Walking on the Moon

Richard Bak’s The Big Jump does an excellent job telling much of the story of the creation and pursuit of the prize that Lindbergh was to win for the first solo crossing of the Atlantic from New York to Paris.  There’s a lot of specificity in naming the goal of the Orteig Prize, and one of the fascinating parts of this particular chunk of history is how that specific feat captured so much of the world’s attention.  It is an odd little niche of history and well worth the treatment Bak gives it.

You cannot tell this story without talking about Lindbergh, of course, but Bak admirably brings to life both the other daredevils seeking the prize and the man who established it.  Raymond Orteig found the challenge that would ignite not only the imaginations of the flyers who would try for it, but also of the public who would breathlessly watch it.  Bak is insightful in pointing this out.

Orteig is an interesting character, and in many other histories would be one of the most interesting players.  1920’s aviation had a bumper corp of remarkable folks in play, though, and Bak paints them all with some verve.  One-legged French aces, sparky engineers, and a self-promoter who sneaks himself onto a trans-oceanic attempt to duck out on his wife are only a few of the characters who drift on and off the stage illuminated by the prize.

There are certainly some things left out, and in many ways The Big Jump is like the Ortieg prize itself.  It generates interest in a great achievement, but there is more to do fully realize its promise.  Lighting that fire is an fine achievement.

Strongly Recommended.

When people hand me books, I tend to read ’em.  My Dad handed me this one when I saw him over Christmas break.  He’d been killing some time in a used bookstore and he liked the title.  It’s a great title to get you to pick up a book, so I see how it drew him in; Lewis Grizzard, the author, pulled it out of a country western song for just that reason.  My Daddy Was A Pistol And I’m A Son Of A Gun is also a great title because it sums the book up so well.  Grizzard’s father was larger than life, and their relation shaped him.

The title is so universally appealing that it is easy to imagine that the book is about fathers and sons in general.  It is not.  This is about a specific father and son, a larger-than-life engaging but eventually tragic drifter and his son.

Grizzard does a great job at getting all of his enormous father on to paper.  His daddy was such a man of extremes that most people trying to think about him would have to constrain themselves to one or two aspects, to write the man into a caricature.  Grizzard manages to give a fully realized picture without pulling a punch or failing to give credit.  Getting something like that right in your own head is hard enough; putting explaining it to someone else on paper is much harder.

He looks at his father’s influence on himself with the same clear eyes.  Again, clearly sizing that up and presenting it honestly is a feat.

All that would only be interesting to Grizzard and maybe a mental health professional except that Grizzard writes an entertaining yarn.  This is entertaining in the best sense of that word – diverting and interesting.  This is a great story told to keep an audience listening.  The yarn is much more than a shaggy dog story, but its told with the rhythms that hold a listener’s interest without exhausting their patience.  Being honest and engaging simultaneously is Grizzard’s great achievement here.

Strongly Recommended.

Sam Kean takes the Periodic Table as a loose guide for a series of stories about the unusual things we know about the elements and how we found them out.  There’s some promise that this is a book about the periodic table and its history, but that falls more and more by the wayside as the book goes on.  From a writing perspective the table is as much a McGuffin and an organizing principle.  How that affects your enjoyment is largely going to be a function of how much you wanted to know the table’s story.

Kean’s writing has two excellent features.  He can clearly and intuitively explain science and he can bring scientists to life.  His discussions of the discoveries that people have made are plain enough that one can follow them easily, but keeps enough of the complexity that the reader understands why they are discoveries.  That balance keeps the reader’s interest up without losing them in the details.  Secondly, he does a great job at making the scientists distinct and memorable with a few anecdotes.  Several times he reminds the reader of a person we haven’t talked about in a couple chapters with a pithy summary of the person’s character that brings them immediately back into focus without the feeling that you’ve been studying for a test.

The periodic table is a broad subject, even when taken strictly.  Just understanding why the thing is laid out the way it is and what it says keeps physics and chemistry students busy for weeks.  If you throw in a historical discussion of how we figured out the layout, there’s quite a bit to say.  Kean doesn’t say all of that.  In fact, he strays from the details and evolution of the table itself pretty quickly, branching into other areas of physics, chemistry and the people who do them.  If you are interested in that in-depth exploration, you will be disappointed.

I was not disappointed.  The topics and discussions are connected and intriguing.  Though Kean never goes into the secret origins of the periodic table in obsessive detail, everything he talks about rhetorically connects.  He started from the table, and stays connected, so there’s always a way to where we started.  And the trips are interesting and informative.

Strongly recommended.

I first read this collection of Larry Niven’s short stories sometime in the early 80’s.  I’ve always enjoyed Niven’s short work.  It’s direct, speculative and interesting, everything I look for in SF.

This collection includes several of his stories where he extrapolated the societal changes that cheap ubiquitous teleportation would bring.  It is fun to see how many of those speculations held even though communication more than transportation won the race.  Flash crowds are now communication artifacts, but were put forward by Niven in his teleportation stories.

The other thing I noticed was the strong sense of 1970’s California that pervades the stories.  Several times I understood a place reference or an attitude reference I’d missed before, because I’ve lived in California for a while.  While the gender politics is enlightened for the times, the biases of the times are also present.

Overall these are entertaining, thought provoking stories.  Recommended.

Tony Horwitz has picked a remarkable subject for this history.  His claim that Brown’s tactically laughable attempt to mount a series of slave insurrections in 1859 was strategically brilliant is well taken.  The raid both galvanized abolitionists in the North and convinced the South that Northern public opinion was widely united against them.  Horwitz goes into detail because while many Americans know of the attack, few know any details.  It is fascinating to understand how one lone fanatic catalyzed the largest and most violent social change in American history.

Horwitz does not quite make the situation understandable, but he does lay out Brown’s history and actions clearly.  Brown is a largely unremarkable 19th Century American who is monomaniacal about abolition.  Though driven to act, his limitations as a marginal leader and planner prevent him from forming a directly feasible plan.  Furthermore, even the infeasible plan is pretty poorly executed.  Yet the history of secession and abolition run through the raid.

He also shows that the times were on abolition’s side. In another time, Brown’s raid might have been taken by the South as proof of that abolitionists were a violent fringe group without support or skills and by the North as evidence that abolitionists were unhinged radicals whose methods were unconscionable.  Brown’s powerful, theatrical martyrdom steers the reaction away from those possibilities.  While Brown is clearly not someone who can plan an insurgency, he can die operatically for a principle, and that makes all the difference in his legacy.  So does the overall shape of national opinion at the time.

Outside of the introduction, Horwitz does not tie Brown’s legacy to recent martyrs.  McVeigh, the 9/11 terrorists, and many others who have launched doomed attacks to further their beliefs have been largely unsuccessful in impelling events toward what they believe to be righteous. I’d like to hope that is because those people were misguided fanatics; but that’s how many would have characterized Brown in 1845. There are evidently times when bold and doomed violence changes the world – sometimes for the better.  While Brown’s story does not in itself tell when those times are or why it is so, it captures a clear case to study.

This is an interesting, well told history that makes you think.  Strongly recommended.

I’ve been aware of Max Allan Collins’s love of PIs and skill at writing them since following Ms Tree in the 1980’s.  While I don’t follow mystery writing closely, I see he’s earned a bunch of honors in the field.  Ms Tree was some good stuff, so when I ran across Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Stories for cheap on Amazon, I had to give it a look.

In his introduction, Collins claims to be more novelist than short story writer, and these stories bear that out.  They’re all solid pieces of genre fiction, told with a bit of panache, but none of them blows me away.  However, these stories are presented chronologically from Heller’s perspective but were written decades apart.  There is a clear, interesting character evolution going on in the background – that is, in the Heller novels – that is reflected in these stories.  That kind of organization and attention to detail makes me think that Collins has characterized his writing strengths clearly.

Lightning does have its pleasures, one of which is the meticulous research Collins brings to each story.  Most of these stories are historical fiction, with Heller interacting with real people and events of the day.  Historical detective fiction is a nice trick, and Collins breathes life and credibility into a setting that is often mythologized. The short stories don’t give him quite enough space to completely make the time his own; the veneer of fiction over the true crime reports is visible in some.  Still, as with the continuity and changes between time periods, there’s enough here to whet my appetite for a novel.

Overall this is a tantalizing introduction to an author and a character I will certainly seek out again.

Recommended.

Fifteen Minutes Including Q&A is a short discussion on how to give better short presentations, written by Joey Asher.  It is full of good advice about sticking to the point, engaging your audience and using interaction to maintain interest and tailor material.  For the sorts of short presentations it targets, it is great advice.

Not all presentations are the short, business-oriented ones Asher has in mind, but his advice is generally reasonable.  There are plenty of ideas in here I’ll be using in future presentations.

Recommended.

In A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage has taken an interesting idea and run with it pretty well.  The idea is that a surprisingly small number of beverages have played a large role in human history, starting with beer changing us from hunter/gatherers to soft drinks driving 21st century capitalism.  It is an interesting idea, and it works as long as you squint a little.

Standage has a nice touch with the big picture viewed through a high-concept lens.  He did a similar, though less ambitious, trick with The Victorian Internet. In both cases, he has an eye for the telling anecdote and a skill at fitting the historical record into his thesis.  He does an excellent job describing the forces and trends of history with a few key incidents.

He picks six drinks that are evocative of times and ideas – itself support for the prominence of drink in the human consciousness.  He dedicares a couple chapters to each one’s properties and place in history.  They are covered pretty much chronologically from beer to cola.  It is interesting that each can, to some extent represent a philosophical and historical trend, but the parts don’t completely mesh.  The history of beer and wine is mostly lost to and influential in antiquity, while coffee, spirits, and tea become prevalent in the West within a century.  Still, history is a messy collision of ideas, and tying the ideas to beverage technologies works pretty well.

For me, it works pretty well until we get to Coca-Cola in the 20th century.  Standage rightly ties Coke philosophically to globalization and the US.  These are presented as overwhelmingly positive developments where I was expecting more nuance.  Admittedly, Standage has a lot of ground to cover, and broad brushstrokes are a necessity, but I didn’t expect to see no line drawn between globalization and expansionism.

Still, overall Six Glasses in interesting and informative.  It’s a great start to looking at an era.

Recommended.

For those of you using my implementation of grap, I’ve released an update.  The new version is 1.44 and supports simple date parsing.  Enjoy.  That page also describes grap briefly, if you’re curious.

While I was fooling around, I made the images on the html examples bigger.

Sinclair Lewis has a real knack for creating characters without redeeming qualities that readers cannot look away from.  Elmer Gantry is one of these, cut from the same cloth as George Babbit, who has a brief cameo.  Babbit is a realistic and depressing Middle American businessman, and Elmer Gantry is a realistic and depressing Middle American Evangelist.  Gantry is, if anything, less introspective than Babbit, but Lewis compensates by making Elmer Gantry‘s plot more exciting.

At their core, the two books – and Main Street for that matter – are very similar.  They’re looks at singularly American people (and places) with a clear eye.  Lewis isn’t a schoolmarm about this, though.  While he clearly doesn’t approve of what his characters get up to, he’s got a sense of humor about it.  And that sense of humor expresses itself in word play, the occasional joke, and some wicked backhanded irony.  As deadpan ironist, Lewis has few peers.

Lewis’s artistry and ironic distance make Gantry palatable, even entertaining, but his critique of American evangelism is the central theme.  The unique amalgam of marketing, showmanship, and politics that makes up Gantry’s world will be familiar to anyone watching evangelists in the 21st century.  Though Gantry is set almost a century ago, the fundamental tenets of American Evangelism remain largely unchanged. Lewis vividly depicts the cynicism and outright hypocrisy that seem to be prerequisites for success in this world.

A satirical expose of unscrupulous clergy is interesting, but Gantry is stronger than that.  Despite all his larger-than-life transgressions, Gantry remains recognizably human.  In fact, I easily identified with Gantry’s ambivalence that leads him to compromise after compromise until he has become something pretty awful.  It is easy to see the lure of that road, even as I hope I’m not on it.  And it is easy to see that Gantry can’t tell how far down the road to perdition he’s gone. He’s not self-aware enough to see where the sum of his decisions have taken him.  I think he’s got plenty of company.

While Lewis is a scathing critic of the hypocrites who seem to be the most successful, he does not ignore the good done by many of the cloth.  In fact, even the worst clergy depicted have  moments of decency and benevolence.  He also draws out the range of belief in and out of the clergy itself.  There is a lot to think about here.

Strongly recommended.