nonfiction

“The conclusions don’t surprise,
but crackerjack reporting crackles throughout.”
from the ball
pain and evil in the world. After providing a sound background in
the concepts of theodicy, free will and atheist arguments as they
have been formulated over centuries, the author dives into the
heart of his thesis. We live, D’Souza argues, in a world, and a universe,
made for humans. In such a world we necessarily encounter
positives and negatives. Tectonic plates are seemingly unique
to earth, and their slow movements are necessary for life as they
create and regulate carbon dioxide on a global scale. The downside
They create earthquakes that sometimes take innocent lives.
Water is a foundation to the existence of life. The downside
Floods, which cause extensive damage and lost lives. D’Souza
argues this is not proof that God doesn’t care; instead, he asks,
what alternative would we prefer His argument climaxes with
the anthropic principle, which points to the tremendous level of
chance necessary to create a universe that would lead to life at
all, let alone to the existence of humans, as proof that there is a
creator. The author is erudite, accessible and clear, and he offers
a tremendously wide range of sources. However, he has entered
a realm in which no one can be entirely pleased or convinced.
Fundamentalists will not like his acceptance of evolution or an
“old” universe, while other readers will wince at conclusions like,
“While animals feel pain, they do not suffer.”
A modern apologetic with appeal for like-minded readers.
CHINA AIRBORNE
Aviation and the
Future of China
Fallows, James
Pantheon (288 pp.)
$25.95 | May 15, 2012
978-0-375-42211-9
978-0-307-90740-0 e-book
In this natural follow-up to Postcards
from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China
(2008), Atlantic correspondent Fallows
analyzes the problems and promises of China’s economic development
through an examination of the efforts to create a worldclass
aerospace industry.
With its unprecedented manufacturing prowess, China has
become a world economic power. But how real and sustainable
is the development The test, writes the author, is how well
China succeeds in its current effort to build an aerospace industry,
to which the Chinese government has pledged $230 billion.
“If China can succeed fully in aerospace,” writes Fallows, “then
in principle there is very little it cannot do.” However, this is no
easy task. It is one thing to assemble iPhones, quite another to
build an industry of the complexity of aerospace. Fallows ably
guides readers through this complexity: developing internationally
recognized standards of safety and inspection, ensuring
adequate air space above China for a busy airline industry, developing
and manufacturing airplanes, and their millions of components,
that can compete with established manufacturers such
as Boeing and Airbus. In this effort, Fallows sees both the broad
positive and negative features of Chinese society. While China’s
economy at its best is marked by an anarchic spontaneity of
entrepreneurial energy, this energy is often checked by a state
apparatus obsessed with monitoring and controlling it. If the
government will not allow open Internet access, it cannot easily
open up the skies to commercial flights. The Chinese military
owns the country’s airspace, with only a few narrow corridors
open for commercial flights into China’s major cities. With
precise yet accessible language, Fallows discusses a variety of
contradictions in China, revealing much more about it than its
prospects as an aerospace power.
An enjoyable, important update on an enigmatic economic
giant.
THE DIVORCE OF HENRY VIII
The Untold Story
from Inside the Vatican
Fletcher, Catherine
Palgrave Macmillan (288 pp.)
$28.00 | Jun. 19, 2012
978-0-230-34151-7
Assiduously tracking Henry VIII’s
point man in Rome.
Henry’s divorce from Catherine of
Aragon took six years to effect, involving
numerous emissaries to the Vatican who may or may not
have been on the up and up, and rupturing England’s ties to
the Catholic Church in the end. The process proves exacting,
engrossing reading as English academic Fletcher (History/Durham
Univ.) focuses on the toilsome job of “resident diplomat”
in Rome Gregorio Casali, who tried desperately to placate all
factions, including Pope Clement and King Henry. However,
the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, had besieged Rome for
plunder and was not amused by Henry’s attempt to divorce his
lawful queen of nearly 20 years. While Catherine was effectively
lobbying her Spanish relatives and the pope constantly for support,
Henry was enlisting academics to substantiate his claim
that marrying his brother’s wife had amounted to a biblical
hex. The campaign for public opinion wore on: Henry wanted
an heir, plain and simple, and was willing to sever ties with the
Roman Catholic Church to do it. Little by little, with his lover
Anne Boleyn’s help, he cut the Church’s influence across England,
putting the pressure on Clement, who delayed interminably.
Fletcher goes step by step, a numbing-by-details process:
Bribery, nepotism, murder, marriage (Casali’s own) and Halley’s
Comet all pass through these pages before Henry finally got his
way and married Anne in 1533. Yet with Wolsey’s fall from favor
and death, Casali returned to England to plead his case “that I
and my kindred shall be an example to every man of the ingratitude
of princes,” then died soon after, abandoned by England.
An impressive, dogged study for armchair Tudor detectives.
RAINY BRAIN,
SUNNY BRAIN
How to Retrain Your
Brain to Overcome
Pessimism and Achieve
a More Positive Outlook
Fox, Elaine
Basic (352 pp.)
$27.99 | Jun. 5, 2012
978-0-465-01945-8
A psychologist looks at the influence
that outlook—a tendency toward optimism or pessimism—can
play in shaping the events in our lives.
For the past 20 years, Fox (Head of the Department of Psychology
and Centre for Brain Science/Univ. of Essex) has studied how
“the diverse ways in which people interpret the world around them”
are reflective of optimistic or pessimistic mindsets. She reports on
experiments that differentiate between these mindsets in a variety
of circumstances: the direction of a subject’s attention to positive
or negative images, brain scans that reflect the activation of different
pathways in the brains, longitudinal studies that correlate personality
type and life success. The author explains that the human
brain has evolved two different circuits—the “rainy brain,” which
allows us to have a rapid response to perceived danger, and the
“sunny brain,” which directs us to pleasurable activities. Both are
necessary to help us cope with our environment, but experiments
show that the predominance of one over the other is observable
in sunny-brained optimistic people compared with rainy-brained
pessimists. The difference reflects the “delicate ebb and flow of circuits
deep in our brain that shapes the contours and valleys of our
personality”—e.g., while the pleasure circuitry of both optimists
and pessimists are triggered by positive experiences, the activation
will last longer for those with sunnier dispositions. Not only
have optimists been shown to be happier, but they tend to be more
successful in flexibly meeting life’s challenges. While there may be
genetic factors involved in the development of personality type,
Fox suggests it is possible to adjust the “reactivity of these brain
areas,” although sometimes professional help is advisable.
An insightful addition to the self-help bookshelf. (16
b/w illustrations)
THE BALL
Discovering the
Object of the Game
Fox, John
Perennial/HarperCollins (368 pp.)
$14.99 paperback | Jun. 1, 2012
978-0-06-188179-4
An anthropologist and freelance journalist
debuts with a peripatetic analysis of
our ball games—where they came from,
how they evolved and why we love them.
Fox darts around the globe to show us the origins of our
games. Locales include Ecuador, the Orkneys, France, Mexico,
Onondaga, N.Y., Newbury and Springfield, Mass., and Ada,
Ohio. In a mostly chronological fashion, the author reveals a
variety of odd, amusing and even horrifying facts. Dolphins prefer
balls to any other toys; Galen loved the popular Roman game
of harpastum, a roughhouse contest; the Mayan game of ulama, a
soccer-like competition with a much heavier ball advanced by
hitting it with the hips, sometimes cost the losers their lives. In
the Orkneys Fox witnessed a violent street game, the Kirkwall
Ba’, that divides the town, as many as a hundred on a side, a
contest that continues until a side wins. Bruises, blood, broken
bones—all are part of the action. The author played the medieval
game of indoor tennis, teaching us about the origins of tennis
terms like “love.” He also explored the New World games
of lacrosse, baseball, football and basketball. He dismisses legends
(Abner Doubleday), confirms truths (James Naismith and
basketball), participates as well as observes and teaches us how
all sorts of balls were and are made. Occasionally, he speculates
about the significance of it all—did our ability for language
develop because we figured out how to throw Sometimes he
pontificates: “We play, therefore we are.” The accounts of the
ancient games engage more than the recent ones.
The conclusions don’t surprise, but crackerjack reporting
crackles throughout.
THE LOST BANK
The Story of Washington
Mutual—the Biggest Bank
Failure in American History
Grind, Kirsten
Simon & Schuster (384 pp.)
$27.00 | Jun. 12, 2012
978-1-4516-1792-4
A welcome new addition to the increasingly
crowded shelf of books about banking
failures during the past five years.
Wall Street Journal reporter Grind began covering Seattle-based
Washington Mutual while employed at the Puget Sound Business
Journal. When WaMu went out of business in 2008, it qualified as
the largest bank failure in American history. Grind chronicles the
mostly proud 110-year performance of the bank, tracing the failure
in large part to the increasingly reckless management decisions of
chief executive Kerry Killinger. The author begins in 1981, when
WaMu’s outside lawyer Lou Pepper reluctantly began running the
daily activities of the troubled bank. Pepper was a likable man, perceived
as a smart, fair boss. He helped save WaMu by converting
it into a publicly held stock company, owned by its shareholders.
When Pepper retired, Killinger stepped in as his predecessor. For
a while he was a cautious steward. As the housing market heated
up, however, Killinger and his management cohorts decided to ride
the bubble by making unwise home loans. As at other mortgage
lenders, the decision makers seemed unreasonably optimistic that
the bubble would never burst. Despite warnings from his staff and
from two federal bank regulatory agencies, Killinger continued to
expand the mortgage-loan business despite the poor credit ratings
of borrower after borrower. Grind takes readers inside the Federal
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