Pascal's Wager by James A. Connor

Blaise Pascal had a great impact on mathematics. He laid the foundations of our mathematical understanding of probability. A computer programming language was named for him.

Pascal was also a deeply religious man and philosopher. His book Pensées is read as a devotional by many Christians. His argument that the belief in God is rational is widely known.

James A. Connor takes the name of that argument for the name of his biography of the man, Pascal’s Wager. Connor considers both Pascal’s life in science and math and his religious convictions.

For many, there is no conflict in scientific study and religious devotion, but there was for Pascal. He was a Jansenist, though somewhat at odds with the leaders of the movement because of his interests in science and philosophy. The Jansenists were deeply concerned with sin and living a life of penitence; to pursue anything else was to embrace worldliness. Pascal loved the discoveries he made by reason and experiment, but he also longed for a life of purity and closeness to God.

Pascal was seen as a bit of a mathematical prodigy, especially in his youth when his father led a secular life by the standards of the day. He published a pamphlet on conic sections when he was 16 years old. He invented a calculating machine, the Pascaline, when he was 19. He was still fairly young by modern standards when he developed a theory of probability in a series of letter he exchanged with Pierre Fermat.

He had a mystical experience in 1654 that changed his focus in life. He told know one about it, but wrote a note about it that he kept pinned in his coat to carry with him the rest of his life. The note was discovered by his nephew shortly after his death.

After his experience, he devoted more of his time to supporting Jansenism, which his entire family had come to follow, especially his sister, Jacqueline, a nun. Jansenists were in conflict with other Catholics over their views on original sin and election, especially with the Jesuits. Pascal became an apologist for Jansenism, and especially mocked the Jesuits in The Provincial Letters.

Politics and religion were deeply linked in 17^th Century France, and the conflict between Pascal’s sect and the wider French Catholic church became a conflict with Louis XIV. He felt that the Jansenist leaders capitulated to the king and the Jesuits, which brought him into conflict with them as well.

Though religious debates had been part of his entire life, this heating up of the conflict to such a level occurred toward the end of his life. He expressed his devotion to God in self-imposed poverty and care for the poor; which in one case took the form of establishing the first public transportation system. He did not abandon math, though, and published a paper on the cycloid as well. He had been sick most of his life and passed away in 1662 at the age of 39.

Connor’s book is approachable for most readers. Though Pascal’s fame today probably rests more on his accomplishments as a mathematician, Connor shows how his life was shaped by his religion and both the religious and secular traditions of his time (Connor is a former Jesuit priest).

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Chance by Amir Aczel

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

Connor, James A. Pascal’s Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need by Paul Pearsall

Self-help books are baloney. Psychologist Paul Pearsall didn’t go that far, but he encouraged readers of his book The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need to have a healthy skepticism about the advice and claims of self-help books. Much of the standard advice in the genre is unsupported by research and sometimes just wrong.

Pearsall’s chief criticism of self-help is its focus on the personal and individual. He argued that there is more joy and fulfillment, along with better solutions to our problems, to be found in the interpersonal and relational aspects of life.

Good relationships are largely a matter of the value you place in them. If you want to others to like you, find ways to like them first. To get love, give love. To find a partner, become someone who would be a good partner. Look for the best in others and overlook their faults. Lasting, loving relationships are based on commitment, not passing, emotional passion.

Another important aspect of Pearsall’s perspective is that there is much to be said for accepting life as it is, good and bad, instead of buying into self-help’s striving for the perfect life.

Life is never going to be perfect anyway. There is no reason to make yourself crazy trying. Instead, aim for a good life of deep enjoyment and engagement. Life is chaotic. Remain calm and learn to enjoy the messy reality. Practice mindfulness; accept the facts of life as it is, but do not passively accept the interpretation you may receive from others. You find the great pleasures and great challenges of living in thinking for yourself.

The themes of relationships and mindful acceptance run through all the chapters of the book. In addition to those areas already mentioned, Pearsall address health and work.

If you’ve read a lot of self-help, you may feel burdened by the gap between where you are and where self-help authors say you can be. Pearsall’s book may be an antidote for that. At the very least, reading it may put things in perspective and help you give yourself a break.

Paul Pearsall also wrote

The Beethoven Factor

Toxic Success

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat

Pearsall, Paul. The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

In The Language of God, physician and chemist Francis S. Collins considers the compatibility of science and religion. At the time this book was published (2006), Collins was head of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Since 2009, he has served as director of the National Institutes of Health.

Collins is a Christian, but he did not come to the faith until after starting his career in medicine and science. His interactions with patients drew him to consider the spiritual aspects of life. Through this God eventually drew Collins to Christ.

Collins is very much a supporter of science. He readily calls people of faith to task for damaging their own cause through ignorance of science or abandonment of reason. A true god won’t be damaged if we come to a better knowledge of his creation.

Science, however, is hardly able to answer all of humanity’s important questions. It isn’t designed to do that, and sometimes it simply cannot do it.

In exploring the issue, Collins considers several potential stands on religion. He finds atheism impossible to defend. His own former agnosticism was something he could hold to so long as he did not seriously delve into the questions of existence, human life and ethics. He argues that theism is the most reasonable belief, though it may take a few more steps to get from theism to Christianity.

He also gives some attention to the idea of how we can live peaceably with science and religion. He has plenty to find in history. The seeming antagonism between science and religion, which he attributes mostly to proponents of extreme views on both sides, is a relatively new phenomenon. Historically (and currently) many scientists were people of faith and the church was a supporter of scientific discovery. He finds model of harmony between science and religion going back to St. Augustine.

Collins addresses this book to both believers and nonbelievers. To both he argues that belief in God is rational, and that faith is complementary to science.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Why Science Does Not Disprove God by Amir Aczel

Collins, Francis S. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Free Press, 2006.

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

Clarence King was probably the most well-known American scientist of his time. It doesn’t hurt that his scientific reputation was built on exploration of the then still wild west of the United States of that he could spin a tale. Robert Wilson recounts the life of the accomplished geologist in The Explorer King.

King was born in 1842. He was raised in Newport, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.

As a young man, King was enamored of art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin thought the rugged Alps of Europe to be the best subject of art for their beauty, colorfulness, ruggedness and variety. When he met western geologists and mountaineers through mentors at Sheffield, he wanted to be part of it.

He headed out for California in 1863 and became part of the state’s geologic survey. He would spend the next decade studying the geology and geography of the American west, especially its mountains. He showed great physical prowess and courage as a mountaineer.

After working on the California survey, he went on to lead surveys. In 1864, he was chosen to lead a survey of Yosemite.

He built on his reputation from the Yosemite survey to lobby Congress to fund a survey of the 40^th Parallel, roughly the route the transcontinental railroads would follow. Though it was under the auspices of the Army Corp of Engineers, it was the first federally-funded scientific endeavor that was completely staffed by civilians. While working on this survey, he was the first to discover active glaciers in the U.S. His team published new methods of silver smelting to make the mines for productive (the survey’s first report dealt with mining in order to show the commercial value of their research to money-conscious Congressmen).

The 40^th Parallel survey made King famous, though not because of the many contributions to science that came from it. King’s team heard rumors of a diamond discovery in Colorado. It would have been very embarrassing for them to have walked over such a valuable mineral resource without observing it. They tracked down the site of the discovery and determined it was a hoax; the site had been planted with rough diamonds and other uncut gemstones that the con men had bought mostly with money from their marks. Stories of massive fraud sells newspapers, especially when the names of big money men in San Francisco and New York are attached to it. King was the hero of the story.

When the U.S. Geological Survey was created, King was appointed to be its first director. His career as a scientist was already on the decline. He would turn his attention to making money in mining, but he would not be successful. He would have no money when he died.

This leads to an interesting point about King, though it is not the focus of Wilson’s biography. King had nothing to leave for his secret family. He was married to a black woman. This was a very unusual thing at the time. To protect his reputation, he kept the marriage a secret. He did not even reveal to his wife his real identity until shortly before he died (she knew him as James Todd). His friend John Hay provided for Ada Copeland Todd (and the five children she had with King) after King died in 1901.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

Wilson, Robert. The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West. New York: Scribner, 2006.

A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin

In A Slight Trick of the Mind, Mitch Cullin imagines the life of an aged Sherlock Holmes. He has lived through two world wars and seen most of his closest friends and family die. He is a man with no place in the world, and even the little place he has separated out for himself cannot hold back time.

This is not a crime story, but it deals with mysteries. These are not mysteries in the secret society sense of things revealed only to the cognoscenti. They are mysteries in the Christian sense of things that are beyond the understanding of man. The Holmes of this book is struggling with memory, death, war, abandonment, relationships, and grief. Even with diminished capacity, Holmes can tell how a boy died. What Holmes can’t grasp is how this boy he had come to love should die for no apparent reason while he has lived long after his place in the world faded away.

I have always thought that part of the appeal of Holmes was his humanity. Though he has a cool demeanor and focuses on reason, these things don’t motivate him. Beneath the surface is a passion for justice and a compassion for his fellow man. Cullin captures both of these sides of a very old Holmes who is struggling with mysteries that stump us all.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Cullin, Mitch. A Slight Trick of the Mind. 2005. New York: Anchor, 2006.

The Power of Nice by Linda Kaplan Thaler & Robin Koval

Nice guys do not finish last. According to advertising executives Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, authors of The Power of Nice, kindness, generosity, empathy pay off even in the business world.

Kindness is a great way to make a positive impression, and those impressions can come back multiplied. In addition, you never know when the one you’re showing kindness to someone who has the will and means to extravagantly repay you, though you shouldn’t go around with a fake generosity hoping some of your supposed goodness will bind a jinni to your service. Be good because it is good, but don’t be surprised when the little people you help along the way become big people who want to help you.

Niceness should become automatic, a way you treat people all the time, whoever they are. You’ll know when you’re being genuine and when you’re being fake, and let the knowledge lead you to be genuinely kind. Extend it to cover even your rivals; if you can’t convert them, you’ll neutralize them to some degree.

Even if you don’t have much to give, be a giver. Even little gestures, smiles, and a helpful hand count. One of the seemingly most simple, but in practice difficult, things to give is your attention. Few things move a person as much as the sense that someone genuinely listened to them; and it is a great way to learn.

The skill at the heart of all this is empathy. I use the word skill because Kaplan Thaler and Koval write about how people can improve their empathy. First, listen to the emotion words; people are telling you how they feel if you will listen. Consider how what you say and do will affect others. Finally, don’t assume the actions of others are about you; they have other stuff going on.

This is a short book and full of anecdotes. If you’re looking for a quick read touching on the emotional side of business with practical advice, this will suit your needs.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Eat That Cookie! by Liz Jazwiec

It’s Not About Me by Max Lucado

The Velveteen Principles by Toni Raiten-D’Antonio

Why Good Things Happen to Good People by Stephen Post and Jill Neimark

Kaplan Thaler, Linda, & Robin Koval. The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness. New York: Currency, 2006.

Esther

Esther is one of the most famous people from the Old Testament. The story of her life, as told in the Biblical book bearing her name, has been adapted to the stage and film. Joan Collins played her in Esther and the King (1960); Tiffany Dupont played her in One Night with the King (2006) based on the novel by Tommy Tenney. In 2013, Jen Lilley played the role in The Book of Esther.

It is easy to see why the book has captured the interest of storytellers in several media. It has court intrigues, romance, poetic justice, a beauty pageant, culture clashes, political and religious oppression, just to name a few elements a storyteller or reader of almost any persuasion might latch onto. You can bring many viewpoints to this book and carry many interpretations from it, though the book also provides its own interpretation.

Esther takes place during the reign of the Persian King Ahasuerus (generally identified as Xerxes I). He puts aside his wife, Queen Vashti, and his princes arrange an elaborate campaign to find a replacement. Esther is forcibly recruited into the competition. Esther is a Jewish woman, a ward of her relative Mordecai, who serves in Ahasuerus’ court. He secretly advises her, her humility and kindness win her favor in with the head caretaker of the harem, and her beauty wins the king. Meanwhile, Haman, a high official who has come to hate Mordecai, hatches a plan to destroy the Jewish people through the empire. Esther risks her life to appeal to the king and thwart Haman’s plan. This summary hardly does justice to the story, though even in the Bible the style is plain.

These events are the genesis of the Jewish festival of Purim. This is where the internal interpretation of the book comes in. Esther is celebrated for her courage to act. In addition to that, the hand of God, who is barely mentioned in the book, is seen throughout the events. He puts someone in place to rescue the Jewish captives from their enemies. He elevates Esther and Mordecai to give them protection while they are under the rule of foreigners. Though the people were threatened with genocide, God used the situation to preserve them and possibly even set up their eventual return to their homeland.

The historical books of the Bible are generally written in a plain, narrative style, though it occasionally records songs or other literary forms. Esther stands out in that it is almost novelistic. The conflict escalates to a climax followed by a brief denouement. This makes it a very engaging book.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Deal with It! by Paula White

Second Kings

Esther. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Mindset by Carol S. Dweck

Beliefs can powerfully affect our success in life. In her book Mindsets, psychologist Carol S. Dweck describes two prevailing, overarching beliefs that can color our assessments of everything in life and affect our willingness to do what it takes to achieve our goals.

Dweck refers to these two beliefs as the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence, character, and personality are unchanging. You have the talent or knack for something or you don’t. The contrasting growth mindset is that people can improve their abilities by their efforts. If you’re willing to do the work, you can learn and get better.

These mindsets affect the way we view ourselves and interpret everything that happens in our lives. People with a fixed mindset see problems, setbacks and failures as a reflection on who they are. If they have difficulty with a subject, maybe they aren’t smart enough. If a relationship is troubled, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. The fixed mindset comes with a lens of judgment, through which one sees success as a validation of talent or specialness, and difficulty or failures as proof of inherent shortcomings.

People with a growth mindset see failure as a sign of where they are, or their current status, which they can change. If they have difficulty with a subject, they can study harder or ask for help. If a relationship is troubled, they can reflect on things they or their partner are doing that may be producing negative results. With the growth mindset, failures become opportunities to learn and successes are evidence that your efforts are paying off.

Though written in an informal style, Dweck draws on her own and others’ research. She also draws examples from business, education and sports. She illustrates the mindsets in the lives of CEOs, teachers, students and coaches.

There are few points I’d particularly like to remember from this book. First, the fixed mindset is essentially rooted in pride. A person with a fixed mindset sees himself as special or superior to others, and much of he does is oriented to proving that point, at least to himself. A person with a growth mindset doesn’t expect to be good at anything, at least at the start, because he has much to learn and much effort to put into improving; he is humble.

It is important to praise rightly. Praising someone’s talent or ability tends to put them into the fixed mindset. This may make them less likely to take on challenges or put forth effort in the future. Instead, praise the effort, which puts people into the growth mindset and makes them or open to taking on challenging work, even at the risk of failure, in order to learn and improve.

Change is not easy. In particular, one with a fixed mindset must put aside the idea that he is special and let go of the strategies he used to protect that status. He must embrace a new, less idealized, image of himself that is open to challenges, setbacks, and even failures for the sake of learning—all things the fixed mindset guards against. When you adopt growth-minded strategies that produce positive changes, you can’t let up on practice and learning. People can easily slide back into old habit, and the fixed-minded judgment of the backslide can be worse than the judgment of the perceived failures before the change.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Future Bright by Martin E. Martinez

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

9 Things You Must Do by Henry Cloud

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006.

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (audio book)

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (Random House, 2006)

Audio book read by Dennis Boutsikaris

This is the story of the trial of two men for the murder of Debra Sue Carter, a young woman who worked as a waitress in Ada, Oklahoma. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were convicted of a crime they did not commit, and the justice system consumed more than a decade of their lives before minimally correcting its error.

I’m not surprised it took so long to overturn the convictions of these men. I’m surprised it got so far to begin with. The police investigation was very incomplete and shoddy, even for 30 years ago when technology and science played a much lesser role in collecting and analyzing evidence (Grisham strongly suggests the Ada police had ties to drug dealer, including one of the detectives on the case, and that influenced the investigation). The lawyers for the defense were competent, but they were not supplied with the means to mount a good defense for their poor clients. Williamson was clearly mentally ill, but there was never a proper determination of his fitness to stand trial. The evidence was so thin I’m surprised a trial was permitted. They even let a former Ada police chief sit on the jury (admittedly, he was not forthcoming during jury selection, but you would think someone in that small town would have known or pressed the issue more).

I can understand the thirst for answers, especially in a small community where a violent crime captures the public attention. It reminds me of the 2005 conviction here in central Missouri of Ryan Ferguson for the of journalist Kent Heitholt in 2001, when Ferguson was still in high school. The conviction rested on some uncertain eyewitness accounts, possibly influenced by police and prosecutors, and the confession Charles Erickson. There seems to be little evidence against Erickson except his drug-induced loss of memories of the night of the crime. He took a plea bargain to testify against Ferguson. As with Williamson, police and courts seemed to pay little attention to the mental state of Erickson.

In spite of the lack of evidence to back up the witnesses few, in my mind Erickson is a very sketchy witness even to his own involvement, the jury convicted Ferguson. People wanted answers, order, justice, and a sense that the issue was resolved so they could return to a safe life. This made them blind to all the problems with the case against Ferguson. The police felt those public pressures and were too ready to go with a problematic case rather than go through a tough investigation that might lead to no answers. The case had other problems, and as people began to admit to false confessions and prosecutorial influence of witnesses, the conviction was revisited and overturned in 2013, after Ferguson had spent most of his 20s in prison.

I think our justice system is often close to the mark and produces mostly good results. However, it should not take years, or decades, to correct such problematic cases as these. In fact, these cases should have never come to trial based on such flimsy evidence.

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

Harry Bruinius takes the title of his book, Better for All the World, from a quote from famous United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  In his opinion, written for a court majority that authorized states to forcibly sterilize some people, Holmes expressed the notion that it was better to sterilize a defective person than to permit them to have defective children who may place greater burden on government systems for justice and welfare.

This legal justification for forced sterilization was just one of the policy victories of the eugenics movement in the America. Eugenicists were also influential in establishing state marriage laws and federal immigration quotas and restrictions.

Even from its start, notions of social engineering and politics tinged the science of eugenics. Francis Galton coined the word that applied to both the study of heredity and the improvement of humanity through selective breeding over generations. Galton established the field based on concepts from his cousin Charles Darwin’s books on evolution, Gregor Mendel’s studies of plant heredity, and his own statistical studies of human characteristics. Though he mostly kept these speculations to himself, he considered the possibility of improving humans through breeding just as farmers improved plants and livestock.

American reformers of all political persuasion welcomed Galton’s ideas; they were looking for reliable, scientific means of tackling poverty and crime. Galton’s method were used to study families and supposedly proved that traits related to poverty, criminality, low intelligence, and the harder to recognize (therefore more dangerous) feeblemindedness. These studies also uncover a troubling pairing in females of feeblemindedness and fecundity. The implication was that the good stock of moral, productive Americans risked overrun by a class of hereditary degenerates. America’s best needed to produce larger family, and its poor and feebleminded needed to be restrained from passing on their inferior traits.

Much of Bruinius’ book focuses on this American eugenics movement. Representing leadership in the scientific community is Charles Davenport. He popularized the work of Galton, convinced the Carnegie Institute to fund a station to study eugenics, and did research that contributed to the early development of genetics. Representing the bridge between science and policy is Harry Laughlin. A Missourian and a protégé of Davenport, his reports and advice to Congress helped to inform restrictive immigration policy and support state programs of forced sterilization of convicts and the feebleminded, ultimately upheld in by the Supreme Court, as previously mentioned, in the case of Buck vs. Bell.

The development of eugenics policy in the U.S. was being watched overseas. In particularly, racial purity laws enacted by the Nazis in Germany explicitly cited American research and legal precedents. Many reformers in America and elsewhere were gratified by the apparent success of eugenics policies in Germany.

Even as it was reaching its peak as a political reform movement, laboratory science was undermining eugenics. Laboratory studies of the mechanisms of heredity, which had discovered chromosomes by the 1930s, were showing that heredity and the expression of traits, especially moral or personality traits, were much more complicated and harder to predict than the eugenicists assumed. Through its association with the Nazis, eugenics became wholly discredited in the public mind, though its effects lingered in American policies for decades.

Our understanding of genetics and heredity has improved a lot. Biotechnology has made a new kind of genetic engineering possible. The eugenicist dreams of eliminating disease and creating better people in future generations is more attainable than ever, at least in limited ways.

If this puts our evolution in our hands, are we ethically and morally evolved enough to use this power? Are humans intelligent animals or are we unique creatures? Are human rights inalienable characteristics of human beings, or are they social constructs, ideas that can rise, fade, or change like other ideas? How does the good of the species relate to the good of the individual? What does it mean to be a parent? The way we answer these questions, and other related to the implications of our science and technology, will establish what kind of people we are, and possibly the destiny of generations to come.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Bruinius, Harry. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

A Complaint Free World by Will Bowen

It was big news back in 2006 to 2007 when a Kansas City church challenged its members, and the eventually the world, to stop complaining. The pastor, Will Bowen who authored A Complaint Free World, appeared on Oprah. The method was simple. Wear a purple bracelet; every time you complain, switch the bracelet from one wrist to the other. When you manage to go 21 days without speaking a complaint (it will take months for most people), you form habits that reduce even your complaining thoughts. A rubber band, a token you switch from pocket to pocket, or similar reminder will do the trick.

Complaining is talking about what we don’t want instead of what we want. This is important in Bowen’s view because our words are a reflection of our thoughts and, as Earl Nightingale put it, “We become what we think about.” Complaining creates in our lives more of what we complain about. When we start thinking more about what we want, we’ll get more of what we want.

Why do we complain? We do it to get sympathy, to avoid something we don’t want to do, to demonstrate our sophistication, or even as a way of bragging.

Bowen gives several reasons to quit complaining. One is health. He cites a study that indicates complaining makes us sick; as much as two-thirds of illness is psychological in origin. In addition, complaining about others (criticism) is rarely works to change them; people respond to appreciation. Even great social movements that started in deep dissatisfaction moved forward by showing a positive vision of the world as it could be.

I visited the web site established for the movement, AComplaintFreeWorld.org. It looks like they no longer give out free purple bracelets, but you can order them or get a free widget.

The notion of becoming what you think is in line with Bowens faith. This is a teaching of Unity, a religion founded in Kansas City. (Incidentally, I used to work in Lee’s Summit a short distance from the organization’s headquarters in Unity Village.) Though Unity expresses esteem for the Bible and Jesus Christ, it’s teachings about the nature of God, the Bible, Jesus, the notion of Christ, and the relationship of man and God is very different from traditional Christianity.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Acres of Diamonds by Russel H. Conwell

The 4:8 Principle by Tommy Newberry

Gratitude by Melody Beattie

Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott

I Declare by Joel Osteen

Just Say Thanks! by R. T. Kendall

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good by Robert H. Schuller

Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melody Beattie

Positive Imaging by Norman Vincent Peale

Power in Praise by Merlin R. Carothers

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

The Success Principles by Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer

Thanks! by Robert A. Emmons

365 Thank Yous by John Kralik

Write It Down, Make It Happen by Henriette Anne Klaus

You Can if You Think You Can by Norman Vincent Peale

Bowen, Will. A Complaint Free World: How to Stop Complaining and Start Enjoying the Life You Always Wanted. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

This Year I Will... by M. J. Ryan

Many of us make New Year’s resolutions, but few of us keep them. There is less interest on the statistics of other goals, but it seems likely that resolutions are hard to keep whenever we make them. Self-help author and consultant M. J. Ryan would like to change that sorry state of affairs. Her book This Year I Will… has advice on how to turn goals into action and dreams into reality.

Ryan makes the important point that much of our behavior is habitual. We have repeated behaviors so many times that we unthinkingly return to them when we encounter the stimulus that triggers them. To complicate the matter, our behaviors fill a need or solve a problem. If they hadn’t they wouldn’t have become ingrained habits.

You don’t have to delve into you half-remembered childhood to change behavior, though. You just need to identify the underlying need or problem and find other means of dealing with them. Ideally, the new behaviors will also help you meet your goals instead of getting in the way.

I suppose I have made it sound easy.  It is not, and Ryan does not promise quick fixes. In fact, she warns her readers they will face internal resistance to change. There are parts of brain, power emotional parts that exert a lot of control over us, that see change as a threat and will not easily leave the familiar path. Ryan offers advice on how to handle this, and even how to get our emotional brain to help us instead of hinder our change.

The book is organized into short chapters. Ryan suggests you can go directly to the parts you need and return to the other parts later, or when they seem more useful. Instead of being a book you read through once, she wants This Year I Will… to be a reference you can return to when you need fresh ideas or a refresher on techniques you’ve used before.  Some of the subjects that stood out to me were

• concentrate on “what” instead of “why,”
• dealing with doubt,
• taking action,
• focusing on one or a few changes at a time,
• taking one step at a time (though sometimes we need a big goal to motivate us),
• track your progress (I’m a believer in this),
• have a Plan B (and C, and D…),
• tips for effective visualization,
• performance review, and
• remember to have fun.

There is more than that. The book is not a collection of unrelated mini-chapters. Though the book isn’t necessarily made to be read linearly, I found that later chapters tend to build on earlier ones. There is also a subtle shift from an almost wholly practical to a somewhat philosophical view. You’re not just doing a better job of setting and achieving goals. The goals you achieve and the habits you form shape and define your life.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

Ryan, M. J. This Year I Will…: How to Finally Change a Habit, Keep a Resolution, or Make a Dream Come True. New York: MJF, 2006.

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Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

I was going read only fiction over the holidays and give myself a break from writing reviews.  So I picked up Arthur & George by Julian Barnes.  I remembered I reviewed The Sherlockian by Graham Moore and began to feel obligated to review this other novel about Arthur Conan Doyle as well.

The books are very different.  The Sherlockian is a thriller and it is entirely fictional.  Barnes’ book is a more literary, historical novel based on real events.  If he had been writing a thriller, the story would have started when Doyle got involved in overturning the wrongful conviction of solicitor George Adelji for mutilating and killing animals in the rural community where he was raised by a Scottish mother and an Indian father who converted to Anglicanism and served as a vicar.  This doesn’t occur until you’ve already read 70 percent of the book.  Barnes doesn’t indulge the achronologic order a novel permits, but he does take his time, gets into the heads of his protagonists, and takes a long look at side stories.  This is why I refer to it as a literary novel in contrast to a thriller, which is more to-the-point and plot driven.

I wonder why Barnes decided to write a novel instead of a nonfiction account of the events.  I suspect there was plenty of source material.  Doyle was a prolific writer.  Newspapers abounded in England at the time.  Clues to the truth can be found in even the most obfuscatory court and government documents.  The Adelji case led to new laws, including the introduction of appeals courts to the British criminal justice system.  I suspect he wanted to explore themes that interested him without too strictly bound to a factual narrative.

There is the suggestion of a theme in the opening chapters.  Doyle and Adelji are introduced through their childhood exposures to death, something that would have been common in the 1800s.  Doyle famously became a spiritualist.  He was committed to the idea that death was passage into another life and that gifted people could communicate with the departed.  I do not know if Adelji’s views are on the record, but Barnes depicts him as something between neutral and skeptical.  He also seems indifferent and uncurious.  The only fact he is sure of is that everyone dies.  What happens after death, if anything, is unknown, and he finds the evidence of an afterlife to be weak.  These views are not contrasted; they are juxtaposed.

Ethics may be another theme.  Doyle derived his ethical view from his notions of chivalry.  Adelji, who comes across as a high-functioning person with Asperger’s syndrome, found his place in the order and logic of the law.  There was plenty of unethical activity, or at least human venality, presented in the story: racism, eugenic notions, sloppy police work, unjust courts, and heel-dragging bureaucrats.

I might have preferred a straight nonfiction account of the events.  Barnes novelization worked for me, though.  It was certainly more effective than the partial fictionalization attempted by David Gelernter in his history of the 1939 World’s Fair.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Barnes, Julian.  Arthur & George.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

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