… or at least for the next couple of months. Here are some books that I’ve ordered and perhaps readers will want to check out some of these so that we can have a discussion here.
- The Line Becomes a River is by a former Border Patrol agent. The Wall is the big fight right now and immigration is the big issue for the next 100 years so it should be worth hearing from someone with direct personal experience.
- The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present should be helpful for understanding the Warren Presidency. Buy it before new taxes take away the wealth that you had been planning to spend!
- The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea will, I hope, explain red tide!
- She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity might settle the nature/nurture debate
- On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle will make us grateful that South Korea was saved so that they could in turn save us from Gillette (the razor engineers at Dorco are Korean)
- Bright Air Black, a fictionalized account of a domestic dispute before the no-fault divorce era (also a book by Mary Renault, an expert within the genre of fictionalizing Classics)
You might add one or two of these other books about Mexican immigration to your list. All of them together with your Border Patrol book show a more complete picture of how migration has evolved in the southwest… It also tells why it has become impossible to fix the problem.
https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Dr-Journey-Migrant-Surgeon/dp/0520271181/ref=asc_df_0520271181/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312446862670&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13533009795670961826&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9029987&hvtargid=pla-569537784693&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Harvest-Migrant-California-Agriculture/dp/1786632217/ref=asc_df_1786632217/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312029822325&hvpos=1o5&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13533009795670961826&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9029987&hvtargid=pla-566247384136&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=61316180319&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=312029822325&hvpos=1o5&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13533009795670961826&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9029987&hvtargid=pla-566247384136
https://www.amazon.com/Braceros-Migrant-Citizens-Transnational-Subjects/dp/1469609746/ref=asc_df_1469609746/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=316966985685&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=9770675013851907269&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9029987&hvtargid=pla-614182475225&psc=1
What book by Mary Renault are you reading? Her and Robert Graves are an education in antiquity.
It’s Black history month, how abt Michelle Obama’s book
The Carl Zimmerman book is quite solidly in the delusional Blank Slate camp, and is not the book to read on nature/nurture – although on other topics, like genetic chimeras it’s interesting. Zimmerman is a New York Times science journalist.
Two books more recent than Zimmerman’s, both by scientists in the field, are better for evidence-based nature/nurture:
— “Blueprint,” by Robert Plomin
— “Innate,” by Kevin Mitchell
Plomin writes about the very recent discovery of “the nature of nurture,” the fact that your genome pushes you to create your own environment/nurture. This accounts for about half of what had previously been assigned to non-shared environment. Mitchell disposes of most of the rest with his explanation of the randomness of much of brain development, even as it’s following instructions in the genome. And Mitchell explains that any brain development in children and young adults just serves to emphasize their innate characteristics, not change them.
Would be really interested in the Carl Zimmerman book, particularly if it falls on the “nature” side of the nature vs nurture question.
I remember when I was growing up one of my heroes was Judit Polgar, the Hungarian chess player. Her father, Laszlo Polgar, an educational psychologist, believed strongly in the blank slate theory of human development (“Geniuses are made, not born!”). To prove this hypothesis, he homeschooled his daughter Judit to be a chess prodigy. What were his results? Judit broke Bobby Fischer’s record to be the youngest ever (at the time) chess grandmaster ; she became the first (and to date only) woman to break into the top 10 chessplayer list; and she became the first woman to compete in the “men’s” world chess championships. Laszlo’s blunt but rather inspirational message? “Humans are capable of much more than they think they are.”
I found Mr. Polgar’s ideas to be rather convincing. But how the pendulum has swung since the 90’s! Now a number of intellectuals on both the right and left have embraced the idea that intellect (along with personality) is determined largely if not exclusively by genetics. I remember reading an interesting essay by a leftist pundit named Freddie DeBoer in which he advocated “educational realism” about the fact that a significant percentage of the population was just born stupid. Conveniently for DeBoer (a public school bureaucrat himself) the deep genetic origins of intelligence meant that public schools could not be held responsible for abysmal test scores among their students.
I think it’s a shame how fast this kind of bioessentialism has come into vogue. Among other things, i think there are deeper philosophical problems with this determinism, related to issues of free will… It will be interesting to get some more perspectives for sure.