The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

HeLa is an immortal human cell line. It is immortal in the sense that the cells will live and grow in culture indefinitely. Since it was first cultured in 1951, the cell line has been an important part of medical research. It was used to develop vaccines for polio and HPV (Human Papilloma Virus). It has been used to study cancer, HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), other diseases and drugs to treat them. HeLa cells have made medical science as we know it possible.

These cells came from a real person. Her name was Henrietta Lacks. She was a poor, black woman who went to Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment of what turned out to be cancer. The cells were taken from a tumor by a doctor who was treating her.

Cancer took the life of Henrietta Lacks, but her immortality in the form of the cell line has caused a lot of pain and distress for her descendants. Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta, her family, the HeLa cells and their legacy in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

It is a bit unusual in a book of biography or scientific history to write in the first person, but is the approach taken by Skloot. In order to emphasize the humanity of Henrietta, she tells a personal story of her research and the relationship she develops with the Lacks family, especially Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah.

This is important. It’s easy to get swept up in all the incredible results that have been produced from developing and testing with the HeLa cell line. It is harder to look at the individual lives on people, especially when those people are treated with little respect by the scientists and physicians who are benefiting from the cells taken from her mother.

These men saw little if anything wrong in what they did by taking the cells and growing them. They were doing what was legal at the time (and still legal) and in keeping with the ethical standards of the time. There is still much debate over the ethics of using human tissues in research. Though there are standards related to samples taken from humans, the only legally binding ones relate to federally-funded research. Issues of informed consent, ownership, and commercialization are still being worked out. If you’re a corpse, the law is fairly clear. If you’re a participant in a research study, legal and ethical standards assure some level of informed consent. If tissues are taken from a living patient for purposes of diagnosis or treatment, what can happen to those tissues is up for grabs.

I think this is a book worth reading. HeLa is an interesting scientific story. The ethical issues related to research using human tissues deserves more attention that it gets. I think the most important thing to remember is that the things we do affect human beings. Science, law and philosophy can become so abstract they are nearly pointless if we lose sight of how the things we say and do, individually and as a society, affect the lives of real people.

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

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown, 2010.

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

Post, Stephen, and Jill Neimark. Why Good Things Happen to Good People: The Exciting New Research that Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Happier, Healthier Life. New York: Broadway Books, 2007.

Solomon wrote, “The generous soul will be made rich, and he who waters will be watered” (Proverbs 11:25 NKJV). According to bioethicist Stephen Post and writer Jill Neimark, this ancient wisdom is true and backed up by modern science.



Throughout the book, they site numerous studies of showing that giving benefits the giver with better physical and mental health and longer life. The effects can be both immediate, such as the release of feel-good chemicals in the brain when we do good, and long-term, such as longer life and better health in old age.

The book is only partly a summary of the research on the benefits of giving. It is catalog of types of giving. In each area, it provides a test to evaluate one’s giving and suggestion on how to be a giver. The authors seek to reach from the research to its application in how people can be better givers and reap the benefits of it.

An interesting aspect of the book is the areas of giving. Some are expected. Generativity, compassion and listening are types of giving that will quickly spring to the minds of many. Some may be unexpected. Courage, humor and creativity are less obvious ways of giving, but the authors show how we can enrich the lives of others through them and be better off, too.

A chapter that particularly caught my attention dealt with the way of celebration, or gratitude. I’ve long thought that our appreciation for the good in our lives is essential to our happiness. The research sited in this book confirms that gratitude makes happier and calmer. It also helps us heal and have relationships with others. The authors offer some very good advice on how to increase gratitude, just as they show ways to increase in the other forms of giving.

Vital Friends by Tom Rath

Rath, Tom. Vital Friends. New York: Gallup Press, 2006.

Do we need scientific research to tell us that friends make us more happy, healthy, engaged, and productive? Apparently we do, at least in the context of work.


Tom Rath describes the work he and his associates at The Gallup Organization have undertaken to study friendship and identify important friendship roles in his book Vital Friends. He uses the term vital friend to describe someone who significantly improves your life, who you wouldn’t want to live without, to distinguish him or her from less close friends or acquaintances.

Rath begins with a discussion of friendship in general. He describes the benefits of friendship to human health and happiness.

From there he moves into friendships at work, which is more the focus of the book. People who have a best friend at work enjoy many benefits in terms of their satisfaction with their employer, work, and compensation. Employers benefit from more engaged, safe, and productive employees.

Unfortunately, the traditional culture of many workplaces discourages friendship, both among peers as well as at different levels. Those businesses suffer the results of less engaged employees like lower productivity, quality and customer satisfaction (at the extreme, actively disengaged employees may sabotage their employers).

Part of Rath’s purpose is to help organizations turn this around and create opportunities for their employees to develop friendships with each other. A part of the book is devoted to these ideas.

A larger part of the book is useful to individuals who are looking to indentify vital friends, or friends who might become vital. Through their research, Gallup identified eight roles that friends play in our lives that correlate to our engagement at work and our overall sense of wellbeing. Each is described in some detail. Rath provides pointers on how to find people who may fill these roles for you, strengthen friendships with those who do, and how to be a better friend of this type if it is your inclination. He assumes that no friend can fulfill all these roles, and you and your friends will be more satisfied if you rely on them for their strengths and not try to fit them into another mold.

This aspect of the book is supported by on online tool in which you can answer questions about your friends and the way they relate to you. It’s designed to help you identify which friends play what roles in your life. It is meant to be a launching pad for discussions with your friends, both as a way to express you gratitude for the ways they help you and to help them be even better friends to you (you may find them responding in kind). I didn’t use this tool because the book was loaned to me. Even so, reading the chapters on the roles will give you ideas to make your own determinations of what friend are filling these roles in your life and who might fill the gaps.

The book wraps up with a description of the research that supports the ideas it presents. The research-oriented sections are in appendices; the main text has a much more casual style.

I started this review with a somewhat flippant question about needing science to tell us what we should already know about needing friends. The thing Vital Friends adds is a framework for identifying and discussing important friendships. You probably don’t want to over-intellectualize your friendships, but you may find it helpful to have some specific ideas and terms you can use as a springboard for your own thoughts and discussions with friends.

Tom Rath also co-wrote How Full Is Your Bucket?

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Charles F. Kettering’s legacy as a philanthropist is memorialized in the names of the institutions he supported such as the Kettering Foundation and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. As an engineer, I’m more familiar with is reputation as an inventor and innovator, especially in automotive engineering.

Kettering’s associate, T. A. Boyd, memorialized him in the biography Professional Amateur. I think the title is intended to convey Kettering’s humility and determination to not let expertise or established knowledge get in the way of progress. As an engineer, and arguably a scientist, Kettering was devoted to experimentation.

As with others of his era (he was born in 1876), Kettering’s education was not traditional by current standards. After graduating high school, he began teaching in one-room schoolhouses in Ohio such as the one he had attended. He later attended the College of Wooster, studying Greek with an eye toward becoming a pastor, and eventually graduated from the Ohio State University with a degree in electrical engineering. Problems with his eyes caused interruptions in his formal education.

Kettering valued his school experience, but he also valued his practical experience. He got a job installing poles for a telephone company and worked his way into installing lines and switchboards. He and friends undertook amateur experiments in chemistry and electricity. Even as a child he took great interest in nature.

After introducing us to his early life, the book turns to his career as an inventor and research engineer. He established what is now Delco, which he sold to General Motors. He had a long career leading the research efforts at GM. The final chapters of the book describe Kettering’s views on business and education and his career as a public speaker.

Kettering met his wife, Olive, while working for a rural telephone company. Their son, Gene, followed his father into engineering and eventually had a successful career in designing and building diesel-electric locomotives a General Motors.

Boyd was a friend of Kettering, who was still alive when Professional Amateur was published. Needless to say, the book is very complimentary to its subject. Few faults are attributed to the man, except that Kettering is depicted as being so absorbed in his research that he would overlook social conventions like keeping a nice suit clean, entertaining guests, or remembering the purpose of his appointments. The research engineer left his business affairs mostly in the hands of trusted partners so he could concentrate on the work that interested him, though Boyd’s depiction indicates Kettering was shrewd about business.

I don’t think the book is intended for children, but it is written in simple and direct style that might be accessible to many young readers. It was published in 1957, so more recent or thorough biographies may be available. For instance, Kettering introduced tetraethyl lead to gasoline as a way to reduce knock and improve fuel efficiency. Though it was considered safe at the time (as Boyd points out), the lead emissions from automobiles has be reevaluated sense and we no longer use leaded gasoline. The book was written before anyone was seriously aware of or concerned about this issue, so it does not consider it.

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

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

Boyd, T. A. Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1957.

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.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Wonder Woman is one of most popular comic book characters. Because she is about to be featured in a film that will bring Batman and Superman together in epic battle, and is expected to be featured in a film of her own, the Internet is already beginning to buzz with concern over how badly she may be portrayed and hopes that the filmmakers will get her right. She has starred in some great stories, but often the stories about her have disappointed for various reasons. The difficulty of depicting a woman superhero has its roots in sorting out the roles of women in society, something we’re still working on. It is a struggle Wonder Woman was born to fight.

Jill Lepore explores the birth of this female superhero in The Secret History of Wonder Woman. In one of her various comics origins, the demigoddess was formed from the mud of Paradise Island, but Lepore describes how she was formed in the suffrage and feminist movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and an unusual family with strong ties to these movements.

Wonder Woman first appeared in print in 1941. When she became the title character of her own comic, her creator came from behind his pseudonym, with some fanfare, and revealed himself as psychologist William Moulton Marston.

Marston’s lifestyle is known now, but it was a closely held secret during his lifetime. For all practical purposes, if not legally, he had two wives. Surprisingly, both women were feminists. They both loved Marston and found in this arrangement a way to live the lives they wanted. They had a pragmatic, flexible feminism that was accepting of the unconventional. I can hardly do it justice in a few words, but Lepore explores the early days of feminism that shaped the arrangement Marston had with these two women.

Marston met Elizabeth Holloway while they were undergraduates, he at Harvard and she at Mount Holyoke. They were both advocates of women’s suffrage. They married in 1915. Marston received a doctorate and Holloway a master’s degree. Holloway claimed to be deeply involved in Marston’s early research. The Marston household became full of writers and editors, and overtime attribution became a matter of convenience or marketing rather than identification of individual authorship.

Olive Byrne met Marston as an undergraduate at Tufts, where she became his research assistant. She quickly became more and moved into the Marston household. Eventually they worked out the arrangement that Holloway would work full-time (over time she had several jobs as an editor) while Byrne raised the children (each had two children with Marston). Byrne eventually felt the need to contribute the finances and in the 1930s wrote for Family Circle as Oliver Richards (Richards from the marriage and widowhood she faked to obscure the parentage of her children). Byrne, like the Marstons she joined, had ties to the feminist and birth control movements. She was the daughter of Ethel Byrne  and her aunt was the more famous Margaret Sanger.

Holloway, Byrne, and even Sanger, were to varying degrees the models for Wonder Woman. She was to be feminist propaganda, and under Marston’s pen she was. One would guess that this would have attracted criticism, but it was not the feminism of Wonder Woman that most stirred up critics.

Bondage was depicted on almost every page of Marston’s comics. In addition, Wonder Woman’s costume was skimpy. Lepore links the bondage in these comics to the use of bondage as a symbol used by suffragists and feminists. Sometimes Marston drew very consciously on images associated with these movements. In addition, the bondage represented notions of domination and submission rooted in Marston’s theories of personality and the relationship between the sexes. Bonds, and the breaking of them, represented the misappropriation of power by men and the power of women to free themselves and take their place as leaders in society. Similarly, Wonder Woman’s bare limbs were emblematic of her athleticism, strength, power and essential equality to make heroes. It’s hard to say that the depiction of Wonder Woman is completely free of sexual undertone, Marston wanted her to be beautiful. Lepore shows the clear link between the symbolism of Wonder Woman and the symbolism  of suffrage and feminism that Marston consciously referenced.

When Marston passed away in 1947, Wonder Woman fell into the hands of writers and editors who did not share his vision. She hasn’t been the same since. After World War II, the feminism she represented was not welcome in the broader culture or by the men who wrote her comics. Even after the second wave of feminism adopted her as an emblem in the 1970s, she’s not been quite at home. Perhaps we’ll have trouble getting Wonder Woman right as long as we have conflict about the roles of women in our culture.

If you’re interested in either comics or feminism, I recommend Lepore’s book. It is thoroughly researched and thoroughly readable.

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

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

A lot has been written over the last few years about expertise, often referring to a 10,000-hour rule. Research indicates that the people who exhibit the highest level of expertise, even possibly being a genius, have in their life put in 10,000 hours or more of deliberate practice.

Your response to that bit of knowledge might be like mine: “I’d don’t have 10,000 hours to put into learning something new.” What if you don’t need to be an expert; you just need to be proficient. Maybe you want to learn something for your personal edification, and you do not aspire to be great, but simply to be good enough.

According to Josh Kaufman, gaining a basic proficiency in a new skill is within reach. With an orderly approach, it can be achieved in as little as 20 hours. Kaufman event entitled his book on the subject The First 20 Hours.

Unlike other books on learning I’ve read, Kaufman focuses more on skill than knowledge, more on being able to do something than knowing about something. Acquiring knowledge is important to learning a new skill, and he acknowledges this by making research a part of his program, but he still emphasizes using as much of the 20 hours as you can on deliberate practice.

Kaufman lays out a strategy for rapid skill acquisition. If compressed to a list, it wouldn’t cover the length of a page. Part of what he does is break down his method into parts that are easy, at least conceptually. That is one of the methods: breaking a skill into sub-skills that can be more easily learned and practiced. In this way, his method is simple.

If simple were easy, more things would be simple.  Kaufman’s methods may reduce gaining proficiency in a skill to 20 hours, but they are 20 hours of focused work to which you must commit yourself. You can give yourself some early wins that will make it easier to overcome the discouragement that comes when you become frustrated by difficulties, but The First 20 Hours holds no strategies for overcoming laziness or disinterest.

If Kaufman only described his method, his book would be quite short. He illustrates the methods by showing how he used them to rapidly acquire six different skills. In addition to reiterating the steps to rapid skill acquisition, he demonstrates the variety of skills one can learn. They range from knowledge-intensive, technical skills (programming) to physical skills (yoga), and much in between (playing an instrument).

The skills that interested Kaufman were not skills that were of much interest to me. Even so, it prompted me to think of skill I would like to acquire and how I might apply his strategies to the task.

Kaufman also hints that his method could be used by a proficient person to improve his skill, taking a step closer to expertise. The strategies are aimed at engaging you in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is the heart of both acquiring and improving a skill.

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

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

Future Bright by Martin E. Martinez

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Kaufman, Josh. The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything…Fast.  New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013.

Learn Better by Ulrich Boser

Learning is not easy. It takes effort. Too often, people squander their effort on ineffective activities. Ulrich Boser seeks to correct this by describing effective, research-based learning techniques in Learn Better.

Learning begins with value. You won’t put effort into learning something you don’t care about. When I was in third grade, I found very little value in memorizing how to spell words or recite multiplication tables. When my teacher tied my performance on multiplication tables to my attendance of recess, something I valued quite a bit, I found the will to exert myself.

“Motivation is the first step in acquiring any sort of skill,” Ulrich Boser, Learn Better

Once you’ve squared away the motivation, you can get on with the doing of learing. Learing is at heart doing. It is a mental activity, though it is often paired with, supported by, or supportive of physical activity. If you’re actually learning, you’re probably experience some struggle and feel like your pushing yourself a little, but not so much that you’re lost.

In a sense, Boser’s book is organized around different types of doing appropriate for different stages of learning. In the early stages of learning, you decide what you want to learn and plan you learning process. When you have a foundation, you can concentrate on improvement. As your skills improve, you can shift to deepening your knowledge and exploring more complex applications. The best experts add to this a strong sense of the patterns and connections. From beginning to end, learning requires humility, and the people who sustain and grow mastery over time evaluate their knowledge and reflect on what they are doing.

The book is full of ideas you can use. For instance, I created for myself a simple process of spaced-out learning to polish some skills I wanted to improve at work. When I started writing reviews and summaries of books, even before I started this blog, it was because I found I could remember the major points better if I summarized them in my own words, even if I did not return to my notes. I was using form of retrieval practice, which is one of several techniques Boser describes.

Though Boser draws on research, the book is intended for a broad audience. If you’re looking to improve your own learning or for ways your children or employees can get more out of their learning efforts, you’re likely to find something you can understand and use in Learn Better.

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

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

How to Improve Your Memory by James D. Weinland

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

Idea Mapping by Jamie Nast

Mindset by Carol S. Dweck

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Boser, Ulrich. Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything. New York: Rodale, 2017.

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 Introvert's Way by Sophia Dembling

Introverts are coming out of their shells, but in their own way. This isn’t to say they are becoming more introverted. Instead they are demand that the traits they bring are valued. We are not simply “not extroverted.”

Blogger Sophia Dembling is part of this wave of outspoken introverts. She writes about living as an introvert in a culture that values extroversion, and how to become more comfortable with it, in The Introvert’s Way.

Personality is a complex subject. Introversion is one of five personality traits that seem to remain consistent over a person’s lifetime.

Actually, extroversion is the trait that is measured. A typical test defines introversion as a lack of extroversion. Dembling calls this into question. She sees introversion as a way of interacting with external and internal stimulus that is different from extroversion. It is not better or worse and it certainly is not an absence of a personality trait.

Dembling is not shy about taking on extroversion bias in psychology and research. For instance, she wrote about research that showed extroverts to be happier. Even introverts who acted extroverted seemed happier. She found that psychologists have a three pronged definition of happiness, but the researchers used only one. The signs of happiness in this prong are practically synonymous with traits of extroversion. No wonder extroverts seemed happier. Introverts are often happy in their own way.

Much of the book is a discussion of the introverted experience. It can be tough to be introverted in a culture that values extroversion (not all do). How do you deal with well-meaning friends who try to get you to have fun when you’re already perfectly contented? How do you manage your energy, especially when things that get others psyched leave you drained?

Dembling offers advice on these issues. Her core advice is to accept your introversion. You are different and that is fine. You can create a space for you to be you. You can teach you friends to respect who you are just as you have respected their extroversion.

Introverts who begin to embrace who they are can seem like angry turtles at first. However, we are not inclined to disturb our peace with resentment; we move on to living a life we like with a little gentle forcefulness.

I previously wrote about this book in another post.

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

The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron

The Irresistible Introvert by Michaela Chung

Quiet by Susan Cain

Dembling, Sophia. The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World. New York: Perigee, 2012.

Lost Connections by Hari Johnson

Depression and anxiety are growing problems in the West. The model of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is breaking down, and antidepressants are ineffective. (I’m not suggesting you should stop taking antidepressants. Even if they are not working out for you, discuss it with your physician first.) Where do we turn to find relief?

 Johann Hari considers this problem in his book Lost Connections. Hari was a long-time sufferer of depression and taker of ever-increasing doses of antidepressants. He was happy with the model that depression was a chemical imbalance that was beyond his control and a pill could fix it. The problem was that a pill didn’t fix it; he was still depressed.

 First, it isn’t all in your head—or even in your chemistry. Though there is a physiological, and even hereditary, aspect to depression that can make some more susceptible, depression is triggered by our experience and social environments. Depression is a symptom of problems in your life. To Hari, depression is essentially a social disease and it requires social treatments.

 Though Hari does not claim to have completely uncovered the causes of depression, he outlines several that are supported by research. He describes them all as types of disconnection.

 For example, many are disconnected from meaningful work. They have no sense of control over their work. There is no connection between effort and reward, and the work can be humiliating drudgery. In addition, work has become much less secure; many have no idea if they’ll have work next week or even tomorrow.

 Related to this is disconnection from status. Research of primates suggests that depression is an expression of low status intended to protect apes from the abuse of their neighbors. In highly stratified cultures, like the United States, stress is higher than in cultures with more status equality. Low status people are under constant stress, and high status people experience extreme stress when their status is challenged.

 Most of all, we are disconnected from other people. We are less likely than ever to belong to a church, club, civic group, professional organization, sports league or similar structure of getting together with other face-to-face, bonding over common interests and building relationships. Neighborhoods are no longer communities; they’re just clusters of homes.

 Though it is more challenging than taking a pill, the solution to depression is to reconnect in those areas where we have become disconnected. It is especially important to reconnect to other people. If you want to feel better, do something to make someone else’s life better.

 The difficulty is that it is hard to get better on your own. Fortunately, if you’re willing to take a step, there are things you can do. On the bigger scale, we need cultural reform that supports personal relationships, meaningful values, meaningful work, empathy, hope and time in natural settings. There is no money to be made in prescribing a community garden, a book club or a job where one is treated with respect, so the money will probably continue to pour into drugs (whether they work or not), until we demand—and start to create for ourselves—something better.

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

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

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

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

Switch on Your Brain by Caroline Leaf

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

Timeless Healing by Herbert Benson with Marg Stark

Vital Friends by Tom Rath

 Hari, Johan. Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.