March 2025

My reflections on the books I read this month

(Scroll down for a list of the books I’m currently reading.)

After Lives: On biography and the mysteries of the human heart

by Megan Marshall

Click on the summary to read the entire note about this book.
Marshall is an acclaimed biographer. Her biography of the Peabody sisters was well received and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Margaret Fuller. In this collection of essays she turns the biographical eye on herself. This is not a chronological narrative about her life; instead, she tells stories about objects, about people, and about events that have shaped her. I find it an interesting approach – just as a biographer exists in the background of the subject’s life, Marshall as autobiographer emerges more subtly than she might in this collection of essays. Each of the essays stands alone in some ways, but I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasional conversations over the course of many years. Her personality and her person emerge both in the stories that she tells and in the way that she tells them.

I won’t attempt to describe all of the essays here, but rather focus on two that I found most interesting. In “Free for a while,” she tells the story of how her life interfaced with that her high school classmate Jon Jackson. Jon’s brother George was found guilty of stealing $70.00 and received a sentence of one year to life. He published a collection of prison letters called Soledad Brother. In his senior year of high school, Jon died in a courthouse raid that he hoped would free his brother so that could escape together to join Eldridge Cleaver, exiled in Algeria. The judge and two prisoners also died. The story of George Jackson and the other Soledad Brothers and of Jon Jackson’s failed attempt to rescue George is well known; what I found most interesting in this essay is how Marshall describes the interweaving of her life with Jon’s, showing the different circumstances of their private and family lives and also the ways in which they overlapped in and around school.

Marshall doesn’t excuse Jon’s violent attempt to free his brother from prison, but draws on one of George’s letters (a letter that provides the essay’s title) to make a crucial point. “It’s not my place to tell what happened that summer, to raise or attempt to answer the questions that lingered with Jon’s classmates and teachers who wished so hard, as the bereaved always do, that it could have gone otherwise and looked for somewhere to place blame. George professed ignorance of Jon’s plan, lauding him as the ‘black man-child with submachine gun in hand, … the true revolutionary who, during the brief span of time he’d controlled the courtroom, ‘was free for a while. I guess that’s more than most of us can expect’” (p. 76). The essay brings out how the freedom that different individuals can expect is shaped largely by circumstances beyond their control.

In “These Useless Things,” Marshall considers how objects that some might deem useless can have a profound significance, both in the life that one lives and in how one understands the history that shaped the present. She begins by reflecting on the old “ice pick on my kitchen windowsill, its tarnished prong thrust into an ancient wine cork for safety’s sake.” She found the ice pick while going through her father’s possessions after he died. These reflections lead her to considerations of her relationship with her father, of how the hands that once held that ice pick helpfully taught her to use various tools. But her father, suffering from mental illness, was frequently absent when she was growing up. “When wielding the ice pick, my father was the father I hoped for. And perhaps the immplement’s concealed danger, the spike blunted with a wine cork, spoke to me of my father as well. I had him in hand on the window sill” (p. 103).

Marshall also considers how other objects from the past shape the present. In her biography of the Peabody sisters, she described a portable writing desk — a wooden box that can be used as a lap desk – that Elizabeth and Mary received as a gift from their students. Sometime after the book was published, Marshall received a letter from a man who thought he owned that desk and would like to pass it on to someone. Marshall eventually bought the desk, and it now sits in the room where she writes. Someday, she writes, she’ll find a museum or archive that will add this desk to their collection. Quoting phrases from Elizabeth’s description of the desk written almost 200 years ago, Marshall writes that “for now I’m happy to set my morning coffee down next to my own portable writing device — a Lenovo IdeaPad S340 laptop computer, which also opens to reveal secrets, to enable me to reveal mine — and look up at the shelf where the most ‘handsome’ and efficient writing box of its kind in 1826 reminds me of my purpose. The box may not be used, but it is not useless to me. If … there is a language of form, my two portable ‘desks,’ each containing ‘everything convenient’ in one compact case, speak of the enduring human need to communicate in writing, to give things life in words (p. 109).

What to Save and Why: Identity, authenticity, and the ethics of conservation

by Erich Hatala Matthes

Click on the summary to read the entire note about this book.
I stumbled on this book while browsing the shelves of Book Culture, a bookstore enthusiastically recommended by one of our son’s good friends. I mention that only to illustrate the rather chance nature of my encounter with this book. It’s not the sort of book I seek out, and if the title were on a list of books I might read next I suspect I wouldn’t have selected it. But something about the title (or the jacket design?) led me to pull it off the shelf, and I left the store with it under my arm. (That day I also purchased a copy of Open Socrates: The case for a philosophical life, which is a book that was on my list of books to read soon.)

Chance is good.

I think that if Matthes were pressed to provide a one-sentence response to the questions implied in his title he would say something like “We save those things that shape who we are and remind us of who we want to be, not only to understand our past and present, but also to offer an authentic sense of self that those who live after us can inherit and shape for themselves.” Of course, the “we” in this sentence is complex — there are many different groups, each with its own artifacts and cultural traditions that inform its identity.

And this complexity of groups implies a complexity of conservation approaches and practices. Individuals within a cultural group struggle to reach agreement not only on what to conserve and why, but also on just how best and in what form to conserve it. But the existence of many different cultural groups complicates things still further: what’s the difference between conservation and appropriation, and how does one adjudicate the different claims on cultural artifacts? Here Matthes argues that authentic participation of the different parties both in the decisions about what should be conserved and also in the conservation process itself. In making this point Matthes draws on the work of Suzy Killmister: “‘What the participatory model draws attention to is the way in which practices such as language, ritual, and history provided the context within which the self is understood, supplying the scaffolding upon which personal identity is built.’ More even than scaffolding, which is removed when a building is complete, these participatory goods often end up functioning as constituent parts of personal identity. They’re not just the scaffolding — they’re the brick and the mortar” (p. 119). And the issues apply not only to the identify of the self, but also to the identity of an entire culture.

Matthes has me thinking more deeply not only about the larger issues regarding the conservation of cultural artifacts important to large groups of people, but also about issues related to my own personal possessions – issues exacerbated as my partner and I live into the downsizing appropriate to people of a certain age. I’m not surprised that he closes the book with thoughts about small items from his family history that he has preserved. He wonders whether his young daughter will find in these items anything like the sense of self they hold for him. I’m thinking about an old metal measuring cup, a gift from a favorite grandparent more than fifty years ago when I moved into my first apartment. Each morning these days, as we prepare our breakfast, I weigh our breakfast coffee beans in that cup. I’m thinking also of a worn rocking chair from my grandparents’ house now sitting in our living room, this one an inheritance rather than a gift. Both the cup and the rocking chair – simple material objects in themselves – have me thinking of my grandmother, the life she lived, and how she helped to shape the person that I’ve become. Perhaps our son will someday face the question whether one or both of these objects carry similar meanings for him, despite the fact that he never met my grandmother. As Matthes says, my treasuring them now is an important element in the person that I am. My saving them now offers our son the opportunity to find some sense of history in his family as well.

It’s worth saying that I once had other items from my grandparents. Now I have only the measuring cup and rocking chair. The other things disappeared from my life one by one over the years, sometimes because I lost them, and other times because I made either a considered or impulsive decision to pass them on. But my having and treasuring these two items now that shapes my sense of my history and my sense of self. Simone de Beauvoir says somewhere that our identity is a combination of choice and chance. I think Matthes is right in saying that the things we save and the reasons we save them both shape our identity and I agree that we should take care in deciding how and why we save them.

We also have to acknowledge the chance involved in this. My discovering his book was a matter of chance. I’d say the same about my holding onto the cup and the chair. The book, the cup, and the chair have shaped the person that I am, and I’m grateful for the chance that brought them into my life.

The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters

by Sean B. Carroll

Click on the summary to read the entire note about this book.
Carroll takes the title of this book from the Serengeti, a massive ecosystem in Africa supporting a wide variety of animal and plants species. Extensive research of this ecosystem has provided a deep understanding of how the many different species interact. Carroll draws on this research to develop a set of rules that he calls the Serengeti rules, and argues that these rules are relevant the study of both other ecosystems of animals and plants and also individual organisms like human beings. In each case, a healthy system is one in which the different players exist in a balanced environment. Moreover, he says, the rules provide a framework that supports interventions that can heal damaged systems, both in the larger environment and in individual organisms. In each case, he says, someone seeking to return a system to a balanced state needs to identify the players, sort out all the relationships among them, figure out what’s missing or over-abundant, and finally to introduce corrections. He’s not suggesting that this work is easy, and he acknowledges that we face major challenges from both diseases that affect individual organisms and ecological disruption, but he expresses what I would call a cautious optimism, arguing that we are not defenseless in either case.

His goal here is both to integrate the work and research of molecular biologists with that of ecologists. He traces the development of medical research and practice that have helped us to face major health challenges — like polio and smallpox – and overcome those challenges. On the basis of this survey, he develops “a set of general rules and a logic of regulation” that he says has broad application in both medical and environmental practice:

Positive regulation – A → B – A positively regulates the abundance or activity of B

Negative regulation – A →| – A negatively regulates the abundance or activity of B

Double-negative logic – A →| B →| C — A negatively regulates B, which negatively regulates C; A increases the abundance of C through double-negative logic

Feedback regulation – A → B → C →| A — The accumulation of C feeds back to negatively regulate A and the production of B and C

He then turns to a discussion of several different instances in which researchers have identified particular stress points in decaying environments and then worked to restore those environments to something like their natural balance. This leads him to the statement of the Serengeti rules. While the Serengeti is something like an archetype here, he includes several examples from other ecosystems.

The Serengeti rules, together with their relationship to the general rules and logic of regulation

Keystones: Not all species are equal. In a particular ecosystem or food web, there are some species that punch above their weight – their impact on the system is out of proportion to their numbers or biomass.

Some species mediate strong indirect effects through trophic cascades. An environment can be seen as a food web, in which some animals are primarily or exclusively predators, some are both predators and prey, and some are only prey, eating plants rather than animals. In these webs, the predatory nature of some species has an extremely strong “top-down” impact on the ecosystem as a whole.

Here “A →| B →| C”: A predator can decrease the number of its prey, which means that the food of the prey become more numerous

Competition: Some species compete for common resources. This competition has an impact on the rates of survival of these different species.

Here “A →| B”: when two species compete for food, each lowers the number of individuals of the other species.

Body size affects the mode of regulation. Smaller animals are typically regulated (i.e., the size of their population is controlled) in a top-down way by predation, while larger animals are typically regulated in a bottom-up way by food supply.

Top-down regulation is an expression of “A →| B”: The existence of the predator negatively impacts the number of the prey.

Bottom-up regulation is an expression of “A → B”: the relative availability of food supports or restricts the number of animals that depend on that food.

Density: The regulation of some species depends on their density. A food environment can support only a certain number of individuals in a species that eats a particular food. This is how the food supply provides bottom-up regulation.

Here he has a slightly modified expression of the general rule of feedback regulation: “A → → → A →| A”: the increase in the number of individuals is eventually lowered because more individuals mean less food for each of them.

Migration increases animal numbers. A species that typically migrates can increase its numbers, both by having access to a wider range of food supply and by having lower exposure to predators that don’t follow the migration.

Nature is resilient. This rule, Carroll says, is perhaps the most important rule, in large part because it provides some encouragement that we can overcome the environmental and climate-related challenges we currently face. He offers examples of instances when environments that were seemingly totally destroyed have been restored to something very close to an ecological balance.

Throughout the book, he relies heavily on the work of the scientists who did the research he is describing. He captures the drama of their research and also their personalities as these were expressed in their work. While I’m impressed by his optimism that we can meet the challenges we face, I fear that I didn’t emerge from my reading quite as encouraged as I think he would like me to be. Perhaps I’m overly shaped by the moment — the growing skepticism of scientific and medical expertise, the decay of our public health system, and the emphasis on short-term goals at the expense of long-term health of both individuals and ecosystems — but I don’t share his optimism, cautious though it is.

A postscript. Picking up on my comment about the stresses of the current moment, it occurred to me that Carroll’s rules and principles might help me to understand better what’s going on in the United States and formulate some sort of response to it. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suggest that there are different players involved in our culture and politics, and that in a properly functioning democracy these players are in symbiotic relationships with each other. Of course, there’s the standard rule of the checks and balances between the three branches of government, but I would suggest that these aren’t the only players here. Other players include the political parties, the news media, the entertainment media, the public as a whole, and also the various publics. Surely there are others. Following Carroll’s lead, how might we sort out all the relationships among these players, figure out what’s missing or over-abundant, and finally introduce some corrections. Having written this out, I confess that I can’t muster even the small amount of optimism regarding this task that I have for Carroll’s proposals for the ecosystem and human health. It would be an interesting exercise to explore the possibilities, even if it leads merely to acknowledging the impossibility.

Metazoa: Animal life and the birth of the mind

by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

Click on the summary to read the entire note about this book.
As the book’s subtitle suggests, Godfrey-Smith presents here his understanding of how consciousness emerged in evolutionary development. He’s arguing here for a position he calls (and others call) biological materialism, a view that differs starkly from the dualism of philosophers like Descartes. The “project is to show that somehow a universe of processes that are not themselves mental, or conscious, can organize themselves in a way that gives rise to felt experience. Somehow, a part of the world’s often-mindless activity folded itself into minds” (p. 19). In short, he says, minds emerged in biological evolution, not as something different from or somehow produced by material processes, but rather as those processes themselves: “Brain processes are not causes of thoughts and experiences; they are thoughts and experiences” (p. 20).

In this work he draws not only on scientific research, but also on a wide range of philosophical reflection. He complements this research and reflection with examples from his own observations of animals in the sea and on land. He makes his way through time and the many branches of the evolutionary tree, drawing comparisons and contrasts between different elements that might be called the precursors of experience and consciousness in animals and even, at some points, in plants. Along the way, he highlights developments of these precursors that he says anticipate something like the experience of contemporary animals generally and/or human beings in particular.

That’s the structure of his presentation generally stated; I found some of the particular discussions along the way to be especially interesting.

I’m particularly fascinated by his rather extensive discussion of research on split-brain patients, human beings whose connection between the two hemispheres of the brain has been severed. This severance has often been done in order to treat humans suffering from severe seizures. Severing the connection prevents a seizure that starts on one side of the brain from spreading to the entire brain. Work with these individuals highlights the fact that each of the two hemispheres specializes (to some extent) in particular tasks.

For example, in some studies, researchers ask a subject to describe an object that’s presented only to the left visual field, which feeds it to the right side of the brain. They then ask the subject to describe the object. However, speech function is centered in the left side of the brain, so the subjects are unable orally to describe the object that they see. Research by philosopher Elizabeth Schlechter points to “improvised communication between the two halves of the brain that takes place in the public world. For example, in a number of documented cases, the right side of a patient’s brain, which cannot speak, has tried to convey messages to the left side by writing with a finger of the left hand onto the back of the right hand. If the right hemisphere knows the answer to something and the left does not, the right may try to get a message across in this way. This was sometimes an attempt to subvert the point of an experiment, as the aim was to show images to the right side and see how much the left could say about them. The experimenter would see the finger writing and say, ‘Don’t write!’” (p. 152).

In other research the hemispheres are “disconnected” using with anesthesia, in one stage putting one side of the brain to sleep and in the next stage putting the other side of the brain to sleep. “At each stage the patient is tested on their use of language, to see what they can do with one half of their brain asleep. In most cases, when the left side is asleep the patient can’t speak. But the patient is still conscious, or seems so, at both stages: ‘During the test he would show me something, ask me to identify it and whether he had showed it to be before. …For the right side of the brain I didn’t notice anything different. For the left side — wow! When he showed me an object I looked at it and had that feeling you get when you can’t think of a word, like it’s on the tip of your tongue. Only that was true for all words — it was amazing! I had no words” (pp. 153f).

Some of the same specialization in the two hemispheres is apparently present in non-human animals, animals in which the connection between the two hemispheres isn’t as strong. Consider the toad: “If prey is brought from out of view into the left side of a toad’s field of vision, where most information goes to the right side of the brain, the toad usually won’t strike at the prey until it has crossed into the other half of the visual field, engaging the left side of the brain. The left, again, is the side that specializes in identifying food. The opposite applies, roughly speaking, when what is seen is a competitor toad rather than food” (p. 239). Godfrey-Smith suggests that the heightened skill in food recognition by the left side of the brain offsets the cost of the right side’s not recognizing prey as prey.

Another interesting point is the relationship between social engagement and brain development. Simply put, some animals are gregarious, preferring to stay in larger groups, often to provide a measure of protection against predators. “A complex social environment makes it worthwhile to develop recognition, memory, and strategic skills” (p. 181). (Interestingly enough, experiments with fish suggest that some are able to use this pattern-recognition ability to distinguish between blues and classical music.) It’s worth noting that many researchers suggest a similar process early in the evolutionary process leading to humans, when our predecessors moved out of forests into the Savannah, where they gradually developed cooperative skills (and the brains to manage them) that allowed them to flourish. Those who are more adept in such relationships have an evolutionary advantage — they’re more likely to survive long enough to pass these skills on to their offspring. (And, it seems, many human beings can also learn to distinguish between blues and classical music.)

These are just a couple of examples of the research Godfrey-Smith describes as he develops his argument for biological materialism. He makes what I think is a convincing case that experience itself emerged gradually as increasingly complex organisms developed more sophisticated ways of taking information about the external world in and then manipulating that world. He develops a simmilar narrative that shows how particular elements — “new kinds of engagement with the world through the senses and action…, subjectivity and agency…, [and] a tacit sense of self” (p. 258f) — eventually came together in human beings as what we now call consciousness or mind. He readily admits that there remain many questions to explore about this. And he argues that something like consciousness is more broadly distributed across animals and even insects than is commonly thought. There is, however, one way in which human consciousness is different from that of other animals, at least to some extent: “A feature of human cognition that really does seem to differ greatly from what goes on in other animals is something psychologists call ‘executive control,’ the ability to direct oneself on a task, suppress momentary urges, and marshal one’s various abilities in pursuit of a consciously represented goal. Through this side of human cognition, in concert with tools such as language as an organizer of thought, we can deliberately induce and control our offline journeys, rather than just having them happen. We can set out deliberately to some particular elsewhere, though we might also meander, drift off, and dream” (p. 258). As I read him, though, he sees this more as a difference in degree rather than an absolute contrast. Just as both experience and consciousness emerged gradually, so that there’s no particular moment which marked the move from absence of either to its full presence, so the line dividing our ability to focus from that of other animals is rather fuzzily and broadly drawn.

Surely it’s clear that I’m not a biologist. Nor am I conversant with the details of evolution generally or human evolution in particular. I’m not in a position to evaluate the soundness of his entire discussion. But I found the book to be extremely engaging, both in its general argument and in the particular examples he introduces along the way.

Currently reading

(Yikes! This list is growing out of control – my excuse is that some of these are library books with short check-out times that came to me before I expected to receive them. And I’m not yet ready to give up on the others.)

A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the making of the planet, life, and you

by Sean B. Carroll

A. J. Ayer: A life

by Ben Rogers

Saving Time: A life beyond the clock

by Jenny Odell

A Sand County Almanac and sketches here and there

by Aldo Leopold

Fly and the Fly-Bottle (a re-read)

by Ved Mehta

Confession

by Leo Tolstoy

So Late in the Day: Stories of women and men

by Claire Keegan

Equality and Tradition: Questions of value in moral and political theory

by Samuel Scheffler (I’ll likely read just a few of these essays)

Radical: A life of my own

by Xiaolu Guo

reading