Sapiens, Yuval Harari

Sapiens:  A brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is a book that was on President Obama's reading list and looked interesting to me.

Started:  8/2/2017

Completed: 8/24/2017

Recommended By:  President Obama

Recommendation: Highly Recommended

Review:

The first half of the book was a bit of drudgery for me.  It was largely a rehash of things I already knew well and I was getting worried that the whole book would be that way.  The second half, however, was excellent and it built cleanly on the first half (so, I would not skip the first half).  The very end was mostly speculation about when/how "humans" might graduate from being "Sapiens" to some other form of existence.  I found this later part also a rehash of speculation with which I have long been familiar.

The focus on Capitalism as a "religion" and the concept of happiness as a measure of the success of changes that have been made were both novel to me.  I really enjoyed the insights that both pieces brought and I was, once again, reminded that I should be spending more time meditating and making that part of my normal existence.  It seems that almost everything I encounter encourages me to spend more time meditating.  I think that this is because more and more learned people are experiencing the value and wanting to share it with others.  Either that or there is a divine force pushing me to meditate :).

I highly recommend this book as long as you will not be offended by the broad definition of "religion."

Patient H. M., Luke Dittrich

Patient H.M.: a story of memory, madness, and family secrets by Luke Dittrich.  This book focuses on the history of one of the most studied patients in neurology and related brain studies.  I read a paper on this patient about 10 years ago and his story was repeated again in Moonwalking with Einstein.  I haven't been able to get him out of my mind, so when I saw this book, I thought it would be worthwhile reading about the details of the individual now that he has died and his identity no longer requires protection.

Started: 7/11/2017

Completed: 8/2/2017

Recommended By: Nobody

Recommendation: Not Recommended

Review:

It is frustrating to not like the author of a book.  I found Dittrich's character questionable as described by himself early in the book.  He correlated his own character with that of his grandfather who performed the surgery on Patient H. M.  At various points in the book Dittrich gets lost in his own efforts to write this book which is, perversely, effectively a biography of another person.  It is also uncomfortable that this book is told in the first person.

It also seems odd to add a ton of personal family history to a book about a patient of one's grandfather.  While there is some insight to be had based on the author's maternal grandmother's experiences in mental hospitals.  It is difficult to understand how these insights are anything less than background material fleshing out a story that is not better for this material.

Later in the book we hear about how both the author and his grandfather tried their hand at bull fighting.  I find it harder and harder to get anything from this book.  As the book concludes we hear about the grandfather's penchant for fast cars and an unsubstantiated suggestion that he had performed a lobotomy on his wife.  This is a pretty gross man.  The author shows a little bit better set of ethics then his grandfather, but it is a small improvement and his outrage is focused at his mother's best friend in childhood.  His outrage is appropriate given the situation he has described (shredding the test results of almost 50 years of testing on Patient H. M.).  It appears that no records were actually shredded.

So, what I could take away:

• MIT strongly protected Patient H. M., but treated him like a possession rather than a person.
• It is possible that Patient H. M. may have had memory deficits prior to his surgery which might taint or otherwise inform all the studies done on him.
• MIT and Professor Corkin in particular, did their best to treat Patient H. M. well in terms of his role as a subject for study.
• The distinction between episodic and semantic memory is not something I have previously seen and it was nicely and well described.
• Dittrich and his family seem to have questionable morals.