Recent reading has essentially been variations on the theme of "why are we this way?" where "we" can be individuals or an entire society. How did we become what we are now? All these different takes on different aspects, different problems add up to an interesting look at modern life.

The first book I read was The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David Shipler. I am just barely out of that category by some definitions and definitely in it by others: I earn a low enough amount each year to get the United States' tax system's "Earned Income Credit." My income is low enough to get me free antidepressants from Wyeth's "Accesss to Care" program (thank goodness, because otherwise I would have to pay, literally, over four dollars per pill for the anti-depressant pill I take each day). And yet I don't feel poor most of the time, partially because my expenses are comparatively low -- I'm not supporting children, nor a car (car payments, insurance, and gas add up to a pretty big chunk out of a monthly income -- on the other hand, if I drove I could probably earn more) and I have no debt. I know, however, that one major medical problem could sap my savings in a brief time and put me into a deep financial hole. So I know where the people in The Working Poor are coming from. The book goes through a lot of situations that make people who are generally willing and able to do something in their lives have to scramble to live from paycheck to paycheck -- be it the problem of child care sucking up all that they can earn in the jobs they are qualified for, decisions in their pasts coming back to haunt them in the form of convictions, bankruptcies, or lack of education, or things that happened to them beyond their control, such as childhood abuse, and the resulting psychological problems -- this last seems truly overlooked in discussions of poverty I've seen before. It truly makes you aware that simply commanding people to get a job will not fix anything, and should probably be read by anyone before they dare to hold an opinion on welfare systems.

Tom Schachtman's The Inarticulate Society: Eloquence and Culture in America seems unrelated to The Working Poor at first in its discussion of the simplification of language, vocabulary, and the points being put across in words in the modern U.S. However, after its discussion of the changes over the last century in American language complexity, the book goes over American educational systems, popular culture, and politics, arguing that all of these are snowballing -- less literate Americans choose less complex entertainment and require less in-depth summaries of political issues, so politicians and the makers of entertainment dumb things down more, which gives the public, now an audience instead of participants, even less practice in understanding, so people trying to get a message out have to simplify still further, ad infinitum. I've always been a reader who watches comparatively little TV, and so my vocabulary and leisure choices have always stood out -- I feel comfortable in a sub-society with people I'd consider my fellow geeks, and after teaching university courses for several years, I had my own proof of how incapable some students of the American educational system could be of writing coherent papers or doing their own thinking. Thus Schachtman was probably preaching to the choir with me -- but I had never thought specifically about how this affects the political process. I certainly agree that if those seeking to represent the American people would express their own positions in more than sound bites, and if Americans would bother to listen, our country would be much better governed.

A different sort of articulation is covered in Audrey Nelson and Susan Golant's You Don't Say: Navigating Nonverbal Communication Between the Sexes. It is a natural follow-up to well-known books like Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand in that it goes into not the words we communicate with, but the body posture, gestures, tone of voice, placement with respect to others, type of listening and even clothing that can affect one's message as much or more as the words spoken. (The clothing issues are very similar to those raised in John Malloy's The New Dress for Success for Women.) It's not just gender differences, either, as any parent who has shouted "Don't roll your eyes at me!" at their teenager as much as my mother did to me can affirm. Some of these things are comparatively obvious -- men are socialized that big boys don't cry, and their attitude toward visible emotions differs from women's -- and some that don't register consciously, like the difference between men's and women's most common gestures (nodding, for example, tends to mean "I agree" for men, and "I'm listening" for women, a difference that can certainly lead to misunderstandings). Each chapter ends with "Gender Prescriptions" (and not only for one gender, either!) but as many useful tips can be found outside of these summaries. Perhaps teaching people to be aware of these nonverbal messages could ease their ability to communicate a verbal message more effectively.

The body can communicate to others, but it can also store one's own memories sometimes, as explored in Maggie Scarf's Secrets, Lies, Betrayals: The Body/Mind Connection. "Body memories" -- unpleasant flashbacks of physical sensations -- are a familiar topic from the sexual abuse survivor forums I used to spend a lot of time on, and the idea that a physical stimulus can bring back conscious memories (Proust's famous madeline cookie dipped in tea inspiring Remembrance of Things Past, for example) is nothing new. But the idea that body sensations could be used in therapy to get over trauma has not received enough attention, even though tension from an emotional state can cause all kinds of physical results and continues whether or not a person is even consciously aware of their emotions. Scarf focuses on two particular therapy methods, EMDR and psychomotor therapy, neither of which is terribly well known -- but if they can work as well as the cases highlighted in the book, they should be. The case studies, including the author's own life story, keep the book fascinating while exploring the results of both "big-T Trauma" and "little-t trauma" (Scarf's distinction between life-threatening events, such as wars and national disasters, and smaller but no less earthshaking personal events such as finding out about a spouse's infidelity), and the way physical carriage, alertness, and other symptoms are affected by such events. It's yet another area that needs further exploration.

You wouldn't expect a book called Is Your Parent In Good Hands?: Protecting Your Aging Parent from Financial Abuse and Neglect to be so suspenseful that I had trouble putting it down. But it was, and the reason why was that in this book, author Edward J. Carnot tells the story of the longtime housekeeper-turned-caretaker who did everything she could to get money out of Carnot's father, and the older man's refusal to accept that anything was wrong, even when presented with the record of the two or three paychecks a week that the forgetful senior citizen had been signing for her. The difficulty Carnot and his sister had with their father's situation is extremely well expressed and will resonate with everyone who has an older relative whose desire for independence might lead to such difficulties -- despite the fact that my grandfather's preferred style of independence means that he would never accept any outside caregiver for himself or my grandmother, I can certainly see how problems can develop for them.

Carnot uses each event in his own family story to go through some issue that concerns seniors and their families: powers of attorney and other legal setups, mental/emotional health for both the senior and family members, working with officials such as police or social services, working with medical professionals, retirement communities/assisted living facilities/nursing homes (and the differences in those categories), home care, and others. Since Carnot has practiced law for decades, he has professional experience as well as personal in several of these fields. It's both an easy and interesting book to read and a useful overview of things adult children might want to plan for with their elderly parents, particularly as the events-gone-wrong in Carnot's family give a cautionary tale. I got the book from the library, but I am thinking of actually buying a copy for my mother because of our family's concern about my grandparents living by themselves.

There aren't a lot of mystery novels told from the viewpoint of a sock monkey. (Particularly not murder mysteries that stem from bodies being pulled out of New York City waterways by divers.) In fact, most mysteries are a lot more straighforwardly told than Penn Jillette's Sock. And that's why most mysteries are forgettable, quick reads that often disappoint. Since Penn Jillette is better known as half of the magic duo Penn and Teller, perhaps his interesting way of telling the story comes from his experience in misdirecting and adding some flair to his stage actions. But he's a fascinating writer; though Sock was not a difficult read, neither was it one of those zoom-through-in-the-waiting-area kind of mysteries. The sock monkey ("Dickie") provides an unusual view of his owner ("Little Fool"), and his hairdresser friend Tommy, as they try to figure out what happened to get "Little Fool's" ex-girlfriend murdered and tossed into the water, with many digressions into popular culture (there's even a list of songs and such referenced in the book at belm.com/sock, how people relate, and the meaning of life. The end does get a little preachy, I felt, but not preachy in a Christian way -- in fact, what the Fool and Dickie preach is a doctrine of atheism which even puts down agnostics as avoiding the real questions. Despite my own (agnostic) beliefs being put down in that way, I enjoyed the book.

Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes by Robert M. Wachter and Kaveh G. Shojania, both M.D.s themselves, is not nearly as sensationalistic as the title might imply. It is instead a fascinating exploration how how medical mistakes happen and what might be done to reduce the number of them, both from the medical and the patient ends.

People tend to look at medical personnel as either experts on subjects far too complex for the everyday human, or money-grubbing butchers. Internal Bleeding portrays doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others in medical fields as exactly what they are: human beings with no special powers except training. The case studies they discuss are detailed without blame for individuals (in most cases), but they point out exactly where systems fail -- for example how the various procedures that are supposed to ensure June Morrison and Joan Morris don't get mixed up in the hospital, or that the wrong leg of diabetic Willie King doesn't get amputated (a case of personal interest to me as I live a few blocks from the hospital where it happened, and indeed once spent most of a night retching in their emergency room), or that the blood type of a transplant patient Jesica Santilan matches those of the organs she received in her transplant, all failed from a long series of separate human errors. Wachter and Shojania also have realistic (if sometimes expensive, as they admit) suggestions for hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, etc., to avoid these mistakes; suggestions that are not the type of safety rules that get routinely ignored (such as the rules that certain dangerous drugs be kept in locked cabinets, exactly where they aren't accessible when needed immediately for a flatlining patient).

They also provide a chapter and several appendices of things patients can do for themselves -- for example, making sure they know what drug in what dosage is being prescribed for them before leaving the doctor, so as to avoid the situation of Ramon Vasquez, whose pharmacist misread the handwritten prescription and gave him the wrong heart drug. (He was supposed to get 80 milligrams of Isordil daily; instead, he took 80 milligrams daily of Plendil, which is normally prescribed at 10 millligrams per day.) A similar case happened to a friend of mine, whose prescription was filled with some completely different drug from that intended; however, Ben knew what he was supposed to be taking and so caught the error. I think this book does an excellent job of showing people the need to be careful and aware of what's going on in their own medical care without being scary and inducing a fear of any and all medical help.

Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror is an illuminating look at the U.S. government's response to terrorism. Clarke worked for the Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations; presumably he's pretty good at his work to have lasted and kept getting promoted through 20 years under both major parties. However, George W. Bush's administration's response to September 11, 2001, disappointed him, as it will anyone who reads this behind-the-scenes look at officials (Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) who "complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq instead, which, he said, had better targets." (Clarke compares this to "invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.")

Clarke explains much of the recent history of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, starting with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the revolution in Iran which replaced the U.S.-friendly Shah with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Most Americans at the time focused on these events only as they immediately affected the Cold War balance of power and the U.S. (the Iranian hostage crisis, for example) and not how the changing politics in these largely Muslim countries affected the attitudes toward the U.S. of a huge block of people. U.S. military forces being moved into the Persian Gulf area in the 1980s did not help matters, even though the Reagan administration felt it necessary to counter the possibility of Soviet forces doing the same. U.S. forces were placed in Lebanon to try and help stabilize the country during the partially Iran-instigated turmoil, but were withdrawn after car bombings of a Marine barracks and the U.S. embassy killed several hundred people. In the eyes of the bombers and many others, this was proof that terrorism worked as desired against the U.S. Clarke tracks the shifting alliances through 25 years which included continued Afghan fighting, the Iran/Iraq war, the Iraqi takeover and expulsion from Kuwait, and the results of U.S.-Israeli cooperation. He gives his opinions about about which things the U.S. did were good and which made things worse in the long run. Whether or not one agrees with his opinions, his behind-the-scenes looks at international politics are fascinating.

'"Well, something just exploded. We don't know if it was a bomb, sir. The World Trade Center," a young Navy officer replied. "I know you handle terrorism, sir, and we're supposed to tell you when something happens that might be terrorism, but do you want to know when things happen in the United States too? Do you guys handle domestic crises too?" The notion that might occur in the United States was completely new to us then.'
Clarke, then working for the National Security Council, calls the government Situation Room on the day of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

This seems to have been just the beginning of difficulties in figuring out who was responsible for doing what during crises affecting the U.S. This as well as money -- "There was not one fund for counterterrorism, but several department budgets. We sought to fund programs in the Department of Energy, the Health and Human Services Department, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other departments whose Congressional appropriators did not see 'their' agencies as being counterterrorist departments." -- seem to have been great difficulties in 1990s attempts to be on guard against terrorism.

Clarke has a tendency to say "we" did this or that, and one is often not sure if it's the U.S. government, the agency he's working for, or even an informal group of people he'd put together. It's easy to feel that he's saying he was personally involved in every single thing he's discussing, which he may or may not have meant to imply. However, the personal look at individuals he worked with, particularly presidents (Clinton and Bush Jr.) makes the names and faces from the news a lot more human.

When he talks about the George W. Bush administration, Clarke gets much firmer in saying that the wrong things were done and that Iraq was not the place to focus. And though I believed that already, this book gave me a lot more evidence that the top levels of W.'s administration ignored what the people working for them were trying to tell them. Maybe Clarke's ideas on what can be done to better the existing mess would work, maybe not. But both the government and the people voting for that government need information to work with, and this book provides a lot.

I never thought a book in support of a position that I believe in could make me so angry. But Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good For Gays, Good For Straights, and Good For America pissed me off far more times than I could count.

Rauch's basic position is that marriage is desirable for everyone, that alternatives to marriage are bad (for gay or straight people), and thus that gay marriage should be made legal and as acceptable as straight marriage. My position is that marriage is fine for people who want it, and anyone who wants it, straight or gay, should be free to enter into a marriage, but that alternatives are the better choice for some people and those alternatives should not be legally frowned upon. Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller of the Alternatives to Marriage Project represent my views very well in their book Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide To Living Together As An Unmarried Couple: that unmarried (gay or straight) couples should not be discriminated against in such matters as:

• Housing: it is technically illegal in many U.S. states for different-sex couples to cohabit; Florida, where I have lived with my beloved Jon for six years, is one of those states. This isn't enforced, obviously, but it leaves us without legal recourse if we encounter a landlord who wouldn't rent to an unmarried couple. And of course, in places without any laws against discrimination against sexual-orientation, a gay couple could encounter the same problem.
• Insurance/benefits: Domestic partner benefits are not that common (and when available are often limited to same-sex couples on the theory that they cannot (currently) marry legally, and different-sex couples could)
• Taxes: Married couples shouldn't be penalized financially on their income taxes, but neither should unmarried couples take a hit in the finances.
• Children's issues: a married step-parent can adopt their partner's child, becoming a "third parent" -- this has been denied to both unmarried gay and straight couples wanting the person who is raising the child but is not a genetic parent to legally adopt.
• Hospital/Inheritance issues: Unmarried couples have to jump through all sorts of hoops, filling out many, many legal forms to get the next-of-kin rights that legal marriage automatically confers. Hospital visits, health power of attorney, guardianship of children, inheritance, and many other relics of the legal system's former view of husband as wife as legally only one person still exist.

These are just the immediate legal inequalities of unmarried couples. Rauch acknowledges them when he says that marriage creates kinship; however, he seems to think that everyone should just be able to marry someone they love (and I certainly wouldn't deny him the right to marry the "Michael" mentioned in the book's dedication: "Marry me, when we can.") However, his view of traditional marriage's rights and responsibilities as something preferred for everyone is outdated. As Solot and Miller point out that the "wife" and "husband" roles put pressure on people to be a certain way; people they interviewed experienced this outside pressure: "It might be OK for a girlfriend to wear bright sweaters and crack lots of jokes, people seemed to be saying, but a wife should dress appropriately, speak appropriately, and behave altogether differently," or "a few men say they're uncomfortable with assumptions about what husbands 'ought to' do or be." I've seen it myself, at a friend's wedding shower: the assumption that the bride was going to change her surname, and when she said that she was hyphenating their surname, getting a response along the lines of "We'll see how long the groom lets that last!" (Despite the fact that this groom had seriously considered taking his bride's surname.)

And frankly, I don't think the government should have anything to do with my love life at all. Legal marriage is a contract between two people and one government, and I don't want that. Even if I wanted a contract with Jon (and neither of us see any compelling reason to have one), neither local, state, nor federal government need to have anything to do with it. If people want to marry according to the rites of a religion they believe in, they can do that. (If they are not religious and want to marry, let them figure out what it would take for them to feel married, but not force it on everyone else.) Christianity did not write out any rules for marriage until 770 A.D. (and kept rewriting those rules for at least 500 years), Judaism historically accepted unmarried relationships called "pilagshut," and many other societies of the past did not distinguish between marriage and cohabitation. Essentially, the bulk of the marriages of the past, around the world, were what would be considered "common-law marriages" in modern terms -- there was no ceremony, no paperwork; a couple moved in together and started calling themselves married. It is only in the past few hundred years that governments have involved themselves in marriage by limiting what types were acceptable or recording when a marriage took place.

Rauch, however, talks about the history of marriage as if since the dawn of time, there had always been white wedding gowns and marriage licenses, and so draws a distinct line between cohabitation (which he seems to consider at best a poor substitute for marriage and at worst a threat to the stability of society) and marriage. In the book's introduction, he states first, "True love means, first and foremost, a love which ends in lasting marriage" and later:

'Marriage depends for its success on its uniqueness and its universality. Those in turn, depend on two principles. One is "If you want the benefits of marriage, you have to get married." the other is, "Marriage is for everyone -- no exclusions, no exceptions." Gay marriage reinforces both principles. It makes marriage not just a norm (the one for heterosexuals) but the norm (for everybody). In doing so, it offers the best hope of stopping the proliferation -- aided, perversely, by the anti-gay-marriage movement -- of marriage-like and "marriage lite" alternatives.'

I found those statements to be as excluding of me, and everyone else who is in a long-term loving relationship without any desire for marriage, as the anti-gay-marriage movement is of Rauch and all other gay people who want to get married. Later in the book, he continues in an even more insulting vein: "It certainly would be convenient if your employer and society and the law simply provided recognition and benefits for whatever relationship you happened to be having ... a lot of people, gay and straight, would like a halfway house: or, to be more blunt about it, a free ride. Throughout most of history, society has been smart enough to deny it to them." No, throughout history, nobody got any "benefits" from employers except everyday pay (if that, given the existence of slavery in a fair number of cultures) and, as I said before, society and the law considered you married pretty easily.

Rauch is right in that gay people have almost always been denied any recognition, not even of their existence, much less their relationships, and he is correct in that this needs to be corrected. Many of his rebuttals of arguments against gay marriage, such as the idea that marriage must be between people who can have children, are well-thought-out and serve his cause well. However, his conservative view of what marriage is may drive away his possible supporters who started out with liberal social views, without necessarily winning over anyone whose opposition to gay marriage is essentially "God said marriage has to be male-female." (Though Rauch does point out how many things have been in the past said to be God's will and people have nonetheless changed; I particularly like his reference to 19th-century lawmakers opposing laws allowing married women to control their own property on the grounds that it was "contrary not only to the law of England but to the law of God.") And he may be right in saying that having states individually recognize gay marriage, one at a time, would work better in public acceptance than having it federally imposed on all states at the same time. In his example world where Maryland has legalized gay marriage and Virginia has not, "Even in Virginia, people who saw my ring and learned I was 'Maryland married' would know I had made the Big Commitment in my home state and thus in the eyes of my community and its law." (However, I am not as sure that this would help acceptance in other states -- Americans may recognize that a rich Saudi is legally and societally committed to four wives, but how likely is it to make them think of allowing plural marriage in the U.S.?)

Rauch says that gay marriage in a few states would be better than gay marriage in none and "marriage lite" in many. Some supporters of gay marriage agree with that, and others accept "civil union" or some other not-quite-the-same option. David Moats' book Civil Wars: A Battle For Gay Marriage deals with that issue and many others as it chronicles the attempt to establish legal gay marriage in Vermont and the state legislature's substitution of "civil union" for gay couples as a compromise. This book, being true story rather than hypothetical argument, is far more human than Rauch's book; we hear about the lives of the three couples who brought the gay marriage suit to the state Supreme Court, the lawyers who argued the case, and the legislators who had to deal with the court's decision to say that it was against the state constitution to deny gay couples the benefits given married couples, but that it was the state legislature's job to figure out and enact laws extending those benefits to gay couples. Some of those legislators wanted gay and straight marriage to be the same, some wanted a parallel structure for gays, some didn't want anything remotely like marriages for people they considered to be doing wrong, and some were completely undecided. Even knowing what happened in the end, the reader gets a new, close view into how it happened -- and what the results were.

I found it a more pleasant read (in that the author doesn't say anything that made me want to throw the book across the room, though some of the words of opponents of gay marriage certainly did) than Rauch's book, and even though many of the same points are made, the two books still differ greatly in their approach to marriage in general and gay marriage specifically. For example, Moats draws many parallels to the civil rights and gay rights movements, and the civil union option is even compared to the "separate but equal" setup for black and white Americans that was ruled legal by the Supreme Court in the 1890s and then overturned by the a different Supreme Court in the 1950s. Rauch barely mentions race as a possible comparison to sexual orientation when he talks about the discrimination of excluding gay couples from marriage.

Both books are necessary, because the issue of gay marriage is one that it is simply no longer possible to ignore, and they can both provide information to base one's position on. Many people do not want to think about it and say they'll go with their "gut feeling" on the issue, but political issues should not be decided by "this turns my stomach." Just because the mere smell of asparagus makes me want to vomit doesn't mean I should deny other people the right to eat the stuff, and the same applies to other issues -- think with your brain, not your stomach.

It's hard to write for another author's characters and setting; the more interesting they are, the more this is so. The comparatively colorless Nancy Drew or Bobbsey Twins don't lose much by being handed over to whatever author the Edward Stratmeyer organization had available, while even as a child I found that any attempt at Oz books by writers other than L. Frank Baum were unreadable.

Sherlock Holmes has for a centurty been popular enough for other authors to try and write him, and eccentric enough that most have failed to capture his essence. Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Per Cent Solution was once the only novel-length story that I felt stood up to the work Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dashed off to support his more serious writing. Meyer's Holmes and Watson differed from the original, but it was explained why -- the consequences of increasing use of the cocaine that Holmes had indeed taken occasionally in Conan Doyle's stories.

My father, also a Holmes buff, a few years ago showed me The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie King. He'd enjoyed the story of a retired Holmes entertaining himself training the mind of a fifteen-year-old girl living near him, once she'd shown herself worthwhile material for training. However, my father will not read the sequels that Laurie King has written featuring a Mary Russell who has grown older, because Holmes and Russell have married. For my dad, a married Holmes is just unacceptable. To me, though, it follows perfectly from the relationship they have in the first book -- hardly romantic, but a marriage of best friends and working partners. Conan Doyle's Holmes only ever respected one woman -- Irene Adler, who outwitted him. King's Holmes has found another mind he can respect carried in a female body, and their partnership is merely made formal (and more convenient, given the era) by a marriage certificate. Russell even keeps her maiden name.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary, The Moor, O Jerusalem, and Justice Hall have been my reading material for the past week and a half, and I just started the latest in the series, The Game. Previous books in the series have been all over England with sea journeys to Palestine and Canada; this one heads towards an India still under British rule, thirty years after that of the frequently-referenced Kim by Rudyard Kipling (which I have yet to read, but will probably track down after this). So far I am enjoying this well-researched story as much as the previous ones. Like O Jerusalem, it takes place amongst the difficulties of international politics of the era (Holmes' older brother Mycroft, major figure behind the scenes of English government, appears more often in King's works than in those of most others who've tried their hand at Holmes) and the non-English cultures Holmes and Russell must disappear into.

Throughout the series, any differences from the Conan Doyle canon are explained -- there is no feeling of disregard for the original. I couldn't stop re-reading the first six of the series (hence the finishing them all in ten days) and I look forward to finishing the seventh.