Mon - March 30, 2009

Book: The Steerswoman's Road by Rosemary Kirstein


Rosemary Kirstein
The Steerswoman's Road
Random House, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-46105-3
$15.95
653 pages

A steerswoman deals in truth. Anyone may ask a steerswoman any question and she will reply to the best of her knowledge. In return, a person must answer any question a steerswoman asks to the best of their knowledge. A person may refuse to answer, but then no steerswoman will answer that person's questions ever again. Wizards never answer and so fall under the steerswoman's ban, but they're a deliberately close-mouthed lot.

Since steerswomen are pretty rare and a steerswoman's answers are more valuable to any individual than their answers could be to her, steerswomen are rarely charged for their modest needs for food and lodging as they travel to learn new things. (There are a few steersmen, but it is overwhelmingly women who feel called to the profession.) Rowan is one such steerswoman and she has become interested in the origins of a particular sort of gem that's reasonably rare but isn't accorded any special value. As she travels, Rowan falls into the company of Bel, a woman who's an outskirter. Outskirters live on the edge of the lands occupied by the dominant culture of the novel's world (a pretty standard fantasy-novel late-medieval culture). Most "inner-landers" consider Bel a barbarian, but her people are goat-herders and in fact their culture is complex. It would need to be for them to survive in the unforgiving outskirts.

Rowan's skills and Bel's are complementary and that turns out to be a good thing when it seems that Rowan's inquiries about the gems have attracted the unwelcome attention of a wizard. That's a pretty good premise for a fantasy novel, if you ask me.

The volume The Steerswoman's Road contains the first two books of what seems intended to become a longish series of novels (they were originally published as The Steerswoman in 1989 and The Outskirter's Secret in 1992). That means that little of substance is resolved by the volume's end and that there's a bit of repetition in the beginning of the second book in the volume. Those things aren't in themselves reasons not to like the book. What did bother me some is that the book reads as though the author made the story up as she went along and did so pretty casually. A book does not need to be tightly plotted in order to be good. But if a book's plot wanders here and there, the narration still needs discipline. And that's somewhat lacking here. Take, for example:

    It was not her being a steerswoman that made her want
    to know; she had become a steerswoman because of
    her own need, the need to know and understand. And at
    this moment, she merely wished, for herself, to be aware,
    and could not bear the thought of being otherwise.
    (p. 632)

That might be a good and useful piece of characterization at the beginning of the first book. At a stretch, it might be good at the beginning of the second. Coming, as it does, a few pages before the end of the second one, it grates. If Ms Kirstein hasn't made her reader understand her character's motivations by then, it's too late. Alas, too much of the book is like that. Interesting characters come and go. There are longish stretches in which relatively little happens and then the plot is moved forward by means of talky exposition. Rowan reasons now one way and now another. To be somewhat old-fashioned, I'd say that the book is a bit short on dramatic unity. I get the impression that the author had only a few general ideas and a small amount of the plot in mind at any given moment that she was telling the story.

I wish that I could say that the places that Ms Kirstein's story goes are interesting enough to make up for those faults. They're not, quite, for me.



Minor spoiler follows:


I'm no astronomer, but as far as I can tell, for a geosynchronous satellite over an Earth-like planet to be readily visible to the naked eye at night, it would need to be a good deal larger than a big house. It seems that something more on the order of a mile in diameter would be necessary.

Posted at 07:33 PM   Category:    Permalink

Fri - March 13, 2009

Book: Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm


Janet Malcolm
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
Vintage, 1982
ISBN: 0-394-71034-7
$15.00
163 pages (main text)

Truman Capote's book In Cold Blood is a powerful book when read today. How much more powerful it must have been in 1966 when it was new and the novelistic techniques that Mr Capote used in it were new to non-fiction. I suspect that something similar is true of Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.

The book is not really about how psychoanalysis is exactly an impossible profession (though it seems to be a rather difficult one). On one level, the book is about the state of psychoanalysis in New York in the late 1970s. That was presumably of some interest to readers at that time since psychoanalysts are, as a result of their profession, a rather close-mouthed lot. But there's rather more to the book than that. If there weren't, it would hardly be worth reading twenty-seven years after it was published. On another level, the book is an opportunity for Janet Malcolm (herself the daughter of a psychiatrist) to analyze (indeed psychoanalyze) psychoanalysts, psychoanalysis, and Freud himself. That's reason enough for anyone interested in the subject to read the book. Ms Malcolm is perceptive and persuasive on a difficult subject. On a third level, the book is a meditation on themes of knowing and learning. Psychoanalysts are professionally chilly and what they do may even seem cruel at times. The same is true of journalists, perhaps especially of Ms Malcolm. Those last two ways that the book works are interesting enough now, but I suspect that they were rather remarkable when the book was new.

Ms Malcolm is very informative about psychoanalysis and also the lives and working conditions of psychoanalysts. It was probably pretty interesting to read in 1982 something like:

    I had come across numerous papers on the subject,
    and been struck by the extraordinary tension and
    bad feeling that pervade analytic organizations.
    "Envy, rivalry, power conflicts, the formation of small
    groups, resulting in discord and intrigues, are a
    matter of course," the Dutch analyst P. J. van der
    Leeuw wrote in 1968, adding wistfully, "We expect
    fulfillment from the relationships between ourselves,
    and are so often disappointed. (p. 106)

But none of that is probably very surprising these days. But a description like this, of an analyst and his office, retains its power to shock:

    The room was like an iconoclast's raised fist; this
    analyst's patients didn't come here to pass the time of
    day, it told you. Cross himself looked like the gnarled,
    tormented stubs of men that Bacon paints. You felt
    that he didn't sit down to meals but furtively gulped his
    food, like a stray animal; you fancied that his wife had
    left him years ago, and that for several days he hadn't
    noticed she was gone. He was a man without charm,
     without ease, without conceit or vanity, and with a kind
    of excruciating, prodding, twitching honesty that was
    like an intractable skin disorder. (p. 81)

I imagine that it had even more power when it was written, two and a half decades ago.

Few people would enjoy being written about that way. But Ms Malcolm says, "The job of the analyst isn't to offer the patient sympathy; it's to lead him to insight" (p. 75). I suspect that she would say the same of the job of a journalist.

This work was originally published in The New Yorker and reminds me that when that magazine was edited by William Shawn, there was little in its articles that was amusing or light-hearted. Ms Malcolm is an excellent journalist, but I suspect that Mr Shawn rarely found her prose lacking in seriousness.

Posted at 07:58 PM   Category:    Permalink

Wed - March 11, 2009

Book: Race of Scorpoins by Dorothy Dunett


Dorothy Dunnett
Race of Scorpions
Vintage, 1999 (originally published in 1989)
ISBN: 0-375-70479-5
534 pages
$15.95

Race of Scorpions is the third book in the seven-book "House of Niccolò" series of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett. They're set in the late fifteenth century and, so far, the story has taken us from Bruges to the Black Sea.

This is the third book in the series and no one would start reading the series here. Reviews of the previous books are at: 1, 2. I liked them both very much and this book does not disappoint. Significant spoilers for the earlier books follow.


As The Spring of the Ram ended, Nicholas vander Poele, formerly a dyer's apprentice and more recently a very canny trader and the agent for a small mercenary army, has had considerable commercial success in Trebizond. Which turned to ashes when he found that his wife, Marian, had died on a journey to meet him. As this book begins, he's on his way through snowy northern Italy to visit the place of Marian's death. While he's resting at an inn, an alarm is raised and Nicholas helps to rescue a queen whose party is being attacked nearby. As queens go, she's a relatively minor one. Carlotta is queen of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Armenia. But she actually reigns over only part of the strategically-important island of Cyprus (divided even today). The rest of that island is ruled by her illegitimate half-brother, James.

Carlotta urges Nicholas (and his small army) to take her side in the dispute for the island. Nicholas declines. He eventually travels on to Bruges where he finds that his step-daughters (Marian's daughters from a previous marriage) are managing their late mother's business well and with able assistance, but want nothing to do with him. There, a courtesan of Carlotta's court finds Nicholas and tries to persuade him to come to Cyprus. Again he declines. A bit at loose ends, Nicholas joins his army for a couple of battles, but someone kidnaps him in the confusion of the battlefield and spirits him onto a boat headed for Cyprus. Someone does not want to take no for an answer.

If it sounds like I've just described a lot of the plot, I haven't. That omits much and takes us up to about page 70. Race of Scorpions is even more intricately plotted than the previous books. And there are characters scheming and plotting at every level. The result is intricate, fascinating, and a splendid read.

As seems to be usual with the books in this series, the female characters are more complex, especially in their motivations, than the male ones. But that's not important. And by now the reader will have learned to skip the introduction by Judith Wilt.

Posted at 07:07 PM   Category:    Permalink

Sat - February 21, 2009

Book: Sharpe's Triumph by Bernard Cornwell


Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe's Triumph: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803
Perennial, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-095197-4
$13.95
291 pages

Sharpe's Triumph is the second book in the timeline of Bernard Cornwell's twenty-two-book plus two-short-story historical-fiction series about Richard Sharpe. Sharpe is a soldier in the British army and former London guttersnipe, brawler, and thief. The book is the second in the timeline, but the seventeenth in order of publication.

This is where I need to make an unfortunate comparison. This is the third of Mr Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels that I've read and they've all been very good. But George MacDonald Fraser wrote a series of historical novels featuring Harry Flashman about the British army in the nineteenth century and Patrick O'Brian wrote a series of historical novels featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin about the British navy in the nineteenth century. Mr O'Brian's novels are brilliant and Mr Fraser's are brilliant and hilarious. In a more ordinary genre, Mr Cornwell's novels would stand out. In this one they are "only" very good. We won't be getting any more novels from either Mr Fraser or Mr O'Brian, alas, and so if you've read them all or are taking a break to make them last longer, you will almost certainly like Mr Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels.

As the book begins, it has been four years since the events of Sharpe's Tiger and Sergeant Sharpe is still serving in India. He has had mostly easy duty serving under the slightly-dotty engineer Major John Stokes at the armory in Seringapatam. Sharpe goes to lead a detail and that doesn't go well, though that's no fault of his. Then Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, Sharpe's nemesis from the earlier book, makes an appearance. But before anything can come of that, Colonel McCandless, whom we also know from Sharpe's Tiger, arrives. He wants Sharpe's help in capturing a deserter from the British army who's now one of the European officers in the army of the Mahrattas. Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley is leading a seemingly-inadequate British force against that army and McCandless and Sharpe need to be on hand to be sure that the man is captured.

The story that follows is splendid fun and the battle is an impressive one. And this time the "Historical Note" at the end doesn't break the novel's spell.

Posted at 07:29 PM   Category:    Permalink

Book: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson


Stieg Larsson
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Knopf, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26975-1
465 pages
$24.95

Like the book's main character, the author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, was a respectable Swedish journalist who worked in Stockholm for a small news magazine. Alas, "worked" is necessary because Mr Larsson died at the age of 50 of a heart attack shortly before the book was published.

As the book begins, the main character, Mikael Blomkvist, has just been convicted of libel for a story he wrote about a Swedish industrialist, Hans-Erik Wennerström. Apparently, in Sweden, libel is, or at least can be, a criminal matter since he'll have to serve a shortish prison sentence and pay a significant fine. The staff of the magazine he works for is very small and he thinks it would be sensible to stay away from it for a while so as to avoid damaging its reputation further. So he's a bit at loose ends. Just then he's offered a freelance job by a different Swedish industrialist, Henrik Vanger. Or, more exactly, he's offered two jobs and an additional inducement. Henrik Vanger wants him to write a tell-all biography of the Vanger clan. But that's just the cover story. He really wants Mikael to investigate the unsolved disappearance of his grand-neice, Harriet, which took place nearly 40 years previously and which he has been obsessing about ever since. As an added inducement, if Mikael finds the answer, Vanger will provide him with evidence of impropriety by Wennerström. And so our reluctant detective begins poking around the town of Hedeby in rural northern Sweden.

Because he's a fan of detective novels and because of the circumstances of Harriet Vanger's disappearance, Mikael refers to the mystery as, "A sort of locked-room mystery in island format" (p. 78). But his investigation doesn't proceed all that much like the investigation in an ordinary detective novel. It's more like the sort of careful and patient research done by an investigative journalist. Which makes sense of course. That's one of the things that makes the novel interesting. Another is the character of Lisbeth Salander, an ace investigator and goth who is about as much outside the mainstream of Swedish culture as Mikael Blomkvist is in it.

The narrative is not speedy. But I never wished for it to go faster because there was always some new and interesting element of Swedish atmosphere or culture or history coming up. It is interesting to observe though Mr Larsson's story how Swedes speak and remain silent. You do not imagine these characters gesturing vigorously as they talk.

For example, it's easy to imagine a Swede saying gently, "He's not the most positive person anyway" (p. 49). Or take, "She turned to smile at him -- for the first time with warmth. Then she was gone" (p. 153). Or, "He wore a yellow shirt, narrow green tie, and comfortable dark-brown suit" (p. 212). And then there's the time when someone is invited in to dinner at the spur of the moment and we're told, "Anna produced a great quantity of bacon pancakes with lingonberries" (p. 221).

The careful and unhurried narrative matches (what seems to me to be) the careful and unhurried Swedish culture it's set in. And that turns out to be a very fine way to tell a mystery. It's a shame that Mr Larsson finished only two more books before his death. But I very much look forward to reading them.

Mr Larsson is generally very well served by his translator, Reg Keeland. The translation is into British English, but I think that few Americans will be put off by the occasional "decamped" or hyphenated "no-one". "Tunnelbana" might have been usefully rendered as "metro" or "subway" (for Americans) though I rather like the word. And "exiguous" (p. 181) would have been just fine as "very small". Also, "Norsjö was a small town with one main street, appropriately enough called Storgatan..." (p. 282) will not actually seem especially appropriate unless you know Swedish or look up "Storgatan" and find out that it means "Great Street". But those are quibbles.

Posted at 06:54 PM   Category:    Permalink

Wed - January 14, 2009

Book: Caine Black Knife by Matthew Stover


Matthew Stover
Caine Black Knife: The Third of the Acts of Caine: Act of Atonement: Book One
Del Rey, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-45587-1
$14.00
343 pages

I've read Matthew Stover's two fantasy novels, Jericho Moon and Iron Dawn, and the two previous novels in the series that this book is in, Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle, and found them all excellent. (Sadly, only Heroes Die seems to be in print, but Amazon's used-book sellers seem amply stocked with the others as of this writing.)

The premise of the series is that society on Earth is caste-based and thoroughly vile for most of its inhabitants. There's an expensive way to travel instantaneously to another Earth-like planet. That planet is straight from a fantasy novel: there's medieval-era technology, magic, faeries, dwarves, and gods who sometimes interfere with human affairs. Our flawed hero is Hari Michaelson from Earth. He's an actor, but he doesn't do Shakespeare or summer-stock. He gets sent to the other planet, Overworld, where he's Caine the assassin and his adventures are recorded for the entertainment of people on Earth. You might say, approximately, that he stars in an alternate-reality television show.

So what we have are fantasy novels with sort of side-helpings of corporate maneuverings and repressive politics. But what's also unique and rather more interesting is that the books are told in the first person and Hari Michaelson is someone who couldn't possibly have been born on Overworld. He has a thoroughly modern and reasonably bad attitude and he has no reverence for anyone, including himself. That's an interesting premise if you ask me, and Mr Stover works it out very well.

It would be better, but not strictly necessary, to read Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle before reading Caine Black Knife. There are some spoilers for the earlier books in this one.

There are two plot threads in the book. One is a sort of prequel to the first book, explaining how Caine became famous. The other thread takes place after the end of the second book, when Caine has retired. Naturally enough, the two threads turn out to be related. There are gods and knights and desperate battles here and the result is very good fun.

People who, unlike me, notice the "Book One" in the book's sub-title won't be surprised when they come to the last page of the book and read, "This story concludes in Act of Atonement: Book Two: His Father's Fist". I confess to being a little disappointed that I'll have to wait, probably a couple of years, for the conclusion of the story. Still, the book is very good, even if it's not quite as grand as the first two in the series.

Posted at 07:20 PM   Category:    Permalink

Tue - January 6, 2009

Book: Janissaries by Jerry Pournelle


Jerry Pournelle
Janissaries
Baen, 1996 (originally published in 1979)
ISBN: 0-671-87709-1
245 pages
$5.99

A few months ago, over at Tor.com, Jo Walton recommended Jerry Pournelle's book Janissaries as a splendid example of uncomplicated military science fiction. (Her post is here. It contains more spoilers for the book than this one does.) And the book is that, or very nearly. It's also fun to read recognizably modern SF that was written 30 years ago. A videoconference via flat-screens is in the realm of science fiction and there's a character who thinks that it's natural to do calculations using a table of logarithms.

As the book begins, it's the Cold War and a small group of American soldiers is fighting in Africa. They're losing to Cuban troops. Then a flying saucer shows up and they end up in one of those situations in which it's a lucky thing that one of our plucky group has made a study of military history. All in all, the book is uncomplicated fun. Take, for example:

        "We don't have to stay here--"
        "No," Rick said. "We don't have to. But I'm not running
    this time. I've given up running."
    (p. 141)

In my opinion the ending is marred slightly by some talky exposition that seems intended to set up some sequels that are only sort of available. But the book is still good fun.

Posted at 07:24 PM   Category:    Permalink

Wed - December 31, 2008

Book: Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty


Stephan Talty
Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign
Three Rivers Press, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-23661-6
305 pages (main text)
$14.95

Empire of Blue Water is about the exploits of the Welshman Henry Morgan, the most famous pirate to sail the Caribbean. It's really also the story of all the early English and Welsh pirates of the Caribbean. And that story is as fascinating as you might imagine it is.

The story really begins with Oliver Cromwell. In the middle of the seventeenth century, England wasn't much of a naval power. Spain was the great European power of the day and its colonies in the Americas sent home fabulous riches. Cromwell, the Puritan dictator (technically Lord Protector) of England, had no fondness for Catholic Spain and was thoroughly unimpressed with the fact that the Pope had decided that Spain should own most of the Americas. Thomas Gage, a clergyman who had traveled there, persuaded Cromwell to outfit a military settlement expedition to the Caribbean as a sort of Protestant crusade.

On Christmas day of 1654, 3000 men, including Thomas Gage and Henry Morgan, set off in 38 ships from Portsmouth, England, headed for the island of Hispaniola. They collected reinforcements along the way and arrived off the city of Santo Domingo with a huge force. Nevertheless, the Spanish easily repulsed their attack, with considerable loss of life on the English side. Rather than go home empty-handed, the fleet took Jamaica as a sort of consolation prize.

At that time, the European powers were perpetually short of money with which to conduct their wars. To wage war on the cheap, they invented the "letter of marque". A ship carrying such a letter became a private warship (or privateer) for the issuing government and was paid only in what it captured. Of course, some ships sailed against Spain's possessions without first going to the trouble of getting a letter of marque. Privateers were often brutal, but the governments of the day were also, pretty often.

Spain's military resources in the Americas were very thinly stretched and privateers, with no wish to settle or fortify the places they attacked, were highly mobile. And, in the crew of a privateer, enterprise was likely to be rewarded. That wasn't true in the Spanish civil service. With the island for a base and license to plunder Spanish ships and colonies, the stage was set for some fascinating history.

So the story is a splendid one. Alas, Mr Talty's writing does not quite rise the same level. His prose is generally serviceable, but his metaphors and narrative devices are often inelegant. Take, for example, the beginning of a description of present-day Port Royal:

    The city feels like a place from which time departed
    centuries ago, if it even touched down at all; you get
    the feeling that it hurried across the bay to Kingston
    or skipped across the famous blue waters north to
    Miami. (p. 4)

I'm not sure what it means for time to be an airplane (which departs and touches down) and I certainly don't know what it means for it to subsequently turn into a person (who hurries) and then a stone (which skips across water). And then there's the difficulty of figuring out how time could have left a long time ago.

In a misguided effort on a somewhat larger scale, Mr Talty doesn't observe what a typical crewman on a privateer might have done or thought. Instead, he invents a typical crewman, gives him the name Roderick, and tells us from time to time what Roderick thinks or does.

The book is still very much worth reading, but it could have been great.


There are a couple of minor mistakes in the book. It is not certain that "dead reckoning" came from "ded. reckoning", an abbreviation of "deduced reckoning" (p. 60). And the Gibraltar in the Mediterranean is not an island (p. 153). Also, the type that the book is set in has a jarring italic that is needlessly difficult to read.

Posted at 06:43 PM   Category:    Permalink

Mon - December 29, 2008

Book: Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell


Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe's Tiger: Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Seringapatam, 1799
HarperCollins, 1999 (originally published in 1997)
ISBN: 0-06-093230-9
385 pages
$13.95

Sharpe's Tiger is the first book in a (so far) 22-book series of historical novels by Bernard Cornwell. The books follow Richard Sharpe, a former London guttersnipe, brawler, and thief, in his adventures in the British army in (mostly) the nineteenth century. This is the first book in the historical time-line but it's the fourteenth in the order in which they were published. I happened to start reading the series with the tenth. My opinions about that book are here.

As this book begins, it's 1799 and Richard Sharpe is a private in the British army. He's in a force that's led by General George Harris (Sharpe's colonel is Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington) that is marching on the Indian state of Mysore. The ruler there, Tippu Sultan, has been far too friendly with the French for British tastes and the army Sharpe is with is to take the state's capital, Seringapatam.

In addition to some very impressive superiors, Sharpe has some truly vile ones. Sharpe is remarkably quick-witted, but he'll need to defeat some people from his own side in addition to doing the job he has been ordered to do.

The adventure is a good one. It isn't Mr Cornwell's fault that George MacDonald Fraser and Patrick O'Brian have also written in the genre of historical fiction about the nineteenth-century British military. Patrick O'Brian's books are brilliant and George MacDonald Fraser's are brilliant and hilarious. Judging from the two I've read, Mr Cornwell's are "only" very good.

Since we won't be getting any more from Messers O'Brian and Fraser, if you've read all of theirs or are taking a break to make them last longer, there's every reason to read and enjoy Sharpe's Tiger. It seem that it's not only Mr Fraser's Flashman who gets medals by accident.

If you can bring yourself to, skip the Historical Note at the end. I'm sure that it's from the highest of motives that Mr Cornwell details the places where he departs from history. But it does rather break the spell.

Posted at 08:01 PM   Category:    Permalink

Wed - December 17, 2008

Book: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely


Dan Ariely
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Harper, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-135323-9
247 pages
$25.95

Predictably Irrational is a book in the newish field of behavioral economics. What's behavioral economics? Traditionally, when economists want to know how someone will act, they use a rational actor model. That's a fancy way of saying that they assume that people will act rationally to maximize their utility. (Utility is a fancy way of saying, roughly, medium-term happiness.)

But everyone knows that people aren't perfectly rational. The rational actor model treats irrationality as an aberration that will averaged out or corrected. Behavioral economics seeks to see what useful or interesting things can be found out about people's irrational actions. As it turns out, very often when people are irrational, they're not irrational in random ways. And the ways in which people are predictably irrational can be very interesting.

Predictably Irrational lives up to its title. In it, Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, discusses eleven broad themes of human irrationality that he has investigated. Professor Ariely's work is very persuasive and one reason for that is that it's relentlessly empirical. Indeed, Professor Ariely describes so many experiments that he and his colleagues have conducted that it seems that anyone in the same city that he is would constantly observe armies of clipboard-toting graduate students asking people seemingly-odd questions.

Among the themes that Professor Ariely investigates are: the relativity of value, prices that are unrelated to supply and demand, the relationship between economic norms of behavior and social ones, and the difficulty people have predicting how they will react when under the influence of strong emotions. All of the themes are worthy subjects and Professor Ariely has interesting things to say about each of them. Each theme is addressed in a separate chapter (actually, honesty gets two). In each of those chapters Professor Ariely gives some background on the subject, describes the research he has done and what it suggests, and finally gives some suggestions about how people might modify situations so that they acted more rationally in the future.

If that doesn't sound much like a traditional economics book, that's because Predictably Irrational isn't much like a traditional book on economics. For one, prosperity is a secondary issue. We might be more prosperous if we were more rational, but human behavior is the focus here. The book reads more like one written by Steven Pinker than one written by an economist. That comparison is an apt one in another respect as well: Professor Ariely comes off as a friendly and engaging narrator. (At one point in the book, he wonders why people confide in him so often. If he is in person anything like the sort of person he is as a narrator, I expect it's at least partly because he's a very friendly person.)

A few of the sections are slightly repetitive, but that's a very small complaint. Some of the suggestions for ways to arrange to act more rationally seem a trifle impractical to me. And the final chapter, which is in part a discussion about how institutions might go about creating situations that encourage rationality troubles my libertarian soul just a bit. It sounds as if it could be the start of a slippery slope in which people helpfully encourage me to do what they have decided I "really" want.

Though Professor Ariely (and others) have persuasively shown that people are sometimes irrational in predictable ways, we're still pretty far from having a useful and coherent "irrational actor" model. I doubt that anyone has a very good idea how or when behavioral economics will connect with the more ordinary kind. If it ever does, the result would be a powerful tool of analysis. Until then, enjoy this short (247 pages of largish type somewhat loosely set), fun and interesting inquiry into human nature.


There's minor editing error in that "high density" should be "high definition" on page 135. And whoever is responsible for the author's capsule bio on the inside of the dust-jacket wrote "Institute for Advance Study". It's actually the Institute for Advanced Study.

Posted at 07:30 PM   Category:    Permalink

Book: The Spring of the Ram by Dorothy Dunnett


Dorothy Dunnett
The Spring of the Ram
Vintage, 1994 (originally published in 1987)
ISBN: 0-375-70478-7
469 pages
$15.95

The Spring of the Ram is the second book in the seven-volume "House of Niccolò" series of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett. My opinions about the first book are here. Some spoilers for that book follow.

The series is set in the early Renaissance and is (so far) about the Charetty company and the people associated with it. Until recently the company wasn't much more than a dye-shop in the Flemish city of Bruges. There's Marian de Charetty, the widowed owner, Nicholas vander Poele, formerly her apprentice and now her husband, and various daughters, lawyers, military men, and other people associated with the company.

As the book begins, it's 1461 and Marian's younger daughter, Catherine, aged 12, has been acquiring polish while living with relatives in Brussels. While there, Pagano Doria, a flashy, unscrupulous, and smooth-talking rake, takes advantage of Catherine's naivete and a rebellious streak she has to persuade her to elope with him.

Nicholas knows none of this but finds it convenient to be away from Bruges for a while. He has the idea to get Medici financial and political backing for a trading expedition to the grandly-named but rather small Empire of Trebizond (roughly the coastal area of eastern half of the south shore of the Black Sea). That empire styled itself the successor state to the recently-defunct Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire. The city of Trebizond was at that time a northern terminus for the camel caravans that made up part of the "silk road". (Wikipedia link for Trebizond omitted because the article there contains a spoiler for the book.)

And, what do you know, Doria and his bride are headed to Trebizond as well.

What follows is a fine adventure. This book is at least as good as the first volume and I'm eager to read the next. Unlike some series of historical novels, this one doesn't seem to be episodic. Ms Dunnett doesn't restore the situation to pretty much what it was at the beginning of the book. It seems that the series will follow a single, extended plot.

When I say that a book is intricately plotted, I generally mean that as a compliment. I do in this case too, but it's near the limit of what I enjoy following for fun. Nicholas is a very clever schemer and trader and there were a few times that I wondered to myself, "Why is he thinking that?". Also, it's not important at all, but the female characters in the book seem to have a bit more depth to them than the male ones. And you can safely skip the introduction by Judith Wilt, a professor of women's studies.


It may be that Nicholas is speaking ironically, but I suspect that a "not" was omitted from, "She's my step-daughteer. Of course I've forgotten her" (p. 172). And an editor might have suggested "reached" rather than "fell" in, "The monks had given him a loose robe which fell to the ground, concealing most of his injuries...." (p. 308).

Posted at 07:04 PM   Category:    Permalink

Mon - November 24, 2008

Book: Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre


Ben Macintyre
Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal
Three Rivers Press, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-35331-2
305 pages (main text)
$14.95

The problem with most true-life spy stories is that they're not especially interesting. Even for spies, real life isn't usually all that exciting. But Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre is an exception. It's about Edward Chapman, who was born in 1914 in a small town in the north of England. In the early 1930s he joined the British army but went absent without leave after nine months. He was caught, imprisoned, and dishonorably discharged. He then embarked on a life of crime, becoming an experienced burglar and safe-cracker. His willingness to spend the money he stole brought him into contact with London's demimonde and he got to know Noël Coward, among others.

A little while later, he was serving a prison sentence on the British Channel Island of Jersey when the Germans invaded. He was eventually released from prison and promptly offered to spy for the Germans. Shortly thereafter he ended up in trouble with the new authorities and found himself in a German prison outside of Paris. The Germans eventually took him up on his offer but, as the book's title suggests, that's not nearly all there is to the story.

Eddie Chapman (as he was known) was a morally and psychologically messy person. It seems that he had some good reasons for that. Though Mr Macintyre doesn't mention it, it seems likely from his descriptions that Eddie had (among other problems) bipolar disorder and some not very socially acceptable mechanisms for coping with it. I didn't count the number of women Eddie had love-affairs with and then abandoned during the course of the book, but it's a lot. He was smart, brave, charming, tough, and a scoundrel.

Not only is there an interesting story here and an interesting character, but Mr Macintyre's writing does justice to both. Take this from the beginning of the book:

    A group of men in overcoats and brown hats had
    entered the restaurant and one was now in urgent
    conversation with the headwaiter. Before Betty
    could speak, Eddie stood up, bent down to kiss
    her once, and then jumped through the window,
    which was closed. There was a storm of broken
    glass, tumbling crockery, screaming women, and
    shouting waiters. Betty Farmer caught a last
    glimpse of Eddie Chapman sprinting off down the
    beach with two overcoated men in pursuit.
    (p. 4)

There are a fair few funny parts of the story. But Mr Macintyre makes sure that we don't lose ourselves in the story, fascinating as it is, by reminding us of the Nazi horrors that the allied victory would stop.

If I can find a complaint about the book, it's that it makes the work at Bletchley Park sound a bit easier than it was. But that's a very small thing. The ending isn't especially tidy, but that's real life for you.

Posted at 07:03 PM   Category:    Permalink

Wed - November 12, 2008

Book: The Hundred Days by Patrick O'Brian


Patrick O'Brian
The Hundred Days
W. W. Norton, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04674-5
281 pages
$24.00

I have written before (1, 2) about books in Patrick O'Brian's series of historical novels about the British sea-captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, the physician, naturalist, and intelligence agent Stephen Maturin. The books are set during the Napoleonic wars and this is the nineteenth of the twenty-book series (plus one book that was left unfinished at the author's death).

Little really needs to be said here. Fans of the series will not be surprised that the book is as good as the previous eighteen. And no one would start the series here. If you think you might enjoy mostly-naval nineteenth-century adventure that's written beautifully, get a copy of the first book, Master and Commander, and expect to become a fan.

As the book begins, it's 1815. Napoleon has escaped from Elba and is contesting Louis XVIII's rule of France. Jack and Stephen are aboard H. M. S. Pomone and Jack is the commodore of a seven-ship squadron that's arriving at Gibraltar. Our adventure this time involves preventing a shipment of gold from crossing the Mediterranean to help Napoleon. But before that, they're to run up the Adriatic coast and make as much mischief as possible in the shipyards that are building and refitting ships for Napoleon. And before that there are a few indiamen to see safely to England.

The book, like the whole series, is exciting, entertaining, and, at times, very funny. A buddy has pointed out to me that I should mention that the books are narrated in a style that's closer to the English of the era they depict than to today's English. I've read so much of that sort of writing that I hardly notice it (which is why it needed to be pointed out to me that I should mention it) but it is a bit obtrusive to some.

Posted at 07:59 PM   Category:    Permalink

Fri - November 7, 2008

Book: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman


Neil Gaiman
Neverwhere
Harper, 2001
ISBN-10: 0-06-055781-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-055781-2
370 pages
$13.95

Neil Gaiman is an excellent storyteller. So it's a bit of a pity that, as far as I can tell, he has only one story to tell. It's the Alice in Wonderland story (or, if you prefer, the Opheus and Eurydice story) about an everyman character caught at the junction between the mundane world and a magical one. (Which could be taken, kind of recursively, as a metaphor for reading if you were the sort of person who wanted to do that.) In the case of Neverwhere, our everyman is Richard Mayhew who is an investment analyst in London. He has a pretty nice life except for his dreadful fiancee.

Richard and his fiancee are on their way to an important dinner when he stops to help a bedraggled girl in distress. Richard and Jessica are already late, but Richard does it anyway, much to Jessica's displeasure. Richard takes the girl to his home to get her cleaned up and she turns out to be (wait for it) a refugee from a magical place called London Below. London Below is where people who fall through the cracks of the ordinary London end up, and its residents of are generally pretty invisible to the residents of London Above. Many of the people and locations in London Below are related to London Underground stations. There are literal black friars, a down street, an earl's court and so forth.

Richard is dragged into a quest involuntarily by his association with the girl, but (wait for it) comes to respect and even like some of the people he's thrown together with.

If there's nothing much surprising in Neverwhere except for the particulars, Mr Gaiman tells his story well enough that it's worth reading every time. This short book (370 pages but the type is big and set loosely) is very suitable for a few evenings' entertainment.

Posted at 06:30 PM   Category:    Permalink

Book Anathem by Neal Stephenson


Neal Stephenson
Anathem
HarperCollins, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-147409-5
937 pages
$29.95

I lacked the patience to get through even the first of Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" books, and so it was with some trepidation that I picked up Anathem, which weighs in at at 970 pages and about 3 pounds. Beyond that, on the world that the book is set, people use word that are similar to, but not quite the same as English ones. In the book, people of a scientific, philosophical, or mathematical bent often voluntarily enter sort of scholar-monasteries for extended periods (no gods are worshipped in them but much chalk is consumed). The scholars ("fraas" and "suurs") are called "avout" and the monasteries are "concents" where the avout abjure most technology (called "praxis"). Theists are "deolaters", insights are "upsights", the government "extramuros" is the "Sæcular power", and so on. Such jargon could easily become distracting or even annoying.

But I needn't have been concerned. There is imagination in this book to match its heft. Indeed, even rather more than that. And the jargon has a wonderful sort of logic to it.

Our main character is Fraa Erasmas, a relatively young member of the avout of the Concent of Saunt Edhar. (Scholars who accomplish great things are referred to as "saunts", from savant, naturally.) As the book begins, he's a member of a group that's just coming to the end of a ten-year cycle of seclusion from the outside world. During those ten years, he participated in a lot of Socratic dialogs. The members who are on that cycle will have a few days to interact with the (currently rather tawdry) Sæcular world outside before voluntarily returning to their lives in the concent. Things have been working that way for the past 3700 years, so the avout tend to take a long view of Sæcular history.

As you've probably guessed, the plot of a book with a main character and a setting like those does not proceed in a rush. But we learn lots of interesting things about this very thoroughly-imagined world. And, of course, something big does happen.

There are some huge laughs in the book and Mr Stephenson expertly evokes emotions of every sort. There's a fight scene that would impress Jackie Chan. Plato's forms get a thorough workout and there's an interesting theory of consciousness. The plot is fascinating and intricate. Indeed, all that is only a hint at the scope of the things that the book deals with. Only a big book could hold it all.

In the book's scope and the thoroughness with which Mr Stephenson has imagined its world, the book invites comparison with Dune. Really, it's that impressive. I wish it had been longer.

Posted at 05:40 PM   Category:    Permalink

Book: Niccolò Rising by Dorothy Dunnett


Dorothy Dunnett
Niccolò Rising
Vintage, 1999 (originally published in 1986)
ISBN: 0-394-5310708
470 pages
$15.95

Niccolò Rising is a historical novel by Dorothy Dunnett and it begins in 1460 in the Flemish city of Bruges. As it begins, it's about Claes, a dyer's apprentice and a clever prankster. He's on his way home from a brief excursion with his employer's son and another young man, and they've gotten a ride in a canal-boat. On their way, they get into a bit of a scrape, as young men sometimes will, but this one has some interesting consequences.

Though the book concentrates on the Charetty company (run by the Widow Charetty) which Claes works for, it's really about the early renaissance in Bruges and, to a lesser extent, among the often-warring duchies of northern Italy. Various historical figures play small roles. There's Giovanni Arnolfini, the silk merchant, and various minor Sforzas and Medicis. And the era was a fascinating one. If it wasn't exactly an era of globalization, then it was at least one of Europeanization. Merchants were becoming prosperous and even, occasionally, politically important. Burgesses improved their social standing by learning to joust.

The scene, as Ms Dunnett sets it, is at once familiar and unusual. It's familiar enough that the characters and their motivations seem natural, but it's unusual enough that I was always eager to see what would happen next. The book is the first in a series of eight. For that reason it doesn't have much of a plot, at least not in the sense of a place that this book needs to get to. It feels like it's doing something more like setting things up for the books that are to come. It does an interesting and entertaining job of that and I'm eager to read the others.

Posted at 05:30 PM   Category:    Permalink

Book: American Shaolin by Matthew Polly


Matthew Polly
American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China
Gotham, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-592-40337-0
366 pages
$15.00

In the genre of books in which a young American goes to Asia to find himself, American Shaolin is considerably better than average. That's partly because the author, Matthew Polly, is better than average at learning about and interacting with his host culture and it's also because the adventure he goes on is more interesting than average. Mr Polly interrupts his college education and leaves for China, against his parents' wishes, to study kung fu at the Shaolin temple. That temple has a very reasonable claim to being directly descended from the place where both kung fu and Zen Buddhism (Chan in Chinese) were invented. Mr Polly says that when he left to go there, he didn't even know where in China the temple was.

Two years practicing and competing in martial arts in a remote, mountainous corner of rural China would be pretty much bound to give someone enough interesting and funny stories to fill a book. Mr Polly has the stories and he tells them well. He is a good writer, but he's not a very experienced one. For example, he uses the device of starting the book with the beginning of something exciting: "It had been a calm night at the Shaolin Temple before the fight started" (p. 3). And then, before that's resolved, he goes back to set the situation up. The problem is that the setup begins with his motivation for going to China to study kung fu in the first place and the rest of that particular story begins on page 275.

Still, if Mr Polly's writing is not always especially elegant, there's nothing else I would call a mistake in the narrative and what he has to say is consistently interesting and entertaining. If you have any suspicion that you'd enjoy reading the book, you almost certainly will.


There's a tiny editing error in that there's "affect" where "effect" is wanted on page 268.

Posted at 05:09 PM   Category:    Permalink

Book: Sharpe's Escape by Bernard Cornwell


Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe's Escape: Richard Sharpe and the Bussaco Campaign, 1810
HarperCollins, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053047-2
357 pages
25.95

Patrick O'Brian's historical novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars are terrific fun. And George MacDonald Fraser's historical novels about Harry Flashman in the British army a bit later in the nineteenth century are hilarious and terrific fun. But, alas, we won't get any more of those novels since Mr O'Brian died in 2000 and Mr Fraser died earlier this year. To judge from Sharpe's Escape, Bernard Cornwell's novels about Richard Sharpe in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars aren't quite as much fun, but are still quite good.

This book is the 10th the series, which currently stands at 22 books. In the book, Sharpe is the captain of the Light Company of the South Essex regiment. As the book begins, Sharpe's regiment and various others under General Wellington's command are waiting for the French to attack up a steep hill at Bussaco in Portugal.

Messrs Fraser and O'Brian have set an exceedingly high standard for military historical fiction of about this era and it's not surprising that Richard Sharpe (a former London guttersnipe and brawler) isn't quite as memorable a character as Aubrey and Maturin or Harry Flashman. Still, he has his moments:

    "I doubt I called him illegitimate, sir," he said. "I wouldn't
    use that sort of word. I probably called him a bastard."
    (p. 136)

The story is interesting and well told and the battle scenes are stirring. In almost any other genre I'd recommend Sharpe's Escape quite highly. As it stands, if you've run out of Flashman books and have run out of or, perhaps, feel like taking a break from Aubrey-Maturin novels, you could do a lot worse than to read Sharpe's Escape.

Posted at 05:01 PM   Category:    Permalink

Book: Crusade in Europe by Dwight D. Eisenhower


Dwight D. Eisenhower
Crusade in Europe: A Personal Account of World War II
Doubleday, 1948
ISBN: None
478 pages
$22.50 currently

Crusade in Europe is a very readable, though rather sanitized, account of the American participation in the North African and European theaters of the second world war. There's little in it that will be new to someone who is even moderately informed about that war. It seems to have been written, in part, as a reply to various questions about the American conduct of the war, such as why it was begun in North Africa, why the German counterattack through the Ardennes mountains in late 1944 (the Battle of the Bulge) was allowed to happen, and how it is that the Soviets ended up with so much of Berlin.

The most surprising thing in the book to me is the degree to which General Eisenhower already knew many of the lessons that I had supposed were new to the American army in Iraq. For example, "Politics, economy, fighting -- all were inextricably mixed up and confused one with the other" (p. 129).

For a pretty short, readable history of the part of the second world war that General Eisenhower participated in, you could probably do a lot worse. The book is likely to make a reader want to know more than it tells, but perhaps that's what a good history book does.

Posted at 04:58 PM   Category:    Permalink

Book: Moment of Truth in Iraq


Michael Yon
Moment of Truth in Iraq
Richard Vigilante Books, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9800763-2-5
227 pages
$29.95

It's hard, for me at least, to know whom to believe about what's happened recently in Iraq. People and organizations that I might hope for objectivity from on such an important issue seem often to pursue a political agenda instead. Michael Yon has spent a lot of time there at considerable trouble and expense and, sometimes, in considerable danger. He has been embedded with American troops, seeing for himself what they do, and reporting it directly on his website. But his website is a bit hard to dip into because it's often necessary to have more than a little context to get the most out of an individual post. In his book Moment of Truth in Iraq, he has put together a very readable account that requires next to no further context to read profitably.

Still, why should someone believe Mr Yon rather than someone else?

Mr Yon could be a big liar. But I think that's extremely improbable because he writes so specifically about the places he goes to and the things he sees. If things had been significantly different from what he describes, it seems very likely to me that someone would have pointed that out. As far as I can tell, no one has.

Or perhaps the American military has shown him only the things that they want him to see. I think that's also extremely improbable because Mr Yon has been to so many places and seen so many things that I can't conceive how it could all have been stage-managed successfully.

Mr Yon was once a member of the American army's special forces. Since everyone has biases, it's reasonable to imagine that his are pro-military. But if that's the way his biases do run, I can't detect it in his writing. Mr Yon is uncompromisingly critical of some things that the American military has done in Iraq and cautiously optimistic about others. In this book, his emphasis is on the second, but that's because that's what the book is about.

So what does Mr Yon say? The overwhelming impression that I took away from this book is that the job of being an American soldier in Iraq is very difficult. That's because a captain, indeed, probably a sergeant there, needs to have all the skills that you'd expect a warrior to have and also have all the skills that you'd expect the mayor of a small city to have. And they need to be able to switch between those two roles at pretty much a moment's notice. Remarkably enough, they very often manage to do that. That is, the American army in Iraq is engaged in nation-building and, where they're doing that, in general it's succeeding.

According to Mr Yon, after the American-led coalition won the conventional war in Iraq, the American army virtually threw away the victory by alienating Iraq's citizens. That allowed al-Qaeda and other unsavory groups to move in and operate pretty freely. Those groups, however, made a similar mistake. Many of the insurgent groups, and al-Qaeda especially, alienated the Iraqi people even more. Just about the time that Iraqi citizens were deciding that, General Petraeus became the allied commander there and, using lessons from earlier successes he had when he was commanding the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, he set the American forces on a course of nation-building and good relations with Iraq's citizens. That strategy began to pay off very quickly, both in terms of safety and security and also in terms of public relations, which is inevitably a part of counter-insurgency warfare. Mr Yon's opinion is that if the American army continues on that course, a very important victory may yet be secured.

Since no one else seems to me to have nearly Mr Yon's credibility on the subject, I'm going to believe him. The book is a splendid antidote to the piles of tendentious and unsupported claims that have been written about what has been happening in Iraq.

Posted at 04:26 PM   Category:    Permalink

©