Walking on the Moon

Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution is an excellent discussion of the multi-faceted experiences and experiments that back the understanding of evolution.  He discusses evidence from the range of experiment and observation that support that worldview and points out convincingly that fossil evidence is the least of it.  In fact the fossil record can only refute evolution, which it pointedly has not done.  It is an admirable collection and explanation of reasons that scientists are convinced that evolution is a theory in the same sense that a heliocentric solar system is a theory.

However, it is not going to convince anyone who did not believe in evolution when they began reading.

I understand the contempt he expresses for those who oppose evolution. To scientists, they are simply ignoring facts, and worse, disrupting the work of people trying to pass on and extend those facts.  People who disbelieve evolution, to Dawkins, are equivalent to those who believe that the Sun orbits the Earth; and they are interrupting his lectures. He literally cannot contain his disdain for them.

While I understand his position, I think it is a counterproductive tone to take if you are trying to convince someone to give up their passionately held beliefs.  So, if you are diametrically opposed to evolution but are open to being coaxed into understanding and believing it, this is probably not the book for you.

If you do believe in evolution, Dawkins does an excellent, if occasionally rambling, job of laying out the major evidence and providing hooks where one can learn more.  I learned a bunch from it.

Recommended, with the above tonal caveats.

One of the great joys of reading Bill Bryson’s travel writing is joining him on his side trips, literary and physical.  Bryson writes like a guy who likes to learn and share facts about our world from the profound to the obscure, and will take off on a side trip with the slightest encouragement.  I generally find this to be one of his great assets.

The premise of his At Home: A Short History of Private Life is that he will take his readers on a tour of the old English rectory he lives in and explain how it came to be what it is.  He will then connect its history to the larger trends in the development of private life in the West. The tour will go room by room from the entryway to the attic. This seems to be a great set up for Bryson to spin many informative and interesting yarns.

Generally he does not disappoint.  He touches on everything from the development of architecture in England, Europe, and America, to the lives of servants, to why we have the spices on the table that we do.  Because he’s Bill Bryson, this information is swaddled in clear, diverting language with a wry humor that keeps it all in perspective.

Despite all this, I found myself looking at the number of pages remaining much more often than I usually do in a Bryson book.  I think that the structure is a little too loose here.  There’s almost nothing that can’t be tied to a room in the house somehow, and Bryson takes advantage of that to range widely on topics from the London sewers and the germ theory of disease to the anatomical rearrangements caused by corsets or the once fashionable practice of having wigs made from one’s healthy hair.  All these topics are diverting, but it is remarkably easy to lose track of the big picture when the picture is as big as Bryson makes it.

While that rattling narrative makes for a wandering read, it also makes it easy to pick the book up for a few pages, soak up Bryson’s description of whatever fascinating corner of Western civilization he’s decided is fair game, and set it back down for later.  The loose structure makes for a rambling book, not an unreadable one.  And it is an enjoyable and educational one as well.

Recommended, though the pace may be different than one expects.

Robert Reich is a former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and general supporter of worker’s rights.  His Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future lays out his point of view on the current situation and where he thinks we should go. I do not buy everything he says, but there are some thought provoking ideas in here.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is his take on the growing economic inequity in America.  Most of the people who rail against this argue from some moral position about how large disparities in wealth are wrong because of their unfairness.  Reich’s position is more interesting: to a first approximation he argues that if you want to have a stable economy based on the sale of consumer goods, you need to make sure your citizens can earn enough to buy those goods.  It’s a nice perspective because it lets you have the discussion with people who have different ideas of the righteousness of economic disparity.

There are other interesting ideas in here, too, as well as some very radical ideas for restructuring the economy and government to provide job and wage security for middle class workers in America.  I’ll be very surprised if many of these ideas appear in the near future, but it’s worth having someone putting concepts like these out there, if only to remind people that they exist.  A reverse income tax may never happen, but it’s an idea worth understanding and considering.

Almost everyone will find something to disagree with in here, but that will require thinking about it.  That’s worthwhile.

Recommended.

Peter Buffington’s Squawk 7700 is partly the bittersweet memoir of a man who had to give up on his dream of flying for a living and partly an indictment of the state of the airline industry that led him to that point.  I am naturally sympathetic to both of those aspects.  I love flying and dislike the idea that making a living doing it is closed to people with a passion for it.  I also see the dangers and unfairness of the treatment of regional airline pilots.  They have to work incredibly long hours at a technically and physically demanding job for the kind of money we pay house painters.  That is a recipe for trouble and more people should be aware of why their tickets are so cheap.

Buffington writes knowledgably and with heart about the technical topics and the hopes and routine days of an aviation professional.  He also is unflinching about the state of professionalism that he finds at all levels of the aviation world. There are a lot of useful facts and many interesting anecdotes in the work.

All that said, I think Buffington’s editors have let him down. As I say, there are two related but distinct books in here vying for time and focus –  the memoir and the warning.  Walking the line so that they reinforce each other’s message rather than distract from each other is no easy task, and Buffington is not always successful.  The dispassionate tone of a whistleblower creeps into his memoir at times, reducing the reader’s sympathy, and the inflamed tone of storyteller comes through in critiques of policy that may be better served by a cool assessment of facts that need no magnification.  There are some spots where closer copyediting would clarify the technical portions as well.

Overall I agree with his assessment, and respect his passion.  I think another editing pass or two would make those clearer to readers outside the aviation world, who would benefit greatly from hearing what he has to say.

Lionel Shriver has produced a compelling and engrossing work in We Need To Talk About Kevin. The premise of looking at the aftermath of a school shooting from the point of view of the shooter’s mother holds many possibilities, not all of them original or interesting.  Fortunately, Shriver steers confidently for waters deep enough that headlines and sensationalism are the least of the narrator’s worries.

The narrative itself is a remarkable high wire act across a deep chasm of ambiguity.  We’re told the mother’s story in her words from before the shooter’s conception until well into the aftermath.  She’s the real star of the work; a very believable character with flaws and blind spots, who, through a nice contrivance, is telling her story to someone who already knows it.  This means her story interprets  the facts rather than retelling them.

That interpretation is the heart of the book.  The actions of the shooter are pretty much the only unambiguous events in her story.  The rest are presented through the eyes of Eva, the mother, in hindsight and to a particular end. She’s painted strongly enough that the reader forms an opinion of her, and that opinion drives the interpretation of the events she relates.  She’s a strong character, but not a cliched character.  What different readers think of her will reflect the reader as clearly as the character.  This is half the fun of the book.

Though the narrative is direct, a story about a teenager believably committing harrowing acts of violence almost requires a search for root causes.  The elemental nature of the crimes pushes the reader’s questions well past parenting practices to the nature of good and evil.  This is all presented even-handedly enough – or obliquely enough – that the reader’s ideas are at least as important as the author’s.  Or the narrator’s.

I read this on a recommendation from my Mom (read into that what you want), and when we discussed it I was struck by the different interpretations we’d had of the characters and the actions.  It wasn’t as if we had read different books, or even that we disagreed on much, but our impressions illuminated our personal experiences and beliefs.  Each reader will see something different here, and talking about what you see is more interesting than reading it.

In addition to being a catalyst for deep thoughts, the book is very absorbing reading.  I found it very hard to put down.

A must.

The full title of Michael Lewis’s book about the 2008 financial crisis is The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine, which is a little melodramatic.  But not much.

Lewis has made a career out of explaining fairly complicated numbers games and how they impact people’s real lives.  He’s taken on the stats geeks in baseball and Wall Street in earlier books that I haven’t read, but if The Big Short is any indication, Moneyball should be on my list soon.

Lewis dives into the shenanigans that drove the housing crisis with the knowledge of an insider and the eye of a journalist.  He covers the tricky financial instruments in enough detail that one can clearly see the amazing disregard for risk and greed for profit that pulled the bandwagon forward, but at a high enough level that the mathematics is never daunting.  If you want to understand the gears that inflated the bubble and the cords that tied all the banks together when it burst, this will explain it to you.

In addition to knowing and communicating the technical details, he assembles an interesting cast of characters who were working out the problems in real time.  It may surprise you that there were such people, but it’s a big world.  He does a good job bringing them to life and using their stories to tell the larger one that we all saw unfold.

Overall this is an indispensable book in understanding the recent financial crisis, and one that tells the story with clarity and wit.

Strongly Recommended.

A couple years ago, I wrote an interactive quiz for aviators to practice determining hold entries – mainly because I sucked at it.  At the suggestion of a user, I added a display mode to it.  You can check out the quiz.

Steven Waldman’s Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America is exactly the kind of writing I like to see on difficult matters of history.  The topic is charged because of the constant battle between Church and State and the politicizing of faith on both sides, but there are real lessons to learn from history.  Waldman leads the reader toward those lessons by looking at several key founders and examining both their personal faith and their contemporaneous opinions about how religion and the republic should interact.  He also provides the context for these decisions in terms of the religious and political forces of the times.

Though Waldman uses a few well known founders to motivate his discussions, he never forgets that these were extraordinary men who created popular political consensus.  Madison may have believed in a wall between Church and State, but he never lost sight of the fact that other positions had to be considered and ground conceded.  Appeals to Jefferson’s position on an issue should not ignore the fact that all of the founding documents and many actions on which we base that position were products of consensus.  The frustrating ambiguity of the First Amendment exists partially so that different constituencies can see what they want to in it and support it.

Despite that caveat, this is not a wishy-washy book.  Waldman calls the history as he sees it, whether he’s providing supporting evidence that Jefferson meant what he said about a wall between Church and State or arguing that none of his selected founders were Deists or Atheists.  Partisans on either side of modern Church and State debates will find some of their historical support kicked out from under them.

This is as it should be.  Waldman’s interested in a real understanding of the issues – religious and political – in the early years of the nation.  There are important differences in how religion was practiced that shape the founders’ views that imply those views require context, but not so much context that appeals to God are anything but what they seem.  Furthermore the founders do not speak with one voice.  Adams and Madison have very different views of the role of religion in moral and public life.  Beyond that their personal faith and their positions on how the government should deal with religions differ as well.

Overall this does a great job of getting the historical issues in place and showing how both the most respected minds of the era addressed them as well as how the country as a whole approached things.  I came away with a much better understanding of the period, the pressures, and how the decisions of the time were influenced.  Waldman does not pick a particularly strident position on any side and try to defend it.  These are some facts that will help the reader form their opinions, not positions to adopt or refute.

Recommended.

How The States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein, is an odd little book about history and geography of US states.  It’s fun to hang a little history lesson how each jog of the various state lines reflects a human interaction that’s fairly permanently etched into the landscape.  I was also happy to have found and read this on the Kindle.

The US is a federation of semi-autonomous states that joined together to gain their freedom.  This has a surprising effect on the shape of states.  The original 13 (or maybe 14 depending on how you feel about Vermont) were laid out according to the needs and sometimes the whims of the British monarchy.  As they came together, the disparities in state layouts and populations influenced the creation of the bicameral legislature.  That’s interesting enough, but the reaction of Congress was to attempt to maintain size and population parity of subsequent states.  That logical and surprising decision is one of the revelations of How the States…

There are others, from the concessions made to absorb Texas and California, to the multiple surveying errors – intentional or accidental – to the effects of the various natural features on the economy and geography of states.  Unsurprisingly, the Missouri compromise is visible in state boundaries, and the Civil War plays a role in Nevada’s borders.  There are surprisingly many good stories to tell about state lines.

The layout of the book makes it more a reference than a narrative.  After a short overview of principles and key national events, Stein proceeds state by state and border by border around the country.  The states are considered in alphabetical order, which means the same story gets told at least twice.  It can make it a little difficult to follow themes.  The fairly brief length also means that on some occasions, only the beginning of the story is in here. Still, this is a book that I expect to return to occasionally, when I forget why a particular blip is there on a boundary.

I was happy to see this on a Kindle for two reasons.  First, I found this odd thing in the Kindle store.  I was afraid that as I did more shopping on-line, the opportunities to run into interesting things like this would be reduced.  Apparently this is not the case.  Secondly, the book is chock full of maps that were generally easy to read in the Kindle.  I hadn’t been looking for a book full of maps to evaluate the Kindle’s illustration rendering, but I found one, and it was an enjoyable read.

One bit of Kindling that would have been nice would be better indexing.  Frequently part of a shared border’s story is told in one state’s entry and referenced in another.  These are not set up as Kindle cross references, so looking up the end of the reference is more painful than it needs to be.

Overall a fun book that told me a bunch about my country and my Kindle.

Recommended.

Like every other Kindle owner, I downloaded the free version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from Amazon. While I do have some criticisms of the collection, they’re mitigated by the facts that 1) this is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and 2) it’s free.

I was about to claim that I’m not much of a mystery reader, but I’ve been gushing about Raymond Chandler for a while now, so it’s probably pointless to try to defend that position.  I will say that I almost never read a mystery to try to beat the detective to the solution, but to see what the author brings to the story outside the genre trappings.  I’m not trying to stay ahead of Holmes – which would be difficult for no other reason than I don’t know enough minutae from the Victorian Age – but to visit his world.

I do genuinely enjoy Doyle’s stories.  His characterizations of Holmes’s cantankerous and logical character as well as the leads’ mutual affection are effortlessly communicated.  The tales and the company quickly become enjoyable, and Doyle mixes up the genre elements well enough that the stories never become completely formulaic.

That said, this isn’t a great collection either in terms of content – there are many missing stories – or in formatting for the Kindle.  Almost any unusual character is misrendered, to the point where any reference to currency was simply a blob with a number somewhere in the middle that may or may not be related to the sum in question.  While this did not pose an insurmountable problem for the stories, it was annoying.  Not that I remember the Victorian English Currency system, anyway.

Beyond the formatting of the text, the book itself didn’t take advantage of any of the Kindle features for navigation or visualization.  Iorich, which does, was a more pleasant navigation experience.  I like knowing roughly how far it is to the next chapter break, or, in Adventures, story conclusion.  Since it’s clear from the Kindle store that everyone gets this book, I was expecting more of a showcase.

As I say, my gripes should be taken as minor.  This is a free collection of Holmes stories; you can’t go wrong.

Recommended.