Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Maria Konnikova’s title to her book, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, makes it sound like a self-help book. Instead, between the covers we find a exploration of how our brain works, with Sherlock Holmes as our recurring role model.

 

I’m a long-time Holmes fan, and thinking like Holmes seems like an admirable goal. But as Konnikova shows, it is not an easy feat. Our brains have been trained to think like Watson — to think like Holmes requires not only a change in thinking, but a great deal of practice to have any success.

 

Holmes is well known for his power of observation. He and Watson can walk into room, but what they observe is completely different.  The fact is, most of us are like Watson. But take heart! “Our brains aren’t stupid….We don’t notice everything because noticing everything…would make us crazy.” Instead, Konnikova lays out how Holmes succeeds in observing more than most: he is selective, objective, inclusive, and engaged. “

 

Many of these we can understand in theory, but Konnikova provides multiple examples (at times, a few too many) to show how our brain does not always work this way. We let our background biases alter what we see, we follow a line of thinking even when the evidence points elsewhere, and we are distracted by elements which do not matter. Only through conscious effort and training can we overcome many of these challenges. Holmes (and it is good to remember he is a fictional character) trained his brain early on to have the abilities it possesses.

 

A trait not often applied to Holmes, which Konnikova sees as essential, is imagination. “It uses the building blocks of all of the observations that you’ve collected to create the material that can then serve as a solid base for future deduction.” In other words, once you have the different elements, it takes imagination to create the picture. Holmes is too often portrayed as a human robot, when it is his ability to be imaginative that sets him apart. 

 

What Konnikova also focuses on is Holmes’ willingness to sit and think. “A three-pipe problem,” he might say.  ”If you get only one think out of this book, it should be this: the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn’t often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.” Brave words in a loud world, and Konnikova is no stuffy old professor. She is a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia University. A Harvard grad who learned her Holmesian lore by hearing her father read the stories to her in Russian.

 

It is that knowledge and clear love of the canon that makes this book so interesting for the Holmes fan. While she can quote psychological studies at length, she also quotes Doyle often. The stories serve as ways to illuminate what we know about the brain, but her thinking provides new insight to the stories. One will return to Holmes with fresh eyes.

The Magic Christian

Terry Southern is an American novelist, Academy-award nominated screenwriter, and even later did writing for Saturday Night Live. He is praised for his satire and humor, and “The Magic Christian” has no shortage of luminaries singing its praises.

Not this reviewer. 

The novel revolves around Guy Grand, a billionaire who likes to spend his money to show how far people will go for money. He says everyone has a price, and he intends to find it. Would you eat a parking ticket for a few thousand dollars? Grand finds out, although whether or not that really says anything about the moral character of the individual is questionable. Would you swim in a cesspool of toxins for thousands? Again, he is trying to push the limits on how far one will go.

 

This is an interesting concept, but the point is quickly made, and so even this short novel becomes repetitive. Grand sets up a prank, we see the event occur, and then it is done. In between we are part of his conversation with this two live-in aunts and a desperate, socialite. Then back to another prank. While this repetition is tiring, it becomes irksome because many of the pranks say nothing about our moral limits. At the end he opens grocery stores, sells everything at loss in one night, closes it, and does it again. What does that say about anything? The same works for “The Magic Christian” prank, which is the name of an ocean liner he buys and refurbishes as an incredibly high end travel liner. Those lucky enough to get a place, gradually find themselves on a boat with people intended to make them feel uncomfortable, nothing to eat but potatoes, and a host of other problems. To what point? This says nothing about people and their moral limits. It does say something about Grand.

 

Grand himself is an interesting character. He sets up these elaborate plots for his own humor and often takes part in them, although unknown to others in the crowd. He clearly delights in making people uncomfortable. However, at times he is simply sadistic, which makes this his moral challenging of others questionable. Plus, he has no hesitation is using others, especially the disadvantaged, to meet his needs. He puts circus people on his liner and sends the bearded lady in to the dining room, naked. Funny? Well, to him perhaps, but only it only demeans her and embarrasses others — there is no moral lesson for others here. 

 

So, could Southern be actually hoping to have Grand stand in as the satirical character? Is he the one we are supposed to see ourselves reflected in? If so, he fails to make that connection, and as such the book fails. As a short story, this could have some potential, but the repetition and the failure to hold to his own thesis creates an incomplete novel.

Tree of Codes

Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Tree of Codes, is an unusual work. As opposed to creating a novel from scratch, Foer takes his “favorite book,” The Street of Crocodiles by the Polish-Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz, and cuts away that text to create a new novel.

 

It is a unique idea and raises the philosophical questions of what makes a novel, what is authorship, and even what is morally acceptable in taking work from others. Foer gives no authorial credit to Schulz, presumably because he sees this as his own work. This may actually be deconstructionism taken to its logical extreme.

 

In order to do this, Foer has worked with a publisher (Visual Editions)  to present the novel with the full pages, but every page is die-cut to show only the words he has chosen. The result is a book with many pages, but few words. As a work of art, it is interesting to see. As a literary work of art, it is an interesting experiment.   

 

But does it work? As a novel, no. The text he has kept is clearly constrained by what is already in the Schulz’s novel, so he is trapped within that structure. He can re-imagine the words in different ways and with different uses, but he cannot escape the structure. As such, he must create a story which can be found within a limited text (if we think of all texts as limited by their scope). He does not succeed in creating a full story.

 

I struggled with a way to summarize the book (best shot: son sees father’s demise at the hands of his mother), so I went in search of what others say. This was not a scientific survey, but a look at what a good Google search would bring up. Not surprisingly, almost everyone focuses on the physical book or the idea behind the physical book, but not the narrative itself. Why? Because the narrative is not nearly as strong as the idea behind it.

 

It can be better viewed as a work of poetry, but with lines like  “Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness,” it even fails in that category.

 

This is a book worth looking at, and because it is short, go ahead and read it. But it has been noticed not for what it contains, but how it was created. When the act of creation exceeds the creation, then it says little for the creation itself.

Underground Nest

 

Kathleen Maher’s novel centers around the dissolution of the proto-typical American family. Mom, dad, son, daughter. Dad is the breadwinner, a former Eagle Scout and Boy Scout supporter who teaches Political Science. The kids go through the normal growing pains, although the son does follow dad up the Boy Scout ladder. Mom stays home and lives a housewife existence rarely seen today. The daughter rebels — at times.

 

Not surprisingly, the “underground nest” of the title tells us that just beneath the surface, a nest of hornets await. Zach Severins is the dad, and beneath his perfect surface is an obsession with himself and what others think of him, a tendency to find sex outside of his marriage, and eventually a long-term relationship with a woman who moves in the top circles of Washington D.C.

 

Eventually, the surface collapses and we watch as Zach’s perfect life is exposed for the lie it is. To avoid giving away too much of the plot, suffice it say that everything unravels. The result is that Zach is forced to reexamine himself and given the chance to redeem his life. The novel ends before we see if a promising beginning is followed through, but I’m not convinced that two years down the road, he would not be in a similar situation.

 

The story is interesting and Maher moves the plot along quickly and deftly. Where it suffers is in the characters, a group of somewhat two-dimensional people who must have more going on than what we see. As a result, the reader is often surprised at what is happening. After they separate, Zach and his wife, Beth, have an ongoing “angry sex” routine, but from we know of Beth, this seems out of character. Even the children seem to move in and out of anger faster than the normal teenager who finds out their dad has been having an affair.

 

Still, the novel raises questions about how we live our lives, and takes the side of living the well-considered life. It does so within a scenario many of us will recognize, which makes the possibility of actually taking some away from it all the more likely. 

 

A Grace Revealed: How God Redeems the Story of Your Life

Jerry Sittser understands pain. He understands loss. He understands grief. But more importantly, he understands that our life is a story of redemption, of connection to the person of Christ. While we cannot forget, nor should we forget, our painful times in life, we need to know that the God’s story for our life is not over.

This is no mere glib, theological chatter. Sittser’s family was in a car hit by a drunk driver nearly 20 years ago. In an instant, his mother, his wife, and one of his daughters, was gone. Three generations of women gone all at once, and Sittsler suddenly finds himself the single father of two daughters and a son — all young.

Sittser wrote about the incident four years after it happened, in “A Grace Disguised.” He now returns with more distance from the event. But what makes this work so powerful, is that Sittser is not writing a memoir, but using his story to tell the story of God’s working out our redemption. “This book will not tell a sweet and simple story about tragedy leading to triumph. Still, I hope it will tell a redemptive story.”

And it does. Sittser is inspirational not in that he, twenty years later, he is “handling” the tragedy well. Instead, he inspirational in how he seems himself in the context of a larger story, and he trusts God’s authorship. This is not a self-help book, it is not called, “Using God to Feel Better About How Bad Life Is.” It is about redemption. “Redemption involves the story of how God reclaims and restores us into a living relationship with himself so that we can become the people that God has always intended us to be.”

Sittser organizes the book in way which focuses on redemption as a story. Chapters are about characters, “Scene and Setting,” “Plot,” “Author,” and other story devices. The Bible itself is explored as a story, and in six of the most amazing pages I’ve ever read, he summarizes the entire Bible by relating it as a story. Sittser focuses on scripture for what he explores, and he quotes scripture (often at length) to show the story of redemption. So many books today, including Christian books, spend more time quoting other authors than returning to the source, which makes this book so strong, theologically speaking.

This is not surprising. Sittser is a professor of Theology at Whitworth College (and, I was pleased to learn, a fellow alum from Hope College). He has a unique gift for be theologically grounded, but clearly able to write for the layperson. And his unfortunate credentials in suffering create an authentic voice.

On a very personal note, this was a profoundly moving book for me. Myself a father of four, I am also the parent of a six-year-old who has been battling cancer for nearly three years. There is no longer much hope that this will be cured, and we have wrestled with this reality. I have written openly and honestly about this process since the outset, and many people have said, you should write a book. Well, Sittser has written the book I would want to write, and done it far better than I could ever do.

I knew at the outset that his voice would be one I understand. “God has written and played the key role in the story of salvation, which promises to redeem our stories….This glorious story of redemption turns on the work of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and Savior of the world, who came into this world to make us new, which he accomplished through his life, death, and resurrection. It is all his doing, a gift of pure grace. But we must receive this gift and make it our own, like children growing into adults.”

That last line challenges us to not feel sorry for ourselves, but to accept God’s grace and trust in his story. How many of us have wasted our lives, filling it with bitterness over real and imagined tragedies, instead of recognizing that God is not done writing our story. But we need to accept that gift, and accepting gifts requires humility. Some people are blessed with a natural humility, others learn it the hard way, but those who never see themselves in a larger context, who center their world around themselves instead of God — well, there is the true tragedy in life. A stepping out of the story God is writing.

Sittser shares the story of a woman who, after many years of struggling, decides to meet the man who murdered her brother. And she tells him as she leaves, God wants him to know that “It is not too late to become the man that God designed you to be.” Our stories are not over.

Who Is This Man?: The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus

The essential premise of John Ortberg’s Who Is This Man? The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus, is that Christianity has had a great impact on society. Hardly earth shattering news. Somehow, Ortberg seems to think this legitimizes Jesus for the world, but, of course, it does not. A Christian will not point to the lived out faith as proof that Jesus was Christ, but instead focus on Jesus. Ortberg does show ways the influence of Christianity has spread, but he tends to focus on the all the good ways, instead of the evil. He gives passing mention to some errors, but if you want to focus on the role of Christianity in the world, you have to address the Inquisitions, Christian support for slavery, Christian countries warring, and countless examples of individual misuses of Christ’s teachings.

One thinks of Gandhi’s reply to why he rejects Christ.  “Oh, I don’t reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It is just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Which is one of the few quotes in the world which does not make it into this book. Ortberg strings quote after quote after quote together, quite often from four or five unrelated sources, on a single page. Sometimes they relate, sometimes they do not, but you want to hear more from Ortberg and less from everyone else. These are broken up by some very bad, classic “preacher” jokes which are often forced into the text.

Clearly, I found this all annoying. What he does have to say of value is what you would pick up in any history of Christianity class or text. Now, let it be known that I’m in the minority here. This is book is very popular and has spawned many study groups. If it succeeds in getting people talking about their faith, there is something going right. And many may argue that I get Ortberg’s goal wrong. An arguable point, so feel free to disagree in the comments.

And just when it seems that all hope is lost for the book, I do find some saving grace (pun intended) as  Ortberg turns his attention at the end to the three essential days in Christianity: Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Here we get a glimpse of what Ortberg has to share if he quits quoting others and writes his own thoughts. His reflections on each of these days are simple, but strong. Especially interesting are his thoughts on the Saturday, when no hope existed. If you are looking for devotional reading for Easter Weekend, use these three chapters. As for the rest, spend time instead with a good history of Christianity. And never confuse Christians with Christianity — we are stumbling lot seeking the perfection of Christ, but always falling short.

Nox

Some books just do not work as books. So what is a writer to do when they want to express something which does not fit into the usual binding? It helps when you are Anne Carson, an established poet and classicist, and you are writing on an usual subject.

Nox (Latin for “night”) is an elegy, or as Carson says, and epitaph, for her estranged and now deceased brother, Michael. Battling drug use, Carson says he left the United States in the late 1970′s in order not to go to jail. She would never see him again, and only spoke to him six times in over 20 years. During that time he traveled under false names, fell in love with a woman and was devastated when she died young, was married twice, and already had his ashes scattered before his sister found out he was dead.

But this is no collection of stories about her brother; it is a scrapbook of pictures, fragments of letters, Carson’s own thoughts, and other items. Instead of fitting it into the regular book format, “Nox” comes is an accordion style book which comes in book shaped box.

So how does this book manage to succeed in tying together such arange of items? Catullus’ poem No. 101, an elegy written by the poet when he arrived at his brother’s grave. Catullus was a first century, BC, Roman poet, who learned too late of his brother’s death to be there in time for the burial. Carson provides the poem in Latin, and then gives the etymology of each word in the 63-word poem on the left hand side, while the items relating to her brother are on the right. Toward the end, you finally get the poem in English, although she says that translating the work does not work well as the meanings of some of the words are lost in other languages.

Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed—
I arrive at these poor, brother, burials
so I could give you the last gift owed to death
and talk (why?) with mute ash.
Now that Fortune tore you from me, you
oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,
now still anyway this—what a distant mood of parents
handed down as the sad gift for burials—
accept soaked with tears of a brother
and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell.

Carson’s own words and arrangement of her brother’s show her poetic tendencies. A moving story of her brother always being on edge of others, is across the page from “sunt.” Carson gives the definition of “to be (continue) among the living; (of things) to be in existence.” Her story of her brother, one of the longest memories given, tells of a photograph she has of him (shown on the previous page) “about ten years old standing on the ground beneath a treehouse. Above him in the treehouse you can see three older boys gazing down. They have raised the ladder.” She wonders if his future drug use was found in this desire to be where he was not welcome, where he is on the edge. “No one knew him.”

In the end, what we have is a uniquely personal and moving meditation on death. Of course, we know death by contrasting it with life, but Carson does not pretend that our lives are made up of a simple narrative history. Instead, small elements, diverse elements, create a picture of who we are. She could write a detailed biography of her brother, and we would know less about who he is than we get from her own creation. In great part, this is because we know him only through Carson. And we know other people only through ourselves. It is not possible to know a person as they do themselves; relationships are quite simply that seeking to know another, and be known, in ways which are unique to each relationship. Carson’s brother’s absence for 22 years is an essential element of how she knows him, and she does not try to bridge the gap. That is the beauty of this epitaph. It explores a relationship as it was, and does not seek for more than what exists. As a result, she is respectful of her brother and his life without her, while not forgetting what she remembers of him. What better tribute could be offered?

Read more about Anne Carson at the Poetry Foundation