Operators’ manual for the people of Lake Woebegone and other shy persons

A review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you’re the sort of person who gravitates to the sidelines at parties, shuns speaking opportunities and the spotlight in general, and wonders how gregarious people ever got to be that way, this book was written for you. And, as it turns out, not just for me, too, but also for between one-third and one-half of the American population.

Here’s Susan Cain framing her subject: “Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality — the ‘north and south of temperament,’ as one scientist puts it — is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them.” And, of course, lots more.

The popular misconception of introversion in America is that it’s “somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.” By contrast, extroversion has become what Cain calls the “Extrovert Ideal” in U.S. society, making the rest of us feel somehow guilty when we don’t measure up. Cain takes on this misguided notion with a vengeance. In Quiet, she demonstrates how each of these two personality types has its own advantages and disadvantages. She makes a clear case for including a balance of the two types in any organization, the extroverts to push the limits and the introverts to hold them back from hurtling over the edge.

The terms introvert and extrovert were popularized by Carl Jung in an influential book published nearly a century ago (1921). “Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves.” In Quiet, Cain details the many ways in which the two personality types differ in the ways they work, play, invest, love, and perform just about any other function common to Americans in the here and now.

The distinction between the two types isn’t hard and fast. For example,
“[i]ntroverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while they wish they were home in their pajamas. . .  Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating.” Introverts listen more than they talk. Extroverts talk more than they listen. Still, the contrast isn’t complete: these are tendencies exhibiting strong statistical correlations with distinct patterns of chemical interaction in the brain . They’re not universal guides to behavior.

Cain places contemporary views of introversion and extroversion in historical context. A century ago, during what she terms the “Culture of Character,” Abraham Lincoln was placed atop the pedestal of virtue. Today? Tony Robbins represents the ideal in the Culture of Personality. (Tony Robbins?! You’ve got to read the book.)

Quiet is endlessly fascinating, with lengthy passages and sometimes chapters devoted to Robbins, Harvard Business School, Dale Carnegie, Rosa Parks, open-plan offices, Steve Wozniak, and other icons, fads, and trends of today’s America. Throughout, the author presents the detailed findings of research in “personality psychology,” as the relevant field is called. She cites the jargon but explains everything in clear, straightforward prose.

If you want to gain insight into who you are and why you act the way you do, read this book. It’s a pleasure.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

A review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is extraordinary on several levels: as a beautifully researched work of medical and scientific history, as a portrait of the profound impact of racism in America, and as a brutally honest first-person account of a writer’s challenging, decade-long struggle to write a serious book. If The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks doesn’t win at least one of the major awards for books published this year, I’ll be hugely disappointed.

The text on the cover telegraphs the essence of the story: “Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and a multimillion-dollar industry. More than twenty years later, her children found out. Their lives would never be the same.”

Henrietta Lacks, we discover, was an ill-educated African-American woman who died of cervical cancer at the age of 31 nearly sixty years ago. She was a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, home of one of the nation’s most prestigious medical schools and of some of the world’s leading researchers in fields such as cell culture and oncology. One of those researchers asked Henrietta’s physician for a sample of her diseased cervix in faint hopes that, unlike every other tissue sample anyone to that date had ever tested, the cells he extracted would divide indefinitely,thus become “immortal,” and open up new vistas for medical research. To his and everyone else’s astonishment, they did. And not only did those cells continuously divide from 1951 to the present, they proved to be so aggressive and so persistent that they contaminated every other cell culture they came in contact with — invalidating years of medical research that was conducted before the contamination was discovered. To this day, HeLa cells, named as a contraction of Henrietta’s name, constitute one of medicine’s most pervasive experimental tools.

The medical history in this book is engrossing. As Skloot amply demonstrates, it’s also scientifically significant. But for me what was most powerful about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was the unfolding story of Henrietta’s life and of the lives of her many children and grandchildren. Skloot devoted a decade to befriending and later interviewing Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, Deborah’s brothers, and other influential members of the Lacks family in Virginia and Maryland. Theirs is one of the most dramatic and moving tales I’ve ever encountered of the profound impact of racism in our society. At Deborah Lacks’ insistence, Skloot reported every incident and every conversation precisely as it occurred, with no sugar-coating. The power of her reporting is irresistible.

Rebecca Skloot is an accomplished science journalist, but amazingly this is her first book. If she never writes another one, her contribution to the history of medicine and science will be assured.

ISBN-10: 1400052173

ISBN-13: 978-1400052172