Finished The Men Who Stare at Goats on Wednesday

A little bit ago, I read and enjoyed Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists in which he interviews and follows around conspiracy theorists and other weirdos. So I decided to give his more recent book, The Men Who Stare at Goats a try. I wasn't disappointed. In this work, Ronson investigates many of the oddball parapsychology projects that the U.S. military and government undertook from the 70s through the 90s. Then he goes on to write about how many of these projects are indeed still be going on under the guise of the War on Terror.

Many of these projects involved such flights of fancy as mind control, the use of LSD to see if it could aid in mind control, use of subliminal messages, use of ultra and sub-sonic frequencies to try to cause pain and discomfort to the enemy, and the title of the book, where "psychic warriors" attempt to explode the hearts of goats just by staring at them and concentrating. One of Ronson's interviewees claims he was successful in killing a goat this way. Of course, none of these used proper scientific or ethical protocols.

As usual, Ronson writes with great wit and clarity. The book is funny, but disturbing. It's hard to imagine that we, the "good guys," are spending money on projects that not only are ethically dubious, but have no basis in science and no chance of working. In what we usually consider to be one of the most steely-eyed and results oriented segments of the nation, our military, it seems that superstition still has a very strong foothold.

Gave up on American Project

Sorry to report that I gave up on reading American Project by Sudhir Venkatesh. I was really interested in the subject matter, but the writing was just too dry.

Finished A Few Bricks Shy of a Load

Finished A Few Bricks Shy of a Load by Roy Blount, Jr. this morning. It's an account of Blount's year embedded with the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers. I've been meaning to read this book for oh, say 25 years, and now I really wish I had read it earlier. It was superb. Blount really got into the heart of the team, which is to say, it seemed he really understood the players as people. Not supermen, no interchangeable pieces in a football puzzle, but as people like everyone else. He also did a fine job reporting on the ownership of the team, the Rooney family. He swore he didn't want to write a glowing review of the Rooney family, but that he couldn't help it. He felt a little defeated as a journalist that he couldn't find anything significantly mean or rotten about the family. Because Chuck Noll was cool to him, Blount never really was able to talk about the coaching much, but that didn't really matter. This wasn't a book of X's and O's anyway.

Blount covered many other important areas: race, drugs, the toll on the body, and locker room chemistry. All were done with a very fine and detailed touch. It's hard to remember a time in sports when steroids were legal, let alone not worth much of a mention. One of the linemen talked about how steroids helped him bulk up out of college but how his wife made him quit. That's it....one small mention. One has to assume that it was so common that it didn't warrant more attention. He did talk about players using amphetemines to get up for games and how some players didn't like that they couldn't smoke pot on the plane on the way back from road games but that they could drink beer.

It was also weird to read a book that had some Steelers I don't really remember well from my childhood. I had heard of Ray Mansfield being a great center, but I never, ever remember the Steelers without Mike Webster as the starting center...he was still in college. And Jack Lambert wasn't a Steeler in '73, he was a senior at Kent State. That was really bizarre. And stranger still, no Lynn Swann and no John Stallworth. They were still in college too. Four Hall-of-Famers that I grew up know as THE Steelers weren't on the team at the time. Noll had a helluva draft in '74 though, wouldn't you say?

Simply put, I loved this book. If it had just been about any football team, I'd have really liked it, but since it was my hometown team, I loved it.

Finished The Know It All by A.J. Jacobs

As a librarian and lover of reference books, I applaud A.J. Jacobs for reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A-Z. Since I'm pretty sick right now, I can't give the book justice, but like The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs is honest, intelligent, and supremely witty. I laughed out loud a few times. Also like his other book, you come away feeling that even though mankind can be a bunch of right evil bastards, we done some wonderful things that we can take pride of as a species. Now if they could just come up with an instant cure for sinus infections, I'd have a lot more pride in homo sapiens.

Still working on American Project. Started A Few Bricks Shy of a Load by Roy Blount, Jr., an account of his year with the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers. So far, so awesome. But I'm a long time Steeler fan.

Back to Slogging

I'm still reading...don't give up on me! I started American Project by Sudhir Venkatesh a while ago. It's a history and sociological study of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes housing development. From what I've read of Venkatesh in Freaknomics and on the Freakonomics blog, he's a very good writer. However, I don't think he was that good of a writer when he published this book in 2000. It just doesn't even seem like his style...it's just not that engaging. I'm glad to see he's grown as a writer though.

So since that was slow going, I figured that since I liked A.J. Jacobs' biblical living book, I started his book on reading the Encyclopaedia Brittanica from A-Z. So far, I'm not disappointed. I'm trying to read both right now, but Jacobs is winning since he's a really funny guy (and it's an easier read).

The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange by Mark Barrowcliffe

Barrowcliffe, reared in Coventry, England, takes us on a tour of his adolescence, which revolved almost entirely around playing various forms of Dungeons and Dragons. A light, funny memoir than will appeal to anyone who ever enjoyed D&D growing up.

True Enough by Farhad Manjoo

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society is one of the most important and relevant books I've read in a long time. I'd recommend that every librarian, heck, every educator and every citizen read this book. Manjoo looks at a lot of topics, but the main theme revolves around how, paradoxically, the overload of information today gets us further away from a factual accounting of the world and more into a world where opinion counts more.

True Enough looks through various information sources (internet, TV news, print journalism, advertising, others) and shows how people pick and choose information to create the world they want to see based on their pre-disposed opinions (and liberals are skewered as well as conservatives for those of you who worry about ideology). Manjoo translates the psychological scholarship on these issues into a very readable form. Other forms of fact/opinion influences (peer-pressure, public relations efforts, others) are also discussed.

Manjoo's book highlight's why information literacy and critical thinking are so important in today's world, and yet so undervalued by society at large. A terribly important book for the times.