partial bukes catch-up

[realthog]

Because finishing off Denying Science proved to be a fraught and exhausting affair, I'm months behind on my notes about books I've read. I still have a large cardboard box full of read books to be noted; here, though, are a few I've managed to do despite the pressures of other work.

I've resolved, by the way, to keep my notes shorter in future.

The Man Without a Name (1977; vt Mr T) by Martin Russell

Technologist John Tiverton gets home one night to discover is wife doesn't recognize him, and neither does the neighbour she calls to help eject this intruding stranger. The tale follows him on his quest over the next few days to find someone who'll recognize him, with all his old friends and colleagues -- and even mistress -- saying that the real John Tiverton looked quite different and anyway died in a car crash six months ago. Brian Garfield, a thriller writer for whom I have enormous respect, gave the book a rare cover quote . . . but that was in 1977. I suppose the floweriness of the prose might be a deliberate part of the characterization of a technologist writing narrative, but it was fairly irritating in places; the two explanations offered for the bizarre setup seem both equally unsatisfying. A highly intriguing premise squandered, I'd say. Even so, the book was consistently interesting enough for me to keep wanting to read more.

A Thoggish moment:

You think you can pull the wool over everyone's eyes . . . but mine, you'll find, are in the back of my head. (p177)

The Oxford Murders (2005) by Guillermo Martinez, trans from the Spanish by Sonia Soto

We saw the 2008 movie of this (John Hurt, Julie Cox, Elijah Wood, Leonor Watling) a while ago, and were charmed by it even though the "mystery" part of it didn't seem to make much sense. The book, despite some continuity problems, is a lot more coherent. The landlady of an Argentinian student mathematician in Oxford for his PhD is murdered; he and a distinguished mathematician who was an old family friend of the dead woman assist an astonishingly well educated copper in the quest for this killing and the series of "almost imperceptible murders" that follows. The joy of the book lies not so much in the mystery plot, although that's (despite aforementioned qualms) fair enough, as in the frequent digressions as the central characters discuss (sometimes cod) mathematical philosophy; my favourite part of this was the consideration that more than one mathematical series might be defined by the same first three terms. In case that might sound forbidding, it isn't. This is great entertainment; I can imagine, though, that the publisher's efforts on the cover to make it seem like just another murder mystery must have led to some mightily puzzled commuters . . .

The translation is generally very good, although every now and there's a glaring mistranslation (because literal Spanish rather than colloquial English) of a single word. I blame the copyeditor for not picking these few instances up.


He Who Hesitates (1965) by Ed McBain

This isn't so much a novel as a short story stretched out to be a fairly short novel. A man from the NY State sticks, Roger, who's staying in The City for a few days to sell his family's handicrafts to Village stores murders the girl he picks up for a one-night stand, and the next day determines to turn himself in to the 87th Precinct . . . but never quite does. In the mean time he manages for the first time in his life to hook up with a beautiful woman, Amelia, only she's -- gasp! shock! horror! -- black, so he knows his bigoted old bat of a mom back in the cultural desert of small-town upstate New York would never accept her. Although this is classified as an 87th Precinct novel, the guys and gals are peripheral; the suspense derives for our fears that Roger, who's already offed one woman, might decide in his nutty way to do the same to Amelia, who's one of the most appealing characters in the McBain canon -- worth the cover price for her alone. All in all, a slight but very enjoyable book.


The Church of Dead Girls (1997) by Stephen Dobyns

If you think the serial-killer story has nothing new to offer, try this. A small upstate New York town is tormented by the disappearances, presumed murders, of a succession of adolescent girls -- not to mention the murder a couple of years ago of the local nymphomaniac and the grotesque murder now of one of the town's few overt gay men. The net effect is a breakdown of the town's social order, as vigilantes presume to themselves a role that is above the law. All of this is told by a rather peculiar high school biology teacher, whose observations of his fellow citizens, while pithy, may not be entirely reliable: he has his own agenda. The style in which he narrates the events is flat, unsensational . . . and, I found, absolutely hypnotic (despite the annoyance of a couple of characterization inconsistencies). This is a mainstream novel whose subject matter happens to be, almost incidentally, a series of psychopathic killings. Much recommended.


Dismantled (2009) by Jennifer McMahon

Extraordinarily reminiscent of Donna Tarrt's The Secret History, this sees a group of people ten years after they were a college clique called The Dismantlers, whose ethos was that "to understand the nature of a thing it must be taken apart". The end point of their destructive pranks was the semi-accidental murder of the instigator of The Dismantlers' exploits, Suz, the promiscuos star around which the others orbited, reflecting her light. At the time, the death was adroitly concealed from the world; now, though, various enigmatic parties seem determined to dig up the truth, and one of them could well be an impossibly reanimated Suz. This is by no means a bad book -- especially when it focuses on Emma, the 9-year-old child of two of the original Dismantlers -- and overall I enjoyed reading it. The writing was good enough that I might well look out for McMahon books in future. It's just that this one seemed to have nothing much new to say.


How I Became Stupid (2001) by Martin Page, trans from the French by Adriana Hunter

Parisian self-styled intellectual Antoine realizes his lifestyle is making him miserable, and decides to try anything that will make him better able to endure the tedium that is life. Abandoning his assortment of chicly weird friends, he tries alcoholism (a half-litre of beer lands him in ER), a career as a bonds-trader (he's a wild success), etc. Eventually, natch, he realizes his happiest state is when he allows himself just to be himself. I chuckled a lot in the first 30 pages or so, less often thereafter. There are some good lines:

"My life would improve if I were stupid."
"That's stupid."
"I'm on the right track, then. . . ." (p73)

Overall, though, I was very disappointed; an excellent premise seemed very poorly exploited.


The Angel of Death (2007) by Alane Ferguson

Oh, my: the YA version of Kay Scarpetta. Teenage Cameryn helps her dad with autopsies (would this be legal? I wonder), because she wants to be Scarpetta when she grows up. When high school heartthrob Kyle discovers a popular teacher grotesquely murdered and then seems to want to make geeky Cameryn his number one squeeze, it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to work out what's going on. It takes Cameryn the best part of 250 pages, though. I was annoyed that the author was sufficiently irresponsible to present as fact to impressionable adolescents that "Random killers almost never get caught" (p204); how many dimwitted teenagers are going to discover the hard way that this isn't true? Overall, the writing style is drab . . . although I was amused by this observation of the proprieties, lest -- gasp! -- someone accustomed to performing autopsies might see -- shudder! -- yet another willy:

Her father shielded her view while Dr. Moore yanked off the boxer shorts, made more difficult due to the angle of the legs.
    "It's all right now," he whispered into her hair. She saw that one of the men had draped a washcloth discreetly over her teacher's groin. (pp91-2)

And then they start cutting open the corpse so Cameryn sees his lungs, brains, heart, bowels . . .


Eight Million Ways to Die (1982) by Lawrence Block

Ex-cop and struggling alcoholic Scudder is hired by a pimp to investigate the murder of one of the pimp's girls -- a killing the cops think the pimp committed himself. As the killings continue, so Scudder's struggles with the demon booze intensify; when finally he does unravel the mystery, the solution is one that comes clear out of left field. Among many lovely, near-surrealistic strokes are that the pimp is, despite all stereotyping, an intelligent, intellectual and caring man (I imagine this isn't common in real life) and all of the characters are educated: at one point, for example, a whore quotes Heine (p108); another quotes Yeats (p292). Shamefully, this is (I'm pretty certain) the first Block I've read. It won't be the last.


The Missing (2007) by Chris Mooney

A few years ago I read and much liked this author's Deviant Ways. How amazing, I thought, that the prominent science journalist could write such an effective, original -- and, as I recall, pretty darned sexy -- thriller. So I bought this one. Much disappointed by it -- it's the standard tale of the sassy female investigator, here a Boston cop, who's on the trail of the serial killer who wrecked her childhood and now seems to have started up again, threatening her once more, imprisons his victims in an underground labyrinth, proves to be the uptight FBI asshole supposedly investigating the case, ya-de-ya-da -- I checked up and discovered there are two Chris Mooneys, and this is the other one. I can't help feeling I've been the victim of a bait-and-switch. From here on I'll stick with the nonfictional CM. Deviant Ways was good, though: let me not take that away from this author.

Meanwhile we have this mensurational nightmare, proof that Atria don't bother copyediting:

. . . near the bottom of the floor was a rectangular-sized hole . . . (p307)


Black & White and Dead All Over (2008) by John Darnton

I loved this author's earlier The Darwin Conspiracy (though not so much his first novel, Neanderthal), so pounced on this when I came across it. A series of murders in the building of the New York Globe (i.e., the New York Times, where Darnton has for a long time been an illustrious fixture) shocks all the journos and indeed the nation. The tale is full of roman a clef elements -- no prizes for guessing who's the prototype for Antipodean media mogul Lester Moloch, for example -- but that's just icing on what proves, after a sticky first 50 or so pages, to be a very delectable cake. Those early pages are annoying because Darnton opts for a cheap way of trying to keep our attention -- repeating wacky urban-legend-style journo tales. Because the tales actually are funny/bizarre/whatever, this first part of the book isn't boring: it's just that I got fed up by the fact that as good a writer as Darnton can be was so lacking in confidence as to be resorting to this tactic. The early part of the book is, too, marred by P.D. James-esque orotundity.

That hurdle over, the book got better and better. I laughed out loud quite a few times (as when the Globe boss, a man with a rare talent for mauling quotes, came out with "The only thing we have to worry about is worry itself", p198); meanwhile, I was turning the pages avidly to find out what was going to happen next. Great stuff.


Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human (2009) by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan

Wonderful, wonderful title (in a recent interview I was asked if I'd ever buy a book on the basis of title alone, and I said no, of course not, but I'd forgotten about this one); a shame about the actual book, really. What the Kaplans set out to do is explain the science behind why, individually and as a species, we're capable of such godawful stupidity: in the largest and wealthiest democracy in the world, there are people who in a few weeks' time will vote for someone who thinks scientists are transplanting human brains into mice. No one could more overwhelmingly subscribe to the worthwhileness of their aim; my difficulty was that very often I couldn't follow the Kaplans' arguments. Obviously I suspected (a) this might be my own failing, because I'm stupid, (b) the problem might be that the subject matter is too complex for me, (c) both. But then I recalled how I'd been able to wade through popularizations of far more complex scientific matters -- yer quantum, like -- and came to the conclusion the fault was perhaps not entirely mine. My guess is that people steeped in psychology may not have this problem.


Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (1994) by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt

Two smug conservatives go yah boo sucks at leftie straw men. That's not quite an accurate summary of this book, but it conjures up perfectly my feelings all the while I was reading it: revulsion at the abominably orotund and self-congratulatory writing style, profound irritation that -- despite a half-hearted attempt in the introductory pages to claim non-partisanship -- the authors were framing their very justified criticisms of sloppy, antiscientific thinking as a political left-right battle. A full 100% of Republican Senate/House candidates this Fall reject the science of climate change. The leaders of the campaigns against the science linking tobacco smoke to disease, against the science showing the depletion of the ozone layer, against the science demonstrating the reality of evolution, against the science that showed SDI wouldn't work, and now against the science indicating the world is warming -- it is nary impossible to find a leftie amongst them. But, you cry, Gross's and Leavitt's real targets are the postmodernists/social constructivists, who're definitely a bunch of lefties, no? Well, okay, if you think that people like Nietsche and Nazi Party member Heidegger, two of the primary inspirations of that school, are lefties. To be fair, some of the authors' targets are of the left -- for example, that branch of feminism which tried to twist science for ideological reasons -- but this is by no means uniformly the case. Antiscientific idiots are to be found all across the political spectrum, but the majority of them seem always to be on the political right.

I succeeded in ploughing through this book because I had to for the sake of research. What's depressing is that, behind the tone of infantile sneer, there's some very valuable stuff being said. But I imagine that most of the people who should be reading it will have thrown the book at the wall in disgust long before they get that far.


Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography (2006) by Janet Browne

Probably unsurprisingly, this jolly little book doesn't quite live up to its promise in the subtitle -- really it's a selective biography of Darwin himself, focusing on those elements of his life that related to Origin, from inception through composition to aftermath, plus the reactions of others to it. Browne is the author of one of the biographies of Darwin, the whopping two-volume (1200+ pages) study comprising Voyaging (1996) and The Power of Place (2003), so obviously she knows what she's talking about; in consequence, I was slightly alarmed to come across the occasional footling mistake, such as spelling Stephen Jay Gould's first name with a "v" rather than a "ph". Such annoyances aside, this was a great read and surprisingly informative for a book that appears at first to be so slight.


Science, Sense and Nonsense: 61 Nourishing, Healthy, Bunk-Free Commentaries on the Chemistry that Affects Us All (2009) by Joe Schwarcz PhD

The "PhD" on the cover sets the antennae tingling, but in fact this is a very jolly collection  of essays -- Martin Gardner-style -- on science and more particularly pseudoscience by the chemist, broadcaster and columnist whose day job is as Director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society. Obviously I was more concerned with the latter two-thirds of the book, where the prime focus was on pseudoscience, especially quack medicine and crank nutritionism, but the first part was fascinating too: more than once I found myself stumbling through to Pam's workplace saying, "Do you know what I've just learned?" The writing style is smooth and very readable, and I chuckled a lot. My only real gripe is the lack of basic citations and of a bibliography; in a few cases Schwarcz discussed things I wanted to follow up on, and my task was made far more difficult by the fact that I didn't have any names or titles with which to start my internet searches.


God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory (2006) by Niall Shanks

This is certainly the best analysis of ID -- and of Creationism in general -- that I've come across. Shanks has actually, as an evolutionary biologist teaching at East Tennessee State University, fought in the front lines against Creationist claptrap -- you can find his very funny essay about these experiences, "Fighting for Our Sanity in Tennessee", by googling. He brings some of that battle-hardenedness to this far more sombre work; although there could hardly help but be a few moments worth chuckling over, his intent here is deadly serious. He also manages to explain the principles of ID more clearly than any IDer I've read! I'd shyly suggest this is a very important book, and, if you care at all about trying to push back against those forces who'd like to see us enter another Dark Age of ignorance and deprivation, one you should put on your reading list.


Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Have Fueled the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (2004) by Ross Gelbspan

I'm quite embarrassed and annoyed with myself that I didn't read this book earlier -- at least half a decade earlier. It's about as good a brief guide to the imminent climate catastrophe as you're likely to find, written in a highly readable journalese style and full of excellent information that I'd not come across elsewhere. I checked quite a few of the sources and found the information is indeed kosher; in so doing, I also discovered that Gelbspan has a very extensive wbsite collecting articles on climate-related issues (http://www.heatisonline.org); again I'm embarrassed that I did not know this before. I thought the weakest part of an extremely strong text came in the final sections, as Gelbspan outlined a proposed scheme for averting the disaster: not only did it seem idealistic, in that it expected people to behave rationally rather than with puerile greed and selfishness, but of course -- because of the passage of years -- the kind of emissions reductions it seeks are already known to be far too small. My only other quibble was with the system used for citations; endnotes are a complete pain in the as however you organize them, but the system adopted by Gelbspan is one of my least favourite. This book is due for a new edition, I'd have said; in the meantime, the 2004 version is extremely deserving of your attention.


Clean Energy Common Sense: An American Call to Action on Global Climate Change (2010) by Frances Beinecke with Bob Deans

I wish I could put a copy of this book into the hands of every US voter -- more accurately, I wish I could have done so before the midterm elections, so that voters would have been able to give themselves a better assessment of the views of the candidates on offer; the results would assuredly have been very different. In a text not much longer, if at all, than the Tom Paine tract its title homages, it spells out very readably exactly the nature of the climate-change problem facing us, the corruptness of the arguments of those who try to persuade us it doesn't exist, what we can do to solve it, and how, rather than approaching the solution as if it were some kind of a burden we can instead regard it as the glorious economic opportunity it in fact is. The authors have gone out of their way to avoid making this a partisan broadside, even going to the extent of citing the famous George W. Bush address to Congress in which, years late, he finally acknowledged the existence of global warming and emptily promised to do something about it. If you're unlucky enough to have someone in your family dumb enough to have swallowed the line that gross excesses of CO2 in the atmosphere just mean there's more plant food to go around, here's the ideal stocking stuffer for them.


A Writer's Life (2011 reissue of a 2001 book) by Eric Brown

Daniel, an established but struggling novelist, deep in a relationship with a woman he loves but who has difficulty loving him in return, discovers and is immediately entranced by the writings of an older novelist, Vaughan Edwards, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances a few years ago. But it seems Edwards semi-plagiarized his works from a writer active in the Victorian/Edwardian era ...

This is a genuinely engrossing tale, quietly but beautifully written -- a ghost story that proves in the outcome to be about something stranger than ghosts, and also about the complications of love. In a sense it's a Lovecraftian piece, and it certainly builds up that sort of atmosphere, although it (mercifully!) lacks Lovecraft's desperate stylistic excesses. And any writer reading this book will recognize that it is also, as the title implies, about the writing life. Great stuff!


One More Unfortunate (2010) by Kaitlin Queen

Twelve years ago Nick Redpath's mom died, and as an orphan he was shuffled around various homes. Now he's back to visit his hometown of Bathside, Essex. Soon he begins running into the kids he used to know at school, only now of course they're grown up with their own lives and liaisons; most traumatic for Nick of these re-encounters is with Jerry, the girl he adored from afar when they were both adolescents, now a doped-up, adulterous femme fatale. Only this time it's the femme fatale who winds up being the murder victim, with Nick -- in true noir style -- the prime suspect.

There are twists and turns galore before finally the murder is solved, and in the interim we're offered plenty of neat insights into the hypocrisies and vulnerabilities that oil the wheels of social life in small towns that have somehow been left a few years behind by the world and are aware that the gap could be widening. The characterizations are vivid, and in a couple of cases really quite affecting; the taut tale-telling rattles along at good speed; and the solution to the mystery is both startling and satisfying. Recommended.


Memesis (2010) by Keith Brooke

The first story, "Witness", sets the stage for this oddly disturbing collection. A man whose son is a bird of prey is confronted by a stranger who may very well be himself. These uncertainties of *identity*, whether of people or places or situations, permeate all of the eight stories here. All of the stories are good, so it's hard to pick out a favorite, although if I had to I think I'd perhaps opt for either "Memesis" (after a neurological war, the victorious aliens are trying to rebuild the psyches of surviving humans) or "The Art of Self-Abuse" (an android sent back through time discovers the extent to which it has been duped). And then there's "Queen of the Burn Plain", with its vividly bizarre geology. The final story, too, "Beside the Sea", packs a heck of a punch. As I said, it really is hard to select a favorite!

Brooke's prose is very muscular and his characters very real. These are stories you won't easily forget.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Thank you! The marquis and I were struggling to remember the title of The Man Without a Name over the weekend.

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

So for a time The Man Without a Name was The Book Without a Title?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Or is it a case of the Marquise without a Memory?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service, ma'am. I picked the book up for nostalgia reasons, having the dimmest of memories of having read it before, 'way back when.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Thog should know that the terminal degree granted at Oxford is the D.Phil, not the Ph.D earned by those of us who went to lesser universities.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I refuse to go check whether it's me that's in error or the book.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

*snort*

When I was in graduate school, at UC San Diego, my political theory teacher, Tracy Strong, was telling us the story of Wittgenstein's doctoral examination at Cambridge. G.E. Moore, pronounced on the subject of the work submitted as Wittgenstein's thesis, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as Tracy was recounting it, 'this may or may not be a work of genius, but it certainly suffices for a Cambridge D.Phil'. 'Tracy', I interrupted, 'unlike Oxford, the doctoral degree at Cambridge is a PhD'. I got a severe glare from Dr Strong, (PhD, Harvard).