The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman

Fascinating. I would recommend this book highly to anyone. However, it bothered me throughout that Fadiman didn’t explain what she was doing or why; she simply provided a description of what appeared to be an investigation of some kind. This was especially odd since she offered extraneous personal details of other kinds to animate her scenes. But she never said to the reader or the interviewees: “I’m trying to find out more about Hmong culture” or “I’m a professor of medicine investigating what went wrong at this hospital” or “I’m a human rights lawyer following up on a complaint,” etc., all of which she could have been doing.

-- Hmong embroidery (from a private collection)

I, Claudius, Robert Graves

Very enjoyable. I was put off by glimpses of the swanning BBC series 30 years ago and so never read it till now. As it turns out, there are soap opera elements and a lot of gore, but these are redeemed by the interesting presentation of Roman history and daily life, and by Graves’ clever explanations of vexing historical anomalies. Will I go on to read Claudius the God, though?

-- Claudius (British Museum)

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells

Yuck. I read this because Malcolm Gladwell said it took the U.S. by storm, and I realized it had been made into a movie, and so concluded that it must have something compelling about it. But no. It is nowhere near as good as Gladwell made it seem [see “claims” below]. It’s written by someone who obviously really loves Louisiana but is unable to find a way to make the reader experience the place.

-- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Yvette Guilbert

The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

As with Blink, the material assembled for this book is fascinating, but I thought the thesis was not as focused and coherent as in Blink, and there were a couple of questionable claims made (regarding the importance and profoundness of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, for example). The research on the perfect size for corporations and on how people's behaviour is related to the care lavished on their environment were the most interesting insights to me.

-- Gary Dumbrill, Surplus Labour

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

Excellent. He deals with a lot of the myths and folklore surrounding first impressions, gut reactions and so on, and shows under what conditions these spontaneous judgements make sense and are valuable, and when they should be tempered with careful review or discarded altogether. You really see the world differently afterwards, just like the publicity promises, lol.

-- Edgar Rubin, Vase

The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout

Very interesting. Stout defines “conscience” convincingly as attachment to other people, or, basically, the ability to love and be loved. She then offers evidence that 4 per cent of the population are born without the ability to love or be attached, and they are our sociopaths, carrying out agendas that range from the relatively harmless to the unspeakably criminal, all under the impression that everyone is like them. If she is correct, there is no point feeling sorry for serial killers, rapists, child abusers, etc., or trying to rehabilitate or psychoanalyze them -- it’s not that they come from unhappy backgrounds that they are the way they are: they simply think that people with consciences are chumps.

Strangely, from my point of view, Stout spends a lot of time comforting us “normal” people with the assurance that it is better to have a conscience and know love than to be a scheming materialist who will never know it. I don’t see why she hastens to console -- why would anyone want to be more ruthless and cold-hearted than they already are, or envy those who are? We all think we’d like to thrash our way to the top and be rulers with absolute power, but would we really give up love to have that?

-- Alex Colville, Pacific

Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver

It’s not as good as Poisonwood Bible, lol -- poor Kingsolver must be tired of all her books having to live up to PB, whether they were written before it or not.

Here there are three or four interrelated stories which are all carefully crafted to show how people are like plants (or, in one case, animals) -- they need a good environment, a sex life, maybe a trellis -- and the clever intertwining of these stories is set in a lush and evocative landscape, so it is an aesthetically pleasing read. The symbolism’s a bit too pat, though.

-- Henri Rousseau, Le rêve