How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett ****

“The classical view has wasted billions of research dollars and misdirected the course of scientific inquiry for over a hundred years.” How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that human emotions are neither universal nor fundamental. All efforts to analyze faces and recognize emotions, either by people (law enforcement, TSA) or by software (Apple, Microsoft) are based on outdated science (aka mythology, ideology, stereotypes) and doomed to failure.

The book makes two key points.

First, the emotions we ascribe to others are unreliable, even though we use our intuitions in all aspects of life from employment to law enforcement. For example, parole boards grant parole more often first thing in the morning and less often when the panel get tired and hungry later. The same is true for employment interviews.

Psychologist and doctors are no more reliable in diagnosing mental states. The author gives two example where patients correctly abandoned health care providers when they confidently delivered the incorrect diagnosis.

Second, the emotions we ascribe to ourselves are also unreliable. The author, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology, offered an illustrative anecdote where she mistook symptoms of flu for physical attraction. With the onset of fever, she accepted a second date, but once the fever passed, she never saw him again.

In an interesting contribution to the nature-nurture debate, the author notes parenthetically, “In fact, your learn statistically even in utero, which makes it complicated to determine whether certain concepts are innate or learned.”

The author is a scientist. The book is a demonstration of how difficult it is to write about science. The book is part memoir, part research report, and part self-help. Common with many scientist-authors, much of the book is redundant as if the author could not figure out to make their point clearly, so they chose instead to make it often. Feel free to skim over some sections. Important points are repeated.

The self-help advice is in the second half of the book. You might skip the advice, as even the author notes, “This is the most speculative chapter (Emotion and Illness) in the book.”

If you are open to the learn the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, this is a wonderful book. “Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.”

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Miss Peregrine (book 1) by Ransom Riggs ***

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (book 1) by Ransom Riggs. The inspiration for this series was to put stories to old photographs of children. Riggs builds an elaborate fantasy world of peculiar children with strange powers, times travel, and monsters who want to exterminate the children and their guardians. Set during World War II in the United Kingdom, the plot reflects the plight of the evacuated children with the monsters playing the role of Nazis.

The protagonist Jacob Portman is a troubled teenager with vision and nightmares of monsters. The source of these hallucinations is the stories he’s heard from his grandfather Abraham Portman. [These names are Jewish patriarchs, further reinforcing the World War II connection.] When his grandfather dies, Jacob goes off on a quest to learn the truth of his grandfather’s life and stories.  This quest takes him to Cairnholm Island off the coast of Wales.

On the island, he learns the truth: his grandfather hunted monsters (called hollows and wights); he has special powers and the answer to his teenage angst to the abandon the normal world.

On the positive side, the peculiar children are pretty interesting.

If you’re interested in a World War II fantasy/allegory with familiar conflicts and resolutions, this is the book for you. Peculiar but not surprising.

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer *****

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows is an epistolary novel about the occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II. Set in 1946, after the war, author protagonist Juliet Ashton is struggling for her next book idea when she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams from Guernsey inquiring about Charles Lamb, having found her name and address in a used book by Lamb. As the saying goes, one thing leads to another.

The general tone of this story is light. For example, Juliet broke up with her fiancé when he decided to move her books to the basement. She returned the books to their proper place and sent him on his way. Later when her flat was bombed, she recognized the “irony—if I’d let Rob store all my books in the basement, I’d still have them, every one.”

One thread of the novel is the correspondence is between Juliet with her publisher Sidney Stark and his sister, and Juliet’s best friend, Sophie. The other thread is between Juliet and various people from Guernsey (the eponymous literary society). Juliet starts in London but eventually moves to Guernsey.

In line with the light tone, the Germans are presented much more sympathetically than other recent books about the German occupation. Two are listed below.

Much of the story concerned Elizabeth McKenna who falls in love with one of the German officers, and they have a child Kit. Kit is the only one to survive the war, but all of them figure prominently in the narrative.

This is a historical novel which draws on historical settings and events, but the plot and characters are all fiction…with the one exception of a cameo appearance by Oscar Wilde. Thus, the book has two gay characters, but little is made of this.

If you like romance and quirky characters mixed in with your World War II history, this book is highly recommended.

I can make a similar recommendation for All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (http://1book42day.blogspot.com/2018/05/all-light-we-cannot-see-by-anthony-doerr.html) which is set in St. Malo just two hours south by ferry. Though the backgrounds are similar, this second book is placed during the war and is significantly darker.

Another excellent book of this genre (?) is The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (http://1book42day.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-nightingale-by-kristin-hannah.html).

The pie recipe is: “Potato peel pie: mashed potatoes for filling, strained beets for sweetness, and potato peelings for crust.”

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Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell *****

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell is #1 in the Kurt Wallander Series. It opens with the brutal, but unseen, murder of an older couple, Maria and Johannes Lovgren, in a rural area of southern Sweden. The police detective is intelligent and tenacious but also troubled by an irascible father, a pending divorce, an estranged daughter, and a drinking problem. The investigation is against a growing anti-immigrant sentiment.

The murder investigation uncovers layers of mysteries. The police, led by Wallander, track down each lead often feeling they were close to solving the case (“The stones were starting to burn under Kurt Wallender’s feet.”) until they hit a dead end. Eventually, they find a different direction and the process repeats. These investigative ups and downs keep the story moving.

There is a second murder that is solved more directly. The jumble of the two murder investigations and Wallander’s chaotic personal life keep the book moving very briskly.

However, once again, I am left to wonder why so many detectives are single and troubled. Wallander, who rarely sleeps, struggles with his father wandering around in the middle of the night believing he’s on the way to the train station. His daughter appears unexpectedly, but never at a time or in a place where he can talk to her. He communicates with his wife, but never productively. Beyond this, he struggles with drinking, his poor diet, and weight gain.

Without spoiling anything, one clue, which is often mentioned, is left unanswered at the end.

“He shuddered. He had no answers. Ans that made him uneasy”

I was also uneasy. Did Mankell intend to solve this part of the mystery and the narrative ran away from him? Or did he always intend this as a red herring? A second similar clue is addressed, but in a way to indicate that it wasn’t really important either.

If you want a fast-moving murder mystery in a foreign, but vaguely familiar, setting, this is a good choice. Fast read with a minimum of sex and violence.

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Waters of Eternal Youth by Donna Leon *****

Waters of Eternal Youth by Donna Leon (Commissario Guido Brunetti #25) involves an incident where a teenage Manuela is rescued from a Venice canal by a known drunk Pietro Cavanis. She suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation and, now fifteen years later) has not recovered. She has the mental age of seven.  Shortly, after her grandmother Contessa Demetriana Lando-Continui convinces Brunetti to reopen the case which was previously declared to be suicide, Cavanis is murdered.

Brunetti is assisted by Commissario Claudia Griffoni. She contributes insights, such as the observation that a man murdered Cavanis, who was stabbed. 

“The knives are kept in the kitchen, and their husbands pass through there every day, countless times, and yet very few of them get stabbed. That’s because women don’t use knives, and they don’t stab people.”

 She also had an important role in this story establishing a relationship with Manuela, the seven-year-old in the body of a young woman.

An enjoyable cozy mystery featuring life in Venice.

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Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell ***

Historical novels range from fiction with a few historical characters/events to history with a few fictional characters/events. My novel (Kitane, Bull Jumper) is necessarily of the former type as little is known about the Minoans and the Bronze Age. Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell is of the latter type. Fictional protagonist Agnes Shanklin observes the 1921 Cairo Conference socializing with Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Gertrude Bell. I expect Russell’s goal was (in her words) “scholarship…so easy and exact, so deep, but so unobtrusive.”

Protagonist Agnes Shanklin’s backstory includes World War I and her family dying during the Spanish flu epidemic leaving her with the independence to travel to Cairo in 1921. Agnes had been the responsible daughter. Her brother left home to join the army. Her sister to marry and be a missionary in Lebanon. She had stayed to take care of her mother. Now she has purchased a flapper wardrobe and is off to an adventure. Often the history overshadows the adventure.

The book is full of prescient predictions of how actions of the Cairo Conference sow the seed of conflict a century later, like this comment in a political discussion, “you cannot simply draw a line around Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra and declare everything inside a nation!” The novel intertwines the action where political discussions predominate and Agnes’s interior monologue about her romantic adventure. The two are barely related and often the politics seem to dominate.

If you are interested in the history of the Middle East and the events that have brought us to the current situation, this is an enjoyable way to learn the history. 

The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes *****

“The Iron Giant came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where had he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows.”

The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes is a five-act fable that echoes two familiar fable themes.

The first theme is generosity of spirit (https://www.learningtogive.org/resources/generosity-spirit-world-folktales-and-myths). 

In this tale, the farm boy Hogarth (isn’t it always a child?) befriends the Iron Giant when everyone else wants to attack and kill the stranger.

The other theme is the trickster. 

When earth is attacked by a terrible dragon…

“Terribly black, terribly scaly, terribly knobbly, terribly horned, terribly hairy, terribly clawed, terribly fanged…”

…the Iron Giant tricks it rather than fighting it.

If you’re looking for a fable about using kindness and cleverness instead of violence, this is your story.

Skin Deep by Morgan Smith *****

Skin Deep by Morgan Smith is a short story, retelling of a Scandinavian folk tale. It has a cursed prince and a poor village girl, and you can probably figure out the rest. You don’t read these tales of lovers redeeming each other for the plot. In this wonderful fable, it is the setting and the characters that make the story.

“Katya was not the sort of girl that anyone ever took notice of.”

But Katya, plain, non-entity Katya, had courage and strength. She didn’t believe rumors, only what she saw for herself. She wasn’t frightened by appearances, only actions. She was the kind of girl we all want to win, despite the risks and odds.

So, there you have it, a delightful fable from the time of cursed princes and brave village girls. Certainly, a treat for all.

*Out of Print* Other books by Morgan Smith.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz ***

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz is an anthology of contemporary ideas on the future of Earth and homo sapiens. Most of the book is based on interviews and published books, by scientists and science fiction authors. For example, Newitz recaps several of Octavia Butler’s novels. Unfortunately, if you are interested in the topic you will know about most the ideas presented…for example: synthetic biology, climate simulation, space elevators, and uploading brains.

The book has many chapters on farming, including community garden, local foods to conserve energy, rooftop gardens, growing plants on walls of tall buildings, and causes of famines. Ideas for the future are contrasted with historical examples of what not to do.

There is also good coverage for space colonization. As with most of the book, Newitz is an impartial observer/reporter, presenting both sides of the question. She discusses colonies on the Moon, Mars, and Titans(beaches), against the risks of space travel (radiation) and the ethics (we’ll “fuck everything up” — quoted three times).

Some other interesting quotes:

“It’s possible that we’ll become cyborgs.”

“Our kids are the last generation who will see no city lights on the Moon.”

If you’d like to read the current thoughts about the future of humanity all in one place, this is the book for you.

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Blackett's War by Stephen Budiansky ****

Blackett's War by Stephen Budiansky is a World War II history from the perspective of submarine warfare and the evolving discipline of operations research (OR). Patrick Blackett plays a role on the British side, but many others contributed to OR and the fight against the German U-Boats. OR is based on the idea that scientists collecting and analyzing data can make contributions in any and every field. The book contains many examples applied the antisubmarine warfare (ASW), such as convoy size, use of aircraft, and depth charge tactics.

One of the early successes was changing the strategy for depth charges. OR analysis found that following the original strategy, “targets that were at the right depth were almost certainly in the wrong place; targets that were in the right place were definitely at the wrong depth.” OR depended on data analysis, statistics, and probability. Getting OR results accepted faced challenges from politics and tradition. The book includes many cases of clever scientists having their suggestions opposed for reasons of politics.

When I was in college, two decades after WWII, OR was still an important discipline. One of the successes of OR was queueing theory. Whenever you see a single queue for multiple bank tellers or a special queue for “10 or fewer items,” you have OR to thanks. Today OR is assimilated into business administration.

Any engineer or scientist will find humor in examples where tradition was demonstrated to be unfounded and counterproductive when the data was analyzed. For example, when scientists investigate the reported success of shore batteries downing enemy aircraft over the Channel compared to land-based batteries, they discovered no difference beyond the shore batteries inflating their reported kills due to the difficulty of verification over water.

The book also includes a history of code breaking and the question of bombing strategy, civilians or combatants, cities or military installations. On WWII strategy, the author vacillates between the importance of ASW (D-Day would have been impossible until the Battle of the Atlantic was won) and the suspicion that WWII was more lost by the Germans than won by the Allies.  

If you are interested in WWII history or scientists making fun and fools of military bureaucrats, you’ll enjoy this book.

OR is a mid-20^th-century management discipline similar to scientific management at the beginning of the 20^th century.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah ****

French women and the French resistance during World War II have been themes in my recent reading. Both All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah show the women’s roles in the resistance and how ordinary people bit-by-bit cooperated with the Nazis.

Author Hannah tells the story of Isabelle Rossignol and Vianne Mauriac “Vianne the rule follower and Isabelle the rebel”, two sisters who resisted Nazis in their own way, both taking advantage of the assumption that “it’s a fact that women are useless in war.”

Isabelle was a rebellious woman who ran away from home and was often kicked out school. When to Nazis arrived, she was eager to join the resistance and took the dangerous job of escorting downed pilots to Spain. In this high-profile job, she earned the praise of the British and Americans, even if some of her benefactors resented taking orders from a woman. The Germans also knew of her work, as The Nightingale, and had a desperate manhunt to find her. Their search was hampered by their belief that The Nightingale had to be a man.

Vianne had a daughter and took the less flamboyant, but also dangerous, role of hiding Jewish children.

These novels have the dual themes of general Nazi resistance and resistance by women. The former addresses the history of French-Nazi collaboration and the latter shows the important role of women during World War II.

If you can tolerate the horrific terror and brutality of the Nazis, this is a story of women’s resistance against violence. Note that neither novel is not a tale of good triumphing over evil.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations.