ASK Musings

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Non-Fiction Archive

Friday

4

July 2014

0

COMMENTS

Mindfulness

Written by , Posted in Reviews

Three stars

mindfulness 1

Many people find themselves with over-scheduled social lives, or work situations filled with a seemingly endless stream of projects, meetings and deadlines. Perhaps these people are facing challenges at home, or school, or with health. The challenges might seem minor to others, or perhaps others observe and wonder how the person is still functioning given everything that’s happening in their lives. We hear it a lot from women who have children and also work outside of the home – there are demands everywhere, and these women can’t seem to get a break.

Without going into too much detail about why I found myself drawn to this book (during yet ANOTHER trip to Powell’s in Portland – that place should just take all of my money now), but I wanted something that would help me to be more present in my life, and kinder to myself. My husband meditates, and it really helps him when he’s feeling a bit off. Given that, this specific book appealed to me in many ways – it wasn’t horribly long (about 250 pages), it had a clear plan (it focuses on an eight-week meditation program), and it even came with a link to audio files to guide the meditations.

I was successful in keeping up with the program for about a week. I did read each chapter, and I really enjoyed the messages within them, but I don’t think this book was what I wanted. I sort of want to meditate, and I mostly enjoyed the meditations in this book, but I found the information within the chapters leading up to the meditations themselves to be much more useful. It was probably not the best book for me given what I was looking for, but I think it was well-written, supported with some research, and not overly flowery. Yes, it the authors discuss self-care, but if you have an aversion to anything that seems new age-y (although meditation is hardly that), you can still read this book and enjoy it. I’m sure I’ll end up referring back to it during challenging days, but it hasn’t turned me into a regular meditator.

Wednesday

30

April 2014

0

COMMENTS

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Written by , Posted in Reviews

Three Stars

quiet

Both a good friend and my mother-in-law recommended this book to me in the course of two days, so I figured I should pick it up. It’s only $2.99 on Amazon for Kindle right now, so if you’re interested I say seize the moment and order it.

I am an introvert with some outgoing tendencies. I’d almost always rather stay in at night than go out for the sake of going out, but I do love being active during the day (a long walk alone or with my husband, exploring a new neighborhood, is kind of my version of heaven). I love to read, love to analyze things, and just generally enjoy thinking through issues to come up with solutions to problems. I don’t have a problem with public speaking (I give presentations often at conferences), but I loathe ‘networking’ and have a hard time making small talk with people I don’t know.

Being an introvert in the U.S. can be a challenge, and this book focuses on the ways U.S. society holds extroverted personality types up as the ideal, and how that isn’t necessarily beneficial to individuals OR to society. Working in teams, being a confident public speaker, and feeling good networking or marketing one’s self are all seen as end goals that introverts need to overcome, as opposed to what they really are: ways of doing things that work for some people but not for all.

When reading this book I was reminded of when the new CEO of Yahoo cut all telecommuting options off. When I read comments on some of these articles (I know, I know, but stick with me here) I was sort of amazed at how many people took the position that if you feel more comfortable working at home and not in a big open plan office with the “team,” then you weren’t the kind of person who deserved to work in the tech industry. The implication was that success comes to those who thrive in that type of environment; everyone else was either worthless or needed to ‘overcome’ their preferences for solitary work to get ahead. I think that’s bullshit, and this book provides support for my assessment.

It is not my favorite book; I found that it wasn’t organized in a way that necessarily best presented her arguments, and the last chapter on raising introverted children seemed important but also sort of tacked on. But Ms. Cain makes some good points about the benefits of allowing people to work within what feels comfortable to them; it’s not about allowing everyone to stay safely within their comfort zones, but instead about recognizing that there are different comfort zones, and forcing a minority of one type of person out of theirs to accommodate the majority of another type isn’t the way to get the best out of people. I will definitely return to it for reference when I am faced with those arguing that my introversion is some sort of flaw to be overcome as opposed to a strength.

Thursday

20

March 2014

0

COMMENTS

I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This by Julie Jansen

Written by , Posted in Reviews

Two Stars

Hmmm. I can’t tell if this is a bad book, or just isn’t the book that I wanted or needed it to be. I’m in the midst of a bit of a self-improvement kick (and my books this year will likely reflect that), and bought this one during one of my many ill-advised book store visits. It looked interesting, and even seemed to offer suggestions for people like me, who have ‘good’ jobs but just feel like they might be in the wrong career and are looking for something different.

office-space-4

The book starts with a whole lot of self-assessment. Some of it is really interesting and some of it seems to require a whole lot of self-reflection that could mean the book could take a reader months to get through. Some of it feels like a glorified Cosmo quiz, but some of it really did get me thinking about what I want out of the work I do to make money, and what I need to do to get there.

After sixty pages of self-assessments, worksheets and quizzes, the author breaks her advice down into chapters to address common problems people who are unhappy in their work are likely to face:
– Finding meaning in work
– At a good point (financially) and not able to take a pay cut
– Current very negative work environment
– Bored
– Desire to run a business
– Close to retirement

Obviously close to retirement wasn’t really applicable to me, but the rest did, at times, apply to how I’ve felt about my career over the past few years, so I read through them. Each was filled with some more quizzes and attempts at forcing self-reflection, but I think the book tried to be all things to all people and so ended up not giving me enough to work with in any given area. I think it did help me sort through my thoughts on starting my own business, as well as my desire to have a job that makes a difference in people’s lives, but I didn’t finish reading it with any sort of concrete action plan. Maybe that’s on me, or maybe it’s on the book, but either way I can’t really recommend this to anyone who is struggling with where to go in their career.

Monday

3

March 2014

0

COMMENTS

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

Written by , Posted in Politics, Reviews

Three Stars

blindspot

You’re not racist, right? I mean, if given two equally qualified candidates for a job you were hiring for, you’d be just as likely to give it to the Black person as the White person, right? And you’re in favor of same sex marriage, so you definitely don’t give any preference to straight people, right?

Not so fast. The premise of this book – which is backed up by some pretty solid science – is that we all hold biases in our unconscious minds that influence what we do. Because they are unconscious biases, it’s hard to imagine we have them, and even harder to figure out how to address them. I mean, it’s one thing to make it illegal to ban people of a certain race from eating in one’s restaurant; how do you fix something that is so deep in your brain you don’t even know it is there?

The concepts in the book are mostly supported by the IAT, or Implicit Association Test. The book goes into much greater detail, but here’s the basic idea: when presented with a variety of words, is it easier for you (as measure by how quickly you do it) to sort them into the category associated with positive characteristics when that category is also associated with a specific race? So, if the option is Black/Positive and White/ Negative, and the word ‘happy’ pops up on the screen, is your reaction time sorting that correctly going to be slower than if the options are Black/Negative and White/Positive? If so, you have an unconscious preference for White people.

It’s a pretty fascinating test and, like I said, has been validated many times, and expanded beyond race to measure all sorts of different possible biases – I recently took the test to see if I had an unconscious negative association regarding people with disabilities. I did not – huzzah! You can play around with it yourself – but man, be prepared to be disappointed. The vast majority of folks who take the race test show at least some unconscious preference for White people. It’s a bummer.

So, what’s the point then? How do we fix this? That’s basically the problem with this book – there isn’t a lot here by way of suggestions as to how to fix this. I can think of some that are alluded to, such as vastly increasing the positive representations of people of color in the media so that those negative associations don’t creep into our minds. But being really aware of these biases seems to be a good place to start. That, and not being so defensive about whether there really still are biases out there. Just because you live in an area where people don’t call Black people the n-word or non-straight people the f-word doesn’t mean there aren’t unconscious biases at work.

Saturday

23

November 2013

0

COMMENTS

Blackwater

Written by , Posted in Politics, Reviews

Four stars

Blackwater_Scahill

 

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page: Blackwater is a horrible, horrible, horrible company, right? Like, everyone with a conscience is aware of that fact? Everyone who works there is not a horrible person (many are just trying to survive), but we all know that the organization is bloody awful, yes?

Okay, so starting from that premise, why read a book that tells you in detail about how horrible it is? Because it’s good. Really good. It is very well researched, with a level of detail in the writing that brings home the realities of just how atrocious an organization this is.

Scahill provides a history of the company, from its roots in the southern U.S., through the Iraq war and into present day, where Blackwater (now ACADEMI) has truly terrifying plans. He discusses the problems of a mercenary army – recruitment, payment, accountability (well, lack thereof), lawlessness. He uses the murder of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah as backdrop against which the book is set, returning to what happened, how it happened, and the impact on the families. That running story points out how expendable these contractors are to the company. Their lives may be on the line, and they may be getting great compensation (unless they are from South American or Africa, which Scahill addresses in the book), but in the end, the company doesn’t care about them. Their deaths are a PR issue, but that’s about it.

The biggest problem with contractors like Blackwater from the perspective of the county and the world is that they are essentially mercenaries. They are paid to protect the elite, to do things that our military might or might not be able to do, and they aren’t accountable to anyone. They may technically be subcontractors, but they aren’t covered by the same laws as private citizens, and they pretend to be military even though they don’t have the same oversight. They can do whatever they want with minimal consequences; claiming immunity as a quasi-military organization. It’s despicable.

From the perspective of the families of the contractors who are killed due to the careless policies of Blackwater (and, by extension, the U.S. government for contracting with them), these contractors don’t get the same respect and care as the military. Some of them may be doing work that troops would have done in the past, but because they aren’t military, they don’t get the same benefits, or support. Is that wrong? I don’t know. You can argue they know what they signed up for, but Blackwater is so shady that who knows what they were really told, and how much time they all had to really review what they signed.

Beyond the tasks Blackwater performed in Iraq and Afghanistan, they also ingratiated themselves in the Katrina response, taking part in disaster profiteering. They lied about saving lives, and tried to not pay the contractors the prevailing ways.

This company isn’t just bad for the reasons stated above; they are bad because of what they represent: a shift from governmental accountability to private (stockholder / owner) accountability. One thing about war is that the country is supposed to feel the consequences of it. It should keep us from just going to war with anyone we dislike, without cause. But as more of the actions are shifted to mercenary companies like Blackwater, who’s to speak up and say it’s not okay?

If you have any interest in this, and want to have some details to back up your understanding that Blackwater is just appalling, check out the book.

Friday

11

October 2013

0

COMMENTS

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Written by , Posted in Reviews

4 Stars

packingformars

This is my second Mary Roach book of this Cannonball read, and the fact that it popped into my queue right now is perfect, because Gravity is out and I cannot wait to see it.

I was excited to read this because when I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. Not enough to get into the physics and astronomy track in college, or enlist in the air force, or really do anything to actively pursue that career path, but enough that to this day I still think that if I win the lottery I plan to squirrel away a chunk of the change to pay my way into space (after donating the vast majority of it to charity, of course.)

The premise is not just exploring space travel, but specifically extended space travel. Ms. Roach does a great job of weaving in the history of space travel through specific areas from eating space food to … eliminating said food. There are so many wonderful facts, great footnotes and just fun stories. She gets to ride the vomit comet (i.e. the parabolic flight), interview groundbreaking (atmosphere-busting?) astronauts, scientists and others.

The book is especially interesting because it doesn’t sugar-coat anything about space travel. I didn’t realize, for example, that some of the early space flights involved two dudes hanging out in a capsule for two weeks, no ability to wash or really take care of any personal hygiene needs. Or how much fecal matter can end up floating around in the space shuttle, and how much research and development had to go into creating a toilet, or how much effort goes into creating food that allows for a little more time between … evacuations.

Along the way of telling the story of all the challenges that are increased on a long space trip, Ms. Roach drops great little bits of knowledge. For example, she explains how the flag on the moon looked like it was blowing in the wind even though there isn’t wind on the moon, and talks about why people get motion sickness. There are so many awesome nuggets that it’s worth it for anyone who is into trivia.

You know the drill. It’s Mary Roach. It’s good. You’ll probably like it. Add it to the list.

Monday

16

September 2013

0

COMMENTS

Girl, Interrupted

Written by , Posted in Reviews

Three Stars

150px-Girl_interrupted_book

Content Note: Discussion of depression, mental illness, suicide.

I’ve seen the movie – the one that won Angelina Jolie her best supporting actress Academy Award, the one starring Winona Ryder and featuring Whoopie Goldberg as the head nurse. It’s the one about a young, white, middle-class woman who commits herself into a psychiatric institute at the direction of a therapist. I felt some sort of inexplicable connection with it the first time I saw it, to the point where I ended up purchasing it. On VHS. I found a DVD of it at a going-out-of-business sale a few months ago. It reminded me that I wanted to read the book it was based on.

I should say loosely based on, because the book painted a much sparser picture than the film. In the book, Ms. Kaysen does tell some stories about the women she encountered while at the facility, and those women were definitely present in the film, but some of the stories in the film differ. There isn’t the same overlap, and clearly the narrative arcs of those women were expanded to make for a more involved film. It’s also possible that Ms. Kaysen shared more information with the screenwriters to flesh out those women for the film.

The book stands well on its own though. It is disjointed at times – it’s not a straight through memoir, but instead a collection of essays – but there is a lot of wisdom in the writing. The author has clearly had time to reflect on what her diagnosis (Borderline Personality Disorder) meant then and means to her now, as the book was written 25 years after she was discharged from the facility. For example, her discussion of her suicide attempt is really interesting – she thinks of it as wanting to kill only part of herself – “the part that wanted to kill herself” – which is both pretty meta but also makes a lot of sense. She also describes mental illness as coming in two forms: slow and fast, or ‘viscosity’ and ‘velocity’.’ “Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination; velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can’t tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.”

The book is also interesting as a study (although again, a sparse one) of the facility itself. Kaysen describes it quite vividly, but she describes the feel of it even better: “For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy.”

The author clearly struggled with whether she really was ‘crazy’ enough to be in the facility – some of the other residents seemed to have much deeper mental health concerns than she did. Was she being self-indulgent? Was she just someone who didn’t accept the rules everyone else accepted, and did that make her crazy, or just different? Or both? And would she have been viewed differently if she had expressed the same feelings and taken the same action but were a young man, not a young woman, in the late 1960s?

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in this area. It was a very quick read for me (only a couple of hours) but I do feel like I got a lot out of it. I wish there had been more, so I’m going to look at some of her other work, as I did enjoy her writing style. Her self-awareness and introspection could come across as navel-gazing in less competent hands; instead the book provided me with an interesting introductory look at how mental health is viewed.

Wednesday

7

August 2013

0

COMMENTS

The Panic Virus

Written by , Posted in Reviews

Are our feelings “a more reliable barometer than facts?” If you think you know something ‘in your gut,’ do you ignore the science that strongly suggests you are wrong?

panic virus

I started this book before Jenny McCarthy was hired to be on The View, reminding many of us of how her activism has likey harmed so many children. While some are looking forward to seeing her strong personality come out while discussing the latest pop culture news with Whoopie Goldberg, others are frustrated that ABC would give her a platform that could ostensibly lead to more discussion about the myth that vaccines cause autism.

The Panic Virus is about much more than the vaccine vs. autism ‘controversy.’ It’s about science – the scientific method, the meaning of ‘theory’ in a scientific context, the fear of the unknown, the rights of the individual, and what we owe to each other. Mr. Mnookin doesn’t spend more than a chapter on Jenny McCarthy (although it is a fascinating one – did you know she was an indigo mom?), and Andrew Wakefield of course features but is not the main player. Science and families compete for the stage as Mr. Mnookin expertly weaves together the history of vaccine fear with the benefits of vaccines and the devastation of autism with the fatal consequences of pertussis on a baby too young to be vaccinated.

These two areas of focus fascinated me as I took this book in. What do parents owe their children – a vaccine against a disease few people have seen in recent years? A ‘better’ chance of not developing autism? What do community members owe to each other – helping to build the herd immunity if possible? Trusting science when it has repeatedly shown the lack of widespread harm of something?

I am not a parent. I am also not a scholar of vaccine history. I am, however, someone who appreciates science, and this book has laid out some of the amazing history of vaccines (including some moments that were extraordinarily poorly handled). It deals with the fact that some children are injured by vaccines, but not on the scale or in the ways that most folks who oppose vaccines claim. When a child with autism is shown with the distraught parents who argue that their child was a happy, perfect baby until immediately after he or she received the MMR vaccine, it’s hard not to empathize. The ‘one child injured by vaccines is one too many’ argument is pretty tough to accept, however, when one looks both at the STRONG evidence that vaccines do not cause the harm these parents claim coupled with the very clear reality that those who either cannot be vaccinated or who do not build immunity from the vaccine are at a real risk from those who refuse vaccines.

The politics of the different autism organizations, the piss poor media coverage, and the celebrity focus are all fascinating, but I was more intrigued by the broader debate over what we owe to each other. Can I be a good citizen if, knowing full well that I can get vaccinated, I choose not to, and then pass pertussis on to a friend’s baby who isn’t old enough to get the vaccine? Is there an obligation to act in the interest of others when the risk to yourself (or your child) is so much less than the risk to the community?

I highly recommend this book. It’s not horribly long, it’s interesting, it’s infuriating, and it’s an important topic to know and understand.

Thursday

25

July 2013

0

COMMENTS

The Happiness Project

Written by , Posted in Reviews

Meh.

happiness

Since one-word reviews are frowned upon at the Cannonball Read, I’ll elaborate. Like Sophia, who read this book prior (and whose review I should have read first), I had some issues with the depth of this book. I got some useful tips from it, and it was a pretty quick read (I read it in about three days), but I didn’t enjoy it. It was like watching a rerun of one of the filler episodes of Friends – it was fine, and I laughed a bit, but I could have been doing something better with my time. (And also like the characters in friends, the people in this book are affluent, white, and seem fake.)

That’s probably part of my problem. I don’t particularly like what this author presents of herself. While that doesn’t really matter with other books, it’s kind of a big deal with this style of book. There was an ‘aww shucks’ quality that is not my particular cup of tea. Additionally, this woman started from pretty high up on the happiness scale. Not that any happiness discussion should be limited to those who have been deeply unhappy, and I recognize that there is value in helping people improve their lives regardless of where they started from, but COME ON. This woman is rich. This woman has two healthy, adorable daughters that she clearly loves. Both the kids grandparents were alive as of the writing of the book, and her in-laws (whom she also adores) live around the corner. She makes a living following her passion. And all of that was BEFORE she started the Happiness Project.

But as I said, that doesn’t necessarily mean what she’s going to say doesn’t have value; it just means a whole hell of a lot of people aren’t going to be able to find much in common with her and so may find it a little hard to think that singing in the morning is really going to change things for them. And Ms. Rubin is clear that this is *her* happiness project, and that everyone’s will be different. But I’d be more inclined to start on my own if the one I’d just read hadn’t been so … weirdly lacking in self-awareness. For example, she talks about wanting to eat better but seems to applaud herself because she’s NOT going on a diet. She’s just … cutting out food groups entirely to lose weight. O-kay. And while she has the healthy view that you can’t change others, you can only change yourself, some of the discussions around trying to give up needing to be praised kind of make her husband look like he’s taking total advantage of her. And since I know about 300 pages worth of her marriage (i.e. next to nothing), I’ve no right to actually judge that relationship. But it was impossible to remove my thoughts on the author from what the author was saying.

Here’s my take-away: if you respond well to checklists, you’ve got an interest in somewhat saccharin writing, and you are looking for a dozen or so useful nuggets, sure. Add this to your list. Otherwise … no need. Shoot, you can even email me and I’ll send you the items I thought were the most useful if you’d really rather not bother.

Wednesday

17

July 2013

0

COMMENTS

Checklist Manifesto

Written by , Posted in Reviews

checklist manifesto

We were standing in a bookshop in Kilkenney, Ireland, which we were visiting on our honeymoon. I had loaded my kindle up with plenty to read, and even bought a paperback (book one of the A Song of Ice and Fire) to read during the no-electronics portion of the flights. But I was in a bookstore, and you all know what that means.

The synopsis of the book struck me as kind of interesting, and I thought it might help me at work. The basic premise is that checklists really can save lives. Not lengthy, twenty-page checklists (i.e., what I prepare before leaving town for two weeks), but five-to-seven item checklists that serve as triggers for the really important things you should do in a given incident. He pulls examples from flight emergencies, financial deals and even surgery.

He was asked to help reduce complication rates in surgeries by the WHO, and prepared a three-part, 19-question checklist to be used in high-tech and low-tech hospitals around the world. During the pilot, even the fanciest hospitals saw a highly significant decrease in infection rates, reducing deaths. He repeatedly points out how simple this seems – and how those with high levels of expertise might find checklists insulting, especially when steps seem so basic. But he backs up his assertions with evidence of their success that is pretty convincing.

It was a quick read. Even at 200 pages, I pretty much flew through it. And given my field, I think there are certainly some areas where checklists would be extremely helpful. If you could see potential for improvement in your field as well, I suggest checking it out.