Category: Book Report

Whenever Heather and I travel, I like to pick up one of these silly little quiz books to help us pass the time. I picked up the Barnes and Noble edition of this book, for a number of dollars no less, because I knew we would be on the road this year. Unfortunately, although this book bills itself as a way to “Get your friends to reveal their inner selves with The Little Book of Stupid Questions“. Unfortunately, the book serves more to let you get to know David Borgenicht as much as to get to know each other.

Face it, quiz books of this sort should proffer brain teasers to elicit chuckles, amusing stories, or wry revelations on the part of those answering the question. Unfortunately, Borgenicht cannot help intruding with follow-up questions that presume the question will be answered a certain way, such as

If, by some quirk of fate, you run into your favorite celebrity/supermodel fantasy object, and, by some other quirk of fate, they [sic] come onto you, what would you do? What if you were in a committed relationship? Do you ask for an autograph afterwards?

or

When you’re in the shower and you see a little hair on the tile wall, do you fill your hands with water and try to splash it off, or [sic] try to pluck it off with your fingers? Why are we so predictable?

Some of the questions are seemingly rhetorical, as though Borgenicht couldn’t wait for Amateur Night at the comedy club.

If you ate your own foot, would you lose weight?

or

Do you think that the first time corn ever popped [sic] it scared the hell out of the Indians?

and furthermore

Why do people who use "correct grammar" sound like such dorks?

Even when he’s not cracking wise or writing with a smirk, he’s repeating himself. What would your name be as a rock singer/super hero/exotic dancer? Who would you least like to be haunted by/stuck in an elevator with/spend an eternity in hell with? I started skipping the similar questions, the rhetorical questions, and the repeated questions. Ultimately, it left about a third of the book qualified to do what it advertises.

However, Borgenicht does lead to hours of amusing speculation with this question:

If they can make a "black box" that is so indestructible that it survives a plane crash, why don’t they just make the airplane out of the same material?

Wow. Is Borgenicht plagiarizing from George Carlin’s Brain Droppings, or is he plagiarizing from Mike Barnicle’s column in the Boston Globe which itself plagiarized from Brain Droppings and led to Barnicle’s dismissal?

Wondering about that answer could eat up some drive time in the middle of Illinois, werd.

I got this book, in hardback, from the Quality Paperback Club for like a buck. I’ve been a fan of the Darwin Awards since I joined the IT industry and realized that I had an Internet browser right on my computer desktop and learned all the amusing little sites with which I could amuse myself when I needed a break from breaking the software (even when I was a mere technical writer, I was hell on code, werd). So I’m already familiar with the concept of the Darwin Award.

A Darwin Award goes to people who make spectacularly poor decisions that lead to their own deaths. Not just bad decisions; having a few beers and then driving up the Pacific Coast Highway while calling your ex-girlfriend and then going off the road and into the surf, that’s a bad decision, but not spectacularly bad. Spectacularly bad is drinking a couple of beers, climbing a telephone pole, and peeing onto electric wires. Macabre, no doubt, but amusing from a distance.

Because the book comes from a Web site, one has to wonder what the book format brings that the Web site does not. For example, I’ve read F’d Companies as well as and urban legend encyclopedia that resemble printed versions of Snopes, and in many cases, the answer is not much. As it is with this volume.

The book, as a value-added nod to the print medium, also contains an essay that begins each chapter. Unfortunately, the essays are rather short–600 words or less, I reckon–that lightly touches upon a topic unrelated to the chapter. These essays are light overviews of topics such as how the entries are picked, flame wars on the Web site, and transgenic animals, and they offer the depth one might find in a syndicated newspaper feature. A short one. But they’re unrelated

Each actual Darwin Award vignette is properly sized for a screen of text, so each is about a page or so in print. They’re quick and easy to read. That’s the plus for the book, but it’s also what’s on the Web site. So now that’ve said something nice about the book, I’ll sum up.

This volume doesn’t add much to the Web site, so it’s worth the money if “the money” is only a buck and/or you like to read this stuff offline or cannot type www.darwinawards.com into a Web browser.

As some of you know, I’ve been reading Steinbeck on and off for the last couple of years (Of Mice and Men review); what I said then holds true. Steinbeck’s as accessible and as easy to read as Hemingway, which means I’ve read a bunch of him, and the Faulkner I was supposed to read in college remains on my to-read shelves.

This book deals with a group of Mexican-Americans who live in Tortilla Flat, a small, er, suburb of Monterey populated by Mexican Americans. It’s set immediately after the first world war. The main characters are layabouts. It’s not so much a novel as a collection of anecdotes or loosely-related stories, a la Winesburg, Ohio. Actually, considering that the pastime of the main characters is stealing or trading for gallons of wine, perhaps this book should be called Winesburg, California. But it’s not.

To keep with the spirit of the book, I drank much red wine while reading it. The level in my bottle went down, down, and perhaps I enjoyed the book more for it. Still, I couldn’t apply too many lessons of the book to my life, since none of my neighbors have chickens I can steal, and because I like to think my life has more meaning than acquiring money for wine. I’m a Guinness man, don’t you know?

Still, the ultimate point of this book might be that there’s more to life than laying about and drinking. However, the thin characterization and even the thin narration don’t really compel the reader to make those conclusions. It’s sort of like an epidode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We were lazing about, stealing for wine, and an incident occurred.

Unlike Star Trek: The Next Generation, though, you can sound a bit snooty when you say, “This reminds me of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat….” So if you like quick reads in Great American Literature, pick it up. Especially if you can score it as part of a Steinbeck set at $1 each like I did. Werd.

This book is 20 years old. You like the Far Side? That’s yesterday’s newspaper. The Far Side has been out of business for so long, most young people today–indeed, most in that coveted 18-34 demographic–won’t remember it. Sort of like if you talk about Opus, or Bloom County, or Calvin and Hobbes in five years, or Dilbert in ten or fifteen (although perhaps Dilbert, like Hagar the Horrible, will remain in the funny pages longer than in the culture).

So I’m ashamed that this book is now one of those cultural artifacts I’m fond of reading–especially since I remember it in its pre-artifact days. The wry, outlandish humor remains, but I wonder how much of it would fly in today’s world. Particularly the gags with the mushroom clouds. Of course, in the early eighties, we had a Republican president that contemporary conventional wisdom thought was bringing humanity to the brink of its extinction. Looking back, the sepia-toned memories are less frightening since the bigger story turned out well. But I digress. Mushroom clouds? Not so funny. Office politics and corporate shenanigans? Funny and relevant, for a couple years yet.

Still, the book’s amusing enough in itself. One typically encounters Far Side cartoons individually, tacked on cubicle walls from Far Side calendars (or at least that’s how I encounter them on my beautiful wife‘s cubicle wall). En masse, such as a great book like this, one encounters a greater number of cartoons of varied punchlines, which means the end result is average–wherein the cubicle wall is very selective, choosing one or two cartoons from a year’s worth of cartoons reprinted from several years’ worth of cartoons.

Perhaps I just read this book too quickly (a single night). But I didn’t spend too much on it (4 books for 4 bucks plus shipping and handling from Quality Paperback Club), so I’m pleased with it. If you’re a Far Side fan, it’s worth it. If you’re not, it’s like a collection of Andy Capp’s greatest hits. Well, no, probably a bit better than that since most of us can identify with cattle on the moon better than English ruggers, but you get my point.

As you all know by now if you’ve been reading these book reviews and haven’t skipped over them to get to the snarky humor, I read a lot of books that are not only sociological studies, but also are artifacts of their time periods. What they say about whatever they’re talking about reflects the time in which they’re written as much as the subject they cover. So I picked this book for under a buck during one of those binges of used book-buying in which my my beautiful wife and I often indulge.

I read it over the course of a couple weeks during my lunches at work. I even pasted a number of Post-It notes into the book with snarky comments so I could do a longer, more reasoned evaluation of the book. However, since it’s been on my desk here, just to the right of the MfBJN mainframe for a couple of weeks now, this is all you get. Sorry.

You can pretty much guess how the book’s going to go from the title. Unfortunately, the book’s cover doesn’t have the proper soap opera score to illustrate the way you should read the title. Ideally, it would be Video Fever: Entertainment? [piano tinkle] Education? [tinkle] or Addiction [heavy chord DUM DUM!]

Charles Beamer, high school teacher, examines the video game craze as you would expect a high school teacher might. He goes to video arcades (remember them?), asks questions to which anyone not called “faculty” in a professional capacity would raise an eyebrow, and then extrapolates results from a limited statistical sample.

You know what he found?

Bad elements liked to hang out in arcades, smoke marijuana, and sometimes those bad kids stole a couple bucks from their parents’ purses or wallets to play. Sometimes, games were the “only friend” of the players, and other anthropomorphic mayhem ensued. Beamer “examines” the typical player archetypes, from the preteen misfits to the 20-somethings blowing off steam. He briefly examines the benefits that video games might provide–raising a generation comfortable with that fad “computer” thing.

But he’s just waiting to get into the harm video games provide. Stealing quarters from parking meters. Smoking pot (brother, have we got a surprise for you in a couple years, when people start to smoke crystallized cocaine). Antisocial superpredators–no, wait, sorry, that’s what latchkey crack babies movies or GTA would later provide. As a result, the tail end of Generation X has no hope at all.

Then he examines what can be done, which devolves from a study of good family life into a screed favoring extremely strict Christian discipline. Frankly, that particular turn in an attempted even-handed sociological study couldn’t have been more jarring if the author had written Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

So it’s an amusing tract, almost worth the thirty-three and a third cents I paid for it (if that much). I’m not sure it’s worth the hours I spent reading it, but hey, I’m jumping on that grenade for you, gentle reader, to spare you the horror.

---

Marginalia:

As I mentioned, I noted some sections for extra snarkage. I’d hate to have wasted all those expensive little yellow slips with adhesive on one end, so I’ve included the best for you below:

• p11:
  

  It’s dark inside arcades and video game centers, womblike, comforting, exciting. Lights flash and flicker seductively in many colors from strange and alluring sources. Sounds of battle beckon the players to death-defying heroism, courageous exploits hardly possible in the ordinary worlds of school and home, and hours and hours of fun!

  Jeez, man, I’ll admit my mother smoked cigarettes while I was gestating, so I remember the womb as dark, soft, and warm (or so I remmeber through the recovered memories). What was your mother smoking to make her womb like a freaking video arcade while you were gestating?

• In a section called “Tricks of the Trade”:
  

  A distributors’ [sic, and from a TEACHER no less] problem that makers assist in solving is “burn-out” among players who become tired of playing the same games in the same places. One tick the markers use is to provide distributors with decals and pop-in microchips; the decals slide under the tabletop on the front of the machine, making it look like an entirely new machine, and the exchange of microchips changes the way the machine plays in a way so the playes believe it is a new game.

  You heard it here first. JAMMA is a trick! played upon poor, unsuspecting quarter-thieving, ganja-smoking teens. Except swapping the boards (not just the chips, brother) does make a new game. Of course, Beamer’s technical comprehension is limited.

• p67, introduction to the chapter “Do Video Games Harm Anyone?”
  

  Perceptions of experiences are more important than the experiences themselves. There are people who can find joy hidden in even the most tragic situation, and there are others who cannot be satisfied or made happy no matter what their experience of joy. We see ourselves and our experiences uniquely, and “real facts” are distorted and shaped and changed by any number of factors–how we feel about ourselves, our memory of past experiences, and our expectations of a situation.

  Just put down the epistemology and back slowly away before you harm yourself and others. “Perceptions of experiences are more important than the experiences themselves”? Jeez, whatever your mother was smoking must have been potent.

• p135, in “Appendix B: How the Games Work”:
  

  Home-delivery systems have been heralded as the “coming thing.” Promoters say that soon (even now in some areas) it will be possible for you to shop for groceries or any other product from your home.

  Well, it took a couple years, by Cosmo and Webvan took right care of that. Note to younger readers: In the later part of the last century, two Internet companies called Cosmo and Webvan got lots of venture capital to lose trying to do just that. “Even now in some areas” would take eighteen years from Beamer’s prognostication to be proven unready. Cripes, it’s 2004, and I have to explain Webvan.

• p136, the real pain sets in when Beamer describes how arcade games are programmed in Basic [sic] where a pyxel [sic] is manipulated and a byte is 1000 [sic] bits and wherein
  

  Two other terms now come into play, and both refer to program commands in response to a player’s action. The first term is “poke.” Poke is a command meaning “go to” some pyxel or matrix on the screen. When a player fires the cannons or lasers of his spaceship to destroy an asteroid or a space invader, the microprocessor understands only “Poke.” On a microchip, an impulse flashes toward a number of pyxels in a direct line (a line that appears direct on the screen but actually is moving diagonally or slantwise across tiny dots) toward the edge of the screen.
  The second term is “peek.” It is a command meaning “look ahead.” The microprocessor is asking a microchip to look ahead of the “poke” command to see if there is anything along the line of “poke.” If there is, then another subprogram goes into operation: a collision occurs, an invader is blown up, lights flash, sound blares.

  In Beamer’s world, upright arcade games are written in mangled Commodore BASIC 2.0. I’d weep for Babylon, too, if I were projecting the future across these flawed sightlines.

The Holy Tome of Mitnick, describes the various means through which social engineers infiltrate your company to extract sensitive information. Coupled with a bit of technical knowledge, a bit of insight into large corporate community, and two heaping tablespoons of audacity, these fellows play upon the good will of corporate insiders to get into places where they shouldn’t.

Each chapter and section analyzes different techinques used and psychological traits preyed upon, with sample scenarios (often told from real-life hearsay), but you, gentle reader, should buy this book, learn from its contents, and trust no one. Granted, I started out paranoid cautious, but this book reminds you to not trust that friendly voice on the phone and to vet people you meet in person.

Of course I recommend the book. Read it now!

And just so you know how much I value this book, I paid whole paperback book club price for it!

This book is supposed to be a whodunit. It’s more a WTF?

The book is set in 1962. The backdrop: The end of the Mets’ miserable season. During a ballgame in late September, Jerry Fielder, a “businessman” with a shady reputation, is murdered in the pressbox with a number of people nearby. Who could have done it? Who cares?

For starters, the first person narrator is a somewhat minor character, recounting things that happen to other people. It’s kind of jarring to try to keep that bit straight. Second, it takes like 70 pages until the murder is committed. Thirdly, it’s difficult to keep the suspects straight, much less the investigating characters and the partners and whatnot. Some characters call suspects by their first names, others by their last names, and at by the middle of the book, I gave up trying to keep it straight, instead, I just wanted to get through the book.

Someone did it. Or did someone else? Who knows? The Mets didn’t win the pennant that year, and the scorecard for the game in question was the vital clue. A fielder’s choice was marked an error. So you see, the title’s a pun playing on that, not the character’s name! Ha hah! The gimmick got ya!

Ha hah! I paid under a buck for it in hardback, of which the author got what he deserved: nothing!

Excuse me, I am bitter because my own masterpiece has not yet been published, and it only takes fifty pages to get interesting. Where’s the justice, I ask you.

Well, I have done my part to help maintain Jasperwood and to keep Lileks in Hummels and cigars. I read The Bleat, his Back Fence column with the Star-Tribune, and even his weekly Newhouse News column. That’s all free, though, and does little for Lileks’ bottom line, which is probably higher than many peoples’ top lines, but still. By reading off the Web, I was not empowering Lileks. Much like you freeloading readers are doing by not sendng me cash or visiting my Amazon wish list and sending me goodies. Not that I am trying to put a guilt trip on you; I know you’re all heartless socialistopaths who think we should be just doing this because we can, and you want it. But I digress, gentle skinflint reader.

So I went out and bought The Gallery of Regrettable Food, at full price no less, to send a couple pennies’ worth of royalties to Minnesota (the poor man’s Wisconsin). Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the work.

As you might know from viewing Lileks’ Web site, the Gallery represents photos and some snarky wit about recipes collected in books released in the years when Baby Boomers’ parents were cooking. Lileks started the project based on a cookbook he found among his mother’s effects. The book’s wit might be spot-on (Heather liked the pages she browsed), but unfortunately, it didn’t rub me the right way for a couple reasons:

• As a rule, I am deferential to older generations and their wisdom. I don’t mock it, even when it’s goofy. Well, maybe I do sometimes, but this book led me to a high horse, and you can lead a man to a high horse, but you can’t make him drink. If you lead him to Guiness, though….what was my point?
• I read this book too soon after Make Room for TV, a book which examined old television shows and extrapolated from them to score Marxist/Feminist points. Lileks’ book doesn’t make political points, but it does make light of the knowledge of our forebearers. Or at least the knowledge of those who marketed to our forebearers. Still, I had too much anti-Spigel venom built up to appreciate what Lileks was doing.
• I have a closet full of these books from when I was doing the eBay thing. I’d pick them up for a dime and list them for a couple of bucks. I sold a couple, too, to people looking for their parents’ recipes, or perhaps to the parents who lost the recipes in a divorce settlement or something. Still, Lileks cuts into the resale value of these treasures I own.

Still, I am glad I bought the book. I’m happy to underwrite Lileks, even though this particular tome is not my bag. I imagine his next volume, Interior Desecrations, will be some of the same. But he’s a good writer, and soon he should have some collection of his other writings coming out which I’ll enjoy more.

You might wonder why I bothered to read this book, whose full title is Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Actually, I wondered a bit myself while wandering through this Marxist/Feminist inquiry into the impact of television on life of the bourgeois in the ten years after World War II. Then I remembered. Because I paid a whole quarter for it at the library. Plus, it just sounds cool if someone asks what you’re reading, and you can answer Marxist/Feminist inquiry into the impact of television on life of the bourgeois in postwar period. Not that anyone asked. But I was ready to answer.

So I sloughed through five chapters and 187 pages of this book, remembering for a brief moment (if you count three weeks’ worth of head-shaking lunches as “a brief moment”) what it was like in college. When I would be assigned something like this, or would be assigned some topic tangentally related to this for a paper whose research would lead me to this book, and I would read some of it because I had to. Let’s face it, this thing wasn’t aimed for the mass paperback market.

My second problem with this book is the author’s faulty methodology. The first, of course, is that she’s a Marxist/Feminist academic, but to bring that up would be ad homenim, and people are allowed to believe stupid things because this is still a free country. When it’s no longer free, we’ll be mandated to believe those stupid things. But I digress.

Spigel builds a history of repression in America in what she calls the Victorian period, willfully or foolishly applying a historical term that denotes a period British history. Calling it the era of the Robber Barons wouldn’t have had the same connotation of repression and need, though, so she calls the last portion of the 18th century through World War II “Victorian” for, I would assume, the whole world, not just Britain. Granted, this is just a quibble over language, but since language is how we communicate concepts, I could tell pretty early how different the author and I conceptualize.

So, about the methodology. Spigel surveys magazines from the immediate post World War II period, examines the advertisements for televisions, and compares them with some prepackaged thought in the form of other academic pabulum which agrees with her basic M/F premises. As a result, she tells us about the repressed suburban bourgeois and how television was a tool of The Man to hold them down.

Brothers and sisters, I cannot tell you how goofy the ultimate intellectual content of this book is. Spurious assertions, laughable on the face, abound. Americans felt ambivalent to television because it was used as a weapon in World War II? Spigel forgot to footnote how commercial broadcasts brought the Axis to its knees. Perhaps she just meant sounds carried invisibly, magically through space. The more intellectually rigorous sections of the book do offer two sides to an issue. For example, if men don’t help the housewives at home, they’re pigs. If they do, it’s because they’re powerless at work and seek to assert their control where they can, in the home. Truly, Spigel has a dizzying intellect.

Sometimes, though, she makes a coherent, almost reasonable argument, such as asserting that television provided a proxy communal neighborhood at a time when suburban sprawl removed people from their traditional, more urban neighborhoods. Unfortunately, Spigel took this argument elsewhere, leaving me with a small idea with which I could agree. I hold tightly to this single idea, because otherwise I wasted a bunch of time and twenty-five cents, which is about a thirty-secondth of a six-pack of Guinness.

Academic textbooks that share this worldview spend a lot of time analyzing existing metaphors, images, and other artificial constructs and magically reveal, through their scrying, that the premise with which the academic began the inquiry is actually the conclusion. Unfortunately, they (like this book) write syllogisms in space.

So there you have it, gentle readers; the missing book. I meant to do a longer, more reasoned review pointing out where Spigel diverges from reality, but then I realized I have better things to do. Were I an academic, teaching three sections a week, perhaps I could have time to fit it into my salaried day. But it’s not worth my leisure time. And this book is not worth yours, unless you’re like me: a book slut.

I picked this book up in a Barnes and Noble in Springfield last year. Off the remainder rack, for $6.95, so don’t think I am out there buying all sorts of expensive books. However, based on this book, I’d be happy to buy another of Lupica’s novels.

The story revolves around the recruiting of an American ex-pat living in Europe to a struggling NBA team. After seeing D. Gerard play in a charity game, scout Eddie Holtz is determined to bring him back to play for the New York Knights. When D. Gerard removes a cap, Eddie’s shocked to see it’s a woman. He think she’s got enough game to run with the males in the NBA, and he convinces Dee that she ought to take her shot at the big time. He convinces his boss to take a shot on integrating the NBA, and the boss is happy to, if only for the novelty. But when Dee starts to play, she’s got to prove she deserves to be in the NBA.

Seemed to me that the first Lupica book I read was a mystery, so I almost expected a corpse to turn up in this book. Well, one does, sort of; but it’s not a mystery. It’s a mainstream novel, one I could enjoy. I don’t watch basketball as a matter of course, but the book conveyed enough authenticity in digestible form that my rudimentary knowledge of the game didn’t hinder my comprehension.

Most of all, I liked Lupica’s writing style. Easy to read, smooth and comprehensible, kinda like Guinness for the eyes. Of course, I remarked to Heather that Lupica’s style is rather like my own. So perhaps I am prejudiced.

For those of us keeping score at home, this is the 19 book I have read this year, and the 18th review you’ve suffered through. Thanks. And sorry for the review for the missing book, which you’ll suffer through when I get around to it.

I don’t know if it was inappropriate or not, but I read The Dilbert Future at work. Unlike most Dilbert books, which lament the workplace environment and the world’s dysfunctional state, this book laments the current state and the state the world was going to be in. So it represents a forward looking bad employee attitude.

Scott Adams took his cartooning insight into trends that were nascent in 1997 (or 1996, which is when I assume he wrote the book) and projected them out into the future. With some wryness, of course, but with some sincerity, too. His futurism is hit or miss, but he did pick up on some interesting things which came true. Some don’t, however. We don’t all have ISDN, but we do have cable modems and DSL, which are gradually supplanting the dial-up lines used in 1997. And this Internet thing has gotten a whole lot bigger. Not as big as the hype which would peak within a couple years of this book’s publication, but bigger. Adams also picked up the trend of blogging:

Prediction 52: In the future, everyone will be a news reporter.

Jeff Jarvis is so behind Scott Adams.

So Adams takes his best stabs at the future, and the book’s amusing enough with that. However, with the ultimate chapter, “A New View of the Future”, Adams goes careers off into a I’m Not Really Here-style weird Buddhist musing. He talks about how future paradigm shifts will indicate our current perception of the experience of time is inaccurate, and the near past, near future, and present are all the same, or similar, or something. He’s sincere. Hey, I am all for keeping an open mind, but this bit lacks a big enough dose of skepticism for me.

Still, it’s only a chapter, and it’s not the whole book, so I can overlook it and say the book’s amusing enough to read.

When I finished this book last night, Heather asked me if I liked it. I said, “It’s okay.” Was it a good book? she pressed. “It was okay,” I responded.

There you have it: this is a nice book.

It’s about 40% biography, wherein John Stossel tells us about his evolution as a thinker and a commentator, and 60% survey of libertarian positions on issues. It’s an unfortunate mix, because it really didn’t do too much for me.

Stossel tells us anecdotes from times throughout his career when he was working as a consumer advocate reporter for local affiliates up until he became the 20/20 presence and network gadfly. These anecdotes and insights are the strength of the book. It could have used more of Stossel’s personal account of his odyssey. The first four or five chapters describe it.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the book is not much more than a laundry list of what libertarians believe (less government, more personal responsibility). The very chapter titles reflect this: “Welfare for the Rich”, “The Trouble with Lawyers”, “The Left Takes Notice”, “”It’s Not My Fault” and up to “Owning Your Body” and “Free Speech”. Stossel works in a few anecdotes–including the one excerpted in Reason–but mostly he just conducts a survey course.

Perhaps it’s a good primer for the people who’ve seen Stossel on television and don’t know much about libertarianism. If so, he assures them that others share the vision they might find attractive. Heck, he even invokes Ayn Rand a couple of times. But it doesn’t offer a detailed, reasoned argument to sway thinkers–or to offer arguments for the believers who want to them.

Of course, it’s not Bias when it comes to harsh indictment of media, and it’s not Ann Coulter or Michael Moore polemics to rouse the rabble or enrage the heretics. It’s more even-tempered than that, and it does treat the reader fairly, and the opposition sympathetically. Stossel even offers kind words to the police state government and contemporary society, noting that we’re remarkably open and free even while we’re moving towards crackpot nannyism.

That Stossel’s a nice boy.

So that’s what it is; a nice, rational, but ultimately lightweight treatise (if that’s not an oxymoron) on how one man became a libertarian (or small-l liberal) and what it means to him.

Ah, a light mystery romp. This is the first book of Carl Hiassen’s that I have read, and it probably won’t be the last.

It’s the story of a newspaperman who’s gone from the front page of his small Florida daily to the obituary beat, punishment for his forthright (and possibly self-destructive) nature. As he grows older, he starts obsessing about the ages of famous people when they died, and whom he’s out lived–without contributing as much.

When an obscure 80s pop star dies, Jack Tagger suspects foul play. He’s right, of course; what kind of mystery would it be without it?

You know, Hiassen might just be the funniest writer to come out of the Miami Herald ever. The voice of the book is light, vulnerable, and humorous. It’s a good light read, and I look forward to my next Hiassen novel.

Yep, that’s all I got for a review.

I know, I know. You’re all saying, “Brian, why are you reading a book that goes in the Self-Help / Psychology / Inspiration section?” Easy question.

Because I am a promiscuous book slut. I’ll read anything with two covers. Sometimes two at once even. Good, bad, beautiful, ugly, I just cannot stop. Also, I thought the title indicated this particular work was a mind-over-matter, Zen or Hindu ascetic equivalent of Gainpro. There, I admitted it.

It’s not. What it is, however, is a dose of practical, populist pragmatism for the masses. Of course, since I spent forty-five thousand dollars and interest on a Philosophy degree, everything relates to Pragmatism, Existentialism, Objectivism, Dialectic Materialism, or Rudimentarialistic Sponteneal Constructionism.

The core message is that you have to believe in yourself and your abilities to make the efforts and to take the chances to succeed. Much like William James’s parable of the mountain trail, or Thoreau (a Transcendentalist, not a Pragmatist, don’t you think I know that?) telling you to aim high, for men can hit what they aim at. Schwartz directs much of his energy and the book at being successful in business, particularly succeeding in a corporate environment or as an entrepreneur. As such, he does intimate that you can get by with just the right attitude without bogging down your pretty little head with technical aptitude. I’ve worked for too many project managers who got an MBA from Schwartz’s academic successors to heed that augury. I forgive him, though.

I forgive him because the style of the book is accessible and easy to read. Easier than Charles Sanders Peirce, anyway. And since it deals with everyday problems and situations, it makes pragmatism relevant to everyone. Undoubtedly, it’s helped the two generations preceding mine, as the book was originally published in 1959 and revised in 1967 before being reissued as a paperback in 1997. So while the concepts are applicable, the book’s quaintly dated whenever he mentions salaries, housing prices, or veterans (from World War II and Korea) taking night classes.

So grab the book if you can find it cheaply. It’s inspired me a bit, and I’ve even put a quote from it on my whiteboard:

Persisting in one way is not a guarantee of victory. But persistence blended with experimentation does guarantee success.

That’s better advice than I’ve ever gotten from an underpants gnome, werd.

In his characteristic Author’s Note at the end of the book, Anthony admits:

I wrote “Ghost” the story, about 10,000 words long, somewhere back in 1961….

No doubt. This whole volume smacks of a sixties sensibilty. The Author’s Note describes how long and hard it was for Anthony to get this thing published. It’s not that the book is bad, but it is dated with a sixties sensibility.

The plot deals with a time-traveliing ship, the Meg II, sent into the future to search for a source of energy for the starving planet. And maybe some insight into what happened to the Meg I. The world from which the Meg II launches is a slightly dystopian future, where space travel exists but is looked down upon by earthbound residents as a waste of scarce resources. So far, so good.

But the timeship is rooted to its original time by a psychadelic psychic beacon whose connection to its origin time cannot survive strong emotions from crewmembers. So it goes without saying that the free-love rules will lead to strong emotions, and there’s a suicide, and suddenly the ship finds another entity moving through time. A galaxy, or a ghost. Once the ship meets the entity, suddenly it’s a bad acid trip having something to do with the Seven Deadly Sins and when the crew groks understands the nature of the entity, the book ends.

Incarnations of Immortality, it ain’t.

I brought this book along on my vacation as some light reading for the flight to Florida. The full title of this book is Freefall: From 41,000 Feet to Zero – a True Story. To make a long book short, on July 23, 1983, a 767 bound from Ottawa to Edmonton ran out of fuel in mid-flight. Somewhere east of Winnipeg, the engines just shut off at 41,000 feet. Fuel starvation, it’s called. But hey, without any explosive fuel, the passengers only had to contend with dropping from eight miles in the sky at 400+ miles an hour–no fireball needed!

Yes, I brought it and yes, I read it on the plane–a 757, thank you, not a deathtrap 767 like in the book. Some people read horror books about clown-looking serpent demons who come out of storm drains, but they’re pikers. You want real terror, put something at stake. Like your life aboard one of those damn contraptions while your read about a hideous plane disaster

You want to know why flying a plane is scary? Because a cascading system of simple failures can lead to disaster. Suppose you’ve got a fuel sensor, redundant of course with two channels, but instead of getting 5v to one channel, it’s getting .9v and the whole sensor blanks out instead of switching to the working channel, and then a mechanic discovers a work-around but the mechanic at the next airport disables the work-around, and the visor-wearing Quebecker fuel guy hand calculates the fuel in the tank by multiplying by the specific gravity of pounds (1.44) instead of kilograms (.8), and suddenly you’ve got 61 passengers and 8 crew watching personal in-flight movies of their lives on the backs of their eyelids.

I’ll admit, the book helped take the edge off of the flight. Its pacing is slow and non-suspenseless. It’s as though the authors took a Reader’s Digest Drama in Real Life and stretched it into two hundred plus pages. The authors manage to work in the biography of all of the crew, many of the passengers, some people in an unrelated nearby plane, and the complete history of the town of Gimli, Manitoba. The fluff, while adding depth to the book, really detracts from the suspense.

Without appropriate apprehensiveness from reading this book, I had to turn to Heather’s uncle in Florida, a former engineer for Pratt and Whitney, for tales of terror. Remember Des Moines? He does, and he can tell you in great detail what happens when a stress-fatigue crack sends a turbine blade through the control cables on the wing.

As some of you know, I hold Robert B. Parker in the in the highest esteem. Of course I buy his books when they come out, whether they’re Sunny Randall or Jesse Stone, or especially when they’re Spenser novels.

This novel represents the best of the Spenser novels. For those of you who are not in the know, the Spenser character spawned the 1980s series Spenser: For Hire which starred Robert Urich. So they’re crime fiction. This piece finds Spenser working for a wealthy woman who wants to catch her husband in flagrante delecto for a divorce. The husband turns up dead in his office at a large energy-trading corporation while Spenser’s outside tailing, which Spenser cannot abide. Spenser finds himself with an onion to peel; each layer of sex, scandal, and big business leads to another. Red herrings abound. A tightly-crafted plot, and Spenser muddles through with some help from his friends.

Sure, Parker derives some from the Enron scandal and even some from his own previous work, but it’s a damn good read and a damn good thirtieth birthday present to the Spenser character and his fans. ‘Nuff said.

When I drove to Milwaukee, I listened to a couple of Bill Cosby CDS that were originally released as Bill Cosby LPs in the late 1960s, when Cosby was fresh from I-Spy and before he embarked on the Fat Albert thing and The Cosby Show. If you damn kids don’t know what an LP is, Google it. I enjoyed his warm storytelling style of humor and the easy chuckle-style amusement it brings, so I stopped by Downtown Books in Milwaukee and picked up a copy of Time Flies, a book written during the height of his Cosby Show celebrity.

The tone of the 30 year-old Cosby’s stories contrast with the book written by the 50-year-old Cosby; the book deals with Cosby turning 50, and he reminisces about his former glory as an athlete and talks about the loss of memory, physique, and other things that come while the eternal footman goes to the coat check room for you. The essays don’t mourn the loss with disappointment or rancor, but more a nostalgia. I liked the book and read it pretty quickly.

An interesting, extra poignant moment in the book is when Cosby compares his aging physique to that of his son, Ennis, as they play basketball together. The young reaching its prime, the older recognizing the fundamental shift and the nature of the cycle. Ten years later, the cycle was broken when Ennis died, but seventeen years ago, they played basketball together, and the father thought of his mortality while the son didn’t recognize his own.

Unfortunately, the publisher or someone has seen fit to include an introduction by Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., that really detracts from the book as a whole. Before Cos can start, the doctor has started talking seriously about the prospect of aging and the fears faced by aging people (as opposed, I suppose, to dead people, who are very mellow indeed). We readers could have figured out Cosby’s overall message without some therapidiocy slathered onto the actual text before we read the text. Thanks, doctor, for getting me in touch with my inner senior.

I paid a dollar for this book at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri. It was on the rack of cheap books that they keep outside the store because they don’t care if someone loots them. That’s the kind of book I bought for a dollar.

The book takes place aboard a space ship containing survivors from Earth’s social breakdown, en route to a planet around Barnard’s Star. All but one are in suspension for the trip, leaving a single person to wander the ship for the five year trip, checking on automatic instruments and going mad with guilt for the sins he committed while stealing the ship. And others.

Much of the book is told in flashback, flashbacks to an Ehrlichian future imagined by those whacky Brits in the period between world wars. The remainder of it represents a descent into paranoia and a climactic delirium that almost tells the untold story, but allows the user to concoct his own meaning if he cares to. Okay, I did a little the night I finished the book, but that’s it.

It’s a light read and I spent only a couple of nights on it. It helped that many of the 184 pages featured concrete poetry, drawing words on the page with other letter much like ASCII art. At least it got that part of the future right.

Book Review: All the Trouble in the World by P. J. O’Rourke (1994)

This book examines some of the worst problems that the world thought it faced in the 1990s: Overpopulation, famine, ethnic hatred, plague, poverty, and such; for each chapter, P. J. O’Rourke goes beyond the statistics proffered by the movements and think tanks to examine the roots of the issues in the fertile beds in which they grow. As you can expect, he presents his usual irreverent viewpoint in smirky prose. For example, the chapters bear these titles:

1. Fashionable Worries If Meat Is Murder, Are Eggs Rape?
2. Overpopulation Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You
3. Famine All Guns, No Butter
4. Environment The Outdoors and How It Got There
5. Ecology We’re All Going to Die
6. Saving the Earth We’re All Going to Die Anyway
7. Multiculturalism Going from Bad to Diverse
8. Plague Sick of It All
9. Economic Justice The Hell with Everything, Let’s Get Rich

Within each of the chapters, O’Rourke visits a symptomatic location that exemplifies the problem. For “Overpopulation”, he ventures to Bangladesh and learns why so many people want to live there (it’s the most fertile soil on the planet) and muses about how overcrowded man really is by comparing population densities of other locations (such as if the entire population of the planet in 1995 would scrunch together with the population density of Manhattan, we could all fit inside a region the size of the former Yugoslavia. Bangladesh has the same population density as the suburban city of Fremont, California, so O’Rourke delves into why the country seems so overcrowded and Fremont seems so American. Therein lies the rub; American government and society are open and dynamic, whereas Bangladesh’s government is not. They have a Ministry of Jute, designed to promote jute, the leading agricultural export of Bangladesh. You know, jute–the key ingredient in burlap, which was a very popular packing material a hundred years ago.

O’Rourke gets behind the pamphlets and examines not only causes, but the factors that lead to the continuation of problems as well as some amusing extrapolations: You want to embrace diversity? They have in the Balkans. Of course, that’s not the tribalism that comes from diversity, it’s the tribalism that comes from private ownership of guns, undoubtedly.

When O’Rourke’s on, he’s amusing to read, biting, and obviously arguing from a wealth of background. When he’s not, he’s simply presenting a travelogue of places he’s traveled and drank. Still, this book is more of the former, which is what I expected from the title.