Very small:
Why We Do What We Do: The Science of Motivation
Posted in Books, Clips, Science on January 17, 2010 by frankbures
Ever wonder why you get out of bed in the morning? Or why you hate your job? Or whether there’s a perfect place for you in today’s economy? I found lots of great insights into those and other questions here:
As I read though Daniel Pink’s new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, I started to wonder why I was writing this review.
It certainly wasn’t for the money (no one, to my knowledge, has gotten rich writing book reviews). And it definitely wasn’t for the fame (although, while I’m at it, “Hi, Grandma Maude!”)
So there must be something else. Why then? Why, in fact, do we do anything? That’s the question at the heart of Pink’s new book, for which he has some, yes, surprising answers.
The book builds on Pink’s previous book, A Whole New Mind, which essentially argued that the economy will be driven by creative, empathetic right-brained individuals, because so many left-brained, logical professions are on a death march toward automation. The book became a runaway best seller, largely because it gave hope to an entire generation of English majors.
More on A Week at the Airport
Posted in Books, Travel, Video, World Hum, Writers on January 8, 2010 by frankbures
The soul arrives at the speed of a camel: An interview with Alain de Botton
Posted in Books, Clips, Travel, World Hum, Writers on January 6, 2010 by frankbures
If you happened to pass though Heathrow airport late in the summer of 2009, you may have seen a bald man sitting at a desk in the middle of the departures area of Terminal 5. He wasn’t there to register complaints. He wasn’t giving out travel information. And he wasn’t taking boarding passes.
His name is Alain de Botton. He had written about many things—architecture, love, literature, travel—when he got a strange call with an offer to be Heathrow’s first ever writer-in-residence. The result of his time there is a slim book called A Week at the Airport, full of de Botton’s musings on the airport and its place in society and in our lives (and with accompanying photos by Richard Baker).
It is a curious document: a meandering, looping, speculating account that uses Heathrow as a means of probing the human condition. De Botton examines the security, the food, the airport priests, the bookstores and the people passing through this porthole. “My notebooks
grew thick with the anecdotes of loss and desire, snapshots of travelers’ souls on their way to the skies.” He also shows us that the place that now represents tedium and annoyance for many travelers can still be full of wonder, because, as he says, “to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness.” Read the interview here.
On Beauty and Gulags
Posted in Asia, Books, Clips, Writers on January 5, 2010 by frankbures
Er Tai Gao’s new memoir isn’t exactly a coming-of-age romp through revolutionary China, but In Search of My Homeland is a beautiful, haunting and somehow inspiring book. It’s mostly, though not all, about Gao’s time served in Chinese labor camps (for writing an essay, of all things) and the events took place in a strange time, when ideas had so much power, but meant so little. Read the review here.
Afrika is de ideale bestemming, zegt Frank Bures
Posted in Africa, Clips, Travel on January 3, 2010 by frankbures
Eventjes weg van alle sleur Als je de platgereden toeristische paden wil verlaten voor een levensveranderende ervaring met zo weinig mogelijk ecologische belasting, dan is Afrika de ideale bestemming, zegt Frank Bures. (Translation here, plus more about Angola, Cameroon and Rwanda.)
New Year, New Mind
Posted in Science, Video, Words to live by on December 26, 2009 by frankbures
As the planet completes one more turn around the sun, it feels like time to reflect on something that I think about a lot: How best to spend the time we have on it.
It’s something that was driven home by a line I came across in the book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experiences, which notes that in 70 years of life we can take in about 185 billion bits of information. That information, in turn, makes up our consciousness.
“It is out of this total that everything in our life must come–every thought, memory, feeling, or action,“ writes, Mihaly Csikszentmihahyi, “It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far….an individual can experience only so much. Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; It is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of our life.”
For the last few years, I have been allowing a torrent of information into my mind, mostly via the Internet. Much of it good, and much of it important. But at some point you have to choose. I’m nearing 40 and according to Csikszentmihahyi, I have less than 90 billion bits left, and I have wasted too many already.
The internet is a powerful tool, but sometimes I feel like it is hungry for my mind, and up till now, I have been giving it too much, doing too many things online that up add up to nothing. As a result, I’ve had this gnawing unease, like I was sliding down some scree slope of trivia, like my mind was a balloon with a million tiny holes. Until reading that passage, I didn’t know exactly why.
So in a small but significant gesture–a finger in the dike–I’ll be spending each Monday this year offline. There is plenty of other work to be done (that used to be all we did!) and if there is anything urgent, there is a jurassic piece of technology on my desk called the telephone.
As far as I can see, this may be the only way to wrest back some control over the content and the quality of my life, and over my mind. This year, I want to remember how to lose myself in things again. I want to regain the focus that has carried me so far. And I don’t want to waste time on distractions, because I have too many things that I haven’t done yet.
So with that, I wish you all the best in the new year.
See you on Tuesdays.
Best Travel Books of 2009
Posted in Books, Clips, Travel, Travel Writers, World Hum on December 26, 2009 by frankburesTons of great titles this year. See the list here.
10 Great Books from Aughts
Posted in Books on December 23, 2009 by frankburesWell, it’s list time again. The first decade of the century is behind us, and what have we got to show for it? Right. Best not to think too much about it. But at least there were the books, and some great ones! Here are the titles that really sang for me, either because they were just what I needed, or because they are incredible pieces of work, or both. Either way, if you haven’t read these, you’re missing out Here are ten books that will be well-worth reading far into the next decade and beyond:
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler (Travel/Memoir)
The mid-1990s saw an exodus of young would-be writers to foreign parts, people like Josh Swiller, Tom Bissell, Rolf Potts and others. I love all their work, partly because I was one of them too, but Hessler’s account of his two years teaching in Fuling are something truly special. The place and its people come to life. You fall in love with it and feel like you’ve lived there too. There is no higher praise for a book about life elsewhere.
The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri (Fiction/Novel)
I read this book while doing a profile of Suri for Poets & Writers, and it has stayed with me ever since. It tells the story of Vishnu, an apartment building’s errand man who lies dying on the landing which is his home while life goes on around him. It is equal parts brutal, funny, tender and sometimes wise, much like what I imagine life in urban India is like.
Population 485, by Michael Perry (Nonfiction/Memoir)
When I tell people about this book, I feel like I always have to qualify: No, it’s not as boring as it sounds! That’s probably not fair, but I can see they don’t believe me that this book about life in a small Wisconsin town is one of the best books about life in America to come out in the last decade. It’s full of humor and pathos and big characters. More to the point, it has a transcendent quality which is hard to convey in an elevator, to someone important. You just have to read it.
God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories, by Tom Bissell (Fiction/Short Stories)
When I first read these stories, I was amazed and moved, but I also felt a rush of pride that someone from my generation had produced a work of art of such clearly lasting value. The stories are spare, and hit you deep down. They are full of vivid scenes, unflinching portraits and hard won bits of wisdom. If God lives anywhere, it’s in this kind of storytelling.
501 Pounds: A Story of Love, Willpower and a Bike
Posted in America, Clips on December 16, 2009 by frankbures
Scott Cutshall’s full story is now online:
Late one afternoon in 2002, Scott Cutshall’s Grand Am rolled toward the leafy Jersey City, New Jersey, neighborhood where he, his wife and their daughter lived on the ground floor of a brownstone apartment.
The car was silent, except for a quiet refrain. “I’m a dead man,” the 38-year-old Cutshall said. “I’m a dead man.”
In the driver’s seat sat his wife, Amy, who had asked him to see a doctor about his weight, which then hovered at 427 pounds, and would later top out at 501. In back sat three-year-old Chloe, who Cutshall cared for as best he could given how little he could move.
The news was not good. The doctor gave him six months to live without bariatric surgery. With it, the doctor said, Cutshall had a 50 percent chance of making it out of the operating room.
“I’m a dead man,” said Cutshall, sobbing softly.
Over the next few years, even as he defied that dire prediction, every doctor, every authority he consulted would give him equally urgent warnings. Everyone told him the same thing: Lose weight or die. At the doctor’s office that day in 2002, Cutshall had voiced the foremost question in his mind.
“Do you think I can lose the weight on my own?”
“No,” the doctor had said. “At your weight, I’ve never heard of anyone doing it.”
