Review: Secrets to Happiness

On May 15, the New York Times published Jincy Willett's review of Secrets to Happiness by Sarah Dunn, and I immediately put a hold on it at the library. I love the Wheaton Public Library, by the way. They keep up with the new books--this one, released in March, was on their shelves in April--and if they don't have a book you want, they'll find it for you.

This book is not a how-to guide to happiness, nor is it really about warm puppies (though two dogs are characters, and I came close to buying it purely for its cover). It is, I suppose, chick lit: the main character and most of her friends are single, 30-something city dwellers who obsess about their relationships, which are, at least from my vantage point--I'm the age of their unpleasant mothers--pretty screwed up.

But it's much better than the term chick-lit implies. In fact, after I read a few passages to Mr Neff, who tends to read books with titles like Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine, he said he wanted to read it too. I warned him that it contains a lot of gratutitous, um, carnality. That did not appear to faze him.

To learn more about the book's content, read the NYT review. If all you want is a recommendation, try this: Secrets to Happiness is witty, fast-paced, and cheerful. The characters are intelligent, if feckless, and nearly all of them are endearing (I'll make an exception for Spence). Holly's philosophizing is hilarious and sometimes profound. "Somebody should feel guilty," she tells her married friend Amanda, who is about to take a lover, "and I tend to feel all the feelings in the room."

The only thing I don't like about the book is its happy ending. Well, I sort of like it. I mean, I'm glad for all the characters that things work out so well for them, despite their deplorable behavior, and I try to avoid novels that leave their protagonists weeping or catatonic. On the other hand, Holly criticizes psychotherapy for making "it possible for a person to do whatever they wanted to do, with whomever they wanted to do it, when and where and however the hell they felt like it, while reaping no negative emotional consequences whatsoever." So it seems odd when Holly's moral compass--the only one in the crowd, apparently, and a consistent theme throughout the book--turns out to be irrelevant.

Maybe Jack, apparently untroubled by moral questions, gets it right: "'You believe in God,' he said [to Holly]. 'You just don't believe that God is good.'" Maybe a good God would redeem, not smite.

And yet, in Holly's words, "It just feels like there should be consequences.... at least I'd feel like there was some moral center somewhere, like we lived in a universe where things made sense. Instead, in this version, people do whatever the hell they want and everybody gets off scot-free."

* * *

Here's an excerpt I enjoyed. Holly and Jack, post-coitally, are sitting nude on the bed, discussing religion.

"What about finding a church that's Christian, but not so..."
"Not so evangelical?"
"Not so conservative, I was going to say."
"Like, what, one of those Episcopal churches that has an openly gay priest?" said Holly.
"Why not?"
"With the clothes drive in the narthex and the transgendered support group in the basement, antiwar sloganeering from the pulpit, potlucks featuring mung bean and tofu chili, hymns addressed to God our Mother, that sort of thing?"
"In that general neighborhood, yes."
"I can't do it," said Holly. It's completely foreign to me. It's worse than foreign. It pushes more buttons."
"What do you mean?"
"I sit in a church like that and I start to feel like Jerry Falwell. It brings out every long-discarded fundamentalist impulse in me," Holly confessed. "I find myself flipping back through Leviticus and searching for injunctions against sodomy. Honestly, I'm sort of stuck. I can't go forward and I can't go back."

Dear Mr. President: How to save millions on health care

Mr. President, Members of Congress, members of the press, and fellow bloggers---

There's a way to save millions of dollars on health care that nobody is talking about. It's a simple concept, and the start-up costs would not be enormous. It would be ideologically satisfactory to Democrats and Republicans. It would satisfy the President's call for "uniquely American" solutions, because it is based on free enterprise. Though it would not solve the current health-care crisis, it would help to contain costs while a solution is found.

Our current health-care system resembles free enterprise like a mugging resembles a trip to the mall. When we go to the doctor, the pharmacist, or the hospital, it's "your money or your life." We consumers usually have no idea how much any health-care service or product will cost until the bill arrives--we only know that we need help, and so we pay whatever is asked. Comparison shopping, an essential feature of budget management, is impossible.

So what if we figured out a way to make comparison shopping not only possible, but easy?

What if doctors' offices were required to post a list of their most common procedures, with prices for each? What if they also had to list all their prices on a central online data bank that consumers could access? What if pharmacists, laboratories, scan centers, hospitals, clinics--all providers of health care--had to do the same?

Imagine going online and checking to see how much your local family-practice physicians charge for a 15-minute office visit before making the appointment.

Imagine being given, along with your prescription, a computer print-out showing where your medication can be purchased, how much it costs from each pharmacy, and what other, cheaper options might be equally satisfactory.

Imagine being able to refuse your doctor's offer to use the CT scanner across the hall, which he owns, and instead driving three miles to a different CT scanner that costs half as much. Or confidently using the doctor's scanner, knowing that his prices beat out the competition's.

How hard would this be?

Posting the prices of usual procedures would take, what, an hour?

Listing all prices on the internet could take anywhere from ten minutes to a day, depending on how many services are offered.

Setting up an internet portal for providers and consumers would be the most expensive and time-consuming part. Google might be happy to help. Or Bill Gates.

Price-fixing could be a potential problem ("Let's all get together and charge the same outrageous amount ..."), though it is already illegal. Undoubtedly there will soon be caps on medical malpractice lawsuits. Perhaps underemployed ambulance chasers could move into antitrust law, which would certainly increase their popularity.

Some providers might object that they themselves don't know what their prices are, because so much depends on insurance company payments. Well then, imitate hotels and publish your maximum rack rate. Or imitate airlines and change your rates hourly (this would be time-consuming, and I really wish airlines didn't do it--but still, it's a lot easier to comparison-shop for a plane ticket than for a mammogram). Or keep your prices low and reasonable for everyone, and stop asking the uninsured to subsidize the insurance companies' discounts.

Any health-care system acceptable to Americans will contain some element of free trade. To the extent that we want the free market to play a role in our health care, let's insist that normal market forces operate. We live in an information society. Why not information for consumers on what our health care is going to cost?

Why I am a liberal

Liberal means favoring freedom.

In 17th and early 18th-century Europe, liberals brought down the Ancien Régime—a totalitarian alliance of church and state—and (with many false starts and not a little bloodshed) developed their current democratic systems of government. In America, liberals wrote (and fought for) the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

In England and America, especially, liberals favored free markets and strong businesses. Commerce, they believed, was a safer ruler than king or pope, because commerce was based on “enlightened self-interest.” Economic liberalism led to exploration, the industrial revolution, and an increased standard of living for Europeans and Americans.

However, 19th century captains of industry began rivaling 18th-century despots in their opulent lifestyle, and in turning a blind eye to the miserable living conditions of the workers who supported it. Liberals—that is, lovers of freedom—began arguing that freedom is possible only when everyone has access to education, decent housing, adequate food, reasonable working hours, and a safe working environment.

Today, some Americans think that liberals are anti-business and pro-government. Perhaps some who wear the liberal label are, but this is not true liberalism. I repeat: liberalism means favoring freedom. But this does not mean freedom without limits.

As a Christian, I believe in original sin: we all fall short of God’s ideal. I also believe in community: we are individually members of one another, and our enlightened interests must extend to others as well as ourselves. (That is why I am a liberal and not a libertarian.)

Alas, communities of sinful people are rarely better than the individuals who form them, and often—because of the increased power of the group—they are considerably worse. Think of the powerful medieval church, for example. Christ instituted the church for the good of humankind, but “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton, a devout Catholic, wrote that in a letter about the power of the pope.

If power corrupts the church, it also corrupts secular governments and multinational corporations. America’s founding fathers limited religious power by including the first amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights. They limited the government’s power by dividing it into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. They did not limit the power of multinational corporations, because even though the Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1602, multinationals were not a huge concern in colonial and frontier America.

Paradoxically, excess power, wherever it occurs, needs to be limited in order to allow freedom to flourish. Another name for freedom without limitations is anarchy, and a frequent result of anarchy is totalitarianism. Untrammeled freedom can destroy liberty.

Given humanity’s power-hungry sinfulness, the best way of limiting one power is often by keeping it in balance with other powers. In the Western world today, our princes are not kings or presidents or bishops, but CEOs and financiers. Tomorrow our princes may come from some other sector, requiring different kinds of limits. The important thing for a liberal is not to be anti-business or anti-government or anti-church, but rather to be pro-liberty, and to seek to limit any power that is dangerous to basic human rights.

One thing is certain: as original sinners, we are powerfully attracted to the god Mammon. Whoever has the power also has the money, and whenever power goes out of control, it enriches itself at the expense of others. If you want to know who needs restraining at any given moment, follow the money.

Review: A Plague on Both Your Houses

Knowing of my fascination with medieval sleuths, a friend recommended the Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew by Susanna Gregory.

I began with A Plague on Both Your Houses, listed all over the internet as #1 in the series that is now up to 15 books, even though the book jacket unaccountably calls it the third chronicle. I suspect this book was the third written though the first chronologically, just as The Magician's Nephew is the 6th chronicle of Narnia though the first chronologically. Which makes me wonder how you can have an unchronological chronicle, but perhaps I'm being too logical.

The story takes place in 1348, some two centuries after Brother Cadfael flourished in Shrewsbury and nearly a century before Dame Frevisse roamed Oxfordshire, but only 15 years before Owen Archer will unravel his first mystery in York. Cadfael and Frevisse are monastics; Archer is an retired soldier and apothecary who works closely with a monastery; and Matthew Bartholomew is a physician who lives with monks and friars in a Cambridge college.

Gregory, a police officer before earning a PhD at Cambridge, has skillfully created the richly detailed historical ambience that medieval mystery readers crave. She includes not only descriptions of 14th-century university life, but also gruesome portrayals of what bubonic plague did to the human body, how it destroyed entire villages, and what the young doctor did to try to alleviate his patients' suffering. You can almost smell the piles of rotting corpses waiting to be tipped into the communal pit.

Of course--since this is a mystery--there is moral putrefaction as well: plots, conspiracies, greed, betrayal, all connected to a series of bizarre murders. Unlike many of his confrères, Bartholomew is naïve and very, very good. Like his biblical namesake (aka Nathanael), he is a man "in whom is no guile" (John 1.47). His innocence gets him into all sorts of trouble.

Bartholomew's character is well drawn, and his companions are believable. Conversation, however, is often stilted and professorial ("'There have been other signs, too,' Michael continued after a moment. 'In France, a great pillar of fire was seen over the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. A ball of fire hung over Paris. In Italy, when the plague arrived, it came with a terrible earthquake that sent noxious fumes all over the surrounding country and killed all the crops. Many died from famine as well as the plague.'" To the author's credit, Bartholomew nearly falls asleep listening to Brother Michael drone on.)

Occasionally Gregory seems guilty of anachronism. Though she depicts the general ignorance and superstition underlying 14th-century medical practices, and though she acknowledges that Bartholomew is ahead of his time, his ideas about the causes and treatment of disease sometimes seem unbelievably advanced. The plague is not a punishment from God; leeches are harmful; there is no reason to waste time with horoscopes ... will we discover in a later installment that a time machine has flung Bartholomew back from the Renaissance into the Middle Ages?

This is a complex, tightly plotted book. Trying to get my bearings, I kept returning to page 7, where the eight Fellows of Michaelhouse are briefly described. Eventually I knew everybody well enough to read in a more linear fashion, but then the bodies started to pile up. Gregory helped me out by having Bartholomew stop every now and then to take stock, usually by asking himself a paragraph or two full of questions ("Was it Abigny? Had he come back from wherever he was hiding when he had heard that Bartholomew knew about the [spoiler deleted]? Could it have been Swynford, back from his plague-free haven? Was it Michael, who had reacted so oddly at Augustus's death? Was it William, who had prompted him to look at the bodies in the first place, or Alcote, skulking in his room?" Is it tedious to read so many questions?).

The author also helped by neatly tying off all the loose ends in the final chapter and epilogue, which seemed just a little like cheating--but then if she had followed the novelist's adage Show, don't tell, the book might have become too heavy to lift.

Whether this is the first or the third chronicle, it is an early book in a series that has a lot of devoted fans. A reader who thinks the Matthew Bartholomew books "are simply the best out on the market" (and he's read them all) wrote this in an Amazon customer review: "Admittedly it has taken Ms Gregory 4 novels to really get going and you can almost see the development in the writing skills as you read each one." That's how I felt about the Dame Frevisse novels, with which I eventually fell hopelessly in love. So perhaps, several books from now, I'll be in love with the Bartholomew chronicles too.

Bestsellers, 2008

I've been looking at Publishers Weekly's list of bestselling books 2008 (which they inexplicably title "Bestselling Books 2009," but publishers must think ahead), and I confess I have read very few of them.

The list includes books that were published in 2007 or 2008 and that sold (in the United States, in 2008) more than 100,000 copies each. Of these, 156 were fiction and 119 were nonfiction. I have read eight of the novels and one and a half of the nonfiction books (although I spent a long time at Barnes & Noble leafing through another nonfiction book on the list, How Not to Look Old.)

Fiction
PW's fiction list is predictably heavy on brand names: Grisham, Patterson, Cornwell, Baldacci. My own brand preferences run more to PD James and Alexander McCall Smith, both of whom also made the list. Here are the eight bestselling novels I read, with comments:

• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski. Ecco (9/08) 1,320,000 (Well, it’s about dogs and families, and it’s well written, but why did everyone like it so much?)
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Dial (368,288) (Yes! By far the best of the lot. A book for booklovers, and also a beach book.)
• Remember Me? Sophie Kinsella. Dial (336,870) (Forgettable fluff, but fun)
• One Fifth Avenue. Candace Bushnell. Voice/Hyperion (290,004) (Also FF but F)
• The Private Patient. P.D. James. Knopf (235,000) (Excellent. PD James is still wonderful at age 88.)
• People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks. Viking (212,498) (Good, but I liked Year of Wonders more.)
• The Miracle at Speedy Motors. Alexander McCall Smith. Pantheon (150,000) (Mma Ramotswe is my favorite serotonin enhancer.)
• Liberty. Garrison Keillor. Viking (101,000) (Ranges from annoying to infuriating, with occasional spots of comedy.)

Nonfiction
The nonfiction list was crowded with “how to fill your life, which currently sucks, with wealth, meaning, and beauty” books, which I have avoided ever since it occurred to me that if any of these books actually worked, no more would need to be published.

Since 2008 was an election year, political and issues books were also popular. I read half of

• Hot, Flat and Crowded. Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux (9/08) 625,363

a book with an excellent premise that is easily understood in the first chapter or two, so that eventually the remaining chapters seemed superfluous.

I also read

• Things I've Been Silent About. Azar Nafisi. Random (100,305)

perhaps not as compelling as her earlier Reading Lolita in Tehran, but still a fine memoir that has increased my understanding of the frequent scary headlines from Iran.

Religion books
Interestingly--at least to me, since I've worked for some 30 years in religion publishing--21 of the 119 nonfiction bestsellers were religion books. Each of the 21 either was by an already well-known author or else profited from a recent sensational news story. I can't comment on their content, since I haven't read any of them. One of two looked worth reading (if you wrote one, no doubt I am referring to yours).

Of the fiction books, only one was published by a religious house: Dead Heat by Joel C. Rosenberg (Tyndale). Alas, it's a right-wing political thriller.

Marilynne Robinson's Home didn't make the bestseller list, though perhaps it will in 2010. Meanwhile, it is accumulating awards. Christianity Today chose it as the best religious novel of 2008, it won Britain's Orange Prize, it appeared on the New York Times "100 Notable Books of 2008" list, and it was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

Which just goes to show . . . bestseller lists are interesting sociological and business phenomena, but they're not a great guide to good reading.

You knew that all along. Now you have the data.

Summer reading: nonfiction reviews

Over the last 15 months I've reviewed or commented on some 40 books on this blog. Here's the nonfiction list--with links to my reviews--of books about sex and marriage, worship and coffee, anxiety and happiness, food and animals ...

OK, so there isn't much of a theme, which must mean I'm a hedgehog and not a fox. If that metaphor is unfamiliar, check out the first review on the fiction list here.

Brown, The Body and Society
Butcher, A Little Daily Wisdom
Coontz, Marriage: A History
Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells
Gill, How Starbucks Saved My Life
Grandin, Animals Make Us Human
Hathaway, The Year of the Goat
Jones, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food
Kolodiejchuk /Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light
Madigan & Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews
McMahon, Happiness: A History
Paulsell, Honoring the Body
Pearson, A Brief History of Anxiety
Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Squire, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage
Stark, The Rise of Christianity
Sweeney, Almost Catholic
Wright, Days of Deepening Friendship

3 more lists
2008 Books: The 10 Mosts
Books and films that break your heart
Fiction reviews through June 2009

Summer reading: fiction reviews

Over the last 15 months I've reviewed or commented on some 40 books on this blog. Here's the fiction list--with links to my reviews--of mysterious, grisly, heartbreaking, heartwarming, thought provoking, or silly books, most of which I enjoyed.

Clearly my reading is not thematic. It does, however, promote happiness, and if you'd like to read more on that topic, check out McMahon's book on the nonfiction list here.


Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Cornwell, Blow Fly
Frazer, The Apostate’s Tale
Genova, Still Alice
Harvey, The Wilderness
Keillor, Liberty
McCall Smith, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built
Minot, Evening
Mohsin, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Munro, The Complete Saki
Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher
Robb, The Apothecary Rose
Robinson, Home
Sansom, Dark Fire
Sansom, Dissolution

3 more lists
2008 Books: The 10 Mosts
Books and films that break your heart
Nonfiction reviews through June 2009