Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong - and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster

    Expecting Better was a great book highly recommended by multiple friends that I read to learn more about pregnancy (since my wife is pregnant). Most of the book is about researching the facts about pregnancy to find out how pregnant women can best assess risk without resorting to hard rules. Emily Oster is a really valuable writer because she is a trained economist who has applied her economics background to pregnancy and parenting. I previously read Cribsheet, but didn't do much of a reflection on it--it's crazy to think I read it seven years ago!

    Oster is very nonjudgmental, which is really good since pregnant women are faced with tons of judgments about their decisions to have a glass of wine, rest, exercise, you name it. So the book is filled with tons of things like her analysis of drinking coffee, which basically shows that there is really no clear evidence of any effect of caffeine intake on pregnancy health for mother or child. It is likely difficult to conduct studies because nausea during pregnancy is correlated with a low rate of miscarriage, and nauseous women usually don't crave coffee. But the hard rule of 200mg of coffee a day doesn't seem necessary. With alcohol, it appears that the real factor is speed of drinking that overwhelms the liver. Seven drinks a week may actually be safe as long as they're spread out--drinking a glass of wine slowly is unlikely to have any effects on the baby. Problems only arise when significant amounts of alcohol get into fetal tissues, but after mom's metabolization of the alcohol, that's usually not happening if it's just a little. She also does a really good analysis of raw fish: eating raw fish may make pregnant women sick, and it's worse to be sick when pregnant. But the real risk is mercury, which requires that women know the mercury levels of fish they are eating and reduce exposure by eating less fish with high mercury levels, but doesn't require full abstinence to stay safe. In fact, the mercury levels of many fish may reduce baby's IQ, but the omega-3s they have may increase IQ, so who knows?

Miscellaneous Facts:

• During the first half of a woman's cycle, her body temperature is below 98 degrees, then, the day after ovulation, it increases by about half a degree or more.
• Almost 90% of women have nausea during pregnancy, usually peaking between 8 or 9 weeks and falling off after. 50% of women report vomiting at some point in weeks 5 to 8 of pregnancy, but less than 15 to 20 percent by 17 weeks. At the worst point in pregnancy, 13% of women report throwing up 3 or more times a day.
• Airplane travel is unlikely to create enough radiation exposure to be a danger. It takes three round trip flights from New York to Tokyo to reach 1% of the level at which there is a demonstrated risk of birth defects or miscarriage. This can be relevant for women who work on airplanes, but not for the most frequent of frequent flyers.
• Kegels during pregnancy are highly effective at reducing urinary incontinence post-partum. Randomly assigned women who did 3 sets of 8 kegels twice a day for 6 seconds each had significantly lower urinary incontinence before and after delivery. Prenatal yoga also had beneficial effects, but not nearly as significant.
• Lying flat seems to have no effect on fetal health unless it makes the mother uncomfortable. Otherwise, there don't seem to be significant effects from sleeping position. The mother's discomfort may be a sign of blood flow constriction. A small minority of women feel faint from lying flat, but those who don't feel faint experience no negative effects that have been observed.
• Queen Victoria was one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth--inhaled chloroform for her seventh child. In the 20th century, women were sometimes given a combination of morphine and scopolamine that put them in "twilight sleep," where they experienced some pain, but forgot it. In the turn of the century, doctors administered cocaine to women in childbirth.
• Epidurals were used in two-thirds of births in the United States in 2008, although they often require use of more instruments due to the fact that epidurals make pushing harder. This can cause more tearing.
• Women who were randomly assigned a doula were half as likely to have a C-section and less likely to use an epidural.
• Eating and drinking during labor is usually prohibited, but probably doesn't need to be. The prohibition came from a time when women were put under full anesthesia, and the prohibition on eating was to avoid them throwing up during surgery and choking to death without anyone noticing. This was rare even in that situation, and today, thanks to epidurals, even less frequent. However, most women aren't hungry during the later stages of labor anyway, but if they are, they probably shouldn't be stopped from eating. Clear juices and Gatorade are a decent compromise.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff

    Hunt, Gather, Parent was a really cool parenting meets anthropology book. I would not call it a parenting guide by any means, although chapters end with bulleted lists of techniques. But it is an entertaining read of different parenting styles across the world in hunter-gatherer societies compared with our more Western ways of parenting. A good recommendation from my wife, who I already discussed this book with, so I don't have a lot of motivation to write it all down here.

    A lot of the advice in the book boils down to regulating parent and child emotions. She recommends that parents do things with their kids, but not for their kids--so no activities that are fun only for the kids. Instead, kids become part of the family by doing things with parents. This is especially useful when kids learn to do chores, or at least watch parents do chores. That way, they expect chores to be a part of their lives, and the parents and children are sort of on the same schedule having done the chores together and then being ready to rest together. Other themes of the book are about giving kids more autonomy, and really picking battles whenever possible. Parents shouldn't argue with children, and lessons are best learned after emotions are passed, and at a lower volume. All in all, a cool book, and I'm jealous of this mom and daughter who got to travel the world together to do the research for it.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

    What. A. Book! Lonesome Dove is an absolute epic, and reading it right after Moby Dick makes it feel like an amazing foil to Moby Dick. But on its own merits, Lonesome Dove is this incredible collection of events on a big cattle drive from Texas to Montana, and I definitely want to watch the miniseries, which is apparently amazing as well.

    I couldn't stop thinking about the Moby Dick comparison. The two books are both set around the same period, just a few decades apart in the mid-19th century. Both of them are stories of men going on a journey, but one is on land, and another is at sea. In Moby Dick, everything builds towards an absolutely massive climax, but in Lonesome Dove, the feeling you're left with over and over is anti-climax. Almost no one achieves their goals in Lonesome Dove. Almost everyone dies. The language is also very different in each book. Moby Dick is highly stylized and rich language, while Lonesome Dove is bare bones, especially in dialogue. McMurtry likes to go one for paragraphs or pages about a character's internal thoughts, but then make their dialogue almost nothing. Lonesome Dove is filled with characters not telling each other how they feel or what they think. But the characters are similar to Moby Dick in that they are all on the frontier, having few opportunities for good conversation.

    The best character in Lonesome Dove is The West. The West is like The Whale in Moby Dick, except no one can be mad at The West since none of the cowboys are as insane as Ahab. Except that in Lonesome Dove, by the end of the book, Call can't stop going north, getting a little hint of the madness that struck Ahab from the beginning. There are all these confrontations with nature itself in lightning storms, sand storms, flooding rivers, thirst, etc. Then you have all these intermittent confrontations with other men in the west, a lot like in Cormac McCarthy's books.

    In sum, this book was excellent, one of the best I've read in a very long time.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

 Little Women is a classic and I’m so glad I read it after being introduced by my wife to the newer movie by Greta Gerwig. I love that movie and I came away appreciating it way more after reading the book. The book is fantastic and I really appreciated how well the movie updated it and reinterpreted it for a modern audience. The original book is very old fashioned in a lot of ways, and it was interesting to think about how Gerwig changed the timeline and a little bit of the tone. I think she did especially well with Amy’s character. I was surprised that this monologue wasn’t in the book:

“Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.”

In the book, the conversation with Amy and Laurie in Nice plays out a little differently, and Gerwig is really inserting the opposite of what Marmee teaches in the book- life isn’t as simple as just being virtuous all the time. Marmee is always giving the best advice and teaching the girls, but in Gerwig’s movie, she’s a little deemphasized and the problems they face are a little more morally complicated.

Little Women is also very funny, and has a great narrator. I loved this line:

“There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

If anybody asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, ‘My nose.’”

I like that Jo isn’t so much the heroine and Amy not so villainized in the book as in the movie. In the movie Amy isn’t necessarily the “bad guy” but it has you rooting a lot more for Jo than for her in order to build up her redemption in the end. I didn’t feel that way in the book. For example, in the book, it was Jo’s fault she didn’t get invited to France, since she went on a diatribe in front of Aunt March about not needing anything from anyone. I don’t remember that in the movie.

There’s also an interesting Germanophile streak in the book. Louisa May Alcott makes all these references to Goethe and Germany and Germans, and that got left out of the movie. I’ll stop here, I don’t have the time to write this post anymore.

The Book of Czestochowa edited by M. Szucman (and a committee)

    This is another yizkor book made up of a compilation of individual survivors' recollections of their time in Czestochowa before and after the war. I found it thanks to the World Society of Czestochowa Jews, which maintains incredible resources on the Jewish community that existed there. A concept that this book introduced me to, although I haven't confirmed it's truth, is that Czestochowa was the "last remaining large Jewish community in Poland." Natan Eck, who wrote one of the longer chapters in the book, recalls saying that to other Jews after a meeting of the Judenrat to discuss the possibility of mass exterminations, in which most couldn't believe what was going on. In a similar vein regarding the uniqueness of Czestochowa, Aron Gelbard recalls that proportionately, more people from Czestochowa transports survived than from other cities, due to a high requirement of laborers.

    The strength of the book is obviously its personal stories. Szlojme Waga, who wrote another yizkor book, tells the story of a local man whose daughter had married a German and lived in Berlin. That daughter had written a letter home to her parents in Czestochowa advising them to commit suicide and naming the drugs they should take. The letter was warped from her tears, and she described how committing suicide would ensure that they would have graves for some survivor to visit after the war. Apparently the letter was shared widely and contributed to a sense of panic in the ghetto. In another story recounted by Szlojme Waga, he met the former city Chazan (cantor), who bitterly told him, "I have become a bachelor," because his wife and seven children were all deported. His beard was shaved off and he was thin. He suddenly straightened up and his face reddened, and he yelled, "The murderers! They've made me young! Turned me into a bachelor! Annihilated my seven children! Murdered my wife!" The same Aron Gelbard above recalled how he worked at Treblinka for 19 days, and in that time, would help throw naked people into piles of baggage, and then secretly pull them out later and give them clothes to escape. Unfortunately, some of the people they threw in didn't understand what they meant by doing so, and jumped back up and continued running.

    I always hope to find some mention of my family in these yizkor books, but nothing found in this one. What is interesting is the addresses. Like ul. Nadrzeczna 71, the home of the kibbutz that resisted the Nazis (although I also see reference to a kibbutz at Garncarska 72). At ul. Nadrzeczna 66, there was another house of resistance, known as the "66 Group." In December 1942, Mojtek Ziberberg started to try to unify these groups into one resistance. He would be killed in the uprising and ghetto liquidation on June 25th, 1943. I think I will try to put together a little map of the relevant addresses of the resistance.

Moby Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

    Classics can be hit or miss, but this was a huge hit for me. Moby Dick is one of the best books I have ever read, and I know I will be coming back to it for years to come. Melville writes language that is so close to being over the top, but writes with such confidence and skill that it works. The language is super Romantic and makes clear that Melville is in love with whales and whaling. His passion is just poured on the page and you can tell that he knew he was doing something here.

    The one thing that takes away from the book is the intense racism of its narrator. Melville was probably racist himself. The book seemed to start out with a lot more racist language and then eased up, but I might have just gotten used to it and managed to ignore it. I think the argument could be made that that racist perspective is just what should be expected from an 1850s whaler, but it also made it hard to read. For example, in chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Melville analyzes the titular topic, and talks all about how whiteness usually enhances beauty, going on about how the whiteness of his skin gives "the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe," yet the whiteness of the whale makes it scarier. We could pretend this is just the narrator, but this it Melville expressing his own idea matter-of-factly, just like he would talk about the anatomy of the sperm whale, he would say that the white man is the master of the world.

    But the writing is amazing. I just took note of a few great lines and passages because they deserve to be reprinted here. They're over the top, but something about seeing someone go on for pages about the anatomy of whales and the makeup of whaling ships with references to Greek mythology and classic literature just makes it all work. Melville also writes some chapters with stage directions like a play, and has the sailors break into song.

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map, true places never are.

I just like that line. The next multi-paragraph passage is just a really funny bit on how kings and queens are anointed with whale oil. 

    It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life, we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

     But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, not macassar oil, nor castor oil, not bear's oil, nor train oil, nor codliver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

    Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

Melville is so funny for dedicating these little chapters to asides like that. That was almost the entire chapter above, and it was just to make a point about how valuable and important whale oil is/was! Here's another:

    As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. It this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!

     In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough the shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

Here's another one:

 Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

And another:

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field.

You see what he did there with cannonballs into ploughshares like swords into ploughshares? This guy can write! And I love the image of Ahab's death, in the final chapter of the book:

    The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in it's depths.

    I'll finish by saying that this book is so modern. I read it less like a work of fiction than like a modern work of literary-esque nonfiction. I think of The Perfect Storm, a nonfiction book that maintains a really engaging story while still stuffing the reader full of facts about fishing, the Atlantic Ocean, and what drowning is like. Melville is doing that a century earlier, teaching the reader about whaling while using this story. I think this is especially good in chapters 74 and 75, titled, "The Sperm Whale's Head" and "The Right Whale's Head." He introduces these two anatomy lessons from the point of view of the narrator, Ishmael, on the Pequod, giving a tour to the reader as if you were on the ship with him. The tour happens at that moment only because we have reached a point in the events of the book when the ship has two whales' heads tied to either side. So Ishmael says, "Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own," and "as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?" How can you not love that?! And then he goes on to tell you about how whale bones are used in umbrellas, and how the whales are even philosophers, with the Right Whale being a stoic and the Sperm Whale a Platonian. Truly one of the best books ever written. I get it.

 

 

 

 

 

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

    A Midwife's Tale is a really cool work of scholarship that absolutely masters what would seem like a small task: publicizing and contextualizing the diary of a midwife from 1785-1812. The author's work is so important because it reveals Maine history that was otherwise totally lost and also teaches by example that getting women's perspectives on history can completely change the modern perception of events. In countless instances, Martha Ballard's diary provides completely unique or very different interpretations of events, and sometimes records names and events unrecorded elsewhere. 

    Martha Ballard seems like an incredible woman. She delivered over 600 babies, and saved countless lives of children and mothers. She crossed frozen rivers and streams, and on one occasion, fell through the ice, and arrived soaking wet and freezing to deliver a baby in December. At the time, women practiced "social childbirth," meaning that as labor got closer to delivery, female relatives and neighbors attended births and assisted the midwives. They would often become midwives themselves after this informal apprenticeship, since it was not infrequent that a midwife would be delayed or called too late to attend the birth. Martha Ballard probably developed her career as a midwife in this way, and the author writes that it is no mistake that Ballard's midwifery picked up more when her daughters were old enough to weave, freeing up her time. Ballard was also a member of one of the last generations of women to engage in this system of social childbirth and midwifery in the United States, as doctors started to take a greater and greater role in childbirth in the 19th century, and midwife's slipped into a role as doctors' assistants.

I thought this passage was particularly good:

To celebrate such a life is to acknowledge the power--and the poverty---of written records. Outside her own diary, Martha has no history. Although she considered herself "the head of the family," a full partner in the management of a household, no independent record of her work survives. It is her husband's name, not hers, that appears in censuses, tax lists, and merchant accounts for her town. She is not listed in Hallowell's poor relief records, though we know she relieved the poor, not in the earliest records of the Augusta First Church, though she was a member. Nor does any extant court records acknowledge the testimony she took from unwed mothers in delivery. Her name appears on a list of witnesses at the North rape trial, but no one, except she, preserved a record of what was said. Henry Sewall mentioned her five times in his diary, four in relation to births and once when she died, but he never explicitly identified her as a midwife or acknowledged paying a fee.

It is incredible to think how a long life can be summed up. She delivered 600 babies, testified in a rape trial of a judge, witnessed the aftermath of a family annihilation-style mass murder, and did so much more in 77 years of life, and all that is left of her is her diary, miraculously-preserved.  

Common Sense

    Around the same time I finished A Midwife's Tale, I read "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine, which was an extremely good essay, although way more religious than I ever realized. It is totally within the tradition of the other essays I read in the Revolution, although it is really strange to read something written in January 1776, after the war began, but before the Declaration of Independence was written. Of course, this essay gives the best reasons for the necessity of declaring independence. 

    One thing that I thought was interesting was that Paine is clear on the lack of necessity of government and obviously has a more positive view of men's ability to live in a smaller-government world. He writes in one good line, "the plain truth is that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as it is in Turkey." He is also really strong against the English monarchy. He refers to William the Conqueror: "A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives is, in plain terms, a very paltry rascally original." The part that I knew from the essay, that it is ridiculous for a small island to govern a continent so far away, only shows up wedged in the middle of the long essay, and doesn't take up that much space. But the government Paine proposes is very similar to the government eventually adopted, although I like his idea of having the presidency rotate among the states.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• It isn't surprising that Martha Ballard spelled and punctuated words and sentences more or less randomly. What is interesting, though, is that she used different spellings for the names even of her own family members. That's a very different way of thinking about names before everyone was literate and writing.
• It was not uncommon for Ballard to receive payment for a delivery as much as four years after the fact.
• In the eighteenth century, it was believed that a woman could not lie about the father of her child while in labor, and it was sometimes considered a legal necessity for an unwed woman to declare the father of her child while in childbirth in order to establish which man was legally responsible.