Book Review: The Undercover Economist

Following my recent interest in books on the psychology of decision-making and behavioral economics, I thought it might be interesting to read up on some actual economics. I had gotten some of this out of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics by Levitt and Dubner, but Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist is a little less afraid to throw in actual economic theory and terms. So you get explanations of “perfect” markets, inefficiencies, externalities, and other economic jargon.

Which isn’t to say that the book isn’t interesting. In fact, Harford has a great style, and like those other books he couches his discussion of economics in everyday things that we’re all familiar with: buying a cup of coffee, health insurance, traffic, and orange juice. My favorite parts of the book were where he would look at very practical problems from a consumer’s point of view, such as why you have to pay so much more for coffee in certain locations and why “fancy” gourmet grocery stores will stock some of the same products as their bargain bin competitors, but use it to influence different purchasing patterns.

But there’s also larger scale discussions about China’s economic recovery (which I found really fascinating), the influence of corruption on small countries, and globalization. It’s interesting to see how an economist approaches these issues with an ultra rational approach to decision-making, and it’s pretty shocking to see the extremes to which that kind of thinking can you lead you –some of Harford’s propositions would nip problems like cross-town traffic or public health in the bud, but they may offend our sense of justice in the process. And Harford is grounded enough in reality to cop to that kind of thing, up to the point where you get just a little feeling of world weariness and cynicism. But not too much.

Books I read in 2009

Per my annual tradition (c.f., 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005) it’s time to look back on all the books I read this year and pick out my favorite and and least favorite.

The Stats

My total reading volume took a big dip this year, as I’m at 46 books –way down from the 65 I read in 2008. The main reasons for this are a) I wasn’t specifically doing a “52 books in 52 weeks challenge” as I was in 08, and b) I listened to a lot of podcasts this year, which crowded out some audiobooks.

  • Total books: 46
  • Total pages: 14,906*
  • Average book length: 331 pages**
  • Paper books: 19
  • Audio books: 27
  • Fiction books: 24
    • Fantasy: 11 (mostly Terry Prattchett)
    • Science fiction: 7
    • Other Fiction: 5
    • Horror: 1
  • Nonfiction books: 22
    • Other nonfiction: 7
    • Science: 6
    • Business: 6
    • Biography: 3

*If you convert the length of the audiobooks to page counts by looking at their paper counterparts

**Same story

That seems like a pretty balanced spread to me. As usual, individual reviews can be found here.

Best Book I Read in 20009

Some good books this year. I enjoyed Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide because it was another solid popular science book around the science of human decision making, but it felt a little close to my favorite pick from 2008, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I also found myself really enjoying Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which took Kipling’s The Jungle Book as a starting point and told you a story about a little orphan boy lovingly raised by the supernatural inhabitants of a rural graveyard.

Dune

In the end, though, I decided you can’t go wrong with a classic, and chose Frank Herbert’s Dune as my favorite book from 2009. It’s got a lot of the tropes from fantasy AND science fiction, but it presents them in such a way that it’s fresh and interesting, not to mention an epic storyline full of battles and giant worms. Thoroughly entertaining stuff, and I’m at a bit of a loss to explain why I haven’t gone on to read more of the Dune books. I shall resolve to do so in 2010.

Worst Book I read in 2009

Why is it that I always have stronger contenders for this than the best books? I could barely get through Jack Kerouac’s On the Road despite its stature as a classic. Garth Nix’s Sabriel about a young necromancer trying to save her father squandered an interesting premise on poor writing and bland characters, but I have to cut it some slack for being a young adult book. And David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle tries to retell Shakesphere’s Hamlet with a young boy and a dog breeding business in Wisconsin, and while it’s really terrible in so many ways it just barely gets eeked out by another entry.

Buyology

Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy and the New Science of Desire takes that honor. Lindstrom is an advertising mogul of some kind, and he’s so breathlessly eager to tell you about this SUPER new science that HE has created that will explain why we buy. The problem is that the author only knows how to write like an advertising man, not a scientist or even a competent distiller of other scientific research. He slings nonsensical terms around like advertising jingles and generally adopts a pompous, hyperbolic tone that’s not far off from what you’d expect in a late night informercial for a stain removal spray.

So, what about you all? What’s your best and worst of 2009?

Book Review: Lords and Ladies

Lords and Ladies is the 14th Discworld book by Terry Prattchett, which is a feat in and of itself, and it’s the 4th book to focus on the Lancre coven of witches. I had initially disliked Granny Weatherwax in her first couple of books, but along with her ever present friend Nanny Ogg she has become one of my favorite inhabitants of the Disc. Lords and Ladies deals with the pending marriage of Magrat Garlick, the third member of the coven, to the king of Lancre and a simultaneous outbreak of elves. Only Prattchett’s elves aren’t of the “Fa la la la” or toy-making kind. They’re more the “take over the world and torture people to death” kind.

What’s interesting about Lords and Ladies is that it shows how Prattchett has grown at this point into being able to tell a pretty good adventure story with genuine character arcs (or in Granny Weatherwax’s case, revealing what’s already there, since she’s too stubborn to change) and at the same time being really funny. And of course the author’s signature social satire is in palce, with his taking pot shots at everything from Shakesphere’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to the feudal system to psychology to superstitions about crop circles to the whole goth culture. It’s dizzying sometimes, but often very funny. Plus it features Cassanunda, world’s second greatest dwarf lover and repairer of step ladders. Some of my favorite quotes:

“Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare.”

“Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.”

“The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.”

“In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

“And the child had a permanently runny nose and ought to be provided with a handkerchief or, failing that, a cork.

But Magrat, like this, frightened him more than the elves. It was like being charged by a sheep.

Book Review: The Elfish Gene

NOTE: The author of this book posted a comment here that provides some interesting context to my review and some counterpoints. It’s definitely worth noting, so click on the “comments” link below.

In The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, author Mark Barrowcliffe presents his memoir of what it was like to grow up during the 70s in Coventry, England and being utterly obsessed with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. As someone who was himself once obsessed with D&D to the point of being able to recite entire blocks of text from the Monster Manual or tell you how many level 3 spells an 8th level Magic-User could cast, this was a good enough hook for me. I’d been there, albeit about a decade later and on the other side of the Atlantic, and I wanted to compare notes.

The problem is that I’m not sure who the audience for The Elfish Gene is supposed to be. Barrowfliffe certainly details his obsession with the game, and I think that any past or current D&D player would be hard pressed NOT to identify with something from the book. Maybe it would be the way the author would show up at schoolmates’ houses awkwardly hoping for a game, or maybe how he delighted in his discovery of the area where D&D and heavy metal overlapped in a Venn diagram. Or maybe how his parents would –as only a loving if confused parent can– feign interest in his nattering about hit dice, kobolds, and +5 vorpal swords.

Likewise, Barrofcliffe does have some genuine insights about how kids see social class, what drives teenage boys to be sardonic bastards, the nature of counter-cultures, hero worship among the self-loathing, and like. It’s all very introspective and again it’s interesting to compare experiences from my own adolescence.

There are also a few really funny bits to the book, as Barrowcliffe is not without the ability to occasionally turn an amusing phrase or describe a situation so absurd that it can only be a true tale born of childhood logic. There is, for example, the time he plans to ignite a balloon full of lighter fluid in order to recreate a fireball spell, but sets his friend’s bathroom on ablaze during a test run. Or the time that he decides to evaluate his ninja abilities by jumping, practically naked, from his bed into his dirty clothes hamper, only to miscalculate things and end up knocking himself out and leaving his befuddled parents to conclude that it must have been some bizarre masturbation ritual. Because, frankly, that’s more believable than the ninja thing.

On the other hand, Barrowcliffe isn’t describing all this in the context of nostalgia. Not even the wry, “can you believe what we used to think was cool” brand of nostalgia. From the opening pages, it’s clear that he thinks that getting into D&D was a huge mistake and that if he had only chosen a different path –one populated by girls and carburetors and maybe cricket– he’d have actually been happy, well adjusted, and better off in life. In fact, he’s downright disdainful of the game and those who play it, right up to the epilogue where he makes a half-hearted attempt to join a modern day game and ends up deriding the players and literally running away from them.

According to Barrowcliffe, everyone who plays role-playing games does so because he’s a socially inept, hopelessly nerdy git. This is mostly because Barrowcliffe is (well, was) himself a socially inept, hopelessly nerdy git and he doesn’t bother to see past his own experiences. While D&D certainly attracts its share of nerds, there are many positive things the author could have said about D&D if you weren’t so bent on blaming it for his own shortcomings. It encourages reading, it develops logical reasoning, it fires the imagination, and it’s an inherently social game, just to name a few.

But there’s none of that; the treatment of the game is entirely lopsided. A more complete book would have delved more into the history of the game and how it and the author evolved over time. There would have also been more examination of the gaming subculture on a wider scale, as well as its many offshoots into other forms of entertainment. Of course, you can say that this is a memoir, and since Barrofcliffe gave up D&D for life and developed other interests, he can’t very well talk about all that, can he? And that’s fair enough. But it remains that Barrowfcliffe doesn’t understand about role-playing games or the attendant culture. He understands about being a socially retarded teenager seeking escape from life. And yes, there’s a difference.

Review: In the President’s Secret Service

The humongous, full title of this book by Ronald Kessler is In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect. And as the title suggests, it aims to tell the secret story of the equally secret service, gleaned by meticulous research, high quality reporting, cross-referencing each story with multiple sources, and maintaining a tone of level headed objectivity without taking sides.

Ha ha, no. Seriously. No. While it’s true that Kessler does aim to tell exciting and interesting stories about the Secret Service based on his extensive interviews with current and former Agents, what we end up with here doesn’t bear much resemblance to anything derived from sound journalism or rigorous research. Instead, the author seems most interested in taking quotes (often anonymous) from Agents (often disgruntled) that are assumed to be true without any kind of verification and usually without any kind of qualification. Think “tabloid.”

That’s bad enough but Kessler seems to be intent on wringing every bit of sensationalism he can out of the book, usually in the form of painting extreme pictures of the Presidents and other people protected by the Secret Service. So you get stories about how Jimmy Carter was aloof with the staff and disingenuous with the public, or how the Bushes sent the Agents steaks every year, and how Al Gore couldn’t stop eating cookies. Or how the appropriately named President Johnson would walk around the White House with his, um, namesake hanging out. Some of these are entertaining, but are tainted by their apocryphal nature, and Kessler’s judgmental tone.

Kessler also makes the frankly absurd mistake of thinking that I’m more interested in employee relations problems within the Secret Service than I am hearing about how they foiled assassination attempts or organize security measures. I sympathize, for example, that Agents have a hard time getting vacation time off or transfers or that their bosses are unsympathetic about all the overtime they’re working. But I really don’t want to read a whole book about it and I really don’t want you to try to convince me of how terrible this all is. The author goes to great lengths to rail against the Secret Service management about all this and more, and frankly it’s just not interesting and the bombastic tone of it all is pretty off putting.

The book does have some interesting bits, like an overview of the methods the Agents use to profile threats, the crazy hardware powering the Presidential motorcade, and a few good stories about catching would-be assassins. But those are buried under tedious discussions of stuff I don’t care about and an annoying, judgmental tone that relies on thin evidence and hearsay.

Book Review: Neverwhere

I picked up this “urban fantasy” novel by Neil Gaiman based on the fact that I had enjoyed the author’s The Graveyard Book earlier this year, as well as some of his other stuff. Turns out it’s the novelization of a BBC TV miniseries from the 1990s, which is kind of odd. Both the show and the book tell the story of Richard Mayhew, your typical sad sack archetype that is put upon by his hag of a fiance and run down by his demanding yet unfulfilling job. In a substantially darker inversion of the classic Cinderella story, Richard is yanked from that life when he stops to help a young girl and is taken away to “London Below,” a magical, shadowy world that exists in just the place its name suggests it would. Aside from Gaiman’s doing his thing with crazy world building and parading a mess of (supposedly) colorful characters across the pages, the rest of the book involves Richard’s growing a backbone and emerging from his ordeals as a much stronger and wiser version of the dope we met in the opening pages.

While I like the idea of urban fantasy that doesn’t center on vampires and I appreciate Gaiman’s substantial imagination, I was mostly “meh” throughout Neverwhere. I think the main problem is that the world of London Below lacks any kind of internal consistency that usually makes fantasy world building so interesting. Stuff just happens transparently because Gaiman needs it to happen to advance the plot, regardless of whether it makes sense. A prime example is the “Markets” which are migrating nightly bazaars at which our heroes can acquire various macuffins and plot devices. The Markets are in a different place each night and apparently require a dangerous trip to reach, yet the logistics of everyone’s knowing where the Markets are and how so many people brave and survive the trip is explicitly handwaived away by the characters. It all feels a bit lazy and obviously contrived, which pulls the reader out of the world. London Below just isn’t believable, even in the extremely generous context of a fantasy world.

Other than that, the book isn’t badly written for a piece of light fantasy that mostly eschews the typical tropes and cliches. And I enjoyed how Gaiman got playful with his language once in a while, as in describing how one character chose for his home the top of a tower that he found unbearably ugly, simply for the fact that at the top of the tower was the only place in London that you couldn’t see much of the tower itself. So it’s easy and occasionally fun reading, though I think Gaiman has definitely done better.

Book Review: Superfreakonomics

I enjoyed Levitt and Dubner’s 2005 book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything quite a bit, so I was excited to hear that the duo had collaborated on this sequel. You can draw a fairly straight line from economics to the field of behavioral economics, and from there it’s just a quick jaunt over to psychology in general, so what I like most about the books are that they use model building and data analysis techniques to answer questions that are at least put in different contexts and at most completely off the wall. Either way, it’s interesting.

Questions addressed in Superfreakonomics include why terrorists should buy life insurance (answer: it helps them circumvent computer software used in profiling), how hookers are like department store Santas (answer: both work more hours during holidays), what killed so many babies and mothers in Victorian hospitals (answer: doctors who didn’t wash up after going elbow deep in cadavers), whether it’s safer to drive drunk or walk drunk (answer: drive drunk), whether pimps or realtors are more valuable to their constituents (answer: pimps), how much car seats improve child passenger safety over regular seatbelts (answer: not much at all), and a lot more. There’s also some dubious stuff on global warming that’s been discussed elsewhere, as well as a hilarious anecdote about the invention of monkey prostitution.

Of course, it’s not just the answers that are interesting, but the process that the authors walk you through to get to them from their initial conjecture. The book is entertaining and well written, with a tone that does that magical trick of straddling the line between being informal and scientific. Levitt and Dubner use the tools of science in general and economics in specific to tackle these unconventional topics, and I enjoyed watching them go at it and do their best to surprise me with what they found. Occasionally they get a little too bombastic (comparing Al Gore to the high priest of a church full of climate change zealots comes to mind) but in general it’s really fun and it gives you no end of little factoids to throw out at your next cocktail party.

Book Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller technically fits into the science fiction genre and the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, but at the same time it’s different from other books that might share those classifications. The closest thing to a a main character that spans the book’s considerable timeline is actually a monastery in the blasted remains of the Southwestern United States. The monastery’s order is dedicated to Saint Leibowitz, an electrical engineer who helped establish an movement dedicated to preserving scientific and cultural knowledge in the wake of a cataclysmic nuclear war. Actually, while the nuclear armageddon was bad, the real impediment to civilization’s survival came in the form of “The Simplification” which was a world-wide backlash against all scientific learning that had led to nuclear weapons. Books were burned, knowledge was willfully destroyed, and pretty much anyone who could even read was put to death. Leibowitz, who engaged in “booklegging” in an attempt to preserve human knowledge, was martyred by the “Simpletons” and inspired the same goal in the residents of the monastery featured in each of the book’s three sections.

Interestingly, the monastery’s story spans thousands of years and several casts of characters. Things start off many years after the nuclear war when a young novice discovers holy relics of the not-quite-yet-canonized Leibowitz, including a shopping list and an impenetrable electrical diagram. This is during a new dark age possessed of only primitive technology and ruled by barbaric power mongers. Eventually civilization and scientific knowledge begin to knit themselves back together with the help of a few brilliant minds and the materials saved by monks in charge of Leibowitz’s legacy. By the end of the book it’s thousands of years later and mankind has once again employed science and technology to bring comfort and civilization, but it has also proven unable to resist reasserting its mastery over the atom in the form of nuclear weapons. Fearing the worst, a group of Leibowitz’s followers prepare to depart for the stars in order to escape history’s vicious cycle.

In a classic science fiction manner, Miller plays a lot with this theme of civilization’s self-destruction and rebirth, and it seems pretty clearly to be the central point to the book along with the evolving tension between science and religion. In the beginning the Catholic residents of the monastery work to preserve and eventually redevelop scientific knowledge, but over time a tension develops between religious faith and secular progress through science, culminating in a heated and complicated debate between the Order’s abbot and a doctor about how to best deal with human suffering in the victims of terminal radiation poisoning. These kinds of themes are played with on several levels.

It’s fascinating stuff, even if Miller’s style is a bit sterile in spots. And while the book lacks the traditional structure of a novel (it’s more like three related novellas, really) this is one of the reasons why I liked it. It’s different, yet retains that same great science fiction focus on big ideas and fundamental questions about human nature.

Book Review: Death From the Skies!

Death From the Skies!

The full title here is Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End, and in it astrophysicist (or something along those lines) Phillip Plait takes on the bombastic topic of global annihilation. Specifically, he looks at all the ways Earth could destroyed by threats from outer space, dedicating a chapter to each threat. Topics include being hit by an asteroid (or meteor or meteorite or whatever it would be called at that point), blasted by a too-close supernova, having our electrical systems fried by a particularly obnoxious solar flare, being immolated when our dying sun gives out a final cosmic belch, being yanked down into a meandering black hole, and perhaps most strangely the eventual heat death of the entire universe.

After presenting each apocalyptic scenario in the form of a small vignette, Plait takes you through the hard science associated with such things, usually accompanied by generous use of scientific notation in an attempt at giving you a proper sense of scale. So you learn about the magnetic fields of the sun and Earth and how those could be screwed up in the event of a huge solar flare, for example, or what Einstein’s theories have to say about the event horizon of a black hole. The author even poses some crazy solutions to problems that straddle the line between science fiction and fact, like the idea of millennium-long endeavors to move Earth to a more distant orbit to save it from an expanding sun. It’s all really interesting for a nerd like me, and Plait does a pretty good job of keeping it high level and sensational enough so that you don’t have to solve any equations. It’s not necessarily light reading, but anybody with a decent high school science education and some imagination can follow along well enough to get the point.

You might think that this all serves to play on some grotesque fascination with planet-wide (or solar system-wide or galaxy-wide, or even universe-wide) death and destruction. There’s some of that, particularly in the chapters on asteroid collisions and monster solar flares, both of which HAVE happened and WILL happen again . But those two events aside, Plait quickly moves on to events that are next to impossible (e.g., being zapped by a nearby gamma ray burst) or guaranteed to happen only after a few billion more years (e.g., our sun running out of fuel). It’s on topics like these that Plait just shrugs his shoulders and says “Yeah, but what the hell it’s fun to conjecture, so let’s just go for it.”

And he’s right –it IS fun to move the decimal point a few places in our probability estimates or fast forward the clock by trillions of years. Mental problems aside, you’re not going to lie awake at night wondering if you’re going to fall into the supermassive black hole in the middle of the Milky Way, but Plait is a good enough popular science writer to make it fascinating to hear about what would happen if you did.

Book Review: Small Gods

Small Gods

Small Gods is, what the 13th Discworld book by Terry Pratchett? Like Pyramids, it’s more of a stand alone book, with only few of the characters appearing in subsequent or previous books. It tells the story of Om, a god who decides to manifest himself physically on the Disk and is surprised to find himself trapped in the form of a lowly tortise due to a lack of followers. There are supposedly people who worship him, but everyone is sort of going along with the rote parts of the religion without really believing in it. And also, there’s the matter of the high priest Vorbis, who compels them all to continue out of fear more than faith.

The sole exception to all this is a somewhat dim-witted Novice named Brutha, who is apparently the last person who genuinely believes in Om and who thus is the only one who can hear the highly frustrated god-cum-tortise when he shows up at the monestary. Brutha is also gifted with a perfect memory, so when Vorbis enlists his help in a holy war on a neighboring country disguised as diplomacy, Om goes along because he has no other choice and has to fight for his own right to exist as a god.

Like with a lot of the other Discworld books, there’s some great social satire going on here. The obvious targtets are organized religion and zealots, but Pratchett also enjoys poking fun at the philosophers who serve as a stand in for secular science and who aren’t much better than the institutionalized religion they oppose. It’s basically more of Pratchett taking modern themes to their extreme and using his fantastical setting to present them in an absurd light. Any attempt, for example, to tell this kind of story using the context of Christianity and Christ’s coming back as a bleating lamb instead of a tortise would have been seen as sensational and not nearly as widely applicable to other religions or institutions. Pratchett manages to make it both funny and thoughtful without that.

Book Review: Maus

Maus

This biographical graphic novel by artist/writer Art Speigelman is essentially a story about the Jewish Holocaust, but with the curious twist that Speigelman draws all the characters as different kinds of animals according (loosely) to their race. Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, and Americans for some reason are dogs. So right off the bat (so to speak; there are no bats in the story) the book kind of captures your attention, even if the author never really goes far with the idea as a literary device.

Instead, the value of the book is with the story, which flips between modern day scenes where Speigelman visits his elderly father Vladek in order to interview him about the Holocaust, and flashbacks showing what Vladek describes. Almost as much time in the latter is given to describe the buildup of the travesties so that we get to see the gradual decline of Vladek’s wealthy Polish Jewish family and its ensnarement in the Nazi machine.

Interestingly, I actually got more enjoyment out of the parts of the book showing the interactions between modern Vladek and his aspiring biographer of a son, which included lots of little dramas, challenges, and caricatures. It was neat to see how the elderly Vladek honestly wasn’t that likable a fellow –he’s miserly, manipulative, controlling, and unfair to his son– and how that contrasted with the heroic, loyal, loving, and resourceful Vladek from the flashback scenes. The interesting (some might say “artistic”) thing is that even though these discrepancies exist, you can still see how it’s the same character and how the hardships of the earlier times acted to define the man we see in his elder years, both for good and bad. Art Speigelman himself also makes for an interesting character study, as he’s not without his own issues.

About the only major complaint I have about the book is that the way Speigelman draws the characters doesn’t allow him to do much to differentiate between them much. There were many scenes where I lost track of who was who because the panels just showed a bunch of identical looking animals. But otherwise the book’s stark black and white art style works given the bleak subject matter.

Sometimes it’s hard to recommend a Holocaust book –it’s not the most cheerful of subjects and yet has been extensively covered in other works. But Maus works pretty well for how it blends modern and past characters as well as its inclusion of a wider time frame. Check it out.

Book Review: The Brain That Changes Itself

On the Road

The full title of this book is The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science and in it author Norman Doidage examines the concept of “brain plasticity.” Essentially this has to do with the ability of the human brain (and the mouse brain and the chimp brain, for that matter) to change in response to trauma, disease, or some graduate student with a bone saw and a fist full of electrodes.

One of the early examples in the book deals with a woman who suffered damage to the part of her brain that deals with balance, leaving her with the sensation of perpetual free fall any time she rose to anything above a completely horizontal position. But by controlling a machine with a sensor attached to her tongue of all things, she was able to remap her brain so that a different part took over the balancing gig and she could once again stand up and walk a straight line.

Like other good science writings, The Brain that Changes Itself is filled with personal stories like this one, and they cover some pretty varied ground. One part of the book deals with blind people who learn to “see” by having a computer translate images into physical pressure on different parts of their otherwise vestigial eyeballs. Another looks at what effect (besides the obvious one) hard core pornography has on the brain. Yet really graphic and cringe-inducing section deals with sado masochism and its origins in the dark side of neuroplasticity. And my favorite section dealt with a group chimps, some scientists that were deliberately causing them brain damage, the birth of PETA, and the protracted destruction of a gifted neuroscientist’s career. It’s all pretty compelling and really, really interesting since it’s tied directly into lessons on how the brain works.

My only complaint about the book is that Doidage goes off in some pretty weird directions, such as his condemnation of porn –not that I disagree with the condemnation, it’s just that his arguments come from a pretty odd direction. And about three quarters of the way through he switches gears a bit into a staunch defendant of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis in general. This wouldn’t be so bad (it’s still educational), except that the case study he employs in this section laughably ticks off every item on the list of psychoanalysis cliches –emotionally distant man whom the psychoanalyst asks to “tell me about your mother” and who uncovers buried memories until he’s curled up in the fetal position on the couch and bawling like a child. It was just a wee bit over the top.

Still, those parts aside I liked this book. It’s brain science made fun and interesting.

Book Review: On the Road

On the Road

On the Road by Jack Kerouac is often cites as one of the best English language novels ever, but my experience with it suggests that to get that level of appreciation out of it you really need to have lived through the beatnick era to which it’s supposed to be a touchstone. I found it horribly grueling.

The book ostensibly tells the story of insouciant traveller Sal Paradise (essentially a stand-in for Kerouac), who criss-crosses North America in the late 1940s. Along the way he meets and travels with a lot of different characters, most notably the hyperactive and womanizing Dean Moriarty. Sal and his companions are just half a step up from being vagabonds as they rely on a combination of cars, hitchiking, odd jobs, and panhandling to make their way west from New York. Zany things happen and it’s all very slice of life for a very unorthodox life.

The novel is largely plotless, and I guess it’s best appreciated as a series of interconnected vignettes about American life during the period. We get to see a lot of different people of the type that at the time of publication probably weren’t discussed much in American literature or culture at large. It’s all very flavorful and in a way reminded me of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat –just a bunch of guys who loaf around, drink, and convince themselves that loafing and drinking are the most noble of pursuits.

This is fine and all, but it just didn’t work for me. Ironically I grew restless and bored with all the shenanigans and all the traveling around and the endless parade of characters that don’t seem to matter at all in any kind of narrative or personal sense. It’s colorful, but sprawling and formless. I guess that’s largely the point of the book, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to love it.

Book Review: The Black Company

The Black Company

Ocassionally I get the itch to read a fantasy novel for the same reasons that other people my age will stop channel surfing if they come across an old Scooby Doo episode. The Black Company by Glen Cook, though, is different from a lot of others in the genre. It doesn’t feature a young hero coming of age and fighting a dark menace that threatens the world. Instead, the book is narrated by Croaker, the aged physician and historian for a group of mercenaries called The Black Company.

The Company is amoral at best, willing to take on pretty much any contract. In fact, for the majority of the book the Company’s employer IS the dark menace that threatens the world –a horribly powerful sorceress called The Lady and her group of none too nice lieutenants. You get the feeling that many members of The Black Company are barbarous and devoid of morals themselves, though what it seems to come down to most often is a strange sense of honor requiring them to follow through on the letter of their contract with The Lady.

But what I think really sets the book and its sequels apart is the fact that you soon get the feeling that good and evil are all relative depending on where you’re standing, especially if you’re just a grunt on the ground in the middle of a war whose overall scope and purpose is outside your ken. Sometimes you’re just trying to stay alive. Furthermore, the reader gets the feeling that the Rebel armies that oppose The Lady aren’t all noble and pure themselves. It’s not light versus dark, but rather gray on gray.

It’s also worth noting that while there are wizards and demigods in the book, the way Cook handles them is interesting. They’re just people –weird and twisted for sure, but in the end people who are not only vulnerable to weapons but who have their own desires and motivations. A lot of them are killed off in the peripheries of the story which just further reinforces the book’s “in the trenches” point of view. So it’s pretty good stuff, and a good example of what I would consider “mature” genre fiction.

The Art and Science of Competency Models

Competency Models

One of my co-workers and I often joked about creating a television sitcom about a group of twenty-something Industrial-Organizational Psychologists who lived in the big city where they learned about love, friendship, and how to leverage the tools and methodologies of psychology to solve organizational problems. This book by Anntoinette Lucia and Richard Lepsinger would figure into one of the episode’s B stories in some way, perhaps because the “Chandler” of the show needs to figure out how to identify the critical knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to adequately perform a target job. Look for it soon on NBC’s Thursday night lineup.

But enough about that. This book is pretty much what the title suggests: it discusses a hands-on approach to developing competency models –that is, a collection of basic requirements for doing a given job in a work setting. What I like about it is that it’s got a very “nuts and bolts” approach that pays some respect to the academic side of the subject but is really pretty squarely aimed at practitioners. It goes into some basic definitions and reviews of relevant legal material, but then jumps right in to how to create a competency model and then how to use that model to build various Human Resources functions like selection systems, training/development, performance appraisal, and succession planning. There are little vignettes along the way that describe how real companies are doing all this stuff.

So it’s good that the book doesn’t get bogged down in minutia, but at the same time I would have appreciated a little more in terms of tools, worksheets, surveys, handouts, and examples. The authors talk about what you should be doing and even how to do it, but I would have liked to see more concrete examples. It’s almost as if they seem afraid to take anything but a generalist approach, since any examples would be specific to a given organization and job. But I don’t mind that, since I’m smart enough to figure out how to take what’s presented and adapt it to my own circumstances; at least give me a chance to do that. Still, as a primer, it’s not bad if you need an overview or starting point for more research on the topic.

Book Review: Sabriel

Sabriel

Sabriel by Garth Nix (awesome name, by the way) is the first in a series of fantasy novels for young adults. It features the eponymous girl, who is the latest in a long line of Necromancers –magicians who deal with death and getting the dead to shuffle around on this side of the grave. Only Sabriel’s clan is unique in that they specialize in putting the dead back down and protecting the world from them. So when her father dies, Sabriel has to shoulder the mantle of his office –until she can track him down and bring him back from the dead. Along the way she must face –yes, you guessed it– an ancient and deadly evil that threatens the entire world.

Nix has some really neat ideas in Sabriel. The whole necromancer angle is interesting, too, and Nix sets up some intriguing world building with the magic and silver bells that Sabriel and her brood use to ply their craft. So that’s cool. He also sets up two “kingdoms” that exist in parallel –one magical and old world, and the other non-magical and modern by the standards of early 20th century England. Sabriel is from the former and raised in the latter, presenting a nice duality that makes her easier for young readers to identify with her.

But that’s also a problem. The whole book is so incredibly, aggressively Mary Sue that it was hard to see Sabriel as anything other than a vehicle for fantasy fulfillment. This is a young girl who is mature beyond her years, the best at everything she does, unusually powerful, and without any real flaw. She’s just there to be a bland stand-in for the author and/or any young person reading the book. In fact, this is a criticism that can be leveled at just about any character in the book, especially Sabriel’s love interest, “Touchstone.” Who is, of course, really a handsome prince with all the personality of a brick. None of the characters have any spark, any sense of personality, no emotional range, and they speak in dialog that could probably be delivered with more passion by a Speak-And-Spell. Also, Sabriel has a pet cat. That talks. No, not kidding.

I can cut Sabriel some slack for being a young adult book. That’s clearly the audience, and it could be argued that Nix is doing some of this deliberately and the act is not unlike feeding bland, formless food to a baby just learning the mechanics of eating. And maybe the book would appeal to that kind of audience. Everyone else, though, should be aware that despite the glowing reviews it’s not the kind of YA book that crosses over well to other audiences.

Book Review: The End of Overeating

The End of Overeating

The full title here is The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite and in this book former FDA Commissioner David Kessler blends together such disparate fields as biology, psychology, marketing, and sociology to help explain why so many Americans are so fat. The main culprits, he argues, are precisely engineered “hyperpalatable foods” that lead many people into a syndrome of behaviors that he groups together under the term “conditioned hypereating.” Which is a term that, frankly, sounds ridiculous, but he makes a really good set of arguments to go along with it.

I really like the fact that Kessler draws upon so many different fields to explain his thesis. He starts off exploring the world of modern industrial foods and goes into how these products have been meticulously designed to have just the right balance of sugar, fat, and salt to act on the biological and psychological levers that get you to not only get you to eat them, but to crave them and to gorge yourself on them to the point of overeating. He also describes how a lot of food that you may think of as “whole” have already been pre-processed more than you’d guess. This stuff is incredibly eye opening, and the details that Kessler provides on how these food-like products are developed and delivered (packaging and presentation matter, too) really made me not want to ever set foot inside an Applebee’s again. The big food corporations are downright insidious in their manipulation, but ultimately we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Later in the book Kessler attempts to formulate a plan for readers to follow in order to end this cycle of overeating, but this part fell kind of flat to me since most of the advice that he spends pages and pages giving can really just be boiled down to “put down the fork, fattie.” Still, I appreciate his NOT veering into touchy-feelie territory when dispensing diet advice, and I think that the most useful thing he does in the whole book is the expose on industrial food contained in the earlier parts. That knowledge alone has made me less likely to indulge in those manufactured substances simply because I now view them with the same jaded attitude as I view TV commercials for a particular brand of blue jeans or a billboard for a particular sports car. Those things are less food and more some unnatural thing, some product cobbled together from sugar, fat, and salt. And they’re simply a lot less appealing viewed in the light that Kessler shines upon them.

Book Review; The Graveyard Book

The Graveyard Book

Wait, wait, all right. Dude. Let’s take like The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and retell it, but like instead of making it a story about an orphan boy raised by the creatures of the jungle let’s have the kid grow up in a graveyard. So instead of a python we’ll have a vampire. And instead of baboons we’ll have ghouls. And instead of a bear we’ll have a …a werewolf. Dude.

All glibness aside, that’s actually a pretty cool idea and I’m glad that author Neil Gaiman got it, because I liked The Graveyard Book quite a bit. As I said, it kind of takes The Jungle Book concept and switches it around so that little Nobody Owens (“Nob” for short) is adopted by the ghosts of a pastoral graveyard when the rest of his family is murdered by a mysterious figure that ends up dogging him for most of the book. Nob is bright, precocious, and largely unaware of the outside world because he is forbidden from venturing outside the graveyard gates. But he is given certain magical powers otherwise possessed only by the dead, and he makes the most of his life among death.

I should mention that this is pretty clearly a book for young adults, so the language is pretty simple, there’s not much violence, and there are no adult situations of the salacious type. But as you might guess from a book about the citizens of a cemetery, The Graveyard Book does tackle one theme typically reserved for adults: death. It’s everywhere in the book, and Gaiman uses that as an opportunity to talk about the flip side of that coin: life and the potential it brings. In a lot of ways The Graveyard Book is a coming of age book, as Nob develops a very blase attitude towards death to the point of not caring if he dies –almost all of his best friends are dead, after all.
But in the course of his character arc, Nob learns to value his own life and the potential that he has to do anything, to go anywhere, and to be anyone. It’s a theme that a lot of young adults will find compelling, and Gaiman executes it really well while keeping the plot brisk and the setting imaginative enough to keep you turning the pages. And the last couple of chapters in particular are bittersweet partings that I think every one of us can relate to.

Book Review: Dune

Dune

Dune by Frank Herbert is kind of an oddity. It’s mostly science fiction given how it’s set on a distant planet and got space ships and lasers and all that stuff. But it’s also got a few of the tropes of the fantasy genre –people fighting with blades, a feudal system with noble houses, prophecies, and stuff that looks suspiciously like magic. But whatever you call it, Dune is pretty good.

The book follows the noble House Atreides, specifically its heir apparent Paul and his mother Jessica. The Atreides family was given the supposedly plum job of managing the desert planet Arrakis, which is the universe’s only known source of this totally rad magical spice called “melange.” Ingesting melange is kind of like snorting baby shark catiledge, except it makes you live forever, turns your eyes solid blue, and lets you see into the future.

The problem is that this is all part of an elaborate ploy by the dude at the top of the feudal food chain to get rid of House Atreides, which was getting a little too big for its interstellar britches. Paul and his mother are soon on the run and fall in with the Fremen, the native people of Arrakis. They are are mysterious, twelve separate kinds of badass, and preocupied with drinking their own sweat. On top of all that, they also view Paul as some kind of messianic savior. Like Jesus, but with more roundhouse kicks. From there Paul both tries to engineer his revenge on his enemies and his reclamation (in all senses of the word) of the planet.

I liked Dune because while it was straight up sci-fi space opera entertainment in some ways, Herbert built in a lot of subtle stuff, too. I particularly liked how Paul had to deal with the fact that he can fulfil the role of messiah to the Fremen natives, but his crazy ability to see the future tells him that if he’s not careful that he’ll ignite an intergalactic holy war, which is a wee bit more extreme than what he has in mind. There’s also some cool stuff in there about how the prophecies about Paul were actually meticulously engineered whisper campaigns conducted by a sect that had been trying to produce someone like Paul through selective breeding and genetic engineering rather than something so mundane as divine intervention.

So I like my introduction to Dune, and I plan to pick up subsequent books. I hear that all the ones that Frank Herbert himself wrote are good, but that I should stop before getting to the ones his son wrote after his father’s death.

Book Review: Alas, Babylon

Alas, Babylon

I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction novels, be they involving zombies, meteorites, natural disasters, or in the case of Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon, nuclear armageddon.

The book follows Randy Bragg, a man adrift in life and lounging around in the small community of Fort Repose, Florida with nothing much better to to. That all changes when nuclear war breaks out between the U.S. and Russia (the book is set in the early 1960s) and everything goes to pot. Fort Repose luckily avoids the overlapping circles of nuclear doom that hit most of Florida’s cities, but it becomes cut off from the rest of whatever passes for civilization. Randy has to abruptly change gears and finds himself a leader both among his town’s survivors and his own expanding household. The book tells about how Fort Repose acts as a stand in for civilization in general as it unravels, adapts, and is reborn.

I really liked this book. The extra twist for modern readers like you and me is that Alas Babylon is set about 50 years in the past. In a way this is weird, because there’s a lot of ink spent on out dated details, like milk deliveries, telegrams, radio, and the like, where an updated version of the story would no doubt deal with cel phone networks, the Internet, and satellite television. But at the same time, this temporal setting gives the book its own flavor that grows on you and intrigues you by setting forth a slightly different set of rules. Then again, things like gasoline supply chains and the abstract nature of the world financial system remain as relevant now as they were then. Either way, it gets you thinking.

The other thing to like about Alas, Babylon is that there’s a lot more literary machinery going on under the adventure story surface. The book comments extensively on race relations between Whites and Blacks (which were no doubt different in 1959 than they are in 2009) and how it takes a nuclear war to level the playing field. And there’s plenty of commentary about how different people deal with the upturning of their world. Randy Bragg make plans to dig an artesian well to procure fresh water while the rich banker’s wife blithely decides to saunter down to the super market and hopes that it’s “not too crowded.”

So I’d definitely recommend Alas, Babylon despite its original publication date, or perhaps even partially because of it. It combines end of the world adventure with social commentary and psychological character development. What’s not to like?