Maybe repetitive as I've posted about some of these previously, but here's my list and brief comments:

                NONFICTION



The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow


   What if we ask ourselves how we come to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? This is my paraphrasing of the authors’ simple yet provocative question, the one that motivates David Graeber and David Wengrow’s synthesis of decades of accumulating knowledge in anthropology and archeology. The sheer efficiency of that question pleases me, as I labored in deep concentration over a richly documented synthesis of a body of work. Surely no one person could possibly be expert in the fullness of this material. The back matter - endnotes, index and bibliography - of this encyclopedic work are fully 30% of that of the text. And as I read, rapt and consumed by topics that have driven me for much of my life, I wrestled with doubt that I could convey the essence of a book of such scale in short form like this.

   If there is one essential thing to glean from the authors’ ten year effort, it is this: without knowing it, we have all been subject to a basic story about the last some 30,000 years of human history. Roughly this is a story about original small bands of human beings; the advent of sedentism and agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution; the rise of cities and empires; and the growth and complexification that bring about the political structures and social control requisite for large scale human societies. It is Graeber and Wengrow’s project to demonstrate that this conventional account - to use their schema - is wrong, is boring and comes with dire political implications. It is a myth that dates largely to the Enlightenment. In abandoning it we can begin to consider other narratives of human history. Not only are alternative social arrangements abundant historically, but the accumulating evidence offered by new scientific tools and the research of recent decades allow us to see an ossified false narrative. Actual human societies are far more varied and quirky, and far less limited than we need or should believe. Given that unchained history, future human societies may achieve far more freedom and variety than we tend to assume.

   Any attempt to convey the evidence and even the full arguments presented would occupy a substantial fraction of the 526 pages the authors took. So I will offer a few ideas and examples from the book. I highly recommend exploring the entire synthesis.

   The only possibility in this account is to oversimplify. The authors see the Enlightenment narrative stemming from the work of Jean-Jaques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, whose nearly opposite accounts of history have been elaborated and reified over four centuries. In brief, for Rousseau, we began in freedom and only in settling into organized societies did we arrive at the current state of restriction and inequality, as humans “ran headlong to meet their chains”. For Hobbes, the original “state of nature” was notoriously “nasty, brutish and short”, and only by voluntarily surrendering to a central authority did people establish a “social contract” that protected them from the predations and misery of human life in its “uncivilized” state. Graeber and Wengrow argue that both narratives are wrong, and contributed to the emergence of views of human social arrangements that limit us intellectually, politically and socially.

   For a practical illustration, consider the tendency toward explanations of human arrangements that suit our preexisting beliefs. For example, for centuries there have been people arguing for the existence of some kind of proto-economy or “primitive trade” very early in human history, based on the discovery of materials, precious stones, shells, etc. found hundreds or even thousands of miles from their original sources. However there are many other explanations for this distant dispersal. To share only one example, it is now understood that in many indigenous North American societies, women would play gambling games. Often they bet shells or other objects of personal adornment. One well known ethnographer estimates that many of the shells and other exotic materials found far across the continent arrived by the nonintuitive means of repeated wagering over a long period of time. This example not only indicates something of the explanatory limitations of motivated or biased conjecture, but shows the failure to account for the sheer wackiness - the authors use the word “quirky” - of human behavior, and how hard it is to anticipate its myriad forms.

   One of the strengths of The Dawn of Everything is its ability to present familiar accounts of history whose faulty logic, upon exposure, can readily be seen. For example (and others have delved deeply into this area), they suggest that the role of foragers in the construct of the “Agricultural Revolution” is to stand for everything that farming is not, in order to help explain what farming and the agricultural life is. “If farmers are sedentary, foragers must be mobile; if farmers actively produce food, foragers must merely collect it; if farmers have private property, foragers must renounce it; and if farming societies are unequal, this is by contrast with the ‘innate’ egalitarianism of foragers. Finally, if any particular group of foragers should happen to possess any features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be ‘incipient’, ‘emergent’ or deviant in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to ‘evolve’ into farmers, or eventual to wither and die.” We see how the prevailing concepts have defined our viewpoint, regardless of their reality.

   Graeber and Wengrow review the evidence refuting that agriculture was adopted once humans learned its methods. Rather, many groups were uninterested, seeing it as unnecessary, even while understanding both the techniques involved and the attendant labor costs. It was adopted and rejected many times in many places, and there was apparently nothing inevitable about groups choosing to farm. Many other societies found ways to cultivate with minimal human involvement. And there is Richard Lee’s famous account of his discussion with an anonymous Bushman, who when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”

   Such is the flavor of the book. In miniature and abbreviation.

   This is a provocative and important book. One of its brilliancies is that any particular claim or example can be questioned without altering the fundamental point. Some have objected to the characterization of Rousseau’s thinking. Others have challenged the notion of a Native American “Indigenous Critique” that influenced Enlightenment thinking. And so on. Such critiques, however regarded, alter little if at all the fundamental claim here. It is hard to imagine marshaling any evidence or material of this breadth and volume without eliciting objections among some. And even harder to reject the fundamental insight that, despite one’s doubts about certain particulars, humans have lived within an exceptional range of social choices and arrangements over a vast period of time. In this, the authors are incisive and persuasive. I find this point of view truthful and exhilarating!

   So what if we ask ourselves how we come to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? Graeber and Wengrow have rendered a liberating service: the invitation to regard ourselves and our history more clearly, with less bias. We see more clearly who we have been and who we are. Optimistically, with such awareness we envision future human life with greater freedom. And who couldn’t use an extra dollop of optimism right now?




     Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
    by Oliver Burkeman


   How long is the average human lifespan? See title. Not very long, even for the longest-lived.

   There is almost nothing unfamiliar in Four Thousand Weeks. It reformats wisdom all of us have surely heard before. And yet I would love to meet the enlightened being who couldn’t benefit from this liberating book. Perhaps this is true of all wisdom. The task isn’t so much to assimilate the radically new; it’s how not to forget.

   Time management traditionally helps overly busy people to become more efficient in getting stuff done. Organize, prioritize, eliminate distraction, improve focus. Burkeman has done us the service of writing a time management book whose central suggestion is that instead of trying to get more done, we ought to acknowledge the reality: we will never get done even a fraction of  what we consider worth doing. We are finite creatures. The brevity of life is almost an absurdity. Time is the currency of our lives. All the frenetic energy spent trying to accomplish a minute portion of what is worth doing would be better spent in greater balance with the sense of wonder and gratitude that we exist at all.

   We know this. We find elements of it in diverse cultural and spiritual traditions. Edward Young, writing in the eighteenth century, memorably wrote: “All men think all men mortal but themselves.” Marcus Aurelius’ admonished in the second century CE: “Don’t behave as if you are destined to live forever. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good. Now.” Earlier still came the Buddhist insight that all we have is the present moment.

   Efficiency will never empty our inboxes. The decks cannot be cleared. The mistake is in pretending otherwise. The good news, Burkeman suggests, is that we can admit defeat, and move on with living within what’s gloriously attainable. This way lies what freedom is humanly possible.




The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis
and
Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic by Scott Gottlieb


   It was with a sense of kindred familiarity that I opened Michael Lewis’ new book The Premonition, subtitled A Pandemic Story. Lewis is among the distinguished contemporary writers of narrative nonfiction, and the dust jacket blurb suggested a story close to my own experience. A group of rogue experts saw the COVID-19 pandemic coming before most did, including those tasked with the job. This sounded like The Pandemic Meets The Big Short - the latter Lewis’ fascinating and famous story of those in the financial world who saw what few others did during the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2008. While I was oblivious to that coming financial crisis, I too recoiled at the inevitability of a catastrophic pandemic in January of 2020. I have written about this elsewhere (https://www.meetinghousemag.org/stories/pandemic). As an observer versed but non-expert in emerging viral threats, I was eager to read about the foresight of savants.

   The Premonition invites us into the thinking of some brilliant outside-the-box thinkers. These doctors, public health officials, and administrators understood early on the threat we in the US faced, and were in a position to try to take some action. But propelled by Lewis’ characteristically irresistible storytelling, it turns out that in the most meaningful sense, these accounts are the mere scaffolding for a far darker and more urgent revelation. Because if I knew by mid-January 2020 that we were facing no less than a viral disaster, why was the country so ill-prepared? Where was the testing, the messaging, the preparation of the public for what would need to be done? Where was the truth-telling that would bring us together for the necessary NPIs - non-pharmaceutical Interventions - that would buy time, slow the spread, and prevent the hundreds of thousands of deaths that would otherwise occur before a vaccine could protect us?

   That is the real message of The Premonition. At multiple levels, the institutions and leaders who could have made a difference failed the people they were charged with protecting. The politicization and culture of the CDC - despite its continued capacity to produce world class academic research - meant suppression of the truth, unreadiness for testing or necessary medical supplies, a craven obedience to an incompetent Administration primarily concerned with the next election, and not to put too fine a point on it, gross negligence.

   We may have thought we had a functioning public health system. But the pandemic revealed the shocking absence of such a cohesive arrangement. Instead, early on what constituted public health amounted to a balkanized set of sometimes dedicated but always local offices. In most cases, individual officials in local public health leadership waited for advice from on high that never came. In January and February 2020, the truth was actively suppressed. That the virus was already spreading within the US was not a mystery to the Administration or to its leading health officials. Federal and many state leaders calculated that keeping the public in the dark was a better policy than entrusting them with the information that might have enabled them to protect themselves. Those within the health system who understood the reality found themselves silenced and shuttled to the side, or simply ignored.

   The protagonists in Lewis’ telling deserve a medal, but no doubt they would say they were just trying to do their jobs. This is an eye-opening book. It’s an intelligent page-turner with a mission. If we are to be better prepared for the next one, we had better be clear about two matters: what went wrong, and the perilous, regrettable condition of our public health institutions. Oh, and I’ll add one more thing. Can we deeply acknowledge the hazard that the next time may be much worse?

   Which brings us to Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread, which I pair with Lewis’ book. Note the subtitle: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic. I don’t want to be too hard on Gottlieb, Commissioner of the FDA during the Trump administration from 2017-2019. His constructive aim is to use what we learned during COVID-19 to outline steps that might prevent or mitigate the next pandemic. This is a noble goal, especially given that however much we may wish it were otherwise, that monstrosity is necessarily coming. Gottlieb dutifully relates his particular account of the failings of the system, all familiar and fair.

   His account stands not fundamentally in the service of history. For Gottlieb, the disaster animates a series of practical proposals, ideas widely held within the mainstream virology and public health communities. These are important and necessary suggestions which deserve a broad and visible hearing: viewing health and emerging diseases as a national security issue (global, right Dr Gottlieb?); creating and funding permanent reserves in our capacity for the production of health supplies, including equipment and testing capability; improving surveillance including the use of cutting edge genomic tools to do so. Lastly, expecting that international cooperation in early reporting may be limited, given the disincentives involved.

   But Uncontrolled Spread is unsurprisingly restrained and understated when it comes to the CDC and its shortcomings. The introduction explicitly states this is not a book about politics. Gottlieb argues that many of the same systems failures would have occurred no matter who was in charge. Possibly, though a partial truth at best. I will not recount Trump’s many actions and statements, public and private, that contest this interpretation. I can’t help but wonder whether Gottlieb is still so involved in the political world of US public health that he is unwilling to be too harsh on colleagues or former colleagues. The same might be said for his careful language regarding the handling of the pandemic by the Trump Administration. In contrast he fervently holds China’s feet to the fire for their delay in full early disclosure, even as US intelligence nonetheless warned the Administration of a worrisome outbreak in China as early as November 2019. And even as the protagonists of The Premonition were able to calculate with remarkable precision the coming events in January 2020 from public sources alone.

   There will no doubt be a wave of attempts to reckon with what just happened to the US and the world as we emerge from the worst pandemic in a hundred years. The two books I have paired here crystalize an essential piece of what that reckoning requires. What good are policy recommendations without a direct and open assessment of the failures that such recommendations aim to correct? Without clearly confronting the failures and malfeasance in the national response, policy blandly lacks the requisite sense of urgency and incisiveness.

   We ought to start by acknowledging the unmitigated disaster that might have been reduced. How many of the more than one million direct deaths, losses that will weigh forever on loved ones and on the nation, might have been avoided with a conscientious and vigilant response?

   Uncontrolled Spread falls short in assessing responsibility. In fairness, it is a constructive book that tries hard not to offend. But offense should be the least concern in favor of honesty, and Gottlieb misses major parts of the failing. Generously, it’s a first attempt at transforming the global tragedy of COVID-19 into actionable measures for better protecting the country and the planet from the inevitable. In that sense, it’s a thoughtful and useful effort. Let us hope we remember our history and take action, rather than adopting the usual strategy of being destined to repeat it.



                    Fiction



          When We Cease to Understand the World
                        by Benjamin Labatut


   Wow. Many books are great, some are even works of genius. But I don’t remember ever before feeling that a book is unique in its essence, in its very construction. This one is. To paraphrase Philip Pullman’s cover blurb, it feels like Labatut has invented a new genre. This work cleverly and almost diabolically blends fact and interpretation, fiction and nonfiction, in a way that is delightful and unsettling. There is a frisson of discomfort to read a reliable account of people well known to you, mostly famous and important scientists, to trust an author’s impeccable research, only to have the hairs on the back of your neck rise as you realize that the narrative has shifted into an account that didn’t take place. Or only might have taken place, so that you find yourself in the realm of neither fact nor fiction. You have been subtly taken in by a shrewd and unreliable narrator, one who is working to his own mysterious purposes.

   What makes this book the richer, is that while no knowledge of the characters is required, the more you know about them, the deeper the mysteries. I have spent much time with many of the principals, as the intellectual revolution of 20th century physics has always fascinated me. Einstein of course, though he is mostly a silent partner here. Haber, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, de Broglie, Bohr: these are more than heroes to me. They are the authors of one of the greatest intellectual accomplishments of humankind: the quantum revolution and quantum mechanics. A beautiful theory which yields correct results without fail. And which many would describe as inscrutable and incapable of being fully understood outside of the math.

   So to put Labatut’s methods under the microscope, in a way that will spoil nothing, Fritz Haber invented the chemical warfare that introduced a heinous new method of killing during WWI. Days after its first use, his wife Clara died by suicide. One possibility historians have entertained is that the motive was her revulsion at what her husband had created. But there was no note, and the matter remains unresolved. In Labatut’s telling, Clara accuses Haber of perverting science and killing on a massive scale, and she shoots herself in the chest. Apart from the curious conviction of the narrator, Labatut here has done something fascinating yet subtle. He has taken one possibility, and by observing it, reified it. In this version, we observe their argument, and one of many possibilities is made concrete: we now have a result. In a parallel to quantum physics, a result remains in a state of possibility until observed, at which time it assumes definite characteristics. Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive until the box is opened. Once examined, Clara kills herself because of Haber. Brilliant, and yet the reader must work to see the parallel.

   The title: When We Cease to Understand the World. What are we to make of this? Clearly quantum mechanics is the manifest topic. Perhaps the most entrenched, unassailable theory in science, and yet not understood in human terms. But Labatut has something more in mind. Like elementary particles, the very “ceasing to understand" itself has a host of possible manifestations. We know things but are ignorant of their ultimate consequences. We derive formulae but can’t follow our logic in doing so. We don’t understand our own cognitive processes in reaching conclusions. Some claim to understand things that no one else can follow, in a triumph of subjectivity. The consequences are personal and painful, not only theoretical and philosophical. Something has been lost, something that Labatut sketches out gracefully through compelling vignettes. We are disconnected from ourselves, forsaking our human way of perceiving ourselves and our environment.

   Labatut has written a beautiful book. His research is impeccable. There is a longing here for a time when the world was more comprehensible. Where is the acknowledgment of our changed relationship to what and how we understand? How effectively and elegantly he expresses his lament - almost paralleling the process of the creators of quantum theory! I feel astonished at his creation of a form in which to do so. This is a work of art, and an achievement to be reckoned with.



                    

                Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer



This book mesmerized me. The challenge is to say anything about the actual book, as any thoughtful statement requires qualification, in particular an acknowledgement that any definite interpretation is provisional. Every deliberate word augments the literary realization of the unique ecosystem in which the protagonist - if it is in fact proper to call her that - finds herself or is entangled in or is altered by or voluntarily chooses. You begin to see my point.

A concise summary will suffice: A biologist is part of an expedition to mysterious Area X, a region where an inexplicable and different living environment has taken hold. Is this ecosystem of terrestrial origin? What is its nature?

What is more helpful, probably, is reaction. I was suffused with unease, a sense of the sublime, with perfection, beauty and terror all together. I'm reminded of some of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.

Annihilation takes you on a ride from page one. I can’t do better than Warren Ellis’ succinct blurb: “Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent.” Indeed. This is a masterful work. It’s not casual reading, and not only because it would be a pity to skim through the purposive telling and the fitting language of the narrative voice. This is a book that leads the reader into mystery and perplexity, beyond well rewarded. One needs to puzzle out with effort the uncertainties and subtleties of this realm. It is that pressing imperative that makes the reader feel as if they are personally exploring this confounding place.