How to Win Friends & Influence People

I can sum up this book by fudging the title a bit:

How to Brown Nose Friends & Manipulate People

Written as a textbook, Dale Carnegie used this book to supplement his seminars to encourage self-confidence and public speaking skills. It is divided into four parts: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People; Six Ways to Make People Like You; How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking; and Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment. Sounds like a miracle in a book, doesn't it?

The gist, as I mentioned above, is to get people to like you. How do you do this? Find out what they like and get them talking about it. Ask them questions about their stamp collection, monacle polishing or thoroughbred breeding, but make sure you don't come of as fake. Carnegie, in all his cheery confidence, truly believes that we can make a genuine connection to each person we meet if we only try, but he correctly observes that acquaintances can readily detect B.S. and will react accordingly, so we had better at least look like we're sincere during our interactions.

Furthermore, it is imperative that we develop empathy so that we can better understand each other's motivations and experiences, thus giving us some insight to how to better exploit them. I'm sure Carnegie would disagree, but that's how I read it. I must be the pessimistic yin to Carnegie's almost nauseatingly optimistic yang.

Carnegie puts a nice, positive spin on what is actually happening here: he is teaching the reader to manipulate people, particularly if you are a man. This book has been through several revisions throughout the years (it was originally published in 1936), so a few bits have been changed to show the evolving influence of women. Where most anecdotes spoke to women in the domestic realm, a few stories have been added to depict women working as bank tellers or even-- gasp! -- bank managers, but alas, the people who actually own the bank or other sundry business is always a man.

I really shouldn't be so quick to judge; this is, after all, a book that is nothing more than a product of its time. This is exactly what it bills itself to be -- a 1930s business school textbook --and it is wrong of me to expect anything else.

From a modern perspective, if you remove the misogyny, the overarching theme is to just plain be nice to people. You can get whatever you want from folks -- be it friendship or the new plastering contract -- if you are just diplomatic and polite. There really isn't anything wrong with that.

The Five People You Meet In Heaven

After the emotional weight of Elie Wiesel's Night, I needed some literary bubblegum to take my mind off concentration camp horrors. But, I had a lot of work to do around the house this week and a book on tape would help the drudgery of cleaning and painting, so I went to the stacks to see what my library had to offer. I have grown to love audiobooks and any other storytelling (Prairie Home Companion, This American Life, etc.). I own a few, and I take them out whenever listening to the radio gets to be too depressing. With all the talk of unemployment, a tanking economy, rising healthcare costs and the usual political/media/religious discord, cranking and subsequent "analysis" ad nauseum, the radio is hardly an escape anymore. All the more reason to get a feel-good story.

I have never read The Five People You Meet In Heaven or Mitch Albom's other bestseller, Tuesdays with Morrie, but I knew his novels were popular, beach-reading books that would probably make good movies on the Lifetime Network. It was available and I started listening to it as soon as I got home. TFPYMIH reminds me of A Christmas Carol, except the main character actually died. Here's a bit of the story to explain the comparison: Eddie is a Korean War vet who is the head of maintenance for a fictional Coney Island-type amusement park. A ride malfunctioned and he died trying to save a little girl who was in the path of a falling capsule. He wakes up in heaven and he visits five people who help explain the mysteries of his life. He doesn't meet the people you would assume he would: his mother, best friend, or other beloved family members who have preceeded him in death. Instead, his first visitor is a man who was part of the freak show of the amusement park when he was a young boy. Since Eddie's father was the head of park maintenance before him, Eddie spent a lot of time at the park. This man was in the freak show because his skin was blue, a result of shoddy doctoring to treat a nervous condition when he was a kid. Eddie barely remembered him. Blue Man didn't play a significant role in Eddie's life, and he was nothing more than a long-forgotten figure from his childhood. As it turns out, Blue Man was in heaven waiting for Eddie because Eddie had chased a stray baseball out into the street and he was almost hit by a car driven by Blue Man, though Eddie didn't know it at the time. Blue Man was traumatized by the near miss and he proceeded to pull the car into an alley, suffer a heart attack and die, all a result of his lingering nervousness. Blue Man was not bitter; the story was meant to illustrate the point that life isn't always fair, and from our earthly perspective, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. After revealing his story, his skin was restored to a human shade of beige, and he was whisked away to the upper floors of heaven.

Eddie visits four more people who shed additional light on his life, each progressively more intimate and profound. In this way, it resembles Dickens because it is a morality play that encourages the main character to reexamine his life with a little otherworldly help. Eddie is an everyman; any reader (or listener) can find something kindred in his personality: As a war vet, his body has been a dilapidated, painful shell for years; he lost the love of his life; he had a lousy relationship with his dad; he likes children; he felt like he abandoned his dreams when the weight of adulthood got to be too much; and he believed he was a nobody, one who wasted the life he had been given. Something in his character resonates with anyone who reads the story.

Maybe it's the medium, but I was bawling like a baby at the end of the story. Albom knows just how to tug at your heartstrings, but I think it was exaggerated by the narrator's voice and the overwraught background music. The narrator, Erik Singer, did an admirable job impersonating women and Eastern Europeans. The overarching theme was a plea for empathy and the ability to look at every situation from different points of view. Our lives are too interrelated not to. TFPYMIH isn't Shakespeare, but it is a Hallmark-style diversion from the monotony of everyday life that gives us enough of the warm-and-fuzzies to deal with the real world again.

Night

Contrary to the point of this blog, Elie Wiesel's book Night did not come from the library. I bought it at a garage sale in July 2008 for a dime, and it has sat, untouched, on my nightstand until just a few days ago. I had plenty of time in the intervening six months to read it -- after all, the 1980 edition I have is a short 109 pages -- but I had a vague notion of the horrors within the covers, so I kept putting it to the side in favor of books that were not so weighty, not so disturbing.

A few weeks ago Pope Benedict XVI caused a ruckus when he lifted the excommunication of four bishops who had been expelled from the proverbial flock 20 years ago. It was revealed that one of the four, Bishop Richard Williamson, is a Holocaust denier who claims the gas chambers did not exist and the Nazis really didn't murder six million Jews. Read one account of it here.

To karmically spite Williamson and Benedict, I realized it was time to wear my intellectual ovaries on the outside and quit hiding from history like those two apparently had been doing for the last 60 years. Those were the longest 109 pages I have ever read. It took several days for me to finish it because I could only ingest it in small doses. Part of me wanted to keep reading because it is such a compelling, important story, but I could only deal with so much of the disgusting trauma inflicted on Wiesel and his family a little at a time.

Night is Wiesel's account of his year in three Nazi death camps: Birkenau, Auschwitz and Buna. He tells of the collective unease and hopeful disbelief in his Polish village as they heard rumors of Nazi brutality towards Jews elsewhere. The Germans won't make it to Sighet, they thought. The Russians will defeat Hitler and the war will be over soon. When the Russians didn't stop the progress of the Nazis, the Jews in Sighet were systematically moved to a Jewish ghetto. Since the ghetto was unguarded, Jews had the opportunity to flee to another village. Many believed they were being corralled just so the Nazis could steal their money and valuables. Wiesel effectively conveys the Jewish ambivalence towards their seemingly indifferent captors. They didn't believe that the horrors they heard quietly whispered before the Nazi arrival could possibly be true, let alone happen to them.

Soon, they were transported street by street via cattle car to the concentration camps. Here, the appalling conditions began. The Jews were given no food, no room to lay down (they could sit only by taking turns), and a filthy bucket for a toilet as they rode for days to their final destination. If anyone escaped, they were told, the whole carload of 80 would be shot.

Upon arrival at Birkenau -- the reception center for Auschwitz -- the men and women were separated. That was the last time Wiesel saw his mother and sister. A prisoner told Wiesel and his father to lie about their ages to keep them together: Elie was now an 18-year-old man instead of a 14-year-old boy, and his father lost 10 years and was now only 40. Otherwise, Elie would have been sent with the other children, and his father may have been considered too old and infirm to work, thus relegating him to the furnaces they were shown on their initial march through the compound.

Wiesel continues to recount the beatings, hangings, starving, night-long marches through the snow without coats, the stench of dying bodies, the death. As his father's body started to deteriorate under the brutality, Elie wrestles with his own feelings of guilt for wanting his father to die so that he may have a better chance of surviving. He also sinks into a spiritual crisis; in Sighet, he was a devout student of the Kabbalah, but now he believes the Nazi treatment of the Jews is the twisted proof that God does not exist.

Night ends with the liberation of Buchenwald by the Americans. After their release, all these tormented, barely-alive humans wanted was food. Elie was the only member of his family to survive the death camps. Wiesel did not once mention gas chambers, though his explicit depiction of all of the other disgusting horrors that one human could inflict on another is enough to make one wonder how the world turned a blind eye to the terrors contained within the barbed wire. We need to stop the apathy and indifference. Bishop Williamson, this book should be on your nightstand next. (When you're done, lend it to your boss.)

The White Album

Any work by Joan Didion is inherently difficult to summarize in a short review. Didion herself has what every honest writer desperately wants: she actually makes a living from her writing, and she lives a glamorous lifestyle full of traveling and mingling with artists, rock stars and other culturally influential people. While maintaining that hip visage, Didion still presents herself as a shockingly accessible person. She peppers her prose with sensual descriptions of furniture, the green fragrance of a kitchen garden, the feel of the California breeze gently flowing through the living room, and the way the design and decor of a house has the profound ability to influence the moods of its occupants.

This is a woman who appreciates a well-planned kitchen and the bounty of food that is prepared in it. (I started a kitchen journal because she had offhandedly mentioned she kept one in The Year of Magical Thinking. What better way to remember holidays or impromptu parties than with descriptions of the food everyone savored that night?) But she's not just a pretty face. Didion is a masterful writer who possesses a blazing intelligence and the capacity to link the esoteric with the commonplace. Her pieces are never lightweight essays on the sex life of a vapid actress or the lengthening ability of one brand of mascara over another. She is a hard-core reporter who manages to present mundane subjects --Caltrans (California Department of Transportation), The Getty, orchids -- with a necessary critical perspective. For her interpretation of more salacious stories -- crazy James Pike, the Manson trial -- she personalizes them and, in an often intimate and vulnerable way, manages to fit them in to her own human experience for all to see.

The White Album is Didion's love letter to California. In this space, she uses a series of essays to work through the contradictions and disparaties inherent in her beloved home, while at the same time addressing her own insecurities revolving around her struggles with various mental afflictions. Her tales of the excessively proletariat governor's mansion, the artifice-lacking-edifice lifestyle of Hollywood, and the suburban onslaught of sprawling new shopping centers takes a snapshot of late 1960s and early 1970s materialistic California as only one who had a front-row seat to the tumultuous time can. Didion strips the gilt of California and lays bare the true essence for all to see, and she invites the reader to live vicariously through her writing. She wants you to sit in the mind-numbing traffic of "the 42-Mile Loop"; she persuades you visit her bedroom to share the blinding pain of one of her migraines; she asks you to wait with her in a recording studio for the sexified Jim Morrison to join the rest of the Doors for a session. Didion covers an unexpectedly broad range of topics in this collection, but when viewed in hindsight, it adeptly encapsulates the vast panorama of life in California during a short few years. Often, it is uncomfortably revealing, but just as frequently it captures the beauty and exhilarating possibilities the state has grown to represent in our collective mythology. Through her obsessively cerebral scrutiny for places and events, Didion has summed up the big beautiful paradox that is California.

On Doctoring

Maybe it's my unhealthy obsession with reruns of House, MD, but as of late, I have taken an interest in all things medical. Of course, I do not care for anything remotely technical or sciencey (read: challenging), but I do like reading all the gory, salacious details of surgery, medical conditions, and anything generally disgusting or unpleasant relating to the bodies we occupy every day. So, hoping for some short stories that encompass the above, I picked up a copy of On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays edited by Richard Reynolds, MD and John Stone MD. If medical students get big pimped-out Oscar-style gift baskets their first day of school full of the things a med student would need -- My First Stethoscope; bottles of No-Doz; the obligatory white jacket; piles of tongue depressors; a box of latex gloves -- this would be included as the medical equivalent of Chicken Soup for the Medical Student's Soul. Aside from the preface, the book is arranged chronologically, beginning with some verses from the Bible and ending with a story written in the 1980s. About half the pieces are written by doctors, the rest were composed by regular folks who just happened to have a particularly memorable experience with a doctor.

Not suprisingly, the stories by doctors tend to have more interest for those who actually know a little bit about medicine because they are full of the day to day minutiae of the job, but -- perhaps by design -- they have a common theme: patients will die in your care. The most harrowing of these stories was one by Dr. David Hilfiker who told the tale of a doctor's tragic diagnostic mistake with a pregnant woman. This is a part of the job, so you had better get used to it.

While dealing with the stress of remaining objective and removed enough from the patient to plan the best course of treatment after the diagnosis has been established, each and every 20th century account bemoans the evolution of a health care system that slowly strips the doctor of his decision making abilities while simultaneously endeavoring to make him more businessman than healer. Of course, all of our jobs are in a constant state of flux and evolution, but the doctors describe a system that is stealthily robbing them of their core impulse: to eliminate suffering for the patient. I don't go to work one day a pilot and wake up the next morning an accounts payable clerk; this is the type of radical shift these men and women describe. Hopefully these tales won't scare off a young potential doctor, but the narratives are harrowing enough for me -- an outsider -- whose abbreviated treatments represent nothing more than a potential profit increase for the insurance company.

While the doctors tend to describe medicine from their perspective, the non-medical writers are presenting tales from the view of patient. Have a shot of bourbon (or a take your favorite narcotic) and have a go at Kafka's "A Country Doctor." It's typical Kafka: ghost horses; people walking around naked; rape; angry, torch-bearing mobs; etc. As is typical of Kafka, it's a narcisstic reflection of himself, but there is a surreal tale of a doctor woven through the strangeness. Though many of the stories are good, the poems produced the most powerful physical reactions. L.E. Sissman's haunting account of each and every biological detail of his impending death from Hodgkin's disease made a lump in my throat. Maya Angelou's description of growing old and giving up on life caused my heart to ache. The Bible's short admission, "Death is better than a miserable life/and eternal rest than chronic sickness," (Ecclesiasticus 30:17) made me reconsider religion and its stance on euthanasia, thus hurting my head.

Though I didn't get many medical details, I was satisfied with the book. As with all decent tomes, it gave me a different perspective on the subject, and I really couldn't ask for more. Because they are grappling with death and the progression of disease and age, doctors easily have the most difficult job in the world. They look potential death in the face every day and I am grateful there are people up to that task. If I want dramatic fiction, I'll stick to House. On Doctoring taught me that real life is way more gory and traumatic.