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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