Book Reviews

Takeaway: Humans are very bad as understanding risk whenever risk becomes complicated.

The Science of Fear feels like a book that was written specifically for me.  It is filled with statistics, it has a good bit of sociology and psychology.  Its messages is overwhelmingly that we fear the wrong things, that humans as a whole are not all that good at evaluating risk, and that in the end it is very easy to manipulate people into fear.

That is not to say this is a perfect book.  Even for someone as stats obsessed as I am, this book was easily 75 pages too long.

The summary thesis is that we have a rational side and an emotional (gut) side.  The gut side is what takes over the majority of the time and only rarely does the rational side come up on top.

There are several psychological or behavioral economic principles that that make it hard for the rational side to hold the gut side at bay.  Gardner gives several examples: The Anchoring Rule (if you give a number or example even if completely unrelated to the topic, the listener will use that to anchor the evaluation), the Rule of Typical Things (basically if it sounds right it probably is right: chemicals are bad, rare things must be more dangerous, etc.) and The Example Rule (if you can see that anyone has had this happen to them, then it is probably more frequent than you know).  He also uses some of the more familiar principles of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance but focuses more on the behavior economics rather than the older psychological ideas.

So in an example on the fear of serious degenerative diseases from leaks in silicone breast implants you see how this works.  The example rule says that is a woman has breast implants and has a degenerative disease then they are probably connected.  But if there are a million women with implants and the particular degenerative disease occurs in the general population at 1 percent, then normally 10,000 women with implants should have that disease.  It requires large scale epidemiological studies to know if it is likely that the implants and the disease are related.  In this case they were not.  But the Rule of Typical things says that putting silicone in your body sounds like a bad idea, so it is probably the cause of the disease.

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Summary: A wonderfully unique young adult love story about a teen that wakes up in a different body every day. 

I love original ideas.  And Every Day by David Levithan is an original idea.  The main character, who has named himself “A”, wakes up every day in a different body.  Every day A has to figure out who he is and how to relate.  He has done this from his earliest memory.

Throughout the book A is male, female,a  depressed and suicidal girl, supermodel looking girl, illegal immigrant girl, overweight boy, drug addict, alcoholic, poor, rich, gay, straight, transgendered.  The book clearly is trying to deal with both identity and the way that others perceive you.

What really drives the story is that A falls in love.  And now he does everything he can to fine Rhiannon.  And Rhiannon has to get over the very large hurdle of never knowing who A is going to be, or where he is going to turn up or if a plan that they make will work out.

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Summary: A 13 episode serial audiobook (or kindle book) from John Scalzi set in the Old Man’s War universe.

Publishers and authors will never stop experimenting, in part because the technology will never stop changing.

Over the past few years Stephen King tried a pay as you go serial (he never finished the book).  Thomas Nelson tried giving away a digital copy of the book with every hardcover copy sold (they phased it out).  Cory Doctorow gives away his digital copies of his books and relied on paper sales to make money (he now allows you go buy ebooks).  Baen had a large number of free ebooks that were designed to get you hooked and then buy the later books in a series (the free ebooks still exist, but are a fraction of the original list).  Baen also tried to created a store outside the major ebook stores and kept their ebooks for sale only at their site (they are now available on Amazon and all the other major ebook stores.)

There have been many more experiments than this.  But this is a good overview to show that most experiments fail, but some stick.  A lot of people only 5 years ago were predicting Amazon Kindle would fail.  It is still the dominant ebook store.  The iPad has changed the face of computing.  Smartphones are going to be the most common way to access the internet soon.

John Scalzi is experimenting with the serial format.  These are only available on digital formats, Audible.com Audiobook or Amazon Kindle ebook.  The first chapter is available for free in audiobook, but is only $0.99 in either format at full price.

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It is not a surprise to anyone that reads this blog regularly that I enjoy reading.  It is one of my favorite ways to relax, think and process.  So this past long weekend my wife and I and the extended family went up to my mother-in-law’s cabin.  Over the weekend I read three novels, a Kindle short and parts of two more non-fiction books.

My tendency is to review every book I read.  But I decided there was nothing in particular that either recommended the two trashy novels that I read, nor a good reason to discourage the reading of the particular books.  So I am going to just give some thoughts on the reading of trashy novels.  If you are really interested I read these two. (Yes there is a content warning.)

Unrealistic Expectations

One of the biggest, and legitimate complaints about trashy novels is that they set up unrealistic expectations about life.  They are filled with incredibly rich, incredibly beautiful people who seem to have lots of time.  In the real world there are not a lot of 28 year old self made billionaires, but they seem to pop up pretty frequently in novels.

Even in romance books that are not filled with explicit sex, there is an insinuation that the people of these novels do little other than have sex.  Even the novels tend to make fun of the amount of sex these people have.  But the problem is that often it is the sex that seems to define the relationship instead of the relationship building a safe place for sex.

We are all adults, we get this intellectually, but in the real world, just become you love them, and even if you are married, it is not a guarantee of great sex.  I think Christians teaching plays into this just as much, and maybe more than the trashy novels.  If you grew up in the Evangelical world you were told, probably a lot, that if you waited your wedding night you would have mind blowing sex (probably in those exact words.)  If you have not figured it out yet, it is a lie.  Even if you have good sex now, you will at some point have issues.

The Hero

One of the thing I like about reading trashy novels (although it is probably equally unrealistic) is that there usually is a hero, maybe more than one.  For all of the sex, language and violence, most of the time the story is pretty traditional.  There is a person or a group of people in trouble and someone is going to save them.  One of the seemingly missed themes about the 50 Shades of Grey books last year (Bookwi.se reviewed 1, 2 and 3), was the redemption of Christian Grey by the end of the third book.  Anastasia was the hero and saved Christian by her love of him.  Christian was a more traditional hero and saved Ana from a murderer.  Both people acted as a hero.  Similarly in the books that I read this weekend, both members of the couple had horrible abusive pasts.   In the end the love from the other (eventually unconditional and real) brought about healing.

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Summary: Augustine is very important to the the history of Christian thought and often misappropriated by all sides.

Augustine is not my favorite Christian thinker.  I know this is partially because he is not incredibly accessible.  And partially because I have not read that much of him, and there is a lot to read.

I read his Confessions in grad school.  And I have read bits and pieces since.  Chadwick says that is part of the problem with Augustine.  Because Augustine wrote a lot, more than virtually any other of the church fathers prior to middle ages (or at least we have more of his writing than anyone else), there is a lot of material to mine for Augustine’s support of your favorite theological point.

There are three main points that I got out of this introduction.  One, I have heard frequently that Augustine was anti-women.  There is a lot of evidence to marshal for that position, but Chadwick says that Augustine was not anti-women, he was anti-sex.  And much of his anti-sex position was really about the fact that he was concerned about his own weaknesses rather than being against sex as a whole.  Augustine for a while advocated that pastors live apart from their wives in celibate community.  This was not all that popular among the pastors he supervised. (Although it was part of the movement toward celibate priest.)

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