In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson



Rating: 3 & ½ Stars

More than any other period in recent history, the years of the Second World War continues to fascinate writers and readers alike. In his ‘In the Garden of Beasts’, Erik Larson turns the focus on William Dodd who was appointed the American ambassador to Berlin, and who served in that capacity from 1933-1937. Dodd had spent some of his student years in that country, and was initially disinclined to listen to the naysayers who attempted to raise the alarm about Hitler’s regime. Inexorably, he came to realize that the Germany of his youth was rapidly becoming convulsed with an insanity that would virulently affect the rest of the world.

Dodd cuts a sympathetic figure. He was neither by training nor temperament suited for the slippery business of international diplomacy – a career that demands a silver tongue, serpentine guile, and a statesman’s heart. He had formerly been the Chairman of the University of Chicago’s history department, and saw his ambassadorship as providing financial security while he worked on his life’s project – his book on the old South. Appointed by Roosevelt, he came to Berlin with optimistic ideas about being a moderating influence on Hitler’s Third Reich.

Dodd’s many missteps in his early years are obvious – on several occasions he seems tone-deaf to diplomatic protocol; is cautiously set on giving Nazi anti-Semitism the benefit of doubt; and, seems to expect that with time Hitler would either be ousted from power, or turn reasonable. His fussy frugality, suspicion of his colleagues, and occasional faux-pas earned him the animosity of powerful adversaries in the U.S. State Department, which further complicated an already difficult assignment. But by the end of the book, Dodd wins our respect as a lone, courageous figure at a time when American foreign policy seemed bent on appeasement.

Larson is gifted in making history interesting. As with his other works, here too, he shows his uncanny ability in parallel depictions of private and public life. Adding titillation to Dodd’s embassy years is the presence of Dodd’s daughter, Martha, who cuts a swathe through Berlin’s society with an indiscreet display of sexual freedom, fraternizing with Nazi officers and Soviet agents alike. Unlike her father, Martha is slow to awaken to the menace of the new Germany, and indifferent to the plight of Germany’s Jewish population.

However, Martha Dodd’s views were symbolic of the mind-set of many of her generation, and of many who could have been expected to know better. Larson’s portrayal of U.S. state policy shows a prevalent mood of isolationism; an obsessive emphasis on recovering the debt owed to American creditors; an underestimation of Hitler; and, a disdain for Jews, that evidenced itself in frequent references to ‘the Jewish problem’. At a time when ‘the best lacked all conviction and the worst were full of passionate intensity’, there was perhaps little that a naïve academic could do to turn the tide, yet William Dodd rises in stature as someone who tried to rouse his slumbering nation to the savage reality it would soon have to face.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot



Rating: 4 Stars

The writing of ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ was a labor of many years making for author, Rebecca Skloot. Her curiosity about her subject was awakened when she was still a teenager in science class, and never quite faded away even in adulthood. The actual process of gathering material and writing took a decade of extensive research and exhaustive interviews. The end result is a deeply affecting consideration of the combined ingenuity of many scientific minds; the ethics concerning tissue ownership and research; and the story of a woman, her family, and her community.

A thirty-one year old African-American woman called Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951. Despite her death, cancer cells harvested from the tumor in her cervix continued to produce an entire generation of new cells every 24 hours. These cells were named HeLa after the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks first and last names. The first human cells to be generated in a laboratory, they earned the label ‘immortal’, because they were all descended from one original sample that produced a continually dividing line of cells. Due to her unknowing gift, Henrietta Lacks made possible some of the most vital medical and scientific advances of the past century and the present.

“The reason Henrietta’s cells were so precious was because they allowed scientists to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. They cut HeLa cells apart and exposed them to endless toxins, radiation, and infections. They bombarded them with drugs hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones…If the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter – scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again.”

In one way or another, HeLa can be credited with the development of the polio vaccine, the standardization of the field of tissue culture, cellular cloning, mapping of the human genome, and various medicines to treat cancer, blood-pressure, and depression. This list doesn’t, in fact, begin to cover the immeasurable boon the HeLa cells have been to humanity.

Skloot’s excellent investigative research does more than carefully piece together the historical evidence leading up to medicine’s great breakthroughs. She restores to Henrietta Lacks the one thing the zealous minded scientists took away – her humanity. There is something oddly ironic, yet moving in that this simple, little-educated mother of five should have been the cause of such mind-boggling technical advances.  It would appear that the world benefited by the suffering that ravaged her last few months of life. To the ones she left behind however, especially her five children, there was no reprieve from their acute loss; a loss which was compounded years later by the discovery that their mother’s cells were still ‘living’ in a way that they found hard to understand. Just as hard for them to understand was  why Henrietta Lacks legal heirs were struggling to pay their medical bills while pharmaceutical companies continued to profit from their mother’s death.

The reasons were many and complex, but they lead to the discussion about tissue study and proprietorship that is at the heart of the book, and the moral, academic and ethical considerations that are weighed in the balance in the raging dispute between medical research and patient rights. Skloot raises a lot of difficult questions, but apparently there are no easy answers. However, there is too much at stake on either side to ignore this troubling and thought-provoking debate.

The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin

Rating: 3 & 1/2 Stars

In 1980, Robert Gabriel Karigamombe Mugabe (B. 1924) won Zimbabwe’s first democratic elections by a land-slide. His victory dismayed his mother who felt that her son “was not the kind of person to look after other people”.

The mother’s premonition proved true. The 1980 elections held in Zimbabwe were not just its first. Effectively, they were its last as well. Since then, Mugabe has established a single-party government and has attempted to crush all challenges to his authority through systematized state-sponsored terrorism and genocide.

Peter Godwin’s brilliant and unsettling account of Zimbabwe’s human-rights crisis starts with the author and his sister flying to Zimbabwe in 2008 to celebrate what they optimistically hope is the end of Mugabe’s reign of terror. Too late, they realize their confidence was misplaced. The opposition, led by Morgan Tsvangirai may have won the elections, but Mugabe still refuses to make his exit, and has unleashed a red tide of violence and retribution against the people of Zimbabwe. The book covers the two trips made by Godwin in 2008 and 2009 to his home country, and is a bleak report of a nation sinking into cataclysm, while the rest of the world watches helplessly by the side-lines. 

The son of post-W.W. II British immigrants, Godwin was born in Zimbabwe. He and his family were forced to flee after Mugabe painted the white race as the scapegoat for all the problems endured by the country. Godwin and his sister, Georgina, faced no small danger in returning. They had both been declared enemies of the state for their criticism of Mugabe’s regime. As they traverse the land, the Godwins catch up with old friends and acquaintances who keep them abreast of the current situation in Zimbabwe.

We see many portraits of courage in this book – from high-level opposition members, from grass-roots workers, from professionals, and from the average Zimbabwean. Inevitably, they all endure the dictator’s wrath for daring to ask for a people’s mandate. Make no mistake about it; their bravery comes at a very high price. Yet, most of the people Godwin speaks with not only ask to be identified by name, they name those who oppress and torture them as well. Words like ‘resilience’ seem woefully inadequate to describe the character of the Zimbabweans. 

Despite Godwin’s occasional essays at humor, this book is a harrowing read. It can't be otherwise. Any attempt to soften the conditions to make it more ‘reader-friendly’ would be a betrayal of the truth - the harsh reality of ground zero.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

'Sakhi' Book Club April 2011 Pick

There are seven colors in the rainbow; we learn this in preschool. As we grow older, we learn something else; these seven colors and their tones are what we can actually see. Beyond that, there are more than 16 million colors in the visible spectrum. We will never see those colors, simply because our eyes were not designed to see them, though other species are. It strikes me that maybe Malcolm Gladwell is from another species too. Oh, I know his vision is likely limited to the basic visible spectrum like everyone else’s. Yet he seems to see more, and he is generous in sharing those insights. ‘Blink’ for one, is an eye-opener. 

Every moment – every blink – is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.

The premise of ‘Blink’ is simple: the quantity of time taken to arrive at a conclusion does not determine the quality of the decision, namely, split-second decisions can be just as good, very often better, than the ones made after great deliberation. As a corollary, our snap judgments are not infallible. We do make mistakes with our off-the-cuff choices. The good thing is that our instinctive responses can be educated and improved.

Galdwell’s métier is offering the reader a dazzling array of examples to prove that his theories can be evinced across the board, that they are in fact, part of an appreciable pattern. He does that here too. We are time and again introduced to art historians, psychologists, athletic coaches, military strategists etc. who use their expertise to engage in flawlessly accurate decision-making. The key-word is ‘expertise’. Innate talent and professional training aside, all these people have something in common. They are not theorists. They’ve put in the man-hours needed in their chosen fields and earned their experience, to the point that their skills have now become second nature to them. They are very, very good at what they do because they’ve been doing it for a long time, and because it is their passion.

As for the rest of us, we’re not going to be able to tell a genuine work of art from a fake, and thank god that no man's fate hangs on our instantaneous presumptions of his innocence or guilt. We will however, continually make snap judgments, because that is part of being human. Our senses feed us a constant stream of input. The problems occur because the filter to process all that feedback is more often than not corrupted, meaning, our judgment is distorted by our unconscious biases. As Gladwell elucidates in ‘The Warren Harding Error’, we too often judge a book by its cover, nor do we always even know what we want. Still less can we put them into words. 

He offers us cases of spectacularly bad decision-making and makes a simple but convincing argument that that in all those instances, good judgment was derailed by a combination of stress, lack of objectivity, lack of time, and/or an overload of information. As he succinctly observes, information is not the same as understanding. Perhaps, this is especially important to remember in the time of the Information Age, when we’re bombarded by useless tidbits of news from all sides. Keeping that in mind, perhaps a more selective approach to the plethora of data available to us would refine our judgment, to make it if not fool-proof, at least less error prone.

Into the Wild

 

‘Sakhi’ Book Club Jan. 2011 Pick

            Jon Krakauer’s books reveal his interest in people who live on the edge, pushing their frail physical resources to the extreme. “Into the Wild” is no exception. Krakauer candidly admits his fascination with the life and death of Christopher Johnson McCandless.

            McCandless is an absorbing subject. Coming from a privileged background, and apparently gifted in many areas, he tosses it all aside after graduating from college to embark on the life of a vagabond, calling himself ‘Alex Supertramp’. When his anguished family hears about him again two years later, it is only to learn of his death from starvation in the wilderness of Alaska. This was a tragically ironic end to an idealistic young man. Before abandoning the life he knew, McCandless had magnanimously donated the remaining $24,000 in his college fund to OXFAM, a charity dedicated to fighting hunger.

            The media exhaustively covered McCandless’s story. Jon Krakauer himself wrote about it for ‘Outside’ magazine. The feedback on that article was mostly excoriating, especially from native Alaskans, who deplored this attention given to a misguided, probably even mentally disturbed young man.

            Krakauer’s journalistic instinct, however suggested that there was more to this story than met the eye. His meticulous research turns up evidence of a multi-faceted youth, who though eccentric, was certainly sane. Alex/Chris defies easy pigeonholing; he was a charismatic loner who easily made a favorable impression on people he met. Apparently living a hippie life, he nevertheless adhered to the highest ethical values – personal dignity, no drugs, no rock and roll, no sex. What was his attraction to the wilderness? Was it the possibility of living a life unencumbered by society’s rules and expectations; was it part of an intense quest for spiritual fulfillment; or was it just a pie-in-the-sky delusion of an ill-prepared boy who thought he could take on the desolate wastes of Alaska?

            Jon Krakauer brings his usual intensity and thoroughness to this book as he does elsewhere. As to how Alex/Chris met his death, the author’s reasoning is quite convincing. He suggests many possibilities for McCandless's vanishing act into the Wild. However, by the end of the book Christopher Johnson McCandless is as intriguingly enigmatic as he was at the beginning, perhaps even more so.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

 

Rating: 3 & ½ Stars

  HOG Butcher for the World,
     Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
     Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
     Stormy, husky, brawling,
     City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them…

“Chicago” by Carl Sandburg

Those who have ever wondered how Chicago acquired that particular sobriquet – Hog Butcher – have the answer etched into their memory in Erik Larson’s highly engaging history of Chicago’s Gilded Age.

As the Nineteenth Century drew to a close, America planned to commemorate the 400^th. Anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America with the ‘World’s Columbian Exposition’ that was to be held during the summer of 1893. At least in part, the motivation was to outdo France’s 1889’s ‘Exposition Universelle’ where Gustave Eiffel had unveiled his Eiffel Tower, and where the United States had embarrassed itself with a particularly poor showing.

But that humiliating memory was to be erased, and many U.S. cities were vying for the honor to host the event. New York, even then the cosmopolitan and artistic capital of America was thought to be the front-runner. But Chicago was a fierce competitor, and to the surprise of many, won the rights to stage the Columbian Exposition.

Erik Larson includes minute details about the mind-boggling logistics that went into the planning and construction of the fair, where Americans were wonder-struck and entertained by such new fangled inventions as electric boats, Instant Pancake Mix, ‘Juicy Fruit’ gum, zippers, America’s first large-scale experiment with night-time illumination, and, George Washington Gale Ferris’s triumph of engineering – the Ferris Wheel.

Many men lent their creative genius and energy to make the Exposition’s success a reality. It could accurately be described as a harnessing of opposing egos, and conflicting artistic visions. The man put in charge of this daunting project was Daniel Hudson Burnham. The Fair came at a fascinating point in Chicago’s history, not long after the Great Fire, but before the infamy earned by Al Capone, who did his share to sear Chicago into our collective conscious. The Columbian Fair, nicknamed “The White City” encapsulated the city Chicago yearned to become – clean, dazzling, every bit the equal of it’s snooty Eastern neighbor, New York.

That Chicago had its ugly side is personified by the presence of H.H. Holmes whose presence pervades the book, and whose crimes shocked a city that was hardened even then. Holmes was America’s first celebrity serial killer, who exerted a vampire-like allure to his victims, who are still unnumbered. The fair brought other tragedies in its wake – many accidental deaths, a deadly fire, and a political murder. At its heart, the book is a story about the contrasting forces that propel some to build and create, and others to ruin and destroy.

The book is rich in detail and anecdotes. Larson recreates Chicago in our imagination as a gas-light illumined city fighting its smog, poverty, and vice; striving to become the White City of its dreams.

Emotional Intelligence - Why It Can Matter More Than I.Q.

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Rating: 3 & 1/2 Stars 



Though this is an earlier work than Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’, and could possibly have inspired the later book, each make a fascinating companion piece for the other.

In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman makes a persuasive argument for the forces other than I.Q. that shape success in life. His definition of emotional intelligence is complex and multi-layered: self-awareness, self-restraint, and self-mastery (not to be confused with suppression), when it comes to our own emotions; and, empathy in dealing with others’ feelings.

He offers a valid presentation for the need for applying emotional intelligence, be it in our personal life, the corporate world, or the medical field. If the case studies of the effect on children growing in a less than nurturing environment are sobering, then the effects of these children on society are truly terrifying.

The pivotal point of this book is that it’s never too late to be schooled in E.I., and more importantly, it’s never too early to start.

One might wonder if cash-strapped public schools and over-worked teachers can spare the resources needed to add this vital subject to the curriculum. The more important question would be, hasn’t our society procrastinated on this long enough? If the cost of imparting Emotional Intelligence is considered too high, inarguably the toll of emotional illiteracy is much higher.

As absorbing as I found this book, it has more than average density, and is probably an easier read for those who are already familiar with the basics of psychology and neuroscience. I found that the earlier part of the book tends to a staccato style of writing, with run-on sentences, lugging technical jargon in their wake. But that eases up later on, and he illustrates his arguments with compelling anecdotes that really drive the point home. Stick with this book till the end; it will be well worth your time.