Latest TED Book Club Selections - January 2012

The latest TED Book Club selections are out.  As always, it's an interesting bunch.

Steven Pinker has given several talks at TED, including his 2007 talk which made a deep impression on me.  He argued that, despite today's news overload focused on bad news, the level of violence and wars has actually been declining in the world.  You can find that talk here.  Apparently the talk sparked further research and analysis and culminated in the publication of a book. 

The Better Angels of our Nature elaborates on that theme, arguing that violence between humans is in long term decline. I remember Pinker showed a graph showing the incidence of wars and numbers of deaths in those wars. I imagine I'll find that one in the book when I get around to it.

A friend recently pointed me to a counterargument presented in a TEDx talk by Jonas Gahr Store, the Norwegian foreign minister, which you can view here.  (Thanks Scott).  Store focuses on a shorter time frame - just since 1946 - and he s argues that violence hasn't really declined overall: the increase in intrastate violence has grown faster than the decline in interstate violence.

I'm really looking forward to reading Pinker's book, to understand more clearly his proposition and the his evidence to support it, and to compare it with Store's point of view.

Also in this batch was Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain.  Shermer is another TED speaker that I enjoyed.  He characterizes himself as a professional skeptic and is the founder of Skeptic Magazine.  His 2006 TED talk was hilarious as he mocked various outrageous beliefs held my many people.  He did a reprise in 2010, unveiling more hoaxes and gimmicks, but also argued that we have a belief engine in our brains which makes us want to believe. The Believing Brain explores further why we believe the weird things we do.  On his web site, Shermer describes the books as "a comprehensive theory on how beliefs are born, formed, nourished, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished."  Again, I'm looking forward to reading this book.  Maybe it will explain to this puzzled Canadian why so many Americans believe in creationism over evolution!

The last book in the mailing was The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.  This illustrated collection of fairy tales was printed in time for the 200th anniversary of the Brothers Grimm's tales.  A quick glance through the book revealed some tales that I was not familiar with. This should be an eminently skimmable book!




For those interested, there are several other posts about TED Book Club Selections:

• November 2011 list
• September 2011 list
• June 2011 list
• February 2011 list
• August 2010 list
• May 2010 
• January 2009
• October 2008

Also there are a few reviews of books from the book club:

• Radioactive
• Spark
• TED Books: Media Makeover
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

A Film Unfinished

This was a hard film to watch. It showed all 62 minutes of film captured by Nazis in 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto. The footage was never edited into a film, so there were a series of scenes, but no indication of how it would finally have been put together or narrated.

This movie's footage is often used in other movies but it has never before been shown in its entirety. (Ironically, a snippet of the movie appeared in the movie War Games, which I saw the next day, proving this very point!). But this was a movie about a movie. The filmmaker, Yael Hersonski, had dug into how - and why - the film had been made.

Notebooks of the Jewish 'commander' of the Ghetto (not sure what his official title was) describe the arrival of the film crew and the staging of the scenes of the movie. This man was to later commit suicide the day he was ordered to select the people who would be transported to the concentration camps.

The cameraman, Willy Wist, is discovered to have testified at war crimes trials. An extra reel was discovered with various outtakes and some colour film, apparently by one of the other cameramen which had Wist in a frame and enabled identification.

Most touching were the interviews with survivors of the ghetto. Hersonski focused on their faces as they watched the film. Their anguish was echoed throughout the audience.

By May of 1942, many Jews from Germany had been transported to Warsaw and crammed into the existing ghetto; then the ghetto shrunk and the barrier made impermeable on threat of death, so that there were terrible conditions of overcrowding and privation. Food supplies were paltry (I particularly 1/5 egg per month per person on the list) so people were dying of starvation, and each morning brought fresh corpses on the sidewalk.

The hypothesis is that the film was shot for one of two reasons. One could have been to show how miserable the Jews were, and to later point out what a good thing it was that the Germans had exterminated them. The second might have been to juxtapose the Jews who were still comfortable and not starving against the miserable masses and point out that the Jews themselves had no mercy or kindness for other Jews who were suffering. They were shown dancing as in the photo below.

One scene was filmed several times to show wealthy Jews walking by disregarding the corpses on the street. The corpses were tossed onto open tumbrels, with pseudo-comedic touches as the bodies kept falling off. This was followed by a horrific scene showing two Jewish gravediggers deep in a narrow grave, catching skin and bone corpses as they slid down a ramp, and stacking them together as tightly as possible. The bodies were carefully covered with heavy paper or cloth, presumably ready for tomorrow's batch.

This film won the Hot Docs Best International Feature Award. I highly recommend it, but bring your fortitude with you, as well as perhaps a Kleenex.