Walking on the Moon

Jenny Lawson’s memoir, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened has clear roots in her entertaining blog.  I don’t read it regularly, but I follow references to it and have enjoyed much of what I have read there.  I know Lawson can write manic, funny anecdotes with great style.  I was happy to find her range to be wider than that.

The book is episodic, and each episode has its pleasures: apt turns of phrase, zany escalations of absurdity, and honest moments of revelation. This is an interesting and engaging person who tells her own story well.  The reader comes away with a sense of having met a singular person.

If I have a criticism, it is that it still feels somewhat like episodes that were built into a larger narrative.  There are worse recipes for a memoir, but I’m interested to see what Lawson can build if she were to build a work from the ground up.  I’m interested, but  if she decides she would rather  continue putting out collections of this quality, I’ll stay pretty happy.

Recommended.

I really enjoyed James Loewen’s books about how we record and pass on history.  One of the points he made was how few books there are that chronicle the US war in the Philippines, so I decided that when one came up on my radar I’d be sure to have a look.  Enter Gregg Jones and Honor in the Dust, which discusses Roosevelt, that war, and US imperialism.

Jones does a nice job corralling his facts and following the chronology of the conflict.  He tracks the US’s grab for Cuba and the almost incidental grab for the Philippines in support of their revolutionaries.  It is a good place to start as it frames Roosevelt’s character and support for military intervention well against the times before getting into the dirty details of the Philippine War.

The details are pretty dirty, and not at all surprising to any 21st century observer.  US soldiers in a hostile and grueling environment are ordered to use extreme measures to put down insurrections lead by desperate guerrilla fighters.  Slaughter, torture, and betrayal abound, and when these actions come to light the high command denies everything.  Except that with more than 100 years of time and investigation there is much stronger consensus about the misdeeds committed and the origin of them. It makes for depressing reading, especially when it rings so much like foreshadowing.

Jones has his facts straight and writes clearly, but there is a lack of urgency to his narrative.  Events proceed inevitably but there is little tension.  Some of this may be due to a desire not to oversensationalize the events, which are quite appalling enough without embellishment.  Some of it may be that Theodore Roosevelt, the most larger-than-life of the players, disengages quite a bit from the war itself as he becomes president.  And perhaps some of the lack of tension is that we know that the public and military are going to largely forget about the lessons that the war teaches.  Whatever the reason, the narrative flags somewhat in the later part of the book.

This is important, gut-wrenching stuff to know about, but to an extent it feels like literary vegetables.  It is nutritious but does not go down easy.

Recommended.

In Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, Rachel Maddow lays out the proposition that through the late 20th century the executive has slowly pulled the power to take America to war away from the people. She does an excellent job both laying down the research that led to that position and explaining how it fits together and why Americans should care.

I was careful to say that the executive had taken the power from the people, not from Congress, though that’s true as well.  One of Maddow’s key observations is that the 20th and 21st centuries have steadily compartmentalized the sacrifice involved in going to war.  Sacrifice motivates people to assess the benefits of warfare; blunting that pain removes an incentive to consider it.  It is a keen observation that she explains clearly and supports strongly.  By itself it illuminates a fair amount of policy.

She’s also clear and precise about the other, more commonly heard arguments about how the executive has drawn this power to itself with few setbacks.  There were some important ones, however, that indicate that the trend need not be inevitable.  After Vietnam, Congress did assert some amount of power and pull back some of the rights from the executive.  But Congress is directly responsive to the people in the best and worst senses of that.  When supporters and donors lose interest, congresspeople fight other battles.

That is all only a curiosity if she does not argue that Americans should care.  While you will not find a chapter in Drift called “Why You Should Care,” Maddow does a good job of underlining the problems without beating you over the head with them. The philosophical and practical issues both get some time in the spotlight, from who should bear the risk and cost of war to what it means to commit the power of the US military on the say-so of a few of the powerful.  These are important issues given appropriate weight.

Overall this is a timely, clear argument about the current state of our warmaking engine and a history of how it got to be that way.  It is well worth understanding and probably changing.

Strongly recommended.

Michael Brooks starts with a good theme in 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, but his execution comes off the rails for me.  His idea is to pick 13 places that scientific consensus is weak or non-existent and highlight them as areas in which breakthroughs could come with new thinking.  This is a sound idea.  Things we don’t understand are spots where people are looking and new ideas are necessary, which is a recipe for shaking things up.

The problem is that the actual phenomena he highlights are hit or miss.  While there really is significant confusion if not downright incredulity around dark matter and dark energy, saying that there is less confusion about cold fusion and homeopathy is a big understatement. There is consensus that homeopathy is snake oil and that cold fusion is an over-hyped anomaly. The distinction is between what experts in the field make sense of and what the general public makes sense of.  There isn’t much chance of a scientific breakthrough coming from studying how Penn and Teller catch bullets in their teeth, even though most people don’t know how it works.

Brooks’s choices are not uniformly bad.  I did enjoy and learn from parts of 13 Things.  Overall, though, I found the mixing of real conundrums and simple misunderstanding to be very distracting.

Jonathan Haidt sets himself quite a task in The Righteous Mind – explaining divisions between well-meaning and intelligent people.  While he occasionally presents his work as practical information that will help one frame an argument, I think he sits firmly on the theoretical side.  I came away with some new ideas about how the mind works, but not with a detailed playbook for handling it.

Laying out a framework for understanding how minds reach moral conclusions and how those mechanisms formed is a formidable challenge.  I am always amazed that people studying these ideas can make any kind of progress.  Sorting the subjective from the objective always seems nigh impossible, especially when looking for brain function with respect to slippery topics like moral abstractions.  Haidt does an excellent job of providing intuitions to help laymen play along as well as providing evidence for his positions when he has it. He also creates the clear impression that he is letting the reader in on an ongoing scientific conversation. None of this is settled, and one occasionally wonders how his ideas will stand the meticulous scrutiny he subjects others too.  (That’s not to say Haidt is unfair, just thorough, and he knows confirmation bias better than I do.)

Haidt does spend a fair amount of time laying out what the consensus is in his field and how his ideas buck those trends.  On the one hand it all feels somewhat “inside baseball,” but the approach is also an important way to play fair with the reader.  It would have been easy to lay his case out as being more strongly accepted in the community, knowing that most readers who agreed with him would never read deeply.  His approach gives the impression of a lively area of inquiry in which his ideas are important, which seems fair.

The ideas themselves are intuitive once they are explained and supported.  Haidt has a nice gift for turning complex ideas into simple metaphors.  He has clearly spent time honing them to be keenly accessible.  The idea of the moral sense as a smart rider providing some input and making excuses for the elephant (s)he’s riding crisply captures his position.  The idea is that most judgments are arrived at by intuitions that can only be  modified slowly where those judgments  are generally rationalized after the fact.  That’s an elephant and a rider, all right.

There are plenty of other ideas to chew on in here, including some that one could disagree with.  The overall framework is a compelling way to frame the ideas and problems, and there is useful support for much of it. Well worth a look, but don’t expect to win any arguments from it.  Unless they’re about moral psychology.

Strongly recommended.

I have not read any Dickens for a fairly long time, and it seemed like a good time to read one.  Oliver Twist showed up in my trip through the Kindle Store, and it was hard to resist.

Dickens is Dickens, of course.  He tells a rollicking, twisty, yarn populated with larger-than-life characters using clear, crisp, expressive writing.  In the midst of all of that he fires up beautiful sentiment and clear ideas.  He’s easy to enjoy.

For better or worse, he is a product of his time.  Fagin, the criminal mastermind of Oliver Twist, is supposed to be reprehensible – Dickens says so in his introduction – but it grates on modern ears to hear The Jew constantly used as a synonym for Fagin.  I have no idea if Dickens was more or less anti-semitic than his contemporaries, but this is pretty jarring.  But there is a lot of this era that confuses me.  Why does everyone talk like Elmer Fudd?

Dickens’s sarcasm is unmistakable in any time.  He deploys it mercilessly throughout when describing the hardened criminals of London who heedlessly crush the bodies and  souls of anyone near them as well as when painting the self-serving church members who claim to be helping the poor.  This is high test, industrial grade irony and sarcasm, and its impressive that he is able to deploy so heavy and blunt a hammer with the skill and artistry he displays.  The compassion that underlies his rage here makes his anti-semitism more discordant.

I was also surprised at how passive a protagonist Oliver turns out to be.  “Refraining” and “fainting” are some of the more active verbs that Oliver is the subject of, but he does attract a formidable cast of villains and helpers, so the plot does move forward with Dickens’s highs and lows, false hopes and surprising reversals that keep readers engaged.  He does not waste any characters either.  Virtually every one introduced plays some role in the story, believably or not.  It’s not called Dickensian coincidence for nothing.

Overall a good yarn.

Strongly recommended.

I’m Starved For You is a Kindle Single published by Byliner Originals, who specialize in short pieces from great authors.  It is also from Margaret Atwood, and I’ll read almost anything she writes.

I found it enjoyable, but surprisingly it felt a little rushed.  Atwood often bases her worlds on simple ideas taken to their extremes, and I would have expected the simple ideas to be more compelling in a short story than in a novel. Somehow the simplicity of the underlying idea stuck out more here.  Questions about the logistics and motivations of the system that I often don’t consider came to me in the shorter form.

I think this is because Atwood’s novels often move at a slower pace, bringing the ideas and the characters out into focus slowly, drawing the reader toward exactly the way she wants you to see them.  In the shorter form, she wasn’t able to exert the same kind of control.  At least that was the impression I got from this piece.

While I don’t think this is the best example of Atwood’s writing, it certainly has its merits.  She brings ideas of how humans react to even self-imposed confinement with desperate passion into play in distinctive, powerful ways.  And those are not the only ideas she lofts onto the table in a few pages.

Overall, I prefer other things she’s written, but this is a fine way to spend some time.

Recommended.

Frank Herbert’s Dune was one of my favorite books growing up.  I recently took the opportunity to read it again, partially as an excuse to buy it on the Kindle.  It remains a great and unique space opera.

Dune is frequently praised as a skillful exercise in world-building – and it certainly is – but on rereading it I was struck by how few details outside those necessary for the advance of the story are there.  Despite spawning an enormous number of (impressively inferior) sequels, the novel does not read as first book in a series. Herbert has a beginning a middle and an end, all the thematic and plot arcs wrap up and if you never read a sequel you are left with a great story set in a believable world (or three).  It is a lean bit of storytelling.

I won’t recoup the plot, but Herbert makes the action large enough and the stakes high enough to hold a reader’s attention throughout, while brushing up against many interesting ideas about nature and nurture in becoming who we are, the limits of foresight and the size of events that can alter destiny, and other interesting stuff.  If that’s not of interest – and if not, why are you over in the science fiction section – there’s still a rollicking political and action thriller here.

Strongly Recommended.

Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month is a book that software designers often hear mentioned in respectful tones.  This is Fred Brooks, one of the architects of the old mammoth IBM operating systems of the 1970’s discussing his lessons learned from those projects and applying them to general software engineering.  It is rightly praised for spending the lion’s share of its content on coordinating people rather than coordinating computers.

Academically, it lives up to its reputation quite well.  The edition I have includes retrospective chapters written 10 and 20 years after the initial publication.  In one of these Brooks mentions asking an airplane row-mate who did not know him and was reading The Mythical Man-Month what the fellow thought of it.  The fellow replied that there was nothing in it he didn’t already know.  While Brooks is disappointed, I think it is high praise.  He has taken an arcane topic and made it accessible to the point where readers think they’ve had all these ideas themselves.  By and large they haven’t.

While it is well worth reading and understanding this book if you have any interest in managing large scale creative endeavors there is no question that it is a product of its time.  Discussions of productivity are given in terms of machine instructions and cautions about overflowing resident memory abound.  PL/I is put forth as the only viable operating system programming language.  For the student of computing it is a fascinating look at how these technologies – many of them obsolete – were viewed by their contemporaries.  While these examples may confuse modern readers, the fundamental ideas are put forth with such clarity that the ancient examples are more an interesting side light than a barrier to understanding.

It is also amazing to see how Brooks unapologetically refers to the Bible and religious teachings.  He advocates two-person superior/subordinate programming teams and while he makes an excellent technical argument for the arrangement, it is jarring to see the topic annotated in a summary with “Note God’s plan for marriage.”  The technical arguments do not rest on theology, but it is surprising to modern eyes to see the references.

Overall, this is a classic that deserves its reputation and adds the joys of a unique voice and  historical perspective.

Strongly recommended.  (A must for software people.)

I heard about Jay Wexler’s interesting The Odd Clauses through Lowering The Bar, an entertaining and accessible blog of legal humor.  Anyone who enjoys Lowering The Bar will enjoy The Odd Clauses.

Now that aficionados of legal blogs have stopped reading, I should say that Wexler picks 10 of the least exercised constitutional provisions and both explains their face meaning and application and uses them to illuminate the overall document. He picks the clauses from recent events, which both makes them more relatable and shows that even the oddest corners of the Constitution are relevant today.  Now, some of the examples have been thrown out in debate rather than brought before the Supreme Court, but it would be a sadder world in which a discussion of Ron Paul’s suggestion to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal was dismissed on such a technicality.

Wexler does a nice job at making his discussion both accessible and informed.  The reader can see the research habits of a lawyer influencing his preparation and structure, and the phrasing and timing of a presenter in his prose.  The result goes down easy as it covers all the bases.

Strongly Recommended.