Book Report: The Premonition

57. Michel Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021) (11/14/21)

The other day on my daily walk I was listening to the podcast No Stupid Questions with Freakonomics' Stephen Dubner and psychologist Angela Duckworth, and they were talking about authors they admire. Stephen mentioned Michael Lewis as being something akin to a god for him. This I had to check out. When I searched for Lewis titles, I recognized a couple—not because I'd read them, but because I'd seen the movies: Moneyball, about professional baseball, and The Big Short, about the build-up to the 2008 credit and housing bubble collapse. He's written fourteen others besides. I decided to start with his most recent one.

Well, yeah. Lewis is quite a writer. He takes a complicated subject—in this case, pandemic preparedness—and gives it a human face and a story line. The main character in the book—the through-character, if you will, with all her flaws and all her strengths laid out—is Dr. Charity Dean, whom we first meet as the lead public-health officer of Santa Barbara County. She goes on to become the number-two health official in the state of California—in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Which you'd think would be a position of power. But think again . . . 

Three other key players are Joe DiRisi, a University of California–San Francisco biochemist who is not only brilliant but also immensely creative; Carter Mecher, a Veteran’s Administration doctor known for designing fail-safe procedures to avoid fatal errors in ICUs, and with an uncanny understanding of pandemic mechanics; and Richard Hatchett, a poet turned ER doctor who after 9/11 called for the creation of a permanent medical reserve. These individuals form the core of a farflung, unofficial (and largely underground) group known as the Wolverines who, despite administrative disinterest, manage to get Covid testing and vaccines underway.

And there we see how ineffective—and ultimately, political (I do not mean that as a truism, but as an indictment)—government is. In the end, it's this small army of "L6's," individuals with expertise and passion, far removed from the top levels of power, who are in the trenches fighting the big battles, while such entities as, most notably, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) bumble along waiting for "the data" to come in, unwilling to make any difficult, unpopular decisions. (Lewis does give historical background to explain the CDC's decline from an active, responsive agency—it was at the center of eradicating smallpox in the 1960s—to a gutless, sycophantic bureaucracy. The cause lies in part in the shift from civil service advancement to the top leadership position, to presidential appointments.)

Here is a good in-depth review of the book, if you're interested in reading more.

Lewis employs some excellent metaphors. For example, layering slices of Swiss cheese until you can't see through any holes anymore: this is like having only partial understanding of exactly what a virus is doing, how it is spreading, and yet still needing to fight it with all the weapons available—vaccines, of course, but until those are developed, school closures and masks and lockdowns. Each of these responses is like a layer of cheese: use them all together, and you might have a fighting chance. Another is the Mann Gulch fire—which I keep bumping into: it's become a favorite metaphor for being confronted with something entirely unexpected and having to do something in response that is counterintuitive, indeed counter to all practices one has been schooled in. Carter heard a talk by a doctor that invoked this fire 

and thought: the Mann Gulch fire isn't about fire, or at least not only about fire. It's also about pandemics. In fire you could see lessons for fighting a raging disease. He jotted them down:

You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late.

You can't outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you.

Identify what is important and drop everything that is not.

Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire [a fire lit within the already raging forest fire to protect the firefighter].

The Mann Gulch fire captured the difficulty people had imagining exponential growth, even when their lives depended on it. "We are reactive and tend to only intervene when things are getting bad," wrote Carter. "And what we underestimate is the speed that what's bad moves."

This book is a great read, and now I'm interested in reading more of Lewis—and of checking out his podcast, Against the Rules.

I also wanted to mention that Lewis's explication of the public health "system" in this country (it is anything but "a system") made me, once again, shake my head at the ignorance of people who are protesting the overweening "powers" of public health officials in this country. So many people (especially those who've "done their research") have no idea what they're talking about. If only we had a system for fighting bad things. But we don't; we have nothing resembling a cohesive government response to much of anything anymore, or a national will to come together as one. It's tragic. Another reason we're considering moving to someplace that, we hope, does.

Book Report: Nothing

56. Mick Inkpen, Nothing (1995) (11/8/21)

Gotta slip in a few picture books to make my 66, but hey, I'm not complaining. I found this one in the garage, where I'm trying to make some room and order. I don't recall having read it before. It's charming! 

It's the story of Nothing, a ragged and worn stuffed animal that is left behind when a family, a new baby on the way, move house—"Oh, it's nothing," says the mover on seeing him lying on the attic floor: hence his name. He is coached by a mouse to leave the house, through a gap under the eaves, before the new family arrives, who will surely throw him in the trash bin. Out in the world, he encounters a fox, a frog, and finally a cat named Toby—the very cat, in fact, of the family that moved, only he was out roaming the day the movers came, so they thought he was lost. In all these encounters, Nothing vaguely remembers aspects of his former, less worn and ragged self: whiskers, stripes, and there is something about that cat . . . But despite these nudges, Nothing can only wail, "I don't know who I am!"

Toby takes Nothing to explore the neighborhood, and they end up at the new home of the family that moved. Grandpa takes one look at him, then goes to his photo album. And so Nothing learns who he is: not Nothing, but a stuffed cat named Little Toby. And he is restored, and soon becomes the new baby's favorite thing to hug (and chew on). 

Here are a few of the lovely watercolor illustrations:

Here is a short video where Mick Inkpen talks about a few of his books and the creative work.

Book Report: Our Malady

55. Timothy Snyder, Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020) (11/7/21)

In December 2019, the author suffered a burst appendix, which in turn caused a liver infection, which created an emergency situation leading to several operations. The instigating conditions went undetected, in both Germany (where he was lecturing on totalitarianism, his academic specialty) and back home in the U.S., and several weeks after his lecture and the initial treatments, Snyder ended up in an emergency room in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut—and then in protracted care and recovery. "In five hospitals over three months, between December 2019 and March 2020, I took notes and made sketches. It was easy to grasp that freedom and health were connected when my will could not move my body, or when my body was attached to bags and tubes."

His first response to his predicament was rage: 

The rage was beautifully pure, undefiled by an object. I was not angry at God; this was not His fault. I was not angry at the doctors and the nurses, imperfect people in an imperfect world. I was not angry at the pedestrians moving freely about the city beyond my chamber of twisted sheets and tubes, nor at the deliverymen slamming their doors, nor at the truckers blowing their horns. I was not angry at the bacteria celebrating the bounty of my blood. My rage was directed against nothing. I raged against a world where I was not. . . .
     The rage was pure me, my wish to be a sound not an echo, to compose not decompose. It was not against anything, except the entire universe and its laws of unlife.

He did not die, however. And his second response to his predicament was a "mood that sustained me in a different way: a feeling that life was only truly life insofar as it was not only about me." This reminded me of the last book I reported on, where our connectivity to all things, all beings, all moments, all possibilities is paramount. The profound notion that we are not, ever, truly alone. We rely on an entire web of experience and trust and help to survive well. Both rage and empathy, solitude and solidarity, served to help him back on his feet

The above-quoted words are from the prologue. Snyder continues into an introduction, "Our Malady" ("our system of commercial medicine, dominated by private insurance, regional groups of private hospitals, and other powerful interests, looks more and more like a numbers racket"), where he compares the U.S. against other, more socially responsive nations. The book thus becomes a treatise on freedom—thoughts of which Snyder is rarely far from. 

America is supposed to be about freedom, but illness and fear render us less free. To be free is to become ourselves, to move through the world following our values and desires. Each of us has a right to pursue happiness and to leave a trace. Freedom is impossible when we are too ill to conceive of happiness and too weak to pursue it. It is unattainable when we lack the knowledge we need to make meaningful choices, especially about health.

I would suggest that this statement applies to all manner of "ills" in our society—but yes, Snyder's focus is on health and our "commercial medical" establishment, which is not focused on health so much as on profit. 

Four "lessons" follow (and granted, they are the bulk of the book, so my report is skewed): (1) Health care is a human right; (2) Renewal begins with children; (3) The truth will set us free; and (4) Doctors should be in charge. In these, he again compares the U.S. system with, in particular, the Austrian system, with which he is familiar, focusing on treatment of "the whole person" versus treatment, usually as quickly as possible, of symptoms (guess which applies to which country). He looks at the U.S. response to the covid pandemic, which was hitting just as he lay in the hospital. He weighs philosophical questions, and the power/political establishment, and how the individual really cannot survive, or at least thrive, without a supportive social network.

It is a sobering read, and although he ends with a conclusion titled "Our Recovery," it's hard to see this country actually recovering (and again, one can easily apply that across a spectrum of ills). Health care is, in fact, one reason we are strongly considering a move to Europe, where ordinary people actually seem to matter.

Book Report: In Love with the World

54. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey through the Bardos of Living and Dying (2019) (11/1/21)

In 2011, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, age 36, left the safe confines of his monastery in secret, set on engaging in a wandering retreat. His account covers the first three weeks of his experience, as he grapples first with the discomfort of being out in the world—on a train, in a bustling city, in several sacred sites where the Buddha had been—among all manner of people, with no attendants and very little money, and then with a bout of food poisoning that brings him close to death. Throughout all this he meditates—which means, according to the book's glossary, "working with the mind in an intentional way in order to recognize its inherently wakeful qualities." This includes being aware of physical (dis)comfort, of emotional stress or ease, of yearnings and acceptance. 

Much of the focus of the book is on "the bardos of living and dying." As he explains (again in the invaluable glossary), the term bardo is "commonly used to describe an intermediate state between one life and the next; also understood as stages in one's journey through life and death, which can be interpreted as either physical processes or as states of mind during this lifetime; each bardo state provides heightened opportunities to recognize unconditioned reality." In this book, six bardos are referenced: those of this life, of meditation, of sleep and dreams, of dying, of dharmata (the "true nature of things that is beyond all beliefs and concepts"—this bardo comes after physical death), and of becoming.

The rhythm of the book, alternating between descriptions of his movements in the world, his awareness of his thoughts and feelings, and explications of Buddhist philosophy, is just right. The overall message, it seems to me, is to grasp that, in fact, we are constantly dying—transitioning from one state of awareness to another—and that our task is to stay open. As he puts it in a letter that he leaves for his students,

All that we are looking for in life—all the happiness, content-ment, and peace of mind—is right here in the present moment. Our very own awareness is itself fundamentally pure and good. The only problem is that we get so caught up in the ups and downs of life that we don't take the time to pause and notice what we already have.
     Don't forget to make space in your life to recognize the richness of your basic nature, to see the purity of your being and let its innate qualities of love, compassion, and wisdom naturally emerge. Nurture this recognition as you would a small seedling. Allow it to flourish.
     . . . Where you are and whatever you are doing, pause from time to time and relax your mind. You don't have to change anything about your experience. You can let thoughts and feelings come and go freely, and leave your senses wide open. Make friends with your experience and see if you can notice the spacious awareness that is with you all the time. Everything you ever wanted is right here in this present moment of awareness.

In this book, Mingyur Rinpoche relates his own experience with encountering true, deep, life-changing awareness. He went on to spend four and a half years in his wandering retreat.

Here is a short video in which he discusses what his near-death experience taught him about our ability to change.

Geocaching day out! Gilroy

We took the afternoon off (I could well get used to this newly retired husband who's all, "Let's play!") in order to fulfill a Geocaching HQ "challenge." These challenges usually involve something simple, like finding a cache on a particular day—the anniversary of the first geocache (May 3, 2000), say, or the last or first day of the year. The reward being, a virtual "souvenir." 

The current challenge, called Reach the Peak, is a bit more complicated: it involves finding a number of caches of various sorts, with arbitrarily assigned points for each type (ranging from 325, for a regular cache, to 750, for a cache with 10+ favorite points or an Earthcache, a puzzle cache or a multi), which must add up, month by month, to the heights (in meters) of the tallest mountains on all the continents: starting last August with Puncak Jaya in Oceania, and culminating with Everest in March. Yeah. How silly is that? But today, indeed, we succeeded in summiting Mt. Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe! And it only involved a half-hour drive and a few hours of wandering around! So much easier than actually plodding up an 18,510-foot (5,642 m) peak!

Our destination was Gilroy in southern Santa Clara County, a town we drive past all the time on our way to the Bay Area, but one we've never stopped in. Turns out, it has a lovely downtown area with some nice old buildings. And there's plenty of surrounding farmland. Gilroy calls itself the Garlic Capital of the World: over 50 percent of the garlic grown in the US is grown right there, mostly by Christopher Ranch, established in 1890 by Danish immigrants. 

Here are some pictures I took:

The old city hall, built in 1905;
now a restaurant

One of the first caches of the day: you press on
the perch, and the cache (the white circle is the
bottom of the container) flies out!

We spotted numerous lovely murals

One cache brought us to this amazing
Tiny Library in downtown

This cache is called Hang 'Em High

Here it is lowered

We enjoyed a meandering drive through ag fields

Walnut trees behind

Corn across the road—and purple mountains
(not Mt. Elbrus) in the distance

It was fun. Next up: Kilimanjaro (19,341 feet; 5,895 meters). I'm inspecting my ropes and crampons. We've got all of November to complete the climb.

2022 reading project

Usually, for my annual reading project, I set myself a goal of a specific number of books for the upcoming year. This year, for example, it's 66: the number of years I'd lived when I set that goal. At this moment, I've got 13 books to go before the end of the year, and three of those on my stack are picture books—one of them in Portuguese, so it might take me a little longer than 15 minutes. But still. This is doable.

This next coming year, though, I was thinking about all the big books I haven't read—because of that goal: five books a month doesn't really allow for big books. And so I thought, what about changing things up: make next year a leisurely big-book year? One book a month.

I will not be reading À la recherche du temps perdu, at some 3,000 pages (and that is only the thirteenth-longest novel out there, the longest, written in Tamil, being 22,400 pages). I'm thinking more along the lines of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste (496 pages) and The Warmth of Other Suns (640 pages), both of which I've wanted to read, but I've felt I needed the luxury of time. There's Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I've owned for decades, but... it's so long! (My preferred length is less than 300 pages; this one is 896.) And Richard Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (720 pages), about the Vietnam War, also one I've wanted to read forever. At least, I think I want to read it. I might also allow the luxury of the veto in this next challenge—given that I will be spending weeks with these books. If, one hundred pages in, it hasn't grabbed my attention—on to the next big book.

In fiction, there's John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy (624 pages) or Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman (464 pages). Or War and Peace (1,350 pages), which I have already promised a friend I would read—so I guess that's on the list. Perhaps a Stephen King volume or two (I have already read The Stand [1,200 pages]—it opened my eyes to the very possibility of big books being... possible). I'm sure I'll find others.

Plus, I seem to have stumbled on the Greek classics (a report on The Iliad will be coming in a few weeks), so there's always The Odyssey—in two translations, because that's how the venerable Professor McCall, my online Stanford instructor, recommends we read these—since we can't read (or hear) the original Greek. I'm thinking Lattimore and Lombardo. That should take me a month, easy.

So many good long books out there. I will, hopefully, also be able to intersperse short reads—or at least picture books—in amongst the longer ones. But I'm happy to have a goal for 2022: twelve long reads. Huzzah!

P.S. I'd forgotten, but I wrote about just such a goal a while ago. I think now is the time.

Book Report: The Vanishing Lake

53. Paddy Donnelly, The Vanishing Lake (2021) (10/23/21)

Because I'm falling a little behind in my reading project (13 books to go in just over 2 months), I treated myself to a few award-winning picture books to fill in the gaps. The Vanishing Lake (gold medal in the Independent Book Publisher, or IPPY, Awards) is about just that: a lake in the mountains of Northern Ireland that occasionally, mysteriously, empties out, and then, with the next rains, fills up again. 

Young Meara's grandfather lives on the lake with his pet otter, Cara. Whenever the water disappears, Meara asks him why—and he has a host of whimsical explanations. Thirsty sheep. Narwhals that punch holes in the lake bottom. A giant who, when it gets very cold and the water freezes through, uses the lake as a giant ice cube. She, however, is skeptical. Finally, her granddad says, "Follow me," and he leads her  high into the surrounding mountains where they have a good view over the lake. And there, finally, she is able to see what happens—something so amazing that she can barely believe her eyes. (I will not spoil the surprise. It's a good one.)

In an author's note, Donnelly explains that the mysterious lake in the book actually does exist. It is called Loughareema. "Scientists believe that the lake disappears and reappears because of its leaky chalk bed, loose soil, and plentiful holes at the bottom of the lake." When the lake fills up again, the water pressure unclogs the holes, and it drains out, only to be refilled with rainfall. Over and over. "With a wonder like this on our doorstep growing up, it was easy to take it for granted, however these magical spots in nature are all around us if you look closely. The combination of scientific discovery and a little imagination can help you discover extraordinary stories everywhere."

Here are a few spreads from the book. Donnelly creates his illustrations digitally, and this is the first book this prolific picture-book illustrator has authored.