Category: History

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille (Non fiction)

A comprehensive and detailed account of The Sullivan Institute — a (somewhat secret) urban commune in New York City that ran a 35 year “experiment” to reengineer family, sex, and social life.  Starting in the 50s as a combination of psychotherapy and radical politics, it evolved into an oppressive cult before finally crumbling in the early 90s (largely as a result of various salacious court cases).

Stille compiled the narrative from extensive interviews, written member accounts, and court case documentation.  He proceeds linearly through time covering various motivations and experiences as well as the long dissolution into a bit of a nightmare and the “waking up” of those who went mainstream once it all fell apart.

Begun in the 50s by avowed Marxists, the goal of the Institute was partially to bring the “human” into Marx.  The founders came to see: “the nuclear family as the basic unit of capitalist production, the means by which the system perpetuated itself to the detriment of individual growth.  Parents tamed and squelched their children’s most vital needs in order to turn them into obedient and productive citizens.”  They felt that growth could only occur only through interaction with others.  Unusually for therapy at the time, therapists encouraged complete patient dependence — telling patients what to do in every aspect of their life.  Members were forced to break all bonds with those outside the group, they were not allowed to form pair bonds, and were not allowed to raise their children, being told that they would be “poison” to those children.

What fascinated me was how the group fit into the times — starting with Marxist theories and communal living and progressing through the 70s where alternative therapies— EST, TM, rebirthing, etc. — were thriving.  And the way initial egalitarianism devolved into hierarchical conformity with a controlling personality at the top.  The pattern matches those of cults, certain religious orders (ultra-orthodox Jews, strict evangelical Christians, …), and true communist countries as a whole: impose a demanding lifestyle on members, maintain a boundary between the group and the outside, and ostracize those who want to leave.  And the people in this group were intelligent and well-educated.  In its heyday, the group boasted famous members such as Jackson Pollack, Lucinda Childs, Richard Price, members of the musical group Sha Na Na, etc.

Completely fascinating.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 20th, 2023

The Doctors Blackwell by Janice P. Nimura (History)

This is the story about Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell — pioneers in the efforts to bring women into medicine — and it was not what I expected (it was so much better!) The well-researched book (which includes many direct excerpts from journals and letters) is a thorough biography of both women from their immigrant childhood in Cincinnati through to the fight to be able to attend medical school (Elizabeth was the first woman in American to receive an MD in 1849) and their continuing efforts to open the field to women.

What I liked about the book is that it was no Hallmark Special. These women were motivated by female accomplishment, not by the more “womanly” desires to help and comfort. In fact, neither one had much in the way of empathy — Elizabeth was disgusted by human bodies and managed to take meticulous notes on patient’s dying agonies while Emily was attracted by the science, but not the humans. Elizabeth was also none too happy with the women’s movement, or with women in general, finding most of them “petty, trifling, priest-ridden, gossiping, stupid, and inane.” You can kind of see her point at times. As an interesting side note, none of the five Blackwell sisters ever married, and two of their brothers married suffragettes.

The other utterly fascinating thing about the book was the detail on medical practice, hygiene, and general living conditions of the time. The details of how medical schools operated, what kind of medicine was practiced (leeches, patent medicines, and an overuse of mercury based calomel), and the (lack of) hygiene in both medical and living situations was a window into another world — and a world not well represented by historical fiction which always seems to bring a modern sensibility to a few stray details from the past. I’m not a big non-fiction reader, finding most offerings full of tangents, muddied presentation and overly interpreted facts with specific agendas in mind, but this book was well-structured, full of relevant detail, and presented the main characters as real human beings who don’t necessarily match our ideals of individuals now or in the past.

A new (to me) word: valetudinarian — a person who is unduly anxious about their health. Useful!

Quotes:
“The limited goal of woman suffrage — winning the vote for women who were still enslaved by their own ignorance — was, she believed, woefully premature. What good was a vote if one didn’t know how to think independently?”

“The problem was not the tyranny of men, she wrote, but the disappointing weakness of women. ‘Women are feeble, narrow, frivolous at present, ignorant of their own capacities, and undeveloped in thought and feeling,’ she lectured her well-wisher. ‘The exclusion and constraint woman suffers, is not the result of purposed injury or premeditated insult. It has arisen naturally, without violence, simply because woman has desired nothing more.’”

“It was more important to prove the capacities of women and show them the way forward into the light, out of the shadow of their menfolk. For women, just as for the enslaved, the first step must be freedom. ‘The study and practice of medicine is in my thought but one means to a great end,’ Elizabeth wrote. Caring for suffering individuals had never been the engine that drove her. In becoming a doctor, she meant to heal humanity.”

“ ‘As I learnt to realize slavery & hate it, deeply eternally, while living amongst slaves — so I am learning to curse from the bottom of my soul this heathenish society of the nineteenth century, surrounded here by its miserable victims,’ she wrote. The conundrum of woman’s lot had never seemed clearer: women could not rise until the attitudes of their society shifted, but social mores would never change without women’s leadership, ‘so there seems to me, no opening in the circle.’ Even among the educated women of her acquaintance, few seemed formed for noble causes.”

The Churchill Sisters by Dr. Rachel Trethewey (History / Biography)

Writing: 3/5 Coverage: 4/5 Accessibility: 5/5

This is the story of Winston Churchill’s three daughters: Diana, Sarah, and Mary. The author pulls together a pretty decent narrative from personal diaries, articles, and massive amounts of correspondence between family members and friends. Unlike fictionalized history (which I hate), she never pretends to know what a character is thinking or feeling, although she does occasionally opine about things that “must have been difficult” or provides context about what kind of behavior was “normal” for that time and place.

I found this easy and interesting to read. I did have to ask myself what made it interesting. While Sarah was a reasonably well known actress, neither of the other sisters accomplished anything particularly spectacular. It was kind of like watching Downton Abbey — these sisters were able to lead very interesting lives because their father was who he was and we get to live vicariously. And they were interesting lives! They each were able to travel with him (often his wife was unavailable), met many heads of state including FDR and “Uncle” Joe Stalin, and be present for some important pieces of history such as the Yalta conference.

There was plenty of discussion of psychology and the changing role for women in society. Plenty of heartbreak and insight into how the other half lived and plenty of factual tidbits that were surprising, yet not important enough to bring out in more official histories (eg the squalor including bedbugs at the Yalta conference — yuck!)

Worth reading.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on November 23rd, 2021.

Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown (Non-Fiction History)

The acclaimed author of The Boys in the Boat (which I loved) tackles Japanese Americans in WWII — both those interned in camps following FDRs Executive Order 9066 and those who served in the military’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team — the single Japanese American unit, which also happened the most highly decorated.

While dealing with — let’s face it — some deeply depressing and disturbing topics — Brown makes it clear from the start that this is the story of Victors, not Victims. And that is how the story reads. This is the story of how a diverse group of people (not everyone in a single ethnic group is the same, even as they are treated as the same!) faced adversity and made the best of it. Through extensive research and first person interviews, Brown follows three primary characters who each ended up in the 442nd: Kats Miho from Hawaii, Rudy Tokiwa from Salinas (within California’s Exclusion Zone) and Fred Shiosaki from Hillyard, WA (outside Washington’s Exclusion Zone). An additional thread follows Gordon Hirabayashi as he makes his way through the courts protesting the unconstitutionality of interning American citizens based on their ethnicity. The character set expands to include their families, friends, and comrades-at-arms while the story extends from Pearl Harbor to incarceration to military draft to battle to returns home to legislation (finally) apologizing to the community and paying (some) restitution to survivors.

It is a massive undertaking but Brown’s style makes it appear effortless (like Fred Astaire’s dancing). He gets to the essence of every thought and action. Through personal interviews and letters, we gain access to the actual (not fictionalized) thoughts, discussions, and noticed details of those involved. Often these brought tears to my eyes. Reading first-person accounts is so very different than what I or a novelist imagines in any situation. Facts and figures, as well as historical context, are inserted at just the right moments.

I found the book fascinating from start to finish. While I was aware of the broad strokes of the treatment of Japanese Americans during the war, I was not aware of the many, many, tiny strokes that comprised it. I give this book a strong five star rating and highly recommend but if I were to point out a couple of negatives (which it appears I’m about to do) it would be that he does sometimes descend into hyperbole — for example when describing a situation, such as the conditions initial Japanese immigrants found in the late 1800s, from his own perspective rather an individual’s recollection and report. He also inserts anecdotes — all but one negative — about the treatment of Japanese Americans by neighbors without including any positive anecdotes (there must be some) or giving any kind of statistics on how broad those negative behaviors actually were.

Thank you to Penguin Group Viking and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on May 11th, 2021.

War: How Conflict Shaped Us by Margaret MacMillan (Non-fiction History)

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on October 6th, 2020.

This is a surprisingly engaging study of War as a human activity throughout history — rather than the more commonplace in-depth study of a particular conflict. With tight (read non-meandering, non-dry, non-dull) prose, MacMillan studies War from its evolution across the ages: how the ability to make war and changes in human society progress inextricably; the evolution of war across changes in society and technical advancement; the shift from King and Country to nationalism and our view of warriors; what induces people to fight, the role of civilians, and the efforts to control and regulate something as completely uncontrollable as the license to slaughter other human beings. Drawing on a wide variety of examples — from the Peloppenesian and Punic wars to more modern conflicts and everything in between — she brings this uniquely human activity into a sobering perspective.

Like most historians, MacMillan provides an impressive array of sources at the end — what I particularly appreciated is that a significant portion of those referred to individual accounts — diaries, letters, etc. This gave her narrative the perspective of the individual as well as the big picture trends. Her attention to detail pervades from the high-level machinations of governments, kings, and rebels down to the experiences of individual foot soldiers, civilians, prisoners, and diplomats.

Here are some parts that stuck with me for a variety of reasons:

• For much of history the records were made and kept by that minority who could read and write. WWI was groundbreaking in that the majority of combatants were literate.
• We have an antipathy to war that makes us avoid its study and understanding.
• A paradox of war: growing state power and the emergence of larger states are the result of war but can also then bring peace. A strong state keeps a monopoly on force and violence but keeps things peaceful within. For example, Tito kept Yugoslavia together — once he toppled all the ethnic groups within started killing each other. Similarly, the Chinese Qin empire in 221 BC was run by a ruthless tyrant but was remembered with gratitude as the ruler who brought peace and order to China.
• After Waterloo, the British proudly wore dentures made from battlefield dead and used their skeletons as fertilizer.
• Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to — many came to war to avoid shame, not for glory or duty.
• People at home hate the enemy more than the fighters do. The fighters have pity for each other and understand how similar they are. Those at home see the enemy as one anonymous “they”.
• The longer or costlier the siege, the worse the treatment of the citizens afterwards.
• In WWII, Germany followed International prisoner protocols as long as they considered the prisoners their racial equals — the French and British, not the Poles or Russians.
• The state of the British soldiers during the Boer war was so poor that society started a whole program to improve health of citizenry in order to have more fit soldiers.

While I thought I preferred her deep-dive books to this thematic one, I’ve found these concepts keep coming back into my brain. I’m realizing that it has shifted my way of thinking on the topic — which is exactly what happened to me with her book The War That Ended Peace (highly recommended — all about what led up to WWI). She has an ability to get to the heart of subjects, and her examples are illuminating because while I was aware of some before, I had not been aware of how they exemplified the theme.

Reading this book was both fascinating and depressing, though not in an emotionally wrenching way. While I was aware of all the conflicts she mentioned, the aggregation of violence and mass destruction through the ages makes it harder to ignore. Her concluding point is that we must keep thinking about War, despite our innate abhorrence of the topic, because it has reached a point (Total War, Modern War, high-tech weaponry) where we are threatening all of humanity.

A single quote: “War is a mystery both to those who fight and those of us who are on the sidelines. And it is a troubling and unsettling mystery. It should be abhorrent, but it is so often alluring and its values seductive. It promises glory and offers suffering and death. We who are non-combatants may fear the warriors, but we also admire, even love, them. And we cannot pretend we are not party of the same family, with the same potential for fighting.”

The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan (Non-fiction)

I was surprised at how much I loved this book. I’m a fiction reader and get easily bored (or horrified) by drawn out descriptions of battles, strategies, and political maneuvers. This book was fantastic because it focused on the “why.” The eponymous war (World War I) is literally the epilogue of this book. The first 600+ pages is on what happened in the 30+ years before that made the war possible … though not inevitable.

That is what really fascinated me about the story. MacMillan brings out the details of the individuals involved, the context of the time, the recent events, and the crises averted, to show that so many small things — had they gone just a little differently — might have averted the war that cost 8.5 million lives, with 8 million others missing, and 21 million wounded. Her style is ideal — every detail relevant, a cohesive structure that brings elements to light at the right time and a narrative style that brings the details together to make a coherent story. And no rambling! I don’t know why, but so many non-fiction writers seem to ramble endlessly!

In many places, the book read like a giant game of Risk. Large empires — some new (e.g. Germany had just unified in 1871), some dying (e.g. the Ottoman empire), some struggling to maintain the status quo (e.g. Austria Hungary) — each vying for status in the International community (largely by bickering over colonies and building up impressive militaries) while simultaneously dealing with internal strife in the form of nationalist movements from conquered peoples and new socialist / workers parties demanding rights. Philosophically, social Darwinism concepts had been introduced. Conrad, Austria Hungary’s chief of staff had the core belief (as did many others) that “existence was about struggle and that nations rose and fell depending on their ability to adapt.” MacMillan presents in-depth and well-documented character studies of all the players from the volatile and unpredictable Kaiser Wilhelm II, to his cousins, Britain’s Edward VII and the weak and unprepared Tsar Nicholas II (and his wife Alexandra — “a will of iron linked to not much brain and no knowledge”) to the spartan Franz Joseph of Austria Hungary as well as a panoply of prime ministers, ambassadors, military personnel and socialist leaders.

But my favorite line of all: “Finally…we should never underestimate the part played in human affairs by mistakes, muddles, or simply poor timing.”

As I read I kept having what I call my Gone With the Wind moments — I knew what was going to happen but I somehow kept hoping it would work out differently. With only verified quotes and actual events as material, MacMillan manages to convey the absolute desperation of many as the world drew closer and closer to war and the slow unraveling of the Concert of Europe. The description of this was chilling — rail and telegraph lines were cut, bank reserves were frozen, currency exchange stopped, trade stopped. “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life.” (attributed to Sir Edward Grey, Britain Foreign Secretary in 1914). Although written in 2013 (pre-Trump), she often draws unnerving parallels between the situations in 1914 and those of our current time.

Some advice for reading — if you’re like me and find 600 pages of dense history overwhelming and off putting — read one chapter at a time and take as long as you like. The contents are so memorable that you can pick it up days later and not have forgotten a thing.

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis (Non Fiction)

Fascinating book about the birth of the field now known as Behavioral Economics. Part biography, part history, part research summary, this is the story both of the evolution of a friendship and collaboration as well as the melding of two previously disconnected fields: Economics and Psychology.

After their first meeting around 1968, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were rarely apart. The decades long tight collaboration that resulted produced a stunning number of key insights and seminal papers on the psychology of Judgement and Decision Making. The primary idea: there is systematic bias in the way people make decisions. Their work was responsible for the fall of the concept of the “rational man.”

They studied the cognitive basis for common human errors and elaborated on a set of heuristics (simple rules) and cognitive biases that subconsciously influenced the way people formed judgements or made decisions. Many of the resulting concepts — such as Anchoring, Framing, Hindsight, and the Halo Effect — have become household terms. Their “Prospect Theory,” created in 1979 and developed in 1992, was a “psychologically more accurate” description of how people made decisions, replacing the previously accepted Utility Theory which claimed that people made decisions by rationally calculating the utility (or value) of all potential outcomes. Applications of this work are widespread, ranging across medicine (evidence based medicine), sports, finance, and military uses.

Some of the heuristics:
• Representativeness heuristic: the decision making shortcut that determines probability based on how well the subject is representative of a stereotype.
• Availability heuristic: the mental shortcut that makes decisions based on examples that come immediately to mind.
• Anchoring and adjustment heuristic: the influence of a previously suggested reference point (the anchor) on a person’s assessment of probability.
• Simulation heuristic: the shortcut for determining an event based on how easy it is to imagine – or “the power of unrealized possibilities to contaminate people’s minds.”

Some of the biases
• Recency bias: Decision making based on the relative ease of remembering something that happened recently rather than long ago.
• Vividness bias: bias based on the ease with which an option can be recalled.
• Hindsight bias: the tendency of people to overestimate their ability to have predicted an outcome that they could not have possibly predicted.
• Present bias: The tendency of people to undervalue future with respect to present.

The structure of the book follows the story of the two men. Though the closest of friends and collaborators until the last few years of Tversky’s life, their personalities and background were quite different. While both Israeli, Amos came from an aggressive Zionist family, while Danny and his family escaped from Nazi Europe; Danny was an appeaser, Amos a bully; Amos loved theory while Danny liked practical application of psychology, “Amos was built to fight, Danny was built to survive.” The book includes captivating detail about their backgrounds and interactions, and the process by which the work took flight and captured the interest of researchers and practitioners around the world.

The journalistic style of the story makes the personal bits easy to remember, with the research results a little harder to grasp in its entirety. The narrative jumps around a bit and the down side of watching a theory evolve (and not necessarily in a linear order) is that it can be harder to comprehend the whole. I found reading the Wikipedia articles on Kahneman and Tversky helped supplement my understanding of the actual work.

Some great quotes:
Asked if their work was related to AI, Amos said: “We study natural stupidity instead of Artificial Intelligence.”

In response to evolutionary psychology proponents Amos said, “The mind was more like a coping mechanism than it was a perfectly designed tool.”

On “Creeping determinism,” Amos says: “He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

“Economics was meant to be the study of an aspect of human nature, but it had ceased to pay attention to human nature.”

“Theories for Amos were like mental pockets or briefcases, places to put the ideas you wanted to keep.”

Spies of No Country by Matti Friedman

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Algonquin Books through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. The book will be published on March 5, 2019.
This is the story of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence told from the perspective of four spies from Israel’s “Arab Section” — a precursor of what would eventually become Mossad. Although the book includes a lot of background about the Middle East and the War itself, it is primarily a personal account of the experiences — both internal and external — of the spies.

The spies were Jewish men of Arab descent who wanted to be pioneers in the new, experimental (Zionist, socialist, and paradisical) country. Instead they were asked to “live like an Arab” — far from family and friends and amidst people with completely antithetical views (such as “Death to all Jews”). They were given false Arab / Muslim identities and sent out to gather intelligence and sometimes engage in sabotage. When they were finally able to come back to Israel two years later, it was to a completely different place — the reality of the country was a stark contrast to the ideal which they had held. Drawn from interviews, personal writings, and historical reports, the book did a good job of detailing the time and place as well as the attitudes and activities of the spies and those upon whom they spied.

The writing is uneven with an irregular structure resulting from the mashing together of personal accounts, historical documentation, and the author’s occasionally inserted opinions. A little more synthesis and coherence would have been very welcome. However, I did learn a great deal and appreciated the way the many details brought the time and place to life for me.

While I’ve known the rough history of Israel for a long time, I had either forgotten or never had known many of the specifics that I picked up from the book. At the time Israel declared independence in May 1948, 90% of its Jews were European — and looked down on the “black” Jews of Middle Eastern descent. The creation of Israel was a solution to a European, not Middle Eastern, problem. The declaration of Independence caused a massive influx of Jews from the surrounding Middle Eastern countries — not because they were enamored with the idea of a Jewish state but because they were fleeing a sudden and drastic increase in persecution in their home countries. As an example, according to the book Baghdad was 1/3 Jewish prior to 1948 (pretty much 0% now). So the solution to a European problem resulted in a much more widespread and amplified problem for the same target population in the broader Middle East.

Middle Eastern history is long and complicated and this book did not dissuade me from my largely pro-Israel stance. However, it certainly gave me a deeper comprehension of the experiences of the every-day people of the time on both sides of the fluid borders.

The Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

A chilling history of the “Osage Reign of Terror” in which a large number of wealthy Indians from the Osage tribe were killed over a period of several years, possibly even decades, in the early 1900s. The thoroughly researched story includes the background and social context of the killings, the investigators, and the individual politicians, bankers, and relatives involved in the case. Additionally, the launch of the FBI and some fascinating detail on the evolution of detection and law enforcement techniques.

For me, this is the best kind of non-fiction — told with clarity, drawn from original sources, not over-dramatized (a plain retelling of the events was dramatic enough), and told linearly such that no hindsight colored our perceptions of the players or events as they unfolded.

While it’s hard to be unaware of the gross injustices perpetrated on the Native Americans in this country since the arrival of the European settlers, the humiliating details of how the Bureau of Indian Affairs systematically dehumanized Native Americans and left them subject to institutionalized theft, mismanagement, and even murder was newly shocking. The Osage tribe was more susceptible than most as they were unfortunate enough to have chosen “worthless” land that ended up being oil rich — making them multi-millionaires and therefore prime targets.

A big part of the story is the attitude of most of the non-Indians. As one prominent member of the Osage tribe said during the trial of a set of conspirators to multiple murders, “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder — or merely cruelty to animals.”

In some ways this reads like a good murder mystery, but as is the case with all non-fiction, there is never the complete closure you get with a good novel. While several of the perpetrators were caught, tried, and sentenced, it is clear that the number of murders was far greater than originally expected … and most of the perpetrators got away scot-free.

Extremely well-written — highly recommended.

Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I love Doris Kearns Goodwin — she is an amazing writer. She gets to the heart of any subject and draws you in. In this book — quite appropriate for our times — she profiles four American presidents whose strong leadership skills were critical in helping the country make it through a “turbulent” time. This includes: Lincoln and the Civil War (Transformational Leadership); Theodore Roosevelt dealing with the 1902 coal miners strike (Crisis Management); FDR bringing the country out of the Depression (Turnaround Leadership); and Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights Legislation (Visionary Leadership).

She poses and tries to answer the big questions: “Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times? How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people’s lives? What is the difference between power, title, and leadership? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?” How could you not be hooked?

The book is divided into three parts: Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership; Adversity and Growth; The Leader and the Times: How they Led. She looks at each man through the lens of leadership qualities and how they are attained, developed, and used: intelligence, energy empathy, skill at dealing with people, verbal and written gifts.

Although she has written about each of these men at length in previous books (which I’ve read), I was spellbound by this new curation of the facts. Each president faced horribly difficult challenges for the country and in each case their approach brought about a (positive in my opinion) shift in thinking. Lincoln brought together a cabinet of his competitors, valuing competency and other opinions over agreement and consensus; Teddy Roosevelt with his “Square Deal” championed the concept of a president being the steward of the people, rather than the servant of Congress; FDR brought regulation to industries — particularly the banking industry — to help prevent the kind of wholesale loss that led to the Depression; and my favorite — Lyndon Johnson (not an orator by any means) making the speech championing civil rights saying “There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the issue of human rights.”

Definitely worth reading.