Why We Run

Bernd Heinrich, Why We Run. Bernd Heinrich had a weird upbringing, became a biologist, and had a serious amateur running career. This book is actually a mashup three books, which could be called: My Weird Life, What Animal Physiology Can Tell Us About the Physiology of Human Running, and How I Set a Long Distance World Record.

All three books are pretty interesting, although I did skip some of the biographical material to get to the physiology and running bits. It's not that Heinrich's life wasn't interesting, it's that he doesn't really explain the most interesting part. He was a little boy in a war zone; it's easy to understand how that would affect one's outlook, and Heinrich explains consequences one might not think of. On the other hand, his successful parents abandoned him for most of his childhood at an orphanage, so they could pursue their careers. This I found frustrating. Most parents could not do this. Why did his parents reach this decision? How did Heinrich feel about this? Considering that the orphanage wasn't a particularly pleasant place, what sort of relationship did he have with his parents as an adult? On this, the author is silent.

The best bits are the running bits, which are well-written and fun, and the physiology bits, which are somewhat scattershot but thought-provoking. The book meanders. I imagine it like sitting by the fire with Heinrich on a cold Vermont evening after a few glasses of wine. It's interesting, but I can't help checking my watch.

So why do we run? Heinrich argues that we're built to run long distances so that we can hunt by running prey to exhaustion. Despite his interest in animal models including migratory birds, Heinrich doesn't consider that being able to cover great distances would be equally useful in foraging and migrating.

Regardless, the idea that humans are built to continuously run distances beyond that of almost all land animals was controversial when this book was published, and less so now. Why We Run is still relevant despite its problems, because its key message is an important idea.

Driven to Run

Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.

Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Two books I borrowed from Aki.

Drive is about what motivates people, but even more, it's about what demotivates people. The best way to demomotivate? Take something a person does for the joy of it, and pay them to do it. Getting paid a salary isn't inherently demotivating, but things like giving people a bonus for reaching a sales target or giving a kid a candy bar for completing a homework assignment are inherently demotivating.

Author Pink emphasizes that the basis of his argument is not philosophical, but scientific: over and over, the data show that most of what organizations do to motivate people has the opposite effect, and that most bonus and compensation schemes are destructively counterproductive. People give less blood when you pay them for it. Test scores fall when you reward good scores. Sales force performance falls in the face of quarterly targets. Over and over and over. Ouch.

Pink concedes that some jobs just aren't very much fun, and are going to be done by people who don't enjoy them very much, but even here, he suggests that such jobs can be less dreary than typical if attention is paid to what people find satisfaction in.

What's the connection to a book on ultramarathon running and minimalist footwear? Born to Run is about these things, but also why people run ultramarathon distances. McDougall makes an interesting point on motivation: when American marathon sponsorship enabled runners to make a living running marathons, the effect on performance was rapid and dramatic: while world marathon times got significantly better, marathon times by Americans actually got worse. McDougall argues that turning marathon running into a job caused the performance drop. Pink would approve.

McDougall's book is about what supports running, both biomechanically and psychologically. He describes people for whom running is an escape, a salvation, a way of life, or all of these. Mostly, running happened to people who saw themselves as more than only a runner: nurse, farmer, surf bum, writer, and so on.

I have a little experience in amateur endurance sports. The rewards are the satisfaction of doing the thing, and maybe a bit of ribbon. Getting paid to do it would be very strange, perhaps like getting paid to smile, or getting paid to pray.

These books describe a world that is different than many people think they live in, and maybe a world different than many people want to live in. It is perhaps comforting to believe that motivating people is just pushing the right buttons. The evidence is that the human psyche is much slipperier than that. But isn't it more noble to be motivated best by a desire to do a thing well, just for its own sake?

Checklist Manifesto

What if surgeons operated on people like pilots fly airplanes? Atul Gawande's new book answers that question: fewer people would die on the operating table. Atul's new book is about how checklists can make surgery more disciplined without making it less creative or heroic. Atul tells literally gripping stories, among the most visceral writing I've seen on the very visceral subject of surgery.

But this book is about so much more than just making surgery better: it's about how complex processes fail, and the way we can make human processes that are still human, but produce the low rates of deadly mistakes we insist on. Atul is humble enough not to draw broad lessons that his data don't support, but he is bold enough to note that the question should be asked: in all kinds of complex processes, particularly during emergencies, how can we give people the tools they need to take effective action?

Atul Gawande is a great writer, a dedicated surgeon, and a creative health researcher. They are going to name buildings for him and new surgeons will be reading his books for decades. Read this book to learn about the incredibly vital worldwide revolution in surgical care that is going on right now.

Stones Into Schools

Greg Mortenson's sequal to Three Cups of Tea continues the story, mostly about building schools in rural Afghanistan.

If you don't know who Greg Mortenson is, you must have been hiding under a stone. Greg Mortenson and the schools his organization builds in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan have been reported everywhere, and Three Cups of Tea is a smash best seller. This book covers some of the same ground, so I approached it with limited expectations. The remarkable thing is that it is a great story that stands on its own. Greg makes you believe that a peaceful world might be remotely possible.

Logicomix

A two-pound comic book staring Bertrand Russel? Futhermore, Wittgenstein isn't the supervillain? Unexpected, perhaps, but an entertaining read.

The Outlaw Sea

William Langewiesche's book on why, in a small world, the sea is still a big place. A melancholy book about how all ships die, salaries go down every year, and the sea is even less safe than it needs to be. A very interesting book. Thanks for loaning it to me, Michi.

Just finished David Byrne's book Bicycle Diaries. It's mostly about riding bikes in cities, from New York to Istanbul to London to Manila. It's also about various other musings, thoughts on what cities could be like if we planned for things besides driving, and Byrne's foray into urban planning activism in New York.

It's fun. As a Talking Heads fan, it was interesting to get inside the head of their sardonic frontman. I also found the subject interesting.

Strength in What Remains

There aren't any breezy books about genocide. There are such books that are worth reading, however, and Strength in What Remains is one of them. Tracy Kidder tells the story of Deo, who had the misfortune to endure the genocidal violence in both Burundi and Rwanda.

Such an experience damages the individual in a seemingly endless variety of ways. The remarkable thing about Deo is the ways he was unchanged. Who he is, what he values, and even his life goals are essentially unchanged by a vicious catastrophe that changed everything around him. This is a story about the most terrible human actions, but also about the inner strength of one remarkable individual.

Sunflower

Gyula Krúdy wrote 60 novels. He loved at least that many women, and this book, like many of those loves, is intense, abundant, and memorable, but not the labor of many years. Sunflower was instead serialized around 1918 in a Hungarian newspaper.

Sunflower tells the story of a well-born Hungarian woman, her friend, and their mutual and mutually exclusive loves. Also, much is reputed to be lost in translation. If that doesn't sound promising, let me recommend Sunflower as among the most lavish books ever conceived. A meandering plot yields wistful views of a lost Hungary, from sharp, snow-laden nights to hazy, sweltering summer afternoons, and everything in-between. Plus, it's funny and not a little saucy. I think of Krúdy as a kind of Hungarian Czesław Miłosz. Put down that forgettable Harlequin penny dreadful and get your lovin' from the house of Krúdy.

Three Cups of Tea

The remarkable story of Greg Mortenson, who got lost climbing down K2, and wandered into a world he could hardly have imagined in rural Pakistan. As Pakistan becomes an increasingly critical key to world stability, Mortenson's book is a fabulous window into some of the peoples who live there, what they want out of life, and how outside forces can change their and our lives for the better or otherwise. (Oh, and Mortenson goes to rural Afghanistan, too.) Read this book as a great human story, and as one point of reference to personalize news from that part of the world.

Tweak

Nic Sheff is a meth addict. The first 130 pages of his book Tweak detail a harrowing 27-day train-wreck of late-stage meth addiction. (Nic Sheff hadn't actually been using for all that long before this time —apparently meth addiction can come on very fast.) It's remarkable he isn't dead several times over, by the end. It's also remarkable that someone who has messed up their head that badly can still write very, very well.

But that's not the whole way down the rabbit hole. It gets far deeper, and hard as it may be to believe, darker. It's odd that some of the darkest moments of the book are when Nic starts trying to clean up. I won't tell you how the book ends, but since Nic is still alive at the end of the book, the book in any case isn't a whole life story. So however bleak or hopeful the end, it's not really the end.

David Sheff, Nic's Father, wrote Beautiful Boy as a companion to Tweak, but it's really an alternate reality. For one thing, while Nic always knows more or less what is happening to him, David quite often doesn't know whether his son is using or not, or even if he is still alive. David details the pervasive, consuming anxiety that becomes a companion illness to his son's.

Beautiful Boy is a well written book, but surpisingly not as well-written as the best parts of Nic's book. It's almost beyond belief that Nic could macerate his psyche to the extent he has, and still write better than his father. One can't help wondering what kind of writer he could have been.

The other interesting insight that only comes from comparing the books is how comprehensively dishonest Nic's addiction is. Surely, one important point of meth is to try to avoid life's hard truths. The cruel irony is that meth makes those hard truths so much harder. But it seems that meth comprehensively poisons away the truth from every aspect of Nic's life. Nic lies to everyone including himself. In the end, he even lies to us, his readers.

Most of Tweak is flayed down to a raw, festering honesty. Nic does change certain facts to protect the privacy of people who appear in the book. But reading David's book, we realize that Nic changed more facts than he absolutely had to. Perhaps lying is a habit and nothing more, but in a very subtle way this is a window into the Sheff's joyless funhouse. We realize we can't trust Nic as much as we thought we could. Just as David discovered over and over that every time he trusted his son it was a mistake, and just as Nic learned over and over than even he couldn't trust himself.

Day of Empire

Amy Chua's first book World on Fire, was a fascinating mix of personal and global observations about how small communities make big economic impacts within their larger societies. Here, Chua examines all of the global powers (by her definition) throughout recorded history. Her conclusion is that they all practiced what she calls strategic tolerance: a willingness to embrace new ideas and make use of capable people, whatever their provenance.

Strategic tolerance is an interesting concept. It articulates the self-interested motivations for diversity, as independent from altruistic motives. Chua notes that Genghis Khan didn't form his inner circle from widely diverse ethnic and religious groups because he saw diversity as a social good. He merely wanted the best and brightest people available, so as to be a successful as possible. Diversity has an inherent moral value, at least to some people, including me. Chua articulates the practical benefits that have historically motivated diversity, and documents the world-changing consequences.

Mirroring People

Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People. I found out about this book through Charles Mudede's review of it. Actually, I didn't read the whole review. I read the first sentence. Halfway through the second sentence, I had already ordered the book from Amazon. Yep, it's an interesting book.

Lakoff and Johnson's 1999 book Philosophy in the Flesh persuades that a philosophy of mind should be motivated by our knowledge of cognitive science and neurology. That is, what we believe about minds should be consistent with what we know about brains.

Iacoboni's work on mirror neurons, described in his book, thus provides a new foundation on which to address critical philosophical questions. What does one person really know about another? How do we know that we understand another person, or have been understood? In mirror neurons, Iacoboni and his collaborators have uncovered the specific neurological machinery by which we comprehend and imitate the actions of others, and by which we empathize.

The answer is fascinating and unexpected: when we perceive an action by others, we experience the action as if we had performed it ourselves. In a real and visceral sense, we empathize with others by experiencing what they experince. We are far less trapped in our own brains than was once thought. Specific neurological mechanisms allow us to understand the actions and emotional states of others as if they were our own. Iacoboni shows us a world far less lonely than almost anyone has ever imagined.

Why is Sex Fun?

Jared Diamond, Why is Sex Fun? My friend Heather Holmback loaned me this book, after a typically interesting discussion. (Aki and Heather are old friends, and used to work together.)

In this case, the discussion was on the evolutionary value of menopause, a phenomenon (nearly) unique to humans. Diamond raises and dismisses some typical arguments that don't make much sense, then advances the one widely-heard argument he (and FWIW I) find sensible: by skipping the last child or two, old women can help raise their grandchildren, and do more to ultimately increase their genes' survival than would a risky pregnancy. Grandmothers help not just with childcare: in some traditional societies such as the Hadza of Tanzania, grandmothers are the most economically productive people.

But then Diamond raises an argument of his own, a very interesting argument at the heart of Heather and my discussion: in traditional societies, old people are the library people turn to in times of crisis.

Any human societies that included individuals old enough to remember the last event like a [hurricane] had a better chance of surviving than did societies without such old people.... At times of crisis... prior death of such an older woman also tended to eliminate all of her surviving relatives from the gene pool.... The importance to society of the memories of old women is what I see as a major driving force behind the evolution of human female menopause.

The book is about a good deal more than menopause. And, like sex, the book is also fun. Thanks for loaning it to me, Heather. I'll have it back to you real soon now.

Flight

Yet another of the books I find myself reading lately, mostly concerned with identity. (Compare with Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence, for example.) One difference: this is a novel, one of the few novels I've read this year. Alexie's novels are always fictions, but always picking the scab of an unhealed truth. This isn't a breezy summer novel, but it's a quick read and literally a wild ride. Flight is ultimately optimistic about what people are and what they can become.

Identity and Violence

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen wrote Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny to argue why the conventional wisdom on large scale human conflict is almost entirely wrong. There is no clash of civilizations. Instead, there are people who are happy to speak on behalf of these viewpoints for their own benefit, while actual people are far too complex to be captured in such narrow confines.
    Sen repeatedly makes two points: first that people have a variety of identities, and different identities are more or less important under different circumstances. Sen's second point is that opponents of the narrow-minded "clash of civilizations" perspective usually concede too much. It is not just, for example, that the Muslim and Christian worlds are not inherently at odds. Moreover, people who are ostensibly part of these two "worlds" do not see themselves as one-dimensional components of these worlds, and they should not try to see themselves in this way. Sen has a term for the simple-minded concept of identity that makes a "clash of civilizations" seem possible. He calls it the "miniaturization" of identity. But of course, the consequences of this mistaken, miniature view are serious and dangerous. That's where the "violence" part of the title comes in.
    Sen's book reminds me oddly of a very different book by a very different author that makes similar points: My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd. Loyd's and Sen's books are mostly about different things. However, particularly regarding religious identity, both Sen and Loyd make similar points about how extremists benefit by destabilizing situations and marginalizing moderates. Loyd makes his point more viscerally, and Sen more scholarly, but both draw on their own horrifying personal experiences to inform their analyses.

Sherman Alexie, Insomniac

Sherman Alexie wrote the perfect prose poem for everyone who's ever had trouble sleeping.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

If you read regularly, not many of the books you read can change your life much. I read Mountains Beyond Mountains over a year ago, and it clearly is a book that can change your life. It changed mine.
    This book tells the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a specialist in infectious disease who divides his time between Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a rural clinic he founded in Haiti. In his spare time, Farmer revolutionized the treatment of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. Farmer is about the hardest-working person I've ever heard of, and a great doctor: brilliant, determined, and compassionate.
    Read this book because it tells a great human story, and by the way shows what global health can really be, and how much better life can be for the world's poor, if we are willing to take even a little effort to make it so.
    This is the second book by Tracy Kidder that has had a memorable impact on me. His book The Soul of a New Machine was much read by technologists in the 80s. This book portrays the bright, driven technologists at Data General as, well, kind of soul-less. Sure, they were interesting people, but ultimately their work just wasn't very important, or even very interesting. Most of what made the book interesting is their suffering, but since their suffering was ultimately meaningless, it wasn't even redemptive. Kidder's earlier book persuaded me that I did not want to make a career in the computer equipment industry, a career path I was already on when I read Soul. Kidder's later book made me confidently enthusiastic that, if all I ever accomplish is to put moderately better tools in the hands of doctors like Paul Farmer, my career will have been worthwhile.

The Trouble with Physics

The Trouble With Physics tries to be about physics, but it's more about the politics of physics. Of course, since physics is the original Big Science, there is very little about physics that isn't political. Smolin's thesis is that string theory stopped being a proper theory a good while ago, and is now something more like a political party. Or a cult.
    Maybe people who haven't had much exposure to science might find this booking shocking. Science, as it happens, is fiercely competitive. Most of the scientists I know are kind, delightful people. But science doesn't give much credit for being nice, it gives credit for being right. And not everyone is going to be nice all of the time. When millions of dollars in research funding is at stake, there will inevitably be people who will do things that should not be done. Smolin argues that realpolitik has come to dominate physics research, particularly in America.

Nabokov's Blues

Much like Nabokov's career, Nabokov's Blues doesn't hold a single focus, but the beautiful moments make it worthwhile.
    Author Vladimir Nabokov was famous for two literary careers: one in Russian and another in English. Nabokov also had a third career as a biologist, specializing in lepidoptery, the taxonomy of butterflies. This book is the story of his original work, and the later consequences, with digressions for Nabokov's fictional treatment of butterflies, and a fair bit of traipsing around South America by modern day lepidopterists, chasing down butterflies known as blues that Nabokov studied.
    This books will mostly appeal to fans of Nabokov's literature, including me. But the authors are most obviously in their element describing biological fieldwork, which in the case of butterflies still involves chasing flashes of light around with a net. Like Nabokov, the authors genuinely thrill at this work, and write compellingly of their joy, which Nabokov shared, in fieldwork.