Andrew J. Bacevich. Washington
Rules. ©2010 This is not a pleasant read, but it is one I
would recommend. Bacevich talks about American
militarism and how it has warped our society.
I don’t think I can do it justice, so I’ll just refer you to the review
in the NY Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Bass-t.html?_r=0
.
Stephen Colbert. America
Again, Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t. ©2012
It’s funny, about what you might expect if you have watched the show,
and there was more than enough there. One
point that comes through loud and clear is that we may be a bit too proud of ourselves.
.
Umberto Eco. The
Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
©2004 Maybe I’ll give up on
Umberto Eco. This is about an Italian
used book dealer who loses his memory.
It just wasn’t very interesting.
.
Ken Follett. Fall
of Giants. ©2010 This is
part one of the Century Trilogy. I’m third in the queue at the library for part
2. Follett opens in about 1910 with
Billy Williams, age 13, waiting to go down for the first time into a Welsh coal
pit to begin a lifetime of work there.
Billy’s father is a minister and a labor leader. His sister Ethel is a housemaid in the
Fitzherbert’s mansion. Fitz owns all the
land thereabouts and leases some of it to the mining companies. Naturally Fitz gets Ethel pregnant, and she
has to leave town. He buys her a modest
house in London to ensure she stays gone and doesn’t spill the beans to his equally
pregnant wife Bea, a Russian princess.
Meanwhile in St Petersburg Grigori, a metal worker, is trying to save enough money to go to
America. His younger brother Lev, whom
he raised after their father was hanged by a landowner and their mother was
shot by the police during a demonstration.
Grigori has just gotten his ticket for the boat, when Lev kills a
policeman. Grigori gives Lev his ticket
and passport and stays behind. The
giants of the title are George V, the Tsar, the Kaiser, and other aristocratic
leaders. By the time the book ends in
1924, all are gone except George V.
Other characters are Fitz’s sister, Maud , Maud’s German romantic
interest, a Prussian nobleman named Walter von Ulrich, and Gus Dewar from Buffalo
who works in Wilson’s White House.
Follett weaves his characters into the history of the period: the famous
battles, the Christmas truce between the trench lines, the Russian Revolution
and the Paris peace conference. Grigori
becomes a powerful commissar and Billy and Ethel both become MPs after the war
in Ramsay MacDonald’s labor government.
The major historical events come to life as do the class divisions which
plagued Europe then and still plague us now.
.
.
Doug Fine. Farewell
My Subaru. ©2008 At age 35, a journalist named Doug Fine
decided to opt out of a career that had taken him to hotspots around the world
and to opt out of our carbon based lifestyle.
He bought a 43 acre ranch in New Mexico and set out to live off the land
without using fossil fuels or his hookup to the electrical grid. He bought two goats and some chickens,
started a garden, installed solar panels and batteries and a “solar bread box”
to heat water, and a solar power supply to fill his water tank from his
well. He sold his 12 year old Subaru
which had never been in for repairs in the 200,000 miles he had driven it and
bought a diesel Ford 250 pickup. He had
the diesel converted to run on vegetable oil, and ever after when he drove
through town people on the street got hungry for whatever was served in the
restaurant that had supplied his latest tank of oil. Fine is serious about making his points about
our environment, but his story is really, really funny, especially his
adventures with coyotes and hawks with a taste for chicken and his lame efforts
at hunting for deer, rabbits and birds.
He ends on a serious note with recommendations about how we should all
try to reduce our carbon footprints.
You are already aware of all or most of them, but the best one is:
Install carbon free Congressmen.” July
2013
.
.
James Gleick. The
Information. ©2011 For thousands of years, drummers in Africa
have been able to send complex messages from village to village. No other society had anything even
approaching that until Napoleon set up his chains of signal towers to send
visual signals across France, and this system was slower and less effective
than the drums of Africa. Gleick
explains that it was the tonal characteristic of the African languages that
enabled the drummers to translate language into signals that could be
understood as far away as the drums could be heard. Gleick covers everything in the history of
information, but we can jump ahead from the drums to the work of Samuel B.
Morse and others who realized that symbols could be represented over a wire by
turning the current on and off. In our
time that has become the zeroes and ones of computer science. The book is a wonderful read. Gleick tells us all about Babbage’s efforts
to develop a computing machine – he thought it would be powered by steam -- and
about the brilliant mathematician, Ada Lovelace, who advised him. There is as discussion of the invention of
printing, of the development of the OED, and of Turing’s computer which existed
only in his head, but which helped him and others to arrive at machines more
limited than his which could actually exist in the real world. The computers that we now take for granted
depended on the work of mathematicians like Claude Shannon who did much of his
work for Bell labs, but the whole story involves the collaboration between
mathematicians and electrical engineers with contributions from scientists from
many other disciplines. Even Einstein
contributed with an insight he had about 1905 that at the time would not have
seemed to have any relation to the development of machines to compute and
transmit information. There are long
discussions of the mathematics involved in the development of information
theories which I could not follow, but I did come away with an understanding
that information is something that exists on its own, independent from the
minds, machines or organisms in which it is encoded. July 2013
.
.
Chad Harback. The
Art of Fielding. ©2011 I thought this was mostly going to be about
baseball, but it’s much more than that. Mike
Schwartz, a student athlete at Westich College, sees Henry Scrimshander playing
shortstop in a Legion game and recruits him for the college baseball team. Henry is scrawny and can’t hit but is magic
in the field. Schwartz sees potential
and mentors Henry to such extent that he neglects his own needs. In his junior year Henry ties the NCAA errorless
games record of his hero, Aparicio Rodriguez, but makes an error in the next
game and then continues to play badly.
Eventually he quits. Meanwhile
the college president, Guert Affenlight, is having an affair with Henry’s roommate
and Schwartz is sleeping with the president’s daughter, Pella. Each of these five people goes through a
crisis and this is what made this novel a bestseller.
.
.
Neil MacGregor. A
History of the World in 100 Objects.
©2011 This isn’t really a book; it’s a series
of short BBC programs about objects in
the British Museum. MacGregor uses them to
put major changes in history into perspective.
It starts with the stone axes of prehistory and carries through to our
time with a credit card and a solar lamp.
While I recognized many of the objects from studying art history, objects
that couldn’t be considered art were equally significant and helpful in telling
the story of man.
.
.
Henning Mankell. The
Troubled Man. ©2009 Wallander is now 60 and living alone in a house
in the country with only his dog for company.
He experiences occasional blackouts, and toward the end of the novel we
learn that this book is the end of his story as a detective and that he has
about ten more years before he becomes lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s like his
late father. His daughter Linda and Hans
von Enke, a trader on the financial markets, are having a child, eventually to
be named Clara. Wallender is invited to
a 75th birthday party by Han’s father, Hakan. At the party Hakan, a retired senior naval
officer and submarine commander, takes Wallander aside and tells him a long
story about Soviet submarines in Swedish waters and an act of treason that
prevented the Swedish navy from forcing the subs to surface. The story has no conclusion, but Wallander
senses that there will be more to come.
A few days later Hakan disappears and eventually the police assume he is
dead. Then Hakan’s wife Louise
disappears and is found dead, an apparent suicide. The police find microfilm copies in Russian
of secret Swedish military documents in her purse. No spoilers this time. Was Louise a spy? If so, for whom? Did Hakan know and cover it up? Was Louise murdered? If so, by whom? It is Henning Mankell’s genius that he can
set up the most complex mysteries and then let us follow Wallander step by step
as he gradually works out a solution.
Along the way we learn a lot about daily life in Sweden and about the difficult
life of a somewhat flawed character as he continues his life’s work as a
detective. July 2013
.
.
Oliver Sacks. The
Mind’s Eye. ©2010 The
cases of various kinds of vision loss discussed by Oliver Sacks are fascinating
one by one, but maybe one or two are enough.
.
.
Simon Winchester. Atlantic. ©2011 Somehow the idea of a book about the Atlantic that
goes beyond geology and oceanography didn’t work for me. There are explanations of the ocean’s formation
and its currents and other characteristics, but there is quite a lot of history
thrown in as well. It didn’t seem to
make a book. Maybe it’s two books. I felt like I was reading a series of
anecdotes, and I quit about half way through
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