The Echo Maker

Richard Powers
****
Powers chose a really interesting topic: given what we are finding out about the brain and neuro-science, i.e. that the brain is more like a collection of processors and that our sense of self is a composite sitting on top of those processors, that our "common sense" about our identity is all wrong. The story starts just after an accident next to the River Platte where a yearly gathering of Sandhill cranes provides the back drop and perhaps the chief metaphor of the book: the self is like a flock of birds, it seems to have a mind of its own, but in fact doesn't, and instead is a collection of individual actors instinctively working together to form an emergent whole. The cranes are the echo makers with their load calls, exuberant dances and deep instinctual behaviors. There are three main protagonists in this story with a fourth who is a sort of mystery "key" to unravelling the mystery of why the accident the book starts with occurred at all.
The victim is Mark Schluter -- mid twenties, one year college, works repairing machinery in a meat packing plant, blue collar. His sister Karen comes to care for him after the accident. As he recovers it turns out he has Crapgras syndrome: recognizes her as a fake or copy of his sister, not the real thing. This drives HER nuts, so she writes to a famous neuro-psychologist for help, a guy named Weber. he comes because he's always wanted to meet a Crapgras patient. Meanwhile this uncanny nurse's aide who has helped mark has a saintly influence on all she meets. The evolution of Mark's mental state is interesting and well done. I had the feeling that the psychologist (known as "Shrinky" by Mark) is a device for revealing all the sub-systems lurking in the brain. His sections are not as compelling as those of the brother and sister.
So this was a good book, rather long, but reasonably satisfying.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Thomas E. Ricks
*****
Fiasco is well named. Ricks documents a firestorm of leadership ineptitude. Civilian, military, foreign service, press -- no one escapes blame for the lousy state of events in Iraq. Since Ricks is a Washington Post corespondent, he focussed most of his attention on the military. However, it is clear from his account that Rumsfeld, Wolfurwitz, and Bremer -- particularly the last two -- take most fo the blame. Strangely, after giving Cheney "credit" for starting the war cries, the Vice President plays a lesser role in this account. Essentially, the President did not question Rumsfeld enough, did not rein in Bremer, and like Rumsfeld, ignored bad news. The civilian leadership's inability to accept and act upon bad news, to recognize the kind of war Iraq had devolved into, coupled with the military leaderships inability to develop an effective and appropriate strategy, doomed the war from its earliest weeks. Or perhaps, since General Franks didn't want to cross his boss, and his boss couldn't recognize Franks's lack of strategic thinking, one could say the war was doomed from that point. Or, even more likely, the war was doomed from the beginning since we went in with bad intelligence and few allies. A good but depressing read. Long, too.

Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence

Garry Wills
***1/2
I almost put this book down a number of times. The prose was unnecessarily turgid, the arguments and examples repetitive, and a number of points were overly developed while being picayune. But I plowed on, finally seeing how the argument came together along about chapter 23. In fact, for those picking this volume up, it might be better to start around 21 or 22, reading carefully through 23 -- then go back and skim the rest, reading some chapters more carefully.

Wills's main point is that, contrary to current opinion (current as of 1978), Jefferson's language was actually very precisely chosen, representing a moral and sentimental point of view that had a rich, contemporary context that lends exact meaning to phrases and words like "pursuit," "happiness," "bands which have been connected," and "inallienable rights." These phrases all point back to the Scottish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, not John Locke. This is a huge claim about the difference in meaning between an individualistic and communalistic reading of the Declaration. It is almost certainly the case that Wills felt he had to hammer his points home re Hutcheson as the origin of Jefferson's ideas since it was -- and maybe still is -- against the grain of majority opinion on Jefferson's philosophical underpinnings. So it was a good, but hard book to read.

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes
DuBose Heyward, pictures by Marjorie Flack
*****
Set in a country populated by rabbits, the main character is herself a rabbit with 21 children. It would seem her future is restricted by her responsibilities as a parent. However, this is an unusual bunny. She is wise, patient, brave, and -- a very fast runner.

When one of five Easter bunnies becomes too old to run fast, a wise, grandfatherly bunny holds on open competition to choose a replacement. So Mama Bunny takes her clutch of children to see the competition. As you may guess she is an unexpected contestant and winner.

The climax of the story comes on Easter Sunday, as you would expect. Not to give the story a way, she overcomes several challenges and proves her bravery. Our daughters Caitlin and Hallie have read this story every Easter Eve since -- well. A long, long time ago.

This year Caitlin is spending Easter in Sweden. So we made a short video of this year's Easter at home.



Here is another short video of Easter

The Disappeared: A Retreival Artist Novel

Kristine Kathryn Rusch
****
Well, I've come to the last of the Retrieval Artist novels, though it is actually the first after the original novella -- which is out of print. Now I have to wait for the next one to come out. That will probably be a while, so I'm feeling a little disappointed there isn't another one I can pick up and zip through. All of them have been well plotted with believable, interesting characters. I think even my daughters would like reading these books They certainly are as well written as many of the novels they read from the young adult section of the library.

Miles Flint has been promoted to detective to become partner to an experienced, but politically maladroit, detective named Noelle DeRichi's. DeRichi has a role in almost every subsequent book in the series, playing a big part in how those stories unfold. However, by the end of the novel Flint will have become a Retrieval Artist, employing the services of a retrieval artist who will become his mentor. As in all the other stories, Flint is a force for small justices in an unjust legal system that has been warped by the desire to have major trade relationships with foreign species. In this novel the affects of those agreements and relationships on normal human beings is laid out very well by Rusch. The alien species are the Disty, the Wyngrins, and the Revs, huge monstrous beings with six arms and a high regard for truth. The Disty have gotten their vengeance and the Wyngrins and Revs are after the children of "criminals" who have inadvertently made huge cross-cultural faux pas. Kidnapping, double crossing, and murder are all legal in this extremely multicultural future. The trick is preserving justice without getting caught. That's the central challenge for DeRichi and Flint.

Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

Paul Cartledge
****
Historians, like the Greek city-states in their day, don't really know how to take the Spartans. They were admirable in their war making (a feared opponent), yet repugnant in their social practices: enslaving whole populations as war chattel -- for centuries, separating children from their families to be raised by the state for the state's needs, inculcating a warrior ethic that shamed the survivors of battles into suicide. In fact Thermopylae was a battle in which 300 Spartans, led by King Leonidas, were expected to not come back, and the one survivor who did was spurned by his society. He was miserable, and one year later in the battle of Plataea he left the Spartan line in a berserk-like, suicidal charge to make amends for having survived Thermopylae. (To no avail, it was bad form to break the line.)

So the main problem is that one of the most repressive, totalitarian societies ever known in Western history fought for the freedom of the Greeks against Xerxes and the Persian empire. Not only that, their stand at Thermopylae undoubtedly bought enough time for the Athenians to resist Xerxes fleet at Salamis, forcing his retreat. We can admire and be grateful for that, since the great flowering of Greek culture occurred after the Persian War.

This is a well told history of Thermopylae: background, context, immediate outcome, long term significance to the history of the world, etc. Perhaps the best chapter is the epilogue in which Cartledge recounts how historians and philosophers have viewed the Spartans over time. Totalitarian regimes (i.e. Nazi Germany) admired the Spartans, but so did Plato and Rousseau. At their best the Spartans were willing to die for the idea of freedom, even if the individuals didn't really have a choice.

Education For Thinking

Deanna Kuhn
***
This book struck a chord with me since it puts the emphasis on thinking and teaching thinking, a task that -- mostly -- can only be done by getting students to think. By "thinking" Kuhn means inquiry and argument. In the case of argument she is not advocating canned topics the teacher chooses which the students debate by talking to the teacher and not to each other. Instead she is advocating debates that start out as almost conversations between students which then become formal over time. She also includes an interesting and practical example of how to get Middle School kids to engage in meaningful and respectful argument on the topic of capital punishment. In other words by engaging in arguments, with just a little guidance on what makes some opinions better than others (facts, reasons, explanations of how facts and reasons support particular opinions), kids start thinking and valuing the thinking that authentic argument engenders. This is "learning by doing" pure and simple.

Inquiry is a little more difficult, in Kuhn's opinion, because it requires a student to step back into some meta-cognition regarding the act of inquiring. By implication inquiry is an iterative process, which as students become more adept, leads to more subtle and refined questioning and inquiry. Kuhn gives an example of inquiry by a grade school girl given the task to make a number of generalizations about sail boats. She also had students working in Middle School on an inquiry into marketing music using various booklet covers for CDs. In each case it took a fair number of weeks to finish the inquiry.

In both cases Kuhn felt she needed to find topics in which the students were interested (music), or about which they had strong gut feelings (capital punishment). Strong interest and feelings tend to free people (not just students) to think and communicate clearly. Students, particularly, are often in a position where they have little knowledge and minimal understanding with a new topic. It is almost impossible to speak authoritatively in that situation. Many students have the response of sticking to the facts or generalizing like crazy. If we want them to develop argumentation, then we need to start with subjects about which they can speak authoritatively, i.e. they can be authors. My hunch is that it's similarly the case with inquiry. Inquiry has to be learned by doing also, but maybe not all students should be studying the same topic.

Interestingly enough, Kuhn did not seem to tie argumentation and inquiry activities together, though they seem natural bedfellows. That being said, I was a little disappointed in the conclusion, being more of a call to policy action, rather than an appeal to teachers directly, the people who really make a difference in a child's education.

Hominids

Hominids
Robert J. Sawyer
***
Set in the present, Hominids uses parallel universes loosely based on quantum mechanics as the main conceit for the novel. In one universe us humans survived but the Neanderthals became extinct. The exact opposite happened in the parallel universe. But there verything except for the mutually exclusive extinctions is the same, including the unusual geology of Sudbury Ontario. In both worlds, physicists take advantage of mines excavated in nickel rich rock that blocks almost all radiation. The Neanderthal scientists carry out a quantum computing experiment that accidently propels one of them to our universe.

The story from that point becomes a thought experiment concerning Neanderthal society, physiology, and psychology. In Hominids, characterization takes a back seat to big ideas Neither the Neanderthal nor the human worlds are drawn with immediacy, but they are drawn well enough to keep the story moving along. This was an OK book and I don't resent the time I spent reading it, unlike some others in the last month (See The World at the End of Time). However I'll wait to read the rest of the triology at the library.

Paloma: A Retrieval Artist Novel

Kristine Kathryn Rusch
****
Miles Flint has just returned from a cruise of the outer reaches of the solar system, a cruise he needed after the Disty crisis. Within minutes of his return he received a desperate plea for help from his mentor, Paloma. He rushed to her condo only to find that she had been murdered.

How, why, and by whom constitutes the mystery that Flint must unravel.

Once again the writing is taut, full of verisimilitude, and effective at creating a believable world with believable characters. It has been a long time since science fiction has captured my imagination the way this series has. I'm reminded a little of the Master and Commander series by Patrick O'Brian. Both series create believable, compelling characters who grow and change from book to book. At the same time their worlds are full of interesting twists and turns with unexpected but thoughtful quirks. I'll probably end up buying the whole series.

unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation

Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson
*****

If I were a political operative, I would be dismayed by this book because it lays out for the reader all the tools used by spin-masters in simple, accessible language. Chapter by chapter, the authors explain the indicators and techniques of spin, and our receptiveness to them. For example, the second chapter lists these indicators:

• If its scary be wary
• A story that's too good
• The dangling comparative
• The superlative swindle
• The "pay you Tuesday" con
• The blame game
• Glittering generalities

The next chapter exposes the tricks of spin which match up nicely with the indicators explained in the preceding chapter. The clarity and simplicity with which this is presented makes unSpun unusally valuable and practical. Here is a list of the tricks:

1. Misnomers
2. "Frame it and Claim it"
3. Weasel words
4. Eye candy
5. The average bear
6. The baseline bluff
7. The literally true falsehood
8. The implied falsehood

The authors supply plenty of examples for each trick and explain how the spin is crafted.

But what is it about people that makes them vulnerable to spin? The authors answer that question in chapter four. In short we let language do our thinking for us, have partisan biases, are susceptible to vivid individual examples, can be fooled by our feeling of being right, and -- surprise, surprise -- engage in wishful thinking.

So what can do in the face of these handicaps? The authors supply very practical suggestions in their next two chapters listing mental disciplines and reliable Internet web sites -- including FactCheck.org. This would be a great text for a High School civics class but is a good read for all ages.

Buried Deep: A Retrieval Artist Novel

Kristine Kathryn Rusch
****
This is my second "Recovery Artist" novel and I'm afraid I'm hooked. Recovery Man is a better book, but this one was pretty good as well. Rusch's series is a kind of thought experiment concerning multi-culturalism; the role of networked information and database technologies in a world of reduced privacy, advanced bio-tech; and impersonal, unjust law (at least by human standards). This last is what makes the retrieval artists necessary.

The main conflict in the story is between the Disty, an inscrutible alien race, whose customs and beliefs are very foreign to human understanding, and human customs and beliefs. Disty beliefs and rituals concerning death generate behavior that is "virus like" Beliefs about "contamination" and burials lead to behavior that is irrational by human standards, and deadly for both races.

Miles Flint saves the day with sophisticated search techniques that uncover the solution to "decontaminating" some burials on Mars. The plot is fairly tight, the characterization fully developed, and the evocation on a future world well done. This is a good series.

The World at the End of Time

The World at the End of Time
Frederik Pohl
-*
Most of the books I read are pretty good. Every now and then I find a book that I just don't want to read after I've gotten it home from the library. Nothing wrong with those books necessarily, they just don't strike my interests at the time. More rarely I start a book and read it to the end, wishing it would end sooner. By definition they can never end soon enough.

That was the case with this book. Pohl would sucker me along with some interesting scientific explanations held weakly together by an over complicated picaresque plot, suspended in a goo of wordy exposition and dialog. Pohl has the reputation of being a good story teller, and I can see glimpses of that in this book.

Plot: Earth sends interstellar colonists to far away planet. Un-beknownst to puny earthlings, mighty sociopathic, paranoid star-being is hanging out in the area, afraid that copies he has made of himself are out to get him (Reasonable since they are copies -- so clever!) So he blows up stars where he thinks they live. But he doesn't get all of them. What to do? Send cluster of decoy stars and planets off to edge of universe, causing time dilation. Puny earthlings have colonized one of the planets in cluster, so off they go too! Silly earthlings never figure out what happened only that they are traveling with a cluster of stars near the speed of light. Meanwhile our hero, Victor, gets frozen and thawed out many times to accommodate the story's conceit. Poor Victor, things change. World freezes too. Thaws. Third time he thaws, people really different, have evolved into long, skinny beings from living in orbit (Hmmm . . . LeMark lives!). Becomes sex slave. Misses wife. Goes back to planet. Nothing living even though environment can support it. But super technology works for thousands of years keeping people frozen as "corpsicles." Victor realizes the universe is done except for the last cluster of stars. Star being realizes that too, is on his way ... when the book ends.

You can take it from there. The physics science seems like it is based on real physics. Cloning, environmental science seems poorly conceived.There are probably three good books in this one. But the one needed serious editing. I wonder if his contract called for 400 pages (It's 407, so I'm suspicious.) Anyway, don't read it. That's supposed to be a minus star rating under the author name.