Underground by Will Hunt

Will Hunt has been fascinated with underground places since his childhood discovery of an abandoned tunnel in his hometown. Perhaps abandoned isn’t quite right; Hunt found signs of occasional human occupation in the old tunnels. He pursued his interest in underground places and the way people used and experienced them around the world. He describes these experiences, and what these hidden chambers mean, in Underground.

Hunt’s explorations took him into both manmade spaces and natural caves. He retells adventures from the Paris catacombs and a trip across the city that was almost entirely underground. He entered mines and saw shrines miners created for the spirits (or monsters) that live in them, beings that are sometimes generous and sometimes dangerous. Perhaps these are relatives to the spirits, strange creatures and gods reputed to live in natural caves.

Caves and tunnels are important to varying degrees to almost all religions. Shamans, priests and philosophers have long traveled under the earth to seek insight or communication with other worlds. Hunt ties this to the hallucinations and distorted sense of time humans experience when they are deprived of sensory stimulation. He does not denigrate these experiences, but sees them as something universally human. The altered state of consciousness one might enter in the utter darkness of a cave is simply another way the mind works, and possibly the root of all religion.

People did not always understand what was underground, and we are still making discoveries. Even two centuries ago, the world under our feet was a mystery. As a fan of Missouriana, I was attracted to Hunts telling of the life John Cleves Symmes. A St. Louis-based trader and former Army officer, Symmes was a proponent of a hollow earth theory. We were not living in the inner world, but he imagined there were worlds within ours existing on a series of concentric spheres. From 1818 until his death in 1829, he traveled the country lecturing on this theory and raising money to mount an expedition. He never made that trip to inner worlds, but he was an inspiration to the authors of hollow earth stories such as Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank L. Baum.

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 Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Second Chronicles

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Hunt, Will. Underground: A Human History of the World Beneath Our Feet. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

It's Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel

Depression and anxiety can be tough to handle and treat. Drugs may treat symptoms, but they do not cure depression and they typically do not work for long or require ever increasing doses. Talk based therapies can be helpful, but sometime it take a long time to get a helpful breakthrough.

Some forms of treatment aim to be more active. One such is accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy, or AEDP. This form of therapy is the basis of the methods described by therapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel in It’s Not Always Depression.

In a nutshell, AEDP sees maladaptive behaviors (defenses) and stressful emotions such as anxiety (inhibitory emotions) as ways to suppress potent core emotions. This can be useful to help us get along in social situations, maintain relationships and keep ourselves from being carried away by strong emotions. This is especially true when we are children and may not have the maturity or power to choose another path. However, we can become stuck in this behavior, never dealing properly with our core emotions, and our inhibitory emotions and defenses can become maladaptive, keeping us from the life and relationships we want and need.

Hendel organizes these items into an equilateral triangle setting on point. Defenses sit at the upper left corner, inhibitory emotions at the upper right, and core emotions at the bottom. Beneath the core emotions is your authentic self, which Hendel calls an openhearted state, in which one feels calm, confident and clear-headed.

Working the triangle is getting in touch with core emotions by finding how our defenses and inhibitory emotions are protecting us from them and the consequences of expressing them. Hendel draws examples from her therapy practice, but the fact that this is a book for a popular audience suggests that this is a technique that people could use on their own as well as in a more formal therapeutic setting. When we acknowledge our core emotions, name them, let ourselves feel them (they will pass) and express them in safe ways (sometimes through fantasy), they lose their potency and move on. By doing this repeatedly we learn that we can handle our emotions in ways that are safe and constructive; we have alternatives to our old defenses and inhibitory emotions and we can let them go. From here we can relax into an openhearted state.

“[W]e cannot  think our way through a core emotion; it must be experienced viscerally to be processed,” Hilary Jacobs Hendel, It’s Not Always Depression

Because defenses and inhibitory emotions protect us from core emotions, it can be difficult to know what we are feeling. Emotions are felt in the body, and Hendel describes was of slowing down to scan the body, assess our sensations and use this information to uncover our core emotions.

I’m not a therapist, but I can see the benefit of the framework. It gives someone a way to identify what they are doing and feeling. It can give one words to describe what one is experiencing and a process for exploring that experience. Its ultimate aim is to retrain the brain so one can let go of behaviors that are no longer helpful an embrace new ways of coping that allow for one to feel emotions and at the same time have the calm and clear mind to deal with situations constructively.

It is hard to do justice to these ideas in a few paragraphs. If you are looking for a way to deal with depression and anxiety, this book may be helpful. Even so, if your issues are severe, you should not abandon professional help from a physician or therapist. You may need a guide to help you through the process. There is no shame in that. We all need help when we are learning something new.

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

The Mindful Way through Depression by Mark Williams et al

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Hendel, Hilary Jacobs. It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi

For some, the promise of technology for easy access to information that was supposed to make us more free has devolved into constant distraction that can feel like enslavement to a cell phone. Even people who have less extreme views might still feel that it is too easy to get lost in games and social media, browsing online instead of being present, procrastinating instead of getting things done.

 I’m in that camp. I’m not an obsessive user of my phone, but I have found it easy to reach for it in quiet times when I have nothing pressing. That used to be time I spent staring into space. That could be very relaxing time. More importantly, I came up with some of my best ideas in those times or shortly afterward. My brain was hard at work behind by vacant visage, but now it is hard at work scrolling Facebook or watching YouTube videos.

 Manoush Zomorodi took this problem to the listeners of her WNYC podcast, Note to Self, and challenged them to be more aware of their use of technology and wean themselves from it to some degree. That experience, with some refinements, is described in Bored and Brilliant, and Zomorodi hopes it will extend the challenge to a wider audience.

 I expected Zomorodi to focus on how technology has captured our attention and eroded our ability to concentrate. She touches on this. However, the theme of her book is that we need boredom for deeper cognition and creativity. In order to reach their most creative states, our brains need a break from stimulation—we need to get bored.

 The benefit of boredom, in addition to training us to handle tedious tasks, is that it put our mind into its “default state.” In this condition, our minds wander. We daydream. We can imagine things and make connections that would not be available to us if we were concentrating on something or stimulating our brains.

 The default state isn’t universally good. We can fall into ruminating on problems and failures, berating ourselves. That is not useful.

 However, for most of us daydreaming is positive. The lives we dream up for ourselves in such moments, Zomorodi refers to it as “autobiographical planning,” can help us identify what we want, solve problems and see ourselves as more capable.

 Zomorodi presents seven challenges to her readers. The idea is that readers would do one challenge a day for a week. Some of the challenges are adaptable for continued or periodically repeated practices. She describes how several Note to Self listeners responded to the challenges and made them their own.

 Bored and Brilliant is not about abandoning technology by a long shot. It is about making space in your life to think in different ways, especially for the daydreaming that arises in the dull, unstimulating moments in life.

 Zomorodi writes in a journalistic style. The book is not loaded with notes, or even a bibliography, like a more scientific text. However, she sites research, interviews with specialist and other books within the text. The benefits of boredom are documented. If you want to research the subject deeply, you might skim this book for other sources. If you want to loosen your ties to you cell phone or tablet, get out of the mental rat race and give your brain space for a deep breath, try the challenges in this book; it is a good place to start.

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

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara A. Oakley

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Quiet by Susan Cain

 Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

The Johnstown Flood by David McCollough

On Memorial Day 1889, a storm struck western Pennsylvania. Floods were common enough in the mountain community of Johnstown and the surrounding villages. This one was extraordinary. Upstream the valley sat a structure that was poised to make the flood much worse, the dam at South Fork Reservoir.

David McCullough describes the flood and the devastating dam break in The Johnstown Flood. It was the worst disaster in the United States up until its time with more than 2,000 people killed by the huge wave that swept down the valley, with more killed by fire and disease in the aftermath.

The dam had originally built by the State of Pennsylvania too supply water for a canal. Within a few years the canal was closed because the railroad provided freight and passenger transportation through the area. The dam changed hands several times after that. I fell into disrepair. Somewhere along the line someone salvaged the pipes that allowed one to control the water level behind the dam; though in it partly collapsed state it no longer held much water.

This changed when developers bought the dam and surrounding property to build a resort for the wealthy industrialists of Pittsburgh. The dam was rebuilt with indifference to materials and methods. The drain pipes were never restored. The spillway was obstructed by a grate (to keep the fish in the stocked lake from disappearing downstream) and low bridge. By the time of the flood, perhaps since it was repaired, there was a slight dip in the center of the dam, creating an unknown, unprotected second spillway. This dip was hard to see with the eye on the large dam, but a survey to measure the elevations would have turned it up.

The dam filled and the lake became quite large. The vacationers sailed ships on it. The water level was commonly within a couple of feet of the spillway, and there was no practical way for the dam operators to control that water level. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Many of the people of Johnstown expressed concern that the dam was a danger to the city. However, the prevailing view was that the wealthy elite of Pittsburgh would have it built right; very few endeavored to assess it for themselves. Similarly, the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, including such prominences as Andrew Carnegie, had faith that the developer did the work right, and they put no effort into checking it out.

When the floodwaters overtopped the earthen dam, it collapsed quickly, unleashing a deadly wave of possibly 20 million tons of water. It is hard to imagine the devastation caused by the wave, even 15 miles downstream in Johnstown. McCullough describes it, sometimes in great detail, based on reports from the time. The rolling wall of water seems awesome at first, but as it begins to destroy homes and injure and kill people, it becomes sickening as well.

The people of that valley recovered with admirable speed and took over the cleanup and restoration of their town the very next day. Soon aid came from across the country, and especially from elsewhere in Pennsylvania, including the National Guard and a still young American Red Cross.

As the initial terror of the event subsided, attention turned to the club at South Fork. Though the press, including the Engineering News, laid blame on the club and the shoddy, unprofessional work done to rebuild the dam, the courts never held the club or its members accountable. The courts, mostly in Pittsburgh where club members held sway, accepted that it was an act of God. It’s clear to more objective observers that a properly built dam would probably have survived the flood, or at the very least would have had a much less damaging failure. Though McCullough suggests the residents of Johnstown and the members of the club were too trusting, he does not shy away from the negligence of those who rebuilt the dam in a way that would almost surely lead to the disaster that came.

David McCollough also wrote

The Great Bridge

The Wright Brothers

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

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Genesis

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

On the Mainlines by William B. Claycomb

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

McCullough, David. The Johnstown Flood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.

The Computers of Star Trek by Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg

Star Trek fans, I’m one of them, have praised the show for the way it has anticipated technology. It used to be quite the thing to compare a flip phone to the Trek communicator.

However, have you ever watched a rerun of the show and seen something that now seems quaint, even ridiculous, especially when it comes to computers? Back in 1999, Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg published observations like this, along with a few kudos for the shows, in The Computers of Star Trek.

The book covers episodes from the original series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine, Voyager and the films through Insurrection. While all the series, even the more recent prequel series Enterprise, depict a technologically advance future, none are focused on technology. They are more focused on telling stories that deal with the social issues in the periods in which they were made.

Gresh and Weinberg note this: Trek computers are mainly supersized versions of the computers of the time the show is made. In some ways, the Federation computers in the show are throwbacks to 1970s and earlier era mainframes, even though smaller, networked computers were becoming the dominant model when the revival series started in the late 1980s. This continued even as the Internet emerged and became part of the popular culture.

Of course the producers of the show aren’t especially interested in how computers actually work; they want to make an entertaining TV show and sometimes explore what is going on the society around them through the lens of a fictional future. Trek is interesting in this regard because it shows the attitudes of people about computers over time. In TOS computers are regarded with skepticism: computers break down, Spock is a hacker who takes over the ship, artificial intelligences take over planets but get fried by the illogic of emotions. By the time of TNG, computers are ubiquitous and acceptable—everyone uses them—but the threat of the Borg show concerns that computers might take over our lives and cause us to be depersonalized, destroying our individual identities.

An almost 20 year old book can’t help to be out of date, and the authors inevitably miss on some predictions. For instance, in their criticism of Trek’s take on medicine (not very advanced at all except when it is practically magic), the mention Army research into smart shirts that will monitor wearers for vital signs and injuries. It was a tee shirt with sewn in sensors that could be made for $30 (in 1998 dollars). Though we now have a lot of wearable technology, hospitals, soldiers and health nuts aren’t making use of cheap tees that keep track of their status moment by moment.

I don’t bring this up to knock the authors’ predictions. It’s hard to predict the future, especially by projecting from the current state of the art. Trek writers arguably haven’t tried very hard, but the show really isn’t about technology anyway.

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

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Gresh, Lois, & Robert Weinberg. The Computers of Star Trek. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

World War II was a time when secrecy was often a necessary part of security. The secrecy surrounding the development to of the atomic bomb was particularly thick. Since that veil was lifted, Las Alamos, Nevada, has become strongly associated with the bomb, as it should be. However, there were other locations critical to the project. Denis Kiernan discusses one of them, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in her book The Girls of Atomic City.

The Clinton Engineer Works was part of the Manhattan Project. Its purpose was the enrichment of uranium to supply the research, development and construction of an atomic weapon. When it was built, the Army took over thousands of acres of farmland in Tennessee, displacing the residents. Oak Ridge did not exist before the project.

As the title suggests, Kiernan focuses on the role of women at the Clinton Engineer Works, as the area was known when it was a military reservation. The book draws on her interviews with women who worked at the site; the experiences of nine particular women serve as guideposts for the story. These women served in a variety of roles: statistician, chemist, inspector, equipment operator, nurse, secretary, and janitor. Some became wives and mothers as well during the war years. It was an interesting time when there was space for women in science, technology and manufacturing, but not a lot.

Kiernan reaches outside of Oak Ridge to mention other notable women who played a part. German physicist Lise Meitner coined the term nuclear fission; she had Jewish ancestors and fled to Sweden as the Nazis came to power in her homeland. Earlier, Ida Noddack was the first to suggest that the atomic nucleus could split, an idea that was initially rejected by many scientists studying radioactivity and the inner workings of the atom.

The growth of families in a place designed solely for one purpose suggested a result that had not been considered when the Army started to build the Clinton Engineer Works. Oak Ridge was becoming a community and it eventually became an incorporated city (in 1958 by a vote of the residents after federal and state laws opened the opportunity). Though the population dropped dramatically from its war-time peak, Oak Ridge remained a center for research in nuclear energy and the peace-time use of radioactive materials as it transitioned to civilian control. Today the Oak Ridge National Laboratory continues research in energy and computing. The city of Oak Ridge continues as well, still connected to its past as a unique factory town, but in many way a city like any other.

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

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

Kiernan, Denise. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. 2013. New York Touchstone: 2014.

Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat

Mo Gawdat, an executive and software engineer at Google, has been curious about happiness for years. When his son died suddenly, he took inspiration from the happy young man he lost to get his thought together on the subject and produce Solve for Happy.

To Gawdat, happiness isn’t something we gain, it’s something we lose or bury. Happiness his how we would normally feel, what he calls our “default state,” but we let all manner of thoughts make us unhappy.

What buries our native happiness? It’s the suffering we experience when the events of our life do not meet expectations. Gawdat illustrates this in his book with a balance with the events on one side and expectations on the other.

Donte be quick to blame unhappiness on the events of life. Gawdat points the finger at expectations.

Our expectations are often out of touch with reality. We suffer under misperceptions, illusions, blind spots and lies we tell ourselves. Gawdat identifies 13 such issues and challenges them. As long as you cling to beliefs and biases that lead to false expectations, you’ll suffer.

Experiencing the greatest joy involves embracing the truth. Gawdat describes five things he believes to be true that lead to joy.

I’m reminded of The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. Dr. Peck calls for a devotion to truth. Like Gawdat, Peck believed that every life has some pain, but a lot of additional, unnecessary pain is caused when we refuse to deal with reality.

I think there is a lot to be said for Gawdat’s overall concept. I can see in myself and others a lot of pain and disappointment that has its roots in false expectations, refusal to deal with reality and the avoidance of the hard (but rewarding) work of living and growing as a person. I don’t agree with every detail of Gawdat’s book, but don’t think you have to in order to gain useful insights from it.

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

Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Self Love by Robert H. Schuller

Gawdat, Mo. Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy. New York: North Star Way, 2017.

Reposition Yourself by T. D. Jakes

We’re not always where we want to be in life, but we can make it better if we’re willing to change. Megachurch pastor T. D. Jakes offers advice on making positive change in his book Reposition Yourself.

To make a change, you need to face the truth. For most of us, a hard truth is that we have a lot to do with our problems. We bring ourselves to an unhappy, unfulfilled state through our own apathy, lack of passion, settling for less than our best, passivity, poor money management and lukewarm relationship with God.

Another hard truth is that life is unfair. Bad stuff happens to all of us, and to some more than others. Success demands perseverance and flexibility.

People who successfully change take effective action. They are attentive to their situation and to themselves, developing a strong sense of their gifts and purpose. They are intentional, setting definite goals and putting themselves in environments and around people who support what they want to achieve. Thee have a plan, recognizing that it is inevitable that things will that they will face setbacks, but a delay in achieving their goals does not mean they will be denied success.

Humility is another key to successful change, though I don’t recall Jakes putting it so bluntly. Humility begins with recognition that we need God; we need the cleansing and power we can only receive through Jesus Christ. Our humility is grown through gratitude. In thanksgiving we appreciate what we have, learn contentment, and gain strength from our struggles. Humility also protects us from the pitfalls of success such as excessive self-reliance, neglect of important relationships or becoming coopted for the agendas of others.

Along the way to way, it is good to make some money. Money gives you options. Jakes offers some advice on managing money so you can make yours grow and have more freedom.

Jakes, T. D. Reposition Yourself: Living Life without Limits. New York: Atria, 2007.

Duel with the Devil by Paul Collins

The body of a young woman, Elma Sands, was found in a well outside of Manhattan on the second day of 1800. A carpenter who boarded in her family’s house, some suggested he was her secret lover, was immediately accused. The case led to one of the first sensationalized, broadly followed murder trials in the young United States. Paul Collins recounts the events in Duel with the Devil.

The carpenter, Levi Weeks, might well have been convicted of the crime had he not had a legal dream team with the competence to show the weakness of the prosecution case and suggest an alternate explanation for Sand’s death. That is one of the interesting things about his trial. His defense team consisted of political rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr along with their fellow Revolutionary War veteran Brockhurst Livingston.

The political and legal elite of New York state, and especially Manhattan, of those days was close knit and often resulted in odd combinations. Hamilton and Burr were both in debt to Weeks’ brother Ezra, a prominent builder, which may explain their participation.

Weeks was found not guilty after what was considered a very long trial for the time, mainly due to the great number of prosecution witnesses. Sands’ murder was never properly solved.

She was probably killed by another roomer in her house, Richard Croucher. He had fled England to escape the insane asylum after his behavior led him trouble and criminal charges. Shortly after Weeks’ trial, he was convicted of raping his 13-year old stepdaughter. He was released after three years on the agreement that he would leave the country. He went to Virginia instead, where he fleeced the merchants of Richmond. It appears he eventually made his way back to England, where he continued criminality led to his execution.

Hamilton and Burr famously faced declines. They dueled and Hamilton died from the wound he received. Their co-counsel fared better; Livingston went on to serve as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Weeks left Manhattan. We worked his way west and became a successful builder in Natchez.

Collins’ book reads almost like a novel. It is interesting, quick-reading history.

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

Defining Noah Webster by K. Alan Snyder

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Triumvirate by Bruce Chadwick

Collins, Paul. Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton & Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery. New York: Crown, 2013.