Moving to a new address

I have moved this site to a new address.  You can check it out here:  benjaminleonard.com/books

8 Steps to a Painfree Back by Esther Gokhale

8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back: Natural Posture Solutions for Pain in the Back, Neck, Shoulder, Hip, Knee, and Foot (Remember When It Didn't Hurt)

8 Steps to a Pain Free Back is one of the most thought provoking book I have read.  Its power is twofold: first, its approach of looking a populations which have few back problems and second, its conciseness and practicality.  This book reminds me of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price except that Gokhale deals with teeth instead of backs.  Price was a dentist and went looking for answers about dental decay and ended up finding broadly useful information about nutrition.  Gokhale started her search looking for a way to solve her back pain and developed a broadly useful concept of posture.

The main difference between Price and Gokhale is the path they have chosen for spreading their message.  Price took a more scientific and theoretical approach in his lengthy book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.  He went deep into the concepts behind his theory, described experiments he had conducted, and gave a lot of supporting evidence.  This book was attempting to convince medical professionals, so the housewife looking to improve her cooking would not have gotten much out of it.  Gokhale started by offering lessons teaching people correct posture and has moved from there to writing a book showing people how to teach themselves correct posture.  To my knowledge she has never written a book going into depth about her theory, discussing the different populations she has interacted with, describing her experiments, and presenting in depth case studies.  Hopefully, she will do this sometime in the future.

8 Steps to a Painfree back has a introductory chapter giving the background for the book and describing how the reader go through the lessons.  Next there are 8 chapters each describing and teaching one aspect part of correct posture.  The reader is supposed to do only one chapter a week to allow the lessons to sink in before going on to the next chapter.  Finally, there is an appendix with exercises to help learn the posture.  The 8 lessons are:

1. Stretch sitting
2. Stretch lying on your back
3. Stack sitting
4. Stretch lying on your side
5. Using your inner corset
6. Tall standing
7. Hip Hinging
8. Glide walking

The book and lessons are well thought out, but many of the concepts are still difficult to grasp.  It is hard to go from a verbal desription to a mental image of how your body should look.  It is also difficult to actually make your body carryout a process you conceive in your mind.  The large number of pictures in the book make this conceptualization as easy as possible.  When she describes a concept you will be able to look at pictures of people doing the concept correctly and people making common mistakes.  This is very helpful.

Esther's posture can be summarized by a few key points.  It takes a lot of work to actually incorporate these into how you lie, sit, stand, and move. 

• The pelvis should be anteverted
• The back should be straight not hunched or swayed
• The shoulders should be back and down
• The feet should be arched
• The head should be upright with the chin down and neck straight

My one reservation about the Gokhale Method is glide walking.  I do not feel that glide walking is the optimal way to walk, but on the other hand I am not exactly sure where it goes wrong.  I have had trouble glide walking in snow or slick places and I feel that the ideal method of walking should work in all circumstances.

The Icon and the Ax by James Billington

The Icon and the Axe : An Interpretive History of Russian Culture

 
The Icon and the Ax is subtitled an "interpretive history" of Russia.  It tells the story of Russia from its origins as the Kievian Rus through the 1960s Soviet Union when the book was written.  The author, James Billington, loves Russia and this comes through clearly when he laments the Soviet destruction of Russian culture. During early Russian history the focus of the story is on leaders and historical events.  As the narrative draws closer to the present the emphasis shifts to philosophy, thought and the arts in Russia. If you are interested in Russia and willing to invest some effort, I strongly recommend reading this book. 

Depending on your previous knowledge you will gain different insights from this book.  If you already about the history of the arts (writing, plays, music, painting...) and philosophy in Europe, you will come to understand how Russian thought compares, draws, and influenced European thought.  If you already know the facts and events in Russian history, you gain a better understanding of why these events happened and how they affected the Russian psyche.  If you start without much knowledge of their of these topics (my case), you will learn the plot of Russian history and gain insights into how Russians think.  Unfortunately, if you do not already have a lot of background information, the book will take some effort to follow.  There are allusions to and discussion  many different thinkers, politicians, czars, books, plays, paintings and historical events.  It can be difficult to keep them all straight at times. 

The Icon and the Ax and is long and densely written.  Each chapter is about 40 pages and I read at a pace of one chapter per weekend.  It was limited by the amount of mental energy it took to read and digest the information in each chapter.  Reading at this pace it will take a long time to finish this book, so I recommend taking some notes after each chapter.  This will help you retain the information and you can refer back to these notes while reading future chapters.  Reading this book is a worthwhile--but not easy--mental endeavor.

While many threads ran through this book, in this review I will only discuss a few of the ones I found especially interesting.

• When you read at all about Russia, you are guaranteed to hear about the intellectual battle over whether to follow Europe or Asia and how Russia is part European and part Asian.  I was always a little confused by this because the Russians (to my knowledge) have never interacted extensively with the Japanese, Chinese or Indians (the centers of the East) and are not Buddhists. 
  
  I got a better understanding of this struggle from this book.  The Mongol (Tartar) invasion which overthrew the Kievan Rus had a large influence on the development of Russia.  The Tartars remain in Russia to this day and the effects of their invasion linger.  The Russian have at times both hated the Tartars and viewed them as national heroes. 
  
  There are also the "Old Believers" who wanted to follow the traditional Orthodox Christian beliefs and Russian ways and fled from Peter the Great into Siberia.  The Old Believers and their thoughts have been present ever since.  Their "Eastern" ideals battled with Peter's "Western" secular goals. 
  
  Various philosophical ideas from Western Europe have flowed into Russia and been met with resistance.  They have been seen both as corrupting Russia and destroying its morals at the same time as being a path to wealth and greatness. 

• Russian leaders have often tried to import the successes of Western Europe without following the reforms that Western Europe underwent to attain these successes.  This led to numerous problems because the Western successes were a byproduct of political reforms and decreasing government power not random occurrences. 
  
  A cyclical pattern ensued.  A Czar would bring in intellectuals from the West, start printing presses, and grow the universities in the hopes of growing industry and developing a Russia as a cultural leader.  Intellectual discourse would ensue, but eventually the intellectuals would question the Czar.  Why should he/she be an absolute ruler?  What gave him the right to rule the country at his whim? 
  
  Academic discussion of this matter was not what the Czar had envisioned.  It was upsetting to a monarch whose power had not had his power checked like those of the Western monarchs.  If left unchecked, discussion of this topic probably would have spelled an end to the Czars.  The Czars seeing this problem would crack down on the intellectuals and roll back the freedoms. 
  
  On the surface the "openings" were major changes, but most of the change was shallow and in the end a facade.  

• Russian thought is very dark.  My first experience of it was reading Crime and Punishment my senior year in high school.  Until recently I hadn't thought of this as being typical Russian literature, but it appears to be typically Russian. 
  
  Over the course of history many Russian intellectuals have committed suicide or gone insane.  Hamlet is one of the most popular plays in Russia.  Morbid thoughts probably stem from Russian suffering and failed political reforms.  At low points in Russian history so many men were being killed that the sex ratio reached 20 to 1 in parts of Russia. 
  
  Unsurprisingly Russians are drawn to theories where their suffering leads to some greater good or redemption for the world.  They like unifying theories of history which bring meaning to their suffering and a direction for the future.  

• I had not realized the disillusionment and consequent apathy Russians felt at the time of the writing of this book (the 1960s).  The Russians lost a war to Japan and the First World War at the beginning of the 20th century.  Both wars involved massive losses of life.  The Russians then endured Stalin:  his purges and destruction killed millions.  When things could not get any worse, the Second World War came.  Although the Russians won World War II, they were nearly drowned in their own blood.  When Russia emerged from World War II, Stalin remained at its helm and his killing continued. 
  
  Billington talks about how the Communist leadership was upset [at the time of the book's writing] by the apathy of the youth.  The young generation was not weeded by war and had access to more education than their parents, yet they would not buy into the plan the communist party had for them.  How can you blame someone who has seen their father, grandfather, and probably great grand father killed by the government for not expecting to live a life worth investing in?  How can you blame someone whose grandparents fought for a revolution which turned into a bloodbath for not working for great societal changes? 
  
  Every Russian you meet today had a family member killed in World War II.  In the 1960s these dead men and women were not ancestors but parents, siblings, and friends. 

The Road to Serfdom

The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek)

Reading The Road to Serfdom by Fredrich A. Hayek was an eye opening experience for me. Amazingly this is a short book, just a political pamphlet.  It was written in 1944 aimed at the political controversies of the years following the Second World War. I do not get the feeling that Hayek wrote it this book as a tomb for the ages; I think he was only writing it for the next few political cycles. He talks about the views of specific political leaders and academics and he refers to specific feelings and sentiments which only existed in the wake of World War II. Nevertheless this book is applicable today. When I read it, every other page I would see a quote which I thought I should write down and use in this review. Luckily, I was not near my computer while reading this otherwise I might have transcribed half of the book. I ended up chosing not to include any quotes in this review so that I could focus on the overall message.

The Road to Serfdom was written for Great Britain after the Second World War. Great Britain was deciding what its policy should be after the war during the reconstruction period. Both the elites and the general public were pushing for more central planning and trying to decide how to structure the world for growth and prosperity following the war. Hayek, an Austrian, understood the German personality and the history of German thought leading up to World War II. He had moved moved from his native land to join the London School of Economics in 1931 and thus avoided being in occupied Europe during the war. As Hayek followed British discourse and thought after the war, he realized that the British train of thinking was following the same path as German thought and sought to warn the British.

The main point which Hayek tries to get across is that you cannot have central planning and freedom. The two cannot are mutually exclusive. If you decide to direct a nation on a course, you cannot allow people to do as they choose. People must do what the state tells them and not what they feel is best. For central planning to work you must have a dictator because a democracy cannot get agreement on the very specific directions and goals required for planning an economy. Also laws must become arbitrary in order for central planners to direct society. A law that has a fixed meaning allows individuals to pursue their own agendas if they can figure out ways to avoid actions proscribed by the law. To direct society, a direction must be chosen and the planner must constantly change the meaning of the law to shepherd "his" people from wandering off in pursuit of their own dreams and goals.

Hayek does not say that this is a new trend for Britain. He says Britain had been traveling this path for some time but at a much slower pace than Germany. Furthermore, Britains before the turn of the century would have been shocked by how little liberty the populace had: the 1950s we dream about today were actually tyranical compared to its past.

Hayek places struggle as a battle between German and Anglo-Saxon thought. Anglo-Saxon thought spread outward and eastward until 1870. For much of Western Civilization liberty had been expanding, but in 1870 (Hayek does not say why this year) the tide turned and German thought based on collectivism began to push back the concepts of liberalism and freedom.

There are a number of interesting anecdotes which Hayek discusses in the book. I will only cover a couple here. We all know how Nazi Germans hated the Jews, but we attribute it to some vague propaganda put out by Hitler. Hayek gives a more reasonable explaination. The Jews were already outsiders and at the bottom of German society. As centralization advanced and the government positions became more prestigious in Germany.  More and more Germans began working for the State or in centralized state aided monopolies:  in these positions they had prestige, stability, and fixed wages. The Jews were pushed into the most despised jobs in the economy (entrepreneuring) because they could not get the cushy government jobs. Since they operated in a more free-market sector of the economy than the the Germans many of them ended up becoming wealthy. The Germans already hated businessmen and the fact that the outsiders were becoming wealthy at this hated profession made them hate the Jews even more.

Another interesting aspect of the book is that Hayek is not an anarchist and envisions a role for Government in society. He might be considered a statist by libertarians today as he conceeds many points that no self respecting libertarian would dream of letting slide. This is a sign of libertarianism's intellectual development over the past 60 years.

In closing, this is a short readable book that will open your eyes to the dangers of central planning and the havock it can visit upon society. It will open your eyes to warning signs that you had seen before. The arguments Hayek makes are very concise and convincing.