Walking on the Moon

When I talked about Steven Pinker’s Words and Rules, I complained that the topic was not worthy of the quality of the writing and science on display.  His work has steadily been becoming more universal, while his skills as a writer and scientist have remained at their high level.  The Better Angels of Our Nature stakes out a universal claim of great importance and defends it meticulously, working from the demonstrated facts to an affirmation of the Enlightenment’s classic liberal ideals.  It’s one thing to believe that those ideals – reason, empathy, commerce – are worth affirming.  It’s another thing entirely to build an objective case that this is so.  As with any social science, there are still points to argue, but the scope and quality of Pinker’s arguments are dazzling to behold.

It is clear that Pinker is a defender of the Enlightenment and classic liberalism – though not necessarily of liberalism in modern American politics – and that he has a stake in defending that position.  He remains a meticulous seeker of truth and believer in science and statistics.  When he’s confronted with the choice between making a stronger, vaguer claim or explaining the limits of what he believes science can prove objectively, he does the latter.  It is refreshing to be written to as an adult about an interesting and important topic rather than being recruited to an ideological position.

Explaining a nuanced argument about a topic as large as human violence in a manner suitable for adults takes a lot of space.  Angels runs some 800 pages.  Pinker needs to first convince his readers of his counter intuitive thesis – that violence is declining – and then make the connections to the causes of that decline.  His arguments that there is a real decline in violence run several hundred pages and require the reader to internalize ideas from statistics and cognitive psychology.  It is to his credit that he brings in the relevant ideas from those fields comprehensibly, and is able to make a lucid case.

In a lesser writer’s hands the arguments would be opaque and unconvincing, but Pinker guides the reader through convincingly.  He does this through careful explanations of the relevant science (including lots of citations) and well-chosen examples.  His honesty is at least as great an asset as his eloquence.  He is always careful to quantify and qualify what he believes the data shows and how strong the consensus is around it. This comes off not as hedging his bets, but as being open about what humans know and can know about these inherently slippery topics.  He’s willing to admit what he doesn’t know, which makes the principles he can establish more compelling.

All that clarity and nuance, explaining the supporting evidence and context, and working through the examples takes time.  While Pinker keeps it as lively as possible, the exposition can be dry at times.  It never becomes a complete slog, but there’s a lot to get through. While I believe that the supporting evidence makes his remarkable case stronger, I also believe that if the reader gets too tied up in the details of the earlier chapters, and starts to flag, it’s worthwhile to peek ahead at Chapter 9 and see where it’s all going.

Chapter 9 is Pinker’s gentlemanly and scientific paean to Reason and Enlightenment making the world a fairer and safer place.  That song, sung in the most scientific and objective voice, is one of affection and joy for ideals that have objectively improved life for the majority of people on this Earth. Mankind collectively has slowly, in fits and starts, built a culture and collective mindset that has objectively reduced the violence and cruelty we inflict on each other, even though we barely realize it. Reading this chapter, I felt a little like one of those omniscient aliens from a SciFi B-movie must when it tells the humans that there’s hope for them yet.

Strongly Recommended.

Hello Goodbye Hello is a unique bit of fun by Craig Brown.  The idea is simple and intriguing: start with the unlikely meeting of two well known people and tell that story, then follow one of them to another meeting and describe that, then follow the new one to another meeting, and so on.  And make a circle.  It feels like a party game, and reading Hello Goodbye Hello gives that feeling of improvisation and fun.

Brown makes a couple choices that make the whole thing more compelling.  He keeps each anecdote short, which keeps the players from wearing out their welcome.  He also allows himself a fair amount of leeway.  Some of the stories are about famous people in their youth who are literally dumbstruck by encountering someone more famous.  It’s to his credit that Brown can usually make even these glancing collisions interesting.

Of course not all of these meetings are interesting.  Over the course of the book he spans English nobility, Russian composers, American movie idols, and Mark Twain. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and there were some dry stretches for me.  It doesn’t help that Brown is British, and some of the folks he includes were completely unknown to me, though from context well known in Britain.

Overall, the book keeps the feel of an interesting dinner party where everyone seems to have an interesting story to tell.  Even the tales that are about people you’ve never heard of are told with style.  There are plenty of new things to hear, even if they’re not all about the stars of the anecdotes.

Recommended.

A good title can sell a book, no question, and this title is instantly charming to me.  I like dogs; I like physics; what could go wrong?

Plenty could go wrong, of course.  I generally like popular science books, but I have been disappointed as well. While I like the title, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to take a couple hundred pages of the conceit. To his credit, Chad Orzel carries the physics and the dog characterization off well.

The science isn’t the easy stuff, either.  Orzel’s peddling quantum physics, not that easy Newtonian stuff.  Quantum physics is bizarre  and counter-intuitive, so having it explained at a dog’s level can be helpful.  It helped me.  I have heard the basics of quantum physics many times, and I consider it a success when I figure something new out from a fresh explanation.  This was successful.

Now, about the dog part: the book is structured as a series of conversations between Orzel and his dog.  Who talks.  And that works out pretty well.  Orzel does a nice job using the conversation to pace the material.  The discussions help the material flow naturally and conversationally.  It’s easy not to notice when topics are being reviewed or emphasized when they’re wrapped in the rhythms of a man-to-dog heart-to-heart.

Orzel takes a goofy idea and uses it to wrap up a lot of good science explanation that holds a sense of wonder.  He does an equally nice job of supporting the theoretical explanation with experimental evidence.  All that solid science is wrapped in charming prose.

Strongly Recommended.

Battleborn collects a bunch of short stories from Claire Vaya Watkins, who I’d not read before.  The stories are mostly set in the Pacific Southwest, which is to say in an enormous desert.  When I first came to live out here, I thought that the desert was barren and monolithic.  I’ve learned that it is spartan and demanding, adjectives that can be applied equally well to Watkins’s prose.

All these stories show an economy that seems to come not from the human editing process, but from an erosion and cleansing by the elements.  The stories seem not honed by a writer, but formed by the elements. Now, of course, no natural forces created these stories, but at their best they capture that simultaneous sense of timelessness and history.

Strongly Recommended.

P.T. Barnum believed in aggressive marketing and wasn’t shy about separating people from their money.  It may be surprising to see that he wrote this book exposing scams and balderdash as well.  He claims that exposing this kind of stuff makes his entertainments look better by comparison, and I believe him.  I don’t believe he never stretched the truth, though.

Whatever you believe about Barnum’s personal ethics, the book is a nigh-comprehensive explanation of ways that people fleece the unwary.  Spiritualists, Religious crooks, and cults all take a licking, but it’s interesting to see Barnum take shots at adulterers of food and liquor, and at unscrupulous businessmen cashing in on bubbles. It’s also interesting to see his religious commentary given that he takes a very pro-Christian point of view.

Skeptics wont find a ton of new information in here, but it is remarkable how few new tricks have premiered since the 1880’s.  I enjoyed seeing just how many of these scams continue unchanged to this day, as well as how easily new tech gets incorporated.

While Barnum’s writing is clear, I did find that the book seemed long.  Some of this is that there were few new revelations; some is that many of the names here are otherwise lost to history.  The parade of historic scams gets a little tedious when you don’t recognize any of the players.

The Higgs Discovery is a short discussion of the recent Higgs Boson announcement from Lisa Randall.  It includes a couple relevant chapters reprinted from a couple of her books.  I picked it up because I wanted to know more about that announcement and what it means for physics.  I’m not a physicist, of course, but I like to believe that I know enough to not completely make a fool of myself in intelligent discussion.  This Higgs thing was outside my range, though, and I’d like to be less lost.

The Higgs Discovery helped. I’m far from completely understanding how this all works, or how we think it all works, but I’m doing better.  After reading it, I have the beginnings of an intuition.

To an extent Discovery didn’t make things simple enough for me, and felt jargony where I thought that jargon wasn’t necessary.  I’m picking nits.  This is a very short primer on a complex topic in quantum physics.  Randall’s goal has to be to tell me enough to get me interested enough to pick up a more complete discussion.  Discovery did that very well.

Some Remarks is a very mixed bag of Neal Stephenson’s shorter writings.  Stephenson’s novels are usually tomes, so it’s interesting to see some of his shorter work.  But then about a third of the book is an epic article for Wired that describes laying an undersea telecom cable, so shorter is relative; the article is as long as a novelette.

One of the things I enjoy about Stephenson’s writing is that he often sees commonplace things in new ways, combined with a close correlation between the things he and I think are commonplace.  This collection treats me to his take on the Star Wars movies as well as the aforementioned telecom cables.  We look at similar things and I like the way he sees them.

As much as I enjoy his writing, I can’t really recommend this as a starting place.  The topics, formats, length, and genres of the pieces vary widely.  There are short stories, addresses, interviews, articles and a book foreword. I found them all interesting and engaging to some degree, but I think new readers would be best served by one of his novels.

I grew up in the 1980’s as a geek, playing video games, reading comics, watching movies and a lot of bad TV.  I was a kid who lost himself in stories, and I used all of these as fantasy homes away from home.  So did Ernest Cline, who wrote Ready Player One as an homage to these immersive entertainments.

Player One is set in the near-ish future where a variety of slow catastrophes have made the real world even less attractive than it seemed to a kid growing up in the Reagan years.  The climate’s a mess, pollution and overcrowding are rampant, and the economy is so far in the tank that most people are little more than serfs.  One of the few bright spots in this world is the powerful virtual reality environment called OASIS that acts as a getaway and diversion for the vast majority of people.  When the primary designer of OASIS dies, his will states that the first person to find a particular hidden feature of the game – an Easter Egg – will inherit his considerable wealth.

The Easter Egg is the McGuffin that brings our protagonists together.  The very idea of Easter Eggs comes from the early days of mass market video games in the 80’s and Cline ties his story more tightly to the decade by making the designer a fan of 80’s pop culture.  The protagonists solve 1980’s-themed puzzles in lifelike simulations and enhancements of the entertainments that inspired them.

Cline does a great job running with this without becoming so tied to the era that he’s just regurgitating it.  He replicates the facets of the best diversions most responsible for their charm without producing a clone of any one in particular.  It has the feel of War Games or The Last Starfighter without being a rip-off or a retelling.

There are a lot of 80’s references, overt and oblique.  If you’re a student of the era who likes to play spot the reference, or to annotate stories, Player One will keep you busy. I grew up in the era, and certainly had my share of obsessions, but I didn’t find the references distracting.  There were plenty of times a reference would jog my memory, but I never felt taken out of the story by them.  In fact, the one time I was taken out of the story was an aviation reference, not a geeky one; flying a chartered jet across the country at 10,000 ft is as jarring to me as getting the title of Dancing With Myself wrong would be.

The references are a way to let readers play along with the game of finding the Easter Egg without having to explain all the possibilities.  A sufficiently knowledgeable geek from the 1980s could solve the puzzles fairly without having to learn a bunch of new lore introduced here.  It’s a nice idea.

As with any good quest story, however, Player One sinks or swims on the strength of its characters.  Cline creates a world and set of protagonists who are fun to spend time with and to root for.  They’re flawed enough to have some flavor, but not so real that they get in the way of a fast-paced story.  There aren’t really any deathless characters here, but they’re a lot of fun to spend a couple hundred pages with. Basically they’re heroes of an 80’s quest movie.

There are a lot of good quest movies from the 1980’s and Ready Player One is a worthy addition to that pantheon.

Strongly Recommended.

Strictly speaking, the most likeable character in They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? is probably the Premier of China, and that’s by a nose.  It’s an interesting trick to write a thriller where there’s no one to root for, and Christopher Buckley pulls it off nicely.  The whole thing has the antic, grotesque feel of an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen novel, but without the good guys.  But even in a world without good guys, there are worse guys.

Despite the fact that everyone’s compromised somehow here, Buckley keeps things light and dynamic.  Things move right along and he shifts the point of view around enough to both keep the reader guessing and to give an idea of the scope of the plot. That plot circles around a set of defense contractors trying to drum up business by manufacturing a threat from China, while the various factions of both governments jockey for position around the faux threat.

Buckley does a nice job showing that even PR threats can have devastating repercussions and that once a rumor picks up a certain amount of speed, no single person or group can steer it.  The multiple perspectives help bring that home well.

It’s a lot of fun and a fast read.

Recommended.

I think I’m happy that I went to public high school.  Adolescence is lonely and stressful enough without the added isolation and expectations that boarding schools seem to impose, if fiction is to be believed on the matter.  Jennifer Miller’s The Year of The Gadfly uses those heightened emotions to tell a compelling story.

Stories set in high school are about how this time shapes people as it’s happening or how people have changed after those crucial years.  Miller tells a little bit of both by splitting her narrative across three characters and two time frames.  Her characters all are intricately bound to her fictional academy and the secret societies and plain cliques that animate it.  As usual in a boarding school drama, these are all boiled down to their pure and symbol-laden essence.  On the surface a hidden group of students is enforcing the school’s honor code to the letter through unorthodox and painful means.  Underneath adolescent passions and pressures are clashing operatically and symbolically.

Martin handles her timelines and character perspectives deftly.  Each character sits at a different point in their development and in the development of the events that ensnare them, as well as representing a distinct point of view.  The result is a look at the nominal plot and the symbolic coming-of-age drama from multiple perspective.  Miller creates a nice hologram of adolescence through prose.

It’s also a gripping read.  The plot moves along snappily, and even as the mystery begins to resolve itself, there are twists that engage the reader.  If you’re not one for prose holograms of the adolescent experience, there’s a fun ghost story/mystery here with diverting characters in the mix.  And also cameos by the ghost of Edward R. Murrow.

Recommended.