Wednesday 7 February 2018

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon

Leaving Berlin does some things very well.  Notably, it paints an indelible portrait of post-War Berlin 4 years after the defeat of the Nazis. The city is divided between the American, British, French, and Soviet zones.  The city is in ruins, the Berlin airlift is in progress, and the stunned survivors of the war are trying to navigate an uncertain and ever-shifting present.

We see Berlin through the eyes of the prominent novelist Alex Meier.  Alex is a German Jew who fled the Nazis before the war, and who is now returning to the East as an honoured guest to help build his homeland's socialist future.  But Meier is also a refugee again:  this time from the House Un-American Activities Committee.  When asked to name names he had a fit of temper and told them to go fuck themselves.  As a result, he was exiled from America and from his 10 year old American son.

In Berlin Alex encounters places and people that he knew before the war, but everything has changed.  The city is little more than piles of burnt rubble.  The younger brother of a socialist friend is now an ambitious East German apparatchik who is helping build what will become the Stasi.  One daughter of the man who saved him from the camps lives in West Berlin and is the self-justifying wife of a (former?) Nazi doctor. Her sister, his first love, is the mistress of a Soviet general in charge of slave labour camps. 

Everything is painfully familiar but painfully different, and Alex cannot bridge the gap.  He did not experience the war as they did, and can no longer truly understand the city or the people he left behind.

I think Leaving Berlin would have been a more interesting book if that summary of the book were  complete.  But Leaving Berlin is a thriller.  Alex is actually an American spy.   After his encounter with HUAC he was offered a deal by the CIA: if he gathers enough useful information in the East he may be allowed to return to America and be reunited with his son.

The tropes follow thick and fast:  Alex is, of course, also recruited as an East German informer almost as soon as he arrives, doubling the opportunities for intrigue.  No one is quite as they seem, Alex is quickly pulled between old and new loyalties, and soon Alex doesn't know where to turn or whom to trust.  The plot is driven by constant action.  Alex becomes embroiled in deception, murder, and betrayal the morning after his arrival, and transforms from a naive observer of events to a polished undercover operative over the course of  a single week.

Leaving Berlin is an effective thriller.  I raced to the end even though I'm not entirely sure that I followed all of the plot convolutions.

But Kanon did too good of a job evoking post-War Berlin and its inhabitants.  I wanted to spend more time with Bertolt Brecht, who, as Alex observes, is nostalgic not for pre-War Berlin, but for the 1920s.  I wanted to understand the idealism of the socialist returnees, and to see their struggles and compromises as their hope for a new society fades in the face of Soviet totalitarianism.  And I wanted the portrayal of the vindictive 'bad guy' Russians to be moderated by an understanding of how their attitudes towards Germans and Germany were formed by the 20 to 40 million Russian casualties of World War 2.

It's not entirely fair to critique a novel because it's not a different type of book.  Perhaps it's a tribute to the quality of Kanon's writing?  It left me wanting more from the novel than action and intrigue.

Saturday 3 February 2018

Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine


Men take more risks than women, are more competitive, and have a greater drive for both sex and dominance.  Women are more nurturing, take fewer risks, and value fidelity over sexual novelty.  These differences are rooted in human biology.  Over thousands of generations women bore and raised children while men hunted, leading to the evolution of fundamental differences between the sexes.  We see similar differences in a wide variety of other species.  In general males compete for females, while females bear and raise young.  Testosterone is the primary mechanism that drives these sex differences.  When we see a young man in a hot car, aggressive stock traders, or risk-taking sky divers, we're seeing testosterone at work.

You are familiar with this story.  It is simple and is widely understood.  It has only a single flaw:  it's not supported by the modern science of sex difference.

Take for example the concept of 'risk-taking'.   Who is more likely to take risks?  The answer turns out not to be simple.  What kind of risk you are talking about?  A physical risk?  A financial risk? A social risk?  What are the circumstances under which you are asking the test subject to take the risk?  Who is being asked to take the risk and what is their background?  Are we asking a Chinese woman who is a part of a social group of her peers to gamble a trivial amount, a man to take the social risk of disagreeing with his friends on a matter of principle, or a young woman to decide whether or not to have a baby?  (As it turns out,  if you look at mortality rates per 100,000, in the US you are 20 times more likely to die as a result of a pregnancy than as a result of skydiving).

When you look at the research, who takes which risks depends critically on who is being asked, the particular risk under consideration,  and the circumstances under which the risk is presented.  And, in the end, there is no such thing as a generic 'risk-taker'.  Day traders are no more likely than average to enjoy wing-suit base jumping.  In short, the biological sex of the test subject is not the defining criteria that determines what their risk-taking behaviour will be like, not even when you consider the highly gendered lens through which 'risk' has historically been defined for the purposes of social science research.

Testosterone Rex doesn't deny that there are differences between men and women, or deny that evolution has played a role in human biology.  That would be silly, even if Fine does wish that she had the nerve to claim "Testicles are a social construct" just to see people's reactions.  (Not to mention that it would give her an excuse to discuss a species of fish whose testicular development does in fact depend on the individual fish's social status.) 

Instead in this book Fine surveys the state of research on sex difference and dissects the mythology of testosterone. She argues that there is no such thing as biology unaffected by culture, especially for the human species. She also speculates that perhaps the very lack of fundamental behavioural differences between women and men found by modern research is how evolution has manifested itself in humans: after all, our flexibility to adapt to wildly varying circumstances is the basis of our success as a species.  Large and hard-wired differences between the sexes would leave us less adaptive.

Testosterone Rex won the 2017 Royal Society prize for popular science books.  It's easy to see why:  the book is comprehensive, rigorous, relevant, and entertaining.    Nevertheless, I didn't find a copy in stock at a book store until I hit New York City in January.  I hope the book gets the audience that it deserves.