Lift Up Your Hearts!

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson (Tor Books, 2013)

I was hoping to have another Brother Cadfael book for my Sabbath reading, but #8 is currently unavailable at our library in any form.

Enter, at the precise moment of need, the hearty recommendation of my daughter for Brandon Sanderson's The Rithmatist. Sanderson's works were previously recommended to me by my brother, and then by our grandson, but both of them have a predilection for very thick books in very long series. Knowing that Heather read The Rithmatist in a day—albeit one that cost her more sleep than it should have—and enjoyed it thoroughly was enough push to overcome my inertia.

My only disappointment is that the final words of the book are "To be continued." Never trust an author who prefers to write in series form. Worse, the sequel isn't due out for some time yet. Nonetheless, the book is complete enough in itself and was nearly impossible to put down. Apparently a New York Times review included the complaint, "there is almost no action until the climax." Were we reading the same book? Is the reviewer using the term "action" merely as a synonym for "battle scenes"? The Rithmatist is bursting with action and excitement from beginning to end.

Sanderson has created a very clever "alternative world" and I look forward to reading more about it. Since that time seems to be well into the future, perhaps I should venture into his Mistborn series, though his own blurb for that promises "romance" among other things—and that's often enough to kill my interest. Still, that part can't be too bad, or my grandsons wouldn't be recommending it.

The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language by Eugene H. Peterson (Navpress, 2002)

It's my habit to read through the Bible at a rate of approximately once per year. My last cycle, however, took twice that long, thanks to the version I chose to read. I like to switch up versions, both for the variety and for the slightly different perspectives each brings. This time I chose the very popular The Message, which, as its Wikipedia article notes, "is a highly idiomatic translation, using contemporary slang from the US rather than a more neutral International English, and it falls on the extreme dynamic end of the dynamic and formal equivalence spectrum." In other words, more a paraphrase than a translation.

I'm glad I read it, and I'm sure The Message has been helpful to many, but for me the effort was like slogging through mud. This is the Bible with all the poetry, beauty, and life sucked out of it—not to mention that "contemporary slang" sounds dated the moment it hits print. In the Wikipedia article you can see how Peterson's interpretation of a couple of popular passages stands up against both the King James and the New International translations.

Did I say The Message is a paraphrase rather than a translation? More than that, it's a sermon from beginning to end. Not that I should have been surprised, since Eugene Peterson was a pastor, and the book arose from a lifetime of crafting Bibilical texts into sermons.

Let's just say that I'm glad I have a pastor who occasionally speaks over my head and expects me to rise to the challenge. Peterson's efforts feel condescending and often made me wince.

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote,

The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man. ... We may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.

The greatest crime of The Message is that it makes the whole Biblical epic sound dull—and like a made-up sermon illustration rather than the messy record of real, historical people that it is.

My apologies to those who find The Message inspiring and exciting. From all I've heard of Eugene Peterson, he was an amazing person, pastor, and scholar. I'm sure his books, including The Message, have been helpful to many. Tastes differ, and I'm thankful we have such a variety of resources available to us.

But for my next cycle, I'm going with the good ol' Revised Standard Version (RSV). Not the new one (NRSV), which also makes me wince, but the version of the book presented to me by "the Church School of the First Reformed Church of Scotia, New York, June 4, 1961." Well, technically, not that book, since most of my reading is done through YouVersion's Bible App. But that version. It's clean, it's poetic, and it should be a good palate cleanser. We'll see if I still feel that way after a year.

Recasting the Past: The Middle Ages in Young Adult Literature by Rebecca Barnhouse (Boynton/Cook, 2000)

This was another book from my son-in-law's wish list that I found intriguing. It turned out to be both disappointing and enlightening.

The disappointment was my own fault: The stated purpose of the book is "to provide teachers, librarians, and scholars of adolescent literature with a discussion of fiction set in the Middle Ages," so I should not have been surprised that the author talks like an educationist. Neither should I have been surprised (though I was) that the books she analyzes are all very modern. It reminds me of the fifth grade teacher who required that during their "free reading time," her students read only books from the Sunshine State Young Readers Awards list. This, she assured me, was because she wanted to make sure the children were reading quality books. Once I discovered that even to be nominated for that list a book had to be fiction and published withing the last three years, I knew why I was far less than impressed with the selection. I suppose modern authors need some support, but inflicting their works—to the exclusion of all others—on helpless students is even more unfair than forcing the students to eat school lunches.

This teacher-orientation and modern-author bias of Recasting the Past got my reading off on the wrong foot, but I was able to get over it because there really is some good information here. I've long known that much historical fiction, particularly for some reason that favored by schools (and popular movies), plays fast and loose with the facts. I figured the blame mainly fell on lazy authors, who had a story to tell and liked the idea of fitting it into an historical time period, but preferred to make the time fit the story rather than the other way around. Barnhouse opened my eyes to an entirely different source for the problem.

Although the author does not acknowledge this, I'm convinced that the base culprit is that there is such as thing as "young adult fiction." Why there should be is beyond my ken. Anyone who is mature enough to handle the subjects dealt with in these books—which include torture, religious doubts, and sexual activity—should be offended by dumbed-down reading levels and the assumption that everyone of a certain age must be interested in the same things.

Be that as it may, these are aimed at a young adult audience, and it shows. First and worst, the authors are apparently viewing their stories primarily as vehicles for teaching, and teaching 21st century values more than teaching history.

One such value is literacy. Barnhouse notes that much historical fiction aimed at schoolchildren is anachronistic in its attitude towards reading, writing, and book learning. No doubt they want to encourage the same in their modern readers, but it is wrong to give the impression that back then books were considered the key to knowledge, ignoring the practical ways knowledge was passed on in those times.

Modern authors also seem uncomfortable with allowing their young readers to experience attitudes not in line with 21st century standards. The young protagonists must be models of tolerance and diversity as defined by modern educationists; if anything negative is said about Jews, for example, it must come from the mouth of a character that the readers are not likely to like or respect. In a similarly unrealistic approach, Jews, Muslims, and generally anyone-but-Christians are treated by authors of much young adult fiction as paragons of virtue, instead of as human beings.

Barnhouse touches on other subjects, including stories that appear to be set in medieval times but actually belong in the Fantasy genre.

The primary use of his short book is for developing some tools for recognizing anachronism in so-called young adult fiction. Perhaps the most important of these tools is simply being aware of the problem.

Just two short quotes this time, emphasis mine:

The words "Middle Ages" imply a time between two eras, the Roman Empire and the rebirth of Roman culture in the Italian Renaissance. However, tell a twelfth-century Parisian scholar like Peter Abelard that Roman learning is dead and you'll get a surprised look—that is, if you can pry him away from his study of Greek and Roman historians and philosophers. Abelard and his contemporaries used the word modern to describe themselves. The big lie perpetrated by the Renaissance Italians, who said everything was dark and barbaric until they reinvented Rome, shows how little they knew about the transmission of thought, culture, and learning in the medieval period. While it's true that the vast majority of people didn't participate in all of this learning, neither did the majority of Romans. (Introduction, p xiii)

Well-told modern tales of the Middle Ages abound. ... The writers who research carefully enough to understand the differences between medieval and modern attitudes, between different medieval settings, and between fantasy and history, can help their readers understand a strange and distant culture: the Middle Ages. Writers who create memorable, sympathetic characters who retain authentically medieval values teach their audience more than those who condescend to readers by sanitizing the past. Trusting readers to comprehend cultural differences, presenting the Middle Ages accurately, and telling a good story results in compelling historical fiction, fiction that, like medieval literature in its ideal form, teaches as it delights. (p 86)

UPDATE 11/5/19 Here's a table from Stephan, summarizing the book's evaluations.  Click to enlarge.

Stephan says, What might be confusing about the table is the multiple use of the comments column. The first books with a fidelity rating > 0 come with comments that summarize very briefly Mrs Barnhouse‘s critique; those with a rating = 0 with a „fantasy level“ comment; and the rest with a summary.

On a whim—or more accurately, a teaser from my sister-in-law—I put the show Rizzoli & Isles on our Netflix list. It's another crime/mystery series, which, if you consider our Netflix history, you might think is 90% of what interests us. (Including, but not limited to, Rumpole of the Bailey, Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, The Bletchley Circle, Death in Paradise, NCIS (multiple versions), Monk, Foyle's War, Castle, Inspector Morse, Inspector Lewis, Endeavour, Grantchester, Murdoch Mysteries, Father Brown, Maigret, Nero Wolfe, Numb3rs, Lord Peter Wimsey....)

The teaser was that one of the Rizzoli & Isles shows—I don't know which one—involves a genealogical investigation. We've been through the first season plus a bit, and haven't yet spotted it, although there is one cringe-worthy episode in which two perfectly-matched DNA samples are proclaimed to be, not identical twins, but half-siblings: one male, one female, no less. I felt as Porter must when he watches movies that play fast and loose with historical facts.

Be that as it may, I plan to keep watching, at least until I get to the genealogy episode, because the characters and the stories are interesting. The usual problems associated with television series apply, at least based on what I've seen so far.

• It is a truth universally acknowledged that a story written by committees of writers, constrained by never knowing how long the series will run and which actors will unexpectedly die or quit along the way, cannot have a story arc that knows its end from its beginning. I know that novelists are often surprised at the directions their stories take as they are being written, but by the time a book gets into the hands of its readers the story is fixed. Not so with long-running TV series. I find this annoying.
• Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors are nearly universally liberal (in the sense of the label as it is used these days) in their political, social, and religious views, and this is as evident in Rizzoli & Isles as in most other popular television shows. One does not need to posit ill intent, or a conspiracy to corrupt the population, to acknowledge that these stories are drenched with, steeped in, and pervaded by a world view antithetical to most Christians, most conservatives, and most Americans who live outside of the West Coast, the Northeast, or large cities. It is what it is, and one has a choice: ignore most television and movies altogether, or be alert and aware, noting the sea in which the shows' characters and events swim. The latter is possibly the more rewarding path, but definitely the more dangerous. It's hard to stand in the water without getting wet, and if the frog-and-kettle story isn't actually true to nature, as a metaphor it's spot on.
• The level of graphic violence varies widely from one TV series to another. Rumpole, for example, is only secondarily about the actual crimes, and not at all graphic; NCIS Los Angeles is about some exceedingly violent and gruesome stories, and makes no attempt to hide the visceral realities from viewers. Rizzoli & Isles, so far, is somewhere between the midpoint and the graphic extreme.

So why am I finding the shows worth watching?

• I'm anticipating the genealogy episode.
• The characters and mysteries are interesting, especially the friendship between the title characters. It reminds me a little of the relationship between the two brothers on Numb3rs: one tough and street-smart, one polymath—but with some twists as well. I'm a sucker for quirky, misunderstood—if nonetheless respected—geniuses, hence my attraction to Numb3rs, Monk, Inspector Lewis, and The Bletchley Circle.
• I like the music (Irish-ish)

The show is set in Boston, and I always enjoy recognizing places and people I'm familiar with. In just the first season (2010) there have been some interesting events.

• References to Whitey Bolger when he was still at large (he wasn't recaptured till 2011)
• A show about killings during the Boston Marathon, three years before the famous bombing in 2013. Interestingly, although the event is clearly the Boston Marathon—e.g. a famous marathon set in Boston, mention of "Heartbreak Hill"—in the show it is called the Massachusetts Marathon, which leads to speculation. Probably the name "Boston Marathon" is copyrighted, and perhaps the organization decided they didn't want their race associated in people's minds with violent death. Oops.

Speaking of television series, don't talk to me about the final episodes of NCIS last season. Not only did we miss them when they aired, but we also missed the opportunity to see them free on the CBS site. Season 16 won't be released to DVD till September 3—and who knows when after that they will be available on Netflix. So—someday, maybe.

Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments by Joy Davidman (The Westminster Press, 1953)

I recently re-read Joy Davidman's book because it seemed logical to include in my C. S. Lewis retrospective. How long ago was my previous reading I can only guess, but it's likely two decades or more.

The first time around, I remember being quite impressed by Davidman's take on the Ten Commandments; this time, less so. It's still a book worth reading, but perhaps two decades further on has made her examples and emphasis seem more dated. Her analysis is still pretty good, however. Basic human nature doesn't change—and neither do the Commandments.

The one thing that bothers me most is certainly very minor in the scheme of the book, but it comes up over and over again. Not in anything directly related to her arguments, but in her assumptions about society: that is, that one of the biggest problems of this world, and a concern of all intelligent people, is overpopulation. I think my children don't understand quite how intense the pressure was in my generation to have no more than two children. I'm very glad that has now eased—but the attitude still rankles when I run into it.

Maugre all that, there were plenty of quotes worth extracting. Remember that Davidman was writing in the early 1950's, and reflect how à propos they still are.

The articulate, the leaders of opinion, the policy makers, all those who set the tone of our society, seem for the most part to be frightened men. (p 18)

Despite her fears of overpopulation, Davidman has a pretty good take on much of what's wrong with family life today.

Everybody today ... will agree that that family life is indispensable to human health and happiness. Yet we find ourselves accepting conditions that make war on the family. The lands behind the Iron Curtain deliberately weaken family ties in their schools, lest loyalty to parents should conflict with devotion to the sacred State. Our own country tries to keep the home fires burning with verbal sentiment about Mom, but meanwhile forces Mom to leave the hearth fire untended while she tends the factory machine. A century ago, American houses were twelve-room affairs designed to hold grandparents, and maiden aunts, and uncles, as well as parents and children; today they are usually cramped little flats and cottages, and we feel lucky to get those. We can hardly do much about honoring Father and Mother if there's no room for them in the inn. (pp 63-64)

I will add that the Iron Curtain may have fallen, but schools are doing no less to weaken family ties, and today they've been joined by a host of other assailants, from governmental policies to music, movies, and television.

Every age has its professional apologists, and ours are working hard to convince us that our worst sins are virtues. A mother forced to take a job needs a crèche [daycare] for her baby, admitted—but that does not justify the false comforters who tell us a crèche is better than a mother. An overcrowded school must pick up its pupils in large handfuls all of an age, and pass them along without paying attention to their individual abilities—yet this hardly warrants the current theory that children ought to be herded in age groups, as if we gave birth to them in litters! The cooped-up small families of cities are likely to develop unhealthy tensions, as we all know—need we, therefore, swallow the fashionable psychological doctrine that it's natural for all sons to hate their fathers? Were it really true that sons and fathers are natural enemies, how could mankind ever have dreamed of such a thing as the Fatherhood of God? (p 65, emphasis mine)

Through such apologies, and our own mental laziness, we are in danger of accepting without question some very queer distortions of human life. Already our generations are being walled off from each other: teenagers flock together deaf to all language but their own, young couples automatically drop their unmarried friends, whole magazines address themselves to age groups such as the seventeens or the young matrons or the "older executive type." Vast numbers of people think it is "natural" to hate your in-laws, "immature" to ask your parents for advice after your marriage, "abnormal" to value the companionship of anyone much older or younger than yourself. (pp 65-66)

Our modern cities have created a society in which children are in the way. They are physically in the way, and therefore we find them in the way emotionally too. There are many who do not want them at all, like the girl who recently told this writer that a civilized woman can "realize her creative impulses through self-expression" without needing anything so dirty as a baby! Even those who do want them are sometimes rather shame-faced about it; pregnancy, once something in which a woman gloried, is now treated as a disfigurement to be concealed as long as possible; and giving suck, the greatest joy and greatest need of both mother and child, is quite out of fashion among us. "I'm not a cow!" some American women will remark scornfully, as if it were preferable to be a fish. (pp 66-67)

Worse yet, perhaps, is the taming process we are forced to put our children through in order to keep them alive at all in city streets and city flats. In their infancy we must curb their play, and force adult cautions and restraints on them too soon; in their adolescence, on the other hand, we must bend all our efforts to keep them children at an age when our ancestors would have recognized them as grown men and women ready to found families. Our objection to child labor is admirable when it prevents the exploitation of babies in sweatshops, but not when it keeps vigorous young men and women frittering away their energies on meaningless school courses and still more meaningless amusements. (p 67)

It is gratifying to know that in our time pregnancy, nursing, and rearing independent children have been enjoying a comeback, but the gains are yet small and the opposition still great.

Let us remind the innumerable Americans who don't seem to know it that begetting and rearing a family are far more real and rewarding than making and spending money. (p 69, emphasis mine)

"Honor thy father and thy mother" is not the only Commandment on which Davidman expounds—it's just the one for which I found the most interesting excerpts. Here's one for "Thou shalt not steal," followed by one each for "Thou shalt not bear false witness," and "Thou shalt not covet."

Our society, in some respects, is a vast confidence game. Even our money sometimes becomes a swindle; no crueler form of theft was ever devised than an inflation, and since the value of paper money depends on that doubtful commodity, faith in the Government, it is hard to see how all present currencies can help inflating. Those who remember the German inflation of the 1920's know what happens, in such cases, to trusting old people living on pensions and savings. (p 105, emphasis mine)

Sadly, even our professional economists seem to have forgotten the horrors of inflation. I only need to look back as far as the 1970's to fear inflation—and we were in a good position then, with salaries that inflated along with the dollar. Inflation is very attractive to governments and other debtors; it rewards spending beyond our means, promotes consumerism, and punishes thrift and contentment. Unfortunately, for governments and those crippled by debt, inflation looks like a promising get-rich-quick scheme. We all know where those lead.

Perhaps what unsettles the modern mind most is its despair of ever knowing truth and the conflicting and untrustworthy and very dusty answers we get in our daily life. There are people who believe that not only are there no truths, but there are not even facts—all is a matter of "subjective values." Whatever the merits of this as a philosophy, its practical use is often as a method of evasion and rationalization. ... The denial that truth exists is a good beginning for habitual lying. And if we start confessing our habitual lies, shall we ever be done? There are the lies of gossip, public and private, which make haters out of us; the lies of advertising and salesmanship, which make money out of us; the lies of politicians, who make power out of us. And the lies of the sort of journalist who manufactures a daily omniscience out of the teletype machine and the Encyclopaedia Britannica! And the lies of a professional patriot who assures us that our cause is so just that it doesn't matter what injustice we commit in its name! Two hundred years ago Dr. Johnson wrote:

"Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages. A peace will equally leave the warrior and the relater of wars destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie."

The observation still holds good, except that the scribblers no longer live in garrets. The pay is bigger nowadays—but then, so are the lies. (p 111, emphasis mine)

Seeing God face to face is our goal; the pleasures of life, and even life itself, are the means to it. Therefore the milk and honey and corn and wine and soft chairs and fine houses and swift automobiles—all those pleasant things!—exist primarily as a kind of currency of love; a means whereby men can exchange love with one another and thus become capable of the love of God. ... We value such things not only for their pleasantness, but also because we can give them away and give our love with them; or else because, in receiving them, we receive others' love for us as a baby at the breast sucks his mother's love with her milk. (p 122, emphasis mine)

What a delightful view of the giving and receiving of gifts!

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Crown Business, 2013)

This book was on my son-in-law's Amazon wish list. Since in my own life I have chronic difficulties with decision-making, I thought I'd read it myself. Often I can do this while the book is in my hands awaiting a trip to Switzerland, but that doesn't work for Kindle books. However, our local library came through.

It was not quite what I had hoped. Having read other books by the Heath Brothers, I was prepared for this book to be primarily about business.  But even when they deal with personal issues they are more weighty ("Should I break up with my boyfriend?") than help for someone who has trouble deciding what to order at a restaurant.

And yet the book was still very interesting, especially the real-life examples, and it has given me ideas to ponder. Decisive is not long (253 pages, plus some notes at the end) and not hard going. The quotations below are almost random, chosen for the interest they piqued, not as any kind of meaningful summary of the ideas presented. Emphasis in bold is my own.

David Lee Roth was the lead singer for the Van Halen band. Their concerts were massive productions involving complex set-ups. Roth knew that even a small mess-up could put the safety of the band at risk. They could control their own technicians, but what about all the work done by local stagehands at the venues before they arrived?

Rumors circulated wildly about Van Halen's backstage antics. ... Van Halen seemed committed to a level of decadence that was almost artistic. ... Sometimes, though, the band's actions seemed less like playful mayhem and more like egomania. The most egregious rumor about the band was that its contract rider demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage—with all the brown ones removed. There were tales of Roth walking backstage, spotting a single brown M&M, and freaking out, trashing the dressing room.

This rumor was true. The brown-free bowl of M&Ms became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star diva behavior. Here was a band making absurd demands simply because it could.

Get ready to reverse your perception.

The band's "M&M clause" was written into its contract to serve a very specific purpose. It was called Article 126, and it read as follows: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation,." The article was buried in the middle of countless technical specifications.

When Roth would arrive at a new venue, he'd immediately walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he'd demand a line check of the entire production. "Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error," he said. "They didn't read the contract.... Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show."

In other words, David Lee Roth was no diva; he was an operations master. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention—whether they'd read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. (pp 26-28)

Or maybe he was still an obnoxious diva—but a very savvy one.

The question a college-bound senior should be asking ... is not "What's the highest-ranking college I can convince to take me?" Rather, it should be "What do I want out of life, and what are the best options to get me there?" Those two questions are in no way synonymous, and once families start thinking about the latter one, they often find that they have many more good options than they ever thought possible. (p 40)

Ay, there's the rub. How many people don't have a clue what they want out of life until the approaching end of college forces them to think about it?

A study of graphic designers demonstrates the value of multitracking. The designers, tasked with making a banner ad for a Web magazine, were randomly assigned to use one of two creative processes. Half of them were instructed to design one ad at a time, receiving feedback after each new design. Each designer started with a single ad and revised it five times based on rounds of feedback, yielding a total of six ads. The other half of the designers were instructed to use a "simultaneous" process, so that each one started with three ads and received feedback on all three. Then, in successive rounds, the set was whittled down with further feedback to two ads and then one final ad.

All of the designers ultimately created the same number of ads (six) and received the same quantity of feedback (five ad critiques). The only difference was the process: simultaneous versus one at a time.

As it turned out, process mattered a great deal: The simultaneous designers' ads were judged superior by the magazine's editors and by independent ad execs, and they earned higher click-through rates on a real-world test of the banners on the Web site. Why?

The study's authors, trying to explain the better performance of the simultaneous designers, said, "Since [simultaneous] participants received feedback on multiple ideas simultaneously, they were more likely to read and analyze critique statements side-by-side. Direct comparison perhaps helped them better understand key design principles and led to more principles choices for subsequent prototypes."

In other words, the simultaneous designers, by multitraking, were learning something useful about the shape of the problem. They were able to triangulate among the features of their three initial ads—combining their good elements and omitting the bad. (pp 53-54)

Plus, as it turned out, the simultaneous designers were happier about the feedback they received, and felt more confident in their abilities as a result of the experience. Not being 100% invested in a single design made them more likely to see criticism as a useful informative tool rather than as a personal attack.

When life offers us a "this or that" choice, we should have the gall to ask whether the right answer might be "both." (p 65)

Or neither. Binary decisions (either/or, "Should I quit my job?" "Should I marry Oliver?") rarely lead to the best decisions. Adding just one or two more options to the list forces you to widen your view and get better insight.

Imagine a new restaurant has just opened near you. It serves your favorite kind of food, so you're excited and hopeful. you search the restaurant's reviews online, and the results show a handful of good reviews (four out of five stars) and a handful of poor ones (two stars). Which reviews would you read?

Almost certainly, you'd read more of the positive reviews. You really want this restaurant to be great. A recent meta-analysis of the psychology literature illustrated how dramatic this effect is. ... The researchers concluded that we are more than twice as likely to favor confirming information than disconfirming information. (So, scientifically speaking, you'd probably read twice as many four-star reviews as two-star reviews.) (p 95)

I admit to struggling with what they call "confirmation bias," but this is totally different from my own approach to online reviews. I do start off with a product that has mostly positive reviews, as if the sample size is large enough, that's probably a good indicator of general quality. But what I concentrate on reading are the negative reviews, because I want to know why people didn't like a product. Often it's irrelevant to the product itself (late arrival, damage in transit, reviewer's ex-wife liked it therefore it must be bad). Sometimes the negative is about something that doesn't apply to me ("not enough romance in this book"). Sometimes they're genuinely helpful. Then I read the middle-of-the-road reviews, as I figure they're more likely to see both the positives and the negatives. Finally, I'll check out a few of the five-star reviews, just to be sure someone else thinks the item is what I hope it is.

Rather than jump headfirst ... dip a toe in.

Think about a student, Steve, who has decided to go to pharmacy school. What makes him think that's a good option? Well, he spent months toying with other possibilities—medical school and even law school—and he eventually decided pharmacy was the best fit. He's always enjoyed chemistry, after all, and he likes the idea of working in health care. He feels like the lifestyle of a pharmacist, with its semireasonable hours and good pay, would suit him well.

But this is pretty thin evidence for such an important decision! Steve is contemplating a minimum time commitment of two years for graduate school, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and forgone income. He's placing a huge bet on paltry information. [An obvious move] would be to work in a pharmacy for a few weeks. He'd be smart to work for free, if need be, to get the job.

Surely this concept—testing a profession before entering it—sounds obvious. Yet every year hordes of students enroll in graduate schools without ever having run an experiment like that: law students who've never spent a day in a law office and med students who've never spent time in a hospital or clinic. Imagine going to school for three or four years so you can start a career that never suited you! This is a truly terrible decision process, in the same league as an impromptu drunken marriage in Vegas. (pp 137-138)

Phil Tetlock, a professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania ... resolved to design a study that would, for the first time, hold experts' feet to the fire. He recruited 284 experts, people who made their living by "commenting or offering advice on political or economic trends." Almost all of them had a graduate degree and over half had a PhD. Their opinions were eagerly sought: 61% of them had been interviewed by the media.

They were asked to make predictions in their area of expertise. ... As predictions go, these were pretty basic—nothing more strenuous than multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. Tetlock was trying to create such clear questions that experts would have nowhere to hide if they were wrong. ...

How'd the experts do? They underperformed, to say the least. Even the best forecasters did worse than what Tetlock calls a "crude extrapolation algorithm," a simple computation that takes the base rates and assumes that the trends from the past few years will continue (e.g., predicting that an economy that has grown at an average of 2.8% over the past three years will continue to grow at 2.8%). ...

Surveying these scores across regions, time periods, and outcome variables ... it is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms. ...

Sadly, pundits aren't the only experts who have prognostication problems. Previous research has shown that psychologists, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and car mechanics are also poor at making predictions. ...

Does this mean that expertise is worthless? No. ... [In another experiment], when students proclaimed themselves 100% certain that something would happen, they were wrong 45% of the time. When the experts were completely certain, they were wrong "only" 23% of the time. ... What the data shows is the base rates are better than expert predictions, which are better than novice predictions. (pp 140-143)

The strange words appeared anew every day, printed in capital letters in the corner of the blackboard, right underneath a warning to the cleaning crew to "Please save." The university students who attended the class were mystified by the words, which appeared to be in a foreign language: SARICIK. RAJECKI. KADIRGA. NANSOMA. ZAJONC.

On some days, only one of the words appeared; on other days, there would be two or three. “Zajonc,” in particular, seemed to appear a lot more than the others. The professor never acknowledged the words. Students were mystified; one later said of the words, "They haunt my dreams."

After the words had been appearing on the blackboard for nine straight weeks, the students received a survey with a list of 14 foreign words on it, and 5 of the 14 words were the ones from the blackboard. They were asked to assess how much they liked each word. ... The most-liked words were the ones the students had seen the most. Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, then, but more like contentment.

For decades, psychologists have been studying this phenomenon, called the "mere exposure" principle, which says that people develop a preference for things that are more familiar (i.e., merely being exposed to something makes us view it more positively). ...

What's more troubling is that the mere-exposure principle also extends to our perception of truth. ... When the participants [in another study] were exposed to a particular statement three times during the experiment, rather than once, they rated it as more truthful. Repetition sparked trust. This is a sobering thought about our decisions in society and in organizations. All of us ... will naturally absorb a lot of institutional "truth," and chances are that much of it is well proven and trustworthy, but some of it will only feel true because it is familiar. As a result, when we make decisions, we might think we're choosing based on evidence, but sometimes that evidence may be ZAJONC—nonsense ideas we've come to like because we've seen them so much. (pp 163-165)

It's possible that the Mere Exposure Principle may be the most important take-away from this book. Certainly it deserves its own blog post. Or two. Two that have been floating around in my brain for years; perhaps seeing this succinct statement in print will spur me to bring one or both to birth.

Short-term emotion [sometimes makes us] erratic and too quick to act. ... More commonly [it] has the opposite effect, making us slow and timid, reluctant to take action. We see too much complexity and it stymies us. We worry about what we must sacrifice to try something new. We distrust the unfamiliar. Together, these feelings make individuals and organizations biased toward the status quo. (pp 172-173)

Yep, that's my gift, and my curse. Some people jump at any new idea with full enthusiasm, and only later discover the drawbacks. My mind immediately goes to what could go wrong, and I disappoint people by my slow, sober response—even if I become excited after careful consideration, the damage has been done. But both approaches are important.

Perhaps the most powerful question for resolving personal decisions is "What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?" (p 174)

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, suggests that we create a "stop-doing list." What sparked the idea was a challenge from one of his advisers to consider what he would do if he received two life-changing phone calls. In the first call, he'd learn that he'd inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second call would inform him that, due to a rare and incurable disease, he had only 10 years left to live. The adviser asked Collins, "What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?" (pp 187-188)

That, too, deserves its own blog post.

There's [a] technique that is useful in guarding against the unknown. It's surprisingly simple, in fact: Just assume that you're being overconfident and give yourself a healthy margin of error. (p 208)

Simple, sure, but we're surprisingly poor at taking that advice. Richard Killmer, Janet's oboe professor in college, is famous for his playing, his teaching, and who knows what else—but what I remember most is his habit of always being early. When driving from Rochester, New York, to New York City, for example, he'd plan to arrive two hours early for his performance. Usually, that's what would happen, but the time wasn't wasted—there was always something productive to do with that time. But if an accident on the Thruway snarled traffic—no stress.

Contrast this with my own habit of tailoring my activities precisely so that I will be ready to leave for church at the exact right time. That may sound clever, but let Porter say—as he does with disconcerting frequency and little-to-no notice—"Let's stop at X on the way to church," and I'm undone. How much more reasonable just to plan to be ready to get in the car a half hour early, and then use any extra time to my advantage. It may sound easy, but....

By bookending—anticipating and preparing for both adversity and success—we stack the deck in favor of our decisions. (p 217)

Of course, time is only one of many factors that benefit from a healthy margin of error. Because we are so notoriously poor at prediction—how much time, how much money, how much profit—a technique called "bookending" can help mitigate problems on both ends of the event spectrum. Some of us are accustomed to considering the worst-case scenario, and trying to build in mitigation, but unexpected success can be nearly as great a problem. What if your new product takes off beyond your wildest dreams, and you have no way to handle the sudden onslaught of orders?

With the right tripwire, we can ensure that we don't throw good money (or time) after bad. (p 231)

I found the section on tripwires especially interesting, particularly because of the story of Kodak's failure to recognize the importance of digital photography. That's a story I lived through, being in Rochester and having several friends who worked for Kodak and saw that failure up close. Van Halen's obsession with brown M&Ms was a tripwire, warning of potentially dangerous carelessness. Kodak might have not gone under if their confidence that digital photos would never be acceptible to the public had been hedged by a tripwire such as, "We will reconsider when more than 10% of the public finds digital images satisfactory." Parents might tell a recent graduate, "You're welcome to move back home and work full-time on your art, Vincent, but if after six months you haven't sold a painting, you'll need to find another source of income."

Our first instinct, when challenged, is usually to dig in further and passionately defend our position. Surprisingly, though, sometimes the opposite can be more effective.

Dave Hitz, the founder of NetApp, says he learned that "sometimes the best way to defend a decision is to point out its flaws."

"Let's say you have decided to pursue Plan A. As a manager, it is part of your job to defend and explain that decision to folks who work for you. So when someone marches into your office to explain that Plan A sucks, and that Plan Z would be much better, what do you do? ... My old instinct was to listen to Plan Z, say what I didn't like about it, and to describe as best as I could why Plan A was better. Of course, the person has already seen these same arguments in the e-mail I sent announcing the decision, but since they didn't agree, they must not have heard me clearly, so I'd better repeat my argument again, right? I can report that this seldom worked very well.

It works much better if I start out by agreeing: "Yep. Plan Z is a reasonable plan. Not only for the reasons you mentioned, but here are two more advantages. And Plan A—the plan that we chose—not only has the flaws that you mentioned, but here hare three more flaws." The effect of this technique is amazing. It seems completely counterintuitive, but even if you don't convince people that your plan is better, hearing you explain your plan's flaws—and their plan's advantages—makes them much more comfortable. (pp 244-245)

A Morbid Taste for Bones: The First Chronicle of Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters (Little, Brown, first published 1977)

Everyone wants to give the surprise, spot-on birthday gift. True, the wish list was a great invention, allowing us to give gifts that will be welcomed, even though we aren't close enough (physically or emotionally) to a person to know well what he wants or needs. But perhaps the best gift is one that comes unbidden and meets a need or desire we didn't even know we had.

Such was this book for me. Once having cleared up my initial confusion of reading the author as Ellis Potter, an entirely different sort of writer, I recognized Brother Cadfael as a PBS show, of which we may have seen an episode long ago. Apparently we were not impressed enough to continue the series.

Not so with the book! I was hooked immediately by this medieval murder mystery, combining as it does two of my favorite genres. And, much more than that: the characters, plot, and actions are all touched by that quality so rare in any tale and especially modern writings: grace. To quote the last sentence of the second book, One Corpse Too Many, without giving anything away: From the highest to the lowest extreme of a man's scope, wherever justice and retribution can reach him, so can grace.

I began this review after having read just two of the books in the series; at the time, my thoughts were almost entirely positive. Now I have devoured five books, and binge-reading tends to exaggerate the presence of small negatives. Hopefully all that has done is make me more realistic in my assessment. After all, I still adore the books of Miss Read, even though a recent re-reading of everything I have of hers—which is very nearly everything she wrote—similarly raised the profile of the books' faults.

The negatives (with some mitigation) of the Brother Cadfael series, based on the first five books:

• Too much romance. As a genre, Romance ranks only slightly better than Horror in my mind. To Peters' credit, the romance takes second place to the mystery, but it's still too prominent for my taste. In many ways the Cadfael books remind me of George MacDonald's novels. MacDonald is one of my favorite authors (as he was of C. S. Lewis), but many of his novels (as opposed to his fantasies and children's stories) have Romantic elements clearly designed to appeal to his 19th century audience. I bear with the Romance because of the serious philosophical content of which it is the vehicle. (MacDonald was a preacher, and it shows—but far from detracting, that is what makes his novels worth reading.) In Cadfael, I bear with the Romance because of the detective story content. The Romantic elements are also (at least so far), pure love stories—nothing embarrassing about them.
• The stories are somewhat predictable. That is, I find myself able to guess many of the plot twists and outcomes. But hey, it doesn't bother me to feel smart.
• More troublesome is the occasional feeling of anachronism, with both attitude and action sometimes owing more to modern sensibilities than to those of the 12th century. But it's reasonably subtle and does not get in the way of the story, at least not in my limited experience. In any case, I don't know enough history to be certain of calling it out. The author seems to take seriously the historical accuracy of the setting—the period of English history known as The Anarchy. Perhaps when you write in modern English—and what else could she do?—modern phrases and modern perspectives will creep in.

The positives:

• Grace, as mentioned above. For the most part, it's not cheap grace, either. (“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
• The character of Brother Cadfael: come late to his life as a monk, carrying with him his experience as a soldier, a sailor, and a Crusader, he's a gentle, kindly man with a vast store of knowledge and a razor-sharp wit. He is wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove.
• The respect shown for the Christian faith and the Church. Peters—and Cadfael—do not brook hypocrisy, arrogance, boorishness, and deep evil when they appear within the monastery, but there is goodness there, too, and also self-sacrifice, justice, mercy, patience, forebearance, duty, responsibility, and humanity.
• Happy endings. I love happy endings. Love triumphs, justice prevails, courage and hope live. The real world is quite full enough of darkness and sorrow. Happy endings, at least if done right, are not escapism nor foolish denial, but an expression of faith in the ultimate victory of justice and mercy. As C. S. Lewis said, "Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage."
• The mysteries. They're clever, and fun.
• The setting. The castles and monasteries, medieval towns, knights, monks, squires, damsels in distress—and not in distress. (One of the giveaways that Ellis Peters is a modern author is her use of strong, intelligent, and courageous female characters. That's okay with me.) Brother Cadfael's herb garden and medicinal concoctions. Evil that is portrayed as evil, but not luridly painted. Good that is good, and desirable. Indeed, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful shine here.

Incidentally, should any of my family decide to read these books, be aware that you are related to some of these historical figures. For example, the Empress Maud (aka Empress Matilda) who is contesting with King Stephen for the English throne, is my 25-great-grandmother, and Porter's 24th-great-grandmother. Genealogy makes history—and historical novels—personal, which adds to the pleasure of the experience. Brother Cadfael also serves to render more familiar those bizarre Welsh names that appear in our family tree, such as Efa ferch Madog and Hywel ap Meurig. And I have our new rector to thank that a character's pilgrimmage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is meaningful to me, and not just another unfamiliar historical reference.

If the rest of the series lives up to the promise of the first five books, I should be set for a while with temptations away from my more serious readings. (Thanks to Wikipedia for the list.)

1. A Morbid Taste for Bones (published in August 1977, set in 1137)
2. One Corpse Too Many (July 1979, set in August 1138)
3. Monk's Hood (August 1980, set in December 1138)
4. Saint Peter's Fair (May 1981, set in July 1139)
5. The Leper of Saint Giles (August 1981, set in October 1139)
6. The Virgin in the Ice (April 1982, set in November 1139)
7. The Sanctuary Sparrow (January 1983 set in the Spring of 1140)
8. The Devil's Novice (August 1983, set in September 1140)
9. Dead Man's Ransom (April 1984, set in February 1141)
10. The Pilgrim of Hate (September 1984, set in May 1141)
11. An Excellent Mystery (June 1985, set in August 1141)
12. The Raven in the Foregate (February 1986, set in December 1141)
13. The Rose Rent (October 1986, set in June 1142)
14. The Hermit of Eyton Forest (June 1987, set in October 1142)
15. The Confession of Brother Haluin (March 1988, set in December 1142)
16. A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael (September 1988, set in 1120)
17. The Heretic's Apprentice (February 1989, set in June 1143)
18. The Potter's Field (September 1989, set in August 1143)
19. The Summer of the Danes (April 1991, set in April 1144)
20. The Holy Thief (August 1992, set in February 1145)
21. Brother Cadfael's Penance (May 1994, set in November 1145)

The Story of Christianity, Volume 1: The Early Church To The Dawn Of The Reformation by Justo L. Gonzalez (HarperOne, 2010)

My list of books read this year shows June's tally to be woefully short, a mere two books. In part that shortfall is due to being on vacation with much else calling for my attention, but the primary cause was this 530-page book. I read most of it in June, but it squeaked over into July before completion.

Our rector chose this book for his six-week class in church history. I chose the Kindle version because that enabled me to begin the reading while still out of town—unfortunately we had to miss three of the six classes, and I wanted at least to keep up with the reading.  It wasn't easy, because Fr. Trey set a pace that was blistering even to a bookworm like me, though perhaps not to one who has so recently been in seminary and law school.

But I more than kept up. I finished the book yesterday, and the last class isn't until mid-month. What can I say? Once I get started, it's hard to stop. And I have a new birthday book—Brother Cadfael—calling out to me.

Plus, the book is interesting. The earlier chapters are better than the later to my mind, because the closer the author gets to modern times, the more obvious his biases become. I'm wondering if the trend will continue in Volume 2.

Mind you, I don't hold against him the fact that his biases show, even if they are sometimes frustrating. How can someone write on any subject, let alone one as difficult and as sensitive as history, without leaving the imprint of his own life's experiences? Isn't that why particular people write particular books? But the experience illustrates the truth-seeker's variant of caveat emptor: Be leery of trusting single sources.

I'll spare you the collection of quotations this time, but simply share one of my strongest and most lasting impressions.

As most of my readers know, it is my habit to read through the Bible once each year. I like to switch off different versions, and currently I'm using the one called simply, The Message. I don't doubt that many people find this version useful and enlightening, but for me it combines slogging through a swamp with enduring fingernails on a blackboard, so it's taking me a while to make progress. I'm well into my second year, and still in the Old Testament. The constant grind of God sets us on the right path—we mess up badly—God gets mad and threatens to give up on us—bad things happen—God decides he loves us too much to abandon us completely—God sets us back on the right path—we mess up badly—ad infinitum, is getting really old. This theme-and-variations seems a little repetitive in any translation, but it's orders of magnitude worse in The Message.

Enter this book on church history. History in general has been a weakness of mine ever since I learned in school that one could enjoy/be good at science and math or English and history, but not both. (I know. Surely no one actually said that? But that's what I heard.) About the history of the church I know even less, hence my eagerness to take this class. Reading the book made me glad to be experiencing the Old Testament at the same time. Why?

The impression given in most churches seems to me to be that God did a lot of work through history preparing mankind for the Incarnation—the coming of Jesus—and then considered the job done, with nothing left to do till the Second Coming. That's like jumping from the Garden of Eden to the Stable at Bethlehem, without considering all the years of history and preparation in between. What learning something of church history has shown me is how similar the Anno Domini years have been to those Before Christ. It's the same old song in a different key: make a good start, mess up—sometimes disastrously—receive correction, try again, mess up again, etc. Gradually learning, clarifying, and growing in the midst of and in spite of and even because of some really bad stuff going on. Just like Old Testament Israel.

Everything changed with the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And yet ... plus ça change ... people are still people. God's process of teaching, refining, clarifying, and polishing goes on. His work in and on and through his Church is just as important as his work with Israel. It is much like his work with individuals: everything indeed changes radically when one becomes a Christian, but God's work in us is far from complete.

Why do we learn so much in church about what God does in our individual lives, and what he did with Israel BC, but so little about his work with the Church AD?

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ♦ Prince Caspian ♦ The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" ♦ The Silver Chair ♦ The Horse and His Boy ♦ The Magician's Nephew ♦ The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis (Macmillan, 1950-1956)

I have elsewhere averred that Lewis's Narnia septet is worth reading annually. Not even the rapid growth of our grandchildren has made me more cognizant of the rapid passage of time than realizing that the last time I read these books was in 2010. That was the year I began keeping a comprehensive record of my reading; without it, I would have been certain it had been no more than a few years since my last reading. Wow.

Their turn came up recently in my C. S. Lewis retrospective, in which I'm reading his books in a rough chronological order. They have always been my favorite of his books, and my discovery of Michael Ward's Planet Narnia enhanced my admiration by an order of magnitude.

One thing I noticed this time around—thanks to my awareness of the chronology of his writing—was the salutory effect the entrance of Joy Davidman into his life appears to have had on his view of women. Lewis's attitude towards women sometimes makes me cringe, but as I've become aware of his biography, I'm amazed he wasn't a total misogynist. His beloved mother died when he was very young, and his subsequent experiences with women were not conducive to developing healthy ideas about normal family life and competent, caring females. Even his relationship with Davidman could hardly be called normal.  But she was strong and intelligent, and it's hard not to conclude that the presence in his life of such a woman influenced him to give his female characters more respect as the Narnia series progressed.

That is, if you read them in publication order. I'm 100%, whole-heartedly of the belief that one should read the Narnia books in the order listed above. It is fashionable now to read them in chronological order, supposedly the order Lewis recommended. But if that truly was his recommendation, then I'm bold enough to say he was wrong, even if he is the author. The Horse and His Boy and The Magician's Nephew work very well as flashbacks in the story, much more interesting because of their non-chronological positions in the Chronicles. Scenes in The Magician's Nephew, such as the "planting" of the lamppost, would lose much of their wonder and magic for me if I had not read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first. Similarly, I think meetin Aslan for the first time works better in Lion.

This series deserves the highest praise. It's some of the cleverest and most uplifting material I've ever read. I'm sure I would respect it even more if I had better knowledge of Dante, but reading Planet Narnia was eye-opening enough. The only thing that makes me cringe just a bit is that in two of the books the culture of the heroes is clearly modelled on England, while that of the villains is like something out of the Arabian Nights. I think this makes perfect sense for a British author writing for a largely British audience, and since the books were written in the 1950's, this obviously has nothing to do with the current political situation.  But it is worth being aware of.

Ocean-Born Mary by Lois Lenski (J. B. Lippincott, 1939)

I grew up with Lois Lenski's Indian Captive, a fictionalized version of the story of Mary Jemison, captured by Indians during the French and Indian War. She remained with the Senecas all her life, and I have seen her grave in Letchworth State Park, one of our favorite spots in Western New York. It remains one of my favorite stories.

Many years later, after moving to Florida, I discovered the Newberry Award-winning Strawberry Girl, Lenski's novel about rural Florida in the early 20th century, and liked it also.

I wish Lenski's books weren't so hard to find. Recently I discovered a new one, in little Hillsboro, New Hampshire's tiny library: Ocean-Born Mary—and it's as good as the other two.

There's a reason this book is in a New Hampshire library: it is the fictionalized story of Mary Wilson Wallace, who was born on a ship that was part of the 18th century Scots-Irish immigration to New England. She grew up in New Hampshire, and her grave is in Henniker, the next town over from Hillsboro. Our New Hampshire grandchildren will want to be sure to read the Afterward, where they will find such familiar names as The Isles of Shoals and Star Island.

Warning: some spoilers below, but important for parents to read.

I loved Ocean-Born Mary. This is the world many of my ancestors lived in. Lenski has fictionalized the story and softened some of the harsh details for the juvenile audience, but there is great historical detail and it rings true. Written in 1939, it does not have 21st-century sensitivities, and modern parents may cringe at the casual references to "Negro slaves." But that was reality, and it's good for Northerners to realize what they would love to forget—that slavery was not exclusively a Southern sin. It was part of life at that time, as were smallpox and starvation, Indian attacks and British oppression.

Many modern parents may find even more objectionable the protagonist's friendship with an older man of very ill repute, and the fact that she sneaks away on several occasions to meet with him. Nothing untoward happens, and there is nothing at all romantic in the modern sense about the relationship. I've read many modern children's books that are infinitely worse in that dimension. Nonetheless, it may make modern parents queasy, which is why I'd suggest this book as a read-aloud, or that parents might at least read it themselves, first.

But I do recommend Ocean-Born Mary, highly. It's a gripping story, enjoyable to read, and I think it paints a good picture of colonial New England.

A Book of Narnians: The Lion, the Witch and the Others by C. S. Lewis, text compiled by James Riordan, illustrated by Pauline Baynes (HarperTrophy, 1994)

When I read a book, it's the words I care about. I confess that I rarely look at illustrations; even when reading picture books to our grandchildren I mostly ignore the pictures. (You can guess how I feel about the "wordless books" that were popular for children at one time.) My view is that if you can't tell a story without illustrations, you're not really telling the story. So much for "a picture is worth a thousand words," at least as far as my reading habits are concerned.

On the other hand, in A Book of Narnians the illustrations are the book, and as far as I'm concerned are the whole worth of the book. Sadly, James Riordan's descriptions of the various Narnian characters, even though taken largely from the books themselves, make me cringe. I'm not certain why, except that—unlike Lewis' words in their original context—they feel condescending, as if someone decided that because this is a picture book, it should be written on a childish level. That's an attitude no intelligent and self-respecting child would put up with.

But it doesn't really matter. The star of the show here is Pauline Baynes' paintings, full color and worth taking time to study. Included as well, to my everlasting delight, is a reproduction of the original published map of Narnia, a poster of which hung for years, alongside a similar map of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, in whatever house or dorm room I happened to inhabit.

(The map of Narnia now resides with our daughter, who takes better care of it than I, alas, ever did. I'm sorry to say I don't know what happened to the Middle Earth map, which was just as delightful.)

On Stories and Other Essays on Literature by C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982; originally written between the mid-1940's and the early 1960's)

This is a surprisingly delightful, eclectic collection of essays. They are less informal than Mere Christianity, which was originally a series of radio broadcasts, but more accessible than his deeper, more philosophical works, like Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Not that these are any less intellectually honest, but the shorter lengths and the variety of subjects make On Stories a joy to read, with relatively little effort.

Table of Contents

From "On Stories"

Lewis is speaking of a film version of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, but he captures much of my complain about the film version of The Lord of the Rings.

At the end of Haggard's book ... the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the scene in the original was not "cinematic" and the man was right, by the canons of his own art, in altering it. But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined.

It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one’s adult enjoyment of what are called "children’s books." I think the convention a silly one. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.

[N]othing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the camera.

It is very difficult to tell in any given case whether a story is piercing to the unliterary reader's deeper imagination or only exciting his emotions. ... The nearest we can come to a test is by asking whether he often re-reads the same story.

It is, of course, a good test of every reader of every kind of book. An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? 

From "The Novels of Charles Williams"

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.

From "On Three Ways of Writing for Children"

A children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last.

Since it is so likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. ... I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel.

The question "What do modern children need" will not lead you to a good moral. If we ask that question we are assuming too superior an attitude. It would be better to ask "What moral do I need?" for I think we can be sure that what does not concern us deeply will not deeply interest our readers, whatever their age. But it is better not to ask the questions at all. Let the pictures tell you their own moral. For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life. But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in. For the moral you put in is likely to be a platitude, or even a falsehood, skimmed from the surface of your consciousness. It is impertinent to offer the children that. For we have been told on high authority that in the moral sphere they are probably at least as wise as we. Anyone who can write a children's story without a moral, had better do so: that is, if he is going to write children's stories at all. The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.

The child as a reader is neither to be patronised nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man. But the worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle. We must of course try to do them no harm: we may, under the Omnipotence, sometimes dare to hope that we may do them good. But only such good as involves treating them with respect. We must not imagine that we are Providence or Destiny. I will not say that a good story for children could never be written by someone in the Ministry of Education, for all things are possible. But I should lay very long odds against it.

From "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said"

In the Author's mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. ... This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author's impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to get out. He longs to see that bubbling stuff pouring into that Form as the housewife longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It's like being in love.

From "On Science Fiction"

Speaking of the charge of "escapism" in some literature:

I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple questions, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

From "A Reply to Professor Haldane"

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong, he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality.

From "Different Tastes in Literature"

In literature the characteristics of the "consumer" of bad art are [easy] to define. He (or she) may want her weekly ration of fiction very badly indeed, may be miserable if denied it. But he never re-reads. There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible. The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterday's newspaper. One may have some hopes of a man who has never read the Odyssey, or Malory, or Boswell, or Pickwick: but none (as regards literature) of the man who tells you he has read them, and thinks that settles the matter. It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk.

From "Unreal Estates"

A book's no good to me until I've read it two or three times.

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (Macmillan, 1978; originally published 1944)

Mere Christianity grew out of a series of radio talks Lewis gave in the 1940's. Consequently, although he reworked them slightly to be more suitable for the print medium, they still retain an informal, easy-to-read flavor. I don't want to say Lewis dumbed down his talks for the sake of the average BBC listener (and me) but ... he did. There's none of the head-spinning intricacies of philosophy and literary criticism found in some of his other books. As with the others, there are some allusions that made more sense to a mid-20th-century Englishman than to a 21st-century American, but they're minor and easily puzzled out—or ignored. There's nothing dated about the content of this very worthwhile book. [Emphasis in the quotes below is mine.]

Table of Contents

From the Preface

[This book] did at least succeed in presenting an agreed, or common, or central, or "mere" Christianity. In that way it may possibly be of some help in silencing the view that, if we omit the disputed points, we shall have left only a vague and bloodless H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor, for those who have left elementary mathematics far behind]. The H.C.F. turns out to be something not only positive but pungent; divided from all non-Christian beliefs by a chasm to which the worst divisions inside Christendom are not really comparable at all. If I have not directly helped the cause of reunion, I have perhaps made it clear why we ought to be reunited. Certainly I have met with little of the fabled odium theologicum from convinced members of communions different from my own. Hostility has come more from borderline people whether within the Church of England or without it: men not exactly obedient to any communion. This I find curiously consoling. It is at her centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests that at the centre of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.

We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning [of "Christian"]. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts 11:26) to "the disciples," to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were "far closer to the spirit of Christ" than the less satisfactory of the disciples. The point is not a theological, or moral one. It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

I hope no reader will suppose that "mere" Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.

It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait....

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

From Book 2, Chapter 5: The Practical Conclusion

Do not think I am setting up baptism and belief and the Holy Communion as things that will do instead of your own attempts to copy Christ. Your natural life is derived from your parents; that does not mean it will stay there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it: but always remember you are not making it, you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam—he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. And that has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not, A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble - because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

From Book 3, Chapter 2: The "Cardinal Virtues"

Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it. Nowadays most people hardly think of Prudence as one of the "virtues." In fact, because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are "good," it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of "prudence" about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as St, Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. The fact that what you are thinking about is God Himself (for example, when you are praying) does not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you had when you were a five-year-old. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. ... God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers.

Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism. But in the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened "Temperance," it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion. Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

From Book 3, Chapter 3: Social Morality

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

From Book 3, Chapter 5: Sexual Morality

The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of "modesty" (in one sense of that word); i.e. propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in what words, according to the customs of a given social circle. Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes. A girl in the Pacific islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might both be equally "modest," proper, or decent, according to the standards of their own societies: and both, for all we could tell by their dress, might be equally chaste (or equally unchaste). Some of the language which chaste women used in Shakespeare's time would have been used in the nineteenth century only by a woman completely abandoned. When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in themselves or others, then they are offending against chastity. But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of propriety is any proof of chastity or any help to it, and I therefore regard the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule which has taken place in my own lifetime as a good thing. At its present stage, however, it has this inconvenience, that people of different ages and different types do not all acknowledge the same standard, and we hardly know where we are. While this confusion lasts I think that old, or old-fashioned, people should be very careful not to assume that young or "emancipated" people are corrupt whenever they are (by the old standard) improper; and, in return, that young people should not call their elders prudes or puritans because they do not easily adopt the new standard. A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.

Reading this out of context might lead one to think that Lewis would approve of the relaxations of the rule of chastity itself that have taken place since his time; I think it's clear that he would not. He remains firm on chastity—it's modesty or propriety he considers flexible. What struck me was the part I highlighted, with regard to language, and it works both ways. I should think better than I do of young people who use casually (and frequently!) language that not that long ago marked one as scum of the earth, and I wish they would think more kindly of their elders who grew up in a time when certain racial terms, now only used by the "scum of the earth," were in many circles considered normal and not improper. "A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems" would do the job well.

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

...There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

I've heard before the comparison of our appetite for sex and our appetite for food; what I note now is how much the latter is now veering off course as well. We may not actually have food stripteases, but I've seen cooking shows and food videos and bizarre recipes that could almost be called food pornography. There's more to food than nutrition, just as there's more to sex than reproduction, but when the basic purpose of an appetite is almost forgotten, and when any instinct is kept inflamed for profit—it's a sure sign we're on the wrong track.

A repressed desire or thought is one which has been thrust into the subconscious (usually at a very early age) and can now come before the mind only in a disguised and unrecognisable form. Repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all. When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue—even attempted virtue—brings light; indulgence brings fog.

From Book 3, Chapter 6: Christian Marriage

Before we consider this modern view [of marriage and divorce] in its relation to chastity, we must not forget to consider it in relation to another virtue, namely justice. Justice, as I said before, includes the keeping of promises. Now everyone who has been married in a church has made a public, solemn promise to stick to his (or her) partner till death. The duty of keeping that promise has no special connection with sexual morality: it is in the same position as any other promise. ...

To this someone may reply that he regarded the promise made in church as a mere formality and never intended to keep it. Whom, then, was he trying to deceive when he made it? God? That was really very unwise. Himself? That was not very much wiser. The bride, or bridegroom, or the "in-laws"? That was treacherous. Most often, I think, the couple (or one of them) hoped to deceive the public. They wanted the respectability that is attached to marriage without intending to pay the price: that is, they were imposters, they cheated. If they are still contented cheats, I have nothing to say to them: who would urge the high and hard duty of chastity on people who have not yet wished to be merely honest? If they have now come to their senses and want to be honest, their promise, already made, constrains them. And this, you will see, comes under the heading of justice, not that of chastity. If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not mended by adding another: unchastity is not improved by adding perjury.

From Book 3, Chapter 7: Christian Forgiveness

I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself.

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. ... But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again. ...

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. 

From Book 3, Chapter 9: Charity

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

From Book 4, Chapter 8: Is Christianity Hard or Easy?

When [Jesus] said, "Be perfect," He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder—in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. ... This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else.

It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

From Book 4, Chapter 11: The New Men

No man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Past Watchful Dragons: The Narnia Chronicles of C. S. Lewis by Walter Hooper (Macmillan, 1971)

No other analysis of the Narnia books stands a chance with me now that I've read Planet Narnia. And both books are best read only by those who have already absorbed and fallen in love with the Chronicles. But for such people there is value. I didn't find Past Watchful Dragons nearly as interesting this time as when I first read it—several decades ago, I believe—possibly because through my "C. S. Lewis Restrospective" I've already absorbed much of what Hooper says here, sometimes several times over.

For me, the best part of the book—the reason I recommend it—is Hooper's inclusion in Chapter 5, "Inspiration and Invention," of a long fragment of the only substantial Narnian manuscript that survived Lewis's decluttering fervor. The story never saw publication, though many elements show up in other Narnian tales, most notably The Magician's Nephew. But in this case the boy Digory has a special gift: the ability to talk with animals and trees in our own world—until he tragically loses it. I would really like to have seen what Lewis would have made of that part of the story had it continued. Of course it made me think immediately of my friend Diane, who talks with trees and would probably approve of the reason Digory lost his gift.

Reading it also made me appreciate how much work must go into getting a book from the initial idea to the final version, as this fragment, despite the good story line, sounds amateurish, clearly lacking the beauty and polish of the other tales of Narnia.

I'll end with one of my favorite quotations. I had no idea it was from C. S. Lewis until I found it here, quoted a couple of pages before the story fragment.

There are only two times at which you can stop a thing. One is before everyone is tired of it—and the other is after!

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg (Free Press, 2012)
More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg (Free Press, 2007)

Steve Landsburg was a classmate of mine at the University of Rochester who, like my friend and roommate Kathy, went on to graduate school at the University of Chicago. He always was bright, and what I remember most about him is his ability to think outside the box. Kathy graduated after four years with simultaneous bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics; Steve did essentially the same thing, but took the master's degree alone, thus avoiding the foreign language and physical education classes that were at that time required for an undergraduate degree.

Eventually, he returned to his roots and became a professor of economics at the same University of Rochester, perhaps because economics gives him so many opportunities to demonstrate (1) how economically illiterate most ordinary people, media commentators, and political leaders are, and (2) how often careful economic analysis leads to results that are unexpected and contrary to what we might like to believe.

Both of these books are filled with examples. They are illuminating, witty, and fun to read. They are also proof that no one in his right mind would make decisions solely on economic principles. At the same time, those economic principles, even when applied in grossly simplified situations, shed invaluable light and provide ways of thinking about problems that are otherwise hopelessly fuzzy.

I enjoyed The Armchair Economist so much I immediately bought a copy for our 15-year-old grandson. I enjoyed More Sex Is Safer Sex as well, but (1) the former is more basic and has been more recently updated; although the principles of the latter are still sound, the technological examples from only 12 years ago positively creak with age; and (2) I have to answer to his parents. He can get it (and/or others of Mr. Landsburg's books) out of the library if he wants more.

The Armchair Economist

Table of Contents

I. What Life Is All About

• The Power of Incentives: How Seat Belts Kill
• Rational Riddles: Why U2 Concerts Sell Out
• Truth or Consequences: How to Split a Check or Choose a Movie
• The Indifference Principle: Who Cares If the Air Is Clean?
• The Computer Game of Life: Learning What It’s All About

II. Good and Evil

• Telling Right from Wrong: The Pitfalls of Democracy
• Why Taxes Are Bad: The Logic of Efficiency
• Why Prices Are Good: Smith versus Darwin
• Of Medicine and Candy, Trains and Sparks: Economics in the Courtroom

III. How to Read the News

• Choosing Sides in the Drug War: How the Atlantic Monthly Got It Wrong
• The Mythology of Deficits
• Unsound and Furious: Spurious Wisdom from the Media
• How Statistics Lie: Unemployment Can Be Good for You
• The Policy Vice: Do We Need More Illiterates?
• Some Modest Proposals: The End of Bipartisanship

IV. How Markets Work

• Why Popcorn Costs More at the Movies: And Why the Obvious Answer Is Wrong
• Courtship and Collusion: The Mating Game
• Cursed Winners and Glum Losers: Why Life Is Full of Disappointments
• Random Walks and Stock Market Prices: A Primer for Investors
• Ideas of Interest: Armchair Forecasting
• The Iowa Car Crop

V. The Pitfalls of Science

• Was Einstein Credible? The Economics of the Scientific Method
• New Improved Football: How Economists Go Wrong

VI. The Pitfalls of Religion

• Why I Am Not an Environmentalist: The Science of Economics versus the Religion of Ecology

From "The Power of Incentives"

Occasionally people are tempted to respond that nothing ... is worth any risk of death. Economists find this objection particularly frustrating, because neither those who raise it nor anybody else actually believes it. All people risk death every day for relatively trivial rewards. Driving to Starbucks for a Mocha Frappuccino involves a clear risk that could be avoided by staying home, but people still drive to Starbucks. We need not ask whether small pleasures are worth any risk; the answer is obviously yes. The right question is how much risk those small pleasures are worth.

From "Truth of Consequences"

Smoking habits are a quick and easy indicator of general health consciousness. They reveal your type in a publicly observable way. Insurance companies use that information by offering lower premiums to nonsmokers. If you take advantage of such an offer, your discount reflects more than just the health benefits of not smoking. It reflects also that, as a nonsmoker, you are more likely than average to be watching your cholesterol.

Insurance companies know that people cheat, and they account for that when they set the nonsmoking premiums. If you are truly a nonsmoker, you pay a little more because some "nonsmokers" are sneaking cigarettes where the insurance company can't see them. But do not jump to the conclusion that if cigarettes were banned, your insurance rates would fall. As a voluntary nonsmoker, you implicitly notify you insurance company that you are probably cautious in a lot of ways they can't observe. As a nonsmoker in a world without cigarettes, you might be indistinguishable from everybody else, and be charged accordingly.

From "The Indifference Principle"

Call it the Indifference Principle: Unless you're unusual in some way, nothing can ever make you happier than the next best alternative. You might prefer cheddar cheese to provolone, but if all your neighbors share your preference, then the price of cheddar cheese must rise to the point where you're just as happy to buy the provolone. Fortunately most of us are unusual in a great variety of ways, which is what allows us to benefit from choosing one activity over another. The Indifference Principle calls our attention to the fact that the greatest gains in life come in the areas where we're most unusual. [my emphasis]

From "Telling Right from Wrong"

During his years in the White House, President George Bush occasionally wished out loud for lower interest rates to ease the burden on young home buyers. For heaven's sake, everybody already knows that lower interest rates ease the burden on home buyers. Everybody also knows that lower interest rates can devastate people who are saving for their retirement. To call attention to one side of the cost-benefit ledger while ignoring the other is plain dishonest. If a politician wants to argue legitimately for lower interest rates, he needs to explain not why it is good to help borrowers, but why it is good to simultaneously help borrowers and hurt lenders.

From "Choosing Sides in the Drug War"

Our insistence on counting all individuals equally has some striking implications. One implication is that a change in price is never either good or bad. Whatever buyers gain, sellers lose. Price changes often result from changes in technology or in the legal environment, which can simultaneously affect production costs or consumption levels in ways that can be good or bad. But a price change in and of itself is neither a good nor a bad thing.

From "How Statistics Lie"

In a world of many prices that fluctuate independently, there is no way to construct a single meaningful index that is not biased in one way or another. The U. S. government actually reports several different measure of inflation, each with its own built-in biases, and economists try to be careful about selecting the right index for the right purpose. Particularly in times of high inflation, the media tend to focus on the [Consumer Price Index], perhaps because it serves their purpose of making things look bleak. Journalism is the dismal art. [My emphasis. This is a play on economics frequently being referred to as "the dismal science."]

For three decades in the United States of America, the income gap between the rich and the poor appears to have been widening. If you looked just at a snapshot of the numbers, you might be forced to conclude that while the rich have gotten richer, the poor have done nothing but stagnate. But there are several reasons to take those numbers with a grain of salt.

Landsburg goes on to explain that in detail; I'll include just two of his reasons—because I'm getting tired of typing.

Second, income tax rates were cut dramatically in the 1980s and again in the 2000s under Presidents Reagan and Bush. Those tax cuts had important real effects, but they had important illusory effects also. When tax rates fall, people devote less effort to hiding their incomes. For that reason alone, reported incomes go up, especially at the high end. ... Any tax cut tends to create an exaggerated appearance of a growing income gap.

Third, family breakups create statistical illusions of falling income. When a household has two $50,000 wage earners, it gets counted as one $100,000 household. When the family breaks up, suddenly there are two $50,000 households, even though no individual's income has changed.

This matters a lot. For example, between the years 1996 and 2005, according to U. S. census data, the median household income (after adjusting for inflation) rose only 5.3 percent. But if you correct for changing household sizes, the increase was a far more substantial 24.4 percent.

The gross domestic product, or GDP, is the most frequently reported measure of general economic well-being. As such, it has some obvious deficiencies. It counts the value of all goods and services produced in the economy, but not the value of time spent relaxing on the beach.

It also has some less obvious deficiencies. First, it really doesn't count the value of all goods and services produced in the economy. Many goods and services are produced within the household. Whether you wash your own dishes or pay a maid to wash them, the net benefit is a cabinet full of clean dishes. If you pay the maid, the GDP reflects this benefit; if you wash them yourself, it doesn't. ...

This observation is particularly important when GDP is compared across countries. In less developed countries there is usually more household production and consequently a greater discrepancy between reported GDP and actual output. When you read that per capita GDP in the United States is over 100 times as great as it is in Liberia, remember that people in Liberia grow their own food and make their own clothes and get no credit for it in the national income accounts. They are much poorer than we are but not as much poorer as the statistics seem to indicate.

Another deficiency is that increased output of goods and services can be either a good or a bad thing. A construction boom that creates thousands of desirable new houses is a good thing; a construction boom that replaces thousands of old houses destroyed by a hurricane consists of running as fast as possible just to stay in one place. The GDP counts them equally.

From "Cursed Winners and Glum Losers"

It is a fair assumption that people who run auctions for a living know what they are doing, and that if there is some discrepancy between their behavior and the prescriptions of the economic theorist, then it is the theorist who is missing something. Our job as economists is not to tell auctioneers how to run their business. It is to assume that they know how to run their business and to figure out why their strategies are the right ones. [emphasis mine]

Amen! I'd say that applies to more professions than auctioneering, and more experts than economists. Think teachers/educational theorists, or parents/child psychologists, for example.

More Sex Is Safer Sex

Table of Contents

Preface: Unconventional Wisdom

PART I: The Communal Stream

• More Sex Is Safer Sex
  Addendum
• Be Fruitful and Multiply
• What I Like about Scrooge
• Who's the Fairest of Them All?
• Children at Work

PART II: How to Fix Everything

• How to Fix Politics
• How to Fix the Justice System
• How to Fix Everything Else
  How to Fight Fires
  How to Fight Crime
  How to Prevent Accidents
  How to Fight Pollution
  How to Solve the Kidney Shortage
  How to Fight Grade Inflation
  How to Shorten Waiting Lines

PART III: Everyday Economics

• Go Figure
• Oh No! It's a Girl!
• The High Price of Motherhood

PART IV: The Big Questions

• Giving Your All
  A Defense of Pure Reason
• The Central Banker of the Soul
• How to Read the News
  Racial Profiling
  Disaster Relief
  The Sack of Baghdad
  Global Warming, Local Crowding
  An Outsourcing Fable
  The New Racism
• Matters of Life and Death
• Things That Make Me Squirm

Appendix

From "Be Fruitful and Multiply"

For many of the comforts we enjoy today, we can be grateful to the inventors of cable television, video recorders, and the personal computer—and to the stroke of good fortune that prevented their parents from joining Zero Population Growth.

The engine of prosperity is technological progress, and the engine of technological progress is people. The more people, the more ideas. The more ideas, the more we prosper.

Some families prefer to have wealthy descendants; others prefer to have lots of descendants. But as long as our choices don't impinge on each other, that's not a policy issue; it's an opportunity to celebrate diversity.

In the 1930s, we had a Great Depression, when income levels fell back to where they’d been about twenty years earlier. For a few years, people had to live the way their parents had always lived—and they considered it almost intolerable. The underlying expectation—that the present is supposed to be better than the past—is a new phenomenon in history. ...

Not only are we richer than ever before, we also work less and have better-quality products. One hundred years ago, the average American workweek was over sixty hours, today it’s thirty-five. One hundred years ago, only 6 percent of manufacturing workers took vacation; today it’s 90 percent. One hundred years ago, men entered the full-time labor-force in the early teens; today labor-force participation by young teenagers is essentially zero. One hundred years ago, only 26 percent of male workers retired by age 65; today over 80 percent of 65-year-old males have retired. One hundred years ago, the average housekeeper spent twelve hours a day on laundry, cooking, cleaning, and sewing; today it’s about three hours. ...

Today in the United States of America among the very poorest of the poor—those with household incomes under $15,000 a year—99 percent have refrigerators (83 percent of them frost-free); 64 percent have air-conditioning; 97 percent have color TVs and over two-thirds have cable; 60 percent have washers and dryers. ...

The probability that a 20-year-old has a living grandmother today is higher than the probability that a 20-year-old had a living mother a hundred years ago.

The moral is that increases in measured income—even the phenomenal increases of the past two centuries—don't accurately reflect improvements in our economic condition. The average middle-class American might have a smaller measured income than the European monarchs of the Middle Ages, but that does not prevent the American from leading a more luxurious life. I suspect that Henry VIII would have traded half his kingdom for modern plumbing, a lifetime supply of penicillin, and access to the Internet. 

From "Children at Work"

Dr. David Livingstone, the African explorer, medical missionary, and hero of the Victorian Age, began his career at age ten, working 84-hour weeks at the local cotton mill. In other words, his was a rather typical upbringing for a British child in the 1820s.

Dr. Livingstone, we may presume, would have been rather bemused by modern American college students, with PDAs in their pockets, iPods on their hips, and $20,000-a-year educations [feel free to substitute your own updated examples] on their résumés, gathered on campus to share a keg, toss a few Frisbees, and raise their voices in the annual spring ritual of protest against third-world child labor.

The student protesters' message to African children on the edge of starvation comes down to this: kick back, relax, and take life a little easier. That, after all, is the content of the protesters' call for trade agreements that "protect" third-world children by limiting the number of hours they can work and the environmental conditions they can work in. David Livingstone, whose childhood labor financed his medical education, and who genuinely cared about the welfare of Africans, might have advised them differently. ...

People in the third world are poor; they're about as poor as the English and Americans of the mid-nineteenth century. Being poor means making hard choices, such as whether to work more or to eat less. Neither alternative is terribly palatable, but it requires more than a bit of hubris to suggest that middle-class American and European demonstrators can choose more wisely than the African and Asian families who have to live with the consequences. ...

The question, then, is whether third-world parents really do have their children's best interests at heart. The answer seems to be yes. Multiple studies have shown that in developing countries, most parents take their children out of the labor force as soon as they can afford to. ... When decisions are made by people—in this case loving parents—who have to endure the consequences, there's rarely any basis to override them. This is particularly so when those who would override have exactly zero experience with similarly dire conditions. [my emphasis]

From "How to Fix Everything"

When were you last bumped from an overbooked airplane? It used to happen all the time—until an economist named Julian Simon came up with the crazy idea of bribing passengers to give up their seats. Gone are the days when you relied on the luck of the draw to make it to your daughter's wedding.

In those same bad old days, African elephants were hunted almost to extinction. Hunting bans never had much effect against determined poachers—until Zimbabwean officials came up with the crazy idea of giving the elephants to rural villagers. Unlike the poachers, who would poach and then move on, the villagers know that the elephants they preserve today will still be theirs tomorrow. So unlike the poachers, the villagers harvest at a sustainable rate—and make it their business to drive the poachers away. The result? Villagers have prospered and the elephant population has soared.

 From "Giving Your All"

American corporations are essentially immune to charitable impulses. This is for the good and sufficient reason that stockholders don't want corporate executives to choose their charities for them. You hire a tailor to make your clothes, you hire a carpenter to fix your roof, and, if you're a stockholder, you hire executives to run your company. Your tailor, your carpenter, and your executives might be very good at what they do, but it doesn't follow that they'd also be good at figuring out how to give away your money.

So, for the most part, corporations eschew charity completely. Instead, they truckle to the public-relations circus known as the United Way.

Nothing could be less charitable than giving to the United Way. Among the several dozen agencies that receive United Way handouts, surely you can identify—with essentially zero effort—at least one that, according to your own beliefs and values, will make better than average use of an extra dollar. ... Allowing the United Way to split your contribution among thousands of less-worthy causes is the very opposite of charity. Your employer's public-relations department might love you for it, but you purchase that esteem by diverting resources away from the worthiest recipients, a complete perversion of what charity is supposed to be about.

From "Things that Make Me Squirm"

Most of the time, we're not forced to choose between prosperity and economic freedom, because the two go hand in hand. Canada's Fraser Institute, in cooperation with several dozen think tanks around the world, assigns each country an economic freedom rating from 1 to 10. High ratings go to countries with limited government, low taxes, well-enforced property rights, functioning markets, and free trade. Currently, Hong Kong ranks first, followed by Singapore, and then we have a three-way tie among New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States. Myanmar brings up the rear. ...

The general upward trend [of a scatter plot of economic freedom versus per capita income, with each dot representing a country] is obvious. Of course, that doesn't prove anything about causation, but it's awfully suggestive—and we have plenty of theory to support that suggestion.

Incidentally, if you carry out the same experiment with political freedom—including scheduled elections, robust opposition parties, freedom of speech and religion, and so forth—on the horizontal axis, the dots look almost completely random. Political freedom is, in my opinion, a good thing, but unlike economic freedom it seems to have almost no link to prosperity.