Review: Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims

Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a really amazing autobiography from the grand-daughter of chief Truckee, medicine chief of the < ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paiute#... Paiute. I especially like the first part of the narrative, as touches on the tribe's first forty years of contact with European Americans during a time when her recollections from early childhood give a dream-like quality to the first interactions and "talking rag" letter her grandfather treated with reverence as a powerful amulet in dealing with these mysterious, unpredictable, dangerous, and powerful creatures. With adulthood, her role as interperter and Paiute representative to the Indian Bureau and then the populace adds many levels of perspective to an all too typical tragedy of broken treaties, unnecessary violence, and concentration camp-like reservations.

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Review: Red Blood, Yellow Skin - Endless Journey

Red Blood, Yellow Skin - Endless Journey by Linda L.T. Baer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Quite an amazing tale of loyal love, really. From the crumbling regime in Vietnam at the end of the war to Iran to America. All the while, she builds an extended family and thriving business in a foreign land. All the while her husband does such atrocious errors as ending up in a ski lodge when trying to book a beach vacation in Japan and moving the family to a remote Appalachian plot to find it lacks utilities. On top of this, he descends into years of pills and alcohol abuse. Linda Baer heroically triumphs over all this and keeps her family together.

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Review: Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From Fischer's limited world of connection, this somewhat privileged view of the chess talent's bizarre and extreme arc tempers claims of madness to a more functional paranoia. The detailed book covers Fischer's entire life, and beyond to exhumation, including a more real and positive relationship with his mother than is often stated and a view into his peripatetic and hermit-like life from a cramped Pasadena room to the end of an bookstore aisle in Iceland. There is some bizarre irony, not explicitly stated here, that as he turned craven and money-grubbing he became the worst stereotype from the anti-Semitic fever-dream of the neo-nazi thinkers whose books and pamphlets he sometimes promoted to intimates and strangers.

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Review: Senseless Secrets: The Failures of U.S. Military Intelligence from George Washington to the Present

Senseless Secrets: The Failures of U.S. Military Intelligence from George Washington to the Present by Michael Lee Lanning
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

" from George Washington to the Present " makes for a very wide, ambitious scope. As such, this ends up being a thin military history of the U.S. with a focus on and point of view of military intelligence. One point well made is that military intelligence did not emerge institutionally until the pre-detective agency fumbling of Pinkerton and a bunch of unreliable balloons during the Civil War. The book could have started there after some introduction. In looking back with a view that most military failures and successes have an intelligence cause, the author calls for inter-service cooperation and greater coherence between the military branches. It is depressing how often in the field even just radio tech differences were crucial.

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Review: The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this historical novel on the The Great Gold Robbery (not the train robbery a century later that made Ronnie Briggs famous) when on he night of 15 May 1855 gold sent from London Bridge station for Paris was swapped en route for lead. Crichton's research in the underworld economy and slang of the time make this evocative and engrossing. The (literal) years of preparation and execution make for compelling reading while it does seem that the aftermath and trials are given short shrift Now I have to see the movie based on the book.

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Review: Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush V. Gore

Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush V. Gore by James T. Patterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Historical author James Patterson assesses the twenty-seven years between the resignation of Richard Nixon and the contested election of George W. Bush. This narrative encompasses social, cultural, political, economic, and international developments in a context of "culture wars" between liberals and conservatives. At times, such as calling Gulf War Syndrome a "conspiracy" and with criticisms of sex, etc. in art I feel Patterson is possibly much more conservative than I, yet I feel this does not detract from his historical review and indeed I feel this book, which was for me a very natural and good follow-up to Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations With Gerald R. Ford, does more to explain the basis for and path to the current divisiveness in popular political views. I feel this will even be worth re-reading for the detail and connections contained herein.


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Review: An Illustrated Dictionary of Surrealism

An Illustrated Dictionary of Surrealism by José Pierre
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I would give this 5 stars if it were a larger format for more legible type and larger presentations of the numerous images. Author José Pierre as a Surrealism movement participant was a disciple of André Breton and the metaphoric, poetic entries here include despite the expected name entries for artists entries for topics like "God" and "Expulsion" that are defined with only a Breton quote. The subjective and evocative descriptions used for definitions make this a dictionary that may be read like a book. Obviously in awe of the automatism that defined the early, largely literary, beginnings of Surrealism, Pierre is more critical of the late stage painted, even as far as critical of even Salvador Dalí ("...techniques concentrating on detail but lacking greatness..."). He does appreciate Man Ray: "...undiminished inventiveness..." where he surveys the oneiric (dream-inspired) phantasmagorical output of painters and some scultptors that seem to be the ultimate inheritors of the post-Symbolist Surrealists. It is also interesting to read how so much of the main movement was rent by political considerations with people like Pablo Picasso criticized for communist leanings while the dedicated core appeared to have anarchist leanings.

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Review: Erotica Universalis

Erotica Universalis by Taschen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With introduction about erotica as a defense against death in English, French, and German, these 30 postcards from remote antiquity to the 20th Century form an arc of erotic depictions. Apparently, such human art went from shamanistic phallic displays to one or more women in consensual sex-play to one woman actor in a bondage vignette.

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Review: The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions

The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions by Scott Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I pulled this off the shelf thinking it was merely a compendium of Dilbert cartoons. It is a much more involved exegesis of the The Dilbert Principle in action and the apathy and rage when "companies tend to systematically promote their least competent employees to management (generally middle management), to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing." Bolstered by anonymized emails from the field, it is at times as saddening and painful as it is funny. This stuff is all too true. Unfortunately, many of the strips are reproduced too small to be easily read.

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Review: Euclidean Distance Geometry: An Introduction

Euclidean Distance Geometry: An Introduction by Leo Liberti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This textbook on distance geometry covers some relevant theory with several algorithms presented in Mathematica. The slim volume of not much more than one hundred pages of core material represents about one semester of content. The central core is the Distance Geometry Problem (DGP): the characterization and study of sets of points based only on given values of the distances between member pairs. ...

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]


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Review: Encyclopedia Of Serial Killers

Encyclopedia Of Serial Killers by Nigel Blundell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this murder-opedia is that it feels like it has a British focus, so there is more detail on European and English murderers, like Fred West, who was apprehended and charged in 1994, apparently when this text was authored. However, the material, already burdened by excessive grammatical errors, feels more dated than it should be, as if Blundell pasted in notes or material a decade or so older in many cases. When this jumps out in the cases I know, it makes me doubt what I am reading about killers I am not as familiar with. For instance, the 1996 book The Boston Stranglers based on the files of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts "Strangler Bureau" argues that those stranglings were the work of several killers rather than solely Albert DeSalvo as still suggested here. Similarly, the Atlanta murders of 1979–81 include only 2 killings for which Wayne Williams was convicted and criminal profiler John E. Douglas told us in 1998 in Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit cryptically: "It isn't a single offender and the truth isn't pleasant." No even real suggestion beyond Williams' protestations of that "truth" here. Also, In May 1996, Chicago television news anchor Bill Kurtis received video tapes made at Stateville Correctional Center in 1988 from an anonymous attorney. Showing them publicly for the first time before the Illinois state legislature, Kurtis pointed out the explicit scenes of sex, drug use, and money being passed around by prisoners, who seemingly had no fear of being caught; in the center was Richard Speck, performing oral sex on another inmate, sharing a large quantity of cocaine with another inmate, parading in silk panties, sporting female-like breasts (allegedly grown using smuggled hormone treatments), and boasting, "If they only knew how much fun I was having, they'd turn me loose." With no mention of that at all in Speck's entry, I believe the text in need of an editor was written in 1995 or earlier despite when the book was published.

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Review: The Miracle of Dunkirk

The Miracle of Dunkirk by Walter Lord
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the recent 2017 Dunkirk movie, so I wanted to get a history lesson on the actual events. I though the movie had too much empty beach and did not fit the crowded image in my mind. I don't that this excellent book so much changed that as broadened the field to the built-up sections of Dunkirk where soldiers sheltered in basements, seaside hotels and did trade with small businesses in the area. The book also added a small army of stray dogs that hunkered down with the allied troops, although they were generally abandoned out of necessity as nearly were thousands of the French soldiers saved.

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Review: Bizarre Phenomena

Bizarre Phenomena by Richard Williams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I think I could have read through this in a few hours or less if I really liked it. It is a collection of folklore, hoaxes, and unusual phenomena lacking the known or considered causes. ALl in magazine-like format, this is like a collection of Ripley's Believe It or Not! ringing hollow in a world with Snopes and Wikipedia.

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Review: Working on the Dark Side of the Moon

Working on the Dark Side of the Moon by Thomas Reed Willemain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Shrouded in secrecy, the United States Department of Defense’s National Security Agency (NSA) is where the most clandestine of U.S. operations are carried out in the name of national security. The author, a software entrepreneur and statistics professor, spent a few years alternating working “outside” and working “inside” at the NSA and the Central Security Service (CSS). This affiliated, shadowy think tank has a cryptologic charter.

[...]

Indeed, Willemain appeared to have a much more difficult time with the thought of protocol peccadilloes: “I was visited by nightly nightmares about Security blunders during my first weeks…” Pulling back a tad the curtain on the inner workings of the NSA at the cubicle and cookie cart level is an engaging read for anyone drawn to the mundane details supporting national intelligence in a post-Snowden world, but expect nothing like an exposé in this officially cleared work."

[Look for my entire unredacted review at MAA Reviews]


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Review: The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance

The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance by Michael Perino
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Flat narration of textbook-like, dry history is what keeps me from giving this three stars.

In title, this is about "Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance", i.e. the Pecora Commission begun on March 4, 1932, by the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency to investigate the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The fourth and final chief counsel for the investigation, Ferdinand Pecora, exposed of abusive practices in the financial industry which galvanized broad public support for stricter regulations. As a result, the U.S. Congress passed the Glass–Steagall Banking Act of 1933, and created the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) putting in place a familiar regulation landscape tested in more recent financial disasters. His exposé of the National City Bank (now Citibank) made banner headlines and caused the bank's president to resign. It is that testimony detailed here that becomes the main feature of this history. It is amazing to me how rapacious the concert was then -- shades of Enron -- and amazing how, unlike Enron, it survived and thrives even now as the consumer division of financial services multinational Citigroup, one of the Big Four banks in the United States.

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Review: Write it When I'm Gone

Write it When I'm Gone by Thomas M. DeFrank
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting collection of interviews and reflections on the former president with excellent narration from Scott Brick, one of my favorite narrators. DeFrank was a friendly associate from the veep days, so nothing controversial there. Here, Ford sticks by the Warren Commission findings and was too far out of Nixon circle to know of any crimes ordered by the president, though he faults Nixon for letting a sloppy cover-up appear out of inaction. In 2004 Ford openly loathed Dick Cheney and although this ardent supported of his Republican Party changed that opinion to one of respect he never stopped being a critic of the WMD premise for invading Iraq. He felt Saddam was premised himself. Ford is the only person to have served as both vice president and president without being elected to either office. Add to this being defeated by Carter in the election and not given another opportunity to try and you have the biggest regret documented here.

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Review: Cleopatra

Cleopatra by Robert Geissmann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is like a movie souvenir program from 1963. It feels like the '60s equivalent of Peter Jacksons "The Appendices" for LOTR, etc. Plenty of color and shows how the movie was made, the history behind the events portrayed and key personnel on both sides of the camera. The first part talks about the relevant Roman and Egyptian history around Cleopatra's rise and fall. The second part deals with
the movie production and several key scenes from the movie. There are, of course photos of Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, Richard Burton, etc. with biographical details down to choreographer Hermes Pan. It feels like the pics of Taylor and other women in the film are purposefully slanted to the racy presentation. This probably made it easy for men to pick up a copy "for the house"

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Review: The Secret Life of Beer!: Exposed: Legends, Lore Little-Known Facts

The Secret Life of Beer!: Exposed: Legends, Lore Little-Known Facts by Alan D. Eames
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a nice collection of verse (maybe finding an apogees with Gloucester's 16th Century beer tourist poet John Taylor), quotes, aphorisms, and trivia about beer in history. The "lore"
is mostly chronological from remote antiquity to the 20th Century. Some themes that stood out include the cross-cultural connection to magic and the diving with beer and other "spirits". Also, the pre-hops beers of Pict heather beer, Egyptian brews served with bittering condiments, early Western Hemishphere concoctions like chicha, and more. Actually, I would probably have given this 4 stars if not for the typographical choice of blurry font often in shades like dark yellow on burnt sienna paper...

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Review: Sweet Thursday

Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

It was nice to check in on the denizens of Cannery Row after WWII and see how Doc was getting on at Western Biological, the latest shenanigans of Mack and the Boys, entrepreneurial Wide Ida, etc. The story feels contrived with floozy with a heart of gold Suzy blowing in to take up residence in a boiler and Mack et al running angles to select an owner for the Flophouse, but I just ignored that and enjoyed the atmosphere and looking in on this familiar cluster of buildings and dreams. Too bad about the violence on Doc which seemed unnecessary and too dark for the setting...

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Review: The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tough Bronx and Baltimore neighborhoods with exposure to crime and the illicit drug economy serves as a launching point to success and a Rhodes scholarship and decades of imprisonment for his namesake. The author does a good job at highlighting the similar beginnings and dissimilar developments for the two subjects in this dual autobiography and biography. He doesn't come up with any answers on why the outcomes should be so different. Maybe chaos theory, branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, can help? Nah, that would maybe be too easy, reducing it to a probability problem. Author Moore goes at the addressable and thus has a lot to comment on about American society today. This pbk. edition is augmented with an afterword further groping to some sort of answers, as well as resources, a reader's guide, and a reprint of an interview with Farai Chideya.

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Review: What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1850

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1850 by Daniel Walker Howe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I would probably rate three stars the print edition. Narrator John Lescault is so monotone and rushed (I actually checked my app to make sure it wasn't sped up) that the textbook-like material lost any liveliness it had. Still, the subject matter is intensely interesting in appreciation the evolution of the United States. Historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, the transition out of the age of the Founding Fathers covering these presidencies:

James Madison (1809-1817)
James Monroe (1817-1825)
John Quincy Adams (1825-1829)
Andrew Jackson (1829-1837)
Martin Van Buren (1837-1841)
William Henry Harrison (1841)
John Tyler (1841-1845)
James K. Polk (1845-1849)
Zachary Taylor (1849-1850)

This was an era of revolutionary improvements in transportation (Jackson rode a horse into his populist and militarist reign of Indian Removal and left on a train) and communications (telegraph and daily newspapers) that accelerated the extension of the American empire. That acceleration is largely detailed in the merciless militarist imperialism of expansionist Polk who did more than Jefferson to extend the States. He examines the era's politics in an era when party politics evolved from reactionary organizations such as anti-Freemasons founding the Anti-Masonic Party in thw wake of assassinations and supposed conspiracies and the violent, nativist Know-Nothings and the factional Whig promoters of the American System. During this time there was a power of religion to shape many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women's rights, and other reform movements. This is the era that led to -- relentlessly -- the Civil War and was thus the defined antebellum era between its idealistic founding and berfore its bloody maturity.

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Review: A Place to Stand

A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Admittedly, I could have Baca all wrong... I was intrigued enough by the documentary A Place to Stand to get the book, read it and re-watch the doc. While Baca had little to live for when he entered Arizona State Prison, the modern fairy tale of his unearthed new center ("the quiet strength of poetry") feels a bit too much like a self-serving portrayal. His published success and acclaim and prison background makes for a memoir worth reading, but I expected more revelations of character defects - revealed and triumphed. Mentor Bonafide comes across as darker and more dangerous and may be closer to what Baca is really, for all I know. Also, a plastic prison-made blowgun dart that passes through a human torso strains credulity and emphasized the lingering doubts I have that much of this may be smoke and mirrors. Also, this could be a reflection of my inability to appreciate the sentimental metaphor of his free verse.

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