Review: May It Please the Court

May It Please the Court by Peter Irons
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Great history here, with transcripts (including narrator) of abridged court proceedings backed up by audio cassettes.

It forces me to consider my opinion and how it aligns or not with the court decisions (I found I agree much more with this august body than I would have guessed):

Cases included:

Gideon v. Wainwright(right to counsel)
I AGREE that states are required under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to provide counsel in criminal cases to represent defendants who are unable to afford to pay their own attorneys.

Abington School District v. Schempp (school prayer)
I AGREE that school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools in the United States to be unconstitutional.

Miranda v. Arizona (“the right to remain silent”)
I AGREE that arrested people should be "mirandized" and am glad the fiend miranda didn't avoid decades of sentence due to this case.

Roe v. Wade (abortion rights)
I AGREE with a women's right to choose and feel comfortable with the trimester-based direction of the court. I also always felt this was more on an enlarged idea of constitutional protection of "privacy" but see it is more on the fact that the born mother is the whose liberty is protected by the constitution.

Edwards v. Aguillard (teaching “creationism”)
I AGREE that the Louisiana law requiring that where evolutionary science was taught in public schools, creation science must also be taught, violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion.

Regents v. Bakke (reverse discrimination)
Difficult. I DISAGREE that "affirmative action" that race should be one of several factors in college admission policy-where federal funds are accepted. I AGREE that specific racial quotas, such as the 16 out of 100 seats set aside for minority students by the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, are impermissible.

Wisconsin v. Yoder (compulsory schooling for the Amish)
I DISAGREE that Amish children could not be placed under compulsory education past 8th grade. Compulsory education for individual and societal good should not, IMHO, be second to denomination.

Tinker v. Des Moines (Vietnam protest in schools)
I AGREE that the First Amendment applies to public schools, and that administrators should have to demonstrate constitutionally valid reasons for any specific regulation of speech in the classroom.

Texas v. Johnson (flag burning)
I AGREE with invalidating state prohibitions on desecrating the American flag, thought I think protestors taking such a route are being more provocative than articulate.

New York Times v. United States (Pentagon Papers)
I AGREE that the First Amendment did protect the right of The New York Times to print the Pentagon Papers materials. (However, I do think later WikiLeaks and other episodes of vomiting volumes of data out to the world went too far. Have any of those made it to the Supreme Court?)

Cox v. Louisiana (civil rights demonstrations)
I AGREE that a state government cannot employ "breach of the peace" statutes against protesters engaging in peaceable demonstrations that may potentially incite violence.

Communist Party v. Subversive Activities Control Board (freedom of association)
I AGREE with the Supreme Court's first decision against the Board, though it was a dodge of the issues. I DISAGREE with the Supreme Court's second decision that upheld the constitutionality of the Act's registration requirements.

Terry v. Ohio (“stop and frisk” by police)
Especially difficult these days of so many reports of police abuse, but I AGREE that the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures is not violated when a police officer stops a suspect on the street and frisks him or her without probable cause to arrest, if the police officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime and has a reasonable belief that the person "may be armed and presently dangerous."

Gregg v. Georgia (capital punishment)
I DISAGREE with the use of the death penalty in the United States. I don’t think we need it. This is a difficult one as I feel we have such a free society, dangerous individuals have greater opportunity to use that free climate to become predators.

Cooper v. Aaron (Little Rock school desegregation)
I AGREE that the states are bound by the Court's decisions and must enforce them even if the states disagreed with them. (This was the issue not desegregation itself.)

Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (public accommodations)
I AGREE that public accommodations must be desegregated.

Palmer v. Thompson (swimming pool integration)
I AGREE that a municipality may close their pools if they are not grown up enough to administer them as integrated facilities.

Loving v. Virginia (interracial marriage)
I AGREE marriage should be race-blind. (Great case name, BTW)

San Antonio v. Rodriguez (equal funding for public schools)
I DISAGREE that the constitution does not compel states to offer equally funded public education institutions to its citizens.

Bowers v. Hardwick (homosexual rights)
I DISAGREE that consensual sex acts between adults can be illegal.

Baker v. Carr (“one person, one vote”)
I AGREE that redistricting (attempts to change the way voting districts are delineated) issues present justiciable questions, thus enabling federal courts to intervene in and to decide redistricting cases.

United States v. Nixon (Watergate tapes)
I AGREE with the unanimous 8–0 ruling against President Richard Nixon, ordering him to deliver presidential tape recordings and other subpoenaed materials to the District Court.

DeShaney v. Winnebago County (child abuse)
This was an ugly and difficult case. I DISAGREE that, in this case, this state government agency's failure to prevent child abuse by a custodial parent did not violate the child's right to liberty.

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Review: My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Rian Malan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How to express and relate the horror, terrorism, ... gore and cruelty of the insurrections and reprisals that had the country (countries, really) "aseethe" during the '70s and '80s before the end of apartheid? Malan does a human and humble approach by edging in from family history, expounding on his journalism through the investigations of heinous murders of this time. He finds a parable in spilled blood and hope (triumphant) in a final tale of the redoubtable Neil and Creina Alcock, living lives of self-sacrifice to cross color lines in charity and sharing.

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Review: The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson

The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson by Jon Ronson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Is this an audiobook or a podcast? I think more the latter, but I applaud Audible's content-generation scheme here. I have seen many reviews chiding this series (enjoyable as a single package) for not coming to a clear, neat conclusion, but I find it typical Ronson gold. His discursive, exploratory assaying of the topic - here the modern Internet age of porn - is thought-provoking, feeling, enlightening, and investigative.

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Review: Tune In

Tune In by Mark Lewisohn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty amazing, detailed scholarship on the earliest Beatles years here; The Quarrymen to Hamburg to Brian Epstein to the initial Capitol singles, etc. This goes int deep detail, almost a Beatles dairy of those years from where and when individual chords were learned to each and every verifiable gig. The author does a good job of keeping this a story with rich context, not merely minutiae. I heard the audiobook, but wonder if the printed book has pictures. Several pics are described in detail as to provenance and off-frame activity, etc. This pretty much nails Pete Best as insufficiently skilled and out of touch with the rest of the band, hence his needed replacement. Epstein's dangerous liasions are covered as well as Lennon's frequent and unfortunate on-stage antics imitating the disabled. I really enjoyed this deep dive into Beatles history and look forward to #2, but I can wait several months or a couple of years for such immersion again.

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Review: The Cuckoo's Egg

The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The highly energetic Stoll has a great tale told here; computer crime before the authorities knew what it was. Even on following readings, the part of him literally jiggling the wire to disrupt the hacker without letting on that observation was occurring gives me thrills.

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Review: Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs

Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs by Julie Jackson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My word, there is actually a site for the wigs for cats. The posed pics show the felines largely with narrowed eyes of tolerance challenged, or wider eyes of vaguely uncomfortable confusion. Half the book is unfunny captions.

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Review: Teaching Mathematics with Semiotic Representations

Teaching Mathematics with Semiotic Representations by Raymond Duval
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

[...]

Literary theorist Kenneth Burke famously defined man by stating that "Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal…” Philosopher Susanne K. Langer observed in Philosophy in a New Key that “The assignment of meanings is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking….” There may be no more economical way to illustrate a circle than the image of the closed curve and an indicated center. Yet, I have encountered many students competent to, say, go between graph and equation, yet unaware of any connection to a set of coplanar points equidistant from a fixed point of the same plane no matter how many images they have produced or interpreted. Duval challenges us to make the transmission of the base concept as the measure of success, not superficial figurative problem-solving. As Duval sums up,

“Contrary to what has been always postulated in mathematics education, discrimination of the relevant units of meaning in different representations does not result from the acquisition of concepts, but it is the prerequisite for this acquisition.”

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]

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Review: This Far by Faith

This Far by Faith by Faith Fowler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fascinating and easy read; enlightening and entertaining. The chapters are brief vignettes; looks into the conditions of poverty and recovery in the Cass Corridor and the various cottage industries the resourceful Methodist church led by Faith Fowler conjures up to generate revenue and employee the destitute; recycling tiers into mud mats, a haunted house, even the publishing house for this book. The author and even those she servers come across as plucky and hopeful against inconceivable odds.

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Review: Lone Wolf: True Stories Of Spree Killers

Lone Wolf: True Stories Of Spree Killers by Pan Pantziarka
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics defines a spree killing as "killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders". According to the FBI, the general definition of spree killer is a person (or more than one person) who commits two or more murders without a cooling-off period; the lack of a cooling-off period marks the difference between a spree killer and a serial killer. Serial killers commit clearly separate murders, happening at different times. Mass murderers are defined by one incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders. This author, I feel, hardly focuses on true spree killers, instead focusing more on terrorists, seeking political redress from even imagined persecution. Also, there are more mass murderers than true spree killers, in my opinion.

* The Hungerford massacre series of random shootings in Hungerford, Berkshire, United Kingdom, on 19 August 1987 by Michael Robert Ryan fits the spree killing definition well. The unemployed antique dealer and handyman fatally shot 16 people before taking his own life. The shootings, committed using a handgun and two semi-automatic rifles, occurred at several locations, including a school he had once attended. This also to me fits the old of spree killers of mentally unbalanced individuals challenging society's access to weaponry

* Thomas Hamilton, perpetrator of the Dunblane massacre, at Dunblane Primary School killed 16 children and one teacher before committing suicide. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history and occurred at one location, really. Public debate about the killings centred on gun control laws, including public petitions calling for a ban on private ownership of handguns and an official inquiry, which produced the 1996 Cullen Reports. In response to this debate, two new Firearms Acts were passed, which greatly restricted private ownership of firearms in Great Britain. This book goes little into the gun rights issues - actually overtly avoids them - essential to mass shootings.

* Benjamin Nathaniel Smith may have been a spree killer, but this member of the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator that targeted members of racial and ethnic minorities in random drive-by shootings in Illinois and Indiana is a terrorist mass murder by my book.

* Mark Orrin Barton (Here given the middle name "Orris") was a spree killer from Stockbridge, Georgia, who killed 12 people and injured 13 more on July 29, 1999. The murders occurred at Barton's own house and at two Atlanta day trading firms that had previously employed Barton as a day trader, Momentum Securities and the All-Tech Investment Group. It is believed that Barton was motivated by large financial losses during the previous two months.

* The 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting occurred on August 10, 1999, at around 10:50 a.m. PT, when white supremacist Buford O. Furrow, Jr. walked into the lobby of the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon, firing 70 shots into the complex. The gunfire wounded five people: three children, a teenage counselor, and an office worker. Shortly thereafter, Furrow murdered a mail carrier, fled the state, and finally surrendered to authorities. Again, a racist terrorist more than merely a spree killer.

* Martin Bryant's spree killings in Australia leading to that country's cathartic gun regulations and mass gun destruction is one of the most interesting cases here, including the conspiracy theories that it was a setup in order to control guns.

* Larry Gene Ashbrook was an American mass murderer who killed seven people and injured a further seven at a post See You at the Pole Rally featuring a concert by Christian rock group Forty Days before committing suicide. One location; mentally unstable mass murderer.

* Timothy McVeigh was neither a lone wolf, he was a conspiracy participant and a one-location mass murdered terrorist. This is the only one the author admits to not fitting the definition.

This lack of focus undercuts the author's analysis of paternal issues, gun loving, and lack of stable sexual relationship, etc. That may fit the author's hand-picked selection, but the selection isn't pure spree killers.

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Review: An Introduction to Numerical Computation

An Introduction to Numerical Computation by Wen Shen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Drawing on ten years’ teaching, the author presents complete lecture notes and assignments for a semester’s introductory numerical methods course for senior undergraduates. Videos at the author's YouTube channel from live lectures with short tutorials augment the text making it self-contained for self-study. Multivariable calculus, matrix basics, and some basic computer programming skills are the prerequisites here. The programming examples are in MATLAB. For a compact volume, the homework—homework, not exercises—is ample and well-conceived. Homework problems concluding each chapter include applications, programming tasks, and a list of items to turn in. A complete set of solutions is available for instructors upon request..."

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]



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Review: A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From the cover and the author's last name, I assumed over 400 pages of Nisei recollection. Interesting enough, but a couple of years before I started to dive in. Nisei and Issei together aren't even a chapter in this book wide in scope of the spectrum of immigrant experience. It starts pre-colonial and wraps up quickly after WW II. Covering Africans, Irish, Chinese (barred from citizenship by pre-WWI "white"-only Federal laws), Japanese (unable to own land in California as late as the '40s) and more is done two distinctive attributes that make this work superlative. First, there is a lengthy comparison to one of my favorite Shakespeare plays The Tempest as New World fantasy and, secondly, immigrant poems and songs are continually brought forward to evoke the experience and point of view.

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Review: Love, Lucy

Love, Lucy by Lucille Ball
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sourced from an incomplete autobiography found in Ball's effects after her death, this memoir rings throughout with her voice. It covers her childhood, early career, tumultuous marriage to Arnaz, the incredible success of I Love Lucy and basically breaks off with her marriage to Gary Morton. Thus, it winds up abruptly in the early '60s.

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Review: Lame Deer Seeker of Visions

Lame Deer Seeker of Visions by John Lame Deer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This works great as a forthcoming autobiography of a wasted youth in alcohol, joy-riding, and skirt-chasing to in adulthood learn the value of lessons adults had tried to impart. However, this is not a coming-of-age tale from one man to another, but a "medicine man" to another culture: Native American spirituality is real, cohesive, and valuable; respect it and at least don't destroy it. Also, don't destroy the Black Hills sacred ground with more mountain-marring statues, even of Crazy Horse. (Lame Deer was an active participant in one of the Mt. Rushmore occupations decrying treaties broken as late as the 1940s.)

Lame Deer tells the story to his friend and admirer (definitely read his epilogue), and this reads like a transcript; very natural and conversational. Some others pop in to attest, including another medicine man from a line of medicine men: Peter Catches. (See http://www.ocetiwakan.org/pages/about...)

One of my favorite lines from a movie is "It's a sad and beautiful word" from Down by Law. How does one existence amid such hopeless contradiction. I like the reaction (and also a movie quote), "Accept the mystery! This seems aligned with what I feel is Lame Deer's key message summed up in this line of the book, "Man cannot live without mystery. He has a great need of it."

Along the way, Lame Deer reveals the details of many ceremonial rites: inside the sweat lodge, pulling an embedded eagle claw from the flesh, the yuwipi binding ceremony, cross-tribal peyote sacrament, and more.

Lame Deer espouses some things I find hard to "swallow" from the succulence of puppy flesh to magic like controlling the weather. But, what do I know? As Lame Deer observes, "The elk is an athlete. In spite of his big antlers he can run through a dense forest no matter how close the trees are standing together. You don’t quite know how he does it. He lives with the trees, is himself formed like a tree; his antlers are like branches."

Once, while walking a trail on Isle Royale with my nose in a Nietzche compendium I stumbled on a large moose an arm's length away. I was afraid of being crushed in the dense forest by its sudden moves, but it ran through the dense forest no matter how close the trees were standing together. I don’t quite know know he did it.

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Review: Little Love Book Card

Little Love Book Card by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This must be the small "book" I have ever read! You could hide it under postage stamp! It is a "mini book tip-on with pearl-like accents and flocking" on the cover of a card my wife got me for our 15th anniversary. It contains Shakespeare and has its own single-thread bookmark. The contents are Sonnet CXVI "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" and, from Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III, "O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?". Very nice, but it takes a magnifying glass to read it!

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Review: The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda

The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda by Peter L. Bergen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Published at a time when Bin Laden was yet alive while also questions abounded as to not 0nly where he lived, but if he lived, this has a retrospective feel. It is a look back at the first key decade plus of the Global War on Terror. The focus is on missteps of the bush years from Tora Bora to ill-considered torture. This brings up to Obama's tenure and stepped up drone attacks, less comity with Pakistan, and the albatross of Guantanamo. Two things jumped out at me: (1) Bush briefers knowing McCain's presidential hopes were non-existent when his people where inattentive and not taking notes compared to Obama's and (2) several pages of anti-9/11 pronouncements by moderate Muslim leaders.

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Review: Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific

Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific by Andrew Sharp
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a well-researched book making a strong case for population of the Polynesian islands be non-purposeful pollination of humanity; accidental voyages due to storms or navigational error; exile, etc. This is due to the accounts gathered the earliest European explorers (mostly Cook), missionaries, etc. The author makes the case on navigation realities, horticultural, cultural, and linguistic evidence with a fair amount about the pig and the facts revealed by lone islands where the animal's name is known without it being present.

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Review: Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang

Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang by David Philipps
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An exasperating and enlightening, sad and hopeful batch of history and investigative journalism. Philipps recounts the conquistador-initiated return of equines to the continent they thrived in millennia previous. Then comes the long, fruitless love-hate relationship of steak eaters that want mustangs running freely but without inconveniencing. The litany of travails around Bureau of Land Management mismanagement on behalf of an unrealistic public. This leads to the author's uncovering of Colorado rancher Tom Davis (friend and neighbor of former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar) buying BLM horses on the cheap for illegal slaughter in Mexico. This proves the current practices while being ineffective and expensive, still lead to corruption and animal cruelty. I love the suggested solution - with proven success - of free-roaming mountain lions and judicious fertility management through dart-delivered PZP.

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Review: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An easy and insightful read about exploiting the "adjacent possible" mix your ideas, your contacts (network), etc. so that in unexpected juxtapositions you see the unexpected possibilities that become innovation opportunities. Lots of historical examples including the history of the World Wide Web.

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