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A Genial Undertaker
Feb. 9th, 2006 10:46 pmIt's getting to be time to catch up on my books again. I'm going to start with the recent nonfiction reads, because I still don't keep track of them as closely as I do my fiction, so they're more prone to being forgotten.
Susan A. Clancy: Abducted : how people come to believe they were kidnapped by aliens. I'm a complete skeptic when it comes to UFO abductions. So is Clancy, but she has one thing that I don't tend to--compassion for those who believe that aliens abducted them. She was a false memory researcher, who moved out of child abuse because it was(and probably still is)politically incorrect to doubt the veracity of childhood abuse memories recovered by hypnosis. It is scary what she says about how easy it is to generate false memories--hypnosis isn't even required. Now every time I run across a scene in a book that uses hypnosis to recover memories(and it's happened twice since I read this book), I wince a little bit. Anyway, the scientific community is much readier to believe that alleged alien abductees manufactured their memories out of whole cloth...but why? There's handy scientific explanations for all abduction phenomena, especially sleep paralysis, which is often accompanied by hallucinations. Every popular UFO/alien image was first created for mass entertainment media before it entered people's false memories.
But Clancy discovered that if you have the memories, you don't care about the rational explanations. You remember it, so it must have happened. Furthermore, Clancy, who has met a number of these people, says that they are far from complete loonies--or at least no more than the rest of society. Almost everyone has a number of beliefs which have just as little rational basis--Clancy uses the example of her Irish relatives. Somehow the belief in alien abduction makes these people feel better about themselves, a part of something larger, someone special. It doesn't make them any less wrong or deluded, but it makes them a little bit more "normal", and more understandable. It's just the paranoid schizophrenics who think the aliens are telling them to kill their family that we have to worry about...and if it wasn't aliens, it would be fairies or angels or demons or something, wouldn't it?
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza: Genes, Peoples And Languages. Merritt Ruhlen's highly interesting The Origin of Language, in attempting to demonstrate the plausibility of, and evidence for, a single common ancestral human language, references Cavalli-Sforza's work in genetics. This book(copyright 2001)is supposedly the most accessible and least technical of Cavalli-Sforza's books, and it mostly is, though it's not as absorbing as it could be. In a nutshell, Cavalli-Sforza shows how analysis of genetic data can be used to indicate human migrations in history, though the information is not as complete as they'd like, its interpretation isn't always clear-cut, and techniques are still improving. Near the end of the book he also gets into linguistic change, and tries to draw analogies between genetic change and linguistic/cultural change. He somehow manages to avoid using the word "meme", however appropriate it might be--though maybe it's just that the word hasn't entered the Italian language yet(I seem to recall that this book is a translation), or maybe he doesn't like it. It's interesting, but I think it needs better writing and/or better translation to make it truly compelling.
Michael & Margaret Korda: Cat People. Michael Korda's the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, IIRC, which explains how this piece of fluff got into print. It's basically just a biography of the Kordas' various cats over the years, and I'm glad I just read it from the library. Reading this book makes me think that I'm really not a cat person, just slightly more on the cat side of the origin than the dog side. Okay, it's not bad, but there's just not much to it.
Mark Lewisohn: The Complete Beatles Chronicle. I picked this up on sale at the bookstore. It's a coffee-table-sized book, and a bit hard to read; I also suspect that there's a website out there(beatlesdiscography.com?)that has exactly the same information, if not more. Not to mention that I'm not exactly ignorant of the Beatles story. But despite the awkwardness of actually reading it, I do find it interesting, and it goes into a level of detail I haven't seen before. Lewisohn's specialty is having actual dates for as many performances, recording sessions, and radio and TV appearances as he can find. But each year is preceded by a summation of the events in a decent narrative format, so that reading the individual day entries is almost redundant. So it may still be worthwhile.
There may be another one or two I've forgotten. I haven't made much more progress in The Dragons of Eden. Everytime I read it, it seems to remind me how dated it is. For instance, the last section I read speculated that sleep was not actually biologically necessary, but that it evolved because animals that sleep more are less likely to get eaten. I couldn't find any more current source that said anything of the sort--is this now discredited? It forms the backbone of Nancy Kress's Beggars In Spain, which is of course proof of nothing, but I'm curious. I'm certainly one of those who would appreciate not having to sleep...though I like the fact that my kids have to sleep, so maybe it's something that should only happen when you reach adulthood? Must think.
Susan A. Clancy: Abducted : how people come to believe they were kidnapped by aliens. I'm a complete skeptic when it comes to UFO abductions. So is Clancy, but she has one thing that I don't tend to--compassion for those who believe that aliens abducted them. She was a false memory researcher, who moved out of child abuse because it was(and probably still is)politically incorrect to doubt the veracity of childhood abuse memories recovered by hypnosis. It is scary what she says about how easy it is to generate false memories--hypnosis isn't even required. Now every time I run across a scene in a book that uses hypnosis to recover memories(and it's happened twice since I read this book), I wince a little bit. Anyway, the scientific community is much readier to believe that alleged alien abductees manufactured their memories out of whole cloth...but why? There's handy scientific explanations for all abduction phenomena, especially sleep paralysis, which is often accompanied by hallucinations. Every popular UFO/alien image was first created for mass entertainment media before it entered people's false memories.
But Clancy discovered that if you have the memories, you don't care about the rational explanations. You remember it, so it must have happened. Furthermore, Clancy, who has met a number of these people, says that they are far from complete loonies--or at least no more than the rest of society. Almost everyone has a number of beliefs which have just as little rational basis--Clancy uses the example of her Irish relatives. Somehow the belief in alien abduction makes these people feel better about themselves, a part of something larger, someone special. It doesn't make them any less wrong or deluded, but it makes them a little bit more "normal", and more understandable. It's just the paranoid schizophrenics who think the aliens are telling them to kill their family that we have to worry about...and if it wasn't aliens, it would be fairies or angels or demons or something, wouldn't it?
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza: Genes, Peoples And Languages. Merritt Ruhlen's highly interesting The Origin of Language, in attempting to demonstrate the plausibility of, and evidence for, a single common ancestral human language, references Cavalli-Sforza's work in genetics. This book(copyright 2001)is supposedly the most accessible and least technical of Cavalli-Sforza's books, and it mostly is, though it's not as absorbing as it could be. In a nutshell, Cavalli-Sforza shows how analysis of genetic data can be used to indicate human migrations in history, though the information is not as complete as they'd like, its interpretation isn't always clear-cut, and techniques are still improving. Near the end of the book he also gets into linguistic change, and tries to draw analogies between genetic change and linguistic/cultural change. He somehow manages to avoid using the word "meme", however appropriate it might be--though maybe it's just that the word hasn't entered the Italian language yet(I seem to recall that this book is a translation), or maybe he doesn't like it. It's interesting, but I think it needs better writing and/or better translation to make it truly compelling.
Michael & Margaret Korda: Cat People. Michael Korda's the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, IIRC, which explains how this piece of fluff got into print. It's basically just a biography of the Kordas' various cats over the years, and I'm glad I just read it from the library. Reading this book makes me think that I'm really not a cat person, just slightly more on the cat side of the origin than the dog side. Okay, it's not bad, but there's just not much to it.
Mark Lewisohn: The Complete Beatles Chronicle. I picked this up on sale at the bookstore. It's a coffee-table-sized book, and a bit hard to read; I also suspect that there's a website out there(beatlesdiscography.com?)that has exactly the same information, if not more. Not to mention that I'm not exactly ignorant of the Beatles story. But despite the awkwardness of actually reading it, I do find it interesting, and it goes into a level of detail I haven't seen before. Lewisohn's specialty is having actual dates for as many performances, recording sessions, and radio and TV appearances as he can find. But each year is preceded by a summation of the events in a decent narrative format, so that reading the individual day entries is almost redundant. So it may still be worthwhile.
There may be another one or two I've forgotten. I haven't made much more progress in The Dragons of Eden. Everytime I read it, it seems to remind me how dated it is. For instance, the last section I read speculated that sleep was not actually biologically necessary, but that it evolved because animals that sleep more are less likely to get eaten. I couldn't find any more current source that said anything of the sort--is this now discredited? It forms the backbone of Nancy Kress's Beggars In Spain, which is of course proof of nothing, but I'm curious. I'm certainly one of those who would appreciate not having to sleep...though I like the fact that my kids have to sleep, so maybe it's something that should only happen when you reach adulthood? Must think.
