5) Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink Ph.D.: this book was basically a regurgitation of tons of studies this guy has done about how and why we eat what we do. Some pretty interesting tidbits in there, including that children of big families tend to eat more, faster because of the "you snooze, you lose" mentality regarding dinner and snacks. As the only girl in a house of three boys and a dad with a big appetite, if there was something yummy in the house, I learned to eat as much as I wanted as fast as I wanted, lest it be gone the next time I was hungry. Unfortunately, this rarely applied to fruit or vegetables, but instead to poptarts and doritos. Those things never lasted more than a couple of hours in our house. The most notable example of this phenomenon occurred when "we" ate all of my brother Mike's birthday cake (I believe I was in college at the time, so it wasn't me, and I'm pretty sure that the bulk of that cake was digested by my father, having likely forgotten it was anyone's birthday). Anyway, an interesting book, and I think there might be some noteworthy items in there for Andrew's thesis.
6) Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski: my first work of fiction in the group. This is the story of an American journalist bumming around Thailand while his girlfriend is there teaching English. He gets caught up in the story of a female anthropologist imprisoned for murdering a missionary. She commits suicide right after finishing a couple of papers on life inside the prison. It was a pretty good book -- I got through all 300+ pages in about a day and a half, but the ending was somewhat anticlimactic. Tons of build up to some incredible ending, but then just kind of fizzled. Maybe I read it too fast and missed something. But still interesting. Almost made me want to move to Thailand. Definitely made me happy I'm not an anthropologist.
7) Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer: admittedly, this was re-read. My brother had borrowed it and I had run out of books to read for the ride home, so I just re-read this one. And I loved it -- again. I came home and dug around for more of the stories of the other climbers and the backlash against Krakauer for his alleged finger-pointing in the book. I actually don't think that he was blaming anyone in particular, and I think he did a decent job of accepting some blame himself, which he may or may not deserve. He was one of the first ones down, seemed to be physically one of the best off, both before and after the summit, but he didn't take part in any way in any of the rescue efforts. He even left Beck Weathers lying in the tent freezing and started down on his own, apparently on the advice of the other climbers, all of whom concluded Weathers was going to die anyway and they would have enough trouble getting down on their own. So, it might be that Krakauer is a self-centered douchebag, or maybe he was just crazy tired and doing his best to stay alive. Never having met the guy, nor having ever tried to climb anything higher than Crowder's "Mountain" (read, "big hill"), in Charlotte, I'm not going to judge. Regardless, he writes a great book.
7 1/2) The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang: This book describes the events surrounding the Japanese takeover of Nanking, China in 1936. By conservative accounts, the Japanese tortured and massacred at least 200,000 Chinese (some estimates have it as high as almost 400,000), most of whom were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. I had to stop this one halfway through, to stave off the inevitable nightmares and depression. There has been lots of backlash against this book -- no doubt Chang had an agenda. She's a Chinese-American whose grandparents have fled Japanese invasions. So, she's pissed. Specifically, she was taking issue in the book with the fact that Japanese war criminals were never prosecuted for the atrocities of Nanking, nor has the Japanese government ever atoned or apologized for the brutality that occurred there. The descriptions (many of which included pictures) detailed the murders and rapes (including rapes of pregnant women, which the Japanese soldiers completed by using a bayonet to slice open her abdomen, rip out her intestines, then the baby, then bayoneting the baby; sons being forced to have sex with their mothers; fathers being forced to rape their daughters). The Chinese were allegedly beheaded, burned alive, buried alive, eaten by dogs, etc., etc. Lots of Japanese historians question the death count (although independent agencies have estimated, conservatively 260,000) and the mode of death. But it seems fairly solid that in six weeks, Japanese soldiers individually killed more people than those killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm not necessarily saying one was better or worse than the other, but ever since I was a kid and learned about those bombings, I've been ashamed, and I've questioned how America and humanity could ever engage in such an act (this is the same guilt I carry about the Japanese internment during WWII, slavery, the massacres of Native Americans, etc. -- in short, I'm ridiculously naive and idealistic). But now I have a little more perspective -- the Japanese weren't saints themselves, nor were the Chinese. But my feelings about escaping to an island somewhere (it used to be an igloo, but my love for winter is fading quickly...), shunning my national identity, avoiding politics and commercialism and materialism, has been strengthened significantly.
