Walking on the Moon

Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage tells the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition with an emphasis on Meriwether Lewis and Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson may seem out of place in that sentence.  He never travelled west of the Mississippi, but as Ambrose demonstrates, he did groom Lewis extensively and shaped the goals and principles of the expedition.

Lewis is a fascinating individual. Already a patriot, soldier, and woodsman, he eagerly takes up Jefferson’s training to become a enough of a jack of the trades of writer, botanist, and navigator to turn the expedition from a look around into a scientific endeavour.  Between the two men it is also clear that this is to be a political and business expedition as well.  Understanding and cultivating the trust of the natives, and determining the extent of the land Jefferson bought and how to exploit it take up at least as much time as looking at new plants.

A fair amount of time is spent understanding Lewis’s relationship with Clark, of course.  Their unique shared command of the expedition was key to its success and the two men fought the prevailing structures of society to make it work.  The Army expected one commander, but Lewis (their choice) made it clear to the men and the brass that he and Clark would be equals.  Ambrose illuminates this key relationship.

When exploring something that is as much a part of the American mythos as this expedition, it would be easy to gloss over the real men and real pressures inherent to it.  Ambrose does an excellent job of keeping the magnitude of the task in focus while pointing out places the expedition errs.  There’s no sugarcoating, either.  When Ambrose thinks Lewis has messed up, he is blunt about it.  This is a considerable merit.

As I sit down to write this, some weeks after completing Undaunted Courage, I remember that it did take a while to get through it.  But, I also realize that I remember much more of it than I would have expected.  This is a pretty good selling point for Ambrose’s writing.  I don’t remember any flashiness, but I do remember the narrative and interesting perspectives on a monumental undertaking in American history, undertaken by real humans.  Tough to do better than that.

Recommended.

Whenever I talk about a Neal Stephenson book, I generally have nice things to say.  REAMDE has all of his strengths as an author on display: a well thought-out near-future (or maybe divergent timeline) world, many thought-provoking elements in service of a good story, a set of interesting protagonists solving tricky problems, and a breakneck pace.  There is also the occasional bit of perfect description that causes you to see the commonplace from a new angle.

It’s a lot of fun to read, and one gets the impression that Stephenson is having fun writing it.  At one point, in the middle of a firefight, he steps back and introduces a new character – backstory and all – a detour of tens of pages.  He does this, I think, both for the joy of pulling such a thing off well, and to cheerfully heighten the tension of the conflict by drawing the reader’s attention away.

I can pick at this or poke at that, but basically REAMDE delivers the well-imagined thrills of a Cryptonomicon.  If you liked that, you’ll like REAMDE.

Strongly recommended.

When I reviewed Braniac, Ken Jennings first book, I said I would be on the lookout for more.  I skipped his trivia almanac, but I devoured Maphead with great delight. As with Brainiac, I have an  interest in the topic, even if I haven’t given in to it at Jennings’s level. 

Structurally, Maphead is very much like Brainaic: Ken Jennings goes out and immerses himself deeply into a geeky sub-culture in which he was previously only mostly immersed and tells us all about it.  In this case, his topic is maps and the passtimes around them without feeling like I went to class.

Maphead‘s a little like a 1990’s P.J. O’Rourke book where P.J. would tromp off to some troubled nation, drink with the locals, and boil it all down for his readers humorously.  Except Jennings travels are most interesting in the sense that he’s covering the conceptual landscape of his topic. And there’s much less drinking.  So perhaps not a great analogy, except for the key points that both are funny and I learn things from them without feeling like I went to class.

I think Maphead is best understood as a travel book where we’re traveling around the idea of maps.  In the tradition of great travel authors, Jennings succeeds both because he has picked representative stopping points in an interesting destination, and because he is informed and good company on the journey.

He finds interesting places that readers with less time to look around might miss.  Maps are awesome, and it’s not very surprising that the Library of Congress has a boffo collection; Paris has a big tower.  What one might not expect is that there are a set of folks who hold imaginary road rallies on maps with pen and paper, or the extent to which a game show winner/author might get sucked into GeoCaching, or that there’s a National Geography Bee.  All of these are enticing to different degrees, but The National Geography Bee sounds so bad-ass that it should clearly be widely televised instead of the World Cup.  Our man Jennings found the thing, and shows it to us in all its geeky, competitive, synthesis-of-facts-and-thinking glory.  I am now aggressively hostile to the National Spelling Bee (which isn’t Jennings fault; OK it is kinda) for taking away coverage from the National Geography Bee.

Anyway.

Finding all this stuff and describing it in a way that recognizes its essential nerdity while highlighting its fundamental attractions (beyond its essential nerdity) is a brilliant coup.  If a book called Maphead sounds like the smallest bit of fun to you, you should read this.  You will have much more than the smallest bit of fun.

Strongly Recommended.

Chicago history seems to be full of larger than life characters and ironic juxtapositions. This may be because the city is some kind of fantasy exemplar of corruption, hubris, and contradiction, or because the folks who chronicle the place can spin their tales that way.  Gary Krist’s City of Scoundrels: 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth To Modern Chicago enhances the city’s larger-than-life reputation, for better and worse.

The 12 days in question are in late July 1919 in which a simultaneous race-driven set of riots, political maneuvering, child kidnapping, and blimp crash(!) combine to form a significant crisis.  The driving forces are, unsurprisingly, the riots and the maneuvering.  The crash and the detective case add flavor to and flesh out the news cycle of late 1910’s Chicago.

While the additional color adds context and scope to the main proceedings, the last part of the subtitle never really coheres.  Krist gives us a clear and insightful view of the times, but never quite connects it to the larger arc of Chicago’s history.  Some of this is because larger arcs are inherently large, and few turning points are absolute.  These riots had ramifications beyond their time, but Chicago has too many other forces colliding on it for them to feel definitive.

While the subtitle somewhat oversells the book, what is there is an insightful and engaging telling of a key time in Chicago history.  I found it gripping without having any particular interest in Chicago.

Recommended.

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.