Academy members share the best of what they’re reading this spring. Share what you’re reading and send your review to our book review editor, Robert L. Stamper, MD, at perspective@aao.org.
Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of 40 Years in Hollywood
By David Mamet
Reviewed by J. Kemper Campbell, MD
When David Mamet received a Pulitzer Prize for his play, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” it allowed him to move to California in 1980 to write screenplays and books and to direct movies.
Mamet’s newest book, “Everywhere an Oink Oink,” chronicles four decades of experience in Hollywood and profound disgust with today’s movie scene.
His skewering of the multitude of producers, associate producers, and nonessential corporate parasites who are involved in a movie can be vicious. Mamet, now 76 and living in Santa Monica, believes much human behavior is motivated by greed for money and self-interest. His best plays mirror this philosophy.
As a Jewish conservative who does not fear sharing his opinions freely, he has a reputation as a difficult writer and director. He feels the present subservience to the “woke” agenda of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) has resulted in the demise of meaningful filmmaking.
Lest the reader think this will be simply a jaded screed against Hollywood, Mamet proves to be a true aficionado of all films stretching back to the silent era. His four decades of experience in the film industry have resulted in his personal exposure to Hollywood’s most famous lights and his many anecdotes are often light-hearted. Icons like Walt Disney, Robert DeNiro, and Jack Nicholson are not spared. Although most of the stories will be deemed “gossip”, Mamet avers that “trivia is gossip without malice” and mostly adheres to that dictum.
A brief perusal of the book’s index reveals personalities from Ben Affleck to Darryl Zanuck and movies from “About Last Night” to “Zulu” found within the pages. A warning to those who are not familiar with Mamet’s works is necessary at this point. F-bombs flourish on most pages like dandelions in a Spring backyard. Mamet’s own drawings also decorate the pages. Some are whimsical and others simply cryptic.
His list of stars who changed their Jewish surnames to fit into the approved movie star formula is matched by the list of ethnic actors whose roles were played by white actors in makeup, and gay entertainers were advised to languish in the closet.
To summarize, the book is recommended to any reader who grew up during the years when a trip to the neighborhood cinema could be a biweekly experience to enjoy air-cooled comfort and hot popcorn without having to apply for a loan. Regardless of the personal peccadillos of the actors, directors, and producers of the films, the result was entertainment in its purest form.
Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance
By Christopher MacDougall
Reviewed by Robert Abel Jr., MD
Christopher MacDougall tells the true story of a small band of British operatives, called the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who assisted the Cretan resistance against the Nazi German forces in World War II.
The narrative unfolds on the island of Crete whose relative anonymity belies the profound influence its mythology, archaeology, and linguistics had on Western civilization. The Nazis needed to control Crete to provide a secure supply line for the upcoming Operation Barbarossa (the invasion and conquest of Russia). The Cretan resistance augmented by the SOE was a significant barrier to that goal.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill understood that he could not defeat a dominant German military without the means of subterfuge and sabotage. Therefore, he ordered the SOE to create a department of dirty tricks to train ordinary citizens to perform extraordinary deeds. Several were imported to assist the Cretan resistance in 1944. The main thread of the book describes how 100,000 Germans failed to quash the resistance. Au contraire, the English operatives and the resistance kidnapped a German general in broad daylight.
Some Cretans could run 50-100 miles in a day over mountainous terrain on very little sustenance. The lean efficient forces of their fascia, the powerful connective tissue that is like a rubber band, was the secret to their strength and endurance. And their willingness to do whatever it took to defeat the enemy was amazing. Because of the German failure to conquer the resistance, Operation Barbarossa was delayed enough to ensure failure on the eastern front and, ultimately, to contribute to Germany’s losing World War II.
“Natural Born Heroes” also reveals that Crete, regarded as the birthplace of Zeus, was replete with myths and heroes. During this time archaeologist John Pendlebury discovered King Minos’ labyrinth and the truth behind the legend of the Minotaur. He also identified that many Greek myths may be based on real events. The author also was able to extract the physiology, diet, and training that enabled these otherwise ordinary men to attain such amazing physical feats with lessons for today’s actual and would-be athletes. Perhaps, the mythical superheroes were just people who knew how to exploit human physiology to its extreme.
What is heroism? In this case, the history of Cretan heroism was a commitment to bravery, independent thinking, endurance, and teamwork. Unsung heroes are born every day. To my colleagues what you have accomplished in your compassionate and dedicated lives is also truly heroic.
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present
By Eric R. Kandel
Reviewed by Alfredo Sadun, MD, PhD
Eric R. Kandel is a neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize in 2000.
I knew Dr. Kandel from my time at Woods Hole and Columbia and even then, I was amazed that he knew so much about so many things. He went from his residency in psychiatry to a post-doctoral fellowship in Paris to learn about the marine mollusk, Aplysia, where he identified and studied each and every neuron.
But, he never lost his taste for understanding the human mind and appreciating human behavior. So maybe it was not so surprising that this world renown scientist wrote “The Age of Insight,” which taught me a great deal about how to appreciate art. His book explores the intersection between art and science, in the setting of fin de siècle (1900) Vienna which was, at the time, the cultural capital of Europe.
Dr. Kandel weaved together the worlds of Viennese modernist art, medicine, brain science, and Freudian psychology to create a compelling story about the biology of mind. The one constant is the vibrant culture of Vienna in the early 20th century. This is where rich intellectuals patronized the arts and sciences through their salons. His book introduces us to the creative new artists of expressionism like Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele and learn how they related to psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud or novelists like Arthur Schnitzler. This book is a much more serious version of the comedy by Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris.” Both book and film make you wish you were there to listen to the luminaries at the cafés and salons.
At the core of the book, we have the perspective of Dr. Kandel, the neuroscientist. His science was remarkably reductive and so is his analysis of art and culture. He shows how these particular artists and scientists were actually trying to probe the depths of the human psyche. They each sought to understand the nature and basis of emotion, perception, and understanding.
In making these explorations, Dr. Kandel demonstrates the remarkable parallels between the revolutionary techniques of these artists and the evolving understanding of the mind. Dr. Kandel describes these artists and writers as early cognitive psychologists. The detailed scientific discussions were sometimes very deep. Why does frontotemporal dementia increase artistic creativity?
Dr. Kandel was a reductionist, but he doesn’t neglect the grand design. The brain is a creativity machine, he often repeats. And then another deep dive into the experiments of nature and how they illuminate the normal workings of the brain. What he proposes is that these artists and novelists were actually neuroscientists experimenting with recent discoveries in psychology to test how we see and perceive.
For example, some took advantage of complicated equivalents of optical illusions to gain immediate access to deeper feelings. Throughout it all, you see Dr. Kandel's passion for both art and science. Dr. Kandel is not only an art connoisseur, and a world class scientist; he is a philosopher at heart and this last attribute allows him to inspire us with the many sides of the human mind and to understand the meaning of creativity.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
By David Grann
Reviewed by Robert Stamper, MD
Remember “Lord of the Flies?”
That novel and subsequent movie startled us all with its depiction of a group of English school boys stranded on a desert island without adult guidance. Well, the author of this nonfiction work gives us a similar story of a large group of grown men similarly stuck on the proverbial desert island.
The subtitle gives away the skeleton of this true but hardly believable story. It was 1740 (before the advent of clocks allowing accurate navigation), the British were at war with their arch enemy Spain. The plan was to send out a small flotilla of wooden sailing ships to try and capture some gold-laden galleons from the Spanish colonies in the western part of South America. Five “warships” and one scout vessel were commissioned along with some 2,000 men — some veteran seamen, many impressed into service by force, a few for the sake of adventure and potential wealth, and some 1,000 soldiers.
The voyage from England to the coast of Brazil (a Portuguese colony not at war with England) took over three months with many of the crew dead or dying from scurvy. The trip around Cape Horn was almost as long and extremely dangerous between terrible, unpredictable currents, storms, and almost no visibility. Some boats were lost in this part of the passage. The Wager, a boat meant as a merchant vessel and recommissioned as a warship, was captained by an ambitious seaman in his first command.
After squeaking through the horrors of the Cape Horn passage and finding itself separated from the rest of the flotilla, the boat sailed up the west coast of Chile and then foundered on a bleak, tiny, deserted island part way up the Patagonian coast. Some 200 men were left of the 400-plus that had set sail.
It was “Wager on the Rocks,” but the crew was able to save some provisions, munitions, and wood from the remains. The island was essentially barren except for some wild celery and spinach-like plants. They had essentially no hope of rescue. Rationing of the salvaged supplies was mandatory but not popular. Deaths and total disability from scurvy and starvation became rampant. (The end stages of scurvy can produce some major mental changes).
Rogue groups formed who raided the munitions and other supplies and separated themselves from the main group. The survivors were able to build a sailboat from the salvage. A mutinous group commandeered this seemingly unworthy craft and most of the remaining supplies. Leaving with roughly 100 men, they sailed this craft back around through the Straits of Magellan to Brazil, where 30 starving, delirious, scarecrow-like men made it alive. Eventually they made it back to England where they were treated as heroes.
In the meantime, back to our not quite deserted island where the stranded officers and a few loyal seamen were left to starve to death. They were able to salvage more wood from the Wager, enough to build a tiny sailboat. Knowing they could not make it back around the tip of South America, they managed to find an inland passage to a city in Chile. The few pitiful survivors including the captain and Lord Byron’s (the poet) great-grandfather were detained as prisoners of war.
Eventually released, they too made it back to England to tell a very different story about what happened on that island. Was it mutiny? If so, all of the first group would be hung. Was it justifiable due to the action of the captain? In that case, it would be the captain who would be hung. How this all resolved is an interesting commentary on the military justice and politics of the time. This fast-paced, highly readable, and well-documented account seems like a novel. Yet, it is a real and scary depiction of what can happen to basically good men in extreme deprivation.
The Divider: Trump in the White House
By Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
Reviewed by Samuel Masket, MD
Given that we are in a presidential election year, “The Divider,” a virtual diary of the goings on in the Trump White House by the husband-and-wife team of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, makes for more than an interesting read.
Although people often look back with positive nostalgia, and some tend to think that “we were better off four years ago,” this book offers an insider’s view and quite a sober look at the period from the 2016 election cycle through the insurrectionist actions of Jan. 6, 2021.
Baker, The New York Times chief White House correspondent and Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker, combine their decades of experience in D.C. to draw upon a variety of materials including original interviews, memoirs, journalistic accounts, writings of well-respected colleagues (Bob Woodward, as an example), etc. to portray an atmosphere of infighting, backstabbing, chaos, and impulsive behavior in the oval office. The reader gets a true sense of being there.
Although it is apparent that the authors are not supporters of the ex-president, their professionalism is apparent; they avoid supporting some of the (likely) false conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s activities in Russia that led up to the Mueller investigation. However, they were clear in pointing out Trump’s deference to Putin at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where Trump indicated that he would trust Putin’s word over that of the well-established U.S. intelligence agencies.
The authors also mention the 2019 situation when Trump indicated that aid to Ukraine was dependent on their delivery of “dirt” on then-candidate Joe Biden; this action led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
Some of their insights challenge the reader’s imagination. For one instance, when Trump had secured the 2016 Republican nomination for president, and he and advisers were vetting VP candidates, he nixed Nikki Haley because in his view her facial complexion (likely modestly scarred from adolescent acne) would make him look bad, and to Trump, image is everything.
Along those lines, on the day of his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, on entering the Oval Office, he was all consumed about the quality of the available light for picture taking. His perceived self-image seemingly “trumped” all other facets of presidential decision making.
We constantly learn about squabbles among staff members and the mandatory loyalty oath to Trump, rather than to the rule of or to the spirit of the law. This manifests itself most emphatically with Trump’s attempts to stay in power despite losing the popular vote and the electoral college in the 2020 election.
Through roughly 650 pages, we are witness to those who were Trump sycophants and those who opted to leave the White House for various reasons. There were a few however, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a prime example, who understood that his duty was to the Constitution, acted in the best interests of the country, rather than the inappropriate wishes of the president. Some staff members lingered for a while because they feared that their departure would result in dire consequences to the country.
To my sense, all should be aware of the information in this important book as we prepare to elect a president in 2024.