Book Review: Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019). David Wallace-Wells.

This book contains a series of essays detailing the extent of climate change damage to the earth and its environment and species that have already occurred, and where current trends are likely to take us.  

The author also makes clear how long we have already known about this problem, and failed to take meaningful steps to remediate it, and outlines much of what we know about what the fossil fuel industry has done to prevent progress on climate change, in order to protect its investments and profits. 

It’s all fairly grim and depressing, but important reading for informed citizens.  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.

Movie Review: Carrie Pilby (2022). Netflix.

An amusing tale of a 19-year old genius girl, already graduated from Yale, who is trying to find happiness in New York city. 

 

She's alienated from her father, working on her issues with an older male therapist, dealing with her feelings of loss from her mother's death, starting a job as a proofreader, dating a guy who's  engaged, sleeping with one of her professors, and slowly falling for a nice guy who lives next door. 

 

She's sorting it all out.  It's charming and funny.  Recommended.

Movie Review: The Tender Bar (2022). Netflix.

Ben Affleck plays a key supporting role in a sensitive coming of age tale about a young boy with an abusive and absent father, who is growing up with the support of his mother's large, chaotic family, and particularly the help and fatherly guidance of his bartender uncle (Affleck), and the rowdy group of local working class guys who hang out at his neighborhood bar.  

 

Based on the J.R. Moehringer autobiography, and produced by George Clooney.  Recommended.

Book Review: Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service (2021). Carol Leonnig.

Zero Fail is one of two Secret Service books I have read recently.  It is a history of the agency by a talented investigative journalist, which traces the Secret Service and its leadership from its origins in the Treasury Department, through its changing roles and capabilities as the protectors of Presidents, and its transition in the early 2000s to being one federal police agency among many in the post-9/11 Homeland Security Department.  

Leonnig is particularly interested in the major failures that shaped the agency from its inception, particularly presidential assassinations and attempts, and how the need to protect the agency in the wake of those failures helped create a closed, defensive organizational culture, which has continued to tolerate and cover up mistakes, as well as the bad behavior, institutional sexism, drunken excesses and sexual antics of agents and supervisors.  

A penetrating analysis and treasure trove of “inside secrets” from the agency which continues to have “zero fail” (in protecting the president) as the standard to which it should and must be held.   

This account concludes in near-present time, and does include coverage of Donald Trump's attempts to bend the agency to his own personal service and political purposes, in ways unlike those of any previous presidents.  This is especially relevant now, as news this week has revealed that members of the Secret Service close to Trump may have actively participated in attempts to derail the certification of the 2020 election by Congress.  Recommended.

Book Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015). Yuval Noah Harari.

This widely heralded book by an Israeli professor is nothing less than a history of the human race.   It combines anthropology, archeology, history, sociology, and philosophy not only to tell how we came to be (and when), but to explore why we became the dominant species on earth.  

There is much here that is fascinating.   For example, we typically think of humans as having been around for a long time, but Harari explains what the most recent archeological research has shown, which is that Homo Sapiens only appeared and replaced all the other earlier human species within the relatively short time period of the past 70,000 years.  

During that time, we invented government, agriculture, writing, science and other “force multipliers” that extended the reach of humanity’s power over the natural world and other species, by harnessing the collective resources of large numbers of us in pursuit of goals set by the much smaller number of people who emerged as leaders down through the ages.  

A delightful read that provides much food for thought, by looking behind the curtain of our evolution and history as a species, in order to explain how things came to be the way they are.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019). Darrell Bricker and John Ibbotson.

Empty Planet is a startling book in the "everything you know is wrong" genre, having to do with population growth.  

The main thesis is that all our current fears about a population crisis for the planet may be way overblown, because the major demographic effects of global urbanization, increasing wealth and education in developed societies, the rise of women as social equals and professionals in the workplace, and the loss of religious belief are to push birth rates well below replacement levels (which is about 2.1 children/woman).  

That has already happened in much of the world, and is happening rapidly now even in the less developed areas.  The authors argue that the real crisis may be in the effects of shrinking and aging populations on societies and economies.  

Lots of details and demographic analysis are included.  This is a very important book for understanding the current immigration debates and crises as well, given the potential value of increased immigration as used in some countries to compensate for population decline.  Highly recommended.

Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America (2022). Ryan Busse.

This new non-fiction release brings an unexpected insider perspective and history to the evolution of the National Rifle Association (NRA) over the past 30 years from its longstanding traditional role as a sportsman-oriented outdoor recreational and educational organization, to its current position as one of the most influential and dangerous organizations promoting militarism, authoritarianism and extreme right wing politics in the United States.

 

Ryan Busse was raised on a Kansas farm, and grew up with traditional rural American values of patriotism, love of the outdoors, and familiarity with guns, especially hunting rifles and shotguns, which were tied in his mind and emotions to much-loved memories of youth and family.  When it came time to choose a profession, he became an early employee of Kimber of America, at that time a boutique gun maker that specialized in making fine hunting rifles, where he rose during a successful career of more than twenty years to a position as an industry award-winning vice president.  

 

Along the way, though, he witnessed and initially was part of the dramatic transformation of both the gun industry and the NRA that occurred from the 1990s to the present, into something very different and much darker than what he thought he had joined. 

 

The transformation he describes included the early use of organized internet “trolling” as a way to create fear in opponents within the NRA and the gun industry; the glamorization of recent combat veterans and their lethal equipment to build a market for selling more guns, especially high-capacity pistols and variants of the AR-15 assault rifle; skillful use of cynical marketing techniques, to legitimize sale of military-grade weapons to civilians, notably a rebranding of AR-15 variants as the MSR, or “modern sporting rifle”; and the encouragement of gun sales to what industry insiders contemptuously called “couch commandos”, that is, young civilian men with fantasies of war and a desire for a kind of “cosplay” with real weapons as an outlet for their imaginations and frustrations.    

 

Busse provides examples and insights from his own experiences about the extent to which NRA officials used and benefited from corrupt practices, to build personal fortunes, and manipulate individuals and gun companies to conform to the NRA's increasingly hard line on contentious political and social issues.   He also describes his own conflicted position and feelings, as his company, the gun industry and the NRA changed around him, and eventually became threatening to him and his family.

This is an important slice of our recent political history by an inside observer to the rise of a leading force in the American radical right of the early 21st century.  Highly recommended.