Monthly Archives: June 2015

book reviews, faith, history, humor, literature

Book Reviews, June 2015

The June installment of short book reviews has humor, a look at evangelical Christian purity culture, and two more World War II novels, one of which has an appearance by a certain famous detective.

  • Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters by Mallory Ortberg is an extremely silly book.  Imagine characters like Captain Ahab or Miss Havisham or Hermione Granger or Hamlet with smartphones sending snarky, funny, and/or weird texts to other characters from their respective stories and you have the premise of this book.  The jokes originated on the-toast.net, which Ortberg co-created, though it appears that many are exclusive to the book.  It’s pretty humorous, though I found myself nodding in appreciation to the jokes more than laughing.  I can really only recommend the book to English majors (or other readers of classics), as it is hard to imagine enjoying the book without a familiarity with the characters and plots.  Also, the gag can be a bit repetitive; it’s better one or two at a time, which is why it probably worked so well online.  For a sample, check out texts from Miss Havisham, Moby Dick, Edgar Allan Poe, or J. Alfred Prufrock.
  • Dark Star by Alan Furst is an immersive historical novel set in Europe in the run up and first days of the Second World War.  The protagonist is André Szara, a journalist working as a foreign correspondent for Pravda on the European continent.  He gets entangled in the world of espionage, and only near the end of the novel is he able to figure out completely the role he has played in the dealings between Russia and Germany in peace and war.  He is a survivor.  Historical novels can fall into a Forrest Gump trap by having characters happen to be at famous historical events, and this one is no different.  Szara is on hand for Kristallnacht and the blitzkrieg of Poland.  In my experience, spy novels also run into trouble when they try to include a romance, which they often do.  And again, this one is no different.  Szara has two different affairs over the course of the novel that seem unrealistic.  The sad thing is that Furst handles the romance better than most, but it’s harder for me to overlook anymore.  I’d recommend this book to someone who likes spy novels because it’s definitely above average for the genre, but it’s probably not a gateway book into the genre for the common reader.
  • Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity by Dianna E. Anderson is an interesting, if frustrating, book about purity culture within evangelical Christianity.  Purity culture includes things like complete abstinence before marriage and all of the behaviors that go along with it like purity pledges, purity rings, and purity balls (i.e. father-daughter proms essentially).  The book argues against purity culture primarily because it shames women and men for any type of sexual encounters before marriage, instead arguing for everyone to research and develop their own sexual ethics.  The book is essentially an advice book, which I found frustrating because I didn’t know that’s what kind of book it was before I read it, so I had some expectations that weren’t met.  But let me first mention the things I liked about the book.  Foremost, I liked how Anderson emphasized consent regarding sexual relationships.  It is one of her guiding sexual ethics that she came back to again and again throughout the book, as well as devoting an entire chapter to the subject.  The chapter on the history of purity culture was fascinating, but brief for my tastes (one of my hopes had been that there would be even more historical analysis).  The book also had a good description of gender as a performance that we enact based on social cues and pressures, with an accompanying and thorough explanation of what transgender means.  I suspect that many in her intended audience would find this part informative and helpful.  Her intended audience seems to be unmarried Christians who are still part of the purity culture.  In many ways the book functions as the anti-I Kissed Dating Goodbye, an advice book on the other end of the spectrum but still within Christian belief.  Aside from historical analysis, I was also expecting more grappling with Bible passages.  Anderson spends a chapter shooting down and problematizing the way that purity culture interprets key passages.  But I was expecting her to put forward more of her own interpretation and theology of sex (part of my expectation was based on the inside flap of the jacket which describes Anderson as a “theologian”).  Her main biblical advice is “do no harm,” or basically follow the Golden Rule to love our neighbors.  This is all well and good, but it’s not a guide that is particularly or exclusively Christian.  I think this book is a good start to the conversation, but not the last word, nor would Anderson herself want that as she hopes her readers will research and figure things out for themselves.
  • The Final Solution by Michael Chabon is a fun detective story, featuring an old man who has retired to the English countryside as a bee-keeper.  The character is never named, but he is clearly meant to be Sherlock Holmes in his dotage.  He no longer has a Watson to chronicle his adventures, so Chabon does not even try to recreate the style of the earlier stories.  Instead, Chabon writes in his own mellifluous, if sometimes flowery, style a mystery that is worthy of the detective.  It takes place during World War II and concerns a murder and a missing parrot.  I don’t want to say much more than that so that others can enjoy the book.  Though I do have to say that I guessed early on the significance of the numbers that the parrot repeats (perhaps not much of an accomplishment, but I still felt pleased with myself).  In my experience, it’s seeing how Sherlock Holmes (or any detective, really) arrives at his conclusions rather than the conclusions themselves that gives the most pleasure.  But in this case, there are some mysteries that the old man cannot suss out.  I would recommend it to any Sherlock Holmes fan.  It’s a fun little novel.
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personal

Hospital Stories (6)

A few years ago I worked at a hospital as a constant observer.  It was a transitional job as I tried to figure out the next step of my life. What exactly is a constant observer?  one might reasonably ask.  A constant observer is basically a nurse’s aide who stays in one room to be with patients who might be a harm to themselves or others. Hospitals try very hard not to tie people down on their beds anymore.  There are a lot of reasons I might be assigned to a patient: dementia, adverse reaction to medication, brain injury, detoxing, or suicide watch, to name some.  I saw people at their most vulnerable state.  This is the sixth in what I plan to be a series of vignettes on my experiences in the hospital.

“C’mon.  Let’s go, Hiawatha!” he told me at one point during the day.

A stroke can be devastating; a mind and body laid waste, I think to myself.  This guy yells for people who aren’t there—an Ed, a John, a Bob—yells cocksucker and fuck you and occasionally messes up a phrase like son of a fish.  Sometimes he’ll yell for help or just declare that he loves you (though not to you, but to someone else he thinks is there).  Other times he will talk of conspiracies or about business files or stocks.  His right arm and side hangs limp, and he seems not even aware that it is part of his body.  After he bit his hand once, I spend the rest of the day preventing him from doing it again, a half dozen times or more.  It’s a wrestling match.  His legs and arms are covered with bruises and sores from where he has kicked the side rails of the bed.  His left arm, the whole left side really, is very strong.  It’s easy to imagine that he had once been a powerful man when at full strength.  He can still twist his body wildly or squeeze his hand very hard.  But he can’t manage any basic functions.  He had a colonectomy decades ago that causes him to have loose stools ever since.  Now he’s on tube-feeding and that doesn’t help a bit.  He has a catheter for urine and a fecal management tube for bowel movements.  His buttocks are raw from the wiping of shit.  The fecal tube (held in place by a ball inflated with water the size of a nectarine) should help with that, but he ripped it out the night before.  He’ll throw pillows and pull off his gown.  He’ll push himself with his left arm so he’s leaning far to the right on the bed or in the cardiac chair.  The nurses try the chair to give him a change of position, but it’s hard work getting him in and out of it.  Fortunately, the chair has two safety straps to keep him in.

* * *

The doctors say he isn’t going to get better.  In fact, he’s gotten worse since the last time I saw him.  He still yells for Ed to help him or for John, but then feels betrayed by John (which happens to be the name of his nurse today), but he still loves him.  “I love you, Ed.  Did you realize that?”  He says it as if he is just discovering it, too.  I wonder who it is, and if he realized it.  A childhood friend?  His brother?  A business partner?  He keeps pulling at the binder around his chest and belly.  It’s a girdle-looking thing that’s velcroed in the back.  They put it on him so he couldn’t pull out the feeding tube that goes directly into his stomach.  It would have been impossible to place an NG tube (nasogastric).  With his movement and thrashing, a lot of the hair on his chest and back has rubbed off around the binder.

* * *

Now he is in restraints.  Actually, only his left arm, the strong one, is tied down, but this is even while I am in the room.  Normally, patients are not restrained when they have a constant observer because that’s why I’m there.  But he is too much.  He hits.  He still tries to bite his right arm.  He no longer seems to have any idea where he is or who is there.  It’s hard to tell what is left of him in there.  The nurses say the family will have to decide what to do next.  The only option seems to be heavy sedation and keep him in a nursing home.  At times, the drugs have no effect.  He disturbs all of the patients around him.  His fecal tube leaks.  They finally discovered that it’s broken.  And when I say leak, I mean that the ball of water that is supposed to keep all of the liquid stool from seeping out isn’t doing its job.  It’s supposed to direct all of the waste through the tube in order to keep his buttcrack clean, but it isn’t.  His butt is much worse.  It’s so raw he is bleeding in places.  It’s horrible.  The nurse puts in a new tube while four of us hold him down.  It’s like pinning down a wild animal.

* * *

So now he’s dead.  I ask a nurse who had cared for him what happened to him and she told me he died a week earlier.  We both agree it’s probably for the best, that he’s in “a better place,” whatever that means.  She hopes he isn’t in that “other place,” as she puts it.  I start to tear up as I talk to the nurse.  It’s all so sad.  Sad that he is dead at age 50, leaving behind a wife and kids.  On the dry erase board his child (for some reason I imagine a daughter, though there was nothing in the handwriting indicative either way) had written “We miss you, Daddy.”  It’s heartbreaking.  I hate to think of his children or wife seeing him in that state, on the bed, confronting a shell of the man they knew.  One who yells obscenities and calls out for a childhood friend.  Who can’t eat food or control his own waste.  Who doesn’t know where he is.

He was gone long before he left.

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personal, psychology

The Bad Samaritan

The TV sitcom Seinfeld (in)famously ended with the foursome getting arrested for violating a Good Samaritan law. They saw something good to do and ignored it, which was typical for their characters. They only thought of themselves. Am I any different? Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are grotesques—outsized caricatures of neurosis and narcissism. I don’t like to think of myself in the same company. I laugh at the show because it’s not me; it’s a parody of real human interaction. Here’s a story that makes me think I might not be so different given the right (or should I say wrong) circumstances.

I’m late to work. It only takes 15 to 20 minutes to get to school, depending on the traffic, but this morning I hit the snooze on the alarm one too many times. I hate getting out of bed—who doesn’t—but it shouldn’t be so hard to get to work at 8AM. So I’m in a hurry, driving the legal limit in town because I’m cautious even in my hurry. Mostly I worry on the inside and my actions stay the same. I maintain the appearance of calm.

I make the left onto the road to the community college where I work, still a half mile and a major intersection away. As I approach a flattened S-curve, a car coming the opposite direction out of the curve careens across the thick yellow line into my lane. Oh no. It’s going to hit me, I’m sure of it. It’s a game of chicken. There’s nowhere to turn to get out of the way. I’ll have to jerk the wheel to get out of the way, but which direction? My mind is numb. I can’t think. It’s all happening too fast. But the car kept drifting, on a vector out of the curve that takes it off the road entirely. It hops the curb and crashes through a hedgerow and a chain link fence behind the bushes and into an irrigation ditch. I’m so startled and scared. One second I think the car is going to hit me head on, the next it has crashed on the side of the road right in front of me. Houses line the left side of the road, opposite the hedgerow and ditch. I hadn’t seen what the driver looked like. I keep driving to work. I don’t know what to do. I figure someone from one of the houses will call the police or a car behind me will stop. My hands are shaking.

So that’s the story, and it raises a lot of questions I’m still trying to figure out all of these years later. Why didn’t I stop? Why did I assume that someone else would help? Here’s where it gets complicated. Let me first start by telling another story.

In 1964 a woman named Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered outside of her apartment in New York City. According to a New York Times article written about the incident, 37 of her neighbors heard her screams and did nothing. Readers were outraged by the story. Everyone wanted to understand why they didn’t intervene or at least call the cops. One of the neighbors famously said, “I didn’t want to get involved.” Were these people moral monsters? Or was there some rational explanation as to why they didn’t help? Psychologists were very interested in explaining how this could have happened. Researchers found evidence for something they called the bystander effect. When multiple people witness a situation where help might be needed, the responsibility to act is diffused among the bystanders, and so too is the blame for not acting. So maybe this partially explains my not helping the other driver. I was one of many bystanders.

Study after study has shown this diffusion of responsibility to do something if others are present. Everyone assumes that someone else knows what is going on, whether it is a true emergency or not. Everyone also assumes that someone else will do something about the emergency. Say three people are in a room filling out questionnaires and then smoke starts pouring in through an air vent. The three will be less likely to do anything about the smoke than a person alone in the room. Same thing happens in other helping scenarios. Another study had participants in groups of two, three, or six, (though separated physically while communicating via intercom) when a confederate would pretend to have a seizure. The bigger the group, the less likely an individual was to do anything to help the person in trouble.

Here’s how psychologists like Latané and Darley explain it. In order for someone to help in a given situation, the person must (1) notice what’s going on, (2) decide that it’s an emergency, (3) feel personal responsibility to act, (4) also feel competent to act, and then (5) consciously decide to intervene. It’s sometimes hard to determine whether a situation truly is an emergency. If there are many other bystanders, a person might wait and rely on the reactions of others to interpret the situation. So everybody freezes and waits to figure out what is going on. The diffusion of responsibility when there are many bystanders can also keep a person from going through all five steps. For instance, a person might not feel personally responsible if there are so many others around who could act instead. Or they might not feel as competent as others surely are. Besides that, a person might feel inhibited to act when others are watching and evaluating their performance.

So perhaps I was experiencing the bystander effect. Perhaps not, though. I did notice what had happened. I did know that it was an emergency. And I definitely felt some responsibility to act. But still I didn’t. So far my research into social psychology has not explained my behavior. Interestingly, a recent meta-analysis (2011) of all of the bystander effect research shows that the “the bystander effect is attenuated when situations were perceived as dangerous.” In other words, when a situation is unambiguous and serious, such as when someone is in obvious physical harm, there is little to no evidence of the bystander effect. My situation was rather unambiguous: the other driver was clearly in danger of physical harm. I should not have been subject to the bystander effect then.

As a side note, it also turns out that the standard telling of the murder of Kitty Genovese is wrong in some key details. When Kitty was first attacked, a neighbor did call out, “Leave that girl alone!” which prompted her attacker to retreat. He came after her again in the vestibule of her apartment building, now out of sight of most of the neighborhood, and raped and stabbed her. At least two neighbors did call the police, and when an ambulance arrived, a neighbor was holding Kitty in her arms, though she didn’t know the attacker was gone. Far from being the cold and heartless neighbors, some of them did intervene in the situation. The neighbor who said he didn’t want to get involved had his reasons: as a gay man he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by the police who often thought homosexuals were a menace (this being 1964 when the same New York Times ran headlines like “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern” mere months before the killing). Somehow the reporting by the newspaper got some key facts wrong in the narrative. This doesn’t invalidate any of the psychology research that the killing inspired. But it does make it a less useful example of the bystander effect.

I first encountered the original NYT’s version of the story of Kitty Genovese in an anthology for a Composition course I taught for a community college. The class was composed of high school students who were dual-enrolled in high school and college, and they received college credit for the course. The high school was the poorest performing one in the city, located in the area of lowest socio-economic status. One of my students related to the incident in the story. He said he’d heard gunshots outside his home at night but done nothing about it. No one said a word against him in the class. I didn’t blame him either. What was a skinny 16 year old going to do about gun violence in his neighborhood? If he called the cops, it would only cause trouble for himself and his family. I had a real soft spot for that kid. He was clearly struggling with the work. Not that he couldn’t do it, but something was holding him back, maybe family life, or an unsafe neighborhood, or maybe he had to work. I didn’t know, and couldn’t know, how hard his life was.

* * *

My other explanation for my behavior of not helping is that I was in a hurry. In another famous psychology study, seminarians in a hurry to give a talk were less likely than non-hurried seminarians to stop and help someone slumped over and moaning and who seemed to be having trouble breathing. To add insult to injury, in one of the conditions for the study the seminarians were supposed to give a talk on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, while in the other condition they gave a talk on a different topic unrelated to helping. Some of the hurried seminarians “literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way!” (107). After they gave the talk, the seminarians were asked if they had recently seen someone in need of help and when had they last helped someone else. Most of those in a hurry realized, upon reflection, that the person who was slumped over was in need of help. But in the moment, they were too focused on the task at hand (getting to their talk) to realize the ethical dilemma in front of them. Indeed, the authors of the study even acknowledge that the seminarians were “helping” the researchers by giving the talk in the middle of the study. In other words, it was a conflict of helping. I was in a hurry to get to work. Maybe I was no worse than a seminarian. But in the moment I did realize it was an emergency. I wasn’t like the seminarians who only realized later what they should have noticed on their way to the talk. Another explanation slips away.

It still gnaws at me that I did nothing to help. I didn’t get a good look at the driver—I don’t know if it was a man or a woman. Whoever it was might have been seriously hurt. I had a cell phone in my pocket, though I didn’t have a local number at the time. Some cell phones then couldn’t call 911 anyway. Not that I was thinking all this at the time. First I was scared because the car swerved in front of me and could easily have hit me head on. My car had an airbag, and I always wear a seatbelt, but still… two cars traveling 35MPH in a head on collision is bad. Then I was shocked at what was happening. When everyone is following the traffic laws and transportation is running smoothly I hardly notice what is going on around me. But when a car careens across lanes and off the road it’s jarring. The normal patterns have been broken. But that’s the very definition of an emergency. That’s when someone has to do something that they wouldn’t ordinarily do.

I was also confounded by where to park the car if I were to stop. To my right, the road had curbs high enough that I couldn’t pull off the road into the grass. There were residential driveways on the other side, but I would’ve felt strange parking in someone’s driveway. Perhaps that’s what I should have done. Rang the doorbell. Used a landline to call emergency help. Instead I was further down the road’s curve, that much closer to the community college where I worked. With each passing second it was harder to stop, until it was too late.

So this is the truth of it, and I don’t really like it. I wanted to have social science explain my bad behavior away. But mostly it was a matter of my personal traits. I’m indecisive. While momentarily shocked by almost getting hit, I then couldn’t decide where to stop my car. I didn’t want to pull into a stranger’s driveway for fear of an awkward explanation and imposition. I hate awkward situations and making others unhappy. And each moment I remained indecisive, the inertia of doing nothing took me farther away from the entire situation until it felt too late to stop because then I might have to explain why I didn’t stop immediately. I felt guilty and ashamed, and I didn’t want to face up to my failure.

I still don’t.

About half a year ago I wrote about a time when I was a Good Samaritan, although a reluctant one (you can read it here). I’m very interested in the topic of altruism, and the reasons why sometimes we help others and sometimes turn away. I’m going to keep coming back to it.

Articles referenced:

Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 27(1), 100-108. doi:10.1037/h0034449

Fischer, P., Krueger, J. I., Greitemeyer, T., Vogrincic, C., Kastenmüller, A., Frey, D., & … Kainbacher, M. (2011). The bystander-effect: A meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies. Psychological Bulletin, 137(4), 517-537. doi:10.1037/a0023304

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