This website is basically a list of books I’ve read now. Anyway, here are three more:

Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett; read by Daniel Everett.

This book has been on my bookshelf for at least a few years, and on my hypothetical reading list since John Colapinto’s 2007 New Yorker Profile of Daniel Everett. Everett was a missionary stationed among the Pirahã, a group living along the Maici River in northwestern Brazil. He lived there for decades, studying the Pirahã language in order to eventually produce a translation of the New Testament. During this time, the Pirahã — who do not have creation myths and are apparently happier than just about any other group of people — managed to avoid conversion to Christianity, and in fact ended up converting Everett to atheism.

In the meantime, Everett made a series of remarkable and highly controversial discoveries about the Pirahã language, which struck at one of the core tenets of modern linguistics. Namely, Everett called into question the concept of Universal Grammar, the idea that certain aspects of linguistic syntax are baked into human genetics. This idea, popularized by Noam Chomsky and extremely influential in mid-twentieth century linguistics, includes the stipulation that the syntax of human languages is recursive; that is to say, sentences can have other sentences embedded inside of them. This is apparently not the case in Pirahã, and Everett’s claims to that effect were hotly contested in the halls of linguistic departments in the late aughts.

(As something of an aside, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes was published about a year after I graduated with a degree in linguistics from the University of California. My studies focused on syntax, largely due to my early encounters with Geoff Pullum during the class he taught on Chomsky. Pullum was highly critical of Chomsky, but he also clearly had a deep appreciation for Chomsky’s contributions to the field. I enjoyed the class — and the other classes I took from Pullum — very much. And, Pullum apparently advised Everett as he was writing Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes.)

As a book, Don’t Sleep is somewhat odd. It vacillates between travelogue, and ethnography, and linguistic research. Everett’s reading of the audiobook is somewhat awkward, but it’s also quite helpful to hear his pronunciations of the Pirahã, which I would not otherwise be capable of following. I was probably most interested in Everett’s commentary on linguistic determinism (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), which suggests (compellingly but contestedly) that language actively shapes our understanding of the world. But I also saw a more meditative point in Everett’s experience: That separate and apart from language, there are other ways to experience life. Take, for instance, the book’s title, which is apparently a common way to wish someone goodnight in Pirahã. It is meant literally, i.e. that you should not sleep much, and reflects a Pirahã cultural belief that sleep instills weakness. I may disagree with this, but I should also note that it is a valid way to live, and I would be well advised to consider the conditions under which it might be worth adopting myself.

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

I approached Hunt, Gather, Parent with openness, but still was surprised at how convincing it was. I dare say that it has produced a more pronounced change in the way I parent than anything else I’ve read.

Hunt, Gather, Parent was the subject of a series of long threads in SOW’s Members’ Slack, and while come critiques were made, the overall tenor was positive. The book is essentially one person’s journey towards a more supportive and less conflict-ridden parenting experience; the author, a reporter for NPR’s Science Desk, traveled with her three-year-old kid to visit three hunter-gatherer societies. These experiences changed her parenting style dramatically, and she proposes that western parents could benefit from similar shifts.

I cannot do Doucleff’s arguments justice here, so let me highlight a few takeaways:

Doucleff argues that western parenting traditions are only a few generations old, and are out of step with human evolution and childhood development. We evolved in hunter-gatherer communities, and children are well-suited to the family structures and rhythms of hunter-gatherer communities. So, perhaps we should try to understand how those communities support childhood development, and replicate them where doing so is practical.
The lesson I was most struck by was on kids’ roles as helpers. My kids, who are four and seven, are constantly asking to help me with things, and I have often either rejected them outright or sandboxed their efforts so tightly that they could no longer truly be called “help.” I think this was a mistake, and today I’m making a much more concerted effort to enlist and actually rely on my kids’ help — with all manner of tasks.
I also have been attempting to drastically reduce the number of instructions I give my kids. Doucleff suggests topping out at one to three instructions per hour, a number that I regularly exceed by at least one order of magnitude. One way I’m working to reduce this is by acknowledging my kids’ actions and predicting their consequences. Instead of telling them not to climb our lawn furniture, I tell them that if they do climb, they might fall off and hurt themselves. Instead of telling them not to rip leaves off all the trees on our block, I tell them that our neighbors put a lot of time and energy into maintaining those trees, and that they’ll be offended and upset to find the trees hurt. These explanations may sound soft or lax, but in all honesty they’re at least as effective as the constant scolding and commands that I might otherwise issue — and the reduced conflict definitely makes me happier and more pleasant to be around.

To me, this is Doucleff’s strongest argument: Being in conflict with my kids sucks, and it really isn’t that effective, and at the end of a day of conflict I often feel like shit. And ultimately my kids are pretty capable: of starting the bathtub, and putting their laundry away, and learning — not from my instruction but from their own experimentation — how their actions, and their effects, are received by the community in which we live.

The Non-Jewish Jew: And Other Essays by Isaac Deutscher.

This book took me a while to get through, and large portions of it were beyond my full comprehension. Its title essay, The Message of the Non-Jewish Jew, is available to read online for free, and should be reasonably accessible to modern audiences, but much of what Deutscher discusses in the rest of the book is in discourse with ideas which are now three-quarters of a century old, and I often found it difficult to remain engaged and excited to proceed.

That said, much of Deutscher’s message remains relevant. A self-described Marxist of Jewish origin, Deutscher was born in Poland in 1907 and was on a Rabbinical path before becoming an atheist. Prior to World War II he was an outspoken anti-Zionist, though his opinions on Israel evolved (he calls it “a necessity” in light of Nazism); in the end he took the stance that it was silly to begin a Jewish nation “in the middle of this century in which the nation-state is falling into decay.” From my perspective, in 2024, this viewpoint is hopelessly naive and idealistic: The nation-state remains alive and well, and it feels rather impossible to imagine how Zionism — or the broader Jewish exodus from Europe, which Deutscher clearly sees as necessary — would have existed outside of the nation-state paradigm.

But I did not come to Deutscher for commentary on Israel; I came to him for commentary on atheistic Jewish identity. Here his views are also a bit idealistic and probably anachronistic as well:

Are we now going to accept the idea that it is racial ties or ‘bonds of blood’ that make up the Jewish community? Would not that be another triumph for Hitler and his degenerate philosophy? If it is not race, what then makes a Jew? Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I, therefore, a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.

I say this is anachronistic because while it might have felt reasonable for Jews to claim at least partial ownership over persecution and extermination in the 1950s, much has occurred since then. Nevertheless, I find the idea about as compelling as any that I have access to when I consider my own ethnic identity. I am twenty-five percent Ashkenazi, but religious Judaism has not be a part of my family’s story for more than a century. But I would like to think that I stand in solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated, whatever their origins and beliefs. I’m not sure exactly how calling myself a Jew would aid me in that solidarity, but having that as an option feels like it could aide my internal discourse.