Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics, 1992 by Tom Rosenstiel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"But more dangerous than ideological bias in the media is hysteria. The press has become so large, conducts so many polls, examines so many trivial details, that to audiences on the other end context and nuances are lost. And television compounds the problem by compressing everything into the grammar of two minutes."

Continuing my reading project that could be entitled Politics and the media in the US, having read and reviewed here H.R. Haldeman's The Ends of Power, which deals with the early 1970s, and Lesley Stahl's Reporting Live, which spans the period from the early 1970s to very early 1990s, I have now read Tom Rosenstiel's Strange Bedfellows (1993), which focuses on the 1992 presidential campaign.

Tom Rosenstiel, now a well-known author and journalist, worked for the Los Angeles Times as a reporter and media critic. The book offers an inside, extremely detailed account of the campaign, mainly from the point of view of the ABC news network. The author writes:

"For twelve months, I had access to the editing bays, the assignment editors, the story meetings, and the thoughts of the principal people deciding how the network would cover the campaign. I traveled with ABC's correspondents and producers as they followed the candidates. I watched how ABC's nightly newscast was assembled by the senior producers and editors [...] I had access to budget meetings and internal memos. I saw the struggles over personnel and money."

Chapter 1 describes the events and atmosphere of the Election Day, November 3, 1992, when Bill Clinton, the candidate, defeated George H.W. Bush, the incumbent, and Ross Perot, the independent candidate. Next, the author rewinds to the fall of 1991 and, from then, the book can be read as a chronological collection of well-captured vignettes of hundreds of campaign events being covered by the network. The amount of detail the reader can learn from this book is incredible. The book also delivers many interesting syntheses, summaries, and conclusions. Let's mention several of them:

"Ted Koppel, the anchor of ABC's Nightline, even had a theory he called the 'Vanna-tizing' of American culture, in honor of Vanna White of TV's Wheel of Fortune. Vanna remained enormously popular, the theory went, precisely because she was seen but not heard."

Note how well it matches Ms. Stahl's observations from Reporting Live about the primacy of images over words. Or consider the "expectation game":

"[...] the fragile game in which the media set expectations and then interpreted the vote by watching who succeeds or fails to meet them."

The author also notes that while at the beginning the network was determined to provide a serious, issue-based reportage of the campaign, at the end it devolved into quite a chaotic, event-based coverage.

The reader may enjoy the discussion of how the new technologies and the competition from other news sources, including the emergence of CNN, affect the coverage of the campaign. Finally, the angle, which I find the most fascinating. How much does the coverage of the campaign change the campaign itself and, possibly, its outcome? I would love to see a more detailed study of this issue. The author mentions it a few times, for instance:

"Policing what candidates said changed the relationship between reporter and politician. By labeling a candidate's statement as distorted or false, the press went from being a color commentator up in the booth to being a referee down on the field. Implicitly, this role acknowledged that the press not only reflected political events, it shaped them."

Overall, a very good read, perhaps lacking a slightly higher degree of cohesion. Highly recommended, though!

Three-and-a-half stars.

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Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'You gonna cry again, Frankie? What is it? Did your Momma toilet-train you funny? Is that why you're such a goddamned freak-o?'"

When I read dialogue like this, the images of Humphrey Bogart taunting Edward G. Robinson in a 1940s black-and-white movie come to mind. But the words come from a 1975 Spenser story by Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes, so the author seems to be back to parodying the dated hard-boiled genre. Luckily, the dated feeling is not as strong as in The Godwulf Manuscript , so hopefully Mr. Parker is on his way to outgrow the pastiche mode, as I keep reading Spenser mysteries in chronological order.

A baseball manager hires Spenser to check whether the best pitcher in their organization has gambling connections:

"'[...] I heard something peculiar about him. The odds seem to shift a little when he pitches. I mean, there is some funny money placed when he's scheduled to go.'"

Spenser begins his investigation, meets with the pitcher and his wife, and realizes that something that the wife has said bothers him. Then, a couple of low-life hoods visit Spenser: they tell him, "you're only a goddamned egg-sucking snoop, a nickel-and-dime cheapie," and suggest that he should cease the investigation.

Making numerous phone calls and using help from his police contacts, Spenser quickly manages to get to the bottom of the case. The plot is implausible, particularly as to how easily Spenser gets all the needed information. But who cares about the plot if we can enjoy wise-cracking hard-boiled detective in his full glory. Oh, and the romantic Spenser! Both Brenda Loring and Susan Silverman return in this novel. Which one will Spenser choose? Stay tuned.

I am usually able to find a nice fragment of prose, even in weaker Spenser novels. No such luck here.

One-and-three-quarter stars.


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Reporting Live by Lesley Stahl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"So what had I learned in 20 years in Washington? I learned that it's not only 'the economy, stupid.' It's also television, stupid. Television had become the center not only of campaigning and governing but also of diplomacy and decision making. I also learned to have enormous faith in our system. Democracy works. It even intrudes on the way the media functions."

Reporting Live (1999), Lesley Stahl's memoir of her 20 years at CBS, covers all the major events of American politics. Ms. Stahl began working at CBS in 1972, as an affirmative action hire for women and minorities in broadcasting. Among her numerous top reporting positions, she served as a co-anchor of the CBS Morning News, the White House correspondent since 1978, and the moderator of Face the Nation between 1983 and 1991. She was able to watch five US presidents in action, from up close: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush (George H.W.)

Ms. Stahl reported on the Watergate burglary, the impeachment hearings of President Nixon, the Ford presidency, the so-called "malaise" times of President Carter, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the assassination attempt on President Reagan. She reported on all the elections and major party conventions. Even if nothing else counted, the book would be a valuable refresher on the American politics in the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet, the reader will find a lot more in Ms. Stahl's book. First of all, the fascinating thread of juggling the duties of one of the top reporters and television personalities in the country and her responsibilities as a mother - the author's daughter was born in 1977 - shows her drive and extreme hard work ethic.

The mechanisms and machinations of the highest-level office politics in the leading broadcasting company of the time constitute another interesting thread. The account of the incessant jockeying for more important positions and duties among the top reporting staff at CBS might read sort of funny if not for the fact that it seemed to take away too much energy from all the people involved.

In Reporting Live the reader will also find numerous details of political events and background observations that are hard to find elsewhere. For instance the following about the tax-cut-loving President Reagan:

"Reagan went on television with a brawny statement about his commitment to cutting taxes but then signed a bill for fiscal 1983 that raised them. [...] Over the course of his presidency he would raise taxes 13 more times, but each time he convinced everyone he'd never do such a thing."

The insightful personal observations of President Carter are deeply biting, yet somehow they help humanize his image.

To me, the single most important lesson from Ms. Stahl's book are her observations about the primacy of pictures over words. She reminisces about her piece for the CBS Evening News, where she harshly criticized President Reagan's campaign. However, her critical words were accompanied by images from the President's "morning in America" campaign, designed to make the viewers "feel good: about America, about themselves, and about him." The piece was universally considered "an ad for the Reagan campaign or a very positive news story." Virtually no one noticed the strong critique. Indeed, understanding words requires a degree of intellectual effort, while pictures effortlessly evoke feelings.

In the same vein, Ms. Stahl points out how the presidential elections in the US are won and lost on likeability of the candidates and on their image rather than on issues. I love the question she once asked Jim Baker:

"'You don't think Hollywood can create a president?'"

Recommended read!

Three-and-a-half stars.


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God Save The Child by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"She said, 'Come in, Mr. Spenser. I'm Susan Silverman.' [...]When she shook hands with me, I felt something click down back of my solar plexus.
I said hello without stammering and sat down. "

Probably the most exciting thing about Robert B. Parker's God Save the Child (1974), the second novel in the Spenser series, is the first appearance of Susan Silverman, who will become one of the mainstays of the series. Other than that, I find the novel quite weak; in a most generous mood, I would call it utterly unremarkable. However, I have accidentally found the website https://www.ranker.com/list/best-robe..., where God Save the Child is ranked as the very best Spenser book. Huh? HUH? What's wrong with me? Is there a therapy to straighten my understanding of reading material?

Mrs. and Mr. Bartlett, a well-to-do people from Boston suburbs, hire Spenser to find their 15-year-old son, who disappeared from home, along with his pet guinea pig. The Bartletts are pure caricatures, they are as far from real people as I am from youth. I wouldn't think it possible, but the portrait of Chief Trask is even less realistic - a cartoon of a corrupt, stupid, bad cop. Spenser himself? Well, the author is working too hard on making the detective a uniquely insolent wise-ass. This does not jibe with Spenser's inner sensitivity, intelligence, and charm. Only the character of Susan Silverman exhibits some semblance of realism.

The novel escapes the very bottom rating because of several well-written or funny passages. For instance:

"She laughed. Her laugh sounded like I'd always imagined the taste of mead."

Mr. Parker can write well, but this early in the series he has not yet mastered the craft of characterization.

I laughed out loud when I read

"Two sailors went by with a fat barelegged girl between them. One of the sailors said something I couldn't hear and slapped the girl on the fanny. Both sailors laughed. The girl said, 'Oh, piss on you,' and they went by. Ah, to be young and in love."

Indeed. I am in a generous mood now so I will rate the novel with

One-and-three-quarter stars.


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Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do."

Atul Gawande's Complications (2002) strongly resonates with me in at least two ways. My favorite field of mathematics is probability, and one of the topics that excite me the most is how bad most people (including myself) are in dealing with uncertainty, i.e., with practical consequences of randomness. Dr. Gawande dedicates quite some space to this issue in the book, as promised in the snippet from the Introduction, quoted in the epigraph above. Furthermore, when I teach software engineering, I emphasize the topics related to quality assurance. Dr. Gawande's book makes it absolutely clear that the best way to improve medicine is to put a stronger focus on quality assurance in the medical process.

The book contains many fascinating stories of medical cases, often from the author's own practice as a surgery resident. We read about the physiology and psychology of blushing, gastric-bypass surgeries, persistent nausea, evolution of theories of pain, cases of "flesh-eating bacteria" infection, sudden infant death syndrome, and several others. As captivating as these cases are, being in the math and computer science fields, I am more interested in issues of uncertainty in medicine, medical errors, and the potential method of reducing the uncertainty and the number of errors.

The existence of medical error is normal, and I am using the word in two different meanings: normal as 'expected,' 'regular,' 'frequent,' but also normal as in the mathematical term of "normal distribution" that can be illustrated by a bell-shaped curve. Very informally, the so-called Central Limit Theorem, one of the magnificent achievements in the mathematical theory of probability, states that when the outcome of an experiment or event is affected by many, many independent random factors, then the value of the outcome follows the bell-shaped curve: most outcomes are in the fat middle of the graph (these are the average, expected outcomes), and very few in its tails (these are the unexpectedly bad or unexpectedly super successful outcomes).

Consider the author's example of a fairly routine operation of laparoscopic cholecystectomy ("lap chole"). The extreme complexity of human physiology, the complexity of activities in the operating room, the complexity of psychology of the doctors and nurses on the team, etc. result in thousands, probably millions of independent random factors that influence the outcome of the operation. So the outcome must be normal (as in bell-shaped). There will always be the tails of the distribution, and one of these tails may mean the patient's death from a routine surgery. The author writes:

"[...]studies show that even highly experienced surgeons inflict this terrible injury [cutting the main bile duct] about once in every two hundred lap choles. [...] a statistician would say that, no matter how hard I tried, I was almost certain to make this error at least once in the course of my career."

One of the most fascinating fragments of the book deals with the human inability to choose the right decision when randomness and catastrophic results need to be considered. Suppose (this is my example) a patient has a condition that severely imperils the quality of life. Suppose there exists an operation, with a recorded success rate of 99%. But in the remaining 1% of cases the patient will die during the operation. We do know the probabilities but how can we estimate the numerical value of the patient's life relative to the value of their life with the debilitating condition and relative to the value of the healthy life? If we could, the mathematical problem would be simple but, of course, we can't! The additional complication is the natural human inability to understand the difference between probabilities of, say, 0.001 and 0.00001 of something very bad happening. Both events are unlikely to happen, but don't forget that both will eventually happen. To someone, maybe even us.

Dr. Gawande quotes a lot of statistic in Complications. Here's probably the most scary of them:

"How often do autopsies turn up a major misdiagnosis in the cause of death? I would have guessed this happens rarely, in 1 or 2 percent of cases at most. According to three studies done in 1998 and 1999, however, the figure is about 40%."

So is medicine doomed to fail in a high percentage of cases? Or is there a chance for the medical success statistic to improve? The author's answer is positive and he repeatedly offers his suggestion of the best medication for the ailing medicine. In the last chapter he writes:

"[...] to shrink the amount of uncertainty in medicine -- with research, not on new drugs or operations (which already attracts massive amounts of funding) but on the small but critical everyday decisions that patients and doctors (which get shockingly little funding)."

Reduction of uncertainty is the crucial step. It could be achieved by following the quality assurance guidelines from other fields of science and technology. Dr. Gawande mentions various methods and processes that are used to improve aviation safety as recommendations that could easily be adapted for the medical field; I would add the engineering disciplines in general, including software engineering and systems engineering. Standardization, uniformization, "routinization" of medicine are strongly recommended.

A highly worthwhile book! I am sure that also the readers, who are not particularly interested in the issues of uncertainty and error in medicine, will find the medical case stories captivating and valuable reads. Well-written book, accessible, and convincing!

Four-and-a-half stars.


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The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Around ten-thirty the doorman called upstairs to tell her that there was a police officer on his way up. [...] He wouldn't say anything until they were inside the apartment, but by then she already knew. The look on his face said it all."

Lawrence Block's The Devil Knows You're Dead (1993) is the eleventh novel in the Matthew Scudder series, and the sixth one that I am reviewing here on Goodreads. The readers who are into conceptual continuity of Matthew Scudder's life story will appreciate the book even more than I do. There are three main threads in the novel: the criminal plot, the thread focusing on Matt's sobriety, the AA meetings, and his daily struggles, as well the storyline about the women in his life, Elaine and others. I have the feeling that the emphasis on the two "personal" threads is more pronounced than in other novels in the series. Anyway, back to the plot.

A man leaves the luxury apartment in the evening to take care of something, promising his wife to come back soon, and then... The wife learns that he has been killed in an apparently random attack. The Holtzmanns were acquaintances of Matthew Scudder and his significant other, Elaine. A near-homeless Vietnam veteran is charged with the murder; all circumstances of the attack point to him. Yet his brother does not believe he is the killer and hires Matt Scudder to find out the truth. The plot is quite plausible and devoid of ridiculous twists and clichés, perhaps except one: the author resorts to a common literary gimmick:

"Something was playing hide-and-seek in my memory, something I'd heard or read in the past day or two. But I couldn't quite manage to grab on to it..."

To me, the best thing in the novel are three conversations that Matt has with various people. The first one, with the victim's boss, touches on various extraneous topics, such as publishing business and office politics; yes, it could be cut out, yet I learned a lot reading it. The conversation between Matt, the victim's wife, and Matt's lawyer is hilarious: it illustrates various clever ways of making obviously illegal activities appear legal. And, to me, the highpoint of the novel is when Matt's ex-lover explains her decision in the closing section of the story - a desperately sad, yet somehow uplifting paragraph.

On the negative side, despite my supposed wisdom accumulated with old age, I have never been able to understand the author's fascination with Mick Ballou, a recurring character in many Scudder novels and "a boring, stupid creep," to borrow language from Gen Z: Sure, people like this exist and need to appear in fiction, but why come back to the same person time and time again?

Three-and-a-half stars.


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The Ends of Power by H.R. Haldeman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The original plans, apparently, were aimed toward the Democratic convention wherein the prostitutes and kidnappings would flourish, as well as electronic bugging of candidates' suites."
"Then the rest of the money went to CRP in a bizarre way: a man wearing gloves furtively receiving the briefcase full of cash and handing over no receipt."
"'Let me ask you this, to be quite candid. Is there any way you can use cash."

I recommend H.R. Haldeman's The Ends of Power (1978) to anyone who does not believe that politics is the dirtiest area of human activity. Being an old geezer, I am pretty cynical about humankind, yet I still felt soiled reading this book. The author, a long-term Chief of Staff in Richard Nixon's White House, arguably the closest to Nixon member of his cabinet, shows people in the very highest echelons of government constantly busy lying, cheating, covering-up, bribing, entrapping, and figuring out how to most efficiently destroy other people. How do they find the time to achieve successes in, say, foreign policy, as Mr. Nixon undoubtedly did? How do they find time to think about improving the lives of American citizens? Yeah, right...

The book is focused on the Watergate drama. In the Author's Note, he writes:

"In my view, all of us at the White House involved in Watergate did a lot of things wrong. Some criminal, some harmless, some willful, some accidental, some shrewdly calculated, some stupidly blundered, but each wrong."

The Watergate affair that lasts from June 17, 1972, when burglars are apprehended in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in Washington, DC, to August 8, 1974, when president Nixon resigns, is such an incredibly complex mesh of events, motivations, causes and effects, human errors, and random happenings that even though I have read several books on Watergate, I still have only the most rudimentary understanding of the affair. Haldeman's book makes some things clear for me, but - at the same time - it brings so many new aspects and factors to light, that I can't say my understanding has increased much.

I find the later chapters more clear and much more readable than the earlier ones, which intimidate the reader with an abundance of details; the chapter Beginning of the End is most captivating and seems better written than the rest. The Conclusion helps in that it provides a "big picture" overview of the entire scandal.

Recursion is my favorite motif in mathematics, computer programming, and also in art, so I particularly like that at one point in the book the author most likely uses the content of the tape recordings of his conversation with president Nixon, which was about the content of the tape recordings of his much earlier conversation with president Nixon. This could provide a fascinating setup for a thriller.

I recommend this 43-year-old book without hesitation - a worthwhile, if depressing read.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

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The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"I could tell he was impressed with the gun in my hand. The only thing that would have scared him more would have been if I had threatened to flog him with a dandelion."

Robert B. Parker's The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), the very first novel in the Spenser series, must have been written as a pastiche of hard-boiled crime fiction from the 1930s - 1960s. How else to explain the dated language in a novel written only about 50 years ago? The dialogues sound like they have been taken from a 1940s movie starring Humphrey Bogart or from a Raymond Chandler's book. Ross Macdonald's novels from the 1950s read a lot more contemporary than this.

A university president hires Spenser to retrieve a valuable fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript that has been stolen from the university library. The head of campus security suspects that a radical student group is responsible for the theft. Spenser talks to the young woman, a member of the group. And then the plot explodes...

People are killed, and police get involved; we meet Lt. Quirk and sergeant Belson for the first time. The plot is actually well constructed and captivating. Naturally, Spenser gets in a grave danger, yet - despite being Hawkless and Vinnieless - he emerges victorious at the end and even saves the young woman!

While the language is dated by the author's design, the novel makes me realize how much the times have changed in half a century. A university professor smokes while teaching a class! The campus has its own porno shop! Everybody, including the police officers, drinks hard liquor all day! (Well, this may not have changed that much...)

Anyway, this is an interesting, good read, even if it feels like it was written 80-90 years ago. I am curious in which installment of the Spenser saga will the author drop the pastiche mode, which means that I need to look for all the early volumes.

Finally, I love the name of Spenser's romantic interest: Brenda Loring. A pretty transparent allusion.

Three stars.


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Minstrels in the Gallery: A History of Jethro Tull by David Rees
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Three decades during which a remarkably gifted band of minstrels, guided by one of the true musical geniuses of our time, have created a unique brand of music. You can't dance to it, many simply can't listen to it, but to the millions of delighted record buyers and concert goers that discovered the special sound of Jethro Tull at various points of the epic journey, there is nothing quite like it. The sound is still undefinable, yet instantly recognisable."

David Rees' Minstrels In The Gallery: A History of Jethro Tull (1998, 2021) can hardly be considered a traditional biography-type book. The author had been the editor and publisher of a Jethro Tull fanzine, The New Day, for many years; thus Minstrels In The Gallery reads as a collection of fanzine issues. It is a thirty-year-long compilation of news about the band, about insanely frequent personnel changes, descriptions of performances, and some gossip. It is a difficult read because of the stunning amount of detail provided on every page. The overlong paragraphs filled with dense text do not help either.

Jethro Tull, one of the most famous rock bands in the popular music history, has been one of my favorite groups. Being a member of a generation for whom rock music used to be the single most important thing in life, I advanced from late teens to early twenties listening to Jethro Tull's music. I loved their progressive sensibilities and their ventures into classical music (remember Jethro Tull's version of J.S. Bach's Bourrée?) I loved Ian Anderson's flute playing and the British folk music influences.

Jethro Tull's story begins in 1963, when three school friends form The Blades, which - after countless personnel and band name changes - evolves into Jethro Tull. The big breakthrough comes in August 1968, when their performance at Sunbury Jazz and Blues Festival receives both popular and critical acclaim. Their first album, This Was, is released the same year, and the band begins getting invitation to play as a supporting act for such hyper-popular groups like Led Zeppelin. The peak of their world fame occurs during the 1970 - 1973 period; the band tour almost continuously all over the world and keeps releasing new albums. In fact, they keep touring and performing individual concerts all the way until 1998, when Mr. Rees' narration ends.

The author includes several fragments that break the monotony of personnel changes and performance descriptions, such as a passage about Ian Anderson (the only permanent member of Jethro Tull) as a very successful salmon farming and processing businessman, creating jobs in Scotland.

While the book is an absolutely essential read for any Jethro Tull fan, I doubt if it will be interesting for anyone who has not listened to their music.

(Let me note that, contrary to the Goodreads blurb above my review, there are no pictures in the book.)

Two-and-a-quarter stars.

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Now & Then by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'This,' he said, 'has been a model of law enforcement give-and-take. Me, a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You, a simple private peep. And we share what we know to the betterment of our common interest.'
'Ain't it grand,' I said."

Yeah, right, sure! Like so believable!

A man hires Spenser to find out what his wife, an English professor at a private college, "is up to." She seems to be distant, comes home late, with alcohol on her breath. Spenser follows the wife: indeed she meets a guy in a hotel bar. The next day Spenser drops a listening device in the woman's purse and listens to her not only having sex with the man, but also participating in a conversation about radical groups on campus and FBI's antiterrorist activities.

The scope of the case grows rapidly - three people are killed - which allows Robert B. Parker to use several recurring characters in his Now and Then (2007). Not only does the reader meet Susan Silverman and Hawk, who are permanent fixtures in the series, but Spenser also needs help of two "troubleshooters" (one could omit the 'trouble' part), Vinnie Morris, and Chollo. Obviously, these four guys together would pose a formidable threat to the entire military force of any middle-size country.

This is a sort of a fairy-tale for grown-ups, with evildoers and killers instead of princesses and unicorns. The plot is grossly implausible and the ending preposterous. Mr. Parker usually infuses the conversations between characters, particularly the banter between Susan and Spenser, with touches of humor, occasionally quite charming. Even this is largely missing here - I only laughed at the mention of a certain real-estate mogul from New York, who, unbeknownst to the author, will, in a few years, spectacularly fail as an extremely important politician. Also, as a mathematician, I like the following definition:

"'Nothing says even like two in the head,' Hawk said."

I find this installment of the Spenser saga well below the average level of the series.

One-and-three-quarter stars.


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The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June."

What a wonderful way to begin the second half of 2021! John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021) is the best book I have read this year so far, and only my second five-star rating in six months. The book is a collection of 46 short essays on various manifestations of human life and human culture. (In a gimmick that will sound familiar for us Goodreads members, the author provides a rating for each such anthropocene manifestation on a five-star scale.)

Anthropocene is usually defined as "the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment." Yet, the book is not really focused on human influence on the environment. Yes, the author makes it clear that the human race has been succeeding in its job of destroying the planet, but this is not his main point. I love the book so much because he shows that despite all the infinite and perpetual human suffering - pain, disease, pandemics, failure, fear, loneliness, and eventual death - life is beautiful and the world is beautiful. We just need to look carefully.

Being a "word person" as opposed to an "image person" (to me, one right word is often worth a thousand images; and in most cases I care more how the authors write than what they write about), I admire John Green's prose. In the unforgettable essay Sunsets, he defends the appreciation of "the clichéd beauty of an ostentatious sunset":

"It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, [...] And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself [...] It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you've been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That's bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunset five stars."

In one of the most moving essays, Auld Lang Syne, where the author mentions the death of his friend, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the reader will find the following passage of evocative prose:

"And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past -- seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them -- and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us."

This is not to say that it is just the writing that I admire in Anthropocene; in all the essays there is so much wisdom about life and about being human. Lascaux Cave Paintings is, to me, the best essay in the collection. The author writes about Palaeolithic paintings made by people who lived about 17,000 years ago. Some of the paintings are the so-called "negative hand stencils" that all kids produce at some point of their childhood. John Green writes:

"[...] the hand stencils say, 'I was here.' They say, 'You are not new.'"

While the members of each human generation - the Boomers like myself, the Millennials like my daughter, or Gen Alpha like my grandkids - want to think that they and their times are unique in history, we all are really the same, and the Lascaux Cave artists are our great-great-... repeat about 600 times... -great-great-grandparents. We are human, we live, we love, and we die.

There is so much more in the collection! Great Gatsby, velociraptors, scratch 'n' sniff stickers, air conditioning, Jerzy Dudek - the Polish goalkeeper of Liverpool F.C., Doi's circle drawings, and more and more. And there is even laugh-out-loud humor:

"I don't labor under the delusion that the United States is an exemplary or even particularly exceptional nation, but we do have a lot of the world's largest balls."

This is a book full of beautiful prose, sweetness, and love of life and of the world. I guess the only way to enhance the reading experience would be to listen to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World while reading.

I would like to thank my outstanding former student for giving me this book as a birthday gift.

Five stars.

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