The Ionian Mission, Patrick O'Brian

Inspired by Naomi Novik's novels, I'm now working through O'Brian's twenty Aubrey and Maturin books. They are amazing. I don't plan to review any of them any further than that. I do want to offer this passage from The Ionian Mission, the eighth book:

Now when the fiddle sang at all it sang alone: but since Stephen's departure he had rarely been in a mood for music and in any case the partita that he was now engaged upon, one of the manuscript works that he had bought in London, grew more and more strange the deeper he went into it. The opening movements were full of technical difficulties and he doubted he would ever be able to do them anything like justice, but it was the great chaconne which followed that really disturbed him. On the face of it the statements made in the beginning were clear enough: their closely-argued variations, though complex, could certainly be followed with full acceptation, and there were not particularly hard to play; yet at one point, after a curiously insistent repetition of the second theme, the rhythm changed and with it the whole logic of the discourse. There was something dangerous about what followed, something not unlike the edge of madness or at least of a nightmare; and although Jack recognized that the whole sonata and particularly the chaconne was a most impressive composition he felt that if he were to go on playing it with all his heart it might lead him to very strange regions indeed.

(Some serious catch-up here: I read some of these six months ago or more)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
A perfect airplane book. It came out a day before my flight. I started it at the SeaTac airport and finished it on approach to Tokyo; left it on the plane for the next person. I was satisfied with the conclusion, but I do feel that the only part of the series with really exceptional writing was the last third of book 3 and the whole of book 4.

Death of an Expert Witness, P.D. James
Grabbed it from the university library on a whim, enjoyed it. No particular hurry to read more.

The Dark Tower series, Steven King
It's Steven King's magnum opus, for better and worse. It reads like he just wrote it on the fly, which he pretty much did. If you like King enough to want to spend a million words with him, you'll like it. The atmosphere is great, the characters are sometimes great. The horror and scary level is mostly cranked way down. Despite the length, it's not really that Epic, partly because not all that much happens and partly because of the claustrophobic feeling of being in just enough of a world for him to tell his story (the opposite of Tolkien Syndrome). The last three books, especially, feel somewhat like playing a computer game, as you go from location to location, and then back, and then find the widget, and then go back to that one place where the widget reveals a secret door, and then see what's back there, and then go back to that other place and now you see that the guard you killed happened to land on top of the other widget, that's why you didn't see it the first time and wasted two hours before you searched google for a cheat guide, and all the time you are alone, and the computer-generated characters walking in their computer-generated routes for you to sneak past just make you even more alone, with only your thoughts for company. That kind of feeling. Except that you're alone with Steven King's thoughts.

Arthur and George, Julian Barnes
This is Literature in the best sense; you get sucked in and just keep reading and it gradually dawns on you that what you are reading is immaculately awesome in conception and execution. This and Sacred Games were easily the two best books I read in 2007.

Mao: The Untold Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
I already had a sense that Mao was a villain for all time and an equal partner with Stalin and Hitler as the most heinous mass murderers of all time. This book fills in a lot of details, and takes it a step further. It's a very thorough attempt to paint pretty much everything Mao ever did as an act of calculated evil. I understand that the quality or provability of some of the research is under attack. Many people seem to have recoiled just at the intensity and completeness of the argument, taking the position that any description which is so one-sided must be somewhat exaggerated. I don't see that as a logical rebuttal, but I do have my own issues with the narrative, especially the account of Mao during the war period (Long March to 1949). The authors attempt to explain almost all of Mao's successes and escapes as consequences of Mao's masterful manipulations of friends, rivals, allies, and enemies. Given the slender evidence for some allegations, they don't seem to hold up well to Occam's razor. Isn't it more likely that some of his opponents just screwed up or were stupid, rather than that he pulled all of the puppet strings all of the time?

I don't see those kinds of issues as wholly discrediting the book. I learned a lot, even though I found it so horribly depressing that I couldn't read too many pages at a sitting, and ended up setting it aside about two thirds of the way through. Anyone who has a positive or mixed opinion about Mao must be seeing the evidence through very rose-colored glasses; the genuine debate seems to be only about if he's purely evil to the last cell, or just really, really evil.

One Jump Ahead, Mark L. Van Name
A pulpy sci-fi story. I bought it on the strength of the first page or two; it passed the time and had some style but didn't seem especially novel or well-plotted.

Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi
More of the same from Scalzi; it's good, but like diet soda has some weird, unpalatable aftertaste. SPOILER: It may be related to the debate (sorry, couldn't find a link quickly) about whether it's fair to criticize the fascist tone of the earlier book when that tone may represent the narrator's views rather than Scalzi or the world Scalzi has created, or it may just be something about his writing almost but not quite rubbing me the right way.

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Almost everything we (in the United States) eat contains corn. A typical fast food meal may be predominantly corn, in that corn is the input stock to industrial processes that make sweeteners, thickeners, and a myriad of other "ingredients". This is because corn is the most efficient crop at converting sunlight to energy; soy is the most efficient at converting sunlight to protein and so soy is the other main crop in the US. Corn as the foundation of industrial farming is really bad for society for many reasons, not least of which because the corn ecosystem requires huge inputs of petroleum. The proximate cause of this is really destructive farm subsidies and policies.

The book is, for the most part, ultra-readable. Pollan does a lot of hands-on research into farming and the corn industry, including spending time on a modern factory farm and on a smaller, more natural farm which integrates agriculture and livestock in a labor-intensive and astoundingly productive enterprise. The parts where he collects all of the ingredients for his own home-cooked meal are probably the least engaging, but the book has definitely changed how I look at manufactured food.

Uncommon Carriers, John McFee
Like the Omnivore's Dilemma, this book starts tremendously, with very gripping details about mundane infrastructure, and then peters out as the author gets more personal. The stories about a long-distance trucker, a coal train, a Missisippi barge crew; all fantastic and give you a wonderful sense of being there.

1634: The Baltic War, Eric Flint
I've been enjoying this pleasingly escapist multi-novel story about a modern West Virginian coal town transplanted to 17th century Germany, but experiencing diminishing returns. At first I thought I was just getting tired of the story, but then I read this and realized that the real problem is that the writing is degenerating into a "Mary Sue" story. The moderns always face small setbacks but overcome them with ingenuity and steadfast leadership; the locals get entranced by good old American values; it seems like every book features plucky, scared but brave American teenagers getting over their heads in world affairs and having beautiful, progressive 17th century teenagers fall in love with them and it always works out. I liked the ideas, trying to figure out how 17th century culture would interact with 20th century small-town Americans; the pro-union bent of the authors; seeing how you might try to reconstruct modern industrial technology almost from scratch. But the execution has completely turned me off, and I've stopped reading this series, probably a book or two too late.

Star Trek: Swordhunt, Star Trek: Honor Blade, Star Trek: The Empty Chair, Diane Duane
The Romulan Way remains my favorite Star Trek book ever (not meaning to damn with faint praise); these sequels extend the story in a fairly unsatisfactory way. Spoiler: How come it seems like every Diane Duane book (Star Trek or otherwise) has the same climax, as the diverse good guys, now bonded as BFFs, pluckily march once more unto the breach with some sort of reality-bending mystical energy thing as background, a la Madeleine L'Engle? Counting My Enemy, My Ally, Duane uses this ending twice in the same series, not to mention all her non-Trek books. It seems like the Mary Sue virus is at work here too.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller.
I read Catch-22 for Matthew Baldwin's NaNoReMo 2007. His commentary, plus a sampling of user comments, covers the book review territory pretty well, key points being: if you don't like the style, it's hard to read; if you do like the style, it goes very quickly and is a hoot, but can still be trying; the deliberateness of the repetition. I am a bit disappointed by some of Matthew's selections of favorite passages: he seems to favor the most heavy-handed and obvious polemical bits, which to me are not the strength of the book.

What I want to add to the discussion is this thought, from a New York Review of Books article about war reporters:

... that violent conflict is simply beyond representation ... may be true about movies.... About writing, though, it is untrue. This is a matter of craft, a matter of devising the right technique. And it always has been. Right at the dawn of modern fiction, Jakob von Grimmelshausen recognized that his experiences in the hell of the Thirty Years' War could not be told straight because they were beyond the comprehension of peaceful readers. So he transposed them into a key of horrifying, merciless, callous satire, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669). Don't try to "understand," don't try to "imagine,", just read Simplicissimus and be appalled at your own laughter. That way, you are getting close to what Carolin Emcke and Anthony Loyd are trying to report. —Neal Ascherson

This describes Heller, whose biography is similar to Yossarian's, perfectly. This is not the work of a veteran, a decade or two after the war, deciding to write something clever about how darned wacky it was. Catch-22 is a scream of pure rage, at war in general but more pointedly at those individuals who bear responsibility for causing war and for making it worse, at those people who cause horrible suffering with callous indifference.

Naomi Novik, Empire of Ivory
Book four of Temeraire. More of the same. Perfect! (This series cannot be described any better than EW's blurb, "This book is for anyone who's read one of Patrick O'Brian's nineteenth-century-set naval adventures and mused, You know what would make this better? Dragons.")

Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games

Just as his first book, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was utterly accomplished, so does his second book, a decade later, feel like a worthy mid-career work of an absolute master. Chandra dials back the multi-layered storytelling to merely overflowing, and gives us a fairly straight story of organized crime and police in Mumbai. Spoiler: just one little bit of a taste: pages 838 to 876 contain a rich and convincing complete life story, with a background of classism and racism in a town in rural India, of a character who was nameless during his brief appearance in the main story many hundreds of pages before. This little novellette was so good it would have been worth reading 837 pages of junk just to set it up. This was easily one of the best books I read this year.

Cecelia Dart-Thornton, The Lady of the Sorrows.
I have fond memories of reading "The Ill-Made Mute", by Cecilia Dart-Thornton, so I picked up its sequel. Apparently those memories are quite vague, because the only parts of the recap that rang a bell were that the protagonist had been mute and disfigured but got fixed by the end of the book. Within a few pages I was reading this:

It was difficult to sit still inside the house of the carlin, within walls, and to know that Thorn walked in Caermelor, in the Court of the King-Emperor. Now the renewed damsel was impatient to be off to the gates of the Royal City. At the least, she might join the ranks of Thorn's admirers, bringing a little self-respect with her. She might exist near him, simultaneously discharging the mission she had taken upon herself at Gilvaris Tarv: to reveal to the King-Emperor the existence of the great treasure and—it was to be hoped—to set into motion a chain of events that would lead to the downfall of those who had slain Sianadh, Liam, and the other brave men of their expedition.

And it made every bit as little sense to me as it must to you. I was reading gems like this:

The long tables, loaded with dinner service, made the High seem by comparison austere. Myriad white beeswax candles in branched candelabra reflected in fanciful epergnes of crystal or silvered basketwork, golden salvers lifted on pedestals and filled with sweetmeats or condiments, sets of silver spice-casters elaborately gadrooned, their fretted lids decorated with intricately pierced patterns, crystal cruets of herbal vinegars and oils, porcelain mustard pots with a blue underglaze motif of starfish, oval dish supports with heating-lamps underneath, mirrored plateaux and low clusters of realistic flowers and leaves made from silk.

Maybe I've been buried too deep in academic papers, but when I see prose like that I expect to see footnotes and a bibliography. By the time I hit this on page 32:

Thorn!
But no. Of course not—it was just that she had not been expected to see a tall figure wearing the subdued Dainnan uniform here in the palace suites, where braided liveries stalked alongside jeweled splendors. This man with brown hair tumbling to his shoulders was not Thorn, although he came close to him in height, and if she had not first seen Thorn, she would have thought the Commander exceedingly comely. He was older, thicker in girth, more solidly built, his arms scarred, his thighs knotted with sinew. At the temples his hair was threaded with silver. Proud of demeanor he was, and stern of brow, but dashing in the extreme.
The warrior leader's hazel eyes, which had widened slightly at the sight of the visitor, now narrowed. Somewhere in remote regions of the palace, something loose banged peevishly in the rising wind.

I think that was probably when I gave up any hope, and it was probably about 30 pages too late. Sadly, I spent many minutes that afternoon waiting for a night bus (d'oh) with only that book for company, and was driven by desperation to read as far as page 70 or so. I guess the silver lining is that, with a better book, I might have waited the full three hours until the night bus service started.

The dean is a big fan of Thomas Friedman. Dean, if you are reading this, may I direct you to this summary of your most interesting lecture to our negotiation class?

So. Everybody else may want to check out this article, The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman by Matt Taibbi. Taibbi's argument in a nutshell is that Friedman writes terribly because he has nothing substantive to say. But Taibbi's details make his argument sing:

It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.
[...]

According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them. Although these 10 flatteners existed already by the time Friedman wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree—a period of time referred to in the book as Globalization 2.0, with Globalization 1.0 beginning with Columbus—they did not come together to bring about Globalization 3.0, the flat world, until the 10 flatteners had, with the help of the steroids, gone through their "Triple Convergence." The first convergence is the merging of software and hardware to the degree that makes, say, the Konica Minolta Bizhub (the product featured in Friedman's favorite television commercial) possible. The second convergence came when new technologies combined with new ways of doing business. The third convergence came when the people of certain low-wage industrial countries—India, Russia, China, among others—walked onto the playing field. Thanks to steroids, incidentally, they occasionally are "not just walking" but "jogging and even sprinting" onto the playing field.

Now let's say that the steroids speed things up by a factor of two. It could be any number, but let's be conservative and say two. The whole point of the book is to describe the journey from Globalization 2.0 (Friedman's first bestselling book) to Globalization 3.0 (his current bestselling book). To get from 2.0 to 3.0, you take 10 flatteners, and you have them converge—let's say this means squaring them, because that seems to be the idea—three times. By now, the flattening factor is about a thousand. Add a few steroids in there, and we're dealing with a flattening factor somewhere in the several thousands at any given page of the book. We're talking about a metaphor that mathematically adds up to a four-digit number. If you're like me, you're already lost by the time Friedman starts adding to this numerical jumble his very special qualitative descriptive imagery. For instance:

And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.

See also Dial "M" for Moustache. Making Light has more commentary, including a pointer to a resonant critique of James Fenimore Cooper's writing. David Sirota argues that Friedman's ignorance stems from his class: "Far from the objective, regular-guy interpreter of globalization that the D.C. media portrays him to be, Friedman is a member of the elite of the economic elite on the planet Earth. In fact, he's married into such a giant fortune, it's probably more relevant to refer to him as Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman than columnist Tom Friedman, both because that's more descriptive of what he represents, and more important for readers of his work to know so that they know a bit about where he's coming from."

Here's my own review of the Lexus and the Olive Tree from 2002; my executive summary at the time was "Friedman is a tool".

Daywatch, Sergey Lukyanenko and Vladimir Vasilyev

Very satisfying followup to Nightwatch - supernatural battles between good and evil in and around Moscow. I eagerly await the English translations of the next two books.

Throne of Jade and Black Powder War, Naomi Novik

Whatever muse Naomi Novik tapped in to for the first Temeraire book remains in full effect. Superb page-turners. Hurry up and write some more.

Empires of the Word, Nicholas Ostler

A history of the languages of the world. Competently written, and I learned a lot, but not quite well written enough to keep it from turning into a slog by the end.

No Frills: The truth Behind the Low-Cost Revolution in the Skies, Simon Calder.
A notebook dump from a UK airline journalist. Heavy on anecdotes and quotes from British no-frills airline presidents, includes a fair amount of business details such as load factors and costs, and is very light on any deep analysis. Competent but pedestrian writing.

Un Lun Dun, China Miéville
All of China's glorious invention, applied to a children's book and with the characters subject only to a mercifully light version of his usual authorial sadism. Plus illustrations. No more could be asked for in this world or the other.

Deliverer, C.J. Cherryh
Book nine in the Foreigner universe. The series is sufficiently well-written to remain addictive, but sufficiently shallow and repetitive that news of another three books to come is more cause for despair than celebration.

Fortress of Ice, C.J. Cherryh
I can't help myself. Her books pass the time. The ideas and writing don't insult my intelligence.

His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik.
From the Washington Post: "all hail Naomi Novik for seizing on an entirely different set of literary conventions for her fantasy debut — the dashing Brits-on-ships genre perfected by Patrick O'Brian. In His Majesty's Dragon, Novik plunks her scaly beasts into the Napoleonic Wars, as members of the Aerial Corps, air cover for the beleaguered Royal Navy as it fends off a French invasion." All I can add is that it's the impecabble writing that makes all of the mashed up cliches and conventions work together so perfectly.

Read over the last ~6 months. Presented in no particular order.

Between Silk and Cyanide, Leo Marks
An entertaining, moving, and convincing memoir of one young man's service in WWII as a British codebreaker.

The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner
Entertaining return to Ellen Kushner's swashbuckling fantasy world, if a bit light compared to my memory of Swordspoint.

In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, Sailing Bright Eternity, Gregory Benford
In six books written over 20 years, Gregory Benford tells an epic saga, beginning with near-future astronauts and humanity's first encounters with other species and ending with an exceedingly prolonged anti-climax in a clot of space-time orbiting the black hole at the middle of the galaxy. The backstory to all of this is the eternal clash between biological and mechanical life. Benford goes in the general direction of amazing and spectacular Epicness; although his writing improves substantially from the first books with their painful seventies sci-fi-isms, it never really gains the power to fulfill and sustain his vision. Read the third and fourth books and leave the rest.

Mortal Games, Fred Waitzkin
An account of the times journalist Fred Waitzkin spends around Kasparov before, during, and after his 1990 match with Karpov. Readable and interesting, although Waitzkin's style puts him far too much into the story.

Three Days to Never, Tim Powers
I'm always eager to read a new Tim Powers book, but this one sadly disappointed.

Rainbow's End, Vernor Vinge
Vernor Vinge's theory of the Singularity says that the increasing pace of technological change will rapidly render civilization unrecognizable. It's been quite a challenge for him to write science fiction while staying true to this belief. In this entertaining trifle, he tries to peek into the near future of computer-enhanced school kids, whose classrooms include older people back for retraining or even back from Alzheimer's.

1635: Cannon Law, Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis
Flint churns out another entertaining, thought-provoking, pedestrian-prosed novel in the Ring of Fire alternate universe (in which a small West Virginia mining town is transported to 1632 Germany).

Nightwatch, Sergey Lukyanenko
A very Russian take on vampires and good versus evil, with plenty of bureaucracy, dark humor, fate, and vodka. This English translation presents three original novels in one big but not huge book. Entertaining but not great.

One Night at the Call Center
A wretchedly earnest and painfully poorly written story of malcontents at an Indian call center.

Mammoth, John Varley.
Another competent, pedestrian science fiction novel from former sf god John Varley.

Pretender, C.J. Cherryh
"The second book of the third FOREIGNER sequence." That would make it book eight in this series about the politics of various factions of humans and aliens on planet far from Earth. The cover art still sucks; the prose is as good as ever if you like her thing, which I do.

Kant in 90 Minutes, Plato in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern.
(audiobook). The "Philosopher X" in 90 minutes series is lovely, especially on audiobook, because each narrative is mildly informative about the philosopher's life and ideas, and snarky enough to be entertainingy, well-read in a snooty British accent, and short. What I learned (true or not) is that Kant lived and taught in a podunk town in Germany, didn't have much interaction with other humans, was upset by Hume's assertion that skepticism was more powerful than any other idea, wrote in wretched prose, and built a huge castle of logic around the ideas of categories of things and logic and reason and all of that on a shaky foundation. Dunno how accurate that is, but it was a fun 90 minutes. Whatever I learned about Plato, I already forgot.

The Riverworld series, Philip Jose Farmer.
A horrifying warning tale of what science fiction can be without editorial judgement. The first book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, is a minor classic with a great premise: everyone who has ever died wakes up, young and healthy and with their daily needs provided for, along the banks of a tremendously long river. Obvious directions for the story to go include presenting the daily mechanics of life in this setup; speculating on how people would react and how civilizations would spontaneously form; discovering the purpose of the "Riverworld"; and introducing historical figures and seeing them act, reflect on their pasts, learn about their legacies, and interact with one another. Book one hints at all of this and, with writing ability more or less adequate to the task, is a great thought provocation and a good read.

As the series develops along four more books, any hint of writing skill rapidly evaporates. With limited exceptions, the characters' dialog, thoughts, styles, and motivations are interchangable. Stupefyingly, dimensions in the third book (and only the third book) are presented in both metric and imperial, woven into the prose: "Burton spared a glance at the tower. It was only a little over 400 feet or 122 meters away." By the fourth book, the arresting ideas have given over to painfully pointless metaphysics in which the aliens who created Riverworld also created machines that make souls, which they buried underground on Earth thousands of years ago, and there's something about how you have to be properly Ethical in order to advance in some fashion, and ultimately it's about as sophisticated as L. Ron Hubbard, but not as much fun.

(Although, in the interests of fairness, I must say that even at his worst, Farmer's prose is still far, far more tolerable than Hubbard's.)

I would cautiously recommend book one, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but absolutely nothing after that.

Hollywood Animal, Joe Eszterhaus (audiobook) Joe Eszterhaus's memoir of his career as record-breakingly highly paid Hollywood writer is voiced, perfectly, by Eric Bogosian. Eszterhaus has plenty of dirt to dish, and although he cops to plenty of his own mistakes, his narrative is still much to suggestively self-serving to be taken at face value. The book is very entertaining nonetheless, although his return to religion after facing cancer is disappointing from such a vivid and independent mind.

Another Day, Another Dungeon and One Quest, Hold the Dragon, Greg Costikyan.
In a standard Dungeons and Dragons scenario, one cloned by many a successor, the heros form an adventuring party, go down into the dungeons, fight orcs and dragons, and return with treasure. But did you ever wonder how the orcs feel about this? Or how the orcs and dragons and treasure got there in the first place? Or how the heroes can convert their rare and precious treasure, often highly recognizable and with prior owners, into liquid cash? Greg Costikyan gives us two books, with more hopefully to come, delving into all of this via a story line that can only be called revisionist. The priest is a drunk, the magician a pyromaniac, the thieves ex-lovers, the dwarf and the barbarian warrior carved from the purest stereotype. Blissfully funny.

First Contract, Greg Costikyan.
Suppose aliens came, and they had great and advanced technology, and they treated Earth about as well as European explorers treated, say, Micronesians. What exactly would happen to Earth's economy? Another lovely little satire from Costikyan.

The Wave, Walter Mosley
Mosley takes what ought to be hackneyed science fiction cliches and breathes new life into them with his sincerity and his mastery of character. Recommended.

Camoflague, Joe Haldeman
Good, entertaining, enjoyable if mildly undifferentiated characters; a breezy ending.

Dead Solid Perfect, Dan Jenkins
Features at least one shaggy dog story (the source of the title) which is superb; the rest is servicable golf comedy. I imagine it could be turned into a great movie by the right person, and I note that a movie has indeed been made, but I have no idea if it's any good.

1634: The Galileo Affair, Eric Flint, Andrew Dennis
Part of Eric Flint's "Ring of Fire" storyline, which is a wonderful premise that has me hooked even when the writing is merely adequate. An entire West Virginia mining town, everything in a six-mile circle, is transported back to Germany in 1632, smack in the middle of civil wars and religious strife. From that point history rapidly diverges from what we know, as the Americans spread their technology, their influence, and their knowledge (for example, kings read copies of the history books and start promoting and beheading people based on what they are described as having done in the history books).

I like these books because the idea of exposing the past to modernity is fascinating; probably it's mostly as a self-serving mirror for us, but it's still fun. Flint's key innovation, bringing an entire town back instead of just a few heroic figures, reflects his commitment to "salt of the earth" characters, as represented here by the union miners. He's a great optimist, and the books are very upbeat and safe. While I think this raises the bar he would have to meet to produce literature (fairly or not), it does introduce a nice comfort zone.

Ships of Air, The Gate of Gods, Martha Wells
Sequels to The Wizard Hunters, these accomplished science fiction/fantasy novels move at a blistering pace, have engaging characters and scary villains, and the same strong sense of place as Philip Pullman's stories. Wells continues to develop beyond pulp or formulaic genre work.

The Howling Stones, Alan Dean Foster
Light-duty science fiction about a cross-species negotiator dealing with a recalcitrant tribe of primitive aliens who turn out to be backed by mysterious high technology. Easy enough, and a few glimpses of interesting ideas in the ending, but oddly sanctimonious and ultimately not very special.

A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore.
A very funny, moderately moving story about a nebbish whose wife dies shortly after childbirth, leaving him to raise their daughter while also apparently laden with supernatural powers (and enemies) as a deputy of Death.

When I get audiobooks for my ipod, it's a bit of work. I usually get books on CD from the library and rip them, and counting all the overhead and what my time is worth it's probably not that much cheaper than buying a paperback. Nonetheless, I'm more than willing to abandon a bad audiobook, whereas I'm more likely to keepgoing with a physical book. In the last year or so I've started and abandoned several books. Here is my accounting:

The Man in My Basement, Walter Mosley.
(audiobook). I think I've overdosed on Mosley lately. It started well, but when it was explained that the main character has mortgaged the house he inherited from five or six generations of ancestors, and suggested that his need to earn money to redeem his prodigal error will be a pivot point in the plot, I turned it off. That kind of pathos I don't need.

The Myth of Solid Ground, David L. Ulin.
I usually like non-fiction by journalists, and the LA Weekly is packed with good journalists. The notion that earthquakes cause emotional discomfort by disrupting the comforting "myth of solid ground" seems like a great starting point for abook-length report on the state of earthquake prediction in California. But the effort founders on lousy writing and sloppy thinking. After trolling through a few turgid chapters for a meager harvest of new ideas, I gave it up.

Faster, James Gleick.
(audiobook) I listened for a few chapters and didn't learn anything and got tired of the facile tone so I gave up. I like Gleick in general, so maybe it was just the fault of the abridgment.

Clash of the Titans, Richard Hack.
I made it perhaps 30 minutes into this audio book about battles between Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner before coming to the conclusion that, no matter how well written and read the book was, I didn't want to spend 19 hours listening to stories about these two jerks.

The Reality Dysfunction Part 2: Expansion, Peter Hamilton
I had previously abandoned part 1 half-way through because of the utterly mediocre writing. I picked up part 2 five years later in a used bookstore because of lingering curiousity about the story and a desire for mindless, low-risk reading. I can confirm that I scanned almost all of the lines of text in the book, that I was mildly entertained, and that I was quite diverted from my mundane life. Beyond that, there is little to recommend and much to criticize. Most of the ideas, characters, and plot lines are trite at best. The prose is the florid production of a tin ear for text; if Robert Heinlein set the gold standard for effortless integration of futuristic technology into fiction writing, with the canonical example being "The door irised open," Peter Hamilton sets the carbotanium standard. No, I don't know what carbotanium is, but despite his having invented it, I suspect neither does Peter Hamilton. After all of that, the repetitive grammatical errors and the occasional gross mistake in physics are hardly worth mentioning.

The difference between a guilty pleasure and Peter Hamilton is that, when I realized that I would have to read three more books to get to the end of the story, I didn't for one second consider doing so. Also, I threw the book in the recycle bin when I was finished. But I will concede that I finished it.

Everything and More, David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace writes non-fiction with such skill and confidence, and is so grippingly able to evidence deep understanding of complex subjects, that it takes conscious effort to remember, while reading his work, that he is capable as anyone else of jumping to conclusions and ignoring a shaky foundation, and that he has in fact been caught out on factual correctness in the past. That notwithstanding, this is a great read, a great introduction to infinity, and a great source of grief that he started teaching at my alma mater a decade after I left. When Wallace is on target, he's more than capable of expressing in full effect thoughts you only suspected you had:

Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. 'Us' meaning laymen. It's like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time. As in for instance we 'know', as high-school graduates and readers of Newsweek, that time is relative, that quantum particles can be both there and not, that space is curved, that colors do not inhere in objects themselves, that our love for our children is evolutionarily preprogrammed, that there is a blind spot in the center of our vision that our brains automatically fill in. That our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pate. That we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, and hydrogen is flammable, and yet we are not flammable. We 'know' a near-infinity of truths that contradict our immediate commonsense experience of the world. And yet we have to live and function in the world. (Everything and More, David Foster Wallace, p22)

The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
Exactly what I wanted—a reasonably comprehensive survey of philosophy (though I missed the Eastern stuff), in very readable and personable prose, written by someone who understands everything being discussed, in under a thousand pages. While it must certainly be colored by Russell's particular comprehension, such bias is very consistent and thus easy to compensate for; or at least it will be once I find a point on which I differ substantially from Russell, which apparently hasn't happened yet. His snark livens things up without cheapening them too much. It did take about a year to make it through, and I fell asleep a lot, but I think that's mostly because it's about philosophy, and reading it seriously takes a lot of thought, which consumes glycogen stores in the brain and produces sleep.

Reaching the home stretch—ideas less than six hundred years old—and having read a few biographical notes, I found increasing kinship with Russell. A common complaint of atheism is that it takes away the comforting certainty of a personal yet omnipotent God, and forces non-believers to live alone with their thoughts in the universe. This train of thought, with or without other philosophical brain traps, can certainly lead to nihilism and existential despair of the sort attributed to beret-wearing Frenchmen smoking cigarettes and dressing in black, and it seems silly, but it has a real bite. If you think too hard about the universe and your role in it, and about death, and what the lack of an afterlife means; or even if you just keep asking "why" as hard as you can, you can really freak yourself out and get stuck in a dark and lonely place. The fact that I think belief in God is ultimately untenable doesn't preclude being jealous of it. Russell apparently lived with depression on and off throughout his life, maybe from thinking about living in a material world, more likely mostly from other sources. Reading this book, at times I felt, in a secular and materialist way, spiritually connected to the author. I may be alone in the universe, but I'm not the only one. So to speak.

Air, Geoff Ryman
A spectacular combination of Maureen McHugh's deep humanity and sympathy for her characters with Connie Willis' deadpan comedy of manners, plus a dash of Douglas Coupland's invention. The story of the last village in the world to get something like the internet, except that it's called Air, and it runs inside your brain, and it has metaphysical aspects, and there's a glitch in the first trial. Reading this book filled me with a double sense of happiness; its so good that I enjoyed how much I was enjoying it.

The Box, Marc Levinson.

In chapter 1, Marc Levinson describes a shipping container and containerport, sketches out changes in port sizes resulting from containerization, outlines a few changes to the world economy that resulted, mentions the impacts on labor, and complains that the historical data doesn't exist to back up many of his claims. You could stop reading here and you wouldn't miss much. I wish I had.

The rest of the book is simultaneously very detailed and not especially informative. Although he throws in numbers in piecemeal fashion, the entire book is a collection of anecdotes, some very long, without much connective tissue or broad scope to convince the reader that the anecdotes should be taken as representational. More fatally, the prose is consistently mediocre. I didn't dislike it enough to abandon it, but I never enjoyed reading it. For a mass market book like this, that should be a fatal flaw.

After all, the author had as his subjects industrial technology, the biggest ships in the world, multi-billion dollar companies, the Vietnam war, organized labor, violent strikes and strike-breakers, organized crime, and a foundation of globalization itself, and still wrote a tedious book. Although the minutia of committee meetings to standardize container fittings might seem to be a dull subject: 1) it really isn't, when you think of the paradoxes and complexities that cause one-inch changes in pieces of metal to affect billions of dollars of commerce and lead to such absurdities as giant fleets of rubber duckies circling the world because a container tipped over in heavy seas, and 2) even if it were inherently limited, recently people have managed to write exciting books about salt, dust, longitude, and the number zero.

But when I read the dust-jacket and learned that Levinson had been an editor at the Economist, it made sense that he could pick a great topic, mention many interesting aspects, and still fail to produce a good read.

An apparently equivalent book, Box Boats, is due out soon; I think I'll try and skim that one in a bookstore before I buy it.

Sony: The Private Life, John Nathan
Something more than a reporter's notebook dump, less than a comprehensive history of Sony, this book traces the history of personal relationships between the paramount leaders at Sony. It seems fair to summarize the book as, "Sony's key leaders, particularly Ibuka and Morita at the founding, later Ogha, and in the US Schulhoff, have had close personal relationships that have often influenced their business relationships." In that light, the book is interesting but narrow, with competent prose but a slightly repetitive structure.

The author boasts of fairly comprehensive access, appears to speak fluent Japanese, and often follows interviewee's statements wit his own assessment of their honesty. The key things I learned, if Nathan's is taken as completely correct in his reporting and in his speculation, include:

• Sony's paramount leaders made many business decisions in private conversation, and then committees, the board of directors, and even nominally superior officers, all served as rubber stamps. That's not exactly surprising news for any company, but the details of how exactly that happens were interesting and convincing.
• Sony knew that the purchase of Columbia at the asking price, and poaching of Peter Guber, were bad business decisions, and decided to abandon the deal, but then resumed pursuit when Akio Morita expressed his personal desire to own a studio; this motivation is the best explanation for why Sony took steps that led to $3+ billion writeoff only a few years later.
• Peter Guber took Sony for a multi-hundred-million dollar ride. I already knew this, and I was aware of a book about it that I had no plans to read. So I didn't really need hundreds of pages rehashing it, bulked out by self-serving interviews from all involved.
• Two executives are primarily behind Sony's futile quest for synergy, former Sony America president Michael Schulhoff and 1990s Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei. If there's one single thing (in my opinion) that has ruined Sony, it's trying to unify the content business and the electronics business. The hardware people want to make great gadgets that people love. The content people, at Sony and elsewhere, have a long history of dragooning governments into supporting outmoded business models through laws and intimidation. If a line of business has opposed player pianos, radio, cable tv, vcrs, and MP3s, why would you want to merge it with a consumer electronics company?

  Sony invented the walkman; they should have Apple's market share in the digital player market and Sony's own music business is the reason they don't. I seem to remember a story about tails and dogs and wagging. What does Sony's latest CEO say? "While we press for stronger legal protection, we are actively developing a new and more sophisticated generation of copy protection. DRM—digital rights management—will allow us to safeguard content on devices in a manner that is easy for consumers to use and understand." (Howard Stringer, 2004). Sorry, Sir Howard, but it's not going well so far.

• Akio Morita was a lousy father and husband.
• Sony's founders were unusually entreprenurial for Japanese businessmen, but still relied from day one on extensive personal and family networks for money and access.

I enjoyed the fly-on-the-wall boardroom accounts, unreliable but convincing, and I was touched by the relationship between Akio Morita and co-founder and mentor Masaru Ibuku. The scene in which, having built a business empire together and now both felled by strokes, they sit together in a hospital room holding hands, is universal. (Well, universal for the set of all emperors and kings of kings who survive to infirm old age, but I think the rest of us can see something there.)

Overall, the book was good but limited, and I would recommend it only to those already interested in the subjects.

The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki

Executive summary: Collective decisions are usually as good as or better than individual decisions, even expert decisions, provided that the component members of the group are diverse and independent. Wikipedia offers a detailed summary, which I recommend everyone read. Beyond that, the book offers anecdotes, details, and verbiage. It's moderately well written but quite skippable.

Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman.
(audiobook) Better than "American Gods" and not as good as "Good Omens". Plusses include the well-executed choice of milieu (Carribean myths), and the eventual extended development of the characters. Minusses include the time spent waiting for the characters to get going and the ultimately less-than-it-seems plot. The narrator, Lenny Henry, deserves special mention; he was particularly talented with accents and generally very pleasant to hear. Also, the audiobook was available as a DRM-free MP3-CD, a laudable decision.

Notes from Toyota-Land, Darius Mehri.
Darius Mehri provides a book version of his diary from three years spent as an engineer at a company in the Toyota system. His writing is very readable, but a bit shaky in structure: it reads just like a diary expanded to a book. The near-total lack of narrative makes it a bit disjointed but even more credible; nothing seems to have been massaged around to make a better story.

His thesis is that the Japanese factory system does not deserve much of the praise and envy directed towards it: the admirable statistics are built on falsified numbers, such as unpaid overtime and dangerously high line speeds coupled with coverups of injuries and deaths. His Japanese workplace is depicted as racist, hierarchical, utterly sexist, and stubborn-minded. In other words, it's roughly like anywhere else, and substantially behind the times in some areas.

I would recommend the book to anyone remotely interested in the subject, or about to get on a plane; it's short, easy to digest, and a page-turner despite its flaws.

Nekropolis, Maureen McHugh
As is standard for McHugh, this is a stunningly humane story. It's fairly short; it's about people in trying situations; and I was very glad to have read it.

The book and methodology Getting Things Done by David Allen showed up on my radar late last year, and I ended up buying a copy because:

• It has the words "stress-free" on the cover
• I was not happy with my own organizational system.

I read the book carefully over the last month (including losing a copy and having to order another), not just picking up his system but also reflecting on my own system. I like his claims that the book is more about collections of tricks that work than silver bullets, and the promise that the system is more about feeling comfortable with what you are and aren't doing than about being able to simply do more:

And whatever you're doing, you'd probably like to be more relaxed, confident that whatever you're doing at the moment is just what you need to be doing—that having a beer withy our staff after hours, gazing at your sleeping child in his or her crib at midnight, answering the e-mail in front of your, or spending a few informal minutes with the potential new client after the meeting is exactly what you ought to be doing, as you're doing it. GTD page xi.

These claims and promises were partially fulfilled.

The crux of GTD seems to be to be this:

• You can only do one thing at time.
• If you have more than one thing to do, you will inevitably not be doing something you want to do.
• You must write down all of the things that you are not doing right now
• You must truly believe that your system will give you access to these things when you need them.
• Then, you should be able to forget about everything you are not doing
• Then, the stress from those things should go away

I won't further regurgitate his book here; google GTD yourself if you want summaries. Instead, here are the items that struck me especially:

List of things you are waiting for. Delegating doesn't eliminate stress because you still have to worry about the possibility of follow up. Make a list of things you may need to follow up on and then forget them.

Review. This is the big thing I'm missing. I make a lot of good lists and then don't revisit the lists for literally months or years. You need a good system of review, very consistent, before the things that are out of sight truly become out of mind. (a cogent argument for weekly review)

Checklists for review. To improve the review process, create checklists and use them. Here is my in-box checklist:

• email in-box
• physical in-box on shelf above my computer
• things that are on the floor near the front door
• bugzilla bugs for main project
• bugs in other bug tracking systems on other projects
• answering machine
• Files named "notes" in my laptop or desktop home directories.

Keep your inbox empty. The basic argument is that a 1000-item inbox is really a to-do list, and a very bad one. I've already become much better about emptying my email inbox, and can confirm that looking at an empty in-box does reduce stress. I've been worse about allowing physical items to pile up.

Have a good filing system. I realized that, by putting my filing system into a plastic box on a shelf, I created a barrier to filing, and this caused my physical inbox to grow. Last week I bought a filing cabinet (I got a "Hirsh" because it had the smoothest drawer action of the choices at the store) and a label printer, and put them both within arm's reach. I'm very happy with it so far.

Clear outcomes. "One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most powerful to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes." GTD page 69. This resonated with me. As a project manager, it's my most important skill. It's how I enable a group of people to do work that they can do, want to do, need to do, but aren't yet actually doing. I also find that, in working with developers, the more concretely I can spell out a feature and how users will use it, the more the developers support the feature.

Home/work distinction. GTD freely blends personal and professional, asserting that since they are all things you have to do, you should manage them in one system. I can't rebut that argument, but think it's still important to maintain boundaries between the two. The book erodes those boundaries beyond my comfort:

Many people lose opportunities to be productive because they're not equipped to take advantage of the odd moments and windows of time that open up as they move from one place to another, or when they're in off-site environments. GTD page 90

[If you have] zero built-in time or space for regrouping ... you'll need to either accept the requirement of an after-hours time at your desk on a Friday night or establish a relaxed but at-work kind of location and time at home. GTD page 188

Doing. I used to have a giant, overwhelming list of things to do. I hardly ever came close to emptying the list, and it stressed me. Eventually I started kicking a lot of things into the future, so that my daily list was, in theory, do-able. A few times I was able to clear the reduced list, and that led to a sense of well-being, but I still usually failed to clear the list. I realized that I had put myself in the psychological situation of started each day "behind" and having as the best possible outcome merely breaking even. One disappointment in GTD is that nothing in it really addressed that process.

What GTD does push is having context-specific lists of things to do. Because I work from home and spend most of my time with the computer and phone instantly ready, I don't context-switch as much as a frequent flier or office worker would. I'll still use context lists for some stuff, and to separate work from personal, but my big disappointment is this: If I follow the GTD method, I end up with a pretty decent-sized list of to-dos, maybe 50, and then the "Doing" chapter of the book stops helping. It suggests trusting your gut, and keeping the lists short enough that you can scan them and the next good thing to do will jump out, but it's very short on practical tips.

So after going through one good pass of the book and starting to change a lot of my process, I feel like I've been gently and persuasively led half-way across a rope bridge to a better place and then abruptly abandoned to get the rest of the way across on my own. So as I do that, I'll let you know how it turns out.

Those Who Walk in Darkness, John Ridley
Ridley's prose still falters in places, and some action scenes are better that others, but his demented vision shines very clearly. ... is trashy pulp, but with a concept so logically, cynically warped that it creeps into your brain and takes up residence. (Spoilers follow). The book is set in an alternate modern day, where superheroes showed up decades ago, and supervillains soon after. But when a super-fight ended up destroying San Francisco, the United States banned all metanormals under penalty of death, and now they either flee to Europe or live in hiding. Our protagonist is a cop who hunts down and, generally, kills metanormals, and bears an unrelenting, unreasoning hatred for them. The book puts us firmly in her court but simultaneously, in a very down-market take on Ishiguru, makes it clear that she's not playing with a whole deck— in fact, she's a genocidal murderer.

World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven
A slight but fun effort 1966 effort from Larry Niven, in which an alien from a mind-controlling master race suffers mechanical problems and ends up marooned on Earth two billion years after the extinction of his people, and sets to work with the slave resources at hand. However, he has a rival—himself, as channeled by a human telepath who was at the wrong end of a mind copy.

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.

A Leap in the Dark, John Ferling

A very readable account of the American revolution, from the mid-18th century to Jefferson's inauguration. Although six or seven hundred pages long, it is very well balanced: readable but not too chatterful, fairly wide in scope but deep in parts, with detailed accounts where appropriate, liberal quoting from primary sources, and summaries of events elsewhere. It provides a good sense of the character of the main American players, though it's short on the British, French, and Spanish sides. Ferling mostly avoids cheerleading, at least until the last few pages, and does not whitewash the players. Economic interests are among the key motivators for most of the Founding Fathers most of the time. For example, Washington's political interest in nationalism and western expansion, not to mention his pre-revolutionary military career, align conveniently with his frontier land speculation. And concern for his image is integral to many of his second-term actions.

It might be a leap for anyone completely unfamiliar with the time period, and it's too clearly one person's interpretation of current scholarship to be taken completely at face value, but I found it perfectly well suited to moving my understanding forward a few notches. In particular, Ferling shows clearly and comprehensively that partisanship was endemic to the system even as soon as Washington's first administration, and Washington himself was the first and last nonpartisan candidate. I had had a notion that there was always dirty politicing in American history, but this book spells out with plenty of examples the depth of vitriol in the newspapers and the rumor campaigns. People like Karl Rove have invented new varieties of filth, but they're just variations on a theme and nothing new even in depth or shamelessness. I was a bit surprised to find the extent to which democracy was a dirty word for most of the aristocrats involved.

All in all, an excellent book and a good read.

I've fallen behind about a year in concert reviews. Briefly:

Ani DiFranco. Saw her at a concert hall downtown. The audience was predominantly swooning adolescent girls, who were so self-absorbed in their rapture that it wasn't much fun to be in the audience but not on their trip. Perhaps Ani felt the same, because she ended a very tight, pleasent set in about 70 minutes, including the brief encore. Opening act Andrew Bird was entrancing but hard to hear over the hubbub.

David Byrne. At Humpries, an out-door venue in the San Diego Bay. Both intimate and cramped, with a criminal shortage of bathrooms. The opening act was lousy and featured a spastic dancer on stage; they were deservedly ignored. Later, doing something with a catchy latin beat and Spanish lyrics, Bryne had the whole audience eating out of his palm with the slightest of shimmys and rump twists. He is a truly incandescent musician, and at his best sings about life's bitterness with optimism shining through the cracks.

On the minus side, the second half of the show was very heavy on Talking Heads hits, and the guest Extra Action Marching Band, though as engaging and talented a bunch of degenerate San Francisco street musicians as you could hope to find, was more a distraction than an enhancement, especially as they played to the end and then did the encore in lieu of Byrne.

Indigo Girls, at Humpries. A perfectly nice retrospective show, mostly stripped down to the two of them with guitars or banjos and still producing, especially in numbers like Chickenman, plenty of racket. A few songs from almost every album, going way back, and a mix of warhorses and less common songs. Each did one solo performance, and these really highlighted Emily's unfortunate tendency to put words into the lyrics and bend them to the melody and rhythm without any regard for their natural meter, and in contrast Amy's sharp-as-a-tack knack for the beat. I could easily go a decade without hearing Galileo or Closer to Fine again live, but then this was my nth IG show.

Steve Earle at the Belly Up, a club in Solana Beach. He looks old and shrunken and pained, plays as hard as ever (I would guess, never having seen him play while young and coked up), sounds ragged yet tuneful, and flirted discomfitingly with the saucy young opening singer. His fervent political and social positions, though well-aligned with mine, were hard to swallon in the fresh despair of January 2005. He's been around long enough and faced enough hardship that I would have preferred some more comforting elder wisdom about hanging in there in dark times instead of a song with the hollow chorus, "the revolution starts now" when it very obviously doesn't. I was glad to finally see him play in person, and enjoyed it, but it was an uncomfortable show.

Gomez at the Belly Up. Saw them twice. Musically excellent, but their songs are mismashes that with jarring stylistic jumps every few bars. Whenever they start to build a groove, they abandon it for something less promising. Live, they still manage to pull it off with drunken charisma. The patrons of the Belly Up, however, are drunken but devoid of charisma, and if you aren't there early enough to get a seat, it's a bad place to catch a show sober.

Wild Blue Yonder, Nick Kotz

One of my favorite non-fiction genres: the journalistic reporting at book length. Nick Kotz reports on the history of the B-1 bomber, from precursor concepts in the 1950s up to 1988, shortly after it entered production. Essentially, the B-1 bomber is designed to blow up the Soviet Union, a mission which is now obsolete and for which the B-1 was never a good choice. And politics is mostly to blame.

Most interesting for me, from a hard news standpoint, were the well-footnoted descriptions of how the Air Force and other services play politics. They maintain voting scorecards on all members of Congress, use strategic military decisions as bargaining decisions such as trading base locations for funding votes, and generally place narrow service-specific goals above the national defense and the national welfare. (Some of this behavior is illegal, but the only prosecution I can remember is the Boeing tanker case, which was about the revolving door between industry and the Air Force, but not about illegal lobbying of Congress.) Manipulation is also standard in presidential politics; in 1960 Eisenhower restored a bomber development program, against his own military judgment, solely to put money into California to help his VP, Nixon, against Kennedy. That's only the first example; each president since has shameful decisions to answer for.

Kotz goes overboard ascribing positive motives to the guilty parties, and asserts repeatedly that they are surely all very concerned to make sure that America remains well defended. I think that's almost completely BS. The evidence shows that even well-meaning individuals are quickly forced to adopt the party line. The basic political system we use to fund military procurement inevitably leads the services to ask for impossible things, the companies to promise to provide them, and everybody involved to cover up the inevitable failures and cost overruns and pretend that everything's perfect.

Kotz doesn't offer any solutions, but it seems to me that the root of the problem is peacetime procurement. The maintenance of fully staffed, war-ready standing armies with continuously upgraded equipment is a Cold War innovation, and it's a bad idea. Wartime profiteering, ugly as it is, may be less egregious than what people are getting away with in peacetime. Especially at a time when the United States faces no significant military threat, maintaining arms spending equal to the sum of the rest of the world combined clearly shows a confusion of problem and solution. Even if you believe that terrorism wants a military solution, surely the B-1 bomber, Crusader Artillery, and other machismo-oriented weapons systems are not part of it. But because these projects offer prestige and promotion to military officers, money to contractors, and re-election credits for politicians, we're going to pay for them for the forseeable future.

The Great Unraveling, Paul Krugman

Audio book, read by the author.

Of course the catalog of self-serving Administration lies is upsetting, and going back even four years reveals that the predictions continue to underestimate the will of the Bush partisans. But that's practically background noise by now. The new upset I got from listening to this collection of Krugman columns is that he keeps straying away from the economic issues that he illustrates so well. Instead, he reports and analyzes political misdeeds, and here he's adequate but not markedly better than any of the myriad sources for same. Please focus on the economics, Mr Krugman; it's where your real value-add lies.

The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein.

A classic example of how to lose an argument even while proving your points. Finkelstein's thesis is that there exists a Holocaust Industry of Jews who profit financially and morally from exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust, and in doing so live up to the the most revolting anti-Semitic stereotypes. Although Finkelstein presents strong evidence and I believe the basics of his argument, his perpetual venom and contempt, and the way his prose assumes you share these feelings, even before he has started making his case, are very off-putting.

The bulk of the book illustrates how several international Jewish agencies collaborated with American politicians to blackmail the Swiss banks, who had profited from Jews fleeing the Nazis. Under international and American pressure, the Swiss Banks agreed to pay for a US$500 million external audit and $1.25 billion non-refundable advance payment to Holocaust survivors. The audit has since turned up only a few tens of millions of dollars, and additional audits, even with extremely lenient parameters, are unlikely to uncover substantially more accounts.

Finkelstein charges that the Holocaust Industry estimates of numbers of survivors go up when it is expedient to get money, and go down when it comes time to disburse money to the survivors themselves. Another charge is that the Holocaust Industry professionals, the officials of these organizations and museums and the like, frequently offer themselves high six-figure salaries, hire friends and family, take junkets, and generally live high on the hog on money that was theoretically earmarked for survivors.

Finkelstein points out that the United States had at least as bad a record in refusing refugees and confiscating bank accounts as Switerland, but that the Holocaust Industry has not pursuing these claims with any vigor because that would be a harder political fight.

Finkelstein also makes the intriguing argument that, by insisting on the uniqueness of the Jewish holocaust and marginalizing all other Nazi victims, as well as other victims of genocide,

Perhaps the strongest argument in support of Finkelstein's attacks is simply this: if "never again" is the justification for the Holocaust Industry, where is their leadership in intervening in possible or real genocides around the world, such as Rwanda and now Sudan?

The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins

A magnificent book. Dawkins adopts the narrative structure of The Canterbury Tales to a reverse chronological trip from modern humans to the origin of life on Earth. The book is a series of rendezvous with "Most Recent Common Ancestors;" at each rendezvous, species which are joining the pilgrimage tell their Tales. For example, at rendezvous 22, at about 530 million years ago (mya), we encounter 41 species of lamprey and 43 species of hagfish (lampreys and hagfish diverged around 480 mya, so the rendezvous, like all rendezvous, is with the trunk of a lineage). That means that, somewhere on Earth, our "240-million-greats-grandparent," some sort of jawless swimming creature with a notochord but probably not a real backbone, gave birth to children, and the siblings diverged (through geography, like swimming off in different directions, or maybe just through having an argument about inheritance and never speaking again, and one child is an ancestor to all vertebrates, and another is an ancestor to all lampreys and hagfish.

Literally an ancestor; they laid eggs that grew into more proto-vertebrates, and so on, with gradual genetic change over many generations, until there was another speciation split (proto-sharks vs other vertebrates), and so on. For any given period, such as 500 or 2000 years, almost certainly any creature at the young end, given a time machine and some breath spray, could mate with any appropriately gendered creature at the old end of the span and produce a fertile child, but as the years pile up, the chances of that child being fertile decrease, until eventually there's a certainly that it would be sterile (e.g., mules, ligers), and then a chance, and then a certainly, that they can't reproduce at all. And so we have a chain of creatures, about 240 million long, leading from our parents back to a proto-vertebrate that swam in the sea and had no jaw and not much of a spine.

(Clarifications: this doesn't mean that literally one animal is the sole parent of all vertebrates. As the proto-vertebrate species splits into two other species over a period of many generations, lots of different animals in that species can claim ancestorship on both sides of the split. But there must necessarily be one last ancestor who spans both sides. It can then be shown (buy the book) that almost all of those ancestors are shared among all descendents; if you look over a long enough time scale, such as 20 or 50 generations, the combined family trees of all survivors merge into a sort of braid. For example, most humans of European descent probably have some genes from King Richard I, just as they probably have some genes from almost every person alive 1000 years ago who has a descendent chain to the present.)

Each rendezvous presents some Ancestor's tales, and rendezvous 22 gives us the Lamprey's Tale, which turns out to be about hemoglobin. Human hemoglobin has four different types of globin proteins. Two are closely related "alpha" globins, and come from chromosome 11. Two are closely related "beta" globins from chromosome 16. The split between alpha and beta reflects a point in the past where, in one ancestor (literally a single creature), there was a transcription error somewhere in the germ line (e.g., in a cell that makes sperm or eggs, or maybe in an actual sperm or egg, or maybe in a very young embryo?) and a creature was born with two sets of genes for globins.

This creature survived, and bred, and eventually this mutation spread to all survivors of its species. (That spread, by the way, is inevitable in any gene pool given enough time, even for survival-neutral mutations. That is, if the creature was actually stronger or faster as a result of the mutation, then it had a good chance to spread that gene on its merits. But, even if extra hemoglobin genes don't provide any benefit, they will either become standard or disappear. Reason: Imagine a graph showing how many members of the species have that gene. At the top of the graph is 100%, and at the bottom, 0%. For a gene invisible to natural selection, the percentage of the species with that gene will move up and down randomly. If a creature with that gene has a lucky childhood, grows up big and strong, and gets a big harem, the percentage will go up. If a whole family group with the gene have a nice habitat near a volcano which erupts, the percentage goes down. It would wobble between the two extremes as long as the species survived, except: if it ever actually hits 0% or 100%, it can never come back. If ever all members of the species have a mutation, breeding along won't ever lead to a member of the species without it, so the mutation is now permanent. Conversely, if the last creature with the mutation dies, breeding along won't bring it back, so the mutation is gone. A similar or even identical mutation may pop up in the future, but the first one is gone forever. When you run the clock over geologic time, the chance that random perturbations nudges the percentage to either 0% or 100% at least once rapidly goes to certainty. Thus, any mutation either becomes standard or disappears. The only time two versions of one gene remain viable in the population over time is when they have comparative advantages; e.g., type A blood and type B blood each confer immunity to a different parasite or bacteria. Interestingly enough, the type A gene in other mammals is closer to the type A gene in humans than the human A is to the human B. So if you share a blood type with a chimpanzee, for that part of the genome you are more closely related to her than to any human with a different blood type, even a sibling.)

At some point, after the mutation become standard, the two copies of the alpha globin gene diverged, and moved to different chromosomes, and diverged again (there are actually "seven [alpha] globin genes. Four of these are pseudogenes — disabled versions of alpha with faults in their sequence, never translated into protein. Two are true alpha globins, used in the adult. The final one is called zeta, and it is used only in embryos.") When the dust settled, all members of the species had seven alpha globin genes and six beta globin genes, some of each disabled and others active.

The reason this is the Lamprey's Tale is that "Given that the split between the alpha cluster and the beta cluster took place half a billion years ago, it will of course not be just our human genomes that show the split, and possess both alpha genes and beta genes in different parts of our genomes. We should see the same within-individual split if we look at the genomes of any other mammals, at birds, reptiles, amphibians, or bony fish — for our common ancestor with all of them lived less than 500 million years ago. Wherever it has been investigated, this expectation has proved correct. Our greatest hope of finding a vertebrate that does not share with us the ancient alpha/beta split would be a jawless fish like a lamprey or a hagfish, for they are our most remote cousins among surviving vertebrates. They are the only surviving vertebrates whose common ancestor with the rest is is sufficiently ancient that it could have predated the alpha/beta split. Sure enough, these jawless fish are the only known vertebrates that lack the alpha/beta divide. Rendenvous 22 is so ancient, in other words, that it predated the split between alpha and beta globin."

I picked that Rendezvous and Tale at random; they are all deep and cool just like that. A lot of popular science books about biology and evolution tend to be collections of cool stories, but the power of The Ancestor's Tale is that it places all of the stories within a huge, sweeping narrative, so that the sense of drama and suspense (who will we rendezvous with next?) builds and builds. I won't spoil the ending (beginning), but suffice to say, it's not much like Genesis.

My one complaint is that, in a few places, Dawkins' conversational tone devolves to bitchiness about creationists. It's not hard to see how he could be tired with the fight: any sentence he writes which mentions any problem with any aspect of the entire theory and data of evolution is liable to be quoted as proof that all of evolution is bunk and even the scientists admit it. Beyond that, reading the book and seeing the astounding depth and complexity and the interrelated nature of evolution, fossils, molecular genetics, information science, plate tectonics, etc, I get the feeling that a creationist trying to argue with a working biologist is like a flat-earther interrupting 747 pilots chatting about the best route to take over Iceland en route to Malaysia.

Certainly this book moves up to my favorite Dawkins book (over Blind Watchmaker) and favorite book on evolution.

The Little Yellow Dog. Walter Mosley.
(audiobook).
It took me about four months to finish this book on tape. The narrator has a pleasing voice and, at his best, does all of the characters' voices well. But the production seemed sloppy; many hesitations and misplaced accents and a few head-slapping mis-pronunciations slipped through. (Foilage for foliage, La see-en-gah for La Cienega, twice each, among others). That notwithstanding, the words and atmosphere were excellent, although I still can't remember which of Holland and Roman was Idabell Turner's husband and which was the brother-in-law.

Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork.
Robert Bork explains that Western civilization is disintegrating and the liberals are to blame:

I use the phrase ["modern liberalism"] merely to mean the latest stage of the liberalism that has been growing in the West for at least two and a half centuries, and probably longer. Nor does this suggest that I think liberalism was always a bad idea. So long as it was tempered by opposing authorities and traditions, it was a splendid idea. It is the collapse of those tempering forces that has brought us to a triumphant modern liberalism with all the cultural and social degradation that follows in its wake. If you do not think "modern liberalism" an appropriate name, substitute "radical liberalism" or "sentimental liberalism" or even, save us, "post-modern liberalism." Whatever name is used, most readers will recognize the species.

Bork on modern musical trends:

The difference between the music produced by Tin Pan Alley and rap is so stark that it is misleading to call them both music. Rock and rap are utterly impoverished by comparison with swing or jazz or any pre-World War II music, impoverished emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually. Rap is simply unable to express tenderness, gentleness, or love. Neither rock nor rap can begin to approach the complicated melodies of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, or Cole Porter. Nor do their lyrics display any of the wit of Ira Gershwin, Porter, Fats Waller, or Johnny Mercer. The bands that play this music lack even a trace of the musicianship of the bands led by Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and many others of that era.

He has similarly extreme and ignorant things to say about abortion, homosexuality, freedom of speech (Chapter 8 is "The Case for Censorship"), the rights of the accused, feminism, and other topics. I confess that I only skimmed the book, and surely overlooked some thought-provoking arguments. But I didn't have the stomach to sift through his hate and fear to get to them.

This kind of language coming from a shock-jock or person paid to to incite people and provoke false controversy would not be surprising. But I am extremely happy that his nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States was rejected. If he had written this book before then, perhaps the debate about his nomination would have been more honest and productive.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Duncan J. Watts
A good introduction to network science, with the chatty (and incongruously hunky—the cover photo does not look like a scientist) narrator giving glimpses along the way into how and why research happens. Covers basic taxonomies of networks (e.g., small world networks, scale-free networks) and then moves into dynamics (propagation, cascades, etc). The most important insight, for me, was a mathematical argument that successful cascades (when a thing, such as a disease or new song or the desire to purchase a product, suddenly and unpredictably moves from one small corner of a network to take over the whole thing) have more to do with the network than with the thing itself. It's not exactly a refutation of the "great men" theory of history, in which the characteristics of individuals are taken to have necessarily shaped the course of history. A direct refutation, I think, would say that, for instance, the end of slavery in the US was inevitable around the 1860s, and if Lincoln hadn't been the specific person to lead the change, someone else would have popped up. Cascade theory doesn't say that. It says that there are a number of different systemic changes that could have happened, and the characteristics that made Lincoln great were necessary but not sufficient for Lincoln to be a towering historical figure. But his career, and the end of slavery, appear inevitable in hindsight but were probably nothing but—other outcomes were equally or more possible.

Or, more mundanely, there are dozens of new consumer products hitting the market every year and while some can be accurately judged failures ahead of time because of their faults, many products are candidates for breakout success but random chance will determine that, say, the iPod will be the one. Anyway, it was a good book.

Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, Diane Duane
Starts out as an intriguing genre-bender: sci-fi/fantasy/detective story. But as it progresses it turns into a generic Diane Duane novel with familiar characters and a huge, cosmological, touchy-feely ending that feels stamped from the same template as, say, any of her early Star Trek novels. Much as I like elements of her writing, she seems to produce much stronger novels when co-writing. Even as escapist pulp, this was a bit disappointing.

Doomfarers of Coramonde, Brian Daley
The first novel of a very talented hack (and I mean that as a compliment here), it shows many rough edges in pacing, artlessly shifting points of view, and a desperately deus ex machina ending. Most of the elements of solid genre fiction are already in place, however, and it's not out of place in Daley's bibliography of entertaining, well-written, human stories.

Brian Daley is probably most famous for writing the Star Wars Trilogy radio adaptations, or for being half of the Jack McKinney pseudonym which wrote the Robotech novels. He died of cancer in the mid-nineties. Anthony Daniels' tribute, including the script of a tape the radio drama cast recorded for him but which was completed days or hours too late for Daley to hear, is certainly enough to water the eyes.

This article contains SPOILERS for the movie In Good Company.

I got a free online subscription to The New Republic when I renewed my Salon subscription. The New Republic annoys me. One reason is the gratuitously contrarian article summaries. These examples are all from the last week:

• Hosni Mubarak is a nasty dictator who has stymied liberalism in Egypt. But it's precisely for the sake of liberalism in Egypt that he should be allowed to reelect himself one more time.
• The U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal is not really a scandal. It worked exactly as expected. And that's the problem.
• Bush's record on global warming is better than you think.
• Why North Korea's announcement that it has nuclear weapons could prove to be a good thing.
• Holland thought it was a model for Muslim integration into Europe. Unfortunately, it might be.

Yeeahhhhh. Anyway, what I really want to complain about is Stanley Kauffmann. He reviews movies for TNR, and he regularly provides evidence that big chunks of plot and meaning fly right over his head. And I don't mean deep Kurosawa or Renoir subtext. I mean basic plot elements. A recent review provides an example. He writes of In Good Company:

Dan Foreman is an advertising salesman of fifty-one, working for a company that is part of a global conglomerate. A high-level merger shakes the organization of his office, and Carter Duryea, who is twenty-six, becomes his boss. Quite separately (the twist!), with no connection to the office situation, Carter and Alex, Dan's eighteen-year-old daughter, become acquainted and are soon pleasantly involved. The affair blossoms until Dan accidentally discovers it--and Carter discovers that Alex's father is Dan while Alex discovers that Carter is her father's boss. Dan is outraged, fallaciously believing that Carter is exploiting his power over him to make out with his daughter and that Alex is obliging in order to protect her father.

In the version I saw, the first extended conversation between Carter and Alex occurs over foosball in Dan's garage, after Carter has invited himself over for dinner, and many scenes before the affair starts. I could understand forgetting a small detail, just as I'm not 100% sure if Carter already knew Alex was Dan's daughter and Alex knew Carter was Dan's boss before the dinner (they had already met in an elevator), or if they only realized who each other was at the dinner. (I think the latter is true.) But in order to botch things as badly as Kaufmann did in that paragraph, you would have to have forgotten the lengthy dinner scene, and then missed all of the moments when Carter and Alex are afraid of discovery. You would probably have been a bit bewildered by the scene in the office the morning after Carter and Alex first sleep together, and Carter is freakishly nervous around Dan. This isn't deep textual analysis, it's an obvious and overt plot point. After Dan discovers them (he sees them holding hands in the driveway at his birthday party, and later follows her to a restaurant date, where he confronts both of them), there's nothing to suggest that he thinks Alex is "obliging in order to protect her father". The film has made it quite clear that that's not the case, and while it passed through my head that it probably passed through Dan's head, he is furious with both of them, very disturbed simply from the shock and dismay, and never does or says anything to suggest that he invests any credence in that theory, which is never mentioned outright.

Kauffmann misses the point so regularly that, basically, you shouldn't trust him to get even facts right, much less meaning.

I just had to get that off my chest. I'll keep an eye out for his reviews and share with you other gems I see. On a more positive note, his co-reviewer Christopher Orr's review, The director's cut of Donnie Darko explains too much, is well-argued, meshes with other things I've read, and is enough to convince me to avoid the director's cut of this fine movie, which I saw on a bootleg vcd of a bootleg screener tape with iffy tracking on a crummy little PC with tinny speakers,