Ten Thousand Sorrows by Elizabeth Kim

    Elizabeth Kim describes her mother as a headstrong young woman, whose first big transgression was leaving home to work in a noodle stall. I couldn’t help but feel bad for this woman; all she wanted was her independence, and moving to the city to work shouldn’t have angered anyone. But when she got pregnant by an American serviceman, then her troubles really began. Unmarried pregnancy was a major embarrassment to her family, and she became a pariah in her community. Kim’s recollections are of happy times with her mother, until the day her mother was murdered for disgracing the family. It wasn’t a stoning by a mob, but more calculated; her father and her brother wanted her to sell the child into servitude, and when she refused, they hanged her. Then they tortured the child and got rid of her.

The next part of the book is more disturbing than the first, because it lasts longer. She gets adopted by an American couple, and her life improves physically, but stinks emotionally. Her parents have heads full of ideas of what they expect to get from their new daughter, and they’re awful to her, blaming her for the most mundane things. It’s not even clear why her parents adopt her, since there were plenty of white children to adopt in 1950’s USA. Maybe it had to do with their fundamentalist Christian views? Was it their way of “civilizing a savage” and bringing the heathen to Jesus? Did they think they were doing the Lord’s work by taking in a half-Korean child?

In some ways the treatment her mother got in Korea mirrors what she received in the USA. Women didn’t really have any rights in the USA either, and as a teen, she marries a deacon from their church. It’s not clear why. Maybe she’s pressured by her parents? Maybe she just wants to escape her home?  Whatever the reason, her husband turns out to be an abusive man, having sex with other women and forcing her to watch, beating her (even while pregnant) and making her life impossible. Her life doesn’t get much better after divorcing him. She does, however, land a job at a newspaper, and her boss and his wife become surrogate parents.

While I sympathize with the author, I don’t approve of a lot of the things she does. First off, she implies a feeling of nihilism to her daughter, and while it may be the reason her daughter grows up independent and self-reliant, I’m not sure it’s worth the risk to a child. Secondly, she raises her daughter in a house that’s geographically isolated, in an effort to recreate the home where she once lived with her mother. The isolation of the home puts them in danger on several occasions.

Honor killings have been in the news a lot lately, but we hear about the ones in the Middle East, not South Korea. I’ve heard of honor killings happening in Sicily, usually because of a disapproved marriage, or a daughter’s mistake that shames the family. They didn’t have honor killings In Ireland, but unwed pregnant teenagers got a raw deal; their parents left them at the Magdalene Convents and forgot about them.

 Like most Asian countries, South Korea doesn’t have a good record on women’s rights, but what makes it even more shocking is the way her family committed the murder. The events in the USA afterward aren’t much better, but you have to wonder how much has really changed? Today’s news is full of stories about women being thrown out of pools over their bathing suits, or girls being sent home because their clothing distracts the boys. 

When you treat the woman as a temptress, you open the floodgates to abuse.

Happy Money: The Japanese Art of Making Peace with Your Money by Ken Honda

   Ken Honda, a self-help star in Japan, pulls no punches hen it comes to money woes. Happy money is the term for the money you gain for your own benefit, while unhappy money is gained through a job you hate, or ends up going to your ex-wife and creditors.  Years ago, I read a similar argument in Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad/Poor Dad rag, and while I agree with less than 0.03 of what Kiyosaki says, both he and Honda have a point; you’re not wealthy if someone else has a claim to your money.

    Honda gives good advice on saving. Too often, we feel pressure to buy the latest electronics, and then you have families under pressure to take their children to Disney World, dress them to impress, and spend to impress others. Then there’s the FOMO problem, or Fear Of Missing Out, which I confess to having experienced many times. He recounts an experience where his daughter, with her limited command of English, asks him what her classmates mean by “it’s not fair.” He puts the blame on parents who use the term, as in “it’s not fair that he makes more than me,” or “it’s not fair that I have to pay taxes.” Then the parents will probably use that term every time they have to do something they don’t want, like “it’s not fair that I have to host the Christmas dinner,” or “it’s not fair that I have to pay such a huge share of my parents’ anniversary gift.” The question is, why do the parents do it in the end?

   His advice rests on restraint and differentiation. First off, one needs to have the guts to say no, and ignore the pressure to “keep up with the Joneses.” Secondly, you have to admit the reason you want money. Is it serenity? Do you want security? A comfortable lifestyle? Luxury? Power? Attention? Revenge? These things will make all the difference in how we spend and save. Donald Trump (who I thoroughly dislike) gave on important piece of advice in his book. He says that every marriage must have a prenup, whether you trust your spouse or not. It all makes sense in terms of trust; lack of trust means you need a prenup, and if you trust each other, you won’t be suspicious of a prenup.

One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

    Charles Fishman has been reporting on the US space program since the 1980’s, when we celebrated NASA’s accomplishments, and at the same time mourned its 1986 failure. He starts the book by giving credit to the thousands of people involved in the 1969 moon landing, and the scientists were only a tiny fraction. The space suit was designed by men who worked for an underwear company, and a team of expert sewers – all of them women – sewed the suits together. When the moon landing was broadcast on TV, they were the ones who were afraid. Would the suits take the pressure difference? Would their stitching hold together? Never mind that ordinary non-scientists had made the suits, a lot of the products used by those astronauts are considered mundane today. Velcro, tang, microchips, digital clocks, and high-speed computers, were invented years earlier, but not widely used until the moon landing.

NASA would be a proving ground for a whole lot of American technology, and it benefited the US economy. In every state, there were industries that got NASA contracts, whether it was fuel, rocket engines, TV screens, telecommunications, cameras, etc. The USA, at least in those days, was a nation that worshipped science, and NASA was the ultimate citadel of science and technology. The Soviet Union had gotten to space first, but every time they did something great, US scientists did it better. What did we do that the Soviets didn’t?

Aside from the scientific accomplishments, the moon landing was also a political triumph. We’d started the 60’s with the Bay of Pigs invasion (a farce for the CIA) and then came the Kennedy assassination (testing our comfort zone) followed by the violence of the Civil Rights movement and urban riots (discord and instability). How would the USA restore unity and credibility, at home and abroad? In Moscow’s Red Square, Kruschev hoisted Uri Gagarin onto a pedestal, and declared his meager to-hour space ride a triumph of communism. Would US capitalism be outdone by communism, the Europeans wondered? But the Soviets never made it to the moon, and their satellites never worked as well as those in the USA. They did manage to build a space shuttle like NASA’s, known as the Buran, flew it once by computer and then mothballed it a year later when the USSR broke up. In 2005, the shuttle, now dust-covered and abandoned, was destroyed when the decrepit storage hangar collapsed on it. The Soviets had spent billions on a space program that got them nowhere.

In the end, it was just ordinary American work that made the moon landing happen. Mathematicians calculated the trajectory, air force airmen operated the communications, and the astronauts got their start as military pilots. The lunar vehicle was just a dune buggy, but it took 400 engineers to make it collapsible, and then they had to design a motor that wouldn’t shut down in sub-zero weather. Their creation would later become the electric golf cart. Technologies that are bought cheaply today are thrown away when they wear out, but 50 years ago they were a triumph of science.

Fishman doesn’t shy away from the controversy over the moon landing. Was it worth it to got to the moon? Was it worth it to spend all the money? Gil Scott Heron’s poem Whitey’s On the Moon, is an example of the distrust in the space program, a massive money-eater when the cities were crumbling. Then there’s the question of what, if anything, was there left for us to conquer? Supreme Court justice Earl Warren, in his farewell address, said that we’d be on the moon in a few months, but “it would be better if our universities taught us how to live in our great cities.” At least the 1969 moon landing made microchips cheaper (previously nobody knew what to do with them) proved new uses for Velcro.

Why do Americans love space? Maybe it’s because our kids love adventure. Maybe it’s because we’re a nation built on expansion. Wealthy Americans are known to love big projects, and working-class Americans love the jobs that they bring. Some big projects bring profit. Others bring prestige. In the end, NASA brought both.

My Lobotomy by Howard Dully

    I wonder if US colleges will ever include Lobotomy in the history textbooks. Will it be included among all the other injustices in our history? We teach our students about Segregation, the Japanese Internment, and the Wounded Knee massacre, but what about the people who were lobotomized? Was it any less an injustice to the people whose lives were ruined by it? Perhaps historians dismiss it as part of the medical ash heap, along with other quack treatments – insulin shock therapy, radiation therapy for colds, and patent medicines – that we now agree caused more harm than good. However, I see Lobotomy as something more. It influenced far more people than other questionable medical practices, and it was part of a broad desire for a “quick fix,” or even worse, parents who wanted easier control of their kids. This is where Howard Dully comes in; he was one of the last Americans to have a lobotomy, and the victim of a vengeful stepparent who wanted to turn him into a vegetable.

    The story begins in the USA during the Baby Boom era, a time of calm prosperity and scientific accomplishment. Howard Dully’s mother is dead, his father has remarried, and the 12 year old doesn’t get along with his stepmother or her kids. We’re not talking about shoplifting or truancy here, just a moody adolescent who leaves the lights on in the daytime and doesn’t make his bed or clear the table. The stepmother convinces her husband that his son is a buddy violent criminal, and she hears about Dr. Walter Freeman, whose miracle procedure cures all mental problems. The operation, known as a Trans-Orbital Lobotomy, is simple; knock out the patient, insert a steel spike through the space above the eye, crack through the bone, swish the spike back and forth, severing the frontal lobes, and the patient goes home the same day. It would cure violent rages, depression, or other bad behaviors. If not, at least it would make the patient into a vegetable who wouldn’t make any noise.

    Howard Dully was Lobotomized at age 12, in the early 1960’s, at a time when the operation was already being discredited. It began in the 1940’s, and probably fell out of favor once Thorazine was invented. This book tells two parallel stories, one about the author, and the other about the operation and what it did to people in the USA. When he dredges up his medical records, he sees that his stepmother went to multiple health professionals, all of whom wrote that she was the problem, not the boy. It reminds  me of how today’s parents are tempted to medicate special-needs children, in order to keep them quiet, and avoid the hard work and patience they require. Don’t get me wrong, I know how hard it is to raise a kid with ADHD, OCD, ODD, or IED, but too many parents just want a quick fix. The good news is that the worst a parent can do is dope up the kids with Ritalin, Dexedrine, Aderall, and Risperdal, not mangle their brains with an ice pick and turn them into drooling zombies

    After the Lobotomy, Dully spends his teen years in reformatories, jails in his 20’s, and alcoholism in his 30’s. He writes how the Lobotomy left him with a part of his emotion missing and he couldn’t quite grasp what it was. During his time in the state homes for boys, he encounters an orderly named Napoleon Murphy Brock – yes, the same one from the Frank Zappa band – who was studying psychology at a local college. He recalls Brock wondering openly why a seemingly normal kid was in a reformatory that was meant for juvenile delinquents.

    What shocks me the most about this story is that few medical professionals spoke up against Dr. Freeman. The book includes examples of how the medical establishment was generally uneasy about Lobotomy, and how they were not impressed by the zombies that resulted from the operation. It wasn’t scientifically proven, so I can’t figure out why the medical establishment green-lighted Freeman to do the operations. In a twist of dramatic irony, the Soviet Union banned Lobotomy. Despite the horrible things that the Soviet dictators did, they thought it was wrong to destroy someone’s ability to think.

    My Lobotomy was published back in 2006, and I read it eagerly, because I was fascinated by how quickly Lobotomy came and went, yet it ruined so many people in its time. It wasn’t just poor orphans who were ruined by the operation, but a woman from a prominent family, who also was the sister of a US president. Howard Dully is now a bus driver and driving instructor and didn’t learn about his Lobotomy until he was 56 years old. In another ironic twist, Dully finds that Dr. Freeman, despite being a sloppy surgeon, kept extreme records of all his patients, now in the George Washington University archive. Freeman’s records show that the stepmother described the boy as savage, defiant, refused to go to bed, wouldn’t listen, and the doctor advised a lobotomy to cure the behavior. When he finally gets his elderly father to speak about it, the old man makes a shocking admission; it as all the stepmother’s idea, and he admits to being too spineless to object. Then he admits that after the operation failed to turn the boy into a vegetable, it was she who insisted on handing the boy over to the state.

    I wonder why Walter Freeman, a neurologist, was allowed to do operations. One possibility is that in the old days, physicians were treated as being beyond criticism, even when they injured patients. We no know that doctors were doing radiation experiments on people in the 1950’s, and most history books mention the Tuskegee Experiment. There’s suspicion that the children at Willowbrook were used for experiments, and there’s proof that prisoners in Pennsylvania were used to test drugs (see the book Sentenced to Science.) Those of you who read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks know how Black Americans were neglected by the doctors, but at the same time the doctors helped themselves to tissue samples to use for their experiments. If you visit Chicago, you should visit the Museum of Surgical Science, for examples of medical quackery. They have a model of an old drugstore, full of medicine bottles, most of which contain cocaine, morphine, or mercury. They even have a foot X-ray machine, which were common in 1950’s shoe stores, and probably gave cancer to countless children.

    Lobotomy, and the reason for its onetime popularity, remind me of an argument I read in the recent book Rethinking Incarceration. Too many Americans, whether in the medical profession, education, or simply in the role of parent, want to avoid the hard work and sacrifice needed to raise a child. The “quick fix” problem starts at home and goes all the way up to court and prison. Even the prison system wants to pawn things off on other people, which is why the private prison industry is so profitable. As for Mrs. Dully, she didn’t want to have to accept that her 12-year-old stepson was moody, sulky, and would never be obedient. The rest is history.

    I once had a Black student ask me why White parents go to great lengths to discipline their kids. He asked “Why do they do all those time-outs, reward charts, talking to their kids, when Black people just smack the kid and he straightens up?” I answered that smacking the kid doesn’t work in the long run, it just establishes dominance, it teaches the kid that might makes right. Now I have to wonder, now that upper middle class families are fazing out corporal punishment, will the lower classes do the same? Will spanking, slapping, paddling, and butt-belting go the way of the rotary phone? Will people see its danger and futility the way they did with Lobotomy?

    Each year, the US history textbooks are not only updated, but past events are added. Will the injustice of Lobotomy be included? Thirty years ago, the Japanese Internment as left out, and information on Native American abuse was limited. Today, these issues are not only taught in college, but also represented in children’s books. The Stonewall Inn Riots, AIDS activism, and Ryan White are all making their way into the textbooks. It remains to be seen if Lobotomy will be included.

  

The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara

   Sunkara doesn’t come off as the radical socialist, and he actually respects capitalism. He admires the Swedish approach, where enterprises like healthcare and education are considered to be the government’s problem. That leaves the people free to be productive without having to worry about college bills and doctor’s fees.

He writes about how new technologies led to the Industrial Revolution, and with that came a need for labor. What Sunkara doesn’t mention, however, is that the labor all came from ruined farmers. If England’s farmers hadn’t been unemployed, I wonder where the workers would’ve come from. Would the British have imported slaves directly into England? Would they have encouraged Russian Jews to emigrate? He’s right about the relation of the Industrial Revolution and socialism, because it was the English factory workers who began what we call organized labor.

Sunkara, on the subject of business, doesn’t deny that it’s needed. He also dislikes the Soviet model, when was in fact very poor in quality. He thinks that socialism should be more concerned with worker safety, ending discrimination, ending sexual harassment, and pollution control. If you look back to the early gains in worker’s rights, the first thing they accomplished was a fixed workday. Then came child labor laws. Then came fire safety. Fixed hourly wages came last.

I’m going to sum up with a story in the recent book Food and the City, recounted by the owner of a tortilla factory. He says “in Mexico, hen you go to the hospital, you pay upfront or they leave you to die in the street, but here in New York, they patch you up and then ask how much you can pay.”

The Secret Wisdom of Nature by Peter Wohlleben

   The NYC Parks Department recently found a natural way to de-weed their green spaces – by bringing in a herd of goats to eat them! Apparently the plan worked a little too well, and now the goats are getting territorial about the bushes. I have to wonder if there was this much undergrowth in the days when deer roamed Manhattan? Back in the 1700’s, New York City’s entire topography was different, and I don’t just mean in terms of the landscape. There were giant oysters in the harbor, and there were seals, both of which generated interesting cuisine in the taverns. These animals lived in harmony in the harbor, along with turtles, and yes, turtles were a popular dish too. The USA also had a native chestnut tree, but a fungus imported from Japan wiped all those trees out. When the land’s native flora and fauna die out, what are we losing besides local ingredients? This is what Wohlleben’s book tries to figure out.

    Peter Wohlleben, a conservationist from Germany, begins with Yellowstone Park’s program to rebuild the wolf population. The result has been a reduction in the elk herds and an increase in beavers, bears, and native trees. Even the flooding has been reduced. He also shows how domesticated dogs are a far greater danger to humans than the wolves, which are essentially harmless. Far fewer people have been attacked by wolves than by feral dogs, and when the wolves and bears do attack humans, it’s because the humans have been stupid enough to feed them. Then we have the giant salmon that fertilize the plants along the riverbank, and feed the bears and birds. When non-native trout were introduced, they crowded out the native salmon, and that starved out everything else.

    Hate seeing a dead deer by the roadside? To the wolves and vultures, a dead deer is a ten-course dinner. Bears and wolves are attracted by the smell, and they come to gorge, and then the vultures and ravens smell the stink of the rotting meat, and they come in to pick at the leftovers. Ravens show up too, but due to size differences they have to wait until the end of the line. Due to their sensitivity, the ravens alert the wolves if bears are close, so they can gobble as much meat as they can before the slower bears come lumbering in. When all the other carnivores are done, mice come in to pick the hard-to-reach parts, then the insects eat the rest, and the birds and bats eat the insects. When all the beasts have finished, the decaying bones fertilize the soil.

    Excessive light from cities, waste from livestock, human waste, and climate change are all covered in this book. The science of how fish, carnivores, and elk function together has been portrayed in an earlier book by Gary Larson, titled There’s a Hair in My Dirt. A young worm, fed up with his life, learns how much he really means to the environment, along with all the other dirty animals. He learns how dead trees help the forest grow, and how forests need fires every now and then, and how chirping birds are actually cursing at each other, and how snakes prevent diseases by eating rats. Even better, the worm learns how the biggest problem is the two-legged mammals who get in nature’s way.

    Here in New York City, the Peregrine Falcon has made a comeback in the last 20 years, and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing them swoop down to snatch rats. In New Jersey, I had the pleasure of seeing a vulture eating a deer carcass, the stink of which I could smell from a hundred feet away. Every time I got close enough to take a photo, the vulture would fly away and sit on the fence, as if to say “that’s alright, I’ll wait for you to leave, and then I’ll eat my lunch in peace.” I tried several times more to photograph the vulture, but he kept flying to the fence to wait for me to leave. To this day I admire his patience.

Pot in Pans: A History of Eating Cannabis

    Robyn Griggs Lawrence discusses the use of cannabis in history as mainly ingestion, rather than smoking. She brings forth accepted historic proof that the herb was cultivated for the fiber and seeds,  which were known in the ancient era for mind-altering properties.  Then she buttresses her claim with the research of the French botanist Jean Baptiste-Lamarck. He described cannabis’ properties as “going through the head and disrupting the brain,” and making the user feel drunk and happy. He also researched, and noted, that there were different species of the plant and each one had different strengths. However, Lawrence also claims that the plants controversial status hampered the scientific research into its use. Medieval physicians suggested it as a way to relieve gout, but without modern studies it’s difficult to argue in its favor. The anti-cannabis lobbyists, even the early Reefer Madness films (based on sensationalism and exaggeration) have always been powerful.

   The author doesn’t say it outright, but it seems that pot was considered foreign to the USA, and that may have fed the distrust. It came through Asia before reaching Europe, and was banned by Napoleon. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas both consumed it in the form of cakes, with the recipe included in Toklas’ famous cookbook. Unfortunately for her (and the US readers) the recipe was removed by the US publishers in an effort of self-censorship, given that it was the 1960’s, and the publishing houses were still in their “Mad Men” stage. Something tells me if they’d waited until the 70’s, Gale Sheehy of New York Magazine would’ve hyped up the recipe in one of her radical chic campaigns. There were high-society characters who brought cannabis to the upper crust of America, like the food writer  Jeremiah Tower, who served cannabis chicken stock in his lavish dinner parties. He would put the cannabis infused soups right between the meat and the watercress, so that it would kick in around dessert time, and the simplest dessert would feel like a religious experience.

   Amsterdam’s cannabis industry, well-written in this book, was ground zero for its use in food, and the city’s tolerance of the herb was a complete opposite of the USA. The Netherlands, aware of the increase in heroin use worldwide, decided to ignore anything that was not scientifically proven to be addictive. There was never any solid conclusive study as to the health risks, but cannabis addicts weren’t going though withdrawal, and there was no prof that it was a gateway drug. However, the Netherlands did not legalize the importation of cannabis, nor write any laws regarding cultivation, so the source was in the hands of criminals.

    Lawrence writes that Cambodia is a country where cannabis as rarely smoked (American backpackers did that) but was used in soups, and the word “happy” became a code word for any food with the herb in it. It found its way into drinks with the multitude of spices available in the region, but thanks to US pressure, Cambodia banned it. Fortunately, the country never had the resources to do a large-scale crackdown.

    While this book is a wonderful trove of history of cannabis in cooking, the author spends a little too much time on the legal issues, and not enough on the benefits. I’m eager to see how it will make its way into the restaurant industry now that states are loosening the laws. Will it find its way into drinks? Will it replace beer and wine? Maybe it will be to 21^st Century USA what Absinthe was to 19^th Century France.