Back again, this time with my eighth installment. Here are my books from 2023.
And here it is over time.
As always, lots of good ones in there I would recommend. Here are a few highlights.
- Jonathan Rosen wrote a beautiful memoir, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, about he and his childhood best friend, Michael Laudor. He tells of growing up in New Rochelle, NY in the 1970s – in “a Normal Rockwell painting”. They were bookish boys who lived in “book-filled houses”, and each had college professor fathers. They both went to Yale for college; Laudor graduating in 3 years. After college, Laudor went to work for Bain & Company with the plan to make a bunch of money in 10 years and then leave to write a book. This plan was cut short. One day a secretary “reach[ed] for him with clawed hands and bloody teeth.” The schizophrenia that would come to dominate his life had arrived. He moved back home where he became convinced that his parents were Nazi double agents. At one point his mother became so scared that she locked herself in the bedroom and called the police. He spent the next 8 months in a psychiatric unit. “Michael had gotten sick amid the ruins of a demolished system.” Rosen talks at length about deinstitutionalization, “a slum clearance and urban renewal for people with mental illness, a noble idea on paper disfigured by a sweeping centralized approach marred by local prejudice.” Deinstitutionalization succeeded in emptying the mental hospitals, but no working alternative was put in their place. Before his 8-month stint, Laudor had applied to Yale Law School and had deferred his acceptance. After some time in a halfway house, he started at what he called “the most supportive mental health care facility that exists in America: the Yale Law School”. The school went out of its way to provide an environment that was supportive of his special needs. The dean of the law school, Guido Calabresi, “told him that he was in a sort of invisible wheelchair and that he would place ramps wherever needed.” While at Yale he was profiled by the New York Times (A Voyage to Bedlam and Part Way Back). He told the reporter, “I feel that I’m pawing through walls of cotton and gauze when I talk to you now. I’m using 60 or 70 percent of my effort just to maintain the proper reality contact with the world.” The profile made waves. In short order he was offered a book deal and Ron Howard bought the movie rights to his story. The Laws of Madness, as it was to be called, would star Brad Pitt as Michael. This put a good deal of pressure on Laudor to get the book written quickly. He did not do well under the pressure. He stopped taking his medicine. In June 1998, Laudor killed his girlfriend in the midst of a psychotic episode. He then drove 170 miles to Cornell University and approached a campus police officer. When asked about the blood he had on him he said it was his girlfriends “or a wind-up doll.” He asked, “can we check on her?” He was arrested and charged with second degree murder, but multiple psychiatrists ruled he was unfit to stand trial. Laudor is currently committed to the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center in New Hampton, NY. Rosen visits him regularly.
- Robert Sapolsky has to be at the top of my list of people I would love to have a beer with. He’s a primatologist and neurobiologist and a professor at Stanford. As a follow-on to his “magnum opus”, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Sapolsky released Determined: Life Without Free Will in October. His main thesis is this: “we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Everything is caused. “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French scholar, put forward the idea in 1814 of what has come be known as Laplace’s Demon. The idea is that if you know the state of the universe (position and momentum of every particle) at any point in time then you can use it to calculate the state of some future or previous point. This is the idea of scientific determinism. And if the laws of physics define the behavior of every atom in the universe, then why are we any different? Sapolsky builds on Behave by digging into all the biological components of our actions. He covers many scientific disciplines (biochemistry, endocrinology, neuroscience, genetics, evolution, physics, culture, etc.) and in the end finds, “there’s not a single crack of daylight to shoehorn in free will”. I’ve always been struck by the story of Charles Whitman. In 1966 Whitman killed his wife and mother and then climbed to the top of a tower at the center of the University of Texas and killed 15 more people. Before the massacre, Whitman wrote a suicide note where he talked of being the “victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts” and “overwhelming violent impulses”. He also wrote, “after my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder.” An autopsy was performed, and it was discovered he had a brain tumor which was putting pressure on the amygdala (part of the brain central to fear, violence, and aggression). Does this explain why a 25-year-old “average reasonable and intelligent young man” (his words) would do something so horrific? Did the tumor change Whitman into a killer? What about Phineas Gage? Phineas Gage was a foreman on a railroad crew. One day in 1848 he was packing explosive powder into a hole using a tamping iron when there was an explosion and the iron rod shot through his eye and out the back of his head. It tore through his frontal lobe. He survived, but something changed. According to his physician, his employer had “regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again.” Further, “the equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating. … A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. … His friends and acquaintances said he was ’no longer Gage’.” So, the whole essence of who someone is can be altered by damage to their brain. This is also interesting in light of the fact that “a substantial percentage of people incarcerated for violent crime have a history of concussive head trauma to the prefrontal cortex.” Sapolsky makes the point that these famous cases (Whitman, Gage, etc.) are cases where today we understand the science of cause and effect, but they are simply good illustrations of a wider phenomenon – that all our actions are driven by ‘hidden forces’ (forces outside of our control). We are pre-disposed (determined?) to push back on Sapolsky’s argument. As humans we have a visceral reaction to the idea that the feeling of control (being captain of our ship) is an illusion. Sapolsky pushes back with this, “You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.”
- I grew up in Birmingham, AL and, as I mentioned in my 2020 post, my mother was friends with Julie Armstrong who, in May, published Learning from Birmingham: A Journey into History and Home. Armstrong is a professor at the University of South Florida where she teaches civil rights movement literature. Learning from Birmingham is a beautiful memoir interwoven with Birmingham history. Armstrong had an aunt who was a juror in the 1977 trial, Alabama vs. Robert E. Chambliss trial. Fourteen years early, on September 15, 1963, a bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church killing 4 girls (ages: 11, 3 were 14) and injuring 20 others. The dynamite bomb was planted by Chambliss and 3 others, all members of the KKK. Chambliss, known as Dynamite Bob, was sentenced to life imprison. Armstrong’s uncle had his own connection to the civil rights movement (also in a “just so happened to be there” way). In 1957, as part of the 101st Airborne Division, her uncle was deployed to Little Rock at the behest of President Eisenhower to ensure Arkansas complied with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Arkansas’s governor, Orval Faubus, was attempting to keep 9 high schoolers from attending Central High School. Just before Little Rock, Fred Shuttlesworth (the most prominent Birmingham Civil Rights leader) led an effort to integrate John Herbert Phillips High School (Armstrong’s uncle’s alma mater). In the summer of 1957, 4 Black teenagers (two of which were Shuttlesworth’s daughters) requested permission to attend Phillips High School in the fall. To intimidate Shuttlesworth and the other families, the KKK grabbed a random black citizen, Judge Aaron, off the street, tortured him, and told him to go back to Shuttlesworth with a warning to stand down. They “carved ‘KKK’ into his chest, castrated him, and poured turpentine into his wounds.” He barely survived. He did take the message to Shuttlesworth, but Shuttlesworth was undeterred. He took his family up to Phillips on the first day of school and was met by an angry mob. The mob, “beat Shuttlesworth nearly to death with chains, brass knuckles, and tire irons. His wife, Ruby, was stabbed in the hip. Their daughter Ruby Frederika came away with a broken ankle. Despite their injuries, the family showed up that night for a heavily bandaged Reverend Shuttlesworth to lead a mass meeting at New Hope Baptist Church, encouraging the packed house to keep the fight going. Phillips, however, would not desegregate until 1964.”
Previous posts on books read: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
(Chart creation code can be found here.)