Ace Atkins. Robert B. Parker’s Cheap
Shot. © 2014
Several authors have picked up where Parker left off. This is #43 in the PI Spenser series and the third
for Atkins. New England Patriots
linebacker Kinjo Heywood suspects he’s being followed and hires Spenser to find
out what’s going on. Then Heywood’s son
Akira is kidnapped and Spenser has to figure out how to get him back. Behind all of this is an old beef about a
shooting in a New York nightclub involving Heywood and some Italian mob
figures. I had never heard of Parker,
but apparently there’s a regular readership out there approaching something
like cult status. As thrillers go, this
was pretty good. April 2015
Steve Berry. The
Lincoln Myth. © 2014
Cotton Malone has retired from intelligence work to his bookstore in
Copenhagen . He gets a call from
Washington and is asked to find a missing agent. It turns out there is a plot by a senior
senator and elder of the Mormon Church to prove that States have the right to
secede any time they want. Supposedly
George Washington had a document that confirmed this and passed it to his
successor. It got passed on to each
succeeding president until it reached Lincoln.
During the Civil War, Lincoln gave it to Brigham Young for safekeeping
in return for Young’s promise not to disrupt transcontinental
communications. Because Lincoln was
assassinated, the document was never returned to the White House. It was presumed to be in the church archives
in Salt Lake or hidden elsewhere in Utah.
Actually Young had hidden it in Washington. Malone stays on the case and eventually has a
showdown with the senator at a remote Mormon site in Utah. I think I prefer my historical fiction within
the realm of the possible. April 2015
.
Erik Brynjolfsson &
Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age, Work, Progress,
and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant technologies. © 2014
The authors begin with some historical perspective: 60,000 BCE Homo sapiens, 25,000 BCE Homo
sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals, 14,000 BCE end of the ice age, 8,000 BCE
beginnings of agriculture, 3,200 BCE writing, 800-200 BCE serious thinking
begins in Middle East, India and China.
Nothing much happened after that until James Watt perfected the steam engine
in 1775-76. This led to the biggest transformation in the history of the
world. For most people life before Watt
wasn’t much different from life among common people 1,000, 2,000 even 5,000
years earlier. After Watt, daily life
steadily improved as steam technology spread through the economy. A second major surge came in the late 19th
C with the arrival of electric power and the internal combustion engine. And then came computers, automation and big
data. This recent development is all
familiar because it happened in our lifetimes, but just one statistic kind of
sums it up: The number of words in English increased by 70% between 1950 and
2000. Since 1810-1817, when the Luddites
tried to destroy machines in English textile mills, there have been concerns
that automation would displace more and more workers. Up until recently we always seemed to be able
to adjust, but now we have our track record since about 1980 to suggest that
displaced workers may not find new well paying jobs. The authors note that the human capabilities
developed in the last several thousand years like arithmetic are the ones most
easily replicated by machines. Things
like facial recognition, which go back millions of years, are different. They’re harder to replicate, but harder doesn’t
mean impossible. There seems to be
almost no limit to what machines may eventually be able to do. What’s left for us? For those of us who aren’t CEO’s or coders, film
actors and short stops, there’s not much out there other than home health care
provider, and there’s already a robot prototype for that. The authors foresee a winner take all
market. If entrepreneurs can replicate
and deliver their products cheaply, people will buy the best and there will be
no market for the second best or the tenth best. Turbo Tax is an example of what can
happen. I think they said it was
developed by a team of 15 people. It put
100,000s of tax preparers out of work. The bounty from automation is real, but
the result is going to be an economy of superstars, where truly extraordinary
performers will be richly rewarded; others will not. I don’t recall the authors using the word “redistribution,”
but that is exactly what they propose in the form of various taxes that would
have that effect. My own conclusion: we
have a social problem and we must find a social solution. The market economy was a great boon for
everyone, while there was still a place in it for labor, but it no longer
works. One can chant education,
education, education but who needs a PhD barista and how much longer will there
be baristas? May 2015
.
Harlan Coben. The Final Detail. © 1999
(Bolitar 6) Win Lockwood , Myron Bolitar’s friend and
financial advisor, summons Myron back to New York from three weeks incognito on
a Caribbean Island. Esperanza Diaz, Myron’s
assistant in his sports agent business, has been arrested for the murder of
Myron’s client, Clu Haid, a pitcher for the New York Yankees, who had just
failed a drug test. Myron proves himself
to be a first rate detective as he sorts things out among Esperanza, Clu’s ex-wife,
the denizens of a transsexual nightclub, the Ache brothers again, and the woman
who recently bought the Yankees and hired Clu, her consultant on training and
motivation and her daughter who has been missing for two decades. May 2015
.
Harlan Coben. Stranger. © 2015
Reviewers call this one of Coben’s stand alone mysteries, because he is
so well known for his Myron Bolitar series.
In this one an unnamed NBA player who is obviously Bolitar is mentioned
as one of the players in twice a week pickup basketball games in Cedarfield,
NJ. Our protagonist is Adam Price, a
lawyer. At the American Legion hall, a complete
stranger comes up to Adam and tells him that his wife Corinne faked her last
pregnancy that supposedly ended in a miscarriage. Adam finds out it is true and confronts
Corinne, who doesn’t deny it and then disappears. Adam searches for her through so many plot twists
and turns that you start to wonder if even Coben will eventually figure it out. It’s grim, but it’s a winner. April 2015
.
Anthony Everitt. Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor. © 2006 I
have been reading this and that in Roman history for close to 70 years. This is really an excellent biography of
Octavius, or Caesar Augustus as he was known late in life. For the first time I feel like I can sort out
who was who, how Octavius took power and held it, and the roles of Anthony, of Octavius’s
wife Livia and of her son, Tiberius, whom Octavius adopted after other
potential heirs died young. In his
lifetime, Rome went from republic, to dictatorship to a fully established
imperial regime with more or less established borders. As I listened, I was thinking how nice it
would have been to have footnotes, because I am still curious about just exactly
which ancient sources have come down to us and what we can learn from
them. Everitt is very careful to qualify
anything he is not sure of and comments frequently on the reliability of
various sources. May 2015
.
Peter Finn and Petra Couvee. The Zhivago Affair, The Kremlin, the CIA and
the Battle Over a Forbidden Book.
© 2014 This tells the story of how and why the book
got written and how it got published. There was an Italian publisher authorized by Pasternak;
the CIA arranged an edition; and so did the University of Michigan. It’s a messy, even bizarre history, but two
things are really clear: the Soviets
didn’t want it published, and Russians really wanted to read it. I guess I understand why the Writers Union
went along with the government. They had
already sold their integrity and didn’t want to lose the privileged status that
that had bought them. The best line in
the book is Pasternak talking to the other writers: “If you’re going to yell at
me, at least don’t do it in unison.” What
I can’t understand is why the Soviets were so afraid of this book. I’ve read it and seen the movie, and I can’t
find anything to get excited about except a very good story. Besides describing the official machinations,
the book gives one a nice look into Pasternak’s life and his motivation for
shifting from poetry, of which he was a master, to trying to create a great
novel. April 2015
.
Richard
Rubin. The Last of the Doughboys: the
Forgotten Generation and their Forgotten War. © 2013
In 2003 Rubin set out to find the few remaining veterans of WW I and
interview them. It wasn’t easy to figure
out who was still around, but he did find many ranging in age from 101 to 113.
He travelled all over the country to interview them, some of them several
times. He ran into a few difficult cases
but for the most part they were in good health and alert. Like other old people, their memories of recent
events didn’t come easily, but most of them remembered their war years very
well. One of the things that surprised
me was what they had to say about gas attacks.
Apparently gas was part of the daily routine and everyone got a whiff of
it now and then. They didn’t seem to have
the horror of it that I do. My favorite
interviewee was Frank Buckle, who was honored with a ceremony at the Pentagon
in 2008. I think he’s the only one whose
story Rubin followed into the postwar years.
He travelled a lot overseas for business. One of things he mentioned was the anti-Semitism
he found in Germany in 1931. In an
interview, Rubin said there were two important things that he learned. First, he had always thought that America had
played only a minor role in the Allied victory, but he learned that the
prospect of the arrival of the four million strong American Expeditionary Force
and the massive offensive the AEF launched at Meuse-Argonne in September 1918 probably made the difference between victory
and defeat. The US didn’t win the war by
itself, but without the US, it would likely have been lost. The other thing he said he learned was the
profound effect the war had on America.
In effect WW I “created the America we
recognize – and live in – today. Before
it, America was a regional power; that war made us a global power. But that’s
just the most obvious manifestation. Every facet of life at home was changed by
the war, too, most of it permanently. Just about everything you think of,
from civil rights and gender equality to agricultural policy and modern
population trends, can be traced back to World War I.” It’s well worth Googling the book’s author and
title. There’s a lot there. Here’s the last few lines of Amazon’s blurb: “The Last of the Doughboys is the most sweeping look at America’s First World War in a
generation, a glorious reminder of the tremendously important role America
played in the war to end all wars, as well as a moving meditation on character,
grace, aging, and memory.” April
2015
.
Here are three books I didn’t
try to finish:
.
Jill Lepore. New York Burning, Liberty, Slavery, and
Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. © 2005
I read about a quarter of this one which tells the story of an alleged
plot by slaves in NYC to burn the place down, kill the whites and take
over. It took a nice piece of
scholarship to dig out all the details of this bit of history from the early 1740s,
but I kept wondering why I was reading it.
I think I already knew that slaves in the North didn’t want to be slaves
and the owners there weren’t very different from their counterparts in the
south. Since I put this aside, I’ve started another book by this author about Benjamin
Franklin and his youngest sister, Jane. It’s
based on the same careful scholarship and I will stay with it. May 2015
.
Salman Rushdie. Satanic Verses. © 1988
I’ve enjoined several of his books, but I found this one unreadable. From the few chapters I did read, I couldn’t
figure out why the Muslims cared about what Rushdie wrote. April 2015
.
Stacy Schiff. Cleopatra, A Life. © 2010
Apparently we know so little about Cleopatra that there isn’t enough
there for a biography. I quit. April 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment