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.

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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.