Review: Charles II

Charles II by Maurice Ashley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an enjoyable read about "The Merry Monarch" among The Stuarts. The author did a good job at making interesting a story that starts out ready for the movies: overthrow of Charles I, exile of the son, Civil War, Cromwell and The Roundheads, glorious Restoration. Meanwhile, Charles II never seems to let up on chasing skirts, hence the "Merry" appellation I assume, and then the story drags in pointless, unimpressive wars for advantage, curious allying with the King of France and then a tedious series of various Parliaments summoned and prorogued and their fear of a Catholic monarch with ineffectual Exclusion acts and a monarch merry enough to demand Extreme Unction on his deathbed.

I have been known to run on too long in speech, so I was glad to see I have monarchial inclination as Scottish cleric Gilbert Burnet said of Charles I: "he talks too much and runs out too long and too far."

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Review: A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides

A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides by David Rohde
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is an incredible opportunity to gain insight into what really happens when a journalist/loved one is kidnapped by the Taliban; how ransom payments are negotiated and what unofficial agencies are available to consider for bagmen, snatch-and-grab, or consulting. Stretching over Pakistan and Afghanistan, the end of W's term and the start of Obama's, this is also a window into the practical workings then of Pakistan's ISI, the multi-national Taliban, and the Haqqani network

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Review: Let There Be GWAR

Let There Be GWAR by Bob Gorman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Excellent layout and design by Roger Gastman and Leon Gonzalez really take this collection of GWAR history and ephemera compiled by GWAR insider Bob Gorman to a higher level. Images are on the page or adjacent page to relevant text and text fills pages exactly, with nothing dangling alone on a final page. This takes this history of the uncouth and many-membered costume metal space pantheon from its earliest days in Richmond, Virginia to the vista of a future sans deceased founding member and frontman Dave Brockie.

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Review: The Geometry of Remarkable Elements: Points, Lines and Circles

The Geometry of Remarkable Elements: Points, Lines and Circles by Constantin Mihalescu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

...Skipping past Euclid, Pythagoras, Thales, and other well-known geometers of antiquity, this impressive collection launches into the Euler’s nine-point circle whose circumference features a nonet of concyclic points defined from the triangle. This is explored for over one hundred pages yielding a bounty of features and attributes: homothety, the pedal triangle, Mathot’s point, and much more. Fortunately, this detailed taxonomy of the concurrent, cyclic, and collinear is exemplified in a profusion of illustrations. The book is dense with graphics artfully done: black-lined main figures with emanating and encircling additions rendered in pastel green, red, and light purple. Each is ready to be enlarged and displayed in a corporate lobby; a destiny I particularly recommend for Figure 56 tracing “…the isotomic (reciprocal) transversals of the tangents of the nine-point circle…”...

[Look for my complete review in MAA Reviews.]

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Review: Drinking In America: A History

Drinking In America: A History by Mark Edward Lender
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This really ought to be entitled "Not Drinking In America". Most of the book is about the rise of the temperance movement from before the Civil War through Prohibition and after the repeal even reverberations in AA and MADD... I was hoping to learn more about this history of bourbon (a paragraph here), how scotch got its aura, beer vs. wine, etc.

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Review: The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence

The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence by Gerald Blaine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Former JFK detail Secret Service agents Gerald Blaine and Clint Hill put together an excellent memoir of serving in that detail and basically a Clint Hill professional biography including his service under LBJ and Nixon. From their privileged vantage point this has much touching and personal such as JFK Jr. ("John John")'s obsession with military and saluting culminating in him stepping forward to render a final salute as his father's flag-draped casket was carried out from St. Matthew's Cathedral, Jackie O. smoking on the sly, etc. Also, their professional view explains how the presidential car was for maximized visibility, not security and how JFK demanded close proximity with well-wishers, etc. Pointedly about challenging conspiracy theories, this work is not about evaluating JFK as a president. Still, the quick summary of his presidential political career finally tipped me over into believing him over-rated, at least on foreign policy. It really feels to me like his indecisiveness and lack of resolve around the failed Bay of Pigs invasion leading into failed the 1961 Vienna summit invited further challenge from the USSR leading to The Berlin Wall and the nearly nuclear Cuban Missile Crisis. Sure, he avoided nuclear war and set the stage for less tense U.S.–Soviet relations, but only after ineptly taking us to the brink... I see that a 2014 Washington Post survey of 162 members of the American Political Science Association's Presidents and Executive Politics found Kennedy to be the most overrated U.S. president, so I don't feel so bad of my views.

As for assassination conspiracies. The book roundly denies any Secret Service incompetence or conspiracy resulting in the assassination. Without naming the book, Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK is specifically called out. I still want to read that book, but I wasn't really convinced that a stumbling agent w/an AR-15 could take such a shot without resulting in some vociferous witnesses early on. Condemning the veracity of claims from former agent Abraham Bolden figures in highly here.

As for conspiracy, these authors hold to the Single Bullet Theory, that is the first bullet that hit JFK also hit Connolly. I don't know if this can ever be truly answered, but of all I have read and considered, I hold with Dr. Cyril Wecht's convincing arguments that Connolly too delicately holds his hat to be shot when JFK is. I don't know that Oswald even knew of any other gunman, maybe he only knew what he said, that he was "a patsy."

Interestingly, the failure of Dallas authorities to keep Oswald from being assassinated and the Secret Service refusing to allow proper forensic examination of JFK is not admitted in this book as a Service failing that should not have happened. Maybe we need an assassination protocol with federal requirements for full forensic investigation and federal detainment and protection of chief suspects.

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Review: High Adventure on Lake Angelus

High Adventure on Lake Angelus by Cindy V.H. Reynolds
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had hoped this little chapbook was more of a nonfiction memoir. Members of my family lived on Lake Angelus and I attended many family gatherings there from the late '70s through the early '80s. However, this is a bit of a fantasy setting where wild weather can spring up, more like a Michigan Great Lake can than this private, all-sports, 477-acre inland lake. My great-uncle's place was nearly directly across from Welcome Island, here inspiring a "Blueberry Island".

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Review: Gone From My Sight: The Dying Experience

Gone From My Sight: The Dying Experience by Barbara Karnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thoughtfully and respectfully written, this slim chapbook contains an RN's carefully considered experience on the dying experience; physiologically and behaviorally. There is real value here for someone confronted with an unfamiliar experience of a loved in hospice.

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Review: Promises to Keep

Promises to Keep by Agnes W. Dooley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A mother's review of her altruistic doctor son's career and good works. Much of this is told in an epistolary fashion in letters from Dooley's humanitarian work along the border between North and South Vietnam in the wake of the French withdrawal following the First Indochina War and later from Laos at the dawn of the Laotian Civil War. Mrs. Dooley and brother Malcom serve as narrators and add their Stateside remembrances. There is details of genocidal crimes committed by North Vietnamese communists as well as by Chinese Communists in Tibet. I am always moved and awed by the lives of gifted doctors from the First World that forego a financially rewarding and safe life to go where the need is greatest.

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Review: Mere Anarchy

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Mere Anarchy, Woody Allen's first collection in over 25 years, is a reprise of the style and jokes of his earlier, more original work. I agree entirely with The San Diego Union-Tribune:

His ideas have stagnated; “Calisthenics, Poison Ivy, Final Cut,” an exchange of threatening letters between a cinema camp owner and the father of a prodigy, arguing over percentages and distribution rights, will send you scurrying back to “The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers,” weeping.

Ah, self-parody? More original and pretty funny is, “Glory Hallelujah, Sold”, the tale of a “psalm scrivener”, that is, a writer of prayers for cash that involves hucksterism and cartoonish characters.

Unfortunately, much of this was forgettable.

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Review: Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this book exploring the origins and rollout of the The Copenhagen interpretation; the meaning of quantum mechanics that was largely devised in the years 1925 to 1927 by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, physical systems generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probabilities that measurements will produce certain results. The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement. This feature is known as wave function collapse. There have been many objections to the Copenhagen Interpretation over the years. These include: discontinuous jumps when there is an observation, the probabilistic element introduced upon observation, the subjectiveness of requiring an observer, the difficulty of defining a measuring device, and more which Einstein railed against as "God playing dice" and
"spooky action at a distance" as his complaints are often paraphrased.

This audiobook, well-narrated, nicely balances the technical exposition with the human foibles (Bohr's peevishness, Schrödinger's skirt-chasing, etc.) with an amazing period of recasting our understanding of the nature of reality against the backdrop of WW I and WW II. After charting the fevered work around the Solvay Conferences and other places and the balkanization of the theoretical physicists into the Einstein-Schrödinger axis of realism and determinism (or at least the hope to find proof of those things) and the Bohr-Heisenberg axis embracing uncertainty and an observer-dependent reality,the book explores more recent alternatives to the Copenhagen Interpretation including the refuted Bell's inequality and Hugh Everett III's proposed many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he termed his "relative state" formulation.

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Review: Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this insider's recollection of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis as largely told from RFK with a length afterword by political scientists Richard E. Neustadt and Graham T. Allison. RFK was assassinated before his manuscript was complete and, to be sure, he could not have been completely forthcoming in 1968. Still, it is riveting tale of how close we came to nuclear war. Also here in the appendices is relevant documents including JFK pronouncements and correspondence between the President and Khrushchev. It is that discursive, even poetic, and at times contradictory set of Russian letters that makes me think there is a real story to be told of what was going on in the Kremlin. Hopefully, that will come out, some day.

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Review: In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World by John Thackara
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Admittedly this 2006 book is dated and seems most so when it considers the (unnamed) Internet of Thing reality that is already upon. Still, it is insightful and valuable to read, especially for engineers.

Thackara tells us of ancient Greece's symposiarch who could enforce drinking or nude dancing on too-serious feasters. In this, he reminds us that humor helps keep an open mind. It does feel it still takes a very open mind to see a need for sustainability in the ecology invention and production that underpins our consumerist society. Thackara’s central thesis is: “If we can design our way into difficulty, we can design our way out.” I have the same hope and also witness the effects of poor design everywhere, including the “mindless” sprawl that comes from designing for swiftness, not closeness.

The zen of “design mindfulness” he promotes is exemplified by The Open Planning Project. This New York-based organization advocates for a free, distributed and open geographic information infrastructure to help citizens engage in meaningful dialogue about their places.

Thackara doesn't speak to this directly, but I was drawn to think of our automotive-based society: "bedroom communities" separated by a drive from places of work, the need for an expensive (to buy, produce and maintain) automobile for modern independence, and these vehicles that carry with them their own power plants meaning they take on their own fuel-fossil fuel. I think centuries hence there will be examinations on our decades like we look book at slavery-based economies asking "What were they thinking?"

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Review: Getting Even

Getting Even by Woody Allen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ah, I think this is my favorite Woody Allen humor anthology - it still makes me laugh. "The Metterling Lists" with its plot of supposedly intellectually brilliant people acting like still imbeciles, unable to handle basic tasks like socks still hits my funny bone, like Monty Python's "Philosopher Football" skit. "Viva Vargas!" has a lot in common with one of of my favorite Allen films, Bananas . Indeed, The mock philosophical arguments of "My Philosophy" here was later used in the films Bananas and Love and Death. As someone that has actually played chess-by-mail and also likes philosophy-based humor, "The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers" still works for me on this re-reading of the enjoyable audiobook performed by Allen himself. "Mr. Big" is an excellent climax, a parody of the style and structure of hardboiled detective stories flavored with assaults on philosophy and deism.

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Review: AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War

AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War by Tom McNichol
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From Ben Franklin to industry after Edison and Westinghouse, this is a thorough examination of AC vs. DC electricity standards with an important role played by eccentric and unreliable Tesla. I have heard the story about Edison's stubborn and short-sighted clinging to DC and Westinghouse getting the AC edge thanks largely to Tesla's insights and his visionary induction motor, but this goes into much, much more detail of the horrific canine electrocutions done when Edison supported the similarly monomaniacal Harold P. Brown. Along the way this tells the story of the birth of electrocution as a capital punishment and the denouement of the Edison's side's animal cruelty in using electricity (AC, of course) to put down circus elephant Topsy. Topsy outgrew her value as a "baby elephant" and no longer of use for entertainment, was worth more for the grisly souvenirs that could be made from her carcass. Filmed and still available in video, this 1903 act proved to be the first step to culminating over a century later in the modern circus saying goodbye to elephants.

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Review: The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a largely scholarly work with plenty of tables, graphs, and endnotes. The author manages to tip the content to compelling and away from dry, however. This the story of institutional lack of opportunity for African-American Detroiters largely tracked from the WW II-era boom of the city as an industrial 'arsenal' to the eve of the '67 riots. The story of racist loan, real estate, and owner association covenant policies is told on a municipal scale through data with interspersed incidents of particular individuals. It is a sad and disheartening litany of abuses perpetrated upon a population. I understand there are updated and enlarged editions other than this one.

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Review: Without Feathers

Without Feathers by Woody Allen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The original books really made me laugh out loud when I first read them. It is great to hear the stories narrated by Allen himself, even if I don't find them as funny, now. It is like hearing a favorite friend tell a funny story, even though I have heard it before. I especially like the cartoonishly absurdist imaginings as "Fabulous Tales & Mythical Beasts" and the hilarious etymologies for 'cat's pajamas', etc.

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Review: Only Yesterday

Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very well narrated by Grover Gardner, this was an enjoyable re-read of a history classic. Allen really brings the '20s into an exciting light. It seems like wedged between WW I and The Depression was a time of exuberance and exciting changes during a period of enlarging freedom (Women Granted the Right to Vote in U.S.) and improved quality of life (radio frenzy). This all jibes peculiarly with sociological pathology (crimes and trials "of the century" like Leopold and Loeb Murder a Neighbor Out of Boredom; "Fatty" Arbuckle Scandal) and loosening of sexual mores in flapper lifestyle and shortening skirts much documented by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The intensely interesting decade gave birth to fads and crazes: mah jongg, hobby radio, crossword puzzles, etc. That wireless invention was bringing in the world's exciting changes and discoveries: Tomb of King Tut, Not all knowledge was embraced and the radio made the nation ringside to The Scopes (Monkey) Trial and the imperiled

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Review: Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation 1776-1914

Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation 1776-1914 by Marc Pachter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The twenty-nine essays here are by writers expert in the culture being covered. Each essay is a synopsis, biography, and commentary on writings and recollections of foreign travelers on their journeys to American. This summary of observations of European, South American, Asian, and African visitors covers the first century-and-a-half of the U.S.'s existence as a nation. (This was issued to accompany the "Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation 1776-1914" exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in 1976) Even from so many different vantage points consistent themes arise of America's noisy democratic approach, lacking in manners and supporting racism while eschewing elitism. I have come to understand this culture I am in supports a cult of individuality; personal freedom extends maximally and personal liability is absolute. Argentina's Domingo Sarmiento has an aspect on the same feature and here is quoted as saying the each Yankee,

"is his own keeper, and if wants to kill himself, no one will interfere. If
he is running after a moving train and dares to jump and hang from a railing, barely missing the wheels, he has a perfect right to do so; if the rascally paperboy, possessed by the desire to sell one more newspaper, hops off after the train has resumed full speed, every one will applaud the skill with which he lands on his feet and continues his way. This is the way the character of a people is formed and how it profits by personal freedom! Perhaps there are a few more accidents and victims but, on the other hand, there are free men and not disciplined prisoners . . .

(also quoted in Michigan Alumnus QUARTERLY REVIEW, DECEMBER 19, 1942)

Other standouts include Frances Trollope who traded retail investment for bitter loathing, Charles Dickens,a Japanese castaway, Antonin Dvorak falling in love with American native music, and Swami Vivekananda seeking sane religious devotion.

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Review: Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Kenneth P. O'Donnell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I recently watched the documentary The Kennedys' Irish Mafia (2016) and it prompted me to finally get to this Kennedy memoir written by two of the insiders: O'Donnell, David Powers with journalist Joe McCarthy. I saw complaints about this being a whitewash and expected as much, but, honestly, I have had plenty of revelations and conspiracies. With a peek into Camelot, there is also some interesting history: Dave Powers "who was watching the president and Connally carefully during the shooting" thinks there were four shots at the assassination being three hits and a miss. Also, "Kennedy had made up his mind not to involve any American combat troops or planes in this fight [Bay of Pigs Invasion] between two Cuban political factions even though the rebels had his approval and the support and direction of his government's Central Intelligence Agency. When the reports of failure came from the beachhead, he refused to give in to his military advisers, who had accepted his earlier order against any American participation in the invasion, but now argued that we had to change the plan and send in American reinforcements to beat Castro and save the prestige of the United States. Kennedy firmly disagreed. As sorry as he felt for the stranded rebels on the beaches, he preferred the embarrassment of defeat to the use of American military force against a small and independent nation."

On a lighter note, I appreciate his love for poetry, both reading and reciting it, including this excerpt from a poem by Domingo Ortega:

Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous Plaza full;
But he’s the only one who knows—
And he’s the man who fights the bull.

The penultimate chapter tracking the life up to the assassination feels like Kennedy was crossing off a bucket list as if he knew subconsciously of his pending demise: tips with no political or negative political value for pure enjoyment to Ireland and Rome and making such potentially politically harmful decisions as a draw down of troops in Vietnam and his Kennedy's 'yes' to Wheat For Russia.

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