The joys and follies of subtitles for books

This article is posted on my This Just In!  blog. Please visit if you find subtitles on books amusing.

 

A helpful book about helping

I am just finishing a terrific book about helping. The title is Helping, How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help. The author is Edgar H. Schein. Dr. Schein is one of the great names in organizational behavior. That said, why did he write a book on something as “obvious” as how to help people? It’s because helping people is one of the trickiest things in the world to do right. You will agree with me if your attempts to help someone—or your failure to help—ever blew up in your face, or if you have tried to help people who really needed it and they turned a cold shoulder to you.

Dr. Schein analyzes the ego shifts that accompany needing help, asking for help, offering help, providing help, and so on. He explains the tenderness of the ego as it navigates through all of these shifting states. He also introduced me to the notion of “social economics.”

For example: if I hold a door open for a stranger as we enter an office building I inwardly set an expectation of a thank you from the stranger. I think, “You owe me.” It’s dumb, but I see myself in that example. As the stakes get serious with co-workers, bosses, spouses, and friends it becomes increasingly important to be fluent with the social economics of the situation you are in.

This book has increased my sensitivity to the dynamics that surround the art of helping. I am also much more alert to recognizing the “state” of my relationships and to accounting for the social economics that are in play. I don’t want to be unaware of a debt that someone has assigned to me. This is a how-to book with wide applications, and I recommend it highly.

 

The Coldest Winter, a look at the Korean War

If you know David Halberstam’s books you know that they are relentlessly thorough (therefore thick) and profoundly humorless. They are also inspiring for the importance of the subjects they cover and his passion for truth and decency.  They are tough reads, but worth the effort.

The Coldest Winter, America and the Korean War, spans 661 pages, and it is accessible to people with modest backgrounds in U.S. history, although the more you know the more intrigued you are likely to be with the tales he tells.

Taking on the Korean War as a book project showed a lot of heart. Who cares about the Korean War these days? I care for a couple of reasons. It was a classic example of American mismanagement, and we learned absolutely nothing from it. We plunged into Viet Nam and into Iraq having retained no lessons at all from Korea. These stories fascinate me.

Secondly, I’m a big fan of Harry Truman, and the war occurred on his watch and with his consent. It was one of Truman’s biggest errors, and I was eager to know more about the context in which it occurred.  I am also interested in Douglas MacArthur and Matt Ridgway, and Korea is the best context in which to study them.

I really enjoy the way Mr. Halberstam “digresses” into background stories, like the ones about Pinky MacArthur, mother of Douglas. These provide an extraordinary framework for understanding the primary subject at hand.

If you have some motivation for studying any of these subjects I highly recommend this book. Brace yourself, though. It is typical Halberstam.

 

Hooking Up—like dating, but without the responsibility

Kathleen A. Bogle wrote a book about the loosely-defined ritual of hooking up, the college-age substitute for dating. The title is Hooking Up, Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus.

There is widespread agreement that traditional forms of dating, especially during undergraduate college years, carry the burden of too much responsibility for many young men. As Ms. Bogle points out, dating requires planning, expense, and a measure of commitment proportionate to both. When I guy just wants sex, commitment seems like a lot of work—hence the need for hooking up.

Hooking up, in contrast to dating, merely involves mingling at a party and waiting for the alcohol to make one another look good enough to prompt them to pair off for sexual activity with each other. The amount of sexual activity is open to interpretation by the individuals involved. Everything about hooking up appears to be ambiguous.

Ms. Bogle based her book on 76 interviews.  The students she interviewed were, like, I mean, really inarticulate, you know what I mean? What worries me about them more than their shallow attitudes toward one another is their inability to make any critical decisions about their own value systems or to speak clearly about what really matters to them.  The young men want to have sex with their classmates, but they consider them sluts for accepting the invitation. How many encounters qualifies a woman to be a slut? Well, like, you know. Actually I don’t, but none of the young men could say for sure, but they were still willing to heap blame on the hypothetical sluts.

This is a revealing study, again not for the insights into the superficial sexual customs of many young people, but rather that out of 76 people hardly any of them could reason clearly about their own values nor show much respect for one another.

I applaud Ms. Bogle for venturing into these muddy waters of blurred values and unexamined motivations. By design her study was qualitative, not quantitative. I hope the 76 people she found are the exceptions, not the rule.

 

Are garage sales killing book stores?

Reporter David Streitfeld apologizes in The New York Times today for buying used books. He laments the decline of the iconic bookstores such as Powell’s in Portland, Ore., and confesses that he is contributing to their problems.  Mr. Streitfeld flat out blames himself, as if buying books from a neighbor who is done with his copy is some kind of betrayal to the literary food chain. The garage sale may be the ultimate weapon against the bookstore.

I bring this up not to criticize Mr. Streitfeld, but rather to comment on how deeply embedded business models can become in our minds. We are surrounded by businesses that are convinced they will die if their business model is changed. The U.S. automakers certainly feel this way. The newspapers feel this way. The airlines feel this way. The music industry is just now awakening to the decade-old change in their business environment and has decided to stop suing people who challenge the old model.

Such certainty as these industries have is hostile to the powers of imagination. Indeed, Detroit, to choose just one example, is nearly devoid of imagination and has been for years.

I admire Mr. Streitfeld’s willingness to take personal responsibility for the decline of an industry, but I feel it is misplaced in this case.

The publishing houses have long been more of an obstacle than a resource, in my opinion. It is now possible to publish single copies of full-color, hardbound books for about $30 a copy. I’ve printed 10 different titles myself for use by family and friends.  Random House would never publish anything I wrote. Now I’ve got a shot at being recognized some day if I have the talent and tenacity.

If I can redesign the auto, airline, publishing, and news gathering industries—and I can—surely thousands of other people can too. It just takes some imagination and a bit of time.

Let us not allow too much certainty about what is to inhibit our use of imagination about what might be.

 

The Man Who Invented Christmas

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a new book that tells the story of how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol.  The story is well told, and it includes many fun facts. I didn’t know, for example, that the Puritans outlawed Christmas in Massachusetts for a period of time.

The author, Les Standiford, puts Christmas itself into a fascinating historical context that reminds us how fashions relating to holidays change over time. Our current near-obsession with the holiday stands in stark contrast to the days when there were no shopping mall-Santas, no day-after-Christmas shopping frenzy, and no Christmas cards. Santa himself has changed his image many times. He wasn’t always chubby and cheery. But this is not primarily a history of Christmas, it concentrates mostly on the simple story, A Christmas Carol, and how it came to be written.

Dickens was one of the most influential writers in history, but he went through severe financial problems at various times in his life. He pinned a tremendous amount of hopes on this little story hoping that it would generate quick sales and pull him out of a tight financial spot. It did, eventually, but in a roundabout, problem-afflicted way.

Besides the value of the history lessons and the sheer entertainment value of the book, it also provides an inspiring lesson about not giving up. Dickens, in spite of his enormous success, had lots of problems in life that are described in this entertaining book. This is a fine book to read for a bit of Christmas inspiration.

 

To highlight, or not highlight, that is the question

Do you write in your books? Do you have rules about writing in your books? To highlight, or not to highlight, that is the question. I would like to know what you do.

I have rules, but there are large gray areas (grey areas, if you are British) that leave me in a quandary.

One rule is that books that are clearly (to me) work related or spiritual-study related will be subject to highlighting without mercy. They are like college text books. No problem there. I want to find the highlights easily at any time. Well, there is a complication. I have collector-grade Bibles that I don’t write in. I think they blend into my next category—art books.

Then there is the broad category of art books. They are not to be written in under any circumstances. It is usually pretty clear to me what an art book is.

This still leaves a lot of books that fall into other categories. Moments ago I was about to highlight a passage in Carl Sagan’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and I hesitated. The book, presently, is still pristine and highlight-free. It is a fine hardcover book with a nearly flawless dustcover. Do I write in this? I asked myself.

I realized I didn’t know. I’ll submit it to the jury.

While they deliberate, perhaps I can gather some suggestions and learn how other people make this decision. I welcome your comments.

 

Woman, An Intimate Geography

I like interesting questions about really basic notions that we take for granted. For example, Carl Sagan wrote, “Embarrasingly, biologists don’t fully understand what sex is for.” (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, A Search for Who We Are, page 144.)

He points out that nature did fine without sex or gender for a long time. In the beginning, cells simply divided in half to make more cells. Now that we have gender, he asks, why stop with two? Those are wonderful questions.

Natalie Angier , Pulitzer-Prize-winning science writer for the New York Times, has a similar sense of curiosity. She asks things like, what is menstruation for?  What does breast milk taste like, and why?  What really is going on with the clitoris, and how much of it can she explain in 28 pages? How do gay and lesbian mate selection criteria differ from supposed heterosexual norms?

I enjoyed reading all these things Mom never told me. Actually, Mom probably didn’t know any of this stuff.

I loaned this book to my friend Michelle. She and I co-lead a two member book club, and her husband Mike got a hold of it. She said he read it cover to cover, and then he told me that he read it cover to cover, so it’s not just me that has this interest in, well, women studies.

This is an informative and interesting book, and I really enjoy Ms. Angier’s writing style. It is a delightful blend of friendly curiosity, edginess, and sound scholarship.

You can read her personal profile on her web site.

 

What Makes You NOT a Buddhist

What Makes You not a Buddhist is written by filmmaker and Buddhist scholar Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse.  It was published in 2007.

I was intrigued by the title of this book, and by the spread of opinions among the Amazon reviewers. They showed that they couldn’t agree on why they liked it or didn’t like the book. The book pretty well scrambled either their thinking, or their ability to express their thoughts.

I would struggle mightily too, if I tried to describe this book, so I’m not going to.

This book reminds me of a tee shirt in a gift shop here in Tucson that portrayed a cartoon image of the Dalai Lama opening a box presented as a birthday gift. The box contained nothing. He exclaims, “Nothing! Just what I’ve always wanted!”

Many books address the subject of what nothing is, and while it is impossible to do that, this book does the best job of any that I have found. Reading it will enhance my future studies of Pema Chodron, Charlotte Joko Beck, and Krishnamurti. Not a bad find, in my view.

If this review confuses you, then my work is done. I highly recommend this book, but I can’t say why because I would just end up getting it wrong.

 

Making Waves, the story of a successful maverick

I was impressed that Robert Reich and the Dalai Lama both wrote forewords for this book. How common is that?

Making Waves and Riding the Currents, Activism and the Practice of Wisdom, is Charles Halpern’s story of how he used the ultra conservative world of Yale, Harvard, and the legal profession as launch pads to become a social activist and launch the concept of the public interest law firm. He tells the story of his struggle with the conflicts inherent in asking arch conservative people and organizations to sponsor and endorse risky experiments as his own sense of self hung in the balance.

Mr. Halpern is far more candid about his errors and fears than most CEOs are in their autobiographies, and that alone would be enough to make this a good read. But there is more. His chronicle of his  transition from conformist to innovator, and being able to accomplish that without alienating the establishment, is truly remarkable.

In addition, he recounts his discovery of the value of meditation and its effects on his composure and confidence. Considering that he was a privileged man from the beginning, his composure and confidence might be taken for granted. For a person in his position to discover reverence is another remarkable event.

This autobiography therefore provides a rare combination of an establishment man stepping into the sea of risk for the benefit of helpless people, and then anchoring his achievements in a solid practice of introspection. It is a rare story.

My rating: Four √√√√ checkmarks for an interesting story told with candor and courage.