Nina
This is a very fun, but very dense, book. The cover and title make it seem very pop science-y, but it's anything but. I've completed neuroscience undergraduate modules and read medical textbooks, and I found it to be something that required my full concentration to really understand. Also, on the title - whilst the book is excellent, I see few takeaways on how to ‘supercharge' your immune system
Takes you through a full chronology of key developments in immunology in a very fun way. It feels like you're there in the laboratory with some of these scientists, as they reach a blockade, realising their previous understand was entirely wrong, and being unsure of what to do next. Yet, it's always at these moments of utter exasperation does a breakthrough occur. It's fun to see how science develops in this almost literary narrative.
Some truisms about human nature can also be observed - that the people who create real, new and breakthrough understandings of something are often initially met with hostility by their peers - people who are uncomfortable with having the framework of their understanding topple over, how real innovators seem to be driven by this inner spark, that persists somehow without explanation in spite of all the external disincentives
I've got a newfound respect for immunology, which is clearly staggeringly complicated and dense.
Parts of this book that I love, and parts that I detest. Not sure where it places it as a whole.
As a whole, I would avoid reading, and would recommend Nathaniel Branden isntead.
The parts I like: It is to look at things at their core, to realise that any outward manifestation is only meaningful only insofar as it is a genuine expression of inwards. So when you celebrate those things - you can enjoy your achievements, and that's not a paradox, that's not vanity. Because you're enjoying that you have acted in accordance with your own essence. And this is what helps you withstand the consequences when they are negative, too. But all these quick “tools” - behavioural tactics - ultimately are doomed to failure, insofar as this expression isn't the downstream manifestation of this inner source.
Problems:
This book was written on the train of the sneering Viktor Frankl Western Buddhism thing
Alongside it not being supported by the neuroscience (can expand on this later).
Is that it doesn't give any weight to the role of suffering
We didn't evolve to suffer and feel sadness for no reason. These aren't just parts of ourselves that we should try to meditate ourselves out of. We are not just these plain people who can subjectively ascribe any meaning to our experiences. Moreover, nor should we want to do so. We were not given pain so that we can simply look for some meditative tool to avoid it. No, instead we have to experience the pain, lean it into it.
I have a lot of time for the general idea that books of this sort tend to emphasise. The current healthcare system is a model based on specialisation, which, although it has advantages, needs to look at things from a more interconnected perspective. For example, 50% of patients with immune disease have abnormal neurological biomarkers, seemingly ignored and not part of any of the guidelines on treatment. Or, for example, how this model neglects individuals with mult-systemic disorders, which results in them flitting from one specialist consultant to another, each focusing on a specific symptom, with none of them tying them all together. However, he lost me when he started talking about physics. The area of functional medicine already has to stave off accusations of “woo-woo” ism and pseudo-science, so it is particularly disappointing when otherwise credible authors set themselves up all too easily for these allegations.
Also, a lot of the supplement suggestions aren't helpful.
E.g., “vitamin d deficiency is assocaited with X number of conditions”. Yes, that is in individuals who are DEFICIENT in vitamin D., But it doesn't explain at the mechanistic level how vitamin D supplementation can and will help. It's essential to explain the mechanism of how and why something works so that it is tailored for each individual rather than blindly slinging mud at the wall to see what sticks.
Chekhov wrote that Gogol “the tsar of the steppe” might be envious. And here, you see Gogol's influence most vividly compared to any other of Chekhov's stuff.
Like “Dead Souls”, The Steppe is virtually plotless - like an episodic TV show. Its a string of adventures that have no internal connection. It also, like Dead Souls, is infuriatingly impossible to convey in translation (this is always the case with Russian, but particularly so here). The language is the only way to understand the natural descriptions and the human flimsiness.
Brilliant book. I bought it after watching his interview of Andrew Huberman's podcast. This is one of those books that ties together so many different things, all of which drag a person down and remove their ability to live a meaningful life. In at least providing a starting point to begin to identify these things, it fills me with great hope.
“Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble believing, become totally bankrupt by age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, and a fourth, in order to stifle the fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure beautiful youth? Why is it, that once fallen, we do not try to rise, and having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?”
Equally applicable to both the Russian intelligentsia and the Russian serfs. Why are we Russians just bred to suffer? Intelligent enough to recognise it, and even intelligent enough to perhaps know what to do, but there exists this insurmountable gulf....
Very similiar to Fathers & Sons in a way. What I like is it sets the scene of these two ideas - which appear to you, as if so self-evident, so logical, so thorough. And those who espouse them have no modesty or humility - to either the possibility that they cannot possibly hope to exhaustively define the entire human experience, nor what the consequences of implementation of their doctrines require. (just look to the Russian revolution)
The duel this dramatizes is among the many conflict of ideas between the Russian intelligentsia in 19th century.
First, the liberal idealism of the 1840s.
Second, the rational egoism of the 1860s, who here, takes the form of Laevsky. A self-styled “superfluous man” (the very kind christened by Turgenev in 1850) and von Koren, a zoologist, and Social Darwinian with a fittingly German name. These are the spiritual Fathers of communism - which arrives in Russia and is received as the sociological, enlightenment equivalent of what Darwinism was for biology.
The closing line - “no one knows the real truth”.
I wish I had read this book when I was a little younger. The descriptions of the Caucasuses make this book fantastic for Slavophile in me - experiencing Russia as the Southern, confusing place of my childhood, that is not at all a European country. Parts of Act II appear to be the literary predecessor to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, except our protagonist here is a bit more philosophically consistent and not so pathetically pitiful.
Must return to - a large chunk in the middle you didn't read, because it was too dense.
Some sublime moments of almost ecstasy as I stumbled upon parts that put into words concepts that I have known intuitively but never been able to verbally express. I hope one day to be able to understand the sheer scope of the ideas within her and their gravity for all our lives, and to embrace the paradoxes of truth
must read - clinical examples of Hobson. says in psychodynamic neurology about a treatment programme for childhood trauma
Reading this book is weird in ways that I cannot describe. It's very disorientating at times - to flip from the author's comments about the sexual attractiveness of a former patient to being told we are at the epoch of a renaissance of neurology... I can't help but feel these different things would be better off not juxtaposed in the same book...? Moreover, the author's frustration and attempts to repudiate their Freudian teachings sometimes go too far - the science is in your favour, so let it speak for itself.
The problem is Hobson cannot help himself when it comes to his loathing of Freud, and it leads him to arrive to frankly, incredulous conclusions. For example “(Freud's) own account of his academic frustration may have exaggerated the effects of anti-semitic prejudice.”
To say that Jews in Vienna during the period just before WW2 were not prejudiced in their careers is almost as mind boggling as Hobson's theory. Why could he have not focused more on the relationship between cholingeric and aminergic activities and dreaming? I'd recommend the Dream Drugstore to anybody instead, this book doesn't know what it is trying to do.
If somebody with the author's credentials didn't write this book, I would have likely not bothered to finish it. A lot of unhelpful throwing of phrases like “inflammation”, “neurotoxicity”, “toxins” “lymphatic drainage” without explaining WHAT these concepts are and why they are relevant. This is all the more necessary, given how these are phrases that new-age, scientific self-help guides have unhelpfully misused. Anything that wishes to distinguish itself from this credibly must describe why the concepts they are invoking are relevant.
Moreover, data was extrapolated from clinical trials in a way that was not convincing and clumsy.
Again, that is not to say the data in the book is not correct - it is - and the book is helpful as an overview of what does work. But the problem is that I know this works due to my reading, not the book itself.
Masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece.
I dove into Fathers & Sons after dabbling in some of Turgenev's other short stories. Wow.
It is interesting to read this book after Dostoevsky's “Demons”. Fathers & Sons is a more compelling, lucid and moving version of the former. With this, Turgenev has firmly won me over to his side in the Dostoevsky vs Turgenev brawl.
His depiction of the female cast is stunning in its understated soulfulness and accuracy, similar to Tolstoy's.
The danger of nihilism, the legitimate grievances that underlie the mindset of those who succumb to nihilism, and the unbearable inertia that underlies both the lifestyle that conforms to tradition versus the lifestyle that breaks away from its entirety - Fathers & Sons is a pitiful, inspiring train-wreck of the Russian psyche that you cannot tear yourself away from.