There are so many things I want to write about, and yet there are also things that I fell behind on during my sabbatical. I know I should just let them go, but I can't quite do that. I hope to continue to write at least one, and hopefully two posts most weeks, but I also worry that if I keep writing catch-up posts, I will remain constantly behind. Perhaps I will throw in an extra post or two, perhaps not. I haven't gotten that far yet. I can admit that I harbor a certain fear that if I write extra posts now, I might run out of things to say later.
It just so happened that I was at lunch with some friends last weekend when the conversation drifted into a discussion of a recent popular health book, a book that I had read at the beginning of September. The Book is Outlive by Peter Attia and it was a good discussion, a discussion that helped to clarify my thoughts on the book, which is good because they have been decidedly mixed.
First of all, I am a subscriber to Peter Attia's podcast, The Drive and it is probably the most worthwhile podcast I listen to regularly. I love the depth of information and I am one of those subscribers who will follow up on the links to research, who loves delving into the science. Attia notes in the acknowledgements section of the book that "my then publisher said my draft was too technical and lacked any sense of me as a person" leading him to revise and expand his initial draft. I am a person who would probably have loved that first, too technical, version. I don't find a great deal in this book that is new to anyone who keeps up with the research, or listens to and follows up on the information available on The Drive. I also find the lack of foot notes annoying. There are notes in the back of the book, and they are well worth following up on, but they are not specifically referenced in the text. Perhaps this too was a "publishing decision". I don't know.
Despite these quibbles, and they are quibbles, I am glad I read this book and I think more people should read it. There is a lot of valuable material here and it is presented in a clear and relatable manner. I am sure there are people whose reactions run the gamut of extremes concerning this book; any book that promotes thinking in new ways invites those responses.. I think the author did an admirable job and I appreciate the effort involved, especially in terms of telling his personal story. On that note I wish the mental health story had come earlier in the book, if only because the discussion on mindset, of being fixed in one place versus being open to new ideas, is critical to the book as a whole and I am not convinced all readers will get there.
Basically Attia is writing about health span, the years we live doing the things that we want to do, versus lifespan, the actual years of our life. It is an important discussion, as is the author's breakdown of the development of the history of healthcare and his advocating for something called "Healthcare 3.0". I do believe this is a great idea, and although Attia makes a noble effort, I don't think he fully escapes from a lifetime of being trained in Healthcare 2.0. But he does make us think and that is the true importance of this book. Recommended. I'm glad I read it, but I don't think it earned a permanent space on my shelves. I will however keep subscribing to Attia's podcast.
Since I've started with non-fiction, let's keep this post in that arena.
In October I read Michael Easter's Scarcity Brain. This book, in many ways, was more thought-provoking for me, although I can't say that the information it contained was specifically new. Easter made me think about things I knew, on the periphery at least, in new ways and discussed cultural trends that I actually hadn't spent enough time thinking about. Easter is basically writing about addictive behaviors, how we develop them and how to overcome them. In the process he also talks about how we have built a society that revolves around scarcity and accumulation and and uses research into brain neuroscience to drive us to want more. I found it fascinating but not profoundly life changing. The cover of the book appears to make this seem like a self-help book and I'm not convinced it actually works on that level. Nonetheless, I found the book interesting and entertaining, and I have been more overtly aware of the way everything, from news cycles to grocery store layouts, is designed to feed a scarcity impulse and to consider my behavior accordingly.
Perhaps my favorite non-fiction book of the fall was Jonathan Gornall's memoir How to Build a Boat. It is not a perfect book by any means, and there can be many given parts of it that are too much for any one reader, but I found it insightful and charming. Basically Mr. Gornall is writing about how, upon becoming a father again at 59, he decided to build a clinker-style dinghy for his newborn daughter. There is a great deal about boat building, a great deal about sailing, and an exploration of Gornall's own troubled family history both in terms of his childhood but also his previous foray into parenthood. Embarking on a parenthood he desperately wanted, filled with fears of not leaving this child the legacy of his upbringing, he embarks on a job far outside his skill set. Being a writer and a person who thinks far too much about things in general, he goes on and on about his process, about his doubts, about his fears. This is something that endears him to me. Is this not how most of us end up embarking on all the journeys that prove to be the most important to us? I found this book charming and completely satisfying. On top of all that, it has a happy ending.
Two other books:
John Phillip Newell's Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul was a book I wanted to love but ultimately didn't. There were a lot of things that appeal to me and can't really explain it. I very much agree with Newell's thesis about caring for the earth and the soul. Also much as I may agree with his thesis, I found his interpretation and research somewhat faulty. I was cheering when Newell brought up the disagreements that have occurred throughout Christian thought, and the decisions that have been made that have steered the faith in a particular direction and yet at the same time I felt the book lacked a certain historicity that I felt oversimplified many ideas. I can't say that it is just because I disagreed with the ideas in the book, because there are many books I love even if I disagree highly with the ideas, but those books all lead me to think about issues more deeply or look at ideas in new ways and this somehow did not. In fact I think that was what I struggled with here. I did not find new insights and I felt the information was overly simplified. I did attend a talk with the author, and I do think he would be a fascinating person to talk with, even if the book did not delight me.
And last, but not at all least, I raced through The Courage to Face Covid-19, John Leake's book about Dr. Peter McCullough, a doctor I greatly admire for standing up for his beliefs. The book is infuriating and incredibly sad; it reads like a thriller, which is not surprising as Leake is a true-crime reporter. The book is about how a staid, mainstream, highly regarded and well-respected researcher and physician found himself on the wrong side of a wall, becomingo a renegade against the establishment, his career practically destroyed. All this because he was trying to help patients that wanted his help. I don't really care where you stand in the politics of Covid, since most of what we are all told is politics and has nothing to do with science, this is a gripping book and there is a lot here that should make everyone uncomfortable. When did we become a world where politics and money is more important that human lives, and human choice? No matter what side of any argument you find yourself on, the one thing I do know is that no one is 100% right or 100% wrong. When we allow ourselves to forget human lives and human dignity, when we sacrifice people over principles or politics, we have lost our humanity.
