Review: From Dawn to Decadence, Part I: 1500 to the Present

From Dawn to Decadence, Part I: 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This part goes from 1500 to the late 18th Century, circa 1789. This is a vast, encompassing history as saga - a cultural history that is focused on philosophy, the arts, and technological innovation and largely skips over such usual history fodder as battles and bold explorers. There are two elements I really like about this presentation: in-place recommendations to further reading rather than a detached bibliography (including what to skim or what to read in-depth) and similarly at-hand immediate glossing for important facts of etymology and shades of meaning.

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Review: Bigger Than a Breadbox

Bigger Than a Breadbox by Steve Allen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is not so much a book by Allen, but a compilation by Leonard Feather with his commentary. Some pieces may be provided by Allen, but this is really an olio of notes, quotes, transcripts, and correspondence somewhat chronological so that it makes up for in biography what it lacks in cohesion. The jotted remembrances or transcripts are documents lacking zing, but some prepared texts are laugh-out-loud funny. This includes an old radio bit satirizing recaps for serials, which starts, "Yesterday, you'll remember, Agatha paled when Boger entered the library. It seemed as if only days before he had gone out of her life, vowing never to return. And now, here they were strolling along the beach, arm in arm. As they climbed the flagpole David spoke to her, softly..."

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Review: A Venom in the Blood

A Venom in the Blood by Eric van Hoffmann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an amazingly detailed telling of the horrible "sex slave" torture murderer couple Gerald and Charlene Gallego. They turned on each other after conviction and their crimes apparently had no witnesses or survivors. I am unclear how the author has all the details he does on the crimes - this is Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall detail - but, the author said he diligently researched the work and coaxed interviews out of many reluctant family and associates. Also, I did some looking, and found no extensive rebuttal to the author's detailed litany of sadistic abuses perpetrated by these true ogres picking up runaways and unattended teens from parking lots, etc.

Unfortunately, the book skims over in an epilogue a murderous scheme that was Gallego relatives Hunt and Thompson's plot to carry out copycat crimes while Gerald was in jail, let alone many nefarious schemes by Gerald's sordid mother that apparently led to her own assassination. That epilogue should be amplified into a book itself. Apparently, that has been done. So, now I need to read it: Justice Waits: The Uc Davis Sweetheart Murders.

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Review: The Making of the President 1964

The Making of the President 1964 by Theodore H. White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hillary Rodham Clinton was a high-school Young Republican and "Goldwater Girl" in 1964 but swung to supporting Democrat Eugene McCarthy’s campaign in 1968 and George McGovern’s in 1972. "I wasn’t born a Democrat," she writes on page one of her autobiography Living HistoryLiving History, but was a "rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it" (page 11). Her 9th-grade history teacher was also a very conservative Republican who encouraged her to read Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, Conscience of a Conservative, which inspired Clinton to write a term paper on the American conservative movement. "I was also an active Young Republican and, later, a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan 'AuH20.' … I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide."

I think this association with Clinton and similar contexts had given me the perception that "Goldwater Republican" meant someone more progressive or at least centrist compared to a typical Republican. However, as the excellent and detailed reportage clarifies, here, ultra-conservative Goldwater differs from today's libertarians (both big-L and little-L) in that he was an advocate for strong national defense and even a hawkish interventionist and pro-tactical nukes, etc.. This is the guy, remember, who suggested we should “lob a nuke into the men's room at the Kremlin." This alarmed many and reinforced LBJ's determination to defeat him - the Trump of his day it seems - and eventually out-hawk him with The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and run the unforgettable "Daisy" ad. I wish the book went into more detail on the Johnson machine that led to that ad and the organized operatives detailed to hound and disrupt the Goldwater campaign.


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Review: Crossword Puzzles - Volume 101

Crossword Puzzles - Volume 101 by Myles Mellor
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Each puzzle here contains some unfortunately poor clues, dragging down the entire book, such as "knawe" for "weed", "City in Scotland" being "Annant", etc. For me, a good crossword has some stumpers, but they they are contextually self-explanatory once solved and entertain with their wit. Mello and co-author Sally York made something too often merely tedious.

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Review: The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat

The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat by Eric Idle
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I see there are later editions, which I recommend. I got my edition from Audible and it is not atypical of early Audible editions that it appears significant audio quality was lost in transfer. Here, Idle gives us his zany vision of his backstory to the poem "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" by Edward Lear. This is quite grand in scope bring in an Ice Age-threatened dinosaur, an evil quasi-deity, an edible rainbow like something from Roald Dahl's Wonka all revolving around pursuit of an ambulatory tree. This is an idea recalling Monty Python: The Walking Tree of Dahomey (with David Attenborough. Other Python flavors emerge, but this is a work to entertain children of all ages, without the crude jokes and stereotypes of many a Python skit. Give me this low brow humor any idea, but stripped of that we want Idle's characteristic deloivery and enjoy the several ditties he performs but those elements are lost in shoddy sound quality.

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Review: Earth (The Audiobook): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race

Earth (The Audiobook): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race by Jon Stewart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, I miss when The Daily Show was one of the best things on TV and re-reading this hilariously witty and insightful audiobook with not only Jon Stewart, but Wyatt Cenac, Samantha Bee, etc. allows me to re-live that comedic genius while simultaneously being humbled with realization of the foibles of the human race.

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Review: Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this look at Shakespeare and how little we truly know (our image of his face is based on completely or partially inaccurate three early depictions) and facts I had know but love recalling (Shakespeare like most Elizabethans had no consistent spelling of his name). Bryson enlarges this to telling us of life in the era, particularly amongst The Bard's peers and why we should be surprised we know as much as we do. This leads, naturally, to the myriad Who-Really-Wrote-Shakespeare conspiracy theorists (I think Jon Ronson could really treat this subject well) especially the questionable mental stability of Delia Bacon (if there isn't one, let's get a whole book on her life and delusions from May-December love to being The Holy Ghost!)

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Review: Eyewitness: Mummy

Eyewitness: Mummy by James Putnam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While written for children, these mummies from Egyptian to South American to peat to catacomb, are presented in such detail, even clinical detail, to satisfy even adult, morbid curiosity. There is easily two thirds images to one third text so while slim, this page-turner is an album of deissicated curiosities

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Review: What I Believe: 3 Complete Essays On Religion

What I Believe: 3 Complete Essays On Religion by Bertrand Russell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Before World War II, Russell taught at the University of Chicago, later moving on to Los Angeles to lecture at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. He was appointed professor at the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1940, but after a public outcry the appointment was annulled by a court judgment that pronounced him "morally unfit" to teach at the college due to his opinions—notably those relating to sexual morality, detailed in Marriage and Morals (1929). According to Russell, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Marriage and Morals.:

When I was called to Stockholm, at the end of 1950, to receive the Nobel Prize -- somewhat to my surprise, for literature, for my book Marriage and Morals -- I was apprehensive, since I remembered that, exactly 300 years earlier, Descartes had been called to Scandinavia by Queen Christina in the winter time and had died of the cold.

Thus, the godly got their revenge on Russell in. 1940, when a New York court overturned his appointment at. City College on the grounds that he taught 'immorality'. "What I Believe" was part of the evidence his enemies appealed to. That all seems quaint now, as there is nothing here as provocative as a single episode of South Park, or a Nicki Minaj video. Actually, and this is my second reading, pearls of wisdom leap out to me:

* "Some saints, it is true, have called [pests] 'pearls of God', but what these men delighted in was the opportunity of displaying their own sanctity.
* "The practical need of morals arises from the conflict of desires, whether of different people or of the same person at different times or even at one time."

and much more!


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Review: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Volume 2

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Volume 2 by Charles Mackay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

THE CRUSADES ..."

Mackay here revels in the criminalistic excess and folly of the crusades. Largely they became a visitation of hell onto Eastern Europe resulting from the exportation of holy warriors from Western Europe. Over the decades, the infidels of the Holy Land actually by and large were more equitable and reasonable combatants than the inharmonious and superstitions Christians.

THE WITCH MANIA

Writing from 1840, Mackay looks back on the persecutions of witches with a dim view and easily debunks the holocaust largely against women and girls. Herein is also evidence of a touch of the Herodotus in the credulous Mackay. Of the death of self-described Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, Mackay says,

"It is consoling to think that this impostor perished in his own snare. Mr. Gaul's exposure and his own rapacity weakened his influence among the magistrates; and the populace, who began to find that not even the most virtuous and innocent were secure from his persecution, looked upon him with undisguised aversion. He was beset by a mob, at a village in Suffolk, and accused of being himself a wizard. An old reproach was brought against him, that he had, by means of sorcery, cheated the devil out of a certain memorandum-book, in which he, Satan, had entered the names of all the witches in England. "Thus," said the populace, "you find out witches, not by God's aid, but by the devil's." In vain he denied his guilt. The populace longed to put him to his own test. He was speedily stripped, and his thumbs and toes tied together. He was then placed in a blanket, and cast into a pond. Some say that he floated; and that he was taken out, tried, and executed upon no other proof of his guilt. Others assert that he was drowned. This much is positive, that there was an end of him. As no judicial entry of his trial and execution is to be found in any register, it appears most probable that he expired by the hands of the mob."

Mackay is not alone in the belief of this ignominious end as the tale is in The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Walter Scott. But, according to more recent scholarship like Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, Matthew Hopkins died at his home in Manningtree, Essex, on 12 August 1647, probably of pleural tuberculosis. He was buried a few hours after his death in the graveyard of the Church of St Mary at Mistley Heath.

THE SLOW POISONERS

I have been looking forward to reading this since I interviewed Andrew Goldfarb of the band The Slow Poisoners some years ago and learned of the inspiration for the group's name. In Mackay's sensationalist reportage (today he would have had a cable TV series like Forensic Files or Ghost Hunters), this is a vivid depiction of a homicide spree of active patience.

HAUNTED HOUSES

This seems more a continuation of THE WITCH MANIA in the belief in the supernatural, pranksterism, etc. Some of the unveiling, like servants mocking as poltergeists by using long horse hairs to ring down china, reads like the denouement of a Scooby-Doo episode.

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Review: Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander

Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander by David Cordingly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I so like the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World that I wanted to read this book for historical background. Indeed, some of my favorite scenes such as locking with the a larger vessel in a do-or-die maneuver, a sudden timber-snapping turn to face a larger vessel, and setting adrift a phantom lure are all from Cochrane's own life, if at time from his imagined life. Hearing of this Scottish captain's adventures in this Scottish accent of narrator John Lee makes it more the real and rebel, fiercely libery Cochrane has a colorful, decades-long career of greater scope and globetrotting than even the movie suggests. This runs from a pre-Napoleonic start to a career in Britain's navy and what that meant at the time, to fighting the French, to being a mercenary captain in a South American in the throes of independence to a less stellar role in Greek independence from the Turks before a fitful if redemptive return to England.

Cochrane's abilities from wooden sloops to steamships was not bound by the sea. He explored the possibilities of gas warfare, innovated in rotary engines, found himself alongside stock market shenanigans (maybe guiltily so), and more in this very interesting biography.

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Review: My Sergei: A Love Story

My Sergei: A Love Story by Ekaterina Gordeeva
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ekaterina "Katia" Gordeeva is a Russian (former Soviet) figure skater. Together with her partner and husband, the late Sergei Grinkov, she was the 1988 Calgary and 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Champion and four-time World Champion in Pair Skating. I was drawn to this book for the insular experience she would have had in the Communist USSR. Her early life was doubly insular. Gordeeva began figure skating at age four, when she entered Children and Youth Sports School of CSKA Moscow. CSKA Moscow is a major Russian sports club based in Moscow. It is popularly referred to in the West as "Red Army" or "the Red Army team" because during the Soviet era, it was a part of the Armed Forces sports society, which in turn was associated with the Soviet Army. So, she was basically inducted into the Red Army's athlete mill and lived an almost cloistered life of training and performance. In 1991, they began with Stars on Ice, the vehicle for Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic Gold Medalist in men's figure skating. This opened a door to capitalism and professional skating for profit during the end of the Soviet Era. The thrills and risks of freedom and a career without a safety net was an exciting and pivotal time for the athletes starting a bumpy road of highs and some lows ending suddenly with Sergei's death from a coronary to rehearsal and being the unfortunate impetus for Gordeeva's solo career.

As an outsider to skating I found I did not need to know the inside dope on the sport, or the Olympics, or even be interested in sports to enjoy this honest, revelatory, and forthcoming memoir.

One part of skating I found from this that I do not I could get from what I catch occasionally on TV is the personal and artistic impulses and themes expressed by the skating pair during prepared programs. This book is like the synopsis of a ballet for all their high-profile programs.

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Review: They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group

They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating look into the Reconstruction era KKK - Act I and the birth of this terroristic body. The rejuvenated, 20th Century and even modern form of the Invisible Empire is highlighted, but Nathan Bedford Forrest's group borne from a small group of imaginative Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee is the focus here. The story is largely told from the material of born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, the WPA project to capture oral history from the last survivors of slavery and the testimony and journalism arising from the U.S. governement destruction of the first Klan. (In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist organization". It issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina.)

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Review: God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe

God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe by Amir D. Aczel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Einstein field equations (EFE; also known as "Einstein's equations") are the set of 10 equations in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity that describes the fundamental interaction of gravitation as a result of spacetime being curved by matter and energy. The Einstein field equations (EFE) may be written in the form:





This is, basically, "God's Equation" here and the history of its development. As such, it is a biography of Einstein, including some very human revelation about Einstein's ability to use people and be self-promoting. The main scientific advancements in the prelude to the field equations are special and general relativity developed in fits and starts revealed in Einstein's notebooks against the backdrop of WW I emerging and challenges to using eclipses to get validation of gravitational theories.

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Review: Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like Voltaire's Pangloss, Vonnegut's Bokononism, an artificial religion created to make life bearable to the beleaguered inhabitants of San Lorenzo through acceptance and delight in the inevitability of everything that happens, has a simplicity that belies its wisdom and insight. With its vocabulary of granfaloon, karass, foma, and more and Ice-9, this is among Vonnegut's most inventive and engaging novels. This is not the first time I have enjoyed and I will return again.

This audiobook edition concludes with a comfortable interview in Vonnegut's home with friend, poet, and fellow veteran Walter James Miller. The conversation is not so much about this book, indeed it has more to do with Catch-22 and Miller's plans to annotate it in Joseph Heller's Catch 22 as any specific book. Slaughterhouse-Five gets mentioned as panned for the fatalistic "So it goes" by Elia Kazan and Miller draw's Vonnegut out about The Battle of the Bulge.

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Review: Genius Mathematician: Integral Private Class

Genius Mathematician: Integral Private Class by Milad Hashemi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

As a mathematics teacher, I find the typical student is not have trouble with newly introduced concepts and techniques as much as recalling previously learned, fundamental steps required to start solving or finish (simplifying) solving a problem. The author here has had the same observations and the subtitle “Integral Private Class” speaks to the style of the content as a one-no-one tutoring sessions with patient allusions to remedial topics like laws of exponents, handling fractions, using the form of one as an introduced rational factor, and more techniques from algebra and arithmetic. The focus here is on indefinite integrals, largely using change of variables and trigonometric substitutions. The bulk of the content here is worked examples not unlike what one may find in the relevant sections of Schaum's Outline of Calculus.

That being said, this is a nice first-draft that needs a new layout using LaTeX or another high-quality typesetting system, table of contents, clear chapter breaks, an index, and editing for grammar and clarity. Spacing and italics are inconsistent (x sin(x) can also be xsinx, etc.) and English is not apparently the first language of the author here. I hope the author corrects these content issues in a future edition with amplified examples of definite integrals.


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Review: Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There has been a decades long debate between anthropologists and economic theorists as to whether modern economies have their roots in ancient barter systems Who knew? Well, apparently Marcel Mauss did and, in a way, the author here wrote the book refuting the barter basis theory that Mauss never got around to. Another fascinating point made clear is that the archaeologically verifiable history of coinage only records a recurring wave of currency economies intermixed with waves of credit-based systems. Debt and credit, the author finds, devolved from temple actualizations of spiritual debt to become the engine of debt and conquest. The result was debtor prisons, keeping up with the joneses, hopeless struggles of organized labor and modern debt peonage of the working poor. As such, the conclusions are fairly radical, but it doe give a way to interpret the commonly visualized The Productivity–Pay Gap.

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Review: Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder That Rocked New Orleans

Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder That Rocked New Orleans by Ethan Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a true crime and Crescent City fan, there are two basics to what I like about the investigation here: named French Quarter streets and pre-Katrina locations that I can picture in my mind from being there as well as a crime that few rise above in horrendous-ness, maybe not even that chronicled in Beyond Bad. Books directly mentioned and relevant include The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and Disaster Capitalism because this is also about the Katrina, post-Katrina holdouts like the subject couple, and the post-Katrina murder wave. PTSD and the similarities to fallen Baghdad and post-Katrina New Orleans. The author strives for a balanced picture of the unhinged veteran and largely succeeds.

In this audiobook, narrator James Avery delivers a pitch-perfect performance in something between natural and hip that makes me feel the entire story is being related by an avid regular at The Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street in Marigny.

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Review: Hermann Von Helmholtz

Hermann Von Helmholtz by Leo Koenigsberger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am amazed to find I knew so little of wide impact this German polymath had. Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science. In physiology and psychology, he is known for his mathematics and fundamental models of the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, color vision research, and on the sensation of tone, perception of sound, and mechanics of the ear: the mysteries of the malleus, incus, and stapes. In physics, he is known for his theories on the conservation of energy, building on the work of others to consolidate the law of conservation of energy as we know it today. This biography covers his career and successes and family life, too troubled with close deaths, and much correspondence. There is letter from his to his son and from contemporaries like his doctoral student Heinrich Hertz to him.

Also, his travels and impressions of period life in Europe (Helmholtz lived August 31, 1821 – September 8, 1894) as a student, surgeon, researcher, and icon are fascinating. This includes a trip to Canada and the U.S. including correspondence by the septuagenarian Helmholtz reporting back his impressions of a noisy and egalitarian people.

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Review: Bayesians Versus Frequentists: A Philosophical Debate on Statistical Reasoning

Bayesians Versus Frequentists: A Philosophical Debate on Statistical Reasoning by Jordi Vallverdu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book argues for the superiority of bayesianism (the author goes minuscule here) over frequentism in nearly two dozen articles categorized into a few sections with an index of persons. Sections include the origins of numerical and statistical thinking, related philosophical questions, and a contrasting of bayesian and frequentist approaches. The initial, historical section takes a broad view encompassing the cognitive abilities of animals, numerosity (“the ability to appreciate and understand numbers”), and the formation of a foundation for statistics. The middle section presents a brisk overview of statistics from the invention of dice in India to Nineteenth Century formalizations by Peirce, Venn, de Morgan, etc. These two sections prepare the ground for a final culmination in the work of Bayes and the role his approach has had and, by the author, should have. These sections are good, standalone treatments in aspects of the history of mathematics...

[Look for my entire review up at MAA Reviews.]




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Review: Dirty Sexy Politics

Dirty Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This audiobook is narrated by the author and she could have gotten someone better for that role. Here hurried, pressured speech patterns and stumbly over some pronunciation in her "own" writing ("admirable" with a long "i", etc.) makes me wonder if she is really a co-author.

That aside, this is a unique view into the failed McCain campaign and an authentic window into a 17-month road trip with the press where there is not enough privacy for a meltdown, which is an embarrassing issue for Meghan. This is really about the life on the campaign trail and the disruption to personal and family life such a role brings. As such, this a personal, not political memoir and thus probably has much in common with a rock band roadie memoir. Except, instead of salacious (she was basically abstinent during the period of "dirty, sexy politics") we get the petty flare-ups of close quarters living.

Two very interesting dimensions was the injection of the Palins and Meghan being underwhelmed if not distrustful of Sarah Palin and the insider's view of when during the 2000 Republican presidential primary, Senator John McCain was the target of a whisper campaign implying that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock. (McCain's adopted daughter is a dark-skinned child from Bangladesh). Meghan talks about the pain and grief caused by the negative push poll and later encountering the Vanity Fair article “The Trashing of John McCain” by Richard Gooding which laid the blame on the Bush camp and the Christian Coalition.

This "daughter of" provides a witty and revealing look into the Straight Talk Express and the rise and fall of John McCain's run at the Oval Office.

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Review: Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fascinating modern Heart of Darkness in Amazonia like The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey or The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. While Ford never went to see the ungainly rubber plantation with small town design elements he created in the jungle, like he did his towns in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the over ambitious concern limped into and thru WW II with its inventor's worldview. While this is obviously a story of the Ford enterprise in Brazil, it also adds depth to the popular picture of Henry Ford. After all, while he may have said "history is bunk!", he was also an obsessive antiquarian starting the Henry Ford Museum and puttering around in Greenfield Village while resisting technological innovation with an almost fetishistic yearning for the artifacts and modes of the past.

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