Book Review: Jeeves and the King of Clubs

Jeeves and the King of Clubs
Ben Schott
Humor

MIKE PHIPPS DO NOT READ THIS POST IT WILL CAUSE YOUR EYES TO BLEED PLEASE FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY PRETEND THAT YOU DID NOT SEE IT THANK YOU

Now that we've got the Surgeon General's Warning out of the way, I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by Jeeves and the King of Clubs. The author seems to have approached it in a suitably chastened spirit: "nothing can cap perfection," he notes in an afterword. Certainly it's a big improvement on Sebastian Faulks's Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, in which Wooster, B. actually ends up (God help us) engaged.

Not that Jeeves and the King of Clubs is entirely free from innovation. This is the curse of the pasticheur (as I have occasion to know). Imitate slavishly, and you end up with something that's at best dull and uninspired. Stray too far from the template, and the justified wrath of the true believers pours down upon you. In this case, Schott inserts Bertram Wooster into an actual, not-entirely-silly spy plot--one that's occasioned, not by the blundering of his chums, nor by the machinations of his family, but by what might loosely be called the real world.

It's not all that much of a plot, mind you. Nonetheless, it's a departure. Classically, Bertie is motivated by nothing more than his own desire to be a decent chap, aid his undeserving compatriots, stay out of trouble, and not get married. The plot obstacles that occur are of a social nature, no more. Placing him--however gingerly!--into a situation with politics and secret messages and consequences is . . . a little different. It not only features Bertie being almost competent at something; at one point he is right when Jeeves is wrong. Great Scott!

In matters such as this, I'm generally a purist. I liked Jeeves and the King of Clubs pretty well, all the same. There's a little tip of the hat to Lord Peter Wimsey--nicely meta, that man--and an informative section of notes, which will however confuse you if you don't know that Wodehouse's nickname was "Plum". The language is quite good (a sine qua non), and the secondary characters entirely consistent with the Wodehouseian oeuvre. It helps, too, to remember that Wodehouse himself adored detective stories. 

Put another way, Jeeves and the King of Clubs was good enough that I'd read a sequel. As pastiches go, that's high praise.

Book Review: Forever and a Day

Forever and a Day
Anthony Horowitz
Thriller

Anthony Horowitz is one of the better mystery writers working today, so I was mildly curious to see what he could do with the James Bond form. Forever and a Day is in the continuity of the written Bond, not the filmic one, and the written Bond is a more interesting character altogether. (Also, it's a good James Bond title.)

Well . . . it's not bad. It's not especially memorable, though. As an origin story for 007, it has the problem that Daniel Craig's movie version of Casino Royale does the same thing, only better. Often it puts Bond in a curiously passive role, with his love interest Sixtine taking the initiative.. The construction is a bit loose: there's a scene where Bond and Sixtine reconnoiter the enemy base, for example, for no reason whatsoever. And the big reveal--while it really does read like something Ian Fleming might have used around 1960--isn't all that shocking to a modern reader. Even Bond's character is underdeveloped.

On the other hand, the writing is smooth, the scene is alluring, the villain is very good in a very Bondian fashion, and the final chapter is outstanding. Forever and a Day isn't a book for everyone, but there are many worse ways to pass an afternoon.

Book Review: Race to Hawaii

Race to Hawaii: The Dole Air Derby and the Thrilling First Flights That Opened the Pacific
James Ryan
History, aeronautics

This isn't a bad book. The subject matter is interesting, and the writing is clear (if rather simple). On the down side, Ryan is too digressive; perhaps it's an attempt to give context to the air madness of 1920s, but if so it's too unfocused and too anecdotal. The picture of just how big a deal this all was gets presented very effectively--tens of thousands of people showed up just to watch the airplanes take off. The significance of these events in the larger history of air travel and technology isn't. 

What does come through is the absolute star-struck passion that the early aviators had. It's no wonder that primordial science fiction had as one of its staples the half-crazy, half-inspired rocket jockey who aims his untried craft at the moon: that's exactly what these guys were like. Their death rate was absurdly high. While they lived, though, they were touched with fire.

Book Review: In the Hurricane's Eye

In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown
Nathaniel Philbrick
History

Nathaniel Philbrick is an outstanding writer. This is a good book. It's not Philbrick's best work, however.

The aim of In the Hurricane's Eye is to tell the real, de-mythologized story of the Battle of Yorktown. In particular, the battle would never have taken place without the intervention of the French fleet, and it wouldn't have succeeded without French troops. None of what happened was inevitable. Philbrick does a nice job of making a narrative out of the various strange contingencies--the arguments between Washington and the French, the misjudgments on all sides, the titular hurricane, and many more--that led to the astounding result.

All the same, there are so many aspects in play here that the book is somewhat fragmented. The main story has to do with the naval strategy, and the main theme concerns just how much the Americans owed the French; but there are a great many excursions and side trips, and the story of Yorktown itself is curiously divorced from the rest of the book. Perhaps it's necessary to understand the war in the southern colonies in detail, along with Benedict Arnold, Lafayette, the siege of New York, and so forth, in order to fully understand Yorktown. Yet in a narrative history, the narrative has to be king.

Don't get me wrong. I read this book in a couple of gulps, enjoyed it, and will be back for more. It's a good read for anyone with a basic grounding in the facts of the American Revolution. If it's a little undirected at times, that at least accurately reflects the confusions and concerns of Washington and his contemporaries.

"Holmes on the Range" RETURNS!

It's no secret that I like Steve Hockensmith's writing. Heck, I shamelessly ripped off lovingly borrowed his main characters.

Now, after a long hiatus, they're officially back. The Double-A Western Detective Agency is on Amazon even as we speak. Short summary: I liked it a lot, and not just because I had the chance to see an early draft of the manuscript. This is an actual Adventure, with quick pacing and a good deal of action. There's a nice intertwining of multiple plot threads at the denouement, too. There's even an honest-to-God theme about going it alone vs. relying on others.

If you liked the prior books in the series, you'll like this one.

Book Review: Leadership in Turbulent Times

Leadership in Turbulent Times
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Biography

Doris Kearns Goodwin is an outstanding writer. Team of Rivals is a classic for a reason. Wait Till Next Year is a wonderful memoir. The Bully Pulpit is an insightful and sometimes moving triple portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the progressive press.

Leadership in Turbulent Times is a business book.

It's not bad. As a reading experience, in fact, it's pretty good. It serves as an interesting four-way parallel biography of four presidents--Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. It proposes an interesting thesis, which is that these represent four different types of leadership (transformational, crisis, turnaround, visionary). But the business book is a fundamentally limited endeavor, and Goodwin doesn't transcend those limitations.

The weakest part of Leadership in Turbulent Times, in fact, is its most business-book-y part--the third of its four sections. The first two sections are narrative and descriptive, describing her protagonists' childhood and formative political experiences. She goes one president at a time, in chronological order. That works fine. It lets her compare and contrast each man at analogous points in their lives. 

But in the third section Goodwin veers down into the swamp of distilling the biographies into maxims, and the four-way structure doesn't cut it. She should have organized section by leadership practice, and then show how the four presidents applied them--differently, similarly, or both. Instead,  every president is treated in sequence. There are a lot of problems with this, but here are the killers:

1. It's shallow. By drawing on each leader's life individually, Goodwin's text is reduced to a series of platitudes. Of course it's good to "Lead with your strengths," to "Bring all stakeholders aboard," and so forth. Did anyone doubt it?
2. It's not coherent. Any litany of this sort is bound to be littered with contradictions, of the "don't look before you leap" vs. "he who hesitates is lost" variety.
3. It's forgettable. By the time you get to "Know when to hold back, know when to move forward" (Lyndon Johnson), you've probably forgotten about "Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction" (Lincoln).
4. It doesn't support Goodwin's own taxonomy. If you want to establish that transformational leadership is actually distinct from crisis leadership, for example, you need to establish that the "transformational" rubric "Tell the truth" doesn't apply, or at least applies differently, in the "crisis" case. Using silos doesn't do that.

Regrettably, this is what business books do: provide a series of shallow, easily-parroted buzzwords that simple minds can easily turn into shibboleths (and bumper stickers). I'm not a fan of the genre. I'm still a fan of Goodwin's; I just don't think Leadership in Turbulent Times plays to her strengths.

Book Review: On Grand Strategy

On Grand Strategy
John Lewis Gaddis
History, politics, warfare

It's not often that I have a hard time describing my reaction to a book. On Grand Strategy is not exactly a military-history book, not exactly a philosophy book (in spite of heavily referencing Isaiah Berlin), not exactly a political-theory book, not exactly a descriptive book, not exactly a prescriptive book, not exactly an analytical book. I'm not entirely sure who the intended audience is, in fact; it's too popular to appeal to academics, and too academic to appeal to the public. Smart undergraduates, maybe?

Gaddis's thesis is that large scale strategy--whether political, military, economic, or what have you--is always a balancing process. If you fix your eyes on your ultimate ambition, you can lose sight of the practical necessities. If you keep your mind firmly on what's realistically achievable, you can narrow your vision to the point where you don't actually achieve much. Aspirations can be limitless; resources can't; to engage in grand strategy is to establish a meeting point. Or, in Berlin's famous formula, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

To this end, the book proceeds largely as a series of parallel lives. Usually Gaddis picks out one historical personage who failed to negotiate this balancing act, and contrasts him with another one (either a contemporary, or someone else in a similar situation) who succeeded. These case studies are interesting, but they don't add up to a conclusion. That the tension cited exists is plain; a series of examples doesn't constitute any kind of explanation, much less a theory. Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I, for instance, was obviously a prisoner of his ambitious ends. He didn't compromise on his means, and so his ends went unachieved. Okay, true. And . . . ?

The real weakness, to put it another was, is that it's all hindsight. Given a taxonomy and 20-20 postdiction, it's always easy to fit your cases into your structure. Whether that really explains anything, much less accurately reflects how the real historical figures thought or worked or acted, is a much more doubtful question.

I should stipulate that there's much to admire in On Grand Strategy. The scholarship is deep, wide, and erudite. The writing is quite fluid. The content is intellectually challenging, ambitious, and thought-provoking. All the same, when you write a thick book that effectively boils down to "good leaders know how to match means and ends," you haven't quite fulfilled your promises.

Book Review: First Man

First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong
James R. Hansen
Biography

[Yes, I saw the movie. Naturally, that meant I had to read the book.]

Suppose you were a baseball fan. Suppose further that you had a favorite player--Babe Ruth, say. You might find yourself reading, and enjoying, a biography of the Babe that was mainly about his playing days. The statistics--the great games--the sixty-homer season--the awards--the "called shot" home run . . . great stuff.

Substitute "space" for baseball, and "Neil Armstrong" for Ruth, and you've got First Man. Aircraft flown--missions accomplished--piloting deeds--feats of analysis under pressure--touch-and-go-emergencies . . . great stuff. To quantify it (a thing which Armstrong would have approved of), First Man is 389 pages long. Armstrong becomes a pilot on page 46; he retires on page 330. In between is a sports bio for nerds.

Within that limitation, First Man is pretty good. It gives a very complete picture of Armstrong's famously reserved and analytical personality. There are some illuminating anecdotes from the people around Armstrong, though nothing to his discredit. It's exciting in the exciting bits. It's (just) sufficiently technical in the technical bits. It's a little bit hero-worshiping. To nobody's surprise, Apollo XI occupies the biggest single chunk.

The portrait of Armstrong that emerges is an interesting and detailed one, too. He seems to have been a man who avoided strong emotions and was uncomfortable in the limelight. He believed that problems have solutions. (As an engineer, I think I recognize a kindred spirit.) If this doesn't make for the most colorful personal story ever told, it's at least an insightful one.

Book Review: The China Governess

The China Governess
Margery Allingham
Mystery

At one time Margery Allingham had a reputation, along with Christie and Sayers, as one of Britain's Golden Age Queens of Crime. I haven't read all that much of her output, but what I have read leaves me puzzled as to why anyone would think so. The China Governess did nothing to enlighten me. It's a mess. In fairness, it's the next-to-last book she completed; I'll assume provisionally that it does not represent Allingham at the height of her powers.

Book Review: The Poison Squad

The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Deborah Blum
Biography, science, politics

In 2010, Deborah Blum published an excellent book entitled The Poisoner's Handbook. The Poison Squad is in many ways a sequel, or para-quel. Unfortunately, the comparison doesn't work in the current book's favor. In The Poison Squad, Blum slips over the line from writer to cheerleader.

The book is centered strongly on Dr. Harvey Wiley, "Father of the FDA". That in itself is a good choice; Wiley was a remarkable character, and provides a unifying thread. However, Blum makes a dreadful choice in her presentation of facts: a reader of The Poison Squad could be pardoned for concluding that everything that Dr. Wiley said, did, or proposed was absolutely righteous, because it was Dr. Wiley saying, doing, or proposing it.

This is nonsense. However well-intentioned Wiley was, and however nefarious his adversaries--and some were pretty nefarious!--he was not a prophet. The eponymous Poison Squad studies were far better than the previous standard, which consisted of nothing; but they would be laughed out of court today, due to tiny sample sizes and a lack of rigor. To use the existence of those studies to support their conclusions is absurd--but Blum does it, over and over. In no case does she even refer even glancingly to the actual, you know, currently-accepted facts. No: Dr. Wiley was always right, and his foes were always wrong (and not just wrong, but EEEVIL).

Blum likes horror stories. She flings around the fact that formaldehyde was used as a food additive like a mad card sharp pulling aces out of her sleeves, apparently because the phrase "formaldehyde in food!!!!" is a scary phrase. She doesn't mention that formaldehyde occurs naturally in some foods, much less give us meaningful facts by which we could compare quantities or make reasoned judgments. She kicks up Wiley-quotin' storm on the terror that is sodium benzoate, but does she include anything like Science Magazine's commentary on the stuff? I'll give you one guess. (Hint: Science uses the terms "idiotic", "stupid", and "Your reasoning is faulty and your science is wrong".) 

At several points Blum's text reads like the "arguments" of today's anti-vaccine zealots. That is not a compliment.

Blum really shows her colors in a rather bad afterword. Here she tries to connect Saint Harvey Wiley to global warming, the Trump Administration, the heartbreak of psoriasis, etc. (Okay, I made that last one up.) This is not only off-putting; it shouldn't be necessary. If Blum had written her book better, she could have--should have--trusted her readers to make the connections for themselves. Instead, the addendum just looks like more frothing and propaganda.

---

A pretty good book covering some related topics (among many others) is Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit.

Book Review: The Year's Best Science Fiction

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection
Gardner Dozois
Science fiction

This anthology is a mixed bag, which gives it a leg up on a some other contemporary counterparts that I've read. At least it's not universally depressing. I don't think any of the stories here rises to the level of an instant classic--Ted Chiang is your best bet for that nowadays--but some of them are pretty good. I observe that the verb "print," in the sense of 3D printing, is overused; that having at least one character with non-quotidian sexuality and/or gender is is très hip; and that, contrarily, anything -punk seems to have fallen off the radar.

The stories I'd give an actual "I liked this" to are:

• "Dear Sarah", Nancy Kress. Not totally original, but a good (and topical) inverted view of the friendly-aliens-are-here setting.
• "Night Passage", Alastair Reynolds. Very nice plotting.
• "The Martian Job", Jaine Fenn. Nothing groundbreaking, but an entertaining heist tale.
• "The Proving Ground", Alec Nevala-Lee. Great Scott! A science-fiction story that revolves around actual science! The message is hoary, but the development is good.
• "Number Thirty-Nine Skink", Suzanne Palmer. Disclaimer: Suzanne is a friend of mine. A very oddball . . . love story? . . . between a probe and a man.
• "A Series of Steaks", Vina Jie-Min Prasad. Cute crime story (with 3D printing that's actually intrinsic to the story!).
• "Nexus", Michael F. Flynn. I'm not quite sure what this story is trying to do, but it does it in an amusing way.

For the rest, here are my notes, which (I stipulate) are totally biased, and will be useful mainly to readers who share my prejudices.

Title	Author	Attributes	Notes
The Moon is Not a Battlefield	Indrapramit Das	D, U	War is bad, and grunts get the worst of it both during and after. Who knew?
Vanguard 2.0	Carter Scholz	NP	Substantially weakened by a lady-or-the-tiger ending.
Starlight Express	Michael Swanwick	NP
We Who Live in the Heart	Kelly Robson	AP, DF
The Dragon That Flew Out of the Sun	Aliette de Bodard	NP, U
Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty's Place Cafe	Naomi Kritzer	MS, U	Confronted by major external crisis, woman learns what's really important. It's been done.
The Hunger After You're Fed	James S. A. Corey	AP, NP
The Wordless	Indrapramit Das	D, NP
Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics	Jessica Barber and Sara Saab	AP, NP	Star-crossed lovers are star-crossed. Repeat.
Zigeuner	Harry Turtledove	U	An enjoyable read, well-written, with excellent detail, but hopelessly predictable.
The Influence Machine	Sean McMullen	U	Sexism, like war, is bad.
Prime Meridian	Silvia Moreno-Garcia	AP, DF
Triceratops	Ian McHugh	WTF
There Used to be Olive Trees	Rich Larson	AP, D
Death on Mars	Madeline Ashby	AP, MS	Could be set anywhere.
Elephant on Table	Bruce Sterling	DF	I got less than five pages into this before I gave up.
The Residue of Fire	Robert Reed	WTF
Sidewalks	Mareen F. McHugh	U	Did I say the Turtledove story was hopelessly predictable? I take it back.

Key:

• AP: Annoying protagonist (or main viewpoint character)
• D: Depressing
• DF: Didn't finish (or skimmed)
• MS: Mainstream fiction masquerading as SF
• NP: No point that I could discover
• U: Unoriginal 
• WTF: WTF

This isn't all of the stories in the volume, but the comment "This story made no particular impression on me" covers everything else.

---

Even if not all the stories are (in my humble (but obviously correct) opinion) winners, I tip my hat to the authors. They're doing something hard.

Book Review: The Consuming Fire

The Consuming Fire
John Scalzi
Science fiction

The Consuming Fire is the sequel to The Collapsing Empire. If you liked that, you'll like this. I did, and I did. My reservations: there's really not enough description of people, places, and events; the villains aren't especially competent; and the final resolution seems like something that the protagonist really should have done around chapter four. There's couple of nice bits in the middle about how people interpret other people's intentions through their own lenses, though.

Like the first book, this is not a must-read instant classic. It's good workmanlike old-school SF, with John Scalzi's typical strengths and weaknesses. Start with the first book.

Book Review: The Flatiron

The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose With It
Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Architecture, Biography

There is a surprisingly substantial sub-subgenre comprising biographies of buildings. The Flatiron Building is perhaps a little less known nowadays, but it was interesting and important in its own time. The notable thing about The Flatiron--the book, that is--is that spends relatively few pages on the engineering and construction of the edifice. It does some work on telling the building's story throughout its subsequent life, which is nice, and which many other books in this sub-subgenre neglect.

More than anything else, however, The Flatiron revolves around a person. Specifically, it's the story of one Harry S. Black, the would-be "Skyscraper King" of New York, whose ambition and vision--or, if you prefer, ego and monomania--drove the construction in the first place. This improves the book if you're one of those readers who prefers stories about people; Black was certainly colorful enough to carry it.

On the other hand, it also makes the book more conventional. It'd make a good episode of a TV show: there are decidedly soap-operatic threads. Gilded-Age tycoon melodramas, however, are a dime a dozen. The building's story is more unique than its progenitor's. I didn't dislike The Flatiron, but I didn't think it quite lived up to its potential.

---

Some notable books in the biography-of-a-building category include Skyscraper: The Making of a Building, by Karl Sabbagh, and Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, by Daniel Okrent. Moving from buildings to edifices in general, David McCullough's The Great Bridge is a classic for a reason.

Book Review: The Book of Why

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
Judea Pearl
Mathematics, computers, statistics

The Book of Why reminded me strongly of The Evolution of Beauty.

• The author has a Theory, referred to with Capital Letters (here, the Causal Revolution; there, that Beauty Happens).
• The Theory was actually discovered long ago, but it has been forgotten.
• Mainstream investigators have sneered at, pooh-poohed, and generally neglected the Theory.
• Fie on them.
• They are enslaved to their own outdated notions, which lead them to more and more outlandish convolutions to explain things that the Theory explains quite simply.
• The Theory is nothing less than revolutionary, and has profound implications.
• The assertions of significance are maybe a little more extravagant than the book can establish.

There's even a shared villain of sorts, the statistician R. A. Fisher.

Among the differences is that The Book of Why is more technical. I won't say it's written for a specialist audience, but to get a lot out of it you should have at least a basic understanding of probability and statistics. (Bonus points for knowing what Bayes' Theorem is.) You'll need to do some simple probability math if you want to verify what Pearl is saying. 

Put it another way: if you're not familiar with the stock phrase "correlation is not causation," this isn't the book for you--because this is exactly what Pearl is arguing about. Specifically, The Book of Why argues for the power of making inferences based on causal diagrams, and demonstrates rigorous ways to manipulate them to draw powerful conclusions. 

This sounds hazy, so let's go with an example from the book: the low-birth-weight paradox. We've all learned that smoking is bad, and that it's especially bad for pregnant mothers. And yet: babies with low birth weight do better if their mothers were smokers. This isn't a fluke; the statistics establish correlation quite firmly. What gives?

What gives, says Pearl, is that we're settling for a correlational answer when we need a causal one. Specifically, we need to understand that low birth weight may have different causes. Smoking can cause it. But so can developmental defects, or malnutrition. What the paradox show is that babies whose birth weight is low because their mothers smoked do better than babies whose birth weight is low because of other, much more serious conditions. Which makes perfect sense.

Interesting stuff. On the other hand, classical statisticians have good ways to talk about this sort of effect without resorting to Pearl's "Causal Revolution." Maybe it's clearer and simpler with causal calculus--I'm inclined to believe that--but The Book of Why rather implies a stronger claim.

Moreover, Pearl seems to tack sideways around one of the standard arguments against causal thinking. When you create a causal model, you're making assumptions. All the graph-theoretical rigor in the world won't help you answer questions if your graph is wrong--if, say, you assume that plowing the prairie causes rain (don't laugh, people did this), you'll have an incorrect diagram. Sure, this is often trivial--snowy weather causes traffic accidents, not the other way around--but when it's that trivial, why do you need a causal model in the first place?

The power of standard statistics is to tease out correlations that you didn't expect. That's why statisticians, AI researchers, and machine-learning people love it: you dump in a bunch of data, push a button, and poof! you learn something. (In practice, I haven't found it to work that way, but the notion is seductive.) Causal modeling seems like an interesting and powerful approach to quantifying what it is that you've learned. As to whether it merits the designation of "revolution," though, I'm still agnostic.

Professor Allen Guttman

My uncle, who taught English and American Studies at Amherst College from 1959 to 2013, just turned eighty-six. He's still running every day and writing academic articles.

Book Review: Rocket Men

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon
Robert Kurson
History, space

Rocket Men is a good illustration of the difference between "a good book" and "a good book for a specific audience." The specific audience, in this case, is space nuts (of whom I am one). If you grew up drinking Tang and knowing the difference between a Redstone and an Atlas booster, so are you, and you'll like this book. It's got rockets, heroic astronauts, heroic engineering, and the Moon: enough said. 

A more detached view takes in some of Rocket Men's limitations. The chief of these is that Kurson spends the bigger part of his book on the smaller part of his story. He starts out by making a strong case that the decision to send the Apollo 8 mission--it was aggressively brought forward--was a daring one, taken to respond to pressure from the Soviets, and requiring considerable technical bravado. Having done that, he spends most of his page count on an hour-by-hour recounting of the mission itself, which went as smoothly as such things ever did. The real drama, in other words, is in the preparation, and Kurson shortchanges it.

It's the enthusiast's dilemma. What gets Robert Kurson's pulse pounding is the adventure in space, in the same way as a sports enthusiast is excited about the game itself. That leads him to overbalance the book. It edges his astronaut biographies near to starry-eyed hero-worship. It makes his writing a little more fervent than the facts may warrant--he overuses, for example, the would-be-dramatic single-sentence paragraph.

None of this is meant as a slam. Rocket Men is an enjoyable read. It's just that it's much more enjoyable if you're already a fan.

Book Review: The Mystery of Three Quarters

The Mystery of Three Quarters
Sophie Hannah
Mystery

[WARNING: Unlike some people, I generally try not to put spoilers in my reviews. This will be an exception. Then again, if you still want to read the book after reading this post, you deserve what's coming to you. Also: long and screed-y.]

I read Hannah's first Hercule Poirot pastiche when it came out and thought it was pretty bad. The plot was all over the place, she had a tin ear for dialogue and names, one character showed strong signs of being a Mary Sue, and the narrator character was afflicted with pointless and ultimately trivial psychological hand-wringing.

I skipped the second book. But then I spotted the third in the library, and it opened surprisingly well, and I thought, what the hell. (What can I say? I'm not bad, just weak and easily led.) The good news is that the aforementioned problems have been minimized. The bad news is that they've been replaced by new, much worse problems.

Look: if you're going to pastiche Agatha freakin' Christie, the third-best-selling author of all time (behind the Bible and Shakespeare), there's one thing you've got to have. You've got to have a puzzle. This is the one fundamental overpowering thing that Dame Agatha did better than anyone else before, during, or since. She'd set up a puzzle, give you all the clues, and then pull out a solution that (a) you didn't see coming, and (b) seemed totally, logically, inevitable. That "aha!" moment--or, more specifically, that "I can't believe I didn't see that!" moment--is why people read Christie in the first place.

Sophie Hannah's moment is not an "aha!" moment. It's a "chuwhuuuuh?" moment. Actually, it's a series of "chuwhuuuuh?" moments--an elaborate, rickety structure of improbable psychological hand-waving combined with utterly nonsensical internal logic. There are too many ridiculous bits for me to describe them all. A few particularly egregious examples should give the flavor.

The central clue that makes no sense whatsoever.  Throughout the book, an enormous fuss is made about identifying the typewriter that produced several letters. Let us suppose that you are the villain, and do not wish this typewriter found. Do you: Hide the typewriter under a bed. Buy two brand-new typewriters. Beat up one so that it looks like an old machine. Tell the detective "We have two typewriters, a new one and an old one. You can test them both." Throw the typewriter into the lake. Buy one brand-new typewriter. Beat it up so that it looks like an old machine. Tell the detective "That's our typewriter." If the answer is #1, for God's sake, WHY? The absolutely ridiculous fundamental premise. Your cunning plan is to accuse your sister of murder, so that she will be hanged and you will get the money. The death in question was, and was assumed to be, natural. You write letters vaguely asserting that there has been Foul Play. Which of these things do you do? Sign these letters with the name of the most famous detective in the world, thus assuring that he will take an interest. Give your sister an unassailable alibi. Fail to provide any further evidence whatsoever, other than an dubious and not-very-incriminating clue in a place where anybody in the world could have put it. None of the above. The butler did knows it. The point of having a detective is to have him, you know, detect stuff. Having the butler listen at doors and basically spill the whole plot does not count.

I could go on . . . and on . . . but why bother? Sophie Hannah might well be a good writer for a different sort of book--there are flashes of that--but as constructor of puzzles she's absolutely hopeless.

Book Review: Don't Point That Thing at Me

Don't Point That Thing at Me: The First Charlie Mortdecai Novel
Kyril Bonfiglioli
Mystery, humor

Upon the outer integument of this opus a statement is prominently plastered, averring it to be "The result of an unholy collaboration between P. G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming". This doesn't quite whang the nail on the crumpet. I blame it on the New Yorker having a low taste for literary fiction, thus starving its writer johnnies of the oomph necessary for the Higher Criticism. Only a sadly underfed critical faculty could have lighted upon Fleming while fluttering past the clear thematic and semiotic debt to Leslie Charteris's "The Saint" canon. For myself, I should also have identified a smidge--perhaps even a modicum--of Fraser's "Flashman" epos; but this is a subject upon which reasonable chaps might non-concur.

There's some semblance of some kind of plotty thingamajob in this book. It might make what is termed "a lick of sense", but definitely not two licks, and a full serving is jolly well out of the question. Cavil not! Don't permit the pale cast of thought, or any color cast really, to sickly o'er your reading, and you'll be a better and happier person.

Book Review: When Einstein Walked With Gödel

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
Jim Holt
Science, mathematics, philosophy

I really like Jim Holt's 2012 book Why Does the World Exist? It's both a meaty intellectual challenge and a playful, engaging read. When Einstein Walked With Gödel is equally engaging, but less meaty. The difference is simply that Why Does the World Exist is a focused collection that deeply explores a single topic, while When Einstein Walked With Gödel is a diffuse collection that shallowly explores many topics.

This isn't a diss. Jim Holt is a very good writer, and his essays are not unreminiscent of Carl Sagan in both their discursiveness and their humanity. He's especially good at weaving together biography and abstract ideas. These collected essays cover twenty years of writing, though; inevitably there is some overlap. The individual pieces are excellent, but too short to give more than an overview of their subjects. The thing as a whole is brilliant, but fragmented--kaleidoscopic isn't too strong a term.

And it's nobody's fault but my own that my brain insists on setting the book's title to the tune of "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
Steve Brusatte
Natural history, paleontology

As a wee shaver, one of my oft-reread books was All About Dinosaurs, by Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was a character--he may have been one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones--and his books are a mixture of derring-do, science, and personal history. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is as close as I've ever come to an adult equivalent. Like Andrews, Steve Brusatte is obviously having an enormous amount of fun.

The book is at once a good overall introduction to the natural history of dinosaurs, a charming and discursive autobiography, and an up-to-date survey of modern scientific thinking. Brusatte knows a lot of colorful characters (and he seems to like them all, which is nice). If they never quite get rescued from starvation by the last-minute arrival of their camel caravan in the Gobi Desert, there are still a lot of exotic locales and bone-finding adventures. Oh, and the information itself is really interesting.

The writing is good, too. Brusatte uses a conversational, intimate tone, reminiscent of Ed Yong (that's a good thing). He doesn't dumb anything down, but he does make everything perfectly accessible. For instance, I was particularly and professionally interested in the ways that computers, statistics, and basic machine-learning techniques, are being used now in paleontology; in this, as in general, Brusatte strikes a good balance between too much and not enough information for the general reader.

I wouldn't have minded if The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs had been 50% longer, but that's hardly a complaint. Hopefully there will be a sequel.

---

For a biography of Andrews, see Dragon Hunter by Charles Gellenkamp. Though not exclusively dinosaur-related, Douglas Preston's Dinosaurs in the Attic tells the story of the American Museum of Natural History and provides a good recounting of the Bone Wars.

Book Review: How Do We Look

How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilisation
Mary Beard
Art, psychology

I very much liked Beard's SPQR, with the caveat that she sometimes descended into a kind of erudite waffling--it might have been this way, but on the other hand we should be skeptical, but on the other hand Plutarch says such-and-such, but nonetheless on the other hand . . . How Do We Look contains some germs of an interesting idea, but the caveat has grown to consume the book. 

It's not much of a book, to be honest. It's short. Almost half of it consists of (gorgeous) illustrations. Even within its text, it's divided into two largely disjointed sections: one where Beard considers portraiture (especially sculpture), and another where she considers religious art. The tenuous thread that unites the halves is . . . Um. Well. That's the problem, really. I'm not sure there's a thread even within the sections, much less between them.

I mean, there's something. Beard is trying to write a thought-provoking book about how we, the viewers, respond to art--how our expectations shape our experience of the piece, how the piece communicates to us across time and culture, how the concerns of the artist are or aren't relevant to us. It's got interesting bits: Christians are commanded not to worship graven idols, for example, yet they dress up the Crying Madonna of Macarena like a Barbie doll and parade it through the streets. That says something interesting about the way people project their desires onto an artwork. I'm just not sure what, and Beard doesn't really want to tell me.

The caveat to my caveat is that How Do We Look isn't really a stand-alone work. It's a companion piece to a new BBC TV series, a response to Kenneth Clarke's deservedly famous and influential Civilisation. What works poorly on the page would, I imagine, work better on screen. I don't often recommend viewing over reading, but How Do We Look is an exception.

Book Review: Germany

Germany: Memories of a Nation
Neil MacGregor
History, sociology

This book works better than it has any right to. MacGregor's thesis is that it's impossible to write the history of Germany, because for most of history there hasn't been a single "Germany". The Holy Roman Empire overlapped with "Germany", but it wasn't the same, and the empire itself was a jigsaw puzzle of little Mini-Germanies. (As late as the 18th century, most of them had their own currencies.) Various historically-German-speaking regions and cities are now parts of other countries. The German Empire only lasted from 1871 to 1918, and the middle of its three emperors only reigned for 90 days. There were two actual Germanies from 1945 to 1990. And these are just the political fragmentations!

So MacGregor wrote a book about how various things, places, people, and ideas have been used to construct an idea--the titular "memories"--of Germany. Often the same subjects are used in multiple ways: the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider got stamps from both East and West Germany, for example, with quite different messaging. It would be frightfully easy to turn this material into a mess. How can you write one book that encompasses the Iron Cross, the VW Beetle, Charlemagne's crown, the gates at Buchenwald, porcelain, the psychology of the forest, and the defeat of the Roman Legions in AD 9?

Somehow it all works. It doesn't hurt that the individual chapters are excellent little mini-essays in the mold of James Burke's Connections, or that the theme--the manufacture and use of "memories"--is consistently sustained. It's a remarkable stained-glass-window, adding up to more than the sum of its excellent parts. If it never does resolve the twists and contradictions of this thing called "Germany" . . . .well, that's sort of the point.

Book Review: The Age of Genius

The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind
A. C. Grayling
History, philosophy, science

The first hint that The Age of Genius might have problems comes on page xiv, in the Author's Note. 

The section on the Thirty Years' War might be of less interest to some readers than the rest of the book . . . [they] may skim that section and pass on to the rest. It might be enough for them to have the bare report as here given . . .

It is never a good sign when, before your book even starts, you have to tell your readers that they can skip over the first third of it.

Needless to say, I skipped nothing. I can't say that I'm much the wiser thereby, though. Military history is a demanding discipline, and A. C. Grayling doesn't show much mastery of it. He has moments of clarity, but overall he never makes sense of the Thirty Years War (which would be hard to do for anyone).

Nor, more critically, does he really tie it into the rest of the book. His warning is all too true: the first 100 pages of The Age of Genius are not only disjoint in themselves, but they fail to tie into the argument of the book. That argument--that the 17th century represents a watershed moment in human intellectual history--is a defensible one; but Grayling doesn't really make it. Too much of the book consists of a series of examples, like the "Before" and "After" shots in a magazine ad, where what's needed is some illustration of how Before became After. 

Furthermore, the examples themselves are sometimes dubious. For example:

In 1606 Macbeth was stages for the first time. Shakespeare was able to rely on the beliefs of his audience . . . to portray the killing of a king as subversive of nature's order, to the extent that horses ate each other and owls fell upon falcons in mid-air and killed them. In 1649, a single generation later, a king was publicly killed, executed in Whitehall in London before a great crowd . . . The idea of the sacred nature of kingship as premised in Macbeth had been rejected . . . 

Leaving aside the fact that killing off the occasional king was hardly uncommon in previous centuries, Shakespeare's audience was not stupid. We can accept for the sake of entertainment the proposition that vampires walk among us, or that the Nazis won World War II. I have no doubt that seventeenth-century people were just as capable of accepting certain things in fiction, as fiction. By Grayling's logic, Goethe's Faust--written in the heart of the Enlightenment--shows that 19th-century Europeans generally believed in the literal truth of the deal-with-the-devil narrative, which (if it were true) would falsify The Age of Genius's main thesis.

Actually, to call it a thesis is to give too much credit. The book is full of inconsequential side quests. What does it matter whether Descartes was a Rosicrucian or a Jesuit spying on the Rosicrucians? Why spend so much ink contrasting Hobbes and Locke when both of them clearly belong on the "modern" side of the philosophical divide? Grayling proposes at one point to set up a contrast between the world-view of an educated man in 1600 and one in 1700, and then fails to do so (or, if he does it, it's awfully well-hidden). In any case, the fact that a change occurred is hardly in doubt; the attempt to box it into one arbitrary calendrical period doesn't seem to add much value.

The book ends well. The last chapter is a robust defense of reason, the Enlightenment, liberal thought, and education. It's a pity that the rest of The Age of Genius doesn't really lead there.

Book Review: Energy

Energy: A Human History
Richard Rhodes
Science, engineering, history

Maybe I'm just the wrong reader; I know a lot of this story already. Or maybe my expectations were too high, based on Rhodes's prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. For whatever reason, Energy was a bit of a let-down.

I can't really point to anything wrong with it. It's more that, for most of its length, it doesn't do anything unusually right. Rhodes treats a series of energy sources (steam, petrochemicals, nuclear, etc.) in a lucid pop-sci fashion, giving a capsule history of the development of each. It's fine. It's just not very innovative.

The book only really gets interesting, in fact, when Rhodes gets around to nuclear power. This is where he stops reporting and starts analyzing. He's decidedly a Wizard, not a Prophet. He pays little or no attention to arguments that humanity needs to reduce its energy footprint--indeed, he takes it for granted that no such thing will occur. (I think he's probably right.) Without being polemical or myopic about it, Rhodes is pretty clearly on the side of more nuclear power. He makes a strong case, too. Coal kills a lot of people.

If you're looking for a good topic overview with no need for a technical background, Energy is for you. If you're looking for thoughtful argument, the last third of Energy is arguably for you. If you're looking for something groundbreaking, you might have to look elsewhere.

---

The Grid only partially overlaps Energy, but it's a very intriguing book. Coal, by Barbara Freese (and also subtitled "A Human History"), is a decent biography-of-a-substance book that covers related territory. For the emergence of steam as the first non-muscle-based power source, I liked Christopher McGowan's The Rainhill Trials (among others).

Book Review: Ticker

Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart
Mimi Swartz
Biography, engineering

Having read a book on heart surgery recently, and another on heart symbolism, it seemed only natural to continue with heart engineering.

The subtitle is a bit of bait-and-switch. Ticker doesn't recount "the" quest to create an artificial heart. It recounts "a" quest, specifically the quest of one Dr. Oscar “Bud” Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute. Everyone else who's worked on artificial hearts is involved only in so far as they intersect Frazier's orbit. 

The technique is reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, as exemplified in his classic The Soul of a New Machine.  Mimi Swartz is no Tracy Kidder. To be fair, most people aren't. Swartz is a pretty good journalist and she writes pretty good "New Journalism" style prose. Ticker reads like a long article in one of the better class of magazines--Atlantic or New Yorker, perhaps--that's overflowed its banks. It suffers from a bad case of hagriography. It benefits from a narrow focus. It's strong in character portraits, particularly in a devastatingly acerbic view of pioneering heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. It's weak in technology.

Most unsatisfying, however, is that Ticker lacks an ending. I understand that Swartz wanted to get the book out, but the story she tells is an unfinished one. Reality is not neat. Great authors find a way to write as if it were; competent authors merely reflect the fact. Ticker is competent.

Book Review: A Long Time Coming

A Long Time Coming
Aaron Elkins
Mystery

Ahh, the classic looted-Nazi-art suspense tale. Aaron Elkins has done this sort of thing before, in the Chris Norgren novels and the standalone thrillers Loot and Turncoat. And you know what? Like the art itself, it never gets old.

A Long Time Coming picks up speed gradually; it's about the middle of the book before the violence begins. I didn't mind. The setup is interesting in its own right, and the story of Solomon Bezzecca--the victim of the looting--is quite powerful. Once the scene shifts to Milan (yes, it's another one of those books that makes you want to travel someplace and eat things) the plot thickens nicely, with several layers of murkily-agenda'd characters to choose among. There's some good art history and some good art technical details and a nice cryptic development or two for the protagonist to puzzle over.

It's not groundbreaking. It's not going to be picked up for a big-budget Hollywood thriller starring Tom Cruise. It is, however, great fun. I'm not generally prone to car metaphors--I'm a train nut--but I can't help thinking of A Long Time Coming as the literary equivalent of a ride in a sports car with a good driver. The gear changes come smoothly, you get just the right amount of excitement, the car handles superbly, and when you get to the end you'd be happy to do it again.

Or, to put it another way: not once did I think "Oh, come on, I could do better than that." If you think that's a low bar, you didn't read this, this, this, this, this, or this. Among others.

Book Review: Conan Doyle for the Defense

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer
Margalit Fox
True crime

This is a pretty good book, but it's probably a better book if you haven't already read a half-dozen other pretty good books covering the same material. For one thing, the Oscar Slater case isn't truly a  "forgotten cause célebrè". For another, Arthur Conan Doyle's role--while certainly extremely important--isn't quite what Margalit Fox would like you to think. 

Finally, Margalit Fox is intent on fitting Doyle, Slater, and the crime into an overarching narrative about Social Justice and The Victorian Mind and Other Big Important Issues. She's far more right than wrong; but the real world is not actually this neat, and she has to do some judicious editing, hand-waving, and generalizing to make everything go where it's supposed to.

To summarize quite a bit, here's Fox's story:

1. The murder in question was a sensation at the time and a major event in the evolution of he justice system. (Exaggerated)
2. The choice of Oscar Slater as culprit had more to do with contemporary social attitudes, particularly anxiety towards aliens, than anything else. (True)
3. The police investigation was a travesty. (True in spades)
4. Slater's guilt was not discovered but constructed. (True)
5. Conan Doyle was a genuinely admirable person, and exemplifies the virtues of his time as much as the bogus investigation and trial exemplified its vices. (Largely true, but incomplete)
6. Without Doyle, Slater would never have been released. (Exaggerated)

The truth is that many, many people other than Doyle knew that the verdict was a gross miscarriage of justice. Doyle's major contributions were to write an outstanding and devastating summation and analysis of the case, which nonetheless didn't get Slater released, and to lend his enormous prestige and his connections to the cause.

Look: I liked the book. It has great pacing, a generally sound thesis, some magnificent character portraits, pathos, and a fine sense of time and place. Whether it would be a better book if it were more restrained and less carefully topiaried into shape is an unanswerable question. 

Book Review: Bryant and May: Wild Chamber

Bryant and May: Wild Chamber: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery
Christopher Fowler 
Mystery


I've never been able to make up my mind about how I feel about this series. Maybe that's because Christopher Fowler doesn't seem to have made up his mind, either.

Wild Chamber is pretty typical, really. There are elements of black comedy in it, but it's not really a comedy. There are elements of satire in it, but it's not really satire. There are chunks of urban grit, but it's not a hardboiled novel. There are realistic parts, written about natural-seeming characters in believable settings, and then there are parts that seem to have wandered over from Douglas Adams and set up shop. It's sort of a whodunit, although the ending is as much "whuh?" as "ah-hah!" (To be fair, I've read much worse.)

Half the time it seems as though Fowler doesn't like most of his characters, which is a downer. And in every book of the series there's a B plot in which Peculiar Crimes Unit is on the verge of being shut down by the Powers That Be, which frankly gets pretty repetitive.

What's good about it, you ask? (You do. Trust me.) Well, I adore the amiably melancholy off-kilter lead character, Arthur Bryant; he's like Lieutenant Columbo as written by P. G. Wodehouse. There are some excellent deductive bits along the way: "I knew how he got into the garden as soon as I found out that Mrs. Soandso kept a budgerigar". There are plot twists. There are suspects who are actually suspicious. It's wildly creative and full of useless facts. I like the setting. Some of the funny bits are, in fact, quite funny. I didn't spot the culprit until near the end, either.

A mixed bag, in other words--a collection disparate parts, not exactly fitting together, yet it all more or less works out. (That describes the Peculiar Crimes Unit itself, incidentally, as well as the books that feature it.) Christopher Fowler's own website describes the lead characters as "Golden Age Detectives in a modern world", which actually puts it rather neatly. If that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you like, it probably isn't. Otherwise . . . well, I'm not going to be buying the books in hardcover, but I'll pick up the next one if it strikes my fancy.

Book Review: Buzz

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees
Thor Hanson
Natural History

Another fine book from the author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds. Hanson has a gift for picking interesting subjects, and for delving into the most interesting topics within them. 

More than that, he has a gift for narrative flow. One of his better techniques, for example, is to unobtrusively shift paragraph breaks. That is, he takes what would be the conventional break-point between two related paragraphs and moves it a sentence or two ahead. (Indeed, he sometimes does the same thing at the chapter level.) Done badly, this would be incoherent--but Hanson manages to make it work; it's a way of introducing a little smidgen of suspense, of tension that's immediately resolved, into the text.

As to the content of Buzz, I defy you to read this and not start looking for bees the next time you go outdoors. They're extraordinary little critters. Not just the honeybees, either, although Hanson does necessarily devote a good deal of space to them. Sweat bees, carpenter bees, mason bees, bees with tongues longer than they are, parasitic bees, flowers that are codependent on one specific sort of bee, flowers that are actually bee escape rooms, flowers that look like female bees (guys are alike throughout the animal kingdom) . . . it's like the first time you ever walked into the American Museum of Natural History and saw the dinosaur skeletons. You can't help but say: Wow.

Book Review: West Like Lightning

West Like Lighting: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express
Jim DeFelice
History

The historiography of the American West is debated territory. On one side are the mythologizers; on the other, the debunkers. Good books that take the middle ground are few and far between. West Like Lightning tries, but Jim DeFelice's heart is with the mythmakers.

Mind you, it's an easy read; it's just a rather lightweight one. DeFelice structures his book by following the course of an express rider from east to west, draping it as he goes with local color, geography, stories, outtakes, and whatnot. Periodically he veers back in time to go into the Pony's founding, or forward to look at its ultimate fate. He's actually pretty scrupulous about what he claims as actual unvarnished fact; on the other hand, he's fairly liberal in including (admittedly with proper caveats) the inevitable there's-no-proof-it-didn't-happen excursions. 

DeFelice, in other words, mainly wants to tell a good yarn. (He's a thriller writer, and it shows. Many academic historians eschew terms like "pucker factor" and "major badass", for example. Go figure.) He did his homework, then decorated it extensively to produce a book that's amiable, discursive, lively, and lightweight. 

Book Review: The Long Arm of the Law

The Long Arm of the Law: Classic Police Stories
Martin Edwards (editor)
Mystery

An anthology of mostly-forgotten stories, from the invaluable British Library Crime Classics series. The stories are of widely varying quality: some are purely of historical interest, but there are a couple of semi-precious gems in there. The star of the show is the clever "The Case of Jacob Heylyn", by Leonard R. Gribble--a writer whose name is quite new to me. (The best thing, from a reader's standpoint, is that The Long Arm of the Law gives a chap a promising list of author names for further investigation.)

Book Review: City of Devils

City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai
Paul French
Biography, history, "true" crime

Let's start a representative quote. It's opening night at Farren's, the glittering jewel in the crown of Shanghai's hectic eve-of-war demimonde of nightclubs and gambling venues:

Here's the honorary Cuban consul, a man with his hand permanently out for cumshaw; the slimeball Portuguese commercial attaché, talking up Macao's neutrality with his arm round the honorary Brazilian consul--the Portuguese mobs paid both men three times as much as their government salaries in squeeze every month. Here also is the nest-feathering brigade of officials from swamps like Venezuela, Mexico, Chile, all with passports for sale and letters of transit falling like confetti, no worth more than gold. A Portuguese visa had been a few hundred dollars' cumshaw to a corrupt official a year before; now the price is treble, quadruple. Still they mingle--Portuguese bossman Fat Tony Perpetuo, Macassared hair slicked back with some simmering señorita on his arm, trades gossip with fellow countryman José Boletho, while the consults in white linen suits hover near and smile through nicotine-stained teeth.

Here's the thing: "letters of transit" do not exist. They're a plot device made up for the movie Casablanca. Paul French either doesn't know or doesn't care; he refers to them at least twice more.

That's City of Devils for you. Lively, beautifully visual, fast-paced, written in the best choppy hard-boiled style, visceral, an incredible sense of place, full to the bursting of cinematic scenes and sharply-delineated characters . . . and it's bollocks. Not all bollocks. Probably a good half of it might be true. Good luck figuring out which half, though.

It's a ripping yarn, mind you. It's written like a combination of Raymond Chandler and Sebastian (The Perfect Storm) Junger. If you made a movie about it, which could easily happen, it'd be a kind of art-deco Blade Runner. Definitely read City of Devils if you like this sort of thing. Just keep in mind that some unknown fraction of it is bollocks.

Book Review: The Black Chamber

The Black Chamber: A Novel of an Alternate World War I
S. M. Stirling
Science fiction

S. M. Stirling usually provides reliable entertainment, but not this time. The Black Chamber is derivative, predictable, and almost completely without characterization. It's also marred by frequent intrusions that I can only describe as "thought balloons", where Stirling narrates a character's internal monologue--frequently in wince-worthy fashion. There are the inevitable infodumps, which aren't handled particularly well (though the combination of utopian and dystopian elements in the background was interesting). The dialogue is decidedly stilted.

Finally, the main character does not make any of the crucial decisions in the plot. Other people do, and she reacts. The other problems might be recoverable, but not this one. Give The Black Chamber a miss.

---

A better alternative-history adventure by the same author--particularly for fans of the inimitable "Flashman" novels--is The Peshawar Lancers.

Book Review: The Meaning of Treason

The Meaning of Treason
Rebecca West
History, biography, literature

The Meaning of Treason is about the life and post-war trial of William Joyce, the British traitor (known as Lord Haw-Haw) who broadcast for the Nazis. I read it in my college years; I don't recall much of my reaction. Then Anthony Horowitz dropped a couple of references to it in The Word is Murder, and naturally I had to reread it.

It's an exceedingly odd book. It could have been written by nobody on earth but a member of the British upper classes from before 1960. Imagine a collaboration between Tom Wolfe (the one who wrote The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities) and Lord Peter Wimsey, and you'll have some idea of the style: fluently literate, vivid, intimate, closely observed, and sometimes inane to the point of bafflement. Rebecca West (that's Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE, to you) belonged to that persuasion of writers who suppose that, once you have looked upon a man's face and clothing, and perhaps heard him speak, you are entitled to pronounce with high confidence any judgement you would care to make about his character, psychology, literary tastes, dietary foibles, or what have you. If you in addition know his ancestry, the thing becomes an absolute certainty. 

So, for example, we are informed with perfect seriousness that a certain man "had a great head, bulging at the back like the head of a foetus, in a conformation often found in men of exceptional talent." Of a minor witness, West explains that

People of this type need to construct around themselves dramas in which they play the leading part, and doubtless she had made her life in a riverside suburb into a very moving and uplifting drama, using her personal relationships as a fiery but solemn argument for love and decency

As for William Joyce in person, "All though his life he had been anxious, with the special anxiety of the small man, not to make a fool of himself". Good to know!

What makes this book particularly interesting, then, is not exactly its content. West's biographical eloquence is more poetical than informative, for example, and her discussion of the legal issues at question is sophomoric; by her analysis, a person who obtains a British passport by fraud or forgery would be nonetheless entitled to claim its protection. No: The Meaning of Treason is fascinating as a historical document. Rebecca West was of, in, and writing for a social class that basically ceased to exist a few years later. Notice the chummy insularity: "a black-and-lime scarf of the heavy and subtly-coloured sort that used to be sold at the expensive shops at the Croisette at Cannes." Naturally! Observe the unthinking assumption that all humanity can be sorted into fixed categories, predictable in nature, and differing in quality as they approach or fall short of the British Gentry: "He was a not very fortunate example of the small, nippy, jig-dancing type of Irish peasant." Not just an Irish peasant, you understand, but a very particular subspecies of the breed--as if there were some kind of Irish Peasant Fancy, devoted to breeding and showing Irish Peasants, wherein one might amass a modest collection of "Best In Show" ribbons to impress one's friends.

It's off-putting to a modern reader, but it's fascinating as well. The intelligent, sensitive, ex-post-facto writing of the early 21st century can never inhabit the world of William Joyce, of Rebecca West, of the immediate post-war London in which wildflowers grew in the bombed-out buildings around St. Paul's Cathedral, where everyone and everything was tired and a little grubby and still trying to adjust to what had happened. Everything seemed like it was in short supply. Everyone was trying to make sense of it all: what had happened in the War, whose fault it had been, what it might have meant to be pro-Fascist beforehand, what the new world might look like. Considered as reporting, The Meaning of Treason is persiflage. Considered as an entry into that world, it's peerless.

Book Review: The Amorous Heart

The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love
Marilyn Yalom
History, sociology

No, I haven't taken to reading Harlequin Romances. The Amorous Heart is an odd little book about . . . um . . . the way the idea and image of "the heart" have been used to symbolize romance through the ages. Sort of.

I liked The Amorous Heart. I'm not quite sure who else would like it. It's not sufficiently scholarly for an academic readership. It's not zippy enough for a popularization (though it's quite readable). It doesn't go deep on a single, identifiable subject, the way the biography-of-a-substance subgenre does. It's chronological in organization, but its material wanders around from the history of the 💗symbol to the Roman de la Rose to the Valentine's Day industry. I guess I'd recommend it to anyone who's got a certain amount of free-floating curiosity and is willing to attach it to more or less any subject.

Book Review: The Word is Murder

The Word is Murder
Anthony Horowitz
Mystery

A well-written and devious book by one of the few true mystery writers active today. There's a clever blending of fact and fiction that extends even into the acknowledgements. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did Magpie Murders--there's no nostalgia angle to speak of--but it's no less expertly crafted. If you're a mystery aficionado, this is a must-read; if you're not, suffice it to say that it's a nifty puzzle with lively characterization and good pacing. The only knock on it that I have is . . . well, shoot, I can't tell you without spoiling the plot. Read this after you're done with The Word is Murder and you'll see what I mean. (It's a mild case, fortunately.)

---

My well-known decorum and modesty prevent me from capitalizing on the fact, but Anthony Horowitz are professional colleagues. I've published a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and so has he. Other than the fact that he's a well-known author and screenwriter with a bunch of awards and multiple successful series, as well as being an Officer of the British Empire, there's not much to choose between us. Tell him to drop me a line, if you happen to run into him.

Book Review: The Evolution of Beauty

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World--And Us
Richard O. Prum
Natural history

[WARNING: long]

The Evolution of Beauty is a very good book. It's well-written. It has an interesting idea at its core and a leavening of entertaining personal content. It may even change the way you look at the world. It's also overstated, and in parts quite probably wrong--but intriguingly so.

Very briefly summarized, the theory that Prum is championing--originating in Charles Darwin's second great book, The Descent of Man--is that species can evolve features that don't help them survive at all, if those features help them attract mates. The peacock's tail is an example: it doesn't help the peacock fly, fight, or feed, but it surely attracts the chicks (rim shot). Prum's own field of study provides numerous fascinating examples of birds that have evolved some astonishing ornaments and behaviors, none of which seem to be "adaptive" in the survival-of-the-fittest sense. These features persist not because they have any use, but because mates prefer them--and mates prefer them not for any adaptive reason, but just ... because.

To take an well-known example, consider the sneetch (Seussius sneetchis).

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Quite at random, a few male sneetches have stars on their bellies. The stars have no function; they're just a random mutation. Nonetheless, some female sneetches think the stars are sexy--again, not for any particular reason, but just because sneetches make value judgments about stuff. Generation after generation . . . 

1. Male star-bellied sneetches attract more mates than plain-bellied sneetches, because some sneetch-ettes just prefer them. 
2. These couples have more children than plain-bellied sneetches.
3. The children inherit stars.
4. The females inherit a preference for stars.

Over time, then, the both the stars and the preference will tend to spread through the population, displacing the plain-bellied sneetches. Within broad limits, it doesn't matter whether the stars are adaptive, maladaptive, or neutral. If females preferentially chose males with stars, the star-bellied gene will win out.

For a slightly more subtle point, imagine that what the sneetch-ettes inherit is not just "a star is better than no star," but "more stars are better". In this case, the even-rarer two-star sneetches have an advantage over their one-star brethren. Once the one-star trait becomes common, the female preference for more stars preferentially benefits the two-star sneetches. And similarly, once two stars are common, the sneetch-ettes start flocking to the three-star sneetches . . . and so on, and so on . . . In this way, even a trait that does begin as a positive adaptation can turn negative, by being exaggerated into uselessness.

Returning to Richard Prum, his point is that a purely aesthetic preference is perfectly capable of driving evolution, survival value be damned. This is (according to him) something of a heresy within the evolutionary-biology world. Apparently there are those--Stephen Jay Gould called them "hyperadaptationists"--who insist that no trait can be inherited unless it contributes to genetic fitness, i.e. competitive advantage. This view explains the peacock's tail as a signal, advertising the genetic health of the bearer. An extreme version holds that the very uselessness of the tail is part of the signal--look at me, it's saying, I'm so genetically overendowed that I can carry this useless ornament around and still prosper.

Prum takes vigorous issue with these views. I think he's right to do so. The evidence for them seems weak, and their internal logic is less than compelling. Under the extreme view, for instance, shouldn't organisms with extreme deformities attract more mates? If surviving with a long useless tail signals fitness, then surely surviving with a long useless tail and intestinal parasites and only one wing signals more fitness. Ask for it by name!

Another of Prum's targets is the idea that animals simply can't form arbitrary, aesthetic preferences. Evidently there are a good many scientists who believe this; these scientists have never owned cats. (Consider, for example, the laser pointer. One of ours ignores it, one evinces occasional interest, and one will chase it endlessly. Nor is it just a matter of different neurological wiring, because all three were equally excited when they first encountered the Red Dot.) The idea that humans are just so very special in this regard is nothing more than a warmed-over search for the soul. Humans' ability to form aesthetic preferences came from somewhere; simple scientific parsimony suggests that it came from our animal ancestors.

At the same time, I wonder a little bit whether the prevailing wisdom is quite as prevalent as Prum makes out. Certainly his theory is one that I--a complete outsider--had heard before, including the fact that a trait need not be adaptive if it's sufficiently preferred. It's clear, however, that Prum is heavily emotionally invested in his theory. It may be that he's a bit hyper-focused on the opposition. It's almost certain that he's overstating his case.

One issue is that Prum mingles factual truth and normative truth. He points out, correctly, that--in the common case where females chose the mates--mate choice is consistent with female sexual agency, choice, and empowerment (which I'll call FSACE, for short). It's also true that we, societally, consider FSACE ethically desirable--indeed, mandatory. Those two things, however, are not connected. FSACE is not ethically mandatory because it's consistent with mate choice, and mate choice isn't necessarily true because it's consistent with FSACE. Put another way, FSACE is an ethical must even if someone proves that Prum's ideas are false.

In this regard, Prum also doesn't see that the evidence he cites against competing theories can also be used against his own. For example: in many societies women's sexual pleasure has always been marginalized, denigrated, or just ignored. This is evidence against the idea that female sexual pleasure is adaptive, true enough. But it's also evidence against the idea that female sexual pleasure is a consequence of women selecting sexually-compatible mates.

Another overreach comes when Prum tries to explain some behavioral differences between humans and our closest evolutionary relatives. Among apes, females generally can't select mates; the dominant male controls mating. So why do human relationships (cross-culturally, even in small tribal groups) tend towards pair-bonding?

Prum's proposal is that female mate choice explains this. Women, he suggests, prefer males who allow them to exercise their preferences. That is, proto-women preferred to hook up with proto-men who were inclined towards pair-bonding, rather than dominance/polygyny, which in turn spread the pair-bonding genes through the population--not because they provide any particular survival advantage, but because they offer more mating opportunities.

Well, sure, that might be true. There's no evidence of it. Furthermore, it suffers from a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: women promote free mate choice by exercising their free mate choice to select males who will permit them free mate choice, which raises the question of where the free mate choice came from in the first place.

There are plenty of other equally-credible explanations. Here's one alternative, in dialogue form:

#1 MALE: I hereby invoke my maleness to take away your Female Sexual Agency, Choice, and Empowerment!

FEMALES: Let's kill him.

#2 MALE: Yeah!

#3 MALE: I'm in.

#1 MALE: Wait, what? Argh, gurgle.

FEMALES: Good riddance.

FORMER #2 MALE: Aha! Now I am #1 Male, and I--

FEMALES and FORMER #3 MALE: Ahem.

FORMER #2 MALE: . . . that is . . . ah . . . things will be a bit different . . . mistakes were made.

Richard Prum doesn't present any more evidence for his idea than I have for mine. If anything, I think mine is more plausible, because it explains one thing that's unique to humans (our sexual arrangements) with another thing that's unique to humans (our ability to communicate, plan, and cooperate).

On the other hand, Prum's description of his own work with birds is tremendous. He goes into deep detail (which could have gotten dull, but doesn't) about, for example, bower birds' elaborate constructions and manakins' elaborate dances. Here I think his evidence is very strong and his arguments sound. It's no coincidence that the bird-oriented chapters are a lot lighter on the "it is possible"s and the "it could well be"s and the "might have"s.

That's not to say that I discount Prum's ideas entirely when it comes to humans. I do mistrust the single-cause fallacy, particularly when it comes to something as multifarious as human behavior--but that applies to Prum's opponents as well as to Prum himself. If you're at all interested in this sort of thing, do read The Evolution of Beauty. It'll keep you thinking for quite some time.

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There are a number of good books on evolution, adaptation, and related topics. High among them, though also speculative, is Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire. Daniel Lieberman's The Story of the Human Body is extremely convincing, if not quite as daring. A good deal older, but still very much worth reading, is Melvin Konner's The Tangled Wing.