Think Again, by Adam Grant

As anyone who follows my reading at all knows, this is not my usual type of book. Think Again was selected by my company for our work book club. The book club started during the pandemic, and I haven't participated before now. I hadn't intended to participate this time, but two things motivated me to give it a go: (1) this book was selected by a consulting firm we're using to help with our DEI efforts and I do DEI work at my company; and (2) I happened to find an advance reader copy at my local Little Free Library. 

I have to admit I have a bias against this type of book (whatever it is; the back of the review copy categorizes it as "Business & Economics—Motivational), but I enjoyed reading this more than I expected to. The only other time I've read books that I would describe as broadly in this category was in grad school (specifically this book), where I had a similar experience. For one thing, it was easy to read. It served as a surprisingly nice break from the heavy novel I was reading. I'll also confess that while reading this book, I did sometimes reflect on my own willingness (or lack thereof) to rethink my assumptions from time to time. I wouldn't describe myself as the most open-minded person; I'm aware of at least some of my biases, and I'm not always willing to check them. (I do make an active effort to reflect on and explore my biases when it comes to people, but less so my biases when it comes to, say, books like this one. I'm not apologetic when it comes to some of my opinions, and I don't believe I should be.)

The book makes a distinction—one that I actually think is important—about not conflating your values with your opinions or beliefs. You can stay true to your values, but change your opinions and beliefs as you get new information. The idea of reflecting on your values and your beliefs, and understanding that your beliefs may evolve, is a good one. But despite the emphasis on values, the book spent little time talking about them; its focus was on the changeability of opinions and beliefs. The book rankled me when it sometimes seemed to imply a sort of equivalence between various positions on a topic. There's a section devoted to predictions that particularly bugged me. It talked about how predictors improved their predictions by regularly reassessing them and not getting too attached to their original prediction. The predictions in question were mostly about presidential elections. The emphasis of the whole argument was on how to predict better, with the accuracy of the prediction being given more weight than the outcome of the election. (Granted, I do see that with better predictions, perhaps there are actions that could be taken to affect the outcome—it just felt like the whole emphasis was on the wrong thing.) Similarly, a section about getting people with opposing views to reach some level of mutual respect and possibly even agreement, the topics are things where I don't think mutual respect or agreement should be the goal. This reaction of mine is precisely what the book is trying to dismantle, but when Grant came out with a suggestion that, for instance, people on opposite sides of the case for the death penalty might reach some agreement, my own defenses shot up because I don't see this as a place where there is any center that I could move toward: the government should not be in the business of killing people. 

On Father's Day morning, while hanging out with my dad in West Philadelphia, I was telling him about the book. It really wasn't about diversity, I said. I thought it had been recommended to our company with a particular audience in mind: old white guys. We can all get stuck in our beliefs and ways sometimes, but it seemed to me that what the book was counseling: breaking cycles of overconfidence, practicing humility, and even (seriously) the benefits of impostor syndrome, was not a message for the marginalized. When, for instance, lack of humility is a criticism frequently leveled at Black athletes (and Black people celebrating their own greatness generally), this advice can sound dangerously close to the rhetoric white people have been preaching forever. Women and others who have experienced impostor syndrome know that one effect is that might make one work harder (which is, in effect, the supposed benefit touted in the book). It's a truth that's become a cliché that Black people have to be twice as good to do half as well as white people in America. This isn't to say that humble self-reflection couldn't benefit everyone, but the message of this book seems calibrated to people who have not been told their whole lives to know their place.

Sweet & Sour Milk, by Nuruddin Farah; The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai

Aside from Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s, I wasn't much aware of Italian colonial presence in Africa. What I remembered from the African history class I took in college was that Italy tried and failed to colonize Ethiopia in the nineteenth century – putting Ethiopia among the only two countries on the continent not to be colonized during the European division of Africa. What I had only faintly remembered was that Italy did have other colonies in East Africa, so I was surprised when reading Sweet & Sour Milk to find signs of a lingering Italian influence in Somalia. In the book, which takes place decades after the end of the Italian control, the central characters were educated in Italy; another is half Italian, half Somali; Italian restaurants populate Mogadishu (which is spelled the Italian way in the book: Mogadiscio).

Sweet & Sour Milk is the first book in a trilogy called Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. It centers on Loyaan, whose twin brother Soyaan has been murdered; poisoned, he suspects, by the government. Soyaan worked for the dictatorship, but wrote memoranda critical of the General in charge. And yet, on his death, the government claims him as its own and celebrates him as a hero, a martyr who died serving his country. This, it turns out, is the most effective way of neutralizing and undermining everything Soyaan worked for. Loyaan risks his own life and others' to bring out the truth about his brother, how he died and who he really was. He doesn't know whom to trust, while Soyaan's former allies don't know whether their friend in fact betrayed them. This is a beautifully written and heartrending book.

I found The Great Believers in a Little Free Library by my apartment. I knew it had received much acclaim when it came out a couple years ago, but I didn't know anything else about it. I took it with me on a recent trip, thinking I might be in the mood for something different than Sweet & Sour Milk. As I always seem to do when traveling, I carried both books with me and barely touched either. I did start The Great Believers on the flight home and I finished it three days later. (It is, as the cover promises, a page-turner.) The book alternates between events in 1985 in Chicago's gay community just as AIDS is taking root and beginning to kill people off, and Paris in 2015 where the younger sister of one of the young men killed by AIDS back then has come to reconnect with her daughter and finds herself retreading some of her past. This book came out in 2018, but it was interesting to read it with post-pandemic eyes. Now and then during the current pandemic I would come across comparisons to AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and reading this book crystalized some of the parallels I hadn't seen clearly before.