toggle_fow's reviews
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As a twenty-something who is trying her best but increasingly freaking out about how quickly life is passing me by, I expected this book to give me an ulcer and a stress hangover. And yeah, it was kind of stressful, in the way that facing the undefined vastness of your future life always is, but it didn't honestly pressure me any more than I am already pressuring myself.

This isn't a book that tells an already-hustling twentysomething the secret key to landing their dream job in the midst of an unfriendly economy. It's not a book that tells an already-hustling twentysomething from an underprivileged background and with no support network how to jump start their dream career in a field that requires a graduate degree for an even entry-level position without burying themselves in $200k of debt or health problems from lack of sleep.

The Defining Decade is a book that tells stagnating twentysomethings who are just ignoring their opportunities that the good life they want comes from being intentional, not just letting life happen to you accidentally day by day. INTENTIONALITY is definitely the underlying basis of the book's thesis. Plan for things. Go after goals. Hustle. This is, I'm sure, good advice, but I wonder whether the kind of twentysomethings Jay is writing to typically read self-help books about improving their lives.

The advice about intentionality wasn't overly impactful to me, since I stress myself out about that kind of thing on the regular. Intentionality is my middle name. What I found most valuable was the middle part of the book, the chapter about "calming yourself down."

You can't help but feel like a freak when you're crying every day at work, when you hate waking up alive every morning because it means going to work again, when you develop a weird PTSD-like reaction to your boss's voice. I don't know about you, but my thoughts tend to loop around like this: This isn't how life was meant to be, right? Am I doing this all wrong? This stage can't last forever, can it? Please tell me it ends. Did everyone else go through this stage? How can everyone else be so calm and happy and assured when I constantly feel like I'm just five seconds away from losing it?

This section on calming down described my own feelings in more accuracy than I would have thought possible, and helped me feel not alone. Jay's philosophy of focusing on day-by-day small accomplishments, working 10,000 hours to confidence, gave me hope that the terror does have an end.

I'm not sure who this book is for, exactly, because it seems like there are more people who will fall outside its realm of influence, either by circumstance or by self-selection, than people who it will apply to. But even though it seemed like only parts of it were useful, I came away feeling encouraged rather than torn down, which was more than I hoped for.

This book was SO annoying.

He presents pages and pages of other people's research into scattered aspects of how brains work through four pretend people whose lives he's made up to illustrate his points. Harold and Erica are the main ones, but we also spend a ton of time having to hang out with Harold's parents. "This is the happiest story you've ever read!" the book claims, for some reason. In reality, the events of Harold's and Erica's lives range from stressful and frustrating to downright tragic. How the heck does Brooks claim any of this counts as happy at all, much less the HAPPIEST STORY EVER?

Maybe Brooks has never read any fiction books, because wow. This "story" such as it is -- in no way qualifies as "happy."

As you can see, I am overly concerned with Harold and Erica. What does it matter if their lives were happy, given that the point of this book was just to convey to me facts about neuroscience research?
It matters because Harold and Erica were horrible distractions.

I'm not against conveying scientific findings by means of story. Deborah Tannen basically does that through 100% of her books, and it works for me. It's a lubricating vehicle, the spoonful of sugar to help the otherwise dry science and statistics go down. My problem with Harold and Erica is that they did not lubricate anything, and instead threw up barriers to accessing what would have otherwise been interesting science.

Stories and anecdotes work to convey abstract, complicated ideas by encapsulating them in situations we all can instinctively understand, and by catching and holding your interest easier than a detailed page of statistical analysis could. Harold and Erica failed at being effective lubrication first because they were boring. Their "story" did not hold my interest any better than if Brooks had simply presented his information in organized chapters and argued transparently for his conclusions. In fact, it actively disengaged my interest by annoying the hell out of me.

I picked up this book because I wanted to learn about sociology and the brain -- not because I just really wanted to read about two flat caricatures falling in temporary love and living implausible, unsatisfying lives. If I wanted that, I could have read one of those classics, like Mrs. Dalloway, and gotten way more street cred -- the ones that make you existentially uncomfortable and seem like they're about nothing while actually being a deep examination of the human condition.

Second, the disjointed treatment of Harold and Erica's stories dragged The Social Animal down by constantly distracting from the point of the book. Harold and Erica are paper-mache intellectual models, not real characters from a novel, so of course they aren't treated like novel characters, nor should they be. Brooks didn't need to spend every moment of every day with them, so in my opinion the time jumps he did were fine and necessary. What wasn't fine was the way some massive, life-altering conflict between them would be introduced... and never resolved.

Harold desperately wants kids, and Erica screams at him when he brings it up. Why? We don't know. The book never mentions this conflict again. Harold and Erica go through a horrible period where they resent each other for years and barely speak, living together as strangers in the same house. Erica cheats on Harold, then regrets it and thinks about how she needs to "repair her marriage." Next chapter, years have gone by and they're all good again.

At this point, I've had to emotionally invest in Harold and Erica a little just to get through the book without ripping out all my hair -- and I'm PREOCCUPIED by this. They hated each other last chapter! What happened? I can't just let that go -- no explanation, not even a throwaway line to handwave it. Did Brooks not need to do any chapters on the neuroscience of resolving conflict or anything? Same with the kids/no kids fight. I can't concentrate on the statistics Brooks is flinging at me when I'm wondering WTH is up with Erica's aversion to children, why they never hashed this out, and how Harold doesn't spend the rest of his life resenting Erica!

Even though straw men like Harold and Erica don't deserve the detail and focus a novel would lavish on them, these kind of holes are too careless, too choppy, when they're glaring enough to actually distract from the information Brooks is trying to convey. They leave me confused. The book claims to show "how success is achieved," but I've read the whole thing and still have no idea how success is achieved. Is it achieved by faffing about until you meet a hot girl and then marry her and then spend the rest of your life as her mildly dissatisfied but passive kept husband? Is it achieved by striving so constantly and working so feverishly every day that all enriching relationships fall by the wayside, including your marriage? Because those are the only two options I see presented here.

In addition, I believe Harold and Erica made the book worse by acting as crutches. The infinite variation of having their whole lives as a canvas, from the cradle to the grave, allowed Brooks to unleash a monologue on any topic of interest even vaguely related to the science of the unconscious mind. In chapter after chapter, he jumped from topic to topic, giving brief insights about each, but not following any overarching theme for the whole book except "the unconscious mind." He makes some point that the influence of the unconscious mind is underestimated in today's rationalist society, but that's as close as I can come to "the Big Point" to take away from The Social Animal.

The information I learned is fragmented and scattered. If someone said, "So tell me some cool insights you learned from that book!" I would be at a loss. When the topic of babies' development comes up in conversation in the future, I will remember some tidbits about how they cry in sympathy with recordings of other babies crying, and not with a recording of their own cries! But I wouldn't be able to summarize anything for you. It's all disorganized, isolated facts, because disorganized, isolated facts were nearly all the book offered.

Finally, I think the device of Harold and Erica weakened the book by forcing/allowing Brooks to not really delve into any detail with or have to really prove his research. Using Deborah Tannen as a counterexample again - her use of anecdotes to support her theories comes off as weighty and valid because they are the stories of REAL people that she knows and has surveyed. Their single experience, while possibly not the best evidence, is at least EVIDENCE to support or detract from Tannen's findings.

Harold and Erica are not evidence. They are straw men, and their story affirms none of Brooks' conclusions or arguments. Their story allows you to understand his views better, perhaps, but it is HUGE and time-consuming. It is literally the whole book. Using all that page space and effort on a mere illustrative parable means that Brooks has very little room to go into specifics on the actual research he cites, or expand on how such-and-such a study actually supports his opinion that systematic societal ills are only treatable through cultural initiatives, or whatever.

This is supposed to be a book providing insights on neuroscience and sociology, not Animal Farm.

Basically an account of the Bible studies this guy had with his friend from work and his subsequent conversion. I learned some interesting things, such as some opinions that "church father" type reformation people held that I never knew about, and a new way of looking at what it means to "obey the gospel."

The main thing that stood out was... the crazy lengths people had to go to to learn even the SMALLEST FACT in pre-internet days. He was asked, "Who founded the Baptist church?" and basically polled every person he knew at church before finally going to the library to find out. To learn about any of the original Greek words they had to GO TO THE NEARBY UNIVERSITY and speak to an antiquities professor. Meanwhile I'm just here googling Blue Letter Bible whenever I feel like it. Incredible. I can't even imagine living that way, honestly. Lunacy.

Also, if I ever strike it rich, I'm going to found a nonprofit organization that provides pro bono proofreading to self-published authors because my gosh do they need it.

Some serious history. I learned a lot.

This was hard to read because it is not about one of my special historical interests, and also because it is essentially a narration of pure human misery. It does a lot of backstory, starting basically at the Civil War to tell us how and why the Dust Bowl came to be, and then tells the story of the Dust Bowl years by tracking the destroyed and desolate lives of twenty-odd Dust Bowl families.

Finally, it strands you with an unsettling "and things got better for some reason and they're still irresponsibly farming that land by draining and wasting all the water underneath America and we'll regret it in 50 years. The end."

Educational, but brutal.

I have a feeling that you only really need to read one Deborah Tannen book in your lifetime.

The good parts of this were rehashed from the more broadly applicable and more insightful That's Not What I Meant! The less good parts were stuff that you already know if you have ever been a female at any point. There was some odd stuff about social media norms at the end which, similarly, you already know if you have ever been on social media.

There were also a weird amount of anecdotes centering around ladies' bridge-playing groups for some reason?

A manifesto for theistic evolution.

Every time I read one of these books I feel smacked around and uneasy. I read Darwin's Black Box and felt compelled by Behe's explanations. I was similarly compelled by Collins's dismantling of Behe, though. What all of this comes down to is that I am a layman having to trust whoever writes these books to tell me what they wish, leave out & skip over what they wish, and interpret everything for me.

The only solution is to go back to school for my own PhD in biology, I guess.

Honestly, though, I would skip reading this book. If you want the good faith parts just read Mere Christianity or better yet C. S. Lewis's entire bibliography. If you want the good science parts, just read any mainstream college molecular biology textbook, or whatever the latest Richard Dawkins book is.

I started reading this book because I was told it was a great defense of Israel. My education on the Israel-Palestine conflict has come from a very liberal university, and also from the Jordanian Institute of Democracy -- so I was interested in what a very decided pro-Israel argument would offer. Despite my pro-Palestinian educational background, I mostly don't have much of an issue with Israel. I was primarily seeking information on just a few specific accusations, including:

• The Wall
• Limiting West Bank Palestinian travel/access to water/etc
• The ongoing siege of Gaza & the way it is conducted
• Accusations of biased/excessively brutal/double standard policing and justice in general
• Likud & Netanyahu's shady/illegal settlement agenda

Sadly, as I discovered too late, this book was written in 2003.

Since it is FOURTEEN YEARS OLD (which predates full Israeli disengagement from Gaza much less the siege itself) this book predictably addressed barely any of these issues. The only one of my questions that was directly mentioned was the West Bank settlements, and then only in a vague allusion as part of a separate argument.

The West Bank settlements won't be any barrier to peace, Dershowitz states confidently, because the minute the Palestinians are willing to accept a real peace agreement, Israel will immediately dismantle everything it has built in the West Bank, withdrawing back into Israeli territory, like when Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. Which... really? Like, uh... has anyone told Netanyahu?

Ah well. That's my bad for not checking the date before starting the book. I'll have to look somewhere else for more modern analysis.

The Case for Israel was more of a historical account of the conflict rather than a defense of Israel's current (or 2003) policy anyway. Dershowitz takes a different anti-Israel accusation every chapter, and attempts to directly rebut. (Often these accusations are levied by Edward Said. I can't escape this guy, apparently.) I respect this format, since it's easily readable and very coherent. He puts a lot of emphasis on backing up his claims with evidence, too, which is admirable.

Unfortunately, it was still a frustrating and underwhelming read.

Dershowitz starts by laying out a couple principles. 1) He believes in a two-state solution, and 2) there has to be a statute of limitations on ancient grievances in order to make peace. Sounds good, right? I found it kind of ironic that he started by saying "the grievances must go" and then spent like 20 chapters arguing that Israel/the Jews had the right of every single grievance from 1880 to 2003. Meanwhile, I'm crying tears of pure frustration because none of this... is relevant... to defending the current state of Israel from allegations of abuse...

I have quite a few thoughts, but I'm mostly going to keep this short and only talk about two things.

First of all, I am apparently WAY too neorealist for this book.

SO much time is spent arguing in support of Israel's right to exist as a nation on principles of morality and self-determination. I don't care about this. "Right to exist"? Israel's right to exist is the exact same as America's right to exist: the fact that we exist.

Did America take the land from the Indians? Yes. Does this mean that the modern nation of the United States has no right to exist? Maybe, but that question is a useless one for philosophers and moralists. Israel exists, and has the means of defending its existence. There is no point in examining this question further.

Some of the "accusations" he rebuts are also just weird. The academic winds might have changed somewhat between now and 2003, or I might simply be ignorant. But I scratch my head at Dershowitz arguing with assertions that "Israel unjustly occupied Palestinian land after the '48 and '67 wars" apparently referring to the Sinai, West Bank, and Golan Heights. Does anyone really think that being attacked by 3+ neighboring countries, overwhelmingly winning, and then offering them back the territory that THEY LOST TO YOU through stupidity and aggression in exchange for peace... is somehow wrong? Israel is clearly 100% in the right as far as both of these wars go.

Who exactly is throwing the stones here, because I'm pretty sure they live in a glass house. We still have this place we call "the entire Southwestern United States" that we took from Mexico under MUCH shadier circumstances.

Similarly, the accusation that Israel is somehow horrifically morally reprehensible for using assassination against terrorist leaders currently attacking them. What is that? This isn't even referring to the Mossad's history of shady kidnappings and assassinations around the world. (I don't really have a problem with that, either, but I recognize some people do for good reason.) This is literally talking about assassinations of terrorist leaders who are in the MENA region actively making war on Israel. Again, they are at war. What?

I just think about our own colorful history of trying to assassinate Castro and Qaddafi, not to mention Bin Laden. The controversy about al-Awlaki was over the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen -- not over whether it's justifiable to seek to kill those who make war on us! I assume these kinds of arguments are Dershowitz arguing with fellow liberalists, but wow, I don't care. I don't believe there's such a thing as the moral right to exist as a state.

Second of all, Dershowitz is constantly playing a comparison game. At every turn, he is pointing out that international criticism of Israel follows a hypocritical double standard, castigating Israel and coddling the Palestinians. I agree that there is a double standard, but not that it is between Israel and the Arabs. The real double standard is the overly harsh critique of Israel compared to criticism of its other peers in the developed world.

Dershowitz complains that no one criticizes Arab states, but everyone is constantly examining Israeli policy with a microscope looking for flaws. This double standard, he implies, is both Antisemitic (painting exceptional Jewish behavior as reprehensible) and racist against Arabs (the assumption that we can't expect anything from them because they're "crazy").

I do see his point that this double standard exists. The standards the international community seems to feel comfortable holding Arab states to are:

1. Don't become a failed state
2. Don't kill your own people
3. Stop actively sponsoring terrorism

Anything else is a little ambitious. Maybe this is racist. Maybe it's realistic.

Israel, by contrast, is a successful, economically and militarily powerful developed nation. It's a star by literally any international standard. Israel is way beyond getting stickers for not killing people or for not collapsing into anarchy. At that level you start getting scrutiny for civilian casualties, transparency of the democratic process, rigorous observance of human rights, etc.

Yeah, it's a bummer to be the high-achieving child.

Dershowitz's real criticism should not compare Israel to the Arab states. It should compare Israel to the United States. Seriously -- some of their policies as explained in The Case for Israel are deeply impressive and set a high standard for morality during war. For instance: doing more dangerous house-by-house terrorist searches instead of bombing, discontinuing the neighbor policy, and prioritizing civilian life over military life.

Civilian judiciary oversight of the military? That is hardcore. We, by contrast, will always choose bombs over boots on the ground, and continue to see the lives of our soldiers as the most valuable ones.

Of course, we also get a ton of flak. But we have never been called "the world's principal human rights violator" or anything similar by the UN. This is the double standard that truly matters, and I'm kind of confused why Dershowitz never explicitly pointed it out. It's obviously an effect of the balance of power. Who is the UN going to feel more free to constantly hammer? The USA, the sole global superpower and a co-founder of the UN itself -- or Israel, a tiny Middle Eastern country?

I believe this, too, applies to the inconsistency he highlights between the "Palestinian rights" outcry and the relative silence on similar stateless peoples in Tibet and Chechnya. Compare Russia and China -- both UN co-founders, permanent security council members, and world heavyweight military powers -- to Israel. I mean, Russia is currently in the process of swallowing half of the Ukraine, and nobody is saying anything. China straight up views the concept of human rights as Western cultural imperialism, and everyone tiptoes around them. Talk about double standards.

The UN is pretty useless as an overseeing body against the world's principal nations. It only shows its teeth to less powerful states. In my opinion, these considerations have more explanatory power regarding the international community's double standard towards Israel than simply prejudice and Antisemitism.

There are other things I could mention, like how Dershowitz totally glosses over the existence of Jewish paramilitary units like Irgun and Lehi (which did some terrorism of their own) until BARELY mentioning them when saying that Ben-Gurion forcibly disarmed them. Or his weirdly Eurocentric repeated point that the Ashkenazi Jews of the First Aliyah improved life in Palestine by bringing civilization and modern agriculture. (Which gives them right to the land, I guess?) Or how inconsistently applied and disputed the concept of self-determination is internationally! Or how Dershowitz seems to only have 10 points, and by the end of the book he's re-using these same 10 points to rebut every argument, sometimes even in the same exact words.

But I've already mentioned my two things, and I'm done.

I did learn a bit, and The Case for Israel gave me a good refresher of the history. However, fundamentally I found the experience of reading it frustrating. Dershowitz's analysis seemed to be overly moralistic and pathos-focused, rather than practical, and I was left after every chapter with the sensation that he had, either narrowly or sometimes broadly, missed the point.

I still need a good modern book to walk me through Israel's current security policy and whether it is actually suppressing Palestinian rights or not.

This book used a narrative style that reminded me a lot of Chapman's love language books: the short explanation of the concept in general, and then two or three little stories about "John and Marcy" told to exemplify the concept. It's very easy to digest, easy to understand, and for how short and brief this book is, I think it manages to get across quite a few complex concepts.

The core message (that misunderstandings are more likely to be due to difference in style than real ill will, and that while communication styles may be different none of them are morally superior) is a good one. Although it did somewhat depress me. As a person who CAN. NOT. continue talking if I'm being talked over or interrupted, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to pull off the magical transformation one of her example guys did, by just plunging in and becoming one with the gleeful yelling match. And I do still feel like the "but you have to get me something for my birthday that shows you Know Me Really Well without any input from me because if you need me to give you a birthday list you must not truly care/know me" person is needy and unrealistic and should chill.

In that vein, a lot of this book felt like putting a microscope to a problem that by its very nature is hopeless to fix. Intellectually interesting, but leaving you nothing to do afterward but throw up your hands and accept your doom. Hoping all things about people's motives while trying to be conscious of different cultural communication expectations has left me paranoid and jumping at shadow metamessages. I end up paralyzed into doing what I would have done anyway, and hoping everyone has grace for me and my screw-ups. I wish there was an answer for this, but I don't think there is one, and it's not in this book at any rate.

I mentioned how brief That's Not What I Meant is. In this version, it's barely over 200 pages. Partially constrained by its need to be small enough and simple enough to be accessible, and partially constrained by the nature of socio-linguistics as among the softest of soft sciences, this book is pretty essentialist. That's mostly unavoidable, and I think for what it is, That's Not What I Meant does a decent job at nuance and disclaimer. But it is definitely essentialist in the way that my entry-level Crosscultural Communications class was pretty essentialist. You learn all the stuff about "high context" and "low context" cultures first off, so that later you can study how they stand up or break down when applied to real life.

Some of Tannen's chapters remind me of the sweeping generalizations in my CCC textbook, especially her chapters about male and female communication. The temptation with pop psychology/sociology/personality tests/linguistics is to construct some kind of airtight worldview, artificially forcing everyone into the boxes transcribed by the book. As long as you can avoid that and take broad theoretical constructs for what they are -- approximations with value only inasmuch as they are useful -- then this book has some fascinating insights to share.

Today I learned that somewhere in between "history" and "tumblr post" there's this thing called "narrative nonfiction."

Also, I learned that I loathe narrative nonfiction.

Before I go on, caveats:

1. I did waffle between 2 and 3 stars, so take it as a 2.5 maybe.
2. I love the Marquis de Lafayette more than my own life, and this book did have some good Lafayette content so that was enjoyable.

So. First of all. The style and voice. A quick skim of Sarah Vowell reviews will mostly give you the word "irreverent." A lot of people "like her voice," apparently. This is the first Vowell book I've read, and I started it expecting a historical book in the style of every other historical book ever. Thus ambushed, I was taken aback by the author's "voice," which I almost felt that I recognized. There was a haunting echo of those tumblr posts. You know the ones.

At the beginning this playful, I'm-so-funny, informal prose just rubbed me the wrong way. Using words like "preggers" to describe Lafayette's wife? Gross. I thought I was going to hate the entire book. But, hey. I like those tumblr posts, most of the time. I adapted to Vowell's style unexpectedly quickly, and she is funny sometimes. If this short-lived discomfort had been my only problem, I would have rated Lafayette in the Somewhat United States much higher.

Unfortunately, I've also got this problem called Not Enough Lafayette. You think this book is about Lafayette, right? That's an understandable assumption, in my opinion. Not so. Really, it's just an account of the Revolutionary War using Lafayette as the prism through which we view the events of the war. There is a short account of his earlier life, and some brief, sketchy allusions to his sadder later years, but mostly once Cornwallis surrenders it's like, And then the war ended and Lafayette went home to France. The End.

Personally, as a Lafayette enthusiast who picked up this book because it displays Lafayette's name prominently on the cover because it is supposedly about Lafayette. . . I expect more. Even during the war years (i.e. the entire book) Lafayette only pops into the narrative for short visits. This book is as equally about George Washington as it is about Lafayette, if you measure by the percentage of prose dedicated to each. Unsatisfactory.

In a similar vein, honestly my biggest issue with this book: Too Much Sarah.

I feel like I'm on a first name basis with Sarah now, since I've heard so much about her. I'm familiar with a posse of her friends, and their views on topics as random as Thomas Edison and Quakerism. I've heard about her educational background. Sarah's family members. Her modern-day political views. The scholastic interests of her teenage nephew. Her ten zillion mildly topical field trips taken while researching this book, all described and dwelt upon in loving memoir-worthy, philosophical detail.

Do you know how many of these things I know about Doris Kearns Goodwin? Or David McCullough? Or even Ron Chernow? NONE, OBVIOUSLY. BECAUSE HISTORIANS DON'T SPEND ENTIRE CHAPTERS OF THEIR HISTORICAL BOOKS TALKING ABOUT THEMSELVES. And that, friends, is how I like it. Frankly, I don't give a one (1) frick about Sarah, and I resent all the time I was forced to spend reading about her in order to dredge out precious Lafayette-centered anecdotes.

You're all invited to the vigil I'll be holding for all my brain cells that are now unavailable to store Lafayette facts, because they're taken up with Sarah Vowell facts. RIP.

Probably, for some people, this kind of thing serves to humanize and enliven boring, dry historical details? I can definitely imagine there being people out there who would find this kind of human interest New Yorker-y memoir-ism to be a refreshing break among painfully detailed 500-page history tomes. Unfortunately, those people aren't me.

Honestly, if you want to hear about the American Revolution as it would probably be verbally narrated to you over brunch by a humorous, well-informed (though slightly self-absorbed and biased) friend, then you would probably like this book. It's not a bad book. It's just incredibly not my thing.

I will henceforth try to make better life choices, one of which will be to scrupulously avoid "narrative nonfiction."

It is impossible to overestimate the potential for evil inside ordinary humanity.