Review: The Secrets of the German War Office

The Secrets of the German War Office by Armgaard Karl Graves

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I really enjoyed reading this, but find the most exciting parts hard to believe. Most of the book is the autobiographical details of a gentleman spy plying his craft in exotic, urbane locales. All that is well and good enough, but a pre-WW I secret Black Forest meeting with German military leads, Austrians, and British leaders including Churchill and Haldane (British Secretary of State for War) agreeing to support or allow Russia pushed out of Europe at the cost of the Slavs and Antwerp going to Germany! Well, then again Haldane was pushed out of the government for German sympathies and apparently the author's report is substantatiated by the documented Haldane Mission. It seems the more I read, the more interesting and complex pre-WW I Europe was.

However, the exiting relation at the end of super Zeppelin "X 15" machines hidden in secret bases and filled with exotic, nonflammable gases which can reach perilous heights and go over a 1000 kilometers with heavy bomb loads all strains credulity and at least on the Web I haven't found any source for these superweapons beyond the author.

Still, the feeling that Armgaard wasn't Zelig and imagined more than he experienced is overwhelming. Characters like lady spy Olga Bruder feel like they could have been inspired by the [a:Maugham Somerset Maugham|5725487|Maugham Somerset Maugham|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg] story "Miss King", a story collected in [b:Collected Short Stories: Volume 3 of 4|90311|Collected Short Stories Volume 3 of 4 (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)|W. Somerset Maugham|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171189677s/90311.jpg|6532265] where Maugham disclaims in the preface, "The works of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for short stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic, and probable. That is what I have tried to do in this particular series."

Maybe Armgaard's intelligence work was similarly blah and he just meant to make it coherent and dramatic if not probable.



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Review: The Texture of Our Souls: Accounts From the Heart

The Texture of Our Souls: Accounts From the Heart by Idea

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Produced by IDEA, The International Association for Integration, Dignity and Economic Advancement in association with The United States-Japan Foundation and the Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation this booklet focuses on quotes from Japanese and American sufferers of Hansen's Disease (lerprosy). Generally these affecting quotes along side moving B&W images are taken from leprosy memoirs.



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Review: WebFOCUS Client Repository and Security Authorization

WebFOCUS Client Repository and Security Authorization by Information Builders

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I read DN4501172.0312 edition of this work-in-progress manual. It is a good overview of the beta product still being produced with only occasional editing needs although key images are in unfortunately poor resolution.



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Review: Let's Pretend This Never Happened:

Let's Pretend This Never Happened: by Jenny Lawson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Read by the author, this audiobook reads like a comedy performance, rather like Carrie Fischer's audiobook "Wishful Drinking", but not as insightful. That is, the work is full of chuckles but not enlightenment. Her far flung jaunts into self-deprecation are often embarrasing, like a Chelsea Handler memoir. Then, suddenly she will deep dive into a painfully personal moment, like cancer or death of pet, but with no artful segue or edifying conclusion.

There's a substantial amount of extra material self-deprecating the audiobook production process, much of it sounding extemporaneous.



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Review: Let's Pretend This Never Happened:

Let's Pretend This Never Happened: by Jenny Lawson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Read by the author, this audiobook reads like a comedy performance, rather like Carrie Fischer's audiobook "Wishful Drinking", but not as insightful. That is, the work is full of chuckles but not enlightenment. Her far flung jaunts into self-deprecation are often embarrasing, like a Chelsea Handler memoir. Then, suddenly she will deep dive into a painfully personal moment, like cancer or death of pet, but with no artful segue or edifying conclusion.



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Review: THE ENEMY IS LISTENING

THE ENEMY IS LISTENING by Aileen Clayton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Aileen Clayton's autobiorgraphical account of waging "electronic war" on the axis for the British and WWII is a fascinating and detailed if unusual picture of the European Theater. Clayton can't help but go very far into wireless technical details and often her maps add nothing to the story, but the story stripped of these is fascinating. Not only did she listen in on German figher pilots and more from Great Britain to Malta to Cairo, but she pioneered the role of women in British uniformed services and mutual respect for them.



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Review: Sister of Silence

Sister of Silence by Daleen Berry

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is a story of woman who endured chronic date rape and when that led to pregnacy and prime time news attention, tried to build a house of love out of that mess. Sad, very sad, and a very real exposition of the psychology of vicitimization.

A horny teenager ingratiated himself into a needy family and a careless mother let serial rape being and continue under her own roof until nationally recognized pergnacy (a story was done on the author's high school's high rate of teen pregnacy) and Daleen ends up married to her rapist. After three kids and therapy she finally stands up to him. Certainly a cautionary tale on many levels.



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Review: Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction by David Sheff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A really quite enlightening, honest, and affecting drug abuse memoir from a father already a professional author that documented his son's descent into meth addiction and (hopefully) full recovery. Not an experienced professional but, perhaps better for others with addicts in the family, the father talks about what didn't work and the straight facts on the situation.



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Review: Marat/Sade

Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This edition starts with a wonderful introduction/essay by Peter Brook, the English theatre and film director. Not only does he analyze the play and its reception but tackles the topic of what makes theatre good, in general.

The play itself is one of Sade's swan songs from imprisonment at Charenton, the final imprisonment and the place of his death. In it, the imaginary meeting between the Marquis and Marat is a departure point for Sade, who had said, "It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others", to feel resentment over his own condition:

"Give up Marat
You said yourself nothing can be achieved by
scribbling
Long ago I abandoned my masterpiece a roll of paper
in my dungeon years ago
It vanished when the Bastille fell
it vanished as everything written
everything thought and planned
will disappear."

and echo the French soul's buyer's remorse over buying revolution heavily seasoned with violence:

"We're all so clogged with dead ideas
passed from generation to generation
that even the best of us don't know the way out
We invented the Revolution
but we don't know how to run it
Look everyone wants to keep something from the past
a souvenir of the old regime
This man decides to keep a painting
This one keeps his mistress
He [pointing] keeps his garden
He [pointing] keeps his estate
He keeps his country house
He keeps his factories
This man couldn't part with his shipyards
This one kept his army
and that one keeps his king"

Marat and Sade both saw the need for revolutionary change and in answering the call, they were killed by the demons they themselves helped to summon:

"...you came one day to the Revolution because you saw the most important vision
That our circumstances must be changed fundamentally
and without these changes everything we try to do must fail"



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Review: X-Rated: The Mitchell Brothers: A True Story of Sex, Money, and Death

X-Rated: The Mitchell Brothers: A True Story of Sex, Money, and Death by David McCumber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



If you can set aside the fact that the Mitchell brothers were pornographers, this true crime work documents there legal advancements for free speech and their pioneering efforts in the sex enterntainment. This adds flesh to the murder story where one brother kills the other. I saw the documentary on that crime on cable and that prompted me to seek out this book. The last thrid of the book is the trial testimony which was one of the first cases after Prop. 115 in California, the "Crime Victims Justice Reform Act" (1990), and is thus historical in its own right.



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Review: American Psycho

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Of all the ways to highlight Patrick Bateman's hieghtened materialism and shallow set of values, I think this episode of group business card envy is among my favorites:

“New card.” I try to act casual about it but I’m smiling proudly. “What do you think?”

“Whoa,” McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card, genuinely impressed. “Very nice. Take a look.” He hands it to Van Patten.

“Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday,” I mention.

“Cool coloring,” Van Patten says, studying the card closely.

“That’s bone,” I point out. “And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.”

“Silian Rail?” McDermott asks.

“Yeah. Not bad, huh?”

“It is very cool, Bateman,” Van Patten says guardedly, the jealous bastard, “but that’s nothing….” He pulls out his wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray. “Look at this.”

We all lean over and inspect David’s card and Price quietly says, “That’s really nice.” A brief spasm of jealousy courses through me when I notice the elegance of the color and the classy type. I clench my fist as Van Patten says, smugly, “Eggshell with Romalian type…” He turns to me. “What do you think?”


I don’t read much fiction, so it is hard not to compare this in my mind with Bonfire of the Vanities, both novels that offer commentary on empty ‘80s lives funded by Wall Street careers. It seems Wolfe and Ellis both explored vapid personae that emerged from these money-filled pools. Wolfe found a frailty there, a glass palace that could easily be shattered by chance and happenstance. Ellis explored the self-destruction of and destruction fantasized by an exaggerated amoral stereotype that could prosper unmoored from real work and purpose.

I like how Ellis takes from anti-hero Patrick Bateman’s cruel and perhaps murderous reality to the failure to compartmentalize his insanity and it leaks out into his reality until Bigfoot and a Cheerio are among the interview guests on The Patty Winters Show. However, the Dahmer/Gein victim desecration acts became merely irritating as Ellis amplified the excess and I found it too contradictory for a character so obsesses with personal hygiene and fashion. As a true crime read, it seems more like someone so obsesses with such acts would be himself filthy and unkempt.




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Review: Bonfire of the Vanities

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I don’t read much fiction, so it is hard not to compare this in my mind with American Psycho, both novels that offer commentary on empty ‘80s lives funded by Wall Street careers. It seems Wolfe and Ellis both explored vapid personae that emerged from these money-filled pools. Wolfe found a frailty there, a glass palace that could easily be shattered by chance and happenstance. Ellis explored the self-destruction of and destruction fantasized by an exaggerated amoral stereotype that could prosper unmoored from real work and purpose.



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Review: The Portable Hawthorne

The Portable Hawthorne by Nathaniel Hawthorne

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This ia a very good compendium of Hawthorne's writing, the largest selection is a complete "Scarlet Letter". Commentary from the editor Malcolm Crowley is light and unobtrusive yet insightful. Hawthorne could be so heavy-handed in his largely nationalist/Christian/righteous metaphor and this can get tiring (as in "The Grey Champion" or "The Scarlet Letter"), but in small doses this book is a wonderfully entertaining collection of top-notch writing. I find Hawthorne at his best unmoored from his principles and exploring witchcraft, evil and the other darker imaginings as in "Feathertop", "The Marble Faun" (only in excerpt here) and even "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832) which over time has lost its overt nationalism.

Other treats here include his European travel observations and notebooks of stories written and never written.



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Review: The New York Times Collection of Crossword Puzzles

The New York Times Collection of Crossword Puzzles by The New York Times

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Containing puzzles from each year of the NYT that had them, this is an interesting historical arc. It seesm as if most puzzles, especially from the 50s on where picked that ran on holidays - from Xmas to Valentine's Day - and this have predicatable themes. Also, the mid-40's ones are suprisingly large in type size and include the once popular diagramless styles. I had the most trouble with the WWII era ones. They are in the clues-from-the-news category and so much of remote Asian, Russian, and European towns and figures were part of the tribal knowledge than that are now only in the purview of WWII historians...



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Review: American Psycho

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

My rating: 0 of 5 stars



Of all the ways to highlight Patrick Bateman's hieghtened materialism and shallow set of values, I think this episode of group business card envy is among my favorites:

“New card.” I try to act casual about it but I’m smiling proudly. “What do you think?”

“Whoa,” McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card, genuinely impressed. “Very nice. Take a look.” He hands it to Van Patten.

“Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday,” I mention.

“Cool coloring,” Van Patten says, studying the card closely.

“That’s bone,” I point out. “And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.”

“Silian Rail?” McDermott asks.

“Yeah. Not bad, huh?”

“It is very cool, Bateman,” Van Patten says guardedly, the jealous bastard, “but that’s nothing….” He pulls out his wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray. “Look at this.”

We all lean over and inspect David’s card and Price quietly says, “That’s really nice.” A brief spasm of jealousy courses through me when I notice the elegance of the color and the classy type. I clench my fist as Van Patten says, smugly, “Eggshell with Romalian type…” He turns to me. “What do you think?”




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Review: Columbus: The Four Voyages

Columbus: The Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Fascinating take on the complex and frustratingly vainglorious explorer. Finding a New World, he chooses violence, theft, and slavery as standard protocol. We are probably all the poorer for it, now.

The malingering of his men, the gold-thirst of Columbus and the shocked reaction and unheeded advice of Bartolomé de las Casas along with the Colubmus family affair of his brothers and son all add to this telling of start of the Columbian Exchange, including Columbus's hyper-Christian fantasies such that the Earth was pear-shaped and he found the base of the nipple-stem that led to Heaven.



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Review: Sister of Silence

Sister of Silence by Daleen Berry

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is a story of woman who endured chronic date rape and when that led to pregnacy and prime time news attention, tried to build a house of love out of that mess. Sad, very sad, and a very real exposition of the psychology of vicitimization.



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Review: Basic Partial Differential Equations

Basic Partial Differential Equations by David Bleecker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



... The tight integration of the material show the work and effort the authors put in to creating this PDEs text. I have always felt the first PDEs text for a student should challenge the student’s earlier calculus text in size. This is an excellent text for a student’s first deep dive into this important, fundamental topic. It has the breadth and heft covering basic and advanced topics in the subject. It is unusual in my experience to see a work of this scope assigned as a university text for PDEs, so I advise the wise to consider this as a supplement.

See my full review up at MathDL Reviews.



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Review: The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg

The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg by Doug Bremner

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



What should have been two books, ends up as one confused collision of stories. Fighting the good fight against big Pharma over the suicidal depressive effects of Accutane, Dr. Bremner gets a bug to hunt down this birth mother's grave and family. Part Two thus becomes a redemptive and heart-warming second story where Roche's private investigators and depositions fades into the background to the level of a whisper, which is probably what Bremer wanted at the time...



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Review: Essential Works of Stoicism

Essential Works of Stoicism by Moses Hadas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The meat of this slim volume is the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Auerlieus "To Himself". The rest is immaterial and doesn't matter, anyway. But the humble, searching tone of the other two works and the settled peace with acceptance and a reflective, circumspect attitude speaks with a voice that reaches across the eons to deliver wisdom.

This is the best, compact overview of classic Stocism I have ever seen.



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Review: Howard Hughes: The Untold Story

Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Harry Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A fascinating, thoroughly researched and detailed exegesis of the mysterious and impactful life of Howard Hughes. Being brain-damaged, syphillitic, and enslaved by OCD would be a debilitating condition for you and I, probably leading to institutionalized. For the charismatic genius Hughes, it was merely crippling and it took six decades to do him in while surrounded by Mormons and sycophants. Along the way, the satyr chased skirts (Katherine Hepburn to Ava Gardner and beyond), kept a virtual harem, advanced aviation from military to commercial and built the family oil drill tooling fortune to a billion dollar fortune where he held sway over a vast empire that included an airline, entertainment studios, casinos, and more.

Probably among the most revealing exposes here (if among the most thinly documented) is that Nixon's famous recording deletion covered damaging admission to Hughes' money going into Nixon's pockets.



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Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was an affecting and moving read. In an intertwined tale that becomes enlightening and important, Skloot explains to read and guides in hand Lacks' family through a twisted history of changing medical ethics and one woman's family's frustrated attempts to learn the impact and understand the relevance to cancer and bioligical resarch the long-lived strain of their relative' cells.



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