"the crowd is blind to its own wisdom"

James Surowiecki - The Wisdom of Crowds

or, as Michael likes to call it, The Opposite of Blink. (Though it should be said that Gladwell and Surowiecki are colleagues at the New Yorker, and the former provided a blurb while the latter praises The Tipping Point in his book.) I think the argument of the book is relatively self-evident: crowds as a whole end up making smarter decisions than individuals. When they don't, there are things they could have done differently to make smarter choices - if they know those strategies, they can make them work again.

It's a pretty upbeat book, if you think about it. Crowds tend to make the right choices in the end, particularly if you define a crowd as a market or some other virtual, not physical, entity. Just as Gladwell wants to help us harness the power of our unconscious, Surowiecki wants to help us recognize and appreciate the power of our collective (un?)conscious.

This is another in-progress review, so I'm mostly going to leave it at that. Surowiecki's "Financial Page" columns in the New Yorker have always made me happy. (I'm going to try to remember to come back and link to a couple of archives if I can find them.) He's such an elegant writer, good at interweaving story and theory. And I appreciate his ability to change my mind on Starbucks. While they may indeed be a corporate behemoth, they - by creating a market for fancy coffee drinks that didn't really exist before - actually grew the market for small independent coffee houses, of which there are more now than there were in pre-Starbucks days. So I can drink my frappuccino without feeling too guilty, as long as I patronize the indie places too. (Hurrah for justification.)

Anyway, Surowiecki is awesome.

A book that's going on my list

I waited too long, and now you have to pay for the LA Times link, but I am totally excited about reading this book. (Not as excited about what a big nerd that makes me.)

Before I wanted to be a historian, I was really into translation. Learning language made me realize what an artistic - and important! - task it is. Doomed to failure in some respects, open to all sorts of possibilities in others. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The book is If This Be Treason, a memoir by prolific translator Gregory Rabassa. Reviewer Michael Henry Heim, on Rabassa's "commitment to ... cultural mediation as represented by translation:"

Much as he argues against the notion of translation as a betrayal of the original - and he does so with great gusto - he is also perfectly willing to concede the point: In the end, what matters is not so much that a work comes through the translation process unscathed as that it enriches the culture it enters. Even if translation is treason to the original, he argues, we should make the most of it."

final word on A Changed Man

I liked it. It's nice to be nervous reading a book, and to be rooting for the characters, to be embarrassed for them. I almost hate that I can't ruin the ending for you, because it's a pretty exciting one. But I can be patient and wait for you to read the book yourself...

A Changed Man (?) - an in progress review

I'm currently reading A Changed Man, by Francine Prose. It got a lot of attention in newspaper reviews, as it's about a neo-Nazi who has a change of heart and flees to Brotherhood Watch, run by a renown Holocaust survivor. His stated goal: "to help keep guys like me from becoming guys like me" (fortunately, he knows how cheesy a line that is). For the head of the organization and his adoring development director, this is a miracle that can get them the publicity (and money) they've been needing. So our divorcee development director takes him in.

A little far-fetched, I admit.

We are treated to in depth looks at the minds of Vincent, the former racist; Meyer Maslow, world-famous but narcissistic survivor; Bonnie, his acolyte; and Danny, her teenage son. Prose is brilliant at showing the constant mental dialogue that runs through all of our doings and interactions with others. The characters are, like most of us, incredibly perceptive about some things, and utterly oblivious to others. They become intensely real.

I find myself rooting for these characters. But I'm suspicious. I'd like to have a happy ending, but I don't really see that happening. How can it? How cliche? And yet... wouldn't it be something for even "serious" fiction to be light-hearted about its endings from time to time?

Collapse

on Jared Diamond's tome... I have a lot of jumbled thoughts and reactions to this work. I've decided therefore just to list them, instead of forming a coherent narrative review. (Not like my posts are ever particularly coherent.)

Overall: thumbs up. His case histories are interesting, and his last chapter ties past and present together quite well. Despite the differences among each earlier society and between them and our own, it's clear that we have plenty to learn in order to avoid the same fate. Also, man he has a LOT of friends in places and companies all over the world. Similar to my graduate advisor. But onto the thoughts:

*What is it about Easter Island that people find so fascinating? I think it's haunting somehow, but I wonder if "ghosts" of other civilizations are ever jealous.

*I started to think about life cycles of cities, societies, and civilizations. We like to think of history as having "sped up" but I wonder if that's really accurate.

*How big is my footprint? I thought of this quiz while reading. When I think of how much of the world we are unsustainably mining... I sort of think we must be insane. On a happier note, sort of, the quiz says that we'd only need two planets if everyone lived like me (three times fewer than the average American). But then we don't have two planets, that I know of, which brings me to my next point...

*How do societies learn to think sustainably? Although everyone's favorite, Easter Island, has gotten a lot of attention in reviews (mainly I believe b/c it's at the beginning of the book and was all that some readers got to) Diamond provides examples of societies that did learn to think sustainably, by enacting religious laws to save land, or reconceptualizing their identities to line up with environmental realities. I guess one would have to find the "tipping point" for such a shift.

*As far as specific societies, I found the suggestion that the pressures from overpopulation helped precipitate the Rwandan genocide provocative and intriguing. And he has a few pages to devote to his hometown and mine, Los Angeles (pp 499-503). Surprisingly for those who love to bash the Southland, despite our bad environmental rep, Diamond says that our myriad problems still actually have us in pretty good shape comparatively. (So there.)

In closing, this is a big book. I think there is much to be gained from reading the whole thing, digesting all the different societies, applying them to the present. However, he can get a little long-winded, especially about industry stuff. So I would say it's okay to pick and choose chapters, or to skim over the boring stuff. Diamond's pretty good at putting flashing signs around his main points, so you won't miss much.

Sane by Comparison

While I'm finishing Collapse and sorting out my feelings on it, another article on books for amusement:

The LA Times reports on those poor "book people" who collect and collect and collect.

For the bibliophile, what to do with the books is life's central decorating issue, an ongoing discourse, a debate, and often an outright décor war, between aesthetics, the practicalities of storage and the consuming mindlessness of passion.

The roots of that passion are simple. To these readers, books aren't mere objects but possessions that carry intensely personal memories: where they were purchased, who the reader was while reading them, how they changed his or her life. They carry a weight of history.

Exactly. Except, unlike some of the people in this article, I am able to distinguish between the truly weighty and the peewee. The latter, I move on out. Even so, I face the same dilemma discussed in the article: where to put books when you have a lot of them. I'm always wondering "How come other people's homes look so spacious and clean? Oh, because they're missing all the books."

Non-reading post

Regardless of whether you consider the horrors in Darfur to constitute genocide, there is clearly no excuse for them, and the U.S. truly ought to be doing more to protect the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans. If interested, you can sign Africa Action's petition to President Bush here.

Also, the situation in Niger looks really bad. Read LA Times coverage of it here and here. To (misguidedly, I'm sure) connect it to reading, this situation is precisely what Cause Celeb's Rosie is trying to prevent. I mention this in part to again argue how deft Helen Fielding can be at mixing the very serious and the absurd. But more to the point to point out how often famine in Africa has periodically caught the attention of the West, and yet how we ignore the moves that could prevent it in the first place.

In Darfur and in Niger... we say "never again" far too often. It would be nice if we really meant it.

Are we all going nuclear?

Jared Diamond has apparently endorsed exploration into nuclear energy as a potential alternative in the post-Peak Oil world we about about to enter.

"[T]o deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power." Nuclear, he added, should simply be "done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents."

Hmm?

I'm reading Collapse right now - more on that later - and am somewhat surprised to hear this. One of the main stories of Collapse is the law of unintended consequences. Seems like nuclear power has plenty of those.

Admittedly, saying that we should use everything available isn't necessarily a ringing endorsement of nuclear energy per se, but is nonetheless a frightening one.

Contentment

I'm not sure just where I'd be without Helen Fielding. Sure, I think she's a big reason behind the explosion of "chick lit," which I'm not so crazy about. But she's brilliant. And despite the frumpiness of Renee Zellwiger as Bridget Jones - the film's fault, not the author's - she creates sassy (if neurotic) heroines who give voice to both women's insecurities and their kick-ass qualities. Even if Rosie (of Cause Celeb) and Bridget could be a bit daft sometimes, I still kind of wanted to be them.

So imagine my joy at coming across Olivia Joules (of Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination). Utterly ridiculous title - I don't really like it. But pretty clear about the premise of the book - a freelance writer who decides the hot producer she meets on assignment is actually al Qaeda. (My overactive imagination seems so mundane in comparison.) The al Qaeda stuff is a little too much - and man, they have a lot going on in this novel - but I recommend just overlooking that as much as you can, so you can concentrate on the good stuff.

Fielding is so brilliant with her characters' ascerbic observations about both themselves and others. She exaggerates, sure, but there's still a hell of a lot of truth behind most of it. Also, how fun is the British term "snogging," which I guess is equivalent to hooking up short of sex (which would be shagging, obviously). And the banter is sublime. And I like romance. I saved this for a weekend minibreak, and read it at the coffeehouse, the pool, and the beach. Utterly perfect.

Also, Bridget Jones is back in the Independent, but you have to pay for it. Boo.

On ironic titles

I've decided I don't want to skip books on this blog, but I've really had a time trying to figure out what to say about Geraldine Brooks' novel Year of Wonders. It's a very pretty book. Does that even make sense? calling a book pretty? Especially when the subject of the book is the plague, which wipes out the larger part of the heroine's village? And Brooks doesn't spare us much detail in the weeping buboes and the ugly actions of the terrified villagers. It is pretty though - I guess that's part of the wonder.

Anna, the protagonist, is a young pre-plague widow, working for the town's young rector and his wife. Were this book a little different - say, written by Lynne Cheney? - there'd be a love story between Anna and the wife. Instead, they're platonic "lovers" and tireless caregivers to the ravaged people of the town. Anna, already a strong character, matures throughout the novel, and emerges from the plague almost as a butterfly from a cocoon.

Okay, I feel like I sound ridiculous, so I'll skip to the interesting part. Brooks has worked as a Middle East correspondent based out of London. While traveling through England, she came across a plaque in a little village, naming it as "The Plague Town." Turns out that during the plague year of 1666, an unfortunate village over 100 miles away was stricken due to some imported goods. The villagers made a pact to prevent the spread of the disease by all staying within the village - instead of fleeing - and shunning contact with outsiders. Essentially condemning the greater part of them to death in an attempt to save the wider countryside. Year of Wonders is an imagining of what happened within that village during that fateful year. (You could almost see this as a movie, except it would have to be some sort of extraterrestrial disease, and probably more special effects. Definitely more sex.)

Like The Lady and the Unicorn, this book doesn't attempt to be great literature, but it does ground itself in historical fact, and tries to truly envision the past, give shape to it, to imagine the stories and dramas that made up forgotten lives. It's a different sort of "chick lit," one that asks a little more of the reader.

Nurturing the next generation of readers

Check out Barack Obama's speech to the American Library Association from earlier this summer. He's really a lovely and inspiring speaker, and to my mind appeals to the best and most hopeful parts of our nature. A couple examples:

And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we’ve changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.

I believe that if we want to give our children the best possible chance in life; if we want to open doors of opportunity while they’re young and teach them the skills they’ll need to succeed later on, then one of our greatest responsibilities as citizens, as educators, and as parents is to ensure that every American child can read and read well.

I was a library junkie from a young age, but too many children aren't, and that has to change - in order to ensure that we raise a generation of Americans that love reading and learning, that can draw on a wide range of knowledge, and make the connections that our increasingly interconnected world demands.