Monty Lyman (2021)

A book about pain, and why it isn’t what we think.

The conventional wisdom is that pain is caused by damage, but it’s more subtle than that. Pain is a signal that can be triggered by damage, but can also be caused in response to less physical causes such as fear and a memory of past damage – and can be suppressed by activity or positive thinking, at least to a degree. This is awkward ground, as Lyman recognises: it’s close to saying that “it’s all in the mind”, which is both literally true and deeply offensive to those suffering persistent pain. But it also offers hope that enormously dangerous pharmaceuticals can – sometimes – be replaced or complemented with cognitive therapies that might be effective.

Everyone has had the experience of being deeply engaged in some activity, incurring damage, and not noticing until afterwards. Soldiers frequently report it: they also sometimes feel significantly less pain from their injuries than civilians, because an injury that takes you off the battlefield makes you safer than you were. The signals get mixed, and the pain felt changes accordingly.

There’s much to like in this book, not least a very thorough treatment of placebos. It does sometimes get lost in reporting yet another clinical trial, or yet another insight into neurochemistry. It sometimes feels a little too long and too well-referenced for a popular science take on the issues.

3/5. Finished Thursday 3 November, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Anne-Marie Slaughter

A book on grand strategy and its application to less-grand challenges in a world dominated by networks.

The central thesis of this book is that the world of hierarchies and direct state-to-state diplomacy – the chessboard – is giving way to a much more nuanced world in which state and non-state actors interact and co-operate in far ore complex ways – the web. The network effects change everything, from the nature of power and how it’s used to the nature of leadership and how one can actually get things done.

It’s interesting to see the concepts of network science being applied to social and political science in a way that doesn’t trivialise them. The applications range from analysis of interaction patterns to trying to engineer particular interactions such as improving information sharing.

There’s an obvious comparison to The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, with which Slaughter contrasts her work, she being a “Wilsonian” humanist versus Joshua Ramo’s “Kissingerian” realist. Slaughter’s view is that there is a need for more understanding of how small-scale interactions can happen – contrasting with Ramo’s desire for aggressive “gatekeeping” of a US-led networked order. I can’t help thinking that her view is more realistic and democratic.

4/5. Finished Thursday 27 October, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Serhii Plokhy (2022)

A history of nuclear energy in six disasters: five civilian and one military.

Competition seems to lie at the heart of all the problems: a lack of willingness to share details of accidents and near-accidents, and an unwillingness to learn if this requires changes in procedure. Collaboration seems lacking even within organisations and with regulators, while governments treat these matters as merely part of larger strategic concerns (even when they threaten to overwhelm them). It’s also clear that the commercial operation of nuclear power is impossible without state subsidy, and acquiring this opens-up possibilities from regulatory capture – weakening requirements to make them attainable within a fixed cost – to outright bribery.

The science and engineering also seem lacking. The Castle Bravo (and other) nuclear tests massively under-estimate the weapons’ yields, and this seems to be more the case the larger the bomb (culminating in the apocalyptic Tsar Bomba, which isn’t covered in this book as it somewhat miraculously wasn’t actually an accident). But all the systems described make use of technology little changed since the 1930s: imagine if we were still driving cars from that era!

I find Plokhy’s conclusions nuanced but weak. He decides that nuclear and renewable energy sources are both risky approaches to tackling climate change, but with completely different risk profiles: the former perhaps being too slow to start up and with huge accident risks; the latter relying on technologies as yet untested at the necessary scale. But in coming to his conclusion backing renewables and the phasing-out of nuclear stations (with which I entirely agree) he devotes exactly two sentences to the problem of nuclear waste and spent fuel, which should surely be one of the major deciding factors. It’s a strange omission at the end of a book that revolves around radiation hazards.

3/5. Finished Friday 21 October, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Tamsin Calidas (2020)

Moving to an island is many people’s dream (including mine). This is a cautionary tale of the challenges, both inflicted and self-inflicted.

Calidas and her then-husband took the hardest possible route, leaving London to start crofting with sheep and horses. That’s a challenge at any time, but when utterly separated and with no friends or relative nearby it becomes almost impossible. The hostility from the locals varies in intensity from indifference to outright abuse, running into assumptions of who is “allowed” on the island and under what circumstances – a situation that becomes worse when her marriage breaks down and she nevertheless stays and attempts to make things work, something that no-one (including the local women) expects, understands, or supports.

Times change. The later parts of the book show her almost accepted and with a new influx of islanders who are less … well, insular than the original inhabitants.

It’s hard to decide what to take from this book. For a start, it’s unclear how much of the hostility was triggered by Calidas and her husband themselves, not understanding the local sensibilities (although of course it’s also hard to know how they’d’ve learned them). A lot of the tension comes from their efforts at crofting: running a shop would have been easier and perhaps less threatening to others, who felt their life was being intruded-into. But it’s also an indication that moving from anonymous city life to a tiny community means adapting to a way of life that normalises surveillance and comment, and makes it difficult to remain aloof.

3/5. Finished Sunday 16 October, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)