Zen and Now: on the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

by Mark Richardson
rating: 4 star Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

I have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 2 or 3 times in the past 35 years, and feel that I know it reasonably well. So it came as a surprise to learn that others who have read and enjoyed it find such different things in it. My interest in it has always been around the discussion of quality that winds its way through the book. The rest - the insanity, the road trip, the relationship between Pirsig and his son - somehow escaped my notice as elements that might be considered central to understanding the book. But after reading Zen and Now I can see that many, probably most, readers do see those other elements as being by far the more important aspects of the book.

The author, Mark Richarson, set out on his motorcycle to retrace the Pirsig trip from Minnesota to San Francisco. Many others have also done this, and there are websites with GPS way-points to guide the way, right down to the rest stops, cafes, and gas stations where Pirsig and company stopped on their trip. Richardson consciously adopts a narrative style and structure that mirrors the original book. It's actually a little distracting at first, because sometimes it's hard to tell when he is quoting from the original and when he is telling his own story. But pretty soon he settles into a good rhythm, cross-cutting between his own journey, the original trip, the (original) book, the ideas in the book, and Pirsig's biography. By the end, I enjoyed this book very much.

... more

The New York Trilogy

by Paul Auster
rating: 2 star Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

These 3 novellas each begin with the outward form of a classic noir detective novel. They soon descend into madness and obsession, and become almost a parody - but a parody of what, I can't say.

Despite the great critical praise given to these stories, I found them a bit tedious. The detective story can be great literature, without resorting to deconstruction - think of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Georges Simenon for example. So when Auster plays his inversion games with the genre, it makes me think that he simply couldn't achieve what others have achieved. It was disappointing.

... more

This Night's Foul Work

by Fred Vargas
rating: 4 star Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

This is a novel about misguided revenge and misplaced trust. As in all the novels in this series a serial killer is on the loose. Complicating things for Inspector Adamsburg is the fact that a new officer has joined his squad - a man from Adamsburg's childhood, from a neighboring village who has, apparently, come for revenge for a painful and traumatic event that he believes Adamsburg was responsible for. As the investigation proceeds, Adamsburg gets the feeling that he is being deliberately led down a path. The obvious candidate is the new member of the squad, but things are not always quite as they seem.


As always, the writing and the translation are excellent, the plot is satisfyingly complicated, and the characters are distinctive and well drawn.

... more

Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

by John Allen Paulos
rating: 4 star Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Paulos playfully takes on 12 alleged 'proofs' of the existence of a deity - proofs that range from the subtly fallacious to the downright silly. The thing I liked most about the book was that Paulos summarized most of the proofs in syllogistic form, to help expose the flaws in the proofs. He cites an example from Woody Allen :

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, all men are Socrates.

It has never seemed to me that the proofs of god's existence are very difficult to refute, but Paulos at least brings good humor to the task - humor without rancor or condescension.

My question is : what would constitute a 'proof', or even evidence, of the existence of a deity. I think that it would be of the same nature as evidence for, say, dark matter. That is, there would need to be some phenomenon that is not accounted for by our physical theories, that in fact contradicts our physical theories, and that is explainable by the existence of a deity with well-defined properties. Moreover, the deity explanation would have to be such that specific additional predictions could be formed from that explanation, and those predictions could be empirically tested.

But there are two problems here: first, religious believers are unable to ascribe any well-defined properties to their deities. Most of their deities were invented by primitive people who imagined god as a kind of really big and powerful person. So contemporary believers either stick with that story, or replace it with a sort of fuzzy 'god is everywhere as a kind of spirit' concept, which inherently has no explanatory value whatsoever.

Second, a 'deity hypothesis' that actually predicts and explains natural phenomenon is no longer in the realm of the supernatural, and therefore does not refer to a deity at all. Unless, of course, you want to think of natural laws as a deity.

So evidence or 'proof' of god of an empirical nature is doomed from the outset: scientific evidence can only ever be evidence of natural processes, not super-natural entities.

Creationists and other fundamentalists seem to have an intuitive idea that this is so - hence the many 'god of the gaps' arguments for creationism and the formation of the universe.

On the other hand, purely analytical proofs can tell us nothing about the world. By definition, any statement about the world, in particular any statement about what does or does not exist, is an empirical statement, not an analytic statement. For example, Euclidean geometry tells us nothing about the actual geometry of the universe that we inhabit. Neither do any of the non-Euclidean geometries. The question of whether the fifth postulate holds in the real world is one that can only be decided by observation of the real world.

So an analytic proof of god's existence is likewise impossible.

This leaves us with Wittgenstein's observation that "a nothing is as good as a something about which nothing can be said". It is often asserted by religious believers that atheists are just like them, in the sense that atheists have a fundamental belief in something that can't be proven but must be taken 'on faith': namely, the non-existence of a deity. But I would argue that most atheists in fact don't feel much need to deny the existence of a deity, but simply see no reason to believe in something for which there is absolutely no evidence and which explains nothing.

... more

Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War

by Harry, Fisher
rating: 3 star Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Fisher was a union organizer in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. He grew up in poverty and saw first-hand the class system in the United States. When Franco and the fascist forces in Spain staged the military coup against the Spanish Republic in 1936, Fisher was among the first to volunteer for the International Brigade. The US government did everything it could to prevent volunteers from going to Spain, maintaining 'neutrality' while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the US corporations that were actively supporting the fascist cause (Standard Oil being the most blatant example, but support for fascism among the US corporate elites was nearly universal, including, famously, Joseph Kennedy, father of John Kennedy). Fisher made his way to France. By then the French socialist government had persuaded itself that it must also be 'neutral' to avoid provoking Germany and Italy, and had closed the border. So Fisher with many others traveled across the Pyrenees mountains, eluding the French border guards, and joined up with the newly-formed Lincoln Brigade.

During much of the war Fisher worked in the Signal corp, stringing telephone wire from the front lines to command posts. Of the people he met in the Lincoln Brigade, few came back unscathed, and many were killed. He himself was lucky - never seriously wounded, despite being in many fierce battles.

It is clear from Fisher's description that the war was a lost cause from the beginning - the fascists were well supplied and aided by both Germany and Italy, and had complete control of the air throughout the war. The USSR provided token assistance to the Republican forces, but never enough to enable victory, and always accompanied by political aggression against the non-Communist members of the Republican coalition - most notably the anarcho-syndicalists in Catalonia. From the Republican side the war was a long and deadly retreat. It is estimated that the fascists killed 50,000 civilians in reprisal during and after the war - anyone thought to be a 'red' was simply murdered. This does not count the hundreds of thousands killed by bombing and artillery during the war.

By the end, the Republican forces were driven back to the very northeast corner of Spain, and the International Brigade had to disband and get out as best they could. That meant a return to France, temporary internment in what amounted to concentration camps, and eventual return to the United States. On disembarking in the US, federal marshals confiscated Fisher's passport - for the next 37 years.

He eventually returned to Spain long after Franco's death, to attend a reunion of the brigadistas. They were greeted with great warmth and gratitude by the Spanish people who, despite 40 years of fascist rule and propaganda, could never be made to forget the great struggle for liberty that the civil war represented.

By now there are few brigadistas still living - even the youngest would be ninety years old. So Fisher's memoir is a welcome addition to the many histories that have been written about that war.

... more

Mathematical Diversions

by James Alston Hope Hunter
rating: 3 star Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

This is a small Dover book, originally published in 1963. It is a survey of a broad range of topics in recreational mathematics, including 'friendly numbers', the Fibonacci sequence and its recurrence relationships and association with the Golden Ratio, magic squares (including some terrifically simple methods for generating magic squares), an excellent chapter on Diophantine problems and some standard solution methods, and much more.

I found my copy in a used bookstore in Victoria B.C. (the Russell Bookstore on Fort St. - well worth a stop), and I don't know if the book is still in print. Not every chapter will appeal to every reader, but there is enough here to be interesting to anyone with an interest in mathematics.

... more

RESTful Web Services

by Leonard Richardson
rating: 5 star Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

This is both a manifesto for what the authors term 'REST-Oriented Architecture' (ROA), and a technical dive into the mechanics and semantics of REST. It comes as a big breath of fresh air after years of being harangued by the putative benefits of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with its plethora of web-service standards centered on XML, SOAP, and WSDL, and the many competing and largely incompatible SOA toolkits.

REST (or ReST?) stands for 'Representational State Transfer', a term and concept introduced by Roy Fielding nearly a decade ago. The basic idea is that, in current practice, the www consists in large part of interconnected resources where the connections are implemented by the basic HTTP methods of GET and POST, and resource representation is typically HTML, heavily annotated and marked-up, and difficult to work with programmatically. But HTTP, combined with suitably chosen URIs, and combined with more program-oriented representations such as XML and JSON, can provide us the combined advantages of the interconnected web and programmable 'services'.

In the ReST? model the HTTP methods (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, and maybe HEAD) are the only methods that would be exposed by a web 'service'. The service exposes URI (universal resource identifiers) for each of the resources provided by the service (a possibly unbounded set of resources), and the methods are applied to those URIs. Each resource can have one or many representations - for example, as XML, JSON, HTML, PDF, etc. There are multiple ways of selecting a representation: for example, adding an 'Accept' header to the HTTP request, or adding some kind of 'qualifier' to the basic URI (for example, a .xml or .pdf suffix).

Representations can (and in the view of the authors, should) provide links to related resources - in fact this ability to link to other resources is the source of much of the power and attractiveness of the ReST? model. This ability to identify resources by URI sets ROA apart from SOA. As the authors note, an SOA application normally has few URIs, sometimes only one. So it is literally impossible for the result of a service call to identify the related entities (I can't call them resources) for that call. Instead, the client-side programmer must understand the documentation (possibly by poring over the service's WSDL description) to know how to accomplish any given task. Unless the service designers used great care, the service calls within the SOA application bear little relationship to one another, so understanding some portion of the API provides no great insight into the remainder of the API. The situation is (or can be) different in an ROA application: knowing the set of basic resource types gives immediate knowledge of how to access any particular resource instance. Knowing the relationships between resources (for example, which resources are containers, which resource types are related to other resource types) gives knowledge of how to 'navigate' the application - without the service provider having to document every detail of that navigation.

This is exciting stuff. But there are many challenges. At the low end of the scale, there is the issue that browsers know only the GET and POST methods - not DELETE, PUT, and HEAD. So POST has to be overloaded to provide the functionality of PUT and DELETE. At the top end of the scale, it is not clear in any given case what resources should be exposed and what their representation should be. We need a book entitled 'Resource Oriented Design Patterns' to fill this gap.

In the meantime, RESTful Web Services is a terrific guide to developing web applications.

... more

Blink

by Malcolm Gladwell
rating: 5 star Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

This is another fascinating book by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell has an amazing talent for presenting scientific information in a compelling way - he knows how to tell a story while still conveying the essence of the underlying science.

In this case he examines the way in which the brain is able to subconsciously make snap judgments - judgments that are often borne out by more detailed conscious analysis, and judgments that sometimes lead us astray. The book starts with a set of researchers who have done detailed analysis of interactions between married couples. They have identified hundreds of small tell-tales that reveal the ways that couples interact, and are able to predict, with 90% accuracy, whether a couple will be together 15 years later, based on some 30 minutes of videotaped interaction. The amazing thing is that with just 3 minutes of analysis they are able to make the same predictions with only slightly less accuracy. In another study, it was found that ordinary people watching less than a minute of videos of teachers, without sound, were able to accurately pick the most effective teachers with high accuracy.

Many of the 'blink' responses have to do with social interactions, and many of those are focused on facial analysis. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, since hominids have been social animals for over a million years - the ability to assess social situations is vital for membership in the group, and group membership is key to survival. The ability to read faces is innate - infants focus on facial expressions and are able to make accurate assessments. Autistic individuals, on the other hand, do not have that ability, and Gladwell reports on research that demonstrates this. He also reports on research showing that very high stress situations make us all autistic, in that we lose the ability to 'read' faces and thereby to correctly understand the thoughts of others.

... more

About Face: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

by Donna Leon
rating: 2 star Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

I really don't want to write a negative review of this novel. I have read the previous 17 novels in the Brunetti series with great pleasure. The series has been consistently excellent, with well-drawn and believable characters, a nice mixture of politics and plot, irony and compassion. Eventually, though, nearly every mystery series hits the wall; the story elements don't gel, the characters get stale, the author loses the initial passion that made the series come alive. Has this happened here? I don't know.

The usual themes are present: corruption, the mafia, environmental destruction, bureaucratic incompetence. But the elements are introduced seemingly randomly - the murder victim seems entirely peripheral to the story. He was a businessman blackmailed into helping the mafia illegally transport toxic waste from elsewhere in Europe to Marghera, the chemical/petroleum processing region just outside Venice. But most of the story centers on the young wife of an elderly and very wealthy businessman with whom Brunetti's father-in-law had planned to invest. The woman had what appeared to be excessive plastic surgery on her face; excessive enough that it was difficult to look at her. Brunetti found her fascinating because she shared Brunetti's taste for classic literature. There are quite a number of plot twists along the way, but in the end you are left wondering whether there was one story or three, and how they were meant to relate to one another.

I have not detected the usual downward trend in this series - the gradual stasis of the characters, the growing sense that the author is just going through the motions. So I hope that this novel is just an anomaly, or that I just didn't 'get it'. But for anyone new to the series, start with any of the earlier novels - this one just doesn't do justice to the series.

... more

Learning jQuery 1.3

by Jonathan Chaffer
rating: 5 star Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

I started using jQuery a few weeks ago and immediately saw that it would become an indispensable part of my toolkit. Javascript development has always been a tedious and aggravating exercise for me, but with jQuery it has become a real joy. The api lets you accomplish big things in a concise way. The online documentation is very good, for both jQuery and jQuery UI, so you don't have to waste a lot of time guessing how to accomplish your tasks. DOM traversal and manipulation is a breeze. There is a wide range of plugins available, and the ones I've tried have been well documented and work well.

The api is pretty large, which is why I bought this book. I was hoping to get a better overview than I could get by reading brief tutorials and the reference material. The book definitely delivers, and more.

The book starts with a lengthy tutorial on jQuery selectors. The selectors are based on css selectors, extended with navigational and filtering selectors - for example "#foo:next" will select the node following the node that has id 'foo'. Using css selectors was a brilliant choice, because it more closely models the way we think about web pages.

The book then has chapters on DOM manipulation, AJAX, table handling, forms, UI effects, etc. Each chapter has complete examples (also downloadable from the publisher's site), significant enough to be useful as models for one's own work. The examples work up to a large bookstore example, developed over 3 chapters. The final version of the bookstore shows off most of the features and capabilities of jQuery.

Probably the biggest benefit of this book is that it shows how to use jQuery to cleanly separate content, style, and behavior. Of course, we all think that we do this already, but the examples in this book take that separation to a new level. The html is absolutely clean - no event hooks, relatively few class attributes, and id attribues mostly for identifying large structural elements. The css is minimal and minimally repetitive. The javascript is cleanly separated into style-based and behavior-based code.

I've begun adopting this approach in my own work, and it is already making a big difference. And of course this approach makes it possible for a web designer and a developer to collaborate most effectively.

You will benefit from this book even if you are already somewhat familiar with jQuery. Be sure to get the one reviewed here - there is an older version that covers jQuery 1.2, but there are significant differences betweeen version 1.2 and 1.3.

... more

Wow. I would not have thought it possible for a book to be this badly written. The novel is set in contemporary (say, 1990) Venice, but the characters are portrayed as if they came out of a 19th century romance. Think Lawrence Sanders meets Danielle Steele.

Kennedy and Chavez first met in LA in 1959 when Chavez was organizing urban Mexican workers and working to register voters. It was not until 1966 that they formed their friendship, when Kennedy came to California to investigate the conditions of farm laborers, whom Chavez was organizing as part of the National Farm Workers Association, later to become the United Farm Workers union. Kennedy went out on a political limb, offering his whole-hearted support for legislation to gain economic and political rights for migrant farm workers.

The Widow is an extraordinary little novel. Written in 1940 and published in 1942, it is a dark and intense gem. Like the very best Hitchcock movies, this novel conveys a sense of inevitability, tragedy waiting to happen.

The introduction by Paul Theroux mentions that The Widow was published in the same year as The Stranger by Albert Camus. The Stranger went on to become part of the modern canon; The Widow has been mostly ignored or forgotten. At the time of publication, Andre Gide thought The Widow was the better book, and Theroux agrees. Certainly the characters are better and more fully drawn in the Simenon novel. It is not an abstract study, but a kind of cinema verite.

This edition is one of the New York Review reprints and is very well worth reading.

Then We Came to the End is author Joshua Ferris' first novel. It takes place in a Chicago advertising agency during a year of layoffs. Written mostly in the first person plural, it is a darkly comic look at office life and the inter-personal politics of privileged office workers. I found it to be reminiscent of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, with its rich humor and underlying sense of foreboding. The writing is often lyrical, with long languorous sentences describing life in a cube farm, like an urban version of Garrison Keillor.

The characters are clearly drawn and, with one deliberate exception, believable. They might or might not remind you of people you have worked with, but they are certainly plausible office-mates. You get to know them well enough that you have sympathy with them, even with the obnoxious bastards (and there are a couple of those).

This is a very entertaining book.

Very Special Relativity is by far the best quasi-technical treatment of special relativity that I have found. The author, Sander Bais, uses Minkowski diagrams on nearly every facing page to illustrate the facts and apparent paradoxes of special relativity. He provides geometrical demonstrations ('proofs' in a very restricted sense) of time compression and space dilation.

Most importantly, the consistent use of Minkowski diagrams gives the reader a good handle to remember and reproduce the results of relativity theory.

This is an excellent book for anyone with a grasp of elementary Euclidean geometry who wishes to get a better understanding of the special theory of relativity.

The Canon is exactly what its subtitle says: a tour of the basics of science. Natalie Angier is a science writer; that is, a writer who is a knowledgeable observer of science and who is able to get scientists to explain things in terms the rest of us might understand. Her writing style is very light, loaded with enthusiasm, and a bit chatty at times. At first I found the chattiness to be slightly off-putting, but when I got to the chapters on material that I didn't know much about (molecular biology and chemistry), the light-hearted distractions were actually helpful in keeping me focused on the main points.

There are chapters on scientific method, the scale of things, basic physics, chemistry, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. I found that the less I knew about a subject the more I enjoyed the material. So the chemistry and molecular biology chapters really stood out. I had not really learned anything new about cellular biology since high school (except for inferred 'facts' from reading newspaper and magazine articles about new drugs or new viruses). So I found the chapter on molecular biology especially interesting. She devotes many pages to the busy activity inside every cell, ranging from protein synthesis to cell division to communication with other cells. This is really interesting stuff.

Highly recommended.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is a tutorial on one approach to 'close reading', intended to help aspiring writers learn from great writers and great writing. For those of us who are not aspiring writers, the book provides alternative ways of reading and thinking about what we've read.

Each chapter considers one aspect of writing, from word choice, to sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, details, gestures, and concludes with an extended essay on what can be learned from Checkhov, a writer that Prose considers to be an exemplar of the writer's craft. The book is pedagogical, reflecting Prose's experience as a teacher of writing and literature. She offers encouragement to the would-be writer, and emphasizes that although she offers many 'rules', the writers she uses in her examples very often break those rules to achieve particular artistic purposes.

The central idea of the book is the importance of detail. The big things, plot, ideas, Vision (capital V) don't matter as much as the details: the small gesture that sets the tone for a scene, the detail of clothing that indicates social class or era or character. Such details require careful observation (vision with small v) on the part of both the writer and the reader.

Prose provides an appendix with an extensive reading list of books by the authors that she cites as examples (and others, I think, unless I simply missed some of the references).

If you haven't read anything by Francine Prose you are missing out. I've read Gluttony, part of the Oxford/NYU Seven Deadly Sins series, Household Saints, the novel she is most well known for, and The Blue Angel, an updated take on the original 1930s era German film.

Before we moved to Seattle, when we were visiting Seattle only about once per year, one of my obligatory stops was Metzger's Maps, a store that sells all kinds of maps and map-related products. Street maps, highway maps, historical maps, globes, topographical maps, satellite photos, atlases, travel books with maps included, magnifiers, transparent rulers, ... I loved that store, and I love maps. I can spend many hours poring over a Tokyo subway map, or a map of Paris, or an atlas now long out of date, or a map of an imaginary place, or an imagined map of a real place.

So when I saw Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, I thought I was in for a real treat. A history of maps! An analysis in historical context of maps through history, showing how they represent not only places and geography and politics, but also serve to put forward a point of view, an agenda. This book should have been a delight. Somehow, though, Vincent Virga managed to write a boring and discursive book about maps or, rather, a boring and discursive book in which maps serve merely as foil and backdrop to another agenda.

Nothing could have rescued this book, but there are some obvious problems with the design and layout that would have made it at least tolerable. There are, to its credit, maps on nearly every page. But each map is accompanied by just a short description intended, I think, to link back to the surrounding ocean of text. Much better would have been to have a sidebar discussion of each map, set off with contrasting background color, perhaps, or a border, clearly linked to that map. Instead, the book simply refers to the map by plate number, and the map itself is seldom described in any detail but is simply used as an exemplar of some more general point that the author is trying to make.

Virga had the entire resources of the Library of Congress at his disposal. I found myself wondering whether the maps he selected were really the best available. I wondered whether Virga even likes maps, whether he enjoys them for their own sake.

There were so many missed opportunities in this book. There were some ancient maps, among the first maps created in a number of ancient civilizations. In some cases they are nearly incomprehensible, serving as a reminder that maps require interpretation, that they are an abstraction representing particular ways of viewing the world. And if those world views are distant enough from our own, the map itself can serve as a kind of meta-map into the thought processes of the culture in which the map was created. But to gain that understanding itself requires interpretation, which Virga fails to do.

Besides the dismal failure to properly treat the maps that he selected for this book, it is also instructive to think about the maps that he omitted. For example, it would have been useful and interesting to consider modern computer-generated maps of the internet. He does show a highly stylized map of major interconnects around the globe, but he completely ignores the many excellent recent examples of clever ways to represent dense networks. Similarly he offers no treatment whatsoever of maps whose region-sizes are proportional to some demographic measure, heat-maps, mind-maps, or any of the recent visualization methods that can be considered as maps.

This book is a disappointment.

This is a comprehensive history of the CIA from its beginnings at the end of WWII to the present day, written using only on-the-record sources, many of which, surprisingly, became declassified only in the past few years. Much of the history is familiar: the toppling of democratic governments and their replacement with right-wing dictatorships around the globe (Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile); the incompetence, alcoholism, and madness at the top of the organization (James Angleton, Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles); the interference in democratic elections in western Europe; the torture facilities going back to the 50s and still in operation today; the domestic spying under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

Still, this is really interesting, frightening, enraging stuff. Definitely worth a read.

Sullivan itemizes a few dozen ways in which we are being fleeced by corporate capitalism; the hidden fees, the surcharges, the rule changes that lead to big jumps in interest rates, the installation charges that were conveniently not mentioned until after the fact. And he provides a 'toolkit' of approaches for eliminating or reversing those charges. All very useful, I'm sure.

Maybe more useful would be if Congress would re-assume its responsibilities, which it relinquished under the Reagan administration, and re-pass the usury and consumer protection laws that were either gutted or that didn't keep up with the 'structural changes' that have occurred in American capitalism during and since Reagan.

Living Lost provides a detailed exegesis of the television series Lost. I picked it up to get an idea of what all the buzz has been about - I am one of the apparently few people who have never watched the program. Most of the discussion and analysis in the book was meaningless to me since I've never seen the program, but the book did convince me that it would be worth picking up the DVD set for the first couple seasons.

I always enjoy Keith Olbermann's 'Special Comments'. It is refreshing to hear a television commentator with an identifiable sense of decency and of outrage at the lies and corruption of the present administration.

Sadly, Truth and Consequences, a collection of those special comments, with brief introductions to each, makes for not very compelling reading. If you haven't seen most of the commentaries on TV or on YouTube, then there are probably a few of these special comments that you will be interested in reading. But for the most part, polemic does not fare well on the printed page. Expressions of outrage work better when spoken than when read.

A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian war of independence, fought from 1954 to 1962. This is a book that the neo-con overlords would have been well advised to have read before they embarked on their adventure in Iraq - but, sadly, none of the hard-won lessons of Algeria ever seeped into the feeble brains of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice. We've all paid the price of their fact-free theorizing.

If you want to know, in exacting detail, how Algeria won its independence and how the French government was torn apart in the process, this is the book for you. You will come away with the knowledge that there were no 'good guys' in that war; that a war of national liberation is not a glorious thing; that colonialism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction; and that terrorism is a deliberate tactic with specific political aims (and not, as our present government would have you believe, a mythological force of 'evil'). And you will come away with a clearer understanding that even in the extremely rare cases when torture can offer a short-term victory, it leads to long-term defeat; its costs outweigh its putative benefits.

I really enjoy the Montalbano mystery series by Andrea Camilleri, and The Paper Moon is the best so far. The translation by Stephen Sartarelli is brilliant, as always.

Michaela Pardo reports that her brother Angelo has been missing for 3 days. When Montalbano accompanies her to her brother's apartment he discovers that Angelo has been shot in the face. As the investigation proceeds, he discovers that Angelo had a taste for beautiful women, and one in particular, Elena, will prove to be a great distraction for Montalbano.

The running jokes developed in the previous novels really work well in this one: Catarella's incomprehensible dialect, Montalbano's fear of aging, Fazio's obsession with detail, and Augello's newfound dedication to family. Sadly, Livia and Ingrid make only brief appearances, almost as an afterthought. Perhaps this was to make way for Elena.

If you've never read any of the Montalbano stories, don't start with this one. Yes, it's the best in the series, but to fully enjoy it you need to know the characters. I would recommend starting at the beginning with The Shape of Water.

Meh. The idea for Best American Nonrequired Reading is interesting: take a group of bright high school students, have them read everything published during the year, and let them decide what is to be included in the book. Essays, short stories, non-fiction articles, comics - as long as it can fit in 20 pages, it's fair game.

Maybe this was a good book; maybe other people would really enjoy reading it. I didn't, mostly. Maybe it's the sort of book that you need to leave next to your reading chair and dip into periodically over a period of weeks. But as a cover-to-cover read it became tedious less than halfway through. I did enjoy the introduction by Dave Eggers, and Conan O'Bryan's Stuyvesant High commencement speech was fun. Other than that, there were a few articles that were vaguely interesting, and some short fiction that I really did not enjoy.