Walking on the Moon

Sam Kean takes the Periodic Table as a loose guide for a series of stories about the unusual things we know about the elements and how we found them out.  There’s some promise that this is a book about the periodic table and its history, but that falls more and more by the wayside as the book goes on.  From a writing perspective the table is as much a McGuffin and an organizing principle.  How that affects your enjoyment is largely going to be a function of how much you wanted to know the table’s story.

Kean’s writing has two excellent features.  He can clearly and intuitively explain science and he can bring scientists to life.  His discussions of the discoveries that people have made are plain enough that one can follow them easily, but keeps enough of the complexity that the reader understands why they are discoveries.  That balance keeps the reader’s interest up without losing them in the details.  Secondly, he does a great job at making the scientists distinct and memorable with a few anecdotes.  Several times he reminds the reader of a person we haven’t talked about in a couple chapters with a pithy summary of the person’s character that brings them immediately back into focus without the feeling that you’ve been studying for a test.

The periodic table is a broad subject, even when taken strictly.  Just understanding why the thing is laid out the way it is and what it says keeps physics and chemistry students busy for weeks.  If you throw in a historical discussion of how we figured out the layout, there’s quite a bit to say.  Kean doesn’t say all of that.  In fact, he strays from the details and evolution of the table itself pretty quickly, branching into other areas of physics, chemistry and the people who do them.  If you are interested in that in-depth exploration, you will be disappointed.

I was not disappointed.  The topics and discussions are connected and intriguing.  Though Kean never goes into the secret origins of the periodic table in obsessive detail, everything he talks about rhetorically connects.  He started from the table, and stays connected, so there’s always a way to where we started.  And the trips are interesting and informative.

Strongly recommended.

I first read this collection of Larry Niven’s short stories sometime in the early 80’s.  I’ve always enjoyed Niven’s short work.  It’s direct, speculative and interesting, everything I look for in SF.

This collection includes several of his stories where he extrapolated the societal changes that cheap ubiquitous teleportation would bring.  It is fun to see how many of those speculations held even though communication more than transportation won the race.  Flash crowds are now communication artifacts, but were put forward by Niven in his teleportation stories.

The other thing I noticed was the strong sense of 1970’s California that pervades the stories.  Several times I understood a place reference or an attitude reference I’d missed before, because I’ve lived in California for a while.  While the gender politics is enlightened for the times, the biases of the times are also present.

Overall these are entertaining, thought provoking stories.  Recommended.

Tony Horwitz has picked a remarkable subject for this history.  His claim that Brown’s tactically laughable attempt to mount a series of slave insurrections in 1859 was strategically brilliant is well taken.  The raid both galvanized abolitionists in the North and convinced the South that Northern public opinion was widely united against them.  Horwitz goes into detail because while many Americans know of the attack, few know any details.  It is fascinating to understand how one lone fanatic catalyzed the largest and most violent social change in American history.

Horwitz does not quite make the situation understandable, but he does lay out Brown’s history and actions clearly.  Brown is a largely unremarkable 19th Century American who is monomaniacal about abolition.  Though driven to act, his limitations as a marginal leader and planner prevent him from forming a directly feasible plan.  Furthermore, even the infeasible plan is pretty poorly executed.  Yet the history of secession and abolition run through the raid.

He also shows that the times were on abolition’s side. In another time, Brown’s raid might have been taken by the South as proof of that abolitionists were a violent fringe group without support or skills and by the North as evidence that abolitionists were unhinged radicals whose methods were unconscionable.  Brown’s powerful, theatrical martyrdom steers the reaction away from those possibilities.  While Brown is clearly not someone who can plan an insurgency, he can die operatically for a principle, and that makes all the difference in his legacy.  So does the overall shape of national opinion at the time.

Outside of the introduction, Horwitz does not tie Brown’s legacy to recent martyrs.  McVeigh, the 9/11 terrorists, and many others who have launched doomed attacks to further their beliefs have been largely unsuccessful in impelling events toward what they believe to be righteous. I’d like to hope that is because those people were misguided fanatics; but that’s how many would have characterized Brown in 1845. There are evidently times when bold and doomed violence changes the world – sometimes for the better.  While Brown’s story does not in itself tell when those times are or why it is so, it captures a clear case to study.

This is an interesting, well told history that makes you think.  Strongly recommended.

I’ve been aware of Max Allan Collins’s love of PIs and skill at writing them since following Ms Tree in the 1980’s.  While I don’t follow mystery writing closely, I see he’s earned a bunch of honors in the field.  Ms Tree was some good stuff, so when I ran across Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Stories for cheap on Amazon, I had to give it a look.

In his introduction, Collins claims to be more novelist than short story writer, and these stories bear that out.  They’re all solid pieces of genre fiction, told with a bit of panache, but none of them blows me away.  However, these stories are presented chronologically from Heller’s perspective but were written decades apart.  There is a clear, interesting character evolution going on in the background – that is, in the Heller novels – that is reflected in these stories.  That kind of organization and attention to detail makes me think that Collins has characterized his writing strengths clearly.

Lightning does have its pleasures, one of which is the meticulous research Collins brings to each story.  Most of these stories are historical fiction, with Heller interacting with real people and events of the day.  Historical detective fiction is a nice trick, and Collins breathes life and credibility into a setting that is often mythologized. The short stories don’t give him quite enough space to completely make the time his own; the veneer of fiction over the true crime reports is visible in some.  Still, as with the continuity and changes between time periods, there’s enough here to whet my appetite for a novel.

Overall this is a tantalizing introduction to an author and a character I will certainly seek out again.

Recommended.

Fifteen Minutes Including Q&A is a short discussion on how to give better short presentations, written by Joey Asher.  It is full of good advice about sticking to the point, engaging your audience and using interaction to maintain interest and tailor material.  For the sorts of short presentations it targets, it is great advice.

Not all presentations are the short, business-oriented ones Asher has in mind, but his advice is generally reasonable.  There are plenty of ideas in here I’ll be using in future presentations.

Recommended.

In A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage has taken an interesting idea and run with it pretty well.  The idea is that a surprisingly small number of beverages have played a large role in human history, starting with beer changing us from hunter/gatherers to soft drinks driving 21st century capitalism.  It is an interesting idea, and it works as long as you squint a little.

Standage has a nice touch with the big picture viewed through a high-concept lens.  He did a similar, though less ambitious, trick with The Victorian Internet. In both cases, he has an eye for the telling anecdote and a skill at fitting the historical record into his thesis.  He does an excellent job describing the forces and trends of history with a few key incidents.

He picks six drinks that are evocative of times and ideas – itself support for the prominence of drink in the human consciousness.  He dedicares a couple chapters to each one’s properties and place in history.  They are covered pretty much chronologically from beer to cola.  It is interesting that each can, to some extent represent a philosophical and historical trend, but the parts don’t completely mesh.  The history of beer and wine is mostly lost to and influential in antiquity, while coffee, spirits, and tea become prevalent in the West within a century.  Still, history is a messy collision of ideas, and tying the ideas to beverage technologies works pretty well.

For me, it works pretty well until we get to Coca-Cola in the 20th century.  Standage rightly ties Coke philosophically to globalization and the US.  These are presented as overwhelmingly positive developments where I was expecting more nuance.  Admittedly, Standage has a lot of ground to cover, and broad brushstrokes are a necessity, but I didn’t expect to see no line drawn between globalization and expansionism.

Still, overall Six Glasses in interesting and informative.  It’s a great start to looking at an era.

Recommended.

Sinclair Lewis has a real knack for creating characters without redeeming qualities that readers cannot look away from.  Elmer Gantry is one of these, cut from the same cloth as George Babbit, who has a brief cameo.  Babbit is a realistic and depressing Middle American businessman, and Elmer Gantry is a realistic and depressing Middle American Evangelist.  Gantry is, if anything, less introspective than Babbit, but Lewis compensates by making Elmer Gantry‘s plot more exciting.

At their core, the two books – and Main Street for that matter – are very similar.  They’re looks at singularly American people (and places) with a clear eye.  Lewis isn’t a schoolmarm about this, though.  While he clearly doesn’t approve of what his characters get up to, he’s got a sense of humor about it.  And that sense of humor expresses itself in word play, the occasional joke, and some wicked backhanded irony.  As deadpan ironist, Lewis has few peers.

Lewis’s artistry and ironic distance make Gantry palatable, even entertaining, but his critique of American evangelism is the central theme.  The unique amalgam of marketing, showmanship, and politics that makes up Gantry’s world will be familiar to anyone watching evangelists in the 21st century.  Though Gantry is set almost a century ago, the fundamental tenets of American Evangelism remain largely unchanged. Lewis vividly depicts the cynicism and outright hypocrisy that seem to be prerequisites for success in this world.

A satirical expose of unscrupulous clergy is interesting, but Gantry is stronger than that.  Despite all his larger-than-life transgressions, Gantry remains recognizably human.  In fact, I easily identified with Gantry’s ambivalence that leads him to compromise after compromise until he has become something pretty awful.  It is easy to see the lure of that road, even as I hope I’m not on it.  And it is easy to see that Gantry can’t tell how far down the road to perdition he’s gone. He’s not self-aware enough to see where the sum of his decisions have taken him.  I think he’s got plenty of company.

While Lewis is a scathing critic of the hypocrites who seem to be the most successful, he does not ignore the good done by many of the cloth.  In fact, even the worst clergy depicted have  moments of decency and benevolence.  He also draws out the range of belief in and out of the clergy itself.  There is a lot to think about here.

Strongly recommended.

I enjoyed Michael Lewis’s The Big Short so much that when I saw this bit of gonzo economics writing, I jumped in.  Boomerang has the feel of those P. J. O’Rourke books where P.J. travels to some hell-hole where history is happening and writes about it with panache.  I don’t think Lewis is as funny as O’Rourke, but I think he can be more insightful.

These are basically a set of well researched and well written essays about current economic hotspots.  Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and the US all take a turn in the hot seat.  Lewis knows what he’s talking about and knows how to pick a telling story to support his points.  He’s constructing an interesting view of the global mess we’re in the middle of.  Boomerang is interesting and thought provoking.

If there’s anything I disagree with about the book, it’s how much of the crisis he puts down to national character.  While it is difficult to argue that nations don’t have character, those characters don’t change much over time.  It is a fun idea that Icelanders believe they can be investment bankers because their fishing economy rewards self-assurance.  If he’s right, though, Icelanders have been that way for a long time. I would rather know what unique opportunity presented itself to magnify the effect of those traits so much.

Even if you don’t fully believe it, Boomerang puts many interesting facts and theories on the table in a very entertaining way.

Recommended.

Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s stories are, in the right corners of the SF world, regarded as almost legendary.  They have a particularly devoted cult following that’s the right kind of interesting to attract my attention.  How many series of short stories result in a USENET group designed not to discuss the stories, but to mimic their environment?

As stories go, they are very much of their time – 1970’s SF magazine shorts that catch the feeling of the era and entertain.  They lean more heavily on the genre trappings of fantasy than SF, but they are about reflecting human values into changing times which may be SF’s definition.  They also reflect 70’s SF’s love of wordplay and bad puns.  This is clearly the same era that created The Flying Sorcerers.  I mention that not to run down Callahan’s or The Flying Sorcerers – which I see is available for the Kindle, so watch this space – but if you’re allergic to puns, Callahan’s will make you swell up like a balloon.

As far as the writing goes, the stories all amble along with enough drive to keep the reader interested but not so much urgency that Robinson misses a chance to talk about a shaggy dog.  The tone captures the feel of telling stories at a bar pretty well.  As for characters, the only real character is the bar itself.  There are folks running around with personalities and histories, but they’re all a little more decent than real people are, so I don’t feel like I could meet them.  The bar itself is a semi-magical force for compassion, and I think of the patrons as facets of that force more than characters.

Robinson doesn’t quite say that about his fictional bar, staff, and patrons, but he’s also clear that there’s more to the place than meets the eye.  Callahan’s is unrealistic in the way a dialogue in great noir novel is unrealistic; it becomes iconic.  I can’t imagine really walking into Callahan’s (any posts you find from me in alt.callahans not withstanding), but it’s fun to read about it and surprisingly reassuring that it has acquired such a following.

Strongly recommended, if you can cope with the puns.

If that title makes sense to you, you probably know if you want to read this.  It is a Japanese comic from Shin Takahashi (of Trend-Pro Co., Ltd.) designed to teach basic statistics.  To me it is 200 pages of pure awesome.  The plot concerns a young girl who wants to learn statistics so she can impress a young man working at her father’s marketing firm.  She winds up with an eccentric tutor who teaches her statistics and love blossoms.

The drawings are all clear, evocative, and are excessively expressive.  The translation is often hilariously formal – kind of the visual equivalent of bad dubbing, and the characters are fairly broad stereotypes.

But it’s all just trying to be diverting enough to get someone to learn the basics of statistics, including how to carry out and understand basic calculations and hypothesis testing.  It’s a delightful way to get a bird’s-eye view of the basics of the field, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Recommended.