Humankind: A Hopeful History | Rutger Bregman #NonFiction

Humankind: A Hopeful History is more than just a popular science book that hits the right note during this unsettling time in our human history. For starters, Bregman uses a LOT more footnotes than one usually finds in a popular science book. He has obviously spent a lot of time researching, questioning and thinking about his topic - that we are in fact, when push comes to shove, mostly a species of decent and kind beings.

Humankind is a book designed to explore the best and most hopeful aspects of human nature. According to Bregman this is one of the things that we all share in common, regardless of race, culture, and religion. Yes, there are some sociopaths out there, but they are a very specific and aberrant group. They are not the norm. 

I understand there have been some concerns about cultural appropriation of stories surrounding this book and I understand where those concerns come from. But that's not what this book is about. It's about the kindness we all share as human beings, and our ability to pull together in tough times. It's the things that unite us, not divide us. Although, Bregman does spend some time, later in the book, discussing why it is that some of the divides have come into being. It turns out the Age of Enlightenment was not so enlightening after all!

He discusses war, slavery, the Holocaust, sexism, racism, xenophobia and catastrophes within the context of his premise. He dissects the role that media, news and the internet have on exposing the exceptional, the unusual and the shocking as opposed to the usual, the everyday and the normal. The aim of the news and information as we now know it, is to grab your attention and shock, not to enlighten.

He exposes the fallacy and myths surrounding The Lord of the Flies theory, the selfish gene, the reality of battles and warfare "interviewing veterans of WWII, they found that more than half had never killed anybody", the mystery of Easter Island, the 1971 Stanford University Prison study, the Robbers Cave experiment, the 1961 Stanley Milgram shock experiment, the bystander effect and terrorism.

Reading Humankind, as I did, during the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown, I was struck by this particular thought:

Infectious diseases like measles, small pox, tuberculosis, syphilis, malaria, cholera & plague were all unheard of until we traded our nomadic lifestyle for farming. So where did they come from? From our new domesticated pets - or more specifically, their microbes.

 

I was saddened when he noted later on that "education has become something to endure." The truth of this has been brought home to me constantly over the past decade as the boys finished their school years. They have no inspirational stories to tell about their school days, like Mr Books and I both do. They have plenty of tales about what they got up to with their friends during the breaks, but nothing about what they learnt. All they ever wanted to know was what they would need to pass their exams to get them out of there. How did education become such a dull, routine thing?

Bregman finished with his very own 10 rules to live by (everyone seems to be doing it lately!)

• when in doubt assume the best
• think in win-win scenarios
• ask more questions
• temper your empathy, train your compassion
• try to understand the other, even if you don't understand where they're coming from
• love you own as others love their own
• avoid the news
• don't punch Nazis
• come out of the closet: don't be ashamed to do good
• be realistic

I found Humankind to be an interesting read, especially the debunking of the deeply flawed human psychology studies from the 60's and 70's, the very same ones I learnt about at uni thirty years ago, which were held up to be self-evident truths at the time. However I did grow rather weary of Bregman's tone by the end. His determination to be hopeful began to seem like one of the self-fulling, Pygmalion Effects that he wrote about! 

Bregman offers a hopeful antidote to our current pandemic and political situations. It's always nice to be reminded that most people are decent folk doing the best they can. In fact, there are way more kind people on the planet, than not. And that's a good thing.

Facts:

• Translated by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore.
• Bregman was born the year I finished my Diploma of Education (1988).
• Author of Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (2016).

Book 7 of 20 Books of Summer Winter

Fathoms: The World in the Whale | Rebecca Giggs #AWW

Fathoms: The World in the Whale was a recent binge read. 

The weather had turned suddenly cold and it was bleak outside. Curling up on the lounge with a throw rug and a good book was the only logical response. Rebecca Giggs was the perfect companion for such a session - engaging, personable and extremely thorough. Her writing was a bright spark, a little bit of magic and poetry on a dull day. Full of the wonder and majesty of the natural world, and the world of the whale in particular. Sadly, it was also a tale of destruction, as her research led her down a rabbit hole of death, illness, pollution and environmental degradation. 

Told as narrative non-fiction, Giggs was on a personal mission to understand why whales beach themselves. She shares her journey - all the discoveries, the joys and the heartaches - to show us and to remind us how interconnected every living thing is on this planet we all inhabit. 

This is the kind of non-fiction I love. It's intimate, yet scientific; it's lyrical and philosophical; it's passionate and reasonable. I learnt a lot and have been left with a lot to ponder. Giggs is not able to answer all the questions she poses. This is not a flaw in the book, it's simply a sign that we lack sufficient evidence and knowledge to fully understand another organism. 

Below are my notes for future reference. I urge you to read it for yourself though. You can thank me later.

• Why do whales beach themselves?
• Natural phenomena
• sick?
• the weakest in the pod? Natural selection?
• Conspiracy theories
• shooting stars, comets & meterorites?
• Naval operations & military sonar that frightens the whales
• "the assumption that deeper streams of logic undercut the frail authority of science."
• Why have whales started eating the wrong things?
• plastic, debris
• heavy metals, pesticides, fertilisers, PCB's
• "Estuarine beluga in Canada had been discovered to be so noxious that their carcasses were classed as toxic waste for disposal."
• whalefall
• when a whale expires mid-ocean and eventually sinks & decomposes on the descent, eaten & nibbled on by birds, fish, crabs & sharks (consuming the toxic chemicals in the whales blubber and body).
• "it is as though the whale were a pinata cracked open, flinging bright treasures"
• "over 200 different species can occupy the frame of one whale carcass."
• "the death of a whale proves meaningful to a vibrant host of dependent creatures, even as it may look senseless from the shore" 
• what happens when we "pollute not just places, but organisms"?
• petroglyphs "capturing the likeness of another creature implies an imaginative or emotional relationship that exceeds the exigencies of survival"

Helen McGrath | Whale petroglyph Yerroulbine/Balls Head, Sydney

• "a petroglyph denoted an intention to generate, or invite change. A petroglyph spoke to the future."
• "Shallow, and growing ever shallower as a result of erosion, a time will come when the whale will lift out of the rock completely. Lichens stipple its head."
• defaunation "the loss of a place's absolute animalness...a depletion of abundance"
• what are the effects of "reducing animal populations - for those animals, their ecosystems, and the cultures that are nourished by them."
• "One underrepresented truth of the world: things that have been removed from the past exert the pressure on the present moment, just as much as the things that persist."
• whale ecotourism industry "we've come to see what we've saved."
• "to contemplate our own species' capacity for temperance. Each cetacean is an evidentiary exhibit of both human care and the resilience of wilderness."
• John Berger (1977) Why Look at Animals?
• "People, confronted by other species, typically reactivate their self-awareness and superiority. They remember that they are, on a fundamental level, a different kind of animal from the animal they are looking at."
• Augenblick "the feeling of a second as measured by a slow eye-blink"
• Cute aggression "a violent impulse towards pictures of adorable animals."

• Chapter: Kitsch Interior - interspersed with examples of specific whales and what was discovered in their stomachs after they died (tracksuit pants, golf balls, surgical gloves, a plastic bucket, a car engine cover, synthetic netting, shredded balloons, dvd case, disposable cigarette lighters, rice sacks).
• "The existence of parasites makes evident the porousness, the uncontained qualities, of life; these things that move under the traction of their own will, into and out of, and across all animals."
• "These creatures are not knowable...the parasite also inched me towards thinking of animals themselves as environments, and nature as a process....They are the shapeshifters of our Earth, blurring the edges, kicking the insides out." Something we've all been reminded of this year as a virus, another unknowable creature, shapeshifted from one animal to another and kicked us from the inside out.

What floats after falling is

flotsam, and what floats when thrown is jetsam.

Whatever sinks is lagan.

Whatever is cast up

is yours.

'Soundings' in Homing (2017) | Shevaun Cooley

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo is one of those books of the moment, and one that I have actually managed to read during it's moment! And I can see why so much buzz has attached itself to this book.

It's about sex, desire and what it means to be a woman, told from the perspective of three women that Taddeo has spent years and years getting to know. Years and years of trawling through diaries, text messages and legal documents. Years and years of interviews with the three women and their family, friends and colleagues.

It's an extraordinary, personal and universal journey.

One can recognise aspects of one's younger self in each of the women - their thinking, their actions, the external forces that have influenced them. Fortunately most of us (I think) are spared the traumatic episodes that have come to define the lives of the women in this book. Most women I know have had icky episodes in their lives, but another group of women, live with much larger, darker secrets. This is a book about those women.

'And there but for the grace of god go I' was a common refrain that ran through my mind as I read this book. My family has used this phrase all my life, so much so, that we now abbreviate it to a simple 'there but' and the rest of us then automatically, silently, finish the phrase in our heads.

These women were on the other side of this phrase.

Most young women just want to be loved for who they are, messy bits and all. Getting a boyfriend can become such a huge part of our teen years. This desire can often lead to bad choices being made. These young women just want to be accepted, they want to belong. Like boys of the same age, they often want to break out from their parent's world. They want to experiment, have fun and dabble with bad boys, good boys, girls, whoever will show them some love and affection and desire. They want to find their power, even as they can have it taken away by others or as they give it away not realising what it is that they have. The trouble is the trouble that can happen to girls during this phase is often devastating. The double standard still exist and these girls bear the brunt of social scorn, ridicule and censure.

After almost binge reading the first half, I had to put this book aside for awhile. I was starting to feel impatient and annoyed - at the women in the book, at the world we live in, at men who take advantage, at foolish young girls who make bad choices, at families who don't take better care of their teenagers.

A couple of weeks later, I jumped in again. Once again I was utterly absorbed by Taddeo's amazing story-telling  - but there was also a part of me that was repulsed. The roller coaster ride of compulsive empathy followed by pulling away with annoyance was quite exhausting. Exhilarating and exhausting.

So what did I learn?
Or what did I get out of this all-consuming reading experience?

Firstly, that it is possible to find a book utterly engaging, authentic, intricate, insightful, thoughtful, supportive and non-judgemental, yet aggravating at the same time.

Secondly, that it's possible to describe a book as narrative non-fiction at its finest and utterly pointless at the same time. I say pointless, not because I think these women and their desires are pointless, but because I'm not quite sure what Taddeo was hoping to do with the book.

Thirdly, what you get out of this book, will depend on which lens you view it through. A feminist lens will leave you feeling enraged. A diversity lens will leave you feeling disappointed. A psychoanalytical lens will appreciate Lisa's ability to get her three women to reveal so many intimate details about their lives, but I'm not sure anyone of these women could be considered archetypes. A Marxist lens will see class and social inequalities confirmed by the different desires that drive these women.

Finally, I learnt that the beginning, middle and the end of a book can produce very different reader responses, in just the one reader! It was exhausting at times, at other times I empathised and recognised certain universal thoughts and beliefs and at others I wanted to shake them all until I could make them see sense, take control of their lives and stand up for themselves.

I also wondered if the one thing these three women had in common were parents, who despite loving their children, were somehow absent or guilty of not paying close enough attention. Whether it was alcohol, mental illness or emotional distance. As Taddeo says is her Prologue,

how much of what I thought I wanted from a lover came from what I needed from my own mother. Because it's women, in many of the stories I've heard, who have a greater hold over other women than men have.

This is not another book that blames women for the problems of other women. It's rawer than that. And more encompassing. It's life;

the beast of it, the glory and brutality. [The] blood and bone and love and pain. Birth and death. Everything at once.

Three Women was my latest book group choice. It generated lots of discussion, although no-one was prepared to be the first to talk about her desires! And maybe that's why Taddeo wrote this book - as a way to provoke a group of women into talking about desire, love and sex.

Non-Fiction November - Week 4

Week 4: (Nov. 19 to 23) – Reads Like Fiction with Rennie @ What’s Nonfiction.

Nonfiction books often get praised for how they stack up to fiction. 

Does it matter to you whether nonfiction reads like a novel? 

If it does, what gives it that fiction-like feeling? 

Does it depend on the topic, the writing, the use of certain literary elements and techniques? 

What are your favourite nonfiction recommendations that read like fiction? 

And if your nonfiction picks could never be mistaken for novels, what do you love about the differences?

When I first saw this week's question, my first reaction was 'uh-oh'! But then I remembered a conversation that Mr Books and I had a few weeks ago about this exact same topic.

He had just finished reading The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman and was raving about how it read like a thriller more than a book about science, which led us to discuss the merits of narrative non-fiction.

We agreed that good narrative non-fiction consisted of sound research mixed with compelling character development and a pleasing story arc.

Since that discussion I have qualified my view of narrative non-fiction to exclude memoirs or biographies. Memoirs and biographies, being the story (or part thereof) of someone's life are by definition already a narrative. Choices are made about what facts to include or not and it's all about interpretation, memory and personal agenda. Even those drier than dust bio's that include absolutely every single detail, attempt to take the reader on a journey.

A fictionalised account of someone's life (like the books Paula McLain writes about Hemingway and his wives) is what I call fictionalised history. It's based on real life events, with real life people, but conversations have been imagined and the timeline altered to assist the storytelling. Facts and fiction are blurred. I do enjoy these books at times, but often feel frustrated about not knowing which bits are real and which bits aren't.

Perhaps I'm splitting hairs?

Narrative non-fiction, for me, is when a non-fiction book that could be presented as dry statements of fact, with analysis, interpretation and commentary like a textbook or reference book, is instead presented in a story-like format. The facts and figures are revealed by means of anecdotes, sketches or a good old fashion yarn. Often the author inserts themselves into the story so that we can see the journey that their research took them on.

All kinds of non-fiction books can take a narrative turn. But it's the quality of the writing that turns them into one of my favourites. Over the years my picks have been:

Lifestyle books

In Praise of Slow by Carl Honore

Travel books

Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson

Bryson combines history, geography and the personal in most of his books. This one is my favourite.

Tragedy and its aftermath 

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper

Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry

Done with sympathy, compassion and journalistic research, the best examples of this method are moving, informative and enlightening.

Life, death and our health in between

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey 

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge

Science as story.

Unpalatable history 

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

When told as a story, these atrocities can be a little easier to digest.

Epic History

Anything by Michael Wood.
During the 90's Wood made several BBC series featuring various historical events or big names like Alexander the Great, the Trojan War and the Conquistadors. Each series came with it's own book.
They were immensely readable, fast paced and usually included Wood's own journey in these famous footsteps.

Biography mixed with science, geography or historical events

The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester

The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf

Cooking with extras

Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen

Love and Hunger by Charlotte Wood

Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell 

When a cook book is more than just recipes.

Foodie books

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

I'm a sucker for a good foodie books - they usually combine history, geography, science and a great story.

My TBR pile is bursting with plenty of narrative non-fiction. The hard part is deciding which one to read next.

The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China by by Huan Hsu

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

The Brother Gardeners: A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession by Andrea Wulf

The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

Have you read any of these?