Diwali 2011

These are photos of firecrackers burst on Diwali night, Oct 26 2011, at our apartment complex in Bangalore.

Sapna Book House, Koramangala, Bangalore

This is the Koramangala branch of Sapna Book House in Bangalore, located on the Raheja Arcade Road. Sapna Book House advertises this as the larges book store/mall in India. I have no way of verifying that claim, but the store is large, spread across four floors. While it sells toys and other items besides books, the two floors dedicated to books do contain many books.

The store is well lighted, and new releases are stocked in neat arrangements throughout the floor. As far as aesthetics go, for some reason or reasons I prefer Landmark. The tiled floor, the harsh white light, and the white shelves all combine to give a very antiseptic feel to the environs. When browsing books you want the store to exude a more homely, comfortable, and inviting feel.

As most bookstores go, Sapna Book House also does not offer discounts on most books. Some fiction bestsellers are available at 20% or more off the list price, but most other books sell at the published price. As a physical retailer it is understandable that they need to to recover their costs and also make a profit decent enough to justify staying in the business and not turn their store into a multiplex or a mall. However, with the advent of online retailers like Flipkart.com or the older IndiaPlaza.com that offer steep 40% discounts on several bestsellers, it is difficult to see how traditional booksellers like Sapna will survive in this rapidly evolving market.

Recent events in the US, where brick-and-mortar bookstores like Borders (Borders Group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, The death and life of a great American bookstore - CNN), that filed for bankruptcy and then closed down all 400 or so of its stores, or the iconic Barnes and Noble (Barnes & Noble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), that put itself up for sale, and is now relying mostly on its Nook e-book reader and ebooks to revive its fortunes, indicate that Indian booksellers will find it difficult to survive, let alone thrive, as more online retailers start to expand operations in India.

2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't

Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't, by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Kindle Edition, Flipkart, my user review on Amazon)

Do as the world does; not as you think it should.
This book is an urgent wake-up call to the nice, smart, but otherwise powerless people in the workplace. Secondly, it is a guide to understanding how mediocre people rise to and stay in power. Thirdly, well... aren't the first two enough? A riff though; the book almost drowns out its message in anecdotes. Stay focused through the innumerable accounts, and you will see the considerable merits in the book.

The premise of this book is simple. The world is not as nice a place as you think it should be. In fact, the world may actually be run mostly by psychopaths (The Psychopath Test). If bad people do bad things to good people, it is not because the good people deserve it. That's a fallacy. That's the "just-world hypothesis." If you buy into this hypothesis it hurts you in two ways. More on that in a bit. The acquisition of power in the business world does not necessarily flow to the good people. By good people I mean the people that good people would call good people. People who acquire power do so by understanding how the world works, and understand they need to work as the world does, and not force the world to work they way they want it to, notable exceptions notwithstanding.

By knowing these rules, and understanding how they work, and reading about them in the context of examples from the real world, the author hopes to level the playing field.

The belief in a just world has two big negative effects on the ability to acquire power. First, it hinders people’s ability to learn from all situations and all people, even those whom they don’t like or respect.
Second, this belief that the world is a just place anesthetizes people to the need to be proactive in building a power base.

Books on leadership, and books on leadership by leaders are your worst enemy. Because they have been written to fool people into thinking that good, kind-hearted, do-gooders are what leaders are. Leaders writing about themselves seldom write about what it really took for them to get to the top. Churchill called Stalin trustworthy in 1945. You won't read about that in Churchill's writings. Jack Welch did not talk about the accounting jugglery that GE indulged in to make its earnings look more predictable than they were. Why leaders, even rank-and-file people lie about themselves. They lie about verifiable facts. They exaggerate achievements. And this has been documented in studies over and over again.

People distort reality. One study found that out of 1,000 resumés, there were substantial misstatements on more than 40 percent.18 If people make up educational qualifications and previous job experience—stuff that can actually be verified—do you think everyone is completely honest when they describe aspects of their behavior and character that are more difficult to discover?

If that were not good enough, know that performance does not matter. Good performance is not likely to get you promoted. Bad performance will not get you fired, if you are a leader. Being nice may make your neighborhood kids like you, but it won't make your coworkers respect you. Unless there are consequences to disagreeing with you, people will not fear you. Between love and fear, always choose fear. Because fear gets you results. Love gets you, well, a big wet kiss from a puppy. Maybe.

So enough with the cynicism. What does it take to get to the top? Well, like any good book, there is a list. There is a list of attributes.

The three three personal qualities embodied in will are ambition, energy, and focus. The four skills useful in acquiring power are self-knowledge and a reflective mind-set, confidence and the ability to project self-assurance, the ability to read others and empathize with their point of view, and a capacity to tolerate conflict.

The fact that status hierarchies are stable means not only that it is difficult to move up but also that it is difficult to move down. Once you have achieved power and status through the network of your relationships, you will be able to maintain your influence without expending as much time and effort.

This is a very engaging book that is well-organized and takes the reader through the topic of power. However, the anecdotes accounts of people tend to drown out the substantive stuff at times. The author, you realize, is making the point that the real world exists, despite our denials. The accounts reinforce the reality of power in the world. However, you wish they were a little less in-your-face and in-every-paragraph.

University of California–Berkeley professor Morten Hansen has studied what types of social networks are most useful given different types of product development efforts. When you need to access tacit knowledge, a smaller network of close ties is important because it takes close relationships to get people to spend the time to explain their tacit expertise. When the project requires locating explicit knowledge that can be readily transferred once you find it, a large network of weak ties provides greater benefit.

This is a list of the chapters in the book. This will help you understand the lay of the land, so to say, in the book.

1. It Takes More Than Performance 
2. The Personal Qualities That Bring Influence 
3. Choosing Where to Start 
4. Getting In: Standing Out and Breaking Some Rules 
5. Making Something out of Nothing: Creating Resources 
6. Building Efficient and Effective Social Networks 
7. Acting and Speaking with 
8. Building a Reputation: Perception Is Reality 
9. Overcoming Opposition and 
10. The Price of Power 
11. How-and Why--People Lose Power 
12. Dynamics: Good for Organizations, Good for You? 
13. It's Easier Than You Think

• OB 377: The Paths to Power - details on a course taught by the author.
• How David Beats Goliath When underdogs break the rules. by Malcolm Gladwell. The New Yorker. May 11, 2009
• The HBR List 2009 - Just Because I'm Nice Don't Assume I'm Dumb - Harvard Business Review
• Brilliant but Cruel: Perceptions of Negative Evaluators.
• Control of Attributions about the Self Through Self-handicapping Strategies: The Appeal of Alcohol and the Role of Underachievement

Kindle Excerpt:

© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Bisterey hi bisterey

The photo above is from the holy city of Kurukshetra. The shop sign at the top reads "bistery hi bistery and light house", i.e., "beds and beds and light house". Go figure that one out.


© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Kindle Million Club

Amazon announced that George R R Martin (Official Website, Wikipedia) is the latest author to join the Kindle Million Club - i.e. he has sold more than one million books in the Kindle format in the Kindle store. 
George R.R. Martin is the Newest Author to Join the Kindle Million Club

Amazon.com, Inc., today announced that best-selling author George R.R. Martin is the latest author to sell more than 1 million Kindle books in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). Martin's most recent novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, "A Dance with Dragons," debuted in the #2 spot on the Kindle Best Seller list and has remained in the Top 50 for more than 100 days. Martin joins Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Charlaine Harris, Lee Child, Suzanne Collins, Michael Connelly, John Locke, Janet Evanovich and Kathryn Stockett in the Kindle Million Club.

This reminds me of the million club in 1998 and 1999 when DVDs first came out. This was a time when not all Hollywood studios had embraced the DVD format, and thus a significant collection of blockbusters was not available on this new format. 20th Century Fox and Disney were two prominent holdouts. This meant that the stupendously successful trilogy of Start Wars was not available on DVD. This was of course before George Lucas did a slow burn-of-death of his franchise with the newer "prequels" to the trilogy.
The Titanic DVD, released in 1999, was the first to sell a million copies, and it took a long time, by comparison, to reach that seven-figure mark.
Things are a little different now, with the Twilight DVD selling more than 3 million copies on the first day of its release, or Avatar selling more than six million copies in DVD and BluRay formats in the first week of their release.
Game of Thrones Author Enters Amazon's 'Kindle Million Club' | News & Opinion | PCMag.com lists all the authors thus far in this club:

The Kindle Million Club

• Lee Child—Killing Floor, Without Fail
• Suzanne Collins—The Underwood Chronicles, The Hunger Games
• Michael Connelly—Hieronymus Bosch novels, Mickey Haller novels
• Janet Evanovich— Stephanie Plum novels
• Charlaine Harris—Sookie Stackhouse novels (source for HBO's hit series True Blood)
• Stieg Larsson—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
• John Locke—Two Treatises of Government, Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• George R.R. Martin—A Song of Ice and Fire
• James Patterson—Alex Cross novels
• Nora Roberts—The Heart's Victory, Angels Fall
• Kathryn Stockett—The Help

© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Halloween Reads from Amazon at $3.99 or less

Amazon has brought out a targeted list of discounted e-books for Halloween - Chilling Halloween Reads. I don't do a whole lot of fiction reading, and certainly even less of the horror genre. However, there are a few books that are familiar and famous, including one that I had read almost 20 years ago.

I know these books because these have been turned into iconic movies...
Rosemary's Baby - I watched this movie with my brother almost 15 years ago. Some parts are scary, yes.

The Exorcist: 40th Anniversary Edition - when growing up, the movie based on this book was often referred to as the scariest movie ever, and dozens of urban legends grew around it. As an adult, the movie seems much less scarier. Nonetheless.

Again, I haven't read the book, The Shining, but who can forget the "here's johnny!!!" line by Jack Nicholson in the movie.

I saw this book's movie, featuring Will Smith, and that's one cracker of a scary movie. I do plan on reading the e-book shortly. I Am Legend (Richard Matheson Series)

Now, this is one book I did read, but the movie I haven't seen. Maybe I should. Carrie

The Silence of the Lambs - Anthony Hopkins made Hannibal Lecter immortal in the movie. The movie seems to have lost a little bit of its edge over the past 20+ years, but is still well worth a watch.

© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Monkeys in Kodaikanal

As you approach the hills or jungles, you get to see lots and lots of monkeys. On trees, by the roadside, and just about everywhere. More so along the roads because of highway drivers that sometimes stop to throw food for the monkeys.
No different when in Kodaikanal (see my earlier post, On the road to Kodaikanal and all posts labeled kodaikanal). These are photos of some of the hundreds of monkeys we passed during our drive to Kodaikanal and while there.

Some of the monkeys have hairdos you would be proud to get from a salon.

Monkeys are social animals. When they live in groups they also fight for territorial rights. A sign of aggression is to bare their teeth. Look at the canines and you will realize why monkeys can be so dangerous. These canines are long enough and attached to jaws strong enough to inflict mortal wounds on even full-grown adults. Hence it is a good idea to steer clear of monkeys, not to throw food at them because that will attract their attention even more towards you, not to tease them, not to throw stones at them, and lastly, to stay away from groups of monkeys where there are small monkeys.

This monkey below could appear on the cover of GQ and look dapper-er than most of the models that grace its cover I suspect. A most distinguished looking specimen of its species. Hats off.

© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina

Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five 

 (Kindle edition, Flipkart.com, my review on Amazon.com)

All you need is love. Not the smothering kind. Don't be a hyper-parent. And practice inductive disciplining. Slightly repetitive if you have read Brain Rules (blog), but the chapters on parenting, praise, and morals are worth the admission ticket.

Like the author's first book, Brain Rules, that took a look at the research and insights into how the human brain works and how it affects us. This book is then a natural extension of his first book, taking a look at how babies' brains work and evolve. Baby brains undergo the most change and development, so it stands to reason we can all benefit by understanding what affects the baby brain, and how. And how we can use this knowledge to make better decisions as adults, and as parents.

The first chapter is on pregnancy, that is, when the baby first comes into the world, but not quite yet. But even there, in the safe comfort of the mother's womb, the baby is busy having experiences. The brain is busy, growing. And while "No commercial product has ever been shown to do anything to improve the brain performance of a developing fetus." [Medina, John (2010-09-21). Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five (p. 24). Pear Press. Kindle Edition.], there is still enough that parents can do to help the baby's brain develop. Every little bit does count.

For every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVDs and videos, the infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.

The brain starts out as a single cell in the womb, quiet as a secret. Within a few weeks, it is pumping out nerve cells at the astonishing rate of 8,000 per second.

By the beginning of the third trimester, a fetus readily displays avoidance behaviors (trying to swim away, for example, when a needle comes near for biopsy). From this we conclude that babies can feel pain, though it is impossible to measure this directly.

Babies can hear mom’s voice in the womb by the end of the second trimester, and they prefer it to other voices at birth. They respond especially strongly after birth if mom’s voice is muffled, recreating the sonic environment of the womb.

The fact that babies cause problems in marriages is a known fact. Babies are the ultimate stress inducers. From causing sleep deprivation, to introducing an incessant source of demands, and so many other problems that humans don't quite ever fully realize till they become parents. That grown ups, parents, fight, is also a truth universal acknowledged. That such fights can create a stressful environment should not be rocket science either. Babies respond to stress. They respond to stress in stressful ways. Stress can come in different ways. The worst is the unrelenting stress. There are evolutionary reasons for that. Stress used to be over in a matter of a few minutes, when humans roamed the Savannah, along with other, larger predators. Stress ended with the end of either the predator or the prey. Hence the human body never had a need to learn how to cope with unremitting stress. Modern society and the company of humans can subject the body to extended periods of stress. Children are especially vulnerable to the deleterious effects of such stress.

Here are the bad types of stress: Too frequent. Chronic, unrelenting stress during pregnancy hurts baby brain development. The stress doesn’t necessarily have to be severe. The poison is sustained, long-term exposure to stressors that you perceive are out of your control.
Too severe.
...
A woman’s stress hormones affect her baby by slipping through the placenta and entering the baby’s brain,
...
The first target is the baby’s limbic system, an area profoundly involved in emotional regulation and memory. This region develops more slowly in the presence of excess hormone,
...
Excess hormone from mom can mean baby has a difficult time turning off her own stress hormone system. Her brain becomes marinated in glucocorticoids whose concentrations are no longer easily controllable.

It's not enough to raise a loving baby. The baby has to be smart. The baby has to be smart in demonstrable ways, such that parents can finally feel they have achieved something in their own lives. Children become the vehicles and the receptacles for their parents' ambitions and desires. Not good.
However, if you look at the problem of raising a smart baby, independent of the parents' ambitions, you do not need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on useless products that do nothing except make useless advertisers and the product manufacturers rich. All you need is love. And praise. Praise directed at effort, NOT results, or IQ. This is something that Nurture Shock mentioned, as did Geoff Colvin in Talent Is Overrated (post), as did Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers (post), and as did Sheena Iyengar in The Art of Choosing (post). This is something that Amy Chua also says in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (post), but much more provocatively so. And, please avoid hyper-parenting!

Myth: Continually telling your children they are smart will boost their confidence.   Truth: They’ll become less willing to work on challenging problems (see “What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart,’” page 140). If you want your baby to get into a great college, praise his or her effort instead.

Your baby’s IQ is a function of her brain volume. Brain size predicts about 20 percent of the variance in her IQ scores (her prefrontal cortex, just behind her forehead, is particularly prescient). Brain volume is related to birth weight, which means that, to a point, larger babies are smarter babies.

What separates high performers from low performers is not some divine spark. It is, the most recent findings suggest, a much more boring—but ultimately more controllable—factor. All other things being equal, it is effort. Good old-fashioned neural elbow grease. Deliberate practice.
...
How can you get that kind of effort from your child? Surprisingly, it’s how you praise him.
...
Research shows that Ethan’s unfortunate story is typical of kids regularly praised for some fixed characteristic. If you praise your child this way, three things are statistically likely to happen: First, your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failures.
...
Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something.
...
Third, she will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors.
...
Kids praised for effort complete 50 percent more hard math problems than kids praised for intelligence.

So what exactly is hyper-parenting? Well, we all know what it refers to, sort of, don't we? Unsurprisingly, the word and phrase has been researched and there are some precise definitions there to be aware of.

Developmental psychologist David Elkind, now professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University, has divided overachieving moms and dads into categories. Four of them are: • Gourmet parents. These parents are high achievers who want their kids to succeed as they did. • College-degree parents. Your classic “hot-housers”, these parents are related to Gourmets but believe that the sooner academic training starts, the better. • Outward-bound parents. Wanting to provide their kids with physical survival skills because the world is such a dangerous place, these parents are often involved in the military and law enforcement. • Prodigy parents. Financially successful and deeply suspicious about the education system, these parents want to guard their kids against the negative effects of schooling.

Every good book on marketing has a plethora of two-by-two grids. Where an attribute is plotted on the horizontal axis and another on the vertical axis, thus forming a neat four-square grid. If you reduce parenting also to dimensions, then it stands to reason someone would have come up with such a grid.

Baumrind described two dimensions in parenting, each on a continuum: • Responsiveness. This is the degree to which parents respond to their kids with support, warmth and acceptance. Warm parents mostly communicate their affection for their kids. Hostile parents mostly communicate their rejection of their kids. • Demandingness. This is the degree to which a parent attempts to exert behavioral control.
...
Putting these dimensions in the form of a two-by-two grid creates four parenting styles that have been studied. Only one style produces happy children.
Authoritarian: Too hard
Indulgent: Too soft
Neglectful: Too aloof
Authoritative: Just right

The chapter, "happy baby: seeds" has a single valuable lesson. That the best predictor of happiness is friendship. As the Sanskrit shloka says, "mitram kutah sukham" ("without friends there is no happiness" अलसस्य कुतः सुखं ).

Ekman has found several surprising things about human facial recognition. First, people all over the world express similar emotions
...
Second, the conscious control we can exert over own facial features is limited, which means we give away a lot of free information. The muscles that surround our eyes, for example, are not under conscious management. This may be why we tend to believe them more.

How can we tell face-reading abilities are so important? In part because the brain devotes a tremendous amount of neural real estate, including an important region called the fusiform gyrus, to the single task of processing faces. 

It is an oft-repeated myth, especially on brain-dead television soap operas, that the best parents are necessarily those that smother their children with love and affection. Common sense should tell you that is not the recipe for a healthy relationship. 

In the late 1980s, researchers were somewhat startled to find that when parents paid too much attention to their kids cues—responding to every gurgle, burp, and cough—the kids actually became less securely attached. Children (like anybody) didn’t take too well to being smothered. The stifling seemed to interfere with emotional self-regulation,

The Amitabh Bachchan blockbuster, Majboor, has this very poignant line from the amazing Kishore Kumar number, penned by the genius Anand Bakshi, that goes, "bahut zayada pyaar bhi achha nahi hota, kabhi daaman chudana ho to mushkil ho" (बहुत ज़यादा  प्यार भी अच्छा नहीं होता, कभी दामन छुड़ाना हो तो मुश्किल हो...)

Apart from the chapter on stress, one of the best chapters in the book is the one on babies and morals: Moral baby. This covers ground on the touchy topic of whether babies are intrinsically moral, if they are then why don't do they the right things. The development of moral development in children, it turns out, follows a well-defined progressive path. It starts out with "Avoiding punishment", where the intent of the child is to reduce behaviors that result in punishment. Not surprising. The next stage in this development is where a child begins to consider consequences of his or her actions, and finally learns how to act "on principle".

Families who raise moral kids follow very predictable patterns when it comes to rules and discipline.
• Clear, consistent rules and rewards • Swift punishment • Explaining the rules

Scientists (and good parents) discovered long ago that you can increase the frequency of a desired behavior if you reinforce the behavior.
...
Behaviorists call this positive reinforcement.
Researchers distinguish between two discipline strategies: negative reinforcement and punishment. Both deal with aversive situations, but negative reinforcement tends to strengthen behaviors, whereas punishment tends to weaken them.

...punishment by application. It has a reflexive quality to it. You touch your hand to a stove, your hand gets burned immediately, you learn not to touch the stove. This automaticity is very powerful. Research shows that children internalize behaviors best when they are allowed to make their own mistakes and feel the consequences.
...
The punishment must be administered consistently—every time the rule is broken. That is one of the reasons why hot stoves alter behavior so quickly: Every time you put your hand on it, you get burned. The same is true with punishment. The more exceptions you allow, the harder it will be to extinguish the behavior. This is the basis of a Brain Rule: Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Consistency must be there not only from one day to the next but from one caregiver to the next.

In the second type of punishment, the parent is subtracting something. Appropriately, this is called punishment by removal. For example, your son hits his younger sister, and you do not allow him to go to a birthday party. Or you give him a timeout. (Jail time for crimes is the adult form of this category.)
Either type of punishment, under proper conditions, can produce powerful, enduring changes in behavior. But you have to follow certain guidelines to get them to work properly. These guidelines are necessary because punishment has several limitations: • It suppresses the behavior but not the child’s knowledge of how to misbehave. • It provides very little guidance on its own. If it’s not accompanied by some kind of teaching moment, the child won’t know what the replacement behavior should be. • Punishment always arouses negative emotions fear and anger are natural responses—and these can produce such resentment that the relationship may become the issue rather than the obnoxious behavior.

This is on the whole an excellent book. Some chapters will hold your attention more than others, and that depends partly on where in the parenting stage you are in.
My same complaint as with the author's first book, Brain Rules, applies to this book also - that of no references in the book. See my full review of , and the piece on references from the post:

A quibble, minor if you don't particularly care about references in books. The author states that to keep the book "reader-friendly" extensive references are available at www.brainrules.net. I actually found this distracting. I am used to flipping to the end of the book where the references are noted, and then back to the page I was reading. Reading an ebook on the Kindle makes this job of navigating to a reference at the end of the book easier (though Nicholas Carr may disagree). Having to go to a web site is a distraction - the author should know that. Secondly, the website itself is not very well organized if all you are interested in are the references. You have to click to go to a different page for each chapter (rule) in the book, and from that page click on a link at the right that reads, "References for this rule [PDF]". Each chapter's references are in a PDF file (http://www.brainrules.net/pdf/references_exercise.pdf for instance). These could so easily have been included in the book itself. Keep the online references too by all means - they can serve as a place where these references are updated and new ones added. Thirdly, the book itself does not contain any numbering of the references within the text, so it is doubly difficult to figure out where in the PDF of references for a chapter to look for as a reference to something you have read in the book.This is certainly one experiment that has failed.

• Ellen Galinsky’s Mind in the Making
• Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs
• NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
• The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids
• Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs
• What's Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life
• Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn--and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less
• Parenting for Character: Five Experts, Five Practices
• Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Kindle edition)
• Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage, Third Edition
  
• Brain Rules For Baby: How To Raise A Smart And Happy Child From Zero To Five from Flipkart.com
• The Price Of Privilege: How Parental Pressure And Material Advantage Are Creating A Generation Of Disconnected And Unhappy Kids from Flipkart.com

    

Kindle Excerpt

-->
© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Holy Shit by Gene Logsdon

 Holy Shit: Managing Manure To Save Mankind
 
Manure is our and the animal kingdom's way of giving back to the earth, so to say. This book takes a close look at manure - human and otherwise. This book is detailed, sometimes graphic, and I daresay not everyone's cup of tea, for hopefully obvious reasons.

This book is not a humorous take on offals. On garbage. On excrement. It is down in the trenches, close look at waste. Human and animal waste to be specific. Not industrial waste. There is another book for that (The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change). I mean, take a look at the chapters:
1. Manure: The Hot New Farm Commodity - sure to drive an commodities trader in Chicago wild with excitement?
2. The Nitty-Gritty of the Shitty - I kid you not; that's the title.
..
4. The Manure Pack - never again will you look at a face-pack the same way.
11. Pigs Can Potty-Train Themselves - will that change your mind about bringing them in as pets?
..
13. Meditations on a Meadow Muffin - those would be cow pies. Cow dung. Yes.
..
16. The Anti-Bowel Movement - this book is not going anywhere else, be sure about that.
..
18. Dealing with our Dread of Human Excrement - we finally get to the bottom of it. It's just excrement after all.

Flushing kitty litter into the toilet bowl is not recommended. Why?"It takes only a temperature of 100.4 degrees Farenheit to destroy roundworm eggs and less than that for other internal parasites, and that temperature is easily reached in a compost pile, but never in a toilet bowl." [page 127]

Did you know, and now that you know, do you care, that there is a "...World Toilet College with a curriculum to accomplish..." or that "There is now a World Toilet Day and a World Toilet Summit, which in 2008 called for the end of the flush toilet."?

I will say this: the book is a fairly interesting read, but not something you will be able to read for any length of time without getting at least a little grossed out. Get past it and it informs in a good way.

Holy Shit: Managing Manure To Save Mankind

© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.