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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Review: Robert Altman: The Oral Biography

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This "Oral Biography" features narrated quotes by Altman, his family, collaborators, and co-workers. Altman's own words are largely drawn from interviews done close to the end of his life and are not read by himself, as is the case with other quotes it sounds like. Some distinctive voices speaking their own words stand out, among them actors Tim Robbins and Bob Balaban. This book makes me want to see many Altman films I missed (Fool For Love, Thieves Like Us, Brewster McCloud, etc.) and re-see ones I already knew (Popeye, MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, etc.) The book strongly underscores that adoration actors had for him and this seemed to arise from the freedom he allowed them, encouraging improvisation. Going off the script purposefully like that damaged his relationship with studios and backers. Hard drinking and obsessive work habits damaged his relationship with family and friends.

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Review: When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order by Martin Jacques
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is very dry, and textbook like and necessarily dated, published as it was in late 2009. Still, it is informative, even enlightening, and much wider in scope than the forecasting title suggests. There is much history here and much about east Asian in general outside of China. Broadly this goes back to 19th Century history to plot the decline of China when confronted with the West, the rise of Japan as an ersatz Western nation through the same interaction through a final act of China coming up to eclipse Japan and perhaps the West.

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