🍃🌿🌱🐞 Stacy's Idea Garden 🐞🌱🌿🍃

This book was originally written in 1948, published for western audiences in 1973, amd them re-published as a bright-pink paperback in 2001 by New Directions Publishing. Thanks to it’s aesthetically interesting cover design, it became trendy on social media, so I read it while stuck in bed with COVID.

This book is really bad. It’s not boring, I definitely kept reading it, but the immaturity of the author is glaring. The male protagonist is laughably pathetic. He is rightfully shunned by society for taking advantage of every woman he’s ever met. He’s rightfully restricted by his guardians and carers because he shows such incredibly little care for all of the people around him. I have my faults, but could never imagine a person to have such a lack of introspection. It is unbelievable to me that it’s possible to make it into one’s 40s and still be as immature and stupid as the protagonist is.

I have nothing positive to say about neither the character nor the author. I hated reading reviews where young men were given this book by a young woman in their lives with the words “Yozo reminds me of you”. We should not glamourize modeling ourselves after destructive weakness like this.

For a similar exploration of being a social outcast and the way this effects you, or depression and depersonalization, I’d recommend any one of:

• The Bell Jar by Plath
• A Personal Matter by Oē
• Invisible Man by Ellison

Other reviewers describe this as being a “genuine portrayal of depression” and self-destructive behavior. Definitely not. I found the character to be somewhat like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, but without any drive or luxury or glamour. Yuza is a narcissist.

We don’t get to choose where we came from or what others do to us, but we always have some choice in the way we respond. I think that Yuza/Dazai both failed to respond adequately. At some point, a string of bad luck reveals a pattern of bad choices.

Review: 0/5 stars. Nothing about this story is worth telling. This isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read but it kind of comes close.

Before I picked up Walden, I read a bunch of critical reviews that said it was boring. I expected to disagree with these reviewers, but oh boy, they sure were correct!

Who likes this book? Anyone who is doing anything slightly different from what the rest of society does (maybe people who follow veganism, or really avowed anarchists, or anti-natalists). Broadly, I think people who like this probably have some strongly-held concept of moral cleanliness, and maybe believe goodness comes from making sacrifices to conform to this notion. “There can be no black melancholy in him who lives in the midst of nature” - really?

I’ve always thought that the most significant way in which Thoreau was different from others is that he was an abolitionist. I don’t think other unconventional opinions take nearly the same amount of moral courage, nor was his abolitionist stance discussed in Walden itself. For that reason, I find both Walden and it’s fans to be very underwhelming.

I read this book while I was alone in rural thailand. It really made me think about how, as a gainfully employed westerner, I have the same kind of broad social safety net that Thoreau had while living by Walden pond. It was a good reminder about what obnoxiousness looks like from the outside.

Review: 1/5 stars, I don’t understand what’s special about this

My apartment has a diversity lending library that’s maintained by our building superintendent, a black man. I pulled this off the shelf because it seemed to chose to analyze how individual people develop racial identity, in contrast to the more modern wave of culture-focused books. Whether this is the right level of abstraction is another question.

This book is focused on the way that young people develop a racial identity, specifically in the american context. Tatum injects anecdotes from her experiences as a psychologist everywhere - black kids sit together after (but not before) adolescence because at some point in adolescence race becomes an increasingly relevant factor in their experiences, and therefore a more significant part of their identities. White people are seen as something else first, while black people have to contend with being seen as black first. There is probably an increase in self-awareness and in-group bias around that age. I think that experiences with poverty play an increased role in self-segregation than Tatum suggests, but I’m not sure. This book was somewhat artificially scoped to some narrowly defined “middle class”.

There were definitely points in this book where I thought that the author’s interpretation of either internal or external circumstance was wildly out of scope. For example, at one point she describes an encounter with a young woman who awkwardly answers “I don’t know, I’m normal!” when asked what her ethnic identity is. Tatum goes on to describe how this comment reveals the normalization of the white race, and that whiteness is something white people don’t have to think about in the same way that black americans have to think about blackness. This may well be the case, but the examples brought up here were weak and took away from Tatum’s main point.

As an immigrant, I do not feel a sense of confusion about my own racial or ethnic identity, but I’m often read by other people the same way Tatum had read this woman. It’s easy to see parallels to modern discussion of gender - I’d expect that, to someone for whom gender is extremely important, a claim to normality would appear as ignorance. In fact, more often than not, it’s a rejection of the relevance of gender entirely. Similarly, asking this multi-generation american about the ethnicity to which she belongs seems absurd when the relevant factor is her status as a member of the white race.

She also mentioned in multiple places that a minority of her white students responded to her racial inequity class with a desire to preserve their advantage. This is a fringe position that wasn’t explored, but I wish it was. Certainly people who think this way have one of many possible concepts of whiteness, similar to how the black teenagers discussed each hold one of many concepts of blackness. I understand that this is a fringe opinion, but seemed fitting in a book about the psychology of racial identity. Second to complete ignorance, the attitude described by these students might be the most insidious one.

Besides this, I found Tatum’s work very insightful even when she paints with a very broad brush. One of the best chapters in the book discusses the experiences of trans-racial adoptees, and the difference that feeling a connection to their birth communities made in their lives. I wonder how identity development in a family of racially heterogenous adoptees compares to identity development in a family which is mixed race by marriage.

It would have been interesting to see more of the content being updated to reflect the increasing racial diversity of the united states. I’d have been interested in her ideas about how APAC identity development contrasts that of other ethnic groups. I’d have also been particularly interested in her comments on multi-racial families, being someone who intends to start one myself. In her discussion of hispanic families, she mentions the disadvantages faced by hispanic teens when they are instructed and evaluated in one language (english) while speaking another (spanish). A whole other book could be written about anglicization of education, language acquisition, and race.

Review: 4/5 stars, probably worth reading for most people

This book starts off very slow. If you’d ever had taken a course in systems theory (as I had during my ECE degree), it’s almost infuriatingly slow. Once you make it through the first couple chapters, though, it starts to pay off.

Thinking in Systems is an introductory text in systems theory, where Donella aims less to explain the finer details of systems theory and more to describe when it might be necessary to use a new style of thinking. She’s certainly right in that there exist multiple ways to interpret a problem, although this is an idea that many people who deal in more deterministic sciences have been taught to resist. By the end of the book I was no longer irritated with Donella for glossing over so many details, though - there was a great deal of new information in this book, and the level of abstraction she’d chosen was probably correct given the scope of the system theory’s supposed applicability.

There are still portions of the later half of the book that I wish I understood more about, one being the relevance of self-organization to the “leverage points” she discusses in the final chapters.

If I were to say something negative about this work, it would be that Donella never acknowledges that in each systems model presented in the book, there exists a value judgement as to what is important (what constitutes desirable system behaviour). It is only after making this value judgement that you choose which parameters are relevant to consider in the model. Given that Donella herself is interested in the dynamics of the depletion of natural resources, many examples focus on just that. It goes without saying that the this is only one interpretation about what is worth modeling about a system, and how we might go about evaluating a system’s behaviour.

I will likely read the book for which she is most famous, The Limits to Growth, by the end of the year.

Review: 3.75?/5 stars

I didn’t expect to like this book. Actually, I had to force myself to start reading it after renewing it from the library a week late. Once I got started, though, I couldn’t put it down. This review contains many spoilers.

No Man’s Land tells the story of generations (?) of people struggling to transcend their circumstances. Davey, the 14-year-old protagonist, is rescued from a battlefield and raised in a violent pillaging cult. She is characterized from the beginning as being an outsider to the group who dares to question those around her. She cannot leave the group because she has nowhere else to go.

The story starts with a long, violent prologue about a character named Will. While Davey is looking to understand how she ended up in the care of the cult, she doesn’t learn much about her biological family except through a tale told by the Reverend - the cult leader. It is well established by Vigna through Davey that the the cult leader does not tell the truth, though, so even if the prologue and his story might describe the same character and similar events, the reader can’t believe what the Reverend tells Davey. The story is gruesome, disturbing to read, and describes the life of a young boy who learns how to prostitute himself for money and the revenge he then seeks from his father. There are parallels that suggest that this boy grew up to be Davey’s father, but this is never confirmed. After the story is told, Davey meets the same character from the prologue, Will, and for some reason believes that he is her father although she’s got no reason for thinking this. The character Will dies shortly after being re-introduced.

There is a great deal of build-up to the reverand’s story, but everything that happens after feels misplaced. Neither Davey nor the reader find out who his story is about, nor how much is true. 100 pages in, there is an established cast of characters with confused relationships. Vigna has a habit of generating a great tension and then immediately and unceremoniously killing off the relevant characters.

While the story that this book tells is narratively interesting, Davey actually doesn’t change much at all for the remainder of the book. She starts out as a reluctant bystander to her carer’s crimes. She remains as such until the end. The woman who raises her, Bulah, starts off an accomplice to the reverand and remains so until the end. The other support characters who meet various fates do not go through great metamorphosis either. Even a prostitute, Laura Bell, who starts a tentatively hopeful family with an RCMP officer midway through the book, is once again a childless prostitute 26 years later when Davey encounters her in the epilogue. Maybe that is part of the point that Vigna is trying to get across - nothing and nobody really changes.

Other reviewers seem to think that the major themes of this book have to do with confronting religion and wrestling with questions of fate and self-determination. I am of two minds on this - on one hand, this book can be read as being about the strength of religious influcence over group behaviour. On the other hand, it repeatedly emphasizes the a-religiosity and amorality of the roaming group of reverend’s followers, and Davey and a few others are seen to consistently reject his influence. As a character who starts off being a reluctant accomplice, her eventual splintering from the group is not surprising or undexpected. She is there because she is 14 years old. The reasons for her developing her opposition to the leader are never mentioned or explored. The only arguments of fate are ones that come from the reverand, who is from the beginning established to be manipulative and unreliable. Of course Davey escapes the first chance she gets.

This book might have made more of an impact on someone who is more familiar with religion. Sometimes when reading fiction with religious undertones, I feel that there might be some hidden meaning that I’m missing.

Still, the story of a group of roaming pillagers surviving in frontier Canada left me feeling haunted.

Review: 4/5 stars

Running the Books is a memoir about Avi Steinberg’s stint as a prison librarian in Boston. I found this one in the non-fiction section of my local library, but it read more like a novel.

Since this is a memoir, it’s difficult to criticize it. It contains many disjoint narratives, some of which are dropped when Avi loses touch with the inmates. Other subplots are resolved as Avi grows with his job. A few points are mentioned but left mostly unexplored, like the way that Steinberg’s job effected his relationship with his girlfriend and wether or not they eventually got engaged. She is a real person, though, and not a character, so it makes a certain amount of sense that this particular plotline isn’t resolved by the end of the book.

I read this book on a whim and it delivered on it’s promise of being entertaining. If I’ve got one criticism, it’s that this book could have focused a bit more on the the library in the prison and a bit less on prison life. Sometimes it felt like I was watching reality TV through Steinberg’s edit.

I also read a lot of critical reviews of this book after I finished reading it. Many negative reviewers took issue with the author’s use of his Jewish upbringing and his relationships with and descriptions of inmates and correctional staff. I read it as being appropriately respectful and self-aware, but the book is a little bit “The Devil Wears Prada” sometimes. To some people, there is no respectful way for a person in a position of authority to discuss their relationship to the power structures of which they are a part.

Review: 4.5/5, it was funny, interesting, and very easy to read.

Coming in from just having finished the slightly-more-dense Turnaway Study (Foster), I expected to be reading a long-form review of the state of academic research and communication. Instead, I found this book refreshingly free-flowing and easy to read. It unexpectedly felt like I was having a casual conversation with the author rather than sitting down and putting in real mental effort into examining my worldview. However, despite some nods to the replicability crisis and the challenges of scientific communication in the introductory chapter, I found it to be relatively light on new information and opinions of potential solutions.

I expected that this book about “fad” social science ideas which become bad policy. To his credit, Singal spends a great deal of this book writing about how movements based on pleasant stories gain momentum, and how they succeed when researchers don’t have the right political or economic incentives to discredit them. He also spends time discussing the challenges of decision making for policy-makers, who often have incomplete information and therefore can’t discriminate between substantive and “fad” research. However, the chapters are very disjoint - Singal tells more or less the same story each chapter, and leaves the the broader takeaway open to interpretation.

For a book whose thesis criticizes the short, fast, TED-friendly style of glossing over important information, it’s ironic that in places it still does this itself. Singal spend pages of the book praising the careful methodologies of academics he will then later critique in some minor way, before admitting that he doesn’t fully understand some larger part of his target’s research. Singal’s message seems to be to approach extrapolating from limited experimental results with caution, and yet he himself appears to do so in the case of scrutinizing Kahneman, Thaler, and friends. I guess this is part of the paradox of the non-scientist scientific communicator and part of the problem that I hoped that this book would address.

Still, this book was fun to read. I experienced it as a series of disjoint case-studies in how innocent misinterpretation and over-extrapolation of results can and has ended up having dramatic influence over public policy (and therefore the lives of real people). I only wish Singal was not afraid to express his own opinions. Setting assize the topic of scientific communication, Singal spends a lot of his exposition criticizing not only the the marketing/commercialization of psychological research, but the fact of it’s application to policy at all. In Singal’s view, even if scientific communication was perfect and nobody ever sought to make a quick buck by overstating the effects of (say) power posing, applying results from experimental psychology to public policy would still result in ineffective policy interventions.

Singal seems to imply that extrapolating from (individual-based) psychological studies doesn’t address institutional problems, and we need to instead take a more sociological approach. This is the common progressive critique - we can’t understand individual behavior divorced from the institutions in which it’s situated. It is obviously more difficult to sell the idea of power-posing or grit development or implicit association tests to someone who believes that poor outcomes for lower classes are the results of multi-causal institutional, rather than individual, failures. This leaves open the question, then - if individual psychological interventions are ineffective (and prone to over-simplification), then exactly which institutional interventions does Singal propose as alternatives?

I know that Singal believes that effective institutional interventions come in the form of wealth redistribution and means-tested social programs, but these interventions aren’t discussed at length in this book. I would have enjoyed seeing a comparison between the outcomes and cost-efficacy of such (more sociological) interventions, compared to the costs of the failed (more individualistic or psychological) cases discussed in the book. My impression is that both approaches are similarly ineffective and would suffer from similar over-simplification and marketing issued brought up by Singal. I’m not sure which type of intervention is more costly. It would have been interesting if Quick Fix addressed these questions explicitly. Instead, it avoids proposing effective sociological interventions altogether, opting instead only to gesture to systemic change as the answer to the enumerated failures of individualized intervention.

To summarize: This book is series of case studies on failed policy interventions. They fail because they are attempts to apply results from psychology, which suffers from 1) Being prone to exaggeration, misleading commercialization efforts, and difficulties in replication 2) Producing individualistic interventions for systemic problems

Singal suggests that systemic interventions would be more effective but does not expand upon this.

Review: Very easy to read, 3/5 stars (+ for ease and entertainment, - for handwavy vagueness)