needs more demons?

In The Neptune File, Standage expertly balances personal drama and the intellectual excitement of a radical new idea. The new idea rests on the notion that the eccentricities of Uranus’s orbit can only be explained by the gravitational pull of another planet. What makes it so radical is that mathemeticians work out where the new planet could be — and try to convince astronomers to point there telescopes at that area of the sky. The drama arises from John Couch Adams (in England) and Urbain Jean-Joseph (in France) computing Neptune’s orbit at almost exactly the same time, with attendant nationalistic rivalry (there’s even the suggestion of a minor conspiracy with the intent of assuring the planet was first officially observed on the English side by a Cambridge-affiliated astronomer).

Standage with opens Herschel’s discovery of Uranus by way of background, pays some attention to the contention-fraught business of planet naming, discusses “Bode’s law” and the “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter, and goes beyond Neptune to Pluto and other similar objects that were never called planets — and even beyond that to extrasolar planets, which take the radical idea to its ultimate conclusion: since planets around other stars are too distant to observe directly with an optical telescope, the only way to find them is through the pertuberances of orbits. (Strictly speaking, the planets of the solar system don’t actually orbit the sun; the sun and the planets orbit their mutual center of gravity. Since the sun is far more massive than the sum of the planets, this basically means the sun wobbles a little bit, and through similar wobbles the presence of planets around other stars can be detected.)

The previous two books of Standage’s that I read, The Victorian Internet and The Turk were so lively and well-written that I recommended them to pretty much anyone, not just those with an interest in history. The Neptune File perhaps has less sizzle. I wouldn’t push it on someone with no interest whatsoever in astronomy, or someone with no tolerance for history. But if the phrase “astronomical history” makes your eyes light up a little (instead of glaze over…) this is a definite must-read.

needs more demons? no.

Watching Baseball Smarter touches on so many aspects of the sport that it invites facile criticism for the many things it doesn’t cover. But I think this is missing the point. Watching Baseball Smarter would arguably be improved by graphics showing the typical path of various pitches — but there are plenty of other sources for pitch visualizations. Does he give short shrift to Sabermetrics? Kinda, although Bill James does warrant a passing mention. But there are other places to read about serious statistical analysis.

Instead, I think it’s fairer to accept that no baseball book can be comprehensive, and ask two things of Hemple’s book: that it deepen the reader’s understanding of (if not appreciation of) the game, and that it be entertaining along the way.

For me, it succeeds on both counts. I came late to baseball fandom, mostly through riding to band rehearsal with avid Sox fan singer Dave Kichen. I initially learned about the game from Dave, and from Jerry Trupiano and Joe Castiglione’s play-by-plays. I pestered Dave with endless questions, but there’s still a lot I don’t know. For instance, Hemple spends a lot of time on why lefty/righty matchups matter. This isn’t something you pick up on so much when your game education comes from the radio, since it’s mostly about sightlines and which way a throwing arm points. The acid test: the first time I watched a game after finishing this book, I really did feel I had a significantly better grasp of why certain base running, stealing, and position substitution decisions were made.

And Watching Baseball Smarter was an enjoyable, if not exactly compelling read. I have the impression that Hemple worked hard to avoid offending readers while still trying to let some of his personality shine through. Probably the most important aspect is that Hemple makes a real effort to portray both sides of baseball’s many debates, e.g, “The new [interleage] matchups, though limited to just a handful of games each year, boosted attendance but angered purists who felt that the World Series should have remained the only meeting between the leagues.” Sometimes he expresses forceful opinions, but usually uncontroversial ones like calling “Minute Maid Park,” “Coors Field,” et al “hideous names.” Hemple steers clear of outright team favoritism, although there’s a discernable amount of National League bias.

needs more demons? nah. but an index would have been helpful.

Steven Johnson opens his whirlwind tour of modern brain science asserting his intent to deliver a “long-decay” idea in each chapter: the sort of thought that will resonate with you after you finish the book, even possibly altering your behavior.

And he delivers at least a few that stick for me. I learned things about the amygdala and the fear response that will be helpful when I’m allowed to ride a bike again; since I don’t remember the accident itself, I can expect not to be particularly afraid. And now I understand why for the past several years I’ve reacted so strongly to the sight of a car door opening ahead of me, even ones I can easily avoid and that pose no signficant threat.

I was also especially fascinated by Johnson’s chapter on laughter and tickling. After discussing compelling research that illustrates that laughter has very little to do with humor — maybe this is one of the hallmarks of the long-decay idea; it sounds counter-intuitive at first blush, but makes increasing sense as you think about it — Johnson stops just short of suggesting that laughter may have been a precursor to language. He argues that it’s a form of communication, and I’m inclined to think that what it communicates is largely “I’m going to interact with you in a non-threatening way.” (Even though we sometimes use it now to communicate the reverse.)

I didn’t find Johnson’s insight all equally affecting (and I’d bumped into some of them before, blunting their impact a bit) but they were all certainly interesting. As with The Ghost Map I found Johnson an exceptionally lucid writer.

But my naval-gazing response to his fear response chapter was no accident. Throughout Mind Wide Open, Johnson draws parallels between his personal anecdotal experience and the research he is writing about. The Ghost Map was so good that it earned Johnson a lot of leeway with me, and I’m glad I started with it instead, because otherwise I think I might have found passages like this irksome:

As I write these words, my attention is divided roughly between tw primary actions: thinking about the words as they are geneated in my head and materialize on the computer screen, and half listening to familiar songs playing in the background…I also have a vague background sense of mood — a bright midmorning working alertness, slightly caffeine enhanced.

Fortunately, that’s about the peak of the book’s self-involvement, but I can really recommend it strongly only to those who don’t mind a good bit of Steven Johnson the writer/husband/father mixed in with their brain science.

Perhaps predictably, I also became interested in the things Johnson might be saying without intending to say. He lives in New York and the book was written (judging from the interview dates) during 2001-2003 — and even so it was startling to me just how much of a shadow the events of 11 September 2001 cast over this book. (Speaking, for what it’s worth, as a resident at the time of the other city in which an airplane was flown into a building.)

needs more demons? perhaps just a touch fewer personal demons, actually

I had an educated guess as to how A Dangerous Man would bring Huston’s Hank Thompson trilogy to full circle: some naif would bumble into Hank’s way in much the same way Hank stumbled into some nasty heavies in Caught Stealing; Hank would understimate the noob as he himself was once underestimated. Hank might manage to turn the tables on his young adversary, but I thought it was more likely that Huston would bring the curtain down on Hank for good, giving A Dangerous Man’s title the same sort of twisty double-meaning that Caught Stealing had.

This was almost completely wrong. Huston is not a writer who chooses the easy, predictable path. He does revisit aspects of the previous books: some of the survivors of the previous novels make appearances, Hank’s ambivalent passion for baseball reasserts itself, and the central macguffin of the series continues to haunt Hank in surprising ways.

As I’ve come to expect from Huston, it’s hard to say whether funny or grim dominates; it’s both, not just alternately but sometimes simultaneously. It made me laugh out loud at least once, and probably made me cringe, too.

I still think Six Bad Things is the weakest of the three books, but this novel places it squarely in its context as a middle act. A Dangerous Man is pretty much a non-stop adrenaline surge.

needs more demons? noway.

I saw it opined in several places that the third of Sheckley’s mysteries featuring Hob Draconian was so good it would make me want to go back and read the first two — and since I’m a “save the best for last” kinda person, I opted to read them in chronological order. I found The Alternative Detective enjoyable in a low-key way — I wouldn’t say it’s great, but neither am I sorry I read it. Here’s one of my favorite passages to illustrate its flavor:

I have noticed that private detectives do not spend much time discussing the injuries incurred in the line of duty, or whatever it is they call their work. They alll seem to have this incredible ability to shake of serious beatings, sometimes with blunt objects, with a remark to the effect that they were a little stiff the next day but a good shower and massage would take care of it
…
I’m not like that. I bruise easily. The contusions I suffered from that fall in the warehouse in Bicêtre left ugly yellow and purple blotches. I’d probably have them for months. And they hurt. I won’t mention it again, but I did want you to know.

Much of The Alternative Detective’s pleasure is meta-textual — it assumes you’ve read enough hardboiled PI fiction that you will appreciate how it honors some of the time-worn genre conventions and inverts or undermines others, like the more-or-less invincible protagonist. The Alternative Detective also riffs on some of the shopworn plot elements of the genre, perhaps most explicitly on The Maltese Falcon-styled tales. For my taste, The Alternative Detective never got quite so silly that I stopped paying attention to its plot entirely; nor did it ever get so serious that I gave it the kind of scrutiny I give to Dashiell Hammett’s fiction.

I was a little bugged by the narrator’s hippie-ness (worse, actually: ex-hippie-ness) — but that’s mostly a personal problem on my part, and anyway I wasn’t bugged enough to stop.

needs more demons? I’ll go with “no,” though it’s a close call.

I’ve never read anything quite like The Night Watch. It shares a background with Stewart’s earlier novel Resurrection Man, but it’s not a direct sequel; it takes place roughly a century later.

Stewart’s novel is set after the cataclysmic return of magic to the world — the Dream — ended civilization as we know it. City centers became inimical and largely uninhabitable. Technology mutated into new forms or simply ceased to function. Humanity survived, but in isolated pockets.

Near the end of the 21st century, Edmonton’s South Side and Vancouver’s Chinatown are entering an uneasy alliance. Vancouver has problems with monsters on its borders; Edmonton is trying to build a market for its cyberpunkish mercenary services. But although there is a dash of military-sf style action, Stewart’s story is primarily about character and family. The tangled relationship between the Southside’s leader, Winter, and his granddaughter Emily (at the novel’s outset, Emily has just been jailed by her grandfather) is both reflected and contrasted by the complex dynamic of Chinatown’s enigmatic “Minister of Borders” Water Spider, and his father. An estranged marriage between a Southsider and a Vancouverite is less symbolic than emblematic of the cultural clashes between the two communities.

Within a few chapters, I thought I had a handle on how most of the major plot elements would develop and resolve themselves. I was correct on some points, but dead wrong on several others. The Night Watch is perhaps less emotionally satisfying than if it had gone as I expected — it’s not a novel for anyone who insists on unalloyed happy endings* — but much more intellectually satisfying.

Also, it has some of the best writing about painting that I’ve encountered in recent memory.

I thought Resurrection Man could have used a touch more expository background; I think The Night Watch overcompensated just a touch. The Night Watch also has a fairly large cast of characters and while the principals were also clear, I was occasionally confused by some of the minor players (Stewart for instance refers to Chinatowns ministers variously by their full names, nicknames, titles, and by their symbols of office — which lent things a nicely realistic feel, but made me wish once or twice for a crib sheet).

Overall, though, I very much enjoyed The Night Watch.

needs more demons? no.

* If you require novels with unalloyed happy endings, this is almost certainly the wrong site to read

I’m still enjoying the Harris’ southern vampire series more than enough to keep reading, but in this third entry in the series, the genre-defying elements that appealed to me so much in the first novel are definitely on the wane. Club Dead does not equally blend waitress Sookie Stackhouse dealing with both normal and supernatural life stuff; it’s almost all supernatural. The conflict in Club Dead also arises from the rival gangs mode mode that I found Dead Until Dark such a refreshing departure from (to be fair, there were hints of that even in Dead Until Dark, but it didn’t dominate there to the extent it does here).

Club Dead was fast moving and fun (also sometimes funny), and I still think Harris is fundamentally a better prose stylist/dialogue author than Laurell Hamilton (or her many imitators), but I can’t help being disappointed that the series is moving in a more standard direction.

needs more demons? metaphorically, perhaps.

The Ghost Map is the sort of book that could be filed in a number of sections of a bookstore or library. Its wide-ranging approach convinced me that I need to read everything else Johnson writes. It’s nominally the history of the London cholera epidemic of 1854, and of the two men who traced it to its source, took action that may have mitigated the epidemic’s scope, and transformed medical understanding of cholera. It also provides some historical context for the modern reader to grasp some of the unsavory essentials of mid-19th century London life, and draws some frightening parallels with the infrastructures that evolve in shanty cities today. The Ghost Map illuminates how both the epidemic and the understanding of it were uniquely possible with urban population densities. It examines the role of effective information design in overcoming resistance to truth, as well as why fallacies are sometimes so hard to overturn. And it discusses how our population is increasingly living in urban-density environments, and what that implies for humanity’s future.

The Ghost Map is smart and ambitious, but it’s also remarkably accessible and readable, even gripping. Johnson impressively juggles human and intellectual interest throughout.

My only real criticism is that I wish the endnotes were footnoted in the text. Since they’re not, reading The Ghost Map required two bookmarks, one for my place in the text, and the other to for my place in the endnotes. You will note the underlying implication: even the endnotes were (often) interesting.

needs more demons? not a bit of it.

I can’t help but think this heroic fantasy parody would be substantially better if it were a lot shorter.

It opens with a rather laborious description of personal combat ending with a gag death. The humor relies on the reader’s visualization, and I think it would have worked much better as a handful of pages in the other medium David writes in (comics).

After the fight scene, there’s 200-plus pages of flashback, with Apropos narrating his family/life history to date (he starts his story even before his conception). This is sadly pedestrian and predictable stuff — it’s only real hallmark is Apropos’ refusal to conform to the expectations of the fantasy hero — but I waded through enough of Stephen Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever” to know that’s really not so genre-defying after all. If I had been the editor, I would have suggested lopping out this third of the book entirely, and replacing it with a few dialogue asides to fill in the gaps: “Funny, my mother saw that omen the day I was born,” “Now I remember where I’ve seen you before!” and such.

Once the reader makes it back to the present day, there’s some mildly diverting Apropos-has-to-escort-the-princess-through-dangerous-lands-and-they-think-they-hate-each-other-but-are-inevitably-falling-in-love stuff. The mood is a bit like when the Dread Pirate Roberts has kidnapped Buttercup in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (or, really, about a zillion other books of all genres). But David is much bawdier than Goldman (often in a nasty, not fun way, as when Apropos recounts his mother’s gang rape in excessive detail) and perpetrates a few puns that even Piers Anthony might have passed up.

Why did I bother to finish reading it? For a while I was on an airplane, and my other books were wedged deep under the seat in front of me. Then I kinda sorta wanted to see how David resolved his conflicting plot threads (answer: with a little more ick than I bargained on). The worst thing? Because I expected (based, as it turns out, on false information) to enjoy this novel, I already bought a copy of the sequel. Oops.

needs more demons? mostly just needs abridgment.

Small-time hood Frank Hearn makes it out of Irby’s previous Prohibition-era caper novel 7,000 Clams with his skin fundamentally intact and the love of a really terrific dame, but (no spoiler, really) without enough scratch to give her the kind of life he wants to. So in this sequel he goes straight and tries to make some honest dough on the titular “up and up,” — but it turns out that keeping his nose clean in the booming and busting Florida real-estate market isn’t as easy as it might seem, no matter how good his intentions. Also, staying on the good side of the cops is tough when many of them are in the pocket of the local big-time hoods. So pretty soon Frank finds himself in a right old mess where both his fundamentally intact skin and the love of the terrific dame are in serious jeopardy.

As in the prior novel, Irby seamlessly melds real historical figures like Harvey Firestone, Joe Kennedy, Gloria Swanson, and her third husband Henri de La Falaise into his fast-moving, twist-filled plot. Also as in the previous book, Irby leans hard on coincidence, mostly to establish connections between his upper- and lower-crust characters, but that bugged me less this time. Once again, there’s enough accurate historical detail that the reader could learn a few things without it ever getting intrusive.

One feature I didn’t mention when I wrote about 7,000 Clams is that sometimes there’s an additional level of irony. Some of Irby’s descriptions of 1928 could easily apply to other years up to and including 2009, viz a northern society lady’s first glimpse of a swank hotel:

[She] joylessly trudges through the well-appointed lobby of the Flamingo Hotel located on the bay side of Miami Beach. It is a huge, hulking barn of pink stucco, with a decor that strikes her as relentlessly Florida: pastels, marine life, palm fronds. Everything is bigger than it needs to be, glossy to the pint of smarmy, overbearing in its irrepressible invitations to “have fun” and “relax,” and above all dedicated to the haughty display of wealth. Why wear one necklace when six will do just fine? These sunburned barbarians talk loudly, guffaw like baboons, and careen about like they have been jolted with electricity.

(7,000 Clams similarly featured a brief trip to a Baltimore cop bar that was almost like a scene from The Wire.)

Here’s my most telling reaction to this book: If Irby writes another novel about Hearn, I’ll certainly read it. But I hope he doesn’t — I hope he finds some other improbably charming lowlife to write about instead — because I’d like to think that after the conclusion of The Up and Up Hearn might get to live out the rest of his days without anything especially suspense novel-worthy befalling him.

needs more demons? nossir.