29, 30 and 31. Books I read between Christmas and New Year

29. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

This book is part business book and part pop psychology. The book is about a concept that the author calls "thin slicing," or what we normals would describe as how it is that people can make decisions about both trivial and important things based on very little data and sometimes be right about their decisions.

Setting the sound bite nomenclature that the author makes up aside, I found this to be a somewhat interesting book. I didn't learn anything that I could use in business but I was fascinated by some of the people that the author describes and their peculiar talents for thin slicing. I was most taken by the guy who was so subconsciously pescient that he could read minute inflections in people's facial muscles and figure out if they are telling the truth or if they were mad etc.

This is an interesting book but probably not for the reasons that the author intended. There is also a spoof book that is out called, "Blank: The Power of not Thinking All."

30. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

This book is about an average man living in a futuristic version of the late 1990s who has the ability to dream things that subsequently become reality. For example, one night he dreams that he owns a secluded get away home near a forest somewhere and when he wakes up he not only owns a home but he has also changed history so that he has always had that home.

The protagonist, Geroge Orr, however, cannot control these dreams and becomes scared by them and starts taking various drugs to supress his ability to dream. The big brother like system busts him for drug abuse and sends him to an enterprising shrink for treatment. The shrink picks up on Orr's abilities and starts using them to change the world. By hypnotic suggestion he makes Orr dream what he wants, for example, in one of the sessions the shrink makes Orr dream that there are no overpopulation problems and Orr responds by dreaming of a plague that has killed two thirds of the world. Orr, however, is not a willing participant in the shrink's enterprising ways.

The shrink is akin to a benevolant dictator who is a mixture of a benefactor with good intentions and a power hungry maniac. Le Guin suffuses the story with a thinly veiled ethical argument about whether the shrink's activitst benevolance is the right way to go or whether Orr's pacifist approach is better.

Excellent book.

31. The Vanishing by Tim Krabbe

This book is the inspiration for The Shining. It is a short, edge of your seat kind of psychotic thriller. Highly recommended for a good afternoon read.

The Beginning of the End?

There were news reports today that Canadian scientists discovered that the Ayles Ice Shelf snapped away from the coast of Ellesmere Island and became an ice island of its own. It happened in August 2005 but it took scientists 18 months or so to figure out when and how it happened. Apparently it took an hour for the ice shelf, which is the 66km in area or the size of 11,000 football fields, to break off.

28. The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson

Dr. Ferguson is a pop historian who’s stock is rising above even Simon Schama’s. This 1,100 page tome is a survey history of the late 19th and entire 20th centuries with a particular focus on the role of war in our society.

In general it is a good book but the problem with survey histories, I find, is that most readers will know a lot more about certain periods covered by the book than the author cares to get into, which means that sometimes hundreds of pages of the book should be skipped. For me, anyway, I found the book to be a little too much of a survey and a little short on the details that make history interesting.

If you’ve got the time, I would read it, but I wouldn’t make the time for it.