Sun - January 24, 2010

Book: Transition by Iain M. Banks


Iain M. Banks
Transition -- Based on a False Story
Orbit, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-07198-7
404 pages
$25.99

The universe that Iain M. Banks's book Transition is set in is a "many-worlds" universe. In one of that universe's many time-lines there's an organization, called the Concern or sometimes l'Expédience, that has agents called transitionaries who can move from one time-line to another by temporarily inhabiting the body of someone in the other time-line. They also have methods for predicting how a particular time-line will develop. So they interfere with other time-lines occasionally to improve things for other worlds. But the organization is very secretive and hierarchical and agents don't generally see the extended outcome of the changes they make. An agent may make a tiny alteration that saves someone's life, but is it really true that that person would later go on to do great things? Is the Concern really what it seems?

That's not a ground-breaking premise for a book but it's a perfectly good one. For the book to be good, Mr Banks would need to take the premise in some new and interesting direction. Unfortunately, he doesn't do that. Instead, he spends quite a lot of time having his characters give long speeches about the corrosive and de-humanizing effects of unchecked power, how bad people can rationalize anything, and how terrorists are created when their societies become victims.

The only reason that I read the book to the end was in the hopes that Mr Banks would somehow pull a rabbit out of his hat by making a good book out of what increasingly seemed like little more than an unsophisticated political statement delivered via an unremarkable plot. My hopes were not fulfilled.

There are traces here of the skill that Mr Banks has shown any number of times. The characters and settings are interesting and memorable. I wish that they were serving a better story.

Posted at 08:03 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor


Antony Beevor
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
Viking, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02119-2
526 pages (main text)
$32.95

Antony Beevor's book D-Day: The Battle for Normandy is a brilliant book. It will be of interest to anyone who has an interest in the conduct of the second world war in the western European theater.

The period that the book covers is short: from June 1, 1944, five days before the landings began, to August 26, when the liberation of Paris was complete. (Of course there are a few flashbacks and anticipations of what's to come.) You can imagine that with more than 500 pages devoted to a period of less than three months there's a lot of detail. When I began the book I expected to like it but I expected to like it on account of my geeky fondness for for a wealth of intricate detail. Rather to my surprise, I don't think that it's necessary to be a geek to enjoy the book. Mr Beevor sustains a dramatic, interesting, lively and (at times) horrifying narrative though the whole book. You will need to refer to the maps from time to time to keep the battle's progress clear.

I haven't nearly enough knowledge of the second world war to have anything to say about the book's accuracy. But the 47 pages of notes and bibliography (and Mr Beevor's reputation in general) suggests that he took some pains to get it right. And there are any number of fascinating things to be found in the book. For example, in preparation for the landings, the initial diversions worked rather better than had been expected. But the advance air and naval attacks on German positions accomplished much less than had been hoped. The book also indicates that the Ultra radio intercepts were often very useful.

For a flavor take, for example:

    Some people became too carried away by the air
    of excitement at the apparently unstoppable advance.
    An American war correspondent, determined to beat
    his rivals, turned up in Chartres so as to witness the
    capture of the city. Unfortunately, he was two days
    early. The German 6th Security Regiment promptly
    took him prisoner. (p. 443)

Or, regarding a German tank on the Champs-Elysées:

    A Panther on the Place de la Concorde at the far end
    of the Champs-Elysées had spotted some of
    Langlade's tank destroyers move into position on
    either side of the Arc de Triomphe. Their commanders
    yelled their fire orders. One gave the range as 1,500
    metres, but his gunner, a Parisian, suddenly
    remembered from his schooldays that the
    Champs-Elysées was 1,800 metres long. He made an
    adjustment and scored a first-round hit. The crowd
    surged forward and sang the 'Marseillaise'.
    (p. 508)

Those quotes are a fair indication of the level of detail Mr Beevor goes into and also a fair indication of how readable he makes it.

Posted at 07:52 PM   Main   Permalink

Mon - January 18, 2010

Book: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown


Dan Brown
The Lost Symbol
Doubleday, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-50422-5
$29.95
509 pages

As with Dan Brown's earlier novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, The Lost Symbol is a thriller that's heavy on symbology. Or hero is once again the Mickey-Mouse-watch-wearing art-historian Professor Robert Langdon. As the book begins, his friend and mentor, Peter Solomon, who is also the boss of the Smithsonian Institution, has asked him to fill in at short notice for a speaker who has fallen ill. A private jet takes Robert Langdon from Boston to Washington, D.C. where a car is waiting for him. In fact, he is being lured to Washington under false pretenses. He is being manipulated by a much-tattooed man who calls himself Mal'akh. Mal'akh arranges for Professor Langdon to receive a grisly sort of invitation and hopes to force him to decode some Masonic symbology which he is convinced will reveal a symbol which will give him a great deal of power.

What follows is an improbable and entertaining night-long chase around and under Washington in which various people with various agendas attempt to figure things out and control what happens when they are figured out. It should be noted that all the Masons (well, except for one) in the book are perfectly sensible and likable people. The organization is a bit secretive and uses some unusual symbology, but it's entirely benign. The actual MacGuffin in the book turns out not to be all that interesting and the plots of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons are grander and more entertaining, but the book is still good entertainment for a night or two's reading.

Mr Brown even pokes a bit of fun at himself when a character makes the sincere/without wax pun from Angels and Demons and Robert Langdon recognizes it as coming from a "mediocre thriller" he had read (p. 355).

Posted at 09:06 PM   Main   Permalink

Sat - January 2, 2010

Book: A Hymn Before Battle by John Ringo


John Ringo
A Hymn Before Battle
Baen, 2001
ISBN: 0-671-31841-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-671-31841-3
467 pages
$7.99

In the universe of John Ringo's novel A Hymn Before Battle, the habitable planets near Earth are all populated by a federation of peaceful aliens. It seems that warlike species wiped themselves out before inventing interplanetary travel. That worked just fine for them a hundred thousand years or so. But then the Polseen, a space-faring race that's not peaceful, attacked them and has been invading their planets for about two hundred years.

As the book begins, Michael O'Neal is a programmer with a 1990s-era web design firm. He's ex-military and he gets a call from his old boss, General Jack Horner, who asks Mike to visit him at Fort MacPherson. General Horner suggests that it's not really a request. Mike arrives and finds that there's going to be a huge mobilization. The federation had been aware of humans for some time and, after losing many planets to the Polseen, have decided to see if equipping the warlike humans with some advanced technology and sending them against the Polseen will help. Mike begins by helping to design powered combat armor which will be given to a small number of human soldiers and then he deploys with them as a technical representative. They're going to the planet Diess, which is already under attack.

There are a couple of other sub-plots as well and the book is the first in a (so far) four-book series.

The book is a thoroughly entertaining read. Or at least it will be for people who enjoy military science-fiction at all. The most remarkable thing about the book is that it reads like military science-fiction of an earlier era. It reads like a story written by one of those authors of military science-fiction who wrote with the memory of the second world war reasonably fresh in their minds. Of course, the scope of the mobilization is reminiscent of that war. And one plot device is also reminiscent of older military science-fiction. The good ideas come from a junior officer and their value is recognized by grandfatherly generals. But at critical junctures moderately senior officers ignore them until circumstances give the young man a free hand. There's no need to take the Oedipal aspect of that too seriously. If everything went smoothly there wouldn't be much of a story. But that's the sort of uncomplicated conflict that I associate with science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s.

I have previously said of military thrillers by John Ringo (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) that they were somewhat improbable even by the rather relaxed standards of the genre, but they were enough fun that I didn't mind. The same can be said of this book. Obviously I must not mind very much since I keep reading Mr Ringo's novels.

Posted at 06:58 PM   Main   Permalink

Sat - December 26, 2009

Book: To Lie With Lions by Dorothy Dunnett


Dorothy Dunnett
To Lie with Lions
Vintage, 1995
ISBN: 0-375-70482-5
626 pages
$15.95

To Lie with Lions is the sixth book in Dorothy Dunnett's eight-book "House of Niccolò" series of historical novels. (Reviews of the previous books in the series are at: 1, 2, 3, 4. 5.) The series is set in Europe in the early Renaissance and the main character of the series is Nicholas vander Poele (who is now going by the surname de Fleury). He begins as a dyer's apprentice in Bruges with a head for figures and a knack for mimicry. In the course of the books he goes on fascinating and astonishing adventures. It is an indication of Ms Dunnett's skill that it sometimes appears that the history of early Renaissance Europe was arranged for her convenience.

Little needs to be said here. No one should begin the series except at the beginning and readers of the series who have gotten this far will not be surprised to be told that the book is at least as good as its predecessors. Significant spoilers for the previous books follow.

At the end of the previous book, The Unicorn Hunt, Nicholas disappeared in a ship with his son Jordan from Venice during Carnival. As this book begins, Nicholas, his son, and his son's nurses are sailing slowly to Marseilles. Nicholas's wife, Gelis, had kept Jordan from Nicholas for the first two years of his life and now Nicholas is keeping him from her, at least temporarily. Nicholas uses the time on board the ship to get acquainted with Jordan and begin to become friends. After some minor adventures, Nicholas, Gelis, and Jordan are reunited in Scotland, though Nicholas and Gelis are far from being reconciled. Nicholas, artificer that he is, puts on an elaborate play to everyone's delight, including the king's.

Then there's a fishing expedition to the north which ends up involving an overland journey (readers of the series will know to expect an arduous one). Then it's back to Venice, but there's a stop to make on the way. You'll get the idea that a great deal happens in the book's 600-odd pages. And there's a very dramatic scene at the book's end.

Posted at 09:08 PM   Main   Permalink

Sun - December 6, 2009

Book: A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin


George R. R. Martin
A Clash of Kings
Bantam Dell, 1996
ISBN: 0-553-57990-8
969 pages
$7.99

This brick of a book (969 pages of fairly closely-set type) is the second volume in George R. R. Martin's fantasy series "A Song of Ice and Fire". The series currently stands at four volumes and three more are projected. I have previously said that the first volume began the series only pretty well. This volume continues it rather better.

Some spoilers for the earlier volume follow. The series should be begun at the beginning.

The story lives up to its title. A character in the novel remarks that all sorts of people are calling themselves kings these days, and there sure are a lot of them. At the end of the first volume, young Robb Stark was proclaimed King in the North since the young Joffrey Baratheon who is ruling in the south isn't properly the heir of the previous king, Robert, whose death was engineered by Joffrey's mother's family. Dead King Robert's brother Stannis should properly be king and he intends to fight for the crown. But his younger brother Renly also calls himself king and intends to fight Stannis for the chance to fight Joffrey. And King Robert had himself unseated Mad King Aerys. His son died in the first book, but his daughter, lately the widow of a nomad chieftain, has come into possession of three baby dragons and intends to use them to put her family back in power. King Joffrey is quite young and the actual ruling is done by his mother Cersei (as regent) and his maternal uncle Tyrion (as the King's Hand). The two mistrust one another. You'll gather that the conflict is many-sided.

And then there's the fact that, instead of squabbling among themselves, these people should be preparing to defend against an attack coming from the far north, across the woefully poorly-defended Wall.

The first thing that Mr Martin does well is to tell the story in a way that lets the reader keep all that straight. Partly he does that by giving each chapter a title that's the name of one the nine characters whose point of view the narrator follows. And partly he does that by means of sharp, clear narration and memorable characters.

Another thing that Mr Martin does well here is build up to the action. This is a long book and it's early in a long series of books. So the pace is not going to be rushed and little is going to be resolved. Still, a lot happens and there is one large and important battle.

A third thing that Mr Martin does well here is to keep some of the more interesting characters on stage more than he did in the first volume. Tyrion Lannister, the clever and ironic dwarf, and Arya Stark, Robb's intelligent and tomboyish sister, are rather more interesting than those characters whose actions are determined solely by a desire for power or a notion of honor.

This is a fine book that drags not at all and I'm looking forward to reading the third volume.

There are various small hints in this book and the previous one that Mr Martin was familiar with Dorothy Dunnett's "House of Niccolò" series of historical novels.

Posted at 09:01 PM   Main   Permalink

Wed - November 11, 2009

Book: Words on Wednesday Night edited by Janis Bolster


Words on Wednesday Night: Selections form the Rock Hill Writers' Group
Edited by Janis Bolster
Reck House Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9824848-0-7
147 pages
$13.95

Disclosure: I am a friend of one of the authors whose work appears in this volume.

Words on Wednesday Night is a collection of 25 short works written by the members of a Maine writers' group. They arranged for its publication as well. Most of the works are a few pages long and many are excerpts from larger works that have not yet been published.

Most of the works fall into a category that might be called domestic fiction. And since many of them are excerpts from longer works, there is often a limited amount of context supplied. But a great many of the works work very well on the level of atmosphere.

One of the best is "Nicky 1963" by June Vail. Take the beginning, for example:

    Nicky was whistling. He pulled the yellow
    waterproof trousers over his stained khakis and
    knee-high rubber boots. As he fastened the
    suspenders over his sweatshirt, he noticed the
    worn places in both the coverall and the boots.
    Neither did a good job of keeping out the salt
    water, and given the time he was spending in
    the boat, he went through clothes pretty fast.

    From the back seat of the old Dodge Nicky
    grabbed the foul weather jacked and slammed
    the door. He put on the jacket and yawned. The
    sun was not yet up. The sky was gray and it was
    too early to tell whether it would burn through --
    the fog might stay all morning.
    (p. 73)

What follows is a story that's told simply and elegantly and manages the difficult trick of making the reader feel more like an observer. Though the story is perhaps slightly marred by Ms Vail's somewhat unusual choice of a first-person omniscient narrator.

Not all of the works in the book are quite up to that standard but some are splendid and many will more than repay the reader's time.

The book is nicely designed, with the exception that it is typeset with distracting c-t and s-t ligatures. But that's a very small thing.

Posted at 08:51 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child


Gone Tomorrow
Lee Child
Delacorte, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-34057-1
421 pages
$27.00

Gone Tomorrow is the twelfth and latest of Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" thrillers. (I have also written about the first, Killing Floor.) Jack Reacher, our detective, is a drifter and a former American army officer in the military police. He's more interesting than likable, but he's certainly interesting. As the book begins, it's late at night and he's riding uptown on the New York subway number 6 train. Since it's late there are only a few other passengers in the subway car and he notices a woman who's acting strangely. And it's the kind of strangely that has been covered in his counter-terrorism training. He approaches her and, after they exchange a few words, she shoots herself messily in the head.

It turns out that she was from Virginia. What could motivate a person to travel hundreds of miles to commit suicide late at night in a subway train? It also turns out that she was a civilian records clerk at the Pentagon in the Army's human-resources department. If her suicide was motivated by something to do with her job, what could a records clerk have access to that could push her to suicide?

For a thriller, the book's beginning could hardly be bettered. And the ending is perfectly satisfying. If there's a little slack in the middle, there's also a very interesting game of deception that's being played during it. I ought to have caught on to it faster than I did. It's sufficiently clever and interesting that it raises the book above the usual run of thriller novels.

Posted at 07:59 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: The Unicorn Hunt by Dorothy Dunnett


Dorothy Dunnett
The Unicorn Hunt
Vintage, 1999 (originally published in 1993)
ISBN: 0-375-70481-7
656 pages
$15.95

The Unicorn Hunt is the fifth book in the seven-book "House of Niccolò" series of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett. (Reviews of the previous books in the series are at: 1, 2, 3, 4.) The books are set in the early Renaissance and the main character is Nicholas vander Poele, who begins in Bruges as a dyer's apprentice with a mind for figures and a knack for mimicry. He goes on to have some very interesting adventures.

Little needs to be said here. No one should begin the series except at the beginning and fans of the series will not be surprised to be told that this book is at least as good as the four that have preceded it. Some spoilers for the previous books follow.

As the book begins, Nicholas is in Scotland, which is ruled by the young James III. Nicholas is now going by his mother's surname, de Fleury. Scotland is a bit primitive compared to Bruges and the other tidy Flemish cities ruled by the Duke of Burgundy, but it's very pretty and a good place for Nicholas's business empire to expand. (Rather better than England, where they're busy having the Wars of the Roses.) Being in Scotland also provides Nicholas with the opportunity to pursue his feud with Simon de St Pol. Both plans begin pretty well, but nothing can be straightforward for NIcholas and of course he ends up going off in an entirely different direction. Happily for the reader, Nicholas's unplanned adventures are even more interesting than the ones he plans.

As usual with the series, the women characters are generally more interesting, especially in their motivations, than the men. But that's not important.

Posted at 06:01 PM   Main   Permalink

Sat - September 19, 2009

Book: Implant by F. Paul Wilson


F. Paul Wilson
Implant
Tor, 1995
ISBN: 0-812-54470-6
437 pages
Out of print; used copies appear to be plentiful and inexpensive

The main character in Implant is Gina Pancella, a newly-minted doctor who has returned to her native Washington D.C. from Louisiana and is doing the medical equivalent of various odd jobs while she hopes to become a legislative aide to someone in congress. She wants to do that because congress is about to start debating a far-reaching medical-reform bill. One of the jobs she's dong is assisting a famous plastic surgeon, Duncan Lathram, at his private clinic. He used to be a vascular surgeon and he's a hero to Gina since he once saved her life. One of the reasons that Dr Lathram does so well operating on Washington's rich and powerful is that healing from his operations is speeded by means of a (wait for it) implant that was invented by his medical-researcher brother. Dr Lathram has a grudge against certain politicians and he's acting about as suspiciously as possible. That Dr Pancella is dating an FBI agent turns out to be both a blessing and a curse, of course.

The book was published in 1995 and so the cultural references are a bit dated: cell phones are new and a character's being a coffee snob is meant to make him distinctive. But the only real problem that the book has is that it takes about 250 pages to get going. After that, the characters are playing a cat-and-mouse game, each trying to figure out what the others have figured out. That part is fun if you don't mind the wait to get to it.

Posted at 09:20 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders


Lisa Sanders, M.D.
Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
Broadway Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2246-3
$25.00
255 pages

The title of Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis is pretty broad. There isn't a whole lot of medical practice that couldn't be made to fit under it. And the book is in fact a bit miscellaneous. For those people who are (like me) fans of the medical-diagnosis-as-mystery genre, there is some of that here. (The book's dust-jacket mentions that the author, Dr Lisa Sanders, is an advisor for the show House, M.D.) But that's not really what the book is trying to do. (Those fans of that genre who haven't yet should seek out Berton Roueché's books. He pretty much invented the genre, beginning in the 1940s.)

The book's introduction begins with a medical mystery, then Dr Sanders discusses the task of making a diagnosis, and then she tells us a bit about her background. That's not a bad way to begin the book: a story to engage the reader's interest, an analysis of that story that discusses the larger issues it brings up, and then a few words about the person who's telling the stories and doing the analysis here. That's a useful and workmanlike way to begin. If it's not especially elegant, it's probably unreasonable to insist that the author be a literary artist as well as a doctor.

The rest of the book is divided into four parts. The first, "Every Patient Tells a Story", is about the literal and metaphorical stories that patients tell and the ways in which doctors make sense of them. Why exactly should a book with this title have a section of that name? Well, as I said, the book is a bit miscellaneous. The second part, "High Touch", is mostly about the physical examination, its value, and how less and less attention is being given to it. The third part, "High Tech", is a single chapter about Lyme disease. It's about how the disease was discovered, how it's tested for, and some apparently unscientific opinions that some doctors have about it. None of that is especially high tech, but there is an interesting medical mystery there. The book's fourth part, "Limits of the Medical Mind", is about how and why doctors get diagnoses wrong and what may be done to avoid that. There's also an interesting medical mystery there. So the book contains a few interesting medical mysteries and some other information about how diagnoses are done and how they work out that a reader might or might not find especially interesting.

From statements scattered through the book, I get the impression from Dr Sanders that, despite the science and technology that goes into diagnostic tests and treatments, a doctor's interaction with a patient isn't really all that scientific. In the book's last chapter, Dr Sanders tells the story of a patient who looks up her symptoms on the web. Her doctor cheerfully adds her guess to the list of tests to be run. It turns out that she's right and she does have Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

In the same chapter, Dr Sanders describes an infectious disease specialist in Connecticut who needs to figure out what parasite is infecting a women who has recently returned from Africa, In doing so, he consults a database that can be queried to find out what diseases are prevalent in what countries. Apparently, hardly any other doctors do things like that. Indeed, Dr Sanders refers to that simple database as a "digital brain" (p. 225, scare-quotes in the original) rather as though she were a character in a 1960s science-fiction movie.

All that might be nothing more than slightly odd except for something else that Dr Sanders says in the book:

    Physicians are so reluctant to change the way they
    practice medicine that it takes on average seventeen
    years for techniques well established by research --
    such as giving an aspirin to a patient having a heart
    attack -- to be adopted by even half of those in
    practice. In other words, it usually requires an entire
    generation of doctors to turn over for a single new
    practice to become routine, part of medical "tradition."
    (p. 75)

That doctors rarely use computers to assist in diagnosis and aren't likely to start soon of their own accord is a little frightening. It's not exactly what Dr Sanders means to discuss in the book, but I admire her for brining it up. And it is true that that distinction between the science that surrounds the practice of medicine and the way that doctors interact with patients is what Dr Sanders means to discuss in the book. It seems that doctoring is taught and practiced much more like a craft than a science and that makes the book at least pretty interesting.

Posted at 09:02 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson


Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played With Fire
MacLehose Press, 2009 (published in the US by Knopf)
ISBN: 978 1 84724 556 4
UKP 16.99
569 pages

Stieg Larsson's first book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a not-very-mysterious mystery that's told at a relaxed pace. It is, if not exactly saved, then very much improved by being steeped in Swedish atmosphere. You can practically smell the herring and lingonberries. Mr Larsson's second book (of three, alas, he died at age 50 of a heart attack), The Girl Who Played With Fire, is also a not-very-mysterious mystery that's told at a relaxed pace. Unfortunately, in this book Mr Larsson has dialed back the Swedish atmosphere pretty significantly. We do get a trip to Ikea, but that's not nearly as good as the bacon pancakes and open sandwiches of pickled herring, chives, and egg that we got in the earlier book. They do seem to drink a lot of coffee in Sweden.

The main character is again Mikael Blomkvist and he's still a respectable journalist at the news-magazine Millenium. (As Stieg Larsson was a journalist at the Swedish magazine Expo.) The magazine is due to publish an exposé of the Swedish sex trade which will name many influential customers. That's justified because the customers indirectly support the human trafficking that brings women from Eastern Europe to be unwilling prostitutes in Sweden. Then the freelance authors of the exposé are murdered and the police find evidence that Lisbeth Salander, an ace researcher we also met in the previous book, did it.

Little as Mikael understands Lisbeth, he's sure she didn't do it. And that sets the stage for a pretty interesting novel. The mystery is a little more mysterious than the one in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo but, on balance, the book is still not quite as much fun without so much Swedish atmosphere. Still, I'll read the third when it's published in English.


I think that there's a tiny editing error in that there's a "not" missing from "should be on the endangered species list" (p. 179).

Posted at 08:10 PM   Main   Permalink

Thu - August 20, 2009

Book: Toppamono by Miyazaki Manabu


Miyazaki Manabu
Toppamono: Outlaw, Radical, Suspect. My Life in Japan's Underworld
Kotan Publishing, 2005 (originally published in Japanese in 1996)
ISBN: 0-9701716-2-5
438 pages
$26.95

Miyazaki Manabu* was born on October 25, 1945 in Kyoto. His first 50 years, which he chronicles in Toppamono, coincide with Japan's post-war experience. But Mr Miyazaki is no dutiful salaryman, working long hours to build Japan's post-war economic miracle. Indeed, he's quite the opposite.

In Japanese, "toppamono" refers to someone who pushes ahead regardless. Such single-mindedness can be admirable, but it's also very close to recklessness. That describes Mr Miyazaki pretty well.

Mr Miyazlki's father was a yakuza (organized-crime) boss and ran a small construction company. In the interesting life that he describes in the book, Mr Miyazaki begins as a juvenile delinquent, goes on to be a campus revolutionary and brawler at Waseda University in Tokyo (the reader is not surprised to learn that he hardly went to a class), a journalist for an edgy newsweekly, the unscrupulous manager of his family's firm, a sort of freelance gangster, and finally a semi-ethical bubble-era real-estate fixer.

In a culture in which a person's identity is closely related to the groups they belong to, Mr Miyazaki has belonged to few groups. And he is sometimes pretty casual about leaving the ones he joins. And not only is Mr Miyazaki on the margin of Japanese society, the people he relates to and identifies with are as well.

There are plenty of histories of postwar Japan. But this is one from the point of view of a very intelligent man who was always on the outside of the mainstream culture. Though he was an outsider, the things Mr Miyazaki did were always intimately connected with the mainstream culture. Increasingly-prosperous Japan couldn't have built the buildings it did in the way that it did without numerous small construction subcontractors such as Mr Miyazaki's family firm. Japan wouldn't be the kind of democracy it is if there hadn't been leftist students protesting in the 1960s and journalists working outside the conservative newspaper-publishing companies. And Japan's real-estate bubble wouldn't have had the shape it did without semi-ethical fixers. It's possible to be an outsider in many ways, but Mr Miyazaki was an outsider who was always in the thick of things.

So this is a book written from a fascinating and unusual point of view. And it has the potential to inform the reader quite a lot about how post-war Japanese culture worked and works in practice. I just wish that parts of it were a bit more interesting. If you think that following the factional competition in Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is a bit tedious, they've got nothing on the byzantine set competing factions that the leftist college students of the 1960s organized themselves into. And, apart from identifying with other outsiders and having a sense of honor and duty, Mr Miyazaki doesn't tell us much about his motivations. That's probably not surprising. A person who describes himself as toppamono is probably not going to spend a lot of time on introspection. Mr Miyazaki also doesn't discuss much of his personal life. So there's little in the book to humanize him or make his character seem approachable. But I suppose that's to be expected as well. Indeed, I suspect that if Mr Miyazaki heard that some foreign book reviewer on the internet thought that his character should seem more human and approachable, he would probably laugh and say, "Who does that guy think he is? Only an idiot would say that a gangster should be more approachable!"

But anyone who has an interest in modern Japanese culture should treat those limitations as part of the price of admission. There are remarkable insights and observations here that won't be found elsewhere. Take, for example:

    From the viewpoint of ordinary citizens, yakuza are
    bad. But it is a fact that certain people live this way
    because they don't have a choice. That is why the
    yakuza problem isn't easily solved. Moreover, in
    addition to discrimination and poverty, other issues
    are deeply bound up with this -- primordial traits of
    violence, pleasure-seeking, and dissipation, as well
    as traditional concepts of manhood. What I am
    saying is that any society includes its share of
    people who are extreme from the outset and others
    whom circumstances force down that path. This is the
    reality of the human condition and is seen over and
    over again.

    In addition, within Japan's ever more heavily
    regulated society, the yakuza world is one of the few
    realms where it is possible to get on and see one's
    dreams come true. You will always find young people
    willing to risk their lives against heavy odds to be a
    success, so long as they feel they have a chance. This
    has been going on over thousands of years of human
    history. (p. 421)

You're not going to find anything like that in most histories of post-war Japan. There are also more than a few other characters that won't be found in most books about Japan.

Mr Miyazaki on only moderately well served by his un-named translator. The prose doesn't flow as well as it might and there are some unusual stylistic choices. For example, I have some difficulty imagining a juvenile delinquent saying, "Something was definitely afoot" (p. 53). There are also a few errors. There's "principle" where "principal" is wanted (p. 28), "another thing coming" (p. 280), "logic or pretense" which should be something more like "calculation or pretense" (p. 296), and "principal" where "principle" is wanted (p. 303).


* In Japan, names are given family-name first. But when communicating with Westerners, Japanese people usually reverse the order of their names to accommodate Westerners' expectations. Sometimes, because of a desire to be extra authentic, or for some other reason, the family-name first order is retained. Such is the case in Toppamono and I have followed Mr Miyazaki's style here.

Posted at 08:18 PM   Main   Permalink

Wed - August 5, 2009

Book: Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson


Thomas Levenson
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist
Houghton Mifflin Harcount, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101278-7
252 pages (main text)
$25.00

Newton and the Counterfeiter makes me think of Bennett Cerf's old joke that since books on the American civil war sell well, and so do books about medicine and books about dogs, a guaranteed best-seller would be Lincoln's Doctor's Dog. In the case of Newton and the Counterfeiter, it seems that the author, Thomas Levenson, and his publisher were thinking of someone very much like me. Books about scientists are cool. So are books about interesting parts of history and books about detectives. So what could be better than a book about Isaac Newton's detective career? As it turns out, a fair number of things could be, unfortunately.

To some extent that's not really the author's fault. The historical record is there, but what survives from the late seventeenth century is a bit thin. Perhaps not surprisingly, Newton seems to have been a bit of an odd duck and historians find it difficult to give even a coherent portrait of the great man. The counterfeiter in question is William Chaloner and most of the little we know about his life is from an anonymous biography published shortly after his execution. Narrative-wise things kind of go downhill from there. Mr Levenson labors to put a narrative together out of the fragments he has but it never quite becomes seamless. There are interesting things here, but an engrossing narrative isn't one of them.

Much of the first half of the book is a short biography of Newton's early years. If it doesn't really give a sense of the man, it's still remarkable enough reading. It's easy to forget that Newton is pretty much responsible for the image we have of the universe around us being essentially mechanistic and governed by mathematical laws.

Having become justly famous as a result of the publication of his Principia, Newton was angling for a tonier job than that of Cambridge professor. He got it in the form of Warden of the Royal Mint. That was traditionally a sinecure, but Newton was apparently unwilling to let his mind rest and he threw himself into the considerable problems of management and engineering presented by replacing all of England's coins with higher-security versions.

The warden's job also involved catching counterfeiters. Newton didn't particularly want to do that at first, but since he had to, he was going to do it right. And he proved to be an excellent investigator. That brought him into conflict with Chaloner who was one of the more prolific and clever counterfeiters of the time. He was pretty brazen too, testifying before parliament to accuse mint officials of corruption and offering to help stop counterfeiters. Newton eventually gets his man, but that story (which runs a little less than 100 pages), while interesting enough, doesn't rise to be engrossing. For example, at one point, Newton is instructed to prepare a case against Chaloner. Newton knows that the evidence is still too thin, but the prosecution goes ahead anyway. Chaloner is duly acquitted and petitions parliament for redress, claiming that he is an innocent man who has been unjustly persecuted. Mr Levenson then says:

    Chaloner's petition sparked yet another official
    investigation, and for the moment roles were
    reversed: isaac Newton was standing in the dock,
    defending himself against the charge of framing
    an innocent man. A panel of senior government
    figures was assembled to look into the matter,
    and though the group was stacked with Newton's
    friends -- Charles Montague and such reliable
    allies as Lowndes and James Vernon, then
    serving as Secretary of State -- initially the
    evidence heard by the group, including Chaloner's
    own testimony, tended to favor Chaloner's claim.
    The panel persisted, however, and as other
    witnesses testified, more and more gaps turned up
    in the plaintiff's story. In the end, the investigators
    produced a report that dismissed Chaloner's claims
    -- but quickly, in a bald rejection that did not satisfy
Newton's huger for full exoneration. (p. 189)

I'm sure that that's all strictly accurate, but it's not the sort of writing that makes a book hard to put down.

Posted at 08:02 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: Bone in the Throat by Anthony Bourdain


Anthony Bourdain
Bone in the Throat
Bloomsbury, 1995
ISBN: 1-58234-102-8
290 pages
14.95

Bone in the Throat is a novel by Anthony Bourdain, the author of the brilliant and hilarious book Kitchen Confidential and some other books as well (my reviews of two are at 1, 2). One of the sources of Mr Bourdain's appeal is that he knows so much about food and cooking that he feels no need to be reverent about it.

Bone in the Throat is about the goings-on around a New York restaurant, the Dreadnought. There's Michael, the chef who's trying to kick a heroin habit; Tommy, his pretty innocent sous-chef who is related to mafia men; Harvey, the owner who has borrowed money from mafia loan-sharks; and Al, the FBI agent who is trying to make a case against those mafiosos. From other things that Mr Bourdain has written, it seems likely that he knows much of what he's writing about.

And the book works as vignettes. Mr Bourdain's ability to put the reader in a setting is very good. But the vignettes never quite come together to create a novel with a compelling plot. Still, the book is a quick and pretty entertaining read. I can tell you that it makes fine airplane reading.

Posted at 07:05 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: Handling the Big Jets by David P. Davies


David P. Davies
Handling the Big Jets: An explanation of the significant differences in flying qualities between jet transport aeroplanes and piston-engined transport aeroplanes together with some other aspects of jet transport handling
(British) Civil Aviation Authority, third edition, 1977 (originally published in 1967)
ISBN: 0 903083 01 9
Out of print; reading copies seem to run upwards of $20.00
319 pages

David P. Davies was the chief certification test pilot for the British Civil Aviation Authority (the British equivalent of America's Federal Aviation Administration) beginning 1949 and he worked for them until his retirement 33 years later. He wrote Handling the Big Jets for pilots of piston-engined airliners who were transitioning to flying jet airliners. It was originally published in 1967 and was revised most recently in 1971. Though it's naturally a bit dated by now, the book is apparently still considered valuable by pilots.

Little needs to be said about the book. People who will want to read it very likely know they do by now and it will be of little interest to most people. To a geek like me, the book provides a fascinating look, though a somewhat indirect one, into a particular era in the history of aviation. Things like noise-abatement departures were new and the flight simulators of the time didn't have all that much fidelity to the airplanes they were trying to simulate (though Mr Davies looks forward to a time when they will). The requirements of high-speed aerodynamics mean that it's very difficult or impossible to engineer good flight handling qualities into an airplane by purely aerodynamic means. Other means, such as stick-shakers and stick-pushers were new and pilots didn't necessarily trust them yet. Air-data computers existed, but they used cams, not electronics.

Reading the book you also get a feeling for the sort of person Mr Davies was. And it's easy to imagine that there must have been a few tense moments in the cockpit as he acquired all the experience he had. He casually mentions having flown a 747 to mach 0.98 (it is normally limited to mach 0.89). He describes flying a go-around from 1000 feet in a 747 with two engines on the same wing reduced to idle thrust. He did that on a gusty day in bad weather. Running a jet engine considerably beyond its rated thrust, he tells us, "is not immediately destructive occasionally" (p. 79). And, "The inverted dive will be obvious by all the loose equipment flying around the flight deck and the fact that you are hanging on your straps" (p. 246). And then there's, "a dark and dirty night when you have a load of passengers is no time to find whether you or the aeroplane is master of the situation" (p. 105).

It's a bit haunting to read Mr Davies's description of the results of unrecoverable stalls:

    There is no point in discussing the irrecoverable
    case any further, except perhaps to say that those
    aeroplanes which have been lost in such
    manoeuvers finally reached the ground
    substantially level laterally, having defied all
    efforts to roll or spin them out of the stabilized
    condition; only slightly nose down in pitch, with
    little or no forward speed; at an extremely high
    incidence; rotating only very slowly in yaw; with (in
    one case) all the engines flamed out because of
    being exposed to such massive angles of
    incidence; and finally with an enormous vertical
    velocity. (pp. 122-123)

and compare it to the French Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analysys interim report (caution, large PDF) on the crash of Air France flight 447:

    Observations of the tail fin and on the parts from the
    passenger (galley, toilet door, crew rest module)
    showed that the airplane had likely struck the surface
    of the water in level flight, with a high rate vertical
    acceleration. (p. 40)

There are more than a few things to be learned from the book despite its age.

Posted at 06:47 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardener


Daniel Gardener
The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't -- and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger
Dutton, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-95062-2
$24.95
304 pages (main text)

The Science of Fear, by the Canadian journalist Daniel Gardener, is a very excellent and, to those of us keen on rationality, a somewhat depressing book. It seems that research into psychology has made some interesting progress in recent years. Psychologists have found that people's minds process information in two distinct ways. One system is rationality. It calculates and weighs evidence. It's the part of our brans that's interested in books about risk. It seems that scientists call it System Two and Mr Gardener calls it, more vividly, Head. System One, on the other hand, is the collection of habits of mind instilled by evolution over the millions of years that humans (and their predecessors) lived as hunter-gatherers. Mr Gardener calls this system Gut. Unfortunately for us, habits of mind that worked quite well on the African savannah don't work so well in modern industrial and post-industrial society. Even more unfortunately, Gut often takes precedence. As Mr Gardener says:

    Summarizing the relationship between Head and
    Gut, Kahneman wrote that they "compete for the
    control of overt responses." One might say -- with
    a touch less precision but a little more color -- that
    each of us is a car racing along a freeway and
    inside each car is a caveman who wants to drive
    and a bright-but-lazy teenager who knows he
    should keep a hand on the wheel but, well, that's
    kind of a hassle and he'd really rather listen to his
    iPod and stare out the window.
    (pp. 30-31)

There is no need to anatomize the mechanisms by which reason works. But Mr Gardener very interestingly describes the habits of mind or rules of thumb by which Gut arrives at its unconscious conclusions. We learn about the Good-Bad Rule (scientifically called the affect heuristic). (Mr Gardener is somewhat fonder of capital letters than I am but I'll go with his usage here.) It seems that Gut thinks that things are either good or bad and doesn't recognize much middle ground. Then there's the Example Rule (the availability heuristic). If we've heard of something recently Gut thinks it's more likely to happen again. And the Anchoring Rule (the anchoring and adjustment heuristic). When asked to guess at an unknown value, a person will tend to guess a value close to a number heard recently, even if that number had nothing at all to do with the value that's being guessed at. A few more of those sorts of rules have been teased out of Gut's reactions.

All that is interesting enough. And Mr Gardener also provides examples of important ways in which people go wrong and expose themselves to greater risk by following Gut's rules of thumb rather than going to the trouble of getting Head involved to do the math.

But the actual situation is worse than that. It seems that marketers, and especially marketers of politicians, had worked much of that out before the psychologists and sociologists did. They probably didn't work it out in quite the same way or in quite as much detail, but Mr Gardener finds many examples of advertisements that are deliberate attempts to dodge Head and appeal directly to Gut. And it goes beyond advertising. Mr Gardener reports a story that the television reporter Lesley Stahl wrote about in her autobiography. It seems that in 1984 Ms Stahl filed a story that was very critical of the Reagan administration. Mr Gardener says:

    But after the story aired, the deputy chief of staff told
    her the White House loved it. Stahl asked him,
    "Didn't you hear what I said?" The politico responded:
    "Nobody heard what you said.... You guys in
    televisionland haven't figured it out yet, have you?
    When the pictures are powerful and emotional, they
    override if not completely drown out the sound. I
    mean it, Lesley. Nobody heard you."

    Even in 1984, this was old hat.
    (p. 143)

The strongest appeal to Gut is through fear and Mr Gardener turns his focus to that. And he finds no shortage of people who make that appeal. I'm less surprised than I once would have been that scientists do it when their work (and therefore funding) is in the public eye. Journalists do it too (but that's sort of understandable because they're human too and, besides, they have to write what people want to read). As Mr Gardener summarizes:

    Unfortunately, there are lots of activists, politicians, and
    corporations who are not nearly as interested in pursuing
    rational risk regulation as they are in scaring people.
    After all, there are donations, votes, and sales to be had.
    Even more unfortunately, Gut will often side with the
    alarmists.
    (p. 244)

There isn't much to be done about all that except to be aware of what people are trying to do and to try very hard to think rationally.

Mr Gardener then ends the book with an excellent example of rational analysis. It's a chapter in which he analyzes terrorism and where its dangers lie. I had no idea of the quantity of resources expended by Aum Shinrikyo and the number of entirely unsuccessful attacks they made before managing to kill 12 people and seriously injure 42. All deaths from terrorism are tragic, but properly understanding risks will do us all good.

There are parts of the book that are a trifle repetitive, but that's a trivial complaint about a book that should be read by anyone who wants to be an informed citizen.

Posted at 05:02 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: What the Nose Knows by Avery Gilbert


Avery Gilbert
What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life
Crown, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-40000-8234-6
240 pages (main text)
$23.95

Avery Gilbert is a scientist of smell and his book What the Nose Knows contains a great many interesting facts and entertaining anecdotes from that science. Mr Gilbert's prose is chatty and readable and his knowledge of the field is apparently encyclopedic.

For example, dogs that are trained to find drugs very often aren't sniffing for the drug itself, but for the chemicals that the drugs break down into. And take, for example:

    Some spices are used by many different cultures.
    What makes a flavor principle distinctive is its
    specific combination of seasonings. Consider
    lemon, a widely used flavor source. Add cinnamon,
    oregano, and tomato and you've got a Greek
    principle. Add fish sauce and chili and you've got
    Vietnamese. The extensive overlap in ingredients
    across flavor principles means that every traditional
    cuisine on the planet can be prepared from a very
    short shopping list. (p. 98)

And who could fail to be entertained by the story of the competition between two rival systems of adding smell to movies: AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision?

The book's shortcoming is that it never quite rises to be more than a collection of interesting facts and entertaining anecdotes. It's a bit of a pity that Mr Gilbert doesn't quite manage to show us what our smells tell us about our humanity.

Posted at 04:01 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin


George R. R. Martin
A Game of Thrones
Bantam, 1996
ISBN: 0-553-38168-7
694 pages
$16.00

A Game of Thrones is the first novel in the fantasy series "A Song of Ice and Fire" by George R. R. Martin. The series is intended to have seven books,. Four have been published so far.

The book is set is a pretty standard fantasy universe and the story is the old noble-savage one. The story pits the Starks, lords of chilly, northern Winterfell (at least the hero isn't Grimm Shado) against the soft, southern Lannisters. Life in the north is hard (and will become harder when winter comes, which it seems it does for years at a stretch). For that reason, northerners have no time for anything but honesty and honor. Soft southerners have plenty of time and energy to lavish on intrigues, duplicity, and haughtiness. There are also some nomads in the story and even they have a sense of honor.

Shortly after the book begins, King Robert arrives at Winterfell for the purpose of asking his old friend and comrade-in-arms Eddard (Ned) Stark to take an important post in the capital, far to the south. Reluctantly, Ned agrees. He's repelled since it seems that there are plots about, but duty calls. We find out pretty quickly that the once-honorable king has also been weakened by soft living.

What follows is not by any means bad. But it's also not especially remarkable. There's little that's new or especially imaginative. There are a few characters that are more interesting than the rest, but they're not on stage very much. The book is good enough that I'll probably read the next in the series but I'm unlikely to complain that Mr Martin is not writing fast enough for me.

Posted at 03:54 PM   Main   Permalink

Book: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes


Richard Rhodes
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Simon and Schuster, 1986
ISBN: 0-684-81378-5
790 pages (main text)
$20.00

The cover of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes proudly proclaims that the book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It surprises me some that it won all those. Not because it's a bad book. It's an excellent, even brilliant one. I'm surprised because the book tells its story in such breadth and in such detail that I don't know how anyone but a geek like me would remain interested though its nearly 800 pages. Mind you, I don't think that there's a page wasted and Mr Rhodes's prose (regardless of a very occasional infelicitous sentence) is interesting and engaging. I just can't quite imagine that an average reader would be interested in 800 pages of it.

Mr Rhodes doesn't just give the reader detail. He also begins his history early, both in time and logically. That is, in beginning to discuss the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Mr Rhodes brings up the doubly-indirect influence on him of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The influence is certainly relevant, but it's something that I suspect that most people would be OK with skipping. Similarly, Mr Rhodes pretty much begins the story in the first years of the twentieth century with the discovery that atoms have such things as nuclei (though he does step back briefly to discuss seventeenth- through nineteenth-century questions about the existence of atoms). It's quite a trek from there to fission and fusion. Indeed, it's more than 150 pages into the book before neutrons are discovered. All that is so much catnip to me but I can easily imagine someone less geeky becoming a trifle impatient.

There are numerous fascinating details in the book. I think I had known that Enrico Fermi did some of his work at Columbia University, but who knew that the college's football team was pressed into service to pack uranium oxide into cans in an attempt to build a nuclear reactor in Schermerhorn. (Fermi never managed a chain reaction there; he succeeded with a reactor built in a squash court at the University of Chicago,) It was a biologist who gave the world the name for fission. Final assembly of the bomb Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima, was done in flight. And then there's the story of the guy who taught poker to "Johnny" von Neumann (the great mathematician) and who rather wished his pupil had caught on a little less quickly.

Of course, not all the detail is scientific. The number of meetings and government committees is at least as great as one might imagine. And the same is true for the German and Japanese efforts. (The German attempt may have been significantly hampered by a clerical error.)

This is a big book in every way. In addition to the scope and detail, Mr Rhodes brings a very large number of interesting characters to life. (It turns out that brilliant physicists are often fascinating characters.) And beyond all that, his narration makes the project exciting, inspiring, chilling, and horrifying when it should. The range of emotions evokes is greater than you'd expect in fiction.

For any geek like me, the book is a magisterial telling of a fascinating story in which scientists are heroes.

Posted at 02:02 PM   Main   Permalink

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