Jeffrey Kluger's "The Sibling Effect"

This book is an interesting mix of science reporting and autobiography. His topic is birth order and the effects that siblings have on each other. He uses is own quite interesting family to spice up the story with personal details. I found that fascinating.

The book will acquaint you with the major results on the biological and sociological effects of siblings on each other. It looks at genetics, sex, gender, birth order, and a bit of cultural history. It nicely mixes this up with a survey that runs through Kluger's life but nicely separates out issues chapter by chapter.

Here is a bit where Kluger is being grandly philosophical:

I may have been lucky in the siblings I got, and all six of us may have been lucky in the way we were able to parlay the challenges we faced into greater closeness and loyalty, as opposed to greater distance. But if there's anything my research and my own history have taught me, it's that in the overwhelming share of cases, our relationships with our siblings -- whether easy and loving or fraught and factious -- deserve all the care, tending, and watering we can give them. Nature, after all, plays for keeps. Any human life will have more than its share of pains and grief -- and it will end in death no matter what. And yet the life of anyone with a sibling begins with a sidekick and traveling companion who can be with you the entire way. Wasting that relationship is folly of the first order. It's true when we're kids, it's true when we're adults, and it's surely true when we're aging and alone. To the extent that this book has a mission, it's to argue for the sibling ideal -- and for better understanding and preserving those bonds.

I would recommend this as a fun and educational read for everyone.

I've previously reviewed his book Simplexity which was a much more serious review of science. This book doesn't put the demands on you for any real interest in science. You can read this book as a light "biography" with some interesting scientific bits thrown in. It is very entertaining, not in a purely "ha ha" way, but as an insightful look into relationships and family dynamics that I find engrossing. The book will lead you to some "aha!" moments.

James Buchan's "The Authentic Adam Smith"

If you like chatty erudite biographies, this book is for you. There is no breathtaking insight into Adam Smith, but you do get a gritty feel for the man and his times in this concise little book. There is a lot of name dropping and the kind of intellectual history where you find who knew who and who talked to who and what ideas they exchanged.

To get a taste of the book's style, here is a bit from the introduction that nicely exhibits the pretentious ignorance of Alan Greenspan the infamous head of the US Federal Reserve system:

In his seventeen years as governor of the US central bank, Chairman Greenspan had become famous for impenetrable or Delphic sayings, but in Kirkcaldy he was clear. He said that Adam Smith was 'a towering contributor to the development of the modern world' for his 'demonstration of the inherent stability and growth of what we now term free-market capitalism'. This stability and growth arises, Greenspan said, in a principle discovered by Smith and called the 'invisible hand'.

'One could hardly imagine,' Greenspan said, 'that today's awesome array of international transactions would produce the relative economic stability that we experience daily if they were not led by some international version of Smith's invisible hand.'

Couldn't one?

The phrase 'invisible hand' occurs three times in the million-odd words of Adam Smith's that have come down to us, and on not one of those occasions does it have anything to do with free-market capitalism or awesome international transactions. One could with better justice claim that Moll Flanders, a resourceful whore in the fiction of Daniel Defoe who also uses the phrase 'invisible hand', is another towering contributor to the stability of international markets.

From that you get a sense of the meticulous pedantry of Buchan and his joy in using his deep knowledge of Adam Smith to put down those who claim a knowledge of Smith without doing the hard work. It is clear that Buchan has no love for the right wing ideologues who have taken possession of Smith as an icon of "free trade" and "laissez faire". As Buchan so skillfully shows, this is not the historic Smith nor is this what his famous writings justify. But this won't stop the ideologues from abusing poor Adam Smith.

Buchan's book fills a gap in understanding the complexities of Smith by discussing his first great book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is the foundation which helps the reader understand his second great book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. But right wing ideologues remain blissfully ignorant of the first book because they want to "adapt" ideas from the second that fits their fancy whether it corresponds to Smith's actual beliefs or the text of the book. This book is a good antidote by giving you a short introduction to the breadth of Adam Smith's ideas.

Finally, here's another bit from Buchan's book which will give you a real insight into Adam Smith and his ideas:

'Political economy,' Smith writes, 'considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the publick services.' In the next sentence, he prescribes the panacea of every Scots financier and charlatan since John Law of Lauriston had won over the French Regency to paper money in 1715:'It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.'

How was it that the world had gained in prosperity? How was it as Voltaire had put it, that it cost little more to live in comfort under Louis XV in the eighteenth century than in discomfort under Henri IV in the sixteenth? 'The poor labourer,' Smith said in his lecture of 29 March 1763, 'bears on his shoulders the whole of mankind, and unable to sustain the load is buried by the weight of it and thrust down into the lowest part of the earth, from whence he supports all the rest. In what manner then shall we account for the great share he and the lowest of the people hav of the conveniencies of life.'

The answer is not the silver of Peru, nor the wisdom of the sovereign nor the discoveries of philosophers, but an instinctive form of industrial organisation: 'The division of labour amongst different hands can alone account for this.'

This is a delightful book. It won't teach you much economics, but it will entertain you and help you appreciate Adam Smith and the wonderful intellectual world of Edinburgh in the late 18th century.

Augusten Burroughs' "You Better Not Cry"

This is yet another delightful book by Augusten Burroughs. I first picked up his Running with Scissors because I had read his brother's book Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Aspergers. That was an interesting read, but not interesting and entertaining like his brother, Augusten Burroughs.

The two come from a dysfunctional family and reading their books is a Roshomon-type experience, i.e. the same event seen from a different perspective. Very interesting.

This latest book by Bourroughs is an enjoyable collection of short stories related only by the theme of Christmas. They are bitter-sweet funny. They continue the dance-of-many-veils as Burroughs lets you see aspects of his life. He comes across as plagued with problems, but in reality he has managed to make his way through life and is a successful author. His stories are self-centred but wonderfully comic. My favourite story is "Why Do You Reward Me Thus?" with his encounter with Shirley, a down-and-out druggie with the golden voice of an opera singer. The story has the wonderful feel of backing into the unknown with a dash of wholesome human redemption. Very nice.

If you want some light entertainment with a twist, Augusten Burroughs is your man. But -- be warned -- he dances on a precipice. Only if you are able to handle the more bizarre aspects of human existence, will you find this book satisfying.

Death Becomes Him

Sadly, Christopher Hitchen is dying of cancer. The title may seem flip and immoderate, but it is meant as praise. I'm glad to see him going down gallantly, flying the flags high, and hanging on to his credo.

The following is a video clip of an interview done by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine:



The above interview is interesting but unsatisfying. It is too focused on death and religion. Here's a much more sympathetic treatment of Hitchens by himself in an article for Vanity Fair where he talks about his condition.

Here's an article in The Independent newspaper talking about his situation.

Here is a link to my discussion of his latest book Hitch-22.

Enlightenment and Tolerance

Here is a bit from an article by Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker magazine that reviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali's latest book Nomad. I find this interesting because Hirsi Ali thinks she is following the Enlightenment with its tolerance, but she isn't. She draws the line with at compromising with the Muslim religion that blighted her youth:

“Nomad” is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers. Neither will her recent support for the proposed French ban on face veils and the Swiss referendum outlawing minarets. In denouncing Islam unreservedly, she has claimed a precedent in Voltaire—though the eighteenth-century scourge of the Catholic Church might have been perplexed by her proposal that Muslims embrace the “Christianity of love and tolerance.” In another respect, however, the invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realize. Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe’s religious minority: the Jews, who, he declared, “are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts,” who had “surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism,” and who “deserve to be punished.” Voltaire’s denunciations remind us that the Enlightenment was a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than the dawn of reason and freedom that Hirsi Ali evokes. Many followed Voltaire in viewing the Jews as backward, an Oriental abscess in the heart of Europe. Hirsi Ali, recording her horror of ghettoized Muslim life in Whitechapel, seems unaware of the similarly contemptuous accounts of Jewish refugees who made the East End of London their home after fleeing the pogrom.

This bit gives you a better taste of what the book offers:

Hirsi Ali, who renounced Islam in her thirties, speaks from experience of bigotry and intolerance among her former co-religionists: she was genitally mutilated as a child in Somalia, briefly radicalized by a preacher of jihad in Kenya, nearly forced into a marriage, threatened with death in the Netherlands by the Muslim assassin of her collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and is still hounded by murderous fanatics in her new home, America. In her latest book, “Nomad: From Islam to America” (Free Press; $27), she reminds her readers of the West’s tradition of intellectual revolt against clerical tyranny and warns of the insidious, intransigent enemies in their midst. “The Muslim mind today seems to be in the grip of jihad,” she writes.

She is not hopeful that Americans will heed her warning. Her initial job interviews in the United States were discouraging: the Brookings Institution, she writes, worried that she might offend Arab Muslims. (The conservative American Enterprise Institute, however, immediately appointed her as a fellow.) On college campuses, Muslim students accuse her of wanting to “trash” Islam, while Western feminists, convinced that white men are “the ultimate and only oppressors,” lack the “courage or clarity of vision” to help her knock down the mental “hovels” of the East. Pointing to Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murderous rampage in Texas, last November, she deplores the “conspiracy to ignore the religious motivation for these killings” in America.

Muslims today, Hirsi Ali believes, must be forced to choose between the darkness of Islam and the light of the modern secular West. In her new book, which bears the additional subtitle “A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations,” she takes an uncompromising line with her own relatives, who remain faithful to their benighted religion.

I've yet to read this book, but I did read her book Infidel and enjoyed it immensely. It was an interesting peek into East Africa, the Muslim religion, Dutch society, and the travails of her coming to grips with Western culture, especially the Enlightenment and its values.

This reviewer pushes back against Hirsi Ali's thesis. There are elements of truth in his claim that she has a particularly narrow view of Islam. But I find his claims to "diversity" in Muslim countries to be hollow. Yes, there is a faint tint. But in this paragraphy Pankaj Mishra works overtime to paint too rosy a picture of diversity and tolerance. Sure there is a bit. But the reality of life for 90% of the population matches Hirsi Ali's characterization and maybe 10% achieves the following "enlightenment":

Islamic fundamentalist groups have long terrorized many Muslim countries, especially those, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, that were ravaged by blowback from the Cold War and the war on terror. These extremists, who now assault the West as well, have always lacked popular support within their own countries. The anarchic vivacity of contemporary Muslim societies—featuring such figures as Ali Saleem, Pakistan’s cross-dressing television host, and Cairo’s hijab-wearing sex therapist Heba Kotb, whose talk show is beamed across the Arab world—does not quite match Hirsi Ali’s description of an incurably medieval people busy devising ever-harsher laws for themselves while plotting mayhem for the infidels. In recent years, Islamist movements, led or assisted by women activists, have helped democratize Indonesia and Turkey; innumerable Muslims, such as Asma Jahangir, in Pakistan, and Shirin Ebadi, in Iran, fight to defend the rights of women against both Islamic fundamentalists and secular autocrats.

Christopher Hitchens' "Hitch-22"

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It was much more enjoyable that I would have expected. In the past I found a lot of Hitchens' writings to be strident and tedious. But I thoroughly enjoyed his "God is Not Great" and I found "Hitch-22" to be an interesting and enjoyable read.

The books is a very honest look at himself. I don't know enough to claim to be assured of its absolute veracity, but he shows a willingness to be critical about all around him as well as himself. He's willing to admit failings and shortcomings. We all have them, but many refuse to admit to them. This peek into his private life makes reading his other writings much more enjoyable. I now have a linchpin by which to grapple with those other writings.

Here are some bits I especially enjoyed:

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics.

Here he takes on Noam Chomsky and the "Left" and its "stance" on 9/11:

Anyway, I didn't have long to wait for my worst fears about the Left to prove correct. Comparing Al Quaeda's use of stolen airplanes with President Clinton's certainly atrocious use of cruise missiles against Sudan three years before (Which were at least ostensibly directed at Al Quaeda targets), Noam Chomsky found the moral balance to be approximately even, with the United States at perhaps a slight disadvantage. He also described the potential civilian casualties of an American counterstroke in Afghanistan as amounting to a "silent genocide."

If you want a tour through the last 50 years, especially sensitive to the key political events of those years, this is a very good book. It covers Hitchens's life experience, his political causes, and his enthusiasms for literature and his literate friends.

I especially enjoyed the chapter near the end of the book where he discovered that his mother was Jewish and had kept that from his children. He then talks about his stance towards Judaism, Israel, and the Palestinians. It is a complicated story, but told honestly. I especially enjoyed how he points out that his friend Edward Said, a Palestinian Christian, was fundamentally dishonest and their relationship soured at the end.

Between this book and "God is Not Great", I feel I now know Christopher Hitchens. I can now forgive must of what I took to be boringly strident political writings. The guy's heart is in the right place even if he is a bit of a fanatic and bore with his politics. He certainly has lived an interesting and exciting and apparently very rich life.

Update 2010aug05: Vanity Fair has an article by Christopher Hitchens about his cancer. It has metastisized from esophogus to lymph and lung. Sad news.

How the World Works, 1930s Version

Here is a bit from a reminiscence by Charles Hirshberg, son of Joan Feynman, sister of Richard Feynman. I find this interesting because it recalls the historical fact that women were much more limited in career choices until "the culture wars" of the 1960s led to a new wave of feminism that final broke the stranglehold male dominance of academia and technical careers:

One night, he roused her from her bed and led her outside, down the street, and onto a nearby golf course. He pointed out washes of magnificent light that were streaking across the sky. It was the aurora borealis. My mother had discovered her destiny.

That is when the trouble started. Her mother, Lucille Feynman, was a sophisticated and compassionate woman who had marched for women's suffrage in her youth. Nonetheless, when 8-year-old Joanie announced that she intended to be a scientist, Grandma explained that it was impossible. "Women can't do science," she said, "because their brains can't understand enough of it." My mother climbed into a living room chair and sobbed into the cushion. "I know she thought she was telling me the inescapable truth. But it was devastating for a little girl to be told that all of her dreams were impossible. And I've doubted my abilities ever since."

The fact that the greatest chemist of the age, Marie Curie, was a woman gave no comfort. "To me, Madame Curie was a mythological character," my mother says, "not a real person whom you could strive to emulate." It wasn't until her 14th birthday-March 31, 1942-that her notion of becoming a scientist was revived. Richard presented her with a book called Astronomy. "It was a college textbook. I'd start reading it, get stuck, and then start over again. This went on for months, but I kept at it. When I reached page 407, I came across a graph that changed my life." My mother shuts her eyes and recites from memory: "'Relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms . . . from Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne.' Cecilia Payne! It was scientific proof that a woman was capable of writing a book that, in turn, was quoted in a text. The secret was out, you see."

The catalog of abuse to which my mother was subjected, beginning in 1944 when she entered Oberlin College, is too long and relentless to fully record. At Oberlin, her lab partner was ill-prepared for the advanced-level physics course in which they were enrolled, so my mother did all the experiments herself. The partner took copious notes and received an A. My mother got a D. "He understands what he's doing," the lab instructor explained, "and you don't." In graduate school, a professor of solid state physics advised her to do her Ph.D. dissertation on cobwebs, because she would encounter them while cleaning. She did not take the advice; her thesis was titled "Absorption of infrared radiation in crystals of diamond-type lattice structure." After graduation, she found that the "Situations Wanted" section of The New York Times was divided between Men and Women, and she could not place an ad among the men, the only place anyone needing a research scientist would bother to look.

At that time, even the dean of women at Columbia University argued that "sensible motherhood" was "the most useful and satisfying of the jobs that women can do." My mother tried to be a sensible mother and it damn near killed her. For three years, she cooked, cleaned, and looked after my brother and me, two stubborn and voluble babies.

One day in 1964 she found herself preparing to hurl the dish drain through the kitchen window and decided to get professional help. "I was incredibly lucky," she remembers, "to find a shrink who was enlightened enough to urge me to try to get a job. I didn't think anyone would hire me, but I did what he told me to do." She applied to Lamont-Doherty Observatory and, to her astonishment, received three offers. She chose to work part-time, studying the relationship between the solar wind and the magnetosphere. Soon she would be among the first to announce that the magnetosphere-the part of space in which Earth's magnetic field dominates and the solar wind doesn't enter-was open-ended, with a tail on one side, rather than having a closed-teardrop shape, as had been widely believed. She was off and running.

It is sure nice to read a story with a happy ending.

You would have thought that having a world famous physicist as an older brother would have helped her to find a job. But I'm guessing that the job market for researchers had no place on the form for "world famous brother". And even if it did, that wouldn't cut any ice. She had to make it on her own. And she did.

But it wasn't all a simple come-from-behind heroic tale of triumph. There were potholes for Joan Feynman. Here's one:

It was 1971 and my mother was working for NASA at Ames Research Center in California. She had just made an important discovery concerning the solar wind, which has two states, steady and transient. The latter consists of puffs of material, also known as coronal mass ejections, which, though long known about, were notoriously hard to find. My mother showed they could be recognized by the large amount of helium in the solar wind. Her career was flourishing. But the economy was in recession and NASA's budget was slashed. My mother was a housewife again. For months, as she looked for work, the severe depression that had haunted her years before began to return.

I guess the lesson is that everybody has a few potholes waiting for them in life. Success is how you manage to get round or over or through them.

By the way, do go look at the original article with a picture of Joan Feynman. I get a kick out of the strong family resemblance with her brother.

And, here are the slides from a talk given this year by Joan Feynman on the recent solar minimum.

Also, if you are looking for something different, something interesting to read, try reading Richard Feynman's "biography", Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!

Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air"

This is a good read but a bit disconcerting. Johnson is handling more than a story of invention and more than a biography. He dabbles a bit in the philosophy of science and even a bit of historiography:

Seeing human history as a series of intensifying energy flows in one way around the classic opposition between the Great Men and Collectivist visions of history. You can tell the history of the world through the lives of individuals or groups of individuals, and pat of that explanation is no doubt true. But you can also tell that story with the humans in a supporting role, not the lead. You can tell it as the story of flows of energy: growing, subsiding, being captured, being released. Think of those flows as a vast, surging ocean, and the individual human lives of history crowded on a sailboat in that turbulent water. The humans can still steer their vessel, and exploit the waters and wind that happen to be pushing in the direction they wish to go. But the humans are largely subservient to the conditions set by those oceanic forces.

While I agree with his statement, I find his forays into theory a distraction from the storyline of the book. The above is the most egregious. When he talks of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions I'm less displeased because that is a little more relevant, especially the fact:

The classic case study for the concept of a paradigm shift is the Copernican revolution in astronomy, but in actual fact, the first extended story that Kuhn tells in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the paradigm shift in chemistry that took place in the 1770s, led by the revolutionary science of Joseph Priestly.

The core message of the book is that politics, religion, and science are necessarily intermingled and the modern idea that you can separate expertise may advance "normal science" but it undermines Kuhn's "revolutionary science". Here's a bit from the closing pages of Johnson's book:

The faith in science and progress necessitated one other core core value that Priestley shared with Jefferson and Frankline, and that is the radical's belief that progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past. ... To embrace the sublime vista of reason was, inevitably, to shake off a thousand old conventions and pieties. It forced you to rewrite the Bible, and contest the divinity of Jesus Christ; it forced you to throw out all the august, Latinate traditions of the educational establishment; it forced you to invest whole new modes of government, it forced you to think of the air we breathe as part of a natural system that could be disturbed by human intervention; it forced you to dream up entirely new structures for the transmission and cultivation of ideas. You could no longer put stock in "the education of our ancestors," as Jefferson derisively called it. Embracing change means embracing the possibility that everything would have to be re-invented.

The book is a solid retelling of Priestly's life and his science. What makes this book interesting is that Johnson points out the overlap between this early science and the developing democratic movement, especially the American revolution. He documents the close relationship between Priestly and Benjamin Franklin. There is an interesting overlap between this book and Timothy Ferris's The Science of Liberty. Ferris's book is the stronger, more profound read with a much broader scope. But Johnson's book is a smaller, more focused book with its own lively style, and delves more deeply into the details of specific people and their ideas. I recommend them both.

Graham Farmelo's "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom"

Here is what Stephen Hawking said of Paul Dirac, his predecessor holding Newton's Lucasian professorship at Cambridge University:

It has taken eleven years for the nation to recognise that he [Paul Dirac] was probably the greatest British theoretical physicist since Newton, and belatedly to erect a plaque to him in Westminster Abbey. It is my taks to explain why. That is, why he was so great, not why it took so long.

This is a good solid biography of Dirac. The author makes it abundantly clear that Dirac suffered from autism spectrum disorder. He does play into the kind of Freudian explanation of a "bad upbringing" but it is clear to me that the real root cause was autism. It ran in the family. As the author points out, it is likely that his father suffered the disease. In many ways Paul Dirac recapitulated his father's disasterous life, only with a great deal more intelligence and fame.

The book gives a good taste of the miraculous years during the late 1920s/early 1930s when quantum physics was created in just a handful of years. He also makes it very clear why other physicists were in such awe of Dirac. The author cites Freeman Dyson's comment:

The great papers of the other quantum pioneers were more ragged, less perfectly formed than Dirac's. His great discoveries were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another. He seemed to be able to conquer laws of nature from pure thought -- it was this purity that made him unique.

I remember being told back in the 1960s to read Dirac to get the clearest presentation of quantum theory. Sadly I didn't. So I'm relegated to reading second-hand stories of his genius. But this is certainly better than nothing. He was an amazing man and this book makes sense of his life.

The story of Dirac's life is sad. He was so isolated. He lived so long after this great discoveries and worked so hard but gradually went into decline with age like all physicists. He didn't easily move into the role of "grand old man" with heartwarming stories and an avuncular interest in the younger generation. He kept working. He had some great doctoral students (always a good sign of a great mind). But he himself knew that his greatest days were behind him by the time he was 35 years old.

The book has a number of typos. Sadly books aren't proofread as carefully as they were half a century ago. I find this exceedingly odd since we now have software tools to check spelling, grammar, and look for common typos. But apparantly publishers can't be bothered. That is hard to believe, but from what I can tell it is true. This book suffers from a few glaring typos. The one that bugged me the most was the reference to the Kent State killings as happening in 1971 when in fact it occurred in 1970. On the other hand, I must applaud this author for doing what so many biographers fail to do: provide an easy device to track time. Each chapter gives the time frame and there are enough embedded references in the text to easily orient yourself to the historical date. Too often books don't take this care and they drive me crazy. This book has done it right.

This is a great read if you are interested in the history of physics and want to get an intimate feel for the life of a real genius.

A Little Physics In a Different Shape

Here is a bit from an article in Discover Magazine about Shing-Tung Yau. I always am curious about people and their experiences. Here's a peek at an important physics theorist:

Shing-Tung Yau is a force of nature. He is best known for conceiving the math behind string theory—which holds that, at the deepest level of reality, our universe is built out of 10-dimensional, subatomic vibrating strings. But Yau’s genius runs much deeper and wider: He has also spawned the modern synergy between geometry and physics, championed unprecedented teamwork in mathematics, and helped foster an intellectual rebirth in China.

Despite growing up in grinding poverty on a Hong Kong farm, Yau made his way to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied with Chinese geometer Shiing-Shen Chern and the master of nonlinear equations, Charles Morrey. Then at age 29 Yau proved the Calabi conjecture, which posits that six-dimensional spaces lie hidden beneath the reality we perceive. These unseen dimensions lend rigor to string theory by supplementing the four dimensions—three of space and one of time—described in Einstein’s general relativity.

It is hard to write a good autobiography. This magazine interview gives a few glimpses into Yau's life. It isn't very satisfactory, but it is interesting. What I find funny is the contrast between life as observed and life as lived. You can observe somebody and be convinced they are the best of everything, but internally they are deeply depressed and in pain. Conversely, you can see somebody whose life appears to be a complete mess or a continual struggle with poverty, but on the inside they are happy as a duck in water. Appearance and reality diverge. People's description of their own state diverges from reality because we "bend the space" around us and recount our history mostly from the current perspective. So we distort the past and don't see the future.

Robert Stone's "Prime Green"

It was the subtitle of this autobiography that caught my eye: Remembering the Sixties.

The book didn't deliver. It was a satisfactory autobiography, but it didn't give any insight into the 1960s. The bits he talked about were drug experiences with other artists. Something I don't relate to. So for me this book was a bust.

He recounts a tale of being a Johnny-Come-Lately reporter in Vietnam in 1971. But nothing significant was reported by him. Instead he indulged in drugs in various locations.

The section where he talks of the first moon walk is strangely indifferent to the event itself. He mentions it in passing as he recounts a hike through mountains south of San Francisco.

He mentions the two Kennedy assassinations but has nothing to tell. He darkly mentions "riots" in the US but goes into no details.

In short, there wasn't much "sixties" in this book about "remembering the sixties".

He mentions cheating on his wife, but doesn't go into details. He mentions his wife but she is merely a name that drifts in the background. (But I suspect she is the steady breadwinner who kept him and the two kids alive while he futzed around with his writing "career".) His mother raised him as a single mother, but once he leaves for the Navy at the age of 17 we hear nothing more about her.

What he does give testimony to was the self indulgence of the 1960s and the mad drug culture. He mentions friends that die without stopping to weight their life or even comment on the tragedy of a life cut short. There is a cruel indifference to his family, the society about him, and the mad destructiveness around him. No moral qualms. No philosophical questions about purpose or meaning.

I did enjoy his recounting being on a naval research ship in the mid 1950s. I enjoyed his comments on working for a tabloid in New York City around 1960. I found some of his comments about Hollywood and his short stint trying to convert his first book into a screenplay. These vignettes made the book tolerable.

The biography he presents is one with no roots and no community, no history and no direction. I guess what he presents is a thoroughly "modern" life, but I read it as a tragedy and not as a satisfactory life.

Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages"

This is a wonderful intellectual escapade into the lives of Lincoln and Darwin over the theme of angels and ages. I picked this book because Gopnik writes for the New Yorker and I enjoy the 'literate' style. He met my expectations. It is a rich treat. I discovered lots of interesting 'literate' tidbits about both men. But it was, in a sense, too rich and as I neared the final chapter I was feeling that it was all style and no substance. But the last chapter redeemed the book for me.

The first four chapters introduce the two protagonists. They contrast and compare the two. They explore details and grand ideas. They look at the historical period and the daily life of each man. It is all grand, but I found it unfulfilling. The last chapter went for meaning and that more than satisfied me:

Darwin and Lincoln were makers and witnesses of the great change that, for good or ill, marks modern times: the slow emergence from a culture of faith and fear to one of ob sedrvation and argument, and from a belief in the judgment of divinity to a belief in the verdicts of history and time. First, the change from soul to mind as the engine of existence, and then from angels to ages as the overseers of life. For good or ill, that is what we mostly mean by "modernity," and by the special conditions of modern times.

And this bit summarizes the message of this book:

There is no struggle between science and art or between evolutionary biology and spiritual faith; there is a constant struggle between the spirit of free inquiry and the spirit of fundamentalist dogma. That struggle is the story of human intellectual history.

This is a message of a dynamic tension between science and spirituality. Science is the grand view, the summing up into great theories the facts of an immense and indifferent universe. The spiritual is the irreducible factualness of our individual lives with its petty meanings.

He points out that both Lincoln and Darwin understood death. Lincoln from the hundreds of thousands sent to their death on the battlefields. Darwin in the fact that death is the tool by which selection occurs. But both were not prepared for the immediacy of death in their families.

Gopnik is pointing out that we live our lives at two extremes in the modern world. In the grand understanding of the world achieved by science and the very personal feelings we have as individuals struggling with our own lives. The latter is mediated through religion:

... if we mean by religion what most people have actually meant by it since the beginning of time -- an encompassing practice of irrational rituals that can't be justified but only experienced, and give order and continuity to life -- then, yes, or course, religion is compatible with Darwinism. The fairth of George Herbert and Dr. Johnson, of Kierkegaard and W. H. Auden, has nothing to do with obeying the commandments of an invisible man in the sky who occasionally intervenes, and everything to do with confronting the chaotic reality of the cosmos to find serene order within it. In this sense the "epiphenomena" of religion -- choral music, stained glass, Communion -- are the thing itself.

That pretty well sums it up for me. This is very much the same as what the biologist Stephen Jay Gould put forward as the non-overlapping magisteria.

Michael Greenberg's "Hurry Down Sunshine"

I really enjoyed this book. It was extremely well written and the "story" was gripping. (It's a biography, so I put story in quotes.)

Not only was I fascinated by the lives, I loved the use of language (the daughter has "dystopic mania" with an obsession with words and the idea that she has reached a blessed state shared only with young children). This was a very human story. It was real. It had ups and downs. It had many characters with good and bad interactions. There were "plot" twists. There was a Hollywood ending with a tempering that points out that a "good life" was several pegs down from what most people would hold up as ideal.

I was completely engrossed in the story and gobbled the book up. That's always a good sign of a great read.

The Life of a Poet

Here are some bits from a review by Katha Pollitt of the book Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien. From the review, this appears to give the raw and unvarnished view of the poet Lord Byron:

In his short life (1788-1824), George Gordon, Lord Byron, managed to cram in just about every sort of connection imaginable—unrequited pinings galore; affairs with aristocrats, actresses, servants, landladies, worshipful fans, and more in almost as many countries as appear on Don Giovanni's list; plus countless one-offs with prostitutes and purchased girls; a brief, disastrous marriage; and an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. And that's just the women! It's a wonder he found the time, considering everything else on his plate. He composed thousands of pages of dazzling poetry, traveled restlessly on the continent and in the Middle East, maintained complex relationships with friends and hangers-on, wrote letters and kept diaries and read books constantly, boxed and took fencing lessons and swam, drank (prodigiously), suffered bouts of depression and paranoia and physical ill-health, and, in his later years, joined in Italian and Greek liberation struggles. Just tending the menagerie that he liked to have about him—monkeys, parrots and macaws, dogs, a goat, a heron, even, while he was a student at Cambridge, a bear—would have driven a lesser man to distraction.

...

But these affairs (and others) paled beside his incestuous affair with Augusta, Mad Jack's daughter, five years older, married, the mother of four, whom he came to know for the first time in London in 1813: "And so it is Guss and Goose and Baby Byron and foolery and giggles, Augusta wearing the new dresses and silk shawls he has bought for her, the thrill of showing her off to the acerbic hostesses, home in his carriage at five or six in the morning ... and somehow it happened, the transition from affection to something dangerous. Never, he said, 'was seduction so easy.' "

Why, given all this excitement, Byron chose to marry Lady Caroline's prim, religious cousin, Annabella Milbanke, is a mystery. Perhaps he hoped marriage would quiet rumors—incest was a bit much even for the cynical Regency grandees among whom he moved. Perhaps it was a gesture of despair, with a bit of fortune-hunting thrown in. In any case, the marriage was a nightmare, beginning with the bridegroom pacing the halls with loaded pistols on his wedding night and culminating in Annabella's departure, newborn infant Ada in tow, after only 16 months. In her legal case for a separation she accused Byron of ongoing incest with Augusta and appalling maltreatment of every kind, culminating in anal rape two days after she gave birth.

Ostracized by those who had lionized him, Byron left England, never to return. Further adventures and abuses followed, the worst of which was probably his cruelty toward Mary Shelley's stepsister, Jane Clairmont, who bore him a daughter, Allegra. Rather than financially assisting Jane in raising the child, which he could easily have afforded to do, he took custody and refused to answer Jane's increasingly pathetic letters begging for news; he soon handed Allegra off to assorted others before sending her to a convent school, where she died, unvisited by anyone but Shelley, at age 5. By then he had settled down with the young, beautiful, married Italian countess Teresa Guiccioli.

...

It is easy to see Byron as a cad, a narcissist and, at bottom, a misogynist. But that would be unfair. Byron's great insight, in an era where women were expected to be placid and insipid (not that they were!), was to see that women were much like men: They wanted sex and went after it eagerly, if secretly. Don Juan, his great satiric novel in verse, is a virtual catalog of passionate women who are anything but bashful, even if still virginal, and who are presented without condemnation, as human beings doing what human beings do. He understood, too, how limited was women's scope for action.

...

One final note: O'Brien has little to say about Byron's poetry, but without it, he would be just another eccentric milord. To find out what all the fuss was about, pick up a copy of Don Juan. It's as fresh and sparkling and hilarious and sexy as the day it was published, and will make you wish the author was still around, so that you could write him a letter proposing a discreet assignation.

Sure he sounds like an "interesting" character, but something gnaws at me. If he didn't have the money, he wouldn't have lived the ostentatious life and he certainly wouldn't have gotten away with treating so many people so badly. Today, as then, money/power is a secret lubricant that buys you "adventures" as well as a "get out of jail free" card.

For those of you itching to dig into Byron's Don Juan, here's a link to an on-line version.

In Praise of Autistics

Here is an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education by the economist Tyler Cowen that tells us to embrace the autistics in society as just another subgroup with special talents to offer us:

Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics.

...

In spite of some of the common rhetoric, each year specialists are teaching us more about the cognitive strengths of the autism spectrum. In the 1960s, it was a common view that, except for a few savants, most autistic people were intellectually disabled ("mentally retarded" was the less than felicitous term), and to some extent this stereotype persists today. But a growing body of work pinpoints areas where autistics outperform nonautistics.

A partial list notes that autistics have, on average, superior pitch perception and other musical abilities, they are better at noticing details in patterns, they have better visual acuity, they are less likely to be fooled by optical illusions, they are more likely to fit some canons of economic rationality, they solve many puzzles at a much faster rate, and they are less likely to have false memories of particular kinds. Autistics also have, to varying degrees, strong or even extreme abilities to memorize, perform operations with codes and ciphers, perform calculations in their head, or excel in many other specialized cognitive tasks. The savants, while they are outliers, also reflect cognitive strengths found in autistics more generally. A recent investigation found, with conservative methods, that about one-third of autistics may have exceptional skills or savantlike abilities.

Autistic people usually have a superior desire and talent for assembling and ordering information. Especially when they are given appropriate access to opportunities and materials, autistics live the ideal of self-education, often to an extreme. In my new book, Create Your Own Economy, I refer to autistics as the "infovores" of modern society and I argue that along many dimensions we as a society are working hard to mimic their abilities at ordering and processing information. Autism is a topic that anyone interested in education should be reading and thinking about.

It turns out that the American university is an environment especially conducive to autistics. Many autistics are disadvantaged or overwhelmed by processing particular stimuli from the outside world and thus are subject to perceptual overload as a result. For some autistics, that is debilitating, but for many others it is either manageable or a problem they can work around. The result is that many autistics prefer stable environments, the ability to choose their own hours and work at home, and the ability to work on focused projects for long periods of time.

Does that sound familiar? The modern college or university is often ideal or at least relatively good at providing those kinds of environments.

If you find an interest in autism there are a number of books to read. The books by Temple Grandin, Daniel Tammet, Donna Williams, or John Elder Robison are all excellent. I've worked with on high functioning Asperger's Syndrome person. He was very bright, a bit unbridled, and very unsettling because he couldn't read emotional body language so he didn't know normal social limits. He could be tedious, but he was very interesting because he had scoured the technical literature and had lots of ideas. Ultimately it was frustrating working with him because I couldn't get him to be realistic about schedules and commitments.

J. G. Ballard's "Miracles of Life"

I found this to be an enjoyable autobiography. I haven't read Ballard's work. I did watch the film Empire of the Sun. That's what made this book interesting. It let me see the story of his incarceration in a Japanese POW camp from two perspectives. That was interesting.

From what I gleaned from this book, I don't think I would like Ballard's fiction. His science fiction from a psychological 'what now' doesn't sound interesting. His description of the London art scene and his role in it doesn't interest me. I remember when the film Crash came out. It didn't interest me. But this book was interesting and the story of Empire of the Sun interested me.

I found this book oddly disturbing for his distance from his mother and father. He talks of them being cold, but his treatment of them was cold. From what I glean from this book, his fiction was disturbing, distant, and cold. He blames the experiences of his youth for shaping him. But I wonder. There is a coldness that runs through his fiction. While he claims the joys of family and his children, I don't get a sense of any human closeness to others. Strange man.

Here's a bit from the book I enjoyed. Ballard is revealing the seedy side of Kingsley Amis a friend:

Undoubtedly, Amis did have his mean streak, and was one of those people who feel a need to break with all their friends. His treatment of women could be crude. One of his former lovers, a student during his Swansea teaching days, told me that he would regularaly order his wife into the nearby park when it was time for his 'tutorial' with her. There the novelist's wife would push the pram until he drew the bedroom curtains and signal that she could return.

Barak Obama's "Dreams from My Father"

This was an wonderfully readable autobiography. The style, the language, the ideas, the honesty are all wonderful. This strikes me as the work of an accomplished novelist, not a lawyer writing his first book. In that sense I truly enjoyed the book.

What I found tedious was the focus on his "race identity" and his harping on how tough life is for blacks. I understand that life is tough. I understand racism. But all this complaining is coming from a guy who went to an exclusive prep school and got a Harvard Law degree. It is a bit much. The book is honest, but what came through to me was an excessive self indulgence and identification with "my brothers" the beaten down black folks. I understand that he took this on as a cause, but this guy is from the elite, not the dispossessed.

Another thing that bothered me throughout the book was the excessive focus on his father. The guy was a deadbeat and a jerk. He already had a wife and two kids when he married Barack Obama's mother. That's bad enough. But he soon abandoned her. He had two graduate school offers. One from Columbia which had enough money to bring his wife and new son to live with him while he studied. The other was to Harvard with only enough money for himself. So Barack's father chose Harvard. There is no bitterness is Barack over this abandonment. He never talks about the injustice of this treatment of his mother, the new wife. Instead Obama goes on and on about the plight of the "black folk".

It ends up that he father was a very clever but very self-centred man. He had a number of wives and treated them all badly. He got involved with politics but allowed his ego to cause him to have a falling out with the new greedy elite in Kenya so he suffered a devastating loss of wealth and power but was too proud to change his ways. (I sure hope Barack Obama doesn't show similar traits, that would mean America would be subject to abysmal treatment by a man unable to face reality. Honestly I don't think this will happen. I think Barack is significantly different from his father -- probably due to the influence of his mother and maternal grandparents -- so this danger is probably not real.)

The book is an eye-opener. It is very honest. It shows a wonderful sensitivity to people. It shows Barack's ideals. But it also shows him to be a bit of a nut with his focus on the plight of the poor "black folk". This book was written in 1995 before his big success as a politician. I'm hoping that his exposure to the broader community soften this fixation of his. (I'm pretty sure it did.) But this book is cause for a bit of concern in a few areas:

• His father was a deceitful, manipulative man and there is the worry of how much this trait is genetic versus learned. My guess is that the genetic component is over 50%. Therefore the worry.


• As a troubled youth, Obama developed a victimization syndrome of identifying with the "black folk". This is bizarre because he had an elite upbringing and had to work hard to slum among the down-and-out. While empathy is great, a fixation -- especially if it distorts reality -- is not healthy.


• I worry a great deal about the imbalance between his white relatives and his black relatives. His account of the black relatives shows a pretty dysfunctional group (except for Aume who appears to be pretty solid). His white mother is nearly invisible. But she spent a lot of effort raising him. Meanwhile most of the book dotes on his father who was at best a cad, and more likely a con artist. His grandparents cared for him for many years and paid his way through an elite prep school, but they get a clearly second tier treatment. He never criticizes directly but he allows some faily low opinions to colour the text. You can read his grandfather's taking him to poker games, bars, and visits with a black poet as a loser slumming it on the black side of town or you can read it as a white grandfather trying to help Barack make contacts with the black community to get a better sense of self. My guess it was the later, but Obama's book can be read either way. That bothers me.
  

The book is fascinating. It is well worth your reading, especially because this guy is the president. I still like the guy, but this book was a bit of a shocker for me. It was far more one-sided than I expected from a guy who sold himself as bridging the gap between black and white in American society.

Merit versus Chance?

A BoingBoing post by Douglas Rushkoff that caught my attention. It is a simple note about Walter Kirn pointed me toward an essay he published The Atlantic that has now been expanded into an autobiographical book, Lost in the Meritocracy.

Here is a snippet from the essay that resonated with me:

I applied for two scholarships to Oxford, an institution I regarded much as I'd once regarded Princeton—as a sociocultural VIP room that happened to hold classes in the back. The first was the Rhodes, created to fashion leaders for some future utopian global order. Why I imagined that I was "Rhodes material"—which at Princeton meant someone resembling Bill Bradley, our most widely known recipient of the honor—I had no idea. The other students I knew of who had applied were conspicuous campus presences, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was a nervous loner in an old raincoat whose most notable accomplishment was writing and staging a blank-verse play loosely based on Andy Warhol. Still, I sensed I had a chance. I'd learned by then that the Masters of Advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-card slots for overreaching oddballs.

When a letter arrived informing me that I'd been chosen as a state finalist, I bought a blue suit on credit and flew back to Minnesota for my interviews. A doorman at the Minneapolis Club directed me to a gloomy paneled room, where my nametagged fellow candidates were enjoying a get-acquainted cocktail party with the members of the committee that would formally screen us the next morning.

I armed myself with a cheese cube on a napkin and a glass of red wine and strode into the fray, looking for someone important to impress, but my rivals had gotten a jump on me and wouldn't make space in the tight perimeters around the professors and business people tasked with assessing our leadership potential. I noticed that none of the other candidates were drinking their wine; they were using their glasses as props. I looked down at my empty goblet. Caught out again.

Seeing my rivals up close unsettled me. Back when I took the SATs, the contest had been impersonal, statistical, waged against an anonymous national peer group. This time the competition was all too personal—about a dozen of us remained. One short-haired young woman in a dark suit was holding forth on national health-care policy to a man who kept looking past her at a prettier girl whose panty lines were discernible through her skirt. A handsome young brute whose tag identified him as a West Point cadet was discussing his fitness regimen with a lady on the committee who seemed to be sleeping standing up. Every few minutes everyone changed partners, like dancers in a Jane Austen ballroom scene. What expert mixers they were! I hated them.

By the time I managed to corner a few committee members, I was feeling drunk and squirrelly. To give the irresistible impression of humble origins transcended, I affected a lazy backwoods drawl and combined it with a Sunday-best vocabulary straight out of my thesaurus exercises. I got off the word "heuristic" once, a magical bit of scholastic legerdemain, but I pronounced it in the manner of Johnny Cash. I knew I sounded demented, but I couldn't stop myself. Even worse, I'd lit a cigarette, making me the party's only smoker aside from a bearded old fellow with a pipe whom I knew to be an English professor at a local college. I approached him, seeking cover for my vice, and babbled away about my love of Whitman, a name I'd picked out of a hat. He seemed to sense this.

At the end of the party we drew times for our morning interviews. I drew the first slot: seven sharp. I showed up pale and trembling and dehydrated, speckled with crumbs from a cinnamon bun I'd wolfed. My rivals were already seated in the waiting room, some of them reading The New York Times. This was a masterly touch—one I wished I'd thought of.

My name was called, and I sat down in a conference room at a long table of poker-faced interrogators equipped with pencils, clipboards, and questionnaires. "What, in your opinion, is the primary problem facing our world today?" one woman asked, not even giving me time to sip my coffee.

The moisture inside my mouth evaporated; I'd expected a little small talk first. I knew in my gut that to answer the question creatively would be a mistake; these were sober, high-minded people, dedicated to serving humanity by preselecting future American presidents and United Nations ambassadors. The only issues worthy of their seriousness, I strongly suspected, were the obvious two: poverty and nuclear proliferation. My chance to exhibit originality would come with the inevitable follow-up: "And how would you deal with this problem?" That's where the challenge lay. I wanted to bring in poetry—but how? By calling for a new, transformative literature pledged to the empowerment of the voiceless through a concern with the basic global values of justice and mutual respect?

That might be a winner, if I could just remember it.

But I couldn't. Instead I said, "Miscommunication. I think that's the biggest problem we face these days."

"Expand on that," a quiet female voice said. "Miscommunication between whom?"

I offered a list of miscommunicators that included governments and their subjects, men and women, and even—absurdly—animals and human beings. Sometime during my speech I realized I'd lost. I'd never lost at anything before, not even a spelling bee, and the feeling was like waking on the Moon after going to bed on Earth. No sounds, no light, no air, no gravity.

I returned to the waiting room ten minutes later. My rivals scanned my face for clues: how had my interview changed the odds for them? I gave them more information than they deserved, hoping to win their favor for the future. Someday one of them might run the country, and I wanted to be remembered as a good sport.

"You're safe," I told them all. "I screwed it up."

I had a similar experience at age 22 going before a panel for a scholarship and completely fell apart. It wasn't because I was slacking off and I was unprepared. It was because the very aura of a high bench from which the inquisitors put me to the test broke me into a mumbling incoherent fool. It was a terrible experience. But the test did its job. It separated the goat, me, from the sheep, i.e. those with the savoir faire that comes from either wealth or a big ego.

Life is full of these odd moments where your fate hangs by a thread. Kirn goes on to say that a sickness in his summer between undergraduate and graduate school became the random event that turned his life around and created the dedication to real learning that shaped the rest of his life. Too bad we all don't have that moment of redemption. Oh well.

Merit versus Chance. It really isn't an opposition. Life is a dish with many ingredients. Each adds its own flavour. Each pushes the result toward the final concoction.

Making it Big

The NY Review of Books has an article by Sue M. Halpern that reviews three books on what it takes to be a success:

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
  by Alice Schroeder


• Outliers: The Story of Success
  by Malcolm Gladwell


• Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
  by Geoff Colvin

These three books have very little in common. The Buffett book is a standard biography. The Gladwell book is a brilliant thought piece in the tradition of his other books. I haven't read the Colvin book but I suspect it is a fairly pedantic book that looks at factors that contribute to success. The first two books are a lot of fun to read. Here's a bit that Halperns includes from the Gladwell book:

Consider, as well, Chris Langan, whose astronomically high IQ—around 195, 45 points higher than Einstein's—does actually make him a statistical anomaly. In Gladwell's estimation, though, the poor fellow—who lives in relative obscurity on a midwestern horse farm—is a great failure:

He'd been working for decades now on a project of enormous sophistication—but almost none of what he had done had ever been published much less read by the physicists and philosophers and mathematicians who might be able to judge its value.

Gladwell writes:

Here he was, a man with a one-in-a-million mind, and he had yet to have any impact on the world. He wasn't holding forth at academic conferences. He wasn't leading a graduate seminar at some prestigious university. He was living on a slightly tumbledown horse farm in northern Missouri, sitting on the back porch in jeans and a cut-off T-shirt. He knew how it looked: it was the great paradox of Chris Langan's genius.

"I have not pursued mainstream publishers as hard as I should have," he conceded. "Going around, querying publishers, trying to find an agent. I haven't done it and I am not interested in doing it."

It was an admission of defeat.

Really—says who?

Gladwell's explanation for what he believes is Langan's epic failure goes to the heart of his main thesis about success—that it cannot be explained by understanding what a person is like but only by where he or she is from. It's not clear, precisely, why Gladwell considers this is a revelation, not a tautology, but he does. The social science bookshelf is filled with studies linking achievement to background. Most recently, the economic mobility project of the Pew Charitable Trusts found, for instance, that nearly half "of those born to parents in the top quintile [income] who have a college degree remain at the top, [which is] nearly triple the percentage of college graduates born to parents at the bottom that make it to the top of the income distribution." In any case, all stories of success or failure are construed after the fact and the same set of circumstances often leads to fundamentally different outcomes, the explanation for which typically invokes those circumstances. (For example, one man's inherited wealth leads to the revolving door of the Betty Ford Clinic, while another's leads to the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.) To claim, as Gladwell does, that "extraordinary achievement is less about talent than opportunity" overstates the obvious while letting the rest of us, who are not overachievers, off the hook. "People don't rise from nothing," he writes.

We owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.

Chris Langan, the oldest son of a woman who had four boys, each with a different father, the last of whom was an abusive alcoholic, was raised with none of the advantages that might have allowed him to prosper. Though he won full scholarships to the University of Chicago and to Reed College, and enrolled at Reed, he left before the end of freshman year, a crew-cut kid among long-hairs whose mother forgot to fill out the financial aid forms. Then he went to Montana State, and his car broke down and a professor wouldn't let him change a morning class for an afternoon class, and Langan left there, too.

If Langan had had what Gladwell, citing the psychologist Robert Sternberg, calls "practical intelligence"—knowing what to say and who to say it to—he might have graduated from college, gone to graduate school, become an academic, written peer-reviewed articles, sat on innumerable committees, and made something recognizable out of his life. But lacking the kind of family background from which, Gladwell says, such knowledge comes, he was doomed to failure.

For some reason, the Langan story makes Gladwell think of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, another young prodigy ("Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek,") who was also a depressive and a miscreant: at Cambridge he tried to poison his tutor. Rather than being sent home or to jail, Oppenheimer was set up with a psychiatrist and allowed to continue his studies, a turn of events that Gladwell attributes to his practical intelligence:
Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

The sad tale of Chris Langan resonates with me. It is very hard to rise above what you know no matter how "bright" you are. The story of Oppenheimer is the opposite. It is hard to fall from grace when your parents are affluent and well-connected. That's the friction that means that the "meritocracy" claimed by our society will never really honestly work.