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Stuff Previous Camping Trips Around Northern
California Next Capsule Reviews of Books about the Vietnam
War
(Also have reviews of good fiction, nasty reviews of bad books, reviews of good physics biographies and memoirs and capsule reviews of books about the Vietnam War. My favorite poetry is by James Dickey.)
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Diamond is a writer whose work I have admired for a long time. His columns in Discover magazine in the mid-80's were startlingly original and full of ideas. Diamond's latest book does not quite meet the same high standard, but it is well worth reading nonetheless.
The main thesis of Guns, Germs and Steel is what could be called "geographic determinism," namely the idea that local ecological and environmental conditions have been the most important influence on human history over the long haul. Diamond argues convincingly that what has made Europeans dominant over the last few centuries was their luck in having many valuable food plants and domesticable animals native to their region. In addition, Diamond points out the advantage that Eurasia had in being a continent with an east-west land axis, where farming methods developed in one region could readily be adopted in neighboring regions with similar climates. This east-west axis stands in contrast to the primarily north-south axis of the Americas, where the north Mexican desert and tropical jungle of the Panamanian isthmus effectively isolated farming communities in temperate regions from one another. Diamond argues that the racist explanation for European domination doesn't make hold up under close examination, and he has the statistics, maps and citations to make his case.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is full of fascinating information, for example about how linguistics can be used to trace mass human movements, and how migratory populations repeatedly replaced less-developed ones even before the advent of colonialism. The story of how Polynesians colonized Madagascar and how Atahuallpa, the head Inca, surrendered to Pizzarro are alone worth the price of the book. Diamond's commentary is wide-ranging, touching lightly on subject as diverse as why the Chinese failed to colonize Africa, why the Aztecs invented the wheel but used it only in toys, and why Koreans have the world's most advanced writing system.
The book grows a bit repetitive by the end as the primary arguments are pounded into the reader over and over. One chapter about the evolution of governments seems like an afterthought. The included photos are strangely irrelevant. Nonetheless, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a tour de force of research that truly deserves the praise heaped on it. I'm hoping that publishers will now be convinced to bring out a collection of Diamond's Discover columns. They are at least as readable as Stephen Jay Gould's popular book series.
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes.
This book, almost as long as A Bright Shining Lie, is about the early settlement of Australia and its history as a penal colony. I'd be very interested to hear what Aussies think of it.
The Fatal Shore is quite a human interest story. The suffering of the earlier settlers is almost beyond imagination nowadays. Yet their lot was scarcely worse than that of many of the poor in 18th-century Ireland and England, so prisoners kept coming.
The stories of amazing prison escapes in this book reminds me of volume II of The Gulag Archipelago. Overall, The Fatal Shore is like Solzhenitsyn's work in featuring inspiring stories of human persistence against totalitarian systems. And the story of the slow accumulation of civil liberties by former prisoners and their offspring will interest anyone who cares about human rights.
The careers of several inhuman prison wardens are described in detail. Are there such people in power in prisons nowadays in the democratically governed world? One can only hope not.
My only gripe with The Fatal Shore is that it ends a bit prematurely with the of termination of prisoner "transportation." It's left to the reader's imagination to guess how the "convict stain" was wiped out of the Australian imagination and how Australia became a modern nation. But The Fatal Shore is definitely worth a read.
Rising from the Plain by John McPhee.
I personally have really enjoyed McPhee's geology foursome, if only because they present scientists (geologists specifically) to be appealing people. While there is some mineralogy jargon in McPhee's geology series, the reader can comfortably ignore it. You don't have to know any technical terms to find fascinating the descriptions of the California gold rush or to enjoy reading about the raging debate over how the Appalachians formed. I recommend this book of the four (Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California are the other three) specifically because featured geologist David Love is the most interesting character to appear in the series. The account of Love's childhood on the Wyoming frontier is refreshingly unromanticized. Ironically Love played a major role in despoiling the landscape of his youth by finding large uranium deposits near where he grew up.
My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan.
Malan is a descendent of the family that institutionalized apartheid in South Africa. Overburdened by guilt and fear, he left the country and lived for years in Los Angeles. This book is the story of his return home to examine South Africa anew. The greatest strength of Malan's account is that it really is about South Africa and is not at all egocentric.
There is much fascinating information in Malan's book. Learn who Steven Biko really was, and read about the horrible violence between his Black Consciousness Movement faction and the African National Congress. Read descriptions of black mistreatment in the '70's and '80's that rival for horror anything you've heard from the American slavery period. Get a feeling for the lives of everyday blacks in Soweto. Learn about black serial killers and understand the perilous position of liberals like Malan during the ongoing upheaval. This is a completely fascinating book, a true non-fiction pageturner, but not lurid.
Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.
If you live in the American West, especially in California, then you really should read this lively history of western water projects. Besides amazing tales of political corruption and dam failures, there are sickening stories of agricultural subsidies, environmental tragedies and engineering incompetence. Learn about the long-time rivalry between the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. If this incident hadn't been so expensive to taxpayers, it would be much more funny. Did you know that all of America's dams are silting up, so that reservoir capacity is decreasing, and that no one knows a solution?
My favorite natural history book would have to be Arctic Dreams. Part history of the arctic region, part natural history lecture, and part adventure travel book, this is a fascinating read. Lopez traveled all over the arctic talking to native people, watching wildlife, and brooding over the many who lost their lives searching for the Northwest Passage. Somehow this book manages to be both dreamy and informative at the same time. You learn a lot of gee-whiz facts reading it, and yet it's beautifully written and goes down quickly, like John McPhee. The scenes of sailors overwintering on frozen-in ships at the North Pole nearly gave me nightmares.
The Prize, another entertaining non-fiction tome, is a history of the global oil industry. The size of this book is off-putting, but when you finish you will wish it had been longer. Never has there been a greater bunch of rascals than the wildcatters and tycoons who brought us the modern oil industry, and their misadventures, plotting and governmental manipulations are set down in detail in The Prize. Learn how journalist Ida Tarbell brought down Standard Oil, how a Sunday school teacher found the East Texas oil fields, how Royal Dutch Shell was started by the son of a seashell curio peddlar, how Stalin began his career stirring unrest in the oil fields of Baku, and much more! Thrill to the tales of business mavericks like Boone Pickens and Calouste Gulbenkian. Learn much more about British and US involvement in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in the '50s and the downfall of the Shah in the '70s. Did you know that the Nobel family originally made their money in Azerbaijani oil, and that their main competitors were the Rothschilds?
This readable account of the new field of infectious disease ecology is the most thoughtful book I've read in a long time. Garrett can really write, and she is careful to focus on the human side of biotechnology and epidemiology, blending all the scientific facts into the true stories of real people. Many US journalists have taken pains to put real human faces on the AIDS epidemic, but Garrett puts human faces on the hantavirus, Ebola virus and Bolivian hemorraghic fever epidemics as well.
Fascinating and horrifying facts abound; for example, bacteria and viruses can live for years in algal blooms floating on the ocean, where they exchange genetic material. The hantavirus that caused many reservation deaths in the Southwest US is a close cousin of a bug that caused illness in many Korean War soldiers, but no one knows how it got to the US or changed its characteristics. The simian strain of the AIDS virus has been with us for a long time; a specimen in the British Museum that was collected in the 19th century has been shown to be infected!
The most impressive aspect of this book, though, is the profundity of thinking involved. Garrett sees the sudden outbreak of new diseases as a sign of the destruction of the planet by humans, and describes the "coming plague" as a sort of Toxic Avenger sent to wreak havoc on Homo sapiens by dying ecosystems. She makes a strong case that the real reasons for the emergence of AIDS and other new epidemics (like Legionnaire's Disease and Toxic Shock Syndrome) is simply that man's total domination of the earth makes him an inviting target biologically. Garrett describes quite disturbingly the consequences of habitat destruction, decreasing biodiversity, and the witless feeding of antibiotics to livestock. In fact, the underlying theme of the book is the inexorability of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The most tragic example is the horrible impact of the introduction of the hypodermic to Africa, where the cost in disease transmission through the reuse of contaminated needles has far outweighed any public health benefit.
When this book was initially released, I felt no interest in it, since I assumed it was yet another self-help volume, a genre which I avoid. (It seems kind of odd to me on general principle that you would start out to help yourself by reading a book of someone else's advice.) Then I heard an interview with Peter Kramer on NPR and changed my mind.
Kramer's book is a thought-provoking re-examination of what it means to be mentally ill and what the appropriate role of personality-changing drugs is in modern society. The premise is introduced from the historical point of view, with Kramer noting that schizophrenia and manic-depression were initially differentiated on the basis that they were treatable with different drugs, thorazine and lithium. The idea arose that drug response was a useful clinical criterion to define different mental illnesses. As time went by, physicians found that while most severely depressed patients responded well to standard drug treatments, such as imipramine, patients with less severe maladies, such as compulsion disorders, did not improve as much. There was a different class of drugs called MAOIs that these patients responded to, but MAOIs had serious side effects and not all patients could take them. For these patients, the advent of Prozac, a MAOI-like drug with few side effects, was a godsend.
The fascinating aspect of Prozac is that it typically has a positive effect on people whom we would not ordinarily consider mentally ill, namely passive, shy or unusually selfless people. The question logically follows, are shy people mentally ill? Does logical consistency require that we classify them as having a mild form of compulsive disorder? The more disturbing questions about Prozac arise from the fact that patients like the drug's effect. Should a physician prescribe Prozac to someone he does not believe is ill, so that the patient can perform better at his job or in his social life? A Brave New World vision if ever there was one.
Kramer's book is full of interesting information, such as the fact that thorazine is an anti-histamine and is chemically similar to many over-the-counter allergy medicines. Listening to Prozac is a far more interesting book than Oliver Sack's The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, if only because it deals with normal psychology rather than bizarre and unique occurrences. Kramer's plain style also goes down easier than Sacks's somewhat fussy writing. Another lesser work is William Styron's Darkness Made Visible, which is hardly worth reading at all. (Then again, if you enjoyed Sophie's Choice or The Confessions of Nat Turner, you might disagree.)
See also a fascinating article in The New Republic on the same issue. Thanks to gtb for the heads-up.
Who invented the mouse, the bitmap display, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, the Ethernet, the bus/interrupt system, downloadable fonts and the WYSIWYG text editor? If you said, "Wozniak," you are not alone! This book should be required reading for anyone with a "Windows '95, Apple '85" bumper sticker since there should really be a "Xerox '80" appended at the end.
Smith and Alexander are a lawyer and an MBA, respectively, so you should not read their book expecting great technical insights. The story of how so much innovation failed to become a winning product is sobering reading for anyone working in a corporate R&D lab, though. The failure is particularly acute given that Xerox had previously completely transformed itself from Haloid Corporation, a small manufacturer of film, into the world's first copier company. Any product no matter how clever or innovative is a failure if no one buys it, and no technological wonder will make it to market without the cooperation of the men in suits.
I'm happy to see that Fumbling the Future is now back in print. There are still a lot of folks in Silicon Valley who would benefit by reading it. A lot of lip service is also paid to Clayton Christiansen's The Innovator's Dilemman, but the lessons these books have to teach have not yet been absorbed.
Having heard the same "Washington threw a dollar across the Delaware" stories for many years in public school, my eyes have always glazed over at the thought of the American Revolution. I read this book only since I trust Barbara Tuchman (author of The Zimmerman Telegram, about the start of WWI in the US; The Guns of August, about the start of WWI in Europe; The Proud Tower, about the rise of labor unions and socialism and the underlying causes of WWI; The March of Folly, a history of government incompetence; and A Distant Mirror, about the misery of the Plague and endless wars of succession in the 14th century). In fact Tuchman's book is a lively narrative of the War for Independence from the naval point of view. There are vivid accounts of the difficulty of firing a cannon at a distant warship on rolling seas and about the virtual piracy that was perpetrated by British Navy captains, who were allowed to keep a portion of the booty they captured during raids. I had not realized how vital the French Navy under Admiral deGrasse was to the American victory or how the Dutch West Indian islands kept the rebel effort alive by smuggling arms to the Colonies. Washington does turn out to be a remarkable hero: during the War, he did not visit home or see his wife for over six years.
I recommend this book with reservations. Kaplan does a good job of portraying the Balkans as a place where history is alive and ever-present, where a battle that occurred hundreds of years ago is constantly in the thoughts of today's residents. The conflicts are remarkable not only for their bitterness but for their variety: Serbians covet Kossovo, Macedonians covet Thessalonika, Rumanians covet parts of Ukraine, Greeks covet Macedonia and southern Albania, Hungarians covet Transylvania, and the list goes on and on. The phenomenon is "irredentism": each ethnic group wishes to control the territory it had conquered at the peak of its power during the last millenium. Mix in Ottoman, Nazi and Soviet tyranny and you have quite the recipe for unrest. Kaplan argues that only an increase in the regional standard of living will cause Balkan residents to think about the future rather than brooding about the glory of their past conquests.
Kaplan's coverage of the region is spotty. He traveled extensively in Rumania, and his musings about this country are both entertaining and informative. His chapter about Greece, on the other hand, is an anti-Papandreou diatribe, and his chapter about Yugoslavia is very unsatisfying. The Bulgaria chapter is halfway between, since Kaplan by his own admission got to know well only one Bulgarian, a journalist whose experience could have occurred in any Soviet satellite nation. He did not visit Albania at all. Throughout the book Kaplan frequently relates anecdotes about previous 20th century journalists in the Balkans, which severely bored me. What I don't want to read in a travelogue is extensive quotation from other books! While I found Balkan Ghosts to be a worthwhile read, I'm still looking for the book that crystallizes the Balkan situation the way that A Bright Shining Lie and Fire in the Lake describe the Vietnam War.
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman
During the 1980's, Thomas Friedman was first a correspondent in Lebanon and then one in Israel. Potential 21st-Century readers of From Beirut to Jerusalem might be put off by the book's original 1989 publication date, fearing that it is out of date. In fact I found it quite helpful in understanding today's headlines about the Intifada, peace negotiations, and the much discussed characters of Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon. Like The Prize, Friedman's work fairly bristles with fascinating anecdotes and snippets of history. Friedman shows great sympathy for all the participants, having befriended and lived among everyone from Druze to Lubavitchers to Maronites to Gush Emunim. The great strength of From Beirut to Jerusalem is its memoir form, where Friedman uses personal anecdotes to make these long-running conflicts come alive. He extensively quotes the words of participants and eyewitnesses, giving the book a real "you are there" flavor. A variety of mysteries are explained, including Israel's religious motivation for wishing to retain the West Bank, the conflict between Palestinians in the diaspora and Palestinians in the occupied territories, the controversy over immigration into Israel and the true story of the Sabra-Shatila massacre.
Between Bullets and Ballots: Algeria's Transition from Authoritarianism by William B. Quandt
This book is for all of you who've been wondering, "What is the cause of all the grisly violence in Algeria?" All the pat explanations that have been applied to previous civil wars ("It's a religious conflict" or "It's an ethnic conflict") clearly did not apply in Algeria's case.
Between Bullets and Ballots explains Algeria's violent present in terms of both its demography and the incompetence of its recent governments. Quandt makes a clear case that the failure of the French colonial government to incorporate Algerians or to allow formation of an educated Algerian elite left the newly independent state unprepared to govern itself. He convincingly argues that the authoritarian governments of the '70s and '80s muffed the transition to democratization that the oil price shocks of the period necessitated. Nonetheless Quandt ends on a note of optimism, arguing that Islam is not incompatible with democracy and that democratic governments have a bright if not trouble-free future in the Arab world.
The Physics and Chemistry of Color by Kurt Nassau
Most techies know why the sky is blue. But why is copper reddish? Why are clouds white? Why is ruby red? How do photogray glasses and color film work? More interesting than The Flying Circus of Physics, and with color illustrations! Get this book for the technical souls on your Christmas list.
Giant Molecules by A.Yu. Grosberg and A.R. Khokhlov
Giant Molecules is another fun-to-read, lighthearted monograph, this time about polymers and their role in biophysics. Enjoyment of this book requires little more than a knowledge of calculus, as the authors lead the reader through all the required concepts, including the clearest and best motivated derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that I have read anywhere. The most fascinating sections deal with DNA and how the constraints of polymer replication and stability almost require genetic material to take the form it does. Polymer physics is much more unlike the rest of solid-state physics than I'd imagined, and the reason is that entropy as opposed to internal energy plays a dominant role. Because polymer chains have a lower entropy when they are uncoiled, elastic polymers tend to contract when heated!
I picked up this book because the authors of Giant Molecules recommend it. Indeed Unraveling DNA is a good follow-up since it goes into much more detail about how the physical and chemical properties of the DNA molecule determine the biological results. As someone who last took a biology course in 1980, I particularly appreciated the fact that Unraveling DNA was written in 1993 and updated in 1997. Even two years is a long time in the history of molecular biology, a fact that is poignantly illustrated by UD's hopeful comments about the AIDS "miracle" using "cocktails" of protease and reverse transcriptase inhibitors.
Unraveling DNA both traces the history of molecular biology and brings the reader up-to-date on such recent developments as the polymerase chain reaction and DNA sequencing. I was grateful for the plain-English descriptions of how these processes actually work. The author sketches the probable RNA origin of life, describes the variety of DNA-repair mechanisms employed by cells and details current efforts in cancer research. All this happens in a very readable 187 pages, including a number of explanatory diagrams. Unraveling DNA is one of a very few books that I have read twice all the way through.
Anyone who enjoyed Steven K. Roberts' Computing Across America should have a look at the sequel, Miles with Maggie. MWM is an e-book only. CAA described Roberts' decision to flee his secure suburban lifestyle and spend his days traveling around the country on a networked recumbent bike. Altogether he logged about 10,000 miles, had a slew of amusing adventures and slept with dozens of women. The book is as much as a description of Roberts' attempts to make a living at wish fulfillment as it is about cycling or computing.
Miles with Maggie picks up where CAA left off, describing Roberts' decision to build Winnebiko II, an upgraded version of his cybercycle. As the title suggests, he also took along a steady female companion who rode her own recumbent bicycle. They started out in Seattle, rode to the Bay Area, and then got stranded for a couple of years, as the bicycle building and riding became more of a business than a lifestyle. Nonetheless there are a number of entertaining and hair-raising anecdotes from the 6000-mile roadtrip.
The book ends at the point that Roberts is working on the BEHEMOTH project for which he is best known. Amusingly we learn by scanning the Nomadics Research Lab website that Roberts rode BEHEMOTH (the bicycle he exhibits at talks nowadays) only about 500 miles. Hence no BEHEMOTH book! The heroic 16,000 mile jaunt around America was accomplished not on the 780 pound BEHEMOTH but on the 280 pound Winnebiko II and the smaller Winnebiko. I get the impression reading MWM that Roberts lost his interest in travelling around the country on BEHEMOTH to his obsession for building it.
I highly recommend these books to anyone who loves adventure travel, cycling or electrical engineering. Roberts' writing can sometimes be annoying: his descriptions of ecstatic sensory experiences are nearly always cloying. His social observations on the road are acute though, and his criticisms of American mall culture are right on the mark.
At last, a book about paddle sports and physics! Kenneth Brower, son of the famous David, has written an account of the life of George Dyson, son of the famous Freeman and brother of the famous Esther. George turns out to be quite fascinating in his own right, and Brower's juxtaposition of Freeman's fantasies about space travel and George's true-life adventures on the waters of the Pacific Northwest is more apt than it might initially seem. Brower uncovers the spirit of adventure that unites George's painstaking hand construction of a baidarka, a giant ocean-faring kayak, with Freeman's work on nuclear-propelled spacecraft.
The Starship and the Canoe would be of interest to those who have enjoyed Roberts' travelogues. Both do a great job of capturing the unusual sense of community that is prevalent in nerd social circles.
At last, a book about hiking and beer-drinking! I haven't been to Copper Canyon yet, so I can't judge the utility of this trail guide at the vibram-meets-the-dirt level. I can tell you that this is by far the most entertaining hiking guide I have ever read, and I include the Colin Fletcher books in the comparison. Fayhee's book is very funny and includes plenty of fascinating details not only about the geography of the Copper Canyon area, but also about the culture of its inhabitants.
Other hiking guides I enthusiastically recommend are Kauai Trails by Kathy Morey and 100 Hikes in Southern Oregon by William Sullivan. The wonderful cartoon maps in Sullivan's book are alone worth the purchase price. All competent trail guides give directions to the trailhead and tell how long the route is. The distinction between an indifferent guide and a great one is the author's ability to convey to the reader which hikes are the most enjoyable. For this reason, the best hiking guides are fun to sit and read even when a trip is not imminent. Morey and Sullivan's books are both excellent in this regard. With Fayhee, you not only want to go on the backpacks he recommends, you'd like him to accompany you.
Alex Counts vividly tells us the many stories behind the founding and continuing success of Grameen Bank, the home of the world micro-lending movement. Micro-lending is based on the realization that what the poor need to lift them out of poverty is often not a handout, but a small amount of credit (perhaps $100) and some well-organized encouragement. If ever an approach sounded simplistic and utopian, it's Grameen's. What makes Grameen worthy of extended consideration is its impressive success, not only in its base in Pakistan, but in duplicate programs all over the world.
Counts' book is not a dry economics lesson, but an engrossing history of Grameen and the leaders who have sacrificed to make it work. He tells the touching stories of Grameen borrowers both in Pakistan and in Chicago and relates hows the changes wrought by the tiny amounts of money made available have rippled through the local society. I found this book to a great eye-opener; I could never have imagined before how important a flea market might be to women struggling to become self-employed, nor could I have imagined how resourceful and creative the very poor could be in starting their own businesses. Yunus convinces us that the main problems with povery alleviation programs often lie not with the supposed indolence of the poor but with the lack of imagination that donors exhibit.
The Mystery of Capital is a treatise about the economic effects of bad legal systems. Ugh or perhaps eeew, are my initial reactions to this topic, but the engaging writing and curiosity about the question raised by the title kept me reading. Like Muhammad Yunus, de Soto believes that useful assistance to Third World poor is possible, but that current aid efforts are misdirected. He identifies an antiquated system of permits and property as the main obstacle to progress in developing countries. de Soto argues persuasively that the large size of the underground "extralegal" economy in Third World and former Communist countries is due to the near impossibility of working inside these nations' labyrinthine legal systems. He claims that reform of property laws would allow poor enterpreneurs full access to capital, advertising, and economies of scale, and thus would finally make capitalism work in countries where it has to date produced only more misery. de Soto, the author, is president of Peru's Institute for Liberation and Democracy and is a persuasive author.
Thanks to Howie Jackson of the University of Cincinnati for recommending this book and for pointing out that de Soto's ideas about "virtual money" and the fungibility of capital have implications for e-commerce as well as Third World development.
The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore by Harold McGee
The Curious Cook is not a science text but it would make a thoughtful gift for any scientist who likes to mess around in the kitchen. McGee's book does contain some useful information about how to prepare food, but most of the writing is devoted instead to the chemistry of cooking. McGee's simple experiments with food will charm both scientists and small children. (Okay, perhaps this conjunction is not terribly surprising!) Particularly diverting are an explanation of sherbert-making in terms of the entropy of mixing and a discussion of steak-grilling in terms of Fick's Law. Nonetheless McGee's prose is completely jargon-free and will entertain anyone who suspected all along that mushrooms don't really absorb water.
The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin
David Brin asks what outcome the unstoppable advance of surveillance technologies will have and answers optimistically that life may improve. Brin is a well-informed curmudgeon who argues fairly convincingly that technologies may improve public safety and expand democratic freedoms -- as long as they are applied in a symmetric way, where average citizens have as much power to monitor as corporations and governments. He offers a myriad of examples to support his point of view, from whistleblowers to the police brutality videotapes of the last decade. Sometimes the book includes too many examples and supporting quotations, seeming more like a set of notes for a book on openness than a finished text. Brin's critique of "strong privacy" advocates and their support of cryptographic schemes is particularly on-target, as he chides the cypherpunks to recall that electronic communication is only a small part of privacy, and corporate snoops are at least as dangerous as the government. While The Transparent Society can be annoyingly chatty, it is a fast read and leaves the reader with much to consider. Brin's arguments are a valuable addition to the post-9/11 national dialogue about the tension between security and the Bill of Rights.
The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System by Siva Vaidhyanathan
If you've been following the culture war that pits the MPAA, Microsoft and Cary Sherman against BitTorrent, Linux and Phil Zimmerman, then you probably think that there can't possibly be anything fresh to say on the topic. Siva Vaidhyanathan proves this supposition wrong by grounding his discussion of oligarchy-versus-anarchy in the context of European history. He sees the tensions over encryption and peer-to-peer technologies as the latest chapter in a long struggle. The most important new twist of the battle is not technological. Rather what has changed is that governments are now acting on behalf of corporations and copyright-holders rather than in favor of hereditary elites. In fact Vaidhyanathan decries the search for technological solutions to the day's controversies, arguing that a lasting consensus can only through a serious societal discussion of what's at stake -- personal freedoms, artistic expression, the ability of cultures to grow and change. Vaidhyanathan's discussion of the open-source and anti-globalization movements in terms of the historical anarchistic "leaderless resistance" movements is particularly provocative. I had never considered before that the development of a usable e-book may lead to a pay-per-view model for reading and inevitably corporate pressure to close public libraries. Nonetheless the book's greatest strength is in its balanced, reasonable presentation of the issues although it veers a bit left during the discussion of globalization. (I don't agree that Mexico is more democratic than the US!)
The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things by Hannah Holmes
Holmes' story begins with astronomical dust and the creation of the planets, moves on to dust in geology and agriculture, and finishes strongly with a discussion of dust in medicine. The chapters on the varied topics don't have that much to do with one another, and the book could be read out of order without any great loss in comprehensibility. Nonetheless Holmes' writing is chatty and engaging, and she goes out of her way to make the science appealing and accessible to the general reader. Holmes' findings about the toxicity of household dust will make you want to take up your carpet, and the story of the transport of topsoil around the world is fascinating. I wouldn't have thought of dust as a cross-cutting topic of broad scientific interest but Holmes makes a strong case.
Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health by Gina Kolata
Gina Kolata began her career as a reporter for Science and continues to cover health-related topics at the N.Y. Times. She has a rare ability to turn a collection of quotations from scholarly authorities into a readable, informative piece of reportage so I was pleased to see that she had written a book purporting to get to the bottom of exercise myths. Ultimate Fitness is essentially a collection of interviews with exercise pioneers and fitness quacks plus an account of Kolata's own obsession with Spinning, a semi-masochistic workout plan based on stationary bicycles. The author does a great job of deflating stupid myths like the idea that there is a "fat-burning" heart-rate range. Naturally the concept is a misunderstanding of scientific data and a higher heart rate leads to more calorie consumption as any reasonable person would expect. Unfortunately after a few chapters the reality begins to sink in that Ultimate Fitness is much more of a long N.Y. Times piece than the synthesis of the scientific literature that readers will have been hoping for. Kolata's discussion of the psychology of exercise devotees proves to be the most satisfying portion of Ultimate Fitness. In a book generally light on conclusions, she observes that good physical condition may be more of a sign of mental health than a predictor of longevity. (If you're looking for a book about how to become fit, I recommend instead the Navy SEAL Physical Fitness Guide, which has practical advice about varied workouts for any moderately fit person.)
Attack of the Drones: A History of Unmanned Aerial Combat by Bill Yenne
I expected that Attack of the Drones would offer up-to-date information about the Predator, Global Hawk and UCAV (unmanned combat air vehicle) programs. What I didn't expect was Yenne's lively, witty writing, an ingredient that is often missing in the type of instant book I expected Attack of the Drones to be. So while I purchased this book for the fine collection of UAV photos, I was pleased to get a readable and informative text. The early history of the UAV program is quite interesting, with Teledyne Ryan Firebee drones having been used all the way back in Vietnam days to scout out enemy SAM sites. Yenne relates the fascinating story of many UAVs that never made it to production like stealth models and a variety of helicopters. As would be expected, the more recent and successful UAVs are covered in some detail and the presentation has enough technical information and specifications to satisfy most readers' curiosity. (For example, why do UAVs usually have pusher props in the rear? Because net recovery may occasionally be useful even if runway landings are the normal plan.) Yenne includes considerable material about the planned UAVs of the future and profiles the pioneers of the UAV movement, Hollywood actor Reginald Denny and Firebee originator Claude Ryan. Foreign UAV programs are passed over a bit quickly and unfortunately there's not one word in the whole book about cost (the deepest secret of all). Nonetheless Attack of the Drones is strongly recommended to anyone curious about UAVs. I will be looking for the prolific Yenne's other books, including Beers of North America (!).
A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel
A Random Walk is guru Malkiel's classic work about investing, now in its eighth edition. Malkiel's knowledge is encyclopedic but his advice is so common-sensical, it's hard to see why more investors don't heed it. The book's main thesis is that the market is efficient, meaning that short of having illegal inside knowledge to trade on, individuals are unlikely to do better by purchasing individual stocks than by investing in index funds. Malkiel also emphasizes that short-term fluctuations of the market are random (1/f noise presumably) and that "technical" analyses that subject stock price data to statistical scrutiny are extremely unlikely to make money once transaction costs are taken into account. Fittingly then, Malkiel is one of the founders of Vanguard, from which he has recently (2005) retired.
The biggest surprise about A Random Walk is what a lively read it is. Malkiel is not a prose stylist but his text is full of amusing anecdotes and he's not afraid to name names in either praise or derision. I regret a bit reading the 1996 edition (from the library) not because I think his advice has changed but because I'm curious what Malkiel would have to say about Blodget and Grubman. Who knew that there had been a tech stock craze before, in 1959-1962? The real value of the book lies in its explanations of both the simple (buy index funds) and the baroque (why options purchases can be insurance for the conservative investor rather than a vehicle for speculation). Thanks to Nivi for the recommendation.
The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson
Trevor Corson artfully intersperses essays about the biology of lobsters with humorous and touching anecdotes about the scientists who study them and the fishermen who capture them. While the details of the lobsters' behavior and life cycle are fascinating in their own right, the author's portraits of the fisherman and scientists struggling to understand and preserve the lobster fishery are the heart of the book. Corson spent two years as a sternman on a fishing boat and clearly knows his material well. He also spent weeks interviewing lobster biologists, many of whom leave the laboratory to don waders or scuba gear or even visit the benthic realms in submersibles. Like John McPhee, Corson has a talent for presenting complex technical issues in an accessible and entertaing way. Since Corson is a lot younger than McPhee, we can look forward to reading his work for many years.
Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow has been recommended to me repeatedly over the years and I've finally gotten around to reading it. Prof. Csikszentmihalyi makes the distinction between pleasure, which involves a satiation of the senses, and enjoyment, which is the satisfaction that derives from mastering challenges. The essence of his argument is that modern humans expend too many of their waking hours in dull, dissipative experiences like watching television, which hardly even provides pleasure. What we need instead are engrossing hobbies and work tasks that make us forget ourselves. The primary purpose of distractions is to shut up the voice of anxiety in our heads, he argues, but such distractions do not make us happy.
Much of what Csikszentmihalyi writes is undeniably true and his arguments are less original than they are clear and forceful. Robert Pirsig spoke more eloquently on the same subject in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance over 20 years ago. Flow gets more stimulating when the author argues that a short attention span and lack of mental discipline are the primary causes of the restlessness that most people feel. There are inspiring anecdotes about survivors of calamities who have, through tremendous mental discipline, put them out of their minds. However Csikszentmihalyi offers little practical advice as to how an ordinary person might develop such discipline beyond finding an engrossing hobby and pouring energy into it. As with many self-help books, the reader gets the feeling that Flow is a fascinating magazine article which has been expanded into a rather wordy book.
If You Ask Me: the Collected Columns of America's Most Beloved and Irresponsible Critic by Libby Gelman-Waxner
Libby G-W is the fictional alter ego of comic writer Paul Rudnick. She is also an assistant buyer in junior's activewear, wife of dentist Josh Gelner, and the regular movie reviewer for Premiere magazine. Usually I avoid the Howard-Sternlike dishing-on-celebrities type of humor at all costs, but I have to admit that Paul Rudnick is very funny. Every single column made me laugh out loud at least once, which is more than I can say about the movie reviews in our local paper. There are a lot of Jewish culture jokes that only those born in New York or Philadelphia may find funny, so if you've found yourself wishing for a new Fran Lebowitz volume, you should check out Libby.
