Seth’s blog

From a review of Kathryn Harrison’s new book While They Slept, about a boy who murders his parents:

When Billy Gilley is 13, stealing cigarettes leads him to the Children’s Services Division, where the boy trustingly told a social worker about his family: the drinking, fighting, extreme verbal abuse in a family where customarily, after sentencing by his mother, his father would tie him to a tractor tire in order to immobilize him for beating with a rubber hose. He described for the social worker how his parents were, in Billy’s terms, “crazy and unfit.”

The child told his story, and the social worker’s response was to repeat it to those abusive parents. Furious, they demanded to speak with him in private, so that he recanted and said he had been lying. The parents threatened to sue the agency, which fired the social worker and destroyed the record of her conversation with Billy, leaving only the annotation that the child was a liar. . . .Having acquired literacy skills in prison, he writes and illustrates children’s books. In these books, large-eyed animals play an important role: children are in trouble or distress, and human adults cannot understand or help. The animals understand the children, and bring them to safety.

This reminds me of two things. Many years ago, such as in the 1920s, cancer was a terrible thing and a total mystery. People didn’t like to talk about it. Likewise the social worker’s actions are a terrible thing and a total mystery. What should be done about such behavior? Nobody wants to talk about it. The other thing this reminds me of is the Ten Commandments. Here is something else no one talks about: There is no commandment against child abuse. No stealing: yes. No murder: yes. No adultery: yes. No child abuse: no. Stealing is worse than child abuse? Huh?

Well, at least the review is titled “Speaking the Unspeakable.”

About ten years ago Haruki Murakami, the author, gave a talk at UC Berkeley. in which he said he had decided to try to become a writer during a baseball game — specifically, when someone hit a single to left field. I told this story as often as possible. My listeners were always puzzled. It made no sense. Was he kidding?

Now Murakami has told the story in print. Turns out it was a double, not a single. And I missed another crucial detail. Murakami was a “fairly devoted Yakult Swallows fan.” It was the Swallows lead-off batter who hit the double. Now the story makes sense. Something wonderful had just happened on the field. Surprising, too. Wonderful unpredictable things happen, Murakami realized. They could happen to him. “Something flew down from the sky at that instant,” he wrote, “and, whatever it was, I accepted it.”

Given how interested authors are in the Amazon rank of their books, it’s curious how little I can find about how those ranks are computed. Amazon won’t say. Let me try to figure it out.

Is it based on the number of copies sold in some unit of time — say, one day? Surely not. If the unit is too small, then most books will have zero copies sold. That’s too many ties. If the unit is too large — say, one week — it won’t change very quickly. That’s boring.

That leaves average time between orders — what an animal psychologist would call interorder interval (IOI). If one copy is sold at 10:00 am on Monday and the next copy is sold at 12 noon on Tuesday, the IOI is 26 hours. This is easy to track for each book and can discriminate between books that don’t sell many copies.

How many IOIs does Amazon use to compute the rank? One, five, twenty? Surely more than one. Using just one would be too noisy and would do a terrible job of discriminating best-sellers. This morning my editor asked me if Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics blog post about SLD yesterday helped its Amazon rank. I checked: the rank was about 5600 (better than usual). This afternoon, I checked again: the rank was about 1700. I am sure there is no delayed effect of a mention on the NY Times website; Dubner’s post must have had its biggest effect on sales yesterday. So why is the rank improving today? Because Amazon uses a fixed number of IOIs (or at least a maximum number) to compute the rank and today the longer ones are still being replaced by shorter ones. In other words, the rate of sales, although lower today than yesterday, is still higher than usual.

According to this article, a book ranked about 2000 sells about 10 copies per day (on Amazon, I assume). SLD’s current rank (about 2000) reflects an average of long IOIs (before yesterday) and short ones (yesterday and today). Yesterday, therefore, it must have sold more than 10 copies — but this wasn’t enough to get rid of all the long IOIs. So the rank is based on more than 10 IOIs.

Further than that I cannot go.

Using Amazon rank to compute sales. The Bookscan/Amazon-rank correlation I show in that post indicates that a book with an Amazon rank of about 2000 sells about 40 Bookscan copies per day, which is why I assume that the 10 copies per day mentioned above refers just to Amazon sales.

When I gave a draft of my Robert Gallo article to my editor at Spy, Susan Morrison, she called it “well-reported.” I hadn’t heard the term before, but I understood what it meant. (And, yes, I do remember every compliment I have ever been given.)

I thought of well-reported when I read this in The Fortune-Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer Lee:

This eighty-one-year old Chinese woman was a professional Jew.

She lives in Kaifung, China, where long ago there had been a community of Jews large enough to build a synagogue. She is one of the few Jews left; pilgrims visit her. She makes a living selling them paper cutouts that combine Jewish and Chinese themes. You could read a hundred books about China and not come across anything like this, but it reminds me of my experience. When I was in China — I taught psychology at Beijing University — some friends and I visited the Great Wall. To avoid tourists, we went to a remote and less popular section. As predicted, it was nearly deserted. But along the path to the wall, just before it got steep, sat an old man in a chair. “2 yuan” said a sign. He wanted 2 yuan (about 25 cents) to allow us to pass. We paid.

Or should that be Write-Off? Last night I compared, as in a cook-off, the first few pages of four books I want to read. (I also want to read Cookoff by Amy Sutherland.) Here are my notes:

1. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner. Slow start. Weiner goes to Rotterdam to visit happiness researcher Ruut Veerhoven. I am unamused that a Dutch waiter asks “Maybe now you would like some intercourse?”

2. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins. Disappointing, although possibly a great book. The beginning is abstract and preachy — although the central idea — we are beginning an industrial transformation that will transform our lives as much as the Industrial Revolution did — is incredibly important.

3. The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester. About Joseph Needham. Another slow start. Begins with his arrival in China. No amount of well-written detail will make someone getting off a boat or plane interesting, although I expect the rest of the book will be excellent. Here’s how the USA Today review of the book begins:

Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China proves the adage that if you really want to learn a foreign language, fall in love with a native speaker.

Winchester’s new non-fiction book is the tale of what happened after brilliant British scientist Joseph Needham lost his heart to Lu Gwei-djen, a 33-year-old Chinese biochemist. She had come to Cambridge University from China in 1937 to meet with Needham, 37, and his wife Dorothy, also a prominent biochemist.

Much better.

4. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee. (I have no idea why Lee spells her name with a period after the 8.) This was the book I kept reading. After a poor prologue (a cluster of Powerball winners due to a fortune-cookie fortune — unsurprising), the book moves to a well-written mix of stuff I didn’t know about an interesting topic (Chinese take-out) and personal story.

Winner: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.