Matt Alt (2020)

A fascinating take on the effects that Japanese has had (and continues to have) on the rest of the world. This is very much a cultural history grounded in technology, and in the ways that technology drives new cultural possibilities. It’s also often a study in the illogic of cultural trends, and how impossible it is to pick cultural winners.

The history of the karaoke machine justifies the book on its own. The vignettes are fascinating, perhaps most of all for me the way in which the actual machines were invented several times in response to different driving forces. But the most outstanding observation was how one of the inventors realised that perfect reproduction of songs wasn’t the goal, and spent years re-recording tracks to make them easier for karaoke-singers to perform well. This is the sort of techno-cultural feedback that’s fascinating.

Alt tries to draw the threads together, noting that in many ways what Europe and America are suffering in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was presaged by Japan’s “Lost decades”, making the Japanese experience perhaps more characteristic of late-stage capitalism than we realised. It’s an interesting point: I’m not sure Europe will ever have otaku in quite the same way that Japan has, but that’s again a techno-cultural interaction in progress as we see whether social trends follow the technological or vice versa.

5/5. Finished Monday 25 April, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Héctor García (2016)

A short and focused excursion into the Japanese notion of ikigai, meaning something akin to “a sense of purpose”.

The authors’ interest in the idea comes from studying the residents of an Okinawan village that’s thought to be the home of more centenarians than anywhere else, even in such a traditionally long-lived country as Japan. Studying their habits, the authors don’t fall into the common trap of identifying the “one secret thing” that can transform anyone’s life – although frugality, physical movement, and community clearly all help. The most potentially transformative observation, however, is how the long-lived never retire in any real sense. They’ve found their ikigai, and as such they keep practicing it as a part of what they are rather than as something they simply do (to get paid). This a commonality here with the lives of many scientists, writers, and academics, whose work and lives are so bound together that they never stop working as long as they live – and it’s this that plays a large role in keeping them healthy and alert. It also chimes with a lot of modern advice to follow your passions, and is something that’s eminently practical for everyone.

4/5. Finished Monday 11 April, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Anna Della Subin (2021)

Accidental divinity seems to have happened more frequently than one might expect. The mechanisms are very different, ranging from deliberately playing into people’s expectations (in the case of Cortés and the Spanish conquest of South America), to possession by spirits in Nigeria and India, to the entirely accidental raising of Britain’s Prince Philip to godhead.

In Prince Philip’s case the claims are taken very seriously. When his new worshippers want a photograph of him, it initiates a flurry of activity to consult with anthropologists and archaeologists to determine the right way to carry the ceremonial pig-killing stick he is to appear with. There seem to be a mixture of motivations: a sincere desire not to offend, but also an unmistakable impulse to gain a subtle lever of control over a far-away imperial possession. Having a god on your side, as the Roman emperors knew, never hurts.

One perhaps has to feel sorriest for Haile Selassie, the very Christian emperor or Ethiopia who had to run for his life ahead of Mussolini’s invasion and spent an exile in England campaigning for is country’s liberty. After all this genuine accomplishment, he accidentally becomes a god to people he didn’t know or understand as part of Rastafarianism (before becoming emperor he was known as Prince – or Ras – Tafari), which itself emerges from a Jamaican nationalism needing an origin myth. It shows how a need for religion remains entwined into the modern world’s most modern impulses towards self-determination and independence.

3/5. Finished Saturday 2 April, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Casey Cep (2019)

A biography of a book that was never actually written. Actually also the biography of at least two people who never met but nonetheless interacted strongly, one an alleged multiple murderer and one a notable novelist.

Harper Lee returned to the area where she grew up to research and study the case of Willie Maxwell, a sometime preacher and woodsman who was himself murdered at the funeral of the woman he himself was strongly suspected of murdering – and whose murderer walked free despite his confession and the abundant eye witnesses. It’s a compelling story, and it’s a tragedy that Lee never in fact published the book she devoted years to creating.

It’s easy to hear the echoes of In Cold Blood, both in Lee’s endeavours and in this text. It’s gripping and fast-paced, and inhabits the Alabama land where the action occurs just as much as Capote inhabited rural Kansas. It’s amazing that such an engaging book can be constructed from events that are essentially lacking in any conclusions: we don’t know Maxwell’s guilt for sure, nor Lee’s intentions of how to tell the story, so the book rests entirely on process and location, and very much succeeds.

4/5. Finished Tuesday 29 March, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Carole Hooven (2021)

Testosterone is perhaps the only hormone with a personality, one that’s often blamed when violent things happen. It’s interesting to see a “biography” of it that’s so grounded in the biochemistry and the limits of what’s experimentally verifiable. The fact that testosterone is entwined into so many fates of growth and development makes it a hard subject for study.

One aspect that jumped out at me was the extent to which evolution creates mechanisms that are the opposite of engineered, for example having the same hormone control several systems that are to some extent in competition, or create systems that run-away without being inhibited (rather than stay quiescent without being stimulated).

Grounding to firmly in the biochemistry is also a weakness too, though: it’s a little too reductionist, a little too fast to dismiss psychology and how testosterone might affect feeling, and therefore affect behaviour indirectly beyond the strict biochemical pathways. I can accept that psychology is a hard regime in which to do fully-grounded experiments: but that’s true for all complex systems, and so its perhaps better to go looking for the general shapes of behaviour rather than focus so much on the details – and dismiss out of hand areas where these studies can’t be performed.

3/5. Finished Monday 28 March, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)