Random Impressions From a Visit to Japan

Bear in mind that these are the product of a single trip, covering a mere two cities and eleven days. Don't expect deep analysis here.

• If you go, endeavor to go sometime that is not June, July, or August. June is the rainy season; July and August are brutally hot and humid.
• Reports of Japan being ferociously expensive are grossly exaggerated. A good hotel room in Kyoto, right across from the Imperial Palace gardens, cost us $85/night. Perfectly decent meals can be had for $10 or so.
• You could scrape by with no Japanese, although you'd be pretty limited in what you could accomplish. 
• Transportation, even city buses, displays enough English to let you know where you are and where you're going. 
• The general level of English proficiency is not very high, but people in public places--hotels and train stations, for example--tend to know just enough to do their job. 
• Menus usually have pictures. Point. You can say "kore o kudasai" ("this, please") if you want.
• Buying stuff at a cash register is the same everywhere: look at the number, fork over the cash.
• Museums and attractions mostly have text and/or audio in English, although it's not always extensive.
• Take some time to study how the transit systems work before you go. For example, on the subways and trains in Tokyo and Kyoto, you look at a map and find the station you're going to; that tells you what you need to pay for a ticket.
• Taxis are easy to find and not particularly expensive.
• Japan is a modern, wealthy, industrial country. Don't expect to be overwhelmed with the exoticness of it the moment you get off the plane. If you look for cultural differences, you will certainly find them; you will also find many similarities.
• Tokyo is a modern business-oriented city with no particular character but plenty to do. Kyoto is not particularly beautiful or ancient in its streets and urban fabric; its setting is gorgeous, however, and it's positively ringed with splendid temples and shrines of every description. 
• You could eat nothing but western food, if you insisted.
• Many Japanese, in interacting with you, will behave as if doing so were the most wonderful thing that's happened to them for the last month. You should reciprocate, at least to the extent of not being a boor. Learn, at minimum, the rudiments of polite Japanese expressions: "sumimasen" ("excuse me"), "arigatou gozaimasu" ("thank you very much"), and so on.

Photos to follow.

Travel Advisory

It is well known that the movie Jurassic Park was filmed on Kaua'i. What is less well-known, doubtless because the tourism industry is engaged in a massive cover-up, is that the movie is based on fact. I, personally, have seen it with my own eyes: the island is overrun with dinosaurs. Here is a typical example, clearly in threat-response mode:

Even more alarmingly, the dinosaurs have learned to associate humans with food. Here, a pack threatens my wife:

Stay safe, people.

Book Review: The Line Upon a Wind

The Line Upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815
Noel Mostert
History

When you start reading a book that's 800 pages long, you kind of know what you're in for. You know, for example, that it's not going to be a general overview for the novice. You also know that the quality of the writing will make a difference: 800 pages of good writing can be a challenge,  but 800 pages of dull writing is torture.

By this measure, The Line Upon a Wind qualifies as "good enough." I'm a non-specialist, and I finished it. I didn't rush through it in big gulps, but I didn't stall out either.

Having said that, you need at least a Horatio Hornblower or Aubrey-Maturin level of engagement before you start TLUaW. There's a certain amount of nautical terminology, for instance, that isn't always explained. There are a lot of characters. There are descriptions of battles, but not enough maps of same, and those that there are aren't terribly good.

Moreover, you need a certain level of tolerance for the Great Man School of History. In Noel Mostert's case, the Great Man is Horatio Nelson. When Nelson is on-stage, the book leaps; when he isn't, it tends to plod. Since the book has ten years left in it when Nelson dies, the wind (as it were) rather goes out of its sails in the last third. There are a couple of chapters, intriguing in themselves, that nonetheless read like outtakes from other books (e.g., the material on discipline in the R.N.). Nor does the whole thing add up to a cohesive geopolitical synthesis.

I'd describe the result, then, as useful background reading. If you want to get a lot of information, newspaper-style, The Line Upon a Wind delivers. It won't kill you to skip it, though.

Book Review: The Story of Greece and Rome

The Story of Greece and Rome
Tony Spawforth
History

It's an expansive title, but it's not a very thick book. You might suspect, then, that The Story of Greece and Rome would be a general overview without much depth. And you would be correct. It's not the Cliff Notes version, but it's necessarily a synopsis.

This would be a good book for someone who didn't know much of the history in question. I know a fair amount, so I'm not the ideal reader. I enjoyed it, though, for what that's worth. The Story of Greece and Rome does what it sets out to do, and does it pretty well. Tony Spawforth is good at drawing parallels and contrasts between his two titular civilizations. He's also good at providing understandable summaries of complex questions, and scrupulous about indicating where academics disagree. The writing is both clear and learned--I suppose it would be too much to expect that it would be witty as well, but it's at least never dull.

So: a perfectly decent read for the knowledgeable, and a valuable introduction for the curious. The Story of Greece and Rome doesn't quite achieve must-read status, but it's a pretty decent achievement.

Book Review: The Mysterious Commission

The Mysterious Commission
Michael Innes (J.I.M. Stewart)
Mystery

There were quite a few respectable mid-century Englishpersons who moonlighted as detective novelists. "Nicholas Blake", for example, was actually Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate (and father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis). To this tribe belongs "Michael Innes": J.I.M. Stewart, academic literary critic and student of J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford.

The "Innes" novels, from early to late--and this one is quite late--all have a certain flavor to them. It's not easy to describe. Irony is a big part of it, but it's an understated irony. Imagination, sometimes run wild, is there too. I'm tempted to call the writing "urbane", but that sounds a little too mannered. It's a little bit gently snobbish, quite witty, and even  . . . gulp . . . cozy. That latter word has been co-opted latterly by a mystery subgenre that would mostly be better described as "cutesy", which is a pity, because otherwise it would fit the Innes model well.

That aside, The Mysterious Commission is an enjoyable little book. The protagonist is a portrait painter, rather than Innes's usual Sir John Appleby, and the artistic side of the story is nicely handled. There's some good puzzlement and some funny bits. The air goes out a little bit in the last chapter, for the simple reason that the baddies could have accomplished their goals in a much more straightforward fashion. Getting there, however, is at least half the fun. The writing is usually good enough to carry an Innes novel even when the premise is a little lacking in credibility. This one isn't a classic, not even a minor classic, but it's an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Book Review: The Rubber Band/The Red Box

The Rubber Band/The Red Box
Rex Stout
Mystery

If only it were possible to retroactively combine the virtues of Ellery Queen and Rex Stout.

Stout was, by most measures, much the better writer--particularly in the early years. Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin are engaging characters, much better realized than Queen, and always fun to spend time with. The descriptions are better, the dialogue is better, the supporting characters are better, and the Wolfean aphorisms are irresistible.

Only . . . there's the plot. Stout's mysteries are not only not fair-play; they're barely mysteries. Wolfe conjures his solutions from thin air, or using the flimsiest of assumptions. Sometimes the entire book consists of waiting around for the [message, hitherto unknown character, newspaper story, other plot device] that will reveal all. Other times, it's a matter of Nero Wolfe simply declaiming and everyone else nodding.

These two mysteries are fun to read, but they both fall flat at the end. Wolfe makes his pronouncements, and (surprise!) they somehow all turn out to be accurate in spite of being grounded in nothing at all. The Red Box, in particular, depends on a plot device that was elderly and feeble long before Stout got hold of it. Whatever the shortcomings of early Ellery Queen, you'll always get what you paid for: a strong puzzle and a fair solution. 

Book Review: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
Loren Estleman
Mystery

While this is written in an acceptably Watsonian style, it adds absolutely nothing to Stevenson's story. It's nothing more than a rewrite of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Holmes and Watson stuck into it. Every single development in the original is here. "Watson's" introduction promises that this book reveals hidden and shocking depths behind the published version . . . which is exactly what it fails to do! There's one trivial addendum near the end. Unless you've somehow managed to avoid knowing the Big Reveal in Dr. J. and Mr. H.--in which case, I want to know how--you've already read this book. 

Loren Estleman was a noted Sherlockian. He should have known better.

Book Review: The Best American Science and Nature Writing

The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2018)
Sam Kean (editor)
Science

I had read a number of these pieces before, particularly in The Atlantic. Is there no great but little-known writing out there that this series could promote? The book opens with some editorial political rants, which I largely agree with but which could have been dropped. (That said, the piece on Scott Pruitt's dysfunctional EPA is predictably infuriating.)

The articles themselves are, not shockingly, good. I can't say that any of them stood out particularly, although Ross Anderson's "Welcome to Pleistocene Park" is jaw-dropping in its scope.

Book Review: Death at Breakfast

Death at Breakfast
John Rhodes
Mystery

Death at Breakfast is very much a matter of taste (har har!). To put it another way, it's a mixed bag. How much you'll like it will depend mostly on what kind of mystery reader you are.

Specifically, Death at Breakfast is a Golden-Age mystery of a fairly standard sort. A puzzle is given, characters move around asking questions, and a solution is revealed. If you're looking for depth of characterization, this is not the book for you; the detective character isn't even described, and the other characters are absolutely flat. A few hints at a love element are not an asset.

Nor, to be honest, is the puzzle especially startling. A reader well-versed in this subgenre will recognize a good many familiar elements. Applying meta-textual thinking will tell you who the killer is, too.

What remains is a reasonably enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. There are some ingenious clues, reliable pacing, and a clear explanation. I like this sort of thing; ergo, in spite of its limitations, I rather liked the book. I won't go out of my way to search down more John Rhodes, but I'll read him if I get the chance.

Book Review: The Roman Hat Mystery

The Roman Hat Mystery
Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee)
Mystery

The first Ellery Queen mystery; comments here apply equally. The titular hat is rather cleverly resolved, though.

Book Review: Under the Knife

Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations
Arnold van de Laar
Medicine

Even allowing that Under the Knife is a translation, and even allowing that it's really a collection of essays, this is a book that's unskillfully written and composed. Information is repeated. Chapters come in random order. The prose style is serviceable, no more.

Most irritatingly, the individual chapters themselves are disorganized. The chapter on anesthesia veers off, on the next-to-last-page, into Ignaz Semmelweis The transitioning sentence: "Anaesthesia was a revolution in surgery; the next step was the introduction of hygiene." This diversion lasts for precisely one long paragraph before returning, with no explanation or connection, to chlofoform.

Or take the discussion of vascular surgery, which includes this:

In the twentieth century, the crossectomy was combined with "stripping", a method by which the GSV can be removed subcutaneously completely and in one go. This was--and remained until around 2005--the standard procedure for treating varicose veins, the whole operation taking no more than fifteen minutes per leg. Theodor Billroth, one of the greatest names in the whole history of surgery, was vehemently opposed to varicose vein operations, without bothering to explain why.

What? Where did Billroth come into this? What does his distaste for varicose vein surgery in general have to do with the topic of this paragraph, which is the crossectomy? Nor does Billroth resurface later in the chapter; the next paragraph is about the successor procedure.

These solecisms (and many more) give Under the Knife a random, disconnected quality. You never quite know where a chapter is going, regardless of its title or opening paragraph. The anecdotes about the titular operations are quite interesting, in fact, but van de Laar never figures out how to follow up on them. Look, people, if you're going to write nonfiction, you need to understand that there are rules for doing it--just as there are rules in fiction--and that you violate them at your peril.

---

Good biomedical essayists include Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell) and, more tangentially, Loren Eisley and Stephen Jay Gould. For one excellent take on how to write nonfiction well, see Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd's Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.

Book Review: The Devil's Dinner

The Devil's Dinner: A Gastronomic and Cultural History of Chili Peppers
Stuart Walton
History, food

What irritated me most about The Devil's Dinner was the organization. The chapters are arranged without any real narrative flow, information is sometimes repeated, and the whole thing comes off as something of a muddle. Nor did I think that the research that went into the book was especially deep or complete; Walton seems to have relied heavily on a small number of interviews and a lot of second-hand reportage.

That said, there's some interesting stuff in here. The "burning" sensation of chili, for example, really does activate some of the same neural pathways as actual burning. Also, there's a real thing out there called Male Idiot Theory, which has been used to explain chili-eating contests. I'll buy it.

Rather surprisingly, there's no recipe section.

Overall verdict: mildly interesting. But with a title and topic like this, "mild" shouldn't be the descriptor! I'd pay good money to see John McPhee do for the chili pepper what he did for Oranges, for example.

Book Review: Early Riser

Early Riser
Jasper Fforde
Science fiction

Early Riser is totally unlike anything else, including other books by Jasper Fforde, in such a way that it could only have been written by Jasper Fforde. There's what we might dub a Ffordean Ffamily Resemblance to the author's other books, in that Early Riser is (a) deeply strange, (b) wildly creative, (c) funny, and (d) intriguing. But its particular strangenesses are not the strangenesses of other Ffordiana, except in the broadest sense.

More precisely, Fforde's specialty is in creating worlds that mirror ours in some way, but veer wildly off-kilter in others. (I refer the interested reader to his "Nursery Crimes" series, for example; The Big Over Easy is an--ahem--hard-boiled mystery about who killed Humpty Dumpty.) In Early Riser, the difference is that winters are killingly harsh and that, in consequence, humans hibernate. Around this premise Fforde builds up a decidedly peculiar yet compelling milieu. I won't try to describe it, except to note that it has zombies, English aristocrats gone feral (but of course in a very civilized fashion, dear chap), and monsters that may not exist. 

Granted, it doesn't really make much sense. Those who are looking for a consistent picture of what the world might actually be like will be disappointed; various brands, signifiers, history, and features of our own world appear largely unchanged. And the ultimate plot--a sort of thriller--is not, once it's been divested of its more outré trappings, particularly hard to anticipate. To indulge in a very very slight spoiler by way of example, the Sinister Corporate Oligarchy [highlight to reveal] is something of a Fforde standby.

I didn't think this was Fforde's very best work, but I still liked it a lot. Whether you, Dear Reader, will like it, I can hardly speculate. If you like Jasper Fforde, you're on solid ground. If you've never tried him, there are worse places to start; Early Riser is a standalone. Just don't blame me if you end up sitting there, dazed, trying to glue your brain back together.

Book Review: Finder

Finder
Suzanne Palmer
Science fiction

Look, I can't even pretend to be objective about this one. Suzanne is a friend of mine. Moreover, I had the privilege of reading and commenting on an earlier draft of Finder. So I'll just say that this is a fun, fast-paced, engaging space opera with:

• A cool setting
• Excellent worldbuilding
• Great, fast pacing
• Space War!
• An appealing reluctant-hero protagonist
• An eminently hateable villain
• Aliens
• Really weird aliens
• Offbeat humor (we are talking, after all, about the author of the short story "Zombie Cabana Boy")
• Meatcubes

No, I'm not going to explain the last one. Read the book.

Book Review: Making Music American

Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture
E. Douglas Bomberger
History, music

In December 1916, "real" music in America meant music that was (a) classical, and (b) European--most especially, German. With the entry of the U.S. into World War I, that changed. Whether it changed so much or so dramatically as Making Music American wants us to think is open to doubt.

The things I liked best about this book are structural. Bomberger picks a limited cast of characters, emblematic of the changes he's talking about. He gives good introductions of those characters. He doesn't pretend to be inclusive. Each chapter of the book is a single month, and each chapter follows several of those characters through the month. It's a nice format.

The narrative, by contrast, takes a while to get going. There are only so many lists of concerts and repertoire that a body can take before the message starts getting repetitive. Things pick up as the year goes on; the U.S. fell into a depressingly contemporary-seeming slough of jingoism, cheap patriotism, xenophobia, and rabid flag-waving, and the "Germanophile" musical establishment had to cope with it. The depth of animosity, and the speed with which it developed, must have seemed bewildering at the time. The same must have been true of the shallowness, provincialism, and downright stupidity of the so-called patriots. Then, as now, there are plenty of people who imagine that genuine patriotism is interchangeable with symbolic, performative patriotism.

On the American side of the equation, the narrative is less clear-cut. Yes, jazz was clearly in the ascendant in popular culture. It's not particularly evident that the events of the year either advanced or retarded it, though. Nor is there any sign that individual listeners switched from Wagner to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, or even put the two in the same category. Here, I think, the small cast is a double-edged sword; Bomberger omits a lot of significant figures, and can't quite tie his anecdotes into the larger narrative of American music.

I didn't dislike Making Music American, but I thought it oversold its promise. It's well-written enough, but not so compelling as to drag in a reader who's not already invested in the subject matter. The research is very deep, but not very broad. If you're a serious musicophile, in other words, give Making Music American a look. If not, it's skippable.

Book Review: The Dutch Shoe Mystery

The Dutch Shoe Mystery
Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee)
Mystery

All the early Ellery Queen books--those with titles following the The Nationality Object Mystery--are much of a muchness. The clues are placed fairly. The deductions are clever, if occasionally wafer-thin. The characterization is perfunctory. The dialogue is dated. And the detective, Ellery Queen himself, is insufferable.

Yes, insufferable. Dannay and Lee, as the intro to this volume points out, were imitating Philo Vance, whom Raymond Chandler called "the most asinine character in detective fiction". (Or, as Ogden Nash put it, "Philo Vance/Needs a kick in the pance.") Ellery Queen is less a character than a collection of mannerisms. What character he does have consists mainly of supercilious tics and pretentious allusions.

Having said that, The Dutch Shoe Mystery is a workable puzzle. If you can stomach Ellery Queen (by regarding him as a plot device, is the way I did it), it's a decent enough read for those who like this sort of thing.

---

In justice, I should point out that:

• Ellery Queen the character got a lot better over time.
• "Ellery Queen" the authors were true giants of the 20th-century mystery scene; nobody in the U.S. did more for the genre.

Book Review: The Franchise Affair

The Franchise Affair
Josephine Tey
Mystery

[WARNING: Contrary to my usual practice, this review contains spoilers.]

Josephine Tey isn't as widely known as some other Golden-Age mystery writers, but her reputation among the cognoscenti is very high. The Daughter of Time and Brat Farrar and Miss Pym Disposes are all considered classics--and rightly so.

The Franchise Affair, regrettably, is nowhere near that quality. At best, it's aged poorly. Tey's virtues as a writer--characterization, in particular--are present, but they're eclipsed by a pervasive and quite nasty snobbery.

The story is a rather simple one. Robert Blair, a middle-aged lawyer with a settled life and no great passion, is called to assist one Marion Sharpe, who's been accused of kidnapping and beating a teenager named Betty Kane. In the process of finding out the truth, Blair accidentally falls in love with Marion, to his own mild confusion (this, by the way, is by far the best aspect of the book).

This being a mystery, it should surprise nobody that the heroine is innocent. What's rather disgusting is how Tey displays her class prejudices. Blair believes Marion at once because, basically, she's part of his social class--and according to Tey he's right to do so. In Tey's world, Our Sort of People are simply better than the common folk (who are all right as long as they Know Their Place). Our Sort of People can make pronouncements to the effect that you can always tell a criminal by the set of his eyes, or indeed that you can tell someone's character by the color of their eyes, and of course they're correct, because Our Sort of People just know these things. Old Colonel Whittaker pronounces Betty Kane a liar because she reminds him of this lance-corporal (not an officer, obviously!) he knew in India who was a Rank Bad Hat. Robert Blair knows that a certain witness is a liar because of, I kid you not, "the vulgar perfection of her teeth." Blair, indeed, expresses a repellent desire not merely to prove his client innocent, but to actually make Betty Kane suffer--because, I suppose, she's No Better Than She Should Be. It's all down to Breeding, you see, combined with mollycoddling the Criminal Elements among the lower classes. 

Frankly, by the middle of the book I was positively rooting for Marion Sharpe to be found guilty and sent to prison. Of course, that doesn't happen, nor is there any real suspense that it might happen (because Marion Sharp is Our Sort of People, while Betty Kane is ex hypothesi a Nasty Piece of Work). I could maybe forgive the unpleasant attitudes if the plot were a real corker, but in fact Robert Blair does absolutely nothing effective, there are no surprises or twists, and the conclusive evidence is delivered out of the blue by a random hotel owner who happened to see Betty Kane's picture in the newspaper.

Now, class prejudice in older fiction (and non-fiction) is hardly news. This particular iteration expresses the anxiety of the British upper-middle classes at losing of their privileges after World War II. That fear is perhaps the difference between forgivable and not. I'm strongly reminded of the frenzy of certain insecure males about the #MeToo movement, who are convinced that Conniving Women will be coming out of the woodwork to Threaten Their Masculinity with malicious and unfounded accusations. That's Tey's perspective the lower classes. 

By comparison, the snobbery found in Christie and (especially) Sayers is positively benign. Sayers certainly maintains the distinction between Our Sort of People and the rest, but the rest aren't considered to be inherently vicious and threatening and Other; indeed, when she's not being comic, she allows them their own kind of dignity, as with the Thodays in The Nine Tailors or the professional dancer Antoine in Have His Carcase.

Not recommended.

Book Review: The World of the Shining Prince

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan
Ivan Morris
History, Sociology

An extraordinarily complete and encompassing view of something odd and beautiful. Heian-period Japan--c. AD 1000--developed a court society that was, in some ways, unique. For the tiny aristocratic elite, what counted was aesthetics (and lineage, but that's not the unique part). Not the warrior virtues, not competence, not money, not power, but beauty and culture were the currency. The nominal government didn't govern. The police and the army were largely ineffectual. Nobles spent their days in composing poems for one another, judging perfumes, conducting polygamous affairs (according to ritualized patterns), and honing their appreciation of the transitory nature of life. I find it hard to imagine that such a society could have survived long except on an island.

Ivan Morris's prose isn't brilliant, but it's serviceable. He does an amazing job bringing the Heian court to life in all of its details; you can open to any random page and find something worth knowing. Page 137: "One of the most important and active offices in the Ministry of Central Affairs was the Bureau of Divination". Page 80: "Emperor Ichijo's pet cat was awarded the theoretical privilege of wearing the head-dress (koburi) reserved for members of the Fifth Rank and above." Page 235: "The official concubine may be chosen in various ways." Morris is also pretty good at pointing out parallels from more familiar Western examples, as well as pointing out where the parallels are misleading or nonexistent.

I read The World of the Shining Prince because I was going to see an exhibition on The Tale of Genji (he's the Shining Prince, for those of you keeping score at home). It didn't make my must-recommend list, but for anyone trying to understand Heian Japan it's indispensable.

Book Review: For the Sake of the Game

For the Sake of the Game: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon
Laurie R. King, Leslie S. Klinger (editors)
Mystery

Meh.

I wanted to make that the whole review. I would be remiss, however, if I didn't also point out that several of these stories appear to be dross that the authors had lying around, with a few Sherlock Holmes references hastily stuffed in after the fact.

Oh, and it's been done (ahem) better.

Other than that: meh.

Book Review: A Revolution in Color

A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley
Biography
Jane Kamensky

Maybe it's the title. I wanted A Revolution in Color to do something, well, revolutionary--or, at least, revelatory. Something about Copley's painting, perhaps, comparable to the outstanding Eye of the Beholder. Or something about his life, or his times, or politics, or art, or . . . something about something, anyway.

Instead, A Revolution in Color is a basic standard biography. If Copley had kept a diary, and Kamensky had written a book based on it, this is more or less what you'd get. Date, event, painting, reaction, marriage, interaction, repeat. It's mildly interesting to read about Revolutionary-era Boston through a comparatively conservative lens--although I think Kamensky overstates the latter--but that doesn't particularly require, or shed light on, Copley's art.

Every so often it looks like Kamensky is trying to establish a theme around African-Americans (and African-Britons). She makes repeated references to black people's experiences, their presence in Copley's life, their presentation in art, and so forth. To the extent that this rescues the black experience from enforced anonymity, that's great. But in the context of A Revolution in Color, none of it adds up to anything. Kamensky never sustains the subject, nor does she bring to it a coherent story of what it meant to Copley. Yes, he would have known black people. Yes, he sometimes depicted them. Yes, they were unjustly enslaved and erased from history. And . . . ?

Also, Kamensky's writing is not flawless. Late in the book she shifts repeatedly between the past tense and the presence, to no very good effect. She also needs to learn the use of "would" rather than "will" to indicate that an event is in the reader's past but in the future of the moment she's describing. (Example: "In 1905 Einstein published a paper on the photoelectric effect; he would win the Nobel Prize for it in 1922.")

This isn't to say A Revolution in Color is valueless. It's an OK resource for learning about Copley and about his artistic milieu. As anything more than that, it doesn't live up to the title.

Book Review: Death in Captivity

Death in Captivity
Michael Gilbert
Mystery, adventure

This is something of a minor gem. It's both a murder mystery and a prison-camp escape adventure, and both sides are treated quite well. The setting is reminiscent of the classics The Great Escape and Von Ryan's Express. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone seeking a dose of literary greatness, but any aficionado of classic mystery should give it a whirl. 

This is another entry in the British Library Crime Classics series, by the way, which--although not all of the books have aged well--is an invaluable and highly laudable endeavor.

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If you haven't read Von Ryan's Express, go do it now. (There's also a movie version, which is somewhat better-known but not nearly as good.)

Book Review: Bibliomysteries, Volume 2

Bibliomysteries, Volume Two: Stories of Crime in the World of Books and Bookstores
Otto Penzler (editor)
Mystery

It'd take a concerted effort to get me to actively dislike a collection such as this one. Thankfully, Bibliomysteries is pretty good--much better than the usual mixed bag of minor stories by major writers, unsold shorts by minor writers, and whatnot. There's only one real stinker (by a writer whom I once advised on Amazon to switch to writing romances; nothing has changed since then). Of the rest:

• "Mystery, Inc.", a slightly predictable but very effective Poe-esque offering from Joyce Carol Oates, is probably the best. 
• Thomas Perry’s "The Book of the Lion" is an enjoyable take on a familiar setup. 
• Stephen Hunter's "Citadel" is not very believable, but the pacing is excellent and the characters nicely cinematic.

The range of sub-genres is very impressive and the writing standard surprisingly high. Recommended for book-loving mystery fans.

Book Review: The Sentence is Death

The Sentence is Death
Anthony Horowitz
Mystery

[Note: At the time of posting, the U.S. edition of this book hasn't yet been published.]

Sequel to The Word Is Murder. All of my comments on the latter are applicable. As between the two books, this one has less character development--perhaps inevitably, since it's not introducing a new main character--but an even better puzzle. I did spot a crucial clue early on, and I did figure out what Horowitz was up to (using meta-book thinking) a couple of chapters ahead of time, but I nonetheless liked The Sentence is Death a great deal.

Book Review: Heart

Heart: A History
Sandeep Jauhar
Medicine, biography

Yes, it's the fourth book in my heart-books trilogy. Heart is one of those works where the author intersperses his personal biography with medical and/or historical facts. It works pretty well here, although the integration between the two faces of the text is sometimes a bit slipshod. The personal stories are interesting, though, and the history of heart medicine and surgery--organized, interestingly, by theme; each chapter deals with one aspect of the heart's functioning--is clear and concise. Not an all-time classic, but worth a read if you're interested.

---

I see that it's been a while since I've recommended Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies as an inspired book of medical history. Consider it re-recommended.

Book Review: Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita: Three Novellas
Connie Willis
Science fiction

The thing is, Connie Willis is a really good writer. It's just that she has certain extremely predictable elements. Characters talking past each other. Muddle. A protagonist (often female) who can't get anyone to listen to her. An annoying authority figure (often male). Muddle. A resolution that occurs in spite of, rather than because of, anything the characters do. More muddle.

Two of the three stories in Terra Incognita--"Uncharted Territory" and "D.A."--partake of this pattern. That said, it's much more tolerable at shorter length, and when it's played for laughs. Willis's Passage, for example, is an interminable slog which only becomes readable when the main character finally dies; but To Say Nothing of the Dog is a tour-de-force that I'd recommend to just about anyone. "Uncharted Territory" applies the formula to the classic exploring-strange-new-worlds plot, and it works quite well if you accept the premise that such an endeavor would be run like a Monty Python skit. It's funny--exceedingly so, in spots--and it has a nice ending. "D.A." (which is really a short story, and the only recent piece) reads pretty well, but the outcome is awfully predictable.

The exception is the middle story, "Remake". This one is more of a classic what-if scenario than the others, and it's one that could actually be coming to pass. The tone is downbeat, almost noir. The characterization is very strong, too. You'd need to be more of a film buff than I am to fully appreciate it, but it's an effective piece of work.

Terra Incognita isn't a book for readers who like exploding spaceships, nor is it really suitable for SF non-aficionados. (Willis's Domesday Book is known to have filled the latter role, although in my opinion it's overrated.) It's worth reading if you're a fan of literate science fiction. If you've only ever tried Willis's novels, definitely give this one a shot.

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The collection doesn't include what I think is Willis's best shorter work, Bellwether. Her two-parter Blackout and All Clear is a good short novel wrapped around a massive doorstop consisting of people muddling around ineffectually and, ultimately, pointlessly. Lincoln's Dreams is well-written but falls flat at the ending.

Book Review: Through Darkest Europe

Through Darkest Europe
Harry Turtledove
Science fiction

I was pretty sure when I picked up Through Darkest Europe in the library that it would be a lazy alternative history. By "lazy" I mean an alt-hist that doesn't make any real effort to ask "How would the world be different if . . .", but instead just does a one-for-one swap of terms. In this case, it reads as if Harry Turtledove took a contemporary setting and ran it through his word processor, doing two-way search-and-replace for certain key terms:

• Christianity ↔ Islam
• ISIS ↔ Aquinist
• Syria ↔ Italy
• The West ↔ The Muslim world
• Europe ↔ The Middle East
• English ↔ Classical Arabic
• Allahu akbar! ↔ Deus vult!
• Jihadists ↔ Crusaders

And so on.

This makes it basically impossible to say anything interesting about the setting. I already know that free speech and equality are good, and religious fanaticism is bad. Uttering these sentiments in a setting where it's Europe that's the poor and backward region doesn't tell me anything I don't know.

So, yeah, it's lazy writing. That's not necessarily a deal-breaker; sometimes I'm a lazy reader as well. The deeper problem with Through Darkest Europe is that Turtledove didn't find it necessary to include a story. His protagonists wander around his parallel-world Italy  exclaiming at the parallels ("Look, Dawud! These Europeans force their women to dress conservatively! Gosh, isn't that awful?"), having meetings, and reacting to violence that happens around them. Instead of giving them a specific problem to solve or goal to achieve in chapter 1, they're on a vaguely-defined security-assistance mission, which they eventually pursue to the extent of making a couple of phone calls. There's also a superfluity of interior monologue, to much the same lack-of-effect as the dialogue.

Writers gotta eat. I guess the good news from Harry Turtledove's perspective is that he couldn't have taken long to crank this one out.

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Some of Turtledove's other work, including but not limited to alternative history, is much better than this. Look for his short-story collections; "Counting Potsherds," in Departures, is a fine example of what this genre should do.

Book Review: The High Window

The High Window
Raymond Chandler
Mystery

I got this to fill a gap in the collection. To be honest, it's not one of Chandler's better books. The plot is by turns too baroque and too obvious, and there are too many characters who make an appearance and disappear again for no apparent purpose. It does contain some sharp character portraits, descriptive prose, and dialogue, though, so it's hardly a total loss. Marlowe's role as knight-errant is unusually explicit in this one; there's only one person in the story who's really a victim, and that's who Marlowe chooses to help.

*coughs modestly*

Check out what I said about why humans, unlike other primates, don't have a dominant male who controls mating opportunities.

Nice to see that those scientist johnnies are following up on my lead. Leave me a  comment if you need to know where to send my share of the prizes.

Book Review: The World in a Grain

The World in a Grain: The story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
Vince Beiser
Engineering, ecology

Hooray! I thought. Another biography-of-a-substance book! And one that promises to amply fulfill the implied contract of all such books, viz., to take a thing that nobody thinks about and make us think about it.

Chapter 1, the introduction, met all my expectations. Did you know there's a sand mafia--which sounds funny, except that they kill people? That the Arab states import sand, because desert sand isn't suitable for making concrete (it's too rounded)? That China alone used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century? That there's an impending sand shortage?

With all that, I figured chapter 2 would dive into the basic facts. I was hoping to find out something about the geology of sand, the geography of sand, the chemistry of sand, how sand moves, maybe a little history.

These things are not in chapter 2. They're not anywere in the book, except in small incidental doses. That's because The World in a Grain isn't really about sand. It's about advocacy journalism. Vince Beiser is a Prophet rather than a Wizard. He wants to sound the trumpet, rally the troops, sing a few choruses of "We Shall Overcome," and basically change the world. Sand--specifically concrete--is something we're addicted to, he says, and it's bad for us. Repent, ye sinners!

Oh, he does his best to be objective. He interviews people who are in favor of commercial fracking-sand mining as well as those who are opposed. He scrupulously describes positives of things like roads as well as negatives. But his heart clearly isn't in it. A few examples:

• "When pressed, though, [anti-desertification entrepreneur Wang Wenbiao] acknowledges that about half of the company's $6 billion in annual revenues come from "traditional" industries, including chemical production and coal power plants." This dig--I could cite many similar examples--contributes nothing to understanding the topic of the chapter (which is "can China stop deserts by planting trees?"). Its only purpose is to imply, without saying it, that Wang Wenbiao is morally compromised.
• "The bigger question is, can the planet handle the whole way of life that Dubai both represents and embodies--the air-conditioned, car-dependent, energy-dependent, resource-intensive 'good life'?" Gosh, thanks for pointing that out, complete with scare quotes. I would never have thought of it myself.
• "In an ideal world, [fracking-derived oil and gas] could be replaced with solar and wind power." Yes, and in an ideal world magic sparkly pink unicorns would cure cancer and poop ice cream. This is not that world, nor is it likely to become so.
• "At the same time that freeways have brought these benefits, though, they have also hollowed out cities, killed off countless small towns, wreaked environmental havoc, and spawned a car-dependent culture based on sprawling suburbs and soulless shopping malls." Agree a thousand percent. Go write a book about it, Vince--a different book. In this book, passages like this read like mere venting.

This kind of thing is always frustrating. Advocacy journalism is fine in and of itself, but if that's the book you want to write, you should just write it. The World in a Grain veers between empiricism and passion, to the detriment of both. A truly descriptive book on sand would have to, e.g., include at least a few words on the Sahara Desert; Beiser just ignores it. A better advocacy book would use the factual information as a way of drawing the reader to a conclusion, instead of lapsing into oratory in the last third of every chapter. The World in a Grain has a lot of interesting pieces, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Book Review: Talk on the Wild Side

Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can't  Be Tamed
Lane Greene
Linguistics

I'd probably like Talk on the Wild Side better if I could pinpoint what it's about. Nominally, the topic is something like "how do people react when confronted with the ambiguity of natural language"? If that sounds a bit unfocused, you've put your finger on the issue.

It begins tamely enough, with a couple chapters lightly bashing linguistic prescriptivists--material that will be familiar to readers of Stephen Pinker and John McWhorter. There's a long digression where Greene takes pot shots at one particular grammar loon, one who's apparently a big noise among the kind of critics who conflate crankiness with eloquence. It's amusing enough. There's a more sympathetic pass at the people who have tried to create genuinely logical artificial languages (Esperanto, Lojban). That's interesting, although the only point seems to be that not many people speak these tongues.

Then we start getting into the tangled history of machine translation, symbolic AI, and deep learning. Okay, that's a sidestep, but I see the connection. Natural language is chaotic and ambiguous and hasn't been "tamed" by rule-based methods (current translation algorithms are, loosely speaking, statistical in nature).

Then we turn to vowel shifts, pronunciation, and the fact that words drift in meaning over time. Has someone been disputing that there have been changes in pronunciation? But, sure, there are probably people out there proclaiming that the changes must stop here and now. The next chapter, though, is about the politicization of languages--minority languages, language nationalism, and so forth. It's starting to get a bit ambiguous as to who's doing the taming here. Are the Quebecois, who have succeeded in making Quebec markedly more francophone, really domesticating English? It's more like they're just replacing it. This drifts into a discussion of different registers of political speech. 

Oh, and somewhere in there Greene talked about code-switching (shifting into and out of standard English as the occasion demands; he's for it), language acquisition in children, what constitutes good writing . . .

It's all pretty interesting, taken piecewise. It's entertainingly written, too. What the whole thing adds up to, though, is harder to discern--other than an appreciation of "wild" language. Greene works at The Economist; his book might have worked better as a series of connected articles in that publication.

Book Review: Never Home Alone

Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live
Rob Dunn
Nature, medicine

Don't read this book if you're squeamish. Really, seriously, don't. It'll make you want to burn your house down and then shower with industrial-grade solvents and then cover yourself with sterilized plastic wrap and you still won't feel safe.

If you are lacking squeams, Never Home Alone is a very good book about . . . well, it's about several things. Most fundamentally, it's a celebration of the microbial ecosystem. Dunn's major point, I think, is that we are deeply mistaken if we think that we can exist--much less thrive--separate from the fungi, bacteria, protists, microscopic crustaceans, etc. etc. etc. that surround us. In the first place, we evolved to live with them. In the second place, they're everywhere. In the third place, heavy-handed attempts to engineer this microenvironment tend to go awry, sometimes spectacularly so--wiping out benign strains of Staphylococcus both weakens the immune response and leaves a gap for virulent strains to fill, for example.

Okay, there's a little bit of drum-beating for these ideas going on. Thankfully, it's comparatively muted. Even more thankfully, it's backed up by sound observation and testable hypotheses, which is not invariably the case.

Dunn writes in a pleasingly non-technical style, so Never Home Alone should be accessible to almost any reader. (He's also restrained in using the vertical pronoun--also not invariably the case, and nice to see.) He even offers readers a number of ways to join in the scientific fun. If you have any interest at all in natural history, you should read this book.

Me, I'm off to change my showerhead.

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This book pairs nicely with Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes. It also overlaps thematically somewhat with Charles C. Mann's superb The Wizard And the Prophet, particularly in its critique of the technocratic approach to environmental problems.

Book Review: Capitalism in America

Capitalism in America: A History
Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge
Economics, history

Capitalism: Alan Greenspan is for it!

No, that's not the whole review. For the first half of Capitalism in America I thought that it might be, though. That's the half that's purely descriptive. It's stuffed full of statistics, sure enough, and not badly written, but it's a fairly standard economic history of the U.S. into the early 20th century. I already knew that railroads were important, that slavery was bad, that Standard Oil was big; Capitalism in America added only some numbers to my knowledge, which I have since largely forgotten.

The book gets more interesting when the authors finally start constructing an argument, instead of a play-by-play. Thank the reformers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who put the brakes on the laissez-faire free-for-all. Greenspan and Wooldridge have to come to grips with what they did, which forces them to assess the system's successes and failures. The result is a pretty good argument for capitalism, broadly speaking, as an engine for innovation and as a proven way of lifting people out of poverty.

That's not to say that I think their analysis is a complete success. On the contrary, I think it's open to some fairly serious criticism. For example, Capitalism in America rightly contains some ringing denunciations of the slave economy. Good for you, gentlemen! But nowhere--literally nowhere--does it acknowledge that this country's 19th-century prosperity was based on spending down a metaphorical trust fund, consisting of land that had been looted from its native inhabitants. It's easy to make one group (white settlers) prosperous by making another group (Native Americans) poor. How much should we credit that to the success of capitalism vs. the profits of theft? Greenspan and Wooldridge are silent.

Similarly, G&W are decidedly . . . let's say "myopic" . . . when it comes to their critique of the New Deal. They make a fuss, several times over, about the fact that the New Deal recovery under FDR was interrupted by a second downturn in 1937. They do not see fit to mention that many other economists blame that downturn on FDR's premature decision to end a lot of New Deal spending in favor of balancing the budget. They also fall into the classic trap of saying that "It wasn't government spending that ended the Depression; it was World War II." Okay, and World War II did this how? Hint: who paid for all of those tanks, airplanes, salaries, jeeps, Liberty Ships, prophylactics, bullets, cans of Spam, uniforms, etc.? Could it have been the U.S. government? Why, I believe it could!

Perhaps the most telling small indicator of this myopia comes near the very end of Capitalism in America. "There were good reasons for complaining" about the effects of industrial capitalism, the authors concede. . "Deaths from industrial accidents in Pittsburgh per 100,000 residents almost doubled . . . between 1870 and 1900." Then, in the very next sentence, "Politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson whipped up all this discontent into successful political movements" (emphasis added). Note that verb phrase. Now, "whipped up" is a dismissive phrase. The strong implication is that those people who were complaining about the doubling of the death rate were a bunch of slow-witted hoi polloi malcontents, who--instead of being property grateful for the beneficence of their betters--were so crass as to actually agitate for a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The nerve! What right did they have to interfere with the process of accumulating wealth, by questioning the purposes for which the wealth was accumulated?

What's particularly ironic is that it's a version of an argument that southern slaveholders used. Chattel slavery (they avowed) made the country richer as a whole. If some people were the losers in that process, well, too bad for them. Greenspan and Wooldridge would surely have no truck with that version of history; but when it comes to more recent developments they are blind to the parallel.

In the end, Capitalism in America is what I'd call tactically convincing. Its final argument--in favor of "creative destruction" (a cliche that the book rather overuses), and against the growth in entitlements and regulation--is well put, and well-supported by facts. I'm not unsympathetic. It's easy to close the book thinking, "well, that makes sense." But I've read other books that take the same facts, put a different slant on them, and evoke the same reaction towards a quite different set of policies. It's worth reading, but not worth accepting uncritically.

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One of the best books on finance out there is Liaquat Ahamed's The Lords of Finance, focusing specifically on the role of central bankers and the gold standard in bringing on the Great Depression. Broader, and also excellent, is Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes/Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics.

Also, G&W refer several times to Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands. I didn't like the latter book much, but I have to say that future historians could be pardoned for thinking that it was describing a completely different country than the one in Capitalism in America.