Short reviews

I haven't felt like reviewing books lately, but here are some comments about the last few I read. I'd recommend all five of them, though none were exceptional.

David Callahan's The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead first explores the extent of cheating in the US, from illegal file sharing to corporate scandals. He blames that cheating on various factors: the widening gap between rich and poor, a societal focus on possessions & status, the corporate bottom-line mentality, and weak enforcement of laws against white-collar crime. Callahan examines American values and society from a liberal perspective, and finds faults that give rise to widespread cheating.

Lawrence Wright's Twins and What They Tell Us About Who We Are discusses twin studies and what they reveal about the heredity vs. environment debate. Most noticeably, identical twins have very similar personalities, even if they grow up apart, which is strong evidence for behavior being in ones genes. It's a light, easy read, though it's not as profound as Matt Ridley's Nature Via Nurture or Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate. I took issue with Wright on one point, regarding the relation between scientific support of inherited behavior and the rightward drift of the nation. Though both trends have occurred over the last few decades, I'm not convinced that the former led to the latter.

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking comes across as a collection of essays with a common theme, regarding the information that can be gained from brief observations. For example, a psychologist filmed fifteen-minute conversations between various couples, and after analyzing many such conversations deduced the signs that accurately predicted whether the relationship would succeed. Blink if full of entertaining tidbits, but don't expect any deep insight into how the human mind works.

Lord Kinross's The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire is a very good history of the Ottoman Empire. Most of the book is well written, as it brings to life the major events, leaders, and societal changes for 600 years of history. It was a little rushed and less coherent towards the end, only devoting a single paragraph to the Armenian genocide. The Ottoman Empire went from a dominant power threatening Christian Europe to a weak force, mainly because it stagnated under a series of weak Sultans hemmed in by rigid traditions, while Europe made significant headway in terms of technology and organization.

In Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, Frank Sulloway analyzes the lives of the most prominent people who took part in the major scientific debates going back for centuries. He searched for correlations between their stances and aspects of their personal lives, especially birth order. He found that firstborns tend to resist scientific revolutions, while laterborns generally support revolutionary theories. He investigated how birth order interacted with other factors to determine how receptive historical figures are to innovative ideas. Though his statistics became somewhat convoluted at times, with my passing interest in psychology and the history of science I found it interesting.