Wed - July 23, 2008Book: A Deeper Blue by John RingoJohn Ringo
A Deeper Blue Baen, 2007 ISBN 10: 1-4165-2128-3 ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-2128-0 349 pages $26.00 A Deeper Blue by John Ringo is the author's fifth (and thus far last) book in his somewhat hokily-named "Paladin of Shadows" series of military thrillers. I've said of the previous books in the series (1, 2, 3, 4) that their plots are somewhat improbable even by the rather relaxed standards of the genre, but that they're enough fun that I don't mind that. The same is true of this book. Significant spoilers follow for earlier books in the series. Probably the best place to start the series is with the second book. The main character is Mike Harmon, formerly a navy SEAL and now the benevolent feudal baron of a mountain valley in the Eastern European country of Georgia. His feudal retainers, the Keldara, are of an unusual ethnicity for the region and he has molded them into a small but very potent fighting force. As the book begins, he has been on a bender since the end of the last mission which, though successful, resulted in the death of someone close to him. Some of his subordinates begin a mission, but an attack meant for him injures some of them. At that point he pulls himself together and takes over the leadership of the mission. The mission is to keep a shipment of VX nerve gas from being smuggled into Florida via the Bahamas. There should be enough adventure and feats of derring-do here for anyone. All of the books in the series include violent sex to one degree or another. Here, it's committed by bad guys against a woman they don't realize is enjoying it. That's not, especially, what I look for in military thrillers, but it doesn't particularly bother me here. Other people may have different opinions. Posted at 07:21 PM Category: Permalink Sun - July 13, 2008Book: Cool It by Bjorn LomborgBjorn
Lomborg
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming Knopf, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-307-26692-7 164 pages (main text) $21.00 Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg is a short and highly readable book about global warming, mainly looked at from the point of view of economics. At the beginning of the book, Mr Lomborg grants that antropogenic (human-created) global warming is a real problem. He also grants that current meteorological and economic models of global warming and its effects are generally correct. He then takes a seemingly-obvious step that it seems few other people take. He analyzes what those models imply about what people ought to do about the problem. For one, he finds that scare-stories of extinct polar bears and sea-level rises of 20 feet don't stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, he points out that they often get in the way of sensible debate and rational calculation. For another, he finds that promises to make large reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions (such as the Kyoto protocol) are tremendously expensive and either accomplish vanishingly little or actually do harm, depending on whether you make less-plausible or more-plausible assumptions about the future. The problem with plans like that is that severely restricting carbon-dioxide emissions would quickly choke off economic development, leaving people poorer than they otherwise would be. Being poorer they'd then be less well able to deal with the actual probable results of global warming. But politicians like grand gestures that grab headlines. It's telling that almost invariably the reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions that politicians promise will really begin to bite only after they will have safely retired. Mr Lomborg finds that money can be spent far more effectively than that, producing much better results for people at a much lower cost. Then what does Mr Lomborg propose? He proposes a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions of only a few dollars per ton (in line with the best estimates of the actual damage done) and a pretty big publicly-funded increase in research and development on low-emissions energy technology. Now, anyone is free to disagree with any of that. But Mr Lomborg is very careful (you might say meticulous) in constructing his arguments and in documenting his sources. There is an average of more than one end-note per page of text and the book's bibliography runs to 41 pages of pretty small type. If someone wants to claim that Mr Lomborg is wrong and wants to be taken seriously, they'd need to indicate exactly where his logic is flawed or say which experts he refers to are mistaken. Until someone makes an equally careful argument that the world must revert to a pre-industrial society to survive, I'll believe Mr Lomborg. I suspect that you will too if you read this book. Posted at 04:30 PM Category: Permalink Book: Dr Tataina's Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia JudsonOlivia
Judson
Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation Owl, 2002 ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-6332-5 ISBN-10: 0-8050-6332-3 234 pages (main text) $15.00 Life on earth is fascinating in all of its infinite complexity. Or at least it can be. I suspect that relatively few people read books of natural history for fun. And that is the reason for Olivia Judson's alter ego, Dr Tatiana. Dr Tatiana made her debut in an article in the December 18, 1997 issue of The Economist., one of that magazine's lighthearted Christmas double issues. In that article and in this book, Dr Tatiana writes a sex-advice column in which she replies to letters from anthropomorphized wildlife. The last chapter in the book is a narrative of an episode of a television talk-show that appears to be the column's successor. That's a very clever device. It got me to read this (reasonably short) book and in reading it I learned more than I ever expected to about the astonishing, even bewildering variety of reproductive strategies in nature. Sexual reproduction has produced some remarkable examples of co-evolution. Let me quote one of the more safe-for-work questions and the beginning of Dr Tatiana's answer: Dear Dr. Tatiana. There's been a frightful accident. I was happily sitting in my usual spot at the bottom of the sea when I felt and itch on my nose. Being a green spoon worm, I don't have arms and I couldn't scratch. So I sniffed. And I inhaled my husband. I've tried sneezing, but he hasn't reappeared. Is there anything I can do to get him back? Too Much Heavy Breathing near Malta There, there, it's no use crying of snuffled husbands. He wanted to be snuffled, and he's not coming back. By now he'll have assumed his position in your androecium -- literally, "small man room" -- a special chamber in your reproductive tract where he can sit and fertilize passing eggs. How doe he fit? The little chap is 200,000 times smaller than you: it's as if a human male were no bigger than the eraser on the end of a pencil. You could keep a score of husbands without trouble. (pp. 199-200) As with most of the questions, Dr Tatiana goes on for several more pages comparing and contrasting that reproductive strategy with those of other sorts of life. The audience for an entertainingly-written book of natural history is surely larger than the audience for a dull one. You probably know if you're in it. Posted at 03:07 PM Category: Permalink Book: The Nasty Bits by Anthony BourdainAnthony
Bourdain
The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones Bloomsbury, 2006 ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-360-8 ISBN-10: 1-59691-360-6 288 pages $14.95 The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones is a collection of 36 short articles and one story by the chef Anthony Bourdain. They were all originally published in newspapers and magazines. Any collection of that size is bound to be a bit of a mixed bag, and the book's title suggests that Mr Bourdain is aware of that fact. (Indeed, in a series of commentaries on the articles at the end of the book, he says so explicitly.) Even so, the large majority of the articles are good fun to read. People who have read Mr Bourdain's previous excellent books about food, Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour, won't find very many new themes addressed here but they'll find at least a few of them addressed in new ways. Most of the articles are about food and, for me personally, it's a pleasure to read Mr Bourdain's writing about food because he's sufficiently sure of what's important that he feels no need to be reverent about it. He is cheerfully crass and often profane and yet communicates an almost spiritual connection with food and the people who make it. One article in the book ("Food and Loathing in Las Vegas") is a pastiche of Hunter S. Thompson and, perhaps not surprisingly, it doesn't really work. And the short story ("A Chef's Christmas") falls a bit flat too. Happily those are exceptions. "Counter Culture" communicates the joys of eating simply on the other side of a counter from the person doing the cooking. "A View from the Fridge" is about how to be a good customer at a restaurant and told me several things I didn't know. And "Brazilian Beach Blanked Bingo", which is about visiting Brazil with some of the cooks of the restaurant Sushi Samba, made me want to visit there. Despite Mr Bourdain's "aw-shucks" tone, he occasionally reveals that he is very smart indeed. And he's almost always worth listening to, especially about food. There aren't any huge revelations in the book. It's more like a large number of small courses, most of them very tasty. Posted at 02:01 PM Category: Permalink Book: Garllic and Sapphires by Ruth ReichlRuth
Reichl
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise Penguin, 2005 ISBN: 0 14 30.3661 0 333 pages $15.00 Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl is about the author's six-year tenure as restaurant critic for the New York Times. That's a potentially interesting topic for a book: one can guess a bit about how widely-read restaurant critics do their jobs and what they might think but not say in their reviews, but most people probably don't know much about a restaurant critic's life. And Ms Reichl has a fair number of interesting things to tell the reader. But, alas, the book never quite comes together into an organic whole. In the book's first chapter, Ms Reichl is on a flight from Los Angeles (where she is winding up her job as restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times) to New York (where she plans to look for an apartment and begin sampling restaurants) when she is recognized by the woman in the next seat. Not only does the woman know who she is, she has guessed what her plans for her trip are. Worse, she tells Ms Reichl, everyone else in New York's upscale restaurant business knows who she is and is expecting her as well. That's an interesting and engaging beginning to the book and Ms Reichl's response to being so well known is to create various elaborate disguises in an effort to remain undetected as she dines. That's good fun to read about and it gets more interesting because Ms Reichl invents characters and back-stories to go with her disguises. Then she finds herself getting into the characters as well. In one disguise she's very kind and a little goofy and in another she's thoroughly imperious. Ms Reichl also has interesting things to say about how restaurants do business in New York. I'd have supposed that the job of cooking a steak in a restaurant was sufficiently straightforward that everyone would be served steaks that differed only in how thoroughly done they were. But at one meal, when Ms Reichl's dinner companion was recognized as someone important and she wasn't, he got a good steak and she got a lousy one. We also learn something about what it was like to work for the New York Times, nearly a decade ago now. And there's one hilarious part in which Ms Reichl complained of a restaurant's tacky decor in an article, referring to "ersatz old things" (p. 118). The restaurant's owners responded angrily that all of their tacky old things were impeccably genuine. The parts are interesting and often very good: Ms Reichl's characters are often fascinating, the other people in the book are interesting, and there is much to learn about food and restaurants. But those parts never quite come together to tell a single story. If a reader is sufficiently interested in one or more of the things that Ms Reichl discusses, the book may well be worth reading. But it would have been much better if Ms Reichl had found a way to make all those things work together. Posted at 01:36 PM Category: Permalink Book: The Dance of Time by Eric Flint and David DrakeEric Flint and David
Drake
The Dance of Time Baen, 2006 ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0931-8 ISBN-10: 1-4165-0931-3 460 pages $26.00 The Dance of Time is the sixth and final book in Eric Flint and David Drake's "Belisarius" alternate-history series. In the series, evil beings from the far future have sent assistance to an empire from central India in the hopes that it will take over the world and alter history. Rather more benign beings, also from the far future, have sent assistance to Belisarius (a real-life general in the army of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian) in the hopes that he'll be able to prevent that. Reviews of the previous books in the series are at: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Little needs to be said here since no one would read the book without having read the previous books in the series. It is nearly sufficient to say that the book is a fine ending for an excellent series. Anyone who has enjoyed the series up to this point will enjoy this book. The book and the series as a whole maintain a nearly perfect rhythm as the plot progresses. The only complaint I can possibly make is that a change of allegiance of certain people that has been hinted at in previous books in the series is carried out less cleverly than I hoped it might be. But that's a trivial complaint when set next to a splendid story told with sure skill over six excellent books. Anyone who thinks they might enjoy the series almost certainly will. There's a tiny editing error in that there's "crumbled" where I'm pretty sure "crumpled" is mean on page 334. Posted at 12:06 PM Category: Permalink Thu - June 12, 2008Book: Here Comes Everyone by Clay ShirkyClay
Shirky
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations Penguin, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-59420-153-0 304 pages (main text) $25.95 The thesis of Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is that the internet and the tools we use over it make it far easier for people to collaborate and that that sort of collaboration is producing a revolutionary change in society. The only problem with the book is that I don't know very many people who don't already think that's true. Of course, that may be a function of the people I know. In the process of making his point, Mr Shirky gives us some interesting facts (who knew that Wikipedia was its founders' Plan B), some excellent examples, and many clear explanations. For example, he elegantly relates some of the changes that are happening to observations about transaction costs in Ronald Coase's 1937 essay "The Nature of the Firm". And it was news to me that it's almost impossible to characterize an average participant on Wikipedia (or in many social systems) because activity roughly follows a power-law distribution where mean, median, and mode are far apart. Mr Shirky even tells of some non-trivial uses of Twitter. But taken together those interesting aspects aren't enough to warrant reading the book unless you need to be persuaded that Mr Shirky's thesis is true. It's also a bit of a pity that he doesn't speculate a little about the sorts of social changes that will be coming next. There are a few small factual errors in the book: High-dynamic-range photographs, when displayed in traditional ways such as on a computer monitor, do not have lighter highlights or darker shadows than ordinary photographs (p. 99). They have detail in a wider range of brightnesses. It doesn't require a philosopher to make a distinction between a difference in degree and a difference in kind (p. 149). GPL is generally used to refer to the GNU General Public License, not the GNU Public License (p. 241). The GPL that the Linux kernel is licensed under does not directly prevent Linus Torvalds (or anyone else) from selling or patenting it (p. 273). Instead, it ensures that the source code for it and any derivative works is available. Trolling does not just mean trolling for newbies (p. 281). And eBay's feedback system is not an especially good example of a successful reputation system at the moment since it is currently fraying a bit at the edges (p. 284). Posted at 07:04 PM Category: Permalink Wed - June 11, 2008Book: Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas SowellThomas
Sowell
Economic Facts and Fallacies Basic Books, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0-465-00349-5 ISBN-10: 0-465-00349-4 221 pages $26.00 Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies is a terrific book. If I had my way, anyone who wanted to be a politician would be required to prove that they had read and understood it. The book is highly readable and should be very informative to almost anyone. To readers like me who enjoy seeing stuffy and pessimistic conventional wisdom debunked, it will be a particular delight. What Mr Sowell does in most of the book is to bring up a statistic that's widely quoted by politicians or people in the news media when they want to prove that something must be done about some social problem or else some "fact" at the intersection of economics and politics that "everyone knows". He then shows that what people know or claim to know is at least deeply flawed if not plain wrong. As for Mr Sowell's views, he makes a fair number of statement such as: Among the many preconceptions that cannot be subjected to any empirical tests because they are so subjective, is the notion that third-party observers know better what is good for people than those people know themselves. This implicit assumption pervades discussions of urban and suburban housing, mass transit versus automobiles, and the imposition of international aid agencies' pet theories on Third World countries. The most that can be done in these cases is to (1) make that implicit assumption explicit, (2) demand proof of their superior knowledge, and (3) point out how many disasters in countries around the world have followed in the wake of programs and policies based on that assumption. (p. 220) Those statements mark Mr Sowell as a laissez-faire or libertarian (or maybe Austrian School) sort of economist. I find those views pretty congenial and that may or may not have affected my inability to find flaws in his arguments. In any case, I found his arguments very persuasive. What sort of fallacies does Mr Sowell debunk? Between an initial chapter on the power of fallacies and a final chapter of parting thoughts, there are chapters, "Urban Facts and Fallacies", "Male-Female Facts and Fallacies", "Academic Facts and Fallacies", "Income Facts and Fallacies", "Racial Facts and Fallacies", and "Third World Facts and Fallacies". To give an example, Mr Sowell points out that people who discuss rich and poor people generally use income figures to distinguish between them. But there are many people whose income in a given year may be low but who aren't poor, such as spouses of affluent people who feel no need to work or investors who are having an off year. Following people over time also suggests that income figures at a given moment don't give a very complete picture. He points out that thee-quarters of Americans whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were in the top 40 percent at some point during the next 16 years. Equally, income figures don't include transfers to people of low income or taxes on those of high income. He says, "Nor are these random discrepancies. Almost invariably, such widely publicized statistics overstate poverty and understate standards of living" (p. 148). And in regard to inequality among nations, he says: For example, the growth of international free trade has been said to increase inequality among nations because the 23-to-one ration between the twenty richest and twenty poorest nations in 1960 rose to a 36-to-one ration in 2000. But the nations constituting the 20 richest and 20 poorest were different in 1960 and 2000. Comparing the same twenty richest and twenty poorest nation of 1960 over those decades showed that the ratio between the richest and poorest declined to less than ten-to-one. (p. 218, emphasis in original) Mr Sowell finds no shortage of situations in which a naive use of statistics seems to show one thing while a more thorough and patient analysis shows something quite different. Mr Sowell's prose is occasionally slightly repetitive, but that's a trivial complaint about a book that is worth any reader's time. The book is typeset a little oddly. Either italics are always given the additional emphasis of boldface or the book's typeface had an oddly heavy italic. And the em-dash is consistently set with space after it, but not before it. Posted at 05:54 PM Category: Permalink Tue - June 3, 2008Book: A Cook's Tour by Anthony BourdainAnthony
Bourdain
A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal Bloomsbury, 2001 ISBN: 1-58234-140-0 274 pages $25.95 Fresh from the success of Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain persuaded his publisher and The Food Network to finance a year-long series of junkets in which he'd travel the world, notionally in search of the perfect meal. That's not an enormously inventive theme for a book, but it could be a good one. And, happily, in this case it is. Mr Bourdain goes to a bunch of interesting places, many of them places that few tourists visit, he conjures their atmospheres well, he eats interesting things, and he's almost always good company while he does it. Mr Bourdain begins the book with a chapter called "Where Food Comes From" in which he goes to a small town in Portugal that's the hometown of a colleague. He goes there for the traditional butchering and cooking of an entire pig. And the people there use every part of the pig. That was once surely a matter of economic necessity for them. But having learned over centuries how to make every part of it delicious, they are justifiably proud of their tradition and are glad to show it off. There's also a sense of respect for the animal that comes through in the process. In the next chapter, Mr Bourdain goes back to the part of France where he spent summers as a boy. Perhaps not surprisingly, he finds that you can't go home again. Even though he doesn't find what he's ostensibly looking for there, the stories he tells about the trip are good ones. And since a year-long search for the perfect meal is bound to be disappointed pretty often, it's a good thing for the book that his narration is good enough that he can make the disappointments as well as the successes interesting. Mr Bourdain goes to all sorts of places. He looks for the perfect meal in food stalls on Asian streets, in fancy restaurants, in the middle of the North African desert, and even in remote Pailin, Cambodia. That last trip is one where Mr Bourdain's sense of adventure goes a bit over the top. He says: The road to Pailin. It's not a Hope/Crosby movie -- and Dorothy Lamour is definitely not waiting in a tight-fitting sarong a the journey's end. I'd wanted to go up a no-name river to the worst cesspit on earth and, for my sins, I got my wish. (p .173) But even that isn't as daunting to him as the prospect of going to a vegan potluck in Berkeley. Happily, Mr Bourdain mostly has rather better experiences than those. His descriptions of the delights of Vietnamese food were especially likely to make my stomach growl. The book is fun; Mr Bourdain is often funny, he keeps the narrative's pace up, and he's thoroughly unpretentious, especially about himself. Of course there's no such thing as a perfect meal, but in the search for it even the occasionally crass and profane Mr Bourdain communicates an almost spiritual connection with food. There are a couple of minor factual mistakes in the book. For example, bovine spongiform encephalopathy is a prion disease, not a bacterial one (p. 186). But they don't detract from the enjoyment. Posted at 05:21 PM Category: Permalink Book: In the Courts of the Crimson Kinds by S. M. StirlingS. M.
Stirling
In the Courts of the Crimson Kings Tor, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1489-5 ISBN-10: 0-7653-1489-4 304 pages $24.95 In the Courts of the Crimson Kings is the second novel in S. M. Stirling's "Lords of Creation" series. The first one is The Sky People, which is set on Venus. This book contains some spoilers for that one so it would be best to read that one first. My opinions of it are here. As you might guess, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings is set on Mars. In the universe it's set in, in the early 1960s, unmanned probes from Earth to Venus and Mars found life, indeed civilization, on both planets. A much grander space-race began between West and East began than in the real world and there was a consequent lessening of tensions on Earth. By the 1980s, both blocs had bases on each planet. As the main part of this book begins, it's the year 2000 and Jeremy Wainman is an archeologist on Mars and he's outfitting an expedition into the deep Martian desert to a place where he thinks that some ancient artifacts may be found. If that sounds like a plot from a 1950s-era pulp science-fiction novel, that's because it's meant to. Both books in the series take pulps as their models, but they do in slightly different ways. The Sky People has a plot full of adventure and characters with can-do attitudes, while In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (though not short on adventure) spends more time on the ancient, elaborate, and decaying Martian civilization. In the book there has been a single, unified Martian civilization for around the last 36,000 years but things haven't been going so well for the past few thousand years. That's a nifty theme for a book and it's made more interesting by the fact that almost all Martian technology is biological. If The Sky People is sometimes more raw fun because of the adventure, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings is often more interesting because of its more sophisticated premise. In both books Mr Stirling takes pulp tropes, updates them and works them out with everything that has been learned about writing science-fiction since those ideas were new. The book is a splendid fun. Posted at 04:41 PM Category: Permalink Book: Dark Waters by Lee Vyborny and Don DavisLee Vyborny and Don
Davis
Dark Waters: An Insider's Account of the NR-1, the Cold War's Undercover Nuclear Sub New American Library, 2004 ISBN: 0-451-21161-8 228 pages Out of print; used copies in good condition seem to be available for about $6.00, somewhat under the cover price of $14.00. Lee Vyborny was born in California and grew up in the town of Merced during the 1950s. In 1963 he enlisted in the navy and signed up for its nuclear power program. He did well in the various sorts of training he was assigned to and in 1966 he was assigned as a member of the commissioning crew of a one-of-a-kind submarine that didn't even exist yet. That submarine was the blandly-named NR-1 and Dark Waters is the story of that submarine by Mr Vyborny and co-author Don Davis. NR-1 is a remarkable submarine. Despite being powered by a nuclear reactor, it's tiny. Its pressure hull is less than 100 feet long. It's around half the size of a second-world-war era Gato class submarine and less than a third of the size of a modern Los Angeles class sub. It can dive to more than 2000 feet (perhaps twice or three times the depth that a modern Ohio or Los Angeles class sub can manage). It also has viewports, exterior lights, a manipulator arm, and wheels for driving across the sea floor. If that sounds like a submarine that would be useful for clandestine purposes and for oceanographic research, that's what it has done. Because NR-1 was a one-off design, there were considerable challenges in its design and construction and in its crew's learning the practicalities of operating it. And all of that is pretty interesting in a geeky way as Mr Vyborny tells us about it. The missions he describes are interesting as well. What the book doesn't have is much in the way of excitement. There are probably several reasons for the lack of excitement. One of them is surely that much of what NR-1 has done is still secret. Mr Vyborny doesn't mention that there are things that he wasn't permitted to write about, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't some. Another reason is that for clandestine activities, information is surely highly compartmentalized. In a spy novel, we'd hear about information that someone needed, see the tiny submarine go and get it, and see the results that having it produced. But Mr Vyborny is a real sailor in the real world and so that's not what we get. NR-1 goes and pokes around some underwater sonar installations or something and that's all we know. Another reason that there's limited excitement here is that Mr Vyborny wants to give a pretty complete story of the submarine, including its origin. It's about a third of the way through the book that sub actually goes in the water and it's about halfway through the book that the sub goes on its first mission. Mr Vyborny is admirably thorough, but submarine construction isn't going to be exciting. The last reason for the lack of excitement is Mr Vyborny's narration. There are a couple of dangerous situations that Mr Vyborny gets into in submarines and his narration is not especially vivid. Take, for example, this passage from the first chapter: Neither our captain or the executive officer could reach the control room because of the sharp angle and force of the dive had pinned them against the walls of their cabins. I glanced at the large digital depth indicator, where the numbers were changing so fast that they were a blur. In a matter of seconds, the ship drove herself down several hundred feet and the bow angle was greater than ever. The Sargo was out of control and heading toward her crush depth, the point at which the outside water pressure would crumple the hull. Ted Ardell, a sandy-haired young officer not long out of the Naval Academy, had to act immediately and instinctively, for if he hesitated, we would all be lost. (p. 7) That wouldn't be mistaken for Tom Clancy. But again, Mr Vyborny is a real sailor in the real world. People who are chosen to run nuclear powerplants inside little submarines thousands of feet under the surface of the ocean aren't picked for their sense of drama. As Mr Vyborny says shortly after that passage, "Responding to emergencies is part of life underwater" (p. 8). Since nobody but someone in Mr Vyborny's position could have written a book like this one and anyone in that position would have the same limitations, there's not much point in complaining about them. The book is no spy novel, but it's an interesting story about a unique submarine. Posted at 04:14 PM Category: Permalink Tue - May 13, 2008Book: Holidays on Ice by David SedarisDavid
Sedaris
Holidays on Ice Little, Brown, 1997 ISBN: 0-316-77923-7 134 pages $8.00 David Sedaris is, as I have had occasion to say before (1, 2), a talented and funny storyteller and memoirist. Holidays on Ice is a slim volume that contains six of his stories all of which have Christmas themes. "SantaLand Diaries" is about Mr Sedaris's first job after arriving in New York at the age of 33. He becomes an elf at Macy's on Herald Square, shepherding children who have come to see Santa. Anyone who is at all familiar with Mr Sedaris's writing will probably already be chuckling slightly. The situation is typical for one of his stories: a combination of choice and circumstance has put him in an unusual, even peculiar, situation and it's probably going to be a little more unusual, or even peculiar, on account of his being there. The story is vintage Sedaris and splendidly funny. The second story, "Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!" is in the form of one of those letters recounting the past year that some people send along with their Christmas cards. Mr Sedaris gets the breathless and slightly hysterical tone that those letters often have just right. And what an eventful year it was for the Dunbar family! "Dinah, the Christmas Whore" is about an incident related to Mr Sedaris's sister Lisa's after-school job in high school. Mr Sedaris generally recalls his family life as a boy as being rather quirky. This is a brilliant vignette. "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol" is in the form of a critic of serious drama reviewing grade-school Christmas pageants. Making even rather gentle fun of grade-school drama is unworthy of Mr Sedaris's talent. And the remaining two stories, "Based Upon a True Story" and "Christmas Means Giving" are also pretty forgettable. Still, the first three stories are thoroughly entertaining and well worth the price of the book. Posted at 08:09 PM Category: Permalink Book: Comfort Me with Apples by Ruch ReichlRuth
Reichl
Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table Random House, 2002 ISBN: 0-375-75873-9 302 pages $14.95 M. F. K. Fisher is one of my favorite authors ever. (The initials are for Mary Frances Kennedy.) And it was with her possibly rather unfairly in my mind that I started the book Comfort Me With Apples by another writer on food who is associated with California, Ruth Reichl. It turns out that I needn't have been concerned that the implicit comparison was unfair. That's true for two reasons. The first is that Ms Reichl's rather confessional style of food memoir is similar to Ms Fisher's. Indeed, Ms Fisher is Ms Reichl's hero (she gets to know her a bit in the course of the book). The second reason that the comparison isn't a bad one to make is that Ms Reichl's writing is good enough that it can stand the comparison. As the book begins, it's 1978 and Ms Reichl lives in a communally-organized house in Berkeley, California with her husband who is an artist and several other people. She has just become a free-lance restaurant reviewer for the new magazine New West. Her first trip to a restaurant to review it doesn't go especially well when the parking valet refuses to accept her beat-up car and the cost of the meal alone is greater than the limit on her credit card. She rises above these problems and, she suggests, partly by bluffing, talks herself into some important circles in cooking in California. Then a last-minute trip to Paris (via London and then the boat-train because that way the airfare was cheap) brings us to some fabulous food and the first bit of difficult romance in the book. Difficult emotions come up pretty often here. There's a quote from M. F. K. Fisher that I'm not having any luck finding to the effect that life, love, and food are so inextricably intertwined that trying to talk about any of them in isolation is pointless. (She said it rather more elegantly.) And you could take that as the theme of this book. Ms Reichl meets people and travels and cooks and eats and pretty much through it all she keeps those intertwined themes working together. There are some memorable events in the book. We get to meet Danny Kaye and there's a fascinating trip to Barcelona, but mainly the book's virtue is in Ms Reichl's gentle narration and patient interest in the people and food around her. If Ms Reichl's prose doesn't quite rise to the lyricism that M. F. K. Fisher's does at its best, this book is still very much worth the reader's time. There are recipes at the ends of the chapters, but I'm not a good enough cook to comment on them. Posted at 07:15 PM Category: Permalink Sun - May 4, 2008Book: Here at The New Yorker by Brendan GillBrendan
Gill
Here at The New Yorker Da Capo Press, 1997 (originally published in 1975) ISBN: 0-306-80810-2 395 pages $18.95 Here at the New Yorker by Brendan Gill is about the author's long career writing for and editing that magazine. It invites comparison with James Thurber's somewhat earlier book on the same subject, The Years with Ross.. Unfortunately, the comparison is in some respects not flattering to Mr Gill's book. It has been more than a few years since I read The Years with Ross and my memory may be misleading me. But if I recall that book correctly, Mr Gill's book is wider-ranging, more thorough, more systematic, and more psychologically subtle than Mr Thurber's. Mr Gill's book is also, alas, a lot less fun. Working at The New Yorker in its early years (the magazine was first published in 1925 and Mr Gill joined its staff in 1938) must have been fascinating. Harold Ross (its first editor), James Thurber, E. B. White, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, S. J. Perelman and any number of the magazine's other writers and editors are larger-than-life figures today. And there's no shortage of fascinating and often hilarious stories that have been written about them. But Mr Gill doesn't tell those stories. For example, he tells several stories about Alexander Woollcott early in the book and not one of them is funny. Now, it may be objected that Mr Gill's purpose was likely to have been serious history rather than a mere entertainment or collection of amusing anecdotes. To which I would reply only that The New Yorker was founded as a humor magazine and employed a great many very funny people. To write about it at length without telling funny stories (as Mr Gibbs does almost without exception) suggests a deliberate effort. The book's first few chapters consist of vignettes (some of them rather ill-tempered) of events that include people who worked at The New Yorker. They serve as a sort of introduction to the cast of characters. There follow several chapters on Mr Gill's happy childhood as the son of a prosperous physician in Hartford, his college years, and his early free-lance work for the magazine. Then there are chapters that are a petty much chronological history of his employment at the magazine (with a three-year hiatus). Then there are chapters about Harold Ross and Raoul Fleischmann, the magazine's financial backer, with whom Mr Ross's relationship was often tempestuous. Then there are some chapters of short pen-portraits of artists and writers who were regular contributors to the magazine. Some of those are pretty interesting and I think it's unlikely that you'll find the same information anywhere else. Then there's a chapter on the bars and restaurants that the magazine's staff seem to have spent lots of time in. Then more pen-portraits of contributors. The book's final chapter is an exception. In it Mr Gill writes generously and a bit impressionistically about Mr Ross and a bit about his successor, William Shawn. But one amiable and charitable chapter doesn't undo the effect of for the previous 27 that are often uncharitable and seem at least sometimes to deliberately avoid discussing anything charming or funny. Toward the middle of the book Mr Gill reveals that Harold Ross was racist. It's a shame that he was. But that error may not have been entirely uncommon among people born in the nineteenth century. Indeed, on the same page that Mr Gill tells us that, he refers to Central American "banana republics". Which is not the same thing as being racist, but serves as a reminder that everyone is influenced by the times they live in. James Thurber comes in for especially heavy criticism. (I could be wrong, but some of this feels a bit like settling old scores.) Mr Gill twice calls him malicious, providing as evidence nothing more than a couple of tasteless pranks. And I suppose it is logically possible that a humorist as brilliant as Mr Thurber was should have it in his nature to "wish to inflict pain" (p. 290). But Mr Gill admits elsewhere in the book that Mr Thurber was a jokester. Is it not possible that a few of his jokes fell flat and a few more were in poor taste? Mr Gill doesn't consider that possibility, at least not in the book. If you're keen to read about The New Yorker and require the greater scope of this book, there isn't much wrong with it. But The Years with Ross is also informative and is splendid fun to read. Posted at 04:12 PM Category: Permalink Thu - May 1, 2008Book: Taste by Kete ColquhounKate
Colquhoun
Taste: The Story of Britain through its Cooking Bloomsbury, 2007 ISBN: 978 0 7475 8576 3 375 pages (main text) UKP 20.00 Kate Colquhoun's book Taste: The Story of Britain through its Cooking is a good and interesting book, but it doesn't quite live up to its sub-title. To begin with, regional variations in cooking in Scotland and Wales get only an occasional nod. The book is really about English cooking. Second, the book doesn't really manage to tell the story of British (or even English) history. It's more like the cooking supplement to history you're presumed to know already. I have some knowledge of English history and I would have enjoyed the book more if I had been a more diligent student of it. That said, there's more than a little interesting information here and Ms Colquhoun is not short on clues. She begins with what little is known about cooking in Bronze Age Britain and then really gets going when the Romans arrive. The Romans were pretty cosmopolitan even in that far-flung outpost of empire. For example, I had no idea that they used fish sauce and that different people preferred to order theirs from different manufacturers. As with a lot of other things, cooking went downhill pretty quickly after the Romans left. Viking raids aren't really good for a cuisine. Things began to get a bit better once the Normans arrived. And then visitors to the Americas brought back lots of nifty new ingredients. And so on. There's a historical narrative in the book, but it doesn't hold together especially well. That's not much of a criticism. Keeping a single narrative thread going through all of recorded English history would be very difficult and possibly not desirable. So then what is the book's virtue? It's the tid-bits that we pick up along the way. There's the Roman fish sauce, for example. And I also had no idea that chickens were introduced to Britain from India shortly before the Romans arrived. In medieval Britain, people didn't drink water, but rather ale (small beer for children). That makes perfect sense since water was probably often contaminated. For a brief time in the 1590s, court ladies wore carrot greens in their hair. The English pudding was invented, probably in the early seventeenth century, by someone who found that you can cook things by boiling them in fabric bags. The way we commonly dine, at least at restaurants, with course following course, was a nineteenth-century invention and was originally called service à la russe. And, later In the nineteenth century, canned foods with their manufacturers' brands prominently displayed were a wholesome alternative to the often-adulterated foods commonly available. Of course that's a small taste of the large number of interesting facts and stories in the book. And Ms Colquhoun's footnotes are a delight. Take, for example: So ubiquitous was melted butter on English tables that early the following century Napoleon's Foreign Minister Talleyrand famously complained that the British had plenty of religions but only one sauce, while the French were the other way around. (footnote, p 205) If there's a theme that runs through the book, it's Ms Colquhoun's fondness for cooking and eating according to the seasonal availability of local products. That's a sentiment I agree with, but not quite as strongly as Ms Colquhoun does, especially since I live in Minneapolis and enjoy being able to get oranges in the winter. If the book doesn't hang together quite perfectly, the parts are delightful in themselves. Ms Colquhoun's choice of which foreign terms to italicize strikes me as being a bit random. But when writing about a subject in which so many terms come from other languages, it's going to be impossible for everyone to agree on which terms have entered the English language and which haven't. My quasi-arbtrary choices would probably look equally random to her. Posted at 07:02 PM Category: Permalink Tue - April 22, 2008Book: Unto the Breach by John RingoJohn
Ringo
Unto the Breach Baen, 2006 ISBN-10: 1-4165-0940-2 ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0940-0 610 pages $26.00 Unto the Breach is the fourth book in John Ringo's somewhat hokily-named "Paladin of Shadows" series of military thrillers. I've said of the pervious three books in the series (1, 2, 3), that their plots are somewhat improbable even by the rather relaxed standards of the genre, but that they're enough fun that I didn't much mind that. The same is true here. As the book begins, Mike Harmon, an ex-Navy SEAL, is a sort of benevolent feudal baron of a remote mountain valley in the Eastern European country of Georgia. His retainers, the Keldara, are of an unusual ethnicity for the area and he and some other military veterans have trained them to become a small but very potent military force. That's useful because Chechen terrorists are often about. Because he's not closely associated with the American government and has some rare skills and highly-trained soldiers, Mike Harmon is occasionally asked to do favors for governments. In this book, it's a favor for the American government which turns out to be a favor for the Russian government too. Little more needs to be said. You could read this book without having read the others in the series first, but I don't really know why you would. The number of spoilers for earlier books isn't as great as in the previous one, but there are plenty. You'd be better off starting at the beginning. You would, at least, unless you find violent sex distasteful because there's rather less of it in this book than in the others. If you liked the previous books, you're very likely to like this one as well. The stakes are higher in this book's story than in the others and the drama is correspondingly more dramatic. That gives me a little concern. Not for this book: Mr Ringo handles the story and pacing very well. But I wonder a bit about the next book and any that may succeed it. I'm reminded of Tom Clancy's books, the first few of which I enjoyed very much. But it seemed that each succeeding one had to be longer, with greater drama, higher stakes, more characters, and a more intricate plot. I stopped reading them after they became hard to lift. I hope that Mr Ringo doesn't go down that path. I guess I'll find out when I read the next in the series. There are a few minor editing errors in the book. There's "shoe-in" where "shoo-in" is wanted (p. 19), "Chateau Briand" where "chateaubriand" is wanted (p. 73), "showed" where "show" is wanted (p. 200), "occurred" where "occurs" is wanted (p. 354), "odie" where I suspect that "die" was intended (p. 395), "principle" where "principal" is wanted (p. 402), "karats" where "carets" is wanted (p. 428), and "spouting" where "sporting" is wanted (p. 600). Posted at 07:04 PM Category: Permalink Sat - April 5, 2008Book: Economics and its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics by William Oliver ColemanWilliam Oliver
Coleman
Economics and its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 ISBN: 1-4039-4148-3 237 pages UKP 19.99 Among the numerous objections to economics that William Oliver Coleman catalogs and anatomizes in Economics and its Enemies, the objection that writers on economics often write tedious prose is not included. It is, alas, a problem with the book. Which is too bad because the book's subject is an interesting one. Economics is necessarily liberal (in the classical sense of promoting individual liberty) and scientific, Mr Coleman tells us, and there are a whole lot of people who don't like those things. And the catalog of specific complaints against economics that he records is a remarkable one: economics may upset the social order, economics does not sufficiently upset the social order, a market is too democratic and people will pay too little attention to the authority of experts, the market is not democratic enough, and so on. All of that is very much worth knowing. Especially since many political issues are economic ones underneath and it's worth being familiar with some of the arguments about them that are wrong. But it's much harder to be informed if the reader's eyes glaze over on pretty much every page. I will pick a page at random and quote the first paragraph that begins on it. Here we are: Rather than in religion or science, the true future of Marxism within Western Europe lay in Hegelianising philosophy. In the second third of the twentieth century, Marx the materialistic (even positivistic) economist began to be replaced by a 'young' and philosophising Marx. This is reflected in the greatly shrunken attention of Marxists to anything that could be described as economics: in one estimate Leszek Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism devotes only 10 per cent of its pages to economics. So whereas the Second International tended to view Marxism as an economic theory, Das Kapital is, in the judgement of one representative of the modern tendency, 'not economics' (Carver 1975, p. 8). (p. 234, emphasis in original) If you can read that paragraph with interest, you will probably enjoy the book. The difficulty of reading the book is compounded by its being badly typeset. The lines are too long for the size of type used. Mr Coleman makes little mention of what criticisms may legitimately made of economics. To be fair, that's not his purpose in writing, but it would have made the book more interesting. Posted at 06:00 PM Category: Permalink Wed - March 12, 2008Book: Matter by Iain M. BanksIain M.
Banks
Matter Orbit, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-84149-417-3 (UK edition) 565 pages UKP 18.99 The arrival of a new "Culture" novel by Iain M. Banks is a cause for joy here. And there's a pretty good one here. Unfortunately, it starts around page 400. Around the first two-thirds of the book is a pretty good story that's somewhat science-fictiony but is told slowly and has little to do with the Culture. It's not exactly bad, but I'd say that it doesn't make it above fair-to-good. And that's not what I expected to find in this book. If you wade through the first 400 pages, you'll come to a pretty good Culture novel or maybe novella. Alas, not Mr Banks's best, but a pretty good one. Whether it's worth the reader's trouble to get to it isn't obvious to me. All of the book is narrated well and that poses a bit of a quandary for me. Mr Banks chooses to reveal certain aspects of the novel's environment slowly. And, as I mentioned, the pace of the narration early on is not speedy. That means that even a few sentences giving the book's premise would reveal things that Mr Banks doesn't reveal until well into the book. I'm pretty sure that I don't want to do that, so suffice it to say that the Sarl are a humanoid race who live in a somewhat unusual place. Their society is feudal and their technology about equivalent to nineteenth-century Europe or America. Early in the book, a crime is committed by a potential usurper and, eventually, Special Circumstances gets involved. People who would like to know more can read the detailed synopsis on the book's Wikipedia page. The book addresses some interesting themes, among them relationships of power and scale, and the reader naturally wonders how deep the subterfuges run and how long-term the Minds' plans are. The book isn't bad, but it wasn't what I'd hoped for in a new Culture novel. Posted at 08:15 PM Category: Permalink Book: Choosers of the Slain by John RingoJohn
Ringo
Choosers of the Slain Baen, 2006 ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-2070-3 ISBN-10: 1-4165-2070-8 427 pages $25.00 Choosers of the Slain is a military thriller and it's the third book in John Ringo's somewhat hokily named "Paladin of Shadows" series. The main character is Mike Harmon, a former navy SEAL. He's a fearsome soldier but not a very nice person, at least in some ways. Since this is the third book in the series (reviews of the previous two are at: 1, 2) there's no reason that a person would start reading the series here, especially since the narrator gives summaries of the previous two books early on in it. It is probably nearly sufficient to say that if you liked the previous books, you're very likely to like this one as well. Like them, it's a bit improbable even by the rather relaxed standards of the genre, but the story is fun and exciting enough that that didn't bother me. As the book begins, Mike Harmon is a pretty much a benevolent feudal baron in an isolated valley in the Eastern European country of Georgia. His retainers are completing some military training and are now pretty much a modern militia. They have a minor military engagement and then Mike wants to get to work on marketing the valley's excellent beer abroad. But someone high in the American government asks him to do him a favor that requires his unique skills and position. Of course, things are not just as they seem and that starts the main part of the story. Some people may not care much for the violent sex in the book. But the story is fun and the ending is splendid. There are a few editing errors in the book. There's a comma where an apostrophe is wanted (p. 14), "lintle" where "lintel" is wanted (p. 198), "extents and purposes" where "intents and purposes" is wanted (p. 210), "fights" where "fight" is wanted (p, 210), and "out-of-ground hover" where "out-of-ground-effect hover" is wanted (p. 384). Posted at 08:01 PM Category: Permalink Book: The Sky People by S. M. StirlingS. M.
Stirling
The Sky People Tor, 2006 ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5376-4 ISBN-10: 0-7653-5376-8 309 pages $6.99 It's past time that I got all of S. M. Stirling's books that I haven't read. I've occasionally been reluctant to start one of his books, despite the praise they routinely get, because, having heard the book's premise, I'm skeptical that it can be carried off well. Having read several of his books now, I have plenty of reason to set aside any such misgivings. In particular, The Sky People is splendid fun. It's the first book in a series and the second one (In the Courts of the Crimson Kings) is due to be published shortly. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if there were several more to follow. The book is an alternate-history novel with a premise that is straight out of science-fiction's pulp era: In the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union sent unmanned probes to Mars and Venus. And they found Earth-like conditions and intelligent life on both planets. There followed a great space-race (and a diminution of conflict on Earth). As the main part of the book begins, it's 1988 and Lieutenant Marc Vitrac, USASF is welcoming the latest arrivals from America and its allies to the six-year-old Jamestown Extraterritorial Zone on Venus. It's pretty near a native Bronze-Age city-state. Not only is the book's premise out of the pulp era, the book's mood and tone are too. What do people in pulp novels set on a Venus where they have airships do? They have daring and exciting adventures, of course. Not everything in the book is from the 1950s. The narrative is more sophisticated and the novel's themes are handled more subtly than they were then. Still, the book is full of optimistic, can-do people. These days, relatively few writers would have their main character think: Good men, Marc thought -- and that included the scattering of unwedded women. They've been beaten before, but they're ready to try again. (p. 238) The book is a pleasure to read and an antidote to the fretfulness and pessimism to be found these days in many books in a genre that I go to for pleasing fictions. Posted at 07:31 PM Category: Permalink |
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Published On: Jul 23, 2008 07:58 PM |
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