Review: The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe

The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mugabe is the current President of Zimbabwe, serving since 31 December 1987. As one of the leaders of the rebel groups against white minority rule, he was elected as Prime Minister, head of government, in 1980, and served in that office until 1987, when he became the country's first executive head of state. He has led the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) since 1975. Born in the Rhodesia now called Zimbabwe, journalist Peter Godwin returned to his homeland in 2008 after three decades of Robert Mugabe’s brutal economic and human destruction. Hoping to “dance on Mugabe’s political grave” in the wake of the tyrant’s narrow 20008 defeat at the polls, Godwin instead risked his life to secretly chronicle Mugabe’s ruthless backlash of torture and terror locals call “The Fear". Mugabe subsequently won the run-off election in a landslide after his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew; Mugabe then entered a power-sharing deal with Tsvangirai as well as Arthur Mutambara of the MDC-T and MDC-M opposition party. This uneasy balance saw no peace due to the Mugabe party militias executing the military plan given the code name of "CIBD", which stood for: "Coercion. Intimidation. Beating. Displacement." Godwin ended up chronicling a history of violent repression and torture and a coda of the same theme. The near 400 pages becomes a litany of cruel abuse almost too much to bear...

I was surprised at the South Africa angle since ZANU was influenced by the Africanist ideas of the Pan Africanist Congress in South Africa and the countries border each other with spill overs of violence for political and xenophobic reasons.

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Review: Robots and Spaceships

Robots and Spaceships by Taschen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautiful little book of photographs of space-themed tin toys of the 50s & 60s. Seeing so many causes some themes to develop: robots are generally humanoid but our most common real robots (Roomba, drones, bomb handlers) are not. Lots of space tanks were spawned by the Cold War era. These Japanese toys have Western astronauts, often blond.

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Review: BLOW: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel And Lost It All

BLOW: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel And Lost It All by Bruce Porter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read a lot of true crime just for it being in that genre. This one, specifically, I thought to read while doing a re-watch of the Depp movie. Of course, more goes on in the book and more than could have been in the movie. The extremity of Jung's drug use and the kinkiness of sex life could have been more underscored, both for drama and humor. Interestingly, Barile of the Tonsorial Parlor does not come across as colorful as the Reubens portrayal so I wonder how much there was to that, maybe just script and/or improv. (Reubens did need to show what he could do as an actor at that time.)

This is fast-paced and a good read, really amazing to what heights Jung went to as the American rep for the Medellín Cartel generally and Pablo Escobar specifically.

The excess and success of Carlos Lehder is as intertwined with the rise and downfall of Jung here as in the movie and it would seem a movie or book length treatment of that mad criminal's own arc is worth doing.

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Review: Great Calculations: A Surprising Look Behind 50 Scientific Inquiries

Great Calculations: A Surprising Look Behind 50 Scientific Inquiries by Colin Pask
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

...Can such a list be compiled without criticism for some oversight? Probably not. I encourage you to read it yourself and come up with your own necessary additions. What would you part with to keep it to fifty? For me, in a list that includes (rightly so), Archimedes’ insightful approximation of π must find room for Euler’s number e. I would even say this could replace the entry for Euler solving the Basel Problem, since that, essentially, could be a footnote to the exploration of π. Or, let it replace the valuation of annuities as calculated by Halley, better known for predicting his eponymous comet. This is the class of thoughts the book will raise with any reader, and rightly it should. The author directly tackles the subject of necessary omissions, both generally and at the conclusion of the topical chapters. The end of Chapter 8 “About Us” suggests there could have been more on DNA, modeling nervous system signal transmission and Turing’s “mathematically elegant work on pattern formation”. Of course, there are many surprising and appealing entries, such as World War II D-Day tide calculations based on work done by Lord Kelvin seven decades previous...

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews

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Review: Madoff with the Money

Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This surprised me that Madoff seemed to have so many signs of mendacity going all the way back to his college years ... but maybe that should not have. His extreme OCD was unknown to me and the way he even took advantage so completely of this friends and Elie Wiesel shocked me like the first time I heard it. The details about the run-up to the collapse of the Ponzi scheme - both the long years and the final months - make a convincing case for complicity among several of his close family members (but not all), including his wife Ruth.

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Review: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an impressive, lengthy support for an out-sized contributions of inheritable characteristics to human behavior. It is quite humbling to think so much of what makes each of us unique was encoded into our genome before we were born. Pinker takes apart support for any appreciable nurturing/environmental role block by block, but I am sure it does not settle this debate. Hinting that some of the worst human behaviors may be inherent will raise many hackles, and indeed all that will read a work of this breadth will be offended by something. I was offended by the casual remarks on inhumane animal experiments: rewiring ferret brains for synæsthesia and paralyzing animal fetuses in the womb to study join development disturbed me. When I see such broad environments as North Korea's hermit kingdom, chronically impoverished communities and such incident as coin flips picking guards and prisons in the Stanford Prison Experiment I feel he underplays the role of environment, while his arguments are strong, reasoned and supported.

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Review: Interpreting Literature: Preliminaries to Literary Judgment

Interpreting Literature: Preliminaries to Literary Judgment by Kenneth Leslie Knickerbocker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This college lit textbook contains fiction, poetry, drama, lyrics, essays and more. It sat unread and idle on my father's bookshelf, a once required course item, until I picked it up. Poetry of Frost, Crane, Shakespeare, and Poe and also treating the Paul Simon lyric to "Sound of Silence" as poetry made of me a lifelong fan of this language art. Short stories like "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" container here still seem like the best of the art. The classic, The Glass Menagerie was here introduced to me here and I still love plays and theater as a result. I enjoyed the entire text initially published by Professor Knickerbocker together with Professor Willard Reninger back in 1969 by Holt. The fact that this book has stood the test of time and is still available should be testimony enough to the endurance and appeal of this lengthy introduction to the pleasures of literature.I recommend it for any one who is interested in what joys literature may hold.

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