Catching Up: Four Books Behind

If my brain is in as bad shape as my sinuses, these reviews will make absolutely no sense and the linkages in themes I see between them will be just as hallucinatory as the smoke I "saw" waking up with a jolt after taking two too many Contacs.

The first two books are associated with the book club. One of the founding members suggested the latest Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, for April. In our five year history, I think we have read exactly one other nonfiction, and 700 pages seemed way beyond the group's attention span. Nonetheless, I took the book out of the library and carted it all the way to Texas and back ans still only finished it this morning, a month after the wedding. I am a Pinker fan: I loved The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works. His training and career is primarily about how the brain works and how thoughts evolve into language. The is a too-great stretch for him to venture into a "scientific" analysis of why violence has declined.

Perhaps it came too close on the heels of reading The Phantom Tollbooth, but methinks, Pinker is using numbers, graphs and charts to prove his agenda, couple with his linguistic prowess, he merges the worst of Digitopolis and Dictionopolis and makes everything seem logical and backed up with data. Feeling as blah as I do today, and not anxious to incur additional library fines, I can't even bring myself to go back through the text to remove all the post-it notes I scattered throughout. I do agree that we are much "safer" in today's world than under arbitrary rules that punished, tortured and killed innocents for the sake of the communities' biases. But I am left thinking that while Old Testament and Middle Ages' violence was widespread and pervasive, with enormous aggregated totals, the underlying clan and religious fervor continues, with an order of magnitude improvement in the methods of terror. Pinker argues against 9/11 and bombings in Jerusalem on the basis on a score pad tally. He attributes the underlying motivation of Islamic terrorism as being fear and the disruption of daily live. I have not been argued out of my perspective that it is a jihad of conquer. It seems to me like he is covering his ass-umptions when thirty pages before neatly wrapping his theorems with a tidy bow, he reprises:

"Religion: Speaking of ideologies, we have seen that little good has come from ancient tribal dogmas. All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorized the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods ... " He goes on to reiterate the diminution of this compulsion.

Which brings me to the book that eventually surfaced as the more "readable" entrant for April: Daniel Silva's Portrait of a Spy, a novel set in the today present, of a cash poor Dubai, a Pygmalion Saudi Arabia, an ill-advised US President, a demoralized CIA and a group of world saving Israelis. Let me put my lot with the latter. (In fact, I couldn't help but compare Silva's special assistant to the President for homeland security, James McKenna, to Steven Pinker.)

There are some tenets for Pinker's that I hold; the first, that trading with someone diminishes the chance of wanting to harm them, profit trumps violence. And secondly, although it might take a bit longer for me to admit to it, if you can envision yourself as someone else, you are more accommodating to them. That one does not hold in Silva's world of spies, terror and torture. The best spy completely understands the point of view of the other, but that other remains a threatening adversary, and the scales of justice must be balanced by any means.