Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

In this amazing book, Daniel Kahneman displays contradictory realities. First, the workings of our minds are seamless, efficient and resourceful. On the other hand, they routinely trick us. Even when we know ahead of time that we are experiencing an illusion, it's hard to fight our natural tendency to believe in it. One of the things this explains is how psychopaths get away with manipulating people, in particular, trained psychologists.

One professor tells his students in no uncertain terms about a red-light warning. When a client reports a history of failed treatments from several therapists, and makes a statement something like "I can already tell you will understand me," the new psychologist should not be fooled into agreeing with the prospective patient's assessment. This therapeutic relationship is going nowhere; instead of succumbing to the fellow's flattery, the practitioner should "throw him out of the office."

On a lighter note, Kahneman describes an apparently easy logic puzzle that 50% of Harvard undergraduates get wrong. He also discusses an astonishing film that must be seen to be believed.

Another amazing section of the book discusses priming: familiarity alone enhances unconscious trust -- think of the implications of that. This is not to mention the issues of cognitive ease, the mental shotgun, the framing effect, the halo effect, loss aversion, and the delusion that What you see is all there is.

In summarizing his well-supported claims, Kahneman quotes Jonathan Haidt, who said, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog." This book is an altogether surprising and fascinating read.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

In this novel, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri portrays recent history and contemporary problems. The story opens when two brothers are caught breaching property and social boundaries to explore the grounds of the Tollygunge Club. The brothers are close, but very different, and their growing up only enhances the contrast between them. As a young man, Udayan sympathizes with the starving poor of his nation and grows enamoured with communist ideals. Soon he's embroiled in an illegal underground party called the Naxalites.

Touching the pulse of our era, this story deals with the life challenges life of people grounded in two countries. Udayan never leaves India, and his closeness to his brother is severed when Subhash leaves to study in Rhode Island. As a young man, Subhash plans to return to India and marry a bride of his parents' choosing, but fate has other plans.

Before he can fully inhabit his new homeland, Subhash must endure the loneliness of marriage to a tragically ill-chosen partner, a bout of single parenthood, and near estrangement from his only daughter. All of this arises from long unspoken secrets of the past, which cast dark shadows over generations who know nothing about them. Yet what happened to Udayan and his parents so long ago in Calcutta has left his brother Subhash adrift in America.

The Frangipani Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu

I love reading mysteries set in faraway places, so I can learn about them. Singapore writer Ovidia Yu set this mystery in 1936. Su Lin is a smart and intrepid sixteen-year-old girl with great ambitions. Undeterred by the racist attitudes of her employers or the controlling tendencies of her family, she uses her mission school education and her ability to speak the local languages as leverage to move toward her goals, and she doesn't let a limp from a bout with polio stop her.

The first-person voice of the protagonist is often tinged with humour and irony. On learning that the murder victim is not much older than she is, Su Lin reflects that death is "no respector of life expectancy." At the sight of the body, she manages to avoid swooning "like women in English novels."

However, she still hedges her religious bets. Reasoning that "the Christian God likes money" while "Buddhist and Taoist gods prefer incense," she promises both a tithe and "a dozen joss sticks" accordingly, as she dispatches "fervent prayers to God or Guan Yin."

Our protagonist is astute. Reflecting on the family who raised her after she was orphaned, Su Lin comments that "Uncle Chen wanted so much to be seen as powerful and capable that he refused to ask for help from anyone." Her grandmother, on the other hand, asks others to do everything whenever possible, and is therefore "a good deal more powerful."

Su Lin also understands the racial politics of the island enough to understand that Charity, who at home was "only a poor Irish girl," was promoted in Singapore to "White," and as a single woman, was suddenly in demand. Sir Henry, the acting governor, is a stereotype of his kind. Though his talk doesn't surprise Su Lin, it totally shocks the honest police officer to hear that "Coolies are regularly taken and eaten from plantations," by tigers, suggesting that this goes unreported and virtually unremarked among the white colonizers.

As the story gallops along, Yu unveils a steady stream of fascinating details about the geography of the island, as well as its socio-cultural history. Le Froy's sergeant follows Sir Henry's locally born son to determine if he's "seeing someone," and reports back that "if she's white, she's not single, and if she's single, she's not white."

We learn a bit about Singapore cuisine, indentured laborers, the opium trade and "dhobi itch," a discomfort caused by the hot and muggy climate. We are told that a connection was made (and suppressed) about tobacco and lung cancer, and about how Siam ceded certain sultanates to the British without consulting the local rulers.

Inevitably, Su Lin faces danger. In one scene, she must she defend herself against unwanted amatory advances. For this she uses a handy paperweight and letter opener, reflecting as she does so that "Perhaps no girl had ever fended him off before, certainly not with his own stationery supplies." Naturally, her cleverness inspires the notice and the respect of the police inspector, Le Froy, and... Well, you know the tropes.

Hope and virtue

The keynote speaker at CanWrite! 2019 was author and literary agent Donald Maass. He spoke about hope -- as used to create suspense in fiction, as well as to keep us motivated on our writing journeys. I was deeply struck by his inspiring words.

Leafing through BC Bookworld this morning reminded me of his talk. I read a review of Aging of Aquarius, by Helen Wilkes. Reviewer Alan Belk discusses a thread he sees running through it, speaking of the human need for "honest self-assessment and self-appraisal" coupled with "a desire to better the lives of other people" while also helping ourselves.

Belk says that according to the idea of Aristotelian virtue, "in order to flourish as human beings," it is necessary to "balance our responsibility to ourselves with our responsibilities toward others." Sacrificing either our own well-being or that of others fails to promote a virtuous life. "And if we do not lead a virtuous life, we cannot be spiritually happy."

Nathaniel Branden's Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

When Nathaniel Branden published this book in 1994, he was in his sixties. Though he died in 2014, his ideas live on. The book is still in great demand at the library; plenty of holds by others meant no renewal for me. Thinking back to when self-esteem became a buzzword, I pondered how influential this concept has become, revolutionizing our culture's educational and child-rearing practices.

I was surprised to read of Branden's turbulent love life. His long extramarital love affair with Ayn Rand was followed by an acrimonious and very public break. I'm not surprised that philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand has largely been forgotten. Long ago I read Atlas Shrugged; I remember how my younger self found her characters cold, smug and unsympathetic.

The pillars of self-esteem live on, and Branden's ideas continue to resonate. He says we attract and feel most comfortable with those with similar levels of self-esteem -- in today's parlance, people whose vibrations match our own.

But we all need to improve our self-esteem. This is what gives us the courage of our convictions and helps us avoid being pressured into doing things that are not right for us, in the hope of being accepted. We can evolve, though this is no easy process. To aid the work, Branden has developed a set of sentence completion exercises that can be used to uncover our unconscious beliefs about ourselves. He has used these on himself and on his patients, and includes them in an appendix.

Paradoxically, many of us lack the necessary "courage to tolerate happiness without self-sabotage." This psychological dissatisfaction is why we laugh in rueful recognition at the old Groucho Mark joke about never wanting to join to a club that "would accept me as a member." Thus, an important goal of self-development is to reduce feelings of anxiety and insecurity, to "make them less likely to intimidate or overwhelm." To accept, manage and rise above such feelings relaxes us. "Relaxation implies that we are not hiding from ourselves and are not at war with who we are."

We need to think and act in order to evolve. Our consciousness, a tool by which to see ourselves, does not find its right use automatically and without effort. Moreover, self-esteem mustn't be reduced to feel-good notions "that divorce it from questions of consciousness, responsibility and moral choice." Indeed, consideration of right and wrong is natural. Predating social conditioning, the "concern with morality or ethics arises naturally in the early stages of our development."

Hypocrisy, says the author, is "self-invalidating." Sadly, many cultures promote it. They also transmit other values that conflict with the healthy development of responsibility, morality and self-esteem. For instance, many cultures inculcate the destructive and often unconscious belief that women are inferior. Another example is the concept of original sin. "The very notion of guilt without volition or responsiblity is an assault on reason as well as on morality."

"It would be hard to name a more certain sign of low self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior." This idea resonates powerfully, and offers a more hopeful way of considering the rash of tribal hatreds that beset humans. It takes work to eliminate the psychological group-think think makes the tribe "the supreme good and denigrates the importance of the individual." Branden aptly describes contemporary American culture as "a battleground between the values of self-responsiblity and the values of entitlement." Entitlement is a form of tribalism too, and for it to win the values sweepstakes would drastically diminish us all.

Improving self-esteem means evolving certain life practices: living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully, and acting out of a sense of personal responsibility. Blaming, victimization, and demanding special consideration aren't healthy.

"Making mistakes is integral to a great deal of learning," so we need not blame ourselves when we err. Instead, we can use the new knowledge gained through experience. Once we decide to accept responsibility for ourselves, we can overcome hesitation, uncertainty and inaction, and follow our individual paths. Emotional maturation means transferring the source of approval from the external to our inner selves. "A commitment to lifelong learning is a natural expression of the practice of living consciously."

This book reminded me of a story related by contemporary thinker Mark Manson. A century ago, a decision to embrace self-responsibility pulled a young man back from the edge of suicide. That moment of choice set him on the path to evolve into the pioneering psychologist William James.

The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

Swiss-born British philosopher Alain de Botton is an original thinker whose projects include writing a book about a week spent people-watching at Heathrow Airport.

Whether implied or explicitly stated, "happily ever after" ends each romantic story, beginning with fairy tales. This novel portrays the lives of a married couple during a more realistic and less romantic "ever after." Each time a marital conflict occurs, the author steps in with an explanatory comment.

With ruthless clarity, he dismantles the madness of our cultural and romantic ideals. A marriage between two people, he says, is "an infinitely kind gamble...binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."

Children he describes as "the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer, through their exhaustive dependence, egoism and vulnerability -- an advanced education in a new sort of love...in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another."

What a priceless gift: "the child teaches the adult...that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on...beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behaviour."

Loving parents want to help children grow up with minimal fuss and pain, but in spite of their ambition "to pass on in one go insights that require arduous and lengthy processes to accumulate," they themselves must come to terms with the fact that people learn through their own experience. Humans are filled with "an ingrained resistance" to rushing that process of maturing. Indeed, we "are held back by an inherent interest in re-exploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species' idiocies," and insist on "wasting a good part of life finding out for ourselves what has already been extensively and painfully charted by others."

Teaching our partners what we know is also enormously difficult. We may see, or think we see, what they need to know, but help is "a challenging gift to give to those who are most in need of it." Love is a skill. Only over time can we be graced with the knowledge that overwhelmingly, "those who hurt us are themselves in pain." Hence the appropriate response is "never cynicism or aggression, but at the rare moments one can manage it, always love."

Marriage "yields its important lessons only to those who have signed up for the curriculum," and readiness tends "to follow rather than precede the ceremony itself -- perhaps by a decade or two." In choice of partner, we should not seek compatibility; we humans are "too varied and peculiar" for that to be realistic in the long term as we evolve.

Instead, we must hope both to become and to find a partner "who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace." The "capacity to tolerate dissimilarity" is the key quality of the 'right' partner. Compatibility is "an achievement of love" and "shouldn't be its precondition."

Forensics by Val McDermid

Val McDermid knows a lot about forensics. It seems that writing mysteries for a living entails making friends and contacts in this rapidly developing field.

A friend of McDermid, pioneering forensic anthropologist Sue Black developed her special skills while working in Kosovo, collaborating with forensic experts from Argentina who had found ways to identify the skeletal remains of the "disappeared." Black spent four years poring over bones to return remains of war victims to families for burial.

Digital forensics is a relatively new field, and McDermid quotes Jeffrey Barlow, who says the rapid development of internet technology "has complicated mystery plotting because so much more information is available to both the sleuth and the reader."

Mystery writers also make good use of forensic psychology. Motive and modus operandi feature in stories that portray the psychology of repeat offenders. In McDermid's opus, Tony Hill is a skilled profiler who helps police officer Carol Jordan: he can infer much about a perpetrator from a crime scene. The TV series Wire in the Blood is based on these characters.

Forensics is a rapidly developing field, with new techniques constantly coming into play. Yet each time researchers come up with innovative tools to carry out legitimate and socially beneficial tasks, criminals find ways around them. In the beginning of fingerprinting, they used gloves as an anti-forensic technique. Now they eradicate digital data or store it in the cloud. This creates a variety of challenges for law enforcement personnel needing to access it.

Another issue of increasing concern is the fact that now adversarial jury trials often require expert witnesses as well as expensive lawyers. This makes it harder than ever to ensure equal access to the financial resources necessary to launch an effective legal defence.

Forensics is a fascinating work. Reminding readers that there can be no contact without some trace,  Val McDermid shares some sense of the very real science that underpins her stories, and points out the related social issues as well.

A Rising Man loaded with Abir Mukherjee's wry observations

Sam Wyndham, a jaded veteran of WWI, is a bit too fond of whiskey and opium. A former Scotland Yard detective, he's just arrived to join the Calcutta police -- only to discover that "here in the tropics...an Englishman could come down with dysentery by so much as looking the wrong way at a sandwich," and the choice of an eating establishment is "potentially a matter of life and death."

Anglo-Indian Miss Grant explains the hypocrisy of the place to him: "The British pretend they're here to bring the benefits of western civilization to an ungovernable bunch of savages, while in reality, it's only ever really been about petty commercial gain." The educated elite among the Indians are no better. Neither knowing nor caring about of the needs of the millions of fellow countrymen in villages, they "just want to replace the British as the ruling class."

Annie Grant adds that her own people, those with both British and Indian roots, are "as bad as the rest," calling themselves British, mimicking British ways and referring to Britain 'the old country,' even when they've never been closer to it than Bombay.

Sam encounters a variety of characters as he works with his intelligent right-hand man. Sergeant Bannerjee's real name, Surindranath, is so hard for English speakers to pronounce that he's been dubbed 'Surrender-not.' (There was a historical person with this nickname, says Mukherjee.)

Techniques used by power brokers to manipulate information feel chillingly contemporary. So does the rivalry between duelling bureaucracies. After thus tempting the reader to think things have barely improved in a hundred years, the author applies a bit of comic relief, as when Sam describes some fellow as "all mouth and no trousers."

Even as the government restricts movement and suppresses bad news, Detective Wyndham and Sergeant Bannerjee get wind of the shocking Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. They also discover all manner of skulduggery among the apparently great and good. Sam's boss is friendly, but is he trustworthy? His superior in the police force is embittered after a justified criticism of a certain police operation has left him stuck at a low rank. Even the L-G has something shocking to hide.

As they investigate a murder followed by an attempted robbery of the Darjeeling Mail, the two policemen find themselves in church, waiting to question the minister after the service. From inside the plain Scottish kirk, Sam hears "English voices mangling some poor hymn," and imagines the same going on "in every outpost of the empire, from Auckland to Vancouver."

The Reverend tells the cops that Buchan, the Scottish jute tycoon, "measures folks in terms of what they can do for him," seeing them as "simple commodities to be bought and sold, like so much of his jute or rubber." When Surrender-not advises his superior officer to avoid raising the ire of this powerful businessman with hard questions, Sam digs in his stubborn heels, deflecting the Sergeant's warnings by pointing out that in recent days, "I've been attacked, shot and almost poisoned by my landlady's cooking. If Mr. Buchan feels he can top that, then good luck to him."

When a subordinate misbehaves, the policeman shows his stubborn side and his self-deprecating humour. "Call it ego," she says, "but I don't take kindly to anyone pulling the wool over my eyes...that sort of thing can make a fellow look bad" -- then in an aside, says he prefers to do that on his own.

Sam later asks a prisoner, Mr. Sen, newly converted to Gandhi's nonviolent resistance, to identify some of his former associates, political agitators for independence. Mr. Sen responds by pointing out the glaring shortcomings of British justice as practiced in India. He then reminds Sam that he is not a Christian, explaining that "the law of karma does not allow for the possibility of forgiveness. Its consequences are inescapable."

My karma involves reading Book 3 in this series, and then waiting impatiently for Book 4 to be published. Not to mention learning more Anglo-Indian history and more obscure words like thana, satrap, punkah, and high heidyin.