wshaffer

I've been slowly working my way through an audiobook of The Kalevala as my accompaniment to chores and errands. This morning, I was thinking about the phrase, "the dismal Sariola," which occurs quite frequently. Honestly, it doesn't seem that dismal unless you go wooing there, which is, of course, what everyone does in The Kalevala. Anyway, while I was picking out produce, I found myself idly wondering if Sariola were an identifiable place, and if one could visit it while in Finland, and what it would look like these days. I pictured a run-down gas station staffed by a single surly attendant in a little shop that carries beer of dubious vintage, a much dog-eared guide to pike fishing in the river of Tuoni, and T-shirts that read, "I made the Sampo for Louhi and all I got was a lousy betrothal."

It was something of a relief to discover that Sariola has no identifiable location and so there is no reality to contradict that mental image.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Taibbi writes with a very distinctive style - he has a gift for outlandish and vivid metaphors, and a taste for highly emotive language. Sometimes, I wish he would cool it a little, because as a reader I'm wary of being manipulated. And there's plenty of stuff in this book where the bare clinical facts are entirely sufficient to produce outrage, and I don't need the author metaphorically poking me in the ribs saying, "Hey! Hey! Are you angry yet?"

And this book will definitely make you angry (and depressed), but it's an important read. Taibbi does an excellent job of dissecting two trends in the American justice system. First, the extent to which corporate fraud and other financial crimes are prosecuted very gingerly, if at all, and second, the extent to which (often poor, often non-white) individuals can routinely have the full force of the court system thrown at them for relatively minor offenses. The causes behind this are many. There's a big dollop of flawed legal precedent: the tale of the Holder memo is an amazing case study in unintended consequences from a policy that wasn't thoroughly thought through. There are lots of skewed institutional incentives: it turns out that if you evaluate police performance on a metric of number of arrests, police will find ways to make arrests at any cost. And if you tell the Justice Department that the thing that matters most is successful prosecutions, you can pretty much guarantee that the Justice Department will only prosecute slam-dunk cases. There's a whole lot of political theater in the form of politicians scoring cheap points by going after welfare recipients and undocumented immigrants. And a great big chunk of simple racism.

I don't think that there are simple solutions to any of these causes, but having read this book, I now feel much better informed about what the causes are, and ready to join the discussion of how to address them.



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The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


( Unavoidably spoiler review )
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The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wasn't even really sure whether I should review this book, because I figure everyone has either already read it or made up their mind whether they're going to read it. But, here we go.

First off, there's no getting around the fact that the pacing is extremely leisurely. At times, this can be pleasant in a "relax and let the author spin you a yarn" kind of way; at other times, you are just waiting for something to happen. It does pick up a bit in the last third of the book.

Otherwise, this is a book whose virtues are very much bound up with its flaws, and whether you like it or not probably depends on how much particular flaws grate on you. For example, the world building is not terribly original, but by the standards of other books in the big fat fantasy genre, it at least feels reasonably solid and convincing. And Kvothe is just the sort of omnicompetent precocious protagonist with a prodigious ability to get himself both into and out of trouble that is going to strike some readers as a perfect wish-fulfillment character, and some readers as an egregious Gary Stu.

In the end, I found it reasonably entertaining, although I'm a bit frightened of the sequel, because statistically, multi-volume big fat fantasy series do not get more briskly paced as the series moves on.



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1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West by Roger Crowley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A very vividly written account of the siege of Constantinople in 1453. Crowley has a knack for vivid writing, and can really make you feel as though you were there.

Crowley is particularly good at explaining military tactics and the technology of warfare. And the technology of warfare was particularly remarkable at the time. For example, the Byzantines protected the entrance to the harbor of the Golden Horn by stringing a giant chain across the mouth of the harbor, preventing ships from entering. So, what did Mehmet II, sultan of the Ottomans, do when he couldn't break the chain? Well, he had his men carry a bunch of war galleys overland and rolled them into the water on the other side of the chain. I also hadn't known that the Ottomans were early adopters of field artillery. Crowley's description of how they forged immense cannon in an attempt to bring down Constantinople's land walls is fascinating. As is his description of how the defenders of the city made a virtue of necessity - when the Ottoman cannon smashed their stone walls, they rebuilt them as wooden palisades with dirt piled between them - which did a much better job of absorbing the impact of the cannon balls.

Overall, the book is a great read, both informative and suspenseful. Though, be warned, it is a book that will make you want to read lots of other books, starting with Crowley's Empires of the Sea, which appears to be something of a sequel to this one.





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The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, Ruler of England 1327-1330 by Ian Mortimer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is really two books in one. The first (and largest) part of this book is a well-researched and engagingly written biography of Roger Mortimer, the man who (with the assistance of Queen Isabella) deposed Edward II of England and ruled for 3 years, until he was in turn overthrown, tried, and executed by Edward III. 14th century English politics can be quite messy and confusing, with lots of personal rivalries, shifting alliances, and constantly changing positions and titles, and Ian Mortimer (no relation to Roger) does a good job of making it all make sense.

The second part of the book is an epilogue in which Ian Mortimer lays out the evidence for his theory that Edward II wasn't actually murdered at Berkeley Castle in 1327. In Ian Mortimer's version of events, Roger Mortimer faked Edward's death to stave off political intrigues designed to return the deposed king to power. It's a tale of conspiracy at least as thrilling as those woven by all those folks who want to convince you that Richard III didn't kill the princes in the tower, but it has the advantage over those that I think I might actually be convinced. At any rate, I'm convinced that a fair number of people who had reason to be in the know believed that Edward II was alive after 1327. I'd want to do a little independent fact-checking before rendering a definitive opinion on Edward II's fate.

This book also really made me want to find a good biography of Queen Isabella. Because you really have to admire a woman, who, having been abandoned by Edward II and his favorite in the path of the advancing Scottish army, arranged her own passage back to England in a harrowing journey in which two of her ladies-in-waiting died, and then went straight to the Tower of London and struck up a secret correspondence with her husband's worst enemy, Roger Mortimer. Because she had clearly decided to be Done With Edward II's Bullshit. Forget all these kings and lords - I want to read a book about her.



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The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'd rate this one as a solid, but not spectacular Culture novel. It doesn't have the philosophical weight of Surface Detail, or the epic stakes of Consider Phlebas, or the sheer mess-with-your-headness of Use of Weapons. And without spoiling the ending, I'll say that it's the sort of ending that ought to feel like an anticlimax. The book is a bit like a roller coaster - it keeps you so engaged with its twists and turns that you don't feel cheated that at the end you're back where you started.

The book probably also has some of Banks's most spectacular action sequences. The Culture novels have always been notable for the fanciful futuristic constructions that Banks loves to create - giant ships, orbitals, and so on. In this book, he gets to destroy a few of these. Spectacularly and messily. Just as one example, a climactic sequence takes place on a giant airship (location of a continuous year-long floating party) which has been filled with a giant tank of water which party guests have to traverse to get to the ultimate party location. An android pursuing the book's heroes blows a hole in the tank, triggering massive flooding, gale force winds in the upper party area, and a huge increase in buoyancy for the airship, which proceeds to crash into the roof of the tunnel it's flying through. Then there's a laser firefight in the wreckage. This is one culture novel that I think would make a great movie, just for the pyrotechnics.


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Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Overhydration in Endurance Sports by Tim Noakes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If you're an endurance athlete who has ever been told that you should drink before you're thirsty or that you should drink sports drinks with electrolytes to prevent your blood sodium levels from dropping too low, you should read this book. Noakes meticulously outlines the science that proves that a lot of the conventional advice given about hydration is at best useless, and at worst, potentially fatal.

It's also a fascinating look at how the combination of faulty assumptions and commercial interests can skew the interpretation of scientific research. It was actually a bit shocking to me how little we really know about the causes of heatstroke or exercise-induced cramping. Because these conditions are difficult to produce in controlled laboratory conditions, much of what we know has been based on anecdotes or on experiments with less than ideal design.

It's also a very readable book, despite the quantity of detailed scientific data that Noakes discusses. (It might help that I've got a background in chemistry, and went in knowing what "millimolar" means.) I did find that the book got a bit repetitive towards the end - Noakes rightly takes seriously his obligation as a scientist to address all alternative hypotheses and interpretations of the data, but if you're just someone who wants to know how much you should drink while running, you've probably absorbed everything you really need to know by halfway through the book.



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The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria's Jews Survived the Holocaust by Tzvetan Todorov

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A short but fascinating book trying to explain why Bulgaria was one of only two German-aligned countries during World War II that didn't deport their Jewish populations. (The other being Denmark.)[Edited to add: mrissa has pointed out to me that the preceding statement a) omits Finland, which also did not deport its Jewish population and b) in using the word "aligned" to try to describe the rather different situations of Bulgaria and Denmark during the war, implies that Denmark's cooperation with Nazi Germany might have been something other than forcibly coerced. I probably should have just said that Bulgaria and Denmark were both notable in their success in preserving their Jewish populations from deportation in the face of considerable German pressure, and left it at that.] It's a particularly dramatic story, because Bulgaria had deported nearly 12,000 Jews from Bulgarian-controlled Macedonia and Thrace (of whom 12 survived the war), and the Bulgarian government had actually gotten to the point of arresting large numbers of Jews and preparing to load them onto trains for Poland before the whole thing was abruptly called off.

The first part of the book is an essay in which Todorov lays out his explanation for how this happened. As his title implies, his thesis is that it was highly contingent - a number of things had to be true simultaneously for the outcome to be reached. Some of the things that Todorov highlights:
* Bulgaria had neither a particularly strong tradition of anti-semitism, nor a particularly strong narrative of Bulgarian national superiority. Bulgaria's Jews didn't live in ghettos, spoke Bulgarian, and were mostly artisans and small businessmen with a sprinkling of educated professionals like lawyers. This meant that a lot of Nazi propaganda about the Jews didn't really resonate with a lot of Bulgarians. (Lots of the contemporary documents reproduced in the book contain some version of, "Have you seen our Jews? They're poor.")

* The fact that Bulgaria's king, Boris III, was primarily focused on his own political power and Bulgaria's national interest rather than any anti-Jewish ideology. It's kind of hard to figure out what side Boris was on, because he was great at telling everyone what they wanted to hear. Nevertheless, Todorov is convinced that the king was powerful enough that if he'd wanted Bulgaria's Jews deported, they'd have been deported. The king managed to keep the Germans convinced for ages that he was completely in agreement with their Jewish policies while failing to implement the deportation. (There is an account in the book of a rather hilarious-sounding conversation between Boris III and von Ribbentrop, in which Boris tried to convince von Ribbentrop that Bulgarian Jews were different because they were "Spanish" (he meant Sephardic). von Ribbentrop was unconvinced.)

* Finally, the most critical element was a well-timed and well-orchestrated piece of parliamentary politics by vice-chairman of the Bulgarian National Assembly, Dimitar Peshev. This is the part where I wish the book were longer, because I don't really completely understand the nuances of parliamentary politics in wartime Bulgaria. Peshev wrote an eloquent letter of protest against the deportation of Bulgaria's Jews, and managed to get a fairly large percentage of the members of the governing party in the Assembly to sign it. The immediate result was that Peshev was censured and stripped of his post as vice-chairman, which doesn't sound like a resounding political success. But it seems to have done the trick in persuading the government that the deportation would buy them more trouble domestically than it would be worth in support from Germany.

The longer part of the book consists of reproductions of various contemporary documents - letters, newspaper reports, and diaries related to the events surrounding the attempted deportations. The documents shed a particularly interesting light on the claim that you sometimes hear that people didn't know what was happening to the Jews in Nazi Germany. I don't know what people knew in other places, but the documents make it pretty clear that everyone from writers of articles in Communist newspapers to Bulgarian government ministers knew that if they sent the Jews to Poland they were going to die horribly.

Overall, the message of this book seems to be that if good people want to stop evil from happening, they need not only to be passionate and vocal but very very good at operating the levers of political power. Food for thought.



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[Minor edits made to correct the name of the king of Bulgaria, which I'd somehow bobbled from "Boris" to "Basil". Since the most famous Basil in Bulgarian history was "Basil the Bulgar Slayer" this seemed particularly inept.]

Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser by Clarisse Thorn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I suspect that this book will serve as an excellent introduction to feminist theory for a lot of people who would never pick up a book about feminist theory, but would pick up a book about picking up chicks.

Not that this is really a book about "picking up chicks" - it's more like an ethnography on the pickup artist community, except without as much of the pretense of academic objectivity implied by the word "ethnography".
Pick-up artistry, for those not familiar with it, is a set of techniques taught to men to help them convince women to have sex with them. (There are fringe elements of pickup artistry that are devoted to women picking up men, or same-sex relationships, or which are actually focused more on relationships than sex, but the core of it is men's pursuit of women for sex.) Thorn does a good job of conveying the sense of horrified fascination that one feels on learning about this stuff. For anyone who's ever found the whole process of approaching an interesting member of the opposite sex really awkward, the idea that there are techniques that can make it go more smoothly is pretty appealing. On the other hand, the tendency of the movement to reduce women to Skinner boxes whose job is to dispense sex if you push the right buttons is pretty appalling, as is the fact that some popular techniques amount to a script for date rape.

Thorn uses this mix to spin out some pretty thought-provoking commentary on how we view sex and relationships as a culture.

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