Aaron has
277 books
(75 selected)
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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0143039148
| 9780143039143
| 4.10
| 1,912
| 1975
| Feb 28, 2006
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None
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Dec 2012
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Dec 13, 2012
| Paperback
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| 014303913X
| 9780143039136
| 3.98
| 2,314
| 1972
| Feb 28, 2006
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None
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Dec 2012
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Dec 10, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0141186151
| 9780141186153
| 4.05
| 6,469
| 1970
| Jan 01, 2001
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None
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Dec 2012
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Dec 09, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0007350902
| 9780007350902
| unknown
| 3.74
| 15,781
| 1885
| unknown
|
You can think of this as basically a comic book for middle-aged Victorians, simply substituting Superman's superpowers for what Mark Ames so memorably...more
You can think of this as basically a comic book for middle-aged Victorians, simply substituting Superman's superpowers for what Mark Ames so memorably termed the "White God" factor - weathered Anglo badass strolls into a savage land, uses his superior Caucasianosity to kick ass/get rich/fuck local women/own the joint, and departs with some ripping good yarns to regale the chaps back 'ome with over a pint. However, it's worth reminding yourself that this was the book that actually invented all these tropes, so when you're about to laugh out loud over the corniness of scenes like the one where the protagonist uses the prediction of an eclipse to terrify the ignorant tribesmen with White People Magic, just keep in mind that nobody had ever thought to do that before this 1885 blockbuster. Every cliché was once new. Most negative reviews of this book seem to focus on that aspect, and what they see as the book's colonialist racism. While you can argue about what a truly progressive way to write an adventure story about Englishmen in Darkest Africa would be, decanting the Kipling and removing the Cecil Rhodes, I confess I didn't see the portrayal of native tribesmen as that bad. Let me repeat that the book was published in 1885; in that context, this is about the most enlightened tale you could expect. Feel free to make your own comparisons to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, or Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or heck, even Tintin, but to be honest it's no worse than Indiana Jones, and should be looked at more in the vein of something like Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, which it was written to compete with. I have no doubt that the English really did expect something like this from their authors. However, if you can get past the sometimes patronizing references to Africans, you're in for a treat: it's got a dying old-timer with a faded treasure map, a band of noble adventurers setting off on an impossible quest, dangerous big game hunting, deadly deserts, impassable mountain peaks, a forgotten civilization of powerful warriors, a mysterious native companion who turns out to be a king trying to reclaim his rightful throne, action-packed battle scenes, an evil witch, a doomed love affair, secret caves full of diamonds, and Our Hero ending up safe and sound after the adventure of a lifetime. It's the kind of story that was destined to sell zillions of copies, because no matter the century people will always want these kinds of adolescent stories. I wouldn't waste too much time trying to overanalyze it.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Nov 2012
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Dec 03, 2012
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| B004QGYWMG
| unknown
| 4.18
| 2,536
| 1981
| unknown
|
Sometimes a really long book only elicits a very short summary from me, either because I don't have much to say, or because I don't think my reaction...more
Sometimes a really long book only elicits a very short summary from me, either because I don't have much to say, or because I don't think my reaction would fit well in a review. This book is one of the latter cases. First of all, it's huge, and not merely in size but in all the other aspects too - cast, range, and its scope. That epic quality is probably why it's been analogized to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, but I think the plot is also somewhat similar to Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three. It's a novelistic take on the War of Canudos, a small attempt to quiet a small rebellious village that grew into the deadliest civil war in Brazilian history. In Llosa's hands, the town's dedication to an obscure charismatic religious figure becomes a stand-in for the massive changes Brazil was experiencing at the time: abolition of slavery, transition from monarchy to a republic, and attempts to secularize a deeply religious people in the name of Brazil's new motto: Order and Progress. Some of the scenes with jungle warfare also reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (or at least Apocalypse Now). One thing that helped keep it readable was that Llosa is a master of tempo, interspersing the epic battles with the stories of these people whose lives are entwined with the ideals of the age. If ever a book deserved the adjective "apocalyptic", it would be this one. I've never read "Rebellion in the Backlands" by Euclides da Cunha, which is supposedly the primary source material, but the exact fidelity to events is almost besides the point here - the increasing attempts by the central government to conquer the rebels in the town build to a fever pitch amid the kind of hysterical millennialism that feels as real as anything. The constant doom-laden tension is only enhanced by the scenes of analepsis and prolepsis, as characters reflect on their past actions and what they meant, if mere mortals could ever attempt to understand the true magnitude of the action. I don't usually pay a lot of attention to introductions, but I wish my copy of the book had discussed the contrast in the view of politics as presented here and Llosa's real-life, somewhat neoliberal political career. It seems like quite a contrast. Anyway, it was a remarkable book with some truly indelible scenes of faith, war, and death. Many of the book's brief scenes are as well-drawn as anything you'll read in those more famous books it's compared to. This short extract only begins to hint at its qualities: "It's easier to imagine the death of one person than those of a hundred or a thousand," the baron murmured. "When multiplied, suffering becomes abstract. It is not easy to be moved by abstract things." "Unless one has seen first one, then ten, a hundred, a thousand, thousands suffer," the nearsighted journalist answered. "If the death of Gentil de Castro was absurd, many of those in Canudos died for reasons no less absurd." "How many?" the baron said in a low voice. He knew that the number would never be known, that, as with all the rest of history, the figure would be one that historians and politicians would increase and decrease in accordance with their doctrines and the advantage they could extract from it.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Dec 2012
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Nov 28, 2012
| Kindle Edition
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| 0312429096
| 9780312429096
| 3.77
| 511
| 1998
| Sep 29, 2009
|
I have a complicated relationship with contemporary American fiction. Actually, I flat-out despise most of it. Give me a period novel about Edwardian...more
I have a complicated relationship with contemporary American fiction. Actually, I flat-out despise most of it. Give me a period novel about Edwardian English gentlemen, Second Empire French coalminers, post-Petrine Russian nobles, or even Depression-era California fruit pickers, and I will be happy, but it seems like I loathe anything set in the modern United States. Why does the life of a person in the recent past seem so full compared to the bland epigones who populate our shelves? Such small characters, such vitiated lives, such small epiphanies. Charles Portis was right: "We're weaker than our fathers, Dupree. We don't even look like them." At the helm of the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, ordinary Americans are the least interesting people on Earth, yet the most willing to over-document their sluggish swirls through the stagnant pond that they call home. It's either self-indulgence or a simple absence of anything real to talk about. Another reason I get annoyed is that a lot of those kinds of novels make "consumerism" a theme, which I find incredibly boring. What is interesting at all about people consuming goods, talking about consuming goods, or thinking about talking about consuming goods? Nothing. How many novels have we been subjected to where authors try to make "points" about consumerism by including all of those things, lulling the reader into an ostentatiously branded coma so that no one catches on to the complete absence of any action or humanity that would interest a normal person with full control of their faculties? What in the name of God are you trying to SAY? Yet somehow Gain takes both of those themes that otherwise bore me and makes them great. It's two interrelated stories: one, the gradual growth amidst all the turbulence of American history of a small colonial-era soap-making factory called Jephthah Clare & Sons into Clare Inc., a Johnson & Johnson-esque corporate behemoth; and two, Laura Bodey's struggle against ovarian cancer in the modern-day town of Lacewood, IL, where Clare has a factory. As a big economic history nerd, I confess that I found the first story far more interesting for the most part. In long stretches of sometimes-overwrought prose, Powers has concocted probably the most engrossing life story of a fictional corporation you'll ever read (which may not be a crowded field). Parts of it were easily on the level with a real corporate history like Marc Levinson's superb The Great A&P, or a magisterial economic history like William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, which Powers clearly alludes to in the part set just prior to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Watching the fledgling soap company make its first deals, improve its production process, and slowly expand into other markets to eventually become a titan of industry is honestly enthralling; you can almost see Adam Smith nodding approvingly during the sections on how the various Clare family members improve their firm's ability to truck and barter. There are also plenty of great parts about the chemistry of soap (no really). Clare is intended to be both a parody of "better living through chemistry"-type companies, particularly as its story moves into the present-day, and also a serious study of how companies become both legal people and also "good corporate citizens", and enmesh themselves in our lives. Think of the sinister Bland corporation in Gravity's Rainbow, or Ambrose Bierce's definition of a corporation as "An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility", or Milton Friedman's infamous arguments in "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits" that companies have zero responsibilities to society beyond enhancing shareholder value. While Clare is presented as a fairly benevolent company, taking early Progressive-era steps to bring their workers on board with the company and prevent the labor troubles so typical of the era, it slowly begins to seem like Just Another Company, especially when the narrative gets to the 80s. What starts out as a hagiography subtly becomes a much more nuanced picture. This is made a little less abstract by Laura's story. She's a divorced mother of 2 kids who's seeing a married guy in her spare time. I expected to be bored stiff by her life, and initially I was, since she spends a lot of the beginning doing mundane ordinary complaining or snarking about consumer products, but Powers eventually won me over by giving her cancer, a time-tested method of increasing reader sympathy dating back at least to Charles Dickens. I've never had or known anyone close to me who had cancer so I don't know how accurate his depiction of it was, but it seemed pretty real and engrossing to me. While a lot of her story was used to present the reader with some Themes (e.g., the growth of Clare is implicitly analogized to the metastasis of cancer cells, the company's efforts to disavow any link between the chemical outputs of the Lacewood factory and the illnesses of the townfolk are contrasted with their equally assiduous efforts to seem like they Care About the Community), the changes in her relationships with her kids and ex-husband came off as genuine and moving. Powers also namedrops Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, a cool Walt Whitman poem. Overall I liked the book, especially the capitalist cheerleading parts, which I would definitely read more of. While the modern characters occasionally threaten to become as boringly loathsome as their counterparts in a Jonathan Franzen novel, Powers does about the right amount of tearjerking to make them relatable and sympathetic.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Nov 2012
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Nov 25, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0140432280
| 9780140432282
| 3.55
| 5,994
| 1907
| Oct 01, 1985
|
A classic novel of terrorism, I picked it up on a high school friend's recommendation. I hadn't read any Conrad since our 12th grade English class had...more
A classic novel of terrorism, I picked it up on a high school friend's recommendation. I hadn't read any Conrad since our 12th grade English class had included Heart of Darkness. You're guaranteed to hate most books you're forced to read for school, having to wring all sorts of contrived themes and subtexts out of your mandatory tomes, but I enjoyed Heart of Darkness, and of course the movie Apocalypse Now, which we also watched because why not. I didn't really dig The Secret Agent quite as much though, a least at first. The main terrorism plot is the highlight: Conrad is very adept at creating a terrorist group, the Future of the Proletariat, which is both plausible in its aims and actions, and ridiculous in how cartoonish the individual members Verloc, Yundt, Ossipon, and Michaelis are. I'm positive real terrorist groups have their members who strongly resemble the buffoons in the FOP, and I'm sure that their meetings are just as full of irritating speeches. Achmed, stop clowning around, we're trying to finish Phase XVII of Operation Death to the Great Satan! Similarly, the police working against them also have their own personalities and personal issues, and real counter-terrorism work is probably just as full of politicking and feuding. However, Conrad put in an annoying subplot about Stevie, the main character Verloc's wife's brother, who is autistic and does nothing interesting for the entire first half of the book. It was only later that he became important, and even though his only real relevant action happened offscreen, the way the Verloc "family" dealt with it was pretty interesting. Though Conrad is a little too verbose sometimes, the psychological interaction between Verloc and his wife Winnie was great, as was the ending part with Winnie and Comrade Ossipon. Very satisfying ending overall. Since the book was based on a very similar real-life attempted act of terrorism, it's only fitting in a way that it ended up being a favorite of Ted Kaczynski. Ted was smart though - wives will only mess you up! Conrad knew best all along.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Nov 2012
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Nov 24, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0300060998
| 9780300060997
| 3.96
| 19,840
| 1842
| Feb 21, 1996
|
Matt Taibbi, as a journalist one of the few Good Ones, sometimes quotes from this book whenever he wants to make a point about corruption, celebrity c...more
Matt Taibbi, as a journalist one of the few Good Ones, sometimes quotes from this book whenever he wants to make a point about corruption, celebrity culture, or how cringing Americans are towards their economic overlords. His point is that we are in many ways not so far advanced beyond medieval Russian peasants in our willingness, even eagerness, to bow and scrape before our own equivalent of the aristocracy in order to raise ourselves that all-important fraction of a grade above our fellows. In fact, from the social hypocrisy point of view we might even be worse, since groveling to your betters was actually the law in Russia. What's so depressing about the American equivalent of tugging your forelock is how little it takes to get someone to show up on CNBC and start toe-sucking the Job Creators in the hopes that the virtues of that superior class (which must surely be plentiful given their abundant status) will come trickling down. Someone should write a novel about the American version of this "poshlost" syndrome. In the meantime, this excellent novel will do very well. It was written in 1842 and doesn't feel dated at all. Likewise, even though it's very Russian, with plenty of asides on the Russian soul and character and nature and whatnot, Gogol has an amazing ability to make this tale of a con man trying to scam the inhabitants of a tiny provincial town feel universal. There's a great bit right at the beginning of chapter 7 where Gogol says as much directly to the reader: "For the judgment of the writer's own times does not recognize that equally marvelous are the lenses that are used for contemplating suns and those for revealing the motions of insects imperceptible to the naked eye; for the judgment of the writer's own times does not recognize that a great deal of spiritual depth is required to throw light upon a picture taken from a despised stratum of life and to exalt it into a pearl of creative art...." It's a lot of work to bring out the drama in ordinary life and make it art! I think most great cultural novels do the same thing, concentrating very intently on traits so widespread they're not even noticeable until you get enough distance or have the keen enough eye to see them. I haven't even talked about how funny the book is though. The main character Chichikov is visiting an isolated provincial town, trying to game the system by going around to local landowners and buying the rights to the labor of serfs who are dead but haven't been reported as dead to the authorities yet. Once he's able to get a bunch of serfs ("souls", in the parlance of the times), he's going to take out a mortgage on them and abscond with the money. The humor in the book relies on how ridiculous all of the people in the town are, from the various eccentric local nobles to the wacky peasantry, and how that interacts with Chichikov's single-minded greed. Despite some complications, Chichikov manages to buy up a decent amount of souls (the scene where Sobakevich tries to sell his dead souls for 100 rubles is one of the book's best) because the town is so star-struck by this dashing and mysterious stranger that they will accept all sorts of absurdities in order to fit him into their worldview. This is conveyed best in the party scene in chapter 8, where Chichikov, the fresh meat, is swarmed by all the local ladies, yet he has eyes only for the Governor's daughter, who doesn't care at all for him. The growing clouds of gossip are hilarious, as is his sudden fall from grace as insane rumors of his true nature pile up and force him to leave town in a hurry. It reminds me a lot of celebrity culture where people are built up and torn down ceaselessly, virtues and flaws projected upon them in an endless cycle to reinforce whatever small-minded prejudices they have. Gogol has a great meta-point late in the book about this, about how his main character, whom he's made to seem like a swindler, is only so to the reader, who has the privilege of a greater point of view, and how your reactions to his escapades reflect on you yourself as well. A lot of Gogol's thumbnail sketches are both hilarious and sobering, as you start to see those personality types in yourself and others around you. All in all Taibbi was absolutely right that this is a classic novel; definitely worth its place in the Russian literary pantheon, and ours too.(less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Nov 2012
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Nov 18, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0307946533
| 9780307946539
| 3.86
| 3,187
| 2010
| Nov 13, 2012
|
Both of the Houellebecq books I've read have been great, filled with a sort of resigned spirit of detachment yet very funny at the same time. I liked...more
Both of the Houellebecq books I've read have been great, filled with a sort of resigned spirit of detachment yet very funny at the same time. I liked this one slightly more than The Elementary Particles though; Horace Walpole's famous line of "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel" could have been its epigram (though its actual epigram of "The world is weary of me - and I am weary of it" is quite fitting as well). I wouldn't call his writing style "typically French" or anything, since he certainly doesn't have the same worldview that the other French authors I've read have, yet his subtle brand of humor seems perfectly suited to the changing French landscape that he explores here, as well as his other themes of abstraction and misanthropy. I wasn't sure if the title was a reference to the famous map-territory relationship in Borges' story "On Exactitude in Science" or not - there's a later passage on p. 73 where a Chinese art reviewer attempts to catalog the main character's works that reminds me somewhat of the ancient Chinese animal classification scheme in the other Borges story "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy", but it could just be coincidence or a translation quirk. Anyway, the title is perfect because the relationship between things and their representations is the central idea of the novel, from the way protagonist Jed Martin's paintings of Michelin road atlases and famous people (and his earlier photographs of industrial objects) get valorized to the discussions of his sometime-girlfriend Olga and her job at Michelin of steering tourists to the "authentic France" via online reviews of hotels which may or may not be authentic at all. Houellebecq has some great passages discussing authenticity in that respect, as when the only people still interested in traditional French culture are foreign tourists, or even the entire concept of a painter getting famous by taking pictures of the French equivalent of a Rand McNally road map. But the book is really moving overall, and the concept parts are secondary to the story. Jed is a somewhat numb, anhedonic fellow, but Houellebecq is able to bring out real feeling and tragedy in this guy's life. His relationship with Olga is extremely sad, a singular love affair that never lived up to its potential, yet it doesn't feel self-pitying or tear-jerking. Similarly, the stretch on p. 135 where his father talks about his failed childhood efforts to build nests for swallows and how that influenced his architectural career is magnificent, even when put up against the other strong father-son scenes. One of the most remarked-on features of the book is of course Houellebecq's decision to write himself into the novel. It doesn't feel self-indulgent or Clive Cussler-ish at all - surely no writer looking to preen would treat himself as poorly as Houellebecq does his alter ego here - it's done to help Houellebecq get in some jabs at the Parisian literary scene (the real Houellebecq is an expatriate also) and also to bring into sharp relief the protagonist's loneliness, which is partly due to his own character and partly due to the culture he lives in. In the book France is past its glory days, becoming more and more a hollowed-out simulacrum of itself in order to please tourists, and there's a theme of capitalism as alienator and atomizer, although the book's ruminations are never polemical or vulgar-Marxist. In fact there is a great stretch of writing discussing one of Jed's paintings on p. 117 featuring Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as two different heroic faces of capitalism that could never have been written by a lazy or reactionary writer. That that bit was is from an introduction to Jed's works written by the novel-Houellebecq makes it even more thoughtful in context. Again, though, this is really much more of a human novel than anything ideological in the strict sense. The humorous parts - a surprising amount; the book is actually very funny overall, such whenever a character starts thinking about gadgets or supermarkets - battle with the stretches of pathos in Jed's life, until Houellebecq ends the novel seemingly perfectly, on exactly the right graceful note: "The work that occupied the last years of Jed Martin's life can thus be seen - and this is the first interpretation that springs to mind - as a nostalgic meditation on the end of the Industrial Age in Europe, and, more generally, on the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry. This interpretation is, however, inadequate when one tries to make sense of the unease that grips us on seeing those pathetic Playmobil-type little figurines, lost in the middle of an abstract and immense futurist city, a city which itself crumbles and falls apart, then seems gradually to be scattered across the immense vegetation extending to infinity... They sink and seem for an instant to put up a struggle, before being suffocated by the superimposed layers of plants. Then everything becomes calm. There remains only the grass swaying in the wind. The triumph of vegetation is total."(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Nov 15, 2012
| Nov 17, 2012
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Nov 15, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0752865331
| 9780752865331
| 3.94
| 32,785
| 1930
| 2005
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I wasn't expecting this to be bad - after all, it's only the most famous noir novel of all time - but I really wasn't expecting it to be this good. It...more
I wasn't expecting this to be bad - after all, it's only the most famous noir novel of all time - but I really wasn't expecting it to be this good. It's got an intriguing MacGuffin, the archetypal femme fatale, loads of interesting minor characters, a good plot, great writing, and although the protagonist is maybe a little too much of a badass to be plausible (whatever plausibility is worth in a noir novel), he's definitely a badass. I've seen some of the film version and liked it, I definitely need to go back and watch the whole thing, even if only to see how they handled the final scene, which is a masterpiece of psychological move and countermove. I know Hammett's other novels aren't as highly regarded as this, and I can't say I'm going to rush out and pursue them, but this book is one of the greatest examples of how to really use the "show, don't tell" rule well. Deserves every bit of its fame.(less)
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Nov 2012
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Nov 10, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0143039636
| 9780143039631
| 3.88
| 4,037
| 1936
| May 30, 2006
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As a straightforward novel about striking apple pickers, this is a good look at the mechanics of strikes and yet another good look from Steinbeck at t...more
As a straightforward novel about striking apple pickers, this is a good look at the mechanics of strikes and yet another good look from Steinbeck at the psychology of people placed in nearly impossible situations. The book follows Jim, the son of a famous Communist Party fighter, and his own journey from just another unemployed worker to Party organizer himself. He joins fellow Party men Mac and London in the fictional Torgas Valley and its fight against exploitative farm owners. Steinbeck uses Jim and Doc, the doctor, as the primary mouthpieces for his trademark vernacular philosophizing - Jim slowly changes from bystander to violent vanguard, while Doc is always the cool voice of reason, theorizing on the peculiar characteristics of the mass of men the Party is trying to build out of the unorganized mob of desperate strikers. A big theme is the way that people get used for bigger things; not only Jim and the "his name is Robert Paulson"-type scene at the end, but throughout the book there are constant discussions of how bloodshed will turn the mob into a machine, an entity that will rampage over the callous and malignant growers. Eric Hoffer must have read this book several times before writing his own The True Believer on the nature of members of mass organizations, and in In Dubious Battle I also see echoes of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in terms of how the organizers see the Communist Party as savior. What's interesting is that aside from glancing mentions of Hoover (who would have been out of office by the time book is set) there is basically no mention of the government. Steinbeck was probably trying to isolate the characters in the tiny valley setting for dramatic effect, but you could probably write an interesting paper on how the pro-labor liberalism of the New Deal with its Wagner Act helped defuse a lot of the Communist Party radicalism seen here. I wouldn't say this book is as good as The Grapes of Wrath, its most nearly similar Steinbeck book, but I would recommend it to any fan of The Jungle. Steinbeck is incapable of writing a bad book, and while this may seem too political for fans of East of Eden, he does a great job of dramatizing the times, and the eternal conflict between individual, small, antlike people, and the large, collective, powerful anthills they can become.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Oct 29, 2012
| Nov 2012
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Oct 29, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0316228532
| 9780316228534
| 3.27
| 73,233
| Jan 01, 2012
| Sep 27, 2012
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Disclaimer: I only ever read one Harry Potter book (the fourth one, right when it came out) and I've never seen any of the movies, so I came into this...more
Disclaimer: I only ever read one Harry Potter book (the fourth one, right when it came out) and I've never seen any of the movies, so I came into this book without a lot of preconceptions. Still, since like the entire rest of the planet I know J.K. Rowling primarily as a children's book author, I couldn't help smiling initially at the more adult content and sentences like "Andrew returned to his contemplation of the dirty window with an ache in his heart and in his balls." But after a few chapters I wasn't smiling anymore. This is actually a fairly grim novel with plenty of social realism, closer to an Irvine Welsh novel like Trainspotting than what she'd done before, and for long stretches you would have no idea that it was written by a megastar like Rowling. The "casual vacancy" of the title refers to an open seat on the city of Pagford's equivalent of a city council. Its former occupant Barry Fairbrother dies in the very first scene, and as the novel unfolds he gets revealed as a vital thread in the local community fabric, everyone else's lives unraveling as his benign influence disappears. One thing that jumped out about the guy's characterization to me was that his place in town seemed to have a lot of meaning to Rowling, who famously stumped for the Labour Party and the British welfare state in general before the 2010 election: "They think they’ll reverse sixty years of anger and resentment with a few sheets of statistics. None of them was Barry. He had been a living example of what they proposed in theory: the advancement, through education from poverty to affluence, from powerlessness and dependency to valuable contributor to society. Did they not see what hopeless advocates they were, compared to the man who had died?" The way that Fairbrother was used as an example of someone who "made it" through the use of social programs seemed fairly personal, and I imagine some of the impetus for writing this novel, which feels "small" in many ways, was her own well-known life story. But for the most part I think you could enjoy the book on its own without knowing anything about its author. Reading it, it feels like the main legacy of her previous series is in how ignored and misunderstood the younger characters are by all the adults and parents, but their self-absorption is much broader than that - almost everyone in the book ignores their children, but also their siblings, their spouses, their friends, and everything that doesn't have to do with satisfying their own selfish desires. That theme of selfish ignorance is the source of a ton of black comedy in the book's best parts, like the dinner party scene, the mayor's birthday party scene, and essentially all the scenes where characters try to unburden themselves or arrive at some kind of personal epiphany, unaware of how small and self-deluded they appear to the reader. The continual contrasting of various characters to the seemingly superhuman Barry brings home the idea that people need to look beyond themselves, because after you die all people will have is memories and the whatever positive legacy you chose to leave behind. In terms of writing quality, I was pleased that the morals of the book don't feel like forced tearjerking to milk the audience's sympathy. I was even more pleased that the major deaths at the end don't result in "You know, I learned something..." magical life turnarounds for the remaining characters. Life doesn't work that way and neither should fiction. Teenage characters get a lot of screen time, but the adults are all fairly real as well. This book would probably work as a marriage counseling guide, given its numerous and unflinching depictions of how horrible spouses can be to each other when they're unhappy with their lives. I don't really know how this book will stack up legacy-wise compared to That Other Thing she wrote, but I hope she keeps writing books since this one was quite good.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Oct 2012
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Oct 27, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0140004556
| 9780140004557
| 3.86
| 5,622
| 1937
| 1943
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A hilarious satire of journalism, I feel like a lot of the book's skewering of the profession haven't aged a day. From the hapless protagonist John Bo...more
A hilarious satire of journalism, I feel like a lot of the book's skewering of the profession haven't aged a day. From the hapless protagonist John Boot to the imperiously clueless Lord Copper, the characters are funny and plausible as they lie and blunder around trying to "cover the story" of political instability in a country they're completely unfamiliar with. The news media's willing to punch up or even simply invent stories for effect is obviously still with us, and the constant theme of miscommunication is exploited in full Wodehousian form. Waugh has a good ear for deadpan dialogue, as well as parodies of overwrought writing: the famous one is "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole", but my favorite is the Thomas Friedman-esque "A spark is set to the cornerstone of civilization which will shake its roots like a chilling breath."(less)
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Oct 24, 2012
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| 0143039482
| 9780143039488
| 3.95
| 17,127
| 1961
| Aug 26, 2008
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Judging from the little I read about this book before I read it, it's very tempting to psychoanalyze Steinbeck for what seems like a dramatic change i...more
Judging from the little I read about this book before I read it, it's very tempting to psychoanalyze Steinbeck for what seems like a dramatic change in focus, tone, and location. Where is California, why am I in New Baytown, New England? What happened to the ensemble casts, who is this Ethan Allen Hawley dude we spend all our time with? Where are all of the grand themes of life and lineage and struggle, what's with his boring quotidian life? Why does this book feel so small compared to all the widescreen epics he was so famous for? Did the old master lose his touch, or is this some kind of extended metaphor for his own feelings in some way? Well, this was the novel that convinced the Nobel Prize committee to toss a Literature award his way in 1961, and though he wrote an adaptation of Arthurian legend after this one, this is basically his last real novel and the capstone on his legacy. I thought it was good, and though I agree that Ethan won't ever rise to the level of Tom Joad in the pantheon of great American heroes, I'm not sure that's really Steinbeck's "fault" necessarily. The book is all about a very particular time and place, this sad decaying New England fishing town, and it keeps all of the insights and humanist aphorisms Steinbeck was famous for inside Ethan's head, as seems appropriate. I agree that this stylistic choice does make the book feel limited in scope, yet I got the feeling that it was deliberate, and couldn't figure out what I would have tried to add. It seemed like Steinbeck wanted to write a very specific novel about a few days in the life of a middle-aged man with the stench of failure around him, and it's hard to make that kind of person as interesting in that timeframe as his characters were with the decades of time he gave them in East of Eden. So it's not as good as his bigger works, but even second-tier Steinbeck is still great.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 21, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0307264785
| 9780307264787
| 3.62
| 3,289
| 2008
| Jul 29, 2008
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Traffic as a phenomenon is full of irritating paradoxes. Driving faster can mean everyone drives slower. Building roads to relieve congestion creates...more
Traffic as a phenomenon is full of irritating paradoxes. Driving faster can mean everyone drives slower. Building roads to relieve congestion creates even more congestion. Redesigning roads to make them safer can cause more accidents. Putting up more warning signs means fewer of them get read. Trying to keep pedestrians protected from cars makes them less safe. Tailgating the car in front of you in a traffic jam does nothing to let you escape it. Traffic the book is an excellent in-depth study on driving and its effects on society that manages to both confirm a lot of my own driving prejudices and offer a lot of good insights into traffic congestion and a host of other related subjects. Vanderbilt talks about the history of traffic jams going back to the Romans and how modern technology is trying to stay one step ahead of the monster jams that modern technology helps create in the first place. Very readable and full of fun info. Quick takeaways, some of which should be obvious yet somehow aren't for a lot of people: - Don't tailgate, it's really unsafe and often causes people to actually slow down - Driving and texting/eating/anything in the car makes you way more likely to get into a wreck - In a traffic jam, drive a slow but consistent speed instead of stopping and going; you won't get out of the jam any more quickly but you will both save on gas and help out the people behind you - Late merging is the way to go, as it maximizes the use of space; don't get pissed off at people who zoom ahead of you, you didn't "own" a place in line - Support toll roads/congestion pricing/higher street parking fees; recognizing that the precious resources of road and parking space aren't free will help everyone in the long run even if it hurts your wallet up front - Stop thinking of roads as car transport devices only, there are lots of other types of transportation like bikes and pedestrians that have just as much of a right to be there as cars - Suburban sprawl is ruining cities and in very real ways making us poorer as a nation, encourage any and every policy to spur density and alternatives to driving you see If you're like me, you hate driving and try to do as little of it as possible, yet you still find the subject very interesting. Vanderbilt goes through a great tour of the many ways in which the rise of mega-commuting has warped our culture (e.g. we spend so much time in our cars that radio stations time their broadcasts to give you "driveway moments" that get you to stay in your car even after your trip has ended to hear the end of the segment) and the superhuman efforts of traffic engineers to shave even seconds off our journeys. Highly recommended.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 19, 2012
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| 0452288193
| 9780452288195
| 4.11
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| Feb 27, 2007
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Yet another Big History book, this one really pulled out in front of the pack for me and I think it's the best one I've read so far. First, there's no...more Yet another Big History book, this one really pulled out in front of the pack for me and I think it's the best one I've read so far. First, there's no better way to make me smile than with a reference to psychohistory, from my favorite sci-fi series of all time - Turchin compares his goal of scientifying history to Asimov's famous literary conceit right there at the very beginning of the Introduction. Turchin is serious about it though, offering a semi-mathematical framework for historical analysis he calls cliodynamics, which borrows methodologically from statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. In English, that means he models the rise and fall of empires using equations that treat people as groups, and also account for chaotic behavior as well. This means that there's some population genetics lurking in the background as well. There is not actually any math in this book, however; this was a prose exposition of the equations that are all in his earlier Historical Dynamics, which I haven't read. There's still plenty of rigor, though, as he subscribes fully to Paul Krugman's sentiment that "The equations and diagrams of formal economics are, more often than not, no more than the scaffolding used to help construct an intellectual edifice. Once that edifice has been built to a certain point, the scaffolding can be stripped away, leaving only plain English behind." He starts out by asking how empires form, which he calls "imperiogenesis". The list of empires/countries/peoples discussed extensively include Russia, America, Germans, Arabs, England, France, Austria-Hungary, and of course the good old Roman Empire. He doesn't include exhaustive histories of each one, just enough to make his points and tie them back to the larger argument. I would have liked more detail on the non-European empires like Persia, China, the various Indian empires, or anything in the Western Hemisphere, but I think those would only bolster his thesis. He finds that empires typically arise on what he calls a "metaethnic frontier", in other words a boundary between two relatively different cultures (cf. the "us vs them" struggles in Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations). Thus the medieval Rus, ancestors of today's Russians, found themselves assimilating other nearby tribes in a desperate effort to fend off endless raids from the Mongols, and this gradual accretion of similar proto-Russian co-ethnics gradually built the kind of egalitarian, tightly-knit society that was capable of conquering the vast steppes of Siberia. In essence the Rus as a society unconsciously "learned" the social traits - trust, intra-group fairness, self-sacrifice for the group - that it took to be a successful empire, and other groups that didn't or couldn't develop those traits got swallowed up or annihilated. This is similar to how the Romans fought off the Gauls, Phoenicians, etc by gradually assimilating similar tribes like that Samnites and so on. He calls this level of collective solidarity "asabiya" after Ibn Khaldun's usage of the term in his Muqaddimah, his own attempt at a universal history, and ties it into Alexis de Tocqueville's and Robert Putnam's ideas of social capital. Every good theory of how empires rise should also be able to explain how empires fall, and his asabiya concept seems to do a decent job of explaining "imperiopathosis" as well. Asabiya is the glue of peoples, both a measure of general social capital and trust, and the thing that makes your average dude (it's mostly guys) willing to die in some wasteland hundreds or thousands of miles away from home in order to promote the greater good. He backs this up by bringing in some game theoretic/group selectionist discussion of how societies need a critical mass of moralists and institutions to discourage free-riders and cheaters, which encourages solidarity. Something that Turchin finds over and over again in history is that incredibly successful civilizations, after having built their empires, seem to be inherently unstable and prone to decay through loss of asabiya. While this sounds as unscientific as élan vital, it can actually be quantified in some ways. Basically, in a mature empire that no longer feels compelled to expand, the number of elites starts to slowly increase, both due to lower chances of dying in wars and due to the higher reproductive rate that being rich in an agricultural society allows for. Slowly, they shift from being leaders in society to being rent-seekers, and eventually they take so much of the pie that people aren't willing to trust in the civic institutions previous generations built. Eventually, a more vigorous society on the border gets its act together (in the case of the Romans, the Germans; for the Byzantines, the Arabs), and displaces the decadence that might still be numerically and technologically superior, but can't muster the will to resist. "Paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee, great empires die not by murder, but by suicide." So asabiya can be generated through struggles and trials that bind people to each other, and it can be lost through the lack of the same unifying pressures. The differing fates of north and south Italy are discussed towards the end of the book, why north Italy, while fairly rich, still has a social capital deficit compared to countries like France or Germany, while low-trust south Italy is an "asabiya black hole", as demonstrated by the presence of groups like the Mafia. This is reflected in the very interesting fact that Italy doesn't have large public companies like other first-world nations: "The largest Italian company, Fiat, is still family owned. The typical successful Italian company is a family-owned business with perhaps a hundred employees in Milan or Bologna. They occupy a variety of niches from fashion to high-precision machinery, and they are extremely successful at what they do. But they cannot break into certain international markets because they lack the advantage of size. And they cannot grow to a large size, because the Italians, even northern ones, can cooperate only in medium-sized groups. Is this why northern Italians historically could not get beyond medium-sized states?" Religion has an interesting place in Turchin's book; while religious disputes are not necessarily meaningful in and of themselves, they're another way that groups of people use to mark "us" from "them". After reading Diarmaid MacCullough's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, with its endless tales of violent disputes over completely arbitrary doctrinal issues like the filioque clause or if icons are kosher or whether to make the sign of the cross with two fingers or three, this seems very true to me. Turchin's ideas also interact pleasingly with a number of other Big History books I've read semi-recently. In no particular order/rhyme/reason: - He's a little dismissive of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel, saying that while the geographical determinism line of argument can explain trans-hemispherical imperial triumphs, it doesn't do a good job in the vastly more common cases where neighboring tribes with similar resources attack each other, like the Rus vs the Tatars or the French vs the English. This is true - Diamond might be able to explain the ultimate outcome, but how would that explain, for example, the asabiya-induced paralysis and chaos of the Incans after Atahualpa was captured? - He doesn't engage much with Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, which is a shame, because I still think that Tainter's (admittedly somewhat simplistic) ideas about the decreasing marginal returns on civilizational complexity are un-ignorable. Tainter is more resource-deterministic than Turchin, who allows more for human initiative in the way that societies can "choose" to lose internal cohesion by becoming more inward-focused, but I would bet that there's still something to Tainter's idea that there's a certain optimal size for societies given the resources available to them. - I think Acemoglu and Robinson should have cited this book in their Why Nations Fail, because there's a lot of overlap between A&R's ideas about extractive vs inclusive institutions and what Turchin has to say about how institutions can shift between the two poles due to external pressures or the lack of them. Republican Rome was much more inclusive for the average pleb during the parts of its history where it was under threat, lost inclusion for a long period during things like the Gracchi brothers' reform attempts, and then became more inclusive again after enough elites killed each other during the Julius Caesar drama to stabilize the empire. A&R don't have a good account for how dynamic movement along the inclusive/extractive scale can be, and Turchin's asabiya measure seems to include that. - Brian Fagan's The Long Summer talked about how the migrations of primitive humans (and therefore possible tribal conflicts) were driven in part by climate shifts that alternately opened up new lands and closed off old ones. Turchin showed that climate shifts didn't have much to do with the medieval French-English wars specifically, but it would be neat to see more quantification, and if there's a climate shift threshold over which a tribe could ascend to a higher (or maybe lower) level of asabiya in its need to find new lands and resources. Given that, per Tainter, the Mayans might have succumbed to environmental changes, it's reasonable to think that climate might be an input into asabiya. Climate change in our own day might have significant effects on political stability as well. - Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature talked a lot about changes in violence. I wonder if you could correlate intra-society violence to asabiya shifts. For example, the US right after WW2 was infamously homogenous and group-centered, with low levels of crime. This changed after the Sixties, and I don't think anyone would argue that there hasn't been a relative drop in the nebulous feeling that we're one big society of Americans. Is crime a good proxy for asabiya (e.g. the Northeast is rich and low-crime relative to the South, does that mean anything?), and does the recent relative drop in violent crime rates mean the US is getting stronger asabiya-wise? - Relatedly, I've read a lot of good books on inequality recently, like Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence. The parallels between pre-Revolutionary France or ancient Rome to the modern US in terms of the power of the wealthy are numerous and disturbing, although of course only valid up to a point. Still, how would a conservative (or a liberal, for that matter) apply the implications of this book to our current economic condition? Is rising inequality destroying Americans' ability to cooperate with each other? Overall this is a really interesting book, a definite Big History champion, and is also full of great factoids. I'll close with a fascinating quote from where he talks about how medieval societies like England tried to control elite overpopulation: "Lorcin found that in commoner families males outnumbered females by 13 percent. This pattern is just what we expect in a pre-industrial society where a substantial proportion of women died in childbirth. In noble families, however, the pattern was reversed—there were only 85 males per 100 females. In other words, there were 28 percent fewer noble males than we would expect if their mortality patterns were the same as commoners... The wills studied by Lorcin allowed her to calculate that during the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, the proportions of noble girls becoming nuns were 40 and 30 percent, respectively. Only in the second half of the fifteenth century did this proportion decline to 14 percent." Okay, one more: "Destruction of the great fortunes continued under the Tudors, who had it in for their over-rich and over-mighty subjects. The first two Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII, employed judicial murder with great effect, systematically exterminating all potential claimants to the English throne, who also happened to be among the richest landowners. Elizabeth I crafted a gentler method—a kind of “progressive taxation” scheme. When one of her subjects became too wealthy, she invited herself to his castle along with her whole court. After some weeks of dining and wining the queen and hundreds of her followers, the unfortunate host was financially ruined for many years to come, and was too busy paying off his debts to contemplate rebellion."(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 02, 2012
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| 1853675083
| 9781853675089
| 4.03
| 36
| 2005
| Feb 19, 2006
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This is an edited version of a diary kept by a Wehrmacht enlisted man during the various stages and theaters of his service from mid-1942 until the en...more
This is an edited version of a diary kept by a Wehrmacht enlisted man during the various stages and theaters of his service from mid-1942 until the end of the war, with brief interruptions when he gets wounded or doesn't have time to write. As he explains, keeping a diary was forbidden, and though a lot of the situations he gets into seem too insane to be real, given the conditions of the war I can give him a pass on authenticity questions. The Eastern Front was by far the most vicious and awful front of the war, and so his descriptions of Stalingrad and Bagration are amazing in how unlikely his survival seems to be. I'm not sure of the survival rates for machine gunners, which was Koschorrek's specialty, so when I was reading I just sat back and marveled as he dodged endless waves of T-34s and mortars, or in the most ridiculous scene, manages to keep one step ahead of the Russians by stealing a pony. He didn't seem to be stuck in Stalingrad for too long, fortunately for him, but the retreats he chronicles are still epics of chaos and death. Having never served in the military, I read war memoirs for the action and the sense of "what war is like", which he does pretty well. He does a good job of conveying how non-ideological a good portion of the military was; when political officers show up late in the book to spout Nazi propaganda everyone rolls their eyes at them, and while there are some instances of atrocities he sees, they're things like shooting partisans, not death camp-type stuff. A lot of the book is about small things: food, new shoes, cigarettes, letters to home, and complaining about officers. It's interesting to see this kind of different take on the war, and I enjoyed Koschorrek's stories.(less)
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Sep 13, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 156478181X
| 9781564781819
| 3.97
| 4,370
| 1939
| Aug 17, 1998
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Anthony Burgess, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Dylan Thomas all raved about this debut novel, at a 1939 vintage one of the earliest examples of...more
Anthony Burgess, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Dylan Thomas all raved about this debut novel, at a 1939 vintage one of the earliest examples of plot-playful metafiction ever published. I've been a fan of Flann's ever since I read his second novel The Third Policeman, and though I liked the sophomore novel a bit more, this one was also really funny and clever, declaring right on the very first page that "one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with" and that it was going to play around with normal novel conventions. One interesting difference was the change in atmosphere - The Third Policeman is a strange and eerie novel, with an uncanny air hanging over the absurd dialogue and surreal events. At Swim-Two-Birds is more straightforward for the most part, having a simple frame story about a lazy college student who does more drinking than studying, and who's writing novels that feature writers, along with characters out of Irish mythology. The metafictionality comes in when the levels of narrative start to mix - characters decide to rebel and put their author on trial - and the book ends abruptly in a way that calls attention to the conceits of literary forms. I'm not Irish, but the parts that parodied traditional forms of native literature are pretty funny even if you're not completely familiar with the source material. Most of the parts involving the Pooka (a sort of devil, etymologically related to the English puck, as in Shakespeare's The Tempest) are most notable for the language O'Brien uses, which is very reminiscent of a more lighthearted Joyce. There's lots of wordplay and creative ways to over-describe things, and it strikes me that the book would almost be even more enjoyable in audiobook form, as you would get to hear beautiful passages like this: "They beguiled him with the mention of salads and crome custards and the grainy disorder of pulpy boiled rhubarb, matchless as a physic for the bowels, olives and acorns and rabbit-pie, and venison roasted on a smoky spit, and mulatto thick-tipped delphy cups of black-strong tea. They foreshadowed the felicity of billowy beds of swansdown carefully laid crosswise on springy rushes and sequestered with a canopy of bearskins and generous goatspelts, a couch for a king with fleshly delectations and fifteen hundred olive-mellow concubines in constant attendance against the hour of desire. Chariots they talked about and duncrusted pies exuberant with a sweat of crimson juice, and tall crocks full of eddying foam-washed stout, and wailing prisoners in chains on their knees for mercy, humbled enemies crouching in sackcloth with their upturned eye-whites suppliant." Or this description of food: "Quickly they repaired to a small room adjoining Miss Lamont’s bedroom where the good lady was lying in, and deftly stacked the papered wallsteads with the colourful wealth of their offerings and their fine gifts—their golden sheaves of ripened barley, firkins of curdy cheese, berries and acorns and crimson yams, melons and marrows and mellowed mast, variholed sponges of crisp-edged honey and oaten breads, earthenware jars of whey-thick sack and porcelain pots of lathery lager, sorrels and short-bread and coarse-grained cake, cucumbers cold and downy straw-laced cradles of elderberry wine poured out in sea-green egg-cups and urn-shaped tubs of molasses crushed and crucibled with the lush brown-heavy scum of pulped mellifluous mushrooms, an exhaustive harvesting of the teeming earth, by God." Or the whole "A pint of plain is your only man" poem ("pome"), and also funny stories like the one about a guy paralyzed "from the knee up", and a bunch of other great writing. Still, it was great in regular book form and I'd definitely read more from O'Brien. Or, don't take my word for it, check out Dylan Thomas' laudatory quote: "This is just the book to give to your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl!"(less) | Notes are private!
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Sep 06, 2012
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| 0743486595
| 9780743486590
| 3.97
| 372
| 2004
| Apr 27, 2004
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Ellison may be a notorious jerk in the sci-fi world (see the decades of controversies over the infamously unpublished anthology The Last Dangerous Vis...more
Ellison may be a notorious jerk in the sci-fi world (see the decades of controversies over the infamously unpublished anthology The Last Dangerous Visions, or even the somewhat self-aggrandizing introduction to this volume), but his screenplay for Isaac Asimov's classic ended up being really good. He turned a somewhat loose collection of short stories into a coherent story, keeping an impressive amount of the material and characterization from the original works and even managing to emphasize Asimov's points about prejudice and morality. The points of deviation are minor and excusable, for the most part: - The stories Reason, Catch That Rabbit, and almost everything after Little Lost Robot are omitted, which sucks from a completion standpoint but are understandable from a filmability perspective (even I wouldn't really be too interested in a movie version of stuff like Escape!) - There are some aliens, which is unusual given their scarcity in Asimov's works, but their alienness is irrelevant and you could mentally swap them for people with no difference to the story - There's a Citizen Kane-ish frame narrative about a reporter investigating a possible relationship between Susan Calvin and Stephen Byerley; Byerley has also been given a backstory as a John Connor-ish freedom fighter before he became President, as well as a deeper connection to Calvin - Calvin's character is much more at the forefront; her personality has been given more detail, most notably an interest in Amazonian archaeology Overall I thought it was a very good and spiritually faithful rendition, especially in Calvin's relationships to robots and her defense of them as being more moral than people. The screenplay does show its late-70s vintage somewhat in how there are scenes that have a Terminator or Blade Runner vibe, and it also exposes the age of the original stories. From the perspective of the year 2012, when we're nuts about self-driving cars and the like, it's tough to imagine mobs of people getting angry enough about automation to go on a robot pogrom. The idea that people would be resistant to a robot president is somewhat more understandable; Asimov wrote that idea as an allegory for anti-Semitism and it's obviously true that prejudice has been far from conquered. I also won't complain about the inclusion of stuff like teleportation or mind-reading robots, because this is science fiction.(less) | Notes are private!
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Sep 06, 2012
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| 0374522596
| 9780374522599
| 4.23
| 1,701
| 1989
| Sep 01, 1990
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As far as I'm concerned Encounters With the Archdruid will always be my favorite work of his, because of the fascinating interaction between the chara...more
As far as I'm concerned Encounters With the Archdruid will always be my favorite work of his, because of the fascinating interaction between the characters in that book. McPhee really let their personalities take center stage there, and while The Control of Nature features excellent writing as usual, the focus is more on geological features than people. Since people are on the whole more interesting than rocks, this book suffered a little in comparison, though thanks to McPhee's tremendous talents he's still able to bring his locations to life. The Control of Nature is divided into 3 sections, and the overriding theme can be summed up as "people dealing with the consequences of building things where they shouldn't". Humans have tried to force rigid order on restless nature with dams, basins, and barriers since the beginning of recorded history, of course, but the stakes have only gotten higher over time, and our collective efforts to impose our will on the elements is plenty fascinating here even if the characters within the book are not. The first, longest, and best section recounts the history of the Army Corps of Engineers' struggles to tame the mighty Mississippi, with particular concern for the mounting danger posed by the Atchafalaya River and its increasingly attractive drainage basin. Over the centuries, people have built quite a civilization in one of the most frequently flooded swamps in the world, and it is the Corps' thankless task to protect that civilization, building ever-higher levees, locks, and dams in what frequently looks like a self-defeating enterprise. It seems almost impossible to balance the often-incompatible needs of the various interest groups of farmers, fishermen, and city dwellers as the Mississippi tries to flood and shift the way it's been doing since time immemorial. The inherent drama and hubris in the idea of containing a river like that from going where it wants is masterfully explored, and these lessons of the limits of simply piling up earthworks are more relevant than ever in the post-Katrina era. The second section is about Iceland's and Hawaii's struggles with volcanoes. While both island groups are essentially at the complete mercy of the lava gods, Iceland's more defiant attitude towards its eruptions makes for the bigger share of the section. The main action of the story is the struggle to save the harbor of Heimaey, a fishing village, from a lava flow via the high-tech method of pointing a bunch of water hoses at the lava to cool it down, plus building channeling barriers. It works. Iceland is right over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which guarantees it plenty of exposure to eruptions, and residents are constantly faced with the paradoxes inherent in residing on land that suffers from constant threat of immolation. I was surprised by how effective their "pour water on the lava" tactics were in the small scale, but sometimes there's only so much about millions of cubic meters of lava you can do. Hawaii has a much more fatalistic attitude, the reasons for which are not fully explored. The third section focused on Los Angeles' debris flows, which I hadn't realized was among the major hazards they had (at least compared to things like earthquakes), but it seems that the gradual elimination of natural fires in the chaparral scrub of the hills has generated an unhealthy cycle of brush accumulation --> incredible fires --> heavy rains --> mudslides. I found the people in this section the least sympathetic for some reason - somehow I can understand poor shrimpers living in Louisiana swamps despite the hurricanes and floods, or fishermen building on volcanic islands regardless of the occasional eruption, but a bunch of rich people building expensive houses in vulnerable arroyos and canyons leaves me feeling like they should know better, especially when the city governments have to build a bunch of catchment dams that the same people complain about constantly. Either live in the city or live in the woods, but that kind of halfway "naturish" development is a big drain on civic resources and is begging for the kind of disasters on display here. Is it hubris, or just dumb?(less) | Notes are private!
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Sep 03, 2012
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| 0142000655
| 9780142000656
| 4.30
| 165,672
| 1952
| Feb 05, 2002
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Aug 31, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
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| 1451642326
| 9781451642322
| 4.01
| 298
| Aug 14, 2012
| Aug 14, 2012
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This is probably the best book I've ever read about a single bill. Grunwald does a magnificent job recounting the genesis, drafting, passage, and effe...more
This is probably the best book I've ever read about a single bill. Grunwald does a magnificent job recounting the genesis, drafting, passage, and effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus, an act so vast that not even its supporters fully appreciate the range and depth of its impact. The economics that prompted the bill's passage remain controversial in the political world, as do its contents, but Grunwald's evenhanded and fairly comprehensive reporting work should be essential for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion on the stimulus, and even to some extent "government spending" in general. The ARRA, one of President Obama's signature laws, was first proposed before he was even elected as both an extension of previous stimulus efforts and as the fulfillment of many of his campaign promises in the sectors of energy, health, education, and the economy. The economic reasoning behind the stimulus is important to understand, because members of the Republican Party, as recounted here, have had a "complicated" relationship with fiscal stimulus. According to mainstream economic theory, in a recession that features reduced business and consumer spending, it's a bad idea to either raise taxes or cut government spending, because that removes additional money from businesses and consumers, which only exacerbates the recession. By the same principle, it's a good idea to cut taxes and/or raise government spending to try to fill up the missing output gap, until businesses and consumers spend normally again, whereupon government spending and taxation can return to a more sustainable path. You would be able to judge the success or failure of this strategy either by seeing soaring interest rates on government debt, if the policy was too aggressive, or prolonged recession, if policy was too timid. These were Keynes' insights on fiscal policy during the Great Depression, and they've remained basically conceptually intact ever since; the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were in part promoted as perfectly Keynesian stimulus in response to the recession at the start of his term, and although there were questions about the proper distribution of the tax cuts, both Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that cutting taxes and raising spending, or at least not cutting spending, were the appropriate responses. The recession that began in late 2007 and really began to get bad towards the end of the 2008 Presidential campaign was even larger, and in the minds of both parties deserved a commensurately larger response, along with more active monetary policy. And to that end, the ARRA was designed, primarily by Democrats but also with Republican input, as a mix of tax cuts and increased spending which should have been acceptable in theory to Congressmen regardless of party affiliation. On the tax side, there were billions in credits for children, earned income, student loans, homebuying (important in a recession precipitated by the bursting of the housing bubble), energy use, energy use, and more. There was also the typical annual forgoing of scheduled adjustments made to the Alternative Minimum Tax as well as completely new cuts in the payroll tax, with the reasoning that increasing people's take-home pay was one of the most effective methods of stimulus. In an unfortunate preview of the bad press the stimulus would receive, that large payroll tax cut was specifically designed using insights from behavioral economics, which suggested that if people didn't realize they were getting a tax cut they would be less likely to hoard, as opposed to the Bush strategy of simply sending a check. This was satirized as "sending flowers to a romantic interest without signing the note", and indeed it would turn out that many people were under the impression that the stimulus included no tax cuts at all. On the spending side, one big area was aid to state governments, who were hit by massive decreases in tax review and, lacking the ability to deficit-spend, were forced to make large cuts in essential services. Beyond that, there were big expansions of Social Security payment and unemployment insurance, which were important in a crisis involving hundreds of thousands of net job losses per month as well as extremely effective ways to keep money circulating in the economy. Finally, there were a dizzying array of spending initiatives that were either campaign promises or requests from Senators and Governors: over $150 billion for health care, preserving Medicaid and encouraging much-needed improvements in medical IT. Over $100 billion for education, in aid to local governments to keep schools from shuttering, increases in Pell Grants, and in Race to the Top education reform. Over $100 billion in infrastructure, from highway/bridge repair to new high-speed rail initiatives to environmental cleanup to constructing new buildings to improving America's patchy, embarrassing access to broadband. Over $25 billion to energy, providing funds for weatherization, efficiency improvements, and smart grids, as well as seed money to start several entirely new renewable energy businesses with immense future potential (these sections, with Energy Secretary Steven Chu leading the way, are some of the best in the book). Almost $10 billion for science, with grants for NASA, NIST, NOAA, the NSF, the DOE, and more. The book covers such a dizzying array of potentially transformational projects in the stimulus, including plentiful profiles of stimulus-aid businesses, that it could almost be subtitled The Quiet Revolution. In constant dollars it was 50% larger than the whole New Deal, and it was condensed in one single bill instead of being spread throughout years. And yet, this bill passed with 0 House Republicans and only 3 Senate Republicans, ceaselessly denounced in conservative circles as a big-spending, waste-filled assault on freedom and a handout to Democratic interest groups. It's worthwhile to consider their objections. First of all, the purest, most classic examples of fiscal stimulus are "timely, targeted, and temporary" - narrow measures designed to address specific aspects of a recession very quickly and then fade away. The stimulus, however, also included plenty of measures that were "speedy, substantial, and sustained" - things like Race to the Top that, whatever their merits, were not really stimulus measures in the classical sense. Where were the Works Progress Administrations projects, the new Hoover Dams and Skyline Drives, the armies of newly employed workers? Secondly, the stimulus was so large that it seemed inevitable that there would be large amounts of waste and fraud; a nation which had just seen Bridge to Nowhere scandals should expect similar follies on a vastly grander scale. Third, the impact on the deficit could be so large as to seriously impair the credibility of the US dollar as a safe store of value, and these objections were being raised not only by Republicans but also by many Democrats, even some in the White House. Fourth, for all Obama and the Democratic Party's proclamations of bipartisanship, this was a bill that would fulfill liberal priorities and reward Democratic-leaning interest groups, what was the upside for a Republican who voted for a bill that would protect groups like public employee unions? I won't mince words: as Grunwald shows, these objections are basically horseshit, either cynical, hypocritical, or both. First, the stimulus came of age in an era where it's simply not possible to put massive armies of unemployed people to work making new Jones Beaches or Interstate Highway Systems. Labor-saving technologies mean more work can be done with fewer people, and the increased complexities of building mean that even "shovel-ready" projects can take time to get off the ground, and it definitely doesn't help when states like Florida or New Jersey cancel some of the biggest infrastructure projects like new rail tunnels or high-speed rail lines for purely political reasons. Second, the oversight provisions in the stimulus, including websites like recovery.gov that provided unprecedented transparency into specific projects and initiatives, meant that a vanishingly small amount of waste or fraud was uncovered, even using the most uncharitable definitions of waste or fraud conceivable. Third, not only has the stimulus' impact on the deficit been dwarfed by such items as the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of the recession itself, but since the stimulus has passed interest rates on US public debt have fallen to the point where they are actually negative in real terms - investors are literally paying the Treasury money to hold public debt, even as Republicans demand higher deficits through yet more high-end tax cuts. Fourth, it's worth mentioning that the Republican Party had suffered an immense rout in the 2008 elections and remains unpopular even today. But even despite that, Republicans had incredible amounts of input into the bill, Senators like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter in particular had almost carte blanche to arbitrarily insert or remove line-items in exchange for their vote. Their statements and actions - e.g. Rep. Paul Ryan's public denouncements of the stimulus yet quiet letters requesting more funds for his district - give the lie to the idea that they had any kind of principled objections to it. However unfairly, the stimulus seems unlikely to go down in memory as being as transformative as the original New Deal. Part of that is rose-colored glasses, as the New Deal was neither so highly-thought of by contemporaries or as unified a set of policies as it currently seems to us. Part is due to PR missteps by the White House, such as the infamous 8% unemployment projection, part is due to relentless partisan attacks and the new conservative system of epistemic closure, part is also due to particularly bad media failures, and part is due to the nature of the Recovery Act itself. So much of its infrastructure funding was spent on projects that didn't have the iconic stature of, say, LaGuardia Airport, but were badly needed nonetheless; Grunwald gives the distinction as "The New Deal had the world's largest dam. The stimulus had one of the world's largest dam removal projects", and there's another perfect example of the changed mentality later on: "Millions of fans watched Stanford defeat Virginia Tech in the 2011 Orange Bowl, but none of them knew that an aging transformer almost overloaded while feeding power to the stadium.... The problem was detected by Florida Power & Light's new smart grid equipment, which quickly diverted the electricity to healthier transformers, avoiding a midgame blackout." It's hard for people to think in terms of counterfactuals; "think of how much worse it could have been" never got anyone elected. Yet without the stimulus the US would be a poorer and less advanced country, and many businesses that are only just beginning to realize their potential would have been strangled in their cribs by a recession that didn't obey the laws of partisan combat. No one will argue that the stimulus was perfect: it wasn't large enough, it wasn't the political slam-dunk it should have been, some companies it funded like Solyndra and A123 have failed, unemployment remains high years after its passage, and there are plenty of arguments to be had about projects that it should have covered. But it was unquestionably bold and creative, and it will continue to help the economy immensely, years into the future, especially now that Obama has been reelected and the prospect of another period of Republican doldrums has been (mostly) averted. As Grunwald closes with: "We know if it worked. We just don't know if it matters."(less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 29, 2012
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| 3.30
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Not his best work. I liked the shift from astrophysics and technophilia to biology, but even though the main evolutionary puzzle/MacGuffin in the book...more
Not his best work. I liked the shift from astrophysics and technophilia to biology, but even though the main evolutionary puzzle/MacGuffin in the book was fairly interesting, a good cross between quantum computing and evolution, I thought Prabir was one of the weakest protagonists Egan has ever written, and the emotional logic behind his decisions was as incoherent as it was annoying. Prabir was especially irritating in the beginning of the book, when he was an unconvincing wunderkind; it was the least believable child character I've read since I suffered through a Don DeLillo novel. It really seemed like Egan got it into his head that he would write an Indian main character just because he could, because though his heritage plays a very minor role in the story, it's fairly incidental and ultimately doesn't add much. Also, maybe I only noticed this because I had read Luminous so recently, but Prabir's attitude towards his homosexuality ("aggressive ambivalence", if that makes sense) is almost exactly the same as the attitude of the protagonist in the short story Cocoon. My final complaint: the post-modern parody sections might have seemed funny when they were being written, but they provoke barely a chuckle at this point. I think this book could have been stronger if Egan had tossed a few more ideas in (the genetic changes described could have been much more dramatic and cooler; speaking of Luminous again, the setting of the Chaff short story would have been a much better choice) and if he had made the main character less of a tool. Time for a break from Egan, sadly.(less)
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Aug 24, 2012
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| Mar 18, 2010
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At 28, I think I'm probably past the age where I'll have a sudden road-to-Damascus moment and convert to conservativism. Not even because I consume la...more
At 28, I think I'm probably past the age where I'll have a sudden road-to-Damascus moment and convert to conservativism. Not even because I consume large amounts of liberal/progressive/left-wing media (though I do), or have mostly left-wing friends (true), or because I find modern conservatives to be mostly repellent (also true), but because I'm no longer really worried about whether I can "prove" deep philosophical foundations for every last nuance of what I believe. I'm comfortable with a certain amount of epistemic uncertainty and the knowledge that not every position can be derived from first principles, and I've reached the point where when people start debating the moral foundations of the welfare state my eyes start to glaze over. I love reading policy papers, and I'm a big fan of chats and graphs arguing about how beneficial or detrimental social democratic initiatives have been for humanity, but when I see anything involving "negative liberty" or the like I get the same sort of itch that I get when I see anything about "monophysitism" or some other theological concept. At a certain point ideology is just words, and even if I agree with a catechism, or maybe especially if I agree, it doesn't mean I want to read several hundred pages about it. So this work, despite being quite good as far as it goes, maybe hit me in the wrong part of my life. Judt has quite a reputation as a historian - his epic Postwar is on my to-read list - and this book is his studied meditation/jeremiad/cri de coeur on how history seems to be leaving behind the noble ideals and accomplishments of what Roger Waters summed up so aptly as "The Post War Dream" on the Pink Floyd album The Final Cut, which this reminded me strongly of. Judt speaks eloquently about the seemingly stagnant, anomie-ridden, atomized world we live in (for first-world values of "we"), how the breakdown of the post-WW2 consensus has given us insecurity, inequality, and unfulfillment even as our living standards have risen on paper, and how the vanished vigor of the one-time vanguard of the proletariat has left us at the mercy of conservatives, reactionaries, and malicious elites. Gone is the transformative drive behind the various left-wing parties around the world who gave us the economic and social foundations we are seeing slowly crumbling around us, and in its place is a shallow spirit of self-interest, good only for the narrow pursuit of wealth, and really not even much good at that. "The worst are full of passionate intensity..." - you know the rest. It's all true. What struck me as boring about the book, paradoxically, was its vivid language. Judt is a man of words, not numbers. He uses numbers from time to time, but they are mostly garnishes of logos on dishes of ethos, to mix food and Aristotle. He wants to make a moral case for social democracy. However at this point I regard the matter as basically settled; either you believe in a robust public/collective/governmental foundation supporting a vibrant private/individual/entrepreneurial structure based on historical data or you don't, and at some point endless musings on legitimacy and grounding veer into theology. Put another way, I doubt this book will convert many libertarians to the side of Good, and to continue the religious metaphor, Judt includes many "fellow traveler" criticisms of failed left-wing movements in the past that are as accurate as they are reminiscent of medieval sophists triumphantly extirpating academic heresies with enthusiastic strokes of their quills. He closes by urging people to remember that it's the spirit of collective accomplishment that's been the best part of left-wing movements, and that while more individualist New Left strains like feminism/minority movements/gay rights/etc may have diluted the main force of the liberal tide, they still produced invaluable results. Of course, in this review I'm doing the same thing I accuse him of doing - criticizing some pensées for not being a white paper is a little stupid, to put it bluntly. Is anything actually wrong in the book? No, not at all, in fact he has a great way of putting things. Here's an example from p. 38, a section talking about how capitalism depends on prior moral sensibilities: "[F]ar from inhering in the nature of capitalism itself, values such as [trust/cooperation/the capacity for collective action] derived from longstanding religious or communitarian practices. Sustained by traditional restraints and the continuing authority of secular and ecclesiastical elites, capitalism's 'invisible hand' benefited from the flattering illusion that it unerringly corrected for the moral shortcomings of its practitioners." This is the pith of Karl Polyani's insights on how contingent what we think of "capitalism" is, and the rest of the section is full of well-crafted musings on the dangers of confusing the profit motive with morality. Another good quote: "It is the Right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. From the war in Iraq through the unrequited desire to dismantle public education and health services, to the decades-long project of financial deregulation, the political Right has abandoned the association of political conservatism with social moderation which served it so well from Disraeli to Heath." This is very true; modern left-wing parties from the Democratic Party to the SPD are in some ways the true modern conservatives, in that they want to preserve the relics of the postwar consensus but seem to have lost the drive to come up with new initiatives. His solutions chapters at the end exhort people to keep in mind the value of togetherness and what it means to have the power to change the world. I still feel like debating the ethical ontology of "government" is not a good use of time and would prefer things that included more charts and graphs, but Judt is probably right that the debate needs to continue anyway.(less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 23, 2012
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This is not quite as good as Axiomatic, his other short story collection I've read. Some of the stories either didn't feature very interesting ideas o...more
This is not quite as good as Axiomatic, his other short story collection I've read. Some of the stories either didn't feature very interesting ideas or had unmemorable protagonists. Interestingly, several of these stories introduce ideas he would later reuse in his novels (e.g. Luminous' idea of battling universal physical/mathematical systems and The Planck Dive's physics technobabble, reintroduced in Schild's Ladder; Transition Dreams' Gleisner robots and The Planck Dive's polises would show up again in Diaspora), but for the most part it doesn't seem like he outright stole from himself. The stories were written over a span of 5 years, from late 1993 to early 1998. Basically every single one makes fun of religion and religious people; Greg Egan obviously HATED being dragged to church as a child. - Chaff - An undercover agent visits a genetically engineered jungle in South America in search of drug traffickers; what if the drug can also bring enlightenment? - Mitochondrial Eve - The battle of the sexes crossed with the search for the Historical Jesus, via quantum paleogenetics. - Luminous - The Adventures of Johnny Mnemonic, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and the War Between Universes. - Mister Volition - A savvy thief steals an ocular implant that offers some apparently intense insights into the way that free will works (or doesn't). - Cocoon - A company researching technology to block harmful chemicals from reaching babies still in the womb suffers terrorist attacks; a gay detective tries to figure out the ramifications. - Transition Dreams - A guy paying to have his consciousness scanned and uploaded to a new robot body finds out that the dreams that ensue are Serious Business. - Silver Fire - A horrifically painful virus called Silver Fire flays its victims alive; a professor investigates a possible cult connection. - Reasons to Be Cheerful - A guy has a life-threatening tumor as a child, which has the side effect of making him happy; when he undergoes treatment, he loses the ability to feel happiness, and has to endure years of joyless rebuilding of his life to experience the world as a normal person. This was the best and most moving story in the collection. - Our Lady of Chernobyl - A private detective makes fun of religion while tracking down the theft of an Orthodox icon. - The Planck Dive - Future people try to dive into a black hole to potentially cheat death. Or, in the language of the story: spacetime worldlines, quantum Feynman diagrams time dilation virtual photons, hypercylinders Schwarzchild radius Belinsky-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz geometry counter-rotation.(less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 10, 2012
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| 4.25
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The main question about World War 1 that Barbara Tuchmann's seminal The Guns of August was trying to answer was "How did this happen?" How did all the...more
The main question about World War 1 that Barbara Tuchmann's seminal The Guns of August was trying to answer was "How did this happen?" How did all these complacent European countries, many of whose leaders were related, with no clear reason to go to war, and with uncounted amounts of wealth in trade and prosperity at stake, end up sending millions of their youth to die in the mud over marginal amounts of land that they didn't even really want? Tuchmann identified a number of cognitive errors that clouded the minds of the people in charge: overconfidence in their own military prowess, fear of looking weak to domestic constituencies, excessive influence of war hawks in decision making, excessive bureaucratic infighting, the elevation of political considerations over military realities, disregard for negative feedback, and perhaps most crucially, a failure to understand how small moves could irrevocably commit nations to much larger future moves, with much greater consequences than originally anticipated. Being a well-read and perceptive intellectual, John F Kennedy was well aware of Tuchmann's insights, and, after being humbled by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, successful used them to avert nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, in one of those little ironies of history, he was completely unable to avoid following a similar path of small but irreversible escalations in Vietnam, until the full-on war he had been trying to avoid eventually trapped his successors and millions of people in the senseless slaughter of the Vietnam War. I think Halberstam's book is easily as perceptive, in broad terms, as Tuchmann's classic. Tuchmann is only cited once, briefly, but even though this book, written in 1972, had a much closer vantage point to its still-active subject than The Guns of August, and hence is closer to unusually detailed and eloquent journalism than a straight-up history, Halberstam observes and recounts all the same organizational pathologies that plagued the French General Staff and the Prussian High Command that were still present in the American political and military leadership. One thing above all that this book does, alluded to in its title, is shatter the illusion that the only thing you need to face big problems is to acquire smart people. There are endless sections chronicling the brilliance and acuity of people like Robert McNamara, who could revolutionize vast domains like the auto industry, but were unable to figure out how to get themselves out of the Vietnam trap or even to make anything close to progress in any direction. Even lesser characters, like the legions of assistant deputy sub-under-secretaries who seem to be pretty bright fellows, managed closely and carefully by a White House that rewarded and encouraged cleverness, spend vast quantities of their page time engaged in self-destructive internecine struggles about whether to report bad news and how much, while the country whose destiny they were trying to determine slowly slipped out of their grasp. Men who had gone to the best schools, who had racked up acclaimed careers in industry or finance or the military, who had smoothly ascended through the toughest jungles of the American elite, were unable to conjure a victory against one of the smallest, weakest, and poorest countries in the world. The struggles of these dramatis personae are told through extended profiles, which are the major highlights of the book due to their length and detail. Halberstam delves deeply into the life stories of all-but-forgotten figures like Averell Harriman, Dean Rusk, or Dean Acheson to show, over and over again, the truth of Yeats' lines about how "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity". It's impossible to overstate the role that McCarthyism specifically, and anti-Communism generally, played in leading the US to the war. People who accurately reported or expressed pessimism about the escalation into war in bother the White House and the military were repeatedly and systematically shunted aside, transferred to worse jobs, or rendered helpless by accusations of being "soft on Communism". For the men whose careers had spanned even "successful" wars like Korea, the traumas of witch hunting made it impossible to back down, like poker players who through pride or fear simply can't fold and cut their losses. And so as the stakes kept getting raised, hawkishness became the only permissible philosophy in the Cabinet throughout both Kennedy's "team of rivals" management style and Johnson's "my way or the highway" style, the war simply got more and more intense with its own peculiar self-reinforcing logic, and each man found himself a prisoner of events beyond his control. All the major players had big incentives to escalate and act tough; no one's career was helped by caution and disagreement. In fairness to Kennedy, book clearly lays out the Truman and Eisenhower-era roots of America's involvement in Vietnam, but as he makes clear, only during the Kennedy era did the Vietnam "conflict", "brush fire", or "quagmire" really start to become a war that we couldn't back out of, despite how smart all of these guys were. Of course, even to this day, it's somewhat of an open question of which President is most to "blame" for the Vietnam War, depending on which part you're talking about and how you define "blame". Truman, for his inaction when the French were trying to regain control of their colonial empire and he was too distracted with the Korean War? Eisenhower, for his belief that the fight against the Soviets and the Chinese was more important than the Vietnamese desire for self-determination, and who allowed McCarthyism to poison vital parts of the government? Kennedy, for his refusal to look weak on Communism after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, the creation of the team who would oversee Vietnam's transformation into chaos, and for his timidity in taking a real stand one way or the other during crucial years of escalation? Johnson, who, unbriefed, unprepared, and unsure after Kennedy's assassination, publicly vowed that he wouldn't "lose" Vietnam the way that China had been "lost", and thought that if he just had a bit more time and money and men, he could make the issue go away with overwhelming force, salvaging his Great Society? Nixon, who, though his involvement came very late, still managed to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations with his "secret plan"? With the hindsight of 40 years after the book was written, it's clear that the problem went beyond any particular President, both because our goals were unclear, and because in a sense, the tools of government that each man used did not really belong to him. At one point, Vietnam genuinely was a tiny, unimportant country whose wishes could be safely ignored, but even with one of the greatest assemblies of talent the country had ever seen, the problem that they were trying to "solve" by propping up dictators, calculating meaningless body count statistics, and suppressing all dissent, was simply beyond their understanding. Ho Chi Minh is frequently compared to George Washington; one wonders after reading this book if King George III had his own "best and brightest" ministers who advised analogous strategies like shelling Boston, propping up a puppet government in Georgia, rounding up colonists and settling them into "strategic plantations", or simply sending more and more redcoats. The profile of Lyndon Johnson in particular really brings home the weakness of the "imperial" style of government, as Arthur Schlesinger termed it, especially when not just Johnson but the country lost as the Great Society was upstaged by the war; Halberstam is nearly equal to Robert Caro in his ability to bring forth the drama in a man's soul and connect it to the larger currents of history. His account also prompts the modern reader to silently consider the many parallels to the way the Iraq War was promoted and managed, and its similar effects on the world. I don't know if all wars have their beginnings in the exact same kind of group stupidity recounted here, but if more governments read books like this, the world would certainly be a better place. I feel that this work, in some sense a Greek tragedy, is essential to understanding the Sixties, its war, and its place in our world.(less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 07, 2012
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| 3.85
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These days "Prohibition" is basically a synonym for "failure", but less than hundred years ago, preventing "the manufacture, sale, or transportation o...more
These days "Prohibition" is basically a synonym for "failure", but less than hundred years ago, preventing "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" in the US was thought to be a good enough idea to not only pass both houses of Congress, but also all but two of the 48 state legislatures by the fateful year of 1919. Last Call is the story of how the anti-alcohol crusade went from being a fringe rural movement to the unifier of a whole host of widely varying interest groups, from temperance activists to feminists and suffragettes, nativists, populists, evangelicals, socialists, and racists. I was really intrigued by the random endorsements that prohibition picked up (P. T. Barnum?), as it was an issue that cut across so many political lines that almost anyone could hitch their wagon to it. By far the most interesting to me of those political linkages was with female suffrage, as one of the main goals of Prohibition was to prevent men from drinking away their earnings and committing domestic violence; that something as seemingly obvious to a modern reader as granting women the right to vote was linked to the extirpation of alcohol is a reminder of far the political landscape has changed. Even though women ironically turned their backs on Prohibition after the passage of the 19th Amendment (and their discovery that they actually liked the freedom to drink), originally the movements were closely joined. Similarly with the classic liberal/conservative split - back then the progressive movement was gung-ho about Prohibition as a way to improve the lives of the uneducated, largely foreign lower classes, while established interests favored the status quo; whereas now it is liberals who favor laxer alcohol laws and conservatives who prefer restrictions on drinking. Okrent has a bunch of great biographical detail on the major architects and forebears of Prohibition, many of whom are almost forgotten these days: Carrie Nation, axe-wielding radical of the Women's Christian Temperance Union; Wayne Wheeler of the ultra-powerful Anti-Saloon League; Andrew Volstead, of the infamous Volstead Act; Morris Shepard, author of the 18th Amendment. It's almost impressive, in a way, that these people were able to impose official sobriety in a country where the average person drank 7 gallons of pure alcohol per year (a stunning amount that is three times higher than the average today). They used all the tactics of any good interest group, like acquiring influence with legislators through various means, getting religious groups to sign off on their cause, distributing propaganda to children, wrapping themselves in the flag, and disparaging the patriotism of those who disagreed. Additionally, they tried to embed Prohibition in American society with larger strategies of varying degrees of reprehensibility: first, introducing a permanent income tax to offset the enormous revenue losses Prohibition represented (excise taxes on liquor made up 20 to 40% of federal revenue); second, refusing to reapportion Congressional seats in accordance with the 1920 Census to limit the influence of undoubtedly pro-alcohol Representatives from the cities, and eventually capping the total number of Representatives with the unprecedented Reapportionment Act of 1929; third, changing the makeup of the cities by passing immigration restrictions designed to limit the immigration of unfriendly Catholic or Jewish or non-WASP foreigners. The political angle is important: big-city saloons were vital political bases back then, and even after Prohibition connections to alcohol continued to provide wealth and power (fun fact: Joseph P. Kennedy is smeared as a bootlegger despite no evidence, but many families like the Bronfmans of the Seagrams brand did indeed illicitly make buckets of money). Though Okrent doesn't really push the connection, the obvious modern parallel to Prohibition is the War on Drugs. Unfortunately there are problems with the analogy that make it seem like drug criminalization will last for much longer yet. First, drug use does not have the same long tradition in American society that drinking does. While a huge percentage of the US has taken one drug or another, drug use has never been legal and widely practiced in the same way that drinking was before Prohibition, so legalization is not seen as a natural "default state" the way that the pre-Prohibition status quo was. Second, while drugs like marijuana are huge cash crops, and the trade in other drugs like cocaine is billions per year, drugs aren't as central economically as alcohol was; few expect legalized and taxed drugs to make up more than a small revenue stream for any level of government. Third, there isn't really a large natural drug-using constituency in the US in the same way as Catholics or Jews with sacramental wine (Rastafarians are a tiny minority), so debate has to take place at a level of abstraction rather than at the visceral level of ethnicity, religion, and nativism. None of that changes the morality or sensibility of legalization, but it makes the debate slower. As Okrent's book shows, high-minded reform efforts don't always make final sense, and what makes sense often has nothing to do with good motives. While perhaps the one success of Prohibition was that it did indeed reduce the amount that people drank, the side-effects on society were nearly intolerable; yet Prohibition endured for over a decade, and was only ended due to the worst economic crisis in world history. We certainly haven't seen the last of these crusades.(less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 06, 2012
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| Oct 01, 1991
| May 04, 1993
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As a history of urban forms, The City Shaped is full of a lot of interesting insights into how and why various planners (both public and private) have...more
As a history of urban forms, The City Shaped is full of a lot of interesting insights into how and why various planners (both public and private) have chosen certain layouts for cities, and how human patterns of usage both are and aren't shaped by the forms those planners have tried to choose for them. As an example, the grid pattern has been both praised and criticized for seemingly contradictory things - it supposedly either constrains human behavior and forces them into lifeless, regimented order; or it's an efficient, predictable substrate that encourages growth, simplifies transportation, and democratizes the cityscape. Not that forms are completely neutral, but humans are a lot more adaptable then any other animal, which is why our civic forms don't play the same role that the honeycomb does to the hive. Kostof has a dizzying array of examples of how seemingly similar patterns can result in very different cityscapes, in the same culture and even in the same city. Take boulevards, which used to be primarily roads marking the boundary between city and country before they became synonymous with avenues: Berlin's aristocratic Unter den Linden contrasts with its socialist-era Stalinallee as well as Vienna's bourgeois Ringstrasse, to say nothing of Paris' monumental Champs-Elysée, Chicago's commercial paradise of the Magnificent Mile, or New York's Broadway. This two-way street (sorry) between people and urban building blocks informs the organization of the book. Kostof will take a topological concept, like that of the "organic plan" (as opposed to that soulless grid; ironically, deliberately "organic" patterns usually require much more advance planning than a grid, and as a result put more constraints on the lives of residents), describe its typical usage and variations throughout history, and enumerate examples of how different societies have used that idea, what it meant to them, and what the eventual effects were on the lives of the people who had to live in the end product. Small things, like Baron Hausmann's attempts to make the facades of Parisian buildings consistent, as they are to this day, can be looked at as either heavy-handed government conformity projects or as as insightful bit of forethought that has given the city such a famous, beloved aspect that it's literally illegal to change it now. Some of the best and most interesting parts were where Kostof examined utopian ideals of planning, which have a long history dating back to Plato's Republic and even before. He drew an interesting parallel between plans intended for surveillance, like Jeremy Bentham's famous Panopticon, and the radial plans of settlements where where power was designed to be at the center. What is it that makes designers of social systems think that they need to design cities as well? What makes them think it will be effective? The book seem to jump around and digress a bit, since it's organized by urban form, but it's no less interesting for it. You see repeatedly cities designed as market towns, military camps, defensive bastions, population overflow catchments, religious centers, administrative capitals, communes, ports, and all sorts of things trying to find their identity while being prodded from all directions, and the way that cities grow and change over time is really interesting to see, especially with all the neat illustrations. Unfortunately the book has a really bad and weak ending - Kostof hates skyscrapers and lauds attempts to reduce them, in passages as meaningless as they are full of high-flown rhetoric. He puts in a lot of confused ideological-aesthetic verbiage about how skyscrapers are symbols of the excesses of capitalism and how they destroy the character of cities. I personally think that skyscrapers not only look really cool, they are incredibly useful for allowing large numbers of people to get together and make livings without having to sprawl out in all directions. Kostof does not deign to actually run any numbers on how expensive and environmentally damaging his anti-skyscraper stance is, but if you stop reading before that section or just stick to looking at its pictures you will have read a very interesting and comprehensive survey on an underappreciated topic. You certainly won't look at the next plaza you see in the same way again.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Sep 12, 2012
| Oct 2012
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Aug 05, 2012
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| 031286731X
| 9780312867317
| 4.22
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| Sep 15, 1998
| Sep 11, 1999
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An excellent collection of short stories, of which even the ones which aren't very compelling are always well-written. Davidson has a great range, and...more
An excellent collection of short stories, of which even the ones which aren't very compelling are always well-written. Davidson has a great range, and can go from Wodehousian parodies to respectable sci-fi seemingly effortlessly. Each story is preceded by a brief note from a staggering range of influential authors (Silverberg, Gibson, LeGuin, Bradbury, Ellison...); he was admired by what seems like half the world. While a bunch of the encomia don't offer much insight, a fair number help provide context for the genre-hopping stories within. I don't think all were successful, but Davidson was a heck of a writer and even the merely okay ones will still typically have some good dialog or characterization.(less)
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Aug 05, 2012
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| Mar 22, 2007
| Mar 22, 2007
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For all its horrors, World War 2 is undeniably a really cool war to look at from a military perspective. However, anyone who plays the Could Germany H...more
For all its horrors, World War 2 is undeniably a really cool war to look at from a military perspective. However, anyone who plays the Could Germany Have Won game (or even a few rounds of Axis & Allies) is confronted sooner or later by the fact that a lot of Germany's military decisions seem a bit... eccentric, to put it mildly. Taking over Austria, yes; seizing the Sudetenland, sure; closing off the Polish Corridor, of course; but why go to war barely 6 years after taking power, way before your own rearmament timetable is done? Why fight Britain and France first off, when you don't even want their land? Why open up another front with Russia when Britain hasn't been beaten yet? In fact, why start a war at all with the countries around you, when every single one has an economy that's at least a match for your own? The traditional answer for questions like these is that Hitler simply wasn't a very good military commander, but while this is perfectly true, Tooze looks deeply into the economic background of Nazi Germany and finds that a lot of the wackier-seeming choices the Nazi leadership made do make a bit more sense given the economic options available to them, and even some of the more appalling facets of the Holocaust were driven as much by industrial considerations as by ideology. Tooze's decision to look at the war from an economic viewpoint is very refreshing, and allows him to bust a truly impressive number of myths, most notably for me the idea that Germany had any chance at all to win the war. Though it's hard to appreciate now, Germany in the 1930s was not a very rich or developed country at all. The deprivation of World War 1, followed by Weimar hyperinflation, followed by Great Depression deflation, all overlaid on the fact that Germany had been a single unified country for barely a half-century, meant that though individual German firms were very competitive and productive, as a whole Germany was quite backwards in many ways (one graph on page 146 shows Germany in 1933 as having only 70% the income per capita as it had before 1914). The single goal of the Nazi Party was to transform Germany from the hemmed-in, middle-weight power it was into a true competitor to Britain, with its world empire, and America, with its continental resources. This primarily meant acquiring land, and Tooze assembles masses of agricultural statistics to show that the goal of Lebensraum, which strikes the modern reader as a bit weird (21st century Germany is much denser than even the most claustrophobic nightmares of Nazi planners), made a lot more sense in what was almost literally a peasant society in many regions. Expanding to the east would also have the benefit of allowing Germany to gather enough resources to be closer to self-sufficiency, a major concern for a country almost totally lacking in vital strategic materials like oil or steel. Removing the need to import important resources would have reduced the need to acquire foreign currency through export, as well as lessening the tension between production for domestic use and production for rearmament. The beginning sections outlined Germany's struggles to emerge from the Great Depression with both a strong military and a robust consumer economy. They got fairly technical (it helps to know basic macroeconomic concepts like current account deficits, currency revaluation, or the relationships between deficit spending, taxation, and inflation), but they were necessary to understand why Germany chose to start the war in 1939, even though their own plans showed that they weren't ready. Putting yourself in the shoes of a Nazi economic planner, once you've taken the goal of Germany conquering all of Europe as a given, now you just have to figure out some way to implement it, and it would seem that waiting until you have a strong advantage would be the most prudent course. Unfortunately for Germany, despite their massive military spending at the expense of the civilian economy (much touted public works like the autobahn or the Volkswagen made surprisingly negligible contributions to Germany's recovery from the Depression), and even after years of treaty-defying rearmament, they were barely at parity with Britain or France. The reason for war beginning in 1939 was simply that waiting would have put Germany farther and farther behind those two powers, who were also beginning to accelerate their own military preparations. Germany's stunning victory over Britain and France was both good and bad for them. Good, in that Germany at a stroke disabled the entire military of one of its enemies and most of the military of another. Bad, in that in a real way they were no closer to victory. Over the course of the war, though Germany helped itself to French tanks and military hardware, in an absolute sense captured French industry did not contribute very much materially to Germany's war effort, and Germany found itself in the position of having to expend its own resources on administering conquered territories. Tooze didn't use this metaphor, but I found myself reminded of a sort of military Ponzi scheme, where Germany kept having to conquer new territories to make up for the losses incurred in acquiring its last conquests. To make matters worse, different military initiatives required completely different production, so Nazi war planners found themselves jumping from priority to priority as targets shifted. There's a fascinating graph on page 148 of armament production from September 1939 to November 1941 that shows the sudden production surges and reversals, as well as the overwhelming focus on aircraft and ammunition. I had never realized that tanks were such a small percentage of the overall military budget, but as Tooze points out, aircraft gave by far the biggest bang for the buck. Speaking of production shifts, I had always been under the impression that German war production had been dominated by political hacks, but Tooze makes a fairly convincing case that, aside from a few ill-advised late-stage "experiments" like the V2 rocket and the Type XXI U-boat, Germany's war economy ran about as well as could be expected, second only to the Soviet war economy, which he should definitely write another book about. More myths busted: that German women did not participate in the economy to the degree that their counterparts did for ideological reasons (false, German women were actually more involved), or that Germany did not have a total war economy until late in the war, also for ideological/propaganda reasons (false, Germany had been gradually letting its military cannibalize the civilian economy since day 1 of Nazi rule), or that people like Speer were miracle workers (false, production surges Speer took credit for were often statistical illusions or were due to other people). The main problem for German planners was that there was simply not enough of everything to go around; a precious resource like steel could be used for a gun, ammo for that gun, a railroad to transport that ammo, or a million other things, and there were just too many needs. By the end of the war Germany was being outproduced at least 4:1 in every single category, and even if every battle had been a crushing victory they still wouldn't have been able to last. The most depressing parts of the book were where he discussed slave labor and Germany's economic relationship to its conquests. Here's how the logic went: Germany took basically all of its able-bodied men off the farm, and required huge food imports to avoid the mass starvation of World War 1. Those imports came from territories like Poland and Ukraine, directly at the expense of the Polish and Ukrainians, which meant that the Polish and Ukrainians had a direct incentive to help kill Jews, who were merely extra mouths to feed out of the leftover food. "... By comparison with a German ration of 2,600 calories in early 1940, the 'ration' for the inhabitants of Poland's major cities was set at 609 calories. Jews were provided with 503 calories per day." Of course, German factories also required extra labor for the same reason, and so there was a continuous stream of captive workers coming into concentration camps to be worked on substandard rations until they dropped dead, to be replaced by others. Even with millions of free disposable workers, by the end of the war Germany's economy was on its last legs and could no longer be sustained. While Tooze raised my opinion of the quality of German wartime economic planning, he really brought home what a stupid idea it was to try to conquer all of Europe. While individual military goals made more sense (even still-questionable ones like Barbarossa), from a practical standpoint Germany might as well have been trying to conquer the solar system. After having read this book, I don't think Germany ever could have won, but they could have failed even more spectacularly than they did in real life.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 2012
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Aug 03, 2012
| Hardcover
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