Shy Creatures

Chambers, Clare. Shy Creatures. New York: Mariner. 2024. Print.

First Sentences:

 

In all failed relationships, there is a point that passes unnoticed at the tiume, which can later be identified as the beginning of the declined. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park. 

Description:

The premise of Clare Chambers' Shy Creatures was enough to hook me for good. A mute, shy man with uncut hair and a beard to his waist is discovered in a run-down Victorian house living with a dotty, aged aunt. Nearby neighbors did not know a man was living in this house, never having seen him outside in 20 years. 

William Tapping is admitted to a nearby phychiatric hospital where Helen Hansfor, a thirty-something art therapist, takes a special interest in his case. William talks with no one, but displays a brilliant talent for drawing.

The book gradually unfolds his story, in reverse chronological order, starting with the disturbance that led police to his home and his subsiquent admittance to the hospital, all the way back to his origins that led him to that point. His is a truly fascinating tale, one that is unpredictable, emotional, and powerful from end to start as the pieces of his life story slowly fall into place.

Meanwhile, on a parallel track, the life of Helen also unfolds. She is having a three-year affair with one of the hospital doctors, Gil Rudden, a married man with a family, a giant in the field of psychiatry, and her immediate superior. While they meet secretly, waiting for the day when his children leave their home in a few years, there is conflict on the treatment of the mute recluse, William Tapping, under their care. 

I think that is all you will get out of me. A very gripping story with highly sympathetic and often stubborn characters interplaying throughout the novel right up to its final conclusion. A great, engrossing read.

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Michaelides, Alex. The Silent Patient.    

A woman is found with a shotgun over her dead husband. There is no doubt she has killed him., But during the trial and for the six years she is in a psychiatric hospital, she has not said a word. Why? And can the new doctor get through to her somehow and learn her story? (previously reviewed here) 

 

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

 

The Silent Patient

Michaelides, Alex. The Silent Patient. New York: Celadon 2019. Print

First Sentences:

Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. 

Description:

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Alicia Berenson, the famous painter, has shot killed her photographer husband, Gabriel. She is found standing in the room with his dead body when the police arrive. Only her fingerprints on the rifle left beside his body, And she is covered in his blood as well as her own.

But she is completely silent during her arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, and then during the six years of her commitment to a psychiatric ward. Why doesn't she talk, plead her case, or at least tell everyone what went on? It will be up to Theo Farber, a forensic psychotherapist, to try to convince her to speak and reveal the events surrounding this murder.

Thus begins Alex Michaelides' intriguing new mystery, The Silent Patient. The criminal psychiatrist Farber has been intrigued by the Berenson's case since it first appeared in the newspapers. He applies for a position at The Grove psychiatric unit where Alicia is being held in hopes of having her assigned as his patient.

But his efforts to win her trust, to get her to even acknowledge his presence or change her deadpan expression, prove both fruitless and controversial for other staff members. Can Faber get some results before the board of executives for The Grove shut down the facility as non-profitable?

This is a very quiet mystery despite the underlying violence of the opening murder. It presents the struggles that medical staff have with conflicting treatment methods, publicity, and funding. While the murder itself seems an open-and-shut case, Alicia and her motivation behind the act are complete blanks. She continues to appear unable or unwilling to make a sound either as a confession or plea for innocence.

But then Alicia's diary comes to light, and it is her writings that we, as readers, have been following in the story all along. Slowly, we begin to unravel the truth. But will Farber and the staff of The Grove be able to piece together her ramblings to understand all the events? And if so, what happens to Alicia?

And believe me, there are some unexpectedly delicious surprises in store, right up to the final pages. 

Loved the suspense, the mystery, the unreliable voices, the silent character, and especially the final solution presented by author Michaelides. A really compelling, interesting read. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Lutz, Lisa. The Passenger  

In the opening sentences, we meet Tonya who is looking down at her husband's body after he had fallen down the stairs. Pushed? Fell? It is unknown, but Tonya decides to take off, not willing to answer to the police. She travels across the country protecting this and other secrets, taking on new names, jobs, and fellow travelers right up to the unexpected revelations in the last pages. Highly recommended. (previously reviewed here)

Best Boy

Gottlieb, Eli. Best Boy. New York: LIveright. 2015. Print.

First Sentences:

Payton Living Center was the sixth place in a row Momma had taken me but neither of us knew it was the one where I'd stay forever and ever..

Description:

Todd Aaron has lived in the sprawling Payton Living Center, a "therapeutic community" for over 40 years. He has a form of autism that makes him a loner and occasionally releases"volts" in his head when under stress. Todd suffered an abusive childhood with his father and brother, but now has settled into a quiet life. He is even considered a "Best Boy" at the facility for always doing what he is told, an example in the other patients who live there. 

But in Eli Gottlieb's novel, Best Boy, new changes in his peaceful life have made Todd feel the stirrings of dissatisfaction. He is terrified of a new staff member who resembles his father and wants to be his friend. Todd gets a new roommate who constantly harasses him. And then he meets a new female patient who teaches him how to avoid taking his most crushing of meds. 

In response to all of these changes, Todd has begun to harbor a secret dream of escape from the Center and somehow get back to his childhood home.

The unhappiness kept getting larger and larger till finally I was so unhappy that it was raining all the time in my head even in sunshine and wherever I looked all I saw were gray dots of water falling sideways across the view. That was how I began to drown.

Todd knows how to read and studies the Encyclopedia Britannica ("Mr. B") that his mother gave him, as well as the computer ("Mr. C") for answers about his autism, medications, and other questions. With a roommate from Hell and few other friends, Todd's life is completely solitary as he deals with the Center's rules, his fears and now his new dream escape...until the day he actually sets off on his journey home.

Gottlieb has a simple, quiet writing style that allows readers to understanding the workings of narrator Todd's autistic mind and memories. Todd is a damaged man, but one who continues to question and seek answers to his world and his past, especially those that involve his beloved mother.

This is a powerful, challenging look at the life of an autistic man, a story that is not always pretty . But Todd is a survivor with inspiring strength and unflinching will to succeed against the obstacles he faces, physically and mentally.


Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Simsion, Graeme. The Rosie Project

A brilliant but socially inept professor seeks to find the perfect mate by creating a Wife Project questionnaire, but another completely unacceptable woman shows up in his life and leads him into another project to find her unknown father via genes. Very funny as well as enlightening about people with Asperger's Syndrome. (previously reviewed here)

Simon, Rachel. The Story of Beautiful Girl

A deaf man and silent pregnant woman escape from a prison-like hospital for the mentally retarded and, before being she is caught, gives the baby to a stranger with the only words spoken, :Hide her."  (previously reviewed here) 

An Anthropologist on Mars

Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Vintage. 1995. Print.

First Sentences:

Early in March 1986 I received the following letter:

I am a rather successful artist just past 65 years of age. On January 2nd of this year I was driving my car and was hit by a small truck on the passenger side of my vehicle. When visiting the emergency room of a local hospital, I was told I had a concussion. 

While taking an eye examination, it was discovered that I was unable to distinguish letters of colors. The letters appeared to be Greek letters. My vision was such that everything appeared to me as viewing a black and white television screen. 

Description:

Oliver Sacks is a practicing neurologist and professor at medical schools in New York including Columbia and New York University, as well as a consulting clinician at a chronic care facility. His experiences with people who have fascinating brain disorders make up his highly engaging book, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales.

In this collection, Sacks encounters and writes about such functioning, yet uniquely challenged individuals he works with including:

• An artist who, after a minor car accident, wakes to find he can only see the world in black and white. His can no longer distinguish even gradations of black, white, and gray, making his ability to paint frustratingly challenging;

• A surgeon with Tourette's Syndrome (and its accompanying uncontrollable tics, starts, verbal exclamations, and lurches), who still performs delicate surgeries;

• An autistic boy who can quickly and accurately draw complex architectural buildings in detail, even after only glimpsing them for a few seconds;

• A man, blind from birth, who regains his sight and the benefits, but also struggles with the challenges of living in a world of images where before there was only sound and his imagination;

• A 54-year-old artist who only creates paintings of the buildings in his small hometown in Italy, a location he left forever at age 15;

• An autistic woman who created her own business, invented unique machines and holding areas for cattle and other livestock, yet cannot relate to people and the language of social behavior. She must memorize how people act in various situations to remember and hopefully predict how she and others might respond to her. So strange is her distancing from other people and her own memorization of their actions that she says she feels like "an anthropologist on Mars."

Sacks interacts with these people as an interested friend rather than a prescribing doctor in a clinical setting. He converses with them as he tries to simply understand the characteristics of their particular situation, and more importantly how these people attempt to cope with their limitations.

Sacks is a great storyteller and writer, bringing both the naivete of someone looking on a peculiar situation for the first time, as well the in-depth analysis of a trained doctor and researcher using references to studies by experts in these fields to gain insights and possible explanations, but rarely solutions. 

Here are fascinating people, ably presented and befriended by Sacks, who relate their stories with a compassion and thoroughness which allow readers to fully experience the world of people successfully living with neurological disorders that might cripple others.

A heartfelt, scientific, and personal series of human stories that I guarantee will make you look at the lives of others with new admiration and insight into the challenges faces. And when you are done, I guarantee you will be thankful for your own fairly whole and normal life. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

The definitive collection of fascinatingly bizarre but true clinical experiences of Sacks with unusual neurological disorders, including lost memories, inability to recognize faces (including their own), ability to judge lying without hearing words, etc. Sacks treats all patients with respect as he seeks the cause and possible treatment of these cases.

Sacks, Oliver. Awakening

Intrigued by a group of people who contracted sleeping sickness just after World War ! and unable to move for decades, Sacks experiments on them with a new medicine that "wakes" them up to full consciousness, with unexpected results.

Quirkology

Wiseman, Richard. Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things. New York: Macmillan. 2007. Print

First Sentences:

I have long been fascinated with the quirky side of human behavior.

When I was a psychology undergraduate one of my first experiments involved standing for hours at London's King's Crossing railroad station look for people meeting partners who had just gotten off the train. The moment they locked in a passionate embrace, I would walk up to them, trigger a hidden stopwatch in my pocket, and ask "Excuse me. Do you mind taking part in a psychological experiment? How many seconds have passed since I said the words, 'Excuse me?'"

After querying about fifty such couples, I discovered that people greatly underestimate the passing of time when they are in love, or, as Albert Einstein once said, 'Sit with a beautiful woman for an hour and it seems like a minute, sit on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour -- that's relativity.'

Description:

Seems only logical that after last week's recommendation of a book about fictional "brain thieves" (who insert probes into people's brains, then released them into the world so their activities could be studied) that I should offer a follow-up of a real life psychologist who actually earns his livelihood studying how we humans behave in everyday activities. 

Of course, his scientific, carefully-constructed studies lead to solid data and therefore logical conclusions about all sorts of quirky, superstitious, strange and unusual patters of behavior. The author, Richard Wiseman, calls his field of research "Quirkology," and presents numerous serious, but wacky behavioral studies of these curiosities in his book, Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Everyday Things.

For many years, Wiseman and like-minded scientists have conducted research into every corner of behavior observing thousands of people worldwide in controlled situations. 

I have examined the telltale signs that give away a liar, explored how our personalities are shaped by month of birth, uncovered the secret science behind speed dating and personal ads, and investigated what a sense of humor reveals about the innermost workings of the mind...measured the amount of horn-honking when cars become stalled at traffic lights...discovered whether suicide rates are related to the amount of country music played on national radio...and proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Friday the thirteenth is bad for your health.

Less you think this a frivolous waste of time for him to study and you to read about, let me assure you that Wiseman is dead serious about his work. He pursues his interesting studies with meticulous attention to detail to filter out any chance of corrupting the data and prejudicing the conclusions. 

The work is serious science, and much of it has important implications for the way in which we live our lives and structure our society.

Each chapter is a different series of studies about a question regarding the psychology behind incidents in ordinary life, such as "Can we distinguish between real and fake smiles?" "Does your birthday actually have any influence on the luck you experience in your life?" Can we tell when a person is lying or telling the truth?" and "Are there words to use in personal ads that will provide a positive response?" Wiseman looks at other studies done in this area and then creates his own live experiments to test new hypotheses about behavior. When you are done with the chapter, you cannot help but agree with whatever conclusions he reaches because the data has been taken from such a large sample audience and the tests controlled so carefully to prevent misinterpretation.

Let's take a look at some of the studies conducted and described in Quirkology by Wiseman and other scientists in this field:

• Does the position of planets actually affect personality and key events? (He decides to study similarities in "Time Twins," those individuals born at exactly the same moment, an also gauge the accuracy of astrological predictions);

• Is there evidence that when you are born influences the luck you fell you receive in your life? (Extensive studies in Australia and Europe show that the people who describe themselves as lucky were born in the warmer summer months);

• Can the way you trace a "Q" on your forehead determine whether you  are a high self-monitor (the center of attention, easily adaptable) or low  self-monitor (guided by inner feelings, tell fewer lies)?

• Can people tell when someone is lying on television? (Wiseman's films an actor on television talking about his favorite movie, then films a second interview with the actor describing a different movies as his favorite. Thirty thousand people phoned in their opinion about which was his true favorite, but results showed they did no better in their choice than if they flipped a coin);

• Can people be lead to believe they have experienced an event that they did not participate in? (Wiseman shows how the false-memory is easily created in people, including Ronald Reagan who told a story to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society about when the Medal was awarded to a pilot who chose to go down with his plane and a crew member who could not escape. Unfortunately, that event never happened and was really the plot from a movie that had become embedded in Reagan's memory as a factual event);

• Can subliminal suggestion inserted into movies or television shows actually influence whether you want to buy a specific product or behave in a prescribed manner?

• Does where you live influence your name? (Examining U.S. census records "uncovered an overrepresention of people called Florence living in Florida, George in Georgia, Kenneth in Kentucky, and Virgil in Virginia...Helen in St. Helen...more Charleses in St. Charles, [and] more Thomases in St. Thomas");

• What's the ideal percentage of talk about "self vs. other" to follow at speed dating tables to increase your chances of receiving a phone number of the person to whom you are talking?

• Is there one joke that is considered the funniest? (This idea was based on a Monty Python sketch where the world's funniest joke makes everyone die of laughter and is therefore banned for warfare. Wiseman constructs a website to solicit favorite jokes and evaluate the humorousness of submitted jokes. He receives over 40,000 jokes and 350,000 evaluations. And yes, he does identify a consensus funniest joke, as well as the jokes most popular with women, Germans, scientists, and Dave Barry fans.)

One incredibly weird study after another is fascinatingly researched, constructed, tested, and analyzed with results that are both surprising and wonderful. They are short and wryly funny, with many studies and examples offered for each quirky topic. Every study makes you learn more about how we respond to each other and the world around us with all our beliefs, intelligence, and idiosyncrasies. 

It is a book that will make you think in completely different ways, and offers a plethora of topics to mystify and delight everyone you tell them to. Of course no one will believe that you can tell whether a person is lying just by listening for specific words, but in Quirkology, you now have the scientific proof to back your wild statements. And what a pleasure that is!

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Wansink, Brian. Mindless Eating  

Fascinating experiments constructed at the Cornell laboratory to discover unknown influences on ordinary people that determine why and how much we eat. Fascinatingly wonderful and will change how you eat, guaranteed! (previously reviewed here)

Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball

Spencer, Scott. Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1973. Print

First Sentences:

My desk is shaped like a kidney and has a slight wobble. 

I have finally learned to draw the curtains to the small window in the parallelogram of senseless noise they call my office. That's something: what we call progress.

Description:

Sometimes just the title can pull you in so you at least have to open the book and check out the first sentence. Who can resist a title like Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball by Scott Spencer? Such a book could be about anything. Any uniquely tantalizing title like this deserves to have his opening pages explored. And this book pays off in each of my "quality read" requirements of great content, character, and plot.

The novel is narrated by Paul Galambos, an experimental psychologist who teaches and researches at a small college. He considers himself "one of the most brilliant, lonely men alive," and is frustratingly going nowhere in his career and life. In an effort to escape his current position, Paul answers an advertisement from NESTER (New England Sensory Testing and Engineering Research) for a job that offers "Full Experimental and Executive Freedom / Unlimited Opportunity." 

And then the oddities begin. After being pushed down the stairs, hospitalized, drugged, and abducted to a motel room, Paul is interviewed by NESTER representatives. He is asked his professional and personal goals (power, money, fame, and maybe danger) and his willingness to give up everything to achieve them. He gladly signs a contract and is relocated to a vast compound full of researchers like himself. He is given a desk, folders of research topics, and freedom to pursue as many interesting theories as he can devise. His dreams have come true, even if his new situation seem to him a bit mysterious.

NESTER, he learns, is a data-gathering operation, studying human behavior in all aspects of life, compiling and analyzing minute responses from the brain and then developing conclusions about behavior that can be sold to companies. To be able to collect this information, ordinary people are captured off the street by NESTER's  "Force Recruiters," have electrodes surgically-implanted into their brains to record info during their future experiences, and then are released unharmed, hypnotized to forget everything about NESTER and their time there. 

Paul begins his work as a brain thief. Working under the sign, "Imagination: The Big Plus," Paul's first study comes up with data about the human gamma motor neuron that shows

changes in furniture styles cause changes in posture which cause changes in susceptibility to anxiety stimuli. In other words, it is possible to design breakfast nook chairs that will send legions of men to work each day with their teeth absolutely on edge, their knuckles white.

His work is highly praised, But Paul later is a bit surprised when he reads a notice about his death and upcoming funeral, which he of course is not allowed to attend. He has now been erased from the world, but Paul doesn't really mind. He is happy and challenged in his work. He is, however, slightly irritated that he can only leave the compound once a month along with three fellow workers and a chaperon/driver who makes sure they all return. His salary is generous, but in the compound he has no access to it. 

Fascinatingly weird stuff, huh? Plausible, yet highly off the chart. 

Soon, Paul begins to suspect everything is not quite above board at NESTER and that maybe this is not the life for him. He is worried that he, too, is being "tapped, taped, and tabulated." He starts keeping a secret journal (this book), his memoirs full of his secret work for NESTER. Naturally, he writes in bed at night under his blankets, humming and singing to mask the tiny sound of pen on paper in case he is being observed himself. Quietly he looks for an escape.

Spencer is an undiscovered author for me, one whose oddball work I will definitely read more of. This is his first novel prior to writing Endless Love, the tear-jerking novel of young love made into a movie by Franco Zeffirelli starring Brooke Shields, and most recently Man in the Woods, a creepy mystery about an unplanned, anonymous encounter between strangers that ends in an (accidental?) killing, perfect because there is nothing to tie the perpetrator to the crime... except his own conscience. I loved it.

For now, let me just say that Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball is a loop-de-loop doozy of a book that never lets you quite get your feet settled on what is going on and which off-beat character you can trust. I highly recommend it for lovers of black humor, science fiction, secret organizations, and off-beat narrators.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Spencer, Scott. Man in the Woods

Two men accidentally meet in a wooded area of a park, argue, and get into a fight in which one man is killed. The survivor feels no one saw this fight and no evidence exists that could link him to the stranger, much less his death, so he tries to go on with his life, carefully guarding his secret.

In Cold Blood

Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Random House.1965. Print

First Sentences:

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there."

Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the country side, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes.

Description:

With the recent death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, I decided to re-watch his brilliant Oscar-winning performance in Capote which depicts Truman Capote's research into the murder of four family members in their home in rural Kansas. I had never read the book that Capote created from this investigation, so decided it was time. Luckily, I had a copy on my bookshelf and immediately immersed myself in In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences by Truman Capote. And what a great ride it turned out to be for me.

One quiet, ordinary day in 1959 in a small town in Kansas, four members of the Clutter family -- two parents and their two teenage children -- are found in their home bound, gagged, and shot in the head with a shotgun at close range. There is no evidence of a robbery, no witness, and no suspects. 

Who are these people, both the victims and the killers? What is the motive? What kind of town is this where this could happen? Who is doing the investigation and what are their chances of discovering the criminals and other answers?

It's a bit unnerving to commit yourself to reading about a real life multiple murder. But Capote uses a calm, matter-of-fact style that removes any flaming prose, judgment, and gratuitous details of this shooting to avoid shock for shock's sake. Using his original style of the "nonfiction novel," Capote researches and presents the facts clearly and in detail from reports, interviews, conversations, articles, etc., but fabricates conversations, thoughts, and organizes the actions into a compelling, highly readable narrative.

Like the first sentences shown above, there is a calmness to his words which paint the murder setting as quiet, isolated, and "out there."  But within these quiet descriptions, Capote gives subtle hints of something else, with adjectives of "lonesome area," "hard blue skies," and "barbed" local accent. The narrative lulls you, but its starkness and edge somehow pull you in deeper and deeper. It's as if you are reading the details of a police report or listening in on conversations: completely devoid of emotion, personality, and judgment by the writer. 

Slowly, events in the town and its people unfold as Capote provides background leading up to the murders. Using interviews, statements, news articles, he tells about the people, the actual murders, the killers' motives, and the steps the law took to pursue the murderers. Each family member and town person is carefully fleshed out, their lives, opinions, and goals uncovered. 

When the victims are discovered, townspeople react with natural fear, suspicion, and new locks on every door. Capote skillfully depicts their suspicions about each neighbor, adding locks to their doors for the first time. The book is about facts, but more importantly the feelings and motivations of people who commit a crime, the victims, and those left behind to deal with their new reality.

Also revealed are personalities of the murderers as they drive together to the Clutter farm, commit the violence, and then leave the crime scene far behind. As we ride along with the killers, their earlier home life, families, and criminal activities are revealed. Are they victims themselves or have they simply chosen to be cold-blooded killers? Should we feel sympathy for them or revulsion?

The local police, overwhelmed by the crime, call in the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and its top agent to take over the investigation. But no leads, no witnesses, and no motive frustrate him and his team for weeks. The killers are long gone.

Capote's taut narrative follows first the investigation, then switches over to the escaping murderers, then back again to the investigation to provide tension as to whether there will be a clean escape or an arrest. 

Capote has created a masterpiece of narration, facts, and personalities. He is a skilled storyteller, no matter the grisly subject matter. The style is unemotional, clear, honest - almost like it, too, was written in cold blood.

Fantastic. Riveting. Taut. What else can I say but read it.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Capote, Truman. Other Voices, Other Rooms

Capote's first novel, the sensitive story of a young boy who sets off to meet his father who abandoned him at birth. 

Haruf, Kent. Plainsong

A pregnant high school girls enters the life of two elderly bachelor farmers is the small town of Holt, Colorado on the edge of the plains.  

Mindless Eating

Wansink, Brian. Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. New York: Bantam, 2006. Print    

First Sentences:

Everyone -- every single one of us -- eats how much we eat largely because of what's around us.

We overeat not because of hunger but because of family and friends, packages and plates, names and numbers, labels and lights, colors and candles, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers. This list is almost as endless as it's invisible. Most of us are blissfully unaware of what influences how much we eat.

Description:

Books about health, diet, exercise, and routes toward an improved lifestyle always fascinate me. So of course, Brian Wansink's  Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think called out to me. As I get older, the food that attracts me changes, often not for the better. Reading that outside factors unconsciously pull me to eat certain foods and that I might counteract these factors to lose weight certainly had my interest from the first sentences.

Mindless Eating presents Wansink's fascinating experiments which reveal overwhelming evidence to destroy our cherished myth that what we eat is determined by our hunger, by the food we like, and by the mood we are in. The book instead focuses on the psychological forces at play which lure us to overeat, even by only a few calories a day. 

Wansink's dietary premise is simple. Let's say your daily nutritional requirement is 2,000 calories per day. If you try a run-of-the-mill deprivation diet and take in only 1,000 calories a day, you will definitely feel a difference: loss of energy; maybe a slowing down physically and mentally; cravings for more food. On the other hand, if you were to intake 3,000 calories on a day like Thanksgiving, you again would feel the effects of overeating: sluggishness, sleepiness, etc. Your body always knows and reacts when it is over or under fed.

But for smaller increases or decreases, the body can be completely fooled and unaware. In Mindless Eating, Wansink points out that rather than stuffing ourselves at meals, our more typical eating behavior is to add small amounts of calories, say 100 - 200, over the daily nutritional requirement of 2,000, so small an amount that we don't even realize we are taking it in. 

At the end of the year, one might think "How did I gain those 5-10 pounds? I didn't change my diet at all." Those 100 - 200 daily caloric increases add up. Wansink reasons that if a person could decrease his/her calories taken in "mindlessly," those same 10 pounds would be lost each year rather than gained. No special diets, no deprivation, simple to understand. Sounds easy, huh?

Wansink, who is Chair of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell University, runs the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. This facility features a restaurant where he can try real-life eating variables (dish size, waitstaff attitude, table shape, lighting, etc.) in a controlled environment to observe what factors affect the way people eat. 

In one of his non-lab studies, he gave people at a real movie theater a soda and medium or large size  bucket of popcorn. Unknown to them, this was very stale 5-day-old popcorn. After the show, all popcorn bags were weighed to see how much people ate. Despite the negative taste, people with the larger bags ate 173 more calories ("21 more dips into the bucket") than those with smaller portions. 

Exit surveys showed these people admitted they had eaten too much popcorn, even when one movie-goer said it tasted like "styrofoam packing peanuts." Repeated tests of this experiment confirmed that the results were unchanged by the movie shown, the city, and the hunger level of the audience: the bigger bucket people always ate significantly more inedible popcorn.

In another study, Wansink had waiters at his Cornell test restaurant give a complimentary glass of very cheap wine to diners sitting in one half of the room. This wine was introduced by the waiters and labeled as a product of a new "California" winery. Diners on the other half of the restaurant received the very same cheap wine, which was now labeled and introduced as coming from a "North Dakota" winery. 

The meal, atmosphere, waitstaff, etc. were all the same. At the end of the meal, those with the "California" wine ate 11% more food and stayed in the restaurant an additional 10 minutes compared to the North Dakota wine drinkers. 

Wansink presents human eating behavior depicted from many other experiments he designed to test factors such as size of plates, packaging, location of food (on desk vs. in drawer vs. six feet away), eating in complete darkness, renaming food, mood of the consumers, etc. Each chapter summarizes the conclusions of the studies, then proposes specific "Reengineering Strategies" to help us be aware of these nefarious influences on our eating and then offer strategies to avoid those additional mindless calories.

The writing style is simple, easy to understand, and clear in its implications. The studies are cleverly constructed and I found the test subjects actions to be remarkably similar to my own eating habits. It is fascinating to understand the subtle factors in play that encourage us to consume food, and through this awareness how we might change the way we eat.

One interesting side note. When Wansink revealed the purpose of each study to his subjects, they overwhelmingly said that, while others might have had their eating influenced by the size of the package, the name on the wine label, the plating, the menu description, etc., those factors did not come into play for them. And, of course, they had eaten exactly according to the pattern, just as did everyone else who fell prey to the psychological factors around the food. Hmmmm ...

Happy reading (and eating!).

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

Comments

Previous posts

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Taubes, Gary. Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It   

Taubes' extensive research from a huge number of studies reaches the controversial conclusion that the "eat less, exercise more" theory of weight loss does not hold true. It is what you eat, according to this controversial and compelling summary of a huge number of available data on eating, food, lifestyle, and weight.