Dan Brown.
Inferno. © 2013 Harvard
professor Robert Langdon is at it again.
He wakes up in a hospital in Florence with amnesia. While he’s still trying to figure out how he
got there, a hired assassin tries to kill him, and he flees with the help of a
woman doctor named Sienna. The assassin
is an employee of the Consortium, a company headquartered on a yacht, which
provides services to very rich people.
In this case the rich person is a mad scientist who plans to release a
virus that will cut world population in half.
Brown takes us through or past all sorts of well known works of
Renaissance art and the mystery involves Dante’s Inferno, Botticelli’s "Map of Hell," and a mural by Vasari
in the Palazzo Publico. The story line
is almost as bad as Brown’s last Langdon novel, The Lost Symbol. There are a
lot of security companies in this world, but I doubt that any of them use
assassins to protect their clients’ privacy.
It’s just ridiculous. Brown seems
to know quite a bit about Renaissance art.
Perhaps he should try writing guidebooks. It’s been all downhill since the DaVinci Code, and it is a mystery to me
how he can hit the best seller lists.
September 2014
.
Robert M. Gates. Duty. © 2014
I was really pleased when I found a CD version of this in the library
but not so pleased after I got a ways into it.
He had some funny things to say; the best was a quote for someone
suggesting what he should say at his swearing in as Secretary of Defense: “I am not now, and I never have been Donald
Rumsfeld.” After that it got a little
tedious and I quit. The book will be a
great resource for future historians who will need to know everything, but
“everything” was a bit too much for me. September 2014
.
Tim Harford. The Undercover Economist Strikes Back. © 2014 This is the economist as iconoclast. Harford uses someone with a British lower
class accent -- plonking is the word
that comes to mind – as a foil, as he explains how totally inept economists are
at understanding or advising about what’s going on in the economy. He starts off by telling us about Bill
Phillips, a man who grew up on a farm in New Zealand and came of age just as
the Great Depression got underway, so his college plans had to be put on hold. He was a born engineer and could fix
anything. After the war he was enrolled
at the London School of Economics and showed up in J.E. Meade’s office in 1949 wanting
to demonstrate Moniac, an analog computer which consisted of interconnected
tanks of colored water that could model the British economy and solve 9
differential equations at once. Meade
had him show it to the whole faculty and offered him a teaching job. Phillips later became a professor at LSE, and
the Moniac was duplicated and used as a classroom teaching tool at LSE and
several other universities. You can see
the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s working model on Youtube:
.
.
The machine worked so well that it made a significant
contribution to the development of economic forecasting. Unfortunately forecasting has never been very
successful – no one at the Federal Reserve saw the Great Recession coming. Perhaps the heart of the problem is that there
are two types of recession, (1) the Keynesian, characterized by lack of demand
which then calls for stimulus in the short run to get the economy back on track,
and (2) the classical, characterized by lack of supply caused by structural
problems which require long term solutions. Every time there is a recession,
some economists and policy makers take one view and others the other and then
little or nothing gets done to get the economy going again. Harford includes two great quotes: “Microeconomics concerns things that
economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things
that economists are wrong about in general” and a quote from Keynes: “The
Master economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be a mathematician, historian,
statesman, and philosopher to some degree.
He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms
of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of
thought. He must study the present in the
light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions
must be entirely outside his regard.”
There’s no mention of cleanliness or godliness. September 2014
.
Shirley Hazard. The
Great Fire. © 2003 Since the blurb said this was set in Japan
just after WW II, I was expecting something about the firebombing or Hiroshima
or both. Instead I got a rather
pedestrian love story. There were some
interesting passages about the war’s effects on soldiers and civilians, but
over all I was disappointed. September
2014
.
Tim Moore. French
Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France. © 2001
Tim Moore, a 35 year old British journalist, set out to ride the route
of the Tour de France in the weeks before the actual event. He was not a cyclist and in no better
physical shape than most of us at age 35.
Along with Moore I learned a lot about bikes and biking, the pre-tour
secrecy about the tour route and the competition among French communities to
have the tour come through their towns and villages and, with luck, to be
chosen as an overnight stop. About
halfway through, I had had enough. September
2014
.
Mark Kurlansky. Basque
History of the World. © 1999 I had always thought of the Basques as a wild
and backward mountain people living in isolation along the border between
France and Spain. This book is an eye
opener. Since Roman times the Basques
have tried to preserve their language and their culture and have been willing
to give up autonomy in return for being left alone. The Basques’ accommodation with the Romans
was to let them pass freely through Basque territory as long as they didn’t
stay on. This suited the Romans since
the Basques didn’t have anything the Romans wanted. The Basques were mostly successful with this
policy until Franco came along. The
Basque language, Euskara, seems to be what binds them together. According to Victor Hugo, their language is a
country and almost a religion. There are
many theories about it including an origin at the Tower of Babel, but the only
sure thing seems to be that it is not Indo-European. Basques have a long tradition as mercenary warriors
and were recorded as such as early as 400 BCE in Greece and later defending Hadrian’s
Wall across the waist of Britain. The
basic set of laws that the Basques consider their constitution is the fueros, which
dates from feudal times, was confirmed by the Spanish monarchy in 1476, and was
cited by John Adams as a precedent for the US Constitution. Early on the Basques realized that their
autonomy depended on economic success. They
were the first to develop whaling on a large scale and sold products of this
industry throughout Europe. They were
excellent ship builders, which enabled them to reach the fishing grounds off of
Newfoundland very early, probably before the “discovery” of America. To preserve their catch, they developed
salted cod, which became a staple in the European diet. Their high quality ships enabled them to become
traders in Europe and the Americas and in Colonial times, Bilbao was Boston’s
major trading partner. They built the ships that sailed in the Spanish Armada
and provided much of the crew, so a lot of the “black Irish” are probably part
Basque. They may have been the first to
develop banking and to industrialize. They
were leaders in iron and steel production until the 20th C and even
as other countries overtook them in efficiency and volume they remained the
backbone of Spain’s industrialized economy at least through the Franco era. Most of us are familiar with ETA and Basque
terrorism to some degree. It’s worth
reading the final chapters of this book to get an idea of Basque politics and
the reasons why the Basques turned to terrorism. Finally I must mention that Frank Geary’s Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao was not commissioned to attract tourists but rather as a
symbol of Basque independence and economic power. September 2014
.
David McCullough. Mornings
on Horseback. © 1982 I guess this bit of history had to be written,
and it will no doubt be a source for future historians, but I quickly lost
interest. It’s almost a day to day
record of life in the household of Theodore Roosevelt senior. Maybe it got more interesting as Teddy got
older, but I couldn’t wait it out and didn’t think to skip ahead. October 2014
.
Larry McMurtry. Last
Kind Words Saloon. © 2014 This is a
nice light work about the Earps, Doc Holiday, Charlie Goodnight and a few other
Western characters. It turns out to be
funny, because McMurtry turns all those legends about gunslingers on their
heads. September 2014
.
John Sandford. The
Hanged Man’s Song. © 2001 Sandford must have hired a computer geek to
sit at his elbow as he wrote this one or maybe when he wrote The Devil’s Code, an earlier thriller
featuring Kidd -- artist, computer whiz, and professional criminal — and LuEllen, his sometime partner, sometime lover and
professional thief and cat burglar. Kidd
is one of a group of hackers who work through Bobby, a master hacker. When Bobby is murdered and his laptop stolen,
it’s Kidd’s job to find the murderer and recover the laptop or he and all of
the other hackers who worked with Bobby will go to jail for a long time. It’s ingenious and exciting all the way
though. October 2014
.
John Sandford. Rough
Country. © 2009
The nice thing about following Virgil
Flowers around as he solves baffling cases is that it’s funny. Flowers is such a flake that you can’t take
all the murders seriously. This one
opens with a long shot to the head of a woman advertising executive in a canoe
on a lake by the lesbian resort where she is staying. This gets connected with an earlier unsolved murder
and ends with a murder victim buried in his car. October 2014
Geoffroy de Villehardoun.
Conquest of Constantinople – Excerpt. I listened to the audio version, and I found
a print version similar to this excerpt online:
.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/villehardouin.asp
.
Geoffrey was a French night who participated in the 4th
Crusade and came home to write about it.
He was born c.1160 and in late 1207 began dictating The Conquest of Constantinople, his only known written work and
perhaps the earliest example of historical writing in French prose. He died
between 1212 and 1218, in circumstances that remain obscure. The crusaders gathered in Venice and hired
the Venetians to transport them to the Holy Land. There was a problem about money and the
crusaders agreed to help the Venetians retake Zara from the King of Hungary in
partial payment for their transport to the Holy Land. Many Venetians, including the Doge, took the
cross and joined the crusade as it headed east.
Then came Alexius, nephew of Alexius, Emperor of Constantinople, who had
deposed, blinded and imprisoned Alexius’s father Isaac. Alexius offered to pay for the crusaders’
expedition, if they would help him take Constantinople and install him as
emperor. I had always thought that the
detour to Constantinople was the crusaders idea and that there treatment of a
welcoming ally was their disgrace. Perhaps
that was a different crusade. After many
battles they took Constantinople on April 13, 1204 and divided the spoils. Taking the city was one thing, but holding it
was not so easy, and Alexius reneged on almost everything. They fought many battles in and around
Constantinople but never got to the Holy Land.
September 2014
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