A Question of Belief: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (Commissario Guido Brunetti #19)

by Donna Leon
rating: 4 star Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

This time it is August in Venice, blazingly hot, and Brunetti is looking forward to two weeks in the mountains with his family. He has taken on two off the books investigations: a judge who seems to have a pattern of delaying civil trials to the benefit of one of the parties, and a charlatan who is taking large sums of money from elderly ladies. Putting those informal investigations on hold, Brunetti is on the train with his family when he is called back to Venice to investigate a murder: a court clerk who was possibly implicated in the corrupt judge investigation.

As always in the Brunetti series there is both more and less to the story than appears at first sight, and there is great sadness in the lives and deaths of the victims, and tragedy in the absence of justice for those who commit crimes amid the pervasive corruption of modern Italy.

In all, this is an excellent addition to the Brunetti series.

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

by Katie Hafner
rating: 1 star Sat, 14 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

If you dislike publications such as People Magazine, you will not like this book.

If you believe that a history book should be well organized along either thematic or chronological lines, you will not like this book.

If you think that a book about the history of technology should include details about the evolution of that technology, you will not like this book.

If you believe that every non-fiction book deserves a good copy editor who will eliminate pointless discursions, you will not like this book.

Otherwise, there is an excellent chance that you will enjoy this book, as a nightly sedative, if nothing else.

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This Time We Went Too Far: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion

by Norman G. Finkelstein
rating: 3 star Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Review of This Time We Went Too Far

Norman Finkelstein draws on reports from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Goldstone Report to document the war crimes committed by Israel in its December 2008 attack on Gaza. He begins with the recent history of Israeli policies, including the 1982 and 2006 invasions of Lebanon, the ongoing expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and the failed 2000 peace agreement (about which Ben-Ami, a lead Israeli negotiator at those talks later said "If I were a Palestinian, I would not have accepted the agreement, either"). He then talks about the conditions in Gaza, and the cynical withdrawal of the Israeli occupation in 2005 which was accompanied by a lock-down on commerce designed to further impoverish one of the poorest regions on earth.

He addresses the claim that Israel was forced to initiate the December attack because Hamas had violated the June 2008 cease fire agreement, and shows that in fact Hamas had abided by the agreement; that the very few rocket attacks were not authorized by the Hamas leadership, and that much of the rocket fire that did occur was in response to a deliberately provocative cross-border attack by the IDF in November.

In the aftermath of the December-January attack, nearly 1400 Palestinians were killed, approximately 80% of them civilians, including 300 children. 14 Israelis were killed, including 4 by friendly fire. This disparity was a result of a well-planned strategy of disproportionate force and collective punishment; a strategy that had been worked out well in advance of the attack, and that was explicitly communicated to the military commanders prior to the attack. Another part of the strategy, also well executed, was the targeted destruction of basic infrastructure. This included the utter destruction of the American International School (the best elementary school in Gaza), multiple buildings at the University, UN buildings, electrical generation plants, and so on.

In the aftermath Israel claimed that whatever slight civilian deaths had occurred were a result of Hamas using the civilian population as human shields and civilians being caught in the crossfire. None of the independent investigating agencies were able to find any credible evidence for this claim. On the contrary, both HRW and the Goldstone report found instances of the IDF using Palestinians as human shields, forcing Palestinians to remain in positions occupied by the IDF and therefore at risk of attack by Hamas forces.

Defenders of Israel immediately attacked the Goldstone report as biased on the day following its release. This is odd, because the report is nearly 600 pages long. It is hard to believe that those attacking the report could have read it in the interval between its publication and the time of their denunciations. And there was certainly no time to have conducted any research to provide evidence of bias. The most adamant defenders of Israel conducted ad hominem attacks on Goldstone himself, charging him with anti-Semitism. The charge would have been risible if the context were not so tragic. Goldstone, a Jew and self-proclaimed Zionist, has been a staunch supporter of Israel his entire life. And this made both the details and the conclusions of the Report a serious matter: his commission found at least 36 instances of probable war-crimes committed by the IDF, and the report lays the blame squarely on the Israeli political and military elite.

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Ten Days that Shook the World (Value Edition)

by John Silas Reed
rating: 3 star Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

John Reed, a young socialist from Portland, Oregon, went to Russia in 1917 as a journalist to report on the unfolding revolution. Russia was in great turmoil, with widespread opposition to the war, a struggling economy, and shortages of basic necessities. The government was barely in control of the situation, and political influence was fractured among many political parties ranging from the far-right to the communist left. Reed was a revolutionist, and so supported the position of the bolsheviks: aggressively push for an alternative government composed of people's committees, and strip the existing government of all power.

So this book is the story, seen from within the power struggles in Petrograd, of the collapse of the Russian government and the rise to power of the bolsheviks. This was not a coup, as right-wing historians would have us believe, but a mass uprising, with widespread support from Russian soldiers and sailors (and fierce opposition from their officers), labor unions, and (with many exceptions) peasants. The political aims were withdrawal from the war, redistribution of land, and worker control of the factories. Though the bolsheviks probably never achieved majority support for their party, it seems clear enough that their political aims were by far the majority position.

The book only covers the early days, up to the assumption of power by the soviets, but already it was clear that this would not be a peaceful transition of power. The opposition by foreign capitalists and by Russian landholders would see to that. For the next five years the new Soviet Union would fight a civil war in which the anti-socialist forces were aided by foreign governments, leading to the further erosion of the economy, and, of course, great loss of life. It is hard to see how a democratic socialist state could have arisen out of those conditions: the old oligarchy still had plenty of economic and political clout and would never relinquish control without a fight. In the end, of course, the government that came out of those struggles was socialist in name only. It is tempting to blame that course of events on Stalin, but I think the seeds were sown by the existential struggle of the civil war.

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What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

by Malcolm Gladwell
rating: 4 star Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:14:30 -0700

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La Ranfla and Other New Mexico Stories

by Martha Egan
rating: 4 star Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:14:24 -0700

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The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know

by Fred Magdoff
rating: 4 star Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:14:13 -0700

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The Parisian Prodigal (Fools' Guild, #8)

by Alan Gordon
rating: 5 star Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:14:05 -0700

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A Play of Treachery (Joliffe, #5)

by Margaret Frazer
rating: 3 star Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:13:48 -0700

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How Math Can Save Your Life

by James D. Stein
rating: 3 star Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

"How Math Can Save Your Life" aims to show how mathematics can play a role in day to day decision making. Aimed at the non-mathematically inclined, it uses only arithmetic, but introduces simple probability theory, statistics, and game theory.

The author, James Stein, a professor of mathematics at California State, Long Beach, has a secondary goal of improving mathematics education in high schools (mostly by de-emphasizing algebra and going back to useful basics).

Each of the 14 chapters explains how math can help achieve some end : improve your grades, win arguments, fix the economy, gamble, etc. And each chapter is illustrated with 3 or 4 examples. He does a good job of keeping the mathematics dead simple, introducing only what is needed to solve the problem at hand, and building on earlier ideas.

For those with any math background beyond high school there is nothing really new here, though some of his examples are interesting. I see this as useful mostly for high school students and math-averse adults. His treatment of game theory as a decision making tool is very useful, as is his treatment of probabilities.

My only serious complaint about this book is the author's right-wing bias. His analysis of the great recession (i.e. the recession we are currently experiencing) is founded on an incorrect analysis - the Rush Limbaugh analysis, to be exact. Specifically he places the root cause on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. He offers no explanation why that law caused no problems for nearly 30 years. He goes on to claim that the requirement, beginning in early 90s, that Fannie and Freddie devote a (small) percentage of their lending to affordable housing, played another part in the crisis that took place 16 years later. At no point does he mention the repeal of Glass-Steagal - the law that had kept commercial and investment banks separate. Nor does he mention the outright frauds committed by Goldman and other mega-banks, AIG, or the sleazy mortgage broker industry that made enormous profits from 'liar loans'. In short, he takes the pure right-wing line on this issue (and on others).

Nonetheless, if you can ignore the right-wing bias, and feel the need for better decision making in your day to day life, this may be the right book for you.

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Wow. I would not have thought it possible for a book to be this badly written. The novel is set in contemporary (say, 1990) Venice, but the characters are portrayed as if they came out of a 19th century romance. Think Lawrence Sanders meets Danielle Steele.

Kennedy and Chavez first met in LA in 1959 when Chavez was organizing urban Mexican workers and working to register voters. It was not until 1966 that they formed their friendship, when Kennedy came to California to investigate the conditions of farm laborers, whom Chavez was organizing as part of the National Farm Workers Association, later to become the United Farm Workers union. Kennedy went out on a political limb, offering his whole-hearted support for legislation to gain economic and political rights for migrant farm workers.

The Widow is an extraordinary little novel. Written in 1940 and published in 1942, it is a dark and intense gem. Like the very best Hitchcock movies, this novel conveys a sense of inevitability, tragedy waiting to happen.

The introduction by Paul Theroux mentions that The Widow was published in the same year as The Stranger by Albert Camus. The Stranger went on to become part of the modern canon; The Widow has been mostly ignored or forgotten. At the time of publication, Andre Gide thought The Widow was the better book, and Theroux agrees. Certainly the characters are better and more fully drawn in the Simenon novel. It is not an abstract study, but a kind of cinema verite.

This edition is one of the New York Review reprints and is very well worth reading.

Then We Came to the End is author Joshua Ferris' first novel. It takes place in a Chicago advertising agency during a year of layoffs. Written mostly in the first person plural, it is a darkly comic look at office life and the inter-personal politics of privileged office workers. I found it to be reminiscent of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, with its rich humor and underlying sense of foreboding. The writing is often lyrical, with long languorous sentences describing life in a cube farm, like an urban version of Garrison Keillor.

The characters are clearly drawn and, with one deliberate exception, believable. They might or might not remind you of people you have worked with, but they are certainly plausible office-mates. You get to know them well enough that you have sympathy with them, even with the obnoxious bastards (and there are a couple of those).

This is a very entertaining book.

Very Special Relativity is by far the best quasi-technical treatment of special relativity that I have found. The author, Sander Bais, uses Minkowski diagrams on nearly every facing page to illustrate the facts and apparent paradoxes of special relativity. He provides geometrical demonstrations ('proofs' in a very restricted sense) of time compression and space dilation.

Most importantly, the consistent use of Minkowski diagrams gives the reader a good handle to remember and reproduce the results of relativity theory.

This is an excellent book for anyone with a grasp of elementary Euclidean geometry who wishes to get a better understanding of the special theory of relativity.

The Canon is exactly what its subtitle says: a tour of the basics of science. Natalie Angier is a science writer; that is, a writer who is a knowledgeable observer of science and who is able to get scientists to explain things in terms the rest of us might understand. Her writing style is very light, loaded with enthusiasm, and a bit chatty at times. At first I found the chattiness to be slightly off-putting, but when I got to the chapters on material that I didn't know much about (molecular biology and chemistry), the light-hearted distractions were actually helpful in keeping me focused on the main points.

There are chapters on scientific method, the scale of things, basic physics, chemistry, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. I found that the less I knew about a subject the more I enjoyed the material. So the chemistry and molecular biology chapters really stood out. I had not really learned anything new about cellular biology since high school (except for inferred 'facts' from reading newspaper and magazine articles about new drugs or new viruses). So I found the chapter on molecular biology especially interesting. She devotes many pages to the busy activity inside every cell, ranging from protein synthesis to cell division to communication with other cells. This is really interesting stuff.

Highly recommended.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is a tutorial on one approach to 'close reading', intended to help aspiring writers learn from great writers and great writing. For those of us who are not aspiring writers, the book provides alternative ways of reading and thinking about what we've read.

Each chapter considers one aspect of writing, from word choice, to sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, details, gestures, and concludes with an extended essay on what can be learned from Checkhov, a writer that Prose considers to be an exemplar of the writer's craft. The book is pedagogical, reflecting Prose's experience as a teacher of writing and literature. She offers encouragement to the would-be writer, and emphasizes that although she offers many 'rules', the writers she uses in her examples very often break those rules to achieve particular artistic purposes.

The central idea of the book is the importance of detail. The big things, plot, ideas, Vision (capital V) don't matter as much as the details: the small gesture that sets the tone for a scene, the detail of clothing that indicates social class or era or character. Such details require careful observation (vision with small v) on the part of both the writer and the reader.

Prose provides an appendix with an extensive reading list of books by the authors that she cites as examples (and others, I think, unless I simply missed some of the references).

If you haven't read anything by Francine Prose you are missing out. I've read Gluttony, part of the Oxford/NYU Seven Deadly Sins series, Household Saints, the novel she is most well known for, and The Blue Angel, an updated take on the original 1930s era German film.

Before we moved to Seattle, when we were visiting Seattle only about once per year, one of my obligatory stops was Metzger's Maps, a store that sells all kinds of maps and map-related products. Street maps, highway maps, historical maps, globes, topographical maps, satellite photos, atlases, travel books with maps included, magnifiers, transparent rulers, ... I loved that store, and I love maps. I can spend many hours poring over a Tokyo subway map, or a map of Paris, or an atlas now long out of date, or a map of an imaginary place, or an imagined map of a real place.

So when I saw Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, I thought I was in for a real treat. A history of maps! An analysis in historical context of maps through history, showing how they represent not only places and geography and politics, but also serve to put forward a point of view, an agenda. This book should have been a delight. Somehow, though, Vincent Virga managed to write a boring and discursive book about maps or, rather, a boring and discursive book in which maps serve merely as foil and backdrop to another agenda.

Nothing could have rescued this book, but there are some obvious problems with the design and layout that would have made it at least tolerable. There are, to its credit, maps on nearly every page. But each map is accompanied by just a short description intended, I think, to link back to the surrounding ocean of text. Much better would have been to have a sidebar discussion of each map, set off with contrasting background color, perhaps, or a border, clearly linked to that map. Instead, the book simply refers to the map by plate number, and the map itself is seldom described in any detail but is simply used as an exemplar of some more general point that the author is trying to make.

Virga had the entire resources of the Library of Congress at his disposal. I found myself wondering whether the maps he selected were really the best available. I wondered whether Virga even likes maps, whether he enjoys them for their own sake.

There were so many missed opportunities in this book. There were some ancient maps, among the first maps created in a number of ancient civilizations. In some cases they are nearly incomprehensible, serving as a reminder that maps require interpretation, that they are an abstraction representing particular ways of viewing the world. And if those world views are distant enough from our own, the map itself can serve as a kind of meta-map into the thought processes of the culture in which the map was created. But to gain that understanding itself requires interpretation, which Virga fails to do.

Besides the dismal failure to properly treat the maps that he selected for this book, it is also instructive to think about the maps that he omitted. For example, it would have been useful and interesting to consider modern computer-generated maps of the internet. He does show a highly stylized map of major interconnects around the globe, but he completely ignores the many excellent recent examples of clever ways to represent dense networks. Similarly he offers no treatment whatsoever of maps whose region-sizes are proportional to some demographic measure, heat-maps, mind-maps, or any of the recent visualization methods that can be considered as maps.

This book is a disappointment.

This is a comprehensive history of the CIA from its beginnings at the end of WWII to the present day, written using only on-the-record sources, many of which, surprisingly, became declassified only in the past few years. Much of the history is familiar: the toppling of democratic governments and their replacement with right-wing dictatorships around the globe (Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile); the incompetence, alcoholism, and madness at the top of the organization (James Angleton, Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles); the interference in democratic elections in western Europe; the torture facilities going back to the 50s and still in operation today; the domestic spying under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

Still, this is really interesting, frightening, enraging stuff. Definitely worth a read.

Sullivan itemizes a few dozen ways in which we are being fleeced by corporate capitalism; the hidden fees, the surcharges, the rule changes that lead to big jumps in interest rates, the installation charges that were conveniently not mentioned until after the fact. And he provides a 'toolkit' of approaches for eliminating or reversing those charges. All very useful, I'm sure.

Maybe more useful would be if Congress would re-assume its responsibilities, which it relinquished under the Reagan administration, and re-pass the usury and consumer protection laws that were either gutted or that didn't keep up with the 'structural changes' that have occurred in American capitalism during and since Reagan.

Living Lost provides a detailed exegesis of the television series Lost. I picked it up to get an idea of what all the buzz has been about - I am one of the apparently few people who have never watched the program. Most of the discussion and analysis in the book was meaningless to me since I've never seen the program, but the book did convince me that it would be worth picking up the DVD set for the first couple seasons.

I always enjoy Keith Olbermann's 'Special Comments'. It is refreshing to hear a television commentator with an identifiable sense of decency and of outrage at the lies and corruption of the present administration.

Sadly, Truth and Consequences, a collection of those special comments, with brief introductions to each, makes for not very compelling reading. If you haven't seen most of the commentaries on TV or on YouTube, then there are probably a few of these special comments that you will be interested in reading. But for the most part, polemic does not fare well on the printed page. Expressions of outrage work better when spoken than when read.

A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian war of independence, fought from 1954 to 1962. This is a book that the neo-con overlords would have been well advised to have read before they embarked on their adventure in Iraq - but, sadly, none of the hard-won lessons of Algeria ever seeped into the feeble brains of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice. We've all paid the price of their fact-free theorizing.

If you want to know, in exacting detail, how Algeria won its independence and how the French government was torn apart in the process, this is the book for you. You will come away with the knowledge that there were no 'good guys' in that war; that a war of national liberation is not a glorious thing; that colonialism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction; and that terrorism is a deliberate tactic with specific political aims (and not, as our present government would have you believe, a mythological force of 'evil'). And you will come away with a clearer understanding that even in the extremely rare cases when torture can offer a short-term victory, it leads to long-term defeat; its costs outweigh its putative benefits.

I really enjoy the Montalbano mystery series by Andrea Camilleri, and The Paper Moon is the best so far. The translation by Stephen Sartarelli is brilliant, as always.

Michaela Pardo reports that her brother Angelo has been missing for 3 days. When Montalbano accompanies her to her brother's apartment he discovers that Angelo has been shot in the face. As the investigation proceeds, he discovers that Angelo had a taste for beautiful women, and one in particular, Elena, will prove to be a great distraction for Montalbano.

The running jokes developed in the previous novels really work well in this one: Catarella's incomprehensible dialect, Montalbano's fear of aging, Fazio's obsession with detail, and Augello's newfound dedication to family. Sadly, Livia and Ingrid make only brief appearances, almost as an afterthought. Perhaps this was to make way for Elena.

If you've never read any of the Montalbano stories, don't start with this one. Yes, it's the best in the series, but to fully enjoy it you need to know the characters. I would recommend starting at the beginning with The Shape of Water.

Meh. The idea for Best American Nonrequired Reading is interesting: take a group of bright high school students, have them read everything published during the year, and let them decide what is to be included in the book. Essays, short stories, non-fiction articles, comics - as long as it can fit in 20 pages, it's fair game.

Maybe this was a good book; maybe other people would really enjoy reading it. I didn't, mostly. Maybe it's the sort of book that you need to leave next to your reading chair and dip into periodically over a period of weeks. But as a cover-to-cover read it became tedious less than halfway through. I did enjoy the introduction by Dave Eggers, and Conan O'Bryan's Stuyvesant High commencement speech was fun. Other than that, there were a few articles that were vaguely interesting, and some short fiction that I really did not enjoy.