Tomorrow — Getting Lucky at Harvard, a Review of Ben Mezrich’s Tale of the Founding of Facebook, ‘The Accidental Billionaires’

Is Ben Mezrich turning into the male Danielle Steel of nonfiction? You might wonder after reading passages like this one from his new The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (Doubleday, 260, $25):

“His hands roamed under her open white shirt, tracing the soft material of her red bra, his fingers lingering over her perky, round breasts, touching the silky texture of her perfect caramel skin. She gasped, her lips closing against the side of his neck, her tongue leaping out, tasting him. His entire body started to quiver, and he rocked forward, pushing her harder against the stall, feeling her writhe into him. His lips found her ear and she gasped again –”

Does The Accidental Billionaires have more going for — or against — it than this sort of purple prose? A review of the book will appear tomorrow on One-Minute Book Reviews.

The Red Lace Bra on the Cover Is Pretty, But Would You Want to Sleep With the Writing in ‘The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook’?

Can there be any redeeming traits to a book full of lines like “the end was really a foregone conclusion”? Or is that pretty red lace bra on the cover the most appealing thing about The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal? A review of Ben Mezrich’s book will appear soon on One-Minute Book Reviews.

The Moral Failures of U.S. Health Care – T.R. Reid’s ‘The Healing of America’

A specialist in Tibetan herbal medicine wanted to taste T.R. Reid's urine.

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. By T. R. Reid. Penguin, 277 pp., $25.95.

By Janice Harayda

This elegant polemic argues that the American health-care crisis is, above all, a moral one: Alone among well-off democracies, the U.S. has never made a moral choice to guarantee health care for all. Americans have decided that everybody has the right to an education and a legal defense, regardless of the cost or difficulty of providing these, T.R. Reid reminds us. But we’ve never decided that everybody has the right to health care. Because we haven’t, the U.S. is the only country in which medical bills can bankrupt people. It’s the only one in which patients who have paid their health insurance premiums for years can — and do — have their policies canceled while they’re fighting for life from a hospital bed.

Fewer than half of all Americans are satisfied with this state of affairs, according to a 2001 study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health. But many critics of the system believe that all the alternatives involve conditions too onerous to accept – long waiting lists, the rationing of care, no choice of doctors, or “socialized medicine.”

T.R. Reid offers a powerful rebuttal to that idea with fascinating and well-written portraits of the health-care systems in five countries that have universal coverage: France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and Canada. Japan, for example, hardly has “socialized medicine.” Its widely admired approach to health care uses private doctors and hospitals and nonprofit insurers. The system involves no gatekeepers, no rationing, and no waiting lists. It offers high-quality care and ample choice for patients. People split the cost of insurance with their employers or if they are unemployed, with their local government. And the Japanese lead the world in life expectancy (85.5 years for women, 78.7 for men).

Reid also evaluates the health care systems in India, Taiwan, Switzerland and other countries. And he found an ingenious way to dramatize some of their differences after an American orthopedist suggested that he have surgery on an injured shoulder. As he traveled around the world, Reid asked foreign doctors how they would treat the problem. In Nepal, he met a specialist in Tibetan herbal medicine who wanted to taste his urine before making a diagnosis. At an Ayurvedic hospital known as “the Mayo Clinic of traditional Indian medicine,” he submitted three times a day to massages of “warm sesame oil laced with forty-six herbs and medications.” These encounters add color and suspense to The Health of America without taking its focus off the moral imperatives of health care reform.

Reid doesn’t urge Americans to adopt any country’s model or a “public option” of care paid for by the government (although he notes that we have a public option in Medicare, a system that its beneficiaries generally like). But he appears to believe we can’t reform the system if we continue to allow insurers to make a profit on basic health care, something no other first-world country permits: The solution lies in a nonprofit model, whether run by the government or a nonprofit group. Reid has suggested in interviews that if Congress can’t enact the needed changes, Americans may have to reform the system on a state-by-state basis, though he damns the Massachusetts approach with faint praise.

The most admirable aspect of The Healing of America is that – like any skilled polemicist
– Reid has an exceptional ability to keep his eye on the ball. He deals forthrightly with the economic and other realities that health care reform would involve, such as controlling costs and creating an effective delivery system. But Reid never allows such issues to transcend the moral dimension of allowing tens of thousands of people each year to die and countless others to suffer needlessly. His powerful indictment shows why health care reform is ultimately not about politics or economics: It is about fairness, justice, and doing what is right for all Americans.

Best line: No. 1: “All developed countries except the United States have decided that every human has a basic right to health care.” No. 2: “ … foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people’s medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only nation that lets insurance companies extract a profit from basic health coverage.” No. 3: “The design of any nation’s health care system involves political economic, and medical decisions. But the primary issue for any health care system is a moral one.”

Worst line: “British women tend to have their babies at home; Japanese women, in contrast, almost always give birth in the hospital – and mother and child remain there an average of ten days after delivery.” The National Childbirth Trust says that in the U.K., 2.7 percent of women give birth at home.

Editor: Ann Godoff

Published: September 2009

About the author: Reid is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post.

Further comments on The Healing of America appeared in the posts “Excuses Aetna, Prudential and Blue Shield Have Used to Deny Claims” and “Going to the Doctor in Japan — Please Don’t Tip the Proctologist.”

Listen to a podcast of T.R. Reid talking about The Healing of America.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com and www.twitter.com/janiceharayda

Eve Pell Airs the Monogrammed Laundry in ‘We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante’

The great-great-great granddaughter of tobacco baron Pierre Lorillard remembers her overprivileged childhood and her involvement with the Black Panthers

We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante. State University of New York Press/Albany, 225 pp., $23.

By Janice Harayda

Eve Pell notes perceptively that there was something “curiously un-American” about the values of her parents, members of the last generation who believed that if your blood was blue enough, you didn’t have to redeem yourself through work or philanthropy. “Horatio Alger, for example, would not have been welcome in our circle,” she writes, “since we looked down on people who actually made their own money (after we did) as ‘latecomers.’”

Pell maps the damage in this memoir of her overprivileged childhood on Long Island, her work with the Black Panthers in San Francisco, and her late-life success as a world-class marathon runner. She grew up fox-hunting and hearing about prominent forebears such as the tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard, her great-great-great grandfather. One of her great-grandmothers gave seated dinners for 125 guests, “one course after another, with a footman in livery standing behind each chair”: “She never put on her own shoes – her lady’s maid did that.” And yet Pell hardly had charmed youth: Early on, her beautiful mother ran off with a lover and fought for custody of her daughter in a battle played out in the New York newspapers.

By telling her story, Pell aims show what happens to rich families when blood and money thin and, in the culture as a whole, an aristocracy of birth gives way to an aristocracy of achievement. And to some extent, she succeeds. Pell is a close observer of the mores of relatives such as an aunt who sold some of her diamonds to create and publish a version of the Bible that “excluded references to eating meat since she was a vegetarian.”

But We Used to Own the Bronx isn’t as enlightening as it could have been. Pell is better reporter than analyst and, as such, offers few insights into her world that go beyond the banalities of psychotherapy. She was in a unique position to shed light on the phenomenon known as radical chic or champagne socialism, but she makes little of it.

As a young mother, Pell became emotionally involved the Black Panther George Jackson, a prisoner at San Quentin, who was eventually shot to death while trying to escape. Why did she act in ways that might have endangered her three children? Pell says, in part, that Jackson “made me feel like a real woman.” She also says that in 1996 — when she would have been in her 60s — she was “surprised and shocked” (and “horrified” and “appalled”) to learn that a cousin felt no guilt about a nasty anti-Semitic prank in his youth. By then, she’d lived for more than six decades in a family teeming with men who belonged to private clubs that didn’t admit Jews, so it’s unclear why she was as startled by this as by her discovery that Jackson may have been a psychopath.

In such passages, Pell comes across as either naïve or sanctimonious and, in any case, lacking in self-awareness. She also shows little sense of humor about the foibles of the oddballs in her clan. Pell has tried not to allow herself to be defined by family – but she takes her clan so seriously as to leave the impression that, in many ways, she’s still in thrall to it.

Best line: “I had been raised to think that anyone who felt bad was not trying hard enough.”

Worst line: Pell writes of an ex-husband: “There were things I had to put up with. He routinely ate all the chocolate icing off the top of Sara Lee cakes and left the rest of it, stripped, in the fridge for us.” We’re supposed to sympathize with this?

Published: February 2009

Caveat lector: We Used to Own the Bronx has one of the worst titles I’ve seen on a book this year. It refers to a large tract of land once owned by the Pells, but leaves the impression that the book is about, say, the 1949 Yankees. The subtitle is fine.

About the author: Pell lives in San Francisco.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
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Excuses Used by Aetna, Prudential and Blue Shield to Deny Health-Insurance Claims — From T. R. Reid’s ‘The Healing of America’

I was going to read The Lost Symbol over the weekend but picked up T. R. Reid’s elegant indictment of health care in the U.S., The Healing of America (Penguin, 277 pp., $25.95). And I was hooked after the first sentence: “If Nikki White had been a resident of any other rich country, she would be alive today.”

Reid had his bad shoulder examined by doctors in other well-off democracies that included France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and Canada. And he uses the results as a springboard for exposing flaws in arguments made by insurers and others against adopting practices that work overseas: “It’s all socialized medicine over there,” “They ration care with waiting lists and limited choice,” “Those systems are too foreign to work in the United States,” and more.

Until I can review The Healing of America, here’s a brief excerpt from the book about the excuses used by major insurers to reject claims:

“In other developed countries, insurers are required to pay every claim. But U.S. insurance companies deny about 30 percent of all claims, although some of these are eventually paid through an appeal process. The reasons cited for denying valid claims can be ingenious. When our family lived in Japan, the friendly adjusters at Prudential used to deny our claims for medical or dental care on the grounds that the bills we submitted were denominated in yen. Somebody at Prudential had determined that the Japanese yen was a foreign currency; that violated the rules. My company later switched our health insurance to Aetna, which employed a similar dodge: The adjuster said she couldn’t pay our claims because she couldn’t call the doctor’s office to verify the bills. It seems that Aetna had a phone system for its adjusters that didn’t allow international calls, so our claims had to be denied.

“The most maddening of all the profit-maximizing mechanisms in the U.S. health insurance industry is the practice known as ‘rescission,’ a legal term that means ‘We’re canceling your coverage.’ This occurs when an injured person who has been paying premiums for months or years has a serious accident or contracts a serious disease, which can mean serious bills for the insurance company to pay. At that point, the insurer’s Rescission Department digs through all the records, looking for a reason to cancel the sick person’s coverage. For example, Steven Hailey, a machinist in Cypress, California, paid his health insurance premium every month. Then he was hit by a truck. He was still being treated for his injuries when Blue Shield of California wrote to tell him that his coverage had been canceled because his weight was too high. He would have to pay the hospital bills himself – about $450,000 worth of bills.”

‘Why We Make Mistakes’ – A Provocative Look at the Causes of Human Error, or Why There’s a 1-in-5 Chance That a Doctor Will Misdiagnose Your Final Illness

If you drink while studying for a test, hope the exam will be held in a bar

Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average. By Joseph T. Hallinan. Broadway, 283 pp., $24.95.

By Janice Harayda

A few days before Halloween in a small town in Delaware, a 42-year-old woman hanged herself from a tree across from a moderately busy road. Her body dangled about 15 feet above the ground and could easily be seen from passing cars, but no one called the police for more than 12 hours.

“They thought it was a Halloween decoration,” the mayor’s wife said as a crowd gathered at the scene in 2005.

Joseph Hallinan uses the tragedy to make a point: Context affects our perceptions of events more than we imagine. Its importance helps to explain why we often can’t quite place somebody we’ve run into: Is he a barista at the local Starbucks? A volunteer at the library? It’s easier to recall who a person is when you know where he belongs. And context involves more than time and place, Hallinan says in Why We Make Mistakes, a fascinating survey the causes of human error. One study found that people who learned while slightly drunk remembered better if they were tested while tipsy.

Hallinan focuses on cognitive or perceptual errors that affect behavior, or factors such as change blindness (an inability to notice shifts in what we see) and overconfidence (a trait that shows up more in men than women and influences the mistakes of each sex). But he writes at times about behavior that affects perceptions, such as not getting enough sleep. And this dilutes slightly the focus of his book, which draws on research in psychology, economics, and other fields. Why deal with fatigue but not with such physical conditions as chronic pain or stress that can also cause errors?

A larger issue is whom the “we” in the title of the book refers to. Hallinan seems to draw mainly on the work of American researchers, and this raises questions when he deals with a topic such as overconfidence. He makes a strong case that “we” are overconfident. But that’s what Europeans have said for decades about Americans, and it makes you wonder if his conclusions would have differed if he’d drawn on more studies of, say, Scots or Hungarians. You don’t know whether this is a book about why people make mistakes or about why Americans make mistakes.

Even so, Why We Make Mistakes is as sobering – and potentially helpful — as it is lively. If you can’t decide whether to get a second opinion about a recommended medical treatment, here’s a fact that could help you make up your mind: Studies of autopsies have shown that “doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time.”

Best line: No. 1: “Memory, it turns out, is often more of a reconstruction than a reproduction.” No. 2: “Wrong-site surgery continues to afflict untold numbers of patients each year. … One recent survey, for instance, asked hand surgeons about operating on the wrong place; 20 percent of them revealed that they had operated on the wrong site at least once in their careers.”

Worst line: “On the kinds of sophisticated tasks that economists are most interested in, like trading in markets or choosing among gambles, the overwhelming finding it that increased incentives to do not change average behavior substantially. Generally, what incentives do is prolong deliberation or attention to a problem. People who are offered them will work harder on a given problem … though they will not necessarily work any smarter.” This passage seems self-contradictory and an oversimplification of the effect of incentives. If people work harder on a problem, isn’t that a change in their “average behavior”?

Recommendation? Why We Make Mistakes may appeal to fans of the books of Malcolm Gladwell, though there’s some overlap of information with them.

Published: February 2009

Editor: Kris Puopolo

About the author: Hallinan is a Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Wall Street Journal reporter. He lives in Chicago.

One-Minute Book Reviews posts short reviews by Janice Harayda, former book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. The site is also the home of the “Backscratching in Our Time” series that calls attention to authors who praise each other’s books. The next installment in the series will appear Friday.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com and www.twitter.com/janiceharayda

John Ashbery, E.L. Doctorow Help Critics Celebrate Their 35th Anniversary

The winner of the first National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry

Update: 2:25 p.m. Monday: A video of John Ashbery’s entertaining talk has been posted on the NBCC blog.

You might expect an anniversary party for a literary-critics’ organization to resemble a wake now that so many book-review sections have folded or shrunk. But the mood was lively at the festivities that marked the 35th year of the National Book Critics Circle last night at the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space in downtown Manhattan.

I spoke at the event along with the poet John Ashbery, the novelist E. L. Doctorow and dozens of current and former NBCC board members. Ashbery, born nearly a half century before the critics’ organization was founded, received the first NBCC Award for poetry in 1975 for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which also won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. And he set the tone  of the anniversary celebration when he said: “It’s great to be back here. Actually, it’s great to be anywhere.”

Ashbery praised the Rain Taxi Review of Books and offered it as partial evidence that serious criticism of poetry and other art forms exists amid the meltdown at newspapers. The NBCC has posted a brief news report on his speech on its blog. You’ll find excerpts from other speakers’ comments, including mine, in a separate post there. The full text of all the speeches is scheduled to appear soon the NBCC site.

What If You Had an Autistic Disorder and Didn’t Know It? Tim Page’s Memoir of Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, ‘Parallel Play’

Tim Page is a friend, and I’m in the acknowledgments of his acclaimed biography of the novelist Dawn Powell, which – you will not be surprised to hear – I love. So I can’t review his new Parallel Play: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s (Doubleday, 196 pp., $26). But Janet Maslin writes in today’s New York Times that this “improbably lovely memoir” shows in “fascinatingly precise detail and often to pricelessly funny effect” what it’s like to have his autistic disorder and not know it. And nothing in her review conflicts with what I know about Tim, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his music criticism for the Washington Post before he decamped to academia. The Times has also posted an excerpt from Parallel Play, a book that is an expanded version of material that appeared in The New Yorker.

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‘The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived’ — Characters From Myths, Legends, and Books, Movies and TV Shows Who Made a Difference

The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived: How Characters of Fiction, Myth, Legends, Television, and Movies Have Shaped Our Culture, Changed Our Behavior, and Set the Course of History. By Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan and Jeremy Salter. Harper, 317 pp., $13.95, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

Publishers have a phrase for books like The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived – “an impulse buy at the bookstore.” Boy, do they know me. I can’t remember what I was looking for when I saw this book near the cash register at a bookstore. Whatever it was, it’s vanished from my mind an episode of Wife Swap. But I keep dipping into this dish of literary tacos with mild salsa.

Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan and Jeremy Salter had the idea of selecting and ranking the 101 most influential people who never existed, giving you a few pages of sprightly text about each and defining “people” loosely enough to encompass King Kong (No. 74), Joe Camel (No. 78) and The Cat in the Hat (No. 79). This concept is nothing new. You can find similar books by searching Amazon for the “dictionary + fictional characters” or in the reference sections at many bookstores.

What is new is the packaging of the book, a trade paperback with a conversational tone instead of the usual professorial door-stopper. So The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived could be a handy book for, say, baby boomers who are having trouble explaining to their grandchildren exactly why Archie Bunker (No. 32) was so different from other sitcom characters of his day. It wasn’t just that he called his liberal son-in-law “Meathead”:

“Archie expressed what ultraconservative white people said behind closed doors on topics such as rape and poverty (the victims were to blame), homosexuality (perverts), militia groups (real Americans), welfare recipients (cheats who took hard-earned money out of his pocket) , college students (all pinko Communists), and support for the Vietnam War (real patriotism).”

Lazar, Karlan and Salter offer no narrative thread to connect the entries, so their essays tend to lack a context. Most readers under 40 might find it easier to fathom how Archie’s bigotry ever made it to prime time if they knew that he descended spiritually from Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) on The Honeymooners, who was always threatening to belt his wife. (“One of these days, Alice – pow! – right in the kisser.”) You could also argue that, for that reason, Kramden and not Bunker belonged on the list. But part of the fun of this book is comparing your list with the authors’ rankings of characters like Hamlet (No. 5), Pandora (No. 47), Prometheus (No. 46), Nancy Drew (No. 62) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (No. 44). Anybody want to argue that Perry Mason (No. 86) had less clout than Ally McBeal?

Best line: About the Marlboro Man (No. 1): “Advertising Age picked the Marlboro Man as the most powerful brand image of the twentieth century.” Why? Philip Morris had marketed Marlboros as a women’s brand that was “Mild As May”: “Marlboro’s new image boosted its sales four-fold from 1955 to 1957, and by 1972 it had become the top cigarette brand both in the nation and the world.” The original Marlboro Man and two other actors used for the role all died from lung cancer or emphysema.

Worst line: About the Loch Ness Monster (No. 56): Nessie is “the most popular tourist attraction in Scotland.” The most popular tourist attraction in Scotland has for years been Edinburgh Castle. Nessie isn’t even among the top ten on some lists. The rest of this section is also weak. As proof of the nonexistence of the monster, the authors say that the most famous photo of it turned out to be a hoax. What about all the sonar and other scientific reports that have shown that the creature never existed?

Recommended if … you’re not looking for a scholarly reference book but for the views of enthusiastic amateurs who get some facts wrong and serve up essays of inconsistent quality. Some entries are well-written, while others read like rough drafts.

Editors: Carolyn Marino, Jennifer Civiletto and Wendy Lee

Published: October 2006

This review first appeared in March 2007.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

‘Disappearing Destinations,’ 37 Places to Visit Before THEY Die

A book I haven’t read but ecotourists might want to look at: Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them (Vintage, 400 pp., $15.95, paperback). Kimberly Lisagor and Heather Hansen won the American Society of Journalists and Authors 2009 Outstanding Book Award for general nonfiction for this collection of travel essays on spots that face an arsenal of threats, including logging (Lapland), mining (Appalachia), overdevelopment (the Galápagos), rising waters (the Maldives), and melting permafrost (the Alps). Pico Iyer writes in his foreword that “many of the marvels of our collective inheritance are disappearing, and because of human neglect or corruption or greed,” and Lisagor and Hansen sought out spots that, if unique, represent the dangers facing many other places.

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