Title: Five Minds for the Future, by Howard Gardner

ISBN: 139781591399124, Harvard Business School Press

About the author: Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elizabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and twenty-one honorary degrees, he is the author of more than twenty books, including Changing Minds, Good Work, and Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons.

From the dust jacket: The world of the future will demand capacities that, until now, have been mere options. Have you begun developing those capacities—in yourself and others?

We live in a time of vast changes that include accelerating globalization, mounting quantities of information, the growing hegemony of science and technology, and the clash of civilizations.  Those changes call for new ways of learning and thinking in school, business, and the professions. In Five Minds for the Future, noted psychologist Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead:

 ·        The disciplinary mind—mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft

 ·        The synthesizing mind—ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others

 ·        The creating mind—capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena

 ·        The respectful mind—awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings

 ·        The ethical mind—fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and citizen

Review:  Thoughtful and visionary in scope. Howard Gardner has long been a trailer-blazer in educational psychology. I have read all of his books and recommend all of them, this present work included. I do, however, wish that he had treated this work as a hierarchy of values rather than as states of mind.   Gardner writes, “One may reasonably ask: Why these five particular minds? My brief answer is this: the five minds just introduced are the kinds of minds that are particularly at a premium in the world of today and will be even more so tomorrow. They span both the cognitive spectrum and the human enterprise—in that they are comprehensive, global.  We know something about how to cultivate them.” Indeed we do, but when you compare these five values with contemporary educational policy, especially the practice of “teaching to the test” one has to wonder how much reason there is for optimism.

Gardner admits his outline for the future is ambitious, even grandiose, but it takes little imagination to realize how much better off we would be as a nation if we could replace No Child Left Behind with Five Minds for the Future.

In Chapter Six, Gardner disputes Judith Rich Harris’s claim in The Nurture Assumption that the “influence of parents pales in comparison to that exerted by peers.” He says “she has mistakenly construed a situation that happens to characterize parts of contemporary American society as a law of evolutionary psychology.” Sorry, but a one-line refutation without supporting studies will not do here. Harris’ research is not so simply stated; it is nuanced and not easily dismissed, in my view, even by the likes of Howard Gardner.    

 Discussion:  How do these frames of mind square with your own values? What should we add to the list?

Title: Dancing in My Nightgown: The Rhythms of Widowhood, by Betty Auchard

ISBN: 139781932173758, Stephens Press, LLC

About the author: Betty Auchard was a retired art teacher when her husband Denny died. For her, writing became a way to heal, eventually taking on a life of its own. Her stories have been published in Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul series and the San Jose Mercury News and other periodicals. In addition to writing full time, she presents the stories from this book to audiences in California’s Bay Area and beyond. She still lives happily within driving distance of her four children and eleven grandchildren.

From the dust jacket: When she loses her husband of almost 49 years to cancer, widowhood forces Betty to find out what she can do on her own. She has a lot to learn, having never been single before. She didn’t know how to put gas in her car. She was not freeway literate, nor had she ever used a computer. And she had never paid the bills by herself.

Betty’s road to self-sufficiency is filled with laughter, creativity, connection, and transformation—and tears, self-doubt, and lonely nights. Through it all, Betty lands on her feet, ready for whatever comes next. The last page doesn’t feel like an ending at all because, really it’s just a beginning.

Review: Inspiring, existentially hopeful and worth reading a second time. This book succeeds on several levels: it offers hope to widows and widowers, it is inspiring to would-be writers demonstrating that it’s never too late to start a writing career and it is an example of writing so in touch with the reader that it reminds me of the personalizing prose of A River Runs Through It.  Although there are no parallels, Betty Auchard’s writing will strike you as that of a letter from a relative. 

Auchard’s grief, and the bittersweet revelations she experiences as she progresses through widowhood, are both sad and humorous. She has the rare talent of being able to engage us in experiencing her loss as our loss and her triumph as ours.  The demographics for this book are such that it will likely be in greater demand ten years from now than it is today. 

Discussion: What effect will the aging baby-boom generation have on the way we view the loss of a spouse?

Title: The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America, by Allan M. Brandt

ISBN: 13978046507047-3, Basic Books

About the author:  Allan. M. Brandt is the Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His previous writings include the book No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the Unites States Since 1880.

From the dust jacket: From agriculture to big business, from medicine to politics, The Cigarette Century is the definitive account of how smoking came to be so deeply implicated in our culture, science, policy, and law.

The invention of mass marketing led to cigarettes being emblazoned in advertising and film, deeply tied to modern notions of glamour and sex appeal. It is hard to find a photo of Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall without a cigarette. No product has been so heavily promoted or has become so deeply entrenched in American consciousness.

The Cigarette Century shows in striking detail how the cigarette reflects the most powerful cultural and political debates of our time. It illustrates how one ephemeral (and largely useless) product came to play such a dominate role in so many aspects of our lives—and our deaths. 

Review: The Cigarette Century is an extraordinary work, worthy of the following claim: Any vision of Twentieth-Century American history that does not include Allan Brandt’s observations of the significant influence of the tobacco industry and how it has affected our culture will be woefully incomplete.  Brandt’s detailed history of the cultural influence of the tobacco industry provides one of the greatest moral mysteries in contemporary history. And the mystery is this: How can we accept the needless death of millions of people, and perhaps a billion in the twenty first century, without marching in the streets in protest? Tobacco industry executives have committed every moral violation conceivable to the point where perjury is a business necessity, and yet the sale of cigarettes is still a growth industry.

One of the most striking effects of the tobacco industry’s efforts to cast doubt about the serious health risks due to smoking is something that Brandt does not mention per se, but the result is clear by his exposition. The incessant, never-ending barrage of questions spurred by the cigarette industry to question whether smoking is really harmful established an ethos of psychological indecisiveness so powerful that it has spilled over to any and all questions of public policy, general health, and the environment.  Name the subject and, regardless of the claims by reputable scientists, if Madison Avenue can persist in questioning the assumptions then American media will function as a surrogate representative frequently suggesting that the jury is still out on whatever question is fronted.  The tobacco industry, through the use of psychologists and ad men, stripped our psychology of being able to make up our mind about incredibly simple, black and white issues as long as someone is dangling questions over the airways.

Brandt points out that there are currently over 40 million downloadable documents pertaining to this issue on the Internet, many of which the tobacco industry fought to keep confidential. Thanks to this masterful analysis, one does not have to read them all to get at the heart of what has transpired. The exploits of the tobacco industry will one day, I suspect, go down as one of the greatest moral lapses in human history.  If you want to understand it, you will need to read this book.   

Discussion: It is estimated that in the twenty first century, if present smoking rates around the world continue, one billion people will die from the ravages of cigarettes.  Only one question: Why does it have to happen?

Title: How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman, M.D.

ISBN: 139780618610037, Houghton Mifflin

About the author:  Jerome Groopman, M.DS. holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He has published more than 150 scientific articles. He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and has written editorials on policy issues for The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

From the dust jacket: On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms with eighteen seconds.  In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences.  In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shoes when and how they can—without our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses.

Review: Jerome Groopman does more than show that doctors are just as human as the rest of us. He also makes it clear, without saying so, that the whole of humanity suffers from the same propensity for making snap judgments when thoughtful reflection is called for.  Groopman tells that the majority of medical errors regarding misguided care are not due to technical errors, but mistakes in judgment: cognitive mistakes.  He tells us that “as many as 15 percent of all diagnoses are inaccurate.” And that doctors are apt to make “attribution errors when patients fit a negative stereotype.” 

Groopman writes, “The cognitive mistakes that account for most misdiagnoses are not recognized by physicians; they largely reside below the level of conscious thinking. When you or your loved one asks simply, ‘What else could it be?’ you help bring closer to the surface the reality of uncertainty in medicine. ‘What else could it be?’ is a key safeguard against these errors in thinking: premature closure, framing effect, availability from recent experience, the bias that the hoofbeats are horses and not zebras. Each cognitive error constrains the pursuit of answers, and correcting the error helps the doctor think of a test or procedure that he didn’t previously consider and can make the diagnosis.”

It is ironic that the older a person is today, the more infallible they seem to think doctors are. It should be precisely the opposite; those of us with many years of life experience should know that doctors are people and are subject to the same errors of judgment common to the rest of us.  This book is not so much an expositional study of the way doctors think as it is representative of one experienced doctor’s opinion based upon years of practice. It does, however, meet with my personal experience of having witnessed multiple misdiagnoses due to what appeared to have been snap judgments.  Reading this book might amount to a simple matter of self-preservation.   

Discussion: How do we hold doctors more accountable without becoming belligerent and obnoxious?

Title: Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis and the People who pay the Price, by Jonathan Cohn

ISBN:  9780060580452, HarperCollins

About the author:  Jonathan Cohn is senior editor at The New Republic, where he has written about national politics and its impact on American communities for the past decade. He is also a contributing editor at the American Prospect and a senior fellow at the think tank Demos. Cohn, who has been a media fellow with the Kaiser Foundation, has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Slate, and The Washington Monthly. A graduate of Harvard, he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife and two children.

From the dust jacket: America’s health care system is unraveling. Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families—unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing something even more valuable: their health or even their lives. In this powerful work of original reportage, Jonathan Cohn travels across the United States—the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship—to investigate why this crisis is happening and see firsthand its impact on ordinary citizens.  The stories he brings back are tragic and infuriating.

Review: Jonathan Cohn offers a very calm, deliberate, well-reasoned and stunning exposition of the crisis, and of the moral indefensibility, of private health insurance in America. This book is not a screed; it is a work filled with living examples of why private is inferior to public interest when it comes to medical insurance.  As Cohn points out, it’s not in the interest of insurance companies to pay claims. Insurance companies save money by withholding payouts.  Many private insurers escape paying claims by exploiting loop holes in their policies; they pass on their savings in the form of seven figure salaries for their executives. And they achieve their success through a relentless drive to exploit those without the resources to put up a fight.

Cohn’s exposition uses examples of people all over the country who, although covered by insurance, were in reality suffering an illusion of coverage because when they really needed their insurance it was inadequate or nonexistent.  Everywhere today, politicians champion full coverage for private health insurance and yet, as Cohn’s book makes clear, there is far too little attention about whether or not the insurance is of any real value.

Everyone interested in the future of America should read this work.

I have also discussed this book in an essay titled Sick, Sicko and the Absurdity of American Health Care.

Discussion: Why is it so hard to convince Americans that universal healthcare should be thought of as a common good? 

Title: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo

ISBN 9781400064113, Random House

About the author:  Philip Zimbardo is professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and has also taught at Yale University, New York University, and Columbia University. He is the co-author of Psychology and Life and the author of Shyness, which together have sold more than 2.5 million copies. Zimbardo has been president of the American Psychological Association and is now director of the Stanford Center on Interdisciplinary Policy, Educational, and Research on Terrorism. He has also narrated the award-winning PBS series Discovering Psychology. 

From the dust jacket: What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is in danger of crossing it?

Zimbardo is perhaps best known as the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Here, for the first time and in vivid detail, he tells the full story of this landmark study, in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into “guards” and “inmates” and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners.

By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the “bad barrel” –the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around. This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are.

Review: It is both sad and deeply ironic that so much is known about so many aspects of human behavior and yet for most people the subject of good and evil represents a mystery.  Public discourse on the subject, if it exists at all, is several centuries behind what is known. Zimbardo writes, “We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver’s skills or intentions.” The sad thing is that this is easy to appreciate when the subject is ourselves and we find we have made an egregious error or have discovered that we are guilty of having committed a crime without even realizing that we were on the verge of breaking the law. It’s sad because we seem incapable of this kind of reasoning when someone else is the accused, especially when we view them as not being one of us.

As Zimbardo makes clear, one cannot comprehend the notion of good and evil in a psychological context without investigating the social dynamics of power, conformity, and obedience. He writes, “Peer pressure has been identified as one social force that makes people, especially adolescents, do strange things—anything—to be accepted. However, the quest for the Inner Ring is nurtured from within. There is no peer-pressure power without that push from self-pressure for Them to want You. It makes people willing to suffer through painful, humiliating initiation rites in fraternities, cults, social clubs, or the military. It justifies for many suffering a lifelong existence climbing the corporate ladder.”

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this work. If you are truly interested in the dynamics of human behavior and, in particular, that of the concept of good and evil then you will want to read this book.

This work is mentioned in the essay, Liberal vs. Conservative: Peace at Last.

 Discussion: Why is the concept of good and evil so thoroughly misunderstood and why is there so much resistance to a public dialogue about it?

Title: Why Truth is Beauty: A History of Symmetry, by Ian Stewart

ISBN 9780465082360, Basic Books

About the author: Ian Stewart is professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick and director of its Mathematics Awareness Centre. He has written over 140 research papers on such subjects as symmetry in dynamics, pattern formation, chaos, and mathematical biology, as well as numerous popular books, including Letters to a Young Mathematician, Does God Play Dice?, Nature’s Numbers, The Annotated Flatland, and Flatterland. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. He lives in Coventry England.  

From the dust jacket: Hidden in the heart of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, and modern cosmology lies one concept: symmetry.

Symmetry has been a key idea for artists, architects and musicians for centuries, but within mathematics it remained, until recently, an arcane pursuit. In the twentieth century, however, symmetry emerged as central to the most fundamental ideas in physics and cosmology. Why Beauty Is Truth tells its history, from ancient Babylon to twenty-first century physics.

It is a peculiar history, and the mathematicians who contributed to symmetry’s ascendancy mirror its fascinating puzzles and dramatic depth. We meet Girolamo Cardano, the Renaissance Italian rogue, scholar, and gambler who stole the modern method of solving cubic equations and published it in the first important book on algebra. We meet Evariste Galois, a young revolutionary who single handedly refashioned the whole of mathematics by founding the field of group theory—only to die at age nineteen in a duel over a woman before publishing any of his work. Perhaps most curious is William Rowan Hamilton, who carved his most significant discovery into a stone bridge between bout of alcoholic delirium.

Review: I suspect one must be somewhat enamored by the subject of mathematics to truly appreciate this book. But if you are you are, then you are in for a treat.  Stewart writes, “Throughout history, mathematics has been enriched from two different sources. One is the natural world, the other the abstract world of logical thought. It is these two in combination that give mathematics its power to inform us about the universe…The story of symmetry demonstrates how even a negative answer to a good question can lead to deep and fundamental mathematics… The true strength of mathematics lies precisely in this remarkable fusion of the human sense of pattern (‘beauty’) with the physical world, which acts both as a reality check (‘truth’) and as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.”

In a similar fashion that historian Will Durant brought personality into the subject of philosophy and made it seem more important and understandable, Ian Stewart does so with mathematics and in so doing he weaves the notion of symmetry into the psyche.  

 Discussion: Why is it so hard to apply reasoning with the aspirational symmetry of mathematics to the other aspects of our lives?

Title: Endangered Species: How We Can Avoid Mass Destruction and Build a Lasting Peace, By Stephen M. Younger

ISBN 9780061139512, HarperCollins

About the author:  Stephen M. Younger is a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He recently retired as a senior fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was in charge of nuclear weapons research and development. From 2001 to 2004, he was director of Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the U.S Department of Defense.

From the dust jacket: A former nuclear weapons designer discusses the increasing threat of weapons of mass destruction and offers ideas on how to construct the best practical world consistent with our human nature. “I have been in the nuclear weapons business for over twenty years, and I have always been a pacifist.” Stephen M. Younger looks into the heart of humankind to present a practical plan for ending mass violence, the scourge of modern times and a threat to our species. Do our genes condemn us to ever greater acts of barbarism? Do our complex societies, so necessary to modern life, include a fundamental flaw that drives us to periodic wars and genocide? Why has an enduring peace proven so elusive?

Younger understands, as few others can, our potential for violence. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction means that any nation, group, or even individual could cause unimaginable carnage. And the accelerating pace of communications and transportation mean that things can happen faster than we can think about them. Looking across our knowledge of psychology, history, politics, and technology, Younger presents a convincing argument that we can escape our spiral into global destruction. But we haven’t a moment to lose.  

Review: A reasoned approach for avoiding catastrophe. Younger writes, “The ability today to cause mass destruction—more than 100,000 deaths—is spreading from nation states to small groups and even individuals. Fifty years ago it took an invading army of massive aerial bombardment to cause such carnage, but today the same effect can be caused by a single nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon, tools of destruction that are becoming available to more and more countries and even terrorist organizations.  No longer will our future be determined by a small number of countries with wealth and resources to support large armed forces. Any organization that wants the tools of mass destruction will have them.” Younger says that the greatest threat we face in the future, “comes down to three fundamental aspects of our own humanity. First, while we may not be inherently violent as individuals, we have the potential for violence if we are placed in the right circumstances. Second, our need for companionship drives us to belong to groups, from families to nations, with the associated ability to alienate and dehumanize those in other groups. Third we are naturally competitive and like to show our superiority, including through the use of violence.”

Younger says our nature is less a problem than the systems we put in place to deal with it. He argues that peace is possible but it will take a sustained effort on the part of peace loving individuals. I agree, but we are past the notion that democracy is a simple solution; one has only to imagine what might happen if there were free elections today in Pakistan.  Endangered Species provides a thoughtful, big picture approach to a stable future.

 Discussion: How do we get onto a peaceful footing with those whose worldviews clash with our own?

Title: Why We Read What We Read, by John Heath and Lisa Adams

ISBN 139781402210549, Source Books

About the authors:  John Heath is an award-winning teacher, scholar and lecturer. He co-authored Who Killed Homer? and has appeared on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Writer, editor and teacher Lisa Adams is a recipient of the Woodall Essay Prize and the McCann Short Fiction Award.

From the dust jacket: What do weight loss, evil emperors and tales of redemption have in common?

We readers have many dirty little secrets—and our bestselling books are spilling all of them. We can’t resist conspiratorial crooks or the number7. We have bought millions of books about cheese. And over a million of us read more than 50 nearly identical books every single year.

In what we read, Lisa Adams and John Heath take an insightful and often hilarious tour through nearly 200 bestselling books, ferreting out their persistent themes and determining what those say about what we believe and how we relate to one another.

Review: If you are a writer, a publisher or are in any way seriously interested in the reading habits of the American public, you may want to read this book more than once. Heath and Adams write in a light-hearted humorous tone and at times it masks their subtle conclusions which are serious and significant.

Book sales in 2005 totaled 25.1 billion dollars. Heath and Adams report what many of us already suspect: too many people choose to read material that is comforting and simplistic and that which vilifies our differences with others instead of helping us to understand one another. They write, “Not only do our reading habits undermine the process of gaining genuine insight into ourselves and the world, they are distinctly undemocratic. By refusing to read anything that would surprise or challenge us—by denying the very possibility that other perspectives, interpretations, or conclusions could have value—we remove ourselves from democratic discourse and severely limit our options. Wadding our ears with familiar comforts, we become increasingly imperative and fearful; indeed, we become extremists, unwilling or unable to endure criticism or debate.”

This book examines the topics of diet, wealth, inspiration, and good vs. evil, political nonfiction, love, romance and relationships, religion and spirituality among others.

In the space allotted here I can barely scratch the surface of the usefulness of this work.  What’s not being read speaks as loudly as what is being read.  Again they write: “Our reading too often simplifies, rather than enriches; validates, rather than undermines; explains, rather than adumbrates; commands, rather than suggests; answers, rather than questions; pardons, rather than challenges; accuses, rather than seeks to understand. It’s a vicious circle that simply cannot cure what ails.”  The whole point of Sept-U is that we do cure what ails.

Discussion: How do we turn the tide and successfully encourage people to read challenging books?

Title: Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad. by Frances Moore Lappé
ISBN 9780979414244, Small Planet MEDIA

About the author:  Frances Moore Lappé’s sixteen books have been translated into over 20 languages and used in hundreds of colleges and universities.  She speaks widely to university and other audiences. She has appeared on the Today Show, PBS NOW, All Things Considered, the Diane Rehm Show, and Living on Earth, among other major media. Articles by or about her have appeared in O-The Oprah Magazine, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and People Magazine, among many other publications.

Lappé’ is a founding councilor of the World Future Council and recipient of 17 honorary doctorates as well as the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel.”

From the dust jacket: Frances Moore Lappé has been called a “warrior for hope.” But to create hope we may have to let go of some old assumptions, says Lappé. Open these pages and you will discover radically new ways of thinking about fear, power, democracy and hope itself.

In a vibrant, intimate voice, Lappé challenges us to examine our mental frame—our core assumptions about who we are and how the world works. They will determine whether humanity can save this beautiful planet, she says. Unmasking the dominant failing frame, Lappé offers fresh insights, starling facts and stirring vignettes through which readers uncover an emerging new empowering frame. “My intent is to enable us to see what is happening all around us but is still invisible to most of us,” she writes.

Lappé’s startling message leaves readers felling liberated and courageous.

Review: As with my own experience with aging, Lappé says she is not mellowing, but is indeed becoming less patient. She writes, “In the span of my own lifetime, both historical evidence and breakthroughs in knowledge have wiped out all our excuses. We know how to end this needless suffering, and we have the resources to do it. From sociology and anthropology to economics, from education and ecology to systems analysis…the evidence is in. We know what works.” 

Lappé argues that the dominant conception of reality that resides in the public mind is one of scarcity and that it is a shabby caricature of humanity. She employs the terms “thin democracy vs. living democracy” to show what is possible simply by opening our minds to what we might achieve if we put our minds to the task.  

Lappé provides a “Spiral of Powerless” chart based upon our misreading of the opportunities at hand because of our mentality of scarcity and she provides a “Spiral of Empowerment” on the premise of an abundance of goods and goodwill. 

This work is mentioned in the essay, Liberal vs. Conservative: Peace at Last.

Discussion: What will it take to convince people that it is indeed possible to help shape a better future? 

Title: The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier
ISBN 139780618242955, Houghton Mifflin

About the author:  Natalie Angier writes about biology for the New York Times, for which she has won a Pulitzer Prize, an American Association for the Advancement of Science journalism award, and other honors. She is the author of The Beauty of the Beastly, Natural Obsessions, and Woman: An Intimate Geography, which was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Award finalist and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles, the Chicago Tribune, People, National Public Radio, the Village Voice, and Publishers Weekly, among others. Angier lives with her husband and daughter outside Washington D.C.

From the dust jacket: With the singular intelligence and exuberance that made Woman an international sensation, Natalie Angier takes us on a whirligig tour of the scientific canon. She draws on conversations with hundreds of the world’s top scientists and on her own work as a Pulitzer Prize—winning writer for the New York Times to create a thoroughly entertaining guide to scientific literacy. People magazine said, ‘Angier has that rare dual talent: a true passion for science combined with a poet’s linguistic flair.’ Those gifts are on full display in The Canon, an ebullient celebration of science that stands to be a classic.

The Canon is a joyride through the major scientific disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Along the way, we learn what is actually happening when our ice cream melts or our coffee gets cold, what our liver cells do when we get caramel, why the horse is an example of evolution at work, and how we’re all made of stardust. It’s Lewis Carroll meets Lewis Thomas – a book that will enrapture, inspire, and enlighten.   

Review: This is a truly delightful book. I watched Natalie Angier on Book TV and almost stopped because she was going on and on about her dental problems and it took a while for her message to become clear.  But clear it is, and fascinatingly so. This book is something akin to an intellectual GPS device in that it better enables the reader to get a fix on scientific reality. Angier is truly a gifted explainer.

Angier writes, “Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face.  It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.”  She continues, “To say that there is an objective reality, and that it exists and can be understood, is one of those plain-truth poems of science that is nearly bottomless in its beauty. It is easy to forget that there is an objective, concrete universe, an outerverse measured in light years, a microwave trading in angstroms, the currency of atoms; we’ve succeeded so well in shaping daily reality to reflect the very narrow parameters and needs of Homo sapiens.”  

The chapter on probabilities alone is worth the price of the book and the same can be said for the chapter on calibration. In biology, she tells us we should never believe our disbelief and that evolution is real if anything is. And then there is this gem: Nature needs nurture, nurture kneads nature, and the codependent conversation never ends. It is ongoing everywhere within you. People often have the impression that if something is ‘encoded in their DNA’ it must be static and unreachable. The environment, by contrast, is thought to be easily changed. Yet this impression is misleading. Your genome is not walled off from its setting. Every cell is a mad Manhattan microhabitat, and every genome a player in it. Genomes are responsive, open to change and modification.” 

My favorite chapter is on astronomy, where the author reminds us that almost everything we know about the universe we have learned from the study of light.

Discussion: Science is the most interesting, most exciting and most inspiring subject there is. Why is it so hard for this message to come through?