Not long ago, as I explained last week, I discovered a perfect novel. Virtually simultaneously, I made another discovery: a perfect nonfiction book. (I’m on a roll!)

So what does a perfect nonfiction book look like? Well, the purpose of nonfiction is to illuminate real-world phenomena. It follows that a perfect nonfiction book would illuminate, incredibly clearly, not just one specialized subset of history or science, but the whole shebang. That’s right—the perfect nonfiction book should reveal all. Everything that ever happened anywhere should be set down in the book!

But to clarify—it should reveal all that is known. Where there are unknowns, the author should be humble in pointing out knowledge deficits. Because while some authors might seem godlike, none really are. An author who won’t admit ignorance is trying to sell you something (and you should run!).

Until this year, most of the very best all-encompassing nonfiction books that I knew of—those that bravely endeavored to explain everything—were written by the great Jared Diamond. Many books explain how Europeans conquered the Americas and elsewhere; Diamond’s books explain why. He delves into the intricacies of human societies and earthly terrains and why events transpired, over the course of history, to produce imbalances of power.

Now comes along another giant, Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian and philosopher. His book Sapiens has been getting a lot of buzz in my community lately. It’s not like the book is fresh off the presses; it was first published in Hebrew in 2011, and an English language edition was released in 2014. My understanding is that English speakers in Europe have been enjoying the book for the last five years, and Americans are now finally getting in on the action.

This could be because this book is likely to be controversial, and in several circles. Both conservatives and liberals may find some of their most cherished beliefs wrestled with and left in unrecognizable forms. In fact, there are certain parts of the book that make one feel that the mightiness of the pen is perhaps getting out of hand! I mean, some of this is world-exploding stuff.

But it’s factual. When you start to delve into the true nature of things, you start to realize that the world is a lot stranger than you initially thought. And yet, while it’s strange, it makes perfect sense. Reading this book is like putting pieces together in a giant puzzle. The world starts to make more and more sense—though it may not be the same “common sense” you were raised on.

I’m not going to quote a passage from the book itself in this blog post, for . . . how am I to choose? I penciled a star, exclamation point, or “WOW” on almost every page. Something on almost every page was mind-bendingly fascinating. The book covers an extremely wide range of history, starting when all humans were hunter-gatherers, moving through all the varied changes our species underwent, zooming past the present day, and speculating on the future of our species. So instead of choosing a random passage, I’d like to quote from the little section appended to the end of the book called “A Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari.” The question is as follows:

“What inspired you to write a book about the entire history of humankind? What was your aim?”

And here is his answer:

“When I was a teenager, I became very troubled by the fact that I didn’t understand what was really happening in the world—why things were the way they were, and what the aim and meaning of life were. I asked my parents, my teachers and other grown-ups and, shockingly, it turned out that they too didn’t really understand life. But I was even more amazed by the fact that they seemed not to care about it. They were very worried about money, careers, their mortgage, the political situation, but were completely nonchalant about the fact that they didn’t understand what life was all about. I promised myself that when I grew up, I would not get bogged down in the mundane troubles of daily life, but would do my best to understand the big picture. Writing the book was, in a way, fulfilling this promise that I had made myself.”

I very much identify with this. For me, it happened as a terrified child; but I had a similar experience.

Are you curious about why the world is the way it is?

Today I’d like to share with you an example of the importance of getting the words right. The language we use is immensely consequential in not just how we think about real-world issues, but also how we handle those issues as a society: how much money is allocated, what kind of care people receive, and other important effects.

Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., exposes the faulty language we use surrounding trauma, and then he makes a fascinating argument for a change in the language—with a corresponding change in people’s decisions and actions.

(Note that this blog post is a brief synopsis of and commentary on a long and complicated expostulation. I encourage you to read The Body Keeps the Score to understand and appreciate Dr. van der Kolk’s full evidence and argument.)

Dr. van der Kolk argues that, over the past century or so, there has been a cover-up surrounding the scientifically demonstrated fact that abused children experience detrimental psychological effects. Moreover, he explains, these detrimental psychological effects are not random; there is what he calls a “consistent profile,” which he describes in detail. Not all abused children exhibit the same symptoms (just as, for example, people can experience different symptoms despite being infected by the same virus). However, such children have commonalities such as trouble regulating emotions, trouble concentrating, trouble getting along with others, sleep disturbances, unexplained pain, and doing things like rocking and cutting to relieve tension.

But, Dr. van der Kolk laments, there is no established diagnosis for this consistent profile. Instead, children are being given multiple diagnoses that describe symptoms, not the underlying cause. For instance, many children are being labeled as having “oppositional defiant disorder” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.” As a result, children who desperately need care that addresses trauma are instead receiving care that addresses bad behavior. Such care, since it does not focus on the core problem, does not come close to resolving the core problem.

How did we get ourselves into this predicament of language? Why has there been a cover-up surrounding childhood trauma? Dr. van der Kolk takes us back to the time of Sigmund Freud:

“In 1896 Freud boldly claimed that ‘the ultimate cause of hysteria is always the seduction of the child by an adult.’ Then, faced with his own evidence of an epidemic of abuse in the best families of Vienna—one, he noted, that would implicate his own father—he quickly began to retreat. Psychoanalysis shifted to an emphasis on unconscious wishes and fantasies, though Freud occasionally kept acknowledging the reality of sexual abuse.”

It’s a hard topic. It’s not a great issue to talk about, politically speaking. What would you rather give a public speech on, child abuse or unconscious wishes?

But Dr. van der Kolk gives the reader hope with his historical analysis of another kind of trauma, today known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. When governments came to realize that fighting in WWI caused “shell shock,” they worked to hide this fact. Publicizing shell shock would cost money (soldiers experiencing it would need treatment and disability pay) and destabilize the war effort (governments wanted to encourage men to enlist, not emphasize war’s dangers). So WWI veterans were not treated for shell shock. Neither were WWII veterans. The politics during the Vietnam War era, however, were different; and a new diagnosis, PTSD, entered the books and the lexicon. Along with this new language to describe a medical condition came new awareness, treatments, and funding.

There was another huge benefit of the language change. As it turned out, veterans were not the only ones who had this medical condition:

“The adoption of the PTSD diagnosis by the DSM III in 1980 led to extensive scientific studies and to the development of effective treatments, which turned out to be relevant not only to combat veterans but also to victims of a range of traumatic events, including rape, assault, and motor vehicle accidents.”

Dr. van der Kolk argues that we are overdue for a language change in the realm of child abuse. He proposes the term Developmental Trauma Disorder. I am not a doctor and cannot comment on his suggestion with authority. However, I can comment with authority that I have read over and over about falsehoods told for political purposes. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of the fake news. If there is a problem and a solution, let’s name the problem in plain language and implement the solution. Covering up the problem and addressing symptoms never works over the long term. The doctor says it best:

“You would not want to have your appendix removed when you are suffering from a kidney stone, and you would not want to have somebody labeled as ‘oppositional’ when, in fact, his behavior is rooted in an attempt to protect himself against real danger.”

Do you fight for truth in language . . . despite the risk that someone will label you as “oppositional”?

In addition to having a delightful plot, The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt, being a historical novel, has delightful references to the era in question: the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century. And being a specific kind of historical novel—a Western—it contains all the traditional elements of that genre.

If you enjoy reading about gunfights and duels, forlorn towns in the wilderness, panning for gold, covered wagons, the gain and loss of huge piles of precious metals, horses, bears, tough guys, and whores—this book is for you.

But this book is also for you if you enjoy a hearty side of quirk with your traditional fare. deWitt displays real brilliance in creating interesting and unique characters whom you’re not sure whether to love or hate.

One of my favorite bits of quirk in the novel is the recurrence of scenes in which different characters get extraordinary joy from brushing their teeth with the different flavors of tooth powder newly available in local general stores. Tooth brushing was, at one time, a novel thing. Perhaps people of the future will roll their eyes at the thought of people in the past getting so much joy from their primitive phone apps; who knows?

By the way, it looks like the promised motion picture was released in theaters last October and on disc and streaming last month. Have you seen it? What did you think? Looks like it got pretty good reviews. Has anyone seen the movie and read the book? What similarities or differences did you notice? (I read the film description and noticed one difference: the brothers’ birth order.)

What do Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College (known as the “This Is Water” speech) have in common?

Both of these famous philosophies, according to Matthew B. Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head, are faulty—and for the same reason.

It’s a bold claim. Crawford attempts to topple two towering figures of Western culture and thought in one fell swoop! So let’s back up a sec and analyze what Kant’s and Wallace’s philosophies, in these instances, are. Then we can delve into why Crawford thinks they are wrong.

Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Freedom

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher famous for a philosophy called the categorical imperative. He states that morality exists beyond the realm of the everyday world, and can be derived through reason alone. The moral law, he says, is categorically (“unconditionally”) imperative (“crucial and essential”).

Crawford points out that Kant held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world:

“Kant builds a high wall between the empirical world and the purely intellectual, where we discover a priori moral laws. Reasons to act must come only from the latter if we are to be free, and the will is to remain pure, ‘unconditioned’ by anything external to it. . . . To be rational is, for Kant, precisely not to be situated in the world.”

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” Commencement Speech

As those who know me well know, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). Infinite Jest was well worth the struggle to read. I have also enjoyed and marveled at the brilliance of many of his other works, fictional and nonfictional. However, I was distinctly unimpressed by his work—for the only time ever—when encountering, ten years ago, the commencement speech he delivered on May 21, 2005: and for the same reasons Crawford cites.

Even ten years later—and I remember it very well: it was exactly ten years ago, give or take a few months, when my boss (at the time) printed the speech and gave it to me, as a benefactory gesture, an offering* of moral guidance from mentor to mentee, and which I duly read, but did not duly (oops) compliment, nor, however, criticize, because, after all, who criticizes David Foster Wallace?!!

But I seem to have gotten off track. As I was saying, even ten years later, I distinctly remember the bit in the speech about the annoyance of grocery shopping. Wallace opines that if you are engaged in one of the many frustrating activities of modern life—such as grocery shopping, after a long day at work, in an ugly and crowded supermarket, when all you want to do is go home and rest, but everything is annoying and taking too long, etc.—that you should remember that you can always control what you are thinking.

Here’s what Crawford has to say about this:

“Wallace’s core suggestion in the speech is that ‘you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.’ . . . His solution is thus emblematic of the problem we are addressing in this book: we have an uncertain grasp of the world as something with a reality of its own.”

In other words, Wallace, in this speech, held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world.

Matthew B. Crawford’s Praise of the World Beyond Your Head

I believe in the power of the mind, thinking rationally; but I also concur with Crawford that thinking in an idealized bubble is not enough. There’s a real world to contend with out there! If the deep, rational thinkers aren’t up for working to make a difference . . . whom does that leave?

Crawford titled his book The World Beyond Your Head. His thesis is that we should work to apply our minds to real things, in the real world, despite the many powers that be and cultural conceptions guiding us in less grounded—and more illusory—directions. This quote of his is buried in a footnote, but it’s one of my favorites in the whole book:

“Wisdom is impossible without biography.”

The mind is not an empty shopping cart, hovering in an imaginary space. It has a history. It has been filled and emptied a bit, filled a lot more and emptied a bit more. It has traveled the aisles again and again and again. It has been knocked around quite a lot, but it keeps going. It keeps moving. It keeps engaging. And the more it moves and engages, the fuller it becomes.

With what real-world activities will you fill your cart today, this week, next year?

*I thought I'd throw a footnote in here, just for good measure. (RIP DFW.)

Despite the immense and unprecedented power of Google, there are some things it just can’t do. It can overwhelm one with information on a vast variety of topics, and yet it remains eerily silent on others.

The Internet can only tell us what we, collectively, already know. And we know much more about the present than we do about the past. When it comes to the past, all we can do is peep back into whatever scant historical documents and bits of evidence exist, make educated guesses, and imagine. Perhaps computaz don’t really rule over so much, after all.

When reading historical and anthropological books like Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston, I often feel a yearning to know more. What exactly did Cudjo/Kossula’s African village look like? Did it look anything like this photo of mud huts in Ghana? Barracoon doesn’t give as many details as I crave. And I know from experience that, no matter how many university libraries one visits, how many obscure texts one reads, and how many answers one delights in finding, there will always remain unanswered questions.

Do you, like me, feel the urge to know more when reading this passage?

“Dey got de women soldiers too and dey run wid de big knife and make noise. Dey ketch people and dey saw de neck lak dis wid de knife den dey twist de head so and it come off de neck. Oh Lor’, Lor’! . . . No man kin be so strong lak de woman soldiers from de Dahomey.”

Whoa, women warriors? Please tell me more. How did they train? What kinds of weapons did they use? What did they wear while fighting? Were most women from Dahomey trained as warriors, or just a select few of them? Were they anything like the Amazons, as described in Greek mythology? Were they anything like Katniss, from The Hunger Games? I’m sure I could learn a lot from Google about women warriors, were I to do a search. I’m sure I could learn even more, were I to scour through library stacks. And yet, I’m also sure that many mysteries would remain.

What secrets of the past would you uncover, if you could?