Review: The Coming of the Third Reich

The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century

Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century by Zbigniew Brzeziński
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: I Am America

I Am America by Stephen Colbert
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I so wanted to like this since I admire Stephen Colbert's funny and clever satire. I loved watching his show and appearances on The Daily Show and miss that. This book definitely sounds Colbert: it's his voice, manner, and style. Still, I couldn't barely endure to finish this. The humor, while a few times made me laugh out loud, largely falls flat on this "flat" page. Also, many of the punchlines are in small, red font footnotes and margin asides which interrupt reading and are difficult for my middle-aged eyes to read.

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Review: House to House: An Epic Memoir of War

House to House: An Epic Memoir of War by David Bellavia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Focused mainly on the U.S.–Iraqi offensive of November 2004, including a lengthy detailed hand-to-hand denouement, this is a compelling modern war memoir. The author details the techniques and tactics (including insurgents made nearly unstoppable by epinephrine and other drugs) in a narrative story that works in the very human interior experience. The depth of this reflection surfaces rage and panic, faith and fear, missteps and hallucinations. With a second life as a journalist embed, a lengthy epilogue covers the cost to family life and a decision to turn from warrior to father-husband.

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Review: Ten Days that Shook the World

Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author's life is the basis for Reds and this memoir of the Bolshevik Revolution. On November 6 and 7, 1917 (or October 24 and 25 on the Julian calendar, which is why the event is often referred to as the "October Revolution"), leftist revolutionaries led by Bolshevik Party leader Lenin (who wrote an introduction here) launched a coup d'état against the Duma's provisional government. Reed chronicles that in multi-front detail which can be a but overwhelming. Steeping back, it feels to me like the militia-like Red Guards and other agitated peasants, workers, and soldiers felt they were in a hyper-democratic, anti-nationalist surge. At times they rejected Russian symbols as "nationalistic", marched to "Les Marseillais", and insisted on the right of self-determination in their promulgations. All said and done, Lenin and company nationalized all commerce and property and enacted a hyper-nationalistic, extremely centralized state-controlled economy. Thinking of the heady, idealistic lead up to the Soviet era it is easier to see how Reed or maybe many others could be caught up in the promise and excitement.

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Review: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Simon Winchester is just one of my favorite history authors and this was a very compelling story of an insaner murder turned OED contributor. He dispels the quaint legend of a dramatic meeting between editor and contributor at the asylum (fake news from America, it was) while adding much more interesting details about Dr. Minor's murder, decades of institutionalization on both sides of the Atlantic, and the herculean task of the OED itself. This audiobook narrated quite well by the author has a bonus interview with that author and an OED editor which is entertaining itself.

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Review: The Way I See It

The Way I See It by Patti Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I would say this is more memoir than autobiography; heck she wrote it like at age 40 and it is really about her growing up and specifically in a dysfunctional Reagan family. Music fans may enjoy in the insights into Dennis Wilson (Beach Boys) who she had a relationship, as well as in the 1970s, living with Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon. (Together they co-wrote the song "I Wish You Peace" which appeared on Eagles album One of These Nights and that story is here.) She is quite candid about her love life as well as getting her tubes tied and then untied. In this bare and forthcoming telling, she is also an open book about her own substance abuse, which started with the prescription pills from the family medicine cabinet abused by her mother while Nancy Reagan hypocritically promoted "Just Say No". This was the mother verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive to her, which in a complex way she appreciated much more than the cold aloofness of her remote father, Ronald Reagan.

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Review: Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I know David Lynch is a real advocate for Transcendental Meditation. Since that subject does not interest me, I have not felt like reading this book. However, I kept hearing about from various sources in a positive way, most recently in reading Creative Quest . Actually, TM is little more than a theme here it what is really a brief artistic memoir. Maybe it is more accurately to say it is a staring point to summarizing his artistic development with tidbits on his films. As for Eraserhead he won't say what line of The Bible gave him clarity of purpose on that project. And the key and box in Mulholland Drive? He doesn't know what is means to that Frankenstein of a film. Maybe he should meditate on it.

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Review: Mathematics, Nature, Art

Mathematics, Nature, Art by Maria Mannone
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is q quick read, profuse with illustrations exploring the concept of transformation not occulted by rigorous mathematical arguments. From the "Conclusions":


In these pages, we proposed a very short journey through nature, art, and mathematics...

This is not a book about mathematics, nor a book about music, or about biology or geology. This is a book wishing to give some answers to our need to connect things and to find ‘the path’ within complexity.


As such, it recollects to me the narrower in scope also quite lovely (and referred to herein) On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson. Like that author, the impetus is an appreciation of beauty and form and linking together abstractions of different, moving expressions:

If science and mathematical concepts can influence aesthetics and artistic production, also the opposite is true: aesthetics can influence scientific research. Aesthetics, elegance of the formalism, and focus on geometry were relevant for the research of the physicist Paul Dirac...

Theorem 4.2.1.
Abstract ideas do not belong to nature, thus we can consider them as colimits or limits using universal properties for natural entities.

While transmutation between forms of development (juvenile to adult, etc.) are common here, the recurring theme is "sonification": creating music constructed from essential elements of a form:

This may give hints about the meaning of images’ sonifications. In fact, sonifying a shape also means to establish a mapping between a sequence of points ‘without time,’ taken from the given shape, to a sequence of events in time (sounds, musical notes performed one after the other). Even if we consider continuous shapes to be mapped into continuous sound sequences, such as a violin glissando, we have to assign a starting time, and an ending time, and thus a duration to the overall process.

I believe artists and artistically minded mathematicians especially those inclined toward nontraditional composition techniques will find the book engaging and potentially enlightening.

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Review: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Largely a history of the mechanizations of the Koch family (I didn't know there were so many brothers and they were so varied), this plots how the mega-rich use a shroud of philanthropy to fund opinion-changing, Republican-raising, and candidate-promoting activities. This is a history of how that became possible through the grown of PACs, Citizens United v FEC and how the tax benefits of using charitable institutions effectively makes the efforts tax-payer subsidized. There are caemos by Scaife, Menard (I may never shop at Menards again), and the DeVos family.

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Review: Fakes, Frauds & Phonies

Fakes, Frauds & Phonies by James Cornell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This feels almost like a "Ripley's Believe It or Not!": whimsical cartoon and amazing fact. These illustration are more accompanied by a two- or three-page essay than a caption, but the content is rather thin landing somewhere between Ripley's and "Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story". Having so many condensed into a small book and reading them briskly in a single sitting evokes the notion that a successful hoax is relatively easy to perpetrate on a wide audience and even experts so long as it first into what they believe, or wish to believe.

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Review: Spectacles

Spectacles by Samuele Rosario Mazza
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mazza is an artist and fashion designer and he merges those skills in this full-color compendium of the artistic possibilities of eyewear. Pictures of these pieces including paintings, assemblies, and mixed media broken out into categories. These groupings blur together as it seems the prompt of glasses results in generally the whimsical and playful. It is interesting how any vaguely head-shaped form or even blank space can be animated, become humanized by the introduction of a pair of spectacles.

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Review: Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes

Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps the most famous poem by Langston Hughes is 'Harlem'. It is also sometimes called 'Dream Deferred'. That is here along with many other great poems. The nod to "Young People" would seem to be succinct, gentle introductions and some word definitions. Certainly any adult that enjoy Hughes' poetry will also enjoy the book, illustrated by Benny Andrews.

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Review: Daybreak

Daybreak by Joan Baez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Originally released in 1969, much of Baez's career still lay ahead when this came out. Still, this is a great read; part prose poetry, part dream journal, part hallucinatory childhood recollections. Even then she had a full life to look back on; a peripatetic one with her Quaker-physicist father, being a house parent at Perkins School for the Blind, and more. Her music career underway by the time of the book, she gets to name drop. She paints an obscure of Bob Dylan as "The Dada King" and recalls poignantly her departed brother-in-law Richard Fariña. Baez also recounts her close friendship and collaboration with Antiwar activist Ira Sandperl, mentions Badger King in an aside and also recalls Florence Beaumont's self-immolationas a Vietnam War protest.

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Review: The Constitution of the United States: Its Sources and Its Application

The Constitution of the United States: Its Sources and Its Application by Thomas James Norton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this book, The Constitution of the United States is examined in granular detail with pieces as small as a fragment of sentence followed up by often essay-length analysis generally covering three things:

1) The context of 18th Century and earlier concerns from King-Parliament interactions that led to the concern addressed
2) Expression of the topic in American political life, such as court decisions, momentous events like the Dorr Rebellion, and legislation
3) Implementation in other constitutions inspired by this one, such as ones calling its union "dissoluble" in an attempt to avoid the perils of secessions.

My first feeling was that this 1967 printing of the 1922 work was a "God and guns" philosophy. However, in its entirety while I feel it expressed conservative ideals of its time, it does not echo the radicalism of the neo-cons and current adherents of the strong version of the unitary executive theory. Consider this review of the war powers as described:

...The important lesson to be learned here is that in the United States one man (or one coterie) cannot declare war. That can be done only by the two Houses of Congress (531 members), elected by the direct vote of the people. Action is not likely to be hurried or unjust.

"The genius and character of our institutions are peaceful," said the Supreme Court of the United States (1849), "and the power to declare war was not conferred upon Congress for the purposes of aggression or aggrandizement, but to enable the general government to vindicate by arms, if
it should become necessary, its own rights and the rights of its citizens."

More on limiting the powers of the presidency:

A celebrated case under this article arose respecting the estate left by the widow of General Robert E. Lee, the military chieftain of the Southern Confederacy in the Civil War, which had been sold under an act of Congress for collecting. taxes "in the insurrectionary districts" and upon one part of which military officers, acting under orders of the President, had, after seizing the estate, erected a military fort and upon another made Arlington Cemetery. In the trial court a jury, acting under definite instructions as to the law, returned a verdict that the sale for taxes had been illegal. The United States Government carried the case to the Supreme Court of the United States and that court said, in 1882: "It is not pretended, as the case now stands, that the President had any lawful authority to do this, or that the legislative body could give him any such authority except upon payment of just compensation. The defense stands here solely upon the absolute immunity from judicial inquiry of every one who asserts authority from the executive branch of the government, however clear it may be made that the executive possessed no such power. Not only no such power is given, but it is absolutely prohibited, both to the executive and the legislative, to deprive any one of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or to take private property without just compensation. . . . No man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity.... All the officers of the government, from the
highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it. It is the only supreme power in our system of government, and every man who, by accepting office, participates
in its functions is only the more strongly bound to submit to that supremacy, and to observe the Limitations which it imposes upon the exercise of the authority which it gives."

Similarly, the analysis of the Second Amendment while in line with the other mentions of militia in the document sounds out of step with the NRA:

ARTICLE II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to
keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
This means the arms necessary to a militia, and not
the dirks, pistols, and other deadly weapons used by the lawless. In the Declaration of Rights it was complained that kings had disarmed the people. Of course the colonists were by force of early circumstances bearers of arms. This prohibition upon the Nation means that it can never
interfere with the people who make the militia of the States, and that therefore the States will always have the means to check by physical force any usurpation of authority not given to the Nation by the Constitution.

One of the many interesting observations here is that the antebellum amendment signal a switch from controlling federal power to limiting state authority:

It has been pointed out that the first ten Amendments sprang from the fear of National power which many of the States possessed. Those Amendments were designed to stay the National hand. But the Civil War taught that the Nation may be in even greater peril from the States than they ever were from the Nation. And so, after more than seventy years, the people, by this Amendment and the two Amendments following, laid up0n the States restrictions which a few years before would have been impossible. The country had gone sixty-one years (1804-1865) without an Amendment.

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Review: Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran - A Journey Behind the Headlines

Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran - A Journey Behind the Headlines by Scott Peterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is was an engaging and enlightening history of modern Iran but I one immersed in the culture on the ground. One feeling I came away with that is the the U.S. and Iran are more alike than perhaps either would like to admit and are (or at least were) natural allies for the Mideast region. Both seem themselves as special, superior civilization with a polar, black and white view of the rest of the world. I feel Iran is at the post the postbellum U.S. was - especially if the U.S. had no separation of church and state. This brings up obvious missteps on the U.S. side such as the usurping of Mohammad Mosaddegh, when his government was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état orchestrated by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom's MI6. Whatever the benefits then, it seemed only to tilt the nation toward revolution and anti-American sentiment all made worse with the reverberating echoes of the Iran-Iraq war (with the U.S. mostly on the Iraqi side) and effective civil war. Wrestling beneath the theocratic state burgeoned by militant purists and vested veterans youthful, freedom-loving revolutionaries spread via samizdat From Dictatorship to Democracy. Then you have further missteps like Dubya's "Axis of Evil" that badly damaged the progressive rule of Khatami nudging the nation back to election-rigging and Apocalypse craving with Ahmadinejad.

Also helpful in this book is the explanation of the politic and cultural expression of Shia beliefs especially with the impending millennial-like view of the return of The Hidden Imam.

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Review: Michigan's Historic Railroad Stations

Michigan's Historic Railroad Stations by Michael H. Hodges
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book nicely covers extant buildings that were depots on Michigan railroad lines. The entries are alphabetical by city with photos, images and an essay. (I think I would have liked a serial set of entries charting one or more theoretical train trips.) There is also a facts box on builder, architect, year or construction and current condition and use. Famous events (often gory accidents and murders) as well as famous personages (generally whistle stop campaigners) get special mention.

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