Andrew Diamond's Blog, page 2

The Germans Have a Word for It

Davis has just lost his wife, Rachel. Bewildered and alone, he downloads an app that promises to restore a bit of her to ease his grief and loneliness. He uploads their chat history to train the app’s AI on her thoughts, her style of writing, and their dynamic. Soon, he begins receiving texts from his beloved. They resume their relationship in the virtual world where it left off in the physical world.

Anyone who’s been in a long-distance relationship knows how frequent, intimate communication stokes the desire to see and be with the beloved. As Davis’ desire grows, the AI company behind the app begins to roll out new features. Would you like to see Rachel? Upload some photos, and we’ll show you new ones of her in exotic places.

How to Grow an Addict

Randall Grange, the main character of J. A. Wright’s How to Grow an Addict, is a sensitive and perceptive girl born into the wrong family. Her father is a drunk, insensitive lout. Her mother is, for the most part, too weak to stand up for her, and her older brother, whom she initially idolizes, is a petty, nasty, mean spirited bully.

Randall is earnest, open-hearted and accepting. She tells her story almost as a reporter would, without sentiment or self-pity. The reader develops a deep sympathy for her, and Wright does an excellent job of conveying the addict’s sense of isolation, shame and loss.

Dr. Bloodmoney

Dr. Bloodmoney, published in 1965, takes place in the imagined future of 1980s California. The book opens in Berkeley in 1981, where Stuart McConchie works as a television salesman. McConchie watches a familiar-looking man whose face he can’t place walk into the psychiatric office of Dr. Standstill, across the street.

The patient, we soon learn, is Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld, a former physics professor at Berkeley and researcher at the Livermore lab whom most people blame for an ill-conceived 1972 nuclear test that exposed huge numbers of Americans to toxic radiation. One effect of the radiation is a spike in phocomelia, a condition in which children are born with stunted, fin-like arms and legs. (When Dick wrote the book in 1963, there was an explosion in phocomelic births due to the drug Thalidomide being prescribed as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women.)

Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation

This is a thoughtful and well done translation of the second edition of Pinel’s treatise, which is generally known in English as the Treatise on Insanity. The translators note that Daniel Davis’ 1806 translation of the book’s first edition was poorly done, and that the second, expanded edition was never translated into English until this edition was published in 2008.

The translators include an introduction describing how they translated certain terms from the French, and why they chose the words they did. This helps the reader understand nuance and avoid misunderstanding, and it shows how seriously the translators took their job.

Dead Calm by Charles Williams

John and Rae Ingram are on their honeymoon, sailing across the Pacific towards Tahiti in their private ketch, Saracen. Stuck for days in dead calm, twelve hundred miles from land, they spy another craft, Orpheus, listing on the horizon. John Ingram, an experienced sailor, can tell by the sluggish way Orpheus rights itself in the rolling swell that she has taken on water. He fires up Saracen’s auxiliary engine and heads toward the other boat to see if anyone needs help.

Before he gets there, he encounters a young man rowing furiously toward him with all his strengh. When Hughie Warriner reaches the Saracen, Ingram and his wife pull the young man aboard. He appears to be in shock, as if fleeing some terror.

The Score, by Richard Stark

A good book leaves you with lots of questions. This book left me with three: 1) Why was it written? 2) Who would want to read it? And 3) Why was it included in The Library of America’s Classic Crime Novels of the 1960’s?

My best guess regarding number three is that the editors wanted to preserve it as a cultural artifact, like something an archeologist found in a dig that gives us insight into the mindset of an ancient civilization. It says, Yes, this is what they read back then, and then leaves us to puzzle over what life must have been like for them and what it might have been like to live in such a world.

The Murderers, by Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown’s 1962 crime novel, The Murderers, takes place in Los Angeles around 1960. Willy Griff, a twenty-seven year old struggling actor, lives in the basement of a boarding house known as the Zoo. Griff and his friend Charlie, who lives upstairs, eke out a living with bit parts on TV and in film, plus an occasional television commercial.

The other inmates of the house, as Griff calls them, are mostly beatniks and misfits who have no interest in making a traditional living. They drink, play music, read bad poetry aloud, have sex and generally live the kind of carefree, bohemian life that the squares of the suburbs would never approve of.

Shorting the Grid

Meredith Angwin’s Shorting the Grid primarily covers what the author calls “the policy grid.” As opposed to “the power grid,” which is a physical entity delivering electricity from generation facilities through transmission and distribution infrastructure, the policy grid refers to the collection of organizations that regulate the production and distribution of electricity. These include the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), state utility regulators, and state and federal legislatures.

These regulations, layered one on top of the other, often work at cross purposes to defeat the goals they’re supposed to promote. Angwin gives a prime example early in the book.

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

This book describes the history of the US power grid and how technology, regulation, politics and demand shaped it into what it is today. In general, the book is well researched and informative. The author, a cultural anthropologist, gives a much broader view of a subject that others treat as merely a technological or industrial topic. The grid shapes and is shaped by many social, cultural, economic, political and technical forces, and Bakke does a good job of explaining how these forces interact.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a collection of six essays by American economist and social philosopher Thomas Sowell. Sowell is a traditional conservative in that he views moral character, cultural values, and individual habits as the primary determinants of one’s fate in society. He is sharply critical of the liberal notion that group identity and inter-group social dynamics primarily determine one’s fate.

Each of the six essays refutes, with varying success, the traditional liberal interpretations of history. Whether you agree with Sowell or not, he will make you think about events and issues that are generally not even addressed in current history and cultural studies courses. Though at times he seems to cherry pick facts to support his preferred interpretations, he nevertheless forces readers to confront historical facts that are difficult to reconcile with the current canonical liberal interpretation of history.