Category: Reviews

Author: Jonathan C. Slaght

Reviewer: Greg McCann

A book about owls? Sure, owls are cute, they’re cool, they’re even interesting—but read a whole book about them?

Okay let me put your mind at rest: first, this is a book about the study and conservation of not just any old owl but the world’s largest: the Blakiston’s Fish Owl of the Russian Far East . This species is found only in the mountains and valleys along the Russian Sea of Japan coastline, in Hokkaido, Japan, and perhaps in a small corner of northeastern China. And equally as important, when a book is about nature conservation, it’s almost never exclusively about the natural history and ecology of that species alone. What you get in Owls of the Eastern Ice is so much more—colorful and often hilarious portraits of vodka-soaked village life in remote outposts, adventures involving gunning cars across raging rivers at just the right angle in the hope that the current can carry the vehicle downstream and land it on the other side where the washed-out road should be, and jungle dramas involving tigers, deer, and, of course, the topic at hand: the Blakiston’s Fish Owl. 

The owl, in addition to being huge and having a dietary preference for feasting on the fresh masu salmon of remote Russian rivers, must be one of the worlds most beautiful birds. Its “electric yellow” eyes blaze from beneath of pair of pointy, tufted ears on a body of luxurious and billowy, creamy-brown feathers that seem like they could hide a person’s body.

At one point the author, Jonathan Slaght, climbs a tree to have a look in a nest, flushing the “glowering” female in the process. He conducts a quick check, photographing a newly hatched chick, and twenty minutes after he’s back on the ground and, he thinks, a safe distance away. Then, turning his binoculars back to the nest and its mother finds himself “meeting her direct stare at ten times magnification.” 

Personally I relished Slaght’s portraits of the eccentric Russians living in this little-visited corner of the world. He meets hermits who sleep in wooden pyramids for the alleged “power” that can be (so they say) harnessed by dozing off in these Egyptian-like structures, while also encountering many scenes in which the effects of vodka have intoxicated the entire population of a village.

In one episode told by the author—who has dedicated his live to the study of the bird—his scientific team drive by a home in which a man is shouting from behind the glass of his living room window, gesticulating and jabbing desperately in the direction of the home’s front door. Slaght’s friend and fellow researcher Sergey reluctantly unlock the front door—from the outside—and: “The man exploded out like a long-caged beast. The jerky, frenzied motions of his dash past Sergey, through the yard, and into the street indicated a mind too hysterical for any coordination.” Sergey explains moments later: “His old lady locked him in so he wouldn’t go drinking.”

I attended Slaght’s 2017 talk on tigers, leopards, and the Blakiston’s Fish Owls in Minneapolis in 2017, and his passion and dedication helped to spur my interest in birds. Back in January this year, before Covid-19 disrupted international travel, I was in the mountainous jungles south of Lake Toba in Sumatra, where we encountered four massive, critically endangered Helmeted Hornbills, which we both heard and saw. It was a rare privilege and an exquisite pleasure to hear this species’ maniacal call-cackle overlaid onto the primal growls of Rhinoceros Hornbills gliding in to a perch, along with the frenzied chants of Siamang gibbons, somewhere in the distance. Indeed, these days when I’m in the field I find myself equally excited to spot birds as I am to discover what type of mammals that have appeared in front of our camera traps. 

Owls of the Eastern Ice was recently “long-listed” for the 2020 National Book Award, and I feel that now, more than ever, when tens or hundreds of millions are shuttered up in lockdowns amid the pandemic, that this is the time to learn about the mysterious and little-known fellow creatures of our planet; to explore from home about far-flung regions where creatures such as the Blakiston’s Fish Owl live. It is also the time to learn about, cherish and reignite our love for local wildlife—something my son and I did as we bought binoculars and spent many a morning and afternoon birdwatching in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York state, earlier this spring. Maybe, just maybe, with books like Slaght’s to read, and with extra time to appreciate the natural world, we’ll all come out of this the better—both people and the planet.         

Peter O. offers his thoughts on BJ Fogg’s new tome, ‘Tiny Habits’.

With self-help books, I can take or leave them, and usually I leave them. 

But in this case,  I took up the challenge to review, Tiny Habits : The Small Changes that Change Everything,  by BJ Fogg PhD,  Founder of the Behavior Design Lab  at Stanford.

In my book, authors who display academic qualifications on their book covers are putzes, so it’s a challenge to take Fogg seriously.

And what an extra challenge it is, to read this, his book.  

Basically the author recommends not overreaching, but to set about completing projects or to change habits or to adapt to new habits in tiny steps, by creating tiny habits.

Much like the Cambodian  saying, of “moi moi moi”, one one one, one step at a time.

Actually, the notion of one small step at a time is a good idea, and I’ve already incorporated it in my life.

For example, I was struggling to write my last book. My desk faced a window that looked out onto a building site and what started out as a procrastinative  distraction became an inspiration.  While watching  workmen building a house, one brick at a time, I  plunged into writing my book  one word at a time, one sentence at a time,  and,  et voila, in time it was finished – about the same time as the building of the house was complete. 

It’s a system that works, and I was wondering how Dr. Fogg PhD would lay it all out. And he lays it out with a heavy trowel. His is a big thick book, in keeping with say a manual for the operation and maintenance of booster rockets for the next Mars mission, replete with graphs, clip art, disturbing jargon, oodles of  diagrams and more models than Covid-19.

While there’s a lot not to like about the book, it’s so comprehensive that, conversely, there’s also a lot to like about it. 
The essence of Fogg’s philosophy is  to set a goal and then “Pick a small step toward your goal—a step so tiny, you’ll think it’s ridiculous.”

In a dinky diagram  headed “Habit to make Tiny”  he lists “Clean the kitchen after every meal,” and as a “Starter Step”  he lists, “Open the dishwasher,” which totally lost me because: 

a) I think that’s a really ridiculous starter step

b) I don’t bloody well own a dishwasher.

But Fogg’s an American and will presume that every one globally has a dishwasher, so fair enough. 

This is a book to dip in and out of, and at times you can have fun with it,  at times it can be exceedingly beneficial, and at times it packs such beaut stuff as contained in the “Tiny Exercises to Practice Stopping and Swapping” section.

Under a subhead of  “Practice Creating a Swarm of Behaviors for Stopping a Bad Habit”,  Fogg lists “Step 1:Pretend you are someone else who has a bad habit.”

This is followed by “Step 2: Draw the Swarm of Behaviors graphic or download the template from TinyHabits.com/resources.”

I riffled back and forth through the book hunting for  the aforesaid graphic and couldn’t find it, and although I suppose I could have  gone online for the template, I got distracted ( a bad  habit of mine)  by a listing of handy hints under the heading of “Tiny Habits for Stopping Habits.”

Listing Number 8 reads, “After I get undressed, I will say aloud ‘Ohio.’ Only handle it once – aka put it away.”

I very much worry about the meaning of listing Number 8, but worry is another a bad habit of mine – as is being somewhat of a w**ker at times – and I’m taking tiny steps to overcome both conditions.

Tiny step 1. is to close this book.

A very special review from the author of the Cambodia wilderness epic, Called Away by a Mountain Spirit: Journeys to the Green Corridor, Greg McCann.

I can’t remember what exactly spurred my interest in curlews—pretty waders with mottled feathers and long, bending bills used for plucking worms, snails and other invertebrates from their oozy homes in grasslands, mudflats, and moorlands. Probably it was the singularity of their proboscis-like beaks that seem stuck onto their face like downturned rhinoceros horns, but it might also have been their name, curlew, which to my ear has the ring of some kind of old world beauty.

Although I have a great interest in birds and have had the exquisite privilege of seeing and hearing some of the rarest in the wild, such as the Helmeted Hornbill, Rhinoceros Hornbill and Sumatran Laughing thrush in Indonesia, and while I have camera-trapped several species new to Cambodia in Virachey National Park—such as the Black-hooded Laughing thrush, Silver Pheasant, and Bar-bellied Partridge—I still don’t think I can call myself a “birder.” True birders are hardcore: they carry binoculars, they know all the bird calls, and some of them even connect mini-speakers to their breast pockets and crank out bird songs from their iPods as they trek through the forest, tricking birds to fly in to inspect what turns out to be a human imposter holding a pen and paper, scribbling down or twitchingoff his list. I need to get my act together before I can identify as a real birder.

Travel writer and journalist Horatio Claire’s recent offering, Orison for a Curlew: In search of a bird on the edge of extinction, is a timely read. It was recommended by my friend Jonathan Slaght, another curlew fan and author of a forthcoming book on the Blakiston’s Fish Owl—Owls of the Eastern Ice— which is set in the Russian Far East. Slaght works for Wildlife Conservation Society and I attended his talk on tigers, leopards and owls in Minneapolis a few years back, and if he recommends a bird book, I order it. This is how I came to my copy of Claire’s spirited 96-page volume about a bird, the Slender-billed Curlew, which could well be extinct. 

The Slender-billed Curlew has not been confirmed in the wild since 1999, despite major efforts by devoted birders and organized teams who set out in search of it in recent years. So instead of setting off on a wild goose chase, Claire elects to hunt down and interview people who saw the bird decades ago. This takes him on journeys to the Greek coast, the shores of a Bulgarian lake, and the hinterlands of Romania. He chats with a fascinating array of characters, from park rangers, to wizened hermits, to environmental activists who tell him about lost relics that are like “extraordinary flashes of another planet.” The Slender-billed Curlew is a symbol of past abundance, when the world was still ecologically more or less whole, when species that are now rare or extinct were represented in numbers appropriate for a healthy planetary ecosystem. 

But mankind cannot leave well enough alone; we are tinkerers and up-enders and we drastically alter and destroy ecosystems in our quest for development and better lives. Wetlands are drained, rivers diverted, pesticides sprayed, oil spilled, mist nets set on beaches, rifles aimed at the sky. Has the slender-billed curlew managed to run this gauntlet along its migratory route from Siberia, through Europe, and into Africa and survive in secret into the present? Could it be, as one energetic Bulgarian bachelor hypothesizes, nesting in an unknown site in vast Siberia and making its main flyway stopover in forbidden Iran, making its existence almost impossible to confirm? It is tempting to imagine. 

Claire offers some hope, observing that, “The journey I undertook shows, again and again, that passionate efforts by very small numbers of committed people can have a tremendous effect on the planet and its inhabitants, whatever the species.” Brief but beautifully told, this book is likely to draw those who read it into birding, and environmental conservation in general. It will probably even rekindle a feeling of wanderlust in those kept in the dreary lockdowns of our current time. 

In 1954 Fred Bosworth wrote in his classic Last of the Curlews: “first there were many, then there were two, then there was one, and now there are none.” Bodsworth’s book was about the last two Eskimo Curlews, a small species that nested in the Arctic, now gone, annihilated largely by American hunters. Has the same sad fate befallen the Slender-billed Curlew? It seems we may never know for sure, and perhaps that’s not a bad thing. As someone who has spent a bit of time in the jungles of Cambodia and Sumatra looking for rare and possibly vanished species, I can relate to Claire’s insight: “Perhaps it will live on for many years in unconfirmed sightings. I hope so. Too much certainty is a miserable thing, while the unknowable has a pristine beauty and wonder with no end.”

And whether it was Orison for a Curlew, or the combined of all the other bird books I’ve recently read, I will be ordering my first set of binoculars this weekend as I delve into my new passion—birding—and it’s something that can even be done from the window of one’s home during the time of Covid-19. 

Orison for a Curlew: In search of a bird on the edge of extinction

Three Tigers, One Mountain
A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea and Japan.

Michael Booth

Few can be unaware that, on occasion, China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan do not get along (actually the Taiwanese quite like the Japanese), a situation rooted in a history that Michael Booth sets out to explore in his new book, Three Tigers, One Mountain (the title is inspired by an ancient Chinese proverb: ‘Two tigers can not share the same mountain’). 

Taking us on a journey that starts in Japan, before traveling on to South Korea (the north remains locked off to his scholarly pen), China and Taiwan (he lumps the two countries together, thus the ‘three’ in the book’s title; not sure what my Taiwanese friends would think of that), before ending where he begun, in Japan, Booth explores the origins of the mutual animosity that has checkered the relations between these four countries. On route he interviews numerous individuals connected to this curious state of affairs – museum curators, campaigners, academics, activists, anthropologists, politicians and ambassadors, as well as war veterans and those tortured and oppressed during the tensions and conflicts that have punctuated the recent history of the region.

A confession: when this book first fell into my lap I thought it might be a dry affair – an academic tome that would cure me of my seasonal insomnia. My concerns evaporated when, looking at the cover, I saw that Michael Booth was the author—I had happily enjoyed one of his previous books, a gastronomical journey through Japan (Sushi & Beyond). Our relationship sealed I felt assured that Three Tigers would not be a boring affair. But then a new concern set in, would an author who had been unable to avoid the clichéd wonderment at Japanese toilets be up to the task of exploring the much harder realities of war, rape, torture and oppression that Three Tigers would need to cover? 

Ultimately it will be up to you, the reader, to decide how successful Booth was in this task. For my part I think he does an commendable job in exploring some of the key points underlying the tricky relations between the four nations, with his engaging prose making the topics more approachable and interesting than they might have otherwise been (although, seemingly unable to avoid the subject, he does note that the Taiwanese have the same partiality to high-tech toilets as the Japanese).

Along the way Booth does what he is particularly skilled at, unearthing unique stories that you have likely never heard. One particular tale, which underlies the periodically vicious nature of affairs between the four nations, arose during the Imjin War of the late 1500s, when Japan sought to invade and occupy Korea. During this conflict, Booth writes, the Japanese generals, finding severed heads too bulky to send back to Japan, sent jars of pickled noses instead. These jars, he reports, were interned beneath earth mounds, one of which he visits during his Japanese sojourn.  

As one would expect more familiar stories are covered: Korean comfort women (there were Chinese as well), protests ignited by the treatment of history in school text books, the rape of Nanking (Nanjing), the Taiwanese ‘White Terror’, along with another ‘fact’ that I did not know, namely, to paraphrase Booth: ‘the Taiwanese really do not like the Koreans’ (I asked several Taiwanese acquaintances if this was true and they simply laughed, meaning either the author is incorrect or he has exposed an embarrassing truth). 

So who or what is to blame for all this bad blood? 

At the outset Booth opines that it is the Americans, the bitterness arising from forces unleashed through the plying open of Japan by the ‘black ships’ of Commodore Perry (1853). Later, midway through Three Tigers, appreciating that the tensions have deeper historic origins, he suggests Confucian principles might be responsible for some of the blame. Finally, towards the book’s end, contemplating the evening skyline of Hong Kong, Booth reasons that, perhaps, a share of culpability lies with his own countrymen, the British (the Opium Wars etc.). 

In the end however, as the author reasons, it is likely that a combination of these factors, alongside more recent political and strategic ambitions, that keep tempers simmering. Yet Booth is likely correct to note that for most, across the four countries, the tasks of day-to-day life take precedence; with differences over past injustices remaining dormant, but susceptible, to the occasional spark of national indignation and provocative righteousness. 

I did get one further ‘take home’ from Three Tigers: if I am ever obliged to leave the fair borders of the kingdom then Taiwan reads like a damn nice place to live.

Recommended.

Peter Olszewski offers up his thoughts on Linda Geddes ode to the value of sunlight in our lives.

Just when you thought you were aware of just about all the potentially harmful pollutants, along comes news of light pollution, and new knowledge about the dangers of being deprived of good old natural light via our very own star, the sun.

We underestimate the importance of natural light and we make the seriously flawed assumption that the electric light that lights our homes and offices is just as good as the real thing – sunlight.

That is a simplified version of the message of a startling new book, Chasing the Sun: The New Science of Sunlight and How it Shapes Our Bodies and Minds by science journalist Linda Geddes.

Basically I think we all understand the basics about sunlight in that exposure to it can be both benevolent and malevolent.

But Geddes book concentrates of just how vital sunlight is and her observations are illuminating [ouch, bad pun Peter]. She points out that while we all know that  a  measured dose of sunlight makes us feel good, we  are only just beginning to fully understand  how vital sunlight is, how it can heal or prevent  a myriad  of physical and mental maladies and how deprivation of it  can cause  significant health and well-being problems.

And this comes with a warning about our urban lifestyles where much of our high-rise cities become sun-less shadow lands and our addiction to the new technology, which keeps us indoors looking at computers and hand, held devices for hours on end instead of being outdoors soaking up some sun.

To tell the new story about sunlight knowledge,  Geddes takes us back about 130 years ago, to the work of  Nobel Prize winner Niels Rybirg Finsen who dealt with the direct impact of the sun’s rays  on bacteria and on our skin,  and in doing so he  instigated a cure for lupus vulgaris or skin tuberculosis, a dreadful disfiguring  facial disease caused by flesh eating bacteria – Finsen  found the cure by directing ultraviolet rays on patients’ faces.

Finsen first became interest in the sun because as a student in Copenhagen he lived and worked mostly in a sunless room and suffered from anemia and tiredness.   But he noticed his health improved when he was exposed to sunlight. He began to experiment, established the Medical Light Institute and as Geddes writes, “He ushered in a new era of interest in the health benefits of sunlight, which continues to this day.”

And before Finsen, Florence Nightingale  in 1860 observed that dark rooms were anathema for patients:  “What hurts them most is a dark room”, she wrote, “And that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.”

AS well as thoroughly documenting the need for humans to be subjected to the right sort of light – sunlight –  author  Geddes, in her compact fact-packed compendium, also documents the  emergence of the wrong sort of light and how it causes havoc with the natural  order of things.

She cites a Cities at Night project, which documents the extent of light pollution and how it’s changing due to the popularity of LED street lights.

“Urban lights scatter photons in unwanted directions, including upwards into space,” she writes.

“This scattered light obscures drivers’ vision and wreaks havoc on wildlife.  Mesmerized by this apparent daylight in the night sky, insects life cycles are disrupted, birds migrations thrown off course and trees cling to their leaves longer in autumn – potentially shortening their lives.” 

Even the reproduction of flowering plants is affected by these artificial suns, by disrupting the behavior of pollinating insects, their daily appointment with flowers that open and close at specific times are missed.

And of course there can be no discussion about sunlight and what happens when the light of day fades into the dark of night: mostly we sleep, or we should sleep and once again, our sleep patterns, naturally triggered by the rise of fall of the sun, are vital to our health.

The tightly written book opens with the science of circadian rhythms, explained in not-too-technical terms, and ends on this note, “We spawned from a revolving planet, itself shaped by starlight. And although we create our own electric star to light the night, our biology remains tethered to a monarch mightier than them all: our sun.”

A good read that’s inducive to a good night’s sleep.

Graphic Novel Gives Unique Take on Khmer Rouge Times

The Guardian review, Rachel Cooke, 4th February 2020

I feel more and more that comics are capable of dealing even with the most difficult of subjects – an ability that has to do, I think, with their relative lack of words. Unlike a novel, they can make full use of silence. Pain may be seen in a glance on the faces of their characters; foreboding may be found in the sky and the trees. Tian Veasna’s brilliant and powerful book about the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the experiences of his family under the regime, is a case in point. Its storytelling is extremely nimble, making easy work of complex political history. But it’s also exquisitely spare. Sometimes, there is nothing to be said; no words are adequate. In these moments, Veasna lets his brush do the talking. Like a bird, he soars above the country where he was born, gazing down on its gutted cities, on its workers slaving in the fields. The documentary precision of his landscapes seems to do the work of a thousand written pages.

Veasna was born in 1975, just three days after the Khmer Rouge seized power in Phnom Penh. Year of the Rabbit traces the day-to-day lives of his parents, first as they join the exodus of people from the cities to the countryside, and then later, as they plan their escape from a country that has in effect become a giant prison camp (eventually, they will make it to France, where he grew up and still lives). Veasna’s father, Khim, is a doctor, and as such is considered to be an intellectual enemy of the bizarrely philistine new Democratic Kampuchea, which prefers to put its faith in traditional medicine. So as he travels, he must hide his identity. This, however, is the least of his worries. The regime takes everything. People are starving. Spies and snitches are everywhere. In the villages, where the masses must wear identical clothes, follow identical routines, and work only for the glory of the motherland, growing your own tomato plant is enough to get you killed.

Year of the Rabbit is an account of terror and unimaginable loss. But it’s not only this. I felt slightly guilty that I found it so exciting – and it was an education, too. Veasna punctuates his story with detailed historical maps, and with a series of darkly funny panels in which he details some of the loopier and more arcane beliefs and practices of the Khmer Rouge. In one, he explains how a person might look like an enemy of the state (appear elegant or distinguished; hesitate when asked about the past). In another, he draws one of the “new people” of Kampuchea, and the very few things he is allowed to own: a lice comb; a spoon; one bar of soap per family, per year. Beyond the fear, the disappearances and the mass graves, as Veasna reveals again and again, there lies a terrible absurdity: those old bedfellows, stupidity and cruelty, go hand in hand, each cheering the other on from the sidelines as their heinous work is done.

Howl reviews Wild Swans author Jung Chang’s new book, a true story of three sisters who came to cast a shadow across twentieth century China

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister.
Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China.

The recent history of China is as compelling as it is complex, yet amongst the long list of figures who have shaped the country’s destiny over the course of the twentieth century the story of three women stands out. 

The first is Ei-ling, who under the patronage of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, became the richest woman in pre-communist China. 

Next, Ching-ling, who married the ‘Father of the Republic’, Sun Yat-sen and who later, following his death, took a left turn and became the vice-chair—second only to Mao—of the People’s Republic of China. 

And May-ling, wife of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who lived to the stately age of 105, and achieved political prominence in her own right, appearing on the covers of Time and Life as she courted international support for her husband’s efforts to thwart the Japanese and later, the Chinese communists.

Alone each of these women’s stories is riveting but what makes them more extraordinary is that all three were related – in fact, they were sisters. 

The Soong’s, their family name, also known by the epithets ‘Big Sister’ (Ei-ling), ‘ Little Sister’ (May-ling) and ‘Red Sister’ (Ching-ling) were the daughters of an ambitious father, whose aspiration to be a prosperous businessman installed a personal drive in each of his daughters. Schooling in the United States added an independent streak to the respective sisters, a trait that would be instrumental in fashioning their later lives.

Returning from overseas each daughter fell into the orbit of men who would rise to be dominate figures in twentieth century China: Sun Yat-Sen, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. And through the chapters of Big Sister Chang reveals the role that each sister played in the actions and events that surround these powerful, yet flawed, male figures. 

For the three the outcomes of these relationships were not always congenial. In one event Chang writes of how Sun Yet-sen fled a besieged Canton by using Ching-ling as a diversion, the middle Soong sister barely escaping with her life while her husband—they had married in 1915—found safety. Unsurprisingly, for a strong-willed woman, it was an action that shattered Ching-ling’s self-belief in her husband.

Away from such stories what seems remarkable, to even the casual reader, is how the three siblings came to navigate their way across the full spectrum of China’s mid-twentieth century political life – from rightwing nationalism (May-ling) to staunch communist (Ching-ling), with the entrepreneurial Ei-ling sandwiched in between. 

One can only wonder what the three sisters talked about when they met—as they often did in their favourite city, Shanghai (until the communist take-over in 1949)—yet Chang’s story shows that blood ran thicker than ideology. The result: while their relationships were sometimes fraught, the three sisters remained committed, if not always close, to each other throughout their lives. 

In the hands of Jung Chang, author of the highly acclaimed family memoir, Wild Swans, the interwoven history of the Soongs has a sympathetic storyteller. As with the former tome, Chang’s compulsive style propels her story forward—the author not permitting her scholastic background to cloud her writing—allowing the interwoven stories of Ei-ling, Ching-ling and May-ling to emerge and provide an engaging account of the China they knew, loved and lost. 

One reservation I have—admittedly borne from my own ignorance of Chinese history—is whether, to raise the significance of her lead characters, Chang has embellishing the story of the Soongs (a criticism that has shadowed Changs previous work on the Empress Dowager Cixi). Equally, of course, one could argue that Chang has simply righted an imbalance in Chinese history—usually framed around ‘great men’ narratives—by presenting a female side to the nation’s twentieth century story. Yet as Julia Lovell, writing for the Guardian highlights, the three sisters only came to exercise influence through their association with these particular men.

Either way I am not in a position to fault her portrayal of the sister’s story. Perhaps it is a case of reader beware while accepting that even if half of what Chang writes is accurate—and here one should acknowledge that she carries a strong academic pedigree (A PhD in linguistics), her book is well referenced and Chang has authored numerous other books on Chinese history—the story of the Soongs is extraordinary. 

One for the Christmas reading list – Two and a half Soongs out of three.

Peter Olszewski returns with a review of the Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book.

It was great to welcome Malcolm Gladwell into my home again, via his latest book, Talking to Strangers.

I’m a Gladwell fan. I’ve read two of his books, and serious adherents claim that this, his latest, is his weightiest – not necessarily good news in my view.

Gladwell, often described (and at times) dismissed as a pop-scientist or armchair philosopher, is also criticised because arguments laid out in his books are anecdotally driven.

While to some ‘serious’ academics this is a negative, to me, as a reader, it’s a positive because Gladwell’s anecdotes are not only highly entertaining, they also perfectly illustrate what he is trying to say without the need for  reams and reams of  often-turgid scientific or analytic  ‘proof.’ 

Gladwell’s anecdotes are masterpieces because he digs up the most amazing material, including intriguing trivia about something we as readers thought we were familiar with, but after reading Gladwell’s brilliantly researched anecdote, the reader mutters, “Gee, I didn’t know that about that!”

And just for fun, here’s an example of classic Gladwell trivia: Elvis Presley suffered from parapraxis.* 

Gladwell essentially is a contrarian,  in his David and Goliathbook  he  maintained that certain experiences and situations regarded as disadvantages are advantages—and vice versa.

In this his latest book, the sub-title reads: “What we should know about the people we don’t know.”

The book then argues that what we should know about the people we don’t know is that we will never fully know about them, despite lie detectors that don’t always work when they should work, and behavioral science analysis that stands up only until it is shot down by a new example emerging from the annals of reality  – or by an anecdote extolled by Gladwell.

 In other words, you never really know people even though you think you do, it’s almost impossible to always correctly ‘read’ all people, and its best to always question strangers. 

Getting it wrong about people and being fooled is not a failure, posits Gladwell, it the norm.  

The anecdotes Gladwell serves up to prove his points – his ‘default to truth’ – are simply brilliant. 

CNN and other media have run with Gladwell’s observation of Adolf Hitler in this book: an intriguing insight revealed is that in the period immediately before the outbreak of WWII, a lot of people got it wrong about Hitler’s intentions, and a lot got it right. 

Those who mostly got it wrong were those who met Hitler, and those who never met Hitler – such as Churchill – got it right. 

One amazing trivial fact is that when Lord Halifax first met Hitler in Berlin he mistook him for a footman and almost handed him his coat. And yes, Halifax also got it wrong about Hitler’s intentions.

As Gladwell points out, those who went to Berlin to meet Hitler would have been better served staying at home and simply reading Mein Kampf.

Although of course, in the contrarian nature of things, there also famous cases where events would have transpired more positively had people actually met the person in question, and not derived opinions from non-contact sources.

The rule is that there are no rules about getting fooled or not by people some of the time or all of the time, strangers or otherwise.

As Gladwell says, “Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.  We need the criminal-justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers.” 

PS: Media reports state that Gladwell “recoils at the implication that Talking to Strangers has anything to do with President Trump.”

*Para praxis: a Freudian slip,a slip of the tongue or pen, forgetfulness, misplacement of objects, or other error thought to reveal unconscious wishes or attitudes.

A harrowing tale of slavery from the Cambodian graphic artist and author Vannak Anan Prum – the man who experienced it all

Long the go to place for ‘ex-pats who lunch’ mid-September found me in Phnom Penh’s Java Café, its fan adorned balcony providing a panoramic view of Hun Sen Park, its statute of King Norodom Sihanouk looking northward, seemingly unimpressed at the view of the inglorious monstrosity that is the Naga World casino. Inside, away from the street noise and the miasma of Phnom Penh, I navigated to the air-conditioned room that lies to the left of the upstairs entrance. Here, as my eyes adjusted to the low light, I was able to make out what I had travelled from Siem Reap to see. 

Along the room’s walls hung a series of prints, some of them bright and colourful, others rendered in the more sobering lines of black and white. On these walls, a million miles away from the smells of coffee and polite conversation going on outside, the images documented a world of hardship and exploitation— a place of slavery—men hauling nets, sorting fish, trying to survive in a place where the shackles are the waters of the ‘deep blue sea’. 

The origin artist of these images is Vannak Anan Prum, a Cambodian national who, unwittingly, found himself enslaved on a small vessel plying the fishing grounds of Southeast Asia.

As a child Vannak had enjoyed drawing pictures in the dirt outside his rural home (Bruce Lee was a favourite subject). This interest evolved into a skill that followed this remarkable individual into adulthood—a journey that saw him spend time as a monk, a soldier and then a farm hand. 

But it is what happened after he left rural Cambodia for an alleged job in Thailand, five harrowing years at sea and on land as a slave, which is laid out starkly in The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea, the book documenting these dark chapters in Vannak’s life.

The volume, described as a ‘graphic memoir of modern slavery’, is an astonishing body of work which, in 230+ pages of images and words, offers as much insight into modern slavery as any number of reports and conference proceedings can ever hope to do.

Some of these insights come by way of episodes that are truly harrowing. Take this experience from Vannak’s three and a half years at sea:
“One night I woke up needing a piss. I walked on deck toward the rope toilet at the stern and heard a strange noise nearby. It sounded like someone trying to kill a big fish. I crept to the end of the cabin and peeked around the corner just in time to see Kay cutting Dam’s head off with a cleaver.”

There are numerous similar stories scattered across the pages of The Deep Eye and the Deep Blue Sea , each one of them reinforcing the inhumanity that arises when people are treated as mere cogs in an exploitative economic machine.

Balancing out these episodes are depictions of the personal turmoil that Vannak endured over his half decade of enslavement – the hours spent longing for loved ones and home, the despair of not knowing if he would see either again, and the physical exhaustion experienced from long hours, with little sleep or food, of retrieving fishing nets and harvesting palm nuts. 

That Vannak escaped his holders and was able to eventually return to his wife and child in Cambodia—at first his wife did not recognise him and doubted the story that this ‘strange man’ told of his recent life—means that he is one of the ‘fortunate’. At the same time he acknowledges psychological scars that match the physical ones from his ‘slave days’. And one suspects that translating his story into pictures and words has been an important part in his path back to normalcy.  

A tale that is illuminating and tragic, Vannak’s survival and return home means that his story is also a triumphant one (in 2012 Vannak was presented with Human Rights Defenders Award for his work in documenting the fishing boat slave industry).

However one should not leave the final page of The Deep Eye and the Deep Blue Sea with the feeling that all is right with the world. The truth is much more sobering, for as Vannak and others have repeated and the recent Australian live-action film Buoyancy shows, millions remain locked in slave conditions across the globe (40 million by some counts) – not just on fishing boats, but also in factories, brothels and on plantations. In fact official records indicate that more people are enslaved today than in any other period in human history.

With this in mind the frozen fish section of your local supermarket may never look the same again. 

Available at all stores of Monument Books