Holiday Bliss

Biscuit and Robin. (Robin is the one in glasses).

Cat Yin+Yang.

Happy New Year to my many loyal readers.

Book Review: The Grid

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
Gretchen Bakke
Engineering

This is a really interesting book about a hugely important and largely invisible subject. It's full of ideas that should make you stop and think. A trivial example: pretty much every single watt of electrical power you are using right now--battery power excepted--was something else a fraction of a second ago. It was a lump of coal or a gas flame or a gust of wind. Electricity, unlike (say) water, is consumed the instant it's used.

That makes the electrical grid an extraordinarily daunting piece of infrastructure. In Gretchen Bakke's argument, the grid that we have is a historical accident: centralized power production was not designed in, it just happened (for business reasons more than technical ones). More to the point, The Grid is an extend argument for rethinking the grid--specifically, for decentralizing it, for making it possible to use power near where it's generated, and for making the whole thing much more resilient.

The argument seems to me to be a good one. Some of the ideas in here are really clever. (That Tesla roadster isn't just a vehicle; it's a battery, meaning it can be used to store energy that's generated during the 90% of its life when you're not driving it.) How well some of these notions will work in practice is a harder question, and how to get there is harder still. At minimum, some people need to think very very hard about incentives--there are far too many horror stories about perverse incentives in The Grid--and probably come up with some kind of massive multiplayer simulation. 

The Grid isn't for anyone who thinks engineering and engineering policy are intrinsically boring. Other than that, I'd recommend it widely. It's well written, it's not too technical . . . and it's important.

Book Review: The Man Who Made Lists

The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madnesss, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus
Joshua Kendall
Biography

The Man Who Made Lists wants to be Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman. It isn't. It would probably settle for being Everything Explained That is Explainable. It isn't that, either. Joshua Kendall spends way too little time on the Thesaurus itself. He spends way too much time on psychoanalyzing Roget, frequently on the flimsiest of evidence. At various points he tells us not only how a conversation went, but what expressions were on people's faces or even what they were thinking. Since there are no end notes, there's no way to know on what basis (if any) Kendall makes these assertions. Buried in the end matter, however, is this:

Though all the scenes are based on actual events, in several instances, where primary source material was lacking, I offered my best approximation of specific details.

"Based on actual events," huh? 

Book Review: Song of the Vikings

Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths
Nancy Marie Brown
Biography, history, mythology

When I reviewed the author's Ivory Vikings, I ended with this comment:

I don't know that I'd be in a rush to read another non-fiction book by Nancy Marie Brown. On the other hand, if she ever publishes any translations of those sagas, I'm there.

Song of the Vikings isn't quite that, but it's the next best thing: the story of how the sagas and myths came to be written down, and the biography of the man who did the writing. It's a subject that play's to Brown's strengths (hugely evocative writing, a sense of place and time, deep knowledge, passion for the subject) and largely avoids her weaknesses (a lack of intellectual discipline).

There are excerpts from the myths themselves, which are nicely done. There's also a good character portrait of Snorri Sturluson, "the Homer of the North"--a sobriquet which is richly deserved, as a vast chunk of what we know about Norse paganism comes from his writing. He was no neo-viking himself: fat, gouty, duplicitous, funny, learned, ambitious, and perhaps a bit greedy. That, if anything, makes him more comprehensible and more sympathetic to us.

In contrast, the weakest parts of Song of the Vikings are about what a true viking would consider important: fighting. Brown tries mightily to make sense of the dense, generations-long series of feuds and counter-feuds, raids and revenge, politics and war that characterized Iceland and Norway in the middle ages, but she doesn't pull it off. (It's a small-scale echo of the absolute spaghetti that characterized the dizzying interrelationships of the classical Greek city-states.) To be fair, putting this history into a coherent story would be hard for anyone.

Finally, any fantasy lover owes a big debt to Snorri Sturluson. Brown does a nice job tracing the later influence of the Norse Eddas, particularly regarding J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. To read Song of the Vikings is to catch a glimpse of the troll-haunted, giant-ridden, bleak, and beautiful world of our collective imagination. I wouldn't recommend the book to everyone, but if you're interested in the roots of fantasy literature or in Iceland or in the Norse myths it's worth checking out.

Yet More Exciting Publishing News

Go here.

Yes: my old pal B.S. is having a short story published. He's more than earned it. He's been working hard at writing stories, taking it seriously, developing his craft. I've had the privilege of being among his alpha readers from the beginning. He started out good and he's getting better.

P.S. But don't forget this.

Book Review: Blade of the Samurai

Blade of the Samurai: A Shinobi Mystery
Susan Spann
Mystery

Pretty much the same as the first book, except that Father Mateo has even less to do.

Book Review: Hero of the Empire

Hero of the Empire: The Making of Winston Churchill
Candace Millard
Biography, history

It's time for the truth to come out: Winston Churchill was, clearly, not a real person. "Churchill" was dreamed up by adventure-story writers. No doubt there was an actor hired to play the role at various points, but the fact remains that "Churchill" and his adventures just aren't credible.

Consider what we're asked to believe. The Churchill character supposedly

• Was born in a palace;
• Came under fire on his 21st birthday, during the Cuban War of Independence;
• Fought in Afghanistan and Egypt;
• Participated, at age 24, in perhaps the last great cavalry charge in military history;
• Wrote a best-selling book about his adventures;
• Went to South Africa as a war correspondent, was captured, and escaped (the subject of Hero of the Empire);
• Became a Member of Parliament at age 26;
• Switched political parties, and subsequently switched back;
• Was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty at age 30;
• Learned to fly an airplane before World War I;
• Championed the daring and controversial Gallipoli campaign;
• Took the blame when the commanders in the field botched it;
• Took command of an infantry battalion on the Western Front;
• Spent six months in trench warfare, coming under shell- and machine-gun fire;
• Helped initiate and pushed vigorously for the development of the tank;
• Became one of the world's greatest speechmakers by overcoming a congenital lisp;
• Led his country to victory when it stood alone and under threat of invasion by a triumphant evil dictator who effectively ruled all of Europe and planned to conquer the world.

Seriously?

Setting that side, I had high expectations for Hero of the Empire. Candace Millard's previous two books (The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic) are both terrific. Her biographical niche is to isolate a crucial point in the life and/or death of an important figure, explain why it was important, use it to illuminate the biographee's character, and make the whole thing into an exciting and informative story.

I'm happy to report that Hero of the Empire delivers on all fronts. It's exciting. It's action-packed. It's well-researched. It's beautifully written. If the actual events of the escape weren't exactly the stuff of fiction--no tunnels, no masquerading as the enemy, no chase scenes--they were surely thrilling enough to those who were in the middle of them, and Millard brings that to life. (Admittedly she's relying somewhat on Churchill's own memoirs, which are inclined to minimize neither the drama of the situation nor Winston's own part in it.) 

There was even a genuine "Wanted: dead or alive" notice for Churchill, with a reward of £25--Churchill was already politically and symbolically important. His subsequent response was that the reward was too low.

Go read Hero of the Empire. It reads like an adventure novel, with the added bonus that it really happened.