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

Title:		The Art of Demotivation
Author:		E. L. Kersten, PH.D
Rating:

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.

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

Title:		Wired: The short life and fast times of John Belushi
Author:		Bob Woodward
Rating:

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.

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

Title:		Mother Night
Author:		Kurt Vonnegut
Rating:

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 Assassins' Gate: America In Iraq, George Packer

Title:		The Assassins' Gate: America In Iraq
Author:		George Packer
Rating:

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.

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

Title:		Blink
Author:		Malcolm Gladwell
Rating:

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 Road, Cormac McCarthy

Title:		The Road
Author:		Cormac McCarthy
Rating:

I wish I knew how to review this book. Frankly, I wish I had a consistent point of view about it.

On one hand, it was immensely irritating. There's no character development and no plot - to the extent that there is almost no action of any kind except walking. The characters have no names, and in fact there are no names anywhere in the book. Even worse, nothing here is ever explained. It's a post apocalyptic novel, but what caused the devastation is entirely unknown to the reader. From the perspective of the story, characters and setting, The Road is a complete bust.

And there are other things that irritated me. For some odd reason contractions that should end in "n't" (e.g. didn't) lack the apostrophe (e.g. didnt). Other uses of the apostrophe were normal. And dialog isn't quoted anywhere. Ever. Why does McCarthy change the rules of English usage in this book?

Beyond that there is the writing. It's simple and repetitive. Simple and repetitive. Really. Simple and repetitive. And irritating.

So there you have it. A lot of things about this book bugged me in various ways. I'd be tempted to give it a totally negative review and end it there, but...

On the other hand, there was something that kept me reading despite all of the above. At times it seemed The Road was more like poetry than prose, and that may have brought me back at points. (It was very easy to put this book down - even mid-sentence. But oddly I did come back to it.) The story is broken into bite sized bits - sometimes just a single sentence or two, sometimes a few paragraphs long. They're kind of like potato chips - reading just one is hard to do for some reason, even if you know it's not good for you.

In addition, that simple, repetitive style is related to the subject matter - walking a very long way in an inhospitable world. That may also have played on my subconscious and kept me interested when I should have gone off and done other things.

But just like someone who eats an entire bag of potato chips, I came away feeling unfulfilled. I learned nothing here - not about the characters or the people they meet, not about the world they inhabit, and not about anything else for that matter. I've read glowing reviews claiming the book shows off the wonderful bond of father and son. Nope. Some say the book discusses the human condition. I don't think so. As an exercise in story telling The Road is a failure. Maybe, as an exercise in prose poetry, it is a bit more interesting, but even then it's about 280 pages too long.

I'm not sure what McCarthy was trying to accomplish when he wrote this, and that is the clearest indication of the problem. I'm in the minority here, I know. Many others loved this book. I simply can't bring myself to that point. I've read a lot of post apocalyptic fiction over the years and this simply isn't that good.

A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 2, Anthony Boucher

Title:		A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 2
Editor:		Anthony Boucher
Rating:

Well, I didn't actually expect to get to this right away, but they way things fell out, it happened. As with volume one, this is a collection of SF from the 1940s and 1950s. It was only slightly better than the first volume, sadly. Read on for the details about the specific contents:

• Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. A short novel about an odd change in the way people think - actually in the physics of the world causing people to think more clearly and rapidly. I found this rather painful reading. Predictable as well.
  
  
• Bullard Reflects by Malcom Jameson. A short story that left me entirely cold. I suspect it was supposed to be humorous but it was just pathetic.
  
  
• The Lost Years by Oscar Lewis. This isn't SF, it's alternate history, though I suspect that category didn't exist when this collection was assembled. It's a short story describing what might have happened had Abraham Lincoln survived the assassination. I found it interesting reading.
  
  
• Dead Center by Judith Merril. A hard SF short story about early rocket flight and moon exploration. Sadly it just doesn't hold up to reality in hindsight.
  
  
• Lost Art by George O. Smith. A hard SF story full of improbable jargon about human engineers attempting to understand and reverse-engineer a Martian electrical device. Implausible in the extreme, sadly.
  
  
• The Other Side Of The Sky by Arthur C. Clark. A short story presenting the memories and tales of someone working on an early space station. Clark writes hard SF here, and much of what he writes is close enough to reality to give it a pass even now, but he can't tell a story about people well at all. A shame, really.
  
  
• The Man Who Sold The Moon by Robert A. Heinlein. A bad novella by a supposed master - one I can rarely read. This one describes early moon exploration assuming that it was driven by companies rather than governments. Among the vast number of irritating things about this story was the implicit claim that one person could design an entire moon transport vehicle. I don't know why I finished this one... I certainly kept hoping it would end.
  
  
• Magic City by Nelson S. Bond. A post apocalyptic tale in which the survivors start down the path to regaining some of the lost knowledge of their forbears. Predictable and pedantic.
  
  
• The Morning Of The Day They Did It by E. B. White. An end-of-civilization short story of no merit at all. It was supposed to be hard SF at the time, but in reality it got things so wrong - even then - that I can't imagine why it was reprinted here.
  
  
• Piggy Bank by Henry Kuttner. Another short story that would have been better left un-reprinted. This one documents the downfall of a wealthy man as a result of his own greed. The entire thing can only be described as silly.
  
  
• Letters From Laura by Mildred Clingerman. A bad short story about time travel. Pointless.
  
  
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. A novel, bridging the SF/fantasy gap in my mind. I'm of mixed opinions about this one. Early on I hated it, and hoped it would end, but it grew on me for some reason. It's frankly not believable, and the main character goes through too much change to be realistic, but somehow the story kept it together. I haven't read anything else by Bester, so I don't know what else he's written, but this one at least wound up interesting in the end.

As with the first volume, many of the giants of SF are represented here, and nearly all fail to produce what I would call good work.

I have no other comments except this: in both of these volumes I kept running into characters who smoke. The action of smoking appears in probably 80% of the items included in both volumes. Why? I know smoking was cool in the 50's, but was it really that entwined with our culture? I shudder to think about it.

The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Nineteenth Series, Edward L. Ferman

Title:		The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Nineteenth Series
Editor:		Edward L. Ferman
Rating:

This is going to be a short review.

I know I read this book. In fact, I just finished it. But I can remember just about nothing from it. Fourteen short stories, all published in Fantasy And Science Fiction magazine in about 1969 or 1970, but nothing stuck with me in any detail.

Perhaps the problem is that these stories are really a product of their time: two mention (or feature) recreational drug use; two discuss Bigfoot. How 1960's.

Most are by authors I've never heard of, but for the record, here's the list from the back cover:

• Gone Fishin' by Robing Scott Wilson
• Selectra Six-Ten by Avram Davidson
• Longtooth by Edgar Pangborn
• Sundance by Robert Silverberg
• The Brief, Swinging Career Of Dan And Judy Smythe by Carter Wilson
• Dream Patrol by Charles Runyon
• Calliope And Gherkin And The Yankee Doodle Thing by Evelyn E. Smith
• Notes Just Prior To The Fall by Barry N. Malzberg
• Confessions by Ron Goulart
• Get A Horse! by Larry Niven
• The Man Who Learned Loving by Theodore Sturgeon
• Litterbug by Tony Morphett
• An Adventure In The Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness by Vance Aandahl
• Starting From Scratch by Robert Sheckley
• Benji's Pencil by Bruce McAllister
• And six cartoons by Gahan Wilson

This volume just didn't hold up. It wasn't bad. It wasn't good. It just wasn't. Oh well.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Title:		Catch-22
Author:		Joseph Heller
Rating:

I've been slogging through two different books lately, neither has been fun, and neither is all that interesting, but this one finished up first.

"What?" I hear you cry. "Catch-22 is famous! It's one of the top 100 books! It's a classic! It has to be good! It is good!"

Forget it. I don't care that it appears at number seven on The Modern Library's list. It's not that good. Not even remotely. I'm giving it a neutral rating for a very specific reason, rather than the negative rating I think it really deserves.

My reasons for such a harsh judgment are pretty straightforward:

1. It borders on incoherent. The story isn't told in any order the reader can fathom. Yes, perhaps, if you take detailed notes about a couple of things you might be able to track some of it, but overall, it's impossible to follow.
   
   
2. There is no - and I mean zero - character development. None. Not a single one of the characters we meet changes in any appreciable way during the book, except that a bunch of them die. At the very end you might think that the Chaplain has possibly changed, but three pages later the book is over and you never find out. Yossarian - in theory the hero of the book - also never changes. Right up until the very end he's still the same confused git that he was at the start.
   
   
3. There are no characters to care about in here. People talk about Major Major Major Major as being hysterically funny. He's a bit player, mentioned in any depth in a couple of short chapters and just a passing character after that. What about the guy who's extending his life through boredom? There's almost no actual mention of that here. Again, he's just not there. None of the characters has a role significant enough to cause me to get interested in them. I kept wondering when someone would do something interesting, and if I should even bother finishing the book if they didn't.
   
   
4. The characters have no motivations. Why is Yossarian good (or at least as good as he is)? Why does Nately's whore go off the deep end like she does? Why are Colonels Cathcart & Korn slimy bastards? We don't know. Nothing is ever explained about them. This just adds to the fact that I don't care about any of the characters in the least.
   
   
5. The writing is poor. Heller describes the appearance of characters we've met before almost every time we meet them again. Each time he blurs the few distinct impressions we have of them until they're all just faceless, pointless people. That may be deliberate on his part, but it keeps them from being memorable. Again, maybe that was part of the point, but if he's going to write about people we're supposed to forget, why bother writing about them in the first place?
   
   Oh, and every so often Heller tosses in a word or two that you need an OED to lookup. I'm good at picking meanings up from context - I do it all the time - but this was just pointless. All it did was irritate me.
   
   
6. It's not funny. Pure and simple. It's just not funny. I never even cracked a smile while reading this, let alone laughed out loud. It's so off that it doesn't even work as farce. That was my biggest frustration with the book. I'd been lead to believe that it was hilarious when it simply wasn't.

So why am I giving it a neutral rating? I suspect there is a matter of perspective here, and I grant that I may not have the right one. It is possible that - for its time - this was a ground breaking book. Maybe no one had written like this about WWII before. Perhaps no one had made fun of "The Greatest Generation" in this way. If so - and I think it is possible - then taken in that context it may be an important work. Viewed with my sensibilities, from 2007, though, it fails totally. But on the assumption that lots of people think it is either important or funny or both, I'm not going to trash it completely. I don't claim to understand those points of view, but perhaps there is something to them. I'm giving it a neutral rating for that reason only.

Lastly, I have another frustration to go with this book that I want to call out separately. For as long as I can remember I've known the expression "Catch-22" and wondered where it came from. I'd been told it came from this book, so I was hoping for a real explanation here. Not of what the expression means - that I understand - but why that phrase was picked. Is there perhaps some historical reason for it? Or does it come from some obscure legal jargon?

Nope. He made it up. From whole cloth. There's nothing in the book about it at all. Nothing except the first explanation of what it means. But if you search wikipedia for "Catch-22" you learn (as of the date this review was written anyway) that the book was originally titled Catch-18 and the publisher wanted it changed to avoid confusion with Leon Uris's Mila 18. Read the wiki page for the details.

Now let me be clear. If an author is good enough to get some new phrase stuck into the language as completely as "catch-22" has become a part of idiomatic English, I congratulate him or her for the achievement. Heller deserves full credit for that. But when I stand back and say "OK.. why that phrase?" there is no answer. If he'd done something really clever - based the phrase on something that was obscure but interesting or relevant, I'd really applaud him. But in this case he could just as easily have called it the "olgleblat rule" as "catch-22" (or "catch-18") and it wouldn't have mattered in the slightest:

"That's some rule, that ogleblat rule," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

See. No change. Nothing important differs. It's just silly. Now I do admire and appreciate silliness, but for it to work it has to be funny, and as I pointed out above, it's not.

I wish I'd enjoyed this book.

As it happens, I saw the movie of the same name just before starting to read the book. The movie is actually much worse than the book. Entire series of events are explained even less well in the movie. For example, I had no idea who it was that was stabbing Yossarian in the movie at all. None. I had to read the book to learn that tidbit. Of course I still didn't care, but at least the book let me know who it was. So give the movie a pass along with the book. Neither is any good.

The Beatrice Letters, Lemony Snicket

Title:		The Beatrice Letters
Author:		Lemony Snicket
Rating:

I wish I knew what to make of this "book". It's a small collection of letters between Beatrice Beaudelair and Lemony Snicket, billed as "supplemental material" to the 13 books of the Lemony Snicket series.

It's mildly amusing, but I wish I'd taken my own advice. Back in my review of Lemony Snicket, The Unauthorized Autobiography I said that people should steer clear and read only the actual series. I should have remembered that.

The other things I said there are also true here. If you like puzzles and have the time to try and put it all together, it may be amusing. For me, alas, it was mostly a waste of time.

Year's Best SF 9, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer editors

Title:		Year's Best SF 9
Editors:		David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
Rating:

There have been a lot of distractions lately, and they have kept me from reading as much as I usually do. As a result I picked up a collection of short science fiction stories to fill the few gaps I've had in my schedule. I wish it had been worth it.

Maybe my tastes are changing. Maybe I'm just getting older now, and I see things that I didn't previously see. Regardless, if this collection is the best short SF that 2003 produced, I really wonder about the state of that genre.

Most of the so called "hard" SF in here still had elements of the mystical in my opinion, and character development was nonexistent. The plots were uniformly uninteresting as well. In fact, having finished a 500 page paperback, I can only really remember bits from the first and last stories. The first because there was a unique concept presented, though not that well executed. The last because it was an novella - much longer than anything else here - and because it was the one I finished today.

In all, this was a disappointment, but perhaps that is my fault rather than the work itself. Maybe I am expecting too much from short fiction. Or maybe I have changed. Several years ago we let our subscriptions to both Asimov's and F&SF lapse because they just weren't all that interesting anymore. It seems nothing has changed in the years since, at least based on the contents of this volume.

Emergency Response Workbook, American Red Cross

Title:		Emergency Response Workbook
Author:		American Red Cross
Rating:

This is the companion workbook to the first aid textbook I have been reading for my first aid class. Alas it is just as full of errors and goofs as the textbook is.

In addition, however, here you are exposed to the astoundingly stupid kinds of test questions that the Red Cross expects you to answer about first aid. The questions break down into three categories as I see things:

• Stupid questions. As a first responder, do I need to know what the most common cause of injuries to people in some age range is? No, I don't. I need to know how to help keep them alive if they are injured. I hate to say it, but I'd guess that a third or so of the questions in this book (and on the tests that I have and will be taking) are of this nature. It's fine as background material, and it might aid in comprehension and retention, but when the rubber meets the road and I hop off the fire engine on Highway 17 to pull someone out of a burning car, it is pointless. In my mind, testing me on it is pointless too.
• Questions with no good answer. There are various reasons this happens. Sometimes the question doesn't give you enough information, and all the answers make assumptions. Sometimes they are assuming a particular kind of first responder, and various answers might be right depending on the point of view you're taking as the responder. Sometimes they just make no sense at all. This is perhaps 5% of the questions here.
• Reasonable questions. These are actually relevant questions that test your retention of specific facts you need to know to perform first aid at the minimum level to get the certificate. They make up the rest of the content.

If it seems like I might be clutching at straws here, let me demonstrate with an example. To do so, you need to know that the first and foremost thing stressed with first responders is not to become another victim. If you have any doubt about what is going on, your job is to keep back, keep others away, and call for more advanced help. Simple, eh? And it makes a LOT of sense in cases like (say) hazardous materials spills, fires, etc. If you lack the training and the gear, staying safe and keeping others safe is a great thing to do.

OK, with that in mind, there was a question on my midterm that said something like: you've come upon an accident at a busy intersection just below a hill. There are 4 victims. 3 of them are in X, Y, and Z condition. The 4th victim was thrown from the car and is lying in the middle of a lane of oncoming traffic. What do you do about that 4th victim? Your answer choices are things like "ignore him and care for others", "move him", "park a vehicle to block traffic so he won't get hit", and so on.

Note the total lack of detail. What sort of first responder am I? A fire fighter with a truck full of equipment and help, or am I entirely on my own? How busy is it? Is the victim lying in the road visible to oncoming traffic, or is he below the rise so he's going to get hit any second now? What risk would I be in if I went into that lane of traffic to look him over? Also note that having been thrown from a car means a high likelihood of neck or back injuries, among other things, and you don't move those folks without cervical collars, head restraints, and backboards unless you absolutely have to.

Well, after you digest all of that and guess at an answer (since none of the answers are really right) you find out they think the answer is to move the victim out of traffic. Now as a fire fighter in training I know that is the right answer, but as a fire fighter I am expected to take certain risks to help others. Without more detail, I have no idea if a citizen first responder should do that or not. And it certainly seems like it might violate the "don't become another victim" teaching. But fine. Whatever.

Later in the same exam, though, I hit a different question that says something like: a car accident has occurred. A car has left the road and hit a building. The victim is inside the vehicle and appears unconscious. You can see blood. Blah blah. The building is damaged but seems stable. (My emphasis.) What do you do about this victim? And the choices - among other things - are "wait for advanced help to stabilize the building" and "treat the victim now".

Here again, I have all kinds of problems. If it seems stable, as a fire fighter, I have news for you: I am going to go treat the victim. By the time an engineer shows up and says things really are safe the victim could have died of shock or any number of other things. But the answer they wanted was wait for advanced help. Now we're back to not becoming another victim. And while I respect that point of view, I hope it is obvious that the answer for the first question and the answer for the second question are in conflict in terms of what the first responder is expected to actually do.

That's the kind of thing a good editor would have found and avoided. If it was only one or two questions like this, I'd probably just ignore it, but it is endemic to the entire book, as well as the tests that I have to take. The Red Cross really needs to get some professional educators involved in their test material creation, along with that previously mentioned editor. This stuff could all be so much better than it is.

Emergency Response, American Red Cross

Title:		Emergency Response
Author:		American Red Cross
Rating:

I have spent the past three months going through this book, page by page, as part of my training to become a volunteer fire fighter. As a result of that time and effort I should wind up with a first responder certificate in a few weeks, and that will be the last straw that lets me finally ride the fire trucks here and help people in need.

With that much time spent slogging through this book, you'd think I'd have a definite opinion about it. And I do, sort of.

On one level, the book is good. The material is important and the basics of first aid should probably be learned by almost everyone in an ideal world. Thus, learning what to do in various cases to save a life is important, and this book is good because it assists that process.

On the other hand, this book sucks. It desperately needed a serious editor to remove all the internal inconsistencies and errors, and to make the overly complex presentations of simple concepts easier to understand.

Here's what I hope for: new CPR protocols were announced late in 2005, and they are a significant departure from the current CPR protocols. In addition, some of the other first aid guidelines are changing as well. As a result, the Red Cross has to redo its books to match those new protocols. If they are on the ball this is a chance to clean up all the stupidities in this book and create something much, much better.

As you may have figured out somewhere along the line, I am a cynic about human nature, though, and I predict here that their new books will be just as bad as this one. Only time will tell, and I'd love to be wrong, but I would bet money on it from what I know.

If you're interested in First Aid and participating in your community, you'll see this book (or the new version) when you take an advanced first aid class via the Red Cross or any organization teaching this stuff. In that context you'll understand how important this stuff is, and yet how bad it can be. I encourage you to take such a class if you can. It might matter one day. And when you do, try to be patient with the poor training materials.

Death Spins the Platter, Ellery Queen

Title:		Death Spins the Platter
Author:		Ellery Queen
Rating:

Death Spins the Platter is the second Ellery Queen novel in a double that I was loaned by Ed Ting.

In my review of the first book in this double - Dead Man's Tale - I wondered aloud (so to speak) about what I had missed in my upbringing around Ellery Queen, since that book was not a whodunit, nor did it feature Ellery Queen.

Well, this second book is closer to what I thought Ellery Queen books would be; it is a whodunit, at least. However, it still doesn't feature Ellery Queen. Thus, I am still not at all clear on what the Ellery Queen franchise was all about.

In this book, the victim dies, and we follow a hard boiled reporter (if I can mash such terms together) through the process of determining who the killer is. The plot is reasonably believable, I guess, but there are problems here that significantly detract from the story.

The first is that the characters are still really wooden. None of them come alive for me, and I don't buy some of the dialog and interaction between them, since I have no background to go on. In a couple of cases the author attempts to provide some background, but it's given in such a ham fisted way that I never buy into it. In short, there are many character related obstacles to achieving the willing suspension of disbelief.

The other major issue with this volume - in my mind - is that the reporter is doing all the work for the police. I am perfectly willing to admit that such a thing could happen, but in this case it simply wasn't realistic. The single largest example would be a spoiler, and I won't do that, but I can say this: if you were a reporter who learned something interesting and technical about a murder case from one of the suspects, wouldn't you actually verify it before you used it in conversation with someone else? Particularly as an accusation?

How do you know that what you've been told is true? In fact you have good reason not to trust many things the suspects are telling you, and yet you trust this bit of information without checking it out first? No, sorry, I simply just don't buy it. If you learn of an accusation from one suspect about another, you either check it for validity yourself, or hand it over to the police and get them to verify it before you make use of it. So again, the willing suspension of disbelief just doesn't come easily here.

Finally, there was one more thing that bugged me about this, but I suspect that really is my problem, rather than the book's. Death Spins the Platter was originally published in 1962, and there are a few uses of language and servants that I just found difficult to swallow. Perhaps people really did talk that way back then, and perhaps some of the upper crust really still did have black children as servants, but it all feels so wrong now that it's hard for me to ignore. As I say, that is probably my problem, rather than the book's, but it annoyed me enough to reduce my enjoyment of the book.

On the whole, this was a major step up from the last Ellery Queen novel I read, but there are still several more steps to go before I hit something I'm really going to like. One left to try, and we'll see what comes of that.

Haz-Mat Course Book, CDF

Title:		Haz-Mat Course Book
Author:		CDF
Rating:

This was the next in an ongoing series of assembled course materials that I have to read as a volunteer fire fighter. It was, frankly, dry as dust. The main things I need to know as a fire fighter coming onto any event scene are:

• Be aware that apparently non-hazardous materials events might actually be (or become) haz-mat events
• If a haz-mat situation is discovered, I get to:
• worry about everyone's safety, including my own
• setup a perimeter around the haz-mat, maybe rescue people (depending on a risk/benefit analysis), and deny entry to anyone wanting in
• call in the big guns who know how to deal with haz-mat situations better than I do

That's it. Really. An entire, thick, three ring binder of stuff that can be digested down to those few bullet points. Probably 250 pages of text.

Accompanying that tome was three days of in-class training to be told about this stuff.

To be honest, I am happy I took the training and read the book. My eyes are opened a bit wider to the real issues around haz-mat events. In reality, though, most of that eye opening experience comes from the real-life stories that the instructors told us about haz-mat situations they've been involved in. Some nasty things happen to fire fighters.

The volunteer company I am in responds to accidents on something like seven miles of the main highway between San Jose and Santa Cruz, CA. A huge amount of cargo is hauled over that road each day, some of it hazardous, and nearly all of it unmarked. The things that could happen there are a bit scary. Never-the-less, I will continue my studies and make myself available to respond to calls as soon as my training allows. This course - and the book - are a state mandated part of the training that lets me do this. I can live with that.

In a followup post to the original review, I added this:

In the interest of sharing lots of possibly useless information...

There are 2 major ways that hazardous materials are identified, that I know of, so far:

• On trucks there are department of transportation (DOT) mandated placards for some loads and contents.
• On buildings, tanks, and other stationary things, there is an "NFPA 704" placard.
  

DOT Placards

These are diamond shaped placards, generally containing a magic number, and often a symbol of some sort, or at least some unique color scheme. They are defined in a book called the "Emergency Response Guidebook". You can find and download a mid sized PDF version of that book online here: http://phmsa.dot.gov/hazmat/library/erg, and if you google "Emergency Response Guidebook" you'll find a few places that sell hard copies for a reasonable fee.

This book contains ways to identify some of the hazardous materials that are hauled around in trucks. There are several sections of the book:

• White Section: general information on placards, placarding requirements, etc.
• Yellow Section: look up a number to determine material (or class of material) and proper initial response data.
• Blue Section: look up a material by name.
• Orange Section: guide pages to describe how to handle the spill initially.
• Green Section: isolation and protective action (evacuate or shelter in place, depending on many things) distances for the really bad stuff, which is highlighted in the yellow and blue sections. (This is the "methyl-ethyl-die-for-sure-inol" section, as my instructors called it.)

Why would you want this book? Well, I may actually need one for real at some point, but in actuality, I am a nerd, and it amuses me to know what is in the vehicles around me:

Me, driving the car: "Hey, what's in that truck? Placard number 2810."
My wife, thumbing through the book: "VX nerve gas."
Me: "I think I'll back off."

Yes, VX really is listed in here. Along with 5 forms of uranium hexafluoride, the nastiest of which (I think) is called "Uranium hexafluoride, fissile containing more than 1% Uranium-235." If you see a truck placarded 2977, I'd keep my distance. Then again, the military is not required to placard any of their trucks, regardless of what they are carrying. Not good.

NFPA 704 Placards

The NFPA is the National Fire Protection Association. They created the standard (number 704) that defines the 4 color (blue, red, yellow, white) diamond placards you have seen on tanks, buildings, etc. You can find a short but reasonable description of that standard here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFPA_704. Alternately, you can buy the entire description of the standard from here: http://www.nfpa.org/aboutthecodes/AboutTheCodes.asp?DocNum=704&cookie%5Ftest=1. A brief description, though, is as follows:

The 3 colored diamonds each contains a number ranging from 0 to 4. 0 means no hazard. 4 means a very high hazard. The 4th (white) diamond has other information in it. The colors each have a specific meaning, starting from the left and working clockwise:

• Blue: health hazards
• Red: flammability hazard
• Yellow: reactivity hazard
• White: symbols indicating unusual or specific hazards.

So, for example, an NFPA 704 reading "421" with a "W" with a line through it means:

• a severe health hazard
• a moderate flammability hazard
• a low reaction hazard
• whatever it is reacts badly to water

Given all that, you might not want to go into that building, depending on the circumstances.

I hope all of this information is interesting to someone other than me.

Basic Firefighter Academy (2005), CDF

Title:		Basic Firefighter Academy (2005)
Author:		CDF
Rating:

I am embarking on a new "career" as a volunteer fire fighter. Or at least, I hope I am. There are still many opportunities to wash out.

This book is actually a three ring binder of information assembled by the CDF that covers basic, overview stuff about working in the volunteer firefighting business. It doesn't actually cover anything about fighting fires - or medical response, or anything else directly call related like that - that's all coming in additional books and training. This volume really is more of an introduction to the CDF / County fire department and how it works.

Sections covered things like the incident command system, basics of vehicle safety, how to put on the structure firefighting clothes, some legal issues, etc.

If it wasn't 200 pages or so, I'd have ignored this volume and waited to claim something more meaty, but it did take time away from my other reading, so here it is.

There are more of this sort of thing coming, I'm sure.