[11] Waking Up: Sam Harris - Review

Depending on how long you may have followed Sam Harris, this book will either read like one man's personal tales reinforced by a few fairly well known phenomena and conclusions drawn from science, or something of struggle to suss out ideas about consciousness, awareness, and self from someone who doesn't want to wade in the pools of the yogis or mystics.

Harris is one of the clearest writers I know. He doesn't leave much to interpretations. Until he's pressed or rushed in a Ben Affleck situation, even if the concept being talked about is incomplete, Harris at least meant what he said. With that, you'll know what he's speaking to when he talks about "transcendent" experiences and trust that it has nothing to do with the metaphysical. You hear his drug trips regarding unending love or standing atop a mountain of shame and know he's painting a picture, not providing a road map you'll need to explicitly stick to.

I suppose at the, primarily uninformed enough, gut level, I think this book has the same kind of problem that "Free Will" had. This is a discussion of the very nature of existence. How or what our brain does to put us in a moment or make us aware of infinite things going on around us. The idea is to hammer in the notion that you can abolish the ego, if only for moments, and when you do you'll be able to cope with stress, anger, pain, or just generally be able to manifest happiness or contentedness easier.

One has to assume we know, or will ever be able to know, enough about our ability and capacity for perception to really buy in to the degree you feel he's advocating. To say something like "'I' is an illusion" is to speak towards an, admittedly potentially inaccessible condition, from which the illusion can arise. Whatever "I" is, or wherever I get my illusion of self, it's still here and plays out for reasons that, illusions or not, can change, be influenced, and have consequences.

And I don't think Harris would dispute that in the book and tries to explain more in the idea that classically understood "religious experiences" are not the sole possession of believers over picking apart the particulars of existence, but it's hard to see this as little more than a book advocating meditation and feeling management.

After finishing and reflecting, there wasn't a kind of jarring or lasting impression, which is odd for a Sam Harris book. My bias could be showing in my familiarity of the subject and knowing his views for so long. I imagine if "the whole religion and spirituality thing" isn't one of your favorite topics, the lessons and groundwork he explains will resonate more powerfully. It's also a pretty quick read that I wouldn't use to characterize Harris as an author in general.

[10] The Divide: Matt Taibbi - Review

Crime crime, everywhere a crime. This book details how they play out and how those consequences severely differ between the rich and poor. Or you know, read the cover.

This is an easy read. Even though the subject matter is half financial dickery at the top and half the hard-luck tales of the U.S.'s poor, you'll easily digest the contrast in how "justice" is conceived and carried out. In contrast to Too Big To Fail, which is essentially too big to read for all the chapters dedicated to Dick Fuld correspondence, Taibbi provides just enough email or text correspondence to make sure you understand the depravity of our nation's hedge fund managers and traders. At the end of the loops and laws you'll get an "X + Y = why this was so fucked up." 

Taibbi provides a lot of details, but you can't help but think you could get the gist with bullet points. It's a fairly long book to hear the sordid details of a few main characters' experiences with our criminal justice system. These include tales of the consequences quotas New York police meet by arresting people for standing in front of their houses to how likely you'll get abducted AFTER you get deported to Mexico. The challenge is to find even one remotely positive thing to say about any step in the process.

Granted, if you believe we actually serve justice and think people get what's coming to them, this is absolutely the book for you to hopefully shatter that worldview. If you're even marginally informed about private prisons, prejudicial if not outright racist laws, and were awake in 2008, this is just a chance to feel ever-more depressed about how deep the problems really go.

It's a book like this you hand to conspiracy theorists. The joke being that there isn't a conspiracy. Systemic fraud is out in the open and rewarded. They'll let you follow the money to temp workers, the shell companies, and locally kicked-back coffers. Why use violence or intimidation when you can just pay everyone to be on your side? Just buy the laws you need to keep the scam going.

This is a long essay on the failings of our nation's soul. The reasons we create systems of justice are lost. The people who have the least to give and the hardest roads to travel are targeted. Any effort to expose or prosecute the willful behaviors that lead to collapsing economies all over the world are often ignored or leave the whistle blowers on a proverbial ice barge floating out to sea. This is testimony, so damming, it's to the point just past absurdity and hopelessness. Read, if you can stomach it.

P.S. If you just come across this book in your travels, just read page 382.

[9] Why Government Fails So Often: Peter Schuck - Preview

I honestly didn't finish this book and don't know if I'm going to be able to. I recently read an article tweeted by Steven Pinker entitled The Source of Bad Writing. You should read that link before attempting this book.

Maybe just see how delicately Jon Stewart treats talking about it.

The strategy is to lay out an assessment of federal government programs and provide an assessment of whether or not they were successful. The problem is that in doing so every inch of the theory and methodology for doing so is stated over and again. It reads like an academic paper that goes on way too long. It comes across as a high school paper that's trying to sound too smart for what it's doing.

Example:

"Finally, I provide the prescriptive context for applying CBA (cost-benefit analysis) to actual policy decisions by elaborating fourteen normative guidelines or principles for policy makers and those who would assess their decisions."

Oh boy! Fourteen normative guidelines! It's not that the sentence doesn't make sense, it's that I had to quote it and re-read it to even start to lay out what I'm going to eventually run into 20 pages later in the chapter. Ironically, government probably fails because people like Schuck are so smart and regimented that they can't convey what it is they're actually wanting to do to "normal" people. And in the interest of honesty and accuracy, there isn't a colloquial way to break that down to keep the point

I, at least, was motivated to skip over paragraphs, found it extremely hard to digest even a few lines at a time, and felt wanting of like a graph or analogy that could create a picture. This is a 400 page book, the first 40 of which go "I'm about to do x in the context of y and over chapters blah you'll see p, q, and enough r to make you reconsider what you want to believe about this very specific definition of 'federal,' whilst keeping in mind the extra paragraph of footnotes I give you on literally every other page."

The bobbing up and down doesn't break the monotony, it just makes an already cumbersome book feel that much heavier. I imagine if you have a ton of patience, or really want to argue about specific federal programs over the last 8 or so years, this will be an awesome read. I may take a few swings at it a chapter or so at a time and provide more as I'm sure it's filled with good information, just, damn.