The Battle for Alaska Statehood, Ernest Gruening
I skimmed this work, a political chronicle padded with many reproduced speeches and statements. It was interesting for showing who was opposed to Alaskan statehood. For much of its existence as a nearly uninhabited American territory, statehood was simply premature. Later, absentee interests who exploited Alaskan resources were the key opposition. In the endgame, Eisenhower's Republicans blocked statehood for much of a decade based on the fear that Alaska's elected officials would be Democrats. The reverse situation occurred for Hawaii, where Democrats blocked what they assumed would be Republican representation. Now, of course, Hawaii is a solid blue state and Alaska has been 100% red at the federal level since before my family moved there in the late 1970s. If Johnson's championship of civil rights and Nixon's appeal to racism resulted in the two parties swapping constituencies, then does that imply that the partisanship in the two westernmost states was reversed by political strategy in the southeast?

The Starfollowers of Coramonde, Brian Daley
The sequel, of course, to The Doomfarers of Coramonde. Daley's second pulp novel offers smoother plotting, an entertaining but disposable fantasy world, and his usual engaging prose.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
Exceptionally readable, not so much fast-paced as breakneck. Coasts on the merits of the other books as re: setting, atmosphere, motivation, minor characters, and pretty much everything besides plot and Voldemort's history. So far, book 4 remains the high-water mark and the series as a whole is a great read but not good literature.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, John Allen Paulos
A general survey of the math and concepts behind the stock market, with mediocre writing and an exceedingly annoying conceit: Paulos frames his text with the self-pitying story of his irrational and ultimately disastrous investment in Worldcom stock. His efforts to explain math are undermined by his determination to use prose narrative form, numbers and signs and all, instead of diagrams illustrating well-laid out equations. The existence of at least one glaring mistake further devalues the work.

Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke
(audiobook, abridged) Clarke reads his own book about his experience as the chief counter-terrorism official in the Clinton and second Bush administrations. The short form is that he saw the Clinton team taking terrorism very seriously and reasonably effectively, though far from his satisfaction; and that he saw the Bush team turn everything into grist for an ideological agenda. He emphatically rejects the Al Quida/Iraq connection, believes that missile strikes on Iraq and Iran ended both countries' active anti-US terror programs; and thinks that Homeland security is more of a political stunt then an effective program. Familiarity with this book is essential to informed discussion on the topics, and the book is quite well-written and full of engaging anecdotes, so reading it far from a chore. Clarke's reading of his own text was very good but I was disappointed to learn it was abridged.

It struck me that Clarke is perfect for the job. There is a valid fundamental debate about tradeoffs. Not the asinine and false trade of freedom for security as found in the bad provisions of the PATRIOT act, but cost/risk/benefit tradeoffs. How much money should go to securing flights vs securing trains? Or chemical weapons plants? Is the goal to maximize the lives saved per dollar spent? Should the goal be to prevent the most extreme terrorist actions? To spend money in basic disaster preparedness that is a good investment even if there is never another terrorist attack?

Since it's impossible to gather statistics on all the terrorist attacks that didn't happen, it's also impossible to make an well-informed tradeoff by many measures. (Note, however, that over sixty terrorist plots have reportedly been thwarted by police work in the US in the last 10 years. If that comes as a surprise to you, it may be because the attempted terrorists are "antigovernment militia groups, racist skinhead organizations, and Ku Klux Klan members" and not brown-skinned Islamic radicals, and so these plots haven't fit into the standard media storylines and so have been under-reported.)

Clarke's greatest value is that he doesn't seem to care about this tradeoff and assumes that prevention of terror should be the top priority of the entire United States. I don't agree, but that's exactly the attitude I would want in the chief of counter-terrorism. His job is to do all he can to stop terror; his boss's job is to allocate resources across many other priorities based on ... well, politics. To think that resources should be allocated according to rational debate is to start heading towards authoritarianism and communism. The lousy and corrupt system we have of balancing government priorities based on satisfying voting and lobbying constituencies and personal ambitions is awful, unacceptable, and better than any known alternative. To that end, perhaps Clarke's worst flaw was that he was too much the dedicated and competent civil servent and not enough the politician.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Walter Mosley
(audiobook) A very satisfying story, in which Easy Rawlins tries to help a friend whose son is mixed up with a bad element - radical black revolutionaries in Los Angeles in the early sixties. The murder mystery itself is a bit of a shaggy dog story, spelled out in excess detail at the very end like an Agatha Christie story, but the real point is the trip along the way, the subtle delivery of extraordinarily rich detail about being black in America at a particular place and time. This reader is technically better than the last one, but somehow shallower as well, and not as good with kids' and womens' voices.

Olympos, Dan Simmons
A giant, sprawling "soft sci-fi" epic with an exceptionally convoluted story involving a reproduction of the Trojan war created and manipulated by Greek Gods living on Olympus Mons on Mars, who are actually ultra-high-technology post-humans; the gods and humans are then observed by a different group of humans who live in idle luxury on a depopulated Earth in the thirty-fifth century or so; meanwhile many robotic cyborgs from Jupiter and the other outer planets, descendents of explorers from Earth fourteen-hundred years ago, send a mission to investigate.

All this was set up in the first book, and here in an equally long book Simmons concludes everything. While the story is goofy and over the top, that's part of the point, and so the puns and gleeful convolutions and absurd juxtapositions (many characters quote classic poetry; Haephestus uses the word "fuck" in almost every sentence; reconstructed 21st century scholar and protagonist Thomas Hockenberry has an affair with Helen of Troy) are not just forgivable but integral. And a lot of times it works, though occasional technical errors and editing errors ("the the" appears twice) mar the glossy finish. The real problem with Olympos is that Simmons is quite uncapable of ever providing a satisfactory ending; had he not even tried, this book would be just as good as the first. If you're in to that sort of thing.