The Creative Spark by Agustin Fuentes ***

Many disciplines strive to answer questions like these: What makes humans unique? Why have they been so successful? Recent progress in evolutionary biology, anthropology, and other diverse fields have provided novel suggestions, but the answer remains as elusive as ever. However, the two-decade success of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond has made such books a genre of their own. The Creative Spark by Agustin Fuentes is one of the latest entries putting forward the premise that creative collaboration is the answer.

I divide the book into three sections. The first section introduces the premise that collaborative creativity explains the two million years evolution and success of homo sapiens sapiens with the well-documented examples of tools and food. This section presents a developmental narrative supported by a wide variety of research results. The description of stone tool making is detailed and fascinating, well worth the price of admission.

The next section is a series of scholarly expositions on war, sex, religion, art, and science. Here is where the target audience seems to drift from the popular science reader to an academic reviewer. The premise only needs to show humans are creative, so virtually all research supports this premise. Even where the different research results are contradictory and conflicting, they are all presented. The result is chaotic and often I imagine the author forming his arguments for specific academic reviewers. This section is interspersed with digressions on various social issues such as race, gender, and religion.

The final section (called Coda) is a sermonette full of advice and more opinions on lifestyle choices:

So that's the two-step signature of a creative human life:
Embrace diversity.
See failure as part of the journey.

Specific directions include avoidance of vegan, raw, and paleo diets, and a final lecture on gender.

This is a book for the hardcore non-fiction reader. It drifts across the line separating popular science and scholarly science, thirty-three pages of notes for 292 pages of text. If you really love the premise, the first six chapters, 126 pages might the perfect place to stop. You are human; we are collaborating; be creative.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie *****

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie is touted as the most widely read mystery of all time. I've taken a long time to get to it, but I can easily understand why it has been so popular. Hercule Poirot is a detective on a snowbound train where Mr. Samuel Edward Ratchett has been murdered. Pretty quickly Poirot discovers the motive. Ratchett is actually Cassetti who committed a horrendous kidnapping/murder. The question is who murdered Ratchett?

The book is presented ordinarily enough. Part One lays out the facts of the crime. Part Two interviews the suspects, everyone aboard the snowbound train. Part Three puts it all together. Part Three is full of surprising reveals but even after all these reveals, the final resolution is still surprising and satisfying.

The reader, like the detective, will find the mystery to be entertaining.

"In truth, this problem intrigues me. I was reflecting, not half an hour ago, that many hours of boredom lay ahead whilst we are stuck here."

M. Bonc, a director for the train company, is a foil for Poirot. He continuously voices the obvious conclusion, but while always reasonable, it is never correct. "It fits–it fits," is his refrain, always eager to jump to the end, while Poirot is moving slowly forward.

Some of the book offers interesting insights into the 1930s. The ladies all travel with dressing gowns. Everyone reads. Most men smoke. Cities which are regularly in the news today, are exotic: Kirkuk, Baghdad, Mosul, and Aleppo.

Any mystery reader will ask the same question I did. "Why haven't I read this sooner?"

The Power of Moments by Chip & Dan Heath *****

The Power of Moments by Chip & Dan Heath is an excellent example of many management books focused on motivation and morale. When I was in charge of Research & Development at a long sequence of Silicon Valey start-up companies, I read many of similar books. They all offer magic formulas but are better considered as a source of a few extra tools.

This book is based on one piece of solid research: memory is not uniform. Beginnings, ends, and changes are recalled more often and more strongly than the quotidian routines. Surprises leave an impression, while consistency is forgotten. If you satisfy a customer 100 times and mess up once, they will remember the one problem. The authors call these memorable occasions "moments." The goal is to create as many positive moments as possible.

One example is a company that works to create a positive moment on the employee's first day. The is an occasion which is often ignored, but which also provides a chance to surprise the person and create a moment that will benefit motivation and morale for a long time forward.

However...

"Beware of the soul-sucking force of "reasonableness."

Moments require personal attention and individual effort. Once new employee orientation becomes routine and optimized, the moment disappears. Most employee recognition programs fall into this trap. The goal is to keep the moments fresh. One of the keys is to care about the individuals. Moments are not one-size-fits-all. I found this was true of most motivation and morale issues.

Everyone--managers, employees, teacher, students--performs better when considered individually. An illustrative example is an experiment done with radiologists. One set of x-ray was read in the normal way, while the second set included a picture of the patient along with the x-rays. The x-rays with faces, literally, were read more accurately. The book includes many examples, where a situation was treated as non-routine with positive results. That might be the message of the book.

This is the challenge presented:

Life is full of "form letter in an envelope" moments, waiting to be transformed into something special.

If you manage people, this book will give you some good ideas and inspirations to improve the performance of your team. This is not the whole answer, but it is a solid step in the right direction.

Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh ****

Ngaio Marsh is a New Zealand author and one of the Four Queens for Crime. Enter a Murderer (1935) might be the first occurrence of a real on-stage murder co-opting the dramatic scripted murder using the prop murder weapon. The deceased is Arthur Surbonadier, degenerate nephew of rich theater owner Jacob Saint. Arthur is part of a love triangle including leading-lady Stephanie Vaughan, and leading-man Felix Gardener. Since everyone saw Felix shot Arthur, the question is who replaced the dummy bullets in the stage gun with live ordnance.

The Scotland Yard Detective-Inspector is Alleyn. Inspector Fox and newspaperman Nigel Bathgate assist him.

As Alleyn observes:

“I’ve been thing that in difficult homicide cases you either get no motive or too many motives. In this instance there are too many.”

Midway through the book, the suspect summary totals a dozen and going on for several pages. Alleyn remarks that the task is difficult because “We’re up against good acting.”

Interesting 1935 vocabulary:

“Sorry to be a bit Hitlerish, but it’ll save time.”

“Why was he sent down?” — expelled from college

“Afterwards, when I took to the boards, he saw me in the first decent part I played — stage, theatre

“He’s been a cat’s-paw, and nothing else.” dupe (derived from La Fontaine's fable, "The Monkey and the Cat")

Many critics credit the Four Queens with the creation of the “cozy mystery” genre. If you are interested in a mystery without tough guys, sex, or violence, Ngaio Marsh is an author to investigate.

Woolly by Ben Mezrich *****

Reading and writing. The three-billion-dollar Human Genome Project established the technology to read DNA. While the first human gene sequence cost the aforementioned $3,000,000,000 in 2003, the same feat can now be completed for under $1,000. Woolly by Ben Mezrich explores the possibilities for writing DNA, also known as synthetic biology.

Returning animals from extinction has already been demonstrated. In 2003, a Spanish team cloned the extinct Pyrenean ibex. They started with a sample that had been preserved in 2000. The process has been demonstrated, the only question is finding an appropriate DNA source. Unfortunately, the further scientists reach back, the harder it is to find well-preserved samples. No one expects to ever find viable sample after 65 million years. Therefore, Jurassic Park will remain forever a fantasy.

The permafrost is a ticking time bomb for climate change. Enormous volumes of methane are trapped in the permafrost ("three times more carbon than all the forests on Earth combined"). If climate change destroys the permafrost, the result will accelerate additional climate change, a deleterious feedback loop. Leaving the winter snowfields fallow insulates the permafrost from the cold and allows the thawing process to progress. Churning the fields exposes the permafrost to the cold and rebuilds it.

Rebuilding the herds that lived in the coldest climates does this. Woolly mammoths are the animals most suited to save the permafrost if we could only find some. The four key traits for mammoths are: hair, small ears, subcutaneous fat, and hemoglobin. Mammoth hemoglobin works at a lower temperature than any know mammal hemoglobin.

The book has several fun characterizations of scientists, such as when Bobby Dhadwar crosses the U.S. border and when asked what he plans to do in the U.S. responds with

"I'm going to be implanting genetically altered DNA from naked mole rats into laboratory mice to try to reverse the aging process."

When the border agents became suspicious, he presented them with his Ph.D. dissertation (Yes, he had it in his trunk) to clarify the matter.

Another anecdote was when Dr. Church suggested he might need some "extremely adventurous female humans" to gestate Neandertal embryos, many people replied to volunteer.

If you were fascinated by Jurassic Park, you'll love this book which hypothesizes ways to return extinct animals without the terror of Michael Crichton's imagination, but with the benefits of forestalling climate change and improving human health.

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck *****

Grapes of Wrath could have been a cautionary tale for the 1% and a “How to” for the workers, but that does not seem to be John Steinbeck’s style. The result is the reverse: “How to” for the 1% and a cautionary tale for the workers.

I have heard that California no longer requires high school students to read this book. Here is a link to an LA Times opinion piece declaring this Nobel-Prize-winning novel to be “Bad fiction and bad history.” http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-grapes-of-wrath-john-steinbeck-75th-anniversary-20140428-story.html

Synopsis: The story follows the Joads from Oklahoma over Route 66 to California where they pick fruit and cotton. They approach their life with optimism and trust but are met with exploitation and death.

“An’ kin we feed a extra mouth?”
Without turning his head he asked, “Kin we, Ma?”
Ma cleared her throat. “It ain’t kin we? It’s will we?”

Here we see two themes that run through the book. First, when the family is in crisis, the women are strong and take charge. Second, attitude is more important than reality, today is more important than the future.

For example, when pregnant Rose of Sharon bemoans that her husband has left…

Ma went on firmly, “You git aholt on yaself. They’s a lot of us here. You git aholt on yaself. Come here now an’ peel some potatoes. You’re feelin’ sorry for yaself.”

This ‘don’t get discouraged and solve the immediate problems’ attitude gets half the family to the end of the book only to face the winter with no prospects for work, no food, and no money.

When John Steinbeck won a Nobel Prize, the committee cited this book. Today it is a classic of American literature and relevant to the 21st century political and economic climate.

Here is another review from 9 years ago: http://1book42day.blogspot.com/2008/10/grapes-of-wrath-by-john-steinbeck.html


Chapters (* indicates background chapter)
1* Drought in Oklahoma
2 Tom Joad released from prison
3* Turtle making it way somewhere
4 ex-Preacher Casy
5* Tractor knocking down a sharecropper’s house
6 Muley Graves has gone crazy, but will not leave the farm
7* Used cars sales
8 Tom Joad’s family, grandparents, parents, brother, two children, pregnant Rose of Sharon & Connie
9* Selling junk to raise cash
10 Last day on the farm and setting west
11* Animals remains: cats, bats, mice
12* Highway 66
13 On the road, grandpa dies, meet the Wilsons, Sairy and husband
14* Sharing food on the road
15* Truckstop
16 Replacing the connecting rods on the truck
17* Camping society: rules and customs
18 Arriving in California, Colorado River, Granma dies, cross Death Valley
19* History of land ownership and conquest
20 Arrive in Hooverville, Connie leaves
21* Migrants to become serfs, small farmers bought up larger one and canneries
22 Central Committee of occupants runs Government camp
23* Recreation activities of migrants
24 The dance and foiling the attempt by outsiders to create a riot
25* Destroy crop when the prices drop, despite people starving
26 Last day in Government camp, Tom killed a cop
27* Cotton
28 Tom goes into hiding and then leaves, Al married, Granma dies
29* Winter means no work, no money, no food
30 Winter rains, floods, Rose of Sharon’s baby dies, shelter in barn