Walking on the Moon

Peter Buffington’s Squawk 7700 is partly the bittersweet memoir of a man who had to give up on his dream of flying for a living and partly an indictment of the state of the airline industry that led him to that point.  I am naturally sympathetic to both of those aspects.  I love flying and dislike the idea that making a living doing it is closed to people with a passion for it.  I also see the dangers and unfairness of the treatment of regional airline pilots.  They have to work incredibly long hours at a technically and physically demanding job for the kind of money we pay house painters.  That is a recipe for trouble and more people should be aware of why their tickets are so cheap.

Buffington writes knowledgably and with heart about the technical topics and the hopes and routine days of an aviation professional.  He also is unflinching about the state of professionalism that he finds at all levels of the aviation world. There are a lot of useful facts and many interesting anecdotes in the work.

All that said, I think Buffington’s editors have let him down. As I say, there are two related but distinct books in here vying for time and focus –  the memoir and the warning.  Walking the line so that they reinforce each other’s message rather than distract from each other is no easy task, and Buffington is not always successful.  The dispassionate tone of a whistleblower creeps into his memoir at times, reducing the reader’s sympathy, and the inflamed tone of storyteller comes through in critiques of policy that may be better served by a cool assessment of facts that need no magnification.  There are some spots where closer copyediting would clarify the technical portions as well.

Overall I agree with his assessment, and respect his passion.  I think another editing pass or two would make those clearer to readers outside the aviation world, who would benefit greatly from hearing what he has to say.

Lionel Shriver has produced a compelling and engrossing work in We Need To Talk About Kevin. The premise of looking at the aftermath of a school shooting from the point of view of the shooter’s mother holds many possibilities, not all of them original or interesting.  Fortunately, Shriver steers confidently for waters deep enough that headlines and sensationalism are the least of the narrator’s worries.

The narrative itself is a remarkable high wire act across a deep chasm of ambiguity.  We’re told the mother’s story in her words from before the shooter’s conception until well into the aftermath.  She’s the real star of the work; a very believable character with flaws and blind spots, who, through a nice contrivance, is telling her story to someone who already knows it.  This means her story interprets  the facts rather than retelling them.

That interpretation is the heart of the book.  The actions of the shooter are pretty much the only unambiguous events in her story.  The rest are presented through the eyes of Eva, the mother, in hindsight and to a particular end. She’s painted strongly enough that the reader forms an opinion of her, and that opinion drives the interpretation of the events she relates.  She’s a strong character, but not a cliched character.  What different readers think of her will reflect the reader as clearly as the character.  This is half the fun of the book.

Though the narrative is direct, a story about a teenager believably committing harrowing acts of violence almost requires a search for root causes.  The elemental nature of the crimes pushes the reader’s questions well past parenting practices to the nature of good and evil.  This is all presented even-handedly enough – or obliquely enough – that the reader’s ideas are at least as important as the author’s.  Or the narrator’s.

I read this on a recommendation from my Mom (read into that what you want), and when we discussed it I was struck by the different interpretations we’d had of the characters and the actions.  It wasn’t as if we had read different books, or even that we disagreed on much, but our impressions illuminated our personal experiences and beliefs.  Each reader will see something different here, and talking about what you see is more interesting than reading it.

In addition to being a catalyst for deep thoughts, the book is very absorbing reading.  I found it very hard to put down.

A must.

The full title of Michael Lewis’s book about the 2008 financial crisis is The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine, which is a little melodramatic.  But not much.

Lewis has made a career out of explaining fairly complicated numbers games and how they impact people’s real lives.  He’s taken on the stats geeks in baseball and Wall Street in earlier books that I haven’t read, but if The Big Short is any indication, Moneyball should be on my list soon.

Lewis dives into the shenanigans that drove the housing crisis with the knowledge of an insider and the eye of a journalist.  He covers the tricky financial instruments in enough detail that one can clearly see the amazing disregard for risk and greed for profit that pulled the bandwagon forward, but at a high enough level that the mathematics is never daunting.  If you want to understand the gears that inflated the bubble and the cords that tied all the banks together when it burst, this will explain it to you.

In addition to knowing and communicating the technical details, he assembles an interesting cast of characters who were working out the problems in real time.  It may surprise you that there were such people, but it’s a big world.  He does a good job bringing them to life and using their stories to tell the larger one that we all saw unfold.

Overall this is an indispensable book in understanding the recent financial crisis, and one that tells the story with clarity and wit.

Strongly Recommended.

Steven Waldman’s Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America is exactly the kind of writing I like to see on difficult matters of history.  The topic is charged because of the constant battle between Church and State and the politicizing of faith on both sides, but there are real lessons to learn from history.  Waldman leads the reader toward those lessons by looking at several key founders and examining both their personal faith and their contemporaneous opinions about how religion and the republic should interact.  He also provides the context for these decisions in terms of the religious and political forces of the times.

Though Waldman uses a few well known founders to motivate his discussions, he never forgets that these were extraordinary men who created popular political consensus.  Madison may have believed in a wall between Church and State, but he never lost sight of the fact that other positions had to be considered and ground conceded.  Appeals to Jefferson’s position on an issue should not ignore the fact that all of the founding documents and many actions on which we base that position were products of consensus.  The frustrating ambiguity of the First Amendment exists partially so that different constituencies can see what they want to in it and support it.

Despite that caveat, this is not a wishy-washy book.  Waldman calls the history as he sees it, whether he’s providing supporting evidence that Jefferson meant what he said about a wall between Church and State or arguing that none of his selected founders were Deists or Atheists.  Partisans on either side of modern Church and State debates will find some of their historical support kicked out from under them.

This is as it should be.  Waldman’s interested in a real understanding of the issues – religious and political – in the early years of the nation.  There are important differences in how religion was practiced that shape the founders’ views that imply those views require context, but not so much context that appeals to God are anything but what they seem.  Furthermore the founders do not speak with one voice.  Adams and Madison have very different views of the role of religion in moral and public life.  Beyond that their personal faith and their positions on how the government should deal with religions differ as well.

Overall this does a great job of getting the historical issues in place and showing how both the most respected minds of the era addressed them as well as how the country as a whole approached things.  I came away with a much better understanding of the period, the pressures, and how the decisions of the time were influenced.  Waldman does not pick a particularly strident position on any side and try to defend it.  These are some facts that will help the reader form their opinions, not positions to adopt or refute.

Recommended.

How The States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein, is an odd little book about history and geography of US states.  It’s fun to hang a little history lesson how each jog of the various state lines reflects a human interaction that’s fairly permanently etched into the landscape.  I was also happy to have found and read this on the Kindle.

The US is a federation of semi-autonomous states that joined together to gain their freedom.  This has a surprising effect on the shape of states.  The original 13 (or maybe 14 depending on how you feel about Vermont) were laid out according to the needs and sometimes the whims of the British monarchy.  As they came together, the disparities in state layouts and populations influenced the creation of the bicameral legislature.  That’s interesting enough, but the reaction of Congress was to attempt to maintain size and population parity of subsequent states.  That logical and surprising decision is one of the revelations of How the States…

There are others, from the concessions made to absorb Texas and California, to the multiple surveying errors – intentional or accidental – to the effects of the various natural features on the economy and geography of states.  Unsurprisingly, the Missouri compromise is visible in state boundaries, and the Civil War plays a role in Nevada’s borders.  There are surprisingly many good stories to tell about state lines.

The layout of the book makes it more a reference than a narrative.  After a short overview of principles and key national events, Stein proceeds state by state and border by border around the country.  The states are considered in alphabetical order, which means the same story gets told at least twice.  It can make it a little difficult to follow themes.  The fairly brief length also means that on some occasions, only the beginning of the story is in here. Still, this is a book that I expect to return to occasionally, when I forget why a particular blip is there on a boundary.

I was happy to see this on a Kindle for two reasons.  First, I found this odd thing in the Kindle store.  I was afraid that as I did more shopping on-line, the opportunities to run into interesting things like this would be reduced.  Apparently this is not the case.  Secondly, the book is chock full of maps that were generally easy to read in the Kindle.  I hadn’t been looking for a book full of maps to evaluate the Kindle’s illustration rendering, but I found one, and it was an enjoyable read.

One bit of Kindling that would have been nice would be better indexing.  Frequently part of a shared border’s story is told in one state’s entry and referenced in another.  These are not set up as Kindle cross references, so looking up the end of the reference is more painful than it needs to be.

Overall a fun book that told me a bunch about my country and my Kindle.

Recommended.

Like every other Kindle owner, I downloaded the free version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from Amazon. While I do have some criticisms of the collection, they’re mitigated by the facts that 1) this is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and 2) it’s free.

I was about to claim that I’m not much of a mystery reader, but I’ve been gushing about Raymond Chandler for a while now, so it’s probably pointless to try to defend that position.  I will say that I almost never read a mystery to try to beat the detective to the solution, but to see what the author brings to the story outside the genre trappings.  I’m not trying to stay ahead of Holmes – which would be difficult for no other reason than I don’t know enough minutae from the Victorian Age – but to visit his world.

I do genuinely enjoy Doyle’s stories.  His characterizations of Holmes’s cantankerous and logical character as well as the leads’ mutual affection are effortlessly communicated.  The tales and the company quickly become enjoyable, and Doyle mixes up the genre elements well enough that the stories never become completely formulaic.

That said, this isn’t a great collection either in terms of content – there are many missing stories – or in formatting for the Kindle.  Almost any unusual character is misrendered, to the point where any reference to currency was simply a blob with a number somewhere in the middle that may or may not be related to the sum in question.  While this did not pose an insurmountable problem for the stories, it was annoying.  Not that I remember the Victorian English Currency system, anyway.

Beyond the formatting of the text, the book itself didn’t take advantage of any of the Kindle features for navigation or visualization.  Iorich, which does, was a more pleasant navigation experience.  I like knowing roughly how far it is to the next chapter break, or, in Adventures, story conclusion.  Since it’s clear from the Kindle store that everyone gets this book, I was expecting more of a showcase.

As I say, my gripes should be taken as minor.  This is a free collection of Holmes stories; you can’t go wrong.

Recommended.

Carl Hiaasen writes some world class light fiction, and Star Island is no exception.  It’s a fast moving send up of paparazzi and their targets where everyone’s a bit larger than life and the plot’s twisty enough to hold your attention without being confusing.  Writing such a thing is harder than it looks.  Striking the right tone, keeping the characters likeable but interesting, and keeping the plot’s clockwork running but obscured is all a challenge.  Hiaasen does all that and adds the South Florida flavor that he’s well known for.

All that said, Star Island is a trifle.  I’d forgotten I’d read it until I was looking through my kindle’s book list to see how far behind I am on these reviews.  Fun, while it lasted, though.

Recommended.

The latest in Steven Brust‘s Vlad Taltos series was available for the Kindle, so I actually read it before it came out in paperback.  My reviews of the books in this series are usually shorter than the other capsules, partially because most of the Taltos stuff is like most of the Taltos stuff, though not in a particularly repetitious way.  There’s always some twist to them that keeps you reading, and the writing is fun and thoughtful.  At this point, the books feel more like chapters than books, and it’s a little hard to review them in isolation.

These are well executed novels in the fantasy genre that are part of an interlocking overall whole.  If that’s your thing, and it’s certainly mine, jump in.

Strongly recommended.

If you’re looking for a detailed accounting of how Shakespeare passed his days, Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare is not going to satisfy you.  As Bryson makes abundantly clear, there are not a lot of hard facts about the Bard’s life, and the interpretation of the ones scholars do agree on is fairly wide open.  If I’m going to be wandering through a field of data with few well marked sign posts, Bryson is one of my go-to guys.  He’s an excellent researcher, a fine raconteur, and brings an excellent blend of common sense and speculation to the topic.

His topic here is utterly fascinating.  Shakespeare is a towering figure in English literature, to the point where even though most people know he’s the biggest name, they really don’t know how many expressions and words he brought into the language.  Even if one leaves aside the structure and execution of his plays as drama, his contributions to the language would make him immortal.  For someone who has literally influenced how every English speaker expresses themselves, we know next to nothing about him.  Even the contents of the plays and poetry are up for some debate.  The absence of data has not lead to an absence of biography, and pulling the supported narrative from the mythmaking is not easy.

Bryson leaps cheerfully and diligently into the fray.  He catalogs the facts well, pausing often to point out the herculean efforts that pulling a single bit of knowledge can require.  His digressions on the lengths that both professional scholars and obsessed laymen will go to in pursuit of a new atom of information are enlightening.  Such obsession leads to wholesale speculation from both professionals and amateurs that often lodges in the public mind.  Bryson turns a lighthearted but needed hose on these narratives when they get out of hand.  But he’s a writer and is not immune to the draw of pulling a coherent story from a few facts.  He respects the urge, but retains his reserve.

Overall the result is a somewhat threadbare biography that illuminates the legend without being seduced by it.  The chapter on debunking Shakespeare conspiracies is particularly delightful in this regard.  Bryson is always engaging and informed, but he’s not buying anything that isn’t supported.  And even by those standards, the life and works of Shakespeare stand up just fine.

Recommended.

Gore Vidal’s Lincoln is a meticulously researched historical novel about the years of Lincoln’s presidency primarily through the eyes of his staff.  It’s no great challenge to find the facts about the Lincoln years, but Vidal’s telling makes the people real and the changes to the nation visceral.

Lincoln is heralded as a master politician, and the record shows his skills.  It’s one thing to read about those skills and to understand in the abstract how careful footwork and forethought made a political nobody into the President in a few short years.  It is quite another to watch Gore’s fictionalized Lincoln outmaneuver a viper in the cabinet that has been denigrating his judgment and plotting against him for half the book.  It is a brilliant scene, with Lincoln maneuvering Salmon Chase into a literal no-win position with lawyerly tactics and superlative control.  Then, even as Lincoln exults in the triumph, he has compassion for the seductive influence of power that drove Chase to make his play, recalling that the same thirst placed him in the presidency.  As I say, all these goings on are supported by the historical record, but Vidal brings it alive with the nuance and power of a great writer.

In addition to making the historical figures as big as life, Vidal’s interested in capturing the metamorphosis of the nation as well.  Lincoln’s four years in office saw some of the largest growth in Federal power in our history, as well as some of the largest abuses of that power.  People are jailed for exercising their freedom of speech, the treasury begins directly controlling currency, a huge army is created, and other expansions.  Again, the record is clear, but Vidal brings his radical’s eye and novelist’s voice to explaining the changes.  He knows and shows the effects of the changes, but never presents the choices as cut and dried.  He makes no excuses, nor conjures any demons.

It isn’t hard to imagine his depictions of Lincoln, Seward and Chase in the cabinet of Barack Obama or of George W. Bush.  That alone is thought provoking.

All that makes the book sound like a civics assignment; it is anything but.  His characters are fascinating and dramatic, and his Lincoln is every bit the charming, disarming, dedicated man that history shows us.  There is drama, pathos, and comedy throughout.  Even if you have no interest in pondering the kind of man Lincoln was or how the mechanisms of government changed between 1861 and 1864, the book is interesting and entertaining.

Strongly Recommended.