Lawrence Block. The
Burglar in the Closet. The hero or central character, your choice, is
a burglar who lives and works in Manhattan.
His dentist tells him his ex-wife has a lot of expensive jewelry and
suggests the burglar steal it and split the take with him. While the burglar is in the apartment, the
ex-wife comes back with a man. The
burglar hides in a closet, while the couple makes love. There isn’t time for him to retrieve the
briefcase in which he had collected the jewels.
When all is quiet, he comes out of the closet and finds the ex-wife
dead, murdered with a dental instrument, and the briefcase gone. It’s up to the burglar to solve the murder,
if he doesn’t want to go down for it himself.
The plot is pretty complicated and I didn’t see the ending coming until
I was almost there. July 2012
.
Arthur C. Clarke & Frederick Pohl. The Last Theorem. I
think this is Clarke’s last work. It is
set in Ceylon, where he lived his later years.
The central character is a Subramanian, a young Tamil mathematician who
becomes famous when he solves Fermat’s theorem.
Ceylon has been chosen as the site from which an elevator will be built
into space, which will greatly reduce the cost of getting equipment and fuel
into orbit from which it can be launched for development of the moon and for
space travel. When the elevator is finished Subramanian’s daughter is chosen as
one of the contestants in a space sailing race. Meanwhile an all powerful race many galaxies
away has noticed the nuclear activity on earth and the aggressiveness of
earth’s various peoples. They order two
of their subservient societies to proceed to earth and wipe it out. While the invaders are in route, the UN gets
control of technology which enables it to use electronic pulses to knock out
all electrical and mechanical activity in a designated territory. First they pacify North Korea and a couple of
Latin American belligerents. They are so
successful that peace reigns everywhere. The
invaders notice this and kidnap the daughter from the sailing race to check it
out. When they are satisfied that earth
is no longer a threat, the master race calls off the extermination and one of
the invader races moves into unoccupied territory in North Africa and provides
earth with technology which solves its energy and mineral supply problems. As I’ve described it, it all seems rather
trite, but I can say that it is a story well told. There’s a lot her about mathematics and we
need to remember as we react to this late 20th C work that much of the science fiction of the early 20th
C is now fact. Among other things,
Clarke and Pohl anticipate the I-pad.
June 2012
.
Niall Ferguson. Civilization. Ferguson presents his ideas on why western
societies succeeded in science and economic development over the last five hundred,
while China and the Arab world, which were far ahead 500 years ago, fell
behind. He identifies six factors – you
might think of them as “aps” on your I-phone: 1.
Competition – Europe was fragmented into
nation states and within each there were multiple competing entities. 2. The scientific revolution – all the
breakthroughs in mathematics and the sciences happened in Western Europe 3. The rule of law – based on property
rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures. 4. Modern healthcare – nearly all
breakthroughs including those for tropical diseases were made by Europeans and
North Americans. 5. The
consumer society – it took place where there was both a supply of
productivity enhancing technologies and a demand for ever higher quality
consumer goods, starting with cotton
garments. 6. The
work ethic – westerners were the first to combine more extensive and
intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital
accumulation. Now, after the fact, if you
know even a little history, this all seems obvious, but the way Ferguson
fleshes out his discussion and contrasts what was happening in western and
non-western cultures is fascinating. I
saw his “Civilization” on PBS. There
simply wasn’t time there to do justice to the subject. The book is better. July 2012
.
Azar Nafisi. Reading
Lolita in Tehran. This reads
like a play in four acts and 26 scenes.
Nafisi relates her experience as a university professor of English and Persian literature in Teheran
during the revolution of 1979 and the first years of the Islamic Republic of
Iran. On their own, many of the
incidents she relates are about as interesting as a joke without a punch line,
but together they are a tour through the banality of the evil that Ayatollah
Khomeini inflicted on that unfortunate country and particularly on its
women. There’s not a whole lot here
about Lolita, just enough to see the parallel between what Humbert did to her
and what Khomeini did to Iran. There is
a lot of discussion of English and American literature, and I learned things that
I had completely missed when I read the books she discusses. While the literary critiques and the
discussions of the hardships endured by her female students were the core of
the book, I have to mention a scene in which a friend reports on what Khomeini
had to say about a man who satisfies his lust with a chicken. He may not eat the chicken and no one in his
family and none of his next door neighbors may eat the chicken, but it’s o.k. for
a neighbor two doors down to eat it. The
reading took 18 hours and the reader used a sort of ersatz Persian accent that
was tiresome, but it’s a must read to get a feel for what Islam can be like
when it goes mad. August 2012
.
John Sandford. Chosen
Prey. This is one of a series of
about 14 detective stories. This one
involves a serial killer and the payoff
for the reader is the detective work involving a lot of shoe leather
which gradually unravels the mystery and identifies the killer. Another payoff, if you get the recorded
version, is an interview with the author, in which he talks about how he goes
about writing a thriller and about the difficulties of keeping his characters
interesting and believable over time. In
terms of technique, in reminds me of James Lee Burke’s series about the Iberia,
LA detective, Dave Robicheaux. July
2012
.
Scott Turow. Innocent. Twenty
years after being cleared of charges that he murdered his mistress Judge Rusty
Sabich is charged with murdering his wife.
She is a genius but also rather unstable. The whole question here is how did she
die? The narrative of the legal
proceedings is fascinating as the plot twists and turns. TNT made this into a movie in 2011. June 2012
.
Randy Wayne White. Ten
Thousand Islands. Doc Ford, a
former Navy Seal, works as a marine biologist on the Gulf Coast of Florida west
of the Everglades. When an attempt is
made to rob the grave of a 15 year old girl, who supposedly had committed
suicide, he becomes involved. The girl
had had a special talent for finding ancient Indian artifacts and it was
rumored that a valuable medallion had been buried with her. It’s a really bad guy who wants the
medallion. It was fun to read, but parts
of it are just too fantastic to make for a convincing mystery. Navy Seals are good but they’re not
superheroes and hardly anybody stores his murder victims in an artificial pond
in his backyard. August 2012
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