Jeff's Book Reviews

2011-12-01T17:22:00.001-08:00

Title:		Blood Meridian
Author:		Cormac McCarthy
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I cannot read this book. I read one and a half chapters and gave up.

A while back I read - and thoroughly disliked - The Road, another work by McCarthy. It was, however, the only thing by him I had read, and I thought I would give him another try.

Mistake. Big mistake.

This book is just about as unreadable as The Road. The prose is deliberately stilted, and convention - like quotes around dialog and apostrophes in contractions - is ignored.

In a nutshell, it's junk. I couldn't comfortably follow it, and was disinterested in it - and the characters involved - nearly immediately.

The only reason I am not giving it the worst possible rating is because I didn't finish it, and I cannot in good conscious do that to something I didn't fully read. That said, I did flip around after giving up, and no, it clearly gets no better. The complaints above apply from page one right through the end.

I won't be reading any more McCarthy. Not my thing.

2011-11-30T09:58:00.001-08:00

Title:		The Varieties of Scientific Experience
Author:		Carl Sagan
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

The Varieties of Scientific Experience is a printed version of Carl Sagan's Gifford Lectures, originally presented in 1985. In them he discusses his views on religion, science, the search for extra-terrestrial life, and philosophy.

These are engaging, and quite possibly very useful to someone without a deep training in atheism. Sagan's sense of wonder at the natural world comes through, as does his openness to many things, even as he indirectly points out the problems and contradictions with much of modern religion.

A good read, particularly for those wondering about their religious faith.

2011-11-12T13:50:00.001-08:00

Title:		The Entire Harry Potter Series
Author:		J. K. Rowling
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

The final Harry Potter movie has shipped on DVD and will be here soon, which means it was time to reread the entire series as part of my ongoing interest in how books are changed as they become movies.

As you might expect, the earlier books in this series suffer less change than the later ones, where Rowling had the ability to ship 800 page books without fear. Getting such monsters into a single movie - or even two - is tough.

Overall I think the screen writer did a pretty good job. In many cases entire sub plots are dropped out, and other things are re-ordered and/or simplified to make them work better on the screen. I found the number of times that lines or actions given to one character in the books are given to someone else in the movies amusing, but it makes sense since hard core fans will recognize those kinds of things.

There are a few places in the movies where things are simply not explained. They're pretty subtle, but there. A simple example: the kids take the Hogwarts Express train from London to the school. Clearly that trip takes a few hours, based on how it is described. But when they fly to London on thestrals, the movie glosses over the time required, whereas the books tell you that thestrals fly really fast, apparently much faster than the train. Other small stuff is like that. The movie doesn't explicitly say Draco repaired the vanishing cabinet, nor why it needed repair in the first place, but the books tell you that, and so on.

If I have a beef with these books, it's the King's Cross bit towards the end of Deathly Hallows. Harry desperately wanted to see is godfather again, but that didn't happen. There's some indication that he will meet him again - when he (Harry) dies - but clearly no way to talk to him now. Then, however, we have a long discussion with Dumbledore in Harry's imagined King's Cross station. Why? How? Rowling doesn't explain that well enough for me, nor why Harry didn't meet Sirius, Lupin, and Tonks there too. Others might not have minded, but it bugged me as I read it.

Still, these are fun books. They keep readers of any age interested and wondering what is going to happen. Rowling's world is deep enough and complex enough that it feels real, which is the sign of a good author in my mind.

I'll read these again at some point. Good stuff.

2011-11-12T13:22:00.001-08:00

Title:		Sleeping With The Devil
Author:		Robert Baer
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Sleeping With The Devil is Robert Baer's book about the US relationship with Saudi Arabia. While it is profoundly disturbing at times, there are places where I don't think he fully supports his arguments. In addition, events have surpassed his vision of reality.

Published in 2003, Baer worries about the affect of very high oil prices on the US economy that might result from instabilities and problems within Saudi Arabia. He worries about oil getting up to or over $100 per barrel, but that has already happened. See, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brent_Spot_monthly.svg

I am sure that the price of oil has deepened our economic problems, but it, singly, has not brought down the world's economy as Baer seemed to fear.

In any case, the issues Baer highlights about the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia - mostly in the form of our relationship with the Saudi royal family - are troubling. Any number of great arguments for energy independence can be made starting from concerns about oil, and I think there is a lot of truth there.

In short, an interesting book, but how much it reflects reality now I am not sure.

2011-09-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Title:		Illium and Olympos
Author:		Dan Simmons
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Argh... lots of time spent on these before giving up.

I read all of Illium, the first in a 2 volume set by Dan Simmons set in the far future. In it, for reasons that I still don't know, a group of gods and humans is acting out something like the story told in The Illiad but on a terraformed Mars, or something like that. A set of humans on Earth is struggling to figure out what they really are, and a set of moravecs - effectively cyborgs that are mostly machine, with wetware brains interfaced to their computers - based around the outer planets is worried about unusual physics in the Mars area, and so sends a small team to investigate.

Olympos is the continuation of the story, but I stopped reading just under halfway through that book because it is all just too disjoint and silly for me to keep going. Lots of things didn't make sense to me once Olympos got started, as if Simmons had a bunch of new things and ideas to add to the series at that point and just did so without worrying about how things interacted with the contents of Illium.

As a result, Simmons - famous for the Hyperion series - just couldn't make these work for me.

I was kind of OK with Illium, but none of the characters except the moravecs were all that interesting. The humans on earth are too dumb to live, the humans (or whatever they are) bringing The Illiad to life have no business being where they are and are thus unexplained in an irritating way, the Greek gods they interact with are too arbitrary and stupid for words, and the "scholic" Hockenberry is so far beyond unexplained that his presence and actions drove me crazy.

These books are long and definitely needed a serious editing. Illium clocks in at 725 pages in my paperback edition, while Olympos is 891 pages. I know there is an argument saying that sometimes authors need that sort of room for their story, and I fully understand that, just not in this case. Simmons needed to put these books on a serious diet.

If you really want to know, it was Setebos that drove me away. Simmons is playing with a bunch of different literary references, well above and beyond The Illiad. I was OK with that despite not having read most of them, but by the time we get descriptions of Setebos and what he/she/it is doing on at least one copy of Earth, I could no longer sustain the willing suspension of disbelief. I plowed on for a while longer, but then stopped. Whenever I had the time and desire to read but faced picking Olympos back up, I did something else instead. After a week of not reading I decided the problem was serious enough to give up.

For me, Illium and Olympos are failures. I suggest reading other things.

A Talent For War, Jack McDevitt

2011-08-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

Title:		A Talent For War
Author:		Jack McDevitt
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

A Talent For War is pretty good science fiction. It's set in the far future, after humanity has had first contact with aliens, and fought a war with them. The story revolves around someone trying to find out what really happened to a war hero who turned the tide of that battle.

I found the characters reasonably well developed, though not perfect, the descriptions of future technology were interesting and well done, and the story moved along at a good clip, mostly without bogging down. From me, given my recent reactions to science fiction, that's high praise.

If I have a complaint it is that some of the story winds up being a bit opaque, and I am still not entirely clear on what really happened in the history being described. Then again it is, after all, history, and that may well be deliberate.

There are two more books in the series, or so I am informed: Polaris and Seeker. I will probably look them up.

The Art Of Demotivation, E. L. Kersten, PH.D

2011-08-29T18:10:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Art of Demotivation
Author:		E. L. Kersten, PH.D
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

What to say about this book? It's a tough one to review.

I've seen bunches of business fads come and go in my time in the high tech industry. I have seen offshoots of the human empowerment movement, various ways of categorizing people by communication style, and a zillion pep rallies of various forms. They were all, in a word, crap.

I am a cynic, though, and I admit it.

When I learned of this book from the chief of Despair, Inc. - the makers of Demotivators (tm) and other amusements - it seemed like it might be a funny read. I wish that had been the case.

Kersten's tome comes across as all too serious. I think it's supposed to be humor, but if so it didn't work that well for me. His thesis - that management is better off creating a demotivating work environment in which employees will resign themselves to their fate, thus costing the company less in benefits (and related expenses), taking fewer chances, and even being so paranoid about keeping their jobs that they won't leave as often - sounds all too real to me in this day and age.

Personally I've been lucky in much of my work. I've had a few enlightened employers and some good managers, so I have seen how a good work environment can function. In my own time in management I've done my best to make things work like that for my employees too. But I have also seen some of the darker side of things, and I know many who have seen far worse. Kersten's suggestions could be marching orders in far too many cases.

While I suspect his tongue really is firmly in his cheek, that only came through effectively (for me) when he briefly discussed how senior management should be treated, and how they need to be kept apart from employees. A couple of those sections caused me to smirk, at least.

But nothing caused a belly laugh, and I can imagine someone who isn't in on the joke thinking this is a real blueprint for how to manage a company. It's that dry and straight in its presentation.

As a result I am not sure this book is successful. Maybe if you've read a bunch of books on management theory the jokes are more obvious, but I found myself cringing too many times at how close to reality his "recommendations" are in far too many cases. Ever since the MBAs starting running the zoo companies are less human and less caring. Squeezing every last dime out of an operation doesn't leave room for anything as simple as having fun in the office. The Art Of Demotivation could easily make that worse as far as I can tell.

2011-07-28T15:09:00.000-07:00

Title:		Atheist Universe
Author:		David Mills
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Atheist Universe is an excellent introduction to the atheist point of view. It covers a wide ranging set of topics from a straight forward, "this is why we think that" perspective. If you're an atheist but not used to defending your turf, this book will help you see how do so. If you're wondering how someone can get along without believing in God, this book will explain it.

It isn't a perfect volume, though. Really deep explanations - the actual underlying science - isn't here. That's not a problem, really, and it would make the book vastly larger to include even a small portion of it. Mills summarizes it when needed, and he mostly gets it right. The years since the last update and the fact that I am better read them him in a few areas give me a couple of minor quibbles with his statements, but they don't invalidate his arguments.

More problematic is his style, which is somewhat "in your face". Some would call it aggressive or pushy. Others might call it calling a spade a spade. Regardless, he isn't afraid to tell you what he thinks is right, and in this era of political correctness I enjoyed much of it.

There is one chapter - on Christian fundamentalists and internet porn - which seems out of place to me, but the rest is pretty solid stuff. If you want deeper arguments - covering the philosophy or science in depth - you need to look elsewhere, but if you want a summary of why an atheist might think the things s/he does, this is a fine place to start. Just be prepared to be challenged if you come from that perspective. Mills is confident that all religion is silly and says so. I happen to agree with him.

Willful Creatures, Aimee Bender

2011-06-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

Title:		Willful Creatures
Author:		Aimee Bender
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Willful Creatures is a collection of short stories by Aimee Bender. These came highly recommended and I was looking forward to reading this volume. Sadly, though, they didn't stick with me.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy reading them. I did, in a way, but life has been busy and now, just a few weeks later, I cannot remember any of them without flipping the book open to renew my memory.

What I do recall from reading the book is that the behavior and motivations of the characters seemed rather arbitrary. I know these are short stories so I don't expect the kind of character development I'd get in a novel, but then again I do expect to see something, some explanation for what they do or why they do it. That was lacking.

The situations were interesting - they must have been or I would have abandoned the book - but there was something lacking in the motivations that kept me from being sucked in as deeply as I might have otherwise.

I suspect that Bender has a consistent style. If you've read other works by her and liked them it is likely you will like this. Alternately if you didn't like her other works, then you probably won't appreciate this one much. If you're not sure, reading it won't cost you much time - it is a quick read, and most stories are very short - and you can make up your own mind. For me, I think I am done with Bender's short fiction. It's not bad, but there is lot that I would rather read.

Three Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser books, Fritz Leiber

2011-06-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

Title:		Three Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books
Author:		Fritz Leiber
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

These are the first three in the Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser series by Fritz Leiber:

Swords And Devilty
Swords Against Death
Swords In the Mist

These are fluff, pure and simple, though they are somewhat fun fluff. After reading all three of these books none of the characters except Fafhrd and the Mouser themselves are at all memorable, but that's OK. Each has a magical advisor/nemesis as well - one with seven eyes, I recall - but I can't tell you their names nor which goes with which main character.

I found the plots somewhat thin and the resolutions somewhat weak, but that really didn't bother me. I think reading these books is about the atmospherics. Many of the tropes of fantasy are present in them - a thieves guild, mysterious mages of unspeakable power, strange events, etc.

The most disappointing thing about these books is how much action takes place off stage. It seems that Leiber is always telling us that there were other adventures that the heroes have been on that set the stage for what they're seeing and doing now, but we never hear about those adventures except for the sentence telling us they happened.

These are not great literature, but they are kind of fun. I might read more - there are seven or eight, at least, in the series - or I might not. Time will tell.

Serenity: The Shepherd's Tale, Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon, Chris Samnee

2011-05-31T14:12:00.000-07:00

Title:		Serenity: The Shepherd's Tale
Authors:		Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon, Chris Samnee
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

The Shepherd's Tale is a short graphic novel given much of the back story behind Shepherd Book, one of the characters from Firefly and Serenity. I enjoyed it greatly, but I am a fan. In truth it's a quick read, but it seems important back story for the series. I wish it could have been fleshed out in the original medium, though, rather than in book form.

An interesting device is the telling of the shepherd's story in reverse, starting at the Haven Mining Colony and working back through his life, linking formative incidents and events in a chain.

Recommended for fans. Those who don't know Firefly and Serenity need not bother until they do know them.

Wired: The short life and fast times of John Belushi, Bob Woodward

2011-05-31T13:45:00.000-07:00

Title:		Wired: The short life and fast times of John Belushi
Author:		Bob Woodward
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I decided to read this book because I have made the comment on a few occasions that certain authors need a visit from the samurai editor. And of course, when you get there you have to think about John Belushi. He was an amazing performer and capable of so much.

Sadly Wired can only be described as a downer.

The writing is utilitarian, not pretty, but it's a journalist's account of Belushi's life, not a fan's, so that is to be expected. The problem is actually the subject matter.

Belushi's slide into drug addition and death makes for painful reading. He had a cocaine habit of vast proportions, and his fame meant he had more than enough money to sustain it. To make matters worse, though, almost the entire culture he was surrounded with treated it as perfectly normal. A couple of people seemed to have tried to provide some restraint, but nothing was effective and the train wreck that was his life continued without a hiccup. Woodward drops names all over the place, and almost none come away looking good. It makes for unpleasant reading.

If you want to know more about Belushi's short life you'll find it in Wired, but it isn't fun reading.

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

2011-03-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

Title:		Lady Oracle
Author:		Margaret Atwood
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I've been holding off on this review for a while, which is something I tend to do. A bit of distance from the book I am reviewing lets me see how well it holds up, and if it sticks with me or not.

Lady Oracle is an earlier work by Atwood, and one I have struggled to come to an opinion about.

On the plus side, Atwood's writing is generally quite good, and her characters are very alive. Her heroine has history in a way most people can't remember about themselves, and Atwood writes it lovingly.

On the minus side, though, all that history is just about all there is. She spends most of the book on back story, and then suddenly the pace picks up to tell about what is happening in the present. It comes across feeling disjoint as a result of those pacing issues. To me it was like the heroine now and the heroine in the past were two entirely different people.

Finally, the biggest issue for me is that almost nothing happens. Yes, the heroine does fake her own death – don't worry, that's on the back cover, and not a spoiler – but that's about the only actual event that takes place. The rest is all interior monologue and a few conversations.

To be clear, it's not that I only like books in which things are blown up, but I sadly conclude that Lady Oracle goes too far into the realm where nothing ever happens for my taste. Lovers of Atwood or less action based stories might appreciate this one.

The Wave In The Mind, Ursula K. Le Guin

2011-03-09T17:45:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Wave In The Mind
Author:		Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

The Wave In The Mind is a book of essays by Le Guin covering a variety of topics. In reviewing it I know I am going to get into trouble, but so be it.

On the plus side, Le Guin ends with a series of essays about writing. These I found interesting and informative. And some of the other works were interesting in various ways, but not all of them. The problem is that her outlook and my own just don't agree on a couple of things.

I consider myself a feminist of sorts. I hate discrimination in any form, and treating women badly - in any way - stinks. But I draw the line when feminism starts creeping into science, and I'm afraid Le Guin has consumed some of that cool-aid. I find it distressing.

Deep science - like physics - can be objective, and the gender of the people doing the research shouldn't matter in the least to the results of the work. (Who can get funded and published is a different kettle of fish, I know, but physics experiments don't care if it's Adam or Amanda trying to figure things out.) I understand it gets fuzzier in the softer sciences, but it isn't clear that Le Guin makes the distinction. That crawled up my nose a bit while reading some of these pieces.

Nothing in here was life changing, and much of it won't impact anyone's career as a writer, but there are some interesting items. It might be worth checking out from the local library if you're curious.

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

2011-03-09T17:19:00.000-08:00

Title:		Mother Night
Author:		Kurt Vonnegut
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Meh. Once again Vonnegut fails to appeal.

Mother Night is the supposed tale of an American who worked for Germany during WWII, but had a double life of sorts as a spy. He was an English language broadcaster who was passing information out to the allies as part of his show. But what he did and said on his show was really awful. Supposedly this is supposed to make the reader think.

I found the presentation boring, and the lack of humor - supposedly one of Vonnegut's strengths - a real problem. That said, it wasn't bad, really, but it barely held my attention and didn't stick with me.

A blurb on the back cover says Mother Night is "in the Catch-22 vein." Had I known that in advance I wouldn't have wasted my time. I really didn't like Catch-22. Oh well.

Other than Cat's Cradle, though, it appears I am just not cut out for reading Vonnegut. I have one more on my TBR shelf. Maybe I'll get to it one of these days.

The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

2011-02-25T14:03:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Sparrow
Author:		Mary Doria Russell
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

If I have my facts right, The Sparrow is Mary Doria Russell's first work of fiction. She was an academic before turning to writing for a living. It won several awards, and I can see why.

It's a story of mankind's first contact with intelligent life from another world. In this case we encounter radio broadcasts from a planet in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, and an entirely private expedition is mounted and sent there by the Jesuit order before any other body can get things rolling.

Only one of the crew - Father Emilio Sandoz - survives and returns to earth, and the controversy around his return is challenging, to say the least. The book tells the story of the expedition to Rakhat, alternating between the present - after Sandoz's return - and the past - following the expedition directly.

On the plus side, Russell's writing is quite good, and her characters are, by and large, extremely vivid. Though this is a science fiction story, what it features is people and how they deal with events well beyond their control or understanding. We feel for Sandoz in his struggle to come to terms with what happened to him on Rakhat, and for those in his order trying to find out what those events really were.

The alien planet and culture are well described and believable, at least for me. Rakhat is different enough that understanding it isn't trivial, and yet similar enough that there is the basis for some understanding at all. This isn't Star Trek; everyone doesn't speak English.

In general the story is well told, well plotted, and well written, but I have two issues that hold me back from giving this book a really great review.

First, Russell disposes of some of her characters to abruptly, even some we have followed for a long time. Yes, real people do just die, sometimes unexpectedly, but I found that a bit frustration here. I had come to care about these characters over many pages, and found the parting more than abrupt in some cases.

Secondly there are some issues of logic and practicality that Russell ignores. The expedition makes no effort (that we are told about, in any case) to avoid contaminating Rakhat with organisms (of any size) originating on earth, nor do they adequately protect themselves from anything potentially hazardous to humans upon arrival. As a pragmatic manner, even a completely privately funded expedition of this nature would need to take a lot more precautions than are documented here. In truth, such precautions would probably have made the story impossible to tell, though. Contact and linguistic understanding would have taken years, not weeks, and much of the story would not even be possible. In that light I understand the lack of caution, but I lost the willing suspension of disbelief in a few places as a result.

I wish I could bring complex characters like Emilio Sandoz to life on the page the way Russell does. It gives me something to aspire to, I suppose.

Recommended.

See No Evil, Robert Baer

2011-02-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

Title:		See No Evil
Author:		Robert Baer
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

See No Evil is the true story of author Robert Baer's time in the CIA, with a particular emphasis on the middle east. It was published after 9/11 but it appears to have been written before then, which makes much of what it has to say even more relevant. I found it a very good read and profoundly disturbing on two different levels.

First, and mostly to Baer's point, is the disintegration of the CIA that he describes. Though the CIA started out as an entity responsible for obtaining information about foreign governments, it should have been our best defense against the attacks of 9/11. Instead, by the time those attacks happened it had little ability to get hard information from actual people. The typically American love of technology, bureaucracy, and general ass covering had taken over. We had lovely satellite pictures, but no one on the ground who could actually tell us what was going on.

Baer's complaints aren't unique. After 9/11 we heard about the CIA's lack of agents and information over and over again, from many sources. Baer manages to give that disintegration a personal spin, though. He loved his job but hated what his employer had become, which is something many of us can probably relate to, even if we do it in much less serious circumstances.

On the other hand, Baer's description of the actual job - running agents and the risks entailed - makes me wonder why anyone would do it at all. The things Baer can actually describe in detail - the book was censored by the CIA, as required by Baer's employment agreement, and the black bars of redacted passages are left intact - are enough to make me rethink the entire business. How much risk is too much? Where do we draw the line on what is and isn't allowed? Who can make those decisions when time is extremely limited and the people involved are under enormous pressure?

There are no easy answers here, as in much of life. Baer doesn't sugar coat his disdain for the CIA's unwillingness to take risks as his career progresses, but at times I really wondered where the right answers were.

I recommend this book, and suggest we all think about these things. Since 9/11 we all know the US's intelligence infrastructure has grown and changed, but what has it really become? There's no good way to know, short of becoming part of it in some way. I wish we didn't need it at all, but that isn't the real world.

The Meaning Of It All, Richard P. Feynman

2011-02-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Meaning Of It All
Author:		Richard P. Feynman
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

The Meaning Of It All is a transcription of three lectures the famous physicist gave back in 1963, as part of the John Danz Lecture Series at the University of Washington. This book was published in 1998, ten years after Feynman died of cancer.

I am of mixed minds about this book. I have to cut it some slack because it appears to be a transcription of the lectures, lacking only the "uhms" and pauses of speech, but including the digressions and spontaneous things that happen when speaking only from notes or off the top of one's head. As a result, some of what is here is hard to follow or mixed up. I cannot fault anyone for that, and I am sure the lectures themselves were just fine because they included his gestures, pauses, and so on that added the nuances lost in the transcription. Setting aside the limitations of the format, though, there are pluses and minuses to what is here.

Feynman was brilliant, of that there is no doubt. He was also something of a polymath, with a wide array of interests and the willingness to explore many topics that other scientists of his day ignored. I admire him for those qualities.

Further, he's eminently rational in most instances discussed here. For example, in the third lecture he dismisses a slew of pseudo-sciences (astrology, quack medicine, and so on) and just plain dishonest behavior that still plague us today. All to the good. But there are times where he gets things wrong, or defines things in unusual ways.

Getting something wrong - as he does when he equates mind reading with telekinesis - I can mostly ignore. Maybe it was just something that came up spontaneously in the lecture. (Note that he effectively dismisses both items, apparently only confusing the names.) More problematic for me is when he says that religion and science don't conflict. To come to that conclusion, though, he defines religion in a particular way, and effectively excludes a lot of Christianity in the process, such that his effective claim is more like science has no conflict with some smaller subset of Christianity. In our highly polarized age, where the non-religious feel like their world is shrinking every day, and where the religious feel the same way for entirely different reasons, his statements didn't ring true.

In summary, I'm sure these lectures show something about Feynman himself and his approach to the world, but I found them a bit disorganized and not as profound as I'd hoped. Maybe I am not giving him enough credit, though. I'm quite certain that he was a lot smarter than me, and the times are very different now.

Superfreakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

2011-02-01T10:58:00.000-08:00

Title:		Superfreakonomics
Authors:		Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Superfreakonomics is the follow-on to the original Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. Oddly, this one feels at once both less and more significant, but retains the style of the original.

Why less significant? Hard to say, actually. Some of the subject matter - much of which concerns prostitution - just felt less important and interesting to me. Yes, of course, it is a business and economics applies, but I didn't get any new insights as a result of this information.

On the other hand, some of the material - particularly that discussing global warming - felt more important than anything I recall in the first volume. The discussions about how one might approach fixing global warming were interesting and enlightening.

I consider myself something of a realist on the global warming front. It seems pretty clear to me that the planet is warming up, and that humanity is at least somewhat responsible, but the important thing is what we do about it, not the placing of blame or even the fingering of specific causes. And as usual with the media there is a lot of hype and cruft on both sides of the argument, making it difficult to separate truth and falsehood.

It seems likely that we'll have to do something about it in the end and it is interesting to read the proposed mitigations here. The authors appear to think getting to carbon free energy sources is a good idea as soon as we can make it happen - for any number of reasons - but that getting there will probably take longer than we want to wait for those energy sources, or for the carbon we've already emitted to be reduced back to normal levels. I tend to agree on all counts.

In one way this book is much better than the first. I didn't come away feeling that the authors were out to promote themselves, which they did a bit of the first time around.

In a nutshell this is a good but lightweight book. If it, like its predecessor, causes people to think about new things in economic terms, that's a good thing.

The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum

2011-01-29T17:43:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Bourne Identity
Author:		Robert Ludlum
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Published in 1980, The Bourne Identity tells part of the story of Jason Bourne, a man who, well... this gets a bit complicated.

First of all, the book and the movie of the same name, while related, tell very different stories. I have a fascination with the conversions of novels into movies, and it was only after I watched the movie (9 years after it was released) that I bothered to track down and read the book, mostly to see how it had been converted into a movie.

Both the movie and the book center around an individual suffering severe amnesia who gradually discovers his past. Some of the other characters share names between the book and the movie, but the story arcs are very different.

In the book we learn that Jason Bourne is part of a plot to remove a master assassin named Carlos. He has to figure that out of course, thanks to the amnesia. As in the movie there is a woman, Marie, who helps him, though in the book she's an expert in international finance instead of a student.

Oddly - and rarely, in my experience - the movie may actually be better than the book, though it's a close thing. In the book I didn't buy the relationship between Bourne and Marie. She fell for him too easily given their "introduction" and nothing in his character made me think he loved her, even though those words were used. Early chapters bogs down in needless detail about certain financial transactions. Later chapters moved along better, but the details of some of Bourne's history got hazy, so things weren't perfect there either. And, frankly, Carlos seemed too good - and too powerful - to be true.

That being said, Bourne himself has a less nasty past in the book than he does in the movie. He feels a bit cleaner here, and possibly a bit more likable. The movie, while being more up to date in many ways, gives Bourne an uglier background, one where his motivations and origin are a lot more gray than white. It then promptly sugar coats it, though, leaving the audience happy and probably not thinking about it too much.

I guess the book is worth reading. Ludlum did get some things right, but it's not perfect.

Hiding The Elephant, Jim Steinmeyer

2011-01-29T17:04:00.000-08:00

Title:		Hiding The Elephant
Author:		Jim Steinmeyer
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Hiding the Elephant discusses the golden age of magic, an era starting in the mid 1800's and ending somewhere around 1920. Magic shows were a major form of entertainment, the egos of the performers were huge, and they fought with or spied on each other with ferocity. And yet there was something gentlemanly about the occupation that clings to it even today.

Steinmeyer gives us a cast of about twelve characters plus supporting parts that collectively show what was going on during the times. He focuses loosely on optical illusions, particularly their history and development, but he tells the story of these magicians as well.

You will learn some of the secrets here - how a particular levitation was performed, for example - but giving away those secrets isn't the author's intent. The people are what matter. And yes, in the end we do learn how Houdini made an elephant disappear, but much more interesting is Houdini himself, and all the others.

If you like stage magic there is a lot to recommend this book. Steinmeyer knows the history in depth and shares it well. If there is a problem it's that at times he tries to share too much, and sometimes the path of the story gets a little lost.

Still, this is an excellent introduction to the time, the magicians, and the techniques they used. Recommended.

Every Living Thing, James Herriot

2011-01-23T17:54:00.000-08:00

Title:		Every Living Thing
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

The final book in the series whose titles are based on the famous poem, this is more vintage Herriot. Nearly all positive, warm stories that have animals at the center.

Some consider these books way too sweet, but I enjoy them. It's good to know that someone else out there cared like this.

Recommended!

Against All Things Ending, Stephen R. Donaldson

2011-01-17T09:47:00.000-08:00

Title:		Against All Things Ending
Author:		Stephen R. Donaldson
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This may be among Donaldson's best, though I see on Amazon that the reviews are mixed. This is book three of four in The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and does what it needs to quite well.

The Last Chronicles tell a very large tale, wrapping together the entire history of the Land - and the universe it exists in - to, it appears, bring the story of Covenant, Linden, and Lord Foul to a conclusion. The first two volumes in the series set the stage, introduced the characters, and - Donaldson being who he is - put those characters under tremendous stress.

Finally we start to see some things being resolved in Against All Things Ending, though not nearly everything. And the final resolution of the story is still unclear given what has been written so far.

Donaldson's writing is meticulous, as always, and he is prone to using words most of us haven't encountered. As a result, this book - and, indeed, the entire series - is not for fans of typical, lightweight, modern fantasy. His descriptions are painstakingly vivid, he's hard on his characters, and on the reader. Some people just won't like it.

But I do, and I can heartily recommend this book, though an argument could be made for waiting until the last volume is published so you can read them all in one fell swoop, without year long gaps in the story.

The Rise Of Endymion, Dan Simmons

2011-01-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Rise Of Endymion
Author:		Dan Simmons
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Well, I'm done with the Hyperion series now, and I'm glad.

The Rise Of Endymion wraps up the Hyperion books for good, or so I hope. It's not that it's a bad book, but it could have been so much better.

Slow to the point of plodding at times, we're told about character development rather than seeing it, and quite a few things are very predictable.

I've called this book "OK" purely because if you've gotten through the first three in the series you'll probably want to read this one to learn the bits of the ending that you don't already know. That said, it's not all that well written.

A major problem that inhabits all four volumes is that Simmons lets his imagination run way ahead of what he's already written. He created a particular universe in Hyperion, changed a couple of the fundamentals in The Fall Of Hyperion, changed a lot of the fundamentals in Endymion, and a few more in The Rise Of Endymion. Effectively he's rewriting the rules of the game - his laws of physics and rules of behavior - on the fly. Changing even one rule like that in the middle of a series is difficult to do well. Your readers tend to lose their willing suspension of disbelief when you pull that stunt. Simmons does it so many times you just start to give up. There are no touchstones you can return to here.

In summary, I think the original Hyperion is a pretty good book, but it has no ending, and the three that follow it get progressively less well written. It's a shame, really. Hyperion has such promise.

On Extended Absences

2011-01-04T12:50:00.000-08:00

There's an old Lauri Anderson song with the line "Days go by" repeated in it. Lately, for me, it's been more like "Months go by." Two jobs that become something different from what was originally intended, a death in the family some time back, and a major remodeling project have just eaten me alive. Reading - usually my escape and salvation - wasn't even an option. I was exhausted, busy, and grumpy for a long, long time.

Things may be changing now, though the exact nature of the changes remains to be seen, as always. I've just posted five book reviews and am now caught up, which at least gives me the feeling of progress, even if no one ever reads them.

One thing the last few months have taught me is never to make promises you aren't absolutely certain you can keep. So, all I will say here is that right now it appears I will be posting a bit more regularly. I hope that is the case and that it remains true for a prolonged period.

Your comments and thoughts are always welcome. Please feel free to leave them here or email me directly if you'd rather.

Oh, and if you're looking for a place to post your own book reviews, I have one for you: Uncle Doug's Book Review Forum. I run it, and would love to have additional participants. Please join us there - in the 31 in 11 forum - if you can.

All the best to you and yours in 2011 and beyond.

--jeffp

Endymion, Dan Simmons

2011-01-04T12:30:00.000-08:00

Title:		Endymion
Author:		Dan Simmons
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Endymion is the first book in the second part of the Hyperion series. In it Dan Simmons takes up the story of Hyperion, some of the characters from the first series, and (of course) the Shrike some 200+ years after the first series.

Religion takes an even thicker role here than it did in Hyperion and The Fall Of Hyperion, and much of the story is a travelogue, with little in the way of explanation for why the characters are traveling where they are. In fact, they all just kind of accept apparently random travel for no good reason, which got on my nerves.

In truth, though, several things seem off here. First of all, Simmons takes some major departures from things he setup in the first Hyperion novels. Flinging aside major characters - like the new pope - with reckless abandon, and recasting events in new and entirely unexpected ways. Going so far, in fact, as to basically tell us that much of what we learned in the first two books was wrong, misleading, or outright lies told by characters there.

When combined with the oppressive presence of Catholicism and the seemingly pointless travels of the characters, it got a bit old, and I even considered putting it aside. In the end, though, a couple of minor characters - the Shrike and Nemes - kept me from doing so. Well, that and the fact that I was traveling and needed something to read where I was at the time.

Sadly, Simmons's main hero - Raul Endymion - is both boring and a bit dimwitted. I'd rather he'd focused more on Aenea or A. Bettik.

And yet again we have a cover featuring a two armed Shrike. Where was the editor during the process of getting these books out? Nonexistent, apparently.

I have some reservations - some of which may or may not be resolved by the final book in the series, The Rise Of Endymion, which I am reading now - but fans of Hyperion will probably want to read it.

The Fall Of Hyperion, Dan Simmons

2011-01-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Fall Of Hyperion
Author:		Dan Simmons
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

The Fall Of Hyperion completes the story started in Hyperion. In the first book the main characters - well, most of them anyway - got to the time tombs on Hyperion and big events are just starting to happen. You might expect the next volume in the series to pick up right there, but no. Simmons instead introduces us to an entirely new character and starts giving us his back story, gradually weaving it into with the original tale.

We eventually get the story of the last Shrike pilgrimage worked out, sort of. There are a lot of unanswered questions, though, and some less than entirely satisfactory story telling. It's not that I require everything to be wrapped up with a pretty, pink bow, but something seems to be missing.

I noted more instances where an editor would have helped, as in Hyperion itself, and the damn cover image still features a two armed Shrike, not the four armed one actually described in the novel. *sigh*

In all I am not quite sure what to make of this. It's good, but not great, interesting, but less than fulfilling. I wish Simmons had done more with it, but I can still recommend it.

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

2011-01-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

Title:		Hyperion
Author:		Dan Simmons
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I first read Hyperion quite a few years ago. So long ago, in fact, that with my rust memory it was almost like reading it for the first time again. As I recall, I really enjoyed it the first time around. I remember thinking it was a great book. Really great. Sometimes it stinks getting older. This time I can call Hyperion a good book, but not a great one.

Simmons clearly has a lot to tell, and even having read it before I was still surprised that it's only half the story, completed in The Fall Of Hyperion. I found the characters interesting and the Shrike compelling, but I seem to be growing tired of the "journey as story" phenomenon. Why is it so hard to find interesting stories that don't include the main characters traveling vast distances? Here we watch the main characters travel by space ship, tramway, wind wagon, and on foot. I didn't object that much as I was reading it, but it did sometimes seem that moving the characters around was more important than the rest of the story. That got a bit old, particularly in hind sight.

If I have any real gripes, though, they are actually less serious. There were a couple of places where Simmons desperately needed an editor. A few sections of repetitive text and a mention of a checking account (yes, really), for example, bugged me. There were also some possible printing errors in my copy, but they might instead have been writing errors an editor would have found and removed. Editing seems to be a lost art these days.

Finally though, the biggest irritant for me is the cover art. The Shrike has four (4!) arms dammit! Why on earth (or Hyperion) do we have four volumes in this series and only the fourth finally gets that little detail right on the cover? What sort of nitwit artists did these covers without reading enough about what they were painting to get it right. Gah! (Yes, this is trivial, I know, but it's amazing how it bugs me now as I sit here with the books writing reviews.)

Anyway, if you can get past these few oddities and irritants, Hyperion is a good tale. Be prepared to read Fall Of Hyperion too, though, or you'll never know how things end.

Paul Of Dune, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

2011-01-04T09:31:00.000-08:00

Title:		Paul Of Dune
Author:		Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I love the original Dune books by Frank Herbert. Well, I love some of them and appreciate the others for what they are, even if they aren't up the quality of Dune or God Emperor Of Dune, which are the best two in the series. Sadly, however, Herbert died with the series incomplete, and left a lot of questions unanswered.

His son, Brian Herbert, picked up the tale with co-writer Kevin J. Anderson, but rather than continue where Herbert left off, they have so far set their stories before or between the original novels in the series.

I'd read another one of their works some time back - Dune, House Atreides, I think - and found it flat. Recently, though, I was given a copy of Paul Of Dune and decided to try it, to see if the earlier work was just a poor example or actually reflected the reality of what Herbert and Anderson are writing. Sadly, it turns out to be the latter.

The Dune universe provides a rich tapestry to work with: compelling characters, fascinating settings, unique technology, incredibly complicated politics, and (of course) the spice. Herbert and Anderson, though, simply cannot find anything interesting to write about here. In fact, they barely find anything to write about at all.

The story has no focus, and we go from chapter to chapter wondering why any of it matters. It appears the time Paul Atreides spends consolidating power after assuming the role of emperor is pretty dull. If this wasn't fiction it might even be true that nothing of interest happened during this period, but Herbert and Anderson could and should have done better. Alternately, if they are following notes left by Frank himself, they should have skipped this part of Dune's history and written about something else. Something that matters.

Vacuum Diagrams, Stephen Baxter

2011-01-04T08:45:00.000-08:00

Title:		Vacuum Diagrams
Author:		Steven Baxter
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Thanks to a lot of conflicts and two crazy jobs in the past year I am behind on my book reviews. That makes writing them a bit tougher as I have to root around in my entirely inadequate memory for what I thought of these things months ago when I finished them. I'll do my best...

Vacuum Diagrams is a collection of science fiction short stories that collect and intertwine the author's larger works in a (relatively) cohesive whole. Baxter actually pulls this off better than many - Asimov and Heinlein come to mind as examples of those who should never have tried such a thing - probably because he actually did have a relatively cohesive world view as he wrote his various works.

Nevertheless, while I found these stories acceptable, they really didn't stick with me. There's something about huge, sweeping tales - these cover the entire history of our universe, and introduce a second, if that makes any sense out of context - that makes me want more than just short stories to get them to stick.

If you've read other things by Baxter and enjoyed them then this may be your thing. You can see the overall view of the universe(s) he imagines here. For me, though, these were simply OK stories without enough glue to make them work overall.

The Big U, Neal Stephenson

2010-10-20T22:44:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Big U
Author:		Neal Stephenson
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Another one for Jeremy, but this time only because of the college setting, not because of anything specific. In fact he's expecting only one book from me, not two. (That surprise will be spoiled now if he reads this... I doubt it, but with Jeremy you never know.)

Anyway... The Big U is a farcical view of college. The setting is a major urban university. The entire place is contained in one vast building - the plex - in which myriad crazy things happen. Jeremy will not recognize the place personally as his school is nothing like the one described here at a physical level. But the people, well, I hope he will have some laughs.

Stephenson's writing is light, even when things take a serious twist. His vision of human affairs in the vast place he describes is both funny and poignant. Things just happen here, usually with no repercussions. Pianos are thrown onto distant roofs, people are factionalized in crazy ways, drugs and booze run rampant, and actions rarely have any basis in reality.

Jeremy, I hope your college days are a lot better than this. Have fun, but stay sane my friend. And be sure to avoid the Crotobaltislavonians!

Doorways In The Sand, Roger Zelazny

2010-10-20T22:29:00.000-07:00

Title:		Doorways In The Sand
Author:		Roger Zelazny
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

As some of you may know, I teach stone carving. Something close to five years ago we had a high school student join the class. This was a new experience for me - the class is generally directed at adults - but Jeremy was a great addition. I learned a lot from him, and he added quite a bit to the classroom experience.

This year saw him graduate and go off to college. Over the years we've watched him get ready for this and now seen him leave. I always told Jeremy he should milk his college days as much as he can. If he needed 3 PhD degrees and a 20 year post doc, for example, he should do that, and all on his parent's dime. He says that won't happen, but in the spirit of the idea I am sending him a copy of Doorways In The Sand.

In it, the hero has managed to stay in college for something like 14 years without graduating. He gets close at times, but always changes majors or otherwise manages to escape. The reason is that his uncle's estate pays for his college education until he graduates, but doesn't contain a time limit. As you can imagine, Jeremy needs to read this. The USPS will deliver a copy to him shortly.

As books by Zelazy go, Doorways In The Sand is good, but not one of the greats. It's fluffier than something like Lord of Light, and lacks the grand sweep of the Amber Chronicles. Still, it's fun and well written. Definitely worth your time if you're into lighter SF.

The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone

2010-10-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Agony and the Ecstasy
Author:		Irving Stone
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

It's been months since I had the time for any reading. In fact, I was nearly finished with The Agony and the Ecstasy when the job started, and though I finished it shortly thereafter it has been a long time since I've posted here, so this review is long overdue.

All I can do now is recommend this book highly, particularly if you're a student of the arts or an artist.

Stone's research is good, and though I cannot tell you where he veered into fiction, I can tell you that I enjoyed this work a lot.

Michaelangelo is one of my favorites, and an inspiration to me as a sculptor. I learned a lot about him and his time from this book, and highly recommend it.

5 Months... Ouch!

2010-10-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

Can it really have been 5 months since my last post? It can.

For the moment all I can do is apologize. In fact I'm not sure the hiatus is over yet, but I'll do my best.

MIA for a while

2010-05-18T14:10:00.001-07:00

House projects have taken over my life and I have little time to read. (Even less to concentrate on reading.) I'll be back with a review of The Agony and the Ecstasy ASAP, but it may be a while before I finish it. Sorry.!

The Happiness Hypothesis, Johnathan Haidt

2010-04-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Happiness Hypothesis
Author:		Johnathan Haidt
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This is a tough book to review. Early on Haidt had me hooked. I felt like he was heading in the right direction and that things were making sense. Then it got derailed. I suspect that was my fault, though. I choked on what I view as his overly generous and accepting position towards religion.

The first half or more of the book seems to be well supported in terms of research. If there's a problem there it's in Haidt's use of excerpts from various ancient sources - mostly religious - without a lot of context and background. That, for me, is something of a no-no, as quotations need to come with context if they are to be taken seriously. The Bible is a violent book when viewed as a whole, and extracting a few peace loving lines out of it doesn't change that, nor does it put those lines in the proper context.

But I got past that because it looked like Haidt was saying something like "Ancient source X says this semi-mystical thing Y. Modern research shows that Y is correct in the following way." (Sometimes Y was incorrect, by the way.) Given that presentation I let things slide.

Then, however, I got to the latter portion of the book and things just started to grate on my nerves. Haidt winds up making the claim that we are ultra social, somewhat hive minded organisms. Like bees in some ways. Now, I recognize that there are some interesting evolutionary drives, and maybe, in some ways, a few aspects of human behavior are similar to those of bees or ants, but we aren't all the way to a hive organism as I see it, and while I'm sure he wouldn't say we were either, he thinks the bits that are similar are a lot more important than I do, or than he justifies as far as I could tell.

And as he gets closer to these more speculative leaps the number of end notes and referenced studies goes down, just as the number of anecdotal reports goes up. (Note: I could be wrong about this. I'm documenting my response to this book, not writing a detailed study in which I count end notes, cited papers, and so on. Still, I think my conclusions are probably sound.)

In addition, Haidt - despite claiming to be an atheist himself - glosses over a bunch of problems with religion. Maybe they just aren't relevant to his conclusions, but I found the act bothersome.

I give him credit for trying to synthesize something of this scope, and there are useful bits in here. For example, he makes a good case that the question "What is the meaning of life?" is pointless. "How can I live a life full of meaning?" is a much better question, and he gives some help in here if you're stuck on that issue. Not a lot of detailed help, mind you - meditate, make use of cognitive therapy, or take Prozac is the gist - but enough to maybe get you talking to someone who can move you along one of those paths. If you decide you need to.

Overall I guess this book was OK. Not stellar, not life changing, at least for me, but OK. Maybe that's because I am (I think) a relatively well balanced person who is pretty happy most of the time. If you are perpetually unhappy you might find something more useful or meaningful here than I did.

A Perfect Spy, John Le Carre

2010-03-26T17:13:00.000-07:00

Title:		A Perfect Spy
Author:		John Le Carre
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This one came off my shelf to make some room, as it's a moderately hefty hard back tome. My previous time with Le Carre has been OK, and I guess that's what I'd have to say about this one.

A Perfect Spy is essentially an exercise in back story and character development. In large measure, nothing really happens in here, and I found that a bit off putting. It wasn't terrible, but I did spend a bit of time wondering if anything - other than the rather predictable ending - would happen.

In previous books I've reviewed by Le Carre I've seen an odd problem: at times he randomly changes the point of view. It can be a bit bizarre to suddenly realize that we've gone from omniscient narrator to the limited point of view of some body guard. Thankfully I didn't note that in A Perfect Spy. Instead I had different problem.

The main character, Magnus Pym, has a somewhat split personality. In his role as narrator he regularly refers to himself as if he was someone else. This gets confusing and it took me nearly 100 pages to catch on. I kept wondering if there was some other character present that I'd somehow missed. Finally, though, I got it. I may be more than a bit dense - others might have recognized what was going on a lot faster - but it really slowed me down until I figured it out.

Other than that, I didn't really note anything all that good or bad. As I say, the ending was fairly predictable, but once you meet Pym and get the gist of where he is in life the ending is just about a given.

If you're into cold war spy stories you might enjoy this. If that isn't your bag, then you can probably give this one a pass.

Ringworld, Larry Niven

2010-03-10T17:27:00.000-08:00

Title:		Ringworld
Author:		Larry Niven
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Ringworld is probably Larry Niven's most famous work, having won both the Hugo and Nebula awards back in 1970 when it was first published. My previous experience with Niven's work, though, has left me cold. He's a hard science fiction writer and his characters have been very flat, to say the least. I hoped that Ringworld would be different.

It isn't.

It appears as though Niven had the idea for the ringworld and forced some characters and story together to give him a reason to write about the toy he'd invented. For me the result simply didn't work.

The toy itself - the ringworld - is an interesting idea, but other than some math about dimensions and spinning it to create gravity, everything else about it is pure, unadulterated fantasy. There are all kinds of impossible things going on here in the guise of "science": impossibly strong and thin wire, materials impervious to just about anything, multiple forms of FTL travel, unexplained failsafe systems, life extending substances, stasis fields, transmutation of one material into another, alien species, etc. One or even a few of these things would be fine in a science fiction work, particularly with some background and explanation, but Niven piles them up thick and just keeps going.

In short, he made up anything needed to let him talk about the idea of the ringworld itself. Everything other than the ring - characters, physics, story - was essentially superfluous. If he was a better writer I might have suspended disbelief, but that never happened. Not once.

Even worse, there were several places where the writing is so bad - or the copy I have is so poorly transcribed from the original - that after rereading a few paragraphs several times I had to give up and move on. Some things just didn't make sense at all.

In other places, despite the fact that the words and sentences held together, Niven didn't adequately describe the situation or action. After a while you just wind up accepting that he's not going to explain things well enough to make sense and forget about it. Not a good sign.

For amusement you can look it up on Wikipedia and read about other technical problems. There are quite a few.

I don't know why this book won any awards. It's not very good. My perception of Niven as a writer remains unchanged and I will avoid his work in the future. Too bad.

Bear v. Shark, Chris Bachelder

2010-03-10T16:33:00.000-08:00

Title:		Bear v. Shark
Author:		Chris Bachelder
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I have no idea now where the recommendation for this book came from, but I am afraid I am going to disappoint someone.

I had the same reaction to this that I have to some modern art, like a canvas painted all one color. I thought "I could write this. I could write a lot better than this guy did."

Nearly the entire book consists of very short (1-2 page) chapters describing the story of the Norman family as they travel to watch the second bear/shark battle. This is a parody of America, though, so while most of what we see is familiar, it's all deliberately exaggerated to the point of silliness.

In an attempt to heighten the effect, most dialog isn't quoted, characters talk past each other, and all kinds of events aren't really explained. Then end result is a ball of semi-related things that sort of make up a story, but a story without any reasonable ending. In fact, it's rather like the author couldn't come up with one, so he decided to leave it open and let the reader imagine his own.

In any case, I didn't find it funny, though others apparently do. It does contain a lot of social commentary, but only of the most blunt kind.

This is the author's first novel. I have no desire to read anything else by him, and I can't imagine why a publisher would spend money on this book. Not recommended.

The Black Hole War, Leonard Susskind

2010-03-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Black Hole War
Author:		Leonard Susskind
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Some time back I read two books on string theory by Brian Greene. Both were interesting, well written, and managed to explain complicated physics in a manner that made them somewhat easier to understand.

It turns out that a lot has changed in physics since those books were written, or that those books don't cover a bunch of things going on in the field. The Black Hole War describes many thing Greene doesn't, but does so in passing, as it tells the story of a significant disagreement over the fate of information that gets sucked into black holes.

The resolution of that argument took a long time. Susskind describes a meeting in 1981 where Stephen Hawking made the claim that any information entering a black hole is lost forever. Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft were bothered by this - it violated a fundamental principle - and began trying to prove it incorrect. It took until 2007 before Hawking admitted he was wrong.

In those 26 years physics saw huge changes. String theory, among other things, made a big impact. But many other discoveries were made as well, and a lot of physicists were involved. Susskind describes all kinds of interesting physics in this book, and credits many other physicists with important discoveries that helped make his case.

Overall The Black Hole War is a good read, and it explores some fascinating ground, but there is a problem. Maybe it's that Susskind has too many things to cover to make his case, so he cannot cover individual topics in enough depth to make them clear. I suspect, though, that Susskind isn't quite as good at explaining these non-intuitive concepts as Greene is.

For example, a few hours after finishing the book I couldn't explain the holographic principle to my wife, and it's a key element of the proof Susskind is making.

Perhaps the failure is mine, or the material is so strange that it doesn't make sense to humans given the way we've evolved, but I think it could be described more clearly, even without resorting to the incredibly complicated math that backs it up. At least I hope so.

In any case it is clear that there is a lot of current physics that I don't understand, and didn't know was being researched before I read this book.

Recommended, but I hope that Warped Passages by Lisa Randall - when I get to it - provides a clearer explanation of at least some of the underlying physics.

James Herriot's Animal Stories, James Herriot

2010-02-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

Title:		James Herriot's Animal Stories
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

A very short collection of stories extracted from other books by Herriot, with some nice illustrations and a brief introduction by Herriot's son.

These are probably among the heartwarming best from the entire series. Nice - particularly with the illustrations - but there's nothing really new here if you've read the other books.

The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

2010-02-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Robber Bride
Author:		Margaret Atwood
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I didn't get this book. Of 466 pages it seemed as if 460 were back story, and there was little action of any kind. Instead we get a pseudo-drama, expressed in the thoughts and discussions of three women: Tony, Charis, and Roz. What little story we get revolves around a fourth woman, Zenia.

The three main characters are actually too well drawn. We don't need to know every little detail about their lives to understand why they might be reacting this way, but we get that detail in any case. And more. And still more.

Tony's a history professor with a specialization in battles. She's a fairly ineffective and self effacing person as well. Her real name is Antonia.

Charis is another ineffective character, but this time with no real talents she can earn a living from. She does, however, have a spiritual side that "works". Her real name is Karen.

Roz is a business woman - someone with power and money - but who is also hopeless in her own way. In this case it's her marriage she cannot manage. Her real name is Rosalind.

None of these characters has it all together. In fact, though they could each potentially be interesting in some sense, collectively I found them pretty annoying. They whine and worry but rarely do anything, and when they try they fail. Every time. Then they whine about failing. Roz's twin daughters are a lot more interesting than anyone else here, and they're only bit parts.

There might be something important about the fact that Tony, Roz, and Charis all operate under something other than their real names too, but if so I can't tell you what that might be.

Zenia is something else. She's a liar and a thief, and ruthless about getting whatever it is she wants - including the man each of the three main characters loves - but that's about all we learn of her. She's the central mystery around which the book is written and we never figure her out. Never.

The story is told mostly in flashbacks - sometimes nested - and it can be a bit hard to keep track of if you set the book down at the wrong point. Unfortunately I found it easy to set it down just about anywhere given the vast back story. Complicating matters, at least for me, is that I didn't really relate to any of the characters. They were either boring or irritating, but never become important or interesting.

The only reason I continued reading The Robber Bride is because I've read other work by Atwood and really enjoyed it. This one, however, just didn't work, at least not for me. It needed both something significant to happen and a resolution.

Oh, and I didn't like Charis's spiritual muck. Or rather, the fact that it "worked" in some way seemed wrong. If she'd believed in it but nothing had come of it, fine. Instead we get a couple of mystical but completely unexplained incidents that make no sense. Then again I'm less spiritual than most bricks, and such tripe is liable to irk me in any case.

Perhaps Atwood is making some feminist point, but if so I missed it, along with just about everything else.

If you want to read something good by Atwood, try The Handmaid's Tale, or Oryx and Crake. I'd skip this one.

On Writing, Stephen King

2010-02-13T16:28:00.000-08:00

Title:		On Writing
Author:		Stephen King
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I have never been a Stephen King fan. As part of some class in high school I had to read a short story about a possessed dry cleaning machine (or at least that's what I think it was) and that put me off him forever. It wasn't the writing - I probably couldn't have identified good or bad writing at the time - it was the subject matter. I was not interested in horror then, and still don't care for it now. In fact it generally irritates me.

In hindsight, that judgment - made when I was about 15 - might be too harsh. Maybe that story was simply a poor example of his work, or I woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day. Whatever the case, I am forced to reevaluate King now.

Those who know me well know I have a desire to be a writer. I suffer from some of the usual writer's problems, though, and haven't done enough writing to make me happy as a result. (That said, this blog is an excuse to write, so I am at least making strides in the right direction.)

Recently I decided to chase this dream a bit more aggressively, and this book came up as a recommendation. I'd never heard of it - I'd ignored King for roughly 25 years - but sometimes a search engine can point you in a surprising direction.

In On Writing King gives us several things:

The experiences in life that made him the writer he is.
Some tools (his metaphor) you need to write: vocabulary, grammar, etc.
How to write. The actual day-to-day process of writing and editing, discussed clearly so you know what you're in for.
An example manuscript before he edited the first draft and what the marked up pages looked like.
Permission to read and write 4 to 6 (or more) hours a day.

All of this is useful information, at least to me. The craft of serious writing is one of those things whose attraction may not survive my actual attempt to pull it off, but King gives me information, permission, and hope.

Anyone looking to write should consider reading On Writing. And I will reconsider King's work. Anyone want to give me some recommendations for things that aren't horror?

The Essential Spinoza, edited by Michael L. Morgan

2010-02-13T16:22:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Essential Spinoza
Editor:		Michael L. Morgan
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I did not and will not finish this book. Sorry.

Baruch Spinoza - an important philosopher - lived between 1632 and 1677. This book is a translation of at least some of his major works.

I've read or heard tidbits about Spinoza over the years and thought he sounded interesting. I should have read the Wikipedia page on him rather than tackle this muck head on, however.

I have come to the belated conclusion that reading philosophy is just not for me. In too many cases I catch the authors playing word games. In the worst example I know of - in Being and Time - Martin Heidegger used a word to mean one thing when it was capitalized and something else when it wasn't. I went nuts trying to figure out what he was babbling about.

Much more common is simply creating a new definition for a word, one that has nothing to do with normal usage. Spinoza (or his editor) plays that game here, and I find it idiotic.

Worse, though, is an apparently rigorous approach to things, reminiscent of mathematics. At the beginning of each major section of the book Spinoza sets out a few definitions, followed by a few axioms - things he takes to be true without need for proof or argument. From this basis he puts forward a series of propositions, each followed by a "proof". Sadly I have to use the scare quotes. I found most of what I read to be lacking in rigor, and much of it to be unintelligible.

At odd intervals Spinoza makes use of additional concepts and terms - undefined - as if they were intrinsically obvious too. New axioms on the fly. How handy.

The resulting hodgepodge isn't interesting or illuminating, at least not to me. I found it frustrating and garbled. In just 50 pages I lost all desire to learn more, began skimming, and gave up.

Elsewhere I read that Spinoza concluded that God exists as a sort of impersonal thing, a part of nature, but perhaps not all of it - see the Wikipedia entry on him for a bit more. Clearly such a God is nothing like the one his Jewish community envisioned. Nor did his views sit well with any organized, European religion at the time. He was excommunicated - in a writ if cherem - by the Jewish community, and at least some of his work was published only after he died.

There was promise here, but I simply couldn't get past the writing. If there's something important or relevant in this I will never know it directly, and probably not at all. I wish that wasn't the case.

Steering The Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin

2010-02-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

Title:		Steering The Craft
Author:		Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I've read a few books on writing over the years. Some were just too silly (write words and draw arrows between them) or were focused on things I honestly don't care about (writing as therapy, or finding my inner whatever).

The things that interest me are:

How do I make my writing better?
What are the ways that various writers find that let the be effective at it?

Steering the Craft falls squarely and wonderfully into the first camp.

Le Guin presents a series of exercises along with supporting text and descriptions that drive home specific points about writing well. In addition, she discusses some of her own opinions about a few things in the writing field. It turns out she's simply a practical writer with both a great feel for language and an excellent ability to distil that knowledge into usable tools and techniques.

This isn't a long book, but it is quite clear to me that if you follow though on it by doing the exercises and evaluating the results honestly - possibly with a group of like minded people - you have a good shot at becoming a better writer.

I've begun that process, and I look forward to following it all the way through.

I expect Steering the Craft will be an excellent resource.

Taking a Break from Dune

2010-02-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

My original plan was to stop after Dune and not continue with the series. Now, coming up for air after the first four volumes of the series, I find I need to force myself to take a break. There are two other books I am reading that haven't seen enough attention, and I don't own all of the most recent Dune books in any case.

What this means is that my reviews will slow down here for a while. The two I am working on now are very different and require more effort on my part. I'm still here, just working harder and longer between reviews.

Back in a bit!

God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert

2010-02-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

Title:		God Emperor of Dune
Author:		Frank Herbert
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

God Emperor of Dune is the fourth book in the Dune series, and my second favorite of the bunch. Only Dune itself is better.

In God Emperor we find ourselves following Leto Atreides's life something over 3000 years after Children of Dune. Yes, he lives that long and it's not horribly contrived that he does so. In fact it was setup during Children of Dune and Herbert is simply following the plan he laid out there. But ruling a multi-galactic empire for over 3000 years is not a simple thing, and Leto's got reasons for everything he does. Those reasons are impressive. I like what Herbert says about humanity here. Leto makes the ultimate sacrifice to save us from ourselves.

In addition to Leto we have a few other major characters: Moneo, Leto's majordomo; Siona, Moneo's daughter; and Duncan Idaho, the most recent in a long line of gholas with their memories restored from the first Duncan, who died in Dune.

I have to give Herbert credit. He can write with a huge scale in mind and pull it off. Sometimes I feel that Leto's words are a bit thick, but on reflection they're actually right for a character of his age and experience, and if I was a deeper reader I might not feel that way.

Another important point is that God Emperor isn't classic science fiction in the usual sense. Oh, it's a classic, but it's not a space opera full of ray guns and space battles. It's mostly conversation and description, as much of the drama is in relationships, so the interactions among characters are key.

If you liked the first three Dune books you'll probably like this one too. I know I do.

Children Of Dune, Frank Herbert

2010-01-29T11:01:00.000-08:00

Title:		Children Of Dune
Author:		Frank Herbert
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Children of Dune was the first "end" of the Dune series. At this point there are a lot more books in that series, but this is where the original work stopped.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It's better written than Dune Messiah, and has more content. In it, Paul Atreides' son Leto takes up his destiny. Preborn - having access to all the memories of his ancestors from conception - he finds himself following in his father's footsteps. And going well beyond them.

Some of what Herbert proposes about human nature in Children of Dune is quite interesting. Leto's "solution" is quite unique as well.

While it's still not quite the grabber that Dune itself is, this is a good book, and recommended.

Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert

2010-01-25T09:29:00.000-08:00

Title:		Dune Messiah
Author:		Frank Herbert
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Dune Messiah is volume two in Frank Herbert's Dune series, and I am of mixed mind about it on this reread.

On the good side, there's more here than I remembered from previous readings. Yes, it's still a short novel - just 256 pages - but it has more plot than I gave it credit for in my memory. Herbert's voice is still here, and the world is still rich and interesting.

I like the way Paul continues to struggle with escaping his vision of the future, and it feels believable, though there is less descriptive language about his actual visions this time. I also like Hayt's role and what he becomes. Those who've read farther into the series know he's going to be around for a very long time.

There are a few things on the not so good side, though.

Most importantly it seems possible that Herbert became enamored of some things that weren't mentioned or present in Dune itself. The planet Tleilax, for example, gets a brief mention in Dune as the source of twisted mentats and another when Barron Harkonnen says he needs to order a new mentat. That's it. In Dune Messiah, however, things are very different. We encounter the name "Bene Tleilaxu" with no explanation, and they have a long history. Several of their creations - Gholas and Face Dancers among them - play major roles in the story. Why did we have no hint of this in Dune itself? Is it possible that Herbert was asked (told?) to "write more Dune!" and turned out Dune Messiah too quickly as a result? I honestly don't know, but I find the way the Bene Tleilaxu are played up a bit bothersome. They are powerful enough they should have had a bigger role before.

As additional evidence for the possible "hurry up and publish it" idea, I give you the book itself. My copy of Dune is nicely typeset, Dune Messiah, on the other hand, was clearly rushed to press. As with Dune, each chapter starts with a quote, but no one bothered to start each quote on a new page. As a result some of these introductory quotes cross pages, which looks very odd and supports my theory that the entire enterprise of writing and publishing it was rushed.

There are some plot issues as well. When Paul took the water of life, whether or not he was presented with all of his ancestors (male, female, or both) is never made clear. We know that Jessica and Alia have an inner dialog with their ancestors, and I know we learn in the next book that the same is true for Ghanima and Leto, but we never find out if that's true for Paul. Why not? Again, I doubt Herbert was given the time he needed to get the book written.

And the link between Paul and Leto at the end is never explained. That may be a bit picky on my part, but I don't know what allows it to happen. An explanation would have helped me.

In all, Dune Messiah was better than I remembered, but still not nearly as good as Dune itself.

Best of 2009

2010-01-22T10:15:00.000-08:00

I saw someone's list of their top reads for 2009 and it caused me to think I probably ought to make a similar list myself. 2009 had a lot of things going on for me, which meant less reading, but I did find three real gems over the year. These are extracted from my reading index and presented in no particular order.

Woken Furies, Richard K. Morgan
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenbegger
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

There are some interesting similarities and differences to those titles, and I suspect they say a lot about me and my preferences.

If you find them interesting, I hope you'll post a comment here!

Need a reading challenge in 2010?

2010-01-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

If you need a reading goal in 2010, you might consider joining us in Uncle Doug's Book Review Forum, or you might try the Chunkster Challenge.

If neither of those appeals, node about on the web. You'll find many others, I'm certain.

Whatever you do, keep on reading!

Dune, Frank Herbert

2010-01-21T16:11:00.000-08:00

Title:		Dune
Author:		Frank Herbert
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

There are very few books that grab me the way Dune does. It's an amazing work of science fiction, and among the best books I've ever read, possibly the best.

I read Dune the first time at roughly 15 years of age, the age of Paul Atreides as the book begins. Whatever was going on in my life then, it let this book sink into me in a way few others have, and despite 30 years and innumerable re-readings, it continues to satisfy.

At one level, Dune is a science fiction story. It has a hero and a complex set of characters set against a backdrop that is foreign but understandable. At another level, Herbert went way beyond what anyone had done before. Written in 1965, Dune is an ecological novel, telling the story of an entire planet and the people that live upon it. I understand that Herbert did something like ten years of research before writing Dune, and it shows. This is a work well ahead of its time.

A quick synopsis: Paul Atreides is the son of Duke Leto Atreides. Duke Leto has been instructed by the Emperor to take possession of Arrakis, a desert planet and the only place where the spice, melange, is found. Melange has several properties, but most importantly it extends life, and it is a drug allowing altered mental states in some. For Space Guild navigators, it allows them to see far enough into the future to permit faster than light travel. For the Bene Gesserit, it permits and inward transformation so their members can access past memories.

Duke Leto, however, is opposed by Baron Harkonnen and others. Leto is killed leaving Paul and his mother to find shelter with the native inhabitants of Arrakis, the Fremen. There Paul comes into adulthood in a hostile environment and sets about taking back that which his father lost, and then some.

With Dune, Herbert hit a peak that I am not at all sure he ever reached again. Subsequent books in the series - Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, and others were OK, but don't measure up in my estimation. Dune is a singular achievement, and stands alone.

A brief story about the first time I read Dune: It turns out that my mother was reading it while I was in school. I came home and read in the afternoons and evenings when time allowed (often) and one night found me nearing the end of the book. Dune is large - my paperback is 537 pages - but I literally let out a cry of anguish when I learned the book ended some 50 pages shy of the cover. There were appendixes of various sorts after that point, but no more story. In the kitchen, though, I heard my mother's knowing chuckle. She'd finished the book a day or two before and knew what happened.

Rereading an old favorite

2010-01-15T13:33:00.000-08:00

This is what happens when you still have the first copy of a book you love after almost 30 years and many re-readings:

The cover comes off and gets taped back on, the spine is mangled, and there are pages that may fall out at any time. A book gets like this for being loved, and Dune is one of my all time favorites. Very few things have ever come close. Written a year after I was born, it's held up really well over the years, and it's time to read it again.

I need to be careful, though. I have a tendency to gulp it down in one or two sittings, failing to savor the concepts and prose in favor of diving headlong into the plot.

I'm giving myself this treat - rereading Dune after several years - because the other things I am reading at the same time are going to be tough sledding. I'll have to ration it out carefully, and work at limiting my time with it. If I don't it will be done in a few hours and nothing else will have advanced at all.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World, Francis Wheen

2010-01-12T11:43:00.000-08:00

Title:		How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World
Author:		Francis Wheen
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I am of decidedly mixed mind about this book. Part of me absolutely loved it and wanted to stand up and cheer many times while reading it. Another part of me, though, found it meandering and somewhat unfocused. Looking at Amazon's reviews, I see they are mixed two, with an average of about 3.5 / 5 stars. I'm not all that surprised.

The subtitle of How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World is "A Short History of Modern Delusions". I'm not exactly sure how I encountered this one, but it was an interesting if frustrating read. I'll divide my review into the good and the bad, as my mixed feelings above make plane.

On the positive side, Wheen tackles a bunch of sacred cows, and he doesn't particularly lean towards the left or the right. In reality, both sides are full of idiocy, and it was amusing to watch them skewered in this way. Starting with Thatcherism and Reagan, he heads into politics with no compunctions. He has direct (and I think mostly correct) things to say about both Bush presidencies (and presidents), Clinton, and various candidates from both sides, along with leaders and politicians from many other countries as well.

He similarly goes after business. He's particularly hard on everyone who thinks (or thought) that the Internet and the so called "new economy" are actually any different from the old economy and environment. He has some enlightening quotes from Keynes and others showing how people thought very similarly about the world a long, long time before computers were even invented. Some of his examples - of company founders, lauded as new visionaries who then fell flat on their faces and of companies (like Enron and Global Crossing) that were corrupt, stupid, or both - are great reading.

Some time is also spent at the end on the left's apologetics around religion and 9/11 in particular. That was interesting reading for me, and the chapter titles ("Voodoo", early on about Thatcherism and Reaganomics, and "Voodoo Revisited" about the left's irrational reactions to 9/11) were well chosen.

From my perspective, though, his best attacks are against religion. He spares no barbs here either, and I think the hypocrisy exposed is a good thing. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade, and Wheen does so. Here, for example, is a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity... Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.

You can find Jefferson's full text here, if you're curious: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions40.html

And some people think the US was founded as a Christian nation. Clearly not.

All of that said, there are some problems with Mumbo-Jumbo that irritate.

First, Wheen seems to have a strong belief that Keynes got it all right and every economist since has gotten it wrong. I appreciate the sentiment in some ways, and I long ago lost my faith in the completely unregulated market. All humans are actually irrational consumers at some level, and we often won't make the "economically optimal" choice even if someone threatens us with a gun should we screw up. But it doesn't follow that since Friedman was in error Keynes is the end of the story, and I'm not sure that Wheen is open to that.

More of a problem - at least for me - was the meandering narrative. There are many great quotes in here, and a lot of interesting facts and stories, but somehow they don't add up to something more. It might be compared to a museum exhibition of paintings selected from all cultures and periods of history, but where they are all jumbled together, so that no indication of the path through history is obvious. Even if all the works were definitively the greatest ever made, the viewer could walk away without learning much about art over time. In a similar way Wheen's point gets lost in the shuffle.

On a smaller scale, some of Wheen's chapters wander off topic as well. So a chapter titled "The Catastrophists" starts out discussing wacko predictions of the end of the world but also discusses things like government support for complementary and alternative medicine. Huh? An editor would have tightened up the focus of each chapter - possibly adding more chapters in the process, where the focus can legitimately change radically - and the result could have been both more directed and cohesive.

The biggest issue, though, is that there are no prescriptions here, and no real hope either. The last chapter attempts to call for a return to Enlightenment principles, but is so wound up in arguing against the far left's view of 9/11 that the message is lost. Even more sadly, Wheen's readers won't include those who need to hear his message. The first chapter - on Thatcher and Reagan - will even drive off quite a few moderates based on its tone alone.

So what can I say in summary? I learned quite a few things from How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, but I am not convinced it's the right vehicle for the author's message. It's both fun and annoying at the same time.

The Word For World Is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin

2010-01-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Word For World Is Forest
Author:		Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

It's hard for me to believe this short volume won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1973. It seems to be well received, with good reviews on various book review sites. As usual, though, I went the other way. I found it predictable, lacking any credible hero or heroine, and the villain is so simplistic he might as well be a cardboard cutout.

The story is part of Le Guin's Hainish cycle, which includes The Dispossessed. Here we see the introduction of the ansible (a faster than light communications device) during a tale of human exploitation of another world and another culture.

It's all stuff you've read before, no doubt. Peace loving natives are enslaved by the rapacious humans coming to take the world's raw materials. There is a vile military man (the source of many of the problems and the above mentioned cardboard cutout), a human who fights for the natives, and a native who befriends that one friendly human. Everyone else is essentially unimportant.

You can probably envision the central conflict of the story at this point.

Usually I like Le Guin but this is both too simplistic and simple minded.

Those who follow Le Guin will feel the need to read The Word For World Is Forest, but I don't think there's much here.

Just Call Me Mike, Mike Farrell

2010-01-04T17:22:00.000-08:00

Title:		Just Call Me Mike
Author:		Mike Farrell
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Just Call Me Mike is the autobiography of Mike Farrell, actor, star of M*A*S*H, and citizen activist. Farrell gives us enough back story to set the stage, and then proceeds to tell us what he's done between his birth in 1939 and 2007 when the book was published. In truth, it's an interesting story for its scrupulous honesty. Farrell often feels he's not in control of his own life, and we see get a sense of that (and recognize the same thing in ourselves) as we read.

M*A*S*H is covered very quickly, just a single chapter and a mention or two in other places. Clearly he loved working on the show and admired all involved, but his family and activism mean a lot more to him than M*A*S*H. I found that refreshing.

Farrell has been a champion of many causes, including exposing (and opposing) our government's role in various countries in South America, opposing the death penalty, supporting labor unions, and others. He's a man of principles, and he doesn't come across as a member of the left or the right. Others might try to pin him to a particular political agenda, but I don't think that's what drives him. Instead what matters to him is doing the right thing, setting an example.

I cannot quite claim to agree with every stance he takes - though in fact I agree with most of them - but I admire his honesty and willingness to say what he thinks is right. In my opinion, America would be a lot better place if more of us were like him. You get the sense that for him confrontation isn't the goal, reasoned conversation is. In this age of talking (screaming!) heads and sound bites, Farrell's openness is a breath of fresh air.

There isn't anything huge and earth shattering in these pages, but they're definitely worth reading. For someone with only a high school education, Farrell's made a difference, and we can all learn from his example. Recommended.

The Prestige, Christopher Priest

2010-01-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Prestige
Author:		Christopher Priest
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Netflix is an interesting thing. You view a movie or two and its recommendation engine gets going. The next thing you know you've got fifteen movies in a row all starring Raquel Welch, or some such.

In my case, it all started with Batman Begins, which lead to a string of movies staring Christian Bale. Among the things I wound up watching eventually was The Prestige, a movie about a pair of feuding magicians in the late 1800s. The movie is pretty dark, and there are some very interesting twists in it as well. David Bowie as Nikola Tesla was a great surprise.

At some point I learned that the movie was based on the book of the same name by Christopher Priest. I wanted to read the book because the movie is pretty convoluted. I thought I might learn a thing or I'd missed in the movie. Also - as those who've read my reviews know - I am always curious about the adaptation process. Going from book to movie isn't always straightforward.

And so it turns out in this case. The Prestige isn't quite as distant from its book ancestor as Blade Runner is from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but it's pretty far from the original. And, in all honesty, I'm still trying to decide which one I like more.

The book has additional characters - set in the present - who are looking into their ancestors. Beyond that, though, the book is mostly in the form of long extracts from the diaries of the two main characters: Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden. Nikola Tesla does appear in the book, and performs essentially the same task, but other characters, though present, are different in various ways.

The book is even darker than the movie, and more of a fantasy as well. At times it borders on horror. The cause of the bad blood between the magicians is entirely different, and various details about the apparatus created by Tesla are different as well. The diary extracts are very different in the two versions of the story, and to my mind the movie did a slightly better job there.

If I have a gripe with the book, it's that the diary extracts get a bit long at times, leaving the reader a bit unsure of where things are in time. That, however, is a minor issue. The story definitely still works, and the book won both the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best fiction in 1996.

This is one of those cases where the book and the movie are so different that they don't impinge on each other, at least for me. Which one you like more is entirely up to you, of course. I find them both interesting and thought provoking, thus, both are recommended.

Holiday Break

2009-12-23T08:59:00.001-08:00

I hope you're all enjoying your holidays. I'm traveling, and thus not doing much on the computer for a while.

There will be reviews again soon, though.

In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy holiday season.

Cheers!

Brainwash, Dominic Streatfeild

2009-12-12T20:24:00.000-08:00

Title:		Brainwash
Author:		Dominic Streatfeild
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Two people before me have reviewed Brainwash in Doug's old forums, and they are both excellent reviews. In fact, it was those reviews that lead me to put this book on my list. Now that I've read it, though, I'm not certain it was worth the time and effort.

The book opens by recounting some disturbing events relating to the behavior of several people in Hungary, Korea, and the Soviet Union in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's. It appeared those countries had developed the ability to modify someone's behavior - and possibly their actual thoughts and beliefs - in very significant ways. It was a scary time, and the reaction of our government - and others - was to go looking for how this could be done and if it could benefit us.

From there we're lead into several stories, some of which are truly horrific, about research (both military and non) into various forms of mind manipulation and control.

Brainwash is non-fiction, and thus useful to someone as an overview of the topics involved. However, I found that some of the contents - like chapters on the Moonies, satanism, and recovered memories - fairly far afield from those things that government organizations are doing. Yes, some of the underlying techniques are the same, but for me the presentation didn't hold together that well as the topics varied so widely.

Another frustration - one that may not be the author's fault - is that we never get complete resolution on the alarming cases presented early on. We get some information late in the book, but some of the victims have died and (of course) the Soviet Union is no more. Still, even an explicit summary of what we do and do not know about those cases would have been nice.

Finally I found the style of the book too informal for the topic matter. It bothered me enough that it slightly reduced my level of trust. This is a very serious issue and deserves a more thoughtful (and well documented) presentation than it was given here. Not that this is a tome full of jokes, but it doesn't exactly read like a scholarly work either. That may be part of the reason it is popular, though.

In the end, an important message is presented: there really is no such thing as brainwashing. It's a handy word for something that cannot be done. It is entirely possible to make people talk in various ways, but to change their thoughts radically without destroying them in the process simply cannot be done. In a way that's reassuring.

Sons Of Palodar, Anne Powell (review extension)

2009-12-08T12:34:00.000-08:00

Title:		Sons Of Palodar
Author:		Anne Powell
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I've now managed to sit down with Anne and go over my comments and thoughts on her book in detail. This sort of review can be tricky - it is always best to avoid offending one's spouse - but it's also an opportunity for her to hear things from someone she knows will speak honestly. Thus, it's a balancing act where presentation means a lot.

Since that conversation I know I am allowed to say soemthing about the plot of the book itself, without giving things away, of course.

Anne's story takes place in the Romnean empire, which spans thousands of star systems in the galaxy. The person in charge - she who must be obeyed, if you will - is named Katera, a wizardress (or witch, depending on how formal you want to be) of great power.

Space ships of all kinds fly between the systems of the empire, bringing trade and residents to new locations. Of course everything that can go with that environment does so: smuggling and piracy, for example.

There are quite a few races present, including humans, but in addition Katera created three races of beings called the Gladius some 700 years before the story takes place. Katera's whim is a command, and the Gladius are required to fight each other in ritualized combat in arenas throughout the empire for the entertainment of the citizenry.

Sons of Palodar is a love story set in this world. We follow Able Greenleaf, a human pilot for a young Gladius warrior as he meets Mary, a somewhat mysterious woman he falls in love with. There are complications, of course, that cannot be detailed here, and though we're not reading about a major event in the history of the empire, we still feel the presence of that history as the story unfolds. We also feel for the characters in a real way. Able and Mary - and a number of other characters - are well developed and believable. It's a pleasure watching them dance around each other and the complications of their lives.

It's risky to write reviews where one's point of view might obviously be biased - in this case by my relationship with the author - but I honestly hope she releases this novel in some format. Yes, there still are a few things that need to be cleaned up first, but for an early draft it felt very clean, and I gulped it down, having to go back for a second time to pick up on a few issues that need fixing.

If this work ever becomes available I'll let it be known here. And if anyone wants to read an early copy, either contact Anne directly if you know how, or contact me and I'll put you in touch. Suffice it to say I think it would be worth your time.

Sons Of Palodar, Anne Powell

2009-12-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

Title:		Sons of Palodar
Author:		Anne Powell
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This is an interesting review to write.

My wife is an unpublished author. She's written two novels so far and has plans for two more. She writes science fantasy - something that straddles the divide between science fiction and fantasy.

Her first novel, Katera's Ghost, is an interesting read. It introduces a number of characters and the universe they inhabit. I liked it quite a bit, but it suffers from one major flaw in my mind. One of the major characters winds up doing something she shouldn't. It's not in character (in my mind, anyway) and it distracts. Beyond that, though, I quite liked it.

Her new novel - the one this review is actually about - is titled Sons of Palodar, and I am happy to report that it doesn't have any major flaws.

I've read it twice now, with the intent of providing comment and feedback. As with any early draft of a work this size there are some nits to work out, but overall this book is quite good. The characters are quite believable, and the plot moves forward well.

As the novel is unpublished I don't want to give away anything detailed about the plot or characters at this time. In truth I hope she tries to find a publisher for this one, though. With another short round of polishing I think it will be ready for that effort. Failing that I would consider some sort of self publishing option at this point, even if it's only in PDF format for ebook readers. I think it would do well.

And if Anne approves at some point I'll write up something that describes some of the content of the book itself.

Oh, and for those who haven't figured it out yet, Anne is a huge inspiration to me. I hope to follow in her footsteps one of these days.

Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

2009-11-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

Title:		Watchmen
Authors:		Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Watchmen is a graphic novel originally published as twelve comic books in 1986 and 1987. It is also the source material for the 2009 movie of the same name.

This is a dark and disturbing story set in the recent past of a world very similar to our own. Costumed crime fighters - superheroes of one sort or another - exist and were mostly forced out of the business by law some time before the story opens. Those who work for the government or ignore the law continue what they were doing while the others retired and aged. As we join the story someone starts killing them off, and the plot grows from there.

Every character in here has a difficult back story of one sort or another, and their psychological challenges are on stage just as much as the plot itself. That's somewhat to be expected. After all, just how likely is a normal person to put on a costume and personally fight crime? No, it takes someone special - or disturbed - to do that.

I found the story engaging, but the methods used by the villain - particularly at the very end - seemed a bit over the top, even for this world. The characters were pretty good, but some suffered from a lack of believability. I bought into Rorshach, and the Comedian, found both Dr. Manhattan and Veidt too far fetched, and Nite Owl didn't resonate. I won't call out the whole list but you ge the idea.

Overall I thought it was a good read, but not outstanding. My copy says it won a Hugo award and is on Time Magazine's list of the 100 best novels. I don't think I can agree with the latter, but it's good in any case.

Recommended with some minor reservations.

The Iliad, Homer, translation by Richmond Lattimore

2009-11-23T12:04:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Iliad
Author:		Homer
Translator:		Richmond Lattimore
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I may be showing my lack of cultural sensitivity here, but I pretty much hated every word of The Iliad. Honestly.

I am warned that some of my reaction may be the result of the translation. A friend - who reads both ancient and modern Greek fluently - tells me he dislikes the Lattimore translation. I suppose another translation might be better, but I can't believe it would make that much of a difference, as many of my complaints were with the content.

I realize that I am reading something that was written a long, long time ago. Thousands of years ago, in fact. Things have changed since then, but still, this really got up my nose.

Let's take something simple: half the text was a list of who killed who, some identifying description about the combatants, and the specifics of the kill. "Bob, who comes from Muncie Indiana and is the son of a tailor and a grocery clerk, killed Joe, who came from Arcadia California and managed a discount clothing store, by stabbing him with a spear in the head. His brains splashed out and he fell, with the dark mist closing over his eyes. Then Bob stripped off Joe's armor." Pages and pages of that sort of thing, varying only with the descriptions of the people and the nature of the killing stroke. To say it was monotonous would be putting it politely.

Then there was the matter of names. Hundreds of names, I suspect, of both people and places, that mean nothing to me. It was boring now, and I wonder about how it would have gone over when it was written. How many people would know those names and places even at the time?

The gods and their meddling bugged me too. Both the Trojans and the Greeks wind up praying to - and taking offense at - the perceived actions of Zeus and the other gods. It's pretty funny (taken from a modern point of view) that Zeus changes his mind so often about who is important and will therefore get the glory of the battle. But in all honesty I got really tired of the constant interfering and bickering among a bunch of nonexistent entities. They were the excuse used for whatever really happened in the battle, and it showed.

I was also reminded of modern athletes who cross themselves or otherwise perform some obvious prayer after scoring or winning in some sporting event, only the Greeks and the Trojans were at least honest enough to admit that the gods could also favor the other side.

On top of that I found the constant descriptions of the offerings to the gods got more than a bit revolting. So many animals and people were killed (just in this one book) to keep the gods happy. And what does Zeus need with all those bits of the fat of the various animals slaughtered in his name?

In the end the gods were more of a distraction and an annoyance than any real part of the story. Maybe if I was a believer I'd feel differently.

Human behavior is on display here too, and that drove me crazy. The Trojan and Greek cultures were abominable. Prowess in battle was all important and women were nothing more than objects possessed by men. I'd like to think humanity has improved since this was written, but I'm afraid it hasn't come nearly far enough to make me happy.

Finally we get into actual story issues. For those not familiar with it, The Iliad discusses a portion of the fall of Troy. The infamous 1000 ships came to Troy to get Helen back, but it was something like ten years of siege later that the conflict finally came to an end and Troy was wiped out. The Iliad covers some but not all of that final conflict.

There were all kinds of issues with the story itself. In places it made no sense in terms of locations and descriptions. In other places the meddling of the gods turned a battle into some sort of supernatural contest, which we know didn't really happen that way.

More disturbing, though, are the main events that are and aren't covered in the story. Why, for example, do we spend a lot of time on the siege and the fighting up to and including the death of Hektor, but then not cover the actual fall of Troy itself? We don't even get the death of Achilleus, though we are told he is fated to die very soon, before he can go home. There's something wrong with a narrative structure that doesn't actually tell the main point of the story.

I suppose I could be wrong. Maybe the main point of the story is the death of Hektor, but if so then it should be entirely recast and a lot of other things left out to spend more time on the events going on around him.

And why is the second to the last chapter entirely devoted to a series of games and contests the Greeks play amongst themselves after Hektor is killed? It's chariot racing, boxing, wrestling, and the like, but it seems radically out of place and unimportant. If it really did take place in history - say a champion of the Greeks (who might have been named Achilleus) managed to kill a champion of the Trojans (who might have been named Hektor) - would they really have paused all activity to spend an entire day playing games in celebration? And if they did, wouldn't the Trojans have done something useful during that time? That chapter felt entirely out of place.

The final chapter deals with the return of Hektor's corpse to the Trojans, which is accomplished only with more meddling from Zeus and his buddies. Silly. I would have found the Greeks more human and approachable if they'd returned Hektor's body to Priam themselves, without needing Zeus (prodded by Apollo), Iris, Thetis, and Hermes to make it happen.

In all I think The Iliad shows humanity in an awful light. I found the writing (or perhaps the translation) to be repetitive and stilted. It actively impeded comprehension of the story to the point that I'm not even sure what the author thought the important story points were.

Yes, it's a "classic" in the sense that it has survived over a very long period of time, and it may be important as a result, but I'm sorry to say that my impression of it as literature is not good.

Sadly, I cannot recommend The Iliad.

All the Ancient Reviews Are Posted

2009-11-21T11:40:00.000-08:00

For anyone who's been following along, all of the ancient reviews have been posted, and the flood of new posts should stop now.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while I slammed something in the range of 190 reviews into the system. It was amusing and enlightening to reread most of them in the process. It helps me figure out what I want to do with reviews from now on, which is good.

Also, look for a post about the site in general coming soon, and some very minor edits to the side bar as I strive to make all the relevant information and links available to those who come to the site.

2005 and 2006 Reviews Installed Here

2009-11-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

I hope I'm not overwhelming anyone other than Doug...

He told me he'd subscribed to this blog and thought he'd get an occasional book review. Instead, he gets flooded as I keep dumping old reviews into the system. My apologies to anyone else suffering the same fate.

I hope to be done with that sometime this week or this coming weekend, though. Only 2007 left to go, and then I am out of the old data business.

In the meantime, please excuse the flood of posts. I'll get back to the "few a month" level of posting ASAP.

Up To Date for 2009

2009-11-15T21:49:00.000-08:00

Well, I've managed to get all the 2009 reviews (so far) put into the site. That's good, and I am happy to have that much of it done. Moving the reviews from 2008 and before will take time, but it will happen.

For the curious, I keep a one page index of reviews - something you might search - on my personal website. It links back to this blog for reviews stored here, and to pages hosted on my site for reviews not yet posted here. As I say, over time they will all move here.

I'll add a link to that index into the side bar next.

Happy reading!

God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens

2009-11-08T14:34:00.000-08:00

Title:		God Is Not Great
Author:		Christopher Hitchens
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

One of the things about reading a lot is that I am constantly having my nose rubbed in how little I know and how small my life experiences actually are when compared with others. Reading just about anything by Hitchens can cause that sort of feeling, and this book drove it home for me.

With the subtitle "How Religion Poisons Everything", the subject is pretty obvious, and Hitchens doesn't hold back. His command of the language and literature are quite good, and he drives his points home completely. He spares no religious tradition of any sort.

There are three different reactions I had to reading this book, and keeping them separate in my mind is interesting:

1) Religion and its problems. This is, of course, the thing Hitchens is really after, and despite being essentially a life long atheist I learned a few things in here. For example, if you wanted the services of a prostitute in Iran you can get them *within* Islam. The Iranian brothels have the ability to marry you to the woman in question for an hour, and divorce you when you're done, thus making the transaction legal in the eyes of god. Seems a pretty petty and small minded god if that's all it takes to make prostitution legal in a theocracy, but then again, Islam tends to treat women pretty poorly anyway.

And don't think Christianity or Judaism get any better treatment here. Hitchens is well read and can open your eyes to the horrific things the founding texts contain, as well as the actions and beliefs of the more ardent current believers. Hitchens really dislikes Mother Teresa, and has all kinds of arguments on that front. Amusingly (to me) has has significant problems with the Dalai Llama too, and once again has the relevant knowledge to back up his vitriol.

I appreciate what Hitchens has to say here, and I agree with most if not all of what I read. There are so many awful things done in the name of religion, even now, that I wish it could all just be stopped. Sadly, however, I don't think most of the human race is anywhere near giving up its love of mystery and it's willingness to be lead by someone charismatic, regardless of how silly that leader's claims may be.

2) All that praise aside, I did have a problem with the book to some degree. It seems to wander a bit. Chapters that supposedly focus on one thing or area seem to meander into other areas without good reason. I found this a bit distracting at times. I can't tell if the book was rushed to print - without an editor suggesting ways to tighten up and/or reorganize to make it more effective. Alternately it might have been written over a very long time, where the focus of the author (and possible editors) gets lost in the long haul to get it out. Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and every word is exactly as Hitchens intended. Regardless, I found some of it a bit perturbing on an organizational level, and would have appreciated a slightly tighter presentation.

3) Finally, there's the issue Hitchens's life experience. This is what I alluded to before. My own experiences and travel are nothing in comparison with those of Hitchens, and it's humbling to be shown how some have lived a broad and expanding life well beyond that of the rest of us. Hitchens has spent time in many foreign countries, in the presence of many dignitaries of various kinds, and generally lived in ways that the vast majority of us cannot imagine. I found it humbling in some ways and yet slightly irritating in others.

At times Hitchens's experiences back up his statements nicely, driving his arguments to conclusions readily. At other times, though they seem a tad peripheral, and it might have been better to present things without reference to all of those places and people.

In any case, I learned things from this book - some of them very disturbing - and I appreciate the fact that it was written. Hopefully it opens a few other eyes in the world.

Recommended.

The Honourable Schoolboy, John Le Carre

2009-10-24T12:58:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Honourable Schoolboy
Author:		John Le Carre
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

For the first three quarters or so I thought this was probably the best Le Carre I've read so far. Then some things happened that I didn't believe, and all bets were off.

Overall the story was good - following the middle part of the end of George Smiley's career - but I've noted something about the writing in these books now that bugs me: the point of view wanders. Sometimes it's omniscient, sometimes it's from the perspective of a single character, sometimes it's from the perspective of some review or report written after the fact, and so on. The changes aren't clearly delineated, and (in fact) I think I saw changes of these sorts mid chapter.

I'm not sure what to make of Le Carre's take on his characters either. No one is presented in a great light, but perhaps that has to do with the nature of the spy business.

In any case the Karla trilogy was very popular and makes for interesting reading, even if there are some issues with the writing.

Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself, Alan Alda

2009-10-03T13:08:00.000-07:00

Title:		Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself
Author:		Alan Alda
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This is the most recent book by Alan Alda, published in 2007. It extracts portions of various speeches he's given over the years and includes commentary written later tying them together and adding perspective acquired since they were originally given.

Alda himself interests me. He's not religious, loves science, and knows his own limits and interests. In short, he looks like someone who's found a reasonable path through the chaos of life. But reading this book you discover that he's always been trying to find meaning in the world, and hasn't always been successful.

At the very end he has some words that sum up what he thinks the meaning of life is and isn't. They are deceptively simple, and close to my own take on things at this point. That doesn't mean they are something you can act upon, though, and how one reacts to them is inevitably a personal thing. Many would in fact disagree with him.

Beyond that bit at the end, though, this isn't a book I found thrilling. It wasn't bad, but I see no need to reread it in the future. Alda's an interesting person with an outlook on life somewhat similar to my own, but he would be the first to admit that he's no expert on much of anything beyond acting, directing, and writing entertainment, and maybe not even on all of those.

Reading this book to learn a bit about someone else's POV is a good thing, while reading it to find "The Answer" would be a mistake. I guess this is mildly recommended as a result.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler

2009-10-03T13:07:00.000-07:00

Title:		Lilith's Brood
Author:		Octavia Butler
Rating:
Review Date:		Oct 03, 2009
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Lilith's Brood is a collection of three separate novels in one volume:

Dawn
Adulthood Rites
Imago

Butler died back in 2006, and she was something special and unusual: a female, black, science fiction writer. It was an replay of an interview I heard on NPR with her shortly after her death that lead me to get some of her work.

These three books discuss what happens to humanity and earth after a nuclear war between the superpowers. (The actual combatants aren't named but it's a fair bet the US and the USSR were among those tossing bombs around.) In the aftermath of the war a very different space faring race arrives and starts picking up the pieces, but their purposes and intentions are less than clear to the few survivors they find.

The aliens - and these really are alien - are radically different from humans, but are DNA based and are driven to find life of all kinds, learn from it, and "trade" for it. The use of the word "trade" there is one of the ways these aliens are so different from us, and I'm not entirely sure I understand how (or if) anything described in these novels can be a trade in any sense I understand.

The first novel - Dawn - sees humanity being restored so they can return to an earth that has been repaired and changed. But the aliens clearly want things from us, and we have no real way to chose to accept or reject their offer. Lilith - the human chosen to lead those who will go back to earth - isn't thrilled about the role forced upon her, nor about what is being done to humanity in the process. In fact, the book ends rather cryptically overall, and left me wondering what Butler's intent was. Was this supposed to be a happy ending, or tragic? In truth I don't think it's that simple, but that possibility wasn't made as clear as it could have been.

The second book - Adulthood Rites - takes place some time later and follows some of the same characters (they live a long time now) on earth itself as a new generation of human/alien constructs is growing up. In this case the story is a bit more directed and the intent is a bit clearer. I think Butler had a specific thing she was driving at in this case and it comes through in the writing. For me this was the strongest of the three books, probably as a direct result.

Imago - the last in the series - was the most disappointing. It started out reasonably well, but snowballed to a conclusion I didn't believe. We have another iteration of humanity appearing in this book, and initially things look pretty tough for them. Then, too quickly, things get easy. The last 75 pages or so seem a rushed ending to just wrap things up and get it over with. I think the characters get a free pass as a result, and I found it frustrating.

Overall, the concepts presented here - having to do with race and sexuality - are interesting and challenging. I suspect, though, that this isn't Butler's greatest work.

Still, it's different from a lot of science fiction in that it is mostly character based, rather than being driven by technology or environment. There is a fair bit of biology that drives the narrative, but it also drives the characters themselves, so it feels mostly right.

Recommended with some reservations.

The Lord God Made Them All, James Herriot

2009-10-03T13:03:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Lord God Made Them All
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Another James Herriot... light but fun reading. This one was mostly new to me, and I enjoyed it. I find these books uplifting and warm without being too sweet. Others, I know, feel differently, but I like them.

This one includes a few stories from trips Herriot took after the war. These glimpses of life beyond the Yorkshire dales were just as interesting to me as the animal stories for which he was justly famous.

If you haven't read this series and are in the mood for something pleasant without being challenging, they are recommended.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

2009-10-03T01:03:00.000-07:00

Title:		Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Author:		Tom Stoppard
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Somehow I found the movie a while ago and I love it. The extras on the DVD told me it was a play first, so I dug up a copy of that. It's quite good.

For me, though, reading a play - any play - is tough. There's less context than in a novel, so (of course) more depends on the dialog. For me to really understand a play requires reading it many times, preferably aloud, and with different people on different parts if that can be arranged.

In this case I never got that far. I did read the play twice, and though I really enjoyed it and can clearly see at least some of the evolution from play to movie, I still don't get a couple of things. More re-reads - particularly good ones as described above - would help.

If you haven't seen the play or the movie, you're in for a treat when you do. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is the story of two characters from Hamlet, entirely from their point of view. They are minor characters - almost bit parts - in Shakespeare's masterpiece, so we have very little to go on for background and their actions when they are off stage in Hamlet itself.

What we get is an existential romp, almost a farce. No one - not even Rosencrantz & Guildenstern themselves - can remember which is which, for example. They have no history, and the world is strangely out of kilter for them. There are interesting discussions of death and musings on just how predetermined things are. Of course, since we know what happens in Hamlet, their futures are ordained to end in a particular way, but the play is a discussion of our own futures too, and to what degree we are stuck playing parts.

The dialog is quick and witty, and the ideas presented are interesting and challenging.

I think everyone should become familiar with this one. See it in a theater, read it, or watch the movie. Whatever it takes. It's both funny and deep. Highly recommended.

Smiley's People, John Le Carre

2009-09-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

Title:		Smiley's People
Author:		John Le Carre
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Another Le Carre. This one is the climax of the Smiley/Karla series, which means I missed one. I believe I can find a copy of The Honorable Schoolboy somewhere, though, and my guess is that the order isn't that critical. Still, my error.

Smiley's People, though, is quite good. Le Carre manages to keep the entire genre and conflict interesting even now, years after the Berlin Wall has come down and the Soviet Union has disappeared as a political entity.

If you have any interest in spy fiction, Le Carre seems to be worth a read. Recommended.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. John Le Carre

2009-09-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

Title:		Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Author:		John Le Carre
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Good stuff. I hadn't read any Le Carre before and I really enjoyed this. It's the first of the series in which George Smiley (in his retirement) comes back to combat Karla, the Soviet spy master.

It turns out that Le Carre (Actually David John Moore Cornwell) really worked in two British spy agencies (MI5 and MI6) so he's got a nose for making his fiction sound like truth.

I, of course, can't tell you if it's really possible - not being in the spy business myself - but I can tell you it reads well, and that's what counts in this case.

Recommended.

Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

2009-09-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

Title:		Last Chance to See
Authors:		Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

As everyone here probably knows by now, I love Douglas Adams's writing style. He was both funny and honest, even when writing fiction.

Last Chance to See is - sadly - not fiction. In it Adams and Carwardine document trips to see some of the rarest animals in existence - animals on the brink of extinction - along with meeting some of those working to save them. The trips took place in the mid to late 1980s, and at least the first one was for a magazine article. It is possible all of their trips resulted in articles that were later substantially rewritten to put them into book form.

Of the book itself I can say this: Adams can write. He does nearly all the writing, despite the author credit to Carwardine, and it's classic Adams in style, even if the subjects are a lot less funny than his usual.

He managed - in just a few pages - to convince me that I never want to go to Africa, for example. Maybe things have improved in the 20+ years since these things happened, but I rather doubt it, human nature being what it is. Seeing the creatures there might be inspiring, but details of getting there and the governments one has to work through render Africa a less than ideal vacation spot in my opinion.

He tells heart breaking stories about the animals and places they go see, but frames them with enough humor - mostly at his own expense - to make the presentation something I could continue reading. (I'm one of those who can't watch programs about endangered animals. They make me cringe to the point where I have to turn them off. As a member of the human race I am at a minimum guilty by association and resource consumption, and I don't like it.)

Last Chance to See is worth reading. Adams drives home some key points and shows how silly (and stupid) we are as a species in the process.

Magic Street, Orson Scott Card

2009-08-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

Title:		Magic Street
Author:		Orson Scott Card
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I think I got this one from my father in law, and (to be honest) I'm not all that certain of his reading choices. Nor am I all that certain I like Card, for that matter. I really liked Ender's Game, but the subsequent books drove me nuts. A few other things I've encountered in Card's work have left me cold as well, so I went into this with some trepidation.

And the first chapter or two had me wondering. I almost put it down, as it appeared to be a thinly veiled religious screed, at least initially. However, I must admit I was wrong about that - at least at some level. To tell you who the characters in the first two chapters actually are would give too much away, but I can say you've almost certainly heard of them before.

Once over the initial hurdle things held together pretty well. There was another spot later on where the religious aspects started to bug me, but they were actually relevant to the plot in that case, so I let them slide.

In the end I found it Magic Street to be a reasonably pleasant if somewhat lightweight read. If you like Card, this is something you'll probably enjoy. If you like modern fantasy, it's reasonably good.

One note: most of the major characters are black and the language used struck me as "off" at times. Not being black and thus not familiar with that culture in any depth I couldn't tell you how authentic it was, but I am quite certain that times it wasn't right. While I clearly noted this at those points - occasionally thinking things like "No one would say that, no matter what color they are" - I didn't let it distract me from the story. Your mileage may vary.

The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene

2009-08-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Fabric of the Cosmos
Author:		Brian Greene
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This is a book on cosmology for the lay reader. Green starts with Newton and works his way though Einstein, the various people involved in the discovery of quantum mechanics, and eventually into his own specialty, string theory.

I found Greene's book very readable and helpful in understanding those parts of physics that are pretty well established. His discussions of string theory are also well done, but here we hit a slight issue with more recent events.

The book was published in 2004, and in the time since there is a growing movement (as far as I can tell, anyway) among some physicists to call string theory a crock and abandon it. Greene isn't among those ranks, of course, and I have no way to assess the validity of the arguments on either side as the math is way, way beyond my abilities.

Still, I think the major objection is that string theory doesn't necessarily appear (and may not be) testable. Greene argues that there are things that can and will be tested. How well his arguments hold up against the growing group of people dissatisfied with string theory I don't know.

In any case, there are some very good discussions in here about Relativity, QM, Newtonian mechanics, absolute vs. relative space and time, and several other topics. If you want to know more about these things without being required to take 15 or 20 courses in advanced math, Greene's presentation is quite good.

Recommended.

The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenbegger

2009-08-01T16:57:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Time Traveler's Wife
Author:		Audrey Niffenbegger
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This was a national best seller when it came out back in 2003. (Or at least that is the copyright date on the copy I have.) Reviews are a bit mixed, with many loving it and some hating it.

In something of a rare event for me I am going to come down on the side of the masses and say I really, really liked this book.

To explain why, though, I need to directly address what I think is the big complaint against it: problems that result from the main plot device. And note that I'm not giving anything away here... no spoilers.

There are two main characters - the entire book is told from the POV of one or the other - the time traveler and his wife. Niffenbegger saddles her hero with a real doozy of a problem: he can't hang onto his place in time and space with any reliability. With some frequency he just disappears to some other time and location - poof - leaving everything he was carrying and wearing behind. He'll return to the place he left eventually, but it may be hours before he does so, or just seconds. The process is unpredictable. The heroine, though, is totally normal in her relationship with time and space.

That's a challenge of a premise, and I think it - and a number of things that fall out of it - are what most of those who dislike the book are bothered by. But for those of us who like fantasy or science fiction literature, it's not a problem. The willing suspension of disbelief came easily for me, particularly because the rest of the book is so wonderful.

What The Time Traveler's Wife is actually about is the relationship between Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire. It's a well written love story, with interesting characters and real situations, set against background of uncontrolled time travel.

Of course all the classic issues presented by time travel are present too. Can you meet yourself and what happens if you do? Can you change the past or the future? Niffenbegger has answers for these questions and more in her world, but they come up naturally in the course of watching a couple meet, fall in love, and build a life together.

In this case Clare meets Henry for the first time when she's only 6, and he meets her for the first time when he's 28, but he's only 8 years older than she is. Understanding that, and all that goes with it, is a lot of fun.

Recommended.

Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell

2009-07-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

Title:		Assassination Vacation
Author:		Sarah Vowell
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

With Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell hits 3 of 4 with me as successful volumes.

In it she describes her researches into the history of 3 presidential assassinations: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. It sounds macabre - and it is - but Vowell pulls it off and keeps a sense of humor about it.

She manages that by adding things to the simple dry history, things like her own opinions and musings on what those involved were saying and and thinking.

I enjoyed reading this, and I learned a few things in the process. Alas, my brain is lousy at holding on to details - I'm better at remembering emotions for some reason - so I'm afraid a lot of the actual history here won't stick with me.

Still, it's fascinating to learn that Robert Todd Lincoln - the president's son - was at or nearby during all three of the assassinations Vowell documents.

I will take a few other facts away from this, too: McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was a depressed anarchist. Garfield's assassin, Charles Guiteau, was probably clinically insane. And Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, actually thought he was doing good for the country.

I recommend Assassination Vacation for it's quirky humor mixed with Vowell's opinions and real history. An odd but nice blend.

Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard

2009-07-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

Title:		Get Shorty
Author:		Elmore Leonard
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This is another in my occasional series of readings that come from wanting to know how the movie differs from the book. Exactly why I want to know that isn't clear even to me, but it is the case.

Get Shorty - the book - is fun. I read it in just a few days and took it to work to read over lunch time. That was a good sign given my recent string of books I haven't been all that enamored of.

The story revolves around Chili Palmer, a movie lover and shylock who is tired of that business - for various reasons. He finds himself getting involved movies when he goes to Las Vegas and then LA to look into some loans that are past due.

There are, of course, all kinds of complications. Chili winds up dealing with some local drug dealers who are laundering their money through a B movie production company, and so on. It's well written and well paced.

For those who have seen the movie, it differs from the book in both small and medium sized ways. Example: the drug courier's father is never mentioned in the book, and never makes an appearance. Nor does the wife of the writer - Doris, played in such outrageous fashion by Bette Midler - exist in the novel.

Other semi-important changes include the fact that it isn't Harry Zimm who causes Ray Barboni to go to LA, and there isn't even a confrontation between Barboni and Zimm, so that hospital scene - "Who wants to take a crack at wiring Mr. Zimm's jaw?" - doesn't happen in the book either.

The smaller changes are too numerous to mention, and yet don't add up to anything all that important.

In all I'd have to say that the conversion to the screenplay was done with skill and attention to detail.

The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker

2009-07-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Mezzanine
Author:		Nicholson Baker
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I'm not at all sure what to make of this one.

Is it philosophy? It examines the meaning of life through the study or our simple, daily activities and thoughts, so perhaps.

Is it humor? It clearly points out some of the oddities of human nature in ways that make the reader laugh, or at least crack a smile.

Is it satire? Certainly some bits - like the long footnote about footnotes - can be thought of that way.

Is it meditation? Nothing "of the world" discussed here is particularly important, and yet, something about the presentation makes the whole something greater than the sum of its parts.

Is it some kind of high art? Well, maybe, but I'm not sure I could defend that description.

In my opinion, The Mezzanine is a novel written in the style of Jerry Seinfeld, only extended. Seinfeld's comedy has been described to me as being "about nothing", or at least about nothing important.

The Mezzanine - in which the entire plot revolves around the author's thinking over one escalator ride, with extensive diversions into things related to those thoughts - is Seinfeld's comedy on steroids.

Instead of a few lines about broken shoe laces, we get whole pages with footnotes and later references. We get an interesting discussion of the frequency of the author's thoughts about various topics, and the idea of comparing that data with similar charts for others. We get expositions on cashier efficiency and polishing the handrails of escalators. In all, it's a disordered and unrelated group of chapters, very loosely bound together by the author's occasional reference to his return from lunch.

But in the process of writing these un- (or barely) related blurbs we actually examine the way people think. There is amusement, at a minimum, in these pages as a result.

In all honesty I don't know that I learned from The Mezzanine. I already assumed that everyone had crazy thought patterns similar to my own, but different in their specifics. Still, I did enjoy it. Recommended.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

2009-06-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Author:		Carson McCullers
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This is one of those reviews in which I let Doug down. If memory serves he loves this book.

Frankly, I didn't particularly like The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. From what I've read elsewhere, it's a classic of American literature, but it didn't work for me.

I found it to be a disorganized presentation of several barely related stories, all of which were bleak, dull, or both.

I felt a small attachment to only one character - Mick - over the loss of her music at the end. Truth be told, though, none of the characters discussed seemed particularly real to me, and their struggles weren't all that important.

None of McCullers's characters grows much in any way during these pages. They just soldier on, suffering through their lives - we follow 6 or 8 of them for a year - and learn essentially nothing.

On a technical level I have to appreciate what McCullers did, though. As a rule I dislike excessive use of writing in the vernacular of the characters. When an accent or speech pattern gets to the point of inhibiting comprehension, I get frustrated. In this case the author walked a fine line. The southern speech was understandable, but because she wrote it in the vernacular it could never be called great English prose. Despite that her writing was pretty good. I give her credit for striking that balance.

I just wish the story had something in it for me. I didn't learn anything new about the human condition or about these people. I can't even tell you how the title is related to the contents.

In a week or two I'll have forgotten it all, and I won't be sorry.

Don't let my dislike stop you from reading this, though. There are a lot of things in the world that others love but which just aren't for me. This may be another in that category. A lot of reviews - and Doug's opinions - strongly support that theory.

Gardens Of The Moon, Steven Erikson

2009-05-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

Title:		Gardens Of The Moon
Author:		Steven Erikson
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Gardens of the Moon is book 1 of a projected ten volume fantasy series. It's full of action and warfare, magic, political intrigue, assassins, thieves, and so on. It was recommended by a friend, so I ordered a copy from paperbackswap.com.

As it happens, what we have here is a HUGE pile of back story. Erikson's history is vast and deep. His notes about any single place he mentions - and he mentions a lot of places - must include at least 5 or 6 conquests spread out among the various races that have peopled his planet. If you want a world with history, this one has it.

But that's about all it's got. His characters are mostly cardboard cut-outs, with very little in the way of real depth, and despite the fact that they live in a world with all that history, we never understand it. Facts from that history are thrown at us as if we should know them, but there is no cohesive way to piece them together. And it gets worse. There are maps at the front of the book, but they don't cover everything described, and it was only at the very end that I learned one of the major characters was "2 continents away" from where she'd started out. Excuse me?

There are many different groups or individuals that could be viewed as major characters, but we have very little to go on for motivations, and they mostly react to things going on around them. Some of those potential major characters are on stage only briefly throughout the course of the novel, so we don't really even know if they're important. And as for that plot they're supposed to be a part of, it's almost a random series of events. Things - sometimes very improbable things that we as readers have no way to know anything about or anticipate - just happen, and these people (or creatures, or gods, or whatever) are bounced about like pieces on a checker board during a 6.5 earthquake. Whenever one of those potentially important characters winds up in a precarious position, we find ourselves introduced to a new player who gets him or her out of the jam. Sometimes those new players are mortals, other times they're not. Usually we had no idea they even existed when they are slapped in our face.

Another thing that pushes characters about is magic. Vast quantities of totally unexplained magic. We don't even get good descriptions of what is going on when magic is involved. And (of course) there are a zillion different types of magic - and a flock of gods, some current, some ancient, and some dead, but all (apparently) capable of other types of magic - that we're supposed to keep track of. Or maybe Erikson doesn't care that we can't keep track of it. I honestly couldn't say.

In a nutshell I couldn't follow the story, I got tired of the "here's something you didn't know" method of dealing with things, the characters (who could have been memorable) aren't, and it was all just too contrived.

So why did I finish it? I could have quit after 50 or 100 pages, but I didn't. I did regularly put it down - sometimes mid sentence - simply because I was sick of it, but came back and finished it in the end. (It took a while... I've been busy and this hasn't been a fun read.)

At some level I think Erikson has affected me in a manner similar to Martin's Fire & Ice series. There are major issues with it, but I kept reading in the vain hope that I would figure things out, or that it would all make sense at some point. Sadly that point never came.

With Erikson I don't think I'm going to bother continuing. Reading a few reviews on amazon.com I am convinced that the later volumes are more of the same and I have far too many other things to read to bother with them. That's a shame, but such is life.

Some people will love Gardens of the Moon, but not me.

Dead-Eye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut

2009-05-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

Title:		Dead-Eye Dick
Author:		Kurt Vonnegut
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This book didn't exactly win me over. Unlike much of the Vonnegut I've read, this one actually had a recognizable plot, though, which was something in its favor. The premise, however, was pretty thin, and there just wasn't much meat here.

I finished reading it 3 weeks or so ago and I honestly don't remember all that much from it. Flipping open to a few pages at random I am reminded of things, but the whole work doesn't snap back to me.

What I am learning from my efforts at reading Vonnegut is that he's really a hit-or-miss writer for me, and this was a miss.

Sorry fans. I can't recommend this one.

Don't Panic, Neil Gaiman

2009-04-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

Title:		Don't Panic
Author:		Neil Gaiman
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Subtitle: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion.

This was written in 1988, after So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, but before Mostly Harmless, and long before Adams died.

I can't find an ordered list of Gaiman's works all that quickly, but this one feels a tad off. Perhaps it was an early work, or maybe he just didn't take it all that seriously. Regardless, it doesn't feel like he put a lot of effort into it.

That said, there is still some good info in here for Hitchhiker's fans everywhere. I learned a few things, and seeing some of Adams's wit on display again was good. I need to acquire the BBC radio series, though, and listen to them. Believe it or not I haven't done that yet.

As always, I miss Douglas Adams. A lot.

Order of the Stick, Rich Burlew

2009-04-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

Titles:		Order of the Stick Vol 1: Dungeon Crawlin' Fools Vol 2: No Cure for the Paladin Blues Vol 3: War and XPs Vol 0: On the Origin of PCs Vol -1: Start of Darkness
Author:		Rich Burlew
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

What is The Order of the Stick?

Well, I'd never heard of it either until recently, but my gaming past is somewhat limited. In any event, OOTS is a webcomic that follows a party of D&D adventurers as they try to accomplish a large and difficult quest.

The books are essentially graphic novels. The art is deliberately simplistic - stick figures, in fact - but Burlew uses that to his advantage and lets the story shine with it.

If you were ever a gamer you'll get a good laugh out of the D&D rules jokes, particularly if you had campaigns cross rules editions. But beyond the rules jokes - which actually diminish over time - the story gets bigger and grander. At the end of War and XPs you've watched a huge battle - on the scale of things seen in the LOTR movies - and the outcome was not good for the heros. Still, there are lots of laugh-out-loud moments in these strips. Burlew is a good writer, and knows how to tell a story.

These are recommended, and you don't even have to buy them. you can read them all online at: http://www.giantitp.com/.

Suggestion: The titles above are listed in proper reading order, at least so far.

Woken Furies, Richard K. Morgan

2009-04-11T16:03:00.000-07:00

Title:		Woken Furies
Author:		Richard K. Morgan
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

Woken Furies may be the best Takeshi Kovacs novel so far. Once again it's a cyberpunk novel set in the fairly distant future, but this time I feel like Morgan has really hit his stride. The writing is crisp, the settings interesting, and the story well thought out. We learn a lot more about the motivations of the hero this time, which I found intriguing.

A short summary that doesn't give things away: Kovacs is on Harlan's World on "personal business" (my phrase, but I don't want to give away what he's doing there) when he gets involved with a group of people who specialize in destroying mechanized, semi-intelligent warfare equipment left over from a previous conflict. Each member of the team he falls in with has a slew of modifications to help them perform this work, and the commander is particularly well linked in with just about anything networked. She, however, goes down during a skirmish and Kovacs finds himself protecting her. He also learns that someone is coming after him, someone he knows very well and has reason to fear. And that's saying a lot for an Envoy. Soon, however, he discovers that he's not actually the primary target, and things get even more complicated.

Morgan covers a lot of ground here. Philosophy, violence, technology, surfing, weapons, rock climbing, sex, diving, you name it.

Recommended.

James Herriot's Cat Stories, James Herriot

2009-03-28T15:33:00.000-07:00

Title:		James Herriot's Cat Stories
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

A short review for a short volume. These are extracts from his earlier works, specifically about cats. They're nice, and I like his introduction - which was new with the volume - but overall I found the dog stories book a bit better, and the original books better yet. Still, these are warm, enjoyable stories. Don't hesitate to read them if you come across the book, but I don't think it has anything in it that you won't find in his longer works, except the introduction.

The Hot Zone, Richard Preston

2009-03-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Hot Zone
Author:		Richard Preston
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I don't remember why I ordered this one from paperbackswap.com. Something about it caught my eye and I have a ton of credits built up over there, so I requested it. Then it sat on my TBR shelf for a while, and got picked up a couple of days ago because it looked like some light reading.

And it turned out to be light reading, but not in the usual sense. I think it's written at about a 6th grade level, making it simplistic to read. The sentence structure got a bit repetitive at times, but the information it was interesting - and dark - so I didn't give up on it.

This is the true story of the first outbreak of Ebola in the US in 1989. What? You didn't know we'd had an Ebola outbreak here? You don't remember news stories about people dying in hideous ways? Well, I didn't either, and the story is interesting in various ways. We got very, very lucky in this case. I won't spoil it, though.

The story covers the historical background of Ebola and some other viruses. Some - like Marburg - are related to Ebola, while others - like AIDS - aren't related but came from the same area, and so share some of the same background.

On the whole this book was good, despite the simplistic writing style. It brought home the risks we face as a result of new viruses. Bird Flu is a new one - not mentioned in the book at all - that shows the planet actually is a really big petri dish, and we're just potential carriers for the next nasty disease to come along. One note: If you can't read about animals suffering, this is not a book for you. Monkeys play a major role here, one they did not willingly chose for themselves.

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

2009-03-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

Title:		Cryptonomicon
Author:		Neal Stephenson
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This was an interesting read. At a bit over 900 pages in an oversized paperback edition, it was a huge, long read as well. That's part of why you haven't heard much from me lately. Well, that and work.

I enjoyed this book a fair bit, actually. The first third or so might have been a bit slow - it took me a long time to get through it - but the rest went reasonably quickly. This is a geek book, though. It discusses any number of topics in depth, possibly far more depth than you're interested in reading if you're not a geek. Happily I am a geek and it worked well for me.

The plot revolves around the interconnected lives of several people at two different times: during the second world war and now. In particular we follow a marine in WW II, and cryptographer and mathematician working in WW II, and a programmer working now. Others factor in, of course, but those are the three main points of view. The marine winds up doing and seeing all kinds of interesting things during the war, some of which are never adequately explained, the cryptographer is more straight forward in some ways, and the programmer could be any of a number of people I know, at least in terms of background.

I think that - apart from it's sheer size - Cryptonomicon is an approachable book by Stephenson. I've read two others by him Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. For my money, this may be the best of the three. If you're looking for something substantial to read, this might be it. I ought to get credit for 3 or 4 regular books on page count alone.

Programming in Python 3, Mark Summerfield

2009-03-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

Title:		Programming in Python 3
Author:		Mark Summerfield
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

I didn't finish this and I don't think I ever will.

We're thinking of doing development in Python 3 at work. For those who don't know, Python is an object oriented scripting language that has had a lot of people saying nice things for some time now. And Python 3 is the absolute latest version thereof.

Interestingly, Python isn't necessarily compatible between major versions, and since we hadn't been using much Python before, we decided to go straight to the latest. Given that I didn't know Python at all, I went looking for a book specifically about Python 3, and this was the only one I could find.

What a waste. I'm a reasonably good programmer, and this is a terrible book. It can't be used as a reference, so forget that. His examples and overview stink too, though, which means that newer programmers who need more to get the gist of things are out of luck as well. I was over 100 pages into it, for example, before I ever saw anything that showed how to open and read from or write to files.

At this point I've resorted to the documentation on python.org. If you're considering Python, I suggest you do the same and give this book a wide berth.

The Assassins' Gate: America In Iraq, George Packer

2009-02-08T14:11:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Assassins' Gate: America In Iraq
Author:		George Packer
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This was a really tough read for me. Some of the reasons are my own fault, one is the fault of the book, and some are the result of all kinds of environmental things going on during the five or six months I've been slogging through it.

And there we hit my first problem: six months. I can't even remember when I started it now. It was a long time back, though, and anything I have to say here must be tempered by the fact that a lot of this book was read long enough ago that it's a hazy memory now.

So let's start at the beginning and I'll review and confess my way through this.

First off, this is an important work. I'd read a few NYT columns by Packer over the years, mostly sent to me as links by a friend. I found his insights into Iraq interesting and honest. When I heard about his book, probably on NPR, I thought it would be a good read. I got ahold of a copy through paperbackswap.com and here I sit.

One of the things I have noted over the years is how so many people seem to think that things are simple. Yes or no. Right or wrong. Paper or plastic. In reality the world is a lot more complicated than that, and the Iraq war is a good example of that fact.

Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Of that I have no doubt. At one point he did have WMD, and his regime was brutal in every respect. That's all well documented from many years ago, long before we went to war in Iraq. But at what price is a thug like Saddam removed, and when does it become the responsibility of the United States to make that happen? That isn't a simple question. The neoconservatives, for all the difficulties the war had and created, take the long view that it will all have been worthwhile in the fullness of time. But there's no knowing that now, of course. Others think that we should never go to war, or that we should only do so when forced. But Saddam had gassed people living in his own country, had threatened neighbors, and was brutal in the extreme. Where is the moral high ground if you leave someone like that in power?

The Assassins' Gate discusses the Iraq war in a mostly unbiased way. It was ground researched in Iraq by Packer himself, and he presents it with all the complexity from which an event like this actually suffers. Even more interesting, part of his presentation is specific stories about specific people living in Iraq as the chaos goes on around them. The writing is eloquent and well edited. It should have been a smooth and satisfying read, but it didn't go that way for me.

In truth my reading of this book was in trouble long before I went back to work. There are so many names and places presented I couldn't keep them all straight. Not even close. Coming back to it after having set it down was always an exercise in trying to remember what I'd read before, even when it had been interesting and enlightening.

Some of the problem stems from the organization of the book, and this is the only thing I can lay at the feet of the author. I had the hardest time telling when something I was reading was related to. Chapters would go by without a date - not even a year - and I couldn't pin down where we were in the process as a result. This made various sections disjoint to the point that I couldn't hold them in my head. The addition of a time line, calling out major events and when the various people he mentions were in the places described, would have helped me immensely.

In any event, I struggled on, knowing I was learning things, if only peripherally. Then came November and I went back to work. I was at least 2/3rds of the way through when that happened, and for a while all progress completely stopped. Coming back to it after that was even harder, but once again I managed it.

Now I'm finally done, and what have I really learned? Alas it isn't as much as I'd like, but that's basically all my fault, not the author's.

Packer managed to reinforce my conviction that Iraq was a mess from the start. That we totally botched the planning by thinking all we had to do was win the fight and get out, making no plans for winning the peace. It is clear that many are responsible for that horrible miscalculation, but the Rumsfeld and Cheney seem to be on the top of that list. Whether or not Bush himself was planning an Iraq war on coming into office I can't say with certainty, but it's still possible as far as I can tell. Those who were in charge actually believe that what we did (and are doing) there will transform the entire middle east, making us all safer in the end. I retain my doubts. Strong doubts.

In human terms the Iraq war has, so far, lead to mixed results. Some Iraqis think they were better off with Saddam. Others disagree, confirming the complexity of the situation. What we've done, though, is unleash the religious differences that had been held in check in Iraq and greatly increased the influence of Iran. I doubt those were the administration's goals going in, and they clearly weren't expected by the exiles and outcasts who pushed for this intervention so forcefully.

Whether history will be kind to President Bush I can't say. It is entirely possible that I won't live long enough to know. Sadly, though, I believe there were other avenues we should have taken that might have lead to Saddam's ouster in ways that were better accepted - by the region and the people of Iraq. The loss of those opportunities is something I believe we should all regret.

Those wanting more information - deep and detailed - about the first half of the Iraq war are encouraged to read The Assassins' Gate. I think it's got a lot to recommend it, even if I had trouble.

The Dangerous Book For Dogs, Joe Garden

2009-01-03T22:24:00.000-08:00

Title:		The Dangerous Book For Dogs: A Parody by Rex and Sparky
Authors:		Joe Garden, Janet Ginsburg, Chris Pauls, Anita Serwacki, and Scott Sherman
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		Uncle Doug's forum review

This is - as the title suggests - a parody of The Dangerous Book For Boys. Fortunately, it's much better than that, since the original was junk. (I read and reviewed it some time ago. I hated it. I'm not even going to give it a link here. It was awful.)

This is funny, at least. And that makes it worthwhile. The authors are all contributors to The Onion, which gives you some idea of the kind of humor involved. They've also got a similar volume out for cats. I suspect we may be taking this entire concept way too far, but what the heck.

It's light reading - I got it for xmas, had to wait for my wife to read it, mostly recover from a cold, and deal with other issues before I could start on it, and still I finished it today. As you can tell, it's not all that long or that deep.

Still, it was amusing, though not laugh out loud funny most of the time. If you're a dog lover you'll probably enjoy it. If not, it won't make much sense to you.

And with that my first review of 2009 is done. I just hope it isn't also my last. There are far too many things going on in my life and my reading has been impacted in too many ways. Still, I'll be here reading and learning.

Serenity: Better Days, Joss Whedon, Brett Matthews, Will Conrad

2008-12-31T10:54:00.000-08:00

Title:		Serenity: Better Days
Authors:		Joss Whedon, Brett Matthews, Will Conrad
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		dougshaw.com forum review

This is my last review in 2008. Several things wiped out my time at the end of the year and slowed me way down. But I'm still trying to read, even if things keep getting in the way.

Serenity: Better Days is a short comic book about the crew of the space ship Firefly, who were featured on the TV show of the same name. If you don't know the setting, this review isn't going to help much, I'm afraid.

As usually happens with tales of this crew, it's the story of a "job" gone wrong. Our heroes are minor criminals, living on the edge of a corrupt society. We applaud their willingness to go it alone and do the right thing in the face of adversity, even if it violates the law, simply because that law is so obviously overbearing and unjust. (You know, simply writing that sentence makes me stop and think about the state of America in a new way, but I digress.)

Amusingly, this story actually starts with a job going well, but then things turn. I won't give away any more than that.

What I can say is that it was a bit disjoint. There were a few places - in a very short book - that I had to back up and reread to try and figure out what had happened. I suspect the authors actually had more material but lacked the page space to include it, so it was cut to fit. The result is OK, but not as easy to follow as I'd like.

I enjoy the Serenity series, and I hope it continues. But I also hope the next one is a bit better edited than this one, so the story flows a bit better.

All Things Wise and Wonderful, James Herriot

2008-11-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Title:		All Things Wise and Wonderful
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		dougshaw.com forum review

I finished All Things Wise and Wonderful some weeks back, but I've been too busy with winter preparation and getting ready to go back to work to write up even a simple review. Things are finally settling down, though. I go back to work on Monday, and since it's started raining and will continue to do so for some time, those projects are coming to a close. As a result, I finally get to write this up.

I greatly enjoyed All Things Wise and Wonderful, as I have enjoyed the other books in the series. Herriot - a pseudonym, I know - writes with obvious love of his home, family, and job. Most of the stories have are positive in nature, but a few are sad. I know some don't like his works but I find them quite nice.

This book details some of the author's war experience. He trained as a pilot for the RAF but just as his training finished it was then found he had a medical condition and he wasn't allowed to fly. I can relate to his tales of the bureaucracy in several ways now that I'm in a volunteer fire department and going back to work. Somehow, red tape is in our blood.

If you're looking for some light reading that will leave you feeling good about people, any of the books by James Herriot will do the trick. You can read a chapter or two at a time or consume an entire book in a few hours. Either way you won't do yourself any wrong. Recommended.

Six Degrees, Duncan J. Watts

2008-09-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Title:		Six Degrees
Author:		Duncan J. Watts
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		dougshaw.com forum review

Six Degrees is subtitled "The Science of a Connected Age". It discusses the emerging science of networks, and does so with some flair, though I found the first half more interesting than the second half.

In the first half, Watts actually discusses the science of networks in some detail, with charts & graphs. He explains how he and others worked out some interesting results in network science, and even shows where they made assumptions that others overturned. For me, this portion of the book was fascinating, and fun reading.

The second half loses that level of detail and instead becomes more of a survey of ongoing work in networks and how it can apply in the real world. There are some interesting stories here, but nothing quite grabbed me the way the first half did.

In any event, if you're interested in the Small World Problem, or (more colloquially) whether or not everyone really is only six degrees of separation apart, this is an interesting read.

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

2008-09-02T10:53:00.000-07:00

Title:		Blink
Author:		Malcolm Gladwell
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		dougshaw.com forum review

What can I say about Blink aside from the obvious jokes?

Well, I started out being really interested in it, but that's an oddity of my personal nature. The opening vignette is about an ancient Greek sculpture that a museum bought. It that turned out to be a modern fake, and the story of how the mistake was made and uncovered was presented. As a sculptor, it resonated with me, but that's probably just me.

After that it goes down hill. While the research Gladwell summarizes is interesting, there is nothing really useful presented here. His underlying thesis - that we all make snap judgements based on very little information, and that sometimes those judgements are good ones - seems obvious on the face of it. But the repetitive nature of his assertions gets old, and the fact that he never once indicates how to change one's skill at "thin-slicing" is irritating in the end.

Yes, he does indicate that experts are better at thin-slicing in their domains, but "Become an expert" is a useless answer to the question "How do I get better at thin-slicing?"

And he fails to explain certain things. For example, the museum that bought the stature hired experts to authenticate it. Why did those people fail to note the problems that others noted later? Why didn't they thin-slice the problem as well? Clearly becoming and expert isn't enough, and there are no other answers given in here.

This would have been better in a much shorter format. As it was, I feel like I wasted a lot of time with it.

Gladwell's earlier big work was The Tipping Point and I thought I might read it, but after reading this I'm not so sure. There's more PR than substance in Blink and the reviews on amazon.com make me think that could be the case there too. Oh well.

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

2008-08-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

Title:		The Handmaid's Tale
Author:		Margaret Atwood
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		dougshaw.com forum review

This is only the second thing I've read by Margaret Atwood, and I found it pretty powerful stuff. As far as I can tell Atwood writes dystopian fiction from a woman's point of view. I don't think she's generally classed as a science fiction writer, but there is some element of extrapolation about the future in the works I've read so far.

The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a near future society in North America. The US government was violently overthrown, the constitution suspended, and most women's rights revoked. Within the very strict regime that took power (in what is now called The Republic of Gilead) women are essentially property. And here we meet Offred, the heroine of the story, and a handmaid to her Commander, one of the people in power.

The term "handmaid", though, doesn't convey the nature of the relationship. It's a euphemism. As it happens, the Caucasian birthrate has dropped severely. Many or most of those still in Gilead are infertile for various reasons having to do with pollution, nuclear leakage, etc. But it isn't acceptable for a leader to have no children, so if someone important is in that situation it is assumed his wife is infertile (it must be the woman, of course; men can't be infertile) and he is given a handmaid to bear his children. A bit of the Bible (Genesis 30: 1-3) is cited to justify this.

Amusingly, when I did a google search on "Genesis 30: 1-3" the first hit that came up was Study Guide to Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1986).

Atwood discusses the history that brought about this challenging culture, and the personal events that got Offred into her current situation in flashbacks. It's a dark and difficult story, with enough possibility in it to scare any sensible reader.

Highly recommended. I'll be reading more of Atwood's work.

Radio On, Sarah Vowell

2008-06-26T10:20:00.001-07:00

Title:		Radio On
Author:		Sarah Vowell
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		dougshaw.com forum review

I've liked other work by Sarah Vowell, and I enjoy her pieces on NPR, but this book hits all kinds of hot buttons for me.

Let's start with the premise. The author spends a year listening to the radio - a lot - and keeping a journal about the experience. Those journal entries are the contents of the book, listed by date, station frequency and call letters. There are a few other things scattered in there too, but mostly it's journal entries. As such, it's not all that coherent. There isn't a story line, plot, history, or even a guiding theme to hold them together.

Actually, I suppose it could be argued there is a theme of sorts: Vowell's hatred of just about everything she mentions. But if vitriol is all that's supposed to hold this collection of paragraphs together, it didn't work for me.

Vowell's not shy about letting her opinions out. She has nothing but scorn for Rush Limbaugh. (That, at least, I can agree with.) Her taste in music is critical to her existence, and those who disagree with her are entirely in the wrong. With the exception of a few bits of ancient history (Elvis, for example) she mentions almost exclusively bands and artists that I've never heard of or never listen to. (For the record, I don't listen to Elvis either, but at least I've heard of him.) Kurt Cobain figures heavily into her rock god pantheon, as does Courtney Love. You're clearly a waste of skin if you can't name every song these people have been involved with.

Sadly I can see myself in her rant to a degree. My own musical preferences were completely different, but there was a time when I thought the "right" music was all important. Thankfully I got over that phase shortly after leaving college. Vowell is (or was) still stuck there over ten years after she graduated. Looking back, I was an ass about things like this on far too many occasions, but at this point I can admit it and move on. It's not clear that Vowell can do so.

Yet more things are wrong with this diatribe. Vowell has absolutely nothing good to say about any radio station except KGLT, the college station she worked for. She does like Ira Glass - famous for his NPR program This American Life - but everything on WBEZ except his show is terrible. The DJs on the myriad of other stations she mentions are all held up as examples of stupidity, or - at the very least - cluelessness. You can get a sense of the depth of her disgust from this quote, taken from the back cover, where you'd normally expect to find some blurb recommending the book in question:

"Vowell's touch is about as delicate as Teddy Kennedy's after a pitcher of martinis."
-- Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

In reality, though, I could set all of those issues aside. At some level I can even relate to it, as I have my own inner grouch who wants to complain about everything and everyone. Admittedly I don't usually let him out long enough to write a 230 page trade paperback, but I can identify with at least some of what she's whining, grousing, and bitching about. But what bothered me most is that Vowell holds everyone up to a higher standard than herself, fails to admit the purpose of things, or both.

By way of example, she excoriates NPR (National Public Radio) in many, many places. As far as I can tell, only Ira Glass's work there has any value. She calls out the various programs by name, trashing them repeatedly, and does the same for the various people who work there. It matters not what your race, gender, or vocal characteristics are, if you work on All Things Considered or Morning Edition it is quite obvious that Vowell finds you repulsive. Not quite as repulsive as Rush Limbaugh, but damn close.

With that as a background, it comes as no surprise that she complains bitterly - and mentions it again later - that one of the NPR announcers working on Morning Edition or All Things Considered (sorry, I didn't mark the pages where I saw this, and I can't bring myself to read it all again just to find the exact quotes) worries about screwing things up. She complains that this is an attitude she never saw back in the good old days working at KGLT. They were happy to screw up. They clowned around all the time.

Excuse me? You're trying to compare some Podunk college radio station staff with those of a major national news program, and because they differ in how much they worry about screwing things up you're bothered? To the point of rage?

But it doesn't end there. Elsewhere in these pages Vowell admits to being a teacher at an art school. Guess what? She found herself nervous early on because people were listening to her and writing down what she said.

Surely I'm not the only one to see the irony there? She rants that the people at NPR are afraid of screwing up, but can't see that she, herself, has the same issue in front of her class? To be afraid of making an error in public is only natural. Surely she knows that. And yet she can't acknowledge the difference between Bob Edwards messing up on Morning Edition and Tom the two-bit DJ doing so on the local college station. Given her other writings, I honestly thought she was smarter than that.

And then, as mentioned above, there's her unwillingness to acknowledge the purpose of things. The NPR programs she hates with so much passion for their their "boring" presentation and "snooty" announcers are actually doing the right thing. They're serious news programs. They tell people about the important events of the day; they do not air artsy, experimental radio pieces that no one will understand. They address a much larger audience - millions, not hundreds - and while a few whoopee cushions and some rambling, selected news headlines for college kids might be amusing, it doesn't (and cannot) do the same job as All Things Considered. Vowell can't see this, and aims a huge barrage of insults at quite a few excellent programs and people as a result. They do not deserve such treatment.

I can be an opinionated SOB, and I'd guess that some things I've written have or will offend some. But I hope I'm a bit less hysterical in my presentation than Vowell, and more willing to see others in the light of reason.

Radio On was published in 1996, and Vowell suffered through some nasty political times given her particular views on the world - Newt Gingrich, for example. Perhaps that added to her misery and lead her to be more harsh than she should have been. And obviously she was younger then, about 28, I believe. Maybe she has (or will) mellow with age. But none of those things excuses the gross mistreatment of others I found in this book. I'd skip it.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Lynn Varley

2008-06-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

Title:		Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
Authors:		Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Lynn Varley
Rating:
Alt Review Link:		dougshaw.com forum review

This is only the third graphic novel I've reviewed here, but I really like it. It's isn't great literature in the classic sense, but it tells a good story, and it kept me interested and entertained.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is a set of four stories, originally published separately, I believe. Collectively they tell of an older Batman, one who had retired but has to come back to defend Gotham City, a Batman driven by his inner demon.

This follows the real point of Batman in my mind: he's dark, tormented, and borders on doing evil while fighting evil. His history is revisited here again: the street corner where Bruce Wayne's parents were killed is present, and a couple of the classic villains make their appearance too. But here Batman also faces a new kind of evil, one with less restraint and more random in nature than he's faced before. He thinks of them as the decedents of the one that murdered his parents. "These are his children. A purer breed... and this world is theirs."

Originally published in 1986 - before the fall of the Soviet Union - these stories tell of a superhero coming out of retirement with a different twist than the much latter movie The Incredibles. Why Batman retired - vanished actually - isn't made clear. Perhaps I'd know that if I followed comic books, but I don't, and it adds a layer of mystery I actually like.

Also present is a long standing conflict between Batman and at least one of the other famous superheros. I won't say who - no need to spoil it for you if you don't already know - but that conflict is built right into the psyche of the two characters in question. If Batman represents the dark side of doing good, you can probably guess who's on the opposite side of things, so good he's hard to stomach for someone like Bruce Wayne.

The art here is well done, stylized but not so much as to be silly. And the story is more interesting than someone who doesn't read comic books might expect. Batman is always conflicted over what he does - what he has to do - and the philosophical issues there are deep. Not that this is a textbook from a college class on ethics, but you will ponder the limits of power, the role of vengeance vs. justice, and even simple aging. As I grow older these things all get to be more interesting to me, and they are well presented here.

This is highly recommended. I got my copy through paperbackswap.com, but I won't be passing it on. This one I'll keep and reread every so often. This Batman deserves no less.

Thanks to Patguy for recommending this one. It's definitely worth it.