Book Review / Good And Mad: The Revolutionary Power Of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister

Ms Traister wrote Good and Mad in just four months because she wanted to keep the intense intellection and emotionality flowing from a series of connected events happening in the United States as fresh as possible such as Donald Trump winning the 2016 presidential election, International Women Marches, #MeToo/#TimesUp, and record numbers of women running and winning political office in 2018.  With each paragraph, she succeeds in sustaining her passion.  My finishing the last page was like letting out a sigh of satisfaction, wonderment, and joy, as if her book was a long love letter, but focusing not on all the emotions connecting two people, but instead on the many intriquing facets of anger as they relate in the struggle for gender equality throughout its long, honourable history, describing in an intimate tone⁠—at times, soothing, at other times, invigourating⁠—various guideposts that has led the way and will continue to do so. She writes:

In the popular imagination, feminism has since its inception been on the verge of collapse, thanks to the intensity of its very real internal conflicts: divisions over race, class, sexuality, and generational difference, not to mention the flare-ups of personal jealousies and combative power plays. These rifts have often been serious and damaging. But they have not set the women's movement apart from any other social justice movement, from the civil rights or Black Power or immigration or gay rights or the New Left or socialist movements, all of which at times been riven by generational, racial, gendered, and class divides, by homophobia, strategic differences, and personal feuds, To some degree, this is the nature of mass activism.

The nature of mass activism is what it is because what it is fighting is what it is.  Entrenched power for a few is only able to hold onto to its privileged position by encouraging and cementing through mass media, education, and policing a climate of division and distrust. To break away from the 'normal' interface to wage protest against 'normality' is a supreme challenge. Taking two steps forward, one step backward is to be expected.

The author participating at a Bay Area Book Festival

Grounding women's anger by showing how it has repeadedly got the job done despite being perceived through the distorted lens of the powerful white male minority as crazy or in less dismissive terms as ineffective is essential. In many instances, women expressing anger was the exact trigger making significant advancement towards social justice possible. Mrs. Till directed an incandescent fury after her murdered, teenaged son Emmett was beaten beyond recognition by white supremacist terrorists on August 28, 1955 by demanding that not only would his hastily buried body be returned to her, but his wake would be conducted via an open coffin so the horror of what was done be seen.

Ms Traister guesting on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

The expertly cut gem of insectionality shines throughout her writing, reflecting light and emitting a rainbow of colours, sending enlightening beams right through the fog of structural, systemic racism and sexism. She quotes Brittney Cooper:

White women and black men both want what white men have--white women want to have corporate power and black men want to be patriarchs. Black women a) know we're never going to get that and b) don't want that. We don't want to wield corporate power and we don't want to oppress people. That's why I look to black women as the political future.

Ms Traister admits though expressing anger and channeling it into action is effective and emboldening, it is also demanding on relationships and families which was born out during the second feminism wave in the 1960s of which I can personally confirm because that's when I was a young woman. Additionally, if being angry will cost you your livilihood among other supports, this approach doesn't align with everybody who is focused on the arc of progressive change. Regardless, Good and Mad inspires, upskills, and empowers.

Childhood photo of the author: girl power and some!

À la prochaine!

RELATED LINKS

Ms Traister's Twitter

Ms Traister's Amazon Page

Brittney C. Cooper's (Professor Crunk) Twitter

Brittney C. Cooper's Amazon Page

I Saw Emmett Till This Week At The Grocery Store (Poem by Eve L. Ewing)

PREVIOUS BOOK REVIEWS

Book Review / So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Book review / Inferior:  The True Power Of Women And The Science That Shows It by Angela Saini

Book review / The Golden Thread : How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Book review / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner Townsend

Book Review / Against Empathy by Paul Bloom

Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord

Book Review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton

Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630

Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal

Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman

Rodriguez with Julia Turshen

Book Review/The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Fall For It Every Time By Maria Konnikova

Book Review / The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates

Book Review / So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Though discussions about race are fraught with difficulties, Ms Oluo does not get bogged down by them. Her approach is like one of a spring--both like water bubbling up from a profound source and a resilient helical coil--because it is buoyed by lived experience while never forgetting her identity despite being pressed or pulled. She responds to well tread protestations against racism's omnipresence with courage, lucidity, and consistency.

The author

Humans, regardless of race and class, are subject to hardships. While poor whites experiencing setbacks and difficulties have less resources than better-off people, impoverished people of colour have their hardships compounded further by racism, a pervasive, bewildering substrate in which people of colour are stuck. If only class inequality were addressed, poverty would not be tackled substantially for people of colour. Kimberlé Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality startles at first because it is so elegant you don't know where to begin to digest its beauty and effectiveness. It makes you think and think hard which is perhaps why some people reject this scholarly concept out of hand, dissing it as banal identity politics/tribalism.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, lawyer, civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory

Racism will not be significantly lessened if a crude definition is that it's just a few rotten apples. Such individuals aren't worth the time of day but that barrel is. Dismantling systematic racism is what needs to be done because then those carriers of the rot will not be able to infect everyone. A common refrain is oh stop with racism is everywhere, you making it worse by seeing something that is not there. I can't help quipping that response falls in the category of is that a pen in your pocket or are you just glad to see me. I would imagine that Mae West found the second reaction to be the more common. The person who is living the experience of being seen fairly consistently in a particular manner is the one to whom I defer.

Ijeoma Oluo with her children

There's much to learn from her book because she knows this topic from all angles. But for me, the standout lesson is whites confronting everyday racism doesn't make them heroes. It's just the bottom line. Get this book, digest it, and apply. Reread. Keep as reference. Buy copies for giving to others.

À la prochaine!

RELATED LINKS

How to pronounce the author's very beautiful name

So You Want To Talk About Race at Amazon

Ms Oluo at Twitter

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw at Twitter

OTHER BOOK REVIEWS

Book review / Inferior:  The True Power Of Women And The Science That Shows It by Angela Saini

Book review / The Golden Thread : How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Book review / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner Townsend

Book Review / Against Empathy by Paul Bloom

Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord

Book Review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton

Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630

Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal

Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman

Rodriguez with Julia Turshen

Book Review/The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Fall For It Every Time By Maria Konnikova

Book Review / The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates

Book Review / Inferior: The True Power of Women and the Science that Shows It by Angela Saini

Ms Saini's presentation despite being one of concise clarity manages to cover, and even more importantly, uncover much ground, providing for an exhilarating, informative read. In her introduction, she lights upon a point that on its own pierces centuries of fog by identifying the manner in which women are perceived. Their inferiority is whispered constantly and everywhere. Certainly this dismissive attitude can be loud and clear, even brutal at times; but to sustain such a direct disregard would be a taxing endeavour. Therefore the approach morphed into an omnipresent implicit bias.

The foggy pestilence is left to billow about because of the nonchalant attitude of well that's what science says even though that is not what science says. It obscures the truth from being seen, an inconvenient one of women being denied their birthright of equality. There's a cough there, a sneeze there, but the fog remains. Mingling with the miasma is yet another poisonous whispering, that there never was any intellectually vigorous analysis opposing the arbitrary proposition of women intrinsically having pared-down worth.

Challenging the notion of innate male superiority and corralling their righteous anger into brilliant and potent late-nineteenth-century rebuttals, women like Caroline Kennard* and Eliza Burt Gamble were ignored by science. Because women. Whisper, whisper. See how that fog seeps over everything a woman does? It stays put so well that an egalitarian society hasn't surfaced yet as women still are not spared from being sexually harassed/assaulted, still earn less pay for doing the same work as men, still not mentored as thoroughly as men hence making success into male-dominated fields beyond university graduation fraught with difficulties that has nothing to with their intellectual ability, and still not have complete control over their reproductive functions and of ones that they have, those human rights are under constant threat.

Caroline Kennard

Eliza Burt Gamble

What makes a woman a woman? Data collected from varied, large samples shows that though men on average are taller and have greater upper body strength, woman are more robust. Less males survive birth and stay alive longer.  Eliza Burt Gamble challenging the notion of the weaker sex in her book, The Evolution of Women: An Inquiry Into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man, had intimated as much when she wrote:

When a man and woman are put into competition, both possessed of every mental quality in equal perfection, save that one has higher energy, more patience and a somewhat great degree of physical courage, while the other has superior powers of intuition, finer and more rapid perceptions and a greater degree of endurance . . . the chances of the latter for gaining the ascendancy will doubtless be equal to those of the former.

Living longer may be a nifty evolutionary fitness edge, but nothing is free, especially in evolution. Women experience more pain because a physical price is paid when you are left standing while your male counterpart is resting quietly in a coffin. The female immune system is not necessarily stronger, but instead it is more flexible which is derived from being able to turn off the autoimmune response to the foreign body developing inside the womb.

The systemic curtailing of women's potential can be traced to when agriculture became entrenched. Due to a historic windfall, that is, basically luck, men were able to build societies catering solely to their needs. And with even more luck, white men could shape the world to fit them like a tailored-made suit. With hoarded inter-generational wealth, especially land, certain white men could lord it over even other men to the present spectacle of white, male billionaires who have never known an emotion they are able to regulate weeping on televised broadcasts because they might be taxed more appropriately.

For most of history, that is, before humans switched to an agricultural focus, women were able to acquire power by networking with each other. When I was a young woman in the 1970s I was fond of saying that the only reason why women were making advances (my goodness there goes a woman firefighter! Wow, a woman police officer!) was that such changes improved men's lives. That is, men allowed such changes after all it is their world. With increasing inflation, the single male earner household went out the window. It became advantageous to the family's financial health if the woman made more than she traditionally did hence some fields begrudgingly accepted female candidates as long as their pay was less. Of course she simultaneously would do unpaid housework as usual.

My observing as time passed allowed adding to this earlier understanding that at present the male power structure has sufficiently supported men pushing technological advances, of the kind, that unwittingly permits women to network easily and rapidly with each other, such as the Web. Women finding and amplifying their voices have not gone by unnoticed as the ever present backlash to #metoo and #TimesUp shows and by my own recent experience of a 'reply guy' wedded to the whispering style plaguing discourses on women's equality unashamedly insisting during an online discussion that the words 'patriarchy' and 'feminism' be not used as if not naming what exists and why it does somehow will erase magically what is problematically and egregiously extant.

Ms Saini discusses the extensive research on brain dimorphism in humans and concludes there is no significant evidence male and female brains are much different, but rather they are intersex, with a bit of both, of which the proportion varies from person to person creating an individual mosaic in each and every one of us. Yet researchers insist on looking for a biological holy grail which would overtake numerous, substantial studies underlining the longstanding inequality between men and women is caused by cultural forces.

This page-turning book which I hardly put down since I wanted to keep on lessening my ignorance as quickly as possible is one I highly recommend. The content is riveting in its detailed elaboration regarding women's supposed inferiority. Dr. Jess Wade's crowd-sourced fund secured enough donations for a copy of Inferior to be sent to each UK state school. You can be a crowd-sourced fund of one and give a copy to a friend or relative because it is an essential tool in promoting equality.

*Caroline Kennard wrote two letters to Charles Darwin, the first asking in disbelief that since a distinguished scientist couldn't be so wrong in believing evolution only made men productive and intelligent that perhaps his views have been misinterpreted. He replied women were passive and less intelligent because evolution didn't push them in that direction since women were unable to hunt and make tools. Her reply not surprisedly was written in a less neat script than the first. Fast forward a bunch of decades and there's evidence women probably made the first tools, created out of fibre such as slings to carry babies and baskets with which to forage and they hunted smaller animals sometimes with the help of dogs which brought in a more consistent food supply than men did with their larger game.

À la prochaine!

OTHER BOOK REVIEWS

Book review / The Golden Thread : How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Book review / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner Townsend

Book Review / Against Empathy by Paul Bloom

Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord

Book Review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton

Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630

Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal

Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman

Rodriguez with Julia Turshen

Book Review/The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Fall For It Every Time By Maria Konnikova

Book Review / The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates

RELATED LINKS

Dr Jess Wade at Twitter 

Angela Saini at Twitter

Inferior at Amazon

Book Review / The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Ms St Clair presents a historical account of humanity not through the lenses which are often used such as war, exploration, and communicable diseases, but through the perspective of thread and cloth, of which the making has been done in a large part by women, so much so, that the word spinster, one who spins, once was laudatory, meaning a financially independent woman. Since the nature of fabric is ephemeral and historians often write from a masculine perspective, the key, pervasive, interlocking influence of spindle, needle, and loom has been overlooked.

This fascinating book is divided into mostly chronological chapters starting with the prehistoric era right up to the present. Linen, silk (worm, spider, and mollusc), wool, cotton, silver/gold threads, and synthetics are all discussed and not just the processes by which they are made, but also how the fruits of this labour-intensive work have manifested in every strata and activity of society, be it domestic, cultural, artistic, technological, commercial, scientific, and martial.

Blue-flowering flax which is used in the making of linen (stock photo)

Her writing has a buoyant, friendly touch as it delivers the goods of information delineating her theme, and at times shines with brilliance as when she describes Vermeer's painting, The Lacemaker : 

A girl looks down at the work between her hands, utterly absorbed. She's seated in a spare, pale room - so bereft of detail that it's difficult to say whether it is a room at all or a void, hollowed out by her singular focus. Her dress is a glowing lemon shade; her hair is gathered away from her face in a coif of plaits and large ringlets. Our eyes follow hers: down between her fingers to the 'V' formed by a pair of bobbins she is using to create a piece of lace . . . Vermeer's luminous canvases, previously so sought after, furred with dust in his studio as the wealth of his erstwhile patrons evaporated like puddles on a hot day.

The significant drawbacks of synthetic fabric manufacturing are unsparingly presented in terms of pronounced damage done to workers' health and nature, all so we can have disposable clothing. Made for fickle fashion and rapid turnover beneficial for corporate profits and their shareholders, these clothes may make the wearer feel good for a short time, but in the long run, it's a net negative for everybody.

The Golden Thread is packed with intriguing quotes, accounts, and informational background that it is near to impossible to pick just one area upon which to elaborate. For me it was a tug of war between space voyage garments, especially regarding moon exploration and spider silk. Well, those spiders yanked that rope so hard, they won. Not surprisingly as they have been inspiring humans since early times. The Greek philosopher Democritus noted that seeing spiders spin their egg sacs and weave webs most likely spurred us in the direction of doing something similar. Spiders also probably influenced the making of nets, lures, and traps.  If that wasn't enough, dressings made from spider silk have demonstrated antiseptic qualities.

Harvesting spider silk goes back quite a ways especially across Africa. However, to this day, the silkworm reigns supreme commercially. Problems include spiders eating each other, their requiring huge amounts of insects for nourishment (all those mulberry leaves that need to be gathered for silkworms comparatively appear less daunting), and extracting enough spider silk.

Botswanian spider silk hat with ostrich feather, late 19C

There are two kinds of spider silk, one for insect-catching webs and the other for threads which they use to travel through the air. The latter has extreme strength and is the focus of researchers. The trend at present is more to leave the spider alone and instead try to duplicate spider silk through chemical means.

Ms St Clair has written that kind of book which earns its place on your shelf because at any point you may feel bored, with your life, with yourself, with others, just pick a page, any page, and you will be transported into a world that is way more interesting and entertaining.

À la prochaine!

OTHER BOOK REVIEWS

Book review / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner Townsend

Book Review / Against Empathy by Paul Bloom

Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord

Book Review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton

Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630

Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal

Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman

Rodriguez with Julia Turshen

Book Review/The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Fall For It Every Time By Maria Konnikova

Book Review / The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates

RELATED LINKS

The Golden Thread at Amazon

Kassia St Clair at Twitter

British Museum Botswanian spider silk hat with ostrich feather

Book Review / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner Townsend

Meet Lolly. She's an useful, acquiescent, and stifled member of the early 20th century, British middle-class. Before her widowed father died and her subsequent, unceremonious shuffling off to a married brother's London household replete with children, she, known as Laura back then, wasn't as abjectly compliant as the proximity to rural life allowed her to be grounded in her own identity.

Ms Townsend's novel is a feminist classic; it is also a gorgeously written story.  Domestic duties are expected to be done by this twenty-seven-year-old unmarried woman without complaint or resistance, transforming her into just a placid servant, and an unpaid one at that. It was through this gradual servitude achieved by considerate interaction, as they only had her best interests at heart, her comfort, her safety, her respectability, Laura became separated from her real self and becomes Lolly. Paraphrasing Kate Manne, misogyny is not hatred of women, but the control of them. Constraining the woman comes slowly but unrelentingly, like a lobster being boiled alive. The lobster's increasing difficulty is unnoticed as the tenders of the pot righteously keep the lobster where it belongs as it is of course the correct action to take.

The author

Despite being lulled for twenty years into being Lolly and before her identity could be completely subsumed into familial machinery, she announces over dinner that she's off to live in Great Mop, a village situated in the Chilterns and a place she has never seen. The day of the dinner while she was out walking about, a shop's jumbled, countrified display of flowers, vegetables, and bottled fruits/jams catches her eye. She buys not only one Football Chrysanthemum which would have been an extravagant purchase on its own, but all that is displayed. The shop keeper adds as a bonus some beech leaves and tells her they came from his sister's place in the Chilterns. She then purchases a guide map for that area. Upon return to her small bedroom and once the mums are put to vase: She unfolded the map. The woods were colored green and the main roads red. There was a great deal of green. She looked at the beech leaves. As she looked a leaf detached itself and fell slowly. She remembered squirrels.

Her brother tries to stop her from relocating, and his vehemence comes not only from righteousness but also from his covert use of her trust fund for speculation. She incisively tells him to take what remains and put it in a dividend-earning stock while accepting her reduced circumstances means she can afford just lodgings instead of her own house.

Settling down in her new home, she gets to know various villagers. She hears unexpected activity at night and is given suitable explanations. Then a stray kitten, soon to be named Vinegar, starving, but still able to bite the hand that feeds, draws blood, and she identifies it as a demonic familiar. She has been transformed into a witch, a witch who discovers that the village has a substantial representation of her kind. Since Christianity binds The Patriarchy's cloak tightly arounds its members, it is unsurprising that her liberator would be Satan. Liberation does come with a state of liminality, where one's footing is unsure, as during a night of revelry with witches, warlocks, and the Prince of Darkness himself, Laura feels disoriented, out of synch and place.

The author & cat

A beloved nephew comes to stay with her. Despite being likeable—everyone in the village warms up to him—he irritates Laura. As a man all he needed was his own presence to feel at home in the world. She notes:

It almost estranged her from Great Mop that he should be able to love it so well, and express his love so easily. He loved the countryside as though it were a body. She had not loved it so. For days at a time she had been unconscious of its outward aspect, for long before she saw it she had loved it and blessed it. With no earnest but a name, a few lines and letters on a map, and a spray of beech-leaves, she had trusted the place and staked everything on her trust. She had struggled to come, but there had been no such struggle for Titus. It was as easy for him to quit Bloomsbury for the Chilterns as for a cat to jump from a hard chair to a soft. Now after a little scrabbling and exploration he was curled up in the green lap and purring over the landscape. The green lap was comfortable. He meant to stay in it, for he knew where he was well off. It was so comfortable that he could afford to wax loving, praise its kindly slopes, stretch out a discriminating paw and pat it. But Great Mop was no more to him than any other likeable country lap. He liked it because he was in possession. His comfort apart, it was a place like any other place.

Such psychological entanglement with her past life results in Lolly departing and Laura staying for good. Of course, the devil plays a most charming and creative role involving wasps: It had pleased Satan to come to her aid. Considering carefully, she did not see who else would have done so. Custom, public opinion, law, church, and state--all would have shaken their massive heads against her pleas, and sent her back to bondage.

Ms Townsend's style covers much ground, from richly eloquent, Pandora's smooth cheeks and smooth lappets of black hair seemed to shed calm like an unwavering beam of moonlight, to stingingly sparse, Titus talked incessantly, and Pandora ate with the stealthy persistence of a bitch that gives suck.

Nature offers a way to become reacquainted with ourselves. It is not uncommon that middle-aged women experiencing an empty nest turn to gardening. It has been suggested such activity is a substitute means to nurture.  I say it is more likely they embrace pottering about flowers, fruits, and vegetables to reclaim their selves. It's hard not to recognise yourself when you smell the earth.

À la prochaine!

OTHER BOOK REVIEWS

Book Review / Against Empathy by Paul Bloom

Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord

Book Review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton

Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630

Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal

Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman

Rodriguez with Julia Turshen

Book Review/The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Fall For It Every Time By Maria Konnikova

Book Review / The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates

RELATED LINKS

Sylvia Townsend Warner's Wikipedia page
Lolly Willowes at Amazon

À la prochaine!

Book Review / Against Empathy: The Case For Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

Mr. Bloom, a Yale Professor of Psychology, isn't exactly against empathy. He is against it being presented ad nauseam as a panacea for all human problems, and because of this myopic viewpoint, better solutions have been relegated to the background. His erudite wrangling with many a fervent opponent—the intellectual equivalent of Houdini wriggling out of chains while underwater—is thorough, gracious, and derived from a well-honed perspective which has been worked on since September 11, 2001.

However, is it possible for the offered alternative trio of compassion, self-regulation, and reasoning to reach critical mass as to move humanity in a better direction? Just as empathy, selected by Mr. Bloom from available definitions to signify the ability to feel what others are feeling, can be set at different points on a spectrum because of the varying influence of genes and environment, so can be compassion, self-regulation, and reasoning. Additionally, can these cooler skills override the hyperarousal one of  empathy?

Reasoning is the cornerstone. With that, compassion and self-regulation will tag along. So is reasoning the real deal? While detractors insist on viewing it from a low level of functioning, that is, at the neuronal level and therefore rife with determinism and glitches, he counters with: It turns out that every demonstration of our irrationality is also a demonstration of how smart we are, because without our smarts we wouldn't be able to appreciate that it's a demonstration of irrationality.

Reasoning works to solve problems in your everyday life, not necessarily in a broader sense. For example, you can be irrational at a ballgame, screaming insults at the opposing team, but rational when cooperating with others via carpooling to get home. Also this approach will not result in an utopia where there is no violence, but rather where violence is used sparingly, as in self-defence. But it will give to moral decisions a more fair, just, numerate edge than empathy which is based often on bias.

But what to do with those who don't have much empathy or compassion or reasoning or self regulation? Excluding people who have organic diseases or incapacities, the problem with the rest of this group is that their high-conflict social interactions are egosyntonic, that is, their antagonistic style satisfies the drives of their ego. Compassion, for you and for them, that is, understanding that you must set boundaries on how you are treated and understanding that they are stuck in a non-reciprocal position may just be what the doctor ordered. Experiments showed that when the part of the brain correlated with compassion fires, there is a centred calmness that is present contrasted when the part of the brain correlated with empathy fires. It seems that having a cooler interaction will feel better, therefore setting in motion a climate of deceleration. Mr. Bloom said that one of the reasons why he prefers compassion over empathy is because it doesn't burn you out.

Though the alternatives to empathy are better for creating a more moral universe, we can not live on morality alone. A nice dose of empathy here and there is pretty wonderful.

À la prochaine!

OTHER BOOK REVIEWS

Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord

Book review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton

Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630

Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal

Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman

Rodriguez with Julia Turshen

Book Review/The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Fall For It Every Time By Maria Konnikova

Book Review / The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates

EXTERNAL LINKS

Paul Bloom at Twitter

Against Empathy at Amazon

Paul Bloom's Introduction To Psychology at Coursera (Starts Nov. 29, 2018)

Paul Bloom's Moralities Of Everyday Life at Coursera (Starts Nov. 29, 2018)