Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 10
July 24, 2024
Alien Earths by Lisa Kaltenegger
Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The author is an astrophysicist originally from Austria who is now affiliated with Cornell University and the Carl Sagan Institute specializing in exoplanets. The book is written for the average reader, not scientists. Much of the beginning is taken up with a primer on how the galaxy and solar system and Earth formed, then does the same with the origins of life on Earth. Any long-time fan of the television show Nova has seen or heard it all before, but it is good background for the main topic of life on other planets. She peppers the book with digressions about her favorite rock songs or coffee or gushing over scenery at the conferences she attended. I could do without that. The meat of the book, a description of the various best candidate exoplanets along with their desirable characteristics, is saved for well into the second half, and is too sparse for my taste. Even so, I found that part worth the wait. Although there no great revelations, the style is very readable and the topic fascinating, so I enjoyed the book.
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July 17, 2024
Bugaboo – Step foot
From time to time I point out annoying trends in language. My bugaboo today is the phrase “step foot.” This term has only become common recently. See the graph from Google N-grams below. It’s only in the last 20 years or so that it’s been popular.
So what’s wrong with it? It’s redundant. The word step includes the meaning of foot. You don’t step with your head or shoulder or belly button. It’s like saying “bite teeth” into something or “think brain” of an idea. When I was growing up I often heard people use the term “set foot,” which is fine because you can set lots of things, so foot is needed. They might also use the word step by itself, e.g. “When I step into the room…” They mean the same and make grammatical sense. I suspect that some people with poor language skills got confused as to which to use and simply conflated the two to make “step foot.”
Of course, people know what you mean if you use “step foot” but you’ll sound more intelligent if you say set foot or just step. That’s my language lesson for today.
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July 15, 2024
November Road by Lou Berney
November Road by Lou Berney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book won a Silver Dagger award as the best thriller that year. I can’t agree. The plot is preposterous. Bad organized crime guys in New Orleans supposedly arranged for the assassination of JFK. Then they proceed to try to kill off every one of their minions involved in the deal. The person they send to clean up the mess in Dallas is a charmer named Frank Guidry. Then another thug is sent to take him out. The book becomes a long chase scene across the country. I hate crime books where the bad guys kill their own people. That just is so inaccurate it’s ridiculous. No one would ever work for them or join a gang. Yes, I have experience in law enforcement, so I know. It’s all about loyalty to the gang. No one is ever expendable unless they turn state’s evidence.
At this point in the plot I ran into another problem: from then on this book is too much like another Berney book I recently read, Dark Ride. I really liked that one, but I realize now it was mostly a copy of this one, at least the second half. The main character develops a kind heart for a damsel in distress with two kids in a perilous domestic situation and proceeds to disregard his own safety to make sure they are safe. Basically antihero becomes hero. In both books there’s plenty of bloodshed, which I don’t consider a good point, but its much more excessive in this one. If I’d read these in the other order I might have reversed the ratings, but I doubt it. I do like the author’s writing, but this plot is even less plausible than Dark Ride.
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Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This was a book club choice so I gave it a try. The first part is a lengthy detailed account of life in the Nazi death camps during WWII. I read as much as I could stomach, but it’s too horrible to read it all. If I was a Nuremberg prosecutor, I’d force myself to read it, but, fortunately, I have a choice, so I skipped to the second part. Frankl lays out his ridiculous theory he calls logotherapy. I won’t spell out the problems with it. You’ll either buy it when you read it or see the flaws for yourself.
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July 11, 2024
A Fatal Inheritance by Lawrence Ingrassia
A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery by Lawrence Ingrassia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The author is a member of a large family that has Li-Fraumeni Syndrome (LFS). That rare condition is the presence in the family genes of a specific genetic mutation on what is known as p53. The result is that many family members have cancers and die young. There are treatments for the various cancers that arise, but not for the presence of the defective gene itself. This book describes the discovery of the mutation and how it works, or doesn’t, to allow cancer. I say it this way because p53 is not a cancer-causing gene, but a cancer-fighting gene. The mutation prevents the gene from fighting any number of cancers that might arise in the body from other causes, such as environmental ones. There are many stories in the book of families with this syndrome and how the cancers brought about so much sadness and suffering, so it’s not for the faint of heart. The author is a former editor and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, so the book is well-researched and well-written. It is an easy read in one sense but a hard read emotionally. He is one of the family members who did not inherit the faulty gene, but he has experienced the loss of many of his family members and watched them suffer through the surgeries and chemo and radiation treatments. Apparently to this day, even many oncologists are unfamiliar with LFS. The book is worth reading for those with a curiosity about medical progress or cancer.
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June 27, 2024
CMC Arthroplasty
I haven’t posted much lately for good reason: I just had surgery on my left thumb. I’ve had arthritis in both thumbs for the last five or so years. It has significantly limited my activities. I had to stop playing guitar, couldn’t use most tools (e.g. pliers, scissors), couldn’t button a shirt, etc. In February I had surgery on my right thumb carpometacarpal (CMC) joint. That’s the one where the thumb bone abuts the wrist bones. That surgery went really well with minimal pain. I was able to get by with only acetaminophen post-surgery and by day nine I could drive again. It’s about 95% back to normal, but there is still some pain with pinching or gripping.
My left hand surgery was 10 days ago and I’m having more pain than the first time. This is the first time I’ve been able to type more than a few words, and most of it is with my right hand. I got my cast off on day 7. I’ll get the stitches out on day 14. I’m using a stiff splint (or spica). The Physicians Assistant (PA) for the right hand told me I was very lucky to do so well with the right hand, so this left-hand experience is more normal. But I’m sure it was worth it. I was able to play guitar again for the first time a few weeks after the first surgery. Of course, I didn’t play well, but I did start to relearn stuff pretty quickly. Now I’ll have to wait a few weeks before I can start up again.
There are several variations on the CMC surgery which is called an arthroplasty. They all start by removing the trapezium bone (a trapeziectomy) . That’s the triangular bone in the wrist at the base of the thumb. The pain originates there where the cartilage has worn away and it’s bone on bone. The standard practiced by most hand surgeons is called the LRTI and uses a piece of ligament taken from your forearm to fill in that gap and the lower thumb bone is attached to the adjacent finger bone in the hand with a rod to give it stability. The newer method is called a suspensionplasty or suspension arthroplasty. It uses fiber to attach those same bones and leaves the gap unfilled, although eventually that gap fills with scar tissue. The advantage is that it’s not necessary to cut your tendon. The fiber may be secured with metal anchors (mini-Tightrope) or only by fiber (FiberTak). The former requires an incision between the forefinger and middle finger bones to place one metal anchor, while the latter can be done with only one incision. If you want details, do some online searches. There are plenty of videos of all these procedures. I recommend the FiberTak that I had after comparing it with the stories from others who had other CMC surgeries. Here’s a picture of my hand taken yesterday.
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June 17, 2024
The Final Diagnosis by Arthur Hailey
The Final Diagnosis by Arthur Hailey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Hailey was a popular author for many years with hits like Hotel and Airport, both of which were made into major films. This is one of his earliest, having been published in 1959. Like his other works, it is based on an enterprise of some sort, a hospital in this case, and is thoroughly researched. Despite its age, it is still riveting, with one crisis after another cropping up. Some of it is literally life or death and not everyone lives. In addition to all the medical plots, there are romances going on, perhaps presaging television series more familiar to modern audiences.
In places it seems dated, even cringe-worthy, but that’s likely because it is dated. For example the sole black woman mentioned in it is referred to as a Negress and speaks like a “sho’ ’nuff” Amos and Andy character. The doctors all smoke throughout the hospital, mostly cigars and pipes, and the adult women are all called girls. The romances are all love at first sight with the women calling the man darling on the first date and the man proposing on the second. Still, Hailey was probably not a bigoted person. It was a pretty accurate portrayal of what it was actually like back then. I’m old enough to remember. At least he includes one female doctor, a surgeon, no less. Chalk that up to the passage of time and enjoy the drama and good writing.
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June 8, 2024
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Rutherford
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m not a fan of history or history books but I found this one interesting. The author describes a Mongol empire I knew almost nothing about, one of wealth, a democratic, intellectual, and commercial mecca during the reign of Genghis Khan (GK). He sets forth Khan’s childhood and rise to power and his subsequent reformation of the Mongol lands from a bunch of squabbling and brutal tribes to a true nation with a vast government, schools, paper money, and extensive trade with foreigners where religious tolerance was practiced. It is clear the author admires GK’s achievements and his personal intelligence and abilities.
Having said that, he tends to minimize or excuse away GK’s brutality toward non-Mongols whom he viewed as barely human like herd animals, and whose main value was in their wealth, which he looted without mercy or compunction. Oddly, brutal as they were at times, the Mongols despised or feared the sight of blood, which they thought contained the human soul, so they often used bloodless, and exceptionally cruel, ways of killing rivals even within their own Mongol nation, like tying them up, wrapping them in blankets and stomping or crushing them to death with horses or even dancing on them. There was more of that in the book than I cared to read about. I’m not naive enough to believe Europeans of the age were any better, but I did not come away with an admiration for Genghis Khan’s benevolence. His vengefulness and egotism reminded me of an ex-president in the news, the main differences being that Genghis Khan was intelligent and honest in trade.
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May 31, 2024
The Knife Slipped by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair
The Knife Slipped by A.A. Fair
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I checked out this book as part of exploring the Hard Case Crime series since I’d read another one of those. I thought this would be a hard-boiled noir detective story like Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain used to write. The other Hard Case book I read was in that mold. Instead, it turned out this one is a spoof of that genre. It’s written by Erle Stanley Gardner under a pseudonym.
When I realized it was a satire, I was a tad miffed at first, but I found it silly enough to be mildly entertaining. There is a murder mystery buried in there, but 90% of the appeal is the completely ridiculous comic character of private eye Donald Lam and his boss Bertha Cool.
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May 23, 2024
The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths
The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This combination murder mystery and horror story isn’t really very scary or even very gory, but it is quite clever. The main character Clare is a tall, beautiful, blonde teacher at a British high school. She keeps a diary. Her best friend Ella is a similar beautiful blonde English teacher at the school. Both have been hit on by their boss, a married man. Clare is a divorcee with a teenage daughter, Georgie, who is secretly into witchy type stuff with a bunch of her friends and who also keeps a diary. Soon Ella is killed, murdered with a knife. A detective sergeant named Harbinder Kaur leads the investigation. Then there’s another death. Throughout this we are fed excerpts from a short story called The Stranger (hence the title) by an author named Holland, who, coincidentally used to live in the house that is now one of the buildings of the high school. Clare teaches that short story in her class. Quotes from it begin to appear in odd places.
The setting is suitably spooky and the various characters are all just suspicious enough that any could be the killer. The violence isn’t yet over and all of it centers around Clare. There’s a student who had a crush on Ella, a weird woman leading a class with him and Georgie, Clare’s ex-husband, Georgie’s boyfriend, a Mr. Sweetman who is head of the school, a professor who has a thing for Clare. The author does a good job of making them all seem plausible as suspects, but they all seem to have alibis or lack of motive, or both.
As an American I had some fun and some frustration with all the Britishness of the story. The educational system seems so different with a 6th form college (?), GCSE’s (?). It seems quaint that the nation is so London-centric and people still travel by train. In the U.S. anywhere but the east coast, Washington, D.C. and New York are irrelevancies to most people, almost as esoteric as London and Paris. And we drive our cars everywhere. I thought I knew most British terms for things due to a lot of reading British mysteries and working the Guardian Cryptic Crossword every night, but I had to look up quite a few, including more than a few geographic locations. I enjoy that sort of thing, but where it got to be a pain is when cultural references were made such as product names or when television shows or radio stations were referenced. These were even important for establishing alibis, but I had no idea when they came on. Another British ambience thing I’m used to is the prevalence of Indian culture and frequent mention of getting curries over there. I’d never had curry until I studied in Japan and I grew to hate it. Here there are a growing number of Indians in the high-tech field and Indian restaurants are popping up, although it certainly isn’t treated as a fast food option the way it is there.
I liked Harbinder Kaur, a rather angry and dark bulldog of a character, largely for the contrast with the snooty school atmosphere. She had a partner who was irrelevant to everything. I have a quibble, though, in that the story switches from Clare’s first-person voice to Harbinder’s at several points (and to Georgie’s, too) for no purpose. I generally enjoy hearing the story told from two or three different perspectives, e.g. The Embezzler, but only when it it sheds a different light on things. Here, Harbinder mostly either repeats what Clare has already related, or just continues the story narrative in a way that could have been told equally by Clare or an anonymous narrator. The same is true for Georgie, although to a lesser extent. It almost felt like padding to get to 300 pages. I really enjoyed the original idea of teasing us with the short story throughout and then finishing it in the epilogue. It’s a great, creepy story. Much of it, like the main story, takes place on Halloween. Overall, the book kept me in perpetual suspense and eager to read the next chapter. The ending was somewhat predictable but hidden to very near the end and, importantly for a mystery, “fair.”
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