Filed under: Book Reviews, Nonfiction | Tags: book reviews, lit, mary roach, NASA, nonfiction, packing for mars, reading
Reading Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars is like seeing the journalist version of my twelve-year-old self: Roach is endlessly curious, prone to digressions, and drawn to potty humor. This makes her a fantastic if sometimes frustrating guide through NASA’s history, and training and testing processes. She alternates between making seemingly unconnected ideas and stories “click” into satisfying place, and leaving her readers with a mass of information on something connected to NASA in only the most generous of terms. Her habit of preceding some throw-off fact with “I read somewhere…” smacks of occasional laziness (just tell us where you read it!), but Roach always recovers herself through the sheer enthusiasm with which she attacks such topics as how to use a space toilet, and whether a Russian porn film was really filmed in zero gravity.
Still, there isn’t anyone I would rather follow on a tour through NASA. Roach has an eye for the absurd and the uncomfortable, and appears to take some pleasure in noting how frequently her questions (about toilet use, sex in space, and so much more) are evaded. She provides a view of the astronaut’s life that is sometimes startling for its divergence from the grade school dream. Astronauts, it turns out, spend most of their time not being in space – a disappointing discovery for someone like me, who maybe hasn’t held close the dream of journeying to outer space, but who nonetheless never paused to think about how unromantic the astronaut’s life is.
Roach’s greatest discovery here, though, may be in finding the NASA employees who are as willing as she is to joke about the odder elements of life in space. She also has a special talent for finding the few worthwhile, gut-busting lines from transcripts that run for hundreds of pages, as when the Apollo 10 crew members find themselves plagued by some “floaters.” (Seriously: shit, in space, does not always stay in the toilet or bag where it’s been deposited.)
CERNAN: …You know once you get out of lunar orbit, you can do a lot of things. You can power down…And what’s happening is –
STAFFORD: Oh – who did it?
YOUNG: Who did what?
CERNAN: What?
STAFFORD: Who did it? [laughter]
CERNAN: Where did that come from?
STAFFORD: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.
YOUNG: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.
CERNAN: I don’t think it’s one of mine.
STAFFORD: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.
YOUNG: God almighty.[And again eight minutes later, while discussing the timing of a waste-water dump.]
YOUNG: Did they say we could do it anytime?
CERNAN: They said on 135. They told us that – Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a –
YOUNG/STAFFORD: [laughter]…
STAFFORD: It was just floating around?
CERNAN: Yes.
STAFFORD: [laughter] Mine was stickier than that.
YOUNG: Mine was too. It hit that bag –
CERNAN: [laughter] I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it. [laughter]
YOUNG: What the hell is going on here?
Look, this space turd segment is, without a doubt, one of the greatest moments of Packing for Mars – I could not resist the temptation to quote it in full – and it highlights what makes Mary Roach such a fun writer. She knows no shame or boundaries, and she answers the questions we didn’t even know we had. She mixes these (frankly hilarious) moments into more serious examination of all the things we don’t know about space: what would happen to a baby conceived in space, how to keep the human body from deteriorating in zero G, how to handle multinational crews dealing with their fellow astronauts’ cultural quirks, whether it is worth putting a half billion dollars into a mission to Mars that in all odds won’t have any tangible results. Oddly enough, given the way Roach strips away many of our childhood images and myths of NASA, she imbues the organization with slightly more wonder than she pulls away. NASA is a bureaucratic engine, and one that perhaps takes itself too seriously; but even in this it offers us something new, as with the biblical instructions regarding sandwiches that can go into space:
The contraband Wolfie’s sandwich [explanation {mine}: one of the astronauts brought an outside sandwich into space] violated no less than sixteen of the formal manufacturing requirements for “Beef Sandwiches, Dehydrated (Bite Sized).” The requirements cover six pages and are set forth in the ominous phrasing of biblical commandments. (“There shall be no…damp or soggy areas.” “The coating shall not chip or flake.”)
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Nonfiction | Tags: book reviews, books, eating animals, factory farming, jonathan safran foer, literature, vegetarianism
In Eating Animals Jonathan Safran Foer doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know about eating animals in America. This is, as he points out throughout the book, one of the most disturbing aspects of being an American meat eater today: there’s a willful blindness to it, as consumers know that their chicken has been pumped full of chicken-flavored liquid to compensate for the bird’s lack of flavor (this being not dissimilar, weird as it sounds, to apples that look great but don’t really taste like anything), that their meat, milk and eggs come from animals pumped full of drugs, and that even meat or animal products stickered “cage-free” or “range-free” came from miserable animals with only the most marginal access to the outdoors and no access to what we would consider a normal or humane life.
Foer’s book is a necessary one, one that should be read by anyone eating factory farmed meat (which is pretty much everyone) or not (which is everyone else), because he addresses some topics that don’t come up in other books, like those from the Michael Pollan crowd, on eating in America. Foer focuses heavily on the cultural aspects of food; he tells stories about his grandmother’s cooking, and how her relationship with food influenced his own, and influenced his thoughts on what he wants his son’s cultural relationship with food to be. As he writes, “Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.”
He writes, too, about how it’s not merely the day to day of factory farming that is cruel, but the very genetics of the animals, which we’ve bred for the amount of meat they can quickly provide us rather than their ability to naturally reproduce or walk without pain; even the vast majority of the “best” farms are raising these same genetically cursed animals.
From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of “broilers” increased by 65 percent, while their time-to-market dropped 60 percent and their feed requirements dropped 57 percent. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be three hundred pounds in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.
Skeptical as I was about reading a novelist’s take on factory farming, Foer brings something to the story that others haven’t been able to; he draws comparisons more vividly than many other writers can, and though he is ultimately advocating a vegetarian diet, he never seems preachy about it. He opens the book to others, printing letters from an animal activist, a rancher, and a factory farmer, among others. And while he sometimes picks at the sustainable meat producers, the sort that Michael Pollan heaped praise on in his Omnivore’s Dilemma, his criticism works in view of his larger argument for vegetarianism. Unlike Pollan, who advocates eating meat sometimes, and seeking out sustainably produced meat, Foer leans towards removing meat from the diet altogether. It is, he argues, not a necessary part of the diet, and it is near-impossible to wade through the dozens of meaningless labels assuring consumers of the humane production of their food to find meat that has, actually, been humanely produced.
Near book’s end, Foer writes, “No one loves to eat as much as we do, and when we change what we eat, the world changes.” Foer’s book is all about accepting responsibility, about understanding the ways we interact with our food and then moving toward a healthier and more sustainable and humane diet, and if he sometimes picks fights with other writers, like Pollan, who have done a lot to advance this cause, it remains a pleasure to hear his voice – advocating not just more mindful eating of meat but no eating of meat, not until we have a system that we can be certain is handling animals humanely.
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Nonfiction | Tags: book review, books, literature, neal pollack, nonfiction, reading, stretch, yoga
Neal Pollack’s Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude is an at times joyful and refreshing look at yoga culture in the States. The “at times” is the key phrase in that sentence; Pollack’s book, which describes his journey from being an overweight, balding, mean-spirited, struggling writer to a “yoga dude,” is at its best at the start of his journey.
Dealing with stress over a poor review in The New York Times and a six-a-day donut habit, Pollacks’ wife urges hm to attend a yoga class with her at the local gym. Unlike his wife, Pollack ends up hooked on yoga. When they move to L.A. so he can pursue work as a screenwriter he gets more serious about yoga; L.A. Is, after all, described as being to yoga what Paris was to writers in the 1920s.
Even when he’s taking yoga seriously Pollack doesn’t take it too seriously. This isn’t a book you’ll be rolling your eyes at as you read, thinking, “christ, gimme a break about this ‘connection with the universe’ stuff.” But he’s at his best early in the memoir, when his skepticism about yoga is still evident to everyone around him. Pollack never hesitates to take jabs at himself, either, but the best come early on, as when he struggles with bouts of gas during yoga class, effectively deflating the world of yoga (which to us outsiders can too often seem composed of people who have never had to do something so crass as race for a bathroom):
If at all possible, I liked for my farts to get lost in a wave of sound. Therefore, the best time to fart, if I absolutely had to, was during the part of the class where we said “OM.” As a beautiful chorus of human voices (including mine) harmonized as one, my colon expanded and contracted, discharging useless gases. I sent them out to the cosmos as an extra blessing, a karmic bonus.
What makes Pollack’s book so fun and accessible is that, when the book opens, he’s willing (even eager) to reveal these aspects of himself, but also that he is such an asshole. Pollack is a contributor to the first issue of McSweeney’s, and the first book published by McSweeney’s is written by him. He views himself on a path to success, and the self-destructive path he heads down (quickly killing off his best contacts) when the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers do make it big, is recognizable to anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed by the unfairness of not being viewed as remarkable as their (assumed) counterparts. The joy Pollack feels in his transformation from the sort of man who publicly rips into a perceived competitor’s book, to one who tries to do headstands without farting, is evident and makes the first third of the book a pleasure to read.
What ultimately works against Stretch is the same thing that makes Eat, Pray, Love a hard swallow: Pollack got a book deal to write about his yoga journey while still on his yoga journey. With the writing he does on articles he writes for journals like Yoga Today, and the Thailand yoga retreat he pays for with his book advance, the last two-thirds of the book read like a journey that’s been designed for its narrative arc. Pollack covers a yoga conference for Yoga Today, travels across the country and attends classes representative of types of yoga, like Bikram, that have defined yoga in America, goes on his retreat and then covers a yoga conference/indie rock fest. His observations about “yogis” in America (like the number of middle-upper class practitioners who wear their $100 lululemon yoga pants while turning their yoga poses into poses for the gaze of others) do effectively skewer the commercialization of yoga, but even this loses its pleasure after a couple chapters.
Pollack writes about finding his “best self.” It’s hard to take that effort seriously, in part because of his habit of smoking a bowl before heading in for yoga practice, but more so because his attempts to craft a redemptive narrative are so apparent. Pollack’s book is at times an entertaining read, but it never quite lives up to its potential.
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Nonfiction | Tags: books, daniel tammett, joshua foer, lit, memory, memory championship, memory palace, moonwalking with einstein, reading
Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein is an inspirational text to my class of people, the sort who (despite being only in their mid-twenties) walk to the refrigerator and forget what they had planned to eat, go to the store and forget what they had planned to buy, avoid shopping malls because of the risk of losing the car in the parking lot, and forget the names of characters halfway through books. Foer’s memory isn’t markedly better than mine, but after covering the U.S. Memory Championships he’s intrigued by the claims of competitors that what they do (memorizing decks of cards, random numbers, names and faces, among other things) isn’t an inherent skill but something that can be learned.
If you’re me, this is about where you start rolling your eyes, but Foer’s book is immensely readable, busting with the sort of energy typical of Mary Roach’s science-y books. Moonwalking with Einstein follows Foer’s year of study under British memory champion Ed Cooke, but also explores the idea of memory and the lives of several memory champions and savants. Memory, he reveals, isn’t a matter of staring at a sheet of paper and committing its information, line by line, to your short-term memory, but of visualizing facts and placing them in a familiar place. Foer writes of the “memory palace”: taking a place that’s familiar to you and scattering throughout the house visual images. This means, if you need to buy cottage cheese, picturing a model splashing around in a kiddie pool full of cottage cheese. As you walk through your memory palace, Foer explains, the images are there as naturally as if they were part of your long-term memory.
Foer’s description of his journey to the 2006 U.S. Memory Championships is sometimes unnerving: much of his year is spent sitting in his parents’ basement wearing goggles and blinkers, memorizing decks of cards or sheets of random numbers. His exploration of memory, and of how the loss of memory and the rise of written memory has impacted our culture, though, is fascinating, raising questions about the way we choose to remember things and the way we educate our children. Memorization as a form of learning is routinely demonized, but Foer makes a strong case for the reintroduction of memorization to education. Not just that, though; he makes some unnerving points regarding our world of externalized memories:
Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.
The sort of memory Foer is focused on gaining in preparation for the memory competition isn’t the sort that we need in our daily lives, and at end he’s clear that what he gained wasn’t an ability to remember grocery lists or where he parked his car, but an understanding that it is possible to “improve” memory (to the application of apparently useless tasks) through long-understood techniques, such as the Memory Palace, that we’ve long forgotten.
He covers a lot of ground, and he does it well, though there are points at which his goals in writing are unclear, as when he argues that the savant Daniel Tammett is simply a skilled practitioner of mnemonic devices. Foer’s accompanying argument, that if we are awed by savants because of the power of their brains to do the seemingly impossible we should be even more awed by the ability of an average man to train himself to do things like complex equations in his mind, is a strong one, but the reason for devoting so much space to Tammett isn’t readily clear, interesting as Foer’s argument may be. (If you watch the fantastic documentary Brainman online, you’ll be able to pick up all the backstory Foer goes through.) Tammett is an intriguing subject, but not one with any real links to Foer’s subject – unless, as Foer declares (and he is, to be clear, in the definite minority on this front) Tammett’s savant-like skills are actually the result of the same memory techniques Foer writes about. Despite this slip, Foer’s book is a fun one and worth reading, even if you, like me, can’t quite muster the strength to practice the Memory Palace on your grocery list, or even write the damn thing down.
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Filed under: Nonfiction | Tags: 60 minutes, afghanistan, byliner, CAI, central asia institute, greg mortenson, jon krakauer, lit, literature, nick kristof, nonfiction, pakistan, reading, stones into schools, three cups of deceit, three cups of tea
The uproar over Greg Mortenson’s twinned deceits – his fabrications in Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools and his alleged misappropriation of Central Asia Institute funds to go on book tour rather than visit or manage the schools the organization builds – is something that I am, for once, able to hear all the way over here in Macedonia. Mortenson’s deceit isn’t just shocking; it’s exhausting, one more in a long line of memoirists to offer up fabricated lives to fit the narrative demands of their books.
Mortenson’s case is of course so much more shocking, for all the things he is that someone like James Frey wasn’t. Mortenson has for years sold himself as a man above. Learning that he is in fact the sort of man to recast his hosts in the Waziristan region of Pakistan as Taliban members who held him hostage for eight days, or who would remove a promise to build a school in one village because the other in some way offered a better story, is disappointing but…did we all, really, expect something different?
The 60 Minutes piece available for viewing online does an effective job of reimagining Mortenson’s work in the light of funds pilfered to pay for a book tour and stories exaggerated to sell more books. The piece as a whole is an effective take down of Mortenson – I find it difficult to imagine how he’ll come back from this – but there’s no more damning moment than Mortenson’s reaction to (and avoidance of) the 60 Minutes crew at a book signing.
Mortenson may be the victim of a well-coordinated media attack, but it’s one that he brought on himself by coloring himself, for so many years, as a sort of humble hero. When Jon Krakauer outlines Mortenson’s creative use of CAI funds in his byliner piece “Three Cups of Deceit,” much of the impact comes not from Krakauer’s writing but from the fact that it is Greg Mortenson appropriating the funds schoolchildren across America have raised to build schools in Pakistan. And for all the deceits Krakauer lays out in his piece (which you should read, whether you’ve read Three Cups of Tea or not, whether you are naturally inclined to love or to despise Mortenson) none have quite the impact as the ultimate deceit, the sense that Mortenson’s act is something that should not have been able to go on for so long – that the questions Krakauer thought to ask are questions that the American public should have been asking years ago.
from Wikipedia
Take the simple question of where the funds from Mortenson’s books end up. It seemed natural to me that some portion of the money from Mortenson’s writing would end up in the coffers of CAI. The books are bestsellers, Mortenson is a known fundraiser, and I can think of few better fundraisers than a book that’s spent years on top of the NYT bestseller lists. As Krakauer and 60 Minutes describe it, though, Mortenson keeps the earnings from his book. He not only keeps those earnings, he uses donations to CAI to fund what is essentially a never-ending book tour, a string of speaking engagements and signings across the country, some of which he receives $30,000 speaking fees for. (He keeps the speaking fees, too.) It’s shocking that Mortenson would treat the donations to CAI so cavalierly, sure, but just as shocking that no one thought, before now, to look into how his book tours are funded, or what percentage of CAI money goes to building schools, or whether the profits from Mortenson’s books go even in part to funding the building of more schools in Afghanistan or Pakistan. These are questions we should have asked, that we needed to ask, but never did, presumably because Mortenson appears as a positive and sometimes heroic (in his own description) figure in a world that too often seems to roll from one disaster to the next.
Coupled with this tale of the never ending book tour are the questions about what isn’t happening as a direct result of more than half the CAI’s funds being poured into the promotion of Mortenson’s book, which benefits them only in bringing greater visibility to education in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Krakauer and 60 Minutes both purport that some of the schools Mortenson claims to have built don’t exist, and that others are “ghost schools,” built in areas that didn’t need them or not provided the support they need to accept students. Three Cups of Tea is so vague on the issues of how the schools are run that I wondered, while reading, what sort of oversight the schools receive, or if the schools are in any way linked to the government’s education system. Again, aren’t these questions we all should have been asking? Mortenson undoubtedly does some fantastic work in terms of bringing positive attention to a region that is too often known only for war or as a breeding ground for terrorists, and in building some schools that do operate successfully; but all of that work is now recast by his dishonesties and half-truths and inability to account for CAI funds.
Mortenson’s publishers say, as publishers will, that fact-checking isn’t part of their job, but at some point it needs to become part of their job; that or the newspapers and magazines that heaped praise on Mortenson should, too, look more critically on the stories they and their authors package as the honest-to-god-absolute-truth. It’s not only Mortenson’s publishers or Mortenson himself who deserve blame for this, though: it’s everyone who without question bought Mortenson’s story, bought his books, donated money, without once asking the questions that would have provided a clearer and more accurate picture of where CAI’s funds were going, how many schools were being built, what the method is for selecting school sites, how schools are supported after being built, what cooperation, if any, CAI and Greg Mortenson have with the governments of Pakistan or Afghanistan when it comes to running these schools. Mortenson’s story was too good, though, and asking these questions might have brought it down. So we didn’t ask.
The shame to this is not wholly contained in the 60 Minutes expose or in Krakauer’s “Three Cups of Deceit.” It lies in that, whatever the “truth” in this story turns out to be, Mortenson’s work has been colored by the failings of his organization and the half-truths and exaggerations scattered throughout his books and speeches. Nick Kristof writes in his NYT column today, “But let’s not forget that even if all the allegations turn out to be true, Greg has still built more schools and transformed more children’s lives than you or I ever will.” Mortenson has done good work, he’s brought much-needed attention to a neglected region of the world, he’s turned people’s minds to children’s education and the education of girls in particular, but all this good work is reduced by the way Mortenson has handled his organization and his story. I wonder how much the reading public is responsible for all this, in our desire to see memoirs that tell stories with the rewarding narrative arc of fiction.
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