education and deconstruction.com

The Book of the Week is “Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors” by Piers Paul Read, published in 1974. This paperback tells the suspenseful true story of the aftermath of a plane crash in the Andes Mountains in Chile.

The small plane contained mostly strapping teenage boys who were members of a Uruguayan rugby team. Read the book to learn how the hardiest victims survived sub-freezing temperatures in the snow for a prolonged period– as they were trapped in the mountains– despite the fact that they had become chain-smokers.

Today is Thanksgiving Day for Americans, many of whom use the excuse of a celebration based on a traditional story of questionable veracity to:

take a break from work

overindulge in certain foods

watch aggressive men play a game called “football” (though the foot is seldom used) and

show fleeting gratitude for their material possessions.

This holiday is a sad commentary on the lack of happiness in the United States.

Along these lines, this blogger would like to list a few interesting, general factoids from the book, “Happiness From the Inside Out” by Robert Mack, published in 2009.

“The second reason people try to buy happiness with success is that they actually mistake success for happiness. They think success and happiness are the same thing, or least should be the same thing.  But happiness is more than success.”

A woman’s, but not a man’s happiness level rises with the birth of a child.

Both parents experience lower happiness levels with the birth of children after the first one.

Parents feel least happy through the kids’ teenage years, and their mood improves significantly only when the kids move out.

In a widely publicized, competitive environment like the Olympics, second-place finishers tend to be harder on themselves than third-place finishers. The silver medal winners compare themselves to the gold medal winners, so they feel more anguish at losing than the bronze medal winners, who compare themselves to all other competitors.

The third-tier athletes are happier– more grateful for what they have; they put things in perspective. Enough said.

The Book of the Week is “Big in China” by Alan Paul, published in 2011. This wordy ebook describes the experiences of an American expatriate family in Beijing, China, as told through the eyes of the husband/father. His wife, a journalist, got a three-year job transfer there.

Paul remarks, “Our fake rich lifestyle included daily household help, the gated community, regularly hiring drivers, and a general sense that access to anything was just a phone call away.” He was grateful for the extra freedom that allowed him to spend more quality time with his two-year old daughter and two older sons, play blues music in a band, blog about his new life, and write a music column for a well-known publication.

Paul relates details on cuisine, poor sanitation, social isolation, extremely bad pollution in the city, and the way his children were the center of attention on the street for their blue eyes, fair skin and light-colored hair. Nevertheless, because they were culturally curious, he and his wife made a conscious effort to break out of the expat community, taking their kids to see the “real” China.

Read the book to learn of their adventures.

The Book of the Week is “Blind Descent” by James M. Tabor, published in 2010.  This book describes various expeditions in the 1990′s and later, of supercavers in their quest to find the world’s deepest cave.  Passionate expedition leaders have included Bill Stone, Alexander Klimchouk and Yury Kasjan.  The months-long trips must be meticulously planned in advance, funding secured by dozens of sponsors such as National Geographic, permission obtained by the political entity governing the cave being explored, and supplies collected and hauled into the location.

The supercavers must be very physically fit and not the least bit squeamish, as they wear backpacks weighing upwards of thirty pounds while tolerating squalid living conditions– camping for days exploring dark, narrow, muddy, wet passages hundreds, if not thousands of feet underground. They might encounter bats or spiders, and eat freeze-dried food.

The skills required for supercaving are the same as those required for mountaineering, rock climbing, space exploration and SCUBA diving. The aforementioned Stone constructed a device for SCUBA diving, called a rebreather, that allows a diver to stay underwater for hours longer than was ever possible before. Nevertheless, people have died due to the extreme nature of supercaving.

Rescuers take hours or days to arrive when an underground explorer’s life is endangered, and wireless communications are inoperable underground. There are numerous dangers, including falling off of a steep ledge, getting a slight injury that develops an infection from any of many underground microbes, getting a case of “the bends,” not to mention drowning in a flood or being buried in an avalanche. Meanwhile, the rescuers are endangering their own lives.

This book contains the suspenseful stories of risk-takers surveying the last few places on earth that have yet to be explored.

The Book of the Week is “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, published in 2010. In this book, the author explains his theory about rare, unexpected events, “Black Swans”– unexpected by those affected, because human traits and uncertain situations cause people to draw the wrong conclusions, formulate the wrong predictions, and make the wrong decisions. “Black Swan events are largely caused by people using measures way over their heads, instilling false confidence based on bogus results.” The author applies his ideas mostly to “experts” who manipulate the financial markets.

While Taleb makes some good points, this blogger suspects that very few readers of this book will come away fully understanding what a Black Swan is. Taleb tries to provide several examples; his illustrations are unclear as to why one event is a Black Swan and why another is not.

One example consists of five trading managers at a European-owned financial institution who wrote a five-year plan. Having neglected to consider all possible adverse future events, they were done in by “the Black Swan of the Russian financial default of 1998 and the accompanying meltdown of the values of Latin American debt markets.” Yet, Taleb writes that the 2008 financial crisis was not a Black Swan. He says such a cluster screw-up will happen again. A Black Swan is a negative or more rarely, a positive occurrence that in general, has never happened before.

One human trait people have is that they are reluctant to attribute events to randomness. But Taleb thinks randomness plays a part in all sorts of events, including long winning streaks of investors. He even generated a computer simulation showing how it would be impossible not to have money managers who beat the market year after year– he says they did so simply by luck alone. Another reason these investors are overrated is that people hear more often about winners rather than losers.

Taleb writes, “We want to be told stories, and there is nothing wrong with that– except that we should check more thoroughly whether the story provides consequential distortions of reality… Just consider that the newspapers try to get impeccable facts, but weave them into a narrative in such a way as to convey the impression of causality (and knowledge).”

The Book of the Week is “The Open Door” — David R. Godine, Publisher, 1989.  This slim volume is a compilation of autobiographical passages of 29 writers recounting the context of their enjoyment of reading. Those mostly male English and American writers range from Ben Franklin to Stephen King.

W.B. Yeats relates that at the start of his formal education, his father discouraged him from reading “boys’ papers.” The reason given was that “… a paper, by its very nature, had to be made for the average boy or man and so could not but thwart one’s growth.”

Eudora Welty wanted to be poor, as were the characters in “Four Little Peppers.” She explains, “Trouble, the backbone of literature, was still to me the original property of the fairy tale, and as long as there was plenty of trouble for everybody and the rewards for it were falling in the right spots, reading was all smooth sailing.”