Walking on the Moon

Steve Martin released this novella, Shopgirl, in 2000 well before he wrote Born Standing Up, but there is considerable similarity between them.  In both cases, the work is thoughtful and well executed, but strangely unmoving.  However, Born Standing Up relates a particular man’s singular experience becoming a unique entertainer while Shopgirl sticks much closer to the everyday.  As a result, there is less to divert the reader from the inertia.

After saying that Martin has trouble building up an emotional punch, I cannot really lay my fingers on what is missing.  There are characters with motivations and back stories, a strong sense of place, clear economical prose with a distinct voice, observations on people from different times of life and how they relate.  This should rise into a nice cake; but it doesn’t, and I don’t know why.

I have read a lot of books that provoked strong dislike.  Shopgirl was not one of those. None of the characters grated on me; the arc of the plot seemed plausible; the messages and themes were fine.  When I caught Martin making a temporally unlikely connection between one character’s involvement in the Vietnam war and another’s upbringing, I was paying enough attention to catch it, and I just more or less let it slide.  The narrative was pulling me along well enough that I did not begrudge him a little missed math.

Still, when I closed the book, I did not care about the journey these folks had been through.

It is difficult to fault someone for writing a well executed novel that lacks an undefinable quality, but that’s what I have to do with Shopgirl.

Sam Harris wrote this short piece, Letter to a Christian Nation,  arguing with a strawman conservative Christian that, I guess, they’re wrong and hurtful in their beliefs.  It is frustrating on quite a few levels.

For me, Harris is attempting the easiest possible refutation – undermining a belief set that requires every word in a sacred text to be literally true – and not doing a great job of it.  You simply cannot argue with the viewpoint that the Bible (or the Koran or whatever) is literally true from the mindset of a scientist who is looking for contradictory evidence. If the person who believes every word of the Bible believed in those kinds of argumentation styles or held those axioms, you would not need to write out the rest of the argument.

Any kind of argument about such disparate viewpoints has to start for some common ground, some sets of basic beliefs and shared context that would make a discussion (or even a meaningful argument) possible.  Because he is arguing with a straw man, Harris does not really have any mechanism for that search.  He simply conjures someone with the same underlying precepts who has been tricked into adopting these beliefs and talks him out of it.  That does not convince me of much.

Even if I believed that he had successfully argued his strawman into the ground, he really does not address the more difficult and interesting case of people of faith holding more moderate views that are congruent with modern science, but that still lead to moral outcomes he disagrees with.

I do not mean to undersell the difficulty of the problem.  I think Harris and I share similar worldviews.  But holding a consistent (or even correct) worldview is not enough when one sits down to try to convince others that their foundations of belief are wrong.  You have to set out your arguments in forms and from axioms that someone with very different ideas of the source of morality and the value of evidence will still have to accept at some level.  It is a fantastically difficult undertaking.

Harris’s swing at this hard problem did not convince me of much.

I enjoy David Rakoff‘s writing a great deal, and was therefore pretty sure I knew what to expect as I dug into his latest, Half Empty. His usual erudite assessments of somewhat esoteric and interesting topics were there.  The meticulous organization of his thoughts and brilliant execution of his prose were on display.  Each chapter cum essay was deep and interesting, and I was enjoying everything without any large surprises.

I had forgotten that Mr. Rakoff writes books.

Many books that look superficially like Rakoff’s are collections of well executed or well received personal essays.  The chapters in Half Empty can easily masquerade as these kinds of essay, and, indeed many of these chapters have been published elsewhere. But it is a mistake to assume that these particular chapters appear just because it was time to bind a book.

As I was reading I did notice a tone that seemed unusual for the type of book thought I had in my hands.  It was more restrained and thoughtful than some of the other Rakoff I’ve read.  Rakoff is always in the center of the picture in his books, though often in a self-deprecating way.  And he is in the center of these as well, but more in a more subdued way – almost meditatively so.

The subtle shift of tone, as well as some of the continuing threads running through the chapters all crash together in the final chapter, which is surprising without being wholly out of the blue.  Themes and incidents from early chapters suddenly link in unexpected and holistic ways that make the events described in the final chapter vivid beyond even what Rakoff’s considerable craft could do without the groundwork.  To do all this in non-fiction is quite a remarkable feat.

Many people use their personal experience to make a point; Rakoff uses his to make a piece of literature, without fictionalizing it.  It is a powerful piece of writing that is not empty in any way.

Strongly Recommended.

Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution is an excellent discussion of the multi-faceted experiences and experiments that back the understanding of evolution.  He discusses evidence from the range of experiment and observation that support that worldview and points out convincingly that fossil evidence is the least of it.  In fact the fossil record can only refute evolution, which it pointedly has not done.  It is an admirable collection and explanation of reasons that scientists are convinced that evolution is a theory in the same sense that a heliocentric solar system is a theory.

However, it is not going to convince anyone who did not believe in evolution when they began reading.

I understand the contempt he expresses for those who oppose evolution. To scientists, they are simply ignoring facts, and worse, disrupting the work of people trying to pass on and extend those facts.  People who disbelieve evolution, to Dawkins, are equivalent to those who believe that the Sun orbits the Earth; and they are interrupting his lectures. He literally cannot contain his disdain for them.

While I understand his position, I think it is a counterproductive tone to take if you are trying to convince someone to give up their passionately held beliefs.  So, if you are diametrically opposed to evolution but are open to being coaxed into understanding and believing it, this is probably not the book for you.

If you do believe in evolution, Dawkins does an excellent, if occasionally rambling, job of laying out the major evidence and providing hooks where one can learn more.  I learned a bunch from it.

Recommended, with the above tonal caveats.

One of the great joys of reading Bill Bryson’s travel writing is joining him on his side trips, literary and physical.  Bryson writes like a guy who likes to learn and share facts about our world from the profound to the obscure, and will take off on a side trip with the slightest encouragement.  I generally find this to be one of his great assets.

The premise of his At Home: A Short History of Private Life is that he will take his readers on a tour of the old English rectory he lives in and explain how it came to be what it is.  He will then connect its history to the larger trends in the development of private life in the West. The tour will go room by room from the entryway to the attic. This seems to be a great set up for Bryson to spin many informative and interesting yarns.

Generally he does not disappoint.  He touches on everything from the development of architecture in England, Europe, and America, to the lives of servants, to why we have the spices on the table that we do.  Because he’s Bill Bryson, this information is swaddled in clear, diverting language with a wry humor that keeps it all in perspective.

Despite all this, I found myself looking at the number of pages remaining much more often than I usually do in a Bryson book.  I think that the structure is a little too loose here.  There’s almost nothing that can’t be tied to a room in the house somehow, and Bryson takes advantage of that to range widely on topics from the London sewers and the germ theory of disease to the anatomical rearrangements caused by corsets or the once fashionable practice of having wigs made from one’s healthy hair.  All these topics are diverting, but it is remarkably easy to lose track of the big picture when the picture is as big as Bryson makes it.

While that rattling narrative makes for a wandering read, it also makes it easy to pick the book up for a few pages, soak up Bryson’s description of whatever fascinating corner of Western civilization he’s decided is fair game, and set it back down for later.  The loose structure makes for a rambling book, not an unreadable one.  And it is an enjoyable and educational one as well.

Recommended, though the pace may be different than one expects.

Robert Reich is a former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and general supporter of worker’s rights.  His Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future lays out his point of view on the current situation and where he thinks we should go. I do not buy everything he says, but there are some thought provoking ideas in here.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is his take on the growing economic inequity in America.  Most of the people who rail against this argue from some moral position about how large disparities in wealth are wrong because of their unfairness.  Reich’s position is more interesting: to a first approximation he argues that if you want to have a stable economy based on the sale of consumer goods, you need to make sure your citizens can earn enough to buy those goods.  It’s a nice perspective because it lets you have the discussion with people who have different ideas of the righteousness of economic disparity.

There are other interesting ideas in here, too, as well as some very radical ideas for restructuring the economy and government to provide job and wage security for middle class workers in America.  I’ll be very surprised if many of these ideas appear in the near future, but it’s worth having someone putting concepts like these out there, if only to remind people that they exist.  A reverse income tax may never happen, but it’s an idea worth understanding and considering.

Almost everyone will find something to disagree with in here, but that will require thinking about it.  That’s worthwhile.

Recommended.

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.

This is a translation of The Iliad by Edward Earl of Darby in 1862, unsurprisingly free for the kindle, my current e-book reader of choice. I’d read parts of The Iliad in high school and had been meaning to get back to it.  Things come up, however, and twenty some-odd years later I finally got around to it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the reading it, front to back.  I suspect that I would have enjoyed it less in high school, but now it was an endless parade of delights.

First of all, it’s a rip-roaring Hollywood blockbuster of a story.  It’s one bloody encounter after another, described vividly and in detail.  I tried to read Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur a few years ago and found it deadly dull.  A big part of the reason for that was how sterile and ethereal all the interactions and altercations were.  Sure Arthur “slew on the left and slew on the right” but that leaves it all pretty vague what was going on.  With Homer You Are There: he describes the various movements of the heroes and how they face each other to the point of telling where the victorious spear enters the loser’s body and just how the body came apart.  While I do not feel any great need to know that Hector decapitated someone as opposed to disemboweling them, the overall tone is much more detailed and close to the action.  As a result the characters and situations are more lively.  Mallory seemed like literature to me in the worst pretentious way; Homer feels like a story that gets retold and amplified by people.

The translation is also a source of fun.  I can imagine a very direct translation that tries to get the meaning across as clearly as possible to modern readers so that they can easily follow events from a couple thousand years ago. That’s not what the Earl provides at all.  Apparently he’s trying to capture the flavor of the ancient Greek, and not knowing any Greek I can’t tell how he did.  What I can say is that his translation has a quirky rhythm and flow all its own.  For example, evidently negation was an intensifier in ancient Greek, because no divine intervention takes place without at least three offsetting negations: “you should not hesitate to avoid throwing your spear.”  It’s all comprehensible, but just alien enough to remind you that Homer’s world is a different place.  It’s also all pretty consistent, which gives the text the flavor of a stylist rather than a translator.

I also enjoy the little shout-outs and digressions throughout that remind the reader that this was a history of the war and the warriors and communities that contributed to it.  It is pretty common to introduce a character and describe his history and personality in the space between a spear being thrown at him and dashing out his brains.  Longer digressions describing the founding of cities or the lineage of the heroes also pop up.  While all this diverts from the main plot, I find it charming that some Greek soldier otherwise lost to the mists of time gets a brief moment of immortality here.

So, overall, The Iliad is a lot of fun to read, and it certainly helps your literacy in the classics.

Strongly Recommended.

I’ve already mentioned this on Facebook, but Warren Ellis has brought another Elemental video to my attention.  You may want to give it some of yours.  Elemental is well liked here.