Review: The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Coming after reading Of Tigers and Men: Entering the Age of Extinction, this is more despair about the unlikely future of wild tigers on Earth...

That being said, like a Forensic Files survey of a crime, this work tracks the action of a tiger showing all the indications in its measured, specific, and targeted actions of carrying out lethal vengeance against a specific man it bore a grudge against.

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Review: Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper:: Edited from the Original Manuscript in the William Robertson Coe Collection of Western Americana in the Yale University Library: With a Biography of Osborne Russell and Maps of His Travels While a Trapper in the...

Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper:: Edited from the Original Manuscript in the William Robertson Coe Collection of Western Americana in the Yale University Library: With a Biography of Osborne Russell and Maps of His Travels While a Trapper in the... by Osborne Russell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Compare to Tough Trip Through Paradise: Montana 1878 where a trader finds area Indians subjugated and almost comically impoverished. Here bookish Russell has to have running battles with Blackfeet and Crow to do some trapping. This book is a largely as-is journal including spelling errors and pet abbreviations but lacking chapter or paragraph breaks. Editor Aubrey L. Haines includes many helpful maps and speaks to the same terrain that he knows. I wish the maps had indications of current state lines and major cities. The extensive notes of the 1830s travels in Snake River territory include many amplifying primary source details and should be read along.

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Review: Simply Wittgenstein

Simply Wittgenstein by James C. Klagge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this overview of Ludwig Wittgenstein's live and works, focusing on Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The author does a commendable job at clarifying the key points of this unusual philosopher's "antiphilosophy". I have always been drawn to Wittgenstein's focus on language and the "game" over ontological minutiae. This book clarifies and expounds on what is still important and relevant about Wittgenstein's thought and the parts of his interesting life that helped shape his outlook.

[I received a free copy of the book to review.]

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Review: A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Edgy and controversial, a real horrorshow romp of language and lewdness, graphic violence and vitality. In the book, the youths are so much younger than the young men than in the movie that this somehow makes it even edgier.

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Review: 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents

1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The presidential election of 1920 was dramatic. The book's title comes from six once-and-future presidents angling in the race: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt. There as many non-president actors of significance, including socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, leading American progressive and isolationist politician from California Hiram Johnson, the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928 Al Smith, and more. Is it that unusual a half-dozen former and future presidents populate the stage? I don't know about that, but the drama of the year includes women's suffrage, U.S. post-WW I isolationism (League of Nations, fear of "internationalism", immigration), the high tide of organized socialism, the end of the Progressive Era period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States from the 1890s to 1920s, the two major parties evolving into the shape we now know, the maturing of the primary process, and the political effects of American urbanization.

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Review: The Unicorn's Secret

The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was born in 1970, so was never really cognizant of the murder of Holly Maddux as a new story, but I certainly noticed in the 2001 coverage of his extradition from France after being on the lam for over 20 years. I wanted to read this book to see what was known before he disappeared, as this book was published while Einhorn's whereabouts were unknown.

His activity in ecological groups and the counterculture, anti-establishment and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s and participation in the first Earth Day event in Philadelphia in 1970 while maintaining lunches with corporate execs and an international correspondence around Tesla technology and "psychotronic" mind military tech (remote viewing, etc.) connect this to The Men Who Stare At Goats. It was a period when anything seemed possible and connected nd conspiratorial and Einhorn navigated that landscape with aplomb.

Even when this book was written, it seemed undeniable he murdered his former girlfriend as a culmination of generally misogynistic behavior and let her corpse mummify in his apartment closet for years. Fortunately, he is now incarcerate with a mandatory life term without the possibility of parole: Pennsylvania inmate number ES6859.

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Review: Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R, Jags, and Stan

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R, Jags, and Stan by John Kruschke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Both textbook and practical guide, this work is an accessible approach to Bayesian data analysis from the basics. Chapter-length explorations of various implementations make this an effective reference for non-expert practitioners that seek to bring the value of Bayesian analysis to problems in their field. Intended for first-year graduate students or advanced undergraduates, this book offers thorough training on modern Bayesian methods for data analysis. Algebra and basic calculus, nothing really beyond simple integration, are prerequisites to maximizing understanding of the theory presented in the primer, but no more mathematics than that. This book features throughout implementations in the programming language R and software packages JAGS and Stan. A comfort level with basic computer programming will bring out the greatest value here. Certainly, someone looking to create a first-time R application featuring Bayesian analysis will be hard pressed to find a better text resource to contribute toward success. As a textbook, the basics of probability and random sampling are effectively covered. Each chapter has a few, generally less than ten, exercises. Many are new or revised and they are thought-provoking, multi-step applications. They have explicit purposes (“Transformed parameters in Stan, and comparison with JAGS”) and guidelines for accomplishment. In a classroom setting, I think further contouring of exercises would be required to level-set expectations.
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[Look for my entire review up at MAA Reviews.


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