The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris is quite a book. Her basic thesis is that children are influenced far more by their peers than by their parents. She first proposed this in 1995, in an article entitled "Where Is the Child's Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development," published in Psychological Review. Here's a nice speech she gave to the American Psychological Association in which she gives a good overview of her theory. In 1999 she published "The Nurture Assumption," which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

In the first part of the book, she examines the history of what she calls the "nurture assumption." Everybody has heard of Nature vs. Nurture: the theory that our behavioral traits are either determined by our genes (nature) or our environment (nurture). The "nurture assumption" is the modern assumption that parents provide most of the environment in which a child's personality develops. Prior to Freud, very few people placed much importance on the role of the parents; even fewer sat around debating the virtues of "parenting styles." Over time this assumption became engrained in our social consciousness, without ever being explicitly questioned or tested using scientific techniques.

But it's obvious, isn't it? As a parent you spend years loving, and raising, and teaching, and disciplining your child. And you've frequently observed how much children turn out to be like their parents, right? Well, yes and no. If you're a middle-class American raising your child in the same middle-class neighborhood in which you were raised, your child is likely to end up very much like you. But, if you're an immigrant raising your child in this same middle-class (English-speaking) neighborhood, you might discover that your child learns to speak unaccented English, and adopts the styles and customs of the American children around him. He didn't learn this from you.

According to Harris, studies have demonstrated that about half of your behaviour is due to genetic predisposition, and the other half is the effect of the environment. This has been determined by performing "twin studies" in which identical twins, fraternal twins, and adoptive siblings are compared. Because there are three different levels of genetic similarity (100%, 50%, and 0%), the researchers are able to figure out how much similarity between the siblings is due to their genes (or the effects of their genes). The rest must be due to their environment.

If parental influence is supposed to be so great, why can siblings turn out to be so different from one another? Two genetically unrelated kids that are raised in the same house turn out to be no more similar to each other than to other unrelated kids raised in the same neighborhood. And identical twins raised together are no more alike than identical twins reared in different homes (p34). It seems as if the home environment does very little to form the identities of children. Harris bases these statement on her review and interpretation of the literature; you'll have to read the book and decide for yourself whether you believe her conclusions.

So if the parents have so little influence, who is shaping our children? Harris proposes an alternative, which she calls 'group socialization theory.' She demonstrates that children do not automatically bring learned behavior from one context to another. Behaviors they have learned at home are not necessarily exploited in playschool, for example. Children unconsciously examine each context to determine what behaviors are appropriate or effective in that context, and tune their behavior to the context. Many parents, for example, have heard the teacher in a parent-teacher conference describing a child they don't recognize. Children develop their personalities to fit into their groups of peers.

Children are natural mimics. They observe and copy, receiving approval when they have copied correctly. At first the parents are the only available models. But then children discover other children. Parents are in charge: they make and enforce the rules, even though they don't have to follow the rules themselves. But other children are in exactly the same situation, and are playing by the same set of rules. Parents quickly discover that their children would rather play with other children than with their own parents.

As the children get older, the group socialization becomes more sophisticated. Children quickly separate by gender, and commence role-playing games, in which they rehearse acceptable behavior. Older children find a subgroup within school that suits them, and then rapidly adopt the group's styles of speaking, dressing, and behaving. Harris says that the academic level of a child will change to fit the group he or she is hanging out with, which opposes the view that the home environment is the primary determinant of academic achievement.

In fact, group socialization continues throughout life. As adults we are influenced by our friends, our co-workers, members of our social circles, and our neighbors. Think about the different things you do as an adult to help you fit into different circumstances. Children are even more susceptible to this than we are; is it so hard to believe that it exerts a powerful force on them? I believe that as you get older, you care less and less about what other people think, perhaps because you're more secure about who you are; consequently you make less effort to fit in with others. This means that your behavior as you get older is less shaped by social forces, and thus more by genetics, which explains quite handily why we turn into our parents as we age.

There is much, much more in this book, including fascinating descriptions and analysis of the statistical techniques used in child development studies; anthropological explanations for why we behave as we do; examinations of interesting studies (including a professor who raised a chimp alongside his son, only to discover that his son was being socialized by the chimp as much as the chimp was being socialized by the parents); and of course a bit of advice regarding what parents can do to help.

After reading the book, I feel she has a powerful argument -- still, I can't escape the belief that I as a parent of pre-teens do play a powerful role in the success of my children. I helped them develop the foundation upon which everything else is built, and I still exert influence over who they spend time with (which will change). Both children are quite different from each other, but that's something that's been there since they were born. And all the nurture in the world isn't changing those personalities they were born with.

Life of Pi is one of my favorite novels. It is disarmingly simple, unusually playful, and at the end makes you question whether you understood a thing you read. It's not that the book is confusing, it's that something happens at the end that causes you to question the reliability of the narrator, who you badly want to believe. And it's the search for that answer that puts the gleam in the eye of the tiger.

Pi Patel is a very religious boy. He is a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim. Not serially: simultaneously. When his pandit, priest, and imam meet in the street and start to argue over his true belief, he stops them, saying, "All religions are true. I just want to love God."

How can all religions possibly be true? Perhaps if you don't take them literally, but instead treat them as stories that illuminate the beauty of God's creation. And, of course, the lessons of these stories help you navigate the complexities of the real world.

As Pi weaves his story, think about these possiblities: is his story true? Or does he simply believe it to be true? Is the alternate story true? Or does Pi make it up because his inquistors don't believe the true story? Or perhaps neither story is true and Pi was just hallucinating while lost at sea. Or maybe both are true -- which is the better story?

Is there anything in the main story that makes you question your belief in the story? Or can a story contain miracles and still be true?

In "Still Life with Woodpecker," Tom Robbins inserts short chapters in which he has a conversation, although somewhat one-sided, with his typewriter. In "Just a Couple of Days," Tony Vigorito uses a similar device. He poses a question, Why aren't apples called reds?, which he discusses in the prologue, and keeps returning to throughout the novel. But Vigorito is more intense than Robbins, and echoes of this question are found everywhere, as the question takes on a personality, even a sex life, of her own.

Just a Couple of Days is billed on its cover as "a Dr. Strangelove for the biotech century." I would describe it as an apocalyptic utopian comedy, which can't possibly make any sense unless you have read the book. As the first sentence of the first chapter explains: Everything makes perfect sense in retrospect. Which indeed it does, or at least way more sense than it does when you first start reading.

Dr. Flake Fountain's best friend, Dr. Blip Korterly, is acting strangely. Normally he is a free spirit, living life without rules, purely for the experience. But now he's starting to act paranoid: he's leaving strange grafitti messages on freeway overpasses, claiming that mushrooms are extra-terrestrial probes, and worrying that the inmates in a local prison are being tortured. Blip kicks off a sequence of events that leave his friend very concerned, and when Flake is asked to join a secret project at his university, he starts to discover that Blip is not as paranoid as he seemed.

Dr. Fountain accepts the potentially lucrative assignment, and we are drawn into the complexities of a bizarre plan to develop the ultimate biological weapon. The story is entertaining, but the story isn't totally the point. Instead the story is a way to raise questions about humanity, society, and our role on earth. In the process, Mr. Vigorito displays a fiendish cleverness, a love for preposterous situations, and a definite profound streak. I repeatedly found myself marvelling at the clever scenarios he came up with, and how the elements of the story interacted with each other. I don't think it's a great book, but it was a marvelous book, full of life and questions and fun.

This book is a little more difficult to get into than the average novel, so if you don't like your books to make you think too much, you might want to skip this one. If you do read it, after you're done, go back and reread the quote from Led Zeppelin at the beginning of the book:

Either he was very lucky in finding an appropriate quote, or the book was fully inspired by the song.

I have always been a fan of Benjamin Franklin, ever since my father gave me my first Franklin half dollar back in the 1960's. Anybody who could have their picture on a coin without even being a president must be pretty special! Although I've read his Autobiography a couple of times, it wasn't until I read this comprehensive biography by Walter Isaacson that I began to appreciate the full complexity of this American original.

Everyone has heard the description of his various careers: printer, author, statesman, scientist, and diplomat. As the originator of several American social institutions -- universities, libraries, national post office, hospital, police department, fire department -- he was the architect of the fabric of American society. And as an inventor, he is responsible for the Franklin stove, the lighning rod, and bifocal lenses, among others.

But I really wasn't aware of his many contribution as statesman and diplomat. He was a proponent of unifying the states long before the problems with Britain were irreconcilable. As a Royalist, he spent years in Britain trying to convince them that they were demanding too much of the colonists. Once that failed he helped draft the Declaration of Independence. He spent years in Paris as ambassador, trying to secure French support in the case of a war with England, and after he finally returned to America, he played a pivotal role in the writing of the Constitution.

Walter Isaacson has written a compelling description of the Franklin years, however I found the first portion of the book too dependent on Franklin's Autobiography. This is probably due to a lack of other sources for this early material, but having recently re-read the Autobiography, I found it to be a bit dull. However, the last two thirds of the book are brimming with information that Franklin wasn't interested in sharing with us (to be honest, he may have been interested, but he ran out of time). Isaacson does a very good job painting a portrait of this interesting man, showing both his flaws and his strengths. He left me appreciating that Franklin, through his Almanacs, his Autobiography, and his public and political works, may have done more than any other American to establish the character of our young nation -- a character that is still with us today.

The investing mantra these days is to keep a well balanced portfolio. Before reading this book I understood this approach as a mechanism for reducing risk, but have never seen a thorough explanation of the thinking behind it. Mr. Bernstein provides a step-by-step analysis of how portfolios perform in the long run (which is the key to his strategy). Here are the key points:

• Each asset class has an expected return rate, which determines how well that asset will perform in the long-run.
• Each asset class has a risk associated with it, which is defined as the standard deviation of the yearly return rates of the asset. The risk determines how long you may have to wait before the asset performes up to its expected return rate.
• The performance of two asset classes can be compared to determine whether they tend to go up and down together, or behave independently. This can be expressed as a number, known as the correlation of the two asset classes.

Then he shows how if the performance of two assets is uncorrelated, by holding the correct proportions of those two assets (say stocks and bonds), you can actually achieve a return rate higher than either of the single assets, and with a lower amount of risk. Expanding the concept to multiple assets, you can choose how much risk you are willing to take and (with the help of a computer program) select a portfolio that should provide optimum returns for that amount of risk.

The key to this improved performance is the annual rebalancing of the assets. You take money out of an asset that has been doing well, thus protecting it from the inevitable reversal. You add money to the asset that has been doing less well, anticipating an upturn. If the assets behave oppositely from each other, you can see how this strategy could lead to improved performance over the long-run.

If your strategy is to invest your money in a tax-free account, and only look at it once a year, I have no doubt that this approach is a very sound one. However, the validity of this strategy as being the best one is based on the assumption that stock picking is impossible, and that the market can't be predicted. He admits in one section that if one asset class (say small-cap stocks) is doing better than others, that it's often better to leave the money there rather than rebalancing it, because momentum effects do seem to exist. And for those of us who remember the prolonged down market of 2000 - 2002, it's hard to argue too convincingly that leaving your money in the broad stock indexes was a sound strategy.

If you believe in this investing approach, then this is an excellent book. But if you believe (or want to believe) that there is money to be made in "playing" the market, then you'll want to augment this approach with other strategies.

This is a wonderful and thought-provoking book. It's wonderful because it tells the inspirational story of a brilliant doctor who does everything in his power to save the lives of poor Haitians who are suffering from TB and AIDS. It's thought-provoking because it makes one realize how much more each of us could do to help others.

Paul Farmer is brilliant and driven. He got his MD and his PHD simultaneously from Harvard, while spending half his time setting up a clinic in Haiti. In later years, he was an MD at a Boston hospital, and a Harvard professor, while running the Partners In Health clinic in Haiti. In his spare time he wrote books, papers, answered 200 email messages per day, and still found time to hand-write thank-you notes to donors. But his main passion was to treat patients.

But what make him most unusual is that he combines these traits with unusually good people skills. As a doctor, he is able to focus his attention on the patient, making that person the center of the world, in a friendly, concerned, and unhurried way. As a social creature, he is truly interested in people, building an incredibly broad network of people who like and respect him. As a leader, he is able to convince people to see things his way, so that they will help him with time, money, or medical supplies. He knows how to use this set of skills to achieve his goals, from healing an individual patient, to convincing wealthy donors to support him.

Tracy Kidder, the author of The Soul of a New Machine and House, does an excellent job of portraying this complex individual. He spends enough time with Farmer that you get a true sense of Farmer's personality and how he uses it. Kidder inserts himself into the story more than do most biographers. This lets him be more direct about how Farmer initially comes across, how he directs the discourse to illustrate his goals, and how he earns people's respect over time.

This is a lively and engaging book that will appeal to just about anybody who likes to read about influential personalities. If you are concerned about the fate of the poor in third world nations, or world health issues, this is one not to miss. I highly recommend it.