Beach Haven

Bibliography
​Rowe, P. (2022). Vacuuming in the Nude and Other Ways to get Attention. Forefront Books.

Review by Michael Beach

The title to this book is misleading, on purpose. Peggy Rowe is mother to Mike Rowe. He’s a TV host, narrator and podcaster among other things. You might know him for shows like Dirty Jobs or Deadliest Catch. I listen to his podcast The Way I Heard It regularly. That’s where I’ve come to know about his mother Peggy and her books. She is a regular on the podcast and is hilarious.

Peggy Rowe is the author in question here, not Mike. She has been writing her entire life with some success, but mostly in local papers or specialty publications like articles in horse magazines. The point of this book was to look at her writing journey and eventual book publication. Her first published book didn’t happen until into her retirement years. This work is about the frustration, rejection, and eventual success in getting to publication. She has published three books. This one is her third. All three have been on the New York Times best sellers list. If the others are as good as Vacuuming, I’m tempted to read them. It’s full of humorous stories about her love-hate relationship with writing, family anecdotes, and perspective on growing older. Rowe includes some of her earlier short stories within the chapters, most of which are snippets of real-life experiences.
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She gives a realistic perspective on people following their dreams. In her case it’s about writing. That idealism gets tampered in a few places as well. Success requires talent and persistence, and not just desire. She shows talent to be sure, but also notes mistakes made along the way. 

 

Bibliography
Dowling, D. O. (2016). Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America's Most Storied Shipwreck. Lebanon NH: University Press of New England.

​Review by Michael Beach

The version of Surviving the Essex I happen to have is an uncorrected proof. I have access to some books in this condition due to where I work. The actual shipwreck of the Essex was inspiration to at least two works of literature. The ship was a whaler out of Nantucket and was sunk after colliding with, or being rammed by, a large sperm whale. The accounts of survivors varies so it’s not all that clear exactly what happened. As you no doubt guessed, the work Moby Dick by Herman Melville was a take on the real-life story. The other work examined here by David Dowling was by Edgar Allan Poe titled The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. I read both of those works many years ago, so I found the connections Dowling makes to them informative. While Melville wrote in the man-versus-nature vain, Poe’s version focused on the dark themes of death and cannibalism.

After the Essex sank, the surviving crew split into two groups. There was disagreement which direction they should take their boats to find rescue. Captain George Pollard led one group, and his first made, Owen Chase, the other. Both suffered and cannibalism was involved. The first mate blamed the captain for leaving the ship during the whale hunt. He had joined one of the harpooning boats and left the mate in charge. Others blamed the poor ship handling of the mate during the whale encounter. The captain’s version was never published. The mate published a version that put himself in a heroic light. Decades later another crew member published an account as well.

There are many books published about the events of the wreck and its immediate aftermath. This book by Dowling is not one of those. Instead he turns his attention to sociological issues. For example, there is a question about the process one boat went through to select the victim on which the others would feed. The decision was to draw straws for both the victim and who would have to do the killing. There is disputation that in Pollard’s boat, he was the shooter and the victim was his nephew. Dowling explores the numerous conflicting accounts of survivors and especially Chase’s version. He also shows some parallels in Pollard’s second ship which also sank after striking a shoal. He explores how Pollard continued to live in Nantucket and became a solid community member despite the two ship-losses. He wraps up the work examining the anthropomorphism resulting from many authors ascribing human motives to the whale involved. Not unlike ‘Bruce’ in the movie Jaws, most depict a vindictive whale bent on revenge.

​The human-element for me was in the shaping of the story by survivors to cast themselves in the best light, the selling of the story in the form of profit making books, and imposing of human motives on the whale. Case eventually also captained a number of whaling ships later, but ultimately failed in economic endeavors. Pollard became a respected citizen of Nantucket. 

Bibliography
Abbott, A. (1988). The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Review by Michael Beach

In the vernacular of sociology, this book focuses on ‘boundary work’. Andrew Abbott looks at some of the more obvious points explored by others like how career paths become defined or known as a profession. He also looks at how professional groups form, compete, specialize and divide. Sociologically speaking, when a boundary is defined, however unclear, the result is division, insiders and outsiders. Abbott creates a framework to try to bring clarity around these issues.

After a literature review on professions, Abbott examines the base concept of professionalization. He describes what is and is not considered professional work, or better stated, what circumstances might be considered in defining it. He describes areas of professionalism such as claims of jurisdiction, implications of exclusionary efforts by those within a profession, and some of the sources of ‘disturbances’ that cause competition between and within groups of study disciplines. After discussing power dynamics (not necessarily in a Marxist concept of power) he speaks to larger social influences on professional organizations such as licensure, post-graduate credentialing, and national or international associations with specific codes of conduct.

The book finishes with several case studies around information science (librarians, computer scientists, etc.), lawyers, and various parts of the medical field. For example, he speaks to nursing professions in relation to medical doctors. In this particular example he notes how one profession is assumed to be somehow subsumed by the other. There is a form of hierarchy among medical professionals, even among branches of medicine itself.

Abbott notes that his system of professions is the process of “linking professions with tasks” (Abbott, 1988, p. 315). The system evolves as groups form around similar tasks, create some standards, then codify the profession. Evolution continues as specializations emerge within the group, competition begins over jurisdiction, and new professional boundaries result. 


 

Bibliography
​Jasanoff, S. (Ed.). (2004). States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order. London & New York: Routledge.
 
This work is a compilation of academic papers that relate to the titular topic. The theory of co-production is essentially that science and technology evolve as influenced by sociological forces, and society also evolved in part based on technological and scientific change. Facts of science, and artifacts of technology bring change to society, and are changed by society as it changes. Co-production does not assume science and technology as the sole influencers or influenced. Several of the chapter authors do make the case describing the relationship in either stronger or weaker terms, essentially putting science and technology at various level of sociological priority as compared with other societal influencers.

As editor, Sheila Jasanoff describes co-production as a framework. She notes how many of the chapters examine specific examples, and “in working out co-productionist ideas through detailed empirical studies, they also demonstrate the framework’s practical uses and limits” (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 6). She also describes co-production as an idiom. Shaping the associated language simultaneously shapes the perspective. Narrowing of language might make things clearer, but the risk lies in also narrowing the perspective and leaving out what might not be addressed by the framework. This is true in any similar effort. Don’t get me wrong when I say this. I put a good deal of stock in the ideas of co-production as compared to say earlier notions of determinism, or constructivism.

One risk here is how one determines a specific ‘society’. For example, those who both use and design the latest video games can be a somewhat narrow demographic. A specific portion of the larger society may indeed both influence and get influenced by the specific technology, but how much of a role do non-users play (pun intended). One can argue tangential technology change that gets implemented in other less narrow projects. Yet, are not those other projects just another application targeting a different narrow portion of society?
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Jasanoff concedes at the end of the book that, “this approach is more consistent with projects of interpretation than intervention” (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 280). “Such studies,” she continues, “are better suited to explaining how things came to be ordered in particular ways than at forecasting future impacts of specific choices and decisions.”

Review by Michael Beach

Bibliography
​Jayawardhana, R. (2013). Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe. New York: Scientific American.
 
I first got interested in neutrino particles many years ago. When we lived in Colorado, much of my professional work put me on airplanes, heading for many corners of the globe. One of those trips I was thumbing through an airline magazine and saw a story on neutrinos. Much of the description of the 'ghost particle' mirrored descriptions of the substance of the spirit as described in the Doctrine and Covenants. I have often kicked myself for not hanging onto the magazine.

I recently stumbled across this book. It is essentially a history of those scientists who made speculation about subatomic particles in general, then those who were able to create tools to try and measure their forces. In the process they discovered many subatomic particles, neutrinos just being one among the discoveries. In the book there are several sections that act as tutorials both of the current understanding of the various subatomic particles, as well as the methods and infrastructure it takes to run experiments and take force measurements. The science is complicated of course, but someone like me who is less ingrained in the community can follow along as described by Ray Jayawardhana. In fact, my poor Anglo brain might find his name more difficult to say than to grasp his explanation of the science involved (just kidding... sort of).

Despite the broader descriptions of other particles, the focus of the book is on neutrinos and the specific scientists who worked it all out. As one might guess, there were plenty of setbacks, collaborations, and competitive interference. Some of the discovery was accidental, or perhaps better said as incidental. As the evidence mounted not all involved were supportive of the explanations eventually adopted. This may be because of the normal versus revolutionary paradigmatic science as described by Thomas Kuhn. At any rate, human endeavor is fraught, and whether facts are created or discovered (that’s a debate by the way), acceptance is rarely universal and almost never rapidly so. Such was and is still the case surrounding subatomic theory (quantum mechanics) and the neutrino in particular.

​Review by Michael Beach

Bibliography
Medina, E. (2011). Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press..

As the title suggests, this work is a look at technology efforts in 1970’s Chile. This of course was pre-Internet. The Chilean government was attempting centralized planning and operation of the country’s economy by bringing all sorts of data about things like crop yields, price indices, and interest rates into not only a single computer system, but into a single physical location. The location was a sort of Star Trek ship bridge where an octagonal room was ringed with screens of data. Statisticians worked to make sense of all the information. Also in the room was a ring of futuristic chairs for government officials to discuss the information. Each chair included a number of control buttons that allowed the occupant to manipulate a screen.

By definition, data is post-facto, but in the case of the Chilean effort, because of the limited tech of the day, some data was not only slow in coming, but by the time it made it to the central room, it was counter-factual.

Although Chilean president Salvador Allende was attempting to ‘centralize’ decisions, the political climate was also one of decentralization, as in the data came from decisions being made at other locations. This was a reflection of his political views. The approach was a holistic design to account for decentralized data through a national Telex network. At the time, Chile was in the throws of work stoppages by industrial workers in particular. The network was dubbed ‘Cybersyn’.

Because of the instability of Chilean politics of the day, the full system never really got running. In many ways, the project was the brain child of Stafford Beer, who was a British cybernetician. Like the program he shepherded, his own status in Chile waxed and waned with the popularity of the Allende government. At times he had his family in Chile with him in lavish surroundings. As Allende’s topple neared, Beer had to leave his family out of Chile for their physical safety. He found himself at increasing risk in more and more spartan accommodations.
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The story is a good case study of how political agendas and technological thought go hand in hand. Although Allende’s success was not pinned to Cybersyn, the technical effort was clearly dependent on political will and support. The tech was seen by administration opponents as a controlling means to ends such groups were against. As a result, the program was scrapped along with the government administration that championed and represented the programmatic ideals. Values of the Allende leadership were seen as expressed in the aims of the Cybersyn project, and any associated technology. Eden Medina speculates that the nature of the technology as a closed system caused people without access to view the whole as suspect. In today’s world, something approaching more universal access to the tech, if not the information, would likely cause less anti-tech rhetoric. Political animas would be more toward the specific way it was used to gather intelligence, make decisions, and enact policy that many felt as repressive. 

Bibliography
​Edgerton, David. 2007. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
 
Review by Michael Beach

The essence of David Edgerton’s treatise is how “…our future-oriented rhetoric has underestimated the past, and overestimated the power of the present” (Edgerton 2007, 206). The book is full of examples where later technology proves either less effective or more detrimental than earlier versions. He pulls examples from war, economics, national relations, and other fields of technological implementation. He compares outcomes in such areas as the effects of time, production requirements, and maintenance needs.

Edgerton also examines the methods of invention. Like many scholars, he rejects the image of the lone scientist or engineer in a basement or garage toiling away until one day, eureka!, some grand new thing emerges. In reality, invention is a group effort in some social setting. Even the likes of Edison, Jobs, and Gates had colluders and predecessors they gained insights and direct help from. The flood of tech that evolves from ‘break through discoveries’ may bring into question if they make life better or not. For example, are we better off with 24/7 connectivity? Are we more informed through the social media of our day than our parents were reading newspapers or watching the evening news? For those of us who have to go to work at a specific place, has life improved in our daily commutes on an ever more congested roadway? With our new approach to remote work and its loss of work-related in-person community, are we not now feeling more isolated?

There are movements for a return to old tech. Things we think of as modern have been around for a long time. We certainly put more value on some things like wood furniture that are individually created by a craftsman than we do on the same thing mass produced. By putting more value on it, I mean we pay more for it. Food seems to taste better when it’s locally provided straight from the farm as opposed to frozen and shipped in from a distance. The caution is to judge carefully the right tool for the job. For example, do we really have to get a new phone every time there is an update? How many landfills are now burgeoning with the hazardous materials included with the millions of perfectly functioning discarded phones? We should all consider when simpler and older is better, or at least good enough.
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Bibliography
​Martin, John Levi. 2017. Thinking Through Methods: A Social Science Primer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago.
 
Review by Michael Beach

As the name implies, this is a methodology work. Specifically, John Levi Martin explores how social science is conducted from a practical ‘how to’ sense. In the empirical sciences one might reduce variables and examine outcomes. In sociology the study subjects are human beings in a given social setting. The variables are countless. One cannot isolate the subject, people, from their natural environment. If one does attempt to remove the subject from normal life by say bringing them to a formal location like a university, the information would likely be less true.

Sociology then is a combination of examining and interviewing people, then looking for patterns. Martin spends a considerable amount of space looking at question formulation and interview arrangement to get as close to truth as possible as it relates to whatever one is attempting to learn something about through research. He notes the ethics of studying people, and procedures to ensure both the subjects are protected while still getting useful information. Martin also approaches how to glean information from all sorts of documents, from official publications such as laws, to personal official information such as tax returns, to private personal information such as journals. He then walks the reader through ways of coding information within observations, interviews, and documents to see patterns that relate to the research topic at hand.

The book is clearly aimed at research specialists in the field of Sociology. Despite all the help, Martin admits that there is a tension between decided what to research originally, and how that aim changes as one gathers information. The researcher has to find ways to be careful to not approach a study with preconceived ends in mind, and at the same time not to allow data to take them too far away from a focused finding. 
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Bibliography
​Brenton, Tony, ed. 2017. Was Revolution Inevitable?: Turning Points of the Russian Revolution. London and New York: Oxford University Press.

​Review by Michael Beach
 
This is an interesting volume. Each chapter has a different author. Each proposes a counter-factual ‘what if’ concerning pivotal moments in the history of the Russian revolution of the early 20th century. The individual authors are each historians whose academic scholarship have concentrated on Russia and the rise of the Soviet in particular.

Each of the cases are more or less persuasive. I think the strongest case was made by Orlando Figes in his chapter titled, “The ‘Harmless Drunk’: Lenin and the October Insurrection”. As the Tsarist hold was slipping and several parties were vying for power, it was by no means a given that the Bolsheviks would eventually take control of Russia. Lenin was living in exile in Germany for a number of years. As the revolution became stronger and more violent, he went back and forth between the two countries a number of times. In general, when the Red army gained ground he would come to Russia. When things seem to go the other way he fled back to Germany, or at least closer to it. Gains by the Red army did not equate to gains by the Bolsheviks, but they were at least sympathetic causes. As the royal household was falling and violence increased, Lenin entered Russia for the last time, but did so in cognito. He disguised himself as a drunk and meandered through the crowds until he could get to a safe house in the capital. Finges speculates what might have happened if any of the city police or White army guards had recognized him. They would surely have put him in jail. Though the Tsar would have fell out of power, both his brother and his son were likely to have formed a new Duma and held some sort of election before the Bolshevik party forcibly seized control over all the revolutionary factions. Lenin coming out of hiding and encouraging his party to put down other opposing parties through force likely is what caused the Tsar’s brother, a popular war hero, to recant and then get murdered along with the rest of the Romanov family. Any political leaders who originally were open to forming a new government quickly ceded when Lenin’s followers began to kill their political colleagues.

Personally, I’ve not explored this sort of historical approach before. In fact, Tony Brenton who authors one chapter and edits the volume, admits that most historians are loath to approach counter-factual musings. Each author acknowledges to what degree they believe their alternative may or may not have made any ultimate difference. Each gives reasons not just for how things might have changed, but also how it was just as likely, or even more so, that outcomes would have been no different.  My look at Russian history and politics is at a very amateur level. I’ve read a book or two and visited Siberia twice for work reasons many years ago. These arguments by scholars imminently more qualified to document and speculate make this small part of human history jump out for me.