Children Of Paradise: The Struggle For The Soul Of Iran

Even in a small world (getting smaller all the time) there are still countries that elicit a sense of mystery and foreignness. Iran is such a country to those brought up in the West. Iran, that seemingly eternal power in the Middle East, presents to the world an unwelcoming, stern faced Islam. Children of Paradise by Laura Secor is an unflinching look at this enigmatic country.

The book describes events following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This is a history book but more than just a history. Ideas thread through the whole of the narrative informing much of what the actors do and how the action unfolds. And the actors are the main thing. The major portion of the narrative revolves around personal stories of honourable individuals struggling heroically to guide Iran towards a flourishing, open and just society. Opposed to these voices of reform is the establishment of conservative forces. The upholders of conservative values grow in power as the story unfolds.  The corollary of unchecked power consolidated in the hands of a few is the blight of repression.  Armed with a rigid understanding of Islam and ablaze with fervour for forming a just society—justice defined on their own terms—the conservatives see themselves as at war with the reformers. The battle is expertly described and the book is well organized. The various parts of the book have titles that all begin with the letter “R”: Revolution, Rebirth, Reform, and Resistance. These terms give, I think, a sense of the sweeping quality of the narrative. Not a lot of dates to remember, rather the work unfolds with snippets from the lives of Iranians caught up in the events of their times. On offer at any moment is, for example, a journalist endeavouring to uncover corruption in the government, and then a poet-philosopher stitching together various threads of ideology to create a coherent system of political thought, and then a social worker defending the rights of the marginalized. The work proceeds in this fashion. It makes for good non-fiction reading.

One common theme in the book is the restless desire on the part of the Iranian powerbrokers to unfettered self-determination. This is often juxtaposed by the idea of westoxication, which is defined as the hostile cultural influence of the West. What could possibly be hostile about western culture? Well to the authoritarian leaders of Iran things like liberalism, the rights of women and minorities, a free press and the like are deemed “untraditional”, that is, hostile to their total control of all facets of Iranian life.

The contest between these two forces, the reformist and the traditionalists-conservatives, is fascinating. It is fascinating and also strangely familiar. All the countries of the west, Canada included, have had some experience of resistance to reform. This seems to be the way of things in robust societies; change is constant as is the reticence to change. The difference between a country like Canada and Iran is the means to the end. Transformations can come hard and cause untold disruption and sometimes destruction or change can come soft like velvet. A vibrant society can modernize (adapt may be a better term) without the convulsion of violence. The cultural world described in Children of Paradise seems to this reader one teetering always on the edge of violence because it is having such a hard time dealing with change. Repression sows violence—it is unavoidable. All repressive regimes, whatever the time and whatever the place, have that similar taint of ugliness.

There may be hope for Iran. Hope that change can come without violence. This hope springs up like green shoots on many pages in this work. If you are curious about what has happened in Iran to bring it along on its present course then Children of Paradise is the book for you.

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Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

The editor that I so unabashedly trumpet myself to be is thankful that The New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris wrote Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. In fact, I could have written the same book without any need to change the subtitle. Norris wrote about her challenges while working for the magazine and used her real-life experiences to educate the reader on proper English usage. This book was as much a tale of working for the magazine as it was a grammar lesson, so for those who like The New Yorker, this book is a must-read. 

Since it was written as a memoir, complete with stories about all the beloved yet quirky people Norris used to work with, the grammar lessons sneak up on you. Norris says about her job:

"One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. In the hierarchy of prose goddesses, I am way, way down the list. But what expertise I have acquired I want to pass along."

In grade seven and then throughout high school I was taught English grammar, how to parse sentences and the parts of speech. No one in my classes liked it, yet I drank it up. This knowledge served me invaluably when I started to learn German (I had already started learning French) as expertise in that language depends on one's grasp of nouns, pronouns, cases and inflections. Sadly, grammar is no longer taught in English class, definitely not in the same degree of depth as my late-seventies grade seven education. I simply could not have excelled in German class had I not known what the teacher was talking about when referring to indirect objects, the imperative case and dependent clauses. While my fellow classmates were puzzling over what case a verb took, and then trying to distinguish between the accusative and dative and what kind of clause threw the verb to the end, I was happily working away enjoying the Germanness of der-words and stem-vowel changes. Norris makes these same points: that knowledge of English grammar can help you enormously in learning foreign languages. And it should not need to be stated that in spite of the uninspiring lessons, my classmates in junior as well as high school remain better writers of the English language because they had been taught about the underlying structure of the language. 

Norris had to deal with some grammatically eccentric people at The New Yorker. Her coworkers had decades of history working for the magazine and championed certain words and spellings. The magazine is famous for its orthographic quirkiness as well: nowhere else in the twenty-first century will you read the words written as coöperate and reëxamine. Norris is a staunch defender of the gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun he: 

"I hate to say it, but the colloquial use of 'their' when you mean 'his or her' is just wrong. It may solve the gender problem, and there is no doubt that it has taken over in the spoken language, but it does so at the expense of number. An antecedent that is in the singular cannot take a plural pronoun. And yet it does, all the time--certainly in speech."

Exactly. I use the neutral pronouns he, him and his in place of plural pronouns or virguled monstrosities. However I must admit that our way of speaking and writing is doomed; I do not see future generations using he as a neutral pronoun. Norris and I will continue to use it, however, inasmuch as The New Yorker continues to use antiquated renderings such as coöperate. 

Norris chose the title of this book to highlight the relatively recent phenomenon of placing the nominative first-person singular pronoun I after the preposition between instead of the correct accusative form me. Her theory why people say "between you and I" instead of "between you and me" is that of a misguided sense of hypercorrection. Educated speakers, or those who strive to be, somehow believe that the accusative pronoun in this expression sounds informal. There is an inbred formality in the usage of the nominative I. I believe this formality is often ridiculed as being too highfalutin in expressions such as "It is I". While grammatically correct, no one really says "It is I" anymore. We substitute the accusative me, and when we do we tend to contract the subject and verb, thus: "It's me". There is another theory why people say "between you and me" which Norris did not touch upon: in English, the nominative and accusative forms of the second-person singular pronoun you are the same. Speakers then don't know what grammatical case they're using since the you that follows between resembles both the nominative and the accusative. If you didn't learn about grammatical cases then you are prone to make mistakes in your spoken and written English. Substitute different pronouns and see if you can spot the difference: would you say "between he and I"? Or would you mix the cases and say "between him and I"? Let's hope you see the logic in using the same accusative case for both: "between him and me".

Grammar lessons may not be cause to laugh out loud, however Norris gave me plenty of opportunities to chuckle. Her visit to the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum gave her such delight that:

"Only a sign warning that the museum is under surveillance twenty-four hours a day kept me from dancing."

You know that if Norris finds such pleasure in pencil sharpeners, chances are she loves to use pencils themselves. If you have a particular fondness for a certain pen or pencil, you will appreciate Norris's quest to find a perfect Dixon Ticonderoga No. 1 pencil. Her box of damaged leads sent her on a frustrated quest to find one whose lead wouldn't break upon sharpening. 

Between You & Me covers punctuation as well as grammar, and gives easy-to-understand instructions on the proper use of commas, semicolons and colons. Norris covers hyphenation as well as the use of apostrophes, and the annoying occurrence of apostrophes in the plural when a simple -S will do. Grammar snobs and closet editors will love this book and will lap it up because we are the choir Norris is preaching to. Other readers not so vigilant with the blue pencil won't realize all the grammar they're learning in between all The New Yorker stories.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World

Before he wrote about maps and fonts, Simon Garfield wrote about dyes, mauve especially. Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World was a joy to read. I should know this by now about Simon Garfield. Yet who would have thought that anyone could have made a book about dyes exciting? I read half of this book in one sitting (okay, I was on a plane en route to Fort Lauderdale at the time). Natural dyes have been around for centuries, yet the first mass-produced artificial dye wasn't a primary red or blue, but in fact mauve. Why mauve?

William Perkin was a young British chemist who liked to experiment. It was during one such lab trial in an attempt to synthesize quinine in 1856 that he came upon a mauve residue. Perkin, at only eighteen years of age, had discovered a way to synthesize a colour using coal tar. The light purple that he produced was a hit all over Europe:

"And then two things happened to change his life. Queen Victoria wore mauve to her daughter's wedding; and Empress Eugénie, the single most influential woman in the world of fashion, decided that mauve was a colour that matched her eyes."

And so the fashion trend raged. Garfield included many vibrant photos in a colorful insert, showing the fashions of the times as well as Perkin's earliest dyes. One of the photo captions said:

"An object of ridicule, an object of pride: gaudy, fugitive and poisonous, but the new colours proved irresistible to fashionable Paris and London."

Poisonous? Arsenic was used in the creation of the dyes and while it remained entirely safe on dry fabric, once the wearer perspired or got caught in the rain, the toxicity became manifest. Skin irritations were widespread and even fatalities occurred. Tests were conducted on the safety of the dyes yet the various tests produced alarmingly contrasting results. It all depended on who conducted the tests, of course. Nevertheless, the official verdict was inconclusive on the dyes' degree of toxicity. Factories in the mid-nineteenth century also risked polluting the water with their toxic discharge; Garfield wrote about wells which had become contaminated and the lawsuits that ensued against the companies.   

Garfield could make a book about the history of the first synthetic dye a can't-put-down read. Humour always makes a book a page-turner and the early history of dye experimentation was a hazard waiting to happen:

"'The nitration of benzene is not, of course, a process free from all danger,' Laurence Morris noted subsequently, 'and in those early, groping stages of manufacture it is a miracle that Perkin did not blow himself and Greenford Green to pieces.'"

A major part of Mauve was Perkin's battle with patents and dealing with foreign companies who produced inferior copycat dyes, or companies that used his breakthroughs and improved upon them. Perkin found that he could not keep up with the dyeworks on the European continent, and instead of battling with them in court over patent violations, the father of synthetic dyes sold his company to a competitor. This did not seem to irk Perkin; he was happy to let others reap the profits while he kept to his small lab working on his own projects. 

It would have surprised Perkin to learn that his experiments with dyes led to many breakthroughs in the field of medicine. Dyes are now used regularly to locate microbes and in exploratory tests. Chemotherapy owes its existence to dyes. The development of photographs onto paper is also based on dye science. Garfield made a case throughout Mauve to celebrate Perkin and give him the credit he deserved as the founding father of so many scientific breakthroughs. In the 160 years since the discovery of mauve, science has forgotten Perkin and despite the recognition he received in a 1906 golden anniversary commemoration and posthumously in a smaller remembrance on the mauve centenary, Perkin seems to be unknown to the scientific community of the twenty-first century. I was moved by the final paragraphs of Mauve, where Garfield, after unsuccessful attempts to find Perkin's gravesite, was contacted by Wendy Blewden. Blewden was Perkin's great-great-granddaughter, and knew where his grave was. The two shared an afternoon sharing stories and Garfield got to see many of the great scientist's personal possessions. 

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The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America

How do we know that the oxygen exists, and that oxygen is different from carbon dioxide? Well, we know it because we've been taught those facts. But how did that knowledge enter the scientific record? Air is invisible to our eyes. How did humans first understand that invisible gases exist, and have predictable properties?

Answering that question, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by science historian Steven Johnson, is at its most interesting. The body of experiments that led to the "discovery" of oxygen, carbon dioxide, the properties of gases, and other foundational principles of chemistry were completely unknown to me. (Indeed, I doubt I had ever considered the question.)

This book introduced me to one Joseph Priestley, considered the father of modern chemistry, and a towering thinker of his era, yet largely unknown to the public today.

As Priestley was a contemporary of several of the American "founding fathers", the author illustrates Priestley's importance with these statistics.

In their legendary thirteen-year final correspondence, reflecting back on their collaborations and their feuds, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote 165 letters to each other. In that corpus, Benjamin Franklin is mentioned by name five times, while George Washington is mentioned three times. Their mutual nemesis Alexander Hamilton warrants only two references. By contrast, Priestley, an Englishman who spent only the last decade of his life in the United States, is mentioned fifty-two times.

One reason (of many) that Johnson greatly admires Priestley was that he valued open inquiry and the sharing of knowledge more than personal credit or financial gain. Priestley was a dedicated open-source man. He would share his ideas, writing, and data with anyone who was interested. This probably resulted in less fame, and definitely resulted in less income, but those were not Priestley's goals.

The Invention of Air is much more than a biography of Priestley or an account of his experiments. Priestley's work helped define and solidify scientific method, and his political and religious ideas influenced the birth of the American republic. I found these areas more challenging and less interesting. Johnson assumes a degree of knowledge of the history of science that I lack. And the book gets bogged down in biographical detail that seems trivial or irrelevant.

I loved Johnson's The Ghost Map - I'm at least partly responsible for it being promoted widely in our library system - and I've enjoyed (on Netflix) several episodes of Johnson's PBS series, "How We Got to Now". So it was a little disappointing not to love this book, too. But The Invention of Air is often fascinating, and it's well worth the read.

As I did when I reviewed Soul Made Flesh, I caution readers about grisly details of experiments on animals. [This review was originally published on wmtc.]

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The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality and the Financial Crisis

I didn’t really know much about Ayn Rand. I definitely didn’t know the causes of the economic downturn of 2008. I thought I had a good understanding of American politics. If you read Darryl Cunningham’s graphic nonfiction book The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis, you will learn how much more you didn’t know.

It is said that the proof of your intelligence is in your ability to communicate effectively the big ideas that you have.  Using this sentence as a metre stick, I’d have to say (a) my intelligence appears to need work and (b) Darryl Cunningham is an awfully smart man. Using a graphic format to discuss these intricate and multi-layered themes is pure genius. The book is divided into 3 major sections: the first is on the life of Ayn Rand and the people that she influenced, the second is on the how and why of the economic crash of 2008 and the third is on American politics as viewed through the alternating filters of altruism and selfishness.

A way to sum up much of the book is in this graphic format:

Ayn Rand + rabid followers (including Alan Greenspan) = “collective”

Randian philosophy = objectivism [(selfishness = virtue) + (altruism = moral failure)]

Alan Greenspan (@ Ronald Reagan) = Chairman of Federal Reserve for 4 Presidents (spanning 3 decades)

U.S. Government adoption of Randian philosophy (“taxation = theft”) = U.S. Government reduces regulation of banking

Banks go power-crazy = messy recession; felt worldwide.

Cunningham does have a solution. He thinks that conservativism has won the day but that liberals need to reassert themselves in American politics (despite the current liberals in power) to bring back true altruism. Cunningham doesn't like conservatives. They "prize hard work, orderliness, and structure...are goal oriented." Liberals, however, "are risk takers...are experimental in their lifestyle choices and self-expression. They are tolerant of different perspectives and values." Cunningham is very sorry but you fit into only one political affiliation or the other. There are no other options. He actually goes so far as to insinuate that these are psychologically defined distinctions that divide all of us into two camps.

Too bad the rest of the world doesn't work out of a two-party system. Canadians don't get mentioned at all. The British don't get much press either, perhaps because they have a four-party system, with voices from seven other parties mixed in. 

Here's another take on this dilemma:

Author Hypothesis:

Selfishness + American political system (Tea Partyists) = need more liberals to fix it.

Reader Doubt:

Psychological profiling of liberals and conservatives = reduction of all people into 2-party system thinking

Reductive thinking = all theses in the book may be skewed

The bottom line is that this book has excellent polemics, but the proposed ideas are still open for debate.  

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Freezing People is (not) Easy: My Adventures in Cryonics

Freezing People is (not) Easy: My Adventures in Cryonics was a rapid-read history of cryonics, the dubious science of freezing the dead under the hope of reviving the corpses later, written by the former president of the Cryonics Society of California (CSC), Bob Nelson, with Kenneth Bly and Sally Magaña. Nelson became enrapt, or more like obsessed, with cryonics after reading the pioneering book on the topic, The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger in 1965, for in it he learned:

"My mind was inexorably bent toward cryonics and this new way of looking at death. For if a person can be revived, then he had never actually died. This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of cryonics suspension. Once a person is dead, he is dead. Nothing can bring a dead body back to life. But death does not happen in an instant; we travel a long journey to the land beyond the veil. Along that path, we pass through a complicated biological sequence as blood stops flowing, chemical reactions halt, electrical impulses stop, and there is no life force to prevent the decay. By lowering the body temperature at an early stage of the dying process (that is, clinical death), we slow down the journey and stop the dying progression, thereby keeping the patient from ever reaching the stage of complete irretrievable death. Freeze the person and stop the dying."

Nelson devoted all his time (and eventually, all his money) to the science of preserving bodies. Fifty years ago, at the beginning of the cryonics movement, there was a lot of interest in theory but few takers in practice. Sadly, when people died, Nelson and his fellow cryonics supporters found that their dearly departed late friends left them no money, or not enough, to preserve them for possible future revival. 

Possessed by the knowledge of a revolutionary new science affecting the future of humanity, Nelson could not deny these people the chance to be "suspended", as cryonicists describe the term of being frozen immediately after death. Nor could he ignore them afterwards, as all corpses required the constant maintenance of dry ice and liquid nitrogen replacement. Nelson was the sole person who kept the initial cryonics "heroes", as he referred to them, under ice. This took years of his time and cost him his marriage.

I liked this story because it was told by Nelson in the first person. It flowed smoothly and did not seem repetitive, which is a fault of monologue books that are unedited before being transcribed. He was smart enough to anticipate questions the readers might have, and addressed them within the first-person narrative in each chapter. One such question concerned the whereabouts of Walt Disney's remains. An urban myth is that Walt Disney himself had been cryopreserved in suspended animation. Nelson shed light on this story: it was he himself who took the call from Disney studios in 1966. However, he never spoke to Disney and neither he nor the CSC ever heard from the Disney studios again. 

Cryonics was and still is an experimental science and of the nine people who were the first to submit themselves to cryopreservation, seven were lost. Their capsules leaked or their dry ice and liquid nitrogen ran out. Thus all the work Nelson did for years--single-handedly and with no funding whatsoever--to maintain them in frozen suspended animation was in vain. A chapter was devoted to a lawsuit filed by relatives who alleged Nelson killed their parents (in their eyes, they died a second time) when their cryonic preservation failed. The trial story could have been lifted right out of a comedy movie as Nelson's own attorney, a manic-depressive on lithium, Robert Winterbotham, could barely stay awake in court. The antics during the trial did however seem too exaggerated to be real. Nelson feared the worst from the jury and needless to say, his lawyer was of no help. The trauma of the verdict made him walk away from cryonics for the next twenty-five years.   

I had first learned about cryonics while watching a TV mysteries show about 35 years ago. While I was curious about the whole idea of bringing the dead back to life, I remain a nonbeliever after reading this book. In spite of the faith Nelson and his followers have in future medical breakthroughs being able to "cure" the dead, I do not believe that anyone declared dead can be revived. Cryonics is a quack science and belongs in the science fiction collection. Nonetheless, Freezing People is (not) Easy was a history, as well as a personal memoir that I could not put down. It was a tragic man-with-a-mission story.

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Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

This is how I understood the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. Adolf Hitler was a megalomaniac who blamed Jewish people for the failures in his life. Through sheer force of will and charisma and no small measure of brutality he managed to convince enough Germans to make him their Führer and to follow him to a glorious future for the German Volk (people). Part of his cracked plan was the occupation of lands east of Germany. He plunged Germany and the world into the hell that was WWII and was principally culpable for the Holocaust. This in outline is how I understood the Nazis, WWII (in Europe) and the Holocaust.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder did a lot to educate me on just how the mass murder of thousands upon thousands of innocent people was made possible.

The insights in Black Earth are truly thought provoking. Mass murder (that is the murder of entire populations) is only possible where there is no state, no law, no rights and no citizenship. When countries die a space is opened for atrocities of the most heinous kind. Take the following quote as illustrative of this irrational thinking:

German international lawyers contended that Poland was not a state, but merely a place without a legitimate sovereign over which the Germans found themselves masters. Polish law was declared null and void—indeed, never to have existed (105).

The Nazis and the "legal" apparatus that supported their twisted views became experts at destabilizing and then eliminating country after country. Here is another example, part of the numerous bits of evidence that Snyder offers the reader for consideration. Examine the numbers of Danish Jews killed verses the numbers of Jews holding, say, Estonian passports. Estonia was first destabilized and ruined by the Soviets before being overrun and crushed by the German Wehrmacht. For a brief few years there was no Estonia, meaning no governmental institutions to underpin anything remotely like the exercise of legitimate power. Denmark, which was weakly occupied by German forces in April 1940, saw many more Jews in their population survive the war than in places like Estonia, Latvia and Poland. Why? Because when the call came from the Nazis to exterminate the Jews Danish authorities resisted. The Danes understood that yielding citizens who followed the tenets of Judaism to Germany would compromise Danish sovereignty (216). The Danish-Jews survived not because the Danish government felt huge love for the Jewish religion or kosher cuisine. The mystery as to how Jews living so close to the heart of darkness survived is solved when you realize that for all of the Nazis’ hold on Denmark, Denmark remained a country with a functioning legal system, a bureaucracy and internationally recognized rights for its citizens. Estonia: no citizenship, peoples subject to untold atrocities. Denmark: functioning legal system, peoples left alone.

This observation, namely that you need to get rid of the legal apparatus that protects people’s rights if you are going to murder them “with a clear conscience,” may seem obvious but what makes the arguments so compelling is the clear and erudite presentation of these facts and the ways the author ties them, in his concluding comments, to what is happening in our world today. Where nations are destabilized you have chaos and death. At the time of my writing this review I can think of at least four countries that are so destabilized that to call them countries is to be generous with the description: Iraq, Somalia, Libya and Syria. The parallels between those events that destabilised Eastern Europe (and so brought about the conditions for large scale crime) during WWII and what we are witnessing in the Middle East today is startling. Black Earth reads like a warning for our times. When we see destabilizing forces like the depletion of natural resources, climate change, and civil war tearing apart state identities, we witness the end of legal rights because it is the end of meaningful citizenship. The loss of rights and freedoms is the breeding ground for the sorts of human crimes of which the holocaust is a most conspicuous example. Deranged, Islamic-totalitarian forces like IS (with its current stronghold in Syria) can only operate where nation state’s institutions and the rule of law no longer function.

If you would like to read an intelligent book on the underlying causes of the Holocaust, read this one. If you have read many books on the Holocaust and think nothing new can be said, read this one.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue