Felix Francis. Dick
Francis’s Gamble. ©2011 Nicholas Foxton did well on his three A level
exams and was offered admission to the London School of Economics. Instead he chose to become a steeplechase
jockey and was doing well until he broke his neck in a fall and was told he
could not ride again. So he went to LSE
and then joined a firm of financial advisors in the City. He found many of his clients among the
jockeys and trainers he knew in his previous profession. He was at the track with a colleague from his
firm, when the colleague was shot and killed by what was obviously a
professional hit man. He learns the
colleague had named him as his executor, and after he starts checking into his
affairs, he finds himself pursued by the same hit man. The problem is the involvement of someone in
his firm in a €100 million scam that promises to build a factory and worker
housing in Bulgaria. Foxton is the
narrator in a sort of lower class English accent which I found annoying, but
it’s a good story and the narrator’s insights into his own and other peoples
characters are worth the read. I
couldn’t find any explanation for the title.
June 2013
Kerry Greenwood. Dead
Man’s Chest. ©2010 This is the 18th in a series of
detective stories featuring Phryne Fisher, an upper class Australian woman who
solves mysteries as sort of a sideline from running her household. It’s the 1920s. She is single, sort of a flapper, a mature
woman who enjoys men, and the parent of two adopted daughters. I gather the earlier novels are sited in
Melbourne. In this one Phryne and her
entourage have taken a house for a few weeks in a small town on the beach. When they arrive, the couple who were
supposed to serve as cook and butler seems to have decamped. While hiring and training new servants and
supervising the preparation of enormous quantities of food, Phryne rescues the
missing couple, breaks up a local smuggling ring, and discovers who cut the
throat of a young actress while trying to cut off and make away with her plait
(pigtail). I enjoyed the recreation of
life in Australia in the 1920s, but I doubt that I’ll go back for more. June 2013
Brad Meltzer. The
Inner Circle. ©2011 Eat your heart out, Dan Brown. When I read The Lost Symbol, I thought Brown’s research on free masonry was
interesting, but the plot and the motivations of the bad guys were just plain
ridiculous. Meltzer does better by
us. He first heard about George
Washington’s spy ring, The Culper Ring, from Papa Bush. Washington’s ring was
so secret that even he did not know the identity of all the operatives, and the
general public was not aware of the ring's existence until the 1930s. Meltzer started asking himself how it would
be if the ring still existed and found an idea for a novel. In the novel the ring’s purpose is protection
of the presidency, although not necessarily the President. The incumbent President is being blackmailed for
a mistake in his youth and is trying to use his “plumbers” to find the
blackmailer. The good guys work at the
National Archives. It’s a complex plot. Beecher White, a young archivist, tries to
solve the mystery, while the loyalties and motivations of those around him seem
to keep shifting. An ally one minute may
be a mortal threat the next. A very good
read, and you will learn something about the National Archives. June 2013
Edward O. Wilson. The Social Conquest of Earth. ©2012
In my post on June 1, I discussed Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. This book covers some of the same ground but
from a different direction (Wilson refers to some of Pinker’s earlier work). Wilson starts with what he learned as an
entomologist about eusociality among various species of ants and carries these
ideas forward to apply them to humans. He describes the society of ants in some
detail and describes how ants actually farm and ranch in much the same way as
humans do. One example is a species of ant
that lives in symbiosis with aphids. The
ants move the aphids to the plants that have the highest concentrations of nutrients
and then collect the aphids’ excrement as a food source for their colony. (An entomologist who tasted the excrement
said that it was sweet). He notes that
the altruistic behavior or eusociality that enables the division of labor in an
ant colony is relatively rare in nature.
Among insects it is limited to ants, termites, some species of wasps and
perhaps a few others. Among mammals it
appears only in the societies of humans and one species of mole rat. A critical element in the development of
cooperative society seems to be development of a “nest,” a protected place for
the raising of young with some members of society specializing in raising and
protecting the nest and others foraging for food. This doesn’t seem to happen until members of
a species develop the ability to intuit the emotions and intentions of
others. He suggests that the ability to”read”
others preceded the development of language.
Wilson has much to say about the evolution of the human brain and the
evolution of language that followed. In
any event, his main conclusion is that eusociality or altruism is essential for
development of successful human societies and at the same time the explanation
for it. He says selfish individuals
always beat altruistic individuals and altruistic groups always defeat selfish
groups. From that he jumps to the idea
that low differentials in wealth are associated with the highest quality of
life. In his opinion Japan, the Nordic
countries and the state of New Hampshire, which do have the lowest
differentials, have the highest quality of life. At the bottom are the U.K., Portugal and the rest
of the U.S. June 2013
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