My reviews of books in reverse chronological order (i.e. most-recent-first) of date-of-review (which is not necessarily the same as the date-read).
Title: Can't Buy My Love
Author: Jean Kilbourne
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 30 April 2002
Jean Kilbourne came to her advertising and media meta-analysis through personal experience---early in her life, she was a model, and well versed in the art of alchohol and tobacco abuse.
Her book Can't Buy My Love is a superb critique of the depth and breadth of advertising in our lives. Not only are we constantly bombarded by companies exhorting us to buy and consume, we are often either not even aware of the shill or else dismissive of the power of advertising on us---this is exactly what advertisers would like us to believe.
Advertising apologists and mass-media outlets claim that ads do not influence people, and certainly not negatively. But these same people advertise in trade-publications devoted to winning advertising dollars about how wonderful their particular demographic (magazine/media consumers) are particularly suited to a specific company attempting to sell products. Likewise, the vast amounts of money spent by advertisers gives lie to the proposition that ads do not influence people to buy and consume more---otherwise, the only logical conclusion remaining is that companies and their public relations departments are run by utter morons who think nothing of throwing away billions of dollars a year in pursuits that have no tangible benefits for their business.
Even more insidious, as Kilbourne points out, is the juxtaposition of supposed journalism and advertising in the same magazines. The cover page of a magazine bemoans the many ways that our children are being attacked and abused, while the back cover of the very same issue of the very same magazine has full-color ads for tobacco and hard liquor.
Ads for selling cars, jewelry, perfume, or clothes, hardly ever sell the product for their primary characteristics, but as means to become more sexy and lovable, or else as proxies for love. Buy this [product] and you will find yourself irresistible is the message.
Unhealthy, expensive, fattening foods are sold with the same level of virulence and intensity as diets that promise to work off the ill-effects of these foods.
Advertising both influences our culture and provides a stark reflection of our own values. The throwaway and instant gratification mentality of people is reflected in what advertising promotes, and the two evolve in a vicious circle.
Using clippings and photos of ads from magazines, Kilbourne makes her critique both extremely entertaining, and educational. She also defers specific solutions of combating advertising to the very end of the book, and wisely refrains from suggesting that the government should adopt to stop the scourge of advertising---after all, those who read such books and realize the psychological assualt of advertising can choose to use their rational faculties and become better consumers, while the morons will continue to be exploited.
An excellent book.
Title: The Age of Diminished Expectations
Author: Paul Krugman
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 27 April 2002
The roaring, dot-com-boom mad 90s are now over, and I decided to go back and re-read Paul Krugman's first popular book: The Age of Diminished Expectations, written in 1990 and laying out a perspective for the coming decade.
Krugman's book is more of a survey of macroeconomics than anything else, but it is quite amazing how well his prediction scenarios have come to pass. More important (than his raw predictions), however, are the inter-connections he makes between the various economic phenomena he talks about---one cannot have the best (however defined) of everything, an increase of a certain quantity must be balanced by a corresponding decrease of some other quantity. This TINSTAAFL attitude is the essence of good economic thinking.
Krugman starts off by enumerating the 3, and only 3, basic metrics of economic well-being: (1) productivity, (2) distribution of wealth, and (3) employment. Everything else, inflation, trade and budget deficits, industry specialization, tax policy, etc. all become secondary to these 3 primary metrics of economic prosperity.
The book itself was born of what Krugman sees as a puzzle. While the 1990s began with the US showing lukewarm productivity growth (compared to earlier decades), highly skewed distribution of wealth, and moderate (NAIRU-optimal) unemployment rates, the populace does not seem to be too concerned about this state of affairs, and hence, there is no coherent political policy aimed at these issues.
What, instead, seems to be at the forefront of discussion are second-order and third-order effects like trade deficits and inflation. Krugman dissects and analyzes, step by step, why none of these policy hot-buttons matter to the economic well-being of a nation.
Krugman concludes the book with a description of 3 possible scenarios for the unfolding of the 1990s: his happy scenario seems to have come to pass; large productivity gains, robust employment, and continuing skewness in wealth distribution. However, we probably find ourselves today, in early 2002, in somewhat of a similar predicament to what we might have seen in the early 1990s. Reading this book provides the much needed historical perspective that there is really nothing new under the sun (thank you, Ecclesiastes) and allows us to better evaluate the political crapola of the Republicrat fuckwads.
A typically excellent book from Krugman.
Title: Fearful Symmetry
Author: Ian Stewart, Martin Golubitsky
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 24 April 2002
Ian Stewart is possibly one of the worst science writers I have ever read. He seems to have managed to find the sub-optimal bitter-spot right between excessive complexity (but accuracy) and excessive simplification (but intelligibility). The result is that his so-called popularization books are neither accurate nor understandable.
Fearful Symmetry is supposed to be about symmetry, broken symmetry, and chaos-generated symmetry in the natural world. A lay, but valid, view of symmetry is that it reduces the number of degrees of freedom in a system---what one might naively think are the many possible configurations of a system, if one were to adopt a simple combinatorial counting procedure, turns out to be over-counted because of the inherent symmetries in these configurations. Not only does symmetry simplify the problem being analyzed, it can also tell us what configurations of the system are not possible (if the system is to satisfy certain symmetry constraints).
While Stewart and Golubitsky do mention some of these points in their book, they never deliver on their promise of showing us examples. Even the stereotypical symmetry topics of mineral crystals and animal gaits is ruined by an extremely annoying and preachy attitude where the authors never explain their symmetry-based arguments. Instead we are treated to 10 pages worth nonsense, irrelevant, non-mathematical ramblings followed by a 3-sentence statement to the effect "and symmetry proves we can have only 243 configurations, trust us on this one, haha". This is one of those books that suffers from too little math.
Stewart and Golubitsky also exemplify the dictum "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". They analyse (in their shoddy, preachy, rambling manner) such phenomena as fluid flow and galactic evolution (of the spiral arms of galaxies) using "symmetry-breaking". Here they really are stretching to make the connections between symmetry and the physical phenomena at hand; they do not succeed even in explaining what a mathematical model of the physical system looks like. Instead, they simply quote various "theorems" breezily and leave the reader just as bewildered and unenlightened after the prose as they might have been before.
Skip this crappy book. And, while you are at it, skip all of Ian Stewart's so-called popularizations.
Title: The Atoms of Language
Author: Mark Baker
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 20 April 2002
Comparative historical linguistics, especially that of the Indo-European language family, has been the big success-story for the field. Starting right from the era of William James (when he started the ball rolling by making the audacious claim that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek were all descendents of an earlier, extinct language), linguists have been identifying the genetic/historical descent patterns of the various languages of the world.
Theoretical linguistics, on the other hand, and at least in its modern, scientific form, was the creation of Noam Chomsky, and attempted to propose a universal grammar underlying all of human languages, and indeed all of human thought.
Mark Baker's The Atoms of Language is a superb popular summary of the recent work in theoretical linguistics in two fronts: (1) universal grammar, i.e. the principles of language construction that are invariant across all human languages, and (2) parametric typology, i.e. systematic variations of meta-grammar rules that, when applied to the universal grammar, can build every human language in all their variation.
Baker starts off by listing a few common typological rules that even naive speakers of 2 or more languages know about. Most popular among these is word-order among subject, verb and object: English being a paradigmatic SVO language while Japanese being a paradigmatic SOV language. Baker analyzes these surface typological variations as arising from a very small collection of correlated phrase-structure rules that he calls a linguistic parameter. Languages, then, differ from each other in the settings (on/off, yes/no, front/back, left/right; although not all parameter settings are binary choices) of a small number of parameters.
Baker also uses the examples of English and Mohawk to identify linguistic universals, i.e. invariants that transcend parameters and are obeyed by all languages, despite surface appearances.
Atoms takes over from where Pinker's The Language Instinct left off---accepting that language acquisition is truly an instinct, and going on to find well-defined rules that explain linguistic variation independent of the historical relationships between languages and language families.
Baker often uses analogies from chemistry (hence the atoms of the title) to explain parameters; I don't think these analogies necessarily work (they do not harm either) since anyone well-versed enough in chemistry to understand them will also be scientifically literate enough to understand the linguistic story as is.
More to the point, for me, is that anyone with a computer science training would consider the premise of theoretical linguistics, a la Universal Grammar, to be almost obvious---indeed, Chomsky's seminal work on syntax lies at the heart, however implicitly, of parsing theory in computer science. Linguistic concepts like tree-structures and tree-transformations are completely natural ways of thinking for computer scientists, and they would particularly enjoy this book.
Towards the end of his book, Baker attempts to provide some insight into why parameters evolved and why the human mind uses parameters to process language. In this attempt, Baker is following in the footsteps of the quest for the holy grail of theoretical linguistics---namely, attempting to understand how the human mind works via language. This is also the weakest part of the book, and Baker's speculations are no more deep than what I could come up with in an evening of discussion with like-minded friends---but this does not detract anything for the rest of the book.
A superb read.
Title: The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison
Author: Mike Wilson
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 9 April 2002
The answer to the question implied by the title of the book The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison is that God does not think he is Larry Ellison.
Mike Wilson paints a fast-paced, often insightful, and always entertaining portrait of Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle. Along the way, he discusses the trends in the computer software industry as a whole---contrasting the corporate cultures in Oracle, Apple, IBM, and HP (to name a few examples), and the effect this culture divide has had on the way Oracle works. One of the other characters discussed in the book is Robert Miner, another Oracle co-founder and the gentle yin to Ellison's brash yang---and the contrast between the two seemingly universal in the industry (a la Jobs and Wozniak, or Gates and Allen).
History is written by the winners, and Wilson's book often runs the risk of being misinterpreted as a success story where the success (of Oracle, the company, and Ellison, the multi-billionaire) is no more than the inevitable consequence of intelligence, personality, and perception of the markets. However, we do not get to read books about the equally spectacular failures spearheaded by people just as flamboyant or intelligent or perceptive as Ellison, Bill Gates, or others. This all's well that end's well theme was the only part of the book that I disliked, even though it was never a hagiography of Ellison.
Ellison's personality comes through strongly in Wilson's writing---the gigantic ego combined with a deep insecurity, and the two mixing to provide a ruthless drive to not just succeed but to destroy. Many of the colorful characters in the book are still working at the company (making the book all that more enjoyable for those who have worked or are still working at Oracle).
In the end, software geeks and industry watchers would gain a better appreciation of this complex figure who, all things considered, has changed the field (however small the change may be in the larger scheme of things).
Title: The Burden of Bad Ideas
Author: Heather MacDonald
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 28 March 2002
One of the many discriminants between conservatism and liberalism (and equivalently, between Republicanism and Democratism, the American political implementations of these ideologies) is that the former stresses individual responsibility while the latter emphasizes social conditioning. This dichotomy has consequences in the solutions used by conservatives and liberals in their atteempts to change the world.
Heather MacDonald's The Burden of Bad Ideas is a critique of liberalism's quest for societal-reform-gone-bad. It is a collection of essays excoriating the ill-effects of liberalism: in the activism of philanthropic foundations, sex education policies, higher education, law, primary school education, government, and so on and so forth ranging over all aspects of public life.
While I believe that liberalism deserves a constant and powerful critique to keep it from degenerating into an incoherent mess of self-serving, guilt-reducing, mumbo-jumbo (fatso-morons like Oprah and Rosie being some of the most visible symptoms of this vulgarized liberalism), this book is not that dose of tough medicine. MacDonald crosses the line beyond which good critique descends into a rambling, shrill, foaming-at-the-mouth rant.
At almost every point in these essays, an error or an act-gone-bad even remotely traceable to a "liberal" thought (defined as something to the left of Cato Institute dogma) is beaten not just to death, but to a point where the putrefying remains of the verbiage start to obscure the thing being criticized.
For example, while MacDonald starts off by making a valid point that abstinence should be an integral part of sex education (which, admittedly had been more focused on handing out condoms to schoolchildren), she does not stop there but, almost knee-jerk reflexively, has to make a nasty remark about Jocelyn Elders's comment about the place of masturbation in the expression of individual sexuality. Such uncalled-for churlishness effectively destroys the force the critique.
Here's another example. MacDonald rages over post-modernist and feminist evisceration of legal theory and practice, but fails to realize that in her own writing she credits other liberal organizations (like the ACLU) for fighting the Frenchy and feminazi menace.
And these are not isolated samplings, but a template for all of the criticism in this book.
The other major fault in MacDonald's writing is that she never once, even peripherally, says anything bad about conservative/Republican ideologies and policies. Never! For example, in all of her 50+ page relentless harangue on the declining standards of public education (accepting for the moment that the standards really are declining), this stupid woman never once, not once, mentions the creationist cretin dipweeds gutting biology curricula in Redneckville, USA. No wonder George Will wrote a glowing blurb for this tripe.
I shall just have to wait to read a well-reasoned critique of liberal nonsense from some other source. This book is not it, not by a long shot. Skip it unless you are a Republican fuckwad.
Title: Riding Lessons
Author: Bo Derek
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 26 March 2002
Riding Lessons is the autobiography Mary Cathleen Collins, better known as Bo Derek. While the book may not appeal to anyone not already interested in Bo's life, it is calm and honestly written---something I cannot say of many autobiographies (most of which are rambling core-dumps; it is a sad day indeed when Bo Derek writes a better, more-readable book than does James Watson).
The book covers Bo's life with her (many years senior) husband John Derek, and her lifelong obsession with horses (riding and breeding them). Bo is also extremely honest about her own lack of acting ability, and about her involvement with films---on both sides of the camera, as actress and as producer. The only thing not sufficiently explained in the book was the reason for her involvement in Republicanism---by her own admission, she is not rich enough to benefit from the most common Republican rape of the country---tax cuts. Republican conservatism also does not square with Bo's image as a sex symbol.
In any case, this book is a good, fast read if only as an example of a good autobiography.
Title: Saving Adam Smith
Author: Jonathan B. Wight
Category: Fiction
Review written: 22 March 2002
If Russell Roberts's The Invisible Heart was the point, then Jonathan Wight's Saving Adam Smith is the counter-point. The book is a fictional setting in which the original ideas of Adam Smith are explained and analysed.
Adam Smith was more interested in moral philosophy (just as most of his Englightenment contemporaries were) than in economics as such. His first major work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the book laid out the preconditions for free-market capitalism to work: moral virtue, justice, and political freedom. His follow-up (and the more widely known) Wealth of Nations assumed the preconditions as given and explained how free-markets, competition, and specialization would foster human happiness and even enhance the very preconditions that make capitalism work.
Wight discusses the ideas of Adam Smith in the modern context where the moral virtue aspect of Smith's work have been set aside (forgotten, considered irrelevant [...]) in the service of pure economic measures of prospertity, and in the service of laissez-faire capitalism.
As an introduction to classical economics, told in a modernized language, Saving Adam Smith works well. However, Wight has chosen to not have a contemporary character paraphrase Smith, but to have Smith himself speak (via a spirit channeling plot device)---something I found rather annoying and silly. There are other unrealistic story elements involving romantic love which are painful to read in their ludicrousness. All of this makes me more and more convinced that writing good fiction is such a difficult task that professional writers on non-fictional matters (economists, for example) should look to avoid it---even dry non-fiction prose is better than badly done fiction.
A satisfactory read, nevertheless.
Title: The Dating Game
Author: Cherry Lewis
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 20 March 2002
The best science writing is decidedly Whiggish---ahistorical, progressive, and with minimal involvement of personalities.
The story of the precise determination of the age of the Earth is a fascinating one, and benefits well from a Whiggish portrayal by Cherry Lewis in The Dating Game. Lewis writes, ostensibly, the biography of Arthur Holmes, the geologist whose work with radioactive isotopes of uranium helped solved the problem, but the biographical details of Holmes's life are well-separated from the scientific story.
The earliest geologists: Hutton, Lyell, and William Smith had identified, by the early 1800s, the relative ordering of geological strata based on comparative mineralogy and fossil evidence. However, absolute ages were never available, and different methods of estimating rock ages (based on uniformitarian processes of sedimentation) gave inconsistent answers.
By the end of the 19th century, physicists had used thermodynamic arguments about the rate of cooling of an initially molten Earth (to its present day temperature) to place an upper limit on the amount of time that had elapsed since the origin of the planet. And, much to the chagrin of geologists and evolutionary biologists, this age was of the order of a few million years and much too short for geological and evolutionary processes to have occured through gradual change.
It was only the discovery of radioactivity that allowed physicists to identify a new source of heat that could keep the Earth's core molten inspite of radiative cooling, and also allowed them to determine the age of rocks based on the relative isotope ratios of various radioactive decay products.
Arthur Holmes, a British geologist, was one of the many figures working on this problem, and his estimates of the age of the Earth (4.5 billion years) set the standard for geological research. Holmes also wrote and popularized the theory of continental drift and offered mechanisms for the process long before it is was widely accepted by the scientific community.
A simple, readable book that combines good science writing with a little bit of biography thrown in for the touch-feely types.
Title: Barriers to Conflict Resolution
Author: Kenneth Arrow, et. al.
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 17 March 2002
Reading Barriers to Conflict Resolution was quite unnerving in the sense of seeing a textbook analysis of every little bit of backstabbing office politics I have ever encountered in my professional life.
Studying human behavior, especially devious human behavior, is difficult enough, but the various authors contributing to this book have done a remarkable job of trying to understand and classify, both qualitatively and (model) quantitatively, the various factors that prevent individuals, organizations, and entire nations from resolving their conflicts even when it is (economically) efficient for them to do so.
Going far beyond such trivialities as outright dishonesty, the authors discuss information imbalances, game theory, mutual evaluation of cost-benefits, utility functions, and even rhetorical posturing in trying to understand why conflicts exist and persist. They quote from theoretical models and real-world examples to explain their ideas with minimum appeal to mathematics or formalisms.
Of particular note is Jon Elster's essay on why people argue ("argue" being used in the Pythonic-sense of "attempt to persuade"). Elster uses the examples of the creation of the constitutions of the US and France as the stages where the various actors attempted to use either bargaining (based on explicit or implicit threats and show of power) or argumentation (based on appeals to higher ethics, morals, and consistency principles) to put forth their point of view.
This book is tough, slow, reading but well worth the effort. If nothing else, you will gain a better understanding of yourself everytime you find yourself in a situation of seemingly unresolvable conflict.
Title: The Empire of Chance
Author: Gerd Gigerenzer, et. al.
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 17 March 2002
The story of probability and statistics is a strange and fascinating one, and the subject of many books.
The Empire of Chance is a collaborative effort by a group of historians and philophers to highlight how ideas of probability and statistics affected the practice of science and aspects of everyday life.
The era of classical probability, from the 1650s to the 1800s was characterized by an attitude never before (or since) seen in any branch of mathematics---the theory was constantly being modified to conform to practice. This was because probability was then seen as a systematization of the reasoning processes of wise and enlightened people.
It was only in the modern era of probability, especially the axiomatization of the subject by Kolmogorov, and the formalization of logical probability (the degree of confidence in reasoning about non-deductive arguments) and factual probability (the frequency of occurrence of events and conjunctions/disjunctions thereof) by Carnap, Hempel and co., that probability became an aspect of mathematics.
Concurrently, the science of statistics which initially arose from acturaries and insurance, soon progressed to affect the study of genetics (and variation), medicine, law, and even something as idiotic and pointless as baseball.
The historians take the approach of explicating how early ideas of probability evolved---the twists and turns and errors and corrections, leading to the modern synthesis of former bitter conflicts.
This part of the book is not as exciting to the pedagogical Whig in me as is the philosophers' approach of how increasing awareness of statistical and probabilistic thinking changed the practice of science.
The book closes with a discussion of the foundational aspects of probability---what does probability actually mean, determinism and free will in classical and quantum worlds, the distinctions between logical and factual probability, the frequentist and Bayesian views of posterior probability and inference (and the related issues of inductive knowledge) and much more.
This book is not light reading, but has a lot of though-provoking material for those interested in either the history or the philosophy of ideas in probability and statistics.
Title: Laughter
Author: Robert R. Provine
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 17 March 2002
A book about laughter---who wudda thunk it. Hahaha!!
Kidding aside, Robert Provine's Laughter: A Scientific Investigation lives up to its title, and delivers on its promises to entertain, educate, and fascinate.
Provine has been studying laughter for many years now and has collected the results of his studies (and those of other researchers in the field) into this gem of a book. Among the many fascinating things I learned about laughter here are:
And, just to show that laughter and humor are not necessarily connected, Provine enumerates his list of typical pre-laugh comments vs. the funniest comments gathered from his clandestine coffee-house observations of groups of people---the comments judged funniest (and I admit that I was rolling on the floor after reading them), did not generate laughter even close to what the pre-laugh comments did.
A wonderful book to tickle your mind with.
Title: Genes, Girls, and Gamow
Author: James D. Watson
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 17 March 2002
A particularly virulent disease has been sweeping biographical writing among American scientists since the 1980s. I call it Feynmanism, and it manifests itself in the essentially random telling of anecdotes that are interesting to no one but the author and a few close friends.
This is not to say that Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman! itself suffers from Feynmanism---on the contrary, Richard Feynman himself wrote in a selective, engaging, amusing, and ultimately instructive style that characterizes so much of his life and attitude.
Most other American scientists who have followed Feynman, however, have fallen flat on their faces by forgetting to educate or entertain.
James Watson's latest book Genes, Girls, and Gamow is an extremely irritating core-dump of Watson's meanderings through life during the years after the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA---from 1953 through 1956---and his 3 primary passions of these years: genetics, women, and his interactions with physicist George Gamow.
Watson excruciatingly describes his lack of success with getting girls to date him (I feel your pain, Jim), and how his professional work suffered as a result of his obsession with the vicious sex. Unfortunately, the book becomes painful to read after about 20 pages because Watson does not discriminate between the interesting and the mundane. There is little here about science, and a lot of irrelevant nonsense about the non-scientific aspects of the lives of scientists. Hey, I don't need a book to tell me that scientists, even Nobel laureats, eat food just like the rest of humanity.
The only saving grace of this type of chronic Feynmanitis is that it is better than the other great American disease of biographical writing---that of worshipful, uninformed, uncritical, idiotic hagiography writtten by a so-called journalist. If I really must be bored out of my mind about the life and times of James D. Watson, I'd rather Watson do the boring rather than someone else.
Title: Stupid White Men
Author: Michael Moore
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 17 March 2002
Michael Moore is an extremely entertaining filmmaker and writer. His latest book, Stupid White Men is a roaring harangue against what Moore identifies as the cause of all the misery in the world around us today---Stupid White Men.
The book was written before 9/11 and Moore had a great deal of difficulty getting it published. He was told to change the title and delete large parts of the book (on the grounds that it was unpatriotic), but I am glad Moore stood his ground and insisted on the book being published as is.
Naturally enough, the book prominently features the fucking moron Dubya, whom Moore fondly refers to as the Thief-in-Chief, the stealer of elections (with a little bit of help from the treasonable SCOTUS thugs). But Moore also whips the sorry-excuses-for-liberals Democrats who seem to have given up any pretense of a fight for ideas that were traditionally associated with them, and have moved over to being closet Republicans---indeed, the only difference between the two parties seems to be that the Republicans make no false promises about helping the poor and down-trodden.
The book also covers topics as diverse as: stock market madness, growing idiocy of Americans, the degrading environment, the battle of the sexes, American thuggery and bullying on the international scene (all the more apparent since 9/11), Republican hypocrisy (as opposed to the Democrat variety), and Moore's support of Ralph Nader during the 2000 elections.
Whether you agree with Moore or not, Stupid White Men is an engaging, fast-paced, hilarious read.
Title: High Bonnet
Author: Idwal Jones
Category: Fiction
Review written: 17 March 2002
High Bonnet is one of the most disgusting, pornographic pieces of writing I have ever come across, and it is no surprise that the book is a novel about food---those who cook it and those who eat it.
Just as the archetypal porno movie's dialogue consists of "Nice shoes, wanna fuck?" interspersed between the act, this book consists of random, pointless, pretentious bits of nonsense story and plot thrown around as filler between disguistingly florid descriptions of food recipes and eating fests.
Even less surprising is that the hero of this novel is a Frenchy. Still less surprising is that Anthony Bourdain wrote the foreword for this book (although he considers the rampant pornography of the story to be admirable) and Ruth Reichl edits an entire series of similar crapola (of which this book is part).
If you eat as a means to live, i.e. you have a working brain, then I strongly advise you to skip this book. I am glad to be a vegetarian and that this novel features only non-vegetarian food---otherwise, I may have already died of starvation from being completely turned off food.
Title: The First Immortal
Author: James L. Halperin
Category: Fiction
Review written: 27 February 2002
There are two ways to immortality. The first, hinted at in the greatest movie ever made, is to download the mind's algorithms into silicon, as it were, and live in a simulated Universe (which, of course, is indistinguishable from the real world, whatever that may be). The second, the subject of Halperin's novel The First Immortal is through cryonic preservation, improved gene-therapy, nanotechnology, and the conquest of cellular aging---an existence that still depends on physical bodies.
The novel spans a 200 year time-frame that overlaps with the world events that Halperin describes in his earlier novel The Truth Machine, but the current book is primarily a family drama.
Benjamin Franklin Smith is a 20th century physician who decides to undergo cryonic preservation until he can be rejuvenated when the necessary science and technology are available. He is ultimately revived almost a century later, and reunites with his friends and family (of children, grand-children, and great-grand-children), and even clones his long-dead wife from locks of her hair.
The world of the 22nd century is one where everyone looks (and, given the conquest of cellular aging, is) 20 years old. Revivided humans clone their spouses, and sometimes raise the clones as their own children until they reach an age suitable for romance. The interpersonal relationship between humans is vastly different from what one experiences in the world of mortals---with humanity still on a quest for personal motivation to excel. And perhaps for the first time since the dawn of human consciousness, there isn't a need for belief in a God.
Once again, Halperin takes a simple idea, immortality, sets up the stage for how it might be achieved (based on reasonably optimistic extensions of today's science and technology), and then goes on to explore how immortality (or very extended lifespans) might affect human society.
A superb novel from a keen thinker.
Title: Why Things Bite Back
Author: Edward Tenner
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 25 February 2002
Steve Johnson, creator of yacc, said of lex:
A good tool is one that is used for a purpose that its creator did not
envision.
In Why Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner takes the contrary, techno-pessimistic position, listing all the many ways that technology has led to unexpected effects.
The books begins well enough. Tenner distinguishes between effects, side-effects, and revenge effects---and gives the impression that the book is about the revenge of technology (the subtitle of the book is Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences).
However, Tenner fails to deliver on his promise. The first half of the book reads like a Greenpeace tract, and is little more than a catalog of medical and environmental effects caused by human activity. There are two huge problems with such a litany: (1) any technology or human activity will certainly have multiple effects, most of them unanticipated (if we waited to completely predict the ramifications of change before engaging in it, we would have to settle for catatonic paralysis); so a mere listing of these so-called unintended consequences is a waste of time and serves no educational purposes, and (2) most of the list is not a revenge effect.
For example, the fact that virulent, infectious diseases have been greatly eliminated, and as a consequence chronic, life-style diseases have become prevalent, is hardly a revenge effect---after all, no one would today ask to go back to the good, old, days of pandemics. On the other hand, massive use of antibiotics leading to bacterial resistance to these drugs, and hence nullifying the intended use of antibiotics, is an example of a revenge effect. If given the choice today to turn back the clock, many right-thinking people would advocate less agressive use of antibiotics to slow down the evolution of drug-resistance. I wanted to read a book about the latter, while Tenner spends 90% of the time with the former.
Moreover, the book is titled Why Things Bite Back, not A List of Things Biting Back---there is almost no insight as to why technology has surprising consequences, or what one can do to anticipate and mitigate, to whatever extent, these revenge effects.
Instead of wasting 300 pages with a dense list of effects, Tenner should have written 50 pages on revenge. Brevity is indeed the soul of wit.
Title: The Truth Machine
Author: James L. Halperin
Category: Fiction
Review written: 24 February 2002
The Truth Machine is one of the best works of speculative fiction that I have ever read---carefully, logically, and chronologically constructed, thought-provoking, and painting a picture of the future that I personally most agree with.
The story is told by an advanced Intel 22g "journalistic computer" in the year 2050 and recounts the events of the preceding 60 years of human history.
The US and the world have slowly moved to a state of no tolerance for violent crimes, even as rapid technological progress wipes out poverty, disease, and even perhaps most age-related degradation of the human body and mind.
The one lingering problem with mandatory execution of repeat violent criminals is that of the false positive---the execution of innocents. In such a world lives Randall "Pete" Armstrong, a computer-genius who works on and develops the Truth Machine, a 100% accurate determinor of whether a person is lying or not. As soon as it is introduced, the Truth Machine vastly revolutionizes law enforcement, business transactions, international diplomacy, politics, and perhaps most importantly, interpersonal relationships.
And yet, there is a dark secret behind the creation of the Truth Machine that only Armstrong knows about, and it torments his life until he finally reveals it, in the year 2050, a quarter-century after he created the machine, and pays the price for his past crimes.
Halperin describes the course of the future in terms that might perhaps shock and scandalize some civil libertarians, but his view of the world is one that I personally most agree with---in fact, if asked what my ideal world would look like, I could do much worse than just point people at this novel. Most important of all, Halperin recognizes and explores the fact that there is no such thing as a right to privacy that comes without cost, and it is inevitable that society as a whole decides to forgo naive notions of privacy for greater truth and honesty (or else, descends into a quagmire of death and destruction).
Give yourself a treat, do yourself a favor, and read this superb novel.
Title: Extreme Programming Explained
Author: Kent Beck
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 22 February 2002
Extreme Programming (or XP) is the name given to a softtware construction methodology that has been gaining popularity recently. Some people think of it as nothing but common-sense practices, while others consider it heretical.
Extreme Programming Explained is a gentle introduction to XP from Kent Beck, one of the originators of the technique. The book does not specify formal rules to follow (indeed, XP throws away much of the formality of software engineering), but explains what constitues (and equally importantly, what does not constitute) XP, and provides some motivation for why XP looks and works the way it does.
In summary, XP includes:
Except for pair programming, I find most of the other XP concepts to be quite commonsensical myself, and certainly a much better way to develop software than the techniques I have seen in action, and have been forced to follow.
My own (pessimistic) view is that XP will fail, but not because of any inherent faults in the technique, but because it will be over-hyped and over-sold as a panacea to all software problems (esp. by people who are not qualified to make decisions about software).
Still, there are some important lessons to learn from XP and this book is a good place to start.
Title: The Royal Game and Other Stories
Author: Stefan Zweig
Category: Fiction
Review written: 9 February 2002
The Economist called Stefan Zweig's The Royal Game the greatest chess story, and perhaps the greatest story about any sport, ever written. High praise indeed, and richly deserved.
Zweig wrote his short stories in the early 20th century, exploring psychological distress in its many manifestations decades before Stephen King or Patrick McGrath.
The Royal Game is about a informal chess match organized aboard a cruise ship between the reigning chess champion of the world, an idiot-savant and arrogant country bumpkin, and an unknown, shy, and diffident fellow passenger. Soon the champion finds that the stranger is a worthy opponent. But there is a dark secret that cloaks the madness of this foe---someone who, as a young man, was imprisoned in such total sensory deprivation, that he takes up playing chess not just against a book of classic games, but against himself---eventually leading to a state of mental dissociation between opposing selves that could not out-guess the other except through the rules of the game.
The collection closes with A Letter from an Unknown Woman, a heart-rending story of unrequieted and unrequietable love, thwarted not by rejection but by indifference.
Each story explores a different kind of mental anguish, and reveals an imagination of high caliber and great depth (Zweig himself committed suicide). A not-to-be-missed set of stories.
Title: The Universe in a Nutshell
Author: Stephen Hawking
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 7 February 2002
Late 20th century physics may, with much justification, be described as the battle between the two great early 20th century revolutions: quantum mechanics and general relativity.
As we move into the 21st century, the holy grail of unification of these two views of the world comes from many different fronts: primarily grand unification (via quantum field theories and symmetry groups), and superstrings (supersymmetry, M-theory, branes, etc.), with a few mavericks like Roger Penrose who think that quantum mechanics will break and have to change before relativity does.
The Universe in a Nutshell is Stephen Hawking's personal take on some of the forefronts of physics research in these matters. The book is a collection of mostly independent chapters on: black holes, time travel, and the origin of the universe (all topics where Hawking has done his own research), superstrings, and the evolution of intelligent life on earth (a subject where Hawking makes delightful reading with his unapolegetic, unabashed description of the tighter integration of electronic and neural substrata).
For the most part, the book is easy reading for a high-school graduate (conversely, if you are a high-school graduate and cannot understand this book, there was something wrong with your education). However, modern physics has become so intricately associated with higher-math that most physical analogies and simplifications do not help very much (and mostly mislead). There are sections of the book where Hawking could have simply not attempted to provide analogies and instead focused on the predictions of theory and whether they have been confirmed or not.
In addition to physics, one also gains occasional glimpses into Hawking's personal philosophy and his sense of humor---like the ripoff of his cameo from the Star Trek TV show which has him not just playing poker with Data, Newton, and Einstein (and winning), but also has Marilyn Monroe sitting on his lap. I also read with much amusement and relish the following sentence about Einstein: "The fact that he spent the war years as a bachelor, without domestic commitments, may be one of the reasons why this period was so productive for him scientifically". How true.
A very good read, and an excellent introduction to more involved books (like The Elegant Universe) for an intelligent lay audience.
Title: The Invisible Heart
Author: Russell Roberts
Category: Fiction
Review written: 26 December 2001
The dismal science and romantic love, side by side?? Yes indeed.
Russell Roberts's The Invisible Heart (a play on the invisible hand of Adam Smith, and a plea that markets do have a heart) is a defense, nay polemic, of unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism and free markets. Think of it as Steven Landsburg's The Armchair Economist in a fictional setting.
The story follows Sam Gordon, an unapologetic free-market economics teacher and his colleague Laura Silver. Sam argues against government-run programs and legal restrictions on the actions of corporations in any form whatsoever, using examples of past legislations that led to distorted incentives for people who modified their behavior in ways that were not anticipated or desired.
In so far as it goes, the ideas discussed by Roberts are all standard economics as seen from the laissez-faire, libertarian perspective. They are expressed clearly so that it is easy to home in on which part of an argument one agrees or disagrees with. The book also encourages the reader to think---always an achievement worthy of praise.
So, regardless of your views of free-market capitalism, this is an excellent, thought-provoking, well-written, page-turner of a book on the subject. Read it and you will have gained the benefits of a crash course in basic economics.
Title: The Grotesque
Author: Patrick McGrath
Category: Fiction
Review written: 24 December 2001
One of the most cliched phrases of the whodunit genre is The butler did it!. Patrick McGrath's English-gothic, Baskervillian psychological thriller is a novel where the butler does indeed do it---or does he?!
The Grotesque is narrated by Sir Hugo Coal, a gentleman English squire with a deep interest in paleontology and little concern for anything or anyone else. Sir Hugo tells us his sad sad story from the confines of a wheelchair and the surreal imagination of his mind as he sits incapacitated by a stroke.
According to the story Sir Hugo tells, his butler Fledge takes over the manor with his depraved scheming---Fledge kills Sir Hugo's daughter's suitor, beds his wife, and precipitates Sir Hugo's own stroke. However, it is not obvious that we can really trust Sir Hugo's words since it is the story not as he observes it, but as he construes it in his sense-starved imagination.
McGrath's superb writing conjures up the images of damp, cold, dark moors where the foggy miasma rising from the swamps is a portend of the human evil that affects the lives of the novel's characters.
An excellent read for the winter season.
Title: The Art of the Matrix
Author: Spencer Lamm, Larry Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, et.
al.
Category: Non-fiction
Review written: 17 December 2001
For those of us who think, nay know, that The Matrix is the greatest movie ever made (as of this writing), the companion book The Art of the Matrix is a wet-dream come true.
The Wachowski brothers come from a background in comic books (they wrote and illustrated for Marvel before their movie days). In order to sell the idea for The Matrix to the Warner studios, they decided to story-board major parts of the story, esp. those involving special effects. Rather than use low-tech stick-figure story-boards, the brothers went whole-hog and hired illustrators to produce what ended up as a 600-page comic book in itself.
The Art is a compendium of almost all of the primary story-boards with commentary from the illustrators, the full-length shooting script for the movie, illustrations, posters, deleted scene scripts, and similar goodies that are sheer pleasure for any fan of the movie. We also get tidbit sneak previews of what might be in the sequels.
The meticulousness to which the Wachowski brothers took their story-boarding, their attention to detail, their graphic imagination, all paid off in producing (of course) the greatest movie ever made, and it is great to glimpse a facet of their work and thought in this extremely engrossing, excellent art book.
Title: Miles Walker, You're Dead
Author: Linda Jaivin
Category: Fiction
Review written: 17 December 2001
Linda Jaivin's first book Eat Me was a delightful erotic fiction work. Either subset of the book worked extremely well on its own, and the combination made it an entertaining read.
Her next book Rock and Roll Babes from Outer Space was not as erotic or funny, but it had its good points.
Unfortunately, her current book Miles Walker, You're Dead is unbearably boring, irritating, annoying, stupid, and is neither erotic nor humorous, although it is clear that Jaivin herself thinks that the book is both.
Miles Walker is a starving painter in Australia living amidst culture and anti-culture wars. Jaivin is trying to parody and satirize modern art (which has become less and less about art and more and more about posturing and trend-defiance), but ends up being pretentious, preachy, and silly herself.
Linda Jaivin, You're Boring. Skip this book.
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Last updated: Sun Aug 29 17:59:30 PDT 2004
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