Review: The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century

The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century by Howie Carr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This edition includes a new afterword covering the capture of Bulger, but predates the 2013 trial in South Boston's John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse before Judge Denise J. Casper on 32 counts of racketeering and firearms possession. The afterword does cover the conclusive tip from professional Icelandic model Anna Björnsdóttir and the hermit-like, craven hoarder life of the retired gangster surrounded by stockpiled supplies and guns. The afterword also details the limited inter-tenant interactions Whitey made, including the active, one-sided friendship with young guitarist Josh Bond.

It is really sickening the way James "Whitey" Bulger's role as an FBI informant gave him an implicit U.S. government umbrella of protection to his life of villainous, murderous crime through tip-offs of recording devices, etc. This book covers that sordid tale and brother William Bulger's rise as a corrupt Massachusetts/Boston politico. The context of a weak and disorganized Mafia (La Cosa Nostra; "LCN" here) that allowed Bulger and the Winter Hill gang to flourish is interesting. There also cameos by Donnie Brasco, Mitt Romney, Barney Frank, and Dukakis, as well as a Bush family member. For instance, it was the weakness and disorganization of the mafia that allowed their initiation ceremony to be recorded in Medford, MA as recounted here and published in an unabridged fashion in The Ceremony.

While this book is updated with a where-are-they-now epilogue it ends with a septuagenarian Whitey still on the lam.

The tale of gangster and elected official as siblings with their successes, such as selling booze to the FBI for parties and making a boondoggle out of The Hynes Convention Center, is really almost too amazing to believe. Oh yeah, and on top of that, Whitey participated in gov't LSD experiments while in prison. Wow.

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Review: The Pushcart War

The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In junior high school I was assigned this book as a special assignment. I enjoyed the fantasy competition of city businesses and it affected me in ways it took me years to realize: 1) it confirmed my love of reading and drew me to libraries and, 2) the plot elements based on the mathematical concept of limits pushed me toward mathematics and mathematical thinking without me even knowing it.

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Review: The Tenth Parallel

The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Eliza finds reports from the front line on the The Clash of Civilizations where cultural and religious identities of Muslims and Christians are the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War, globalized world. The cruel persecutions and open conflicts outlined in Sudan (this book is predates the landlocked Republic of South Sudan gaining its independence from Sudan in 2011), the Philipines, and Malaysia are stark and foreboding. It recalls to me how WWII, often perceived as largely an event of the 40s, was a grim and lethal period of the 30s for peoples from Iberia to Manchuria. The tenth parallel of northern latitude has a present and historical context for a dividing line between Islamic and Christian cultures from northern Africa to southeast Asia and as an investigative journalist, the author reports on warlords and victims from this vast, unstable region in conflicts and emergent issues rarely covered specifically in mainstream media.

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Review: Rats, Lice and History

Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This bountifully discursive romp through a pestilential history was a really enjoyable read. Ostensibly, a "biography of typhus", the disease is not directly tackled biographically until Chapter XII aftr side treks and apologies and then rushed through from the disease's 15th Century emergence verifiably in the 15th Century. It arose probably in the east and even possibly through battling on Cyprus. From there, it flared with the fires of war on to a final subsidence after playing a pivotal role in the Balkans in WWI. More entertainingly, the book starts with a discussion of biographies themselves in a whimsical yet incisive overview worth reading by literary critics considering modern biographies. Lice get their own chapter, verging on lousy praise, as do rats. The Crusades, affected by pestilence in general if not typhus, get an overview along with plagues of the Old Testament era. I especially liked the considering of Justinian's plague and the arrival of syphilis from the New World in the Columbian Exchange.

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Review: Collider: The Search for the World's Smallest Particles

Collider: The Search for the World's Smallest Particles by Paul Halpern
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book came out in 2010, just 2 years after CERN opened so it is in the midst of CERN excitement and prelude to much that has been momentous since, such as when the physics world erupted in excitement in July 2012 to learn that scientists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN announced they had detected a particle that looked to be the so-called Higgs boson. This book is introductory to the relevant subatomic topics and at a much more accessible level than Warped Passages. Having read both I recommend this and then go on to Lisa Randall's book if you need to no more, although there are surely more up to date works out, now. Two impressions I came away with this is a renewed sadness CERN is not in the USA due to the descirptions of the abandoned Texas supercollider that never was and I final grok angular momentum as the product of radio, velocity and mass.

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Review: One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Covering the start with Eisenhower overt Presidential Christian religiosity and continuing to the dog-whistle bywords and attestation on through Reagan and beyond, this is the history of "In God We Trust" and how the pulpit became a stop on the hustings. In the history, it is interesting how in Ike's era there seemed a exploitation of a recurrent Great Awakenings to align political inertia that became a pendulum swung too far in later fights over prayer in schools and more.

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Review: My Mother Was Nuts

My Mother Was Nuts by Penny Marshall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Earlier this year, we cut the cord and being without cable I have discovered some of the networks airing syndicated reruns, like 'Laverne & Shirley' w/perky and positive Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams) sharing an apartment with Laverne DeFazio (Penny Marshall), a tough-talking tomboy. Personally, I always appreciated Williams more, but just because her delivery was more like my own comedic style. I would never be as bold and overt as Penny Marshall - and I liked that about her. Seeing these reruns on MeTV made me seek out autobiographies from the comedienne greats and since Shirley, I Jest is not an Audible audiobook (yet, I hope), hear I am reading Marshall's memoir.

Marshall gets extra points from me for delivery a performance, like a an audiobook written by a performer deserves. Reading her words is cracking wise, and nearly crying when she recalls deaths and breakups. She also brings in some siblings to voice their relevant memories. I would have been glad to have a chapter on each of the show's seasons and episode highlights. Of course, her life is much more than that and with relatively little about the show, I don't miss it. Before the success of the show, there is the arc from her mother's dancing school to breaking into Hollywood with the help of her established brother. There is much on her personal life from an early pregnancy and marriage to later relationships with a globe-trotting Art Garfunkel and Rob Reiner from the neighborhood. She also is very forthcoming on some casual drug experimentation and two unexpected pregnancies. Mostly, on her career, I walked away with more understanding and respect for her pioneering work as a female director directing films such as Big (1988; with interesting tidbits about getting the famous floor piano made), the first film directed by a woman to gross in excess of $100 million at the U.S. box office; Awakenings (1990; with details on De Niro and Williams and how there was no fight), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture; and A League of Their Own (1992; part of her expression as an ardent sports fan).

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Review: The Great Depression: A Diary

The Great Depression: A Diary by Benjamin Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Great Depression took place during the 1930s. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations; however, in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. The Youngstown, OH lawyer that kept the economic diary that is the basis of the book did not know it was The Great Depression until it was well under way for a few years and did not know it was over until the US was in WW II, and even then the threat lingered. So, this memoir is a very human recollection of these pivotal events told from rumours, misunderstanding, and awe. All is rather dispassionate and authentic. This is a very interesting way to consider what living through the Depression would have been like and how issues like bimetallism and the rise of FDR appeared at the time.

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Review: Bob Dylan In America

Bob Dylan In America by Sean Wilentz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finally - I found an audiobook on a musical artist with integrated, relevant music excerpts! Much for the dedicated Dylan fan, these music interludes include bootlegs. I mostly like the historical aspects here, like Aaron Copland's socialist leanings being a catalyst to the folk movement and the forensic details of the late 19th Century crimes that came down to us as "Delia", "Frankie and Johnny", etc.. There is a lot of deep detail here, like recording session details down to individual, incomplete takes. Still taking it at a higher level, Wilentz as one-time historian in the official Dylan Web presence has a lot of privy information and a lot of insight, sussing out details from Dylan's reading and quotes.

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Review: Billie Sol: King of Texas Wheeler-Dealers

Billie Sol: King of Texas Wheeler-Dealers by Pam Estes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Parts of this remind me in tone and feel to My Father's Daughter: A Memoir. These are both memoirs of daughters of powerful men recounting a tumultuous life. Pam's memoir covers Sol's two federal fraud convictions and sentences, both around financial shenanigans based on non-existent collateral. Possibly more interesting is the movements in the LBJ sphere and a cast of colorful characters that make this a footnote for the LBJ-killed-JFK conspiracy buffs.

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Review: Patrick Pearse and the Politics of Redemption: The Mind of the Easter Rising, 1916

Patrick Pearse and the Politics of Redemption: The Mind of the Easter Rising, 1916 by Sean Farrell Moran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a thoroughly researched biography of the Irish revolutionist. The 230-odd page book is so rich in footnotes that is both a very quick read for the actual text and a container of myriad pointers to further exploration. Beside a political life awakened during the Irish literary renaissance, when new sages and ancient mythics rekindled a fire in the Gaelic soul, this is a psychologically probing account. Connections are made from Pearse's asexual adulthood and childhood red light district cross-dressing cosplay to a life's energy sublimated into self-sacrifice for nationhood.

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Review: The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Coming after reading Of Tigers and Men: Entering the Age of Extinction, this is more despair about the unlikely future of wild tigers on Earth...

That being said, like a Forensic Files survey of a crime, this work tracks the action of a tiger showing all the indications in its measured, specific, and targeted actions of carrying out lethal vengeance against a specific man it bore a grudge against.

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Review: Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper:: Edited from the Original Manuscript in the William Robertson Coe Collection of Western Americana in the Yale University Library: With a Biography of Osborne Russell and Maps of His Travels While a Trapper in the...

Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper:: Edited from the Original Manuscript in the William Robertson Coe Collection of Western Americana in the Yale University Library: With a Biography of Osborne Russell and Maps of His Travels While a Trapper in the... by Osborne Russell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Compare to Tough Trip Through Paradise: Montana 1878 where a trader finds area Indians subjugated and almost comically impoverished. Here bookish Russell has to have running battles with Blackfeet and Crow to do some trapping. This book is a largely as-is journal including spelling errors and pet abbreviations but lacking chapter or paragraph breaks. Editor Aubrey L. Haines includes many helpful maps and speaks to the same terrain that he knows. I wish the maps had indications of current state lines and major cities. The extensive notes of the 1830s travels in Snake River territory include many amplifying primary source details and should be read along.

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Review: Simply Wittgenstein

Simply Wittgenstein by James C. Klagge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this overview of Ludwig Wittgenstein's live and works, focusing on Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The author does a commendable job at clarifying the key points of this unusual philosopher's "antiphilosophy". I have always been drawn to Wittgenstein's focus on language and the "game" over ontological minutiae. This book clarifies and expounds on what is still important and relevant about Wittgenstein's thought and the parts of his interesting life that helped shape his outlook.

[I received a free copy of the book to review.]

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Review: A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Edgy and controversial, a real horrorshow romp of language and lewdness, graphic violence and vitality. In the book, the youths are so much younger than the young men than in the movie that this somehow makes it even edgier.

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Review: 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents

1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The presidential election of 1920 was dramatic. The book's title comes from six once-and-future presidents angling in the race: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt. There as many non-president actors of significance, including socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, leading American progressive and isolationist politician from California Hiram Johnson, the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928 Al Smith, and more. Is it that unusual a half-dozen former and future presidents populate the stage? I don't know about that, but the drama of the year includes women's suffrage, U.S. post-WW I isolationism (League of Nations, fear of "internationalism", immigration), the high tide of organized socialism, the end of the Progressive Era period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States from the 1890s to 1920s, the two major parties evolving into the shape we now know, the maturing of the primary process, and the political effects of American urbanization.

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Review: The Unicorn's Secret

The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was born in 1970, so was never really cognizant of the murder of Holly Maddux as a new story, but I certainly noticed in the 2001 coverage of his extradition from France after being on the lam for over 20 years. I wanted to read this book to see what was known before he disappeared, as this book was published while Einhorn's whereabouts were unknown.

His activity in ecological groups and the counterculture, anti-establishment and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s and participation in the first Earth Day event in Philadelphia in 1970 while maintaining lunches with corporate execs and an international correspondence around Tesla technology and "psychotronic" mind military tech (remote viewing, etc.) connect this to The Men Who Stare At Goats. It was a period when anything seemed possible and connected nd conspiratorial and Einhorn navigated that landscape with aplomb.

Even when this book was written, it seemed undeniable he murdered his former girlfriend as a culmination of generally misogynistic behavior and let her corpse mummify in his apartment closet for years. Fortunately, he is now incarcerate with a mandatory life term without the possibility of parole: Pennsylvania inmate number ES6859.

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Review: Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R, Jags, and Stan

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R, Jags, and Stan by John Kruschke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Both textbook and practical guide, this work is an accessible approach to Bayesian data analysis from the basics. Chapter-length explorations of various implementations make this an effective reference for non-expert practitioners that seek to bring the value of Bayesian analysis to problems in their field. Intended for first-year graduate students or advanced undergraduates, this book offers thorough training on modern Bayesian methods for data analysis. Algebra and basic calculus, nothing really beyond simple integration, are prerequisites to maximizing understanding of the theory presented in the primer, but no more mathematics than that. This book features throughout implementations in the programming language R and software packages JAGS and Stan. A comfort level with basic computer programming will bring out the greatest value here. Certainly, someone looking to create a first-time R application featuring Bayesian analysis will be hard pressed to find a better text resource to contribute toward success. As a textbook, the basics of probability and random sampling are effectively covered. Each chapter has a few, generally less than ten, exercises. Many are new or revised and they are thought-provoking, multi-step applications. They have explicit purposes (“Transformed parameters in Stan, and comparison with JAGS”) and guidelines for accomplishment. In a classroom setting, I think further contouring of exercises would be required to level-set expectations.
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[Look for my entire review up at MAA Reviews.


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