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Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough, John J. Ross, M.D., 2012

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The dominant literary theory in the 20th century was the New Criticism, which taught that text was all, that the life and times of the author had little importance to the appreciation of art.  Yet many readers ignore this too precious idea and assume that the writer is inspired by circumstances.  Biography can lead to a greater appreciation of the work.  In Dr. John Ross’ medical biography of a handful of great English authors, he accounts for some of the well known as well as the highly speculative details of their writing lives, occasionally reflecting on their works. Some of the details are TMI, far Too Much Information, especially in the descriptions of the treatments and poisonous potions given to these unfortunate sufferers.  Here are the literary victims and their maladies:
Shakespeare shook.  His handwriting became increasingly tremulous and some have surmised that he had syphilis or perhaps just a dose of the clap.  But his tremor is the only known fact of his diminished scrawl and who knows, this could have been age itself.  That his work frequently referenced venereal diseases is not evidence and neither is the difficult question of why he completely stopped writing at all.  We do learn from Ross that syphilis probably came to Europe from the Caribbean, brought back by Columbus’ crew and the other early explorers.  Perhaps this was only justice as the South Americans were gifted with smallpox and other Continental diseases.
John Milton was a pedantic and generally reprehensible SOB, but we knew that.  He may have had Asperger syndrome.  His blindness was probably caused by chronic glaucoma and retinal detachment related to severe myopia.  Ross confirms what your mother told you, that reading in low light ruins the eyes, or at least a lot of reading does.  Myopia is not common to pre-literate societies.  Lead poisoning may have also given Milton intestinal problems (he was “afflicted with flatulence”) and the deterioration of his kidneys.  The lead may have come from drinking vessels or from his physicians.  None of his physicians were able to make him a better person.
Jonathan Swift became dizzy and deaf, probably from Meniere’s disease.  He grew depressed, dull and demented.  No doubt he had OCD, he was obsessively clean, hated filth and was disgusted by sex.  This did not temper his love life with a Stella Johnson and Hester Vanessa Vanhomrigh, insisting on their fastidious cleanliness.  Some of the smutty passages in his writing may have been a result of his increasing dementia.  After his death, his fortune went to a hospital for the mentally ill which “now has wards named after Stella and Vanessa.”
The Bronte sisters and the whole sickly family suffered greatly from one awful thing or another.  The girls father, Patrick Brunty (he adopted the less ruffian name Bronte) was a literary but pious tyrant and a vicar who enforced his moral rules with a strong left hook.  He placed the famous Charlotte and Emily, together with the lesser known Maria and Elizabeth in a cruel Dickensian boarding school that was subsequently shut down for its vile and unhygienic conditions.  It did not close in time to save several of the girls from death by tuberculosis.  Both Maria and Elizabeth Bronte expired promptly and Charlotte and Emily went on to fame and the unfortunate life of chronic consumptives.  A brother, Branwell, took to the wilder side of life and drugs, from which he too died young.  Then there was Aspergers, depression, insomnia, hyperemesis, delirium, malnutrition, and possibly bipolar disorder.  The youngest of the sisters, Anne, an early feminist writer, “died peacefully” of tuberculosis.  Ross notes that Asperger syndrome may be conducive to the quiet, asocial life of a writer.  And in an aside, Dr. Ross discusses how cystic fibrosis, when only one of the recessive genes is present, may actually provide protection from tuberculosis.
Nathaniel Hawthorne had a social phobia that was extreme and no doubt pathological.  Attendant to this was depression and alcoholism.  His intense shyness led him to slight a visiting publisher, but then run after him as he left and he “shyly handed him a bundle of papers.”  This was the manuscript of The Scarlet Letter, one of the perennial contenders for Great American Novel.  Long a depressive but physically healthy for most of his life, Hawthorne began to decline in health and weight and energy and finally succumb, probably due to stomach cancer.
Herman Melville’s father suffered bipolar disorder leading to an acute breakdown called Bell’s mania and ultimately death.  Melville was no stranger to mental disorders and even Melvilles’s sons suffered likewise.  Melville writes of the debauchery and drunkenness among the sailors in the South Seas and may well have indulged in some of the same.  Wild and uninhibited sex is a not too subtle theme in his writing although there is no real evidence he engage in anything like physical love for Nathaniel Hawthorne his friend and neighbor to whom he clearly was enormously attracted. There is what must only be called a love letter to Hawthorne that has led to speculation about Melville’s most personal life, but there is no smoking gun.  His bipolar affliction resulted in maniacal bouts of writing for which the reading public can only be grateful.  Melville also suffered debilitating back pain attributed to rheumatism but which Dr. Ross contends must have been ankylosing spondylitis.  AS also could account for Melville’s eye affliction, chest pain and even loss in height.  All this assortment of ailments may well account for the gloomy writing.  He live long with his many illnesses but the one that killed him was heart failure.  After his death, Billy Budd was published, but of course, it was Moby Dick that places this long-suffering author in the first rank of novelists in the English language.
William Butler Yeats suffered much from his lungs and had the kind of heart trouble that leads to the agonies of the lovelorn the most compelling of poetry.  It was his heart the finally did him in, dying of heart failure, “his wife and two mistresses in attendance.”    Like Dante and Beatrice, Yeats forever loved his Maude Gonne, who repeatedly spurned his marriage proposals, as did Maude Gonne’s daughter.  Yeats did marry the loyal Georgina Hyde Lees, a friend of Ezra Pound.  The young American Ezra Pound was a genius poet who worshipped the elder poet.  Yeats frequently lived with Pound in Italy, until madness and cynicism turned Ezra Pound into a fascist and traitor.  Brucellosis was the worst of the ailments for Yeats, if love-sickness does not count.  Caused by a bacterium transmitted through contaminated milk, brucellosis is a devastating lung disease that was difficult to treat before the age of antibiotics.  Yeats was treated with arsenic, a valuable remedy for infections known from ancient Greek times and is still used in veterinary medicine.  Yeats may have had a bit too much of the stuff and had a slow recovery.  He also voluntarily endured a “Steinach procedure”.  Steinach, a wacko charlatan, gave patients what was only a vasectomy, which he apparently convinced his dupes would restore the youthful vigor of their manly parts.   Surely Yeats had enough troubles without this, but the poor Irish patriot wrote some of the most moving and transcendent poetry in the English language.
On the other hand, there are those who consider Jack London a hack who wrote a couple of worthy stories.  Nonetheless, London became enormously popular and quite rich.  Jack London was bipolar and his maniacal bouts of energy produced volumes of rip-roaring adventure stories.  On one of his own adventures in the Solomon Islands, London contracted yaws, a disease that is a first-cousin to syphilis but can be contracted by only casual contact.  He suffered from terrible skin ulcers, a rectal fistula, and from the regimen of the attempted cure:  arsenic and mercury.  As a wealthy celebrity writer, physicians would prescribe for him most anything.  For later ailments, in addition to the toxic mercury, but possibly effective arsenic, London was given heroin, strychnine, belladonna, and a plethora of other snake oils.    He died of an overdose.
James Joyce had a dose of the gleet.  The clap.  Gonorrhea.  Neisseria gonorrhoeae.  The description of the symptoms, and worse, the treatment, is given by Dr. Ross, but not to be repeated here.  Joyce apparently took the cure for this awful malady and survived unscathed.  He may also have contracted chlamidia resulting in reactive arthritis.  Reactive arthritis, triggered by the genital infections is an autoimmune disease. This in turn may have triggered his iritis, an inflammation of the iris.  This became chronic and led to his near blindness.  What was the treatment?  Do you want to know?  Yes, he was treated with leeches applied to the eye.  During the writing of one of the greatest of literary feats, the magnificent Ulysses, his afflicted eyes worsened with severe glaucoma.  Ross reports that frequently in Ulysses, many passages refer to the aforementioned gleet and other STD manifestations. Joyce’s eyes continued to worsen, and he had to suffer the repeated cruelties of ocular surgeries.  What did the great wordsmith in at last was acute peritonitis.  Ross relates a doubtful anecdote, but one that rings so true about Joyce and his lifelong argument with Irish Catholicism.  A priest offered to give Joyce a church requiem and burial, but the writer’s wife Nora said, no, “I couldn’t do that to him.”
George Orwell had a bad cough.   Trouble with breathing, congestion, and bronchitis began to bedevil Orwell, born Eric Blair in 1903, as early as infancy.  He had a brilliant academic career but being decidedly among the common classes in snooty England, he took on the role of a policeman in Burma.  His weak lungs suffered in the East and he only worsened his condition upon an early retirement by a Bohemian lifestyle as scruffy writer in London.  Here he was given to fits of coughing up blood, attacks of pneumonia, and later tuberculosis.  The cruelties of his venture in fighting the fascists in the Spanish civil war did not help.  He took a bullet to the neck in that war and miraculously survived.  His incessant smoking could not have helped either.  When the world war came to England in 1940, the adventurous socialist volunteered his services, but of course, he failed his physicals.  Ross provides copious details of Orwell’s failing health, including various gruesome descriptions, which probably ought to be skipped by the squeamish.  No doubt Orwell’s suffering was not only from his diseases, but from the awful medical procedures which may have inspired some of the torture and institutional cruelties in Nineteen Eighty-four.  The critical and financial success of that novel came too late in life for Orwell as he was already dying.  He enjoyed a brief reprieve from his impending end, and sought to take a rest in the Swiss Alps but before his flight was to leave he died alone in the hospital, a gloomy genius to the last.  

How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch

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Recently I heard an NPR report that poetry had been given a new life and new popularity with the internet, with YouTube, public readings, poetry slams, and even apps (yes, I love the app from Poetry magazine).  Years ago, as an English major in college, I read numerous books and reviews that discussed poetry almost as if it were some sort of rare earth or a tarnished but cherished antique, appreciated only by the few.  In How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch celebrates the lyric poem as if it were a compelling song, an ode to life itself, a toast to the ecstasy and sorrow of the world.
The lyric poem is the poem of the song, with rhythm kept on the lyre, and words wrung from the heart.  It is of course the same word, lyric, we use for the words of a song and with the same purpose: to heighten and deepen the emotional experience.  No critic I read in those years of college expressed a greater emotional attachment to poetry than Hirsch, who relates not just the construction of the poem itself, but of his powerful reaction to it.  
Hirsch says that at the most critical level, the lyric poem depends on metaphor.  It is as if we really cannot explain a deep human emotion with ordinary words but must turn to symbolic language.  A poem is a song, a poem is ship on the ocean of time, the first cry of a newborn child, the smile of a grandmother, the long shadow of an Autumn evening, a minuet and a dirge.  
This book is particularly useful in its examination of the poetry of Europe and the South American poets.  The author introduced me to the “Postcards” of Miklos Radnoti, the final one, so tragic, written as he takes his last painful steps toward execution and found in his cloak next to his heart.  His love of Pablo Neruda and his affecting response to this poetic master is fresh and delightful. The erudite Robert Graves claimed that the metrics of Anglo-Saxon poetry (the topic of my Master’s thesis) was sung with the rhythms of the oar in water.  
He helped me understand Wallace Stevens, always somewhat recondite yet captivating.  Hirsch makes obvious his great love for Walt Whitman who loved America so well and the American people that he left us with a body of work that speaks to the unique soul of the people of the New World. The love for poetry of Hirsch is inspiring and he subtitles How the Read a Poem as …And Fall in Love with Poetry.  Certainly Edward Hirsch, and I suppose his readers, are deep in that love. 

The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie. 2003

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When I was a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the English Department (Miserable Job # 24 maybe, but really miserable), one of the assigned stories was Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find.  The students found the story disturbing as I always did.  Undoubtedly O’Connor meant to discomfit the story readers and force them, as if by gunpoint, to examine their lives and perhaps to save it from a life unexamined and in the dark.  The misfits in her stories were dragged up from her own discomfit in her parochial South and her personal torment.

Along with Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, all Catholic writers of the 1950s and 1960s, Flannery O’Connor and her life and work are examined in a history and biography of the four seekers of salvation, Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own.  Perhaps none really found it, but their search became the common currency of the turbulent times where American attitudes toward war, religion, race, and power were in turbulence.  The Life You Save May Be Your Own looks at the major writing of these four literary and social change agents.  This is not traditional literary criticism, certainly not the critical outlook that dismisses the life of the writer as unimportant to the work.  Rather, the social milieu and the very personal lives of each of the writers is examined with a sharp eye.  Passing through the lives of the four writers and brought into focus in this book are many of the thoughtful and prominent religious and social activists of the age.  In some way these writers knew, influenced and were affected by the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, the Berrigan Brothers,  Pope John XXIII, Shelby Foote, Evelyn Waugh, as well as the civil rights workers, beat poets, peace activists, hippies, poverty workers, and other social advocates of change.  Mostly, as all four taught us, change always comes from within.

Introduction to My Miserable Jobs: Job #1, Carrier

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Job Number 1, Paper Boy. To be truthful, my very first legitimate (perhaps that is questionable) job was that of what is now called Newspaper Carrier. Oh, the Palm Beach Post referred to us as Carriers, but everyone else called us Paper Boys. Even the rare girl so employed was a Paper Boy, I believe. I do recall a girl who had a big route, and a particularly big rear, who made quite a success at the delivery business and even bought herself a new bike with front and rear baskets. I was not a success. When did I start this miserable endeavor? I would say I was 14, I think there was a lower limit on age. That would make the year 1963. Maybe I was 13, my memory is not good concerning the 60’s.We did not exactly work for the Post, but were “independent contractors” under the control of a District Manager. This was in my case, as in most cases, an evil Dickensian character, whose expertise in the exploitation of his band of amoral boys was exceeded only by our own skills at deception and trickery. Thankfully, the name of this vile loser has now exited my memory, but I know I remember him as Fagin.Young Fagin was a tow-headed braggart, and a man who rarely buttoned his shirt. He held court in his carport, slouched against some big fin muscle car. He would gather us for “management meetings” on an occasional Saturday, where he would exhort us to sell more subscriptions, thus adding to our income slightly and his greatly. There were prizes of all sorts including brand new Schwinn bicycles which we all coveted but which no one ever won. Fagin was skilled at lighting a fire under the butts of the boys and we went door to door, like orphaned beggars, pleading for subscriptions.You must know that customers paid in cash to the Paper Boy on a weekly basis, and then we paid the District Manager for the cost of the paper. Or rather the other way around, as we always had to pay in full and up front each week or forfeit a large cash deposit which invariably had been made by our parents. On the other hand, collecting from the Post reader was nearly impossible. Once again, this was a door-to-door pursuit, done on Friday evenings in anticipation of our debt to be paid Saturday morning, no later. I would knock and sing out: “Paper Boy! Come to Collect! Paper Boy!” Generally, this was enough to make the inhabitants hide in the bathroom. If I recall, the cost of the subscription for a week was about one dollar or perhaps one dollar twenty five. The boys’ profit for a full weekly subscription was a quarter per week, if Sunday was delivered, and only ten cents per week for a five-day delivery. God only knows what the Fagin demon made, but assuredly he did well as he was always paid while the boys were never paid in full.I recall that the several Jewish households on the Lakeside always paid with methodical regularity, while the good Christian rednecks were generally spent up on beer and were reeking drunk by Friday evening. One boozy fraud, a lowlife woman of questionable profession, was never home in the evening or on Saturday morning. She was so much in arrears to me, that I vowed to keep delivering as it was the only hope I had to force her to pay. If her paper were stopped she would never have any incentive to pay. It was Catch-22 before Heller wrote it. One morning before dawn, on my delivery rounds, I smacked her paper hard against her door. The doorbell brought no answer, but I knew from the car in the driveway the creature was within, sleeping off a night of wickedness. Creeping around in the dark to her bedroom, I noted the window was open to the coolness of the Florida morning. I banged the window and yelled: “Paper Boy! Come to collect! You owe me for five weeks!” From the darkness of the pit inside came a groan of pure suffering. She roared back: “Nobody’s home…and I am asleep!” So much for my pay. I stopped her delivery, gave up and took another loss.The idea that anyone would have so little character as to cheat a child out of $1.25 is beyond my belief even to this day. The substance of all forms of abuse, because they could I suppose. And what we went through on our appointed rounds! The procedure was this: up at 5 AM, and ride the bicycle on the old hand me down machine, if the tires were not flat, to the drop-off site. Once I awoke to the shock and sadness of having my bike’s wheels stolen, no doubt by another paper boy with flat tires. The drop site was an unproductive gas station where the heavy wire-bound bundles of papers were dumped in several piles for each of three or four boys. We cut the bundles with wire cutters purchased at a crooked price from the DM, and individually folded each paper and bound it with a rubber band, purchased in bulk. If it was rainy, we “bagged” each paper in a waxed wrap, purchased from the slimy District Manager. There would be a series of messages with the bundles. “Starts” would add a subscriber to the list of deadbeats and a new paper to pay for. “Stops” were those who quit subscribing after failing to pay for weeks, a loss borne solely by the Paper Boy. To issue a “stop” by the Paper Boy brought an argument from the Evil One. If District Manager did agree to stop the paper, invariably he would keep sending one in the bundle for several days or weeks to exact a revenge out of our profits.Then the procedure, after an hour or so of wrapping papers with the other boys and telling prurient stories, was to stuff the rolled papers into wire baskets fore and aft of the bike. The boys took great pride in their ability to ride fast, reach into the basket and whip out a paper, and sling it hard and fast. A paper on the roof or in the bushes was ignored. Always, I missed several households and wound up with useless papers added to the many extra sent in my bundle by the deceit and crooked counting of the vile Fagin. Of course, the reader would call the Post and I would be charged a penalty for the delivery by the District Manager, in addition to paying for the paper.And this so-called manager was a convincing liar. He liked to brag about how he cheated his insurance company by stealing his own hot rod transmission and hiding it in a closet! After I had the whimpiness to whine to my own dear Mother that I was losing money and now in danger of losing part of her deposit, she asked to “go over the books” with the Fagin Devil himself. He convinced her that I “should be making over $7.75 per week, if only I would collect from the subscribers. It is a matter of hard work,” he proclaimed. In the goodness of her blessed heart, she allowed me to quit in arrears, and lost some of the deposit. So ended my days as a “Carrier” for the Palm Beach Post.

Actually, it didn’t. Later I took another route and fared just as poorly, and then even as an adult I took a motor route to hold life together for a while. One never learns.

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, Simon Callow, 2012

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His audiences would sob uncontrollably, laugh with abandon, and sometimes gawk in rapt wonder and all this after fighting for admission like rock star fans, lining up by the thousands long before daybreak.  Charles Dickens was not only the most celebrated writer and social activist of his era; he was a supreme actor, public reader, storyteller, and showman.  The iconic A Christmas Carolwas performed hundreds of times, along with memorable scenes from his novels and stories.  He wrote, co-wrote and acted in dramas and comedies and readings attended by the elite and poor and even the royalty and artists of Europe.  Queen Elizabeth told him of her adulation dating from her teenage years reading Oliver Twistand later, she was moved deeply by his acting in The Frozen Deep, a three-hankie melodrama.  In America, a late in life reading tour was mobbed, and Dickens was feted and nearly worshipped, and, at long last, forgiven for his snarky criticism from his first American tour in American Notes and in episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit.
Simon Callow, familiar to many as the actor who played Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral, wrote this biography which is focused on Dickens on the stage.  The furious life and frantic personality of Dickens was portrayed as a dominating presence in the theater that seemed to be the real center of Dickens’ life.  Actors and critics loved his performances, and many of his astounding characters, with names right out of morality plays, were portrayed, amended, and brought to life by Dickens himself.  Dickens, who put his entire outsized personality into his stage presence, believed in the power of performance and even dabbled in Mesmerism and magic and mysterious events like the portrayal of a self-combustion in Bleak House.  Like Mark Twain after him, he was equally loved for performance as for writing and even now, Dickens’ work is the stuff of hundreds of movies, plays, musicals, readings, by amateurs and professionals alike, including Simon Callow, who looks for all the world like Dickens himself.

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, 2005

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In Blink, and in earlier The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell celebrates the small, the little clues that we all see but rarely notice, that should lead us to a sound conclusion.  According the Gladwell, we should trust the intuitive, the flash of insight, the first glance, the nonverbal, the insights in the thin-sliced verdict. 
When it comes to nonverbal signals sent by speakers, or liars, or lovers, the evidence is overwhelming that we may not be able to explain the messages, but we all get them.  They teach us more than words can, and, as in the case of the shooting of Amadou Diallao, ignoring the unspoken signs can lead to terrible consequences.  Extreme stress, fear, and the pressure of time blind us to the obvious.
Often enough, we do react, and often badly, to unconscious prejudices about race, and color and even height.  Gladwell shows through simple, verified experiments in judgments of people that such tests demonstrate we all make snap and subtle decisions based on deeply ingrained preconceptions.  Gladwell himself tested positive on these, showing a moderate preference for whites even though he says, “I’m half black,” from the side of his mother, a Jamaican.
The case of the kouros, a fake statue that convinced experts after extensive examination that it was genuine begins the book.  Gladwell shows how the first take, the quick insight of experts told a different story but the Getty Museum wanted desperately to have a genuine kouros and failed to trust that thin-sliced first glance.  In this case, as well as in the discussion of the marriage relationship experts, the author seems to argue, unconvincingly, that the unconscious judgments are better and more trustworthy than close and careful consideration.  This argument of Gladwell tries to convince us that, in some important cases, the magical insights of intuition are superior to the careful and systematic examination of evidence.  It is simply not to be believed.  However, this book presents a fascinating and overwhelming demonstration that the little blinks of insight and discovery are enormously important, that the language of the nonverbal can be learned, and that it is important that we do so. 

Einstein, Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster, 2007

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I wonder what it would have been like for a Princeton undergrad to ride back to school on the Dinky and find himself seated next to Albert Einstein or to see him seated at the corner ice cream store on Nassau Street where he would stop on his walk home.  Einstein would walk daily to his office chatting with his friend Kurt Goedel.  Interesting that these two monumental minds found such a bond, with Goedel who described the limits of logic and Einstein who explained the great expansive energy of the universe.
Walter Isaacson explains the basics of Einstein’s theories in a way that, mercifully, the average reader can understand.  By average reader, I mean, all of us who struggled with math and are baffled by physics.  And it is decidedly not true that Einstein was backward as a child and could not learn mathematics.  He mastered calculus in his teens was good enough at it to tutor the lesser minds of fellow students.  On the other hand, he was slow to take up language, but then again, it is clear that all his life he thought deeply and thoroughly before speaking.
It is interesting and surprising to learn that his discoveries were made mostly of thought experiments, rather than by actual physical testing.  That task was left largely to others who proved his theories.  It is also a surprise that this man of science insistently denied that he was an atheist.  In fact, he surprised several friends who assumed that he had no belief in a grand designer of the incredible design of nature.  On the other hand, he said he had no belief in a personal God, but rather believed in Spinoza’s God.  Spinoza defined God so broadly and was so opposed to what he termed the superstitious stories of the Bible, that it would be hard to say in what kind of deity Einstein did believe.
On thing is certain, he was proud of his Jewish heritage and hated the German nationalism even before Germany turned to the Nazis.  Einstein was also somewhat skeptical of the growing nationalism in Palestine that eventually brought about the state of Israel.  Nonetheless, he lobbied for the founding of Israel and was even offered it first presidency which he wisely declined.
Isaacson debunks many of the things we think we know about Einstein but it is true that there actually was some reason in the suspicions that the FBI had about him during the war.  Apparently he never knew it, but in his later years the woman he dated was indeed a Soviet agent.  His last years were spent quietly and peacefully in Princeton where he was thought to be just as he was, a thoughtful man who had every right to display superior airs, but didn’t.  His neighbors had a little daughter who would sneak over to Einstein and get help with her mathematics homework and he obliged.  She complained to him that her math problems were so difficult, but Albert Einstein, the patient genius, told her that his math problems were even more difficult.

Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely

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Predictably Irrational is nano-economics, a Freakonomics twist on the psychology of buying and selling, deciding and choosing.  Dan Ariely, an MIT professor of Behavioral Economics, presents in a readable style his many simple and ingenious experiments that demonstrate the irrational side of the everyday decisions we make.   Apparently, we may believe we follow a common sense pattern of decision-making governed by the unseen hand of economics, but we really are more ruled by unacknowledged passions, inhibitions, and cultural values.
Some of his experiments do show what seem to be directed by common sense.  For instance, in the experiments where he gives away some chocolates and sells cheaply some others, he shows how most everyone is reluctant to take something for free.  It just isn’t polite to take the last piece of bacon, but Ariely goes to some length to find this an irrational contradiction to traditional economic rules.  And of course, we all tend to decide on a purchase when the vendor can show a similar, equally valuable product for a much higher price.
However, a subtle and irrational twist on purchasing what we think is a bargain is demonstrated by Ariely’s analysis of a subscription offer from the Economist.  The offer was $59 for web access, $125 for print, and $125 for print and web.  Of course, print and web is superior to print only for the same price, but the clever construction of the ad leads the reader to make a comparison and to purchase on the basis that it is a bargain.  Irrational, but we tend to make decisions by making comparisons.  When vendors introduce a product they may well be wise to also sell a slightly upgraded and higher priced similar product so that purchases will feel the lesser priced one is a deal.
The book also demonstrates with clever experiments that we all change the basis of decision making based on social norms and market norms and never the twain shall meet, or the consequences are drastic.  Buying and selling is where greed is good, but our interactions with people are based on love or maybe compassion or at the least on respect.  Don’t read the prices on the menu aloud at the expensive restaurant if you plan on a second date.  And even though your employees or fellow employees are in a market-based agreement with you, it is wise to treat them with the respect that social norms demand.
The chapter on decision-making under the heat of arousal can easily be skipped as a too-many-details story.  On the other hand, the book discusses some intriguing experiments on trust, cheating, and cooperation.  Students, given a chance to verbally report their own scores on simple tests for cash rewards will cheat, but only a little.  Students also quickly helped themselves to soft drinks Ariely left to entice them in dorm refrigerators.  He also left small stacks of dollar bills, but no one at all took any unattended cash.  People will cheat and even steal, but money is safer because it is clearly stealing and it cannot be rationalized.  Stores lose billions every year due to employee pilfering, but far less actual cash is stolen.  You can trust people only so much, but we knew that.
We also know, or most everyone does, about the “tragedy of the commons” where selfish fishing or any kind of common harvesting operations will harvest far too much and destroy the commons for themselves and all of us.  Ariely also discuss a game theory experiment that demonstrates the flip side of the tragedy of the commons.  In the Public Goods Game, four participants are given $10 each and allowed to pool as much of that as they wish.  The common pool is double, then divided by four and re-distributed.  If they all put in their $10, they will each end with $20.  But if one player puts in nothing, then he ends up with $25 while the others get $15 ($30 doubles to $60 divided by 4 is $15).  On the second round, the cycle of mistrust begins and players contribute less until no one cooperates and they all lose.
Could it be that the fiscal conservatives, the one per centers and laissez-faire independents are the ones who know how to game the system while the rest of us poor players think that we will be served best by cooperation and contributions to the common good.  Or do we eventually learn that trust yields less than mistrust?

Coming Apart, Charles Murray

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     Few authors can match the clarity and strength of persuasive writing shown by Murray in another of his controversial books of data, numbers, stats, graphs, and analysis.  It is a joy to read difficult material presented in such a lucid fashion.  Unfortunately, he does not convince, at least not about the decline of American virtues and the fall of the “American project.”  Where he demonstrates the divergence of the new upper class from the broad class of working and non-working class, his remarkably well supported conclusions are hardly assailable.
     He believes that there are four “culprits” leading to a “new upper class that increasing lives in a world of its own.”  These are the rewards of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy.  Brains are valued in the market in the knowledge society and educated persons increasingly sweep up the economic chips while the diminishing middle classes slip into menial or service jobs or unemployment.  Wealth, of course, generates wealth and power too as it always has.  The college sorting machine defines our lifestyle and even sorts us into zip codes, where highly educated ivy league alumni live in super-zips while second tier neighborhoods are occupied by those who had somewhat less education or went to good private colleges but not the best, and state school folks have lesser accommodations.   The poorer classes, or those in Murray’s theoretical Fishtown have no higher education and little hope of middle class opportunities.  What is worse, is the continuation of this class sorting by homogamy, that is, like marrying like.  He shows how (and here we go to Murray’s disturbing use of IQ scores as highly heritable traits) intelligence test scores ascend with each rung of the education ladder.  Thirty years ago, those without a high school education scored 88 on IQ testing but now it is at 87.  With a high school education, the score remains steady at 99.  Associate degreed persons scored around 104 to 105, while bachelor degreed persons scored 113.  With a masters it is 117 and a PhD or MD, LLD, DDS the score is 124.  Here’s the rub:  if IQ is more or less heritable, who is a high IQ young person going to marry?  They will meet a high IQ partner in an elite school, marry and voila, high IQ kinds.  The beat goes on.
     Murray demonstrates clearly that the elite class knows nobody in the lesser classes, and know nothing of their values, entertainment, neighborhoods, or travails.  A clever test he offers can be taken here:   http://www.scribd.com/doc/77349055/Coming-Apart-by-Charles-Murray-Quiz to show the reader just how well or not so well he fits into the new class structure.  
      After this powerful demonstration of the new classes, their size, characteristics, and the forces that drive this structure, Murray goes on to Parts II and III where he makes a case for American exceptionalism as constructed by the virtues of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion and that these traits are lacking in the fall of the middle class and rebounding in the upper, educated classes.  And also that the world is coming apart and we are doomed and so forth.  It is indeed interesting to see that in the upper and elite class that marriage, parenting, industrious work ethics and even religiosity are strong and in the lower class, these have fallen off a graph cliff.  Most people may think that religion is especially strong among the less educated and lacking in the upper class, but the opposite is true.  The rise of fundamentalism among the poor may make it look like religion is strong among many less educated persons, but this is not so.   Murray also spends some time in showing the Putnam bowling-alone syndrome and that the lack of social capital is destroying working neighborhoods. 
      Murray in the final chapters promotes his libertarian answer to wait ails America, but with the crazy tea-baggers out of the closet and a Ayn Rand resurgence out and about, it is a bad time to promote such a nutty response.  He goes into the moral hazards of welfare, noting the awful destruction of personal satisfaction from jobs and responsible parenthood, apparently believing that personal freedom and limited government (that tedious phrase) is preferable to the European social welfare model.  Being fair, he allows how socialism has its points and even gives a suggested reading list for those who disagree with him on this point.  But American fairness is a virtue that seems to me to be more important in our founding characteristics than religion or the work ethic, and fairness is a salient feature of what is most admired about us as a people. When Murray bemoans the decline of religion and promotes individual effort, it seems he forgets that to be fair in the unfair class structure that we have, it is up to government to step in to the place of the failure of traditional marriage to support and educate children and it is up to government which defines and controls the unfair economic system to alleviate the economic suffering that unfettered capitalism produces.  Finally, it is fine to describe the decline of marriage, of the economy and education, but to propose a return to virtue or even, as Murray does, a revived Great Awakening of religion, is just too little too late to preachy and its just too bad for those who suffer from economic destruction.  It is economic forces to which Murray gives little credit, but it is the economy stupid, that defines and constructs our class system, not virtue and not the lack thereof.

The Longest War, Peter Bergen

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    Peter Bergen wraps up his reporting on terrorism and the wars in the Middle East from the 9/11  attacks in 2001 through through the killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. While most of the bloody story is familiar to anyone who can read a newspaper, or anyone who still does, Bergen adds some unfamiliar details only a superb and brave reporter could know. Everbody knows about the memo warning Condoleeza Rice and the President the Bin Laden was going to attack, but Bergen shows that there was a long list of warning and signs pointing to an imminent strike on U.S. territory. While most people understand that Bush II was hell-bent on attacking Iraq, we learn from Bergen about the delusional operatives and think tank mountebanks who for years lobbied for a second round of killing in long-suffering Iraq.  Nonetheless, he does give credit to Bush for revising his war strategy and firing the officials and generals who so made a botch of things.

    Bergen also does a fine job of showing the political and military goals of the Pakistanis and explains their troubling dalliance with local and Talibani militants.  In the Afghan sphere, it is surprising to learn the Hamid Karzai was greeted with open arms by Afghans, who, despite their reputation for tribalism, have a strong sense of national identity that is older than the United States itself.  Even today, in 2012, polls show powerful support for Americans and hatred of the Taliban.