Review: Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes

Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes by Noah Dietrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here is an entertaining insight into Howard Hughes' life from his chief executive and assistant. Wealth, talent, and opportunity squandered in megalomania and mysophobia (germophobia) in a swirl of skirt-chasing and pipe dreams like movie epics and the Hughes H-4 Hercules "Spruce Goose". (I saw the H-4 display in the '80s.) This former CPA's insight made for some interesting asides, such as how part of the outcome of Hughes' pointless battle with Long Beach over land resulted in that community acquiring the Queen Mary and the seeking for political favor led to an ill-conceived loan to Vice President Nixon's brother. The resulting scandal sounds something like a trial run for the ITT affair, which some think a motivation for Wategate.

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Review: The Assault on Reason

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

For the first part of this book I like very much. Gore talks about the orienting response, positing that watching television affects the orienting response, a vicarious traumatization. This figures into a spectacle theory on how media and demagoguery polarizes, traumatizes, and directs the constituency. Unfortunately, that high reasoning is a short first act before a long, low road of a laundry list of criticisms of the George W. Bush administration.

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Review: Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I return once again to this classic novella dripping in metaphor and an exotic, brutal locale as an indictment to extractive colonialism and thus the "horror" of organized and pitiless greed. The bloody race for ivory rings with a loud peal in these days of dwindling rhinos and elephants although protecting wildlife is not even a subtext, here. In this audio edition, Kenneth Branagh does an excellent job with his understated delivery tackling the voices and prose of this three-chapter classic.

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Review: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 by Mark Twain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This compendium of autobiographical material, like the other volumues available freely for online reading, is an entertaining and in insightful view into the wit and world of the great American humorist. For me, this concluding volume (I don't know that more are planned by O of C Press), is in two parts. The first part is the wit and worldview of Twain, from a detailed examination of “Wapping Alice” and the case of the supposed cross-dressing, to his considered views of the deficiencies of Teddy Roosevelt as president. The second half is a saddening look into the twilight of his life: he the The Autobiography was wasted and had to defend himself from a married servant couple from drinking, theft of property and wealth, and the cruel confinement of his epileptic daughter Jean Clemens beyond what was humane.

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Review: Algebraic Inequalities: New Vistas

Algebraic Inequalities: New Vistas by Titu Andreescu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book, while slim, economically, effectively, and elegantly moves from basic arithmetic to sophisticated inequality topics. The reader of this self-contained text lands at Cauchy-Schwarz and Chebyshev's sum inequalities. Part of the effectiveness of the presentation requiring no more than high school algebra is the detailed solutions for the problem sets. Typically, more than one approach to a solution is detailed. The solutions can be several pages longer than the chapter and exercises. The problems are even re-stated with the solutions, which is a generous and seldom-seen convenience...

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Review: My life in court

My life in court by Louis Nizer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't often read court lawyer memoirs, but this one recalls to me Triumph of Justice: Closing the Book on the Simpson Saga. In both cases, the authors strike me as sold on their own brilliance. Maybe to be successful in that work, one needs the self-confidence and even the brilliance. For this one, a compendium of many cases and case types, I enjoy most the mechanics of witness examination and the practical realities of psychology learned by the author. This ranged from technical aspect like the negative pregnant to his own Rule of Probability: "What was probable, probably happened." This was not so much a rule as a yardstick for testing the credibility of evidence. It calls upon the trial attorney to evaluate what his client is telling him had occurred and what his adversary presents as evidence against the attorney's own life experience and common sense.

It seems almost quaint the shock Nizer feels is evident in such things as private group nudism and in-home foot fethishists and cross-dressers. These apparently prurient topics for contemporary readers, with exception detail for the foot fetisher, arose in divorce cases described which include the more prosaic infidelities around that involving Eleanor Holm, American competition swimmer and Olympic gold medalist. In 1954, she divorced Billy Rose—receiving $30,000 a month (worth $267,546 today) in alimony and a lump sum of $200,000 (worth $1,783,643 today).

Libel cases include that of Quentin Reynolds, journalist and embedded frontline World War II war correspondent for his libel suit against right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler, who called him "yellow" and an "absentee war correspondent". Reynolds through Nizer, won $175,001 (approximately $1.5 million in 2014 dollars), at the time the largest libel judgment ever.

While it note make the back cover, the case of Victor Ridder, publisher of the New Yorkers Staats-Zeitung, unmasked as a Nazi agent after being a signatory to the “Christmas Declaration” in December 1942, which urged the German people to sue for peace. The concluding case of the Joseph Vogel MGM Presidency had promise of being a new topic due to the difference of venue: the press and proxy shareholder bouts, etc. However, it felt the most tedious and lacking any center of real interest in this day, dealing with significant corporate turmoil, including a takeover attempt in 1957 from former president Louis B. Mayer in association with two board members, Stanley Meyer and Joseph Tomlinson. Vogel managed to fight off the takeover attempt with Nizer's help...

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Review: The Making of the Pope 2005

The Making of the Pope 2005 by Andrew M. Greeley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating diary from the the final days in 2004 of Pope Saint John Paul II to the election Benedict XVI as successor. Fa. Greeley has a reformist bent and calls out for a democratic papal election process as well as greater equality for women in the Catholic Church, including ordination as priests. His insider view of the convocation in Rome seasoned with his progressive criticisms made for entertaining reading.

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Review: Invisible Man

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First, Joe Morton did an ace job narrating this and this is a big part why I gave it four stars, instead of three. The other reason I gave it more than three is I have to put my own interpretation on the second part, or else I do not like it as much: Either the whole thing is a dream or a Jungian archetype vision or else there is just a deus ex machina that ruins it for me.

The narrator, an unnamed black man, begins by describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights, operated by power stolen from the city's electric grid: how dreamlike is that. He reflects on the various ways in which he has experienced social invisibility during his life and begins to tell his story, returning to his teenage years. This part reminds me much of Manchild in the Promised Land: the story of a Southern African-American confronting racism, temptation, and moral decay in NYC.

The cabin of Jim Trueblood, who has caused a scandal by impregnating both his wife and his daughter in his sleep and delivers an account that horrifies Trustee Mr. Norton so badly is also a nightmare sequence, but still plausible enough for me. The narrator travels to New York and distributes letters supposedly to get him work only to find they are the agencies of his own punishment. After this Sisyphean punishment, the narrator stumbles into a union meeting, and Brockway from his paint factory job attacks the narrator and tricks him into setting off an explosion in the boiler room. The narrator is hospitalized and subjected to shock treatment, overhearing the doctors' discussion of him as a possible mental patient. After leaving the hospital, the narrator faints on the streets of Harlem and at this point I end the first part, the plausible part, and must believe the rest is a dream (if not all of it was) in order to keep it plausible enough for me to enjoy and rate so highly.

After being taken in by Mary Rambo, a kindly old-fashioned woman who reminds him of his relatives in the South., he later happens across the eviction of an elderly black couple and makes an impassioned speech that incites the crowd to attack the law enforcement officials in charge of the proceedings. The narrator escapes over the rooftops and is confronted by Brother Jack, the leader of a group known as "the Brotherhood" that professes its commitment to bettering conditions in Harlem and the rest of the world. These superhuman (considering his prior abilities) of public speaking and parkour are very dream-y to me and The Brotherhood too elaborate and unreal not to be a deus ex machina if it is not a dream. When the narrator returns to Harlem and buys a hat and a pair of sunglasses to elude chasers and so completely has his identity become that of a man named Rinehart, known as a lover, a hipster, a gambler, a briber, and a spiritual leader, I know this must be a dream or else it is a cheap trick to extricate the narrator from sticky situations. . After more narrow escapes, the narrator attacks him with a spear and escapes into an underground coal bin beneath a manhole. Two white men seal him in, leaving him alone to ponder the racism he has experienced in his life. This is the underground realm of the subconscious from which he started and from which he comes to .... awake.

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Review: Escape

Escape by Carolyn Jessop
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the triumphant story of one woman's success and extracting herself and her children from institutionalized sexual slavery, servitude, and abuse and succeeding outside on her own. That itself would be enough of a story to hold my attention for a book. The backdrop is the story of the FLDS Church, one of the largest Mormon fundamentalist denominations and one of the largest organizations in the United States whose members practice polygamy. This history looks back to the government crackdown on polygamy known as the Short Creek raid, in 1953, in which all the FLDS Church members of Short Creek were arrested, including 236 children. This stopped nothing and only server to support a persecution complex and further insulate the community. This story tracks with rise and fall of Warren Jeffs and exposes him as more of a criminal than I knew: embezzlement, Hitler-worship, pandering/child prostitution masking as "assigned" marriage, persecution resulting in "lost" boys and other expelled community members, and more.

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Review: Anthony Adverse

Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book so impressed me in my early 20s that I was consumed with it for several weeks, really. The sweep of time (generations, decades) and global scope (continents) impressed the heck out of me. This historical adventure including the Spanish colonies of America during the time of Napoleon struck me as wildly exotic. I was so awed that I wrote - by in hand in pen in a spiral notebook - my own epic twin-based novel called "Castor and Pollux" and completely blew past the requirements in my community college creative writing course.

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Review: Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu by J. Maarten Troost
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Another hilarious Troost travelogue. This details living in Vanuatu, seeing his son born in post-coup Fiji, and learning to love kava. He makes journalistic investigations of cannibal memories on Vanuatu and explores coup sympathies outside of Fiji's rain-soaked capital Suva.

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Review: Bittersweet

Bittersweet by Susan Strasberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was nice to read this immediately after Timebends: A Life; both have an image of an emotional and insecure Marilyn Monroe, with one from a child's eyes and another from an adult's The meat of this easy to read, often gritty and very forthcoming autobiography is an arc from getting out of her parent's nest to independently forge her own acting career and relationships with Warren Beatty, Cary Grant, and Richard Burton; then a drift into substance abuse with actor-husband Christopher Jones; with a final, third act of getting out of that abusive marriage and shepherding her daughter Jennifer Robin to health in body and mind after a series of surgeries for congenital defects.

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Review: Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1, Part 2

Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1, Part 2 by Mark Twain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The epic work of the Mark Twain Project led to this professionally and ably narrated audiobook. Never compiled by the author into a cohesive document, this is really a curated and often annotated selection of notes for an autobiography, some even incomplete. This does not stop the enlightening insights, remembrances, and Twain humor from coming through to make this a very good read. Because of this lack of structure and Twain's desire to be discursive and even repetitive, there is much overlap with Part 1, such as recollections of Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, etc. This book includes a lot about some of the material Twain wanted repressed until after his death. Largely, this deals with unethical and negligent businessmen still alive at the time, including his nephew-in-law and partner Charles L. Webster. Twain also recalls the momentous

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Review: Parallel Universe: Detroit/Tokyo

Parallel Universe: Detroit/Tokyo by Dick Cruger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

PARALLEL UNIVERSE is a collaboration between a Detroit artist and a Tokyo artist. Photographs of Detroit scenes are matched to photographs of Tokyo scenes. Nearly one-D metallic "robots" from Cruger are populating Detroit, while similarly planar paper skeletons crowd Tokyo. This was a very nice find in my dentist's waiting room. Maybe Cruger and I have the same dentist? No Photoshop was used-just trick photography, like forced perspective, etc.

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Review: Moving Things Around

Moving Things Around by Bowen Kerins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

...Analysis of in- and out-shuffles of various sized decks exemplifies modular arithmetic and permutations. Returning often to this card shuffle theme, the material brings together number and group theoretic concepts in a truly hands on approach. Problem Set 2 can be used to exemplify the pace and breadth of the problems: After opening with “Can perfect shuffles restore a deck with 9 cards”, #2 asks for the least significant digit of three progressively more complex arithmetic expressions; #13 questions if “… .99999… was equal to 1”; and in #21 the student is challenged to “find all solutions to x2 – 6x + 8 = 0 in mod 105 without the use of technology.” In my experience, roughly two thirds of this material would be new to first-year college students, especially abstract algebra topics such as generators, dihedral groups, isomorphism, etc. While the target is precollege, this advanced material is applicable to many first-year undergraduate programs. The problems have helpful sidebar prompts supplying hints and guidance. The problem sets are laid out as worksheets with permission given to “copy select pages for use in teaching”. The middle section of Facilitator Notes offers presentation and pedagogical advice. This is often drawn from observations with students: “At PCMI 2012, the opener proved difficult to understand for participants. We suggest working through at least one or two examples from both tables…”. The concluding section is Solutions, often multistep and detailed.

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Review: Timebends: A Life

Timebends: A Life by Arthur Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While this was published in 1989, it really ends in the late 60s with Miller's involvement with PEN and draws a curtain over his family life in Connecticut with photographer Inge Morath, who he married in February 1962. The meat of this autobiography is professional and artistic development from U of M and NYC dock workers before the plays: Death of a Salesman, The Crucible foreshadowing his haunting by HUAC and the growth of A View from one-act to full, successful play. Of course, much is given over to the marriage to Marilyn Monroe and The Misfits where Miller felt she was lethally overpowered by her insecurity and the complications of Paula Strasberg manipulating involvement.

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Review: Ohio Town: A Portrait of Xenia, Ohio

Ohio Town: A Portrait of Xenia, Ohio by Helen Hooven Santmyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having since the disturbing film Gummo , I have often wondered about the Xenia, Ohio from before the April 3, 1974 F5 tornadocut a path directly through the middle of Xenia during the 1974 Super Outbreak, the second largest series of tornadoes in recorded history, and destroyed almost half of the city's buildings. This does that, first published 1956 and looking back to a Nineteenth Century "'60s" and "'70s" and when authored recalled grandfatherly denizens that were Civil War veterans. Wistful, nostalgic without feeling overly romanticized although it does recall a small-town, quaint, patriotic, and religious ideal. Beautiful, evocative descriptions of buildings, neighborhoods, and neighbors.

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Review: 1601: Conversation as it Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors

1601: Conversation as it Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors by Mark Twain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I came across the fact of this work's existence in reading Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1, Part 2 where Mark Twain claims it was a by-product of his studies to internalize Elizabethan language for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. He does seem to have deeply and successfully internalized this mode of speech, and deep inside it met his earthiest brand of humor. The forged result had samizdat-like life for decades. That underground publishing and the historical background of the work is covered in the annotations of this edition by Franklin J. Meine.

I found the Gutenberg production by David Widger of this edition online at archive.org and gutenberg.org.

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Review: Solid Analytic Geometry

Solid Analytic Geometry by Abraham Adrian Albert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This slim volume is a concise introduction to the basic topics of solid analytic geometry. The content is sufficient in quantity and velocity for a one-semester course for undergraduates. There is here a more rigorous consideration of general theory, as opposed to application cases and contrived exercises, than I see in modern texts aimed at the same level. Basically, the author starts from the general into the specific, a trend uncommon in comparable, modern texts. For instance, cylinders are introduced: “A cylinder is a surface consisting all of the points on all the lines which are parallel to a given line and which pass through a fixed plane curve in a plane not parallel to the given line.” There is something a tad awkward about these introductions. Yet, I appreciate the approach of beginning verbal before the mathematical and defining generally instead of building up from simpler examples, such as a right cylinder. This more easily admits of, say, an elliptic or even hyperbolic cylinder. The latter of which would strike many students as contrary to initial definitions and examples and even unsettling...

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Review: Animal Underworld

Animal Underworld by Alan Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With support from the Center for Public Integrity and courageous and key funding from the Geraldine Dodge Foundation, journalist Alan Green takes u son a repellant sojourn through the market for exotic animals in the United States. Illegally imported, illegaly taken from the wild, or (too often) cast off by prestigious zoos, they end up as a parts of canned hunts, neglected pets, auction fare for zoo-like roadside attractions or animal processors. The wearying and detailed litany of cases build a case that our nation's zoo's catering to patron desire for child animals creates a surplus of adolescent and adult creatures that move from world-class facilities to the lower circles of animal hell.

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