Sixty Days and Counting
By Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam Dell paperback

This is the third and concluding volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about an alternate present or near future when the world is forced to face a catastrophic climate crisis. But this isn’t another apocalyptic dread-feast. Extraordinary events shape and bend the everyday, but they don’t break it.

Robinson is known as a science fiction writer (his Red/Green/Blue Mars triology, etc.) and a futuristic California writer (the Three Californias series). In this volume in particular, he is also an evocative nature writer, describing the wilds of the California Sierras, Maine and Washington, D.C. That he finds wilds in Washington is part of the story.

This trilogy is centered in Washington and follows a group of scientists and politicians as the climate crisis gets real: Antarctic melting leads to massive flooding in Washington and elsewhere, inundating whole island nations. Plus a threatening “Day After Tomorrow” scenario of rapid climate change resulting in the paradox of a monster winter, with worse to come. In the midst of all this, there’s a presidential election.

Forty Signs of Rain introduces scientist Anna and politico Charlie Quibler, and their children. Through them and other characters, Robinson writes realistically of the various responses to the growing knowledge that the world is in deep climate trouble.

Fifty Degrees Below shows the climate crap hitting the fan. It’s told mostly through scientist Frank Vanderwal (a close friend of the Quiblers), and juxtaposes the big picture with the effects on his life, as he loses his home to the floods, and experiments with living off the urban land. His interest in primate behavior suggests he’s partly a tribute to real scientist Frans B.M. De Waal, a contemporary pioneer in the study of primates, especially their peaceful conflict resolution.

Vanderwal gets involved with the Buddhists who live on the fictional island of Khembalung, becoming inhabitable because of flooding. He’s also has a romance with a woman at work (National Science Foundation), and falls for a strange woman he meets on an elevator, who gets him involved in foiling a plot to fix the presidential election.

By the time this third novel begins, the Bush clone candidate has been defeated, and the U.S. has a new President committed to confronting the climate crisis: California Senator Phil Chase, a looser West Coast version of Al Gore, but with Obama’s communication skills. The story follows his efforts and thoughts (he has his own presidential blog called “Cut to the Chase”), and those of the scientists in the actions they propose and begin to take.

But except for the fallout of the failed attempt to fix the election in a not very distinguished but still apropos Washington paranoia-thriller plot (surveillance, proliferating intelligence agencies spying on each other etc.), this novel flows with the lives of those characters. Frank is at the front lines of the scientific efforts, but also living on the grounds of the Khembalung embassy with an elderly Buddhist monk as his roommate. He continues to monitor his friends “living feral” in Washington’s parks and abandoned buildings, as well as the animals flooded out of the zoo, also living feral in the extensive parklands in the D.C. area.

In many ways this is the opposite of the conventional science fiction dominated by technology, even if scientists are the heroes. On his computer, Frank subscribes to “Emerson for the Day,” and both Emerson and Thoreau are guiding spirits. So is Buddhism—in fact, the Dalai Lama appears as a character.

Even President Phil Chase is a philosophical blogger (he gets five million responses to his first post.) By the end he’s musing about reclaiming imagination as the human tool to create a dynamic culture that can be permanently sustained, a culture “in which no one is without a job, or shelter, or health care, or education, or the rights to their own life. Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species. We’ll share the world with all the other creatures. It will be an ongoing project that will never end.”

This is a very smart novel—on politics, economics, science and those underlying matters of soul. Things happen, that it wouldn’t be fair to reveal. But perhaps most surprisingly, it feels like a kind of pastoral: valuing the real Earth and real life that makes keeping humankind from destroying the planet worthwhile. In a technical Shakespearian sense it’s even a comedy, because it ends like As You Like It: good people restoring the state, gathered in nature, for weddings.

A slightly different version of this reviews appears in the North Coast Journal.

Predictably Irrational:
The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
By Dan Ariely
Harpercollins; 304 pages; $25.95.

Update: This review now appears also in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.

Call me crazy, but I’ve always thought the axiom of academic economics that says our decisions, especially buying decisions, are based on rational choice is itself irrational. Counter-examples are rife in most of world literature, movies and TV shows, as well as psychology since 1890 and the entire advertising industry, which is not notable for critiques appealing to pure reason. There’s abundant evidence, including books from Vance Packard’s 1957 The Hidden Persuaders to Douglas Rushkoff's 1999 Coercion to Martin Howard’s 2005 We Know What You Want that advertisers and retailers thrive on pushing non-rational buttons, as have con artists peddling snake oil, pyramid schemes, Florida land, phony stocks and fake charities, from antiquity to the Internet.

But apparently it takes an official Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT like Dan Ariely to suggest that “we are really far less rational than standard economic theory assumes. Moreover, these irrational behaviors of ours are neither random nor senseless. They are systematic, and since we repeat them again and again, predictable.”

In this book, Ariely describes experiments that pertain to general conclusions (“Why we often pay too much when we pay nothing,” “why we can’t make ourselves do what we want to do,” “why options distract us from our main objective,” etc.), and then offers extrapolations of why these tendencies are important. He then offers ideas on how to get ourselves under more rational control, individually and by changing organizational or societal structures.

Some of his research I found eye-opening, particularly the experiments involving the suggestibility that words can have. In one experiment, Asian-American women took a math exam. Half were given a preliminary questionnaire with innocuous survey questions that related to gender (opinions on coed dorms, etc); the other half, questions relating to their racial heritage (family history, etc.) The women who got the race-related survey did better on the subsequent math exam than the women who got the gender-related survey, apparently confirming the stereotypes of women as bad in math, and Asian-Americans as smart in math, as suggested just by the topic of whichever survey they were given.

Another group was given a scrambled-sentence puzzle with words “priming the concept of the elderly,” such as “Florida, bingo, ancient.” Then when they were dismissed, they walked more slowly down the corridor than members of a control group. They weren’t, Ariely notes, “themselves elderly people being reminded of their frailty—they were undergraduate students at NYU.” Yet another experiment found that after being asked to list the Ten Commandment—or when they were reminded of the Honor Code they’d agreed to-- subjects were more honest.

Other topics include how we judge (and misjudge) relative value, the power of placebos, the power of price (more ailments are allegedly cured when the subject believes the medicine is expensive), and the gently subversive idea that market forces don’t always regulate the market for the best outcomes.

Most chapters frame the information in terms of the kind of decision-making processes many of us go through in choosing what or whether to buy, though usually in more simplified form than the bewildering blitz of options, questions and information we contend with these days. Since this book is meant for a wide readership, the style is pleasantly conversational and personal, though jargon is sometimes replaced by cliché.

Ariely’s conclusions sometimes make good sense to me, like bundling preventive health care procedures to combat procrastination. But some seem to be too limited in terms of what questions the research suggests, and others too broad. His general assertions—that we tend to underestimate the role of the irrational in our perceptions and decisions, and that if we have some idea of how we are irrational, we’re less helpless and can assert more conscious control—are useful principles to repeat. Even if they’re not at all new ideas, they could well be new to readers of this book.

While Ariely’s stated goal is to understand the decision-making processes behind behavior—“yours, mine and everybody else’s” he may be overreaching in the applicability of his conclusions.

“We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains,” he writes, but he presents no evidence of this causal relationship. It depends on his behavioral experiments being universal. The experiments he presents support the irrationality part of his argument, but I don’t buy the universal predictability of all their specific findings. While these experiments take place in California, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina and so on, they rarely get off campus, and the experimental subjects (at least the ones he describes) are almost always university students.

That’s a specific demographic group that marketing psychologists study very closely, and pitch their products to in ways that don’t work with other—especially older—consumers. There are several conclusions that Ariely makes (the decisive role of image among peers when choosing food at a restaurant, or the “irrational impulse to chase worthless options” in a game, for instance) that could be quite different according to age or even income and social class. And that’s without even attempting to assess the experiment involving young men, Playboy magazines and a Saran wrap-covered laptop.

In any case the accounts of these experiments are useful as cautionary tales and examples inspiring academic as well as water cooler discussion. As for Ariely’s basic conclusion, addressed as this question—“Wouldn’t economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?”—hey, aren’t those economists wild?

What Thou Lovest Well is Remaindered (A Series)

TIME BITES: Views and Reviews
By Doris Lessing
Harper Collins

This is not a new book, but if you haven't read it, it's new to you, as it was to me until recently. After Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, I wanted to catch up with her, and this collection hit the remainder lists, so I got it.

Lessing's “Children of Violence” series (beginning with Martha Quest) made her name in the 1950s, and The Golden Notebook was a popular and important novel with young people (especially women) in the 60s. In the 80s she shocked the literary world by writing the “Canopus in Argos” series of “space fiction” novels, the first of which (Shikasta) was a retelling of earth history (drawn particularly from the Bible and similar books from other cultures) from the perspective of a beneficent galactic empire. Other literary writers followed in exploring such genres. Her most recent novels in this decade presaged the trend towards apocalyptic fiction.

Lessing will be 89 this year. The breadth of her experience as well as the length of her active life are at this point virtually unique in contemporary literature in the English-speaking world. Born in Persia—in what is now Iran—of British parents, she grew up in southern Africa, in what is now Zimbabwe, and was then the British colonial state of Southern Rhodesia. Her family lived on a small farm in the bush country, but her house was filled with books, and she was an ardent reader. Though her formal education ended with high school, she became part of university Marxist groups opposed to racial injustice. After a failed marriage, she moved to London with her son in 1949, and has lived there ever since, although she has traveled widely, particularly back to Africa.

This somewhat eccentric collection of pieces—articles from periodicals, prefaces to other books—touches upon many literary topics, from a delightfully new reading of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to re-readings of once popular but now unknown books that she believes are still classics. But apart from being a window into her own work, I found three areas of special significance in this book. First is her knowledge of Islamic literature: both ancient texts which in many cases precedes and foreshadows western literature, and more contemporary works like those of the English Sufi, Idries Shah.

Second are her essays with geopolitical implications. Like many former Marxists, she is suspicious of ideology (including aspects of women’s liberation and political correctness) but she is not a nihilist or neocon, as some have become. She remains generously human, and asserts human freedom at every level. Third—and this links the preceding two—she champions the role of literature itself in our troubled and changing world.

There are several essays on that point that mirror her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. She writes about the decline of reading and loss of those insights and experiences in the rich West, contrasted with the true hunger for reading in poor parts of the world where books are hard to come by. She writes in a direct, conversational style about all these subjects (and others—she writes very well about cats)—but she is especially vivid on this topic, as she describes isolated Third World villages where people who haven’t eaten in days avidly organize groups to discuss a book they’ve just received. She also pointedly describes a village where the young boys begged for books, and upon her return there several years later, she found that they had become close-minded members of terrorist groups.

Fans of her space fiction will learn more about their cultural sources, and everyone will get a taste of this remarkable writer with a unique set of experiences and valuable point of view.

Writers of the Year 2007
The biggest book event of the year was the publishing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final novel in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. But the international hoohaw shouldn't obscure Rowling's literary achievement: it all happened because of the actual books that individual people actually read (though some did so in couples and groups, reading aloud or listening to audiobooks, sometimes while reading along in the text--all very literary experiences largely missing from our culture for a long time.) Rowling wrote a series of books that increased in complexity and meaning along with the increasing ages of the characters the books were chiefly about, with important things to say for our time. Has anyone ever done this before? This is an achievement to be celebrated.

Doris Lessing's achievements were celebrated in 2007 when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is a champion of literature in our time, and she made a brilliant case for it in her Nobel address, as well as in essays published in her 2004 collection of nonfiction pieces, Time Bites. She was brought up in rural Africa, has lived in London for many years, and has traveled widely. So her point of view is striking and informed: she sees people in rich societies with easy access to books losing that profound education to consumer obsession, addictive video games and blogs, while people (especially children) in poor societies starving and begging for books and literature.

Lessing had the courage to follow where her writing took her, even to the science fiction series I admire. She had the courage to face hard personal truths and express boldly what others obscured in The Golden Notebook, and then to face down those who wanted to turn it into an ideological tract. In her interviews as well, she takes no nonsense that might limit the complexities and generous spirit she champions in literature. She also writes very well about cats (that's her in the last photo, in 1956.)

R.I.P. 2007

Norman Mailer became famous at age 25 with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, about World War II. Being famous and in that strata of people and events helped define his life. I became aware of him in the 1960s, when he was a frequent guest on TV talk shows (yes, they had actual authors talking at length in those days, not just plugging a book) and was writing about politics. I marched with him (without ever seeing him, of course) at the Pentagon in 1968, the sort of subject of his famous "non-fiction novel," The Armies of the Night.

I was impressed by his passionate defense of writer Henry Miller against the attacks of Kate Millet in the first wave of womens lib. It got me to read Miller. I liked hearing him talk, and reading his essays, as in Advertisements for Myself. I somehow understood the writer's insecurity which came across as ego, though there was a lot about him I didn't understand.

I was impressed by his belief in The Novel, and in the quest to write a great one. I didn't actually read much of his fiction, though. Some of what he said and wrote remain guideposts for me to this day. And a lot I take seriously, and admire for his intellectual courage, but can't go there with him.

In his late 80s he remained thoughtful, lucid and impressive in interviews. He kept writing to the end, and was embarked on an immense project of fiction that he felt was his truest work. That's a good way for a writer to go.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was unique, which caused him a lot of problems early on. Even before he'd refined his very individual style, he seemed to sense the likelihood of failure when he created his crazed, destitute science fiction writer alter ego, Kilgore Trout.

But his novels Cat's Cradle, Good Bless You Mr. Rosewater and Mother Night--with that unique point of view, that gallows humor and unique style (so apparently simple, almost childlike)--got the attention of other writers, and a job teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he quickly became a legend.
His breakthrough novel, Slaughterhouse Five, was a strange but strangely apt combination of sci-fi and realism about the total destruction of Dresden in the World War II firebombing no one wanted to talk about (although I'd read about it in a war comic book in the 50s.) He was a survivor of it as a P.O.W.--not quite as hapless as his hero, Billy Pilgrim, but just as young. (That's his Army photo down there.)
Later he became as famous and popular for his lectures as his novels, and as a writer, lecturer and social critic, he became our Mark Twain. He even came to resemble Twain. Some of his books are judged better than others--he himself graded his novels from A to D. But I've read everything he published with profit and much delight and admiration.

Molly Ivins was a fountain of wit and sense. She was big-hearted, clear-eyed and courageous. She told the truth when it was popular and when it wasn't. And she was fun. If we have to have Texas, then we damn well needed to have Molly Ivins. In this already lunatic election year, we're going to miss her.

She faced cancer that killed her with the same courage she faced the president she called Shrub. She had that incredible smile from first to last, as you can see. She has a shelf full of wonderful books out there. Get some and see.

Grace Paley was a New York writer through and through. When I met her in the late 60s she was already known for her short stories and her political activism, and she excelled at both for the rest of her life. She became a living treasure, recognized as such by Governor Mario Cuomo. She died in 2007.
David Halberstam died in a car accident in 2007. I met him in Boston when he was doing interviews for his first book, The Best and The Brightest, about hubris among those who brought us Vietnam. It's become the conventional wisdom, though historians have refined and tempered his journalistic analysis. He first made his name as a reporter in Vietnam, and after this book became a popular and respected author. Many know him as much for his books on sports as on politics.
Ingmar Bergman is best known as a film director, and secondly as a theatre director. But he also wrote many of those famous movies, and he has other published works as a writer. He died in July, on the same day as another classic European film director, Michelangelo Antonioni.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was one of the last of several fading breeds: the public intellectual, the man of letters. He first made his mark as a political historian (on FDR) and then political essayist. He contributed to speeches and was an advisor to President Kennedy. He continued to write important books for the rest of his long life, and his recently published diaries show how involved he was among the social and political elite. I will remember him for his indispensable books on President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and especially for the book of essays he published in the early 1960s that I read when I was in high school, and had a profound effect on my political orientation from then on, called The Politics of Hope.

Londoners in a shelter during the 1940 Blitz

Some Books of Note

A selection of titles from fall and winter 2007.

These are some of the books from this past fall that I requested because they sounded interesting, not only to me but potentially to book review editors. Some of them turned out to be interesting but too academic or otherwise not quite accessible enough for even the informed and interested general readerships I usually write for, while to my sorrow, others I would have liked to write about—like Owen Flanagan’s The Really Hard Problem—didn’t get assigned, and I otherwise couldn’t find the time to give them the longer consideration they deserve. So in the guise of a year end or publishing season end summary, I’m clearing off my “in” shelf.

But to make the year-end thing credible, I'll add links to books I reviewed this year that I recommend.

Text continues after photos

Social Studies

THE REALLY HARD PROBLEM: Meaning in a Material World, by Owen Flanagan. MIT Press.

Consciousness, or mind, is the hard problem, and also the topic that is threading through several sciences, the arts and what is often categorized as New Age spirituality, although this includes the very ancient inquiries of Buddhism. It is also re-focusing contemporary philosophy, specifically in the writing of Owen Flanagan. This thoughtful, up to the minute and accessibly written book outlines questions that are central to contemporary researches and also of important fascination to us as people trying to make sense of life in these suddenly uniting states. It does so in under 300 pages (including the kind of chapter notes you read on their own with pleasure and profit), and in six chapters, exploring “Meaningful and Enchanted Lives,” finding meaning in the natural world, Buddhism and science, “Normative Mind Science? Psychology, Neuroscience, and the Good Life,” the new science of happiness, and the intersection of nature and spirituality. This book is not only one of the most fascinating of the fall, but a contribution to an ongoing process of developing understandings and strategies of soul that can actually contribute to getting us through the 21st century and beyond.



PSYCHOTHERAPY WITHOUT THE SELF by Mark Epstein. Yale University Press.

Epstein’s earlier books on this subject—the intersection of Buddhist thought and psychotherapy-- Thoughts Without a Thinker and Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, were pitched to a more general audience. This book is more scholarly, and goes into the subject more deeply. For me it doesn’t advance the ball, especially because Epstein continues to see psychotherapy as primarily Freudian. That it may be, but I find myself more interested in Jung—who I perhaps naively see as a better fit with Buddhism.


THE HIDDEN SENSE: Synesthesia in Art and Science by Cretien van Campen. MIT Press.

The different ways that people learn and experience the world by employing different dominant senses has been an important topic explored in the past decade. This book charts a new frontier: the experiences of people who “hear music in colors” or “taste voices,” mixing experiences and even our ideas of separate senses. Now that brain scans have revealed that the phenomena of synesthesia is real, (though the research is still fairly primitive) Van Campen explores the research and ramifications, inevitably crossing and re-crossing borders, including those between science and art. This is a frontier study of a potentially exciting and revealing phenomenon.

BLACK MASS: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray. STRAW DOGS: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray. Both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

John Gray is the most provocative author I've read this year. Straw Dogs (published several years ago in the UK, apparently revised and published in the U.S. this fall as a paperback original) is a series of terse, definite and challenging statements about the contemporary world, human nature and the ideas, ideologies and systems we use and have used in recent centuries to make sense of it all and to take action. Black Mass focuses on one of its assertions with a more detailed historical treatment. Gray sees things in black and white, though mostly in black. He challenges some cherished societal assumptions, and one of his major premises is that the widespread sense of "progress" and that sense of evolution is both delusional and a paradoxical product of belief in apocalyptic end time. His assumption that the failure of Soviet Communism proves the failure and pernicious nature of utopian thinking is familiar, but otherwise I find his assertions fertile (and often pretty scary), even as wrongheaded as some may be. I expect to be looking at these books and writing about them for years to come.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, By Naomi Klein. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. This is probably the most important book I read this year, as well as one of the best.

SOLDIER'S HEART: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, by Elizabeth D. Samet. Farrar, Strau and Giroux.

Thoreau Cove at Walden Pond

Literature


I TO MYSELF: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer. Yale University Press.

AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM: A History, by Philip F. Gura. Hill & Wang.

Thoreau’s journals are a barely explored gold mine, as Cramer’s Introduction notes. This handsome volume of selections is both a contribution to literary scholarship and a book to keep and peruse for the nuggets contained within. Thoreau and Emerson are of course the best known names associated with American Transcendentalism, but as Gura’s accessible history shows, not the only interesting writers or participants in a contentious and malleable movement so important to American literature. Both of these books are important contributions to appreciating this golden era.


I EXPLAIN A FEW THINGS: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda. A Bilingual Edition edited by Ilan Stavans. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The Preface is correct: in the 1970s, around the time of his Nobel Prize, Neruda was a star on American campuses. (I’m pretty sure my first professional published piece was on him.) This selection from his entire career offers translations by Alastair Reed (who with Ben Belitt were the principal translators of 70s era collections), Robert Bly (some of whose translations were available then, and which I much preferred), Galway Kinnell, W.S. Merwin, Philip Levine, John Felstiner, Jack Schmitt, Margaret Sayers Peden and others. Editor Stavans finds the late (70s) poems wanting in his up to date overview preface, yet he translates one of the latest, about the effect of the Vietnam war: “they come, will come, they came,/ to kill the world within us.” They’re still at it.

ON ELOQUENCE by Denis Donoghue. Yale.

This is one of those absorbing books to read and savor, reminding us of literature we love and introducing us to aspects of literary works we don’t know as well, that we might well love. His past books revealed Donoghue as a scholar and reader who writes well, and the topic of eloquence allows him both breadth and concentration. It’s an important and neglected topic, in an era of bad writing and dense, very specific literary writing—an era that needs beauty as well as inspiration and instruction. With all the references and assertions (some I find myself arguing with) it's an active but rewarding read.

AUGUST WILSON CENTURY CYCLE by August Wilson. Theatre Communications Group.

London 1940

History


THE FIRST DAY OF THE BLITZ by Peter Stansky.
Yale.

While the immediate emotional responses to the events in New York on September 11, 2001 were understandable, subsequent hysteria and particularly the actions taken because of it seemed to me even at the time as more than excessive. Perhaps cowardly, particularly in light of the response of the British people to the events that only began on September 7, 1940—the relentless bombing campaign by German planes and missiles known as the Blitz. Stansky contends that the British response in just the first 12 hours of that day transformed its social and political context, and set the attitudes that would result in winning the war. But he also shows that the British were more prepared than the conventional wisdom says. In this relatively short book, the descriptions of that first day are often absorbing and a real contribution to history, as are his conclusions. But I would have liked a few additional chapters on the Blitz as a whole, for it seems to me that the British response over time (as well as that of allies and adversaries) has important lessons for us today as well.

THE GREAT AWAKENING: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America by Thomas S. Kidd. Yale.

This is a solid contribution to the historical understanding of an important contemporary force in America. Since it ends with the American Revolution (though Kidd provides some subsequent overview) it doesn’t yet cover the crucial relationship of evangelical Christianity with science and technology, or its political impact on the nation, but this background can help in the understanding of that essential confrontation.

AUTO MANIA: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment by Tom McCarthy. Yale.
A well-researched source book on these important subjects.

THE AMERICAN DISCOVERY OF EUROPE by Jack D. Forbes. Illinois University Press.

The Jerde designed Mall of America. Kowinski
photo.

Design

ARCHITECTURE OR TECHNO-UTOPIA: Politics After Modernism by Felicity D. Scott.
BRANDSCAPES: Architecture in the Experience Economy by Anna Klingmann.
Both published by MIT Press.

Scott excavates and narrates designers and architectures both well known and little remembered from the late 60s and early 70s, in a context and in language of primary interest to academics. I was interested to see Buckminster Fuller taken seriously within 20th century design, though his theoretical context is not fully stated. Klingmann’s approach is more generally accessible and more contemporary. I appreciated her detailed treatment of architectural guru John Jerde, but her description of how Faneuil Hall Marketplace came about is a little off.