Walking on the Moon

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.

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.

A couple years ago, I wrote an interactive quiz for aviators to practice determining hold entries – mainly because I sucked at it.  At the suggestion of a user, I added a display mode to it.  You can check out the quiz.

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.