The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer
Health Care by T. R. Reid
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor
Mayer-Schonberger
Adland: A Global History of Advertising by Mark Tungate
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and
Follow the Golden Rule by Michael Shermer
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by
Chris Hedges
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has
Undermined America
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
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The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer
Health Care
by T. R. Reid
http://www.amazon.com/Healing-America-Global-Better-Cheaper/dp/1594202346
Washington Post correspondent Reid (The United States of Europe) explores
health-care systems around the world in an effort to understand why the U.S.
remains the only first world nation to refuse its citizens universal health
care. Neither financial prudence nor concern for the commonweal explains the
American position, according to Reid, whose findings divulge that the U.S.
not only spends more money on health care than any other nation but also
leaves 45 million residents uninsured, allowing about 22,000 to die from
easily treatable diseases. Seeking treatment for the flareup of an old
shoulder injury, he visits doctors in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan and
England—with a stint in an Ayurvedic clinic in India—in a quest for
treatment that dovetails with his search for a cure for America's
health-care crisis, a narrative device that sometimes feels contrived, but
allows him valuable firsthand experience. For all the scope of his research
and his ability to mint neat rebuttals to the common American misconception
that universal health care is socialized medicine, Reid neglects to address
the elephant in the room: just how are we to sell these changes to the
mighty providers and insurers?
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Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger
http://www.amazon.com/Delete-Virtue-Forgetting-Digital-Age/dp/0691138613
A fascinating book. . . . [Mayer-Schönberger] argues that technology has
inverted our millennia-old relationship with memory. . . . So what's the
solution? Mayer-Schönberger argues that we need to stop creating tools that
automatically remember everything. Instead, we need to design them to
forget.
(Clive Thompson WIRED Magazine )
If the gathering, storage, and processing of information puts us all in the
center of a digital panopticon, the failure to forget creates a panopticon
crossbred with a time-travel machine. Mayer-Schönberger catalogs the range
of social concerns that are arising as technology favors remembering over
forgetting, and offers some approaches that might give forgetting a
respected place in the digital world. Read this book. Don't forget about
forgetting.
(David Clark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Adland: A Global History of Advertising
by Mark Tungate
http://www.amazon.com/Adland-History-Advertising-Mark-Tungate/dp/0749448377
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this heady, well-researched gem, British journalist
Tungate (Fashion Brands) illustrates the history and globalization of the
$400-billion-a-year advertising industry. Tungate begins by simultaneously
addressing consumers' skepticism (or outright disdain) toward the "jargon,
psychobabble and double talk of advertising," and advertisers' laudable
financing of "a free, varied, democratic media," before hunting down
advertising's birth during the Industrial Revolution. He traces the industry
from there through today's exploding media frontier of new global markets,
viral advertising and seemingly infinite bandwidth. Along the way, he looks
at trailblazers like Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy, whose prosperous
agencies and their offspring propelled the industry worldwide, and
especially in the US, throughout the 20th century. He looks at key players,
time periods and hotspots (Madison Avenue in the 1950s, Tokyo's Dentsu, the
Omnicom mega-merger) with snappy storytelling, interviews with bigwigs and
buckets full of trivia. Tungate argues effectively that the prevalence and
effectiveness of a given country's advertising is commensurate with that
country's entire economy; media enthusiasts and professionals will find this
a handy, entertaining and insightful guide to the past and future of the ad
world.
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The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and
Follow the Golden Rule
by Michael Shermer
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Good-Evil-People-Gossip/dp/0805075208/
From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on evolutionary psychology, Skeptic publisher and Scientific
American contributor Shermer (Why People Believe Weird Things) argues that
the sources of moral behavior can be traced scientifically to humanity's
evolutionary origins. He contends that human morality evolved as first an
individual and then a species-wide mechanism for survival. As society
evolved, humans needed rules governing behavior-e.g., altruism, sympathy,
reciprocity and community concern-in order to ensure survival. Shermer says
that some form of the Golden Rule-"Do unto others as you would have others
do unto you"-provides the foundation of morality in human societies. Out of
this, he develops the principles of what he calls a "provisional ethics"
that "is neither absolute nor relative," that applies to most people most of
the time, while allowing for "tolerance and diversity." According to the
"ask-first" principle, for instance, the performer of an act simply asks its
intended receiver whether the act is right or wrong. Other principles
include the "happiness" principle ("always seek happiness with someone
else's happiness in mind"), the liberty principle ("always seek liberty with
someone else's liberty in mind") and the moderation principle ("when
innocent people die, extremism in the defense of anything is no virtue, and
moderation in the protection of everything is no vice"). Shermer's
provisional ethics might reflect the messy ways that human moral behavior
developed, but his simplistic principles establish a utilitarian calculus
that not everyone will find acceptable
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Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
by Chris Hedges
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568584377
Product Description
Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise
of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion.
Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority,
functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity
and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is
retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic.
In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and
books, are being pushed to the margins.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil
Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture —
attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies —
exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer
41/2 stars book only
Contrary to Americans' common belief that in health care more is
more—that more spending, drugs and technology means better care—this
lucid report posits that less is actually better. Medical journalist
Brownlee acknowledges that state-of-the-art medicine can improve care
and save lives. But technology and drugs are misused and overused, she
argues, citing a 2003 study of one million Medicare recipients,
published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which showed that
patients in hospitals that spent the most were 2% to 6% more likely to
die than patients in hospitals that spent the least. Additionally, she
says, billions per year are spent on unnecessary tests and drugs and
on specialists who are rewarded more for some procedures than for more
appropriate ones. The solution, Brownlee writes, already exists: the
Veterans Health Administration outperforms the rest of the American
health care system on multiple measures of quality. The main obstacle
to replicating this model nationwide, according to the author, is a
powerful cartel of organizations, from hospitals to drug companies,
that stand to lose in such a system. Many of Brownlee's points have
been much covered, but her incisiveness and proposed solution can add
to the health care debate heated up by the release of Michael Moore's
Sicko.
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has
Undermined America
3 1/2 stars, hardcover, kindle, audio
Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) delivers a trenchant look into the
burgeoning business of positive thinking. A bout with breast cancer
puts the author face to face with this new breed of frenetic positive
thinking promoted by everyone from scientists to gurus and activists.
Chided for her anger and distress by doctors and fellow cancer
patients and survivors, Ehrenreich explores the insistence upon
optimism as a cultural and national trait, discovering its symbiotic
relationship with American capitalism and how poverty, obesity,
unemployment and relationship problems are being marketed as obstacles
that can be overcome with the right (read: positive) mindset. Building
on Max Weber's insights into the relationship between Calvinism and
capitalism, Ehrenreich sees the dark roots of positive thinking
emerging from 19th-century religious movements. Mary Baker Eddy,
William James and Norman Vincent Peale paved the path for today's
secular $9.6 billion self-improvement industry and positive psychology
institutes. The author concludes by suggesting that the bungled
invasion of Iraq and current economic mess may be intricately tied to
this reckless national penchant for self-delusion and a lack of
anxious vigilance, necessary to societal survival.
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
4 star, hardcover, kindle
Arguing that human genetic evolution is still ongoing,
physicist-turned-evolutionary biologist Cochran and anthropologist
Harpending marshal evidence for dramatic genetic change in the
(geologically) recent past, particularly since the invention of
agriculture. Unfortunately, much of their argument-including the
origin of modern humans, agriculture, and Indo-Europeans-tends to
neglect archaeological and geological evidence; readers should keep in
mind that assumed time frames, like the age of the human species, are
minimums at best and serious underestimates at worst. That said, there
is much here to recommend, including the authors' unique approach to
the question of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, and their
discussion of the genetic pressures on Ashkenazi Jews over the past
1,000 years, both based solidly in fact. They also provide clear
explanations for tricky concepts like gene flow and haplotypes, and
their arguments are intriguing throughout. Though lapses in their case
won't be obvious to the untrained eye, it's clear that this lively,
informative text is not meant to deceive (abundant references and a
glossary also help) but to provoke thought, debate and possibly
wonder.