Book reviews: ‘The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game’ and ‘The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World’

‘The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game’ by C. Thi Nguyen

C. Thi Nguyen loves games, said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. In his new book, the University of Utah philosophy professor puts himself out on “a long, creaking limb” by suggesting that much of human activity can be explained by two countervailing inclinations of the species: our tendency to gamify life’s purpose and our pursuit of freedom from that chase through, well, less consequential games. If you enjoy board games, fly fishing, or even recreational cooking, you probably appreciate the type of game that Nguyen endorses: an activity whose sometimes arbitrary rules enable us to play more freely and experience different aspects of ourselves. Nguyen worries, however, that our urge to quantify the value of our lives and achievements is soul-sucking, and his worries are less fun to read about than his paeans to play. He writes so beautifully about mastering the yo-yo, in fact, that I’d read a whole book on the subject and “would feel alive at the end.”

“The Score is part polemic and part philosophical inquiry,” said Simon Ings in The Telegraph (U.K.). Nguyen is telling us that in our trying to make life more frictionless, our governments, businesses, and individuals too have created metrics that measure the wrong things. “The result is that our civic life has become superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral.” Nguyen mentions a pastor who neglects other needs of his congregation because he’s been told to meet a baptism quota, and The Score also prods us to consider how the ranking of universities discounts schools’ distinctive value systems, how the pursuit of individual wealth steals time from relationships, and how we’ve come to believe we’re healthy as long as each day we each log 10,000 steps. Nguyen’s cautionary tales can get repetitive, but he is forever leading readers toward a particular set of conclusions, and “if we truly want to understand our civic plight, we should read The Score.”

At the end of the book, Nguyen offers two possible scenarios for our future, said Stuart Jeffries in the Financial Times. In the “Cynical Sad One,” as he calls it, our values continue to be perverted by misleading metrics as tech companies and other businesses monetize such scoring. But because Nguyen is essentially “an upbeat, hopeful guy,” he throws his heart into a second potential outcome, “advocating a kind of playful rebellion against rules and metrics.” Being more cynical myself, “I suspect the evisceration of our values by scoring systems will continue,” as business interests outweigh human interests. “I would love to be proved wrong,” though, and in the meantime, “I give this excellent
book five stars.”

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‘The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World’ by Tilar J. Mazzeo

“There is perhaps no more traditionally masculine literary genre than the seafaring tale,” said Jennifer Wright in The New York Times. “So it
is exciting to read Tilar J. Mazzeo’s The Sea Captain’s Wife,” an account
of how, in 1856, a Massachusetts woman named Mary Ann Patten became the first female captain of a merchant clipper ship while 19 and pregnant. When her husband, the ship’s captain, was stricken with
tubercular meningitis as the 216-foot triple master neared the world’s most dangerous ocean passage, Patten called upon the knowledge she’d accumulated over the previous two years to win the crew’s support. The mutinous first mate had already been shackled below deck when Patten seized command of Neptune’s Car, and Mazzeo
recounts the subsequent action “with a no-nonsense crispness that feels appropriately shipshape.”

“If this were fiction, throwing in a hurricane now would be a little over the edge,” said Bill Heavey in The Wall Street Journal. Yet that’s what happened to Neptune’s Car as it neared Cape Horn and the treacherous
waters separating South America from Antarctica. Patten was rare even in having been a woman on such a ship, and rarer still in having studied books in the ship’s library that taught her both how to treat injuries and how to navigate. When the storm hit, she chose to ride its winds wherever they took the ship, surviving 50-foot-waves and an obstacle course of 200-foot icebergs before putting the ship back on course for San Francisco. It’s “undeniably one of the greatest stories of a bygone era,” but because Mazzeo waits until her book’s second half to reach the action, “readers may find themselves skipping ahead.”

“Fortunately, Mazzeo is an engaging writer,” said Laurie Hertzel in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Her forays into clipper-ship engineering, the science of ocean charts, and the Pattens’ family history are “all necessary for understanding Mary Ann’s story,” and that story doesn’t end when Patten reaches San Francisco and the world celebrates her
achievement. Because Patten had to then fight to be paid the captain’s fee she’d richly earned, “this book will leave you alternately shivering, cheering, and seething.”