Walking on the Moon

Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before The Mast is a very well known memoir of an unusual experience.  Dana was a college student and well-to-do Bostonian who took several years off from study to serve as a common sailor on a merchant vessel trading on the coast of California.  This sounds like a recipe for gimmick book today, but that was not a common tactic at the time.

There are a lot of memoirs that get lost in time.  Dana has two major factors working for him.  First his book is one of the only pre-gold-rush descriptions of California that was accessible to the Gold Rushers.  Many of them retraced Dana’s path with gold on their mind and Two Years Before The Mast under their arm.  Second, he writes very well.

I have read many historically interesting books that were deadly dull.  Even the best authors from more than 150 years ago can be opaque.  Dana is a welcome surprise.  His language is clear, evocative, and descriptive.  While some of the turns of phrase are dated, his meaning is clear and his language flows pleasingly.

He is a good enough writer that a simple diary would be interesting.  The topic is inherently more interesting than that.  Part adventure story, part travelogue, part behind-the-scenes story, Dana always has an interesting incident to relate in his clear prose.  We are treated to two trips around Cape Horn – no Panama Canal in 1834 – trading and hide gathering work in California, a survey of the coastline and population, and quality time on the ship.  As a current Californian, it is fun to hear the descriptions of the people and land from years ago.

My version also includes a chapter relating a later trip to California years later where he sees the changes from the Gold Rush and reconnects with some of the people he met years before.

Overall a very interesting, well-written memoir of exciting times.

Recommended.

William Spaniel wrote this pamphlet , Game Theory 101: The Basics, showing elementary game theory concepts applied directly to simple games.  There’s not much actual theory in here, and certainly no deep proofs, but there are many illustrative examples that combine to give a familiarity with the ideas.  I’ve been curious enough about game theory to want to see that, and this was a useful introduction.

He writes clearly and well, and walks through every step of the calculations.  Still, this reads more like a good textbook than like an essay for the layman.  I found the combination of basic explanations and detailed examples very illuminating.  I walked away knowing a bunch more than I did when I started.

Recommended if you want to see the basic nuts and bolts of tame theory.

Von Clausewitz’s On War is a classic work on war, its ramifications, strategies, and tactics.  It was written in the 1830’s (and technically unfinished), so it is easy to imagine that it is from another age and largely irrelevant.  There are certainly parts that are of their time, but there’s a surprising amount of thinking that is fresh.

All the discussion of the lines between and interdependence of strategy and tactics is relevant, even when the specific examples are from battles of another time fought with old weapons.  Every bit as compelling are discussions of politics and strategy.  Clausewitz is unambiguous that those are never separable and to understand that is to have a hope of understanding a a war.  It makes our current adventures in Asia even less comprehensible to me, probably because I don’t want to think about what our political goals are.

While there are many interesting ideas here, the text – translated from 19th century German – is often opaque.  It doesn’t help that all the examples are drawn from the time as well.  While there are some Napoleonic battles that I have some inkling of, overall I don’t know many details.  The combination of the syntax and obscurity makes for difficult reading.

Worth it if you’re interested enough to penetrate the fog.

I picked up Shine after I had such a good time reading Engineering Infinity.  Shine is billed as “an anthology of near-future optimistic science fiction.”  I was looking for another collection, this was advertised in the back of Engineering Infinity, and I really had to see what they could pull off within those constraints.  Our guide through this happy near-future is Jetse de Vries.

Constraining tone and setting is an interesting approach, and a remarkable set of authors took up the challenge.  From my perspective, the most successful authors in here are the ones who most aggressively subverted one limitation or the other.  That is not surprising; looking at a constraint in a new way is something great SF writers do.  I enjoyed how the folks in Engineering Infinity interpreted the “hard SF” constraint, and I similarly enjoyed most of these.

Optimism is a particularly interesting constraint.  With the exception of Ben Bova’s almost jingoistic odes to space exploration, I can’t think of a lot of SF that is optimistic in tone.  The most Bova-esque story in Shine, Jason Stoddard’s “Overhead” is instructive in how the most successful authors in here attacked the problem.  Setting up multiple perspectives and letting the reader decide who to root for helps, though in “Overhead” there is little mystery where the author’s sympathies lie.  Others provide more complex options.

I should say that “Overhead” is a propulsive, interesting story and that I enjoyed it a lot, but it did not break the mold of a bunch of plucky explorers going into space against any of society’s objections.

Overall, I found Shine to be more hit-or-miss than I found Infinity, but if the lows were more mundane, the highs were higher.  I particularly liked Holly Phillip’s character study of an artist in “Summer Ice,” Marti Ness’s writing clinic in “Twittering the Starts” which expresses a short story as a series of reverse-chronological-order tweets, Alastair Reynolds’s delightful “At Budokan” which I won’t spoil, and Madeline Ashby’s heartbreaking “Ishin.”  Ashby clearly slipped past the “optimistic” requirement with a Hollywood ending, but I’m not fooled.  Finally, I feel like I should mention Gord Sellar’s “Sarging Rassmussen: A Report (by Organic),”  because it is so much the kind of story that resists description, but is so much fun to follow along with.

Because of the high variance, readers are likely to find some stories they dislike in Shine, perhaps some of the ones I like so much. The ones I liked I liked so much that the collection was worth it.  I don’t know that a collection can get a better review than than.

Recommended.

Engineering Infinity is a collection of recent hard SF short stories edited by Jonathan Strahan.  Strahan does a fine job keeping things hard – which is to say stories that turn on current scientific ideas – without making them heartless or humorless.  Overall this is an excellent selection of stories that encourage thought about old tropes in new ways, which is one of the reasons I enjoy SF.

I should say that I grabbed this collection out of a desire to recapture the fun of spending a rainy day or long car trip sampling cool short stories.  For my money SF is the best genre for this kind of thing, because any story has the chance to turn your assumptions on their head.  In a collection like this, if the one you are reading now does not make your ideas flip, the next one will be right along.

By that metric, this collection was a smashing success.  There was a wide range of ideas and writing styles on display, many of them to my taste.  Even the stories I didn’t like were clearly trying something interesting, even when I did not think they succeeded.  Some clung more closely to genre conventions, but it was rare that a story in here did not offer some new twist.  It is to Strahan’s credit that the topics and tones do not overlap much at all.  This is a great sampler.

As I say, there was much to like in here.  My top three were “Bit Rot” from Charles Stross, “Malak” from Peter Watts, and “The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees” by John Barnes.  The last was particularly successful in throwing ideas out at a rate that well exceeded the length of the story.  And if you don’t want to read a story with that title, I’m not sure I want to talk to you.

If one of your ideas of fun is sitting down to gobble up short blasts of adventurous writing on hard SF kinds of topics, this is a good collection.

Recommended.

James Randi’s The Faith Healers is pretty much a seminal work in debunking.  Randi is one of the first, if not the first, to take a serious look at these people who travel from place to place claiming to heal the sick through faith for money.  Randi and his team do a great job running down the evidence on how these guys operate and often spectacularly beating them at their own game.  These faith healers are clearly just ripping people off and it’s great to see them called on it.

All that said, there are some problems with The Faith Healers.  The biggest one is that it is a victim of its own success.  In 1987 when The Faith Healers was published, most of these techniques were unknown by people outside the “trade” and their brazenness and  sophistication was surprising.  Today a lot of this work has become much more widely known.  It was a bombshell that these faith healers were using two-way radios during performances; now it’s a plot point on Leverage.  There are lots of other places for someone of a skeptical bent to find this information these days.

While I love the good works that James Randi has done – this book included – I will say that I didn’t find him a gripping writer.  All the facts are here and the information is clear, but he does not have the flair for narration that makes it exciting.  When one is presenting surprising truth, that is not a great limitation in an author.  Combined with the fact that I knew most of the raw information in here from other sources, it made the book something of a slog.

As I say, The Faith Healers is a victim of its own success.  Its success comes from the fact that it is clear, accessible, extremely thorough, and convincing.  If you have never looked into how faith healers operate, or why you should care that they are not on the up and up, this is a great book to read.  As a template for how to lay out an investigative work, it is sound.

I am amazed how different Kurt Vonnegut’s books can be while remaining Vonnegut books.  Cat’s Cradle has a unique tone and focus among his work, but it is difficult to imagine a reader believing that anyone else wrote it.

Cradle has a lot to say about religion, science, government and how they all interact as constructs of the complex humans who create them.  The water is deep there, but the environment is plenty warm.  While Vonnegut calls out the follies and inconsistencies of people and their intellectual constructs, he is always wryly affectionate to the individual people – or their fictional equivalents.

This is the work from which Vonnegut’s calypso-themed Bokononism religion appears, and is one of the key characters.  The religion gives him plenty to say about how they start and perpetuate themselves, but his genius is in making it simultaneously inviting.  A semi-nihilistic Caribbean religion with pidgin calypso hymns sounds pretty good.  No matter how calculated and ridiculous Bokononism sounds at times in the book, the underlying attractiveness of it takes some of the teeth out of the satire.  That warm feeling goes a long way.

It also contains a Memorial Day speech that is every bit as powerful as Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, while remaining respectful of the valor of young soldiers.  Vonnegut manages to scorch the men who lead young men to war while still lauding their spirit.  It is a remarkable piece of writing, and worth reading even if the rest of Cradle is not for you.

Overall an interesting work that walks a tightrope between satire and warmth.

Strongly Recommended.

This is Jon Krakauer’s critique of Greg Mortenson’s biographical works and charity.  His claims are serious: that Mortenson made up significant parts of his books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones to Schools, and that he has misappropriated significant funds intended for his non-profit charity, the Central Asian Institute (CAI). Krakauer also believes that much of the work that CAI has done has been mismanaged, resulting in unused buildings rather than the functioning schools that the CAI claims.

The situation is ugly.  Mortenson has sold a lot of books and raised a lot of money for the wholly laudable goal of building schools in the disadvantaged world.  Until these allegations were raised by Krakauer and 60 Minutes, he was well respected.  It is difficult for a random reader to assess the veracity of either author’s claims.

And yet.

My gut feeling is that Krakauer is probably right about the inflated claims in Three Cups of Tea.  I said in my earlier review that Three Cups is breathless in places, and that’s an understatement.  Much of that book feels overwrought and the narrative just too overheated to be true. If that was the extent of the allegations, I would be disappointed, but a few white lies to build schools for the disadvantaged is not the worst sin.

Krakauer goes on to say that the CAI is basically being mismanaged to the point of fraud and that funds intended for those schools are not making it there.  Mortenson’s alleged mismanagement ranges from using CAI funds to advertise for his books (which do not directly benefit the CAI) to losing touch with the operations on the ground.  The latter manifests itself as not keeping the schools that have been built operating by training and supporting teachers.  Without them, the school is just another building.

As I say, I am not in a position to judge these claims – other than my literary assessment above.  However, Krakauer’s claims all seem testable, and I think that an audit of a multi-million dollar charity accused of such malfeasance is worthwhile.  One would hope that the CAI would be eager to use such an audit to clear their name.  With the attention this is getting, I suspect the audit is imminent.

I hope Krakauer’s wrong.  Mortenson’s story is compelling and inspiring, and I’d like to believe that he’s made people’s lives better.  I fear he’s right.

Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts tells the story of key years in Hitler’s rise to power from the eyes of a US ambassador to Germany and his adventurous daughter.  Larson has a keen eye for exploring seminal events from unlikely perspectives, and it serves him well here.

His protagonist is an unlikely choice for ambassador.  William Dodd was a history professor who was looking for a sleepy assignment that would give him time to work on a book. Unexpectedly, due to widespread distaste for the posting and Roosevelt’s whim, he became ambassador to Germany in 1933.  Hitler is in power but still consolidating it.  German rhetoric is full of bluster and racism, people are beaten on German streets, yet everyone wants to believe that this will all blow over.

Dodd is a strange man to find in the middle of this.  In a clubby world of career diplomats he is a principled academic.  He guides himself by Jeffersonian principles of everyman’s democracy (and frugality), but finds that his aristocratic brethren are more interested in Germany’s bond payments than its human rights record.  While that somewhat overstates the case – no one could be completely blind to the regime’s violent attitudes – it is remarkable to see the range of opinions that people held.

While Dodd is something of a fish out of water his daughter Martha takes to the Berlin scene like it was meant for her.  She rubs elbows (and other parts) with correspondents, underground opponents of Hitler, Russian spies, and Nazi officials.  Her personal observations round out her father’s ethical ones to construct a lively picture of a turbulent time.

Larson’s choice to frame his history from the views of these outsiders gives his readers a frame of reference that is informed but still apart from the world he is describing.  This helps put the reader in the frame of mind needed to enter into early 1930’s Europe.  The uncertainty and misplaced hope for Hitler’s government look like blindness and folly from the other side of World War II, but at the time rational, intelligent people held those views.  Understanding why they did and how they were disabused of them helps understand our world, too.

The best framework would not be worth much without Larson’s eye for the telling detail and narrative flow.  It is a powerful skill to not construct a telling detail, but to winnow it from the piles of from  this widely researched time.  Larson demonstrates that ability again and again without losing the main thread of the narrative.

Garden is not flawless.  The sharp focus on his characters recedes after the harrowing Night of the Long Knives, but the book lingers on them longer than I expected. Even the ends of even minor players are described in detail.  History is messy, but trailing off is less powerful than ending.

Still, Larson shows a fascinating time from an illuminating angle.

Strongly Recommended.

Apparently Henry Ford has a Forgotten Jungle City.  This is the sort of fact that is impossible for me to ignore.  Fortunately it is also impossible for Greg Grandin to ignore and he has done plenty of excellent reserach to bring the whole story to readers of Fordlandia.

You have to give Grandin some credit for turning an odd obsession late in Ford’s life into a Forgotten Jungle City.  One could easily have looked at the situation and seen a footnote in Ford’s biography and moved on.  Grandin sees a grander tale, both in terms of the city’s story and how it reflects the attitudes of Ford and other US industrialists.

The history section of your local library or bookstore is full of stories of grand engineering feats, especially from this time. Most of those narratives have moments where the builders are fumbling around trying to figure out how to make their plan work, or finding the right people to implement it.  Several pieces fall together to make any of those projects succeed.  While reading Grandin’s story one keeps expecting that chapter where the right people and the right ideas cohere.  It doesn’t come.  Fordlandia never was a going concern.

Obviously there are a lot of failed projects, but Fordlandia sets itself apart because it was bold in both hubristic scope and conflicting ideals.  Those aspects reflect the personality and philosophy of Henry Ford, and Grandin spends much of the book exploring how it reflects Ford’s career and mindset.  That reflection shows a man of surprising contradictions and enormous influence over American thought and industry.  There are plenty of reasons to belive Grandin is accurate, and I was left with an interest in finding out more about Ford.

Overall Fordlandia is clear, well-written, and well supported.  There are a couple places where it feels slightly padded.  Grandin covers some very similar ground more than once, but it is not terribly distracting.  Overall it is an interesting story of a corner of history that reflects and magnifies its time.

Strongly Recommended.