Book Review: Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (2021). Tom Nichols.

As you’ll recall, just last week, I did an “Honorable Mentions” post on five books about authoritarianism, democracy and recent politics. Coincidentally, though, this week I read another such book, but one with a very different outlook than most of the other ones.

Our Own Worst Enemy, written by a professor at the Naval War College, who is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic and other periodicals, turns the focus mostly away from the bad actors and would-be authoritarians whose attempts to undermine democracy here and abroad have held so much of our attention over the past several years. Instead, he argues that “we the people” need to take a hard look at ourselves and our discontents to understand why our politics have reached such a sorry state.

Nichols makes a number of interesting points that have the ring of truth about them. He begins with a well-supported assertion that we are living in a time of material abundance and technological accomplishment beyond anything humans have ever known before, where even the poor take for granted wealth and technology undreamed of by humans in the past. Despite that reality, many of us are obsessively unhappy, and focus mainly on what we perceive as constant losses and social decline (much of which is non-existent) rather than the relatively bountiful conditions all around us. This reflexive dissatisfaction, and the fear of loss, are powerful emotions, and ones easily manipulated by cynical political actors.

The author talks about the growing epidemic of narcissism, now amplified by social media, where more and more of us are focused mainly on ourselves, our own desires, and our appearance to the rest of the world. He contrasts the selfishness of the narcissistic personality with the kind of outward-looking, modest, generous and compassionate personality which is at the core of democratic behavior, and a democratic society. A successful democracy requires that we regularly show compassion and tolerance for others, including strangers, but he suggests that more of us now have little use for or concern for anyone outside of ourselves and our immediate family.

Another observation he makes has to do with boredom. He suggests that our democracy may be a victim of its own success, in creating such freedom and abundant wealth, combined with the endless passive entertainment we consume, that many of us don’t know what to do to find meaning and fulfillment. This is another void in ourselves which is ripe for manipulation by con men and hucksters (on both ends of the political spectrum), who know how to whip up enthusiasm and excitement in a bored population by appealing to imaginary threats and fears.

Several writers have recently noted the apparent vibrancy of Ukrainian democracy under threat from the Russian invasion, as compared with our angry and polarized society. The difference seems to lie in the fact that for Ukraine, the whole society is now united by the excitement, the shared threats and privations, and the clear and present danger posed to their freedom and lives by Putin’s invasion. We don’t share any such feelings of common destiny or meaning in the face of an unambiguous threat (a feeling probably last experienced here in World War II), particularly since we rely on a paid volunteer military populated by only a few of us for our common defense.  Instead we divide into factions and tribes, and allow our discontents to be nurtured by those groups and individuals, from politics to finance to media, who can profit from our antipathies toward each other.

Nichols also spends some time on the extent to which many citizens of the United States are too uninformed about policy and political issues to be able to make reasoned, rationally consistent judgments when it comes time to vote. As a case study, he looks at the significant group of voters who voted for Barack Obama twice, then voted for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. A comparison of the programs of the two candidates, and their respective parties, reveals little overlap in the ideologies and programs advanced by the two parties or the candidates. Yet this group of voters willingly moved their support from one side to the other apparently based on celebrity, “excitement” factors and emotional “feelings”, and the public images of the two candidates, rather than the sorts of policies they embraced, and would attempt to enact if elected.

One other item considered by the author is the growth and active promotion of “resentment” in politics, where increasingly people will act against their own interests in order to make sure that someone else doesn’t get something, and who perceive loss and humiliation in every event that benefits anyone else. Much of this he lays at the feet of social media and our entertainment industry, which stokes our own envy continuously by feeding us idealized images of other people apparently having things we might not have. 

The author himself worries through all this that he is engaged in “moral hectoring”, and perhaps he is, but nevertheless, in his call for us to look deeply at ourselves as well as others in trying to understand and hopefully ease the woes of our contemporary polarized democracy, he is making a vital appeal. It's one we should listen to and reflect upon. Recommended.

Honorable Mentions: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and American Politics.

Today I'm doing another of my "honorable mentions" posts, featuring another five good books I've read that focus on similar or related topics. Today's list includes a sampling of the best of the political science and history books related to the threats to democracy posed by autocratic authoritarian movements, including that of the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

 

Book Review: How Democracy Dies (2018). Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt.

An excellent political science book analyzing how democracy is being and has been eroded toward autocracy, comparing various scenarios and steps in other countries to what was going on during the Trump era.

This was an early warning that democracy has guardrails, in the form of legal and institutional checks and balances, and norms, and that these were heavily under assault in Trump era America. This theme is certainly far less surprising now than it was when written, but nevertheless it’s an excellent political science exploration of the ways in which democracy can be undermined and ultimately destroyed. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017). Edward Luce.

Luce provides an eloquent description of the macro-level global economic trends now shaping the world, to the advantage of rising Eastern countries and economies (especially China) and the increasing disadvantage of the West.

He provides a high-level view of why populism, nationalism, protectionism and autocracy are on the rise here and in Europe, as the middle class thins out, fast-growing economies abroad and automation at home threaten jobs and living standards, the gap between rich and poor expands, and a frightened working population in the West is turning to authoritarian solutions over traditional liberal democracy. Recommended.



Book Review: Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Anne Applebaum.   

Applebaum is an excellent writer for The Atlantic, who is also an historian and subject matter expert on Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet world and authoritarianism. In this account, she draws in part on her own experiences living and traveling in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe over the past two decades to provide illustrative cases of democracies sliding into illiberal democracy and then authoritarianism.

She uses the case of Poland’s transformation under the Law and Justice Party as her point of departure, then also discusses other recent illiberal democracies and anti-democratic movements, in Poland, Spain and Turkey, as well as Brexit in the UK and the rise of Donald Trump, with his authoritarian Republican brand of politics in the USA.

Applebaum has an interesting background from which to make this critique. Her ideological preferences and associations as a writer and person (as she shares in the book) are definitely on the right end of the political spectrum, but these tendencies don’t appear to act as ideological blinders. As a historian, she is clear-eyed and even-handed in seeing the tendency toward authoritarianism within individuals and societies as being equal opportunity: it can and does arise regardless of the ideological background of the leader and his followers.

A very good account of the recent rise in authoritarian movements, and the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of democracy around the world. Recommended.  

 

Book Review:  A Warning (2019). Anonymous: A Senior Trump White House Official.

The same unknown person (now identified as Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor) who wrote an editorial in The New York Times in 2018 claiming a bunch of good people inside the administration were protecting us from Donald Trump has now written a book in which he tells us what it's like to live inside the insane Trump bubble.

And oh, by the way -- those reassurances in the editorial? It turns out they were wrong (big surprise). The author now believes that no one can keep Trump from trying to do what he wants to do, which is to destroy American democracy and become an autocrat. It is an interesting and by now completely normalized view, but nothing we don't already know.

There are many other insider accounts of the Trump administration and his pathological behavior by now, most of which I’m probably not going to read. There will be even more written. I’m afraid they’ll be writing books, plays and movies about Trump and his bizarre administration far into the future. But this book is a reasonably good representative of the contemporary genre, if you’ve never read one before. Recommended. 

 

Book Review:  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia * Europe * America (2018). Timothy Snyder.

Timothy Snyder, the noted Yale University history professor and a leading expert on modern European history, wrote one of the earliest and most excellent guidebooks to surviving the Trump presidency and preserving democracy. Little more than a pamphlet in size, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017) broke down the experiences of Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism into twenty easily digestible rules and principles of how autocracy develops, and what the signs of its onset are.

In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder provides a detailed history of recent developments in autocracy, and threats it poses to democracy around the world, focused primarily on the disappointing collapse of democratic efforts in Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union, and the ominous career of Vladimir Putin as Russia's leader.

He uses Putin’s rise as the most important contemporary instance of modern autocracy, especially in Putin’s creation of what Snyder calls “the eternal present” – an information environment where the past is rewritten to support the leader’s preferred beliefs and interests, the present is made unknowable by the careful propagation of conflicting and contradictory narratives and conspiracy theories, and belief in a different future is impossible because of the lack of any mechanism for succession of political control beyond the life of the current leader.

A portion of this book, which was written before the beginning of the Ukraine war in February, also covers elements of Putin’s ongoing plans and attempts to gain and consolidate control over Ukraine during the past decade. It provides valuable insights into why Russia invaded Ukraine, and also some history to explain why Ukraine’s resistance has been so spirited. Recommended.

Book Review: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016). Sebastian Junger.

This 2016 book by Sebastian Junger, the noted action journalist and chronicler of people under extreme duress, whether at sea, as in The Perfect Storm (1997), in forest fires, as in Fire (2001), or at war in War (2010), is a short, intriguing discussion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans, which he explains as an understandable reaction of fighters to the experience of returning from war, and leaving the close-knit fellowship and shared purpose of small combat units, in exchange for the atomized, anonymous and mundane state of individual life in modern society.

Drawing in part from his own experiences and observations, which included months as a journalist embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan, as well as the literature and recorded history of war and warriors going all the way back to the Greeks, Junger explores the "natural" state of humans living in small groups, with their strong values of mutual aid and communal life, which are now mostly found only in armies, war zones, natural disasters, and in some of the few remaining primitive societies on Earth. 

He contrasts that with the widespread personal alienation and loneliness of life in a mass consumer society, which many returning veterans find so alienating, and which creates so much anxiety for them when they return to civilian life.

In developing support for his viewpoint, he also reviews the well-known and widespread phenomenon of “civilized” people kidnapped into primitive societies where similar bonds of mutual closeness and dependence existed, particularly cases of white settlers on the American western frontier who were taken forcibly into Native American tribes, but once there, did not want to leave, even when freed and given the opportunity to return to the white settler society from which they originally had come.

All of this leads the author to his main thesis (and this certainly has been controversial) that the problem of PTSD may be not so much with the soldiers and their traumatic, violent war experiences, as with the nature of the alienating and isolating modern societies to which they return. 

Without necessarily accepting Junger’s theory as a complete explanation of the problem of PTSD, and the difficulty that warriors have in returning to civilian life, this is a thought-provoking and insightful study of the lingering damages of war to the psyches of combat veterans. But it is also an exploration of the deficiencies of modern advanced societies, and the ways they may fail to meet basic human psychological and emotional needs, although we may not be aware of these deficiencies if we’ve never experienced the sort of intense, inter-dependent connections to the people around us that Junger describes. Recommended. 

Book Review: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020). Mary Trump, PhD.

I decided after a year or two of the Trump presidency that I wasn’t going to read most of the tell-all books about Donald Trump, his life, his corrupt administration, and all the bizarreness that constantly surrounds him. I read several of them early on, but quickly concluded that reading these books was a joyless and monumentally depressing exercise.

Having recognized before he was even elected that Donald Trump was clearly a sociopath and a narcissist, I soon discovered that reading more details of his pathetic existence and chaotic administration brought me few additional insights into his condition and behavior, and no enjoyment whatsoever. Another disincentive to reading Trump-related books was the fact that every shocking new detail of his story contained in the latest sensational book release immediately appeared on every cable news show and in the constant news coverage of Trump, so there was never anything new or surprising to be learned by the time any of these books reached the bookshelves.

Despite all that, I recently read Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, the only book to appear so far written by an actual Trump family member. The author is someone who knew the long history of the family members and their relationships from close-up personal experience. Her insider’s account is enhanced and made even more credible by the fact that she is also a PhD clinical psychologist, who specializes (not surprisingly) in the sorts of dysfunctional psychological conditions which appear to abound in the lives of many of the Trump family members.

Of course, much of the most interesting content from the book was also immediately revealed through the mass media as soon as it was published, partly through broadcast interviews with the author herself, so again, the amount of new information in the book that wasn’t already a part of the gigantic trove of public knowledge of Donald Trump by the time I read it was fairly limited. Nevertheless, there was value in hearing the whole story and her clinical analysis directly from her, in book form – it made it more believable, more complete, and more emotionally comprehensible and resonant than most of the Trump literature.   

Mary Trump was the daughter of Donald Trump’s older brother Fredy. The story she tells about the family is almost Shakespearean in its dramatic excesses and its notorious, conniving characters. At the head of the family was Fred Trump, a driven entrepreneur and family patriarch who built a real estate empire in Brooklyn, and became fabulously wealthy, but had little time or love for anyone else. Like most patriarchs, he looked originally to his oldest son, Mary’s father Fredy, to become his principal successor and heir in his real estate business.

The problem with this plan was that Fredy had little interest in or aptitude for his father’s real estate business. He went off to serve in the army, which he liked and where he did well, but this disgusted his father, who had no use for the military or the concept of service. Fredy loved boats and airplanes too, and had the money to buy them and learn to operate them, but his father also had nothing but contempt for these activities. At one point, Fredy even snuck off to become an airline pilot, a goal which he actually achieved on his own, and was able to pursue successfully for a brief period of time, thereby further enraging his father.

But that didn’t last, because Fredy also had alcohol and drug problems, caused no doubt by the constant stress of trying and failing to satisfy his father's plans for him. So Fredy kept coming back to his father and the family business each time he failed at his own projects, trying hopelessly to find a role in the business he could play well, to win his cold-hearted father’s approval, and eventually be able to support his growing family.

Meanwhile, Donald (Fred's second son) was observing Fredy’s failures to meet their father’s harsh and unforgiving expectations, and decided to modify his own behaviors in ways that would gain him “favorite” status with his father Fred. The behaviors he chose were exactly those that we recognize in the troubled and extreme personality we know today. 

He would become a “killer”. He would be the person who disparaged and mocked “losers”, ironically eventually even including his father, after Fred was afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. He would learn to treat everyone – even his closest family members – as worthless objects, to be despised, used and manipulated for his own purposes, without any sympathy or empathy for any difficulties they might be experiencing. And he would learn to excel in creating a fictitious public image of himself as a powerful, wealthy, and indomitable businessman, regardless of his lack of any demonstrated abilities or personal achievements independent of those enabled by his wealthy father.

According to Mary Trump, every one of the destructive and dysfunctional behaviors Donald tried out on those around him just gained him more approval from Fred Senior, and more leniency from this cold-blooded father for his obnoxiousness, cruelty and misbehavior. It was ironic, as Ms. Trump points out, that none of Fred's indulgence could ever actually reassure the chronically insecure Donald deep down that his father really loved him. And he probably didn't. Fred didn't appear to have the capacity to love or empathize with others either, just as Donald doesn't.

This is an extremely disturbing but highly credible insider’s look into the dark heart of a family with serious behavioral and psychological disorders, who somehow produced the strange and historically anomalous figure of Donald Trump, whose ambitions, unchecked rage, sociopathy and incompetence have so clouded the recent past, present and perhaps near future of our country. Recommended.

Book Review: Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and Unexpected Solutions (2018). Johann Hari.

This is an excellent and unusual exploration of the psychology of depression, which posits a 9-point spectrum of situations and causes in peoples' life situations that create most depression, rather than the more conventional medical view that depression is primarily a biologically based condition, and therefore something that can be easily treated with medication and other psychiatric therapies.

The author reviews the scientific literature in each of the different life experience areas, then moves on to the second section, which talks about the sorts of changes in lives and society which can help control, reduce and eliminate depression.

This book is ultimately political and economic in its view of depression and its sources in modern society. The main thrust of its arguments is that we live in human societies where too many people are economically disadvantaged, politically powerless, and have too few meaningful and supportive relationships with other people in our families, friendship circles, work organizations and communities.

A well-presented case for the need for major changes in our political, social and economic conditions, in order to live happier and less depressed lives, and avoid many of the negative personal and societal effects of depression. Recommended.

Book Review: The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us (2019). Paul Tough.

This book, which was originally published under the title The Years That Matter Most, is a surprisingly interesting and informative exploration of the college admissions process, and how success getting in and completing a degree shapes life outcomes. 

Topics covered include: the special role of elite universities, and the way the competition and criteria to get in to them ends up favoring the children of the wealthy; the social and academic difficulties of poor and minorities when they do get in to the elite schools; the ways that SAT and ACT also favor the wealthy, but are poor predictors of collegiate academic success compared to high school grades; the value of "top 10%" admissions policies in bringing in students who are the most highly qualified and most likely to succeed, regardless of social class; and academic approaches and non-academic factors that affect success and degree completion.

The author nicely blends social science research in these areas with personal interviews and stories of individual students, whose experiences illustrate different aspects of the topics covered in the book. Recommended.

Book Review: Everybody Lies (2017). Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

The essence of this book, by a former Google data scientist, is an exploration of how Google searches reveal more about what we're really like than we ever previously knew or wanted to admit. 

This book is similar in its analysis and impact to OK Cupid founder Christian Rudder’s 2015 book Dataclysm, which made use of huge volumes of personal information collected from online dating sites to dissect the realities of sex, dating, race and other aspects of society, and our true beliefs and feelings about them. 

Both books are entertaining, thought-provoking and of great value for understanding why "big data" about everything we want to know and do, and what we thereby unintentionally reveal about ourselves, is such an important new tool for the social sciences, and for gaining a better understanding of our world and society. 

The author calls Google search and other search engines "digital truth serum" (that is, what we ask search sites, from the hoped-for privacy and relative anonymity of our web browsers, where we’re not trying to create a brand or image of ourselves for public consumption, as we do on Facebook and other social media platforms).  It’s a very good analogy.  Recommended.

Book Review: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). Isabel Wilkerson.

This is a very compelling presentation on how the history and current state of racism against black people in the USA has all the elements of a well-developed caste system, very analogous to those of India and apartheid-era South Africa.   

One particularly horrifying set of historical facts she presents to bolster this case (of which I was unaware) is the extent to which the German Nazi leadership studied and copied the American racist caste system of the Jim Crow era against blacks, as they were making plans for their own racist campaigns against European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. 

In Wilkerson's view, Negroid features and dark skin color were deliberately used in colonial North America as arbitrary markers for the creation of a "sub-human" caste (similar to the Indian Dalits, or “untouchables”) as part of the development of the legal and moral basis for justifying slavery.   

Once firmly established, this caste system has proven remarkably tenacious over the centuries in its ability to keep re-forming and re-asserting itself, as various earlier elements of racism and race-based discrimination have been slowly outlawed or made socially unacceptable in American life.  

The author notes the manner in which this caste system was promoted to the lowest class whites, as an assurance that no matter how poor or downtrodden they were, they could always be confident that they were still of higher caste than anyone with black skin.  With this observation, she shows why lower-caste whites continue to be so resistant to any social changes (or individual achievements, such as Barack Obama's ascendancy to the presidency of the United States) that allow blacks to move to upper caste levels, and she gives examples in our contemporary social life and politics to illustrate and prove the point.  

This is a new and enlightening theory of how systemic racism against blacks has become so deeply pervasive and entrenched in American society, as a classic caste system, and shows starkly the toll that it has taken on black people, but also on the rest of our society, since the first black slaves arrived here in 1619.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1983). Robert B. Cialdini.

In this important work from many decades ago, Dr. Cialdini laid out the six major psychological levers by which people get other people to do what they want.  This book is a classic from the 1980s, which has been heavily mined ever since by advertisers, marketers, social media developers and others who hope to get our attention and influence our behavior.

 

Some techniques based on his principals don't work as well as they once did in areas like mass-mailing campaigns, because they have been so heavily over-used, and in the course of this cynical exploitation, some of the underlying norms of society he describes have been worn away.  

 

But in general these principals still apply, they still work, and are still at the core of how advertising and social media operate, as well as being heavily used in many scams and other malevolent applications of social engineering.  

The six  weapons of influence include reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity.  His explanations of how these methods work, and the related psychological research that demonstrates how and why each approach functions are clear, classic and timeless.

This book is still in print in a revised version.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Boys and Sex (2020). Peggy Orenstein.

After the success of Girls and Sex (2016), which I previously reviewed, and her experience researching and writing it, Orenstein decided it wasn’t either fair, or complete, to leave out the boys’ side of the story.   So she initiated a similar set of candid conversations with young high school and college boys, to find out how it felt to be a boy trying to navigate early sexuality in our society.  

Not surprisingly, she found out plenty about boys’ use of and experience with consuming large amounts of pornography online, but discovered that for many boys (as with the girls), watching porn was more an attempt to know what to expect and to do in sexual encounters than a real pleasure in itself.  

Orenstein also finds out more about the social pressure that boys feel in a wide variety of settings (especially college fraternities) to have a large number of sexual “conquests”, and to avoid sharing their emotions with partners, or getting involved in ongoing love relationships.   

In one particularly powerful section, she talks about the impact of colleges’ and the courts’ changing responses in the #METOO era in how they handle young men who have been abusive to women.  She talks about the often-difficult nature of defining and recognizing consent, particularly in alcohol-infused situations, and describes some of the ways now being developed to promote accountability and greater awareness in victimizers, in the hope of preventing a lifetime of these sorts of exploitative and destructive behaviors toward women by these men.

More so than in Girls and Sex, she also explores some of the experiences and attitudes of gay and trans boys and young men, as they try to establish their own sexual identities and comfort zones in the midst of the pressured, predominantly heterosexual young male environments and social scenes of school and college.

This companion book, like Girls and Sex, is a fascinating, thoughtful and well-researched look at what ails our current approach to raising our children to have healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors, and what we could do to make it better.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships (2010). Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jetha.

An interesting and controversial survey of the modern research and literature of human sexuality, that challenges the widely held belief that monogamy is the natural and normal state of human sex and relationships. 

Instead, the authors make the case that having multiple sex partners was the norm prior to the age of agriculture, and that human biology, including the differing sexual responses, capabilities, emotions and behaviors of men and women, can best be explained and understood as the evolutionary result of the promiscuous relationships which appear to have characterized hunter-gatherer societies for many hundreds of thousands of years.  

Several other excellent histories of humanity I’ve read recently suggest that the idea that any one type of sexual behavior, or any other kind of human behavior or organization, has been consistent throughout all societies during any period of our species evolution is nonsense, given the historical examples of all different types of arrangements and norms coexisting in different cultures, places and times. 

Still, the authors here have at least made a good case for “natural” states of sexuality and types of family relationships that are not necessarily the same as what we take for granted as “normal” today.  The book also makes the case for bonobos as our closest primate relatives, at least as far as sexual anatomy and social/sexual behaviors are concerned. 

It’s a thought-provoking read about one of humanity’s perennially most favorite topics!  Recommended.

Book Review: Girls and Sex (2016). Peggy Orenstein.

A mother and journalist explores the contemporary challenges, ideas and behaviors of young girls and women navigating early sexual experiences, and the associated pressures and issues.  By having candid, open interviews with many young women in high school and college, and detailed discussions with them about their sexual activities and feelings, she was able to show how we as a society continue to fail them, by not providing realistic information about the emotional and pleasurable aspects of sex. 

She discusses the destructive role of ubiquitous pornography online, which is seen by many or most  young girls and boys, as a truly sad alternative to good education, information and advice about healthy sex and women's enjoyment of it.  

She also pays attention to the conflicting social pressures young women face in the modern “liberated” era, where they are expected and encouraged from an early age to be seen as sexually available, “hot” and desirable, yet can be and often are “slut-shamed” (particularly on social media, with terrible  psychological effects) at the same time if they actually act on boys’ expectations or their own desires.  

This is a very revealing, compassionate exploration of the challenges faced by modern girls in  weathering the earliest phase of their sexual lives, as they try to learn how to develop positive sexual relationships and healthy self-images, and have enjoyable experiences, in the realms of sexual pleasure, love and relationships.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth about Men and Women in the 21st Century (2017). Stephen Marche (with commentary by his wife, Editor Sarah Fulford).

The author of this entertaining and compelling account of contemporary marriage and relationships between the sexes was a tenured professor and author at a New York university a few years ago, when his wife was offered a prestigious position as the editor of a major periodical back in their home country of Canada. 

 

From this initially difficult situation for him, where he agreed to put her career first, leave his desirable  academic position and move with her and their family back to Toronto, where he would take on primary responsibility for caring for their small children, Marche explores the reality of our current lives, loves and families, and how men and women (at least in Western society) balance the competing demands of professional lives, raising children, maintaining households and divvying up all the necessary chores and responsibilities.

 

Moving effortlessly between social science research on changing male and female roles, and his own family’s experiences and emotional responses to them, he challenges the post-feminist concept of a “war between the sexes”, a zero-sum approach that assumes that any improvements to women’s condition has to come at the expense of men’s happiness, satisfaction or status.  Instead, he argues that we are moving toward a time where the improving status and condition of women, and their increasing ability to live fuller lives that can include work, home and family, actually improves the emotional fulfillment of men’s lives and of the whole family too.

 

But of course, it’s always complicated.  It’s a dance, and both participants have to commit to it.  So he explores the dynamics of this dance within his own family, and tells a story of life in a modern family that is both endearing and familiar.  And his story is further improved by the fact that his wife, the editor,  periodically injects her own often amusing observations as footnotes to the same topics and events he’s recounting, to provide a woman’s perspective on their shared experiences and sometimes differing reactions.

 

A very enjoyable account and analysis of modern marriage, families and love, that will ring true to many readers who have their own experiences of the same range of common challenges, issues, joys and satisfactions.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (2005). Martha Stout, PhD.

I first read this short but indispensable book a number of years ago.  I consider it to be one of the most important and eye-opening books I have read in recent years.  I have revisited it several times since, because it addresses an apparently permanent part of the human condition we must be aware of to understand much of the destructive and unbearable behavior we see around us.

 

As Dr. Stout points out, psychological research has shown that 4-5% of the human population, consistent across different cultures, is utterly lacking in a conscience.  The one person in 25 with this condition is simply unable to feel or comprehend common human emotions like guilt, remorse or empathy for anyone else.  This is what it is to be a sociopath, almost like an alien species among us that is threatening and dangerous to the rest of us, and that needs to be understood and recognized for us to be able to protect ourselves from them, whether in our personal relationships or in our larger social and political choices.

 

The author wrote this book after more than 25 years of working as a clinical psychologist with patients with disorders in the sociopathy range.  She brings many insights based on this personal experience, as well as her familiarity with the research on these disorders.  To begin, she explains that sociopaths exist along a spectrum, from the exasperating neighbor or co-worker who is always trying to “win” some pointless argument, to the demeaning and degrading boss, to the cold-blooded serial killer, and the monstrous autocratic leader of an oppressive dictatorship. 

 

She describes different aspects of typical sociopathic behavior: the fact that lacking all human empathy and connection, their only possible satisfaction is an endless search for “wins” over other people; their frequent high intelligence, and awareness of the common human emotions, but only as tools for manipulating others, not something they can ever feel; their belief that normal rules and laws of human civilization and society don’t apply to them; and their willingness to lie continuously without remorse.  

There is so much more valuable insight and illustrative stories from her case histories, but rather than recounting it all, I would just say: read this book.  Very highly recommended.