Review: A Fine Dark Line

A Fine Dark Line by Joe R. Lansdale
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Basically a Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys mystery that tries to confront the complexities of early 20th Century racism. It comes across as a white guy's fantasy of racism and some triumph over it while going for a I-was-never-the-same-after-that-summer ending.

Ugh.

I doubt I will ever read another novel by this author.

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Review: Functions and Graphs: A Clever Study Guide

Functions and Graphs: A Clever Study Guide by James Tanton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Volume 29 in the AMS/MAA Problem Books series (https://bookstore.ams.org/PRB) contains more than the expected content related to problem-solving and enlightening approaches for teaching or study. Teachers of secondary mathematics or first-year college algebra will find ready classroom capsules on functions and their graphs. For a student, these lessons offer revealing insights into the subject in ways different from and more broadly illuminating than most textbooks. Sandwiched between this content and concluding each chapter is a thorough analysis of solving a problem from a past year in the MAA American Mathematics Competitions program (https://www.maa.org/math-competitions). Following that are related AMC problems. This completes the chapter format of engaging subject review, hallmark problem solution, and additional problems with the previously published solution at the back of the book. […]

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]



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Review: Things the Grandchildren Should Know

Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a DJ at college station WXOU (Oakland University) the CD library had indie rock CDs in marked with black electrical tape on the spine. All that rows and rows of black from the '90s and aughts... most of it same as the other and so-so. Some, really remarkable. Eels stands out from that pack. The more I revisit Mark "E" Everett's work, the more I enjoy it. This revealing, unabashed autobiography adds depth (and includes audio snippets) of several songs and the backstory on the recording of the early albums, from the soul-sapping "biz" side to the tragedies including the early deaths of his father and sister beside a spate of cray-cray g-friends.

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Review: One Man in His Time

One Man in His Time by Hans Post
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From my 2009 interview with Hans Post:

All in all, it took me twenty-five years to put all the skeletons I had assembled into cupboards and they will strike still now sometimes to come out of them. It was no help by anybody. The Germans didn't want to know of anybody who was in the SS or was a Nazi because they all denied that they were responsible for what they did. And I must say it the only thing was that up until of Lydia joining me is and I actually had in 1956 or ‘57 a complete nervous breakdown. So, it's the only help which otherwise was there I provided myself by trying to search for some meaning of life and one of the books which I studied very much and it had a lot to prove this mensch I have become now was Dr. Wilhelm Reich, the Jewish-Austrian psychiatrist who's books were burnt in 1945 in the New York's incinerator. It all repeats itself again and again.

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Review: Dispatches

Dispatches by Michael Herr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow.

I wasn't there "in the shit", but nothing I have ever read on Vietnam reads more authentic that this work by a correspondent that hunkered with "the grunts", was at Khe San, smoked weed and drank whiskey in the bunkers and got real with it in a way bordering on gonzo journalism.

I did a little research and was in no way surprised to learn that Michael Herr later became a Hollywood writer, lured to the movies by Francis Ford Coppola to work on Apocalypse Now. The tone and outlook of this book and that movie are very much aligned. The scene at the bridge is exactly as described, right down to the stoned M79 gunner killing the screaming VC with a single, instinctive shot in the dark. The movie was surreal based on a war that was surreal and Herr reported that surreal aspect as he experience it, it appears.

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Review: Dispatches from the Edge

Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I WAS TEN WHEN my father died, and before that moment, that slap of silence that reset the clock, I can’t remember much. There are some things, of course—fractals, shards of memory, sharp as broken glass.

Cooper is giving us Dispatches from the Ego of Anderson Cooper, but. He has the experience to do a Dispatches like that by by Michael Herr, but falls woefully short shirking behind poetic metaphor like the above and such statement that sound deep, but really are shallow:

Nothing was certain, but everything was clear.

Well, like he says, he has no feeling:

The more you’ve seen, the more it takes to make you see. Th e more it takes to affect you. That is why you’re there, aft er all—to be affected. To be changed. In Somalia, I’d started off searching for feeling.

These are my honest assessments, and it feels harsh to criticise Anderson at all sense he is laying bare ins inability to articulate his need to individuate aware from his mother Gloria Vanderbilt's NYC posh background, his father's Southern family values while dealing with his brother's suicide and diving past the who, what, when, where or reportage to confront the most difficult: why.

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Review: Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

...there were sensational details about
secret messages in invisible ink, a mysterious document signed with the
letter N. (standing for Nin), and so on and so forth.

- Homage to Catalonia

This audio edition includes errata and commentary discovered in Orwell's effects making it, perhaps, a definitive edition. This is a memoir of Orwell's idealist venture to fight in The Spanish Civil War out of some sense of obligation to combating Fascism, visit a worker-run country, etc. Beside Orwell's details of military life in undisciplined and adequately supplied militia, some things that jumped out at me:

1. Anarchists (really anarcho-syndicalists) were more feared than Trotskyists (internationalist socialists)
2. "The whole process is easy to understand if one remembers that it proceeds from the temporary alliance that Fascism, in certain forms, forces upon the bourgeois and the worker. This alliance, known as the Popular Front, is in essential an alliance of enemies, and it seems probable that it must always end by one partner swallowing the other. The only unexpected feature in the Spanish situation— and outside Spain it has caused an immense amount of misunderstanding— is that among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right. In reality this should cause no surprise, because the tactics of the Communist Party elsewhere, especially in France, have made it clear that official Communism must be regarded, at any rate for the time being, as an anti-revolutionary force."
3. Lot's on contemporary political minutiae that Orwell folds into identified chapters that he offers the reader to skip. Such is the jaded writer looking back on his younger, idealistic self!

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Review: Making Up Your Own Mind: Thinking Effectively Through Creative Puzzle-Solving

Making Up Your Own Mind: Thinking Effectively Through Creative Puzzle-Solving by Edward Burger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Early in a semester, I like to pose to my college algebra students:
Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
This is from the 2010 book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith E Stanovich. From the same book I suggest to the students that they apply “fully disjunctive reasoning”, a phrase I find is a koan-like tool for disruption of quick, reactive thought and nudging students into thinking of categories as a movement toward proof construction. During this time, we work in logic leaving strictly mathematical topics aside. Such exercises in critical thinking are also germane to this text and can be of benefit to students of mathematics, philosophy, engineering, and, well, life. The promotion line here is, “How you can become better at solving real-world problems by learning creative puzzle-solving skills.” […]

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]

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Review: Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge

Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge by Renford Bambrough
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I want to read more and think more deeply about philosophy, but sometimes it feels like reading occasionally -- without making a career of it -- is nearly fruitless. I got a little intimidated on this one, off the bat dropping experts' terms like nomos and phusis... But, I eased into the short study which I feel is open to laymen like myself.

So, regardless of whether you believe or are convinced by the author's arguments, this is a good, concise survey of objectivist and subjectivist approaches to morality from the ancients (Aristotle) to contemporaries. The author is on one side of the fence and this work is an argument for objectivism via

...a direct proof of the objectivity of morals, and hence to undertake to show that the familiar arguments for moral subjectivism, however popular and persuasive, are necessarily ill-founded.

I tend to feel leery of objectivism in many epistemological areas, especially something that feels metaphysical to me, such as morality. However, I came to this book directly after reading Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations and Clarke armed me with the open-mindedness to consider beyond the expected senses. We have more than the five senses. There's a sense of balance for instance. Why not a sense of morality? That does not lead to an absolute interpretation of right and wrong. After all, among the sighted, not all those that see a painting will agree to its beauty. So, if an objective reality is one that we can detect and compare aspects from any our "sense", maybe I can agree to an objective reality for morality ... in that "sense" (I am not repeating an argument of the author's, but this may be the closest thing to an original idea in philosophy that I have conjured up, ever.)

Indeed, I think one of my main reasons for reluctance to embrace and objectivist view of morality -- and I guess then placing me in the realm of "moral scepticism" the author refutes here -- is that it feeds into a threatening equation: morality + objectivism = absolute truth in so many human minds. Indeed, that is acknowledtged here by quoting others, including

...P. H. Nowell-Smith when he remarks that 'It is no accident that religious persecutions are the monopoly of objective theorists' (Ethics, p. 47).

To put it another way, I find it difficult to consider or discuss the epistemology of morality with such investigations careening off inot the morass of determining morality.

Though we are concerned here with abstract issues of epistemology, they are directly relevant to substantive moral issues, as can be shown by an example which also serves as a first step towards the positive characterisation of morality that we are seeking. It is a true story of an incident at an American university some years ago. A graduate student was expelled from the university, and it was believed by other students that he had been expelled for living with a woman student on the campus. At once there was a protest parade with banners declaring that 'Morality is a matter of private choice'. Later it was rumoured that the expulsion had been imposed as a penalty for gross and persistent blackmail of a member of the faculty. The protest died: there were no banners proclaiming that 'Blackmail is a matter of private choice'.

Certainly an enlightening anecdote.

Further than all this, the author makes some throught-provoking arguments for fitting in the moralistic "ought" in the logicians' expressions of proposotions and implication.

Overall, a quick and worthy read in this area. I am surprised the author's approachable writing is not more widely known.

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Review: Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations

Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is amazing how well, even before the moon landing and the Space Age in general, Clarke's speculative essays hold up for remarkable insight and being a joy to read. The initial, title piece I recall reading as a youth (perhaps in a different anthology) and still the point of view of imagined Martians seeing our rust-inducing atmosphere rich in oxygen and water vapor as a dangerous environment that may preclude much life. This type of point of view reframing I think is beyond entertaining -- it is enlightening. That is the most overtly science fiction contribution. Mostly what we have here is lectures and articles written imaging the future, where Clarke foresaw the internet, wireless communications, etc.: "During the next decade we will see coming into the home a general purpose communications console comprising TV screen, camera, microphone, computer keyboard and hardcopy readout device."

Some of the things he perceived campe to pass by this publishing and postscripts and introductions touch on the accuracy (such as $10 billion to reach the Moon, compare at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_...) and even inaccuracy.

There is some very good mental exercise here in the reframing Clarke uses and the Zen koan-like interruptions to linear thought that he employs, such as bringing in a discussion of the painting "The Blind Girl" and the poem "Blind" by Harry Kemp to illustrate how diffent the experiuence can be for alien life able to see ultraviolet, feel magnetism, etc.


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Review: The Secret Holocaust Diaries

The Secret Holocaust Diaries by Nonna Bannister
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title may make many to expect the memoir of a Jewish concentration camp survivor. This life story is actually a bit different path through the horrors of the Holocaust and their precursors. It is actually a biography of a childhood starting from warmth and security in the well-to-do family of royalist supporters after the fall of the czars and the rise of Bolshevism. Fond Christmas memories and early indoor toilets is cut short by Hitler's incursion into the Ukraine. At this point, Nonna and her parents have two enemies: the Nazis and the Stalinists that see them as implicit collaborators for not withdrawing ahead of the advance of the Wehrmacht. Nonna details a couple of times her childhood memory of Red Army planes strafing Ukrainian citizens. The intensity of the fear of Stalinist reprisal is seen from the fact that after leaving her brother and losing her father, boarding a train to go work in the Third Reich with the retreating Germans is actually seens as the wisest option. The work camp is hellacious and Nonna's mother has her painting and piano playing skills extracted out of her until, after having her arms and fingers broken at Ravensbrück concentration camp she was killed there. Apparently, this sharp turn into the lethal Holocaust machine was caused by her attempts to save a Jewish baby on that ill-fated train ride.

Through astute awareness and a gift for languages, Nonna survives the work camp and the war, largely thanks to crippling diseases which places her in the care of nuns who protect her first from the Nazis, then the vengeful Russians.

This audiobook edition includes moving interviews with Nonna's son and husband as well late '90s audio of Nonna relating some of her Holocaust experiences to her family.

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Review: If You Like the Beatles...: Here Are Over 200 Bands, Films, Records and Other Oddities That You Will Love

If You Like the Beatles...: Here Are Over 200 Bands, Films, Records and Other Oddities That You Will Love by Bruce Pollock
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pollock uses the vast world of The Beatles as a springboard to tell the story of pop and rock from roots of the Beatles through the quartet's arc to the faintest echoes in modern rock. At times the book is a mash-up of unsynthesized trivia but I enjoyed as a quick read that was at times an exhilirating, breathless jaunt through decades of memorable music.

My interview with the author is at https://archive.org/details/BrucePoll...

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Review: The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence

The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence by Michael D'Antonio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A very revealing, even penetrating political biography of this muted leader from the evangelical far-right. The title makes Pence sound like a new Karl Rove, but really he comes across as fawning lackey lapdog to Trump in order to advance such fundamentalist goals expected to be in line with his action as Governor of Indiana when he signed bills intended to restrict abortions and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. (With RFRA, he encountered fierce resistance from moderate members of his party, sports associates, the business community, and LGBT advocates. The backlash against the RFRA led Pence to amend the bill to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and other criteria.)

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Review: Man in Full

Man in Full by Tom Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I give four stars for such a readable, large novel: it read fast and easy as half its nearly eight hundred pages. Also bolstering my high esteem is the core plot element as stoicism as a real-world philosophy to find sanity and calm in high and low places, drawing heavily on (with quotations) from The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: The Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius by Whitney J. Oates.

I can't go five stars for the unsubtle irony of Conrad as carer to Conrad, etc. the pulling off the shelf of such a deus ex machina as an earthquake and prisoner-passing-as-soldier.

Finally, while Wolfe has (no surprise) pitch-perfect depiction of white southern dialect and phrasing, his courageous leap in black dialect -- including rap lyrics -- falses short of sounding real and is instead even cartoonish at times.

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Review: Screwjack

Screwjack by Hunter S. Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hunter S. Thompson's "Screwjack" is as salacious, unsettling, and even brutally trio of short stories. (I think the title story is sometimes distributed alone, or maybe used to label the set.) The first of the three pieces, "Mescalito", was published in Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream. This entire audio is enthusiastically narrated by Scott Sowers with a delivery I can easily imagine coming from HST himself.

“Screwjack”, the climactic title piece, feels like the joke “The Aristocrats”; how far will HST go? Voice by Raoul Duke in full cynical/mentally unbalanced Gonzo journalist mode, it is a vivid homoerotic fever dream that careens off into animal cruelty.


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Review: The World, the Flesh & the Devil

The World, the Flesh & the Devil by J.D. Bernal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Clarke so strongly recommended this concise speculative essay in Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations that I just had to read it - tonight. Despite the title, this is less theological then cyberpunk, but from the dieselpunk 1920s. This visionary published in 1929 a considered, thoughtful and logical pronouncement on the future that included space travel"

Once the earth's gravitational field is overcome, development must follow with immense rapidity. Without going too closely into the mechanical details, it appears that the most effective method is based on the principle of the rocket, and the difficulty, as it exists, is simply that of projecting the particles, whose recoil is being utilized, with the greatest possible velocity, so that to economize both energy and the amount of matter required for propulsion.

including such conveyances as the recently trotted out light-sail:

...form of space sailing might be developed which used the repulsive effect of the sun's rays instead of wind. A space vessel spreading its large, metallic wings, acres in extent, to the full, might be blown to the limit of Neptune's orbit.

This seer would not be surprised by the dreams of nanotech and in this own Brave New World moment foresaw cybernetically transformed humans and brain-in-a-pan immortality:

If a method has been found of connecting a nerve ending in a brain directly with an electrical reactor, then the way is open for connecting it with a brain-cell of another person. Such a connection being, of course, essentially electrical, could be effected just as well through the ether as along wires. At first this would limit itself to the more perfect and economic transference of thought which would be necessary in the co-operative thinking of the future. But it cannot stop here. Connections between two or more minds would tend to become a more and more permanent condition until they functioned as a dual or multiple organism.

Even this tether can be snipped for a truly unfettered apotheosis:

Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealize...

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Review: The Casanova Killer: The Life of Serial Killer Paul John Knowles

The Casanova Killer: The Life of Serial Killer Paul John Knowles by Jack Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A short overview of the crimes and demise of Knowles. This is more like an extensive police report than it is a biography. Such reportage could be a podcast episode, but the thin offering here masquerades as an audiobook.

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Review: Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices

Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices by Mosab Hassan Yousef
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fascinating spy memoir of Palestinian Yousef, son of a Hamas founder. His undercover life included being a convert to Christianity, Shin Bet (Israeli) agent, father, employee, business owner and more. I understand much of this is questioned. Who knows? The spy and turncoat stuff largely rings true, to me.

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Review: Mathematical Modelling and Applications: Crossing and Researching Boundaries in Mathematics Education

Mathematical Modelling and Applications: Crossing and Researching Boundaries in Mathematics Education by Gloria Ann Stillman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part of the International Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematical Modelling book series, this compendium of recent research in mathematics education is specific to the teaching and learning of mathematical modelling. Members of the International Community of Teachers of Mathematical Modelling contributed the content. While the articles in this volume cover all levels of education from the early years to tertiary education, the greatest focus is on the secondary level. Most articles here assessing such teaching offer largely disappointment observations on the capability of secondary education teachers to present modeling. For example, in “Mathematical Modelling as a Professional Activity: Lessons for the Classroom”:
While mathematical modelling has been described as “the most important educational interface between mathematics and industry” (Li 2013, p. 51), there are indications, however, that it is not emphasised in current teaching practices at upper secondary school (e.g. the preface in Stillman et al. 2015) nor is the coordination between school and working life strong enough…

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]

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Review: Fighting For My Rights

Fighting For My Rights by Sandro Herrera Johnston
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

More like notes for an autobiography in need of editing and proofreading. I bet at least 10% of the characters printed are ellipses...

Still, this concise mem0ir would have been good prep for my interview with Keli Raven who is all over this book as one of the author's closest friends and part of his "American family." Thanks to an inheritance, Sandro globe-trotted from homebase in Sweden to American, Russia and more hanging out in clubs and around musicians leaving behind a son and finding no stable home or relationships. What "fighting" he was doing for what "rights" I am not sure but at the end, as maybe a thirtysomething, he decides on an under the table job. I hope that direction works out for him... ... ...

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Review: The Beatles Play Shea

The Beatles Play Shea by James Woodall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This concise Kindle Single would have been good prep for my interview with Sid Bernstein. However, I came across this now doing research for my interview anthology including this conversation I came across this and got to read. Great idea to add to the Beatles bookshelf: background and details using the historic Shea Stadium concert setlist. This does a good job of a brisk telling of the Beatles during that pivotal time cresting in their concert-giving career and pre-LSD, pot.

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Review: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This edition features an insightful, four-age intro from Roger Zelazny who praises this "writer's writer" and covers a gamut of works beyond this one.

In the book, Deckard's obsession with buying a living animal plays into an emotional and philosophical landscape that has a magnitude of dimension as great at the gritty stylism of Scott's gritty, post-noir vision. Really the idea of lacking control and ceding personal choice through Mercerism, “better living through the mood synthesizer” and the ever-running television puts the books more in the league of Brave New World as a dark musing on a dystopic possibility where free will sublimates to numbing comfort in the absence of hope. Also, these mind- and emotion-controlling devices are springboards for effective, hallucinogenic passages as Deckard looks into the abyss of monstrous androids and looking back at him, it infects him with an existential panic.

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Review: The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy

The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy by Greg Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Andy Thomas has updated his hugely popular painting of Republican presidents by adding Donald Trump in. I think, after reading this detailed exploration of the pro-Trump meddling by Russians of the 2016 Election, that he should do one of Trump at the Resolute desk sharing a laugh with Putin and Julian Assange.

That aside, is fascinating and detailed account of how the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was first infiltrated by the Russian hacker groups Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear as well as Facebook ads buys in rubles, etc. Of course, Trump found this quite helpful:

Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.

— Donald J. Trump

Along with "shithole countries" and other things I have heard, it seems this exchange in here is just as revealing about the man:

McMaster had recruited an internal ally on Russia in March with the hiring of Fiona Hill as the senior Russia adviser on the NSC. Hill shared McMaster’s distrust of the Kremlin and had even written a critical biography of Putin. Her relationship with Trump couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start. In one of her first visits with the president in the Oval Office—a planning session for a call with Putin on Syria—Trump appeared to mistake Hill for a member of the White House clerical staff and handed her an edited document to type up. When she responded with an arched brow, Trump lashed out at what he perceived to be insubordination. “What’s the matter with this one?” he shouted, motioning for McMaster to intervene. McMaster followed Hill out the door and scolded her. Later, he and others explored ways to repair her damaged relationship with the president. As it turned out, she was still in the White House long after McMaster had been fired.

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Review: There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say

There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say by Paula Poundstone
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really enjoy Paula's perky comedic and quick answers on Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! and that prompted me to read this book for hopefully more than that. One thing I learned there is that promptness in answering helped her on Celebrity Jeopardy! Game 3 even if she didn't do well for not knowing the answers. Well, she entertains me for the answers she imagines on NPR... There was a darker element to this as I had not known of Paula's battles with alcohol and "lewd act" charges (later dropped) made against her by one of her many foster children. We also hear of her many pets, including a bearded dragon, and OCD habits such as excessive vacuuming, etc.

The overall structure of the book is apparently, she takes an outline for each chapter a synopsis of a famous life (Joan of Arc, Sitting Bull, Abraham Lincoln, The Wright Brothers, etc.) and then riffs off the telling of that life with whatever a bit of biographical trivia triggers her to think of.

I laughed out loud a couple of times, and at times I felt her brave.

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Review: Charter Storm: Waves of Change Sweeping Over Public Education

Charter Storm: Waves of Change Sweeping Over Public Education by Mary Searcy Bixby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Storm" in the title makes one thinks could be coloring the charter school movement as a destructive event. Possibly, this is partly true as the author details the "pushback" from traditional school systems and the disruptive effect these institutions can be seen to have at some times in over a decade of existence. Still, Bixby is an overt supporter of the movement and calls out plans and approaches for those wanting charter schools to succeed. There is also much history of the movement drawn from an apparent national tour of various institutions.

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Review: Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House by April Ryan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another entry in the Trump bookshelf. Here, a reporter's 15 Minutes and becoming the story comes from asking Donald J. if he is a racist. Mostly, the reporter's memoir is about a running Cold War with the apparently duplicitous chameleon Omarosa Manigault. So now I have to read that side in Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House.

More of an aside, it seems this African-American is writing her own "dog whistles". Maybe I am too white, but I need help understanding why Black History Month, referred to as a "African-American History Month" at least sometimes by Reagan and Obama, is problematic when referred to as a "African-American History Month" by Trump. Ryan does go this extra distance to help me understand more about the history and role of Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and the rocky initial meeting between HBCU leaders and Trump.

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Review: The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness

The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness by Stanley Coren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes I think I was the last American southpaw to be forced in kintegarten to be forced to write right-handed. I have met others that went through it. But, I recall being the only one in my class and I've never met anyone younger than I that went through it. It means I will never forget the name of that insistent teacher: Mrs. Cole. So, I thought from the title maybe this was related to that. Forcing right-handedness on students is really a footnote to the main thrust of this book: left-handedness as a deadly pathology. That is, birth stressors causing left-handedness land the person in a world of dangerous right-handed power tools and carrying the seeds of destruction from those same stressors so that when 10% or so children are lefties, but only something like 0.5% of octogenarians. Apparently, Coren's research was quite controversial back in the day and I suppose if it were as widely read now it'd be at least as controversial as the bell curve. Some of the minor facts are real groaners, like suggesting the etymology of "footman" is from Roman servants posted to observe that the propitious foot leads into the house, etc. So, that makes me have to take with a grain of salt what I am not taking the time to research. Still, as science writing for a popular audience, I greatly appreciate the author's success is engaging, clear material distilled from many studies and research.

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Review: The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Engaging, even enlightening overview of the growth of cosmology from the 1964 accidental discovery of background radiation echoes of The Big Bang through the solidification of Dark Matter & Dark Energy as that mysterious 96%; the non-baryonic reality of our universe. This telling seems to highlight the unfortunate fact that even among scientists exploring nature, human nature's saddest aspects are in full display: sexism, pettiness, envy, vanity, etc.

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Review: Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of WWII's OSS

Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of WWII's OSS by Patrick K. O'Donnell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Once again, O'Donnell presents a collage of oral history, collecting first-hand recollections on the WW II pre-CIA clandestine operations. Drawn from interviews and memories, the scope tends to be at the individual operation level. There are many underwater frogmen ventures that standout, as they obviously did to Ian Fleming who drew inspiration from the training for them. Of course, not all succeeded and several operatives from the division-strength organization ended in Nazi hands, at times eyeless and hanging from meat hooks.

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Review: Point Counter Point

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I bought his paperback in 1995, coming off the high of Brave New World. I haven't read it yet because, well, I just am not drawn to fiction that much. But, it is Huxley and after all I was pleased with Crome Yellow. On top of that, in 1998, the Modern Library ranked this 44th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Still, after a couple hundred pages into this tome I was really pushing myself following the interlinked storylines such as young journalist Walter Bidlake living with Marjorie Carling, a married woman whose husband refuses to grant her a divorce. Marjorie is pregnant with Walter's child, but their relationship is disintegrating, largely because Walter has fallen desperately in love with the sexually aggressive and independent Lucy Tantamount...

Is this a soap opera? I rarely enjoy stories and movies about people who seems to have no daily obligations and just flop about acting out their character defects.

Well, so Tantamount is based on Nancy Cunard with whom Huxley had a similarly unsatisfactory affair. I have heard that among the recurring themes (as in musical "counterpoint"), we have many autobiographical passages like Everard Webley, a political demagogue and leader of his own quasi-military group often assumed to be based on Oswald Mosley, and Mark Rampion, a writer and painter based on D. H. Lawrence whom Huxley admired greatly, etc. That wasn't sustaining me -- and it often doesn't. How do I know what is true? I liked more the frequent references to other books, adding to my to-read list.

There is a pay-off at the end, of sorts with murder and some sort of suffering child, I guess gnashing its teeth over some adult sour grapes. Some sort of exorcism; catharsis?

Interesting if not fascinating two-dimensional people spewing thoughts on love, religion, science, politics, etc.

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Review: Unopened

Unopened by Doug Hoekstra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Back in 1999, when I began with the whole Internet radio thing with collegemusic.com there was a period where interviews only happened in chat (all typing, no audio), or with the lo-fi quality of a telephone microphone suction cup pickup. It was during this time I came across compelling songwriter Doug Hoekstra and his album Make Me Believe ‎(One Man Clapping Records OMC 0018, 1999) with its memorable opener “Sam Cooke Sang The Gospel”. Hoping to get some recollection or saved artifact from this, possibly, very first interview on my show for my book, I reached out to Doug. While no 1999 traces emerged, such is the font of talent and creativity from Doug that I found instead an opportunity to enjoy his latest collection of poetry: Unopened (Five-Minute Books, 2019).

The title piece begins recalling his father and artfully dodges into a forgotten, left behind, unopened vinyl LP. “Vinyl” from a concluding section in this triptych also explores the magic of those spinning time capsules. That final set of poems explores the mysteries of interactions after groups of pieces on the personal and greater worlds. Broadly, there is little form here in the sense of rhyme and meter in these prose pieces while there is an intriguing similarity to a style of rigid form: the haiku. Know you the typical characteristic of the haiku, that there is a division somewhere in the tiny poem, so that the focus on the first, obvious thing, switches to another exposing a subtle relationship between the two in a that is insightful and sometimes surprising? These pieces tend to end that way, drawing me from first line to the last.


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Review: The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

2 Peter 3: 5-7:

For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

From this New Testament qualification to God's Old Testament promise to Noah comes the implied threat in Baldwin's title. Such a dire prophecy fits with the historically interesting recollection of Baldwin's meetings with Elijah Muhammad and his Nation of Islam followers.

The real core of this book, though, is the examination of the formative times of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a deep, philosophical consideration examination of the consequences of racial injustice. This work, which The New York Times Book Review described as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," is a compelling and forceful classic of American literature which is almost disturbing in the way it still feels accurate in describing the plight of non-White Americans seeking integration and control of their own destinies.

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Review: Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia

Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia by Carmen Bin Ladin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Carmen married a Bin Laden - brother to Osama. I am not sure how much "inside" the kingdom this is. However, it is inside the marriage of a non-Saudi to a prominent Saudi and living some years in The Kingdom. Carmen covers being veiled, the harem-like existence of breeder wives for the distracted oligarchy, and day to day existence in a sort of gilded cage where you can't really run your house (can't interact with male workers, etc) or even socialize and explore.

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Review: Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean Wars Greatest Untold Story - The Epic Stand of the Marines of George Company

Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean Wars Greatest Untold Story - The Epic Stand of the Marines of George Company by Patrick K. O'Donnell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With the detail of Band of Brothers, this is a company-level recollection drawn from interviews of the bitter and contests, often bloody and at close range, leading to the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir by G Company of the 1st Marine Regiment, led by Col. Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller. While this is a very personal, low-level account, some higher level features of the Korean War emerge, such as the threat to the very existence of the Marines as an organization under Truman and the extent to which General MacArthur's hubris led to a mistaken battle with the underestimated and determined Chinese forces.

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Review: Legend of the Free State of Jones

Legend of the Free State of Jones by Rudy H. Leverett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have been waiting to read this until Free State of Jones (2016) was on Netflix so I could contrast and compare. Right into it, I found another film inspired by this pit of lore: Tap Roots(1948). That one has the added bonus(?) of seeing Boris Karloff do an entire film in, I guess, "brownface".

Well, one thing I must say about the audio book is the narration, at least in this Audible digital edition, is a bit mechanical in delivery and not engaging at all.

Still, the work does a good job about untangling truths and falsehood about a region known as the "Free State of Jones" prior to any Civil War era succession. (Apparently, this was somewhat in jest due to the low population of citizens and slaves.) While the country initially was against secession, it ultimately proved very loyal to the Confederacy, during the war and even after. While its swamps gave shelter to apparently multiple CSA deserter bands, it never was any kind of formal anit-CSA let alone pro-Union government and nothing as dramatic and on the scale of the battles and rhetoric in the entertaining Matthew McConaughey vehicle.

That is probably fine as this Jones has always been more imagined than real, it seems.

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Review: Blade Runner

Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This movie tie-in edition touts itself as the "25th Anniversary Edition" with "Blade Runner" larger than the book title. Fine, I was wanting to compare the two pieces of art: novel and film. This includes a 24-page afterword by the author of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner that does just that including a history of scripts written for the film, attempts to have a film version made and PKD's own journey from hating the film to loving it. In the book, Deckard's obsession with buying a living animal plays into an emotional and philosophical landscape that has a magnitude of dimension as great at the gritty stylism of Scott's gritty, post-noir vision. Really the idea of lacking control and ceding personal choice through Mercerism, “better living through the mood synthesizer” and the ever-running television puts the books more in the league of Brave New World as a dark musing on a dystopic possibility where free will sublimates to numbing comfort in the absence of hope. Also, these mind- and emotion-controlling devices are springboards for effective, hallucinogenic passages as Deckard looks into the abyss of monstrous androids and looking back at him, it infects him with an existential panic.

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Review: A New Conception of Geometry

A New Conception of Geometry by Prof Jingzhong Zhang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here Professor Zhang shares a toolkit for solving geometry problems based on methods “used successfully by Chinese students training for the International Mathematical Olympiads.” Indeed, many examples and exercises draw on problems presented at Olympiads over the decades. These tools emerge in the proof-driven development of nine theorems with somewhat idiosyncratic names such as Co-Side Theorem, Co-Angle Converse Theorem, his often-applied Area Method, etc. Some more of the language with room for improvement in this translated work includes counterexamples being “thinking from the contrary” and line segments being “lines” while a line is an “extension line”...

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]



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Review: The Reckoning

The Reckoning by David Halberstam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought from the cover that this was a period and thus maybe dated considering of Japanese disruption of the American car market back in the 80s. If anything, that is a merely the denouement of a consideration of the history of both nation's auto industries, largely from WWII to the early '80s. The author focuses on Ford and the corresponding Japanese #2, Nissan. On the Ford side, the eventual modernization and broadening of the company's scope seems to have occured in spite of Henry Ford the found -- he comes across as heading toward paranoid seclusion -- and his grandson Henry II who comes across as a disinterested, petulant drunk. Of course, Chrysler (apparently perennially in need of rescue) gets a lot of coverage as the Iacocca era is a bit of a post-Ford venture.

The Japanese side is really a tale of a broken nation -- broken even in spirit -- finding will and in America friendly opportunity and then succeeding through the hard work, diligence and attention to quality lacking for too long on the large car-loving other side of the Pacific where fat times got translated into pay (from laborer to CEO) and benefits too dear for indefinite support.

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Review: Banco

Banco by Henri Charrière
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Quote a fascinating life from escape into Venezuela to final peace with his past. Along the way, we get a first-hand account of not only his personal adventures and capers, but a window in Venezuela at a time of boom and then revolution. A lengthy chapter near the end recounts in detail the murder case that led to the imprisonment recounted in Papillon. This is a rollicking, exciting adventure autobiography.

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Review: #uncensored: inside the animal liberation movement

#uncensored: inside the animal liberation movement by Camille Marino
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What started as an effective, coherent collective of pro-vegan, anti-vivisection activists devolved into online flaming and friends turned litigants. As seems often the case in such groups, what may be thought a counterculture is really a subculture, reflecting the ills of the society it seeks to correct. The author recognizes as much:

the animal rights movement is largely regulated by a patriarchy of white men who have the power and want to enforce the rules by which activists can conduct themselves.

What they mainly seemed to do is out vivisectors; first gen doxxers it seems: http://universityofflorida.us/meet-th...

Marino's consuming dedication and self-confessed travails often caused by herself gets shunted into a personal war with one time friend and cohort Dr. Steven Best. It is a fascinating look into one person's journey into extreme animal rights activism while being very honest of her own imperfections:

I want my errors in judgment to prevent other activists from being blinded by cults of personality that are prevalent in every social justice movement; to not lose their sense of right and wrong in service of demagoguery. Drama and trashing others can be alluring and, wherever humans come together, will always happen.

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Review: Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon

Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon by Lytton Strachey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Really a remarkable, vintage biography anthology. I really don't care about Cardinal Manning's wrestling with the concept of immaculate conception and his conversion to Catholicism, but Strachey made it all interesting. I wonder how much energy and talent was wasted over the centuries in such theological hair-splitting?

Florence Nightingale is the attention-getting life story. Strachey really elevated here from bedside nurse to social reformer and the mother of all hospital administrators in an impressive career that spanned decades where her will, for good or ill, triumphed in a male-dominated, military and colonial empiure bureaucracy.

Dr. Arnold could have been left out as I would have advised had I been Strachey's editor; too much like Manning's life, another career political theologian.

Major-General Charles George Gordon, also known as Gordon Pasha here, was a fascinating British Army officer and administrator. He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British Army, but this focuses on Service with the Khedive in Equatoria building Egypt's empire in the Great Lakes region and ultimately the Mahdist uprising, the siege of Khartoum, and his principled death refusing rescue without his garrison while Prime Minister William Gladstone neglected military affairs and did not act promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon.

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Review: Deadeye Dick

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel concludes with ''You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet.'' Tying this work from 1982 to today, its plot elements have issues still not yet resolved: the inherent danger of easy access to firearms, nuclear weapons and radioactive waste, and -- instead of the 'bad chemicals' in the brain, such as 'Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness.' (Breakfast of Champions) -- the bad chemicals around.

Much like "I Hung My Head", the song written by the Sting and released in 1996, this book tackles deeper and more philosophical themes of life and death, justice and redemption. Of course, In 2002, Johnny Cash covered the song on American IV: The Man Comes Around twenty years after this novel and this story of a boy who shoots a person and the resulting shame and consequences for many still has legs and raises uncomfortable issues. Is anyone to blame? Is the gun owner or the boy shooter? Is it a tragic accident and, like something ripped from the headlines, you have abusive cops, too.



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Review: A Beautiful, Terrible Thing: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal

A Beautiful, Terrible Thing: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal by Jen Waite
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Woman marries apparent sociopath and looks like she missed signs, which happens, but this others including business partners withheld revealing facts which seems an unexplored angle here. Overall, the author is brave and forthright in airing this laundry and proves a resourceful single mom in recovering from it. There is also a very modern angle here in how Jen uncovers the infidelity through access Uber history, cell phone records, email, Facebook activity, etc.

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Review: Undergraduate Analysis: A Working Textbook

Undergraduate Analysis: A Working Textbook by Aisling McCluskey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This introduction to analysis is suitable for students who have had at least a year of calculus; “a familiarity with elementary calculus.” It is assumed the reader has “knowledge of how to differentiate basic exponential and trigonometric functions,” etc. The focus is convergence and limits of sequences and series (more than half of the chapters), as well as differentiation (a couple chapters) and a smaller foray into integration. The Cauchy condition for convergence receives a short, dedicated chapter. Other topics include L’Hôpital, Lipschitz, a gamut of mean value theorems, and Taylor series. The authors’ main concerns come across as a firm, even rigorous, foundation in limits and convergence theory...

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]

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Review: Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird

Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird by Tony Juniper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came to this book interested about the mother-son smuggling ring I read that was arrested in connection with this and other rare fauna. However, I was really drawn into the book's larger, two-century tale of the discovery, decline and effective extinction of a beautiful and rare creature. It is amazing the detail unearthed on individual birds and individuals heroes and criminals.

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Review: Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds

Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds by Christopher Cokinos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This work compiles the stories of the extinction of six North American bird species. The demises seems to cluster between the last half of the Nineteenth Century and the fist half of the Twentieth. There is an uncomfortable sameness to the final years: too little too late organized action and almost frenzied destruction triggered by the nearness of extinction. Much of the writing is poetic and evocative as this is obviously a heartfelt subject to the author. Some of the stories are really cruel tragedies: one of the last Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers imprisoned and dying in a hotel room to serve as a model and Martha, perhaps the last Passenger Pigeon, shuffling alone and scruffy in a Cleveland zoo. Other subjects are the colorful Carolina Parakeets, there social clustering good defense against hawks but poor for shotguns. Watching the last of the Heath Hens waste away on Martha's Vineyard could be a stand-in for the shape of all the species' demises, including the Labrador Duck and preyed upon Great Auk.

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Review: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this rather sweeping memoir, very ably narrated by the author. Finnegan shares stories of life from Honolulu to Portugal (Madeira) social upheavals of the 1960s. Along the way, he visits Polynesia, Australia, Northern and Southern California and more in many extended surfing ventures in a kind of 'endless summer' while he finds himself and his parents move forward with a career in TV entertainment production. William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and has won several awards for his journalism, with the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for this work being only about one slice of a rich and accomplished life that has included reporting from danger areas and even teaching in South Africa: Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid .

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Review: Challenger: Mickey Thompson's own story of his life of Speed

Challenger: Mickey Thompson's own story of his life of Speed by Mickey Thompson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A hot rodder since his youth, Thompson increasingly pursued land speed records in his late 20s and early 30s, as told in this biography covering is career from childhood obsessions to post-Bonneville Salt Flats Indy racing. He achieved international fame in 1960, when he became the first American to break the 400-mph barrier, driving his Challenger 1 to a one-way top speed of 406.60 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats and surpassing John Cobb's one-way world record mark of 402 mph. A large part of this story is that project. In the decades leading up to 1960, land speed racing was dominated by the British, gentleman racers backed by English motor component companies. He was America's self-nominated, ingenuous Yankee answer to that. His four-engined vehicle was fashioned from junkyard parts in the garage of his family's El Monte home. In 1960, without the benefits of formal training or technical expertise, he became the first American race car driver to go over 400 mph, making him the fastest overall driver in the world. The NHRA Hall of Fame dubbed him "the quintessential California hot rodder" and this tells the story of personal, professional, technical, and supplier challenges to surmount which he did with brash demands, Vegas gambling and suffering bone-breaking injuries while silencing the scoffers. Although he had clinched the highest overall speed, a breakdown on the return run prevented him from capturing the official record. This is an exciting story -- and I am no gearhead -- about an automotive purist uninterested in the then emerging paradigm of jet-powered cars drawing to a close at the dawn of his Indy years.

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Review: My Folks Don't Want Me to Talk about Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in North Carolina

My Folks Don't Want Me to Talk about Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in North Carolina by Belinda Hurmence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Culled from the myriad pages of the Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives, this slim volume focuses on oral history from ex-slaves interviewed in North Carolina. Done at the time of the Depression, some found speaking to the young, white government workers a time to recall slavery as days better or at least no worst than there then current suffering. One thing consistent when mentioned was how Wheeler's Cavalry, though Confederate, were rapacious, horse-borne criminals. Overall, this is a moving, very human recollection of life-long tragedy and travail and I am certain any sampling from that rich trove of oral history would be, so the No. Carolina connection is merely incidental.

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Review: America at 1750: A Social Portrait

America at 1750: A Social Portrait by Richard Hofstadter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Throughout my reading life I have often dived into and been impressed with the book of Douglas R. Hofstadter. When reading about that Hofstadter it is often pointed out that he is different from this historian Hofstadter. So, I decided, why not read the "other" Hofstadter? I am glad I did. This brisk, accessible American history explores the pre-Revolutionary War American Colonial Era and the foundations laid there not only for that War but for much of what makes America unique. I find it really breaks along three fault lines:

1) Institutionalized Servitude
2) Middle Class socioeconomics and,
3) Evangelism.

"Institutionalized Servitude" includes not only slavery, but indentured servants and gradations between. Endemic during this era it seems to me this bred into the nation nativisit (anti-immigrant) and even racist beliefs that still surface today.

The Middle Class is perhaps the least explored of the three, but is an important pillar to the American cult of personality as well as a a further key differentiation to the Old World and especially England, those broadening a gulf that opened the door to rebellion.

Evangelism around charismatic preachers in a mesh of post-Puritan sects added a curious and even hypocritical blend of openness. (Since no denomination was national, denominational pluralism supported an acceptance of contrasting [religious] ideas if implicitly only Xtian ones.) However, this division fostered regionalist tumult and a broad adherence to xenophobic fundamentalism supporting the shared belief, among other things, that Providence lights the way for America and a susceptibility to demagogue led revivalism.

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