Category: Books

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.

This book extends the world created in Niven’s “The Flight of the Horse”. The book comprises the short stories, “The Flight of the Horse”, “Leviathan!”, “A Bird in the Hand”, and others, as well as a new novella “Rainbow Mars”.

The short stories were published independently between 1969 and 1973, so they’re designed for independence and are farily self-contained. They describe enough of the world in which the stories are set that the reader can pick up what he or she needs to know as he or she needs to know it. In a slightly dystopian future, the UN rules the world and the position of Secretary-General is an inherited position, inherited by idiots. The sceintific arms of the UN compete in bureaucratic battles for budget, and the time travellers need to keep the current Secretary-General amused with their procurement of extinct animals. They try, but often they fail with results that we in their past will find amusing.

The longer work “Rainbow Mars”, coming almost thirty years later, builds upon these earlier stories. A new Secretary General is more interested in astronomy than extinct animals, and the time travellers have to find a way to keep themselves relevant–and they do. They need to bring an extinct Martian from the past.

Larry Niven demonstrates that he’s got a great talent for weaving myths, traditional stories, and classic science fiction stories into a narrative that pays homage to many (too many perhaps). Unfortunately, the people who put this book together put it together in the wrong order. “Rainbow Mars” should not lead off the book; it should follow those that came before it to provide context; although I had read the short stories earlier, I could have used the refresher. I guess the people who put the book together wanted to realy differentiate this volume from Flight of the Horse and Other Stories. They didn’t do us readers any favors, though.

So although I’d recommend the book for the Niven fans amongst us, I’d recommend you not read it in the order in which the publisher presents it. Read the short stories, and then the novel. Especially if you can score this book for two bucks like I did.

I know, you readers understand that if I am reading a book from the last two years, it’s probably a gift. And you’re right. my beautiful wife gave me this volume for Christmas, and I’ve read it already. During lunches at work, mostly, which identifies one of the best parts of Andy Rooney and other broadcast essays: They’re short capsules that render themselves easy to read in short doses. Unlike books you cannot put down, which require you to invest large blocs of time, books of short essays allow you to pick up the book and put it down and pick it up and put it down again. Such books fit easily into the working day and the busy nights of modern men. And let’s face it, I’ve sampled Rooney and Charles Osgood, and Rooney wins hands down.

This particular book captures a number of Rooney’s “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” segments from the television news magazine Sixty Minutes (as do many of his collections). The book starts in 1982 and finishes with some from 2003. It offers an interesting retrospective of a chunk of history I recognize as my formative years, as seen from a man who’s older than I am now. I don’t think that means much, but he does reflect on four presidential administrations, including two terms of Reagan and Clinton.

Some people don’t like Rooney because he’s a curmudgeon, but I don’t hold that against him; after all, I am a curmudgeon in training. I do recognize that he’s a little to the dovish side of me when it comes to foreign policy (he’s all butter and no guns), but I find enough wisdom in his damn kids bits and other non-political things to enjoy his writing.

One thing I don’t appreciate, though, is his reluctance–even defiance–in using apostrophes. Throughout this book, he doesn’t use apostrophes in contractions–at least not consistently. In the introduction, before I can no longer enumerate the typos, he informs me he’s not using them because he composed the pieces to be spoken on television, so he’s omitting the apostrophes since he didn’t pronounce them. It’s a jarring read, especially since he later brags about how many grammar books he has on the shelf behind his desk. Still, I forgive him, since the editors of his other books and his contemporary pieces on the CBS.com Web site have convinced him that most things should read easy, too.

What of this book? It’s a font of wisdom and foolishness. It’s an I-Ching, not quite the touchstone that apparently is The Godfather, but its 500+ pages offer insight into the modern condition that most classic philosophers don’t.