Nonfiction: Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose

In an effort to clean out my current backlog of books (see my post, 6/30/2008), I've finished reading two nonfiction books in the past week. My conclusion: one thumbs up, one thumbs down.

"The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead" by David Shields

This book was spectacularly depressing. I know, I know -- with a title like that, what did I expect? In my defense, I thought that the name of the book was the kind of tongue-in-cheek title that denotes a book of wry and witty essays about a traditionally sobering subject, a la Nora Ephron's "I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman." Wrong.

I should have known better after reading some of the book's chapter headings ("Our Birth Is Nothing but Our Death Begun," "Decline and Fall," "Paradise, Soon Lost" . . . ), and Shield's use of a quote from Schopenhauer: "Just as we know our walking to be only a constantly prevented falling, so is the life of our body only a constantly prevented dying, an ever-deferred death."

Nonetheless, I slogged through this book to the bitter end (no pun intended), fruitlessly seeking some redemptive ray of hope. I did gather some interesting factoids along the way (did you know that when you're born, taste buds cover your entire mouth -- including your throat and the underside of your tongue -- or that from ages 11 to 16, boys' testosterone levels increase 20-fold?), but I can't recommend this book unless the prospective reader enjoys despondence. Even the book's "hero" -- the author's father, who has lived an amazingly healthy, vital life into his 90's -- eventually succumbs to vacant inertia as he awaits the inevitable knock on the door from The Reaper. Spare me.

"Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions," by Dan Ariely

Ariely's book, a New York Times bestseller, strikes a nice balance between respectable reportage of scientific research and "pop-psych readability." Each chapter is self-contained and deals with an irrational aspect of the human psyche that nonetheless dictates many of our daily decisions. What an eye-opener!

Ariely deals with such topics as the power of "free" (Quick! Which would you prefer at a shopping mall kiosk: a free $10 Amazon certificate or a $20 Amazon certificate in exchange for $8?), the "price" of social norms (lawyers are much more likely to participate in a program that offers free services to indigents than they are to participate in a program that offers the same services to indigents for a reduced fee), and the effects of sexual arousal on moral decision making (in one study, college men who filled out a questionnaire while in an aroused state were five times more likely to report that they would "consider" drugging a date in order to obtain sex than those men who filled out the same questionnaire in a composed state).

Besides being entertaining, the book has important social and personal implications (sex survey, above, duly noted). Imagine harnessing the power of "free" to improve public health and the environment by offering free registration and inspection for hybrid cars; free physical exams at set intervals; free weight loss clinics, etc. It's also good to acknowledge that most people are so adverse to losing an option that they will do almost anything to hang onto it, even to their obvious detriment (think personal relationships here . . . ), and that the emotion of "ownership" almost always causes the owner to inflate the value of the owned object (face it, your VW van holds a lot of fond memories, but you need to sell it at market value -- your neighbors are tired of looking at that heap).

Incidentally, the book also reports an experiment in which college students who completed a scrambled-sentence task containing words that suggested old age ("bingo," "ancient," "bifocals," etc.) exited the testing site more slowly than those students who performed a similar task with neutral words. This is yet another reason not to read "The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead." You may be unable to summon the energy necessary to rise from your Rascal (oops -- chair).