The Hidden Messages in Water

#780
Title: The Hidden Messages in Water
Author: Masaru Emoto
Publisher: Atria
Year: 2005
200 pages

With its laughable science and huge leaps of logic, this could just as easily be marketed as a parody of new age tripe. Emoto's pseudoscience is alarmingly concrete and reductive, demonstrating his lack of understanding of physics (yes, including quantum physics) at every turn. To read this as a scientific study of the physical world leads only to incredulous laughter.

It may be better to read it as a spiritual/philosophical text, though Emoto muddies these waters considerably (hah, water-related quip) by claiming scientific status. He has an an unfortunate tendency to make up or possibly cherry-pick data in support of his quasi-religious themes. Emoto doesn't present his data, but only his ideas and purported examples that support his assertions. I say "purported" because he has chosen the guise of science (though he describes himself as not a scientist), so he should be accountable to standards such as describing one's obtained data set and using controls. His "studies" meet no scientific standards.

His spiritual assertions ramble and contradict themselves. Emoto frequently appeals to coincidence as significant, then jumps to puzzling conclusions unsupported by his chain of events. An example: If we consider that the human body is a universe within itself, it is only natural to conclude that we carry within us all the elements. According to Buddhism, the human being is born with 108 earthly desires (such as confusion, attachment, jealousy, and vanity), which torture us throughout our lives. I think it is logical to conclude that these 108 earthly desires have counterparts in the 108 elements. (p. 70) He thinks wrong, at least to the extent that just sticking two ideas together doesn't demonstrate a relationship between them. I've read many religious texts that rely on non-Western logic (the Talmud and the Dalai Lama's work among them) and the problem with Emoto is not that the work is spiritual rather than scientific, but that his logic and evidence for spiritual truth are as poorly executed as his science. His logic is more in line with the semantic leaps and condensations made by people who are psychotic. People have done stunning and brilliant work when driven by the idea, It must all mean something. Emoto has not done so.

Oh, by the way, talking negatively to rice causes mold, so water isn't that special. And water has ESP. And stickers of images of ice can be stuck to your wallet to invoke "the God of Wealth." And humans have more "elements" than other animals. And our souls came to earth via extraterrestrial water. I could go on, but suffice it to say that Emoto throws every woo woo trope into the bucket and stirs them into a scrambled, incoherent mass. Okay, one more: The 'C' of E = MC² refer not to the speed of light, but to consciousness.... There is no way of knowing if Einstein himself considered the possibility of C representing consciousness, but since everything in the universe is relative, you can't say that it is a mistake to see the formula in this new way. (p. 145) Well, yeah, you can.

I agree that the experimenter's attitude may influence findings. We see it in Emoto's work, in fact. What I can't support is the idea that skepticism or critical examination will somehow destroy the data; that is, that faith is destroyed by raising any questions about faith. I don't know if Emoto believes what he says or is a charlatan, but he sells water at $35 for 8 ounces.

I highly recommend this book for anyone teaching a research techniques class. It should be very easy for college students to pick this apart. However, based on the many credulous reviews of Emoto's work, you'll also need to have a critical discussion of the longing for a reductive, concrete, anthropocentric, and illogical universe as well.

See also Harriet Hall's useful http://www.redorbit.com/news/science...orld_of_water/

Oman under Arabian Skies: An Arabian Odyssey

#779
Title: Oman Under Arabian Skies: An Arabian Odyssey
Author: Rory Patrick Allen
Publisher: Vanguard Press
Year: 2010
Country: Oman
213 pages

Such an earnest book, yet so poorly written. It's self-published, as are many I'm reading for this challenge. Here the problem is not typos or formatting but a melange of incorrect usage, grammar errors, and what I can only describe as warped paragraphs that suddenly twist on themselves and go elsewhere. There are piles of sentences only nominally related to each other. I wouldn't care, but the author was an English teacher. There are incorrect quotations: Revenge is not, as he gives it, a dish best eaten cold, nor does Shakespeare have anything to do with it. Jung has nothing to say about collective unconsciousness, though that is sometimes what this book induced in me.

What sort of English teacher, and for whom? I'm not entirely sure. Though he'll expend a paragraph on acts like getting a coffee, he's very vague about himself: How old is he? Why did he leave the UK for Oman? Was he only teaching technical English to Omani? Who employed him (as an apparently civilian instructor) and by which military was he employed? What was his work life like? Why did he leave his first base and move to the second? When he believed himself to be possessed by a jinn, where does his often-asserted Christianity go? Most importantly, does he really see Oman, or only the fantasy Oman that confirms his stated conviction that it's like a Disney movie (hence, perhaps, his repeated references to Sinbad rather than Sindbad)? Does he see the Bedu and Omani, or does he see noble savages (he actually references Rousseau uncritically)? The generalizations induce wincing.

The strongest passages in the book are about such mundane yet unfamiliar acts as killing scorpions or driving on sand. The travelogue aspect, which is the aspect lauded in the Omani press, is pleasant enough but overblown and not especially compelling. The poor writing repeatedly pulled me out of my engagement with his story, and the lack of meaningful personal detail didn't help. For self-publishing, the goal may be "to write down all my memories so when I am old I can recollect them" (p. 25), which I can't argue against. However, it's a far cry from literature. I finished this because I needed a book by a writer who'd lived in Oman for at least two years.

Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail

#778
Title: Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
Author: Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2002
294 pages

Brought up in privilege, Malika, her mother, and her younger siblings were disappeared after their father's failed coup against King Hassan II (also Malika's adoptive father). They spent many years in squalid desert prisons and, after a successful escape that allowed them to contact foreign governments and press, a number of years of house arrest and surveillance. It's quite the amazing survival story.

Owls Do Cry

#777
Title: Owls Do Cry
Author: Janet Frame
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1958/2007
299 pages

Audiobook.

A well-written novel that makes much use of stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and multiple points of view. Fiction on an autobiographical base, Owls Do Cry focuses symbolically on finding self-defined and personally-recognized treasures in the rubbish. Psychologically realistic and deeply sad, it is always engaging and frequently moving.

This audio edition, which appears to be the 50th anniversary publication, includes several brief essays on Frame's life and work as well.

HIV/AIDS in Rural Botswana - Poverty, Gender Inequality, Marginalization, and Stigma

#776
Title: HIV/AIDS in Rural Botswana - Poverty, Gender Inequality, Marginalization, and Stigma
Author: Seiko Watanabe
Publisher: VDM Verlag
Year: 2008
92 pages

A fine monograph on HIV/AIDS in Northern Botswana. Specifically, the author gives background for and reports on the results of her qualitative study of HIV knowledge, cultural knowledge, and other factors amon the San and other indigenous minority groups of the Okavango Panhandle. She conveys her findings clearly, raises broader questions about poverty and gender inequality, and situates herself within her discourse. A refreshing piece of work.

Chronic City

#775
Title: Chronic City
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Doubleday
Year: 2009
467 pages

Audiobook.

I've used the British cover because it's cooler.

This was fine, ranging from excellent to okay. At best, it's a manic, word-choked, Philip K. Dick-invoking search for meaning, love, and the grail, strewn with the mines of Lacanian desires that cannot be fulfilled. Chase Insteadman, naive ex-child star, pines (or doesn't) for his lostronaut fiancee, trapped in space, and with his friends, searches for a truth that will endure. At its worst, it's pages and pages of your stoned friends' uninteresting discussion about drugs and their revelatory power, though the revelation is often that marijuana affects their perspective on reality, if reality exists. 

Wonderstruck

#774
Title: Wonderstruck
Author: Brian Selznick
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2011
640 pages

What a lovely, engaging book! I found myself clustering my associations as I read ("The Gray Wolf Throne--also has ambiguous wolf visions"; "Seeing Voices/Hands of My Father--deaf education"; "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder/Cornell boxes?"), not least of which was, of course, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler.

The book functions much like a dream despite its realism, relying on both determinism and over-determination to lead Ben to a virtually inevitable encounter. The big reveal is wonderfully accomplished through the use of the story's media. Even if you are pretty sure what's going on, the way the information is shared with the reader is very clever [highlight to read]: We switch from Ben's sentences to Rose's images, which identifies the old woman at the wolf diorama as Rose, whom we have known thus far only in 1927.

As with The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the illustrations are reminiscent of Garth Williams:


Williams


Selznick


One minor plot problem [highlight to read]: Jaime follows Ben, but doesn't know he's with Rose? This seems unlikely.

In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger

#773
Title: In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger
Author: Paul Stoller & Cheryl Olkes
Publisher: University of Chicago
Year: 1989
Country: Niger
252 pages

This memoir/ethnography was better than I anticipated. Stoller, an anthropologist-in-training, returns to Niger (where he was previously in the Peace Corps) to conduct field work. He winds up being mentored by a series of sorcerers. What I particularly enjoyed was his own coming of age as an anthropoloist as he struggled to identify his own anthropological style, ethics, and ways of being with a community as well as observing it. While this wasn't Stoller's only focus, it was the one that most resonates for me in relation to questions of how to bridge cultures professionally and ethically.

Norwegian Wood

#772
Title: Norwegian Wood
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1987/2003
389 pages

One of the most tiresome books I've ever read, which is especially surprising from Murakami. I suppose I would need to be more familiar with the cultural context of Japan in the mid-1980s to understand why this was such a huge bestseller.

I read this as an audiobook; the narrator rendered the female voices in unappetizing squawks. I looked it up in print. Less intrusive voicing, but it was fundamentally still offputting. "Hey," she said. "Hey," I answered. Do I really need to know every step of opening a jar? The level of pointless detail and meaningless conversation is astounding, and doesn't seem to serve much purpose.

In my own life, I've tried not to spend time with people who are tedious or pretentious. This was 12-13 hours stuck with those people, leavened only by the unintentional hilarity of their praise for themselves for calling other people pretentious, hypocritical, or mindless. I've also tried to spend time with people with whom the relationship is easy, by which I don't mean simple, but that everyone has good intentions. This novel of brooding, lying, sulking, manipulative, game-playing adolescents illustrates everything you don't want to experience on a date. Oh--except for all the blow jobs and booze. I disliked the characters so much that the sex was quite repulsive. (view spoiler) As for the narrator, though we never learn how he got from the end of the book to the opening framing story, he appears to wind up as something like a salaryman--at least, just some nostalgic guy on a plane--like the people he feels superior to throughout. This point isn't made by the novel, but I certainly noticed it.

An emotionally small novel with none of what makes Murakami sparkle, which is the underlying conviction that weird stuff may be happening, and it will remain somewhat inexplicable to the characters and reader, but it matters to the wellness world. This is a novel about things that don't matter outside a tiny bubble of tortured, brittle college students.
 

When You Reach Me

#771
Title: When You Reach Me
Author: Rebecca Stead
Publisher: Yearling
Year: 2009
208 pages

4.5 stars for this very sweet and earnest middle reader. Though the plot is soft science fiction-ish (there are reasons that A Wrinkle in Time is invoked), this is a foil for the story of transitioning to adolescence. You might kiss someone, or have an insight about a friend, or experience a flash of satori when your brain becomes abstract enough to grasp the paradoxes inherent in time travel.

I enjoyed the chapter headings that alluded to The $20000 Pyramid, which suggested that Miranda is now able to find patterns not only in the hexagonal bathroom tiles but also in her life. I felt great nostalgia as she encountered classmates who were suddenly revealed to have spent time thinking about physics, time, and UFOs. I was pleased to encounter another sympathetic dentist in children's literature, not having seen one since Stuart Little. I was especially appreciative of the conclusion, which holds both the promise of the future and the certainty of death, not tidied up, but acknowledged as inevitable. Spoiler (highlight to read): I completely dig that the Asperger-y kid who figures out time travel uses it to go back to protect another kid from himself--he was slow to get the concept of emotion in relationships, but when he got it, it apparently really stayed with him!

Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Novels about Mental Illness

#770
Title: Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Novels about Mental Illness
Author: Darryl Cunningham
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Year: 2011
151 pages

Cunningham, a cartoonist who worked on a Bristish psychiatric ward, tells 11 "graphic stories" (i.e., stories in visual format) of psychiatric disorders. These are not 11 tales of people (though some include anonymized people and one describes the author's own experiences with anxiety. For the most part they're descriptions of mental health problems made more compelling with human examples. There's an over-representation of self-injury, and I don't agree with all of his assertions, but with those caveats, this could be a useful adjunct to an introductory abnormal psychology course.

Vortex (Spin #3)

#768
Title: Vortex (Spin #3)
Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates
Year:2011
368 pages

Audiobook.

Not his best, I think, but not bad at all. This is the third in a 3-book series, so it has some exposition to take care of. Wilson manages this through a couple of strategies--a framing narrative, a text within the framing narrative, a person out of his time element and his cultural translator, and a character who becomes functionally omniscient. There are two main sets of characters, one in the book's present and one in the distant future. The personalities and options of each coalesce with or diverge from its counterpart as the tale unfolds.

I initially thought "uh oh" when Wilson had a character give a mini-mental state exam but attributed this to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR. Nope, MMSE is not described in the DSM (though it is indeed standard practice for the kind of interview the character is conducting). Fortunately, that was the big egregious psych slip-up. In its long temporal jump and some of the issues that arose from this, the novel reminded me at times of Larry Niven's A World Out of Time. The conclusion is a happier version of Bios, though by "happy" I mean "the satisfactory poignancy of the heat death of the universe and its collapse into entropy--but in a good way". As in many of Wilson's novels, part of the climax or denouement is the hero's capacity to really die (rather than dying but being stored as data, for example). I don't buy the moral argument that since a person doesn't pass through a temporal arch but is recorded and recreated, that person is not the person who entered the arch and therefore is not responsible for their own regrettable acts. This seems like space lawyer sophistry. If it were true, any evil Star Trek denizen who used a transporter could simply claim, "I'm not the guy who did that thing--I'm a very close replica of him!"

What first attracted me to Wilson was a couple of his early books where the hero's journey was inverted so that the chracters the reader identified with were those who encountered the traveler, not the traveler him- or itself. (Think Brad and Janet rather than Frank N. Furter.) Wilson's stories have become less overtly Jungian, but no less interesting. This one was more clever in its construction than some, but not his very best.

Ashfall (Ashfall #1)

#769
Title: Ashfall (Ashfall #1)
Author: Mike Mullin
Publisher: Tanglewood Press
Year: 2011
466 pages

Adding to the broadly-based pleasures of a good YA post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, Mullin includes volcanoes, scientific plausibility, incidental characters in a same-sex relationship that is presented in a matter-of-fact way, teens who want to have sex and also are concerned about the risk of pregnancy, and bad guys in the form of privatized for-profit services. Also, cannibalism. Also, volcanic ash in your underwear. Also: generalized smashing. 

The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time

#767
Title: The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time
Author: Jeff Deck & Benjamin D. Herson
Publisher: Harmony
Year: 2010
269 pages

An amusing cross-country sojourn to correct typos, including prosecution for unwittingly desecrating an historical sign. The tone wears on one in places, but I can't fault their intentions, and do admire their discussions of descriptive versus prescriptive linguistics.

The first major typo I remember encountering in my childhood was at a mall. The signboard, which should have read "The Hecht Company Will Be Close to You" (Just like me/Hecht's want to be/Close to you) instead proclaimed "The Hecht Company Will Be Closed to You". I recall worriedly asking one of my parents to whom we should report this error. Years later, when I had mastered "squirrel" and "scissors" and was aware of Captain Kirk's bold split infinitive, I lived hard by a FURNITURN store in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and later, on my daily commute to Boston, I would pass the new Home Depot in South Attleboro that was adorned with giant letters reading MASSACHUSETT'S. I called corporate about that one, as, presumably, did many, and the offending apostrophe was removed. This is to say that I understand.

Postcards from the Grave

#766
Title: Postcards from the Grave
Author: Emir Suljagić
Publisher: Saqi Books
Year:2005
Country: Bosnia-Herzegovina
196 pages

Bosnia-Herzegovina. A non-linear report/memorial in pastiche form from a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre. Suljagić was spared the fate of his compatriots because he was working as a translator for the UN forces. To understand what's happening in this collection of short essays, first read about the Serbian expansion into Bosnia in the 1990s. As I read, I kept being reminded of Elie Wiesel's holocaust narratives, and particularly of the tension in novels such as The Oath: A Novel in which telling versus not telling the story of the destruction of the community creates terrible conflicts for the narrator.

An often-occurring typo in this book is the inconsistent but frequent elision of a word followed by "I"--"promisedI", for example.

Black Swan Green

#765
Title: Black Swan Green
Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
Year:2007
304 pages

Audiobook.

A bildungsroman from David Mitchell, well-written though ultimately a little precious and formulaic for me. I enjoyed the narrator's voice, and don't care that it's somewhat precocious.

In some ways I wish it had been a novel with a smaller focus--do we really need lessons about racism learned from gypsies? Surely a divorce and a broken watch are sufficient? I couldn't figure out why there was so much emphasis on a couple of characters, and found by Googling after reading that they appear in his other books. That's fine with me, but just as Ezra Pound said that the reader without a classical education should be able to read a poem at face value, without understanding its allusions, so should a reader be able to read a novel without extra-textual references throwing a wrench in the works. (Neal Stephenson, are you listening?)

Listen to Pink Floyd's album The Wall before you start reading this, or read a chapter or two of Lord of the Flies to get you in the mood for British schoolboy hierarchies and bullying. Don't pick up Skippy Dies immediately upon finishing, or you will have to set it down as soon as you get to Chapter 1 in the somnolent, annoying classroom.