I will also say something about Chip that I mean, sincerely, as a very high compliment: He writes without pretense. That's the thing with hobbies. He's not trying to prove anything to anyone. His writing is short, quick, punctuated, uncluttered, to-the-point. You could probably grate some symbolism out of it if you wanted to, but I'm sure he only meant a little of it. In a world where "novels" are bloated and high-strung, stocked with long, "artsy" sentences that you're supposed to pretend to enjoy, Chip doesn't really care. He's a REAL artist, and gets well-paid and -respected for it. He doesn't need to use his writing to showcase his intelligence--it's right on the cover of the last book cover he designed. This was brought home on the cover of his last book, when, presenting the cover reviews, he had SOME PEOPLE LIKED IT followed by the good reviews and SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T followed by bad reviews.

Real men may wear pink shirts, but real artists don't care about bad reviews, and Chip is one of them. "You don't like my hobby?" he says. "Get your own. Better yet, get a job. Something USEFUL." Maybe, as an essay I read recently hoped, the American disdain for snobbery in literature will make a comeback, and maybe Chip will lead the way. This one, at least, will be a good review.

RECOMMENDED

2150 A.D. by Thea Alexander

If only.

If only all humans WERE part of a giant, quasi-Buddist, semi-Christian all-knowing Macrocosm. If only all human souls had multiple lives to "evolve" back to that Paradise of Oneness. If only karma WERE real, and all actions in this world DID balance out in the end. If only you COULD achieve everything in your life with only sufficient desire and belief. If only people COULD achieve "Macro powers" like clairvoyance, telepathy, and psychokinesis. And, most of all, if only the seventies HAD seen the dawn of a new civilization, one bent on love, wisdom, and leadership that would eventually evolve into a semi-collectivist paradise in 2150, fixing all the planet's problems, providing optimal education for all, and helping souls advance in Macrocosmic awareness.

Or maybe not.

It's not challenging, especially for a rabid individualist and realist like me, to find flaws in this utopian novel, which follows a man named Jon Lake who wakes up in 2150 to an Eden of "Macrocosmic" awareness combined with semi-socialist living conditions, mixed in with a mystical addition of his "twin soul" and Macrocosmic "powers" like telepathy. It takes the traditional utopian formula (a modern person finds him/herself in the future and a sympathetic "guide" explains how the future has solved all social problems) and adds in a strangely alluring element of fantasy, philosophy, and life coaching.

If the word "fantasy" just scared you, keep reading: I, the ultimate anti-fantasy guru (the bookworm I am, I refuse to read Harry Potter) could handle it, and even enjoyed it. It never crossed the line. It bordered: scantily clad women, some overt sexuality, and a character named "Elgon," but I assure all fantasy-phobes that it's safe to cross. Overall, it read more like something drug addicts would have to read as part of their "rehabilitation," what with all the "don't-blame-others," "take-control-of-your-life," "you-are-greater-than-yourself" memes present throughout.

As with most of these sorts of books, the plot takes a backseat to the philosophy, and the writing could be better. The concepts though, are worth consideration, even if, like me, you don't really believe any of it at the end of the day. Thea manages to anger Communists, Capitalists, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, business leaders, civil rights workers, sociologists, and individualists, though not necessarily at the same places. She presents the idea of a futuristic "Macro" society that, like most utopias, is based heavily on collectivistic principles. The difference is that this was written in the seventies, not the sixties, so think less social justice and more New Age desperate optimism and mysticism. In fact, people fighting for "social justice" will probably be most angered: One of the most controversial parts of Thea's plot/philosophy (it's sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins) is that all souls chose their own lives and sufferings. That poor black woman in the ghetto in D.C., subsisting on rice and Spam whose son was killed in the crossfire of gang violence? It's not injustice; there is no injustice from a Macro perspective. Her soul simply chose to incarnate in that body during that time, knowing all the horrible details but deciding that it would be a "learning experience" for her, so her next life could be better, moving her forward toward Macrocosmic Oneness, or "everything was was, is, and ever will be." In fact, getting angry at the government agencies, businesses, and elite that exploit only proves how "micro" you truly are, as being "Macro" means that you accept everything that is with love, as everything is chosen by individuals before incarnation and is perfect for them.

On the off chance all of this reminds you of Todd Gitlin's assertion that the sixties student movement fell apart because of just this sort of mysticism, you're right, and he may be, too. The publication date is 1976, when former disillusioned political radicals were seeking some sort of desperate escape, and, trust me, this is desperate. But in an age when Sixties ideas of rebellion, quasi-social justice advocacy, and "blame-big-business" have become institutionalized, Thea's ideas, once considered "conformist," are now paradoxically radical. Anger, Thea's characters assert, is the product of refusing to accept that everything in one's own life is one's own fault; after all, you chose your own life before you reincarnated from the last one. Blaming poverty on the poor isn't exactly in vogue today, but anyone who considers him or herself open-minded shouldn't be opposed to at least giving her mystical ideas a spin, just for fun.

Overall, Jon Lake was a likeable character, if not entirely believable. Thea manipulates the idea of reincarnation to twist the plot around a little. Especially interesting is hearing about Jon's past lives, and one of the best scenes in the book involves Jon making telepathic contact with a heart attack patient's subconscious mind in the twentieth century (when he falls asleep in 2150, he wakes up back in 1976, and vice versa). He now has the power to heal using psychokinesis, but he must first contact the person's subconscious mind to do this. To his surprise, the unconscious heart attack patient's subconscious mind recognizes JON'S mind from their shared existence in a previous life on Atlantis 50,000 years ago, when Jon had healed him. Now, however, the man's mind doesn't want to be healed--this time, the mind tells him, he's ready to "evolate" (a contraction of "evolve" and "graduate," basically meaning die), having learned everything he needed to in this life. Back in 2150, Jon recognizes that the patient's soul has reincarnated into the body of a young girl in that futuristic time.

In the end, you have to be ready to think to read this. The philosophy is, if you're open to it, somewhat applicable to your life today (e.g. you can accomplish anything with only sufficient desire and belief). Jon's foray onto "micro island" in the future provides a revealing comparison to our own world in 2008, unfortunately nowhere near Macrocosmic enlightenment. The plot delivers one final twist in the end that had a delicate beauty about it. I read over thirty books a year, so only the ones a little off the beaten track stick with me, and this will be one of them.

If you're looking for something other than cookie-cutter, Barnes and Noble "fiction" that's pumped out of novel mills every year, THIS IS IT. Enjoy.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

TRAFFIC: WHY WE DRIVE THE WAY WE DO (AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT US) by Tom Vanderbilt

"You're a bad driver." In America, a nation built on Automobile Culture, it's hard to find a accusation that provokes more heated defenses that that one. The subtitle of this book is "Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," and, by the time Tom's through with you, he's hoping to convince you that it says a WHOLE lot about you--something I think many people suspect, which is why the issue can get thorny. "A messy desk means a messy mind" they used to say, prompting a new question: Does being a bad driver make you a bad person?

If the answer is yes, we apparently have a problem, because Tom throws a library's worth of data and anecdotes on you in a seeming attempt to prove that most Americans are, in fact, terrible drivers. We talk on our cell phones, read our papers, work on our laptops, drink our coffee, and fiddle with our MP3 players while navigating toll plazas. After a mere 30 seconds of waiting to make a left through traffic (after Tom's many subtle polemics about the problems of left turns, I started to wonder whether he was advocating an all-right-turn America), we get antsy and start to think about cutting in front of that tractor trailor coming at us at 70 mph.

That is, if we perceive it--it turns out we're terrible at judging distance and speed. Humans can only run, at most, 20 mph, so doing 60 mph in a careening deathmobile called a car isn't exactly recommended in our evolutionary instruction manual. We also tend to hit a lot of bicyclists. And little children. And "stationary objects." Believe it or not, "single-car" crashes (read: driver sees UFO while driving down I-80 and swerves off the road, striking a speed limit sign) are the most common type of accident. In other words, not only do we crash a lot, but we also have dorky crashes--forget Lethal Weapon. And, by the way, "studies" tend to show that people do "live as they drive," which promotes the policy of insurance companies looking at credit scores when determining rates, on the basis that people who are riskier with credit will be riskier drivers. More on why you should probably be suspicious of these "studies" translating into policy later.

The information is packed tightly together: Tom brings in evolutionary biology, the dynamics of insect traffic management (ants are the undisputed kings), and neo-Freudian psychology to explain how and why we humans behave the way we do in traffic. Why do more roads create more traffic? Are divorcees more likely to have accidents? And, of coure, how in God's name does the city of Los Angeles manage its famously suicidal traffic situation? If you're a researcher, the notes are a real treasure trove of information; basically, the research has already been done for you, so find a new job. Tom interviews New York City traffic commissioners, Los Angeles ATSAC managers, and European traffic engineers, coming up with a wide range of opinions and statistics in nine medium-sized chapters. Much of it is fascinating: He introduces Hans Monderman, a European traffic engineer who advocates turning "village" roads into more pedestrian-friendly places (a nod to the "New Urbanism" movement).

Tom also presents a fairly convincing case for congestion pricing in America, although I still disagreed. He points out that "hotels charge more for in-season rooms, railways and airlines charge more for peak travel periods, and telephone companies charge more during the times when more people are likely to call--why should roads not cost more when more people want to use them?" As a capitalist, I was tempted to support this argument, except for one problem: Hotel rooms, airlines, and even long-distance telephone calling are luxuries; roads, at least in America, no longer are. Our infrastructure is built around them, and besides being wildly inefficient as anything controlled by the government would be, congestion pricing could also derail productivity. Still, the fact that he made me consider it is a considerable compliment to him.

Far into the grimy alleyways of this book, around page 253, Tom throws in a sentence that should be front and center, in the prologue: "statistics are one of the most dangerous things about traffic." The sentiment is taken out of context here--it's mentioned in relation to a discussion on rear-end crashes--but a book that relies as much on statistics as this should probably acknowledge it more openly. Unless your cynicism glands are malfunctioning, you'll probably start to tire of every sentence beginning with "studies have shown..." or "researchers in Sweden have found..." or "psychologists have discovered...". Maybe the studies are valid--after all, it did make intuitive sense that traffic fatalities tend to decrease as GDP per capita increases, and that roundabouts are actually safer than conventional intersections (because people are less certain of what to do, they tend to drive more cautiously). But after "studies" have "shown" that power lines cause cancer, BPA is the doomsday chemical for all human infants, and all white people are "racist," I was highly skeptical of these results on a scientific level. Although Tom provides an extradordinarily detailed bibliography explaining exactly where he got his information (papers with names like "The Perception and Cognition of Environmental Distance: Direct Sources of Information"), I started to suspect that he only questioned the "studies" that conflicted with his own personal opinions, which, to be fair, he valiently tried to keep out of the narrative. "Studies" bashing SUVs were prevalent, as were "psychological theories" about everything from BAC levels (they're not set low enough) to how drivers perceive bicyclists. I would caution the reader to be skeptical: Were these "studies" conducted fairly and without bias? Did they include stringent operational definitions of all involved concepts? Were they double-blind? Of course, it's impossible to wade through the astonishing amount of information Tom provides, both in the text and in the notes, so a general aura of suspicion should rule the day.

A couple of other problems: For math-a-phobics, the narrative sometimes tends to read like a physics book. He describes scenarios in specific velocity-speed terms that occasionally become a little heavy if you're expecting a quick read. If you're willing to follow it, the results can be worthwhile. Also, Tom goes a little easy on pedestrians, sometimes making them out to be helpless victims in a massive conspiracy of car drivers to flatten them in the nation's intersections. While, statistically, it may seem like drivers are trying to do just that, the fact remains that some pedestrians (e.g. the ones who walk against traffic signals, and the ones who do their makeup as they jaywalk across city streets) make their own beds. Cars have rights, too, Tom!

Still, don't let these things bother you too much: Just keep an open mind and you'll learn things you never suspected about all the hundreds of "sub-skills" you activate when making your (on average) 1.1 hours of commute per day. Tom's tone is conversational, and he tries to be nice when he suggests that you get a little more "feedback" on your driving before deciding you're a pro at it. And the environmental impact of cars? I couldn't have agreed more with Tom's sentiment in the epilogue: "It will be easier to remove the internal-combustion engine from the car than it will to remove the driver."

The real question is, of course, left open in the end: What will the future of transportation look like? The next few years should be interesting. For now, though, climb in the driver's seat at your own risk: It's a scary road out there.

RECOMMENDED

ATOMIC KITCHEN: GADGETS AND INVENTIONS FOR YESTERDAY'S COOK by Brian S. Alexander

"In one sense, the term 'atomic kitchen' is a fun way of describing a streamlined, labor-saving, 1950s super kitchen, offering the ultimate in Space Age modern convenience, ease, and beauty," Alexander says. "But it's also a term appropriate for its time--one that illustrates the optimism that housewives held for the future." Indeed, paging through this book, with three very short chapters and a huge bulk of 1950s gizmo ads and appliances, some of that post-War optimism rubs off. Brian dug through the bowels of the 1950s advertising world and unearthed hundreds of those suburban paradises that defined a generation: lipsticked, smiling women with pointy red nails beaming almost orgasmically in front of their new "Kelvinator 'Automatic Cook' Electric Range" or their Servel Ice Cube maker.

Alexander generally steps out of the way of the old ads, contributing only a few pages of text to what's largely a picture book with captions. In the Fifties, he says correctly, the Atomic Kitchen wasn't a laughable metaphor at all; Scientific American was giddy about the future of atomic-powered devices, and these gadgets making it into kitchens seemed "just around the corner." From the "Can-O-Mat" to "Decorator Refrigerator" (possibly one of the first LSD-inspired ideas, consisting of matching, say, your plaid curtains with a plaid refrigerator), the future looked both high-tech and high-fashion.

Because the decade's advertisements are probably its most iconic feature, often imitated for satirical purposes, it's impossible not to shake your head and laugh when you read an ad pushing an "all-steel" kitchen that "brightens her eyes...because it's beautiful" and "lightens her heart...because it lightens her housework." Or an ad for a refrigerator that "practically hands you the food." Clearly, some things caught on (electric mixers, individual ice cube makers) and some things didn't (eye-level, cabinet-style refrigerators, spaghetti forks), and some things probably should have (a nifty "sandwich pie" maker that toasted the contents of a sandwich over the stove). Anyone who spent time in the kitchen in the Fifties is bound to find something (maybe with some embarrassment) that graced their cupboards proudly back then.

The most interesting part of the book, though, was Alexander's examples of variations on "Kitchen of Tomorrow" displays that were popular at the time. The "House of Tomorrow" featured at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progess Exposition inspired a strange kind of sadness, a sort of failure to live up to expectations: it was 12-faced and still looks futuristic, with a personal airplane hangar where the garage still, unfortunately, is today. General Electric's "Kitchen of Tomorrow" foresaw TVs and air purifyers creeping into the kitchen, but also predicted automatic floor cleaners and a control station that would monitor temperature levels and food stock, for instance, features that have yet to come true or whose functions are outdated. These sorts of features make this book a great coffee-table book, something to pick up and page through every once in a while for kicks and giggles or party entertainment.

That said, Alexander never quite addresses the key question: What became of the Atomic Kitchen? He acknowledges that fashions changed: fruity decorations and shiny "magic" gadgets gave way to smooth lines and earth-tone colors. But that's not it at all. Although these ads are hilarious and even pathetic to observe today, they were truly inspirational to department store owners and consumers alike in their heyday; basically, these things were SERIOUS in the Fifties--these pieces of colorful, exaggerated marketing paraphenalia made General Electric's, Servel's, Tupperware's, and many other companies' fortunes. They moved merchandise. Because once, in the euphoria of post-War economic prosperity and optimism, when people looked at the shiny, perfect kitchen and the flawless, pacified women, they held a tremendous quantity of hope: "Someday, somehow, that woman could be ME!"

What changed wasn't only the designs; what changed was people's attitudes. In the Sixties, when the bitter Baby Boomers hijacked public opinion, the optimism soured, and suddenly, these sorts of ads inspired quite a different sentiment: "This is a LIE"; "These women aren't real"; "This isn't how people live"; and, later, "All these women are WHITE." The Great American Pessimism was born, and every generation since had varying degrees of it rubbed off on them. The Atomic Kitchen was burned down by the fires of the 1968 DNC, firehosed with the civil rights protestors in the South, detonated with the bombs of Vietnam. Technological advancement continued, of course, at a rapidfire pace, but the milieu changed, and advertising changed with it.

Still, even with all these changes, the American yearning for a touch of magic to accompany technology lives on. Jackson Lears, a commentator on the American Experience, has said that "the recurring motif in the cultural history of American advertising could be characterized as the attempt to conjure up the magic of self transformation through purchase while at the same time containing the subversive implications of a successful trick." Basically, Americans want some soul with their progress. They don't only want a dishwasher that will wash the most dishes in the fastest amount of time; they want a dishwasher that will do all that AND make them feel like good people. Rob Walker, in the last book, Buying In, talks about selling an idea along with a product, and although the media has changed, some of that "self transformation" implied in the Fifties "Kelvinator Kitchen" ads survives in marketing in the millenium.

And who knows? Maybe the optimism, at long last, was warranted. Maybe Atomic Kitchen itself will become the object of parody in the future as atomic-enabled citizens page through this turn-of-the-twenty-first-century book, marvelling at the lack of foresight during our own "modern" era.

Some things never change

RECOMMENDED

BUYING IN: THE SECRET DIALOGUE OF WHAT WE BUY AND WHO WE ARE by Rob Walker

Often, the hardest jobs in the world are ones that involve stating the obvious. Or, rather, stating what amounts to "the obvious" for 90% of the population to the 10% of the population for whom the information is worth $15,000. And then, of course, getting them to believe it. In Buying In, Rob Walker screams, smoke signals, and signs the latest version of "the obvious": Generation Y is NOT immune to marketing. The "consumer revolution" is, basically, a term futurists use to garner checks from the likes of Proctor & Gamble (after all its mentions in this book, I was wondering if Rob got an endorsement from them, a stunt that would be oddly appropriate for a book that seeks to explain underground marketing techniques). The consumer is not in charge; the inmates are still quietly resting in the asylum. In fact, as Rob implies, the inmates have more in common with the Big Nurse itself than with any sort of "selling out" Gen X quasi-rebellious anti-consumerist attitudes.

Rob starts by explaining "The Desire Code," best defined as a rough formula for why we buy the things we buy (and if you're thinking things like price, quality, etc., prepare for reeducation). The problem, Walker says, is "the Pretty Good Problem." Basically, Oscar Mayer and Miller sell the exact same product: hot dogs. By now, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration, you can be pretty darned sure there isn't rat feces (at least in industrial amounts), uncleaned fish entrails, or bull semen getting stirred into the mix a la The Jungle. They're both just meat in a bun; they are both "pretty good." So, how do you choose? Herein lies "The Desire Code," in a process that involves highly complex personal narratives we have with ourselves, including the constant struggle to reconcile our individuality with a sense of community. Symbols (often in the form of brands), he assures us, help us to create that identity: Apple=nonconformist (for most people), for example, and Apple fans will pay more for "their brand" even if a cheaper knockoff is more practical. Most of this first section is common sense to that 90% of the population. The second section, however, may come as something of a shock.

The problem, really, Rob tell us, isn't that Generation Y (AKA "the youth") see through traditional advertising; the problem is that EVERYBODY sees through traditional advertising, if they take the time to look at it for that long. In the era of "the click" and TiVo, you truly are in control of the advertising you see. If the free market was a democracy, you would vote with your remotes, and often do. TV is still, as Rob quotes, " 'a selling machine in every living room' " but you have space-age control over the machine now. A tiny little button called "mute" nullifes the billions of dollars a company like, say, Anheuser-Busch spent hiring tanned, ripped models to dance with bikini-clad women as they clutch cans of its beer. What is needed, proverbially, are ways of advertising that "can't be TiVo'd out." And that's where Rob introduces the nexus of the book, the future (and, arguably, present) of marketing, consisting of a variety of sly little methods he calls "murketing."

A mix between "murky" and "marketing," this new technique involves things like Red Bull underwriting an underground competition between a few guys on kiteboards trying to get to Cuba. It wasn't announced, and no one from Red Bull was there, but that wasn't the point. The point is that consumers respond to brands with vague, "murky" meanings, "filling in the blanks" to fit their own personal narratives. "The truth," Rob says, "is that any Red Bull drinkers, or potential drinkers, who might be impressed by the Cuba crossing are going to get exactly the message Red Bull wants them to get. People who are receptive to the idea that Red Bull's involvement makes the drink cool will decide that without additional prompting. Other Red Bull fans will never hear about it or just shrug when they do and dream up some other, murky reason to buy the next can." Murketing, in so many words, is essentially marketing in self-denial. Sponsoring bike polo games for editors and patrons of underground "zines" and, to use a more prominent example, putting brands in TV shows (otherwise known as "product placement"--think Reese's Pieces in E.T.) are murketing at its finest.

This underground non-marketing "murketing" pales in comparison to the most shocking chapter in the entire narrative: "the commercialization of chitchat." It details a marketing ("murketing"?) company called BzzAgent. Go ahead to their website right now, and you can sign up to become, of course, a BzzAgent. Anyone can do it; you don't get paid, but you can collect rewards. Rewards for what? For adopting the product of BzzAgent's latest client, and working it into casual conversation with your unsuspecting friends. An official BzzAgent's guide recommends ways to "buzz" a product: call up bookstores and casually mention that you're looking for the product you're "campaigning" for, leave little notes about a new brand of eyeliner around back room tables at work where your co-workers will see them, or, in an example that Rob cites, take Al Fresco chicken sausages to your July Fourth cookout, throw them on the grill, and tell all your friends and relatives how tasty, juicy, and fat-free they are. The "agents" then file reports, relating how their friends, neighbors, and, often, acquaintences reacted to the new product.

The entire scenario was terrifyingly close to the dystopian young adult novel Feed by M.T. Anderson, when the teenagers of the future all have product feeds wired into their brains (by choice--in fact, feeds are a "luxury" similar to a cell phone today), and advertising agencies that can monitor their conversations (to make them a "consumer profile" based on their words and actions and suggest relevant products for them) run hauntingly similar campaigns. In one scene, Coke says it will give out free prizes to whoever says the word "Coke" most during his or her everyday conversations, and the teens get together at parties and say the word "Coke" over and over again, vowing to win the money and split the prize. It seems relatively harmless, which is what makes it so scary, because, ultimately, it ISN'T harmless; a world where advertisers are co-opting our conversations isn't a world I ever hope to see.

And Generation Y, that hard-to-market-to Generation, is not only willing to participate in these sorts of campaigns, it's CHOMPING AT THE BIT to participate. Because for Generation Y, there's nothing wrong with branding at all; it's a fact of life. They accept it, and, more poignantly, they're willing to co-opt it for their own artistic and, of course, financial purposes. For better or for worse? The reality is complicated, and, ultimately, you have to decide.

Finally, the last section focuses on consumer ethics, and I was pleasantly surprised by how non-preachy this was. I was expecting Rob, who DOES write a column for the New York Times Magazine, a left-leaning publication, to add to the already massive cloud of smug accumulating around liberal centers and soapbox me about how evil I am to not know where my black one-piece bathing suit I'm wearing right now came from, and don't you care that there are (nameless, faceless, abstract) Chinese children laboring in sweatshops, you horrible, horrible person? But he didn't. One of the main focuses of the section is how IMPRACTICAL "eco" products really are. It will always be a "niche" market. Why not have a quietly green product that will attract a larger consumer base? Rob quotes American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, who lays it on the line: " 'That's the problem with the antisweatshop movement. You're not going to get customers walking into stores by asking for mercy and gratitude. If you want to sell something, ethical or otherwise, appeal to people's self-interest.' " No neo-communism, no lifestyle-scolding, and, THANK GOD, no Al Gore. Walker really boosted his business creds by doing what a business writer should: Sticking to business.

As a member of Generation Y, none of this surprised me, and instead of looking down on my Generation for embracing new forms of advertising, I commend it. Maurice Chevalier once said, "I prefer old age to the alternative," the alternative being, obviously, death. Similarly, I hereby prefer advertising to the alternative: socialism. There was no marketing business, no futurists, no Proctor & Gamble, no BzzAgents in the Soviet Union, and that wasn't incidental; in fact, that was pretty much the problem. Maybe some "murketing" techniques do go too far, and maybe we don't always (or even usually) buy things for the right reasons. But the copious amounts of advertisements flickering through your attention every day, on the sides of blogs, in well-stocked supermarkets, and fifteen minutes an hour on television, while annoying, are collectively an advertisement in themselves, for a super-abundant United States of America. Perhaps it's slightly redundant (and open to satire) for you to have a choice between Dove, Caress, and Neutrogena soap when you're essentially choosing between different color packaging on the same product, but I'll take that ridiculous choice over block-long lines for one decidedly inferior loaf of bread.

Thankfully, this wasn't another "free market capitalism is evil" book (always hypocritical, since books sell on the open market). Rob was surprisingly thorough and fair, critiquing advertising (often cynically) when it was due and praising it, and the new Generation Y entrepreneurs imitating and co-opting it, when appropriate. While the information by itself is entertaining, with various anecdotes about bizarre marketing techniques to neuroscience studies, it helps immensely that Walker has a sharp wit and an effective literary voice to explain it all. Marketing, Rob says, keeping in his role of Stating The Obvious, is not going anywhere soon. It's changing, becoming more effective, and Generation Y is the first generation that is truly learning, in the spirit of "if you can't fight 'em, join 'em," to reap individual benefits from it. "Evil corporations"? Walker reminds us that Time's "Person of the Year" in 2006 was YOU, and, during the "era of the click," consumers are truly increasingly responsible for the kinds of advertising in which they participate.

Stop blaming the companies, and start looking at your own behavior, Walker implies smartly. Because, no matter what radical changes have occured in the shift from "marketing" to "murketing," YOU still have the fundamental power of consumers throughout US history, the power that all the "evil corporations" fear the most: the power to "not buy."

Use it or lose it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

WHITE NOISE by Don DeLillo

[Cue Rod Serling]. Meet: Jack Gladney. Age: No longer young. Jack is a professor at a university, call it "the college-on-the-hill." He lives in a "town of dry cleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. These pictures have not changed in years . The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other states. This is a town of tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids." He lives with his loving wife Babette and four children and chairs the Department of Hitler Studies. To others, Jack appears reliable, intelligent, focused, ready to enter his old age with the dignity and sense of fulfillment that should accompany him into these later years. [Screen shows a picture of a black-robed department head with dark glasses stalking across a college campus]. Yet, under the surface, Jack hides a terrible secret, a secret that's been festering under the skin, a kind of undiscovered cancer, for years, a secret that will soon come to light. For, unbeknownst to him, Jack Gladney is about to enter...




THE TWILIGHT ZONE.




Given the novel's focus on the media, and (black-and-white) television is particular, the Twilight Zone reference seems specifically apt. The entire first half of this novel, called "Waves and Radiation," should be narrated by Rod Serling. "A town of tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids"? As these sorts of descriptions of this tiny college town (if you've ever been to Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, use that as your mental setting) build up, they all start to lead you to an inevitable conclusion: Something horrible is going to happen here. Soon. It's the equivalent of the sunny music and cheerful suburban faces of the fifties at the beginning of a Twilight Zone episode. Everyday American utopia tranformed, revealed, corrupted by the knowledge that it will soon to shattered by aliens, Soviet nuke attacks, time warps. In this case, the disruptive force is an "airborne toxic event," a chemical spill that causes the town to evacuate, to bunk down in an abandoned boy scout camp, trying to outrun a cloud. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, AKA "Steel City," is never named and simply called "Iron City." Hmmm...an "airborne event" in a Pennsylvania town causes a mass evacuation. The details differ somewhat, but this novel is basically a version of the Three Mile Island nuclear near-disaster, a relatively current event when the book was released.




Like The Twilight Zone, the milieu of this book is, unfortunately, dated. When this novel debuted in the early eighties, I'm sure the kids were, as the jacket describes them, "ultramodern," but it's laughable to apply that word today to a generation that didn't yet know the World Wide Web, cell phones, or iPods. Jack's friend Murray, a visiting lecturer from New York with the typical city dweller's romanticism about small towns, is, prophetically, obsessed by the "psychic information" that comes from TV (if you're rolling your eyes and thinking words like "artsy-fartsy"--RUN!). Although his philosophical meanderings about the nature of television still apply, they've lost some of their poignancy over the years.




I was, however, stunned by Don's ability to make you physically EXPERIENCE words. The complex, vague sentences take some work, but when you finally get it, you're imbued with a extremely specific flavor of feeling. It's not just shocked, angry, sad, elated here. It's "that-feeling-you-get-when-the-sun-starts-to-go-down-in-August-on-a-partly-sunny-evening-after-dinner." DeLillo doesn't write at all; he CONSTRUCTS. "I was beyond the traffic noise," Jack narrates as he stands in an old graveyard, "the intermittent stir of factories across the river. So at least in this they'd been correct, placing the graveyard here, a silence that had stood its ground. The air had a bite. I breathed deeply, remained in one spot, waiting to feel the peace that is supposed to descend upon the dead, waiting to see the light that hangs above the fields of the landscapist's lament." A strange kind of beauty.




By the end, I wanted to lay out the entire novel, all of the sentences, paragraphs, emotions, descriptions, events, and characters, so I could observe its structure in its entirety. It seemed to follow some engineering blueprint, some architect's master plan that, like the "starkly modern chapel" on Jack's college, can't possibly be appreciated with just one look at the resulting building. There are ornate niches here, a little hidden design over there. The plot is deceptively simple, but on almost every page there seems to be a sign post, some crossword clue that will make up the entire puzzle. The modern supermarket in the town, with "all the colors of the spectrum," serves as a sort of Portrait of Modern America, and when it starts to decay, gets rearranged, begins confusing people, well, then America is decaying, rearranging and getting pretty confusing, too. Jack teaches Hitler studies and his son's name is Heinrich, but he can't speak German. Everything has a "point": "That is the point of Babette." Everything is "obvious." You could probably write out every sentence separately on a piece of paper and then draw lines connecting them, like a literary fractal.



And above all the layers of hidden meaning, the gothic windows on this structure: Death and Television. "Who will die first?" Jack asks as he watches Babette exercise on the high school stadium bleachers. Once Jack is exposed to the toxic cloud, his horrible secret emerges. Jack is terrified of Death. He must grapple with it just as modern society must grapple with the new, pervasive media. He confronts Death in the image of television, in the image of all the "signals" bombarding the "modern" mind. Little did the Eighties know. I found myself wishing White Noise was written in 2008. When the kids watch television, I wished they were surfing the Web, playing endless video games, posting secret videos on YouTube. I longed for a narrative this poignant about the Internet Age. Falling Man was good, but it was too specific. I had to be content with comparison: When Jack observes the constant "evacuation drills" that obsess the town (and in which his daughter participates) after the toxic airborne event, I just put it in the context of the constant anti-terror drills after 9/11. Maybe the novel is best appreciated in its natural environment of the Eighties, but with the American Public's mixed reaction to the media ("it's evil" vs. "give me more Lindsay Lohan and Gaza bus explosions!") still so very relevant, it was hard to confine it to history. It still straddles a strange middle ground behind "so outdated it's no longer really relevant," and "oh, my gosh, that's still true!" Basically, read quickly. The relevancy is melting away faster than the ice caps.




This is what happens when mystical meets practical. In other words, White Noise is what results when sensitive men write novels. A rare breed indeed. In the Post-9/11 world (take a minute to rinse the sour taste of that phrase out of your mouth), when a growing number of people (let's face it, mostly rural people) are focused on hoarding peanut butter and buying nuclear radiation detectors to "survive" some foreseen disaster, the novel is a confirmation of everyone's worst fears, a tale of what could be, a sort of Disaster Porn. The prose, however, is truly fantastic. As evidenced by the seven shelves of "fiction" on display at my local bookstore, pretty much anyone can put together a plot, and a large number of them can sleep their way into the door of a publishing company, but only a few can actually WRITE like Don DeLillo. This is not a novel you read on an overnight flight. Be prepared to actually engage. And yes, that means THINK.




So carve out some time and clear out the cobwebs. It's really a narrative that will haunt you for days, weeks, and maybe even years.





HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

*NOTE: In the news 10/12/08--Right from the book: Chemical Leak Forces Western Pennsylvania Residents to Flee

THE FUTURIST by James P. Othmer

I won't lie: I'm still not quite sure what this book is about. Would it sound condescending if I said that was a compliment? James doesn't so much construct the plot as "chew on it and spit it out," as Stewie Griffin once said. When I was done, it felt sort of like waking up in Vegas: Something about the Greelandic mafia, and a South African prostitute, and government-like agents in black suits, and surfing in Fiji. Or something. The only thing for sure after a night like this is that IT WAS A AWWWESSSOMMMMMMMEEEEEEE!



Ostensibly, the "plot," hereby properly referred to in scare quotes, centered around a futurist (someone who speculates about the future empirically, mostly for corporations interested in staying on the cutting edge) named Yates who realizes everything he says is bullshit. He then makes a speech to that effect, becomes even more famous, gets hired by two shady corporate versions of International Men of Mystery to go around the world and ask everyone why they hate America, all the while watching a space station slowly crash, then gets blackmailed by said International Men of Mystery and then saves his scheming, morally-presumptuous assistant in a fake Arab country called Ba'sar, and then...well, like Yates, I'm starting to feel like I'm bullshitting, because that's sort of all I got in the "plot" department. The main points are that Yates is a jerk who's trying to reform and, in the process of doing that, he's flying around the world gauging anti-Americanism by force of blackmail.

The rapidfire pace and surreality of the "plot" is really no accident, because Yates spends about 70% of the novel drunk on his favorite "Maker's Mark" bourbon. There's a lot of passing out in hotels from Pinot in the minibars, begging Italian antiterrorism agents (who have just accused him of being part of a mini suicide attack involving a Vespa) for aspirins, and one drunk vomit into a hooker's hooters on a business retreat for a company he doesn't work for. Oh, yeah, his girlfriend Lauren breaks up with him right at the beginning, and then he meets up with her with his new love, the unlikely philosopher in the form of a South African prostitute named Marjorie. Some of it is starting to come back to me now. I'm still not quite sure how that figures in with the quatrains of Nostradamus that end up in his email (I won't give away who sent them) or the "tulip man" who's actually a spy, but I'm sure it does somehow. Othmer's writing is like watching a child try to untangle the Christmas lights on Black Friday, but, amazingly, he does it, and the effort was worth it.

At the beginning of each chapter, we get a few snippets of bizarrity courtesy of Yates' past experiences as a futurist: "He once fired a man on Take Your Daughter to Work Day"; "A recent lecture circuit saw him speak on successive days to a leading pesticide manufacturer and the Organic Farmers of America and receive standing ovations from both"; "He once was an adviser for HeresWhatIDoMom.com, a company that made videos that explained people's nebulous jobs to their confused parents." By the third one, you get the message: Yates has sold out, is telling everyone what they want to to hear; still, the blurbs are funny and a good break from the rollercoaster "plot."



There are deeper levels, if you want to dig for them, which you probably won't have the tools to do on the Carribbean beach where you'll probably be reading this (plastic shovels and lotion will be no help). In case gas prices are keeping you on your living room couch this summer, you can notice the blatant mockery of "the media." Here's a hint for all you aspiring writers out there: Hit on the media. You can't go wrong. Give your main character two email addresses, a 3G International phone (if I have to say cell, you literally won't understand a word of this book), and a feather notebook laptop that gets satellite feeds. When Yates isn't drunk or hungover, he's firing off emails or watching his satellite feed, showing a constant video of a space hotel he endorsed in disaster, with the A-list passengers slowly dying their carbon-dioxide deaths. The media's fascination with death, etc., etc.

Obvious currents of semi-anti-Americanism run through, too. The daughter of a Greenlandic mafia member gives this little tidbit of wisdom to Yates: "They [presumably, THE US GOVERNMENT] don't want to know why. They want to know what and when and where. They want to find out who feels this way and what they are going to do--not why--and then kill them. People like that want to know everything but the why." Message (for all you gas-price hostages out there): We should be asking WHY 19 Muslims flew planes into our buildings, not when it's going to happen next.

Yeah, whatever, James.

It's not a liberal dove tome, though: Othmer actually does acknowledge that the issues are more complex than the brain-devouring meme AMERICA IS EVIL. He describes Yates' fictional encounter with a fictional character from Holland: "He loves American television, particularly The Simpsons, CSI Duluth, and the reality show It's Your Funeral! But he has a big problem with McDonald's (except the fries), the city of Cleveland, and the pop star Celine Dion."

Sure, it's funny, but that pretty much sums up much of the world's attitute toward America: In other words, conflicted. It's complicated. Most things are. Including this book's storyline. That's the fun kind of complicated, though. I started a book by Don DeLillo after this one, and, trust me, I started to appreciate the glib, smooth, and slightly snarky writing of Othmer in contrast to DeLillo's (and pretty much every "fiction" writer's) mystical high-falutin vaguaries. Just in case any DeLillo readers are skimming this, wondering if they could stomach Othmer, there is one mind-bendingly complex metaphor involving The Last Supper and Yates sticking his finger in the wound of an anti-American protestor and, like doubting Thomas, starting to understand for the first time some of the reasons (the media, outrageous wealth, etc., etc.--have I said this before?) that this kid hates him.

Some parts will have you asking, "Does this REALLY happen?" Like Yates' "gig" in the newly-created country of Ba'sar (guess who created it?). The unnamed Iraq still has massive Sunni-Shia-Jihadist civil war raging in the streets, but "the media" in collusion with unnamed Halliburtons are holding a fake "expo" at the air base to try to get the world to invest money in the quickly sinking ship. Yates is driven around under heavy convoy through the city, where they prepare "sets," setting up fake Internet cafes and hydroelectric dams and getting experts to quickly endorse them before the next bomb falls. I was tempted to be skeptical, but pulled back lest my inner critic (some version of a neo-hippie, latte-sipping, tofu-wearing California Code-Pinker) call me hopelessly American and naive. Of COURSE that happens. It's hilarious when Yates describes going onto the "expo's" website and seeing "...five pages validating the credentials of the professional security force charged with keeping the expo safe. Where one page dedicated to security measures would have given Yates faint reassurance, each successive page scares that much more the living shit out of him."

I'll bet the rights to this book are already in the screenwriting process--this "plot" is PERFECT for Hollyood. There's plenty of action, lots of government coverup conspiracies, ridiculously high-tech chrome wireless devices connected everywhere, and one big old jerk (although not, of course, a jerk that can't be redeemed by internationalist reeducation) as the main character. Watch the theaters. As for the novel, it was quick and (thank GOD) the writing was excellent. It's summer--give it a shot.

CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED

UNIFORMS: WHY WE ARE WHAT WE WEAR by Paul Fussell

I would be avoiding the pink elephant in the room if I didn't just say this: This book needs pictures. Badly. As "Team America: World Police" would say, this book needs pictures "like Ben Affleck needs acting school." Maybe even more. I know, the implications are startling. Paul reviews a pretty hefty sampling of uniforms in 35 very short chapters, from the pink officers' pants of the Old Empire to the immaculate toques of chefs (did you know they're disposable now?) to the traditional business suit and tie to Catholic robes. I became very good friends with Google Images while reading this book. Sample the following passage: "Thus, he ordered a total change in the bluejackets' uniform, beginning with a new white dress shirt with buttons and black necktie instead of the dark blue jumper with rectangular collar overlapping the shoulders. New also were the ordinary black trousers with zipper fly instead of the wonderfully odd thirteen-buttoned 'broad fall front'..." Unless you're in the Navy (in which case you're saying, "Hey, that's the Zumwalt uniform!"), you're probably starting to feel that little guilty tickle to flip ahead to see how many more pages are left. I know I was.

I'm not naive--I know that adding pictures would have caused the publication cost to skyrocket, and for a book that didn't really need hefty investment: Fussell wrote the hilarious analysis of the American class system, called, of course, Class, back in the eighties, and even (sort of) coined the term "Generation X." In short, Fussell's already famous, and most people, like me, will pick up this book based on his name alone. As long as the bar code runs across the scanner, the publishing company's happy--frankly, they couldn't care less if you use it to unclog your toilet once you get it, as long as you've paid for it. Still, I was disappointed. I had to keep my laptop nearby so I could look up, say, "the Zumwalt uniform" or the traditional sailor suit. Sure, I vaguely knew about most of these things (the chapter entitled "Blue Jeans" was the easiest read), but he went into OCD detail: numbers of buttons and their significance, designs of patches, blazers and blouses and trousers (oh, my!). Occasionally, the book started to seem like those songs where the artist adds in some "shout-outs" to different cities in the middle of the lyrics, just to make people feel a sense of belonging with the song and, of course, buy the album. Fussell reviews transportation uniforms and Boy Scout uniforms, describing them in painful detail, sometimes, it seemed, just to make some Boy Scout reader/buyer feel a sense of attachment to the book ("Hey, I'M in here! I'm getting this just for MY chapter!").

By the middle of the volume, I was sufficienty tired of hearing about military uniforms. At the risk of offending people rabidly loyal to their particular branch of the armed services, they all started to sound the same, probably because, on a layman's level, they pretty much are. Yes, yes, the medals, the "epaulets," the blazers, the quirky hats, the old colonial colors, the shoulder boards, the symbolic numbers of buttons--okay, already. The Chicago Sun-Times described the book, on the jacket, as "a jolly, witty, often wicked little volume," but I guess I missed most of the wit. Fussell came off sounding like a cloistered tailor, a military one, in a long-winded chat with bored people at a fashion party. What I wanted (and as an American, I expect what I want NOW) was a quick description of the uniform and then some speculation about its effect on the wearer, its overall use for society, and some assorted witticisms on the kinds of people who wear them. And, while we're at it, MUCH less military.

I've decided this is my fault. Paul's title, Uniforms, is meant to be taken literally--he really means OFFICIAL uniforms, and while he does branch into the voluntary, less-defined but more-interesting realms of civilian everyday wear, he doesn't go where I expected. For example, why do people wear pajamas? How do they differ the world over? What about Goth attire, or people who wear full skiing outfits but sit in the lodge with cocoa all day? I know he couldn't encompass EVERYTHING, but he should have taken out some of the tedious military detail and added some more speculative blurbs. I can look at uniforms any time I want (thank you Google Images!) but I can only get Paul Fussell's expert speculation and analysis on them from him, and he didn't exactly deliver.

I started to suspect, around the time I was close to tossing the book if I saw one more description of a British officer's boots, that Fussell focused so much on the military because he so enjoys taking shots at it, and the people who join it. Despite the tango he does around actually insulting anyone, we all know just what Paul thinks about soldiers, and the Army in general, by the end of the book. I'll give you a hint: Fussell's a social sciences professor at a university. The fact that that statement is a dead giveaway of Paul's opinions says more about society than this entire narrative. There are numerous little ironic jabs about the "illogic" of the military throughout, but at the end, Fussell finally stops dancing and says, "the military is a showcase of anomalies, as might be expected in a 'profession' [elaborate scare quotes, of course]--its word [just to make sure we understood]--devoted, in the long run, to killing other people, and not feeling much distress about it." This reviewer was, at the last, slightly insulted. I could lecture Paul about the occassional necessity of "killing other people," preferably BEFORE they fly planes into skyscrapers, but I know better. It would have made reading a tiny bit more enjoyable if he'd kept his political opinions out of the writing, as it ALWAYS does. If I want to hear about politics, I'll turn on CNN.

Topped off by the snide anti-military comments, the book was in some places tedious and in others downright pretentious. Especially annoying were all the unnecessary obscure words. If I married Google Images during this reading, then I had an affair with the Google "define" function. Maybe I'm philistine, but I had never heard the word "viand" before (roughly, an article of food) or "poetaster" (in short, a bad poet). You could get by on context, but why couldn't Paul have just put "food" or "bad poet"? It was a minor annoyance, but when you're as obsessive as me, those blow up quickly. As a quick aside, the book included some interesting factoids, especially about the history of the NFL, the origin of the Boy Scouts, etc. All in all, though, Paul's just going on his good name with this one.

If you really want to know the significance of uniforms, try wearing one.

NOT RECOMMENDED

THE SIXTIES: YEARS OF HOPE, DAYS OF RAGE by Todd Gitlin

"All times of upheaval begin as suprises and end as cliches," Gitlin says, and thus begins the most massive and thorough review of "the sixties" ever written. Part of the reason this book was so excellent, so authentic, so inspiring was that Todd had the RIGHT to write it; he was THERE. As one of the early members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and on a first name basis with the likes of Tom Hayden and I.F. Stone as far back as 1963, Todd brings perspective on a decade that has too many narrow, factional interpretations. Writing in the late eighties, he takes a two-way flight across the landscape of the decade, observing all the in-fighting, out-fighting, successes, mistakes, riots, demonstrations, news clips, drugs, music, politicians, betrayals, friendships (made and broken) and conspiracies, and this book is the travelogue. And what a travelogue it is!

Here's the clincher: You know how the story ends. The Movement dies. The reason "the sixties" hold so much allure is the same reason the conformist jock always ends up with the rebel artist chic: people revel in contrast. The concept of students closing down universities a la Columbia in 1968 or, even more laughably, the CIA bugging phones in college dorms (now THAT would be a sweetheart assignment) is so far into The Twilight Zone for today's students that reading about it from the sixties is like reading a horror novel, with the same mix of excitement, exoticism, unreality, and fear. And yet, there it was, the "Alphabet Soup" decade, awash in acronyms: the SNCC, SDS, LID, PYM, CORE, VDC, FSM--most of these student organizations. Student-started, student-planned, and student-executed.

As a college sophomore, that was the lasting impact of the narrative. Today, the most "activist" organization on campus is problably Amnesty International, the epitome of "quiet" activism, mostly hanging some "Stop the Darfur Genocide" posters, lighting some candles for an end to the death penalty, and passing out some leaflets about Gitmo on weekends when only the dorky frats are having parties. Throwing rocks at police? Marching on Washington? Being taken seriously by the CIA? Lobbying Congress? These are no longer pasttimes of the American College Student. Even today, with another war on, who do you see protesting? OLD PEOPLE--in other words, Todd Gitlin's generation, redux. And so the inevitable question, for better or for worse: What HAPPENED?

He starts answering that question in, of all places, the Fifties, explaining how minor undercurrents, like Mad magazine, medium undercurrents, like the Beat poets, and major undercurrents, like fear of nuclear annihilation, all played their parts in priming the Baby Boom generation (which already had the as-yet unseen advantage of pure numbers) for subversion and rejection of authority. When these kids turned students, brimming with the fat of postwar "post-scarcity" affluence, left suburbia and hit the nothing-better-to-do, no-responsibilities years (sometimes called college), it was "The Revolution" waiting to happen.

As Gitlin puts it, the campus mood "shifted" in 1960, as the election of Kennedy prompted new "hope." Fear of The Bomb in the youth turned to demands for disarmament. In Greensboro, spiffy young black men staged the now-famous sit-in at a lunch counter, bringing civil rights to the fore. Affluence had come of age, Gitlin tells us, and now the generational caucus began to coalesce around groups like SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) which aimed to smash the status quo by challenging Jim Crow laws. To the rebellious students, smashing the status quo sounded almost as great as helping the Southern blacks.

Gitlin plunges you into the elusive "zeitgeist," describing the "fused group" of early SDS, which eventually shattered into a thousand militant, factionalist, neo-Marxist pieces in the late sixties.

The 1964 DNC, lesser known than its Party-splitting 1968 cousin, seemed to be the real turning point of the decade, the moment that sealed the fate of the sixties' legacy. Once the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was hoodwinked by the Mainstream Liberals, all hope of a peaceful fadeout of the radicals was through. This is the moment when SNCC began having "floaters," the "let-it-all-hang-out" type of people who became the vanguard of the counterculture, which rapidly diverged from Gitlin's more Eastern Intellectual political radicals. I opened this account expecting to find it rife with bitterness and feuds between the self-described "New Left" (which, like many a mass movement, eventually begat its own enemies) and the Right, but was suprised that most of the bitterness and feuding was between "radicals" and "liberal" politicians in Congress. In other words, the Sixties, in Gitlin's view, wasn't so much about polarization of the country as about polarization within the Left itself. Conflicts between counterculture radicals like Timothy Leary and political radicals like Tom Hayden go back to the early sixties, eventually growing in proportion to the New Left itself and destroying the Movement.

Gitlin describes the late sixties as "a cyclone in a wind tunnel," its climax, of course, being the famous 1968 DNC, with its signature tear gas and billy club beatings. By this point, Gitlin is disgusted with the Movement and its drugged-out, non-political, violent turn. In one of the most poignant scenes of the book, Todd is on Michigan Avenue, running from tear gas, when he runs into the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who, years ago, in another universe, had sketched a cartoon satirizing one of the Movement's early, innocent protests. President Kennedy (yeah, that early) had sent the protestors coffee, and there had been debate about whether or not to drink it (most did). Feiffer had drawn a little cartoon with a protestor holding a picket sign that said "COFFEE." Now, those innocent days far behind, Feiffer was running in 1968, too, and as they run together, hearing the smashing of windows all around them, Feiffer tells Gitlin that he's scared. As Gitlin says, "a circle closed." It's the moment when Todd, and the reader, realize how far this peaceful, dissenting Movement has come from its innocent little picketing days. And for better or for worse? As Gitlin describes the people throwing up from tear gas, the bloody beatings, the barricade of Grant Park, you know it's for the worse.

Throughout the last, terrible years, as the Movement spun off terrorist groups like the Weathermen (think Bill Ayers), you can feel Todd's pain, his bewilderment, his fear. Just reading the extremely detail-packed text had me holding my breath. Bombings of ROTC buildings, more than half the campuses in the nation demonstrating and over a fourth on strike altogether, "police riots," mass marches, the RFK assassination...and then, finally, the "fadeout," a slow and thrilling denouement, and then this: "The war fizzled to its uninspirining end. At the last, there was no Nixon and no national will to intervene again and keep Vietnam divided. The movement could claim its victories--but there was not much movement to do the claiming, only a few small rallies, a collective sigh of relief, and Chinese boxes full of endings."

WHEW!

After the ride Gitlin takes you on, through the civil rights movement, underground newspapers, arguments with liberal commentators in New York apartments, SDS conventions with Abbie Hoffman jumping on tables and Leninist factions nominating garbage cans for office, molotov cocktails, the writing of the idealistic Port Huron statement, National Guard deployments, LSD--not necessarily in that order, but who's keeping track?--the end is the victory lap, and the stunning developments of the era continued to run around my head for hours afterward.

Yippie to yuppie, Gitlin tells us, is cliched. Many old Movement people still sign petitions, still give money to Greenpeace, are still somewhat active. Many turned to New Age techniques, trying to calm their overly-politicized, disillusioned, drugged-out minds. Reading this in 2008, I could tell that all of this was more relevant in the eighties than it is now. Most of the old Movement people are dead now, of course, including Tom Hayden, who Gitlin seems to have had a painful ideological separation with during the sixties.

Maybe it seems like some of this isn't relevant at all anymore. Sure, the Movement played a huge part in civil rights in the South and women's lib (for the better) and drugs, AIDS, and moral degradation (for the worse) but things are on the move. Things are changing. But here's the bottom line. In 2004, the Democrats were shocked when John Kerry lost the election to Pres. George W. Bush, who was already fairly unpopular because of the Iraq War. Democrats, and some snobby Europeans, wondered out loud: Why? The most direct answer to that question: The Sixties, that's why. The 1968 DNC was when the Democratic Party lost mainstream America, and it has never regained it. People see Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Alec Baldwin, and all the other less-visible but just as theatric radicals that attach themselves to the Democratic candidate and immediately pull the other lever. The 1968 DNC was horror, in technicolor, pumped into the houses of every "prairie power" hippie's parents and their younger children (the next apathetic generation), tearing apart the Party, and it's yet to put itself back together. If the Democrats want to know why they keep losing elections, they should read all 438 pages of this book.

Just a warning: If you're a conservative Republican (like me), be prepared for "liberalism" (even when it's used as a dirty word) to be tauted as the Only Ideology for Smart People. The Right is so contemptible, it's barely mentioned. Gitlin is still a liberal at heart. It didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book, since Gitlin avoids bashing and sticks to mostly the facts, but if you're touchy about these things, beware. Still, he manages to tear the cliches of the sixties off their pedestals and turn them around, examine them, explain them, extrapolate them into the larger world, and pull you into their formation. That's more than most writers can do, sadly. It truly feels like a journey, one that requires patience (there's A LOT of detail, so be prepared to learn everything you ever wanted to know, ever, about the sixties), but that is mind-blowingly worth it.

Especially to college students: Read up. These are your predecessors. Conservative or Liberal, Democrat or Republican, do you measure up? THAT should prompt some soul-searching.

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED