Tag Archives: Reviews

Review: Makers by Cory Doctorow

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I loved this book.
Forget my review and go get it now, it’s wonderful. If you don’t have the scratch right now, that’s ok:  Cory Doctorow walks the talk and has published his book under a creative commons license.  You can get “Makers” for free at his site as a pdf, as html, ePub, or as an audiobook.  Just go get it and read it. Why?
The characters felt right and true and good and wonderful, like people you’ve always wanted to be friends with.  It’s the story of people playing around and doing the creative work that felt right to them, pushing to stay free and work on beautiful things.  Their hard work takes a damn beating from the world around them and they rise up after that beating.

I was sad closing it, because I wanted more from them, more for them, and another thing…

I always wanted to be Perry, but I looked in that book and I’m Sammy.

Review: Where Men Win Glory

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I’ve finished Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory: The Oddysey of Pat Tillman” in the air above the middle of America and I’m furious.  This story begins with the hero dying and it ends with his betrayal by the people who promised us all they would put our interests above theirs.
Krakauer builds a sculpture out of words, and it is an angry art.  In a flat, journalistic style he begins with the creation of Pat Tillman, the birth of the Taliban, and the disturbing story of their meeting in the Graveyard of Empires called Afghanistan.   Instead of the hero meeting his enemy and vanquishing or being vanquished, he is destroyed by the common fuckups of scores of lesser men. He is part of a string of other common tragedies and Krakauer pulls together the infuriating betrayal of Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman and scores of other men and women of the US Armed Forces by their leadership, carving a bleak relief of giants mired up to their knees in a vast, broken septic system.
The horrible coverup of his death is a crime that’s gone unpunished, and it’s only come to light because Tillman was a famous football player.  Joe and Jane Smith get no such scrutiny, and fall into the trash heap of history.
If you care about honor, this is a good book. If you care about truth or valor, this is a good book.  It’s well written, with a slow, burning build up that leads to an ashfield.  Because this is a story about real life, the villains are not caught, the hero isn’t crowned and the story doesn’t end at the climax.  If you’ve got friends in the US Armed Forces, please make sure that they read this.  When we send our heroes to war we know that they might die, but we don’t expect that they will be used so cheaply and with so little respect.

My Best Books of 2009

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I like to read.
Here are the best books I read this year.

Nonfiction

Born On A Blue Day & Embracing the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammet

Yes, it’s two books, but it’s really about the same subject. Daniel Tammet is an autistic gay savant synesthete. He won the unusualness lottery. The first book is his life story and the second is a tour through what he’s learned about the human mind. An amazing amount of good neuro and cognitive science in here, presented in a clear, non-technical way. You can read more about it in my earlier review.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright

It’s brilliant. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, examines all of human history through a single lens, in this case win-win games.
The thesis is that human life and all progress comes about as a series of non-zero sum interactions, games where both parties win.

It gets a bit repetitive some times – when a story begins you can start predicting how it will end because there is only one theme in the book, but it effectively demonstrates the idea and shows you the impact throughout history and applications for the future

Authentic Happiness : Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman

When I was a kid, my answer to “whaddya wanna be when you grow up” was always “Happy.” 1 I had noticed how often adults didn’t seem to be happy and how often they weren’t doing anything about it. Seligman is no snake-oil guru, he’s a past president of the APA and an experimental psychologist who worked on some of the great experiments of the 20th century. His explanations of happiness are based on actual study and experimentation and the recipes for success seem to match up with my personal experience. While I haven’t read his book on Learned Optimism, I’ve heard similar praise for it.

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater

Pure poetry. Laura uses the structure of foundational experiments in social psychology to raise deep questions about medicine, free will, obedience, and the ethics of experiments that involve conscious beings.
I’ve reconsidered long held ideas because of this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough for people who are unfamiliar with how brains work but don’t want to wade through the dry details. Where Daniel Tammet is explaining the big picture, Laura is giving you the impact of these experiments.
If Mary Roach wrote about psychology, but actually had something to say, she might write this book.
Worth reading just to learn what happened to the subjects after the Milgrim experiments in obedience to authority.

The Complete Manual of Woodworking by Albert Jackson

I’m just a beginning woodworker, but this is a great resource.
It’s full of huge, gorgeous shots of wood, cuts, examples and tools. It covers the wide range of methods and materials with great detail but remains accessible.
Reading this book is also worth it for someone uninterested in actually doing any woodworking. It shows you how the furniture and tools around you are made, how the character of wood shapes the architecture of the things around you. I certainly look at my kitchen cabinets with new eyes. You’ll find out why in this book.

Fiction

Litttle Brother by Cory Doctorow

Loved this.
Sent it to my dad. Recommending it to everyone. It’s about how smart courageous kids deal with adults giving up on freedom after a terror attack.

Well written, fast paced, and filled with real characters – something the SF genre doesn’t always get. This isn’t far future fiction, this is about right now.
The technology is all homemade and usable. Heck, they even have DIY instructions for elements of Little Brother up on instructables. Doctorow is a smart thinker about the problems of security, terrorism and politics. He’s an editor on the wonderful BoingBoing blog and is kind enough to provide you free electronic copies of Little Brother under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. That means you can give it away and make new things with it, but you’ve gotta make those shareable, give Cory credit, and share your results under a CC license.
Get it, give it to a kid, and hope.

Crystal Nights and Other Stories by Greg Egan

Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

Greg Egan can’t stop writing things I enjoy. I’ve read so many rehashes of the same ideas and Egan never does that. Every story contains at least two ideas completely foreign to me. He piles them on into a delicious meal in each story. What’s in there: completely alien life 2, the ethics of evolutionary algorithms 3 , and a hundred other things you’ve never thought about, all packaged in exciting, well plotted stories.
Egan is consistently the best hard SF writer working.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories by John Kessel

This is a little bit of weirdness that I read on my new Droid phone. It’s a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 story, so you have no excuse whatsoever for not reading it. The stories are good and whip-smart.
If you’ve ever read a certain Flannery O’Connor story, you’ve got to read this for the perfect “Every Angel is Terrifying”. Set right after the O’Connor story ends and tells you just what happens next in the smartest way.  “The Red Phone” was a delightful story of phone sex, romance, and telecommunications for the deaf
I also enjoyed a series of stories about a matriarchy on the moon. Each story opens up more and more thought into the society – a lovely little bit of world building.

The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson

This is a bit of a complement to Crystal Nights. Egan’s book is full of bright sharp ideas and this one has warm comfy stories with great characters.
Beautiful little short stories that interconnect at strange tangents. Strange booksellers, impossible books, and the first story I’ve read where information visualization plays a powerful part in the story.

I’m looking for more from this author on the basis of these stories.

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

Wonderful. A beautiful classic noir mystery set in a place where bodies are a commodity and life is cheap and possibly permanent.
Sex, death, betrayal and crime for the cyber set.
This is SF for those who thought they didn’t like it because all of the flashy SF ideas are just layered onto a really strong closed room mystery, but one that couldn’t have been done in any other setting. To check out if you think science fiction is stupid but you love Lawrence Block or Robert Parker mysteries.

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

I finished this book 24 hours after picking it up, and didn’t read anything else till I had finished. It’s fantastic.
Fastest book I’ve read since Palahniuk. Similar style and rhythm – full of secret knowledge about medicine and mobsters, great amounts of violence, pain, and gross-out.
It’s a book paced like a punk song about a hitman who becomes a doctor. Yes it’s a cliche to have a hitman who gets found by the mobsters he flipped on, but I couldn’t care less while reading this. It’s fun and furious and a damn fine read.

  1. OK, sometimes it was burglar or policeman, but generally it was happy.   (back)
  2. alien alien, not like the sexy blue elves of avatar   (back)
  3. it’s also a covert of indictment omniscient, omnipotent, but uninvolved deities.   (back)

Books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson

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Includes a cd and some geometry lessons!Neal Stephenson’s Anathem has been called a space opera, but that seems inaccurate.  The characters eventually make it out of the atmosphere, but time is the subject of the book – not space.  Some of the best parts are about contemplation, piecing together puzzles and following the threads of deductive logic through to a conclusion.  A long character-building scene has to do with an art project where the characters recreate a famous battle by planting a garden full of weeds that will battle for dominance and advance their growth in predictable ways.  The kind of ideas where events play out over months, years and centuries hardly belong in space opera.  It is Long Now fiction.

The Setup

In a world far far away, the monasteries are a place where mathematicians, scientists, and rhetoricians have sequestered themselves away from the working world.  They practice a method of separation that allows for regulated exchange of ideas between the monasteries (called concents) and the outer world.  Each concent has a series of gates and subdivisions, all regulated by an enormous clock designed to run on a millenial scale.  For some, the gate opens once a year for a week.  For others, the time between openings is 10 years, 100 years, or even 1000.  This lets the secluded folks work away at their ideas without being interrupted or polluted by popular culture.  The setting projects timelessness, order, safety and ritual.  Obviously, that isn’t going to last, but it’s an idyllic sort of world for nerds, one where you can devote yourself to a higher purpose, abandon ambition, and be recognized solely for the worth of your mental work.  There are analogues between much of what monks do and what these guys do, and lots of the same sort of psychological motivation.

The Gripes

Actually, let’s take a moment to discuss the biggest failing of the book.  The vocabulary is tedious.  There’s a lot of vocabulary and world building going on here, and most of it is a waste, a distraction from the ideas and the characters.  Sure, it’s set in a faraway world and they have different word’s for different things.  But why?  In the end, there’s no real need for this story to take place on a different planet: if set here on Earth you’d have a history for free, you could reference the work ideas of folks like Plato or Pythagoras directly and you’d only need to invent new words for concepts that are actually new.  Too much of the book is set on giving alternate histories for ideas like Platonic ideals, too little on explaining the actual new ideas in the work.  Stephenson’s books are generally not great storehouses of characterization – they are a box of whizzy fireworks for your brain to set off.   That’s great – it’s fun.  But if that’s what you are going for, get to it.  The reader doesn’t benefit from learning that in this world the science monks are called “avout” rather than “devout” and their convents are called “concents”.   With so many analogues between the avout and the monastaries that we know, why not just use those words and explain the differences?  Stephenson’s path means he’s got to explain both the similar and the dissimilar, which draws the plot to a stop.  That’s why it takes a third of the book before our hero gets moving and the action starts forward.

The Push

Or rather, it shoots off like a rocket.  Once things start moving, they pulse on for 600 pages.  Ah, there you go.  That’s the rush you were waiting for.  Once it starts moving you’ve got dashing stories of survival, ninjas, instructional parables of math and geometry, explorations of Graham-Everett-Wheeler Cosmology, etc.  There’s a lot going on.  Like “Snow Crash” or “The Diamond Age”, Stephenson’s technique is to ramp up the book in a hyperbolic fashion.  Picture an asymptotic curve where there is a long flat head as the book builds the world and characters it needs, then a sudden rising motion when the real story begins to show. As you near the end, the drama, intensity and stakes have risen to staggering heights.  Unlike the previous books, this one actually seems to end.  With a real ending.  And there is resolution for the characters.  This is a pleasant surprise, given the past performance of Stephenson’s novels.

The Good

Once the action begins, it kicks hard and continuously.  Danger and excitement are ever-present, the nature of reality is challenged, exploded, put back together, and then smashed to bits again.

The Bad

You have to read 300 pages of setup.  This isn’t unpleasant, in fact these are some thoroughly written stories and they lay a great foundation for the rest of the book.  The vocabulary choice is also grating.

The Ugly Conclusion

I dug it, but I’m a fan of everything the guy’s written.  Some of the best bits of the book surface once you’ve completed it.  The length and complexity speak to the ideas of the Long Now, which apparently inspired the book.  The constant mapping between concepts and words of our culture and the book world brings to mind the Godelian mappings that  I finally began to understand in Doug Hofstadter’s “I am a Strange Loop”.   Also, no, Enoch Root doesn’t appear in this book.

Surveil me better

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I’ve joined the travel site dopplr. It’s pretty simple. Put in trips, connect through them. Useful for the frequent flying types that I’m supposed to become soon. You can see the little badge over there on the left telling you that I’ll be in Mount Snow this weekend.

Except that it tells you West Rutland, because neither Mount Snow or West Dover are understood as places by Dopplr. I picked a town near Killington, but that seems a bit lame to me.

Slave narratives

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While Sam and I were in charleston for the wedding, she picked up a book called “My folks don’t want me to talk about slavery” filled with stories by former slaves of what it was like for them and what emancipation was like. Thes stories came about because of one of the things governments can do that are good, public works projects. During the Depression, the government hired a bunch of out of work writers to travel across former slaveowning areas, find former slaves, and record their stories. Project Gutenberg has just published online, for free, an etext about the administrative process that led to this project and how the writers went about it. Sample text in in it also goes in about the religious beliefs and superstitions of the former slaves.

Interestingly, like a lot of old folks, many of these people reminisce fondly about how much better life was during “Slavery time.”