Washington Post Book Reviews
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Saturday April 2, 2011
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THE SOCIAL ANIMAL: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
David Brooks
Random House
ISBN 978-1400067602
424 pages
$27
Reviewed by Paul Bloom
This is not a modest book. David Brooks is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of our time, known for, among other things, his playful dissections of the lifestyles of the American elite. Here he is chasing bigger game. "The Social Animal" is about the modern life of our species. It explores attachment, parenting, schooling, love, family, culture, achievement, marriage, politics, morality, aging, death and so much more.
And it's in the form of a story! Adopting a stylistic technique from Rousseau, Brooks gives us Harold and Erica, first separately and then as a couple, using their lives to illustrate what he sees as a scientifically accurate and spiritually rich understanding of the human condition.
This is a useful device -- I wish it were done more often -- and Brooks' affection for his characters has an appealing sweetness. But you don't want to read this as a novel -- it's far too didactic: Harold is born, and we learn a lot about infant development and the mother-child bond. Erica goes from a terrible school to a great one, and Brooks explores education. Harold writes a book on the British Enlightenment, and he tells Erica (and us) all about it. Erica has an affair and regrets it, and this frames the chapter on the moral emotions. Harold becomes an alcoholic. Erica goes to the World Economic Forum. And so on, until they get old and one of them dies.
Brooks is a sharp, clear and often very funny writer. Describing someone's preternaturally calm voice: "he makes Barack Obama sound like Lenny Bruce"; talking about baby Harold's fascination with shapes: "He would stare at edges the way Charles Manson stared at cops." And Brooks has a good eye for the cool finding. Do you know that a baby's brain creates 1.8 million new neural connections per second? Or that a disproportionately high percentage of successful people have had a parent die or abandon them early in life? Or that the more people you are dining with at a restaurant, the more food you are likely to eat?
Women underestimate their IQs; men overestimate theirs. Past the age of 50, women initiate most divorces. Americans are half as likely as Japanese to admit that they are often afraid of saying the wrong thing. After looking at the faces of two unfamiliar candidates for a fraction of a second, people can predict with 70 percent accuracy who will win the election.
He has a million of them, which makes for a pleasantly skimmable book. But there are costs to this abundance. Brooks moves so fast that there is no opportunity to distinguish the established findings from the unlikely ones, and no chance to follow up on some of the more interesting claims. He tells us in a sentence that taller men get paid more, for instance, but says nothing about the fascinating question of why this is so. And some of the factoids are less satisfying. There is an occasional drift into neurobabble: phrases about brain parts and neurotransmitters that sound scientific and substantive but don't actually add anything to the argument. In the end, why do we care how many neural connections a baby makes in a second?
All these facts serve a broader agenda, though. Many of us, Brooks believes, are in the grip of an outdated theory of human nature. We give priority to cold-blooded reason, to deliberative, conscious, logical and linear thought. This is said to distinguish us from other animals -- it's what tiger mothers hope to nourish in their children. But now we know better. Brooks cites my colleague John Bargh as claiming that there's been another Galilean revolution, except that instead of the Earth being pushed from the center of the universe, it is the conscious mind that has been dethroned. What really matters is what lies beneath: "emotions, institutions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social norms." Brain research, Brooks tells us, "reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ."
Brooks is right that many psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists believe this to be true. "The Social Animal" is a savvy, accessible and enthusiastic defense of their position -- they are lucky to have him on their side.
But his book also illustrates the limits of this approach to human nature. Brooks has a fondness for stories in which emotion clashes with reason and character is at war with IQ. But in the real world, these are tightly related. Contrary to the nerdy genius stereotype, someone who is book-smart is usually people-smart and emotion-smart, too. Brooks' characters would be nowhere near as successful and happy if they weren't also highly intelligent in a boring, IQ-based, logical, conscious and deliberative way.
This is true as well for our species. Brooks has chosen to have his story take place "perpetually in the current moment, the early twenty-first century," and this allows him to show how Harold and Erica come to deal with the world that we live in now, with its customs, literature, technology, politics and morality. But humans are not rats dropped into an elaborate maze -- we've created this world. We instinctively adapt to social institutions, but we can also reject them and invent betters ones, and we do so in large part through thoughtful deliberation and conscious agency. Without these capacities, Erica and Harold would be two unexceptional apes, running naked through the jungle.
Brooks has his own concerns about policy and politics. He worries about our failures to address problems such as economic inequality and failing schools, and argues persuasively that we will continue to fail unless we come up with a better theory of human nature. He is right as well that such a theory will include an important role for emotions and instincts. But in the course of addressing these problems and struggling for solutions, Brooks is himself engaging in the rational activity that he is so skeptical about. We're not going to solve social problems by listening to our hearts and going with our guts. We have to be smart. Fortunately, we can be.
Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University. His most recent book is "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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DAY OF HONEY: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War
DAY OF HONEY: A Memoir of Food, Love, and WarAnnia Ciezadlo
Free Press
ISBN 978-1416583936
382 pages
$26
THE DRESSMAKER OF KHAIR KHANA: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Harper
ISBN 978-0061732379
255 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Christina Asquith
For the scores of journalists and aid workers who poured into Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the terrible food in Baghdad's hotels was a shock -- greasy minced meat, mayonnaise-soaked vegetables and an obsession with Pepsi. But the story of the occupation and insurgency was so intense that most visitors spent little time worrying about what they put in their mouths. Thankfully, freelancer Annia Ciezadlo, who arrived in the fall of 2003 for a year-long reporting stint, became obsessed with Iraq's food and trekked across its gastronomic desert. In "Day of Honey," she delves into how the 25-year dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and a decade of U.N. sanctions drove Iraq's best recipes underground.
Her epicurial tour cracks open a different Iraq. She looks into its dusty cookbooks, explores its coffeehouses and savors the foods of its many regions and religious sects. Her book is full of more insight and joy than anything else I have read on Iraq. Some tidbits are fascinating. For example, she tells us that the world's oldest known recipe was written on three clay tablets in Southern Mesopotamia in 1600 BC.
Ciezadlo's Arabic husband, the Middle East bureau chief for Newsday, whom she married in New York before the war, helps her navigate the lives of Iraqis and their dinner tables. The book's narrative focuses on the development of her relationship with him and his Lebanese family and explores the theme that food, friendship and family are all intertwined.
Halfway through "Day of Honey," when Newsday moves her husband out of Iraq after a year of increasing danger, the scene shifts to Beirut. Ciezadlo is enchanted by this "city of balconies," which she describes beautifully:
"The million and a half residents of Greater Beirut had only a handful of tiny, pocket-sized public parks, none of them particularly green. And so, like Nebuchadnezzar, people created hanging gardens ... geraniums, bougainvillea, rosemary, and frangipani. A city of gardens in midair." And in Beirut she keeps the focus on food, but also gives readers a survey of the country's civil war, people and history.
"Day of Honey" covers a lot of ground and sometimes loses sight of its main subject: food. But Ciezaldo is a wonderful traveling companion. Her observations are delightful -- witty, intelligent and nonjudgmental. Skirting the politics, hotel food and headline-grabbing violence, she spills the secrets of this region so rich in history as if they were spices from a burlap sack. Her writing is at times so moving that you want to cry for countries destroyed, but she writes with such wisdom that you don't fret over the future of these 4,000-year-old civilizations. It's a shame that the hundreds of journalists, aid workers and pundits who dominate the discussion of Iraq and Lebanon rarely stop to delight in the countries' beauty.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon probes another war-torn country in "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana," a tale of one woman's pertinacity in Kabul and the wide-ranging impact she had. Afghan women, who typically lead deeply private lives, have given outsiders some fascinating glimpses of life behind the veil, in such works as Asne Seierstad's "The Bookseller of Kabul," Debra Rodriguez's "Kabul Beauty School" and Christina Lamb's "The Sewing Circles of Herat."
These real-life Muslim soap operas have enthralled us by exploring the way culture, family dynamics and religion combine to suppress women's rights. In her book, Lemmon focuses on Kamila Sidiqi, a young Afghan woman whose professional ambitions were severely disrupted in 1996 with the arrival of the Taliban. Her parents were forced out of the country, and she was left to fend for herself and her four sisters. Unwilling to give up her dreams, she learned to sew and slowly built a thriving business making dresses for local shopkeepers. As her business grew, she took on dozens of female employees and provided a much-needed economic lifeline to families in the neighborhood.
It's a remarkable story and a worthy case study for aid workers interested in effective ways to promote women's rights. Indeed, Lemmon is a graduate of Harvard Business School, where she focused on expanding women's rights by teaching business skills. But "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana" fails to come alive with the richness of "Day of Honey." Lemmon's bland writing is as formulaic as an after-school TV special, complete with endless thumbs-up, you-can-do-it messages. As Sidiqi built her lucrative business amid Afghanistan's widespread corruption and desperate poverty, she encountered no family squabbles, no jealousies, no duplicity or greed. In Khair Khana, it seems, all Afghans, except the evil Taliban, are kind, generous and hardworking -- and one-dimensional.
The author's insistence on portraying Sidiqi and her family in a congratulatory light and on sending the message that industrious women can overcome all odds is admirable. But that doesn't make for a very interesting book.
Christina Asquith, who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is author of "Sisters in War: A Story of Love, Family and Survival in the New Iraq."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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