From lab girl to lab woman

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, scientists, botany, autobiographies, memoirs

The stereotype of a career scientist is of someone rather dour, square, dispassionate, and driven; one who cannot be deterred; someone who knew what he (rarely she) wanted in a career and thus majored in a chosen field, obtained degrees (at least two or three), excelled at research, obtained a university position, published (and published and published), obtained tenure, and eventually has come to rule a scientific domain as an éminence grise (best translation: "grizzled crag"). A straight line from birth to near-godhood.

Ha! Not in my experience!! The few grizzled crags I've known were either really harsh SOB's who attained eminence while leaving behind a trail of shattered foes, or (much better!) perpetual children who still aren't sure just what they want to be when they grow up, but have mightily enjoyed the ride along the way. The best scientists breathe curiosity, emit questions with every breath, and seldom take anything for granted. They know that great discoveries frequently began when someone said, "That's funny! What IS that?"

But the one adjective above that is accurate is "driven". Driven to know, driven to find out what and how and perhaps even why. Driven to learn endlessly and hoping, if not to find ultimate truth, to carve a new step or two along the path. Sometimes they know this for what it is. Sometimes not. Either way, a scientist worth knowing seems always to have a twinkle in his or her eye.

Getting to know Hope Jahren through her memoir/odyssey Lab Girl, it seemed at first that her dour Minnesota Scandanavian upbringing might have squashed all the twinkle out of her. She remembers her mother as unendingly stern and undemonstrative, and nearly always angry. But as we learn of her own nearly catastrophic level of bipolarity, and that she hints how it ran in her family, a more sympathetic picture emerges: that her mother kept herself under supremely strict control, not liking it but seeing no other way. The twinkle was suppressed in order to conform to the stultifying reserve inherent in the Minnesotans. Too bad they didn't run into Garrison Keillor very early on! He showed the fun under the stiff collar. Clearly, Dr. Jahren had twinkle enough left in her to have a stellar scientific career. But it came slowly, laboriously.

Lab Girl is half memoir and half an introduction to the botany of trees. At first, a chapter on herself and her life alternates with one on the growth of a seed, a sprout, a sapling. By the end of the book, the segments begin to mix. Dr. Jahren has become the tree she writes about, having survived stage by stage of growth, succeeding in spreading her canopy to take in enough sun to thrive.

We look on human life as though success were a right, a given; that "infant mortality" were an aberration; that poverty of body and soul ought to be rare. The mathematics of reproduction in a forest are grim: A tree produces millions of seeds yearly, and at the end of a life that may be no more than 25 years for a Mimosa or as long as hundreds to thousands of years for oaks and redwoods, if two of those seeds have sprouted, grown, and become mature trees, that counts as reproductive success. We count it unusual for a baby or child to die. But even in this most "enlightened" part of Western culture, we pay little attention when dreams die, when millions labor at nearly useless "work", when the bad (i.e. paranoid) kind of "grizzled crag" crushes the hopes of one perceived opponent after another, whether in science, business, art, governance, or industry.

For much of Dr. Jahren's career she was frequently, almost constantly, in danger of being crushed by more established fellow scientists. Like a sapling in a forest, frequently overshadowed and starved of sunlight, she had to struggle to make her way. But make it she did. And I don't think she is at the peak of her career. Perhaps writing this book indicates that she has a nagging suspicion that she has indeed peaked. Not likely. She has too much drive, too much spunk.

Her blog is hopejahrensurecanwrite.com, and I agree, she sure can write! She writes so well, it might actually be a negative in the eyes of some. My younger brother, now an established professor, was denied admission to a History department's PhD program largely because of jealousy: he was already a published author with a very readable writing style, and history professors are well known for writing either badly or abominably. His "judges" felt diminished in his presence. So he got into an Archaeology school instead and the rest is (giggle) history! However, as Hope Jahren tells us, early on she became proficient at writing "a language few read and nobody speaks", the dry, ultra-precise prose of the scientific article or monograph. Rather than let it stultify her popular writing, she learned to use the lessons of scientific writing to sharpen and brighten it. Thus, when she isn't trying to impress a granting agency, she writes sparkling, need I say, twinkling, prose. I think she has another book or few in her. I hope so.

Dancing to the beat of a different accordion

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, humor, autobiographies, commentary

My father said, "Don't put yourself down. The world is full of people who will do that for you." To make this proverb universally applicable, one must add, "…unless you can make a living from it." Think of Rodney Dangerfield ("I get no respect"). Then think of Alexandra Petri as a younger, brasher Rodney Dangerfield, with a greater range.

How great is that range? One could make a useful estimate from the chapter titles of A Field Guide to Awkward Silences. After chapter 1, "How Not to be Awkward", states, in its entirety,

1. I have no idea.
2. Well, how about this? Don't do any of the following.

there follow 23 chapters ranging from "Flopper" (2) to "Tuesdays with Hitler" (6) to "How to Join a Cult, by Mistake, on a Tuesday, in Fifty-Seven Easy Steps" (8) and "Under the Dome" (20 - her father was a Congressman) to "Self-Defense Tips for Fairy-Tale Girls" (21). Don't consider these the extrema, as though they were the points on a starfish. NOr is it even a starfish with 23 points; it is more of a 23-dimensional space. And it implies there are a whole lot more dimensions out there!

In today's paper, the Crossword Puzzle's first and last "across" clues were (1) "Parent of 63 across" and (63) "Child of 1 across". They turned out to be "Baby Boomer" and "Millennial". That is not generally true. My wife and I happen to be Boomers, and parents of a Millennial, only because we were in our mid-40's when he was born. My wife went right out of labor into hot flashes. Most children of Boomers are members of the "X Generation", and most Millennials are their children. Ms Petri, being no more than a few months older than our son, is definitely a Millennial, and between us and her there is a double Generation Gap.

Anyone out there remember the Generation Gap? It was the one between the Boomers and our parents, who were the "Great Depression Generation" and also the "Greatest Generation". They had lived through the two most significant eras of the Twentieth Century, but to us it was all "history", as in our classic dismissal, "Oh, that's history, man!" They said, "Waste not, want not," and we said, "But I want it NOW". They said, "An apple doesn't fall far from the tree," but we were apples with legs, and ran half across the planet. They built "The Good Life" and first we trashed it, then turned anti-trashing sentiment into the Enviro-Nazi movement that drives half of Liberal politics; we soft-heartedly (and soft-headedly) tried to "Save the World" (usually from them!), and Liberal politics (the other half) turned this into the Universal Nanny State (look up "Cowboy after OSHA" to see what I mean).

So it's understandable that it took me a while to warm to Ms Petri's style of humor, and to learn to parse when she was actually being serious. I have observed among Millennials, including our son, that "to think is to do." They lack a filter. In the chapter "Internet Bitch", about the time Rush Limbaugh called her a Bitch, she muses on two collections of words: those that cause a gut reaction, such as the F-bomb and the S-bomb, and those that used to, but don't any more, such as "Zounds!", a contraction of "God's Wounds!"—it could get you burned at the stake in the 1500's. There is a coda. to listen to nearly anyone under 35 speak, the "bombs" and a half-dozen other "four letter words" don't seem to give any of them a kick in the gut, the way they seem to affect Boomers. Fortunately, while not averse to the occasional bombing run, Ms Petri is much cleaner of mouth (of pen? of keyboard?) than most of her generation.

As a journalist (the profession she wraps around all her escapades), she gets backstage for events most of us never hear of. She went to the National Pun contest, entered it on a lark, and did so well that the next year she returned, and won! She applied, and appeared, on Jeopardy; was ahead for a while but then lost. She can't return while Alex Trebek is alive, so she awaits his demise: only then can she return to her "tribe", the trivia-obsessed She did pretty well in a whistling contest. These and other adventures hark back to Chapter 2, "Flopper", in which she shows that, if you can become immune to the shame of being a flop, there are a lot of fun things waiting out there for you to try. You might actually be sorta good at a few of them.

Her humor style is varied, but much relies on the sly exaggeration. She could have almost learned that kind of humor from many of the great humorists of the generation before mine, from Red Skelton to Jack Benny. It would be interesting to see her do a stand-up routine à la Jack Benny. He could draw out more laughs with a slow, turning gaze than a whole monologue by Jay Leno; I bet she could come close.

But her book is about awkwardness, after all. The 23 chapters aren't really about the awkward silences themselves, but about what led up to them…a great many of them. And growing up seems to be the most awkward of all. She sums up the notion that she has become, greatly to her surprise, an adult, this way:

"Everyone sees this competent-looking thing walking around, but that is just the tip of the iceberg, while for the purposes of this metaphor under the iceberg is not more ice but instead a crowd of really nervous penguins frantically trying to hold the ice in place and feeling that they aren't quite up to the task."

So really, why else would she have shown up at the airport to pick up a friend, playing a Polka on her accordion?

You would have to be a brilliant octopus

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, food service, restaurants, waiters, autobiographies

When I was about 16 I worked as a busboy for a summer, at a resort hotel. The hotel had two restaurants, one rather upscale and one more like a "family restaurant". Prices and service differed greatly. I was assigned to the downscale one, using a "bus tub" to clear tables. On the "other side" the busboys dressed similar to the waiters, in black slacks and a starched white shirt, and used a stylish tray to unload a table. Neither place was overly busy; most days there was a pretty steady flow of customers.

I was puzzled at the end of the first week when another busboy called me over at the end of the day, saying, "Don't leave until we get our tips." Busboys get tips? I found that the waitresses on our side, and the waiters on the other, pooled a portion of their tips, which was evenly divided among the busboys. It never came to much. It was equal to an extra hour or two of my meager pay.

I found Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip – Confessions of a Cynical Waiter on a New Books shelf at the library, but learned that while it is new to the library, it had been out for eight years. The author is "The Waiter", and while his identity is now known, I'll leave that for you to look up. He was anonymous when the book was published, and for a few years thereafter.

The book consists of reworked postings from the weblog Waiter Rant., in which the author chronicled his experiences waiting tables and later as floor manager (elsewhere called a headwaiter) at an upscale restaurant in New York. I feel lucky that my short experience in the restaurant business was in a sleepy resort hotel, rather than a Zagat-rated pressure cooker in the Big Apple!

The Waiter gathered together material on about twenty subjects, so while the book is "redacted autobiography", it is mainly topical. Two topics that run throughout and across the others: screwy customers and insane owners. The Waiter writes that perhaps 80% of restaurant customers are nice folks who enjoy their meal, cause no trouble, and leave a decent tip. Ah, but that other 20%! Some may tip very well but are otherwise evil or insane; some are very demanding, even pathologically "entitled"; some seem proud to leave a tip of 8%; and some seem to either hate the staff, or love them to the point of obtrusive obsession. Here's a tip to you as a customer: go there for the food, be nice, behave yourself like you had a mother who raised you well (whether that's true or not), and tip well.

At the resort hotel I was paid half of minimum wage. plus my share of 10% of the pooled tips. In the case of us busboys, it was because seasonal workers are exempt from minimum wage laws. But the wait staff were paid only a little more, and tips were supposed to make up the bulk of their pay. This is true in most American restaurants, whether a place is open seasonally or not. And so it is at "The Bistro" where The Waiter worked. He was paid about 60% of minimum wage, plus tips. Now, at a Zagat-rated place, in which 2-4 patrons could consume $100 worth of food and $200-$500 worth of liquor in an hour or so, a 15% or 20% tip can come to quite a lot. Unless a customer doesn't like something and so leaves little or no tip…or is just a poor tipper or even a non-tipper. In an old Reader's Digest joke, someone says, "Oh, at restaurants I never tip." Asked whether he gets bad service on later visits, he says, "I never go to the same place twice." In a small city like mine I'd run out of places to eat before the year was out.

Let's work the math backward. A tiny apartment in NYC is likely to cost $1,200 monthly. A frugal waiter can eat all his meals at the restaurant, or eat enough at the one or two meals he is there so he doesn't need to eat outside. But a fellow still needs another few hundred bucks a month besides rent. So, let's figure you gotta pull in about $2,000 for twenty days' work, or $100/day. Base pay is $4.25/hr, or $42,50 for a ten-hour day (not uncommon). But only half of those are "busy" hours, so you need to get at least $57.50 in tips in about five hours. If everyone were to tip 15% (they don't), that means moving nearly $400 in food and drinks in those five hours. Realistically, while some customers might tip 20% or even 25%, the average is below 15%, with so many poor tippers and non-tippers. So to break even, a waiter has to move more than $500 worth of food every single day, and double that to have some spending money of his own. That isn't easy, even if the owner or headwaiter assigns you to the more lucrative section of the floor plan.

Restaurant owners want to make money. Most of them want to make a lot of money. This generally means they understaff, and at the place where The Waiter worked before The Bistro, the owner, or a floor manager, demanded bribes from waiters to work "good" sections, and a variety of other kinds of petty graft. At best, waiters work hard. All too frequently they work so hard they finish a day exhausted, dripping sweat, and might have a rash in their butt crack from rushing back and forth in sweat-soaked underpants. Thus this post's title. To do what their boss expects, a waiter at The Bistro and any similar place would have to be a brilliant octopus.

Waiters live in a different world. They work while we play. They do their shopping and other "outside stuff" while we either work or sleep. If they go to a movie, there is never a line or a full theater. And they don't love holidays. They tend to hate Mother's Day and other "holidays", which for them are days filled with more-obnoxious-than-usual customers in larger numbers. It is amazing how many folks either fear or hate their mother, and it seems to all come out at the restaurant to which they take her. In fact, it is almost universal that people let their guard down when they eat, so if they are capable of pathological behavior, a restaurant is where they are most likely to show it.

I have often wondered how the American way of tipping arose. Is it because of our historical devotion to meritocracy? Almost everywhere else in the world, tips are usually not "expected", and where they are, 5%-10% is plenty. Before I was 25, the usual tip in America was 10%, then somehow that shifted to 15%. In 1967 I ate a restaurant meal, and the bill came to about $5. I put a Kennedy half dollar next to my plate as I got up to pay the bill. The waiter was nearby and said, "Excuse me, sir? The customary gratuity is 15%." I said, "I give God 10%. Are you better than He is?" and continued to the register to pay. But I gradually got used to 15%. Now many places have a note, either on the menu or on the bill, suggesting 18% or 20%. I seldom leave more than 15%, plus maybe a little to make the total a round number. But much more frequently I eat at a buffet, where 10% is still OK because the wait staff do much less work per table, or at a fast food place where tipping is not expected.

Even The Waiter says tipping over 20% is usually gauche, unless you got a "divine" level of service. And while tipping comes up again and again in the book, it is about much more than that. A "fine" restaurant is a pressure cooker for extracting bad behavior from customers. Also from the employees. The hyper-stress of working at places like The Bistro drives a majority of the staff to various kinds of substance abuse, and heavy drinking, mainly (but not totally) after work, is almost universal. It becomes a vicious cycle. The Waiter admits to a nearly nightly need to tank up with several cocktails, and that can cost a lot, though sympathetic barkeeps that knew him well would often comp a drink or two. So he has to work harder and force himself to smile more to get more tips to support his drinking habit. No wonder he got out of the business once he started earning money from his book deal!

This story had a moral. At a restaurant, be nice and tip well. The server almost certainly has a much tougher life than you do. He or she is not "a loser". You or I would crumple within the first hour of doing their work.

I looked up a few things. The Waiter has written another book. He's an excellent writer. I wish him well.

Making lemonade from the absence of a lemon

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, neurology, neuroscience, autobiographies

I seldom show a book jacket, but this book's cover illustration tells the objective story. Nicole Cohen has a hole in her brain the size of a lemon. It is not in a random location, but represents most of her right parietal lobe.

As she tells us in Head Case: My Brain and Other Wonders, this was not determined until she was in her early twenties and preparing to go to graduate school. She did not yet have a driver's license, but felt she really needed one at this point. Yet so far, she had been unable to pass a driving test. A long list of impairments finally convinced doctors to order MRI and other tests. Finally. Finally she knew she wasn't "just weird" or "not paying attention". A necessary bit of her brain was missing.

The parietal lobes integrate our sense for time and distance. They are necessary to form an accurate internal map of the world. We seldom realize that our ability to navigate the world requires us to sense the relationships of other objects to each other and to ourselves, both in space and time. If you can't judge how far an oncoming car is and how quickly it is approaching, you can't safely cross the street.

Children learn safe crossing by about age six or eight. Cole Cohen never has. She crosses with others, relying on their sense of time and space. While other children were learning to navigate the world safely, she learned how to rely on other people's abilities. Thus she could safely walk, but you can't drive that way.

Her writing is fluid and enjoyable to read; she is not "dumb". You don't need street-crossing skills to navigate your way to Bachelors' and Masters' degrees. She has learned to play well the hand she was dealt. As she writes, it hasn't been easy. Certain aspects of human relationships were as foreign to her as the distance to the nearest door. Touch is particularly problematic, probably because when she was quite young, touching something usually meant she'd misjudged where she was going and had just knocked something over. She learned to cope. She learned to thrive. A heartening story.

Brilliance by accident

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, savant syndrome

What is a savant? Historically, it is an exceptionally learned and intelligent person. Since the coining of the term "idiot savant" in about 1900 AD, the old meaning has been declining. "Idiot savant" originally referred to a severely impaired person with superior ability in a narrow field such as music performance or painting or drawing or memory skills. Many such persons were found to be autistic, so "autistic savant" was promoted starting about 1970, and particularly after the 1988 release of the film Rain Man. The character Raymond, the "rain man", was modeled on the talents of the autistic savant Kim Peek, now unfortunately deceased. But not all narrowly-focused savants are autistic, so the preferred term now is simply "Savant", usually capitalized, or, more cumbersomely, "person with savant syndrome."

Characteristic of Savants is that they attain or develop almost unbelievable skills with little or no practice. The prototype is someone who sits down at a piano for the first time and is able to play a symphonic piece he recently heard. Most savants are male, so I'll use male pronouns when avoiding pronouns altogether is too onerous. I have a friend, someone of greater than average intelligence, but no genius, and he plays piano really well. He can read music, sight-read, play by ear or from memory, and transpose to any key. He simply sat down one day and could do it. In that, he is a Savant, but he is certainly not autistic.

A very few people develop Savant skills in one area or another after a serious injury. Worldwide about thirty such people are known. They have "acquired savant syndrome", as opposed to being born a Savant. One such is Jason Padgett, whose new book, co-written with Maureen Seaberg, is Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel. Jason is apparently exceptional among Acquired Savants in having gained both extraordinary skills in certain areas of mathematics, and also synesthesia.

As he writes, he didn't care about math in school, and mostly didn't like it. When he was a little over thirty years old he was mugged as he left a Karaoke bar. He was struck severely in the head at least three times. The first blow, he remembers, was followed by a very low note, a kind of Bong as from a piano, but lower than a piano's lowest note. By the next day he began seeing things differently. Moving things now moved in rapid stop-action, and everything seemed to have lines radiating out. It was as though the construction lines of a detailed mechanical drawing had not been erased. (My insta-theory of this is that he was seeing what the vision system usually hides, the various shape detection circuits decoding all the objects in his visual field.)

Synesthesia is the mixing of senses. Some synesthetes see each letter of the alphabet, or each number, or certain words, in specific colors. 3 may be chartreuse (seldom a prosaic "green") and 5 tangerine orange. Or each may be accompanied by a unique musical sound. Or music may evoke colored visions, or smells. Jason sees numbers and other math symbols as collections of boxes stacked in ways that are meaningful to him, for one; other synesthetic reactions occur for him but I didn't get a clear idea of them.

An injured brain will try to heal. It takes time. Jason spent more than three years in self-imposed isolation, driven by agoraphobia, while his brain healed as well as it could. Just prior to that, however, he was very active, first trying to get justice against the muggers, and later searching for some understanding of why he now saw differently and thought differently, and also had much stronger empathetic emotions; he could read people better than most of us (It strikes me that this is a third Savant skill).

One thing that helped him greatly was to begin drawing what he saw or what he imagined about math concepts. This drawing (note his copyright information) represents wave-particle duality, a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics. Some of his drawings take months to complete. When he explains one to a professional mathematician, they recognize his insight.

This shape looks totally symmetrical at first, but there are subtle asymmetries that enhance its beauty, and convey the meaning. Even without an explanation of the mathematical underpinnings, the drawings are compelling artwork!

Learning how to cope with the negative effects of his injury took years, and healing is still going on. He was greatly helped once he was able to get MRI scans and other brain images that validated his study of what must have happened in his brain. He was also greatly helped by meeting, wooing and marrying his wife Elena. He is healing better than if he'd remained a loner.

Jason has found new communities, most particularly other synesthetes, to whom he doesn't seem weird at all. He has been studied by various experts, some of whom are studying techniques such as trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TCMS), which can apparently induce temporary Savant-like abilities. Perhaps one day it will be possible to unleash a hidden skill that was buried in our "genetic memory" (whatever that means!)…without getting whacked by a mugger! Many skills will always need practice and refinement, but perhaps some are innate yet hidden, waiting for us to learn how to find them.

Jason's co-author Maureen Seaberg also experiences synesthesia and blogs about it. Jason has this website, and you can find Maureen on Twitter.

Are psychopaths evil, or broken?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, psychopaths, autobiographies, fmri

Psychopaths and psychopathy have been of growing interest for about thirty years. Amazon currently lists 96 hardbacks with "psychopath" (singular or plural) in the title, and more than 600 if paperbacks and Kindle editions are counted. Perhaps a quarter of these books delve into the science to some extent. The rest are more sensational treatments or contain advice about dealing with a troublesome boss, co-worker, lover, child or parent, who may or may not actually be psychopathic.

Of books on the subject with a more scientific or investigatory aim, I suspect most are at least partly based on the work of Kent Kiehl, who has just published The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience. Beginning with the work of Drs. Hervey Cleckley and Robert Hare, and based very much on the PCL-R (Psychopathy Check List – Revised), he initiated the study of brain structure and function in psychopaths using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging).

While he was a graduate student Dr. Kiehl began working with prisoners convicted of the most violent crimes, learning to apply the PCL (I'll leave the R off; it is understood these days). To properly use the PCL, interviews lasting a few hours, conducted by a well trained clinician, are needed. The score ranges up to 40, with 30 being the cutoff. The average for all inmates in maximum-security prisons is 11. The average for the general population is 4. The average for serial killers is 35, but not all serial killers have been found to be psychopaths.

Throughout the book the chapters each begin with a mini-fact. The first is

One in four maximum-security inmates is a psychopath

So if you have a bunch of inmates whose average score is 11, but a quarter of them have an average score of about 32 (this assumes that higher scores are more scarce), then the rest will average 4, the same as the general population of the non-incarcerated!

Psychopathy is a primarily male affliction. While about one man in 150 is a psychopath, the rate for women is closer to one in 1500, so about 90% of psychopaths are male. If we confine our concern to those between the ages of 18 and 50, in the U.S. population about half a million men and 50,000 women are psychopaths, as measured by PCL-R.

I wondered about the 30-point cutoff. Its utility depends on the distribution of scores. For example, if someone is rated by a trained clinician, for whatever reason, and is scored a 29, is he considered "almost a psychopath" or a non-psychopath? Having dug around some, I didn't find much on score distributions, and nothing for the "general population". But I did find a few histograms compiled for psychiatric populations. They showed a bimodal distribution with a pronounced low region in the range 20-30. Curiously, among many articles that mention score distribution, most treat the scores as a normal (that is, Gaussian) distribution, which introduces serious errors if the true distribution is bimodal (think of a camel with two humps; the Gaussian curve has one hump only).

It is a terrible pity that so many scientists, psychologists in particular, try to shoehorn all distributions into the Gaussian model, when so few natural phenomena are truly Gaussian! Sure, height in males or females tends to be normally distributed ("normally" meaning "according to the Gaussian model"). So do a small number of other measurable things. But consider this question:

What is the average number of digits (fingers plus thumbs) possessed by persons the day of their birth...or death?

Neither question can be answered "exactly ten". On the day of birth, some babies are born deformed and have fewer than ten, and in rare cases, no digits or even hands at all. Also, ten is not the maximum number because some are born with twelve, and sometimes more. The internet abounds with pictures of babies born with 14 digits or more. And at the end of life, a significant number of folks have lost one digit or more to accident or disease. So while the mode (greatest frequency) of the distribution curve is right at ten, the number ranges from zero to at least 16, and is strongly skewed, numbers smaller than ten predominating. To analyze frequencies of digit quantity using Gaussian statistics would be a serious error.

The difficulty of labeling is also discussed. Young people can also display psychopathic tendencies, and there is a PCL for juveniles, but it is a breach to tell a youngster the result. In one case in the book, a young man with some emotional problems was told by a doctor that he was a psychopath, whereas it turned out later he was not one at all! But he believed the doctor and decided he'd live a life of crime, including killing.

Dr. Kiehl's work has been primarily with serious criminals. A significant focus of his work has been predicting rates of recidivism, or re-offending, after a prisoner is released. Psychopaths are six times as likely as others to re-offend. Does that mean that we ought to give the PCL to a freshly incarcerated person and, if he "fails", lock him up and throw away the key? Not so fast. The author spends a chapter discussing the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center (MJTC) in Wisconsin, where a different approach has been used to ameliorate the antisocial traits of the least-manageable juveniles, who are termed "callous and unemotional" to avoid labeling them "psychopaths" at too early an age.

Psychopaths in general do not learn from punishment or other negative consequences. They seem immune to correction, and many are proud of it. At MJTC, as I understand it, the juvenile offenders are trained in a way similar to performing animals. Every slightest "good behavior" is rewarded, and while serious misbehavior may be sanctioned for the safety of the staff, most misbehavior is simply ignored. Everyone there is trained in the method, from clinicians to cleaning staff. The results have been spectacular. For example, among juveniles not treated who were released at age 18, a certain number became adult criminals and several committed murder. Among an equal number of those who completed the MJTC program, fewer than half as many committed any crimes, and none were murders. Some went on to get more education and were able to hold jobs. Getting such results is neither quick nor cheap, but considering that crime in America costs at least a trillion dollars yearly, not doing anything is even more costly!

I find it interesting that Dr. James Fallon has studied psychopaths, using tools developed by Dr. Kiehl, and found that he is himself a psychopath, as are a number of people, such as Niel Armstrong, who are not in any way in trouble with the law. It seems one's fMRI scan can show the suppressed emotional brain activity characteristic of a psychopath, and one can score 30 or more on the PCL, while still having respect for law. Dr. Fallon believes such psychopaths outnumber the criminal ones. Let's hope so!

A "horse whisperer" is one who has a special rapport with horses and can train them quickly and effectively. The book's title points not so much to the author as to the originator of the program at MJTC. I hope the work there leads to follow-on programs that can take the fangs out of  the most dangerous young persons and, one might fondly hope, gradually depopulate our prisons. It is a national shame that America has such a large number of prisoners.

Don't let the Ripper go for your throat

kw: book reviews, fictional status uncertain, autobiographies, murders, murderers

The first famous serial killer was Jack the Ripper. He was not the most prolific, with "only" six confirmed kills. He was not the most creative; his murders were hack jobs, followed by crude dissections in five of the six cases. The "surgical precision" often reported relates more to the use of a scalpel or equally sharp instrument rather than to great skill in its use. So why so famous? Mainly because he got away with it.

My wild card choice this season is The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper by James Carnac. In the Dewey Decimal system the book is classified 364.1523, "Murders". But it is really about the murderer. James Carnac claims to be that murderer. We find a brief physical description: 5 ft 7 in, slight, sallow complexion, round face, and longish black hair. And we find either a possible solution to a popular mystery, or a forest of new mysteries.

The volume consists of the following:

• A map of the Whitechapel area as it was in 1888, with principal locations marked.
• A preface by Alan Hicken, a museum-keeper into whose hands the typescript came in 2007.
• An introduction by Paul Begg, the most authoritative author and investigator of Jack the Ripper.
• The text of the Autobiography in three parts plus an "Explanatory Remarks" and an Epilogue. The Epilogue purports to be a report of a coroner's inquest into the death of James Carnac in a fire.
• Three Appendices: a detailed analysis of the typescript by Paul Begg, Facsimiles of a few pages of the typescript (everywhere called a manuscript, but it was not handwritten), and a list of the six known victims.
• "About the Contributors"
• Index

The typescript, according to Paul Begg, was prepared on three different typewriters. Parts 1 and 2 on one, Part 3 on another, and the Epilogue on a third. His opinion is that Part 3 is the least credible and that the Epilogue is a true wild card, as no other record of the inquest is known.

The Autobiography itself is remarkably well written, and hurries a reader along. Written in a Victorian-era style, and thus wordy, it is nonetheless quite readable. Have you ever noted that writers of that era used more commas and semicolons than one finds today, and that they help a reader track where a long sentence is going?

Carnac, if he existed, claims to be descended from a long line of executioners and official torturers, including the executioner of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Thus a taste for blood and observing death is his heritage. He knows what he is doing is wrong, and only partially self-justifies his actions. He chose victims so degraded—aging and elderly prostitutes—whose lives, in his estimation, had become worthless. I have read autobiographies of several killers, including a couple of professional "hit men" and Monster Cody. These all have a very high self-regard and try to convince the reader that they are really good. If by "good" one means skilled at extracting life from a person, they one must agree. This makes me a trifle suspicious of the veracity of the Autobiography's author. Though he arrogates to himself the right to judge the worth of these women's lives, his self-regard is quite low.

One key fact is brought out in the various apparatuses, and is evident in the writing: that Carnac claims to have killed simply because it was so enjoyable. He was driven to it by an obsession that grew throughout his young life until about the age of thirty, when he killed six times in a span of four months. He reports suffering a catastrophic accident the day after the sixth murder that prevented him from continuing the spree. This principle is supported by more modern research into the psychology of serial killers, who primarily kill for enjoyment.

What do we really know of the typescript behind this book? It was almost certainly written before 1930, passed through a few hands, and came into the possession of Mr. Hicken; he accomplished obtaining the research and publication. If it is genuine, it is valuable history. If it is a hoax, it is nonetheless a valuable historical study by someone who very well knew the Whitechapel area and the circumstances of the murders, and could skillfully get into the mind of a likely perpetrator.

The reflected writer

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, autobiographies, writers

I find it oddly fitting, on this 12^th anniversary of "9/11", to review the memoirs of a British subject who was interned by the Japanese near Shanghai in the 1940s, saw the only city he had known destroyed, and lived the rest of his life in an England where he never quite fit. His productive period began with his years as a widower in his 30s raising three young children.

Many years ago I read a book and a couple of stories by J.G. Ballard and found them beyond my reach, incomprehensible. Now having read Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, and Autobiography, I realize that Ballard's fiction brings us into the ways he coped with the overwhelming losses he had suffered. In one way he is not unique. Many were the expatriate children raised in the Shanghai of the 1930s and 1940s, who came to their teen years in time to suffer internment, who were daily familiar with the sight of the dead, who saw, and sometimes experienced, the appalling cruelties of soldiers trained in the centuries-old bushido ethic, for whom their own lives meant nearly nothing, and those of all others, even less. In another way he is unique. He learned to express what these experiences deposited in him.

Ballard's writing sold better in America and Europe than in Britain. The British of the 1950s and even to the 1980s were too stoic to accept writing that laid bare the emotions he was expressing, in his deceptively bland prose. That's what I remember of The Drowned World: imagery that swung from the banal to the horrifying, in writing so matter of fact that scenes I'd ordinary vomit out could slip in almost unaware. To someone whose favorite Science Fiction previously had been the Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith and the Robot books of Isaac Asimov, one who subscribed wholeheartedly to Campbell's dictum to "present a tough problem and then solve it", Ballard's surreal emotional landscapes and apparently goal-less plots were beyond comprehension.

Ballard dealt in metaphor, and almost single-handedly wrought a sea change in the S.F. genre through the 1970s and onward. Few have been able to publish works as mysterious as his, but many have drawn from his example more rounded characters, more realistic plots—that is, plots more prone to surprising side channels and seemingly meaningless meanders—and stories that need not be placed in a deep future so the writer can get away with fantasy in the guise of SciFi.

I once childishly said to my mother that it seemed the Star Trek series was about colonialism. She retorted that no, it was about exploration and learning. Over time, I saw she was right. I noticed that the chief characters were well-read and thoughtful, not the mindless heroes of sword-n-sorcery nor the banally evil colonial masters of true colonialism. Ballard's experiences furnished him with material for decades of thoughtful analysis of himself and his fellows, to produce a science fiction that needed just a bit of "suppose this small fact were different, then what?" to bring about a new mental landscape for us to explore with him.

Now that I am a tad more mature, perhaps I can read his fiction and get more out of it. I can't wait to try. (Ballard died in 2009, and this is his last book, started soon after his terminal diagnosis in 2007.)

As siblings get scarcer...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, family relations, autobiographies

Sometimes I wonder if I ought to pity our son (I don't, but sometimes I wonder), an only child. I have brothers, and he has none. He has uncles and aunts, but any kids he has will not have, at least on his side of the family. At a family gathering for Christmas when he was little, our youngest girl cousin brought her boyfriend. He was an only child, and his parents were onlies also. He marveled, and said to me, "I never considered I might be missing something, having no brothers or sisters or cousins. There are 19 of you here, and everybody gets along!

I have heard it said that men with brothers become better negotiators. That doesn't seem to have handicapped our son. He is a real tiger when it comes to bargaining or manipulating or cajoling, or just negotiating. How did he get more skilled at these things than I, who grew up with brothers after the age of 3½?

Growing up with brothers does change a man, but it is sometimes hard to say just how. George Howe Colt takes a powerful stab at it in Brothers, just out from Scribner. The book is subtitled "George Howe Colt on His Brothers and Brothers in History". History, indeed; he interweaves his fraternal autobiography with mini-biographies starting with jealous Cain bumping off his brother Abel, who gets replaced by Seth (and his name means "appointed" meaning he is appointed the replacement rather explicitly). Late in the book, a reprise on Seth and the whole phenomenon of a later boy replacing a deceased older brother fills half a chapter.

In keeping with the strongest contrast among brothers, that between the firstborn and the next, Colt limns the "good boy bad boy" phenomenon using the Booth brothers, Edwin and John (Lincoln's assassin). Everybody loved Edwin Booth, the darling of the stage in pre-Civil War America. John was a good actor also, and got raves of his own, but was more the Rodney Dangerfield of his family: he got no respect compared to Edwin, to his other brother Junius, or even his father, who could bring a whole room to tears with his sonorous rendition of the Lord's Prayer. The Booth family exemplifies a gaggle of siblings who seem more different from one another than a random collection of people.

Not every pair of eldest brothers are opposites. The Wright brothers were almost like twins in many ways, completing one another's thoughts, and though they often argued and debated, they found it great fun and did so without rancor. They learned from each other. Two boys our son practically grew up with, nine and ten years his senior, were born eleven months apart, and were inseparable as youngsters. They now have challenging professions: one a surgeon, the other a federal agent. They were too old to be quasi-brothers to our son, but were more like kindly uncles. They remain close to each other, though they presently live in different states.

Then there are brothers who cannot get along, such as the Kelloggs (one being the corn flake king). They spent the last couple decades of their lives in a series of lawsuits against one another. The elder, John Harvey Kellogg, pretty much made his younger brother Will (W.K.) his footstool, until Will simply had to break away and exert his independence. Being an even better businessman than his brother, he soon got rich making breakfast cereals, which irked John no end. John's attempts to duplicate (plagiarize) his brother's products and overtake him triggered the legalities over who had the right to use the family name as a trademark, at least for starters.

George Colt was the second of four brothers, and seems to have become the best known (authors at least become known to their readers, who can number in the many thousands). Similarly, while I am the eldest of four brothers, it is #2 who is the best known, the only one of us to publish a couple of books, with more on the way. He has been interviewed on the Discovery Channel, something beyond my imagination. George and his brothers each carved out a niche for himself: the oldest, Harry, a doctor, George a writer, #3 Ned an international correspondent (who was kidnapped for a few days in Iraq), and the youngest, Mark, administering a nonprofit organization for the blind.

One reason history is so full of brotherly examples is because in former generations nearly everybody had a few. In Colonial America, having 8-12 children was the norm. I once wondered how the 72 members of Jacob's descendants (who comprised 12 families) entered Egypt and grew in only four generations to number a million or more (there were more than 600,000 males 20 and older after the Exodus). It didn't take long to determine that an average couple had to have about 20 children! That's with total inbreeding; probably lots of the second and third generation had Egyptian spouses. Whenever there has been large-scale migration, such as the Europeanization of America, many of the immigrants are younger sons who don't expect much inheritance. Once "they get theirs" they breed like crazy. I share with the author a little concern for the present generation of young mainland Chinese, most of whom are only children, by national fiat.

I wonder whether having only one brother is better or worse than having either none or having several. In most of Western society, the average number of children, at least among Caucasians, is less than two. A growing number of couples remain childless, a great many have just one child, and few have more than two. Of those with just one sibling, only a third of the males have a brother (I know, you expected it to be half, but the combinations are B+B, B+S, S+B and S+S). A research project in the making!

George and his brothers are very similar in age to my brothers and me. Like the Colts, we have grown closer as we aged. Once a fellow is secure in his own life, there is less fear of brotherly usurpation. I often read in rags like the AARP Bulletin of studies that show how so many older people are happier than when they were younger. I guess if your younger days were filled with sibling rivalry and continual battling for parental favor, you're happier once a lot of that falls by the wayside.

George Colt's insight triggered a lot more memories I don't have space to go into here (and it is unlikely you would care about them). I am sure glad that, like him, I've become better and better friends with my brothers as we work our way through middle age. I'd hate to be like W.K. Kellogg, spending huge amounts of time and money fighting a baleful brother. Brotherhood can sure be good!

In from the cold - he beat the odds

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, espionage, policy

Sometimes I get a book so far beyond my experience, the author may as well be another species. Such a book is The Art of Intelligence: Lessons From a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service, by Henry A. Crumpton. You may have read Bob Woodward's book about the first year of the war in Afghanistan, Bush at War. Did you wonder, who was Hank? Wonder no longer. It was Hank Crumpton.

During the first months of the war, the Taliban were routed and many al Qaeda (AQ) fighters killed or driven into hiding. As Woodward wrote and Crumpton confirms, this was largely due to a coordination among the CIA, U.S. Special Forces, and Afghan tribal leaders, well before any American (and Coalition) troops were on the ground. Hank directed this phase of the war. About a third of the book's text covers the war in Afghanistan, but there was a lot that led up to it. I must admit, much was beyond my comprehension. I am a techie, a "geek", and I'm still learning human relations. I do think, however, that I caught a most important fact: The early success (which was not repeated in Iraq) was due to human relations, that led to a vast flow of intelligence that was intelligently used to provide air cover and logistical help and some amount of practical aid for the Afghan ground fighters.

Well, a lot did lead up to this, both in world affairs and in Hank's life. He obtained entry to the CIA and to the Clandestine Service at quite a young age, and did well. He became a productive recruiter of "unilateral resources", foreign nationals who worked with the CIA (this is in concert with Liaison, which is more of a 2-way street). Hank spent years in Africa, and he and his wife raised a family there. When the slow churning of the Federal mind (such as it is) realized that terrorism was becoming a real threat, Hank got the opportunity to work in counterterrorism. This led, in a few years, directly to his being asked to direct the opening phases of the war against AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

After the first year, the war fell into the possession of the professional military. A ground war began, that is still going on, and proceeding slowly if at all. Hank makes the point repeatedly, that the three presidents who best understood the value of intelligence were George Washington (a spymaster supreme), Abraham Lincoln, and George H.W. Bush (former head of the CIA). Presidents Bush, Jr, and Obama both started their terms mostly ignorant of intelligence, but grew to rely on it.

After Afghanistan, Hank worked in National Resources (NR), that arm of the CIA that works on American soil. Few folks realize they are even there. Their task is focused on international policy, not on spying on U.S. nationals, but they use in-country resources, such as business leaders and visiting foreigners, as sources and resources.

One result of the counterterrorism work is friction with the FBI, which treats terror crimes as law enforcement targets, rather than as acts of war (It seems many in civilian government still do not realize that World War III began in  1992, or perhaps earlier. I place it on that date because it is the first bombing of the World Trade Center by AQ). War is different than it was in Roman times, or in 1864, or 1912, or even 1944. The war in Vietnam was our first failure to recognize the value of guerrilla tactics. By the time American forces figured this out and began to get the upper hand, national leaders had lost the political will to win, and pulled out. The later years in Afghanistan, and the entire Iraq adventure, shows most of the Pentagon brass still doesn't get it.

I really have to digress here. A comedian in about 1970 said, "I heard it costs us $150,000 per VC (Viet Cong) fighter we kill. We can buy them off cheaper than that!" The "after-war" in Afghanistan has cost a trillion dollars or so, all consumed by an army that is in the business of blowing things up and killing people. we could have spend 80% of that on infrastructure for the country and jump-started them as a modern nation. The same goes for Iraq. We had won within the first year. Spending the next trillion dollars on rebuilding and modernizing their infrastructure would have gained us a reliable ally. Instead, we have bungled both wars and made a growing roster of enemies as a result.

I hope Hank's successors in Clandestine Services, and in Counterterrorism, and in NR, are doing a good job, as well as he did or better. It is only a matter of time until the next 9/11. Someone will slip through again, because you can't watch everywhere or everybody. The Dept. of Homeland Security needs to recruit us patriotic and loyal citizens as deputies, in a much, much more productive and definite way than having a few signs around that whiningly beg us to report "suspicious activity". We need a National Neighborhood Watch; dare I dub it NNW?

OK, off soap box. Although I didn't understand all he wrote, I really enjoyed Hank's stories. I have two relatives who were spies. One is dead, the other doesn't talk about his service. They were not CIA (not that I know of!). But the essence of such work is human relations. It is like computer hacking; as Kevin Mitnick wrote in Ghost in the Wires, his primary weapon was gaining the confidence of someone who could grant him access to systems he really shouldn't have been getting into. He is a brilliant programmer, no doubt, but it is his human skills that led to his being called the world's most dangerous hacker. So with Hank Crumpton. He didn't need to be a gun-toting gadget-happy James Bond or Matt Helm. He just needed to be a good drinking buddy. He just happens to be a drinking buddy with a razor sharp mind and a prodigious memory. A good writer, too.

Is high really low?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, drug culture, autobiographies

Reading Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood by Peter Bebergal just made me sad. The author is fortunate that the brain is remarkably robust and adaptable. After spending about a decade in a determined effort to totally burn it out (which he saw as an attempt to achieve enlightenment), he dropped all drugs some twenty years ago and has made a remarkable recovery. In any event, he has become a fluent, compelling writer.

I grew up in the sixties also. I am a few years older than Bebergal. Perhaps I am just lucky: I found by experiment that I am allergic to pot, and it does nothing for me anyway; opium makes me sleep before any mental feelings kick in; I quickly got over an early infatuation with alcohol because I prefer to remain in control of my mind; I tried nothing harder, because I could see how ugly addicts were. From both sides of the divide, I suppose one can say, it takes all types. I am about as straight as they come.

Bebergal was, for a time, about as bent as they come. Luckily, he lived through it. When he had his crash, and his parents were forced to realize the depth of his predicament, it began a recovery process that took a few years. He portrays his parents as pretty much ignorant of what he had been doing. In a sense, he had an anchor in their home, that less fortunate kids didn't have. In spite of spending his adolescence in a wasted condition, he had as a core the habit to return home at the end of the day (whenever it happened to end). As much as anything else, that saved him.

The book's title comes from the song "I had too much to dream last night", recorded by the Electric Prunes. Psychedelia in general was an intimate part of the mix of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll that drove the "me generation" of the "Sixties", which ran until the mid-1970s. Drove, and in part destroyed. Now that some of that generation are running Western governments and industries, perhaps it is no surprise that politics and business are floundering and foundering.

I am beginning to think that there is a physical or chemical difference, or something like that, between folks with left- and right-wing views. Politics in America played host for eight years to what Rush Limbaugh called Bush Derangement Syndrome on the left. Now on the right, we see Obama Derangement Syndrome. Neither is helpful. I spent a few days recently with my father and my three brothers. Two of my brothers are politically liberal. My youngest brother and I are politically conservative. We had a few lively discussions. In a side discussion with my youngest brother, I remarked that it is not surprising he is conservative, because he runs a small business, as I have done in the past. The other two have an entitlement mentality, though not as extreme as I see among many left-leaning members of Congress. Anyway, where this is going: People I know who are right of center did few or no drugs; many (not all) of those who are left of center did a lot, and some still do.

I am glad the author found a way out of addiction, rather than dying of it, which was a fear he had for years. A characteristic of the drug culture is pervasive paranoia. You're a criminal, so of course "they" are out to get you! But the paranoia stays there and becomes part of the trip, particularly a psychedelic trip (LSD; mescaline; 'shrooms), making a bad trip more likely. God is out to get you! I once saw someone, running from some internal demon, run right out a third-floor window.

The chapters contain discussions and digressions into the history of various aspects of new age culture, from Aldous Huxley to Blavatsky to Woodring. They are threads in the whole tapestry that has enmeshed so many addicts. It is hard to say whether Bebergal is advocating greater access to drugs. There is caution in his language when he describes recent medical research into the effects of mind-altering substances. Do these substances provide a shortcut to mental states that meditators, for example, must labor for years to achieve? He is ambiguous.

Married now, with at least one child, the author has stayed clean (his term) for two decades. While he eschews drugs, and sex is now confined to his marital relations, he still clings to the music. "Mental" music is growing up. He writes late in the book about a "concert" of more modern music that appeals to him, and it seems to have no genre, but is somewhere in the "new age" spectrum. He is a product of his own past—no surprise—but has a will and direction he lacked before. Some of that was simply growing up. More was re-learning how to be a free person once he was free of the drugs.

I was, and still am, and outside observer of the drug scene. For me, the book was a window into a world I declined to enter. For some, it will be a beacon they may need, a chronicle of one man's journey in and back out.

Cybercriminal to the rescue?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, autobiographies, computers, cybercriminals

I used to live in a working-class neighborhood, and soon found out that my next door neighbor's children were all criminals. The parents were good and hard-working people, but their kids had all gone astray. One of their sons in particular was clearly a psychopath. He thought nothing of anyone's property, only of what might benefit him. He was also, you might say, the master of the short cut. This was evident in the way he got from place to place. If he was going to the street corner, once he left the door to the house, he went in an absolutely straight line, right across the front yards of about six homes. He was a very small-time criminal, really. Nothing so blatant as robbery, for example; his stock in trade was the sob story intended to elicit a "loan" that would never be repaid, and a little sneak thievery.

Many computer system hackers are primarily trespassers. They don't profit from their exploits, at least not in any monetary way. They do it for fun, or for bragging rights. Others are out for the cash, and modern "identity thieves" (to call fraud by another name) hone their computer skills purely for the money in it. As it happens, the most skilled hackers and crackers fall into the trespasser category; not being distracted by the money, they focus on developing their skills and building up their library of code used for compromising computer systems.

Kevin Mitnick is of this latter sort. In his most recent book, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker, written with William L. Simon, Mitnick claims frequently that he never obtained money by hacking. He was in it for the thrill of going where he wasn't supposed to go. Breaking into a computer system is quite a bit safer than physically breaking into, say, an office building or bank or military base. However, he did do a little B+E when it was the only way to get information he needed.

This is a case of a man's hobby becoming quite an expensive proposition. Mitnick took low-paying jobs to get access to computer systems, which he would compromise in ways that helped him get access to other systems over the telephone network. All this was in the days before the wideband Internet connections that so many of us have. Early days, he was limited to phone modems that ran at 300 to 1200 bits per second, and later at speeds to 9,600 bps. Connections from computer to computer were sometimes trunk lines that ran at 1,560,000 bps (called T1), and access to such a level of communication was a precious resource.

He started out "phone phreaking", primarily social engineering (deceiving phone company employees), to get levels of access that would permit him to use long distance at no charge. Later he was able to get free cell phone service, at a time the typical charge was a dollar per minute. Now, right there it is clear that, while he may not have had cash pass through his hands, he defrauded the telephone companies out of thousands of dollars by cheating to get free services. So his "no money" claim is rather hollow. In fact, his heavy use of cell phones in the dollar-per-minute days almost got him caught when fellow employees wondered how he could afford to call so much on a $28,000 salary.

After entertaining the reader with a racy history of his growth as a phone phreaker, and his eventual ability to pretty much take over the operations of at least one telephone company, he turns to the efforts of law enforcement to stop him. He was first jailed at the age of seventeen, but avoided spending time at "Juvie". Instead he had a supervised release program, which ran a few years, under which he was supposed to avoid computer use. He just used other people's computers. From this point, he soon became a fugitive, living under several assumed names.

Part of the reason he did not get into deeper trouble when he was young was that there were few laws prohibiting what he was doing. Once the Federal and State legislatures took care of that little detail, the FBI got involved. He was on the run from the FBI for several years. Once he was finally caught (if I recall right, he was by then 31), he spent nearly five years in various lockups. Most of that time was occupied with various arraignments and legal maneuverings. Once he was finally offered a plea deal he was willing to take, he was sentenced to little more than time served.

It has been said of this book that it reads like a Raymond Chandler thriller. I reckon so; it was designed that way by the co-author. It is, at least, easy to read, a page-turner. It opens a window on an unusual mind. We find a person compelled to find a way around restrictions, a person without conscience; if he refrained from profiting monetarily, it was mainly because he lacks the gene for love of money. Money isn't the only thing a thief can steal. By committing theft of services, stealing source code files so he could better break into systems, and taunting system administrators, he stole peace of mind, he caused large sums to be spent tracking him down, and he cut into the income of a few large companies just as effectively as if he'd robbed the pay clerks at gunpoint.

So what is he doing these days? Still hacking, but with permission. He has become a security consultant! On the theory that "it takes a thief to catch a thief" (the theme of a briefly popular TV show some forty years ago), he is paid handsome sums to commit "white hat" hacking. If he is still one of the best—which boils down to, if he is keeping his skills up to date—then if a system is made "Mitnick proof", it is probably pretty secure.

The biggest lesson of the book is that the weakest link in computer security is the human element. People are too trusting. Mitnick's "career" was based on harvesting low-hanging fruit. A couple of phone calls would often garner him access to a supposedly bullet-proof system. There is still a lot of low-hanging fruit out there! You just gotta hope that none of it can be found at your bank or broker's office.

Periodically at work, some of us get strange e-mails, usually directing us to do something very slightly shady; these are "Phishing" e-mails. It has been publicized that there is a place we are supposed to forward suspicious e-mails. Those who do so are praised; those who follow the Phishing directions are reprimanded. It is one facet of a white-hat-hacking program my company has, to see how much low-hanging "social engineering" fruit there is. The answer is distressingly large. Even where paranoia is justified, not all are sufficiently paranoid. This keeps Mitnick, and security consultants in general, and in business.

Christ finds an Amish heart

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, memoirs, christian faith, religion

Ira Wagler was not a bad boy; neither was he an exceptionally good boy. He was an ordinary boy. If he was different in any way, it was that his heart was larger than the box of his upbringing, and that he longed to believe, but not blindly or unthinkingly. He has something of the soul of a Renaissance man, a keenly inquiring mind, and it is hard to keep such a person bound to unthinking tradition for long.

In Ira's case, it was impossible. Born and raised Old Order Amish, the culture to which he became accustomed is one of the most traditional, conservative and restrictive that Western life has to offer. His Amish community was not the tightest of the tight, not quite. The Amish that moved to Aylmer, Ontario, his parents among them, were seeking to found a colony that would be more pure, more tradition-bound than where they had been. Curiously, there are Amish who think the Aylmer community is too "loose" and "worldly", and will not take the bread and wine of communion with them. I wonder what Ira's life would have been like among them. Likely even shorter than his 26 years among his family's church in Aylmer, and later in Bloomfield, Iowa, and still later in other places.

Ira's book Growing Up Amish: A Memoir is a chronicle that begins in Ira's seventeenth year, when he first left to live among "the English", and ends in his twenty-sixth year, when he left for the fourth and last time, no longer to be an Amishman. You could call it a "life and hard times" book, and it surely is. You could call it a Quest, and it surely was. I find it most akin to The Girl Nobody Loved by Dorie Van Stone or The Woman at the Well by Dale Evans. It is a story of a lost soul being watched over by a loving God, finally to find God in grateful acceptance of His sacrifice for sins and His grace to live in His presence.

The book also provides a much-needed window into the lifestyle and ways of the Amish, which are a great mystery to most Americans, even those who live among them. I confess, though I live just over an hour from the "Amish capitol" of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and buy produce from Amish people at a local farmer's market; even though I have sat and talked with a few now and then, I have known little but that they were an ultra-conservative splinter from the Anabaptists known as Mennonites.

Because of their ultra-traditional way of life, I find in the Amish an exaggerated reflection of the experiences of my own, quite conservative Christian congregation. Christian communities everywhere that attempt to maintain a standard of purity while surrounded by "people of lower standards" experience quite a bit of contrarian activity among their children as they grow towards adulthood. The impulse to test boundaries is built into the human character, as illustrated by the story of Adam and Eve in the garden: There was but one rule, and only one, to not eat the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of course, Genesis 3 begins with Eve hanging around near that tree, wondering why. The serpent is simply allegorical; she needed no prompting other than her own (slightly) rebellious thoughts. How bad could "just a taste" really be, after all? The rest of the Bible provides the answer: tragically bad, but God has a way of redemption.

How do we keep the youngsters from "impurity" and "worldliness"? One way is to eschew contact with that world. The communal Hutterites try to do so. But in some parts of Western North America, there are lots of ex-Hutterites. The Amish at least engage with the English, trading with us, getting jobs among us (if you want a deck built quickly and well, hire an Amish crew. Just be sure to provide transportation!). In the same way, I know quite a few folks who formerly followed a church life such as mine, that they have now left, either for a different "Christian brand" (denomination) or for a non-church kind of Christianity.

An old 1960s byword says it well: Different strokes for different folks. Or the French proverb: Chacun à son goût – each to his own taste. As much as any portion the "body of Christ" may attempt to be all-inclusive, it is not possible. What is liberating to some is stifling to others. Some are quite bored with others' greatest and most precious experiences. And sometimes, when a religious husk has replaced spiritual experience with mindless adherence to tradition, only the most mindless and dull folk will tolerate it. This is what Ira found.

Curiously, although the Amish are considered a Christian sect, the name Jesus never appears in the book, and it is only in the closing chapters that the title Christ is used in a personal way. In 25 years among Amish folk in several localities, Ira Wagler never heard anything remotely close to the Christian Gospel of salvation by receiving Jesus Christ's sacrifice for our sins. He was confronted, again and again, thousands of times, with rigid demands to conform, to perform, to, effectively, save himself by his own efforts. The only time he heard the Christian Gospel was from a friend he calls Sam, whom he met in the last Amish community in which he dwelt. And Sam was not born Amish.

The Amish do not take converts. They prefer to outbreed everyone else (Ira has ten siblings). If a person insists on joining them, they make it hard, very hard, almost damnably hard. You have to learn their dialect of German, memorize tons of their prayers, and go through a process that strongly resembles hazing. It takes years, before one is considered eligible for baptism. Sam had done so. It is obvious that he knew Christ beforehand. He sure didn't attain Christian faith among the Indiana Amish he had joined.

He was exactly what Ira needed. Why did Ira leave, and then return, three times? Primarily, though he wanted greater freedom, he did not want to be a lost soul. He was convinced that only the Amish could be saved. One who left after being baptized was excommunicated, consigned to the Devil, and bound for Hell. During his third return, Ira went through a process almost as tough as Sam's had been, to be reinstated a "member" of the Amish church. Yet he still felt lost, until Sam showed him the way of God's forgiveness in Christ. Only once Ira knew Christ for himself, and knew that it is God who forgives and God alone, did he leave his Amish past behind, his heart at peace.

This does not mean that one must leave the Amish to be saved. Far from it. They do have the Bible, and they do read it, though there is no mention in Ira's experiences of Bible reading for oneself. The Bible alone can lead a person to God. But Ira's experiences limn for us most clearly the difference between faith and religion. He was raised in the bosom of one of the most restrictive and traditional religions found on American soil. It was primarily fear that drove him back to it again and again. Once he attained faith, he was free of religion. He could have remained an Amishman, but the scars were too deep for that. He is a man in Christ now. He lives in Lancaster, a Mennonite, but not an Amishman.

If the best books make us think deeply about ourselves and our experiences, this may just be the best book I have read all year.

No mother lets go - why should she?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essay collections, humor, autobiographies

They say you should write what you know, and this author knows (1) dogs and dog hair, and (2) her daughter who just moved out. Not a bad combination. Lisa Scottoline (I think it has four syllables) has five dogs. Her daughter and co-author Francesca Scottoline Serritella has one, but give her time. The book, a collection of 700-word humorous essays, is My Nest Isn't Empty, it Just has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman. Francesca wrote eleven of the seventy pieces/chapters.

While a core concept is that Francesca "recently" moved out to her own apartment, the pieces are as wide-ranging as you can imagine. Lisa has a squirrel mind, running hither and yon, burying one nugget only to dig up another, and write about it. I don't know what any of her novels are like, because this is the first time I've seen her in print (I read very few "mainline" mystery novels). But she writes about dogs (maybe a quarter of the pieces) and dog hair (three); her happy invention of Unresolutions, or resolving to do more of what makes you happy; her mother Mary (almost another quarter of the pieces), who admonished Francesca to always sing at the piano bar; and finds herself musing on a stretch of highway that boasts a sign it was "adopted" by a strip club. Finally, the title piece, which comes last, is about freedom. Being in the midst of it, we know, my wife and I; we don't have to think every little minute about the way our very next action will impact our son. He isn't here, and won't care, and gets bored if we try to tell him anyway.

So I totally get it, that life is about being who you are and learning, painful as that might be, to let everyone else be who he is or she is. Talking to your parent or your offspring isn't just about conversation, it is about connecting. Talking past one another is, by contrast, a tragedy. I reckon it helps that Lisa is Italian. They won't tolerate "talking past"; they'll talk until they get through, which is why, as she writes, keeping essays to 700 words was so hard: "I can barely say hello in 700 words." It is harder for those of us with that good old "British reserve," for whom creative silence has become an art form, but connecting is quite a bit more scarce. Thank God my son is talkative; if I just sit and look at him long enough, he'll spill his guts. It happens even faster if I can motivate myself to ask some leading questions, and this has enough reward that I keep doing it.

It is gratifying to see, in spite of the double divorce, the departure of Thing One and Thing Two, that the author and her mother and daughter remain close. A mother may always have "her little girl" ensconced in her heart, kept unchanging as the "little girl" grows to 24, 44, 64; but to give her the space to be a good companion even as the mismatches increase, is grace indeed.

Not a wannabe

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, education, culture

At my parents' 50th anniversary celebration, my youngest brother spoke of growing up with three older brothers, and mainly of his school years. One or another of us was always showing him something new, so that he had a head start in some parts of his schooling, but ran crosswise in others. He had other experiences also, ones he felt were the most relevant to living life. His closing remark really stuck with me: "Education is what happens when you aren't being schooled."

Kurt Caswell makes a related remark in his book In the Sun's House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation. On p121: "…life at home was an education too, a better education in how to be Navajo, perhaps, than any classroom could provide." Considering that Borrego Pass School has half the class day held in the Navajo language, this is telling. Just as my brothers and I learned to be who we are by growing up in a certain family, the Navajo kids learned who they are by growing up in their families, and the author became who he is by growing up in his Idaho/Oregon family.

By age 26, having traveled the world more than most of us, having lived and taught in Japan for a year, he would be, one might expect, more cosmopolitan, more resilient in the face of different cultures. Perhaps he is, but in Borrego Pass he was completely out of his element. He didn't help himself by getting into a staring contest with one of the first school children he met; that's a good way to make a lifelong enemy out of a Navajo (and the same holds true for Native American men in general).

I believe the cluster of buildings in the foreground of this Google Earth image is Borrego Pass School. It is less than a mile from that point on the map known as Borrego Pass, where the Continental Divide wriggles through northwestern New Mexico.

The school grounds and surrounding buildings are nestled up against a mesa on and around which the author took frequent walks. In the afterword to the book, Rex Lee Jim has a few complaints, that Caswell didn't experience certain things that might have affected his outlook. He writes of the Navajo tendency to celebrate things like a child's birth or first steps, of the rich family life Navajos lead, and states, "He never sees it."

Indeed, this is true, but what options were there for him? I've spent a total of a few months on various Indian Reservations, and with very few exceptions, they are Third World enclaves buried in the lost corners of the First World US. Borrego Pass (really a part of Crownpoint, NM), is such a case. Poor people everywhere celebrate what they can, for there is little else to take the grinding edge off a poor life. While Caswell has definite loner tendencies—he seems to prefer long walks with his dog to most everything else—he was up against cultural tendencies that excluded him.

Like idealistic young people everywhere, the author hoped he could "make a difference", though he muses more than once over just what such a vague term that is. What he experienced was that Borrego Pass began to make a difference to him. He didn't change anyone much, but he was himself changed. At some point, he began to find the desert beautiful. He almost admits to finding the people beautiful, but he never goes that far. This fits the loner profile, with which I much sympathize; we are more comfortable with landscapes and mechanisms than we are with people.

Every teacher lives for those moments when someone's face lights up, or to hear a quiet "OH!" from the back of the room. He had a few similar moments, and was in the end quite impressed with a student he calls Renee (all names are made up to protect the people he lived among). Of all the kids (he taught 6-8 grade children), she alone seemed to look beyond the New Mexico horizon, for opportunities to grow beyond "the rez" and be able to return to "help the Navajo." Perhaps she will, just as Rex Lee Jim did in his own generation.

Kurt Caswell moved on after that one school year. But Borrego Pass didn't leave him so easily. It took him a few years to settle it in his mind, then he wrote this book. It exposes and reveals him in a way he'd have found painful at the time, but he has matured. He may think he had little effect, but he is like the man on the seashore, throwing starfish and snails back into the ocean. If someone asks, "How can that make much difference? There are so many," he will reply, "It matters to this one" as he throws it back in. For the uninitiated: that ocean is within.

Sometimes the fat boy wins

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, autobiographies

From birth, Frank Bruni was the best eater in a family of big eaters. All his life he struggled to "just lose that extra five or ten pounds." But as he chronicles in Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, Frank was fighting a losing battle until he got a fresh look at himself, courtesy of a rude brother and a practical doctor.

Though he wasn't the oldest of the three boys, he was the biggest and tallest. And though he'd been called "fat" in school, family stuck up for family. A talent for swimming saved him in his school years. Years on the swim team, and winning meet after meet, made him both more popular and more slender than he expected. Not that he was ever skinny. But even though he was "just a bit wider than the rest of the team" he was fast off the blocks, fast on the turns, and such a powerful swimmer that he won, time after time. So during those years, he comforted himself that though he might be "a little overweight", he wasn't obese.

In his college years, swimming and running, along with episodes of bulimic purging and other desperate "dieting" measures, kept some of his demons at bay, but frequent splurges and binges eventually got the upper hand. Finally, in his early thirties, at a big family event, he and his brothers were teasing one another as boys of any age do. He made one quite telling dig at one of his brothers, who responded, "Yeah, but at least I'm not fat." The bomb had been dropped, the family's conspiracy of silence cracked.

Not long after that, he had to visit a doctor, for the first time in many years. At the scale he said, as he always did, "Don't tell me. I don't want to know." The doctor looked right at him and said, "It's 268 pounds." He could do the math. He'd weighed under 190 just ten years earlier. He didn't have a "five or ten" problem; he needed to lose more than seventy pounds! (Strange, though, he claims his pants size at the time was 42. He must not carry much around the waist; I wear 40's and 42's, and I weigh 220, and I am taller.)

Fortunately for him, he was making the kind of money that he could afford a good trainer. He was writing for the NY Times, on a political beat, and spent 3-4 weekly sessions with a trainer at $70 per hour, plus running, plus learning to eat more sensibly. But training, training, Training was the key for him. By the time he was sent to Italy to be Rome bureau chief, he was in much better shape.

Italy! The land of Food! How would he ever stay this side of 300 pounds? No longer hiding from himself, and not willing to accept his proclivities as fate, he observed the Italians. They ate such great food, yet they weren't fat. In fact, most of them were downright skinny. Portion control was the key. They would have one of something, where he'd been contemplating three or four. A few ounces of a pasta dish, not a few pounds. Smaller portions and continued training brought his weight nearly down to 200, and really bucked up his confidence.

He needed that confidence when the Times called to offer him a post as restaurant critic in New York city. Whatever will a born fatty do when he is being paid to, even required to, eat at the finest restaurants seven or eight times per week? So far, for the most part, he has done just fine. It takes a couple of trainers, one Pilates and one more traditional, plenty of running, and the discipline to eat just a bite here and there of the many dishes he must sample daily.

You know how, at a wine tasting, you take a sip, swirl it in your mouth, and spit it out? Well, he doesn't spit anything out, but most of any dish is left uneaten. He's hot hiding from himself any longer. He knows what he is, and he also knows what he has to do about it. His grandmother had a proverb, "Born round, you don't die square." I guess it is the Italian version of "round peg, square hole." He observes that it isn't fate. He sees how one of this brothers has changed over the years, and it heartens him as he continues to do what he must to stay in the "big, but not obese" category.

He is just over forty, having lived about half his life. Maybe in twenty years or so, he'll update us on his progress in the "middle years."

Trying out one life after another

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, experimentation

I could say that A.J. Jacobs tries on lifestyles like suits of clothes, but that would be stretching things. I can try out a suit in about five minutes. He tries something for a month or a year at a time. His one-year experiments resulted in books: The Know-it-All, about reading through the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one year, and The Year of Living Biblically. A year or two of further experimentation with his own life has resulted in The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment.

Author Jacobs calls George Plimpton "one of my literary idols". He recalls Nellie Bly, who actually tried to circle the world in eighty days when Jules Verne's book was published, and had herself committed to an insane asylum to study and report on patient abuse (nearly lost her life on that one).

Experimenting with oneself is more commonly done for scientific purposes. Most recently, Barry Marshall infected himself with Helicobacter pylori to prove it causes ulcers, then cured himself with antibiotics to cement the proof. And what of Dr. Walter Reed, who died proving that yellow fever is carried by mosquitoes?

Being a compulsive sort, of course I will list the nine experiments that comprise the book:

• My Life as a Beautiful Woman – The author and his wife employ a lovely, young nanny, who is shy about dating. A. J. offers to be a go-between on a dating web site. Score: 2 dates of ambiguous success, about sixty creeps of varying creepiness, and the nanny found herself a boyfriend elsewhere…but felt the experiment had raised her confidence.
  
• My Outsourced Life – You can hire people to do stuff for you, such as write and answer mail, or buy birthday and anniversary gifts, or even read bedtime stories (over a speaker phone) to your children. The author calls this the best month of his life.
  
• I Think You're Fat – Brad Blanton promotes Radical Honesty, in which you remove the filters and say whatever pops into your head. Blanton loves controversy and directness. The worst month of the author's life.
  
• 240 Minutes of Fame – He happens to strongly resemble a shy celebrity who'd been invited to an awards event. He went in his place and found that being adulated really does cause mental derangement.
  
• The Rationality Project – Our psychology is composed of System 1 (the emotional reptile mind) and System 2 (our inner Einstein). Tried to live a month by System 2 only. Came to appreciate what both Systems are for. Also tried out forty toothpaste brands to find the "most rational".
  
• The Truth About Nakedness – During discussions with Mary-Louise Parker about an article she would write for Esquire, it was suggested she pose nude for the spread. She agreed, with the proviso that A. J. also pose nude. They did it, and he got another taste of how the other half feels.
  
• What Would George Washington Do? – Depends on how old he was. The Father of our Country was a truly self-made man, nowhere more so than in his personality, which he strove to hone into the dignified, reserved icon he is remembered as. The 110 Rules of deportment Washington followed are reproduced in an appendix. Even professional Washington "interpreters" can't follow them all, but this very emotional aristocrat seems to have done so. Our author did less well, but learned a great deal.
  
• The Unitasker – Heeding the warnings of some that multitasking actually makes us less efficient, A. J. tried to learn to focus on one thing at a time. This in a time when we stand in front of a microwave that's running for 30 seconds and say, "Hurry up!".
  
• Whipped – The author catered to his wife's every whim for one month. He also let her write the concluding Coda to the chapter. Her greatest month, and not too bad for him, either.
  

These were not conducted one after another without a break, but span fifteen years, including the Biblical and Encyclopedic years. I think it is safe to say there are more experiments in the offing. Perhaps one is ongoing right now; read his blog to find out.

Dave never was there

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, autobiographies, comedians

I first heard "Dave's not here" by Cheech and Chong when it became popular as a radio bit in 1971. It was mildly funny, but because I knew enough potheads to see its truth, it seemed more tragic to me. That's the same year I was first at a party where weed was being smoked, and I had a bad allergic reaction to the smoke. I was thus rescued from any risk of becoming a pothead myself.

Cheech and Chong comedy bits became wildly popular, but I noticed at the time that a lot of people just didn't get it. I was kind of in the middle, and didn't find them all that funny, just sometimes. Now, more than thirty years later, I came across Cheech & Chong, the Unauthorized Autobiography, and took the chance to read how their career developed. I braced myself for the reading, expecting grossness overload, and that is pretty much what the author delivers.

Both Tommy Chong and Richard "Cheech" Marin started out as musicians, and each was good enough to become quite popular in Vancouver, where they met in 1968. Both, by that point, were expanding into comedy and improv acting.

Their collaboration lasted about fifteen years, but the legend lives on among the stoner community; see cheechandchong.com. The two had a brief reunion in 2008. In thirty years they'd had time to recover from their breakup.

The book weaves together a few threads. One is a long apologia in favor of legalized marijuana. Here's one thing I noticed about that: in a late chapter the author relates an incident in which Cheech was stopped by Malibu police for speeding and unsteady driving, after which they shepherded him home. Not two pages later he states that smoking pot makes you a better driver. Izzat so? Then I'd hate to be on the road with a weedless Cheech! My observations of stoners convince me that they are much the worse off. Cheech and Chong were wildly successful, yes, because they happened to be good at something they could do while stoned. If someone happens to be good at computer programming, they can't do productive work while stoned. I've seen it tried.

Another thread is the lifestyle. I thank God I got out of the popular music business before it plunged me into the world of hoods, pimps, whores, conmen, and shysters that Tommy Chong considers his normal milieu! As part of this lifestyle, he fathered a child with one woman while courting another, married the latter and had a child by her, then almost immediately took on a mistress, had a child by her, and later married her. That marriage finally stuck. It isn't quite the optimal way to locate one's soul mate.

The third thread is the style of their humor. Simply put: if you want to be degraded, go for it. Toward the end of the book I realized what was happening when I first heard their material. You have to be stoned to appreciate it. If you have your head on straight, their bits take too long and seem to go nowhere. If you are stoned, your thinking is slow enough that it all seems brilliant…and you don't want it to go anywhere anyway.

Had Cheech and Chong come along a generation or two earlier, they'd have gone nowhere. It took the Boomer generation, specifically those Boomers who prefer having their brains stewed in weed, to make the duo rich.

It takes more than writing to write

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, writers

I have had all kinds of advice about writing, but the one proverb that rang most true was, "Write what you enjoy reading." I passed this on to a young friend today, one who is pondering going on for a PhD, who said, "…but I can't write." I also shared Heinlein's Dictum about short story writing, "Write one every week. After a year, pick at least one to submit for publication. Nobody can write 52 bad stories in a row." That can apply to any kind of writing, but I find it applies particularly to essays. With luck, a PhD dissertation can be composed of the best half dozen out of 52 discourses. It worked for me, anyway.

I test my own material, such as blog posts, by reading for my own enjoyment before hitting the "Publish" button. If I can't say, "I liked that!", I either rewrite or scrap it and start over. But I can tell that my own work is also subject to Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is junk." Anyway, if I like it, there's some chance that a few people out there will think enough like me to like it also.

I enjoyed reading Floyd Skloot's third memoir, The Wink of the Zenith. The author suffered a brain-damaging infection twenty-one years ago. His first two memoirs record his struggle to recover some amount of function as he reassembled his shattered memory and personality. He had written quite a bit of poetry and fiction, including three novels. After his illness, he found he needed the flat reality that autobiography provided, to work through his affliction, to have some hope of a return to productive function. This memoir focuses not on his illness, though it is mentioned, but on the experiences that formed him as a writer.

Three things in particular grasped my attention: performance, Faulkner, and home life. Though he loved his mother, if ever a mother deserved hating, it was Floyd's mother: capricious, violent, hateful, and vain, she had little going for her. One wonders how the parents ever got together long enough to produce two boys; by the time the author was old enough to remember, the two were uniformly hostile to one another.

She had had a brief fling at fame as a singer and radio host in the 1930s, and never let anyone forget it. Both before and after her husband's death in Floyd's teenage years, she had to be the center of attention…or else! She was one remarkably self-blind woman. After the death of Floyd's father, she seemed to be in shock for a good part of a year. But thereafter, she embarked on a husband hunt in a relentless way that left little time for her boys (I don't recall now whether the older boy got married and moved out during this time, or earlier; he was about eight years older).

In sporadic efforts to recover a performing career, the mother had coerced her young boys to perform with her at various events. All the family members were good singers. First the older boy, Philip, then Floyd, found the courage to refuse these outings. Sports provided Floyd's outlet, though his small size and slender skills eventually convinced him he'd never be a great player at basketball, football, or even baseball, his favorite.

It was only later in life that he returned to the stage, acting in a few plays. Over a few years, he realized he wouldn't become a leading light as an actor either. However, learning lines, performing on stage and becoming the character taught him a lot about voice, mood, and how to project to an audience. While his home life may have provided some material, or a foundation for his writing, it was the performing from which he learned how to convey it.

In his college years, as he was dithering among this major and that, he was employed as a reader for a blind professor. In those days before Books on Tape, he recorded material for the professor to listen to. This mentor chose selections for Floyd's needs as much as for his own, and one day handed him a copy of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Just reading a few pages of the book makes huge demands on a reader. Imagine reading it aloud with some semblance of meaning!! Between recording this book and producing a large article about Thomas Hardy ("not a good writer, but a great writer"), Floyd learned how these writers could get characters under your skin and make you care about them.

There is more, much more of course, but these influences have been key ones that made Floyd Skloot the writer he was prior to 1988, and have stayed with him as he recovered into the writer he is today.