Books are my only friends

Happy Fourth

2008-07-03T13:44:00.001-07:00

In celebration of the birthday of the USA here are two interesting books I have come across.

I just picked up a copy of George Stewart's The Names on the Land which was recently re-issued by the New York Review of Books Classics line. The book is a thematic exploration of why American cities, states, rivers and mountains have the names they do. There are also a few maps including the distribution of "burgs" and "villes." I've only read a small bit but it has been fun so far.

For example, in the Pacific Northwest I learned there was an attempt, in the competition with perfidious Albion for the Oregon Territory to rename all the Cascades after US Presidents. While we did end up with Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Washington and Mt. Adams, Mt. St Helens and Mt. Olympus avoided becoming Mt Van Buren and Shasta is not Mt. Jackson.

For the smaller set, I highly recommend Go Go America by Dan Yaccarino. The book is framed by a family's cross-country trip and focuses on entertaining details of each state including bizarre laws, inventions and historical events. It features Yaccarino's standard cheery graphics with a splash of retro.

And what better what to celebrate the US on a book blog than with the Library of America? Check out this volume on American environmental writing. And wow, does this noir collection look good.

Mixed

2008-07-02T23:38:00.000-07:00

Barnett Rubin points out that Ahmed Rashid has a new book on US policy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia. Rashid's Taliban was excellent and I am sure the new one will be of value to anyone seeking to learn more this critical region.

Citizen Reader has a nice post on traveling and reading, specifically whether you read about the place to which you are traveling before or after going.

The good folks at Orbit have been republishing the works of Ian M Banks in the US. Consider Phlebas and Player of Games have been out for awhile and I am thrilled to see that Use of Weapons will be out later this month. Use of Weapons is probably his cruelest work, but I really quite liked it. I've started Matter which is a fun read so far.

Speaking of master science fiction writers, I just received a copy (via Harper Collins First Look -- which you would be crazy not to join) of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which comes with a CD to which to listen while you read. Funnily enough, I don't think any of my favorite music would go with any of my favorite books. I am trying to think of what would go with Kavalier and Klay or the Road and can't think of anything appropriate.

What's the best Pavement song you don't know? This one.

Simplicity itself

2008-07-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

In the late 80s, James Gleick wrote Chaos: Making A New Science, an entertaining book that described the rise of the study of chaos. The book also helped popularize fractals. I recall going to an early 90s Lollapalooza where a fellow attendee pointed to a fractal t-shirt and said "woah, chaos theory." In Simplexity, Time science writer Jeffrey Kluger aims to repeat Gleick's success and detail the rise of a new line of inquiry that explores the inter-relationship between simplicity and complexity. While the book tells a number of entertaining and enlightening stories it does not weave these into a strong, compelling thesis. Do not expect the kids at Bonnaroo to get their heads blown by Simplexity.

The principal idea of the book is that defining something as simple or complex is not easy. He gives the example of the pencil, which appears to be terribly simple, but in fact is a complex assemblage of materials from around the world. Much more interesting is his study of how this is manifested in real-world situations. He asks about the complexity of jobs including truck drivers who have to gauge the reactions and behaviors of other people, the status of his machinery, the effects of weather and many other exogenous factors. The highly paid Wall Street analyst running a series of financial models may seem less complex by comparison.

The book is best seen as a collection of a science author's short pieces. The individual chapters are interesting, but they do not build to an conclusion. There is never a clear use of the idea of just what complexity and simplicity are. We just know that when you look at a problem or a system at one level it is simple and at another level it is complex. It is hard to know what to do with this information. Those interested in learning more should turn to the Santa Fe Institute, where as Kluger explains, much of the research in this field is being done. You can read more about its complexity research here.

God speed all the bakers at dawn

2008-07-01T07:49:00.000-07:00

Lifehacker asked its readers to identify the books that changed their lives. Results are here. No huge surprises, the books fall out into religion (the Bible and perhaps Ayn Rand?,) political/philosophical (Orwell, Dawkins and Rand) and geeky (lots of sci-fi). I have nothing against any of these books and have read many of them, but it would be another thing to say they changed your life. I've always been befuddled by the notion that a book might change my life. Never had I read a book that would fundamentally change my life and send me on a course I had not intended. I suppose there is the idea of inspiration, which many of them contain, but that seems to me to be the activation of latent tendencies.

Generally speaking if someone says to me "Read this book, it will change your life," I try to avoid it reading it all costs. For one, it sounds culty. For another then I have to talk about it with them and they will try to gauge if my life has in fact changed.

Visiting Canada

2008-06-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

I recently was in Canada for work and, as is my habit, I sought out books and candy. Sadly I had little success on either front (although it's not your fault Canada.)

On the candy front, most of the more regional candies like Coffee Crisp are already available in the US. Apparently this is big news to many, as it there was a petition going. On the plus side there was lots of good Cadbury action that we don't get that easily including the peanut butter caramel Wunderbar. My big failure was in seeing but not purchasing the bluntly named Eat More, a candy bar that proves the US is not alone in gluttony. Cybele at Candy Blog says it is OK.

On the book front, I kept looking for Toll the Hounds, a book by Canadian author Steven Erikson. The difficulty in finding it was probably related to the fact that it won't be published until next week. Whenever I visit out of the way used bookstores with low turnover I wish that I kept a list of authors of hard to find books. All sorts of treasures lurk in these places but I have to recall all the books, and in my dotage I have forgotten much. I did find the Drowning Towers by George Turner. This is a dark tale of 21st century Australia sinking into a Malthusian and rising ocean nightmare.

Makes a hard man humble

2008-06-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

Poke Rafferty is probably the first mystery hero is also a travel writer. Following A Nail Through the Heart, Timothy Hallinan's the Fourth Watcher continues the adventures of the Bangkok based Asian-American. Poke who has succeeded in building a family finds himself in trouble with the Secret Service and unknown forces of the Bangkok underworld. Lucky for him, as part of research for a book he has been getting training from a former CIA operative in how to navigate the dark and secret corners of the town.

As you might imagine, things are more complicated that is immediately apparent. Turns out that multiple people are watching Rafferty and some have ties to people from nastier places than Bangkok. And some of them are after Rafferty for reasons about which he is unaware. The situation escalates and Rafferty ends up in a cat and mouse game with some unpleasant characters.

The obvious comparison of this series is to the Bangkok novels of John Burdett. While both are set in Bangkok, there is an important difference. Burdett's main character is Thai and the Thai viewpoint plays heavily in those book. Rafferty, as his daughter argues, is an American who wants to be Thai. That tension is a key part of his character as the various elements of his personality lead him in one direction or the other.

This book reminds me of the early Robicheaux books by James Lee Burke. Both feature a good hearted character who goes out of his way to help the weak, while making improbable threatening statements to very bad people. There is also clearly a focus on long term character development with a range of idiosyncratic personalities for Hallinan to grow before the reader's eyes.

(Possible Spoiler)I'm not positive about this, but I believe the title of the book is allusion to Carol Reed and Graham Greene's The Third Man. In both cases the identity of the person is of great interest to the characters.

Coming straight out of Kansas

2008-06-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

Because I am apparently a sap for marketing and other shiny objects, I gravitate towards new books. I am well aware of all the older books I have yet to read, but I still focus my attention on the new sections of the library and the bookstore. I really appreciate it when publishers reissue classic works that missed my attention the first time. So a hearty thanks to Picador for re-issuing the stellar Blackburn by Bradley Denton.

The story is a tragic tale of a creation of a monster, Blackburn, with whom the reader will find both sympathetic and repellent. Imagine a combination of Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Anton Chigurgh and you have Jimmy Blackburn. He starts life as a kind hearted boy in a small Kansas town who justs wants time to play with his family. His abusive father abuses him and schools him in the tools of violence. Unfortunately the other authority figures, including school and the law, destroy any chance that Blackburn will walk a legal line. Blackburn takes these lessons on the road where he identifies other liars, cheats and abusers and then kills them.

While the story is ultimately sad it also produces quite a few guffaws. Half of the chapters are titled with a victim number. In these stories, some terribly (or sometimes mildly) wicked person crosses Blackburn's path and Blackburn, generally reluctantly, decides they have to die. It his skewed views and often poetic means of dispatch that lead to the black humor.

The other chapters tell the story of Blackburn's life and how he came to be who he is. You witness the kindness morphing into a kind of vengeance that a real life Batman might employ. Blackburn's code is fairly simple (hurting the weak= death) is sometimes tested by complications. At one point he asks the unknowing victim of one criminal what would be the result of a hypothetical crime and the victim hyperbolically answers "He should be shot." You should avoid hyperbole with Blackburn as demonstrated by his near immediate execution of the offender.

Denton plays with the reader a bit. At one point, Blackburn meets the author of a book about a killer with a moral code. The author is a misanthropic drunk who hates that people idolize his creation. This is a bit of a tweak on the nose for readers cheering on Blackburn, but Denton is not a cruel didact (like Michael Haneke can be) seeking to shame or convert the reader. This is a story about a youth crushed by authority figures.

The story of his life is a story of the decay of the American dream. In that it reminded me of Jack London's story of a wrecked youth, the Apostate. In both stories, circumstances difficult to address crush a boy and it has terrible effects on the family. This is the finest crime novel I have read in years.

Hey, you got your AI in my dogma . . .

2008-06-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

Should you wish to grapple with the interplay between science and religion, in the words of Tony Soprano, "you got options." You could TiVo "Faith and Reason" on PBS, ponder some Betrand Russell and G.K. Chesterton (which – like duct tape and a universal remote – no home should be without), or crack open Dan Ronco's Unholy Domain. I've gone with door number three, and I've gotta say, it ain't half bad.

Unholy Domain opens in a dystopian, not-so-distant future, in which the world's political and economic systems are gimping along in the wake of the PeaceMaker, a mess-you-up-like-bad-chicken computer virus. It appears that this piece of sunshine was unleashed, for reasons unknown, by the ubertalented and correspondingly erratic programmer Ray Brown, essentially taking down Teh Interweb. As a result of the devastation wrought by PeaceMaker, the federal government has banned all but the most miniscule advances in technology and devolved into corruption and incompetence. *cough, cough *

Against this backdrop we find the Church of the Natural Humans, a sect of anti-technology nuts whose vestments include shoulder-holstered gats and whose theology puts the Luddites to shame, locked in a clandestine war with The Domain, a cabal of black market tech peddlers (imagine the Illuminati recruiting at MIT and bringing on some temps from Blackwater) to be Lords of All We Survey.

Cut to college student David Brown, whom we accompany on his quest to discover the truth about his father Ray and the PeaceMaker virus. What follows is a fast paced techno-thriller that would fit well between a beach chair and cooler of Red Stripe. Some of the prose is somewhat clunky, but Ronco does a great job of drawing out relationships between his characters that seem more fully developed than most genre authors tend to produce. Moreover, the fundamental questions raised by Ronco about the roles of science and religion in the arc of human development are ones worth considering, even if it's while sitting on the beach with a bronson. Perhaps especially then.

If Dan Simmons' Endymion got you all freaky and hot in the ass, what with its time travellin' spikey robot, the AI TechnoCore and the Galactic Catholics, then Unholy Domain will be right up your alley. On the other hand, if you like your discourse to be more elevated, then go get a Mother Jones. And put the beer away.

Your Government Failed You

2008-06-24T06:16:00.000-07:00

Richard Clarke worked for decades in the United States government's national security world. He reached the upper levels of government serving as an Assistant Secretary State and as the chief counter-terrorism official. He left government in 2003 over his disagreements overIraq policy. Shortly thereafter he wrote Against All Enemies, a memoir of his service, as well as a sharp critique of the Bush Administration's terror policy. In his latest book, Your Government Failed You, expands his critique from the personalities and policies of the Bush Administration to the structure and culture of the national security apparatus.

There isn't much that escapes Clarke's scrutiny. The Defense Department reforms meant to avoid another Vietnam failed to prevent Iraq, but helped make it worse. The turf wars, resource allocation and hiring practices of the intelligence community fail to prevent strategic surprise. The Homeland Security Department is described as a underfunded, sum weaker than its parts agglomeration that serves more as a new spoils system than a provider of security.

What is particularly challenging about fixing the issues laid out is the great difficulty in fixing them. In many cases, major legislation will be required and the necessary compromise will take quite a bit of time to implement. More worrisome is whether any single Administration can tackle all of these things in a single or even two terms.

Topics like defense reorganization and the role of the National Guard might be rather dry, but Clarke is writing for both the lay reader and the policy wonk. He provides specific detail about what to fix, but does so in an fashion that doesn't require subject matter expertise. I am particularly happy that Clarke includes global warming (and cyber-security) as a national security issue and that it be treated with the same urgency as issues like terrorism. In terms of threats to the homeland, global warming is probably the worst of all.

None of these issues will be easy to fix and fixing any will be made all the more difficult by the change in the people doing the work. The ideal of government service has certainly faded in this country. Kai Bird, in his masterful the Color of Truth (which, if you can't guess, is gray,) describes the noblesse oblige that led the privileged like the Bundy brothers to seek government service. This is gone, but the government hasn't helped the cause either. On the one hand it continues to outsource key jobs, which may save a bit of money but also fails to develop long term leaders for the government. Then it makes the hiring practices overly long, complicated and demanding and provides pay scales that often require great sacrifice of those who might serve.

In the book, Clarke lays out a number of policy prescriptions to fix the problems he addresses. The most critical one has to be the human resources question. If the government doesn't have the right people to do the work, all the other fixes will come to naught. It is here that Clarke provides the hope that his list of changes might actually be achievable. When the government has the right people in place, it can work wonders.

But I remember everything

2008-06-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

Sam Taylor's the Amnesiac tells the story of Jim Purdew and his realization that he cannot remember anything from his college years. His growing fixation on this fact slowly kills his relationship and sends him back to his old college town to try and uncover what he forgot. Along the way Purdew mediates on the nature of memory and identity in a way I found quite engaging.
The novel eventually enters a murky dreamstate, where the lines between reality and imagination are unclear. The story often teeters on the edge of nightmare. Not the nightmare of fright, but of an strangeness, the sense that thinks are just slightly off kilter.This can become rapidly silly, but I think Taylor does a great job with Purdew's wrestling with his memory. I especially liked his use of peculiar manuscripts that Purdew finds and writes himself.

The book lays it on a tad thick with its Phillip Larkin and Jorge Luis Borges references. Labyrinths are everywhere and a character appears who claims to have inherited Larkin's memory! I am poorly read in both artists, so I don't know how someone better read would react, but it might grate.

Taylor well balances his tasks of keeping the story moving and exploring his themes. Purdew, and other characters, are fascinated by detectives and detective fiction. Purdew even calls himself a private investigator at one point. Purdew, towards the end, wonders if the best mystery would merely give clues to the story and end on an quite ambiguous note. This is quite the tease by Taylor, who manages to add some additional tension to the end with this move.

Angels take their time in falling

2008-06-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

The United States is occasionally beset by moralistic crusades that sweep up the guilty and the innocent. Prohibition, the satanic abuse scare and the Hollywood black list vary in their extent and their severity, but they reflect a righteous tendency that exists in America. Of course there is a countervailing trend that opposes such efforts, and our arts serve to remind (and occasionally to rub our collective faces) in our collective bent towards social zealotry.

Karen Abbott expands the discussion with her Sin in the Second City, a story which sets a pair of enlightened madams against the forces of moral certitude and reform. The madams ran the pseudonymously eponymous Everleigh Club, a club known for the most extravagant epicurean delights as well as the most lovely of women. As opposed to the competition in turn of the century Chicago's Levee District, the Everleighs treated their employees well, limited violence and substance abuse and established a business as civilized as was possible in their trade.

About the same time of the rise of the Everleighs, the nation became fixated on the white slave trade. This was the idea that young women were tricked into becoming harlots through kidnap, rape and drugging. Like their abolitionist predecessors, the anti-white slave trade advocates rallied the forces of society and government. Abbot shows how their crusade helped in the creation of new institutions like the FBI and continued to build our sex-obsessed culture.

There is much for the reader to enjoy in the book. Those seeking salacious detail will get their fill. Those who look for extensively researched period detail will not go wanting and those who just want a good political story will also be pleased. While it is not the core of the book it is about the trade in flesh for sex, one that in Chicago in the early 1900s was not a terribly safe or rewarding career choice. The stark realities occasionally rear their head, but the reader could be forgiven if they lost sight of it themselves.

Dresden

2008-06-19T13:01:00.001-07:00

Jim Butcher's Stormfront : book one of the Dresden Files was one I long hesitated to pick up, mostly because of the prominence of the "Dresden Files." I have an aversion to series books that is based less on experience than it is a kind of fear that the books will be formulaic dreck. There may be a connection to the genre once called men's adventure in which an endless series of crypto-sexual (his gun spat hot lead at the Cuban) tales were presented to reader.

Anyway, the book turned out to be a lot of fun! The main character, Harry Dresden leans a tad goody goody for my taste, but I found him appealing nonetheless. I was also pleased that Butcher made Dresden inept with women. Main characters are often alter-egos for authors and far too many of these sorts of characters end up being hyper-studs.

The plot is nothing special, and won't surprise crime novel fans, but the story elements are a lot of fun. Butcher, in this first book, has laid quite a bit of groundwork for an interesting system of magic based in our modern world. He has a few surprises with the nasties he deploys and I even liked what he did with the ending, which is often a let down in suspense tales.

With the intersection of the supernatural and a thriller/crime novel plot chassis, these books are like Charles Stross's Atrocity Archives tales and Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt stories. They are just a lot less grimy and wicked. I like all of them, but depending on your tastes you might want to go one way or the other.

Evil will triumph if good men do nothing

2008-06-18T15:18:00.001-07:00

The Mist is one of the better Stephen King movie adaptations, from one of my favorite Stephen King tales. It features two of King's great strengths, the disturbing gross out and a jaundiced look at the thin line between civilization and barbarism. Between the two, this is really a monster movie, so don't go looking for life lessons.

The monsters are vile to the point that you can overlook the CGI. King frequently looks at how people can slide from decency to mindlessness, in the case at the hands of a religious zealot. The movie's ending is a bit of a shock, although I think Ross Douthat has the (spoilers aplenty) right take on it.

Still there is something to be said for the ease by which civilization decays, as George Will points out in his excellent critique of McCain's response to the Guantanamo decision.

And no, I am not trying to quote Edmund Burke, but rather the Newton Neurotics:

I just got back from a dream attack

2008-06-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

The last Silver Jews record opened with " Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor?
Just in case I feel the need to puke," which set the tone for a dark, wonderful album. The new album is much more upbeat and is streaming at this MySpace page. It has the bigger band sound of the last album, but a bit of the gleeful humor of Starlite Walker. I've just had a listen so far, but it sounds good.

Bloomsday

2008-06-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

Bookstorm reminds me that today is Bloomsday, a celebration of James Joyce and his book Ulysses. I was actually in Dublin for Bloomsday 92, but celebrated the liquid rather than the literary treasures of Ireland. I don't know if it is worse or better that I was reading the book at the time. Despite spending much time and treasure on books and reading, I haven't done much in terms of actually celebrating them. I did consider signing one of my kids up for Middle Earth camp, but since he hasn't read the books yet, I didn't do it.

The end of the world as we know it

2008-06-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

Fareed Zakaria's new book, the Post-American World is a book I hope both presidential candidates read. It is a brief book that tells Americans we need to re-think our view of the world. We need to jettison the idea of the world's policeman and hyperpower and replace it with the world's trusted third party. In this his says we need to be less Britain than Bismarck, which I rather like. We need to de-emphasize military power and re-consider economic competitiveness. We need to spend less time worrying about Iranian nuclear weapons and more about how to work with India and China.

It is the briefness that will irritate the foreign policy specialist readership and attract the casual but interested reader. Unlike other international relations big think books, this one does not provide a vigorous examination of the global system. It also does not provide much in the way of policy guidelines, aside from a shift in resources away from primacy and towards a focus on domestic policy.

For those who are looking for help in trying to understand how the world works today and the US can best deal with it, the book will be of great value. Zakaria provides a high level overview saying the superpower era is over, and is being replaced by a multipolar world and one for the first time with non-European powers as the majority of leaders. He surveys China and India and then describes the US's fit in the new world.

Like a number of useful books, this one will have you wanting to read more, about how the US can change its ways and more about modern China and India. This would be a good starting point for the dispirited American wondering where how we should start over after eight less than ideal years.

Life is just a bookstore

2008-06-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

We stayed on the Oregon coast this weekend. It being Oregon, it was cold and damp, so we did visit a few sites, and were surprised to see the Coast Guard Training ship the Eagle in Astoria (worth a visit if you are in the area.) And of course we hit some bookstores. Astoria has a decent number for a small town and in one of them I heard a flash of a Jimmy Buffett song. The people at the attached coffee bar began to wonder aloud just who the singer was. After a few names were bandied about, one fellow remarked that it could be Jimmy Buffett, although he did not pronounce it to rhyme with that which Miss Tuffett sat on. Instead he pronounced to rhyme with the decadent French dessert.

At first I approved thinking he was mocking Buffett, but then he repeated it a number of times and I realized he thought this was the correct pronunciation. I considered mentioning the true way to say it, but decided against it as A) it would be terribly rude and B) it would reveal my all too great knowledge of the singer and his oeuvre. The song, you see, was My African Friend, one that only those who have spent far too many hours listening to Buffett will recognize.

Anyway, I bought quite a few books at the coast. I found a used copy of McCarry's Second Sight, one of the few Paul Christopher books I have yet to read. I also found a copy of Karl Schroeder's Sun of Suns. I've not read any of his books, but the blurbs looked good. And it was only two dollars.

Whenever I am at the beach I stop by the Book Warehouse, a place where unpopular books go to die. This is a store of all remainders, so many of the books are not of interest. Whenever I stop by, I find a gem or two. In this case, there was this biography of Chiang Kai Shek as well as Kevin Phillip's the Cousin's Wars, which I am quite excited to read.

Since I read only two books over the weekend (one of which was a library book,) my book stack is now three books higher than it was when I started.

A case where the "for the articles" excuse works

2008-06-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

Sarah Weinman reports that Denis Johnson's new crime novel will be published in Playboy. I though the Tree of Smoke was great, so I look forward to this one. While I initially thought that the Chandler/Hammett reference to which Weinman reacts was OK, I do think she is right. The more obvious reference is to John Banville/Benjamin Black.

Prestige

2008-06-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was rather disturbed when I watched the Prestige. Not because of the movie's content, but because I could not recall any of the basic plot developments of the story. This upset me because I read the book in the mid-90s and quite liked it. I liked it enough to send it to a few friends. But as I watched the movie, it was as if I had never read it! This is no slight against the book, thinking of other favorite books that I read back then, like the novels of Robertson Davies, I suspect I would hard pressed to describe the goings on.

The movie is great, with excellent acting all around, but particularly from the two leads, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. A number of reviews have complained that the movie doesn't play by the rules it establishes, which I think isn't quite right. While the movie appears to be about stage magic, I think it is more about art and obsession, although the technique of misdirection clearly plays a role.

Having watched the movie, I now want to turn back to the books of Christopher Priest. He is a writer of speculative fiction, which is to say books both literary and geeky. This is a tough spot to be in, as any whiff of genre can send the literary types running, while the limited use of technology and action curtails the science fiction side of things.

Having read the Prestige, I went on to the Extremes, a book I found decent, but not worth recommending. From what I can tell, that book is not considered his best, so now I am going to look for his better regarded books, including Inverted World which is about to be re-issued by the New York Review of Books Classics line. I've also ordered the Separation, a book that plays on some of the same themes of dualism that the Prestige does.

All the animals come out at night

2008-06-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

I once had the belief that American history wasn't very interesting. Although I am mostly to blame for this misapprehension, my schooling had an impact. The teaching in my primary and secondary years, while great in many respects, wasn't illuminating in regards to US history. I went to college for a international relations degree, so I learned more about Polish history than American history, domestic at least. With this in mind, I rarely picked up American history books for pleasure reading.

This was of course a mistake. US history is immensely fascinating and engaging and writers like Erik Larson, Tony Horwitz and now Karen Abbott have succeeded in making it even more fun by bringing our national obsessions of sex and violence into the mix. I'm reading Abbott's Sin in the Second City, which is set in turn of the century Chicago, where prostitution thrived and angry reformers sought to shut it down.

Abbott's focus is on the Everleigh sisters whose Everleigh Club served the wealthy and powerful with all manner of sensual delights. Unlike the other houses in the Levee district, the sisters also treated their women well. Abbott contrasts this desire to create a more humane prostitution system with the crusaders who attacked the horrible abuses of how it was normally practiced. It's a very fun read so far, with much period detail.

Having just read one book about the effects of moral crusades on America, it will be interesting to get more of Abbott's take on the crusade against white slavery, as it was called and how it might compare with the anti-communist, anti-slavery and anti-drinking crusades that swept the country.

Just a pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me

2008-06-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the marketing, I assumed that William Friedken's Bug would be another horrorfest like the Exorcist. Not the case. This movie is a claustrophobic study of madness. There are a few of the typical horror movies scary elements, including a stomach churning scene in the middle, but the movie's threat doesn't come from the typical monster-victim relationship. Instead, the movie features two damaged people who reinforce and catalyze each other's paranoias and delusions.

The movie is based on a stage drama and it still feels like one. 90% of the movie takes place in a single set of room. This makes sense thematically as the madness severs connections with reality, including other people. The movie is also dialogue heavy and the characters often fall into the affected, overly articulate mode of stage dialogue. The final third of the film when the madness is filled with over-the-top jibberings that will either fascinate you or have you rolling your eyes. I thought the escalating madness was great.

Us Vs. Them

2008-06-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading J. Peter Scoblic's Us Vs. Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security, and I'm surprised I have not heard more about it. It one of the most readable, while at the same time intelligent books on modern American foreign policy I have read in quite some time. Even more impressively I think he does a better job of fairly critiquing policy than Richard Rhodes did in his similar recent book Arsenals of Folly.

Scoblic goes back into the Cold War to argue that Bush's foreign policy is not something new under the sun, but is actually the full fruition of a movement that previously had been checked by other foreign policy viewpoints. He argues that Bill Buckley and other writers of the 50s laid the groundwork for a full throated rollback position in the Cold War that sought to defeat communism using military means and believed that nuclear weapons were war fighting rather than political weapons. This viewpoint grew in power when it merged with the neocon stream that believed that US power should be used to spread democracy via violent means.

The title of the book makes it sound both more partisan and less analytically nuanced than it is. Scoblic, who is left in orientation, is fair to many on the right, having many kinds words for Presidents Reagan and Nixon. He also notes that many people that the average reader would consider conservative, including people as diverse as Pat Buchanan and George Schulz adamantly opposed the trends he calls conservative. I wish he had found a term to better differentiate. One of his points is that the neocons didn't so much hijack policy as ally with other flavors of cons, but there are still other flavors that didn't want to play ball.

Still, the book is a pleasure to read and will appeal to those looking for a survey of Cold War policy debates on the right as well as another analysis of the Bush administration foibles. Scoblic's background is arms control, so there is predominance of arms control and other nuclear issues and less about Iraq and Vietnam.

I miss the innocence I've known

2008-06-09T22:01:00.000-07:00

I've never read a Chuck Palahniuk novel (and I live in Portland!) so I have no dog in this fight, but I love how the hate of this review cannot be contained and expands to attack the culture at large. (via Suderman)

Check out Tried to Rock, a blog that catalogs the bands that never made it. (via Brownstein) Here is my favorite band that never made it.

Do you recall the news of some years back that Ian McEwan has a long lost brother born of McEwan's parents, who eventually but were then adulterous lovers? The brother, Dave Sharp, has a new book on the way. McEwan wrote the forward, but his name is on top of the cover.

The NYTimes has a nice feature on Lee Child, the author of the Reacher books, one of the world's great not so guilty reading pleasures.

State of Play

2008-06-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

One of next year's big political movies is State of Play, which starts off with a pair on seemingly unrelated deaths that begin to undermine a rising politician's career. Rather than wait for the two hour version, I suggest you invest six hours in the original BBC miniseries.

One of my major worries about the film is that it will by necessity remove a number of characters, plot turns, and developments that make the miniseries so much. With the series you get backroom political deals, fascinating shows of the media at work uncovering stories and people sleeping together that shouldn't. Watch it on DVD before the movie reviews spoil it for you.

A pleasant diversion about the end of the world

2008-06-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

In discussing the Ultimate Galactus trilogy, I was going call it a graphic novel, but really, it is just a very attractive comic book. Shaun Tan's gorgeous (and wordless) The Arrival, a depiction of the wave of strangeness and confusion in the immigrant experience, is a graphic novel. Ultimate Galactus is a bunch of super heroes fighting a really powerful bad guy. The story is set in the Ultimates universe, a reboot of the universe that moves the origins of heroes up from the 60s to this decade. The battle with Galactus was an early Fantastic Four story, but in this new Galactus trilogy, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Nick Fury and the Ultimates/Avengers battle each other and then Galactus.

The huge number of heroes is one of the problems with the story, there are just so many in there, along with some other cameos, that no character gets much chance to shine. The bigger problem is that the final battle is a bit abrupt. The opening chapters should have been trimmed to allow for more action at the end.

On the plus side, it is an action-packed story that nicely updates a few characters. The old Galactus seems a bit off these days. First of all his name sounds Roman and he is a giant human-looking biped despite being an ancient alien. The new version makes much more sense, and they even make his name more reasonable. They also manage to carry forward elements of the old one quite nicely. The Silver Surfer is quite different, and may displease fans, but I liked it.

The Ultimate universe makes for good reading, and this book is no exception. It is not up to the level of the Ultimates 1 & 2, but those are among the finest super hero stories I have ever read, so that isn't surprising. If you want another take on the superheroes get together and fight an implacable alien foe story, read DC's the New Frontier.

Given the short reading time and the fairly high cost, these sorts of books are ideal for library check-out. At $30 and about one hour of entertainment, the price/time ratio isn't very attractive. For the best ones, of course it makes sense, but you can run out of reading material lickety split if you buy a lot of these.