Just the first chapter of Jonathan Cott's On The Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering made me want to write about it. Cott is a wrinter who suffered from from clinical depression severe enough that he received 36 electroconvulsive therapy treatments -- and as a result, he lost his memories of fifteen years of his life, from 1985 to 2000. All those years of world events and personal experiences: gone. (And he is not alone -- electroshock treatment is still in use by psychotherapists who claim that memory loss from it is rare, but Cott assembles testimony from enough others in his situation that it seems to be something common enough to merit great consideration by anyone who might administer it or have it administered to them.)

What would I do if I lost years of memories? It's hard to imagine. I've always been a diarist -- even in 1985 when I was twelve -- so the bare facts of my personal experiences would be preserved for me to read. But waking up in a world still in the Cold War? And a time before I even knew how to type, much less spent hours daily online? (And now, I earn my living by typing, too.) It's also interesting to consider memory vs. skill -- that is, in the same way that some people who have brain damage making it difficult to speak can still sing easily, I would have assumed that what I think of as a muscle-training skill, like typing or knitting, would stay even when memory of events is gone. But one of the memory-loss victims Cott cites mentioned having forgotten how to weave, so I don't know.

The following chapters of On The Sea of Memory are discussions with memory experts of various types: a neurobiologist who made a discovery about the role of stress hormones in making traumatic memories; the author of a book on Alzheimer's disease; the author of a book on techniques of memory enhancement; a neuropsychiatrist/neurologist; the author of a book on the controversy of false memories, and experts on memory and the soul from several religions. It's all really fascinating, even though I personally don't accept all the perspectives given. I think it's rare to find a book that looks at the meaning and importance of memory from so many angles; an education for both those, like me, who are inclined to approach from the physical side, and for others who might come from a spiritual or other perspective. And it's also a great starting bibliography on the subject, as many of the people featured in individual chapters have written their own books on their approach to the subject. (I'm particularly interested in reading a copy of In The Shadow Of Memory, another account of a writer's memory loss (this time due to brain lesions).

I'm not a Christian, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in both the teachings of and the history of Christianity for their influence on history and current events. The various branches of Christianity seek to throw their weight around in American politics, law, and social life. I think every member of a Christian denomination that believes the Bible is the literal word of God should read Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus.

Ehrman was "born-again" at the age 15 and attended Moody Bible Institute after high school, then learned ancient Greek at Billy Graham's alma mater, Wheaton College. Then he went to Princeton Theological Seminary. No one could say he was not steeped in Christianity as a religion and not just an academic study. However, even though he started out in a faith that believes the Bible is the unerring, exact word of God, his book is about all the changes made by humans in the works that make up the New Testament in the nearly two thousand years since their composition, and the many, many variations that exist in the texts. In the ancient world of hand-copied manuscripts, copying errors abounded, as well as scribes thinking they were correcting errors but not necessarily knowing what the original said, and the manuscripts that still exist of these books disagree in many places. Some of those disagreements make quite a difference to Christian doctrine. Even if you believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were divinely inspired to to write down their biographies of Jesus, the Son of God, their four Gospels don't always agree with each other in what has come to be the accepted version of the Bible, which was put together in the late medieval/early Renaissance period from a limited number of manuscripts available to scholars at the time. Comparing all the conflicting ancient hand-written copies shows that the different verions can't possibly all be divinely inspired. (And that's before you even get into the difficulties of translation out of the original languages!)

The Bible is a human book, with human errors in two millennia of transmission. Every Christian should be aware of this before they base their opinions of modern situation on those words (and frequently on a single sentence!) in an ancient book. I'm not saying that there's nothing good in the Bible, but only that like any ancient story, it is not exactly what was originally written and should not be treated as if it were.

And now for something completely different:

I picked up Martha Stout's The Sociopath Next Door in the bookstore because I wanted to see if she related people who are conscienceless, sociopathic, to crimes such as child sexual abuse and other things, short of murder, that still evoke the question "How could anyone do that?" when you hear about them.

Instead, in reading the examination of these people who really aren't aware of and don't care about other people's feelings, I started thinking about a co-worker who left my workplace this past week. She had been found, first, to be lying to the boss about when she had college classes so that she could schedule herself three-day weekends, and second, when given the task of removing paper clip art from the master copies of newsletters and calendars that had already been printed, she been stuffing the bits of clip art into her pockets and throwing them away later, because it was too much trouble to put the pictures back on the correct storage boards to be re-used later. I was just flabbergasted when I found out about this -- she was not just slacking off at work, but actively sabotaging the company, which would have to recreate the clip art before the next time it was needed, taking a lot of employee time and effort.

I don't know if one could call my ex-co-worker a sociopath or anything even close, but this sabotaging the job that was paying her is what came to my mind as I read Stout's examples. And then Stout said that sociopaths often do things to get normal people to pity them, because people we pity are often allowed to get away with all sorts of behavior we wouldn't otherwise accept. And this reminded me that my co-worker was allowed by the bosses to give her two weeks' notice and work out those weeks, so she wouldn't be out in the cold with no money to pay her bills (and, I will admit, because the company was approaching its busiest time of the month and we could use her labor). But after giving the two weeks' notice on Monday, the bosses came in to work on Tuesday to find a message that she was just quitting rather than working out her two weeks -- leaving us short-handed during our busiest time. "Did she really hate the job that much?" I asked myself when I first heard. I couldn't think of why else she would have done any of this. But then, I feel guilty about possibly leaving them short-handed when I stay home sick. Have I too much conscience, or my former co-worker not enough?

Stout's delineation between sociopathy and narcissism, which can also be a mental disorder, particularly interested me. She says that narcissists can feel love and passion, but cannot understand how others feel (and thus might seek therapy to understand how they alienate others and end up alone) while sociopaths do not feel love -- if they miss someone who has left them, it is because they no longer have whatever services that person supplied. My own comparison is that for a sociopath, a person leaving them is like a bus route changing and no longer conveniently stopping by their home -- annoying, but not a matter of love and loss. Sociopaths, Stout says, fake feelings others if it will benefit them, but it is always an act. And up to 4% of Americans -- 1 out of every 25 people! -- may be like this! They aren't easily picked out of a crown, but Stout recommends a "rule of threes" to identify one in your life.

"One lie, one broken promise, or a single neglected responsibility may be a misunderstanding instead. Two may involve a serious mistake. But three lies says you're dealing with a liar, and deceit is the linchpin of conscienceless behavior. Cut your losses and get out as soon as you can."

As a rule of thumb (part of her 13 rules for dealing with sociopaths in everyday life), or just a "who to trust" rule even if you don't want to label all liars sociopaths, this is sound advice. I also particularly applaud another of her 13 rules, "Never agree, out of pity or for any other reason, to help a sociopath conceal his or her true character." This is probably because I apply it to my preoccupation, the area of child sexual abuse, where keeping silent merely places others at risk. The same applies to any other people who do things without regard for others and their feelings or welfaire. Stout's book can really help people realize that the liar, the deceiver, the person without conscience, will not generally look like Charles Manson and may be someone they see every day.

The first thing I thought when I saw David Weber's new novel At All Costs was "Huh, he finally ran out of titles with 'Honor' in them." (Six of the eleven novels featuring Honor Harrington, plus three of the four short story anthologies set in the same universe, have 'Honor' in their titles.) It took me until the second novel in the series before I really got into the saga of Honor Harrington and the Royal Navy of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, but I am now sufficiently addicted that I had to keep reading this new one, despite the flaws I encountered in it.

It's always the characters that are interesting in a novel, and Weber has, over the course of the series, introduced a great number of them. Harrington herself, her family members, fellow Navy members and friends, Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore, Protector Benjamin Mayhew of Grayson, all on one side of Manticore's ongoing war with the planets making up the Republic of Haven, but the Havenites are seen as people too. President Eloise Pritchard and Secretary of War Thomas Theisman, for example, are a Havenite government the reader can sympathize with, unlike some in the earlier books, and both sides would really rather not be fighting anymore -- yet the number of battles in space in this book seems to exceed that of any previous installment. Or maybe it just seemed that way because the battles did not draw me in at all; they were near-endless strings of numbers, of how many missile pods this side can launch and how far they each have to travel and how much defense the other side can muster. It became a series of word problems out of a math textbook, and frankly I didn't want to have to work them out, so I found myself skimming the battles for dialogue that would keep me up to date on what was happening without being so boring.

However, when no one was actively in battle, the book was fascinating. Not only the political ins and outs of Manticore, Haven, and other organizations trying to influence events, but also what was going on in Honor's personal life kept the story moving and the reader interested. This wouldn't be the place to start reading the series -- it's much too complex at this point -- but it continues to be a series generally worth reading.

When many people think of Tourette's Syndrome, they think of the (comparatively rare) variant where the sufferer's neurological problem makes them unable to control their repetition of foul language. Brad Cohen's Front of the Class: How Tourette Syndrome Made Me the Teacher I Never Had (written with Lisa Wysocky) is a memoir that not only dispels the idea that this is the only form of Tourette's, but shows how far someone with a disorder that makes them twitch, jerk, and make noises can still go. I particularly like the fact that it was the misunderstanding and mistreatment that Brad received from teachers in his own school days that made him determined to become a teacher and help children. As a dedicated reader, I can't imagine what it must be like to have difficulty keeping your eyes on a page in a book because your neck is jerking; this is how Brad lived his life and yet he graduated from college, suffered through a multitude of interviews with school administrators who couldn't believe, despite his completed student teaching, that Brad was capable of getting up in front of a classroom. And despite his success as a teacher (he won an award for the best beginning teacher his first year out of all the first-year teachers in the whole state of Georgia, and he also appears as a motivational speaker, particularly for Tourette's groups), and despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, this man is still living with the same disability -- being sometimes asked to leave restaurants and such because his noises bother people. It isn't a medical miracle cure chronicled in this feel-good book; it's achievement despite medical obstacles and people's long-running refusal to understand what things this man can't control and how those uncontrollable things don't stop him being so much more than anyone would have predicted when he was an elementary school child being told to stand at the front of the class by an angry teacher. (The book also has a site at frontoftheclassbook.com.)

I'm not much of a cook, except for a short list of special dishes I've had enough practice with to do right. Most of my time reading cooking books has been goggling at the more obscure recipes in The Joy of Cooking (walnut ketchup?!) That's my favorite cookbook, though, because it doesn't assume you already know things. You can find an explanation of how to do or how to make whatever in that book, it seems. But it isn't so much a reading-straight-through book.

What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained by Robert L. Wolke (with recipes by his wife Marlene Parrish) can work either as a reading-straight-through or a look-up-one-thing book. It's definitely a cookbook second, through, and an everyday science book first. You can learn about how the sense of taste works, the different types of "raw" sugar, the FDA labels for different types of cocoa powder, the difference between the cooking definition of salt and the chemical use of that work, or what the difference is between fats and fatty acids. And that's just in the first three chapters. If you want to know how your water filter works, what MSG really is and why some people avoid foods containing it, what grits are (and even the U.S. Southerners who eat them don't necessarily know how they're made), the five processes used to cure hams, and some rather gross stuff (in my humble opinion) about raw shellfish, this book has it all in one neat package. Perhaps I'll remember to add an additional comment to this entry once I've actually tried the recipe for Mocha Soy Pudding.

(And checking Amazon.com while posting this entry, I find that there's a second volume now. I feel confident that I can recommend that one too, despite not having known it existed until a few minutes ago.)

So for a 12-day trip to my grandfather's computerless home, I brought 12 books to keep me occupied. I only finished 9 and 1/2, as it turned out, but there are two of those that particularly interested me.

The first was Valerie Paradiz's Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. If people even think about how Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected the stories in the Grimm's Fairy Tale books, they imagine them visiting rural areas and listening to elderly people recount the same tales they told their children and grandchildren. The reality is very different -- the Grimms' best sources were their sister's middle-class friends and other people recommended by their own friends, all nice German city-dwellers who could afford to have the women of the house stay home keeping house and doing needlework. Paradiz goes through the brothers' collecting methods, and also examines how the stories reflected the hopes, dreams, and emotions of the women who told them -- how tales of princesses whose only hope was the perfect suitor really meant something to early 19th-century European women. This is an interesting change from most analyses of fairy tales, which either look at them in comparison to modern life, or as a reflection of unchanging components of the human psyche.

So the book is literary, cultural, women's, and traditional history, all in a biography of some brothers and their work. This is just the kind of behind-the-scenes look at something familiar that interests me most, and I hope others as well.

The other behind-the-scenes look that I particularly enjoyed was Doris Weatherford's A History of the American Suffrage Movement. It has a foreword by Geraldine Ferraro, whose Vice-Presidential candidacy in 1984 impressed even my Reagan-voting mother. Ferraro's story of having her credit card application rejected in 1978 when she was a member of Congress earning 60,000 dollars a year stuck with me -- reinforced by my mother's similar takes of women's credit rejections in the 1970s. And that was nearly 60 years after women's right to vote had been added to the U.S. Constitution. The conditions in the 1840s, when the campaign for women's rights movement had its beginnings, were far more discriminatory, and it took more than 70 years and a wide variety of tactics to get that amendment allowing women to vote into the Constitution. Weatherford's book chronicles those 7 decades when the battle was not only to allow women to vote (a goal some of the activists themselves considered too far-out at first) but for property laws that didn't make a woman's earnings automatically the property of her husband, or the right to speak up in their churches.

The reader meets both well-known figures like Susan B. Anthony and little-known ones like Esther Morris, the U.S.'s first female government official. (She became a Justice of the Peace in South Pass City, Wyoming, in 1870, only a few months after the territory of Wyoming became the first in the U.S. to grant women the same voting rights as men. Indeed, the settlers of the West seemed to have fewer preconceptions about women's abilities and weaknesses than did people in the established East.) The book covers the social milieu, the religious background, the politics, the competing causes such as abolitionism and temperance, and even the personal conflicts that influenced the campaigns for women's rights and particularly the right to vote in the U.S over a stretch of U.S. history that was very important for many other events as well. Women's suffrage is a subjec that got about a paragraph in the American history texts used in the schools I attended -- Weatherford's book could be a wonderful source to make up for the omission of the history of half the American people.

The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable vs. Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

I got both books through BzzAgent, which has a connection to both books; BzzAgent founder Dave Balter is co-author, with John Butman, of Grapevine, which chronicles the site's development, how the site works, how word-of-mouth marketing works in general, and how others can use word-of-mouth to promote their product, even when the some of the word is negative. Balter is also one of the 33 business authors who contributed a chapter to The Big Moo, edited by Seth Godin. (The title is a reference to Godin's previous book Purple Cow.)

I don't run a business of my own, unless you count renting a booth at a craft fair once or twice a year. I work for a small business, but I don't have anything to do with the marketing there. So I don't normally read business books. The Big Moo wouldn't have changed my opinion, but Grapevine was far more to my taste. Why? Well, Grapevine actually talks about specific things; it explains how word-of-mouth campaigns work at BzzAgent (and occasionally how they don't work out so well); how word-of-mouth differs from "buzz" marketing or "viral" marketing or "shill" marketing; who the target people for the word-of-mouth are; and it uses real-life examples as well as following a hypothetical company's product launch from beginning to end). This genuinely interested me, and not just because I'm one of the company's "agents."

The Big Moo, on the other hand, didn't hold my attention. This may be because it has 33 different authors, and despite my copy's front cover calling it "a collaboration of 33 of the world's smartest business thinkers," it's really 33 separate and independent essays. Some go off in different directions, some cover the same ground and get downright repetitive. It's not a sit-down-and-read-a-lot books; maybe the busiest business leader who doesn't have a lot of time to read prefers it that way. But I don't.

The other reason I wasn't thrilled with The Big Moo is that it wasn't about anything specific. It its attempts to apply to all types of businesses, it didn't apply to anything in my life at all. Again, this could be different for someone more interested in running a business organization. The Amazon.com reviews are generally more positive about the book than I am.

Grapevine, however, doesn't require a business position. We're all involved with marketing, as the recipients if not the originators, and so this book is likely to appeal to a wider audience. At least, it appealed a lot more to me.