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.
Saturday, November 17, 2018
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
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.
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.
Friday, November 2, 2018
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:
Key:
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.
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.
| 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. |
- 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
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.
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