The Fool's Library

Books . . . they are the lifeblood of our civilization.  They form the topics of our conversation, the inspiration for public policy, the source of education, and the link to our collective past.  I have always been fascinated with what constitutes a “great book” and have compiled, during my lifetime, a number of lists of books that are suggested as “must reads” before one reaches the end of one’s lifetime.  I’m sure that I will never get to but a fraction of these, but I take some consolation in the fact that many books which have been touted as “classics” – even during my lifetime – were subsequently relegated to the Purgatory of irrelevance.  This phenomenon is even more pronounced when one observes the books that are immensely popular when they are released, such as those which make the “New York Times Bestseller List”, but fade, within a few short years, from the public consciousness.  In recent years, during my daily commute on the subway, I have often seen the phenomenon of several people reading the same book, such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or Fifty Shades of Grey.  I am fairly certain that, if I were to be riding on the subway twenty years from now, I would not see anybody reading these particular books, and would probably not encounter anyone who was even aware of their existence.  Similarly, when I think back to several popular psychology books in my youth, such The Peter Principle and Games People Play, I doubt that such books have had many readers in recent decades, and have probably all but vanished from collective memory.  (Other popular books from that era, such as Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Godfather have admittedly probably not seen much circulation in the ensuing decades only because the very successful movie adaptations overshadowed the original stories that inspired them.)

One could argue whether at least some of these books have been unfairly relegated to the dustbin of forgotten history.  But there are other books which more than deserve their place there.  In fact, I suspect that their authors even hope that these books are long forgotten.  These books constitute what I call a “fool’s library”: books that should never have been written in the first place.  Here are my leading candidates for the “fool’s library”: books that – to put it very politely – probably have an extremely low resale value.

•  Kohoutek: Comet of the Century (1973):  Discovered by Czechoslovakian astronomer Lubus Kohoutek in March of 1973, the comet which took his name gained the immediate enthusiastic attention of other scientists, who predicted that it would be the brightest comet in centuries.  This book was rushed into print to broadcast the claims of these scientists and stoke up excitement for the comet’s imminent approach to the sun in December of that year.  And there was definitely a stir of excitement about this much anticipated celestial event.  Even the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II arranged for a special cruise with nearly 2,000 passengers for the express purpose of watching the spectacular comet.  Unfortunately, the “comet of the century” turned out to be a colossal non-event, “a celestial box office dud” in the words of The Wall Street Journal, as even on its best night, it appeared as just a tiny fuzzy object, and that only with the aid of binoculars.  The sad irony is that a genuinely impressive comet, Cornet West, appeared in the night sky less than three years later, in March of 1976, but was virtually ignored by the general public because scientists, having been embarrassed by their trumpeting over Kohoutek, decided to play down the arrival of this other one.  The Kohoutek craze had other ramifications:  David Berg, the leader of a religious cult called the Children of God, claimed that the comet was a harbinger of a doomsday event which would occur in the United States in early 1974, prompting many of his followers to flee to communes.  On a more positive note, the Kohoutek phenomenon inspired a number of songs by popular bands of the day, including Kraftwerk, Argent, Journey, R.E.M., and even Pink Floyd. 

• The Jupiter Effect (1974):  Another celestial faux pas:  The authors, John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, observed that a rare alignment of the (then) nine planets was going to occur in 1982, and predicted that the combined gravitational pull of the planets would produce a number of devastating geologic disasters on the earth, including a massive earthquake along the San Andreas Fault in California.  I happened to be taking a course in college physics not long before this doomsday year approached, and was surprised when I calculated that the combined gravitational effect of these planets upon the earth was just a fraction of that of the moon.  The moon’s gravitational pull does have an effect on the earth of course, by producing the tides in oceans and lakes, but no one has ever blamed the moon for causing earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.  Needless to say, I was not surprised when 1982 came and went uneventfully, and only hope that nobody sold their homes and other personal belongings in preparation for Armageddon as a result of reading this book.

• The Beardstown Ladies Common-Sense Investment Guide: How We Beat the Stock Market and How You Can Too (1994):  Here was a “David and Goliath” story that resonated with the masses.  What if a group of older women in a small Midwestern town formed an investment club, and then based their investment strategies on simple homespun wisdom and common sense?  And what if, over the ensuing decade, their investments then produced outstanding returns, far above those obtained by the stock market and many professional fund managers during the same time period?  This was what was claimed by members of the Beardstown Business and Professional Women’s Investment Club.  Their overall annualized investment return from the time they formed their investment club in 1983, through 1994, was calculated by them to be a staggering 23.4%, which would mean that the value of their investments was doubling every four years.  The book became a best-seller, and was followed by four others, as well as a program about them and their investment strategies on public television.  It was a great story, and an impressive achievement.  If only it were actually true.  The results were not supported by rigorous internal auditing methods, and when these were finally examined by an outside auditor, it was determined that the annualized return rate of the club’s investments from 1984 to 1993 was actually about 9.1%, which was significantly lower than the annualized return of the S&P 500 during that same time period of 14.9%.  Their results were better when calculated over the longer time frame of 1983 to 1997, at 15.3%, but again this was lower than the comparable S&P 500 return of 17.2%.  The bottom line: contrary to the title of their book, the stock market “beat” them, and, rather than following their advice, one would have done better by simply investing in an S&P 500 index fund.  (In fairness to the ladies, research has proven again and again that the market can rarely if ever be consistently outperformed by brokers, fund managers, or expert stock pickers.  In general, the best investment strategy is to put money into an index fund, thereby eliminating the cost of “expert” advice or fund management.)

• The Bible Code (1997):  This bestseller announced a tantalizing discovery:  Carefully hidden in the books of the Bible were (and are) predictions of major world historical events.  These predictions, it was claimed, can be discovered by looking at sequences of letters that appear interspersed throughout the Bible, such as, say, every fifth letter in a passage in Genesis.  Using this method, one can find in the Bible predictions of the Great Depression, World War II and Nazism, the moon landing, the Kennedy Assassinations (both John and Robert), and even the Watergate scandal.  The book caused quite a stir when it first appeared:  The Los Angeles Times declared that it was “a certifiable phenomenon,” and the Baltimore Sun went even further, averring that it constituted “the biggest news of the millennium – maybe of all human history even.”  It is rather embarrassing, in retrospect, how many people who should have known better, including scientists, gave credence to these claims, and even endorsed them, saying that the odds of these historical predictions appearing naturally were beyond astronomical.  The claims are actually based on a rather simple statistical fallacy.  Suppose, for example, that my sister calls me on the telephone just at the moment that I happen to be thinking about her.  Now the odds of such a coincidence, I might say, is probably more than a million to one.  But during the course of any day, which includes an uncountable number of experiences and situations, the probability that something will happen which I will consider to be an unusual coincidence is actually pretty good.  First-year statistics students receive a demonstration of this when they are presented with the “birthday surprise” problem:  “How many people,” they are asked, “must be in a room so that there is a greater than 50/50 chance that two of them will have the same birthday?”  When first confronted with this puzzle, many of these students, realizing that there are 365 days in the year, conclude that at least 183 people must be in the room for this to be true.  But that is not the case.  That would only be necessary if I was looking for somebody else in the room who shared my birthday.  But the odds that any two people in a group have the same birthday, without specifying what that birthday is in advance, are greater than 50% when there are only 23 people in the group.  (Try it yourself sometime, if you find yourself in a group of at least this size.  Ask everyone to write their birthdays on a card, and then compare the cards.  More often than not, you’ll find two people sharing the same birthday.  And if the group is just a little larger – say 30 people – you almost certainly will.)  By the same token, if I take a large book – say, for example the collected works of William Shakespeare – and am then allowed to systematically search sequences of letters separated by a fixed width of my choosing (and to experiment with different such widths), I will inevitably come across something, somewhere, that will spell a word or series of words that I think are significant.  And Hebrew letters make this particularly easy to do, since these letters can also be read as numbers (hence allowing me to identify years that go along with predictions) and also consist of consonants only (so that if I did a similar activity using only English consonants, and came across “m-s-s-l-n”, for example, I could read this as “Mussolini” or, ignoring the final “n” – because I can start and end the sequence anywhere I want – “missile”).  The “Bible Code” researchers gave themselves an additional degree of latitude, by checking for sequences both forwards and backwards (so that, in my previous example, if I came across “n-l-s-s-m”, I could still read it as “Mussolini” or “missile”).  And, sure enough, most of the predictions that are “discovered” in the Bible Code, rather than being complete sentences, are rather bits of “caveman speak”, such as “man on moon”, “great earthquake”, and “world war”.  The book really comes undone, however, with its collection of predictions about the future, including that of another world war, along with an atomic holocaust, in either 2000 or 2006, and the earth’s catastrophic collision with a comet in 2006, 2010, or 2012.  The author very cautiously remarks that these events only constitute possible futures, and that the Bible Code might present us with a key on how to avoid them.  Apparently we should all be grateful that somebody must have discovered that key and used it on our behalf.

• Surviving the Computer Time Bomb: How to Prepare for and Recover from the Y2K Explosion (1999):  Actually, at least an entire shelf of the fool’s library, if not many shelves, could have been filled with doomsday books about the year 2000, and in particular the Y2K apocalypse.  There just seems to be something about the end of a millennium that attracts doomsday predictors of many stripes.  To put it indelicately, the year 2000, for many, was an apropos time for the “shit to hit the fan”.  As I mentioned in my previous blog entry (“House of Cards”, May 2017) many predictions were made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970 about imminent ecological and sociological disasters stemming from overpopulation, and the year 2000 was often used as the target date for the culmination of these disasters.  “Millennials” (a word that now refers to one of our younger generations, but decades ago designated people who anticipated an apocalypse around the year 2000) sprang up from among the religious, who believed that the Creator finds the end of a millennium to be a particularly suitable time to do a final reckoning.  This is not new: similar millennial movements occurred in Western Europe around a thousand years ago.  (I discussed this phenomenon in “The Secret Doctrine”, December 2015.)  But as the year 2000 approached, the crisis that most captured the popular imagination was a technological one.  It was discovered that a limitation in software used in most computer applications throughout the globe was that this software had a relatively primitive way of storing and processing dates – recording years with only the final two digits – so that when the year 2000 came, computers would not be able to distinguish this from the year 1900, and, in many cases, this would result in computers failing entirely, potentially crippling entire sectors of the economy, such as banks and power utilities.  There was something sadly comical about New Years Eve 1999, when roving television news crews searched for something – anything – to fail after midnight, thereby giving them a story to lead with that morning.  Perhaps we can credit the “Y2K” hysteria with actually resulting in widespread solutions to this problem, because the year 2000 came and went uneventfully, with no significant shutdowns of any computer software, anywhere.  Ironically, there might have been one genuine negative consequence of “Y2K”, and this was that a mild recession occurred in 2001, which was blamed in part on a significant decline in infrastructure spending, which was in turn blamed on the glut in spending on computer hardware in the years leading up to 2000, which significantly reduced the need for further such spending in 2000 and 2001.  And, the “Y2K” hysteria inspired at least one disaster movie, which of course quickly faded from memory after the year passed without incident.

• Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End (2007):  Like the last subject, this one, too, could probably fill a shelf full of books, not to mention a DVR-full of television programs about it.  The idea that civilization would face some kind of apocalypse in 2012, perhaps even total extinction, came about from a study of the calendar used by the ancient Mayan civilization, which reached its zenith in Central America around the middle of the first millenium.  The Mayan calendar is impressive in its accuracy: it has a cycle of about 5,125 years, and the Mayans believed that they were living in a fourth cycle, with each of the three previous cycles corresponding to failed attempts by the gods to create a viable world.  The final date of this fourth cycle, which began in 3,114 BC, was calculated by many scholars to be December 21, 2012.  But some scholars went even further, contending that this date was actually a prediction by the Mayans that the cycle would end with the annihilation of the earth, if not the entire universe.  As 2012 approached, the idea of a “Mayan apocalypse” got wider attention, fueled by pseudo-scientists and crackpots of just about every stripe.  Like the authors of The Bible Code, some claimed that the Mayan symbols that corresponded to dates on the calendar contained hidden meanings, which, if properly interpreted, revealed predictions of events that would occur on those dates.  And as with the authors of The Jupiter Effect, some claimed that on the end date of the Mayan calendar, the sun would actually be in a rare alignment with the center of our galaxy, and this is what would produce the destabilizing forces that would tear our world apart.  Finally, like the year 2000 doomsayers, those who predicted apocalypse in 2012 at least managed to inspire an entertaining disaster movie, and this one was a genuine blockbuster.  (I should add that I was personally inspired by this particular doomsday date, because it was the date that I chose to publish my very first blog: titled, appropriately enough, “An Emerald Tablet for the Mayan Apocalypse”.)

• Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race (2009):  Oops!

These then are some of my nominees for the book equivalent of the “Razzies”, the awards that are given for very bad movies.  I am sure that many if not all of their authors would like to forget that they ever wrote them (and hope that their friends and colleagues have forgotten as well).

But if you do happen to have any of these books, or others like them, on your own shelf – don’t be ashamed or even embarrassed.  (After all, who among us hasn't, from time to time, succumbed to the temptation to buy a book simply to see if its contents live up to the bold claims or promises on the cover?)  These books may actually be collectors’ items, like badly minted coins.  And if you have your own nominees – I’d love to hear them.  I'll be happy to share notable rivals to my own list in a future blog.