- Rudy Rucker, Saucer Wisdom (reviewed 20060702)
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Saucer Wisdom is Rudy Rucker's "nonfiction" book describing the travels of a man he meets after one of his lectures who has been in contact with aliens. Rucker asks the man, Frank Shook, to ask various questions of the aliens--about the future of communications, bioengineering, travel, the nature of time, and transhumanity. The book amounts to a future history of the world according to Rudy Rucker, the elements of which are familiar to anyone who has read Rucker's other books (in particular the Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware series, and especially the last two). The "nonfiction" narrative structure makes for a more entertaining book than this would otherwise be--while the future developments Rucker envisions are interesting, without the story it would be more like a series of encyclopedia entries.
The conceit within the book of this book being popular thousands of years in the future is pretty ridiculous--this is not one of Rucker's better works.
- Mark Haddon, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time (reviewed 20050618)
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Christopher Boone is the 15-year-old (15 years, 3 months, and 3 days old at p. 40), high-functioning autistic narrator of this story, which begins with his discovery of Mrs. Shears' dog, Wellington, dead on her lawn, stabbed through with a "garden fork." Christopher is a fan of Sherlock Holmes (but not of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, since he believed in things that weren't true). He decides to apply detective skills and logic to the case and make that the focus of a book he is writing for school. This is not quite the ordinary mystery novel. In the process we learn quite a bit about Christopher's mental life, his lack of understanding of human social skills, his mathematical capability, his unusual ways of categorizing days. Christopher also knows a wealth of facts, and the book touches upon details of Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's being fooled about the Cottingley Fairies, astronomy, the Turing Test, and studies of children's awareness of and reasoning about the existence of other minds, among other things. As these are all topics of interest to me, I was entertained and amused to see Christopher use them in figuring out the world around him.
Haddon does a great job of depicting Christopher's viewpoint and making a person empathy-deficient into a sympathetic character.
- Cory Doctorow, Eastern Standard Tribe (reviewed 20050416)
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The book is the story of Art, a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe living and working in London for Virgin/Deutsche Telekom, where he designs user interfaces for new products. The book jumps back and forth between two timelines, a later one where Art is atop a mental institution to which he's been committed, and an earlier one where he's found a new girlfriend, Linda, after hitting her with his car. The book progresses quickly until the timelines meet and everything is wrapped up. It's a very quick read, and I agree with reviewers who found it to be too short and superficial. But despite its lightness, it is an extremely entertaining book, and contains numerous interesting ideas which are worthy of fuller development in both reality and fiction.
- Vicki Lewis Thompson, Nerd Gone Wild (reviewed 20050413)
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This was given to me for my birthday as a gag gift, but I had to read it anyway, which I did on an international plane flight. I was expecting more "nerd" given the title, but the title character, Mitchell J. Carruthers, Jr. was really a former nerd turned bodyguard, disguised as a nerd. His nerdhood was demonstrated in the book only through references to his skills at financial management and his ability to look up information on the Internet. I don't believe I've ever read another romance novel, but this seems like a rather stereotypical one, from what I've heard. The ultimate outcome (woman gets nerd) seems a foregone conclusion from the second or third chapter, but there's a lot of tease from there to the actual hookup.
The narrative focus alternates between Mitchell and Ally Jarrett (the female protagonist, an heiress who wants to make it as a wildlife photographer without relying on her millions), and the very simple plot involves an Uncle who wants to obtain some or all of the inheritance for himself. There are some minor characters who are townspeople in Porcupine, Alaska, where all of the action takes place (apart from a brief scene in Anchorage) to introduce some minor subplots, conflicts, and comedy. By my reading, the only one who "goes wild" is Ally in chapters 2-3, though perhaps the inevitable hookup of the two main characters also is meant to count.
This was a mildly enjoyable read, but those expecting more nerd content will be disappointed.
[This is a "Spotlight" review at Amazon.com.]
- Penn Jillette, Sock (reviewed 20050225)
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Penn argues for atheism, subtly promotes the Libertarian Party (pp. 96-97), argues against newage (p. 101), criticizes Buddhism (pp. 139, 186), explains cold reading (pp. 184-185), puts Scientology in its place (pp. 163, 210), and tells an entertaining story of a NYPD diver and murder from the point of view of the diver's boyhood sock monkey. I enjoyed the book very much. The ending of many paragraphs with pop culture references was at first annoying, but it became more comfortable as the book progressed, and the lines were well selected. (There's a site on the Internet that lists them all and where they came from.)
My only complaint is a very jarring change of voice that occurs in a paragraph on pp. 166-167 ("a friend of ours"). [This is a "Spotlight" review on Amazon.com]
- Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (reviewed 20041229)
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I picked up this book yesterday on the strength of Amazon.com reviews, and I finished it this morning. I am very glad to have found Cory Doctorow's work, and am looking forward to reading Eastern Standard Tribe and anything else he writes. If you enjoy the work of Rudy Rucker or Neal Stephenson (to whom homage is paid in a reference on p. 97), odds are you'll like this book. Down and Out takes place in a time when death and scarcity have been defeated, money has been replaced with "Whuffie" which are credits based on reputation with others, and political power is managed by "ad hocracy." This is a light and very enjoyable quick read.
- Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four (reviewed 20040807)
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The common comparisons to The Da Vinci Code are apt only in that this is a mystery story regarding codes and a real-life document (in this case, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; in the case of Dan Brown's book it's hoaxed documents about the Priory of Sion which were fabricated by Pierre Plantard and planted in the Biblioteque Nationale). This book is a somewhat better novel with more substantial characters, but it's not a great book. I bought it at an airport and read it during an international flight, and found myself with many extra hours to spare. I don't think it's worth buying in hardback--and unfortunately the British trade paperback edition I bought cost as much as Amazon sells the hardback for.
- Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus! (reviewed 20040711)
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Coupland continues to impress me with his work, and I think this is quite possibly his best novel to date (I consider Girlfriend in a Coma to be the other contender). It evokes some of the same emotions as All Families Are Psychotic, but without the implausible absurdities that occur in that story. It all falls together in the end in some somewhat unexpected, but quite realistic ways--not so much in story as in character development. This book is told in first person from the perspectives of four major characters, from 1988 to 2003, beginning with Cheryl, who is killed in a Columbine-style high school cafeteria massacre, then moving on to her boyfriend Jason, eleven years later. Jason's character is the most richly developed, and his section of the book accounts for over 100 pages of the book's 244, though the characters of previous chapters continue to echo through the later ones. I very highly recommend this book.
- Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito (reviewed 20040622)
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A short (242 pp.), entertaining, but somewhat disappointing book. It's a story about Tanuki and tanukis (a magical racoon-like dog--see http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/tanuki.shtml), about three American soldiers who became MIA in Laos, first unwillingly and then of their own accord, and about a woman with some tanuki ancestry in her lineage. It's a fairly light and whimsical read, without the depth of Skinny Legs and All, which is probably my favorite Robbins novel. It occupied me for about half of a Boston to Phoenix flight, during which I also read Diane Ravitch's The Language Police. This shouldn't be the first Robbins book you read, but if you're a fan you will probably enjoy it.
- Douglas Coupland, All Families Are Psychotic (reviewed 20040530)
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Coupland's most recent books have been consistently excellent and this one ranks up their with his best work. This novel is about a dysfunctional family, the Drummonds. Daughter Sarah, one-handed because of her mother Janet's thalidomide, is a NASA astronaut about to be launched into space. Several family members have terminal illnesses; ex-husband Ted used to physically and mentally abuse his sons. Son Wade has always gotten into trouble, and now has married a born-again Christian, Beth, who is pregnant with his child. Son Bryan met his girlfriend Shw while both were setting fire to retail stores in protest of globalism. This is not for all tastes, but if you like Tom Robbins or Chuck Palahniuk, you'll probably like Coupland.
- John Grisham, The King of Torts (reviewed 20040403)
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Another Grisham book for vacation airplane reading. Grisham seems a bit more formulaic than usual--anyone who has read several of his previous books is likely to find this quite reminiscent (especially of, e.g., The Street Lawyer, if I recall correctly). It was an entertaining read, but not very satisfying once I was finished.
- Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (reviewed 20031126)
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This is the second fiction book in a row I've read in which Opus Dei and their practice of mortification of the flesh through a cilice has played a role (Tom Flynn's book below is the other). Dan Brown has taken the claims of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln's Holy Blood, Holy Grail and made them into a murder mystery novel, full of codes, enigmatic verse, and tales of the Priory of Sion, Knights Templar, and the bloodline of Jesus. It's an entertaining quick read which may also stimulate further research into some of these claims. (For the record, I think the notion that Jesus was married is somewhat plausible, but not substantiated; the stories of the Priory of Sion being carriers of Jesus' bloodline almost certainly false; the stories of an ancient time of peaceful pagan goddess worship are probably bogus--Brown seems to be relying on Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, a work of pseudohistory.) (Update 2/5/2004: The Priory of Sion stories which were the basis of HBHG have been documented as a hoax performed by Pierre Plantard.)
- Tom Flynn, Galactic Rapture (reviewed 20030924)
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This book depicts a future in which the Vatican has its own planet and has recognized the existence of Christs on other planets, reality television has evolved to three-dimensional, recordings of experience called "senso," and a con man native to a backward planet is passing himself off as a divine figure. The story follows multiple convoluted threads which ultimately connect back in a cohesive whole; along the way are some historical details of Christianity, Catholicism, and Mormonism, and amusing and interesting extrapolations.
- Rudy Rucker, Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension (reviewed 20030713)
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Rudy Rucker has written this book before, more than once, but he does this one well--extrapolating the principles in the classic book Flatland to higher dimensions. A good, entertaining read, lighter on mathematical knowledge conveyed by prior works such as White Light.
- Joe Hutsko, The Deal: A Novel of Silicon Valley (reviewed 20030606)
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Entertaining fictionalization of the battle between Steve Jobs and John Sculley at Apple--it starts out very closely paralleling the facts, then veers off. Via Computer = Apple Computer
Peter Jones = Steve Jobs
Clayton and Clara Dodson (Jones' adoptive parents) = Paul and Clara Jobs (adoptive parents)
Matthew Locke = John Sculley
Kate McGreggor = Joan Baez
John Dulin and Rick Caruso = Steve Wozniak
Hank Towers = Mike Markkula
Mate = Apple II
At Hand PC = Newton (but in the Macintosh's role)
PCSoft = Microsoft
PortaPC OS = Windows
Future Processing = Intel
International Computer Products = IBM
William Harrell = John Akers? or earlier IBM CEO?
Byron Holmes = Thomas Watson, Jr. (perhaps blended with Dick Watson)
International Foods = Pepsico
World Online = America Online
Isle = Lisa (the person, not the computer)
- John Grisham, The Summons (reviewed 20030216)
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Picked up at Costco as planned airplane reading, but read it soon after purchase. This is one of Grisham's better books, probably my favorite since The Partner.
- Will Self, Great Apes (reviewed 20021216)
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Simon Dykes is an artist whose drug use leads to the delusion that he is a human being in the body of a chimp--in an alternate reality where chimps and humans have undergone a species-reversal. My wife bought this for me because she liked the cover (which I think looks like a simian Duane Gish, the creationist). It turns out to be quite an entertaining read. One of the main characters is a chimp psychologist who appears to be based on Oliver Sacks (in the alternate universe, his works include The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair, Nestings, and A Primatologist Recounts).
- Nick Hornby, How To Be Good (reviewed 20021015)
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Story of a woman whose husband decides to be good, devoting himself to the poor and homeless, and the disruption caused to their life.
- Stephen King and Peter Straub, Black House (reviewed 20021015)
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The sequel to The Talisman. An entertaining read, quick despite its size, but not quite as well paced as its predecessor. It starts out a bit slow, then everything comes to a resolution fairly quickly, and with too little time spent in alternate worlds.
- Katherine Dunn, Geek Love: A Novel (reviewed 20020710)
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It's about carnival geeks and freaks, not computer geeks... I've had this highly recommended to me a number of times, and as I love Tod Browning's movie "Freaks", I finally decided to pick it up. I've just started it, but it seems quite promising: the owner of a small carnival, having lost his advertised circus geek, allows the woman who becomes his wife to take the job... they decide to breed their own family of freaks, through the aid of drugs, poisons, and radiation. The failures are put on display in jars, where their bodies rise and sink with the barometric pressure to predict the weather...
- Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (reviewed 20020710)
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This entertaining sequel takes off where the Diary ended last. As good as its predecessor, though it won't work well for Colin Firth to play himself in this as well as Mark Darcy, would it?
- Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary (reviewed 20020710)
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This was given to me as a gift by someone who saw that I liked Nick Hornby, as the "female version"... The comparison is apt, and it is entertaining, though I preferred High Fidelity and About A Boy (see below).
- Tom DeMarco, The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management (reviewed 20020119)
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A wonderful and hilariously entertaining novel about a man laid off from a large firm and then kidnapped by the owner of a large Washington software firm who has recently acquired his own country, where he wants to set up a software development operation to build products that will duplicate the functionality of the products of his leading competitors. Each chapter illustrates a particular point about project management and mistakes commonly made by large corporations and by "death march" projects in particular (see Death March in the Computers section of this book list).
- Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (reviewed 20020119)
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An anarchist CIA agent cursed by a witch doctor gets involved with a group of excommunicated nuns guarding the third secret of Fatima... very amusing Robbins.
- Christopher Moore, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove (reviewed 20020119)
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A Godzilla-like creature with an attraction to oil tankers and mobile homes stalks a small community. Also Tom Robbins-like in style.
- Christopher Moore, Island of the Sequined Love Nun (reviewed 20020119)
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Story of a pilot who has to disappear for a while, and takes a job flying secret missions for a missionary and a High Priestess of a cargo cult in Micronesia. Reminiscent of Tom Robbins in style.
- Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (reviewed 20010623)
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It's a dystopian future in which the ozone layer has been destroyed and humans must remain inside. Humans have colonized other planets where they live in hovels and work at menial activity, their only entertainment being use of the illegal drug Can-D, which "translates" their consciousness into miniaturized play sets called "Perky Pat Layouts", where they inhabit the bodies of dolls but seem to be in a perfectly real situation as either Perky Pat Christiansen or her boyfriend, Walt. On earth, the Perky Pat Layout corporation, run by Leo Bulero, employs "Pre Fash precogs" to identify what new products can be miniaturized for sale in Perky Pat layouts. One such precog, Barney Mayerson, and his assistant, foresee the prosecution of their CEO for the murder of recently-returned Palmer Eldritch, who had made contact with the aliens of Proxima and been missing for a decade. And now a new mysterious corporation and drug, Chew-Z, has begun to appear, which promises to be far more powerful than Can-D.
- Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming (reviewed 20010210)
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Another excellent book from Coupland... I'd rank this in his top three (the other two being Girlfriend in a Coma and Shampoo Planet). (Now I'd put Hey Nostradamus at the top.)
- Rudy Rucker, Realware (reviewed 20000827)
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Fourth book in the Software/Wetware/Freeware series.
- Mark Twain, The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (reviewed 20000827)
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Some great classics, some deservedly lesser-known.
- O. Henry, 41 Stories by O. Henry (reviewed 20000827)
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A nice collection of classic stories, though a lot of them start to sound alike after awhile.
- Rudy Rucker, Gnarl! (reviewed 20000826)
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A collection of all of Rudy Rucker's short stories, plus commentary. At least one previously unpublished. A lot of duplication with his other collection, The 57th Franz Kafka, but this is the definitive collection.
- Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (reviewed 20000723)
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Saw the movie and thought it was really good, started reading the book at Borders and thought it was worth picking up. It definitely was.
- Nick Hornby, About A Boy (reviewed 20000723)
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Awesome book. Laugh-out-loud funny in parts, emotionally moving, very well written. I read it all today, even though that meant staying up until 2:24 a.m. and I value my sleep. I valued reading this book more. Highly recommended.
- Po Bronson, The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (reviewed 20000723)
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Very entertaining novel from the author of The Nudist on the Late Shift (nonfiction, see below).
- Powys Mathers / Dr. J.C. Mardrus (translators), The book of The Thousand Nights and One Night (reviewed 20000723)
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1001 Arabian Nights in English, unexpurgated.
- Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All (reviewed 20000723)
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Tom Robbins tackles the Middle East, religion, art, and metaphysics. Highly recommended. Fundamentalists will hate it. Dogmatic skeptics won't be able to enjoy the ending, too bad for them.
- Dean Koontz, Seize the Night (reviewed 20000101)
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Novel about Christopher Snow, who suffers from a skin condition that requires him to stay in the dark, and the strange goings-on in his town, where genetic experiments have gone awry, resulting in highly intelligent but often suicidally depressed creatures. Picked this one up at the airport, a fun read.
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (reviewed 19991116)
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Entertaining, but every change made by the movie was an improvement.
- Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters (reviewed 19991116)
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The back cover describes this book as "hilarious and daringly unpredictable." I found it mostly pretty boring and repetitive.
- Nicholson Baker, The Everlasting Story of Nory (reviewed 19991116)
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Heard good things... haven't read yet. Vox was entertaining. (Update: never got very far into this...)
- Harlan Ellison, The Essential Ellison (reviewed 19990901)
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A good excuse to reread many of his classic stories. One of my all-time favorite writers.
- Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (reviewed 19990921)
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By far Coupland's best book. Highly recommended.
- Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (reviewed 19990921)
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A fairly weak effort from Coupland. Starts off strong, then becomes tedious. Improves again toward the end.
- Thomas Harris, Hannibal (reviewed 19990921)
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Sequel to Silence of the Lambs. Entertaining, though not nearly as well done as the previous (or Red Dragon). Hollywood will never make this into a movie without some major changes. Too bad. (Update: Perhaps I'm wrong... we'll see what Ridley Scott produced on February 9, 2001.)
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (reviewed 19990921)
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An extremely entertaining book, right up to the point where it abruptly ends. Stephenson really needs to work on writing good endings.
- Rudy Rucker, Freeware (reviewed 19990901)
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Sequel to Software and Wetware. Now the world is populated with "moldies" (intelligent cyborg creatures formed from "imipolex" plastic and "chipmold")...
- Rudy Rucker, White Light (reviewed 19990901)
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An early (1980) Rucker novel which covers some of the same concepts in his nonfiction (and also highly recommended) Infinity and the Mind.
- James Morrow, Only Begotten Daughter (reviewed 19990901)
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Award-winning novel about a Jewish hermit whose donation to a sperm bank has miraculously resulted in an embryo which grows up to be God's daughter (and Jesus' half-sister).
- James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (reviewed 199909011)
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Entertaining story of the death of God, whose corpse is to be towed into the arctic for preservation at the request of the angels.
- Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (reviewed 20050626)
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It took me a while to get through this book--I first opened it in December 2003 and finished it in June 2005, but this is an extremely important book for anyone interested in the origins, functions, and evolution of religion. It's potentially a dangerous book--certain aspects of what this book argues about religious inferences could be used to devise cults or improve the effectiveness of proselytization--but I suspect a typical cult leader would find more value in that regard from Cialdini's Influence. If Boyer's view is right, most religions are likely to fail, anyway--there's no reason to expect an average aspiring cult leader will create a mega-religion than an average businessman will become a multimillionaire. Those who are adherents of a particular religion should be interested in this book, if for nothing else than an explanation for how all other religions work. (But such readers should then ask themselves how their own religion is any different.) Boyer's book makes sense of the geographic distribution of religious belief, which supernatural accounts of religion fail to explain.
This book sees religious doctrine, dogma, and institutions as secondary to religion's primary role in social interactions, dealing with death and the disposal of dead bodies, and providing explanations for misfortune or other impersonal events for which causal or purposeful explanations may not be available. Dogma arises along with institutions as a barrier to entry into the business of being a professional religious advocate, a person with specialized skills or powers in communicating with the divine, as a way of classifying competitors as impostors or heretics and enforcing "quality control"--essentially the same role as a trade union. Yet for most religious adherents, the dogma is relatively unimportant.
Boyer sees religious beliefs and inferences as produced by normal reasoning about earthly agents, with only minor modifications (e.g., the agents are unseen). Too many modifications to standard templates yield unbelievable results that are not part of any religion, but minor modifications make for memorable results that are more likely to be passed on. The prototypical religious belief is a specific inference ("this calamity indicates that the ancestors are angry") rather than a general doctrine; general doctrines are more flexible and evolve over time.
The book contains nine chapters which discuss the origins of religion, religious concepts and inferences, an account of mental processes useful in ordinary life that are also relevant to religious reasoning, a chapter on why gods and spirits are the primary subject matter of religions and one on the functions served by gods and spirits, a chapter on the relevance of death to religion (and vice versa), a chapter on rituals and their functions, a chapter on religious institutions, exclusion, violence, and fundamentalism (which Boyer sees as a reaction against competition that raises the costs associated with defection), and one on the role of religious belief.
In the end, the message of Boyer's book is rather pessimistic for the skeptic about religion--his account makes religious adherence natural, and skepticism a resistance to naturally evolved tendencies to make inferences. I think he's got the basic outlines right, and this is an essential book for anyone interested in understanding religion.
- V.S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness (reviewed 20050517)
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I attended the 2005 Skeptics Society conference on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness at Caltech, where Ramachandran had been scheduled to speak but was unable to do so because of a family emergency. Although I was not previously familiar with his work, the description led me to believe he was a speaker I would be interested in hearing, and this book, which I purchased at the conference, provides a strong case for that. I've long had an interest in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and minored in cognitive science in my Ph.D. studies (never completed) at the University of Arizona. I've been out of academia for 11 years now, and apart from reading occasional works like Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Freedom Evolves, I've not been keeping close tabs on the field. The conference and this book were quite a pleasure--it is clear that there have been some significant developments over the last decade. It is hard to believe that there are still people who think the brain is little more than a radio receiver, a set of mechanical controls for a disembodied spirit to manipulate the body. Ramachandran's book--like the case studies of Oliver Sacks and A.N. Luria--shows how wrongheaded that view is.
This is a thin (112 pages of text, 45 pages of notes), very accessible and entertaining book. If you enjoy the works of Sacks and Luria, you are likely to enjoy this as well. This is not a collection of case studies, though there are some descriptions of particular patients--it is written from a higher elevation, bringing together recent results, explaining unusual phenomena, and speculating about how those phenomena may tie in to a further understanding of the details of the brain's function.
The book came from Ramachandran's BBC Reith lectures, so it is for a popular audience, with the notes providing some more underlying detail. There are five chapters, each dealing with a single topic. The first chapter is about amputees who experience pain in their "phantom limbs" and how the parts of the brain which had been devoted to the now-absent limbs can become mapped to still-present parts of the body which are handled by physically proximate parts of the brain. For example, a patient whose left arm had been amputated could feel contact to the nonexistent fingers of his left hand from touches to parts of his face or upper arm. Ramachandran then uses this remapping phenomenon to speculate about the causes of Capgras' syndrome (where a patient believes people he knows have been replaced with impostors), synesthesia, and pain asymbolia, where a patient responds to pain stimulus with laughter.
The second chapter is about vision, and specifically about the phenomena of blindsight (where a person has no experience of seeing, but at an unconscious level does see), hemisphere neglect, and mirror agnosia. In this chapter Ramachandran discusses "mirror neurons," neurons found in monkeys which activate when a monkey performs some task, but also when the monkey sees another monkey perform the same task.
The third chapter, "The Artful Brain," is the most speculative, and provides Ramachandran's suggested ten "universal laws of art," which he offers as features we find aesthetically pleasing in art, and discusses some reasons why those features might be pleasing to the brain.
The fourth chapter deals in more detail with synesthesia, the perception of stimuli with multiple senses, such as experiencing colors corresponding with sounds or numbers. He links this to cross-activation of sites in the brain (similar to his discussion in the first chapter), points out some similar phenomena that most people share (such as a tendency to associate certain kinds of abstract shapes with certain sounds or names), and speculates that such associations may have paved the way for the evolution of language from non-verbal communication.
The fifth and final chapter is titled "Neuroscience--The New Philosophy." Ramachandran discusses how some of the phenomena of neuroscience might bear on questions from philosophy of mind about qualia, free will, and self-awareness. The chapter doesn't get very deep into any of these philosophical issues, but it's clear that more has been learned in the last few decades of neuroscience than in the last few millenia of philosophy.
I highly recommend this book as an introduction to these topics. [This is a "Spotlight" review at Amazon.com.]
- Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (reviewed 20050430)
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I found this to be an entertaining, exciting, optimism-generating book, but after reading it I'm afraid I can't be as optimistic as the authors are. On the one hand, a large component of the book is essentially just spelling out the laws of thermodynamics, and it can't be argued with. Of the myths they debunk, in several cases they make their case quite well--there is always going to be energy waste (that's part of the laws of thermodynamics), increases in efficiency do not result in reduced consumption of energy, and overall demand for energy is continually increasing. I think their suggested path of oil-independence not by continuing to expand the burning of coal (as the U.S. has been doing for the last few decades) but by building new nuclear capacity is sensible. They suggest some other technologies that may also turn out positively (including nuclear fusion). Their comments on the alternative energy production methods already in place (diesel generators and delivery trucks) are fascinating. Where I part ways with the authors is on their assumption that continued success in finding new sources of energy (or better ways at getting at current sources of energy) is inevitable. Yes, we've been successful so far, but this is one area where we can be certain that in a long enough run, the past will not predict the future. (Or, alternatively, they make the mistake of not looking at other relevant past records, like the records of both species extinctions and civilizations that collapse.) I was almost expecting the authors to cite Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality, as part of an argument for an infinite human future. They don't go quite as far as Tipler, arguing that we could upload ourselves into a computer simulation which would produce infinite computation and allow all possibilities to be realized in a finite future--they limit the future to "as long as the sun continues to shine, and the planet rotates, and the depths of the cosmos stay cold" (p. 188).
There is much of value in this book. Like a recent issue of The Economist (April 23-29, 2005), they present arguments for a rational environmentalism that accounts for costs and benefits, and show that steps to preserve a clean environment are a good and effective use of some of the increased energy consumption (at the cost of reduced efficiency).
I recommend the book, with reservations. The parts that are founded on implications of the laws of thermodynamics and solid research support are sound, but there are also claims which run far beyond the support provided (like "we will never run out of energy").
- Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (reviewed 20050124)
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I picked up this book on "a study of gurus" after reading about it in John Horgan's excellent book, Rational Mysticism. The book is composed of biographical sketches of a number of gurus--Gurdjieff, Rasjneesh, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Ignatius Loyola, and Jesus, with occasional remarks about others such as Jim Jones and David Koresh. Storr attempts to identify commonalities among gurus--egocentric, experiencing some kind of personal crisis or madness, re-integrating their personality after the crisis, creating worldviews independent of what was socially accepted, seeking the approval of followers, etc. He distinguishes within the category of gurus between those who act ethically (the saints) from those who are corrupt and abuse their followers (the sinners and the madmen). The remaining chapters of the book examine some of the features identified in the biographical sections in more detail and concludes with a final chapter about those who follow gurus, and the benefits they receive from such a relationship.
The book was quite readable, but I found it remarkably light-weight--it seems entirely like armchair theorizing, without the benefit of any kind of detailed scientific research. I learned about the specific gurus described, but I didn't feel like I learned anything solid about what the conditions are that create them, their effects on the world, or how to wean people away from them.
- John Horgan, Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment (reviewed 20041002)
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John Horgan has written a wonderfully entertaining and informative account of his attempt to find who is productively applying science to the field of mysticism. One other Amazon.com reviewer said that they do not like this sort of book, which is based on interviewing individuals and commenting on their personalities as well as their ideas, but I personally prefer this approach as an introduction to the lives and works of others. I found the book to be very insightful, as Horgan always seemed to ask the questions and raise the issues that I was interested in hearing about. His open-minded yet skeptical approach is one I find refreshing. Horgan's subjects--Huston Smith, Steven Katz, Bernard McGinn, Ken Wilber, Andrew Newberg, Michael Persinger, Susan Blackmore, James Austin, Albert Hofmann, Stanislov Grof, Terence McKenna, Alexander "Sasha" and Ann Shulgin--are all quite interesting people. Horgan seemed most sympathetic to Blackmore, Austin, Wilber, McKenna (personality-wise more than idea-wise), and the Shulgins. He was--correctly, I believe--skeptical of Persinger after finding his pro-psi views. My own view of Persinger is that he attempts to fit everything into his temporal lobe epilepsy/tectonic strain theory views, but has often been unskeptical about the data he's pushing into the theory; I've never understood why skeptics like Blackmore and Michael Shermer have thought him to be plausible. (I've authored a critical review of Persinger's Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events for including bogus debunked events as items to be explained by his theory, and The Arizona Skeptic published an extensive bibliography of critiques of his TST assembled by Chris Rutkowski of the University of Manitoba in the July 1992 issue).
In the end, Horgan is skeptical of all of his subjects, and thinks that they've missed out on the importance of a sense of awe and wonder, as well as playfulness and fun (though McKenna seems to have had that down). I'm not sure I agree with Horgan on that--I thought that what most of these people seemed to have in common was being very comfortable (most seem to be wealthy, famous, respected, and living well) and being advocates of a quietistic conservatism that advocates being content with the way the world is. That's an easy position for someone who is comfortable to take. (My only in-person interaction with Susan Blackmore was a conversation at the last CSICOP conference I attended, in Seattle in 1994, in which she couldn't seem to understand why I thought CSICOP should do anything about plagiarism by Robert Baker in his books published by Prometheus and his book reviews published in the Skeptical Inquirer.) Horgan does touch on the subject briefly a few times, such as when he writes about "the nature does-not-care principle" and the problem of natural evil (pp. 192-194) and when he raises the issue of suffering with Austin (p. 131).
Horgan seemed most at odds with Katz, a view I shared--Katz's views seem sheer unsubstantiated dogmatism, when he insists that drug experiences have absolutely nothing to do with mystical experiences, and in his insistence on a commonality between all forms of mysticism, which reminded me of the Bahai faith--a religion that disagrees with all other religions in arguing for the compatibility of all religions. (Horgan has pointed out to me that the last point is part of Huston Smith's position, not Katz's; Katz holds the post-modern view that there is no saying which religion is right (or wrong)--which I think is at least as absurd.)
In the end, I found myself scrawling notes of other books I'd like to read as a result of the references in this book: Austin's Zen and the Brain, Georg Feuerstein's Holy Madness, V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain, Francisco Varela's Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying, Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay, and Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, as well as finding numerous references to other works that seem to me to be likely to be "on the right track" (Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism without Beliefs, Ronald Siegel's books on hallucinations and drug experiences). Reading Horgan's book was for me a valuable experience that I recommend. [This is a "Spotlight" review at Amazon.com]
- Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (reviewed 20040709)
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This is not just a book about rats, but a book about exterminators, about diseases spread by rats and fleas, and about the history of New York City and some of its colorful characters, and even about the American Revolution. It's a fascinating account of the author's project, inspired by an Audubon painting, to study rats in an alley near the World Trade Center, and how that project led him to learn about that alley, the hill it stands on, the surrounding buildings and the people who lived and worked there, and how the lives of rats and humans have intersected, there and elsewhere and elsewhen. In some ways this book reminded me of Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers--it's a light and entertaining look at unpleasant subjects, made engaging through the author's skill at connecting the subject to others.
- Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (reviewed 20040514)
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This book is an examination of the "Wedge" strategy of the Intelligent Design Creationists of the Discovery Institute, and how these creationists have substituted political maneuvering and propaganda for science. While the Wedge strategy originally put forth specifically called for Phase I to produce "scientific research, writing, and publicity," and the Fellows of the Discovery Institute claimed publicly that the scientific work was a prerequisite for the other phases of the plan, it is the scientific work that has still not even been begun, despite the passage of over a decade of time. The other parts of the plan, however, have proceeded without the scientific prerequisites, and the creationists of intelligent design have taken their case (despite lack of any scientific ground) directly to the general public, to school boards, and to state legislatures. The book's chapters cover the history of the Wedge strategy, the content of the leaked Wedge document which set out that strategy, the results of scouring the scientific literature for any publications by Wedge advocates supporting "intelligent design" (none found), an examination of the intelligent design work of Paul Chien and Michael Behe, an examination of the work of Jonathan Wells and William Dembski, documentation of what the Discovery Institute has actually been up to (two chapters, and "doing scientific research" is conspicuously absent from the list), a look at the political efforts of the Wedge, and finally, documentation of the religious grounds and goals of the Wedge.
This book shows the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the intelligent design theorists, using their own words to convict them. This book should be read by anyone who advocates intelligent design creationism, or who thinks that it may belong in the school science curriculum (as opposed to university-level philosophy or social studies of science curricula).
- Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson, Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales (reviewed 20040430)
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An entertaining collection of anecdotes from the life of Bill Bass of the University of Tennessee's Anthropological Research Facility.
- Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (reviewed 20030521)
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Dennett combines the work in his previous books Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, Consciousness Explained, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea to give a naturalistic account of free will that resolves or dissolves the major philosophical controversies and illuminates questions about morality and responsibility. Very highly recommended.
- William Irwin, Mark T. Conard, and Aeon J. Skoble, editors, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer (reviewed 20020119)
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Professional philosophers discuss the Simpsons and philosophy.
- William Irwin, editor, Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing (reviewed 20020119)
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Professional philosophers discuss Seinfeld and philosophy.
- Karl T. Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (reviewed 20020119)
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Pflock reports the results of his many years of research examining the claims and documentation about Roswell, and has uncovered the facts of the matter.
- Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (reviewed 20011103)
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Martin Gardner sets out his personal views on a wide range of philosophical issues, ranging from free will and determinism (he believes it's an unsolvable puzzle), the existence of God (he believes in God, as a fideist), to ethics and aesthetics (he believes in objectivity of both). He starts with "Why I Am Not a Solipsist" and ends with "Why I Cannot Take the World For Granted."
- W.V. Quine, Methods of Logic (reviewed 20001227)
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Natural deduction, proof, and decision procedures for predicate logic. A somewhat different approach, haven't read yet. Bookmark on p. 42.
- Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? (reviewed 20000827)
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An excellent and very brief (101 pp.) introduction to philosophy by examining the "big questions": How Do We Know Anything?, Other Minds, The Mind-Body Problem, The Meaning of Words, Free Will, Right and Wrong, Justice, Death, and the Meaning of Life. A little light reading for bedtime.
- Daniel Dennett, Brain Children: Essays on Designing Minds (reviewed 20000827)
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The latest collection of Dennett's papers and essays.
- Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel's Proof (reviewed 20000827)
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Classic and most simple presentation of the main ideas and implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem.
- Randolph M. Nesse, M.D., and George C. Williams, Ph.D., Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (reviewed 20000101)
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Interesting book about looking at illness from a new perspective and why treating some symptoms may cause more harm than good.
- Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So (reviewed 19990901)
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Book on errors of reasoning.
- Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (reviewed 19990901)
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A good overview of an answer to the question in the title; at its best in the section on history and pseudohistory (not surprising given Shermer's academic background in history). Check out that list of names in the acknowledgments on p. 9.
- Robert Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (reviewed 19990901)
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A new critique of creationism that addresses "intelligent design theory" and Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski, etc.
- Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (reviewed 19990901)
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Another excellent book from Oliver Sacks about neurological case studies.
- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (reviewed 19990901)
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Typical thought-provoking and beautifully written Dennett.
- Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao is Silent (reviewed 19990901)
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A very subversive book--I loved it. Example passage: "I am fond of asking the following question--particularly to clergymen: 'How do you think of altruism? Do you think of altruism as sacrificing one's own happiness for the sake of others or as gaining one's happiness through the happiness of others?' This question always seems to provoke the most curious reactions! Those to whom I have asked this have usually seemed uneasy and nonplussed. The answers have not been very clear; some have frankly replied: 'Hm, I have never thought of this before.' I wonder how Moses and Jesus would answer this? If I ever get to heaven, I plan to ask this of them. Or would such a question be kind of anticlimactic in heaven?"
Includes the wonderful "Is God a Taoist?" dialogue which is also reprinted in Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter's collection, The Mind's I.
- John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (reviewed 20061014)
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This 1995 Paulos book is written in the form of a newspaper, with many short chapters not particularly related to each other, grouped into sections--politics, economics, and the nation; local, business, and social issues; lifestyle, spin, and soft news; science, medicine, and the environment; and food, book reviews, sports, obituaries. Each chapter is headed with an actual newspaper headline that bears some relation to the topic discussed. The book has a few minor repetitions from Paulos' other works, but is mostly new material. It is entertainingly written and informative, providing useful information about how to critically analyze a wide variety of subjects, suitable for both readers and writers of newspapers and other forms of news reporting, including blogs.
- Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (reviewed 20060514)
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Lessig has written a very clear and entertaining book about copyright, piracy, and culture, filled with lots of real-world examples to make his points. The book covers major events in the history of copyright in the United States (from its beginnings in English common law and the UK Statute of Anne) in order to show how its meaning has changed, and how those who are making accusations of piracy today were the pirates of yesterday. (Jessica Littman's book, Digital Copyright, is a nice complement to this book, covering the history of copyright in greater depth.) Lessig makes a strong case that the direction of copyright, giving greater control over content to a very small number of owners than has ever existed, is eroding the freedom that we've historically had to preserve and transform the elements of our culture. Lessig begins by describing how the notion of a real property right for land extending into the sky to "an indefinite extent, upwards" became a real rather than theoretical issue with the invention of the airplane. In 1945, the Causbys, a family of North Carolina farmers, filed a suit against the government for trespassing with its low-flying planes, and the Supreme Court declared the airways to be public space. [Added 2007-11-10: Apparently the Causbys actually won their case, contrary to the impression Lessig gives.] This example shows how the scope of property rights can change with changes of technology, in this particular case resulting in an uncompensated taking from private property owners, yet leading to enormous innovation and the development of a new industry and form of transportation. He follows this with the example of the development of FM radio, which was intentionally back-burnered by RCA and then hobbled by government regulation at RCA's behest in order to protect its existing investment in AM radio. This example shows how powerful interests can stifle technological change through its ownership of intellectual property (in this case, the patents regarding FM radio).
He then discusses how intellectual property laws have developed in the U.S., pointing out that Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse made his talking picture debut in the movie "Steamboat Willie" (he had earlier appeared in a silent cartoon, "Plane Crazy"), which was a parody of Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." Many of Disney's characters and stories were taken directly from the previous work of others, such as the Brothers Grimm--works in the public domain, freely available for such copying. As new forms of media have been created, they have borrowed from previous forms.
Today, however, the creators of content who have borrowed from their predecessors have successfully changed the rules so that their successors cannot borrow from them, both by extending the term and scope of copyright protection and by developing technologies that have greatly reduced the ability of successors to borrow or re-use content. The specific rules are completely inconsistent, based on the political power of the relevant parties at the time the laws were changed. When Edison developed the ability to record sounds, including recording music written by others, copyright law was changed to provide for compulsory licensing for a fee paid to the composer. With radio broadcasting, the fee still goes to the composer, but not to the recording artist. But put that same radio broadcast on the Internet, and now fees must be paid to both the composer and the recording artist.
Where there used to be a sea of unregulated uses of copyrighted material containing a small island of restricted uses (with shores of fair use), there is now a vast continent of restricted uses, a stark cliff of fair use, and a tiny channel of unregulated uses. Lessig shows a table on pp. 170-171 showing commercial and noncommercial uses and the rights to publish and transform for each. In 1790, copyright only governed publication rights for commercial uses, the other three cells of the table being free. At the end of the 19th century, publication and transformation for commercial use was governed by copyright, while noncommercial use was free. The law was changed to govern copies, including much noncommercial use. Today, all four cells of the table are governed by copyright.
Lessig discusses Eric Eldred's attempt to defend the right to transform public domain works into electronic versions by fighting Congress's continuing extensions of the term of copyright in the face of the Constitution's restriction to "limited Times," and how the case was lost at the U.S. Supreme Court to inconsistent reasoning from the conservative justices who failed to even address the commerce clause argument and the precedent they set in Lopez v. Morrison case.
This is a wonderfully written, persuasive, entertaining, and dismaying book. It deserves to be widely read and understood, so that ultimately intellectual property law in the U.S. will be reformed.
This book is available online at no charge. http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
- James Bovard, The Bush Betrayal (reviewed 20060326)
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Bovard has assembled 278 pages of damning condemnation of a dishonest president who has broken promises, betrayed his oath of office, broken the law, and engaged in deception as a matter of daily practice. It is an overwhelming book, with detail after detail showing that George W. Bush is neither consistently conservative, libertarian, nor liberal in his actions. He has engaged in actions that will cost Americans trillions of dollars--from steel tariffs to farm subsidies to the Medicare prescription boondoggles that amounted to a blank check to the pharmaceutical industry. He has engaged in actions in the name of national security that have done nothing to actually improve security (in many cases making things worse), while restricting civil liberties and giving the government unprecedented powers to take actions against people without any judicial oversight.
And he's done all these things in just his first term as President.
Bovard's book covers Bush's actions in his first four years in office, describing his dishonesty on trade, education, agriculture, national security, the war on terror, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He writes from a libertarian/conservative perspective, arguing that Bush has betrayed the conservative principles he's claimed to advocate at every turn.
This is an excellent book to give to conservative friends who think Bush is a good or mostly good president. It is extensively documented, though unfortunately relies almost entirely on secondary sources (newspaper and magazine accounts) rather than primary sources. Another minor peeve is Bovard's overuse of the word "vivifies," which appears numerous times through the text. But those detract only slightly from what is a powerful indictment of a corrupt presidency.
- Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (reviewed 20051024)
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Levitt and Dubner have written a book which is similar in many respects to Steven Landsburg's The Armchair Economist, in that it applies economic analysis to everyday, ordinary world domains beyond the financial. It is written in an engaging but somewhat superficial manner (but has references to supporting evidence), and it is over all too quickly (i.e., it's thin)--no doubt both of these factors have made the book accessible to a wider audience. One of the best parts of the book is the section where Levitt demonstrates cheating by Chicago public school teachers to inflate their students' test scores, where the book presents the actual patterns of answers from the students' tests and shows how the cheating was detected. In similar fashion, they look at the question of whether Sumo wrestlers throw their fights in circumstances where one wrestler gains far more from winning than the other loses from losing.
In a chapter about the similarity between the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents, the authors state (p. 69) that "WorldCom and Global Crossing fabricated billions of dollars in revenues to pump up their stock prices." At first I thought this statement was in error with respect to Global Crossing (which had to restate its earnings by $1.2 billion regarding capacity swaps with Qwest, Enron, and other carriers), it is true that the two companies combined had to restate their earnings by "billions" of dollars. While Global Crossing's accounting didn't involve outright revenue fabrication as Worldcom's did, and its swap transactions were (at the time) in compliance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), the capacity swaps were driven by a need to meet revenue targets rather than any actual business need for the capacity.
I agree with another review I read, which highly recommended the book, but suggested checking it out from a library. You can easily read it in a day, and the hardback book is a little pricy for the length. Alternatives are buying it used, or buying it new and then selling it after you're finished.
- David Cay Johnston, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else (reviewed 20050221)
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While I found much to dismay and horrify me within this book, I suspect I also often did not interpret things in the way the author intended. The author seems to hold a viewpoint in which if you avoid paying a tax--even legally--you have gained income, rather than merely avoided an expense. The author seems to hold the view there is a fixed amount of tax that is the right amount to collected, and if one person or entity reduces its tax burden, it thereby increases the burden on everyone else, cheating them. This is a judgment without any regard to the other side of the coin, government spending. While I agree that at the extremes (many of which are portrayed in this book), there is clear-cut cheating and not paying a fair share by any reasonable standard, I would not agree that all or even most legal tax avoidance falls into that category. Those who favor limited government and balanced budgets are likely to have a similar reaction to much of what the author writes. That said, however, he makes a very strong case that the U.S. tax system is unfair and corrupt, that the IRS is limited in its ability to go after tax cheats who are breaking the law, and that the net effect is to give tremendous benefits to the richest of the rich, while the burden on everyone else (regardless of whether those taxes are being collected for legitimate or frivolous purposes) has increased.
He has chapters on how the alternative minimum tax (AMT) is completely broken and is now impacting a growing number of the middle class, how tax-exempt insurance companies are being exploited as a mechanism for storing hundreds of millions of dollars in investments and avoiding taxes on the gains, on those who simply refuse to file or pay income taxes at all, on the effects of Reagan-era payroll tax increases, on tax-evading partnership schemes and the IRS's complete inability to devote any resources to detecting them, on American companies moving their headquarters to Bermuda to avoid taxes, and on the destruction of pensions at many large companies. All are fascinating reading.
I agree with the author that something should be done, and that something should include a complete overhaul and simplification of the U.S. tax code, to make it fair and enforceable. But I am not optimistic that anything will be done--I think the level of corruption in the federal government is so high, and that because the behavior of bureaucrats and legislators is more accurately described by public choice theory than by political science, that it is unlikely we'll see radical change in a positive direction.
- Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life (reviewed 20041212)
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Landsburg's book is entertaining and often witty, and written in a conversational, easy-to-read style. The book is very good at presenting often unintuitive and novel (to the non-economist) ways of looking at things. This is an invaluable book for pointing out common fallacies in arguments about deficits, inflation, unemployment, and other major political issues. At the same time, however, I can't help but think that Landsburg occasional misses significant relevant issues, most glaringly in the final chapter on environmentalism. For example, Landsburg describes a case where Jack wants a woodland at the expense of Jill's parking space and vice versa, and argues that the desires are exactly symmetrical. While environmentalists claim that the wilderness should take precedence "because a decision to pave is 'irrevocable'", Landsburg says "a decision _not_ to pave is _equally_ irrevocable" because "Unless we pave today, my opportunity to park tomorrow is lost as irretrievably as tomorrow itself will be lost" (p. 224). While this is correct, this misses the environmentalist's point that it is much easier to convert woodland to parking lot than to do the reverse. The environmentalist fears taking actions that are irrevocable in the sense that they cannot be undone in the future. Landsburg's perspective throughout the book seems to me to ignore the possibility of actions taken which may have consequences which may adversely effect the very existence of mankind (or economic institutions). Another example in the same chapter is when he suggests that the best way for environmentalists to support the existence of cattle is to eat beef: "If you want ranchers to keep a lot of cattle, you should eat a lot of beef" (p. 225). This presumes that environmentalists care about the number of cattle in existence, rather than the conditions of the cattle in existence. Would Landsburg have told abolitionists during the Civil War to buy more cotton as a way of improving the plight of slaves?
Yet a third example in the same chapter is about preservation of the Amazon rain forest, because a new species of monkey was discovered there in October 1992. Landsburg writes that this gives him reason _not_ to preserve the rain forest, since he "lived a long time without knowing about this monkey and never missed it" (p. 226). Would he make the same argument if it was a tribe of people whose existence depended on the rain forest rather than a species of monkey? If not, then he's missing the point of those who argue that animals (or the environment) have inherent value. It is clear from his writing that he disagrees, yet his own position does assign inherent value to the interests of people and so is not neutral. He seems to admit at the end of this chapter--in the letter he wrote to his child's teacher--that his view on environmentalism amounts to a religious view that is not subject to discussion (just as he thinks environmentalism itself amounts to a religion being inappropriately taught to his child).
Despite my complaints, I found the book as a whole to be entertaining and informative, and would recommend it along with David Friedman's _Law's Order_ for insight into economic analysis of issues of the day.
[I should add that a 12/15/2004 presentation on "Saving the Elephant" from UA Prof. of Philosophy and Economics David Schmitz and UA Prof. of Entomology Elizabeth Willet shows, with respect to the second argument above, that there are some contexts where it makes sense, even as an animal rights argument. Elephants in Southern Africa, if left unchecked, destroy the environment and cause damage to other animals; the only natural predator capable of reducing elephant populations is human. This argument doesn't work in the same way in the U.S., however--eating more beef may get you more cattle, but it also gets you more factory farming, unless you specifically get your beef from producers who eschew the factory farms. (In Africa, elephants and humans evolved together for millions of years; in the Americas, humans came in later and eradicated all of the megafauna; the animals here with few natural predators which have populations controlled by humans are smaller animals like deer.) For more on factory farming, which involves not only cruelty to animals but rather obscene human working conditions and the creation of significant environmental problems of animal waste disposal, see Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation.]
- James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (reviewed 20041002)
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James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans is a fascinating group history of six of the major players in the Bush administration's foreign policy: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage. Going to the back of the book, I see that Mann had first-hand input into his research from all of the above except Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the quality of the result is extremely high. It is a sympathetic yet objective portrayal that gives no hint of its author's political views. It points out arguments and evidence in support of Vulcans' views, as well as contradictions within them, such as Rice's published claim (in Foreign Affairs) that Iraq was no threat (p. 259) and the Bush administration's position on North Korea (p. 346). It also points out conflicts between Vulcans' predictions and reality, such as Wolfowitz's prediction that America's allies from the Gulf War would all fall in line if the U.S. attacked Iraq alone (p. 237). Mann also points out the clashes within the group, mainly between Powell/Armitage and the rest--with Powell going as far as to refer to them as "right-wing nuts" (p. 260, referring mainly to Cheney and Wolfowitz). The book is filled with fascinating details, such as Wolfowitz's prescient speech about a new Pearl Harbor, given as a commencement address at West Point in 2001 (p. 291), Bush's giving his OK to Pakistan's becoming a dictatorship (p. 300), the government's plan in the annual Nuclear Posture Review to use small nuclear devices to combat terrorism (p. 314)--which would seem to me to create more and bigger problems than it would solve, Bush's nickname "Pootie Poot" for Vladimir Putin (p. 288), and the degree to which the Bush administration's unilateralism followed policies started by Bill Clinton (p. 287).
The book was published in 2004 and is quite up-to-date, only missing some minor recently uncovered details such as Rumsfeld's calling for an attack on Iraq on September 11, 2001.
- Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan, All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth (reviewed 20040912)
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Fritz, Keefer, and Nyhan run the spinsanity.com blog, and much of the material in this book will be familiar to regular readers. This book is a must-read for U.S. voters--it shows how George W. Bush has taken the strategies initiated by Reagan and Clinton and honed them to perfection. Those strategies are the use of marketing and PR techniques to use deceptive and misleading but factually accurate statements supporting positions on public policy in order to take advantage of the press's feigned objectivity. The book shows how Bush has used the techniques, with example after example, and how the press has been suckered by them, reporting "both sides" without getting to the facts. The conclusion of the book puts it well: Bush has demonstrated "a willingness to engage in day-to-day dishonesty on nearly every major issue he has addressed."
- James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (reviewed 20040807)
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While books on this subject are now proliferating and this one doesn't bring much new information that isn't already circulating on the Internet, what Bamford does bring to the picture is his extensive knowledge of the U.S. National Security Agency. Bamford makes the case that Bush's advisors had long wanted a war against Iraq, had previously tried to change Israel's political policy via consultation with Benjamin Netanyahu (who rebuffed them), but found a willing participant in Bush. Bamford presents the case that Douglas Feith's secret intelligence group operated to politically manipulate intelligence information to make the case for war, and that the CIA was pressured to produce the desired results ("If President Bush wants to go to war, ladies and gentlemen, your job's to give him a reason to do so," p. 334). He reports on the Rendon Group, which may have illegally used government funds to propagandize the U.S. public. Unfortunately, the book appears to have been something of a rush job and is poorly edited, with several duplications of text (e.g., NSA's "Mahogany Row" on pp. 19 and 103; a "whole different ballgame" quote on pp. 156 and 189). I've seen some reviews that tout the fact that bin Ladin's satellite phone number is in the book--Bamford already published that information in the paperback epilogue of Body of Secrets, which also had an account of 9/11 as it pertained to the NSA. This book falls short of the quality of Bamford's previous books.
- Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (reviewed 20040622)
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Ravitch's book shows how a combination of religious right and politically correct left have combined forces to cause textbook publishers to completely avoid anything remotely controversial, with the result that the textbooks are boring and devoid of important content (like evolution and classic literature). She looks at the history of how this came to be and what forces have produced the situation. An appendix contains information from the publisher guidelines that are used to censor texts. Ravitch's recommendations to solve this problem are to stop adopting textbooks on a statewide basis (while maintaining statewide educational guidelines--part of her book evaluates states on the quality of their guidelines and finds a few that are excellent and many that are poor) to foster competition amongst publishers and to open up the textbook review processes to public scrutiny so that advocates of censorship are forced to defend themselves.
- Randy E. Barnett, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (reviewed 20040408)
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Randy Barnett has written a fascinating and well-argued book. The book is composed of four parts: "Constitutional Legitimacy," "Constitutional Method," "Constitutional Limits," and "Constitutional Powers." The first part takes seriously Lysander Spooner's arguments in "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority" that the Constitution is not and cannot be binding on people who did not explicitly consent to it--the "we the people" in the preamble is a fiction. Barnett argues for a view that a Constitution can be legitimate and binding in the absence of explicit consent only if it incorporates appropriate limitations on government to safeguard individual rights. This is the most philosophical section of the book, and I found it the weakest--while I think Barnett had good arguments against tacit or implied consent, I'm not sure his alternative really provides the legitimacy it purports to, nor am I particularly persuaded by his account of natural rights. (I am a strong proponent of individual rights, but I am unconvinced that they are grounded in nature, as opposed to being justified by a combination of empirical fact and subjective values.) In Part 2, "Constitutional Method," Barnett argues that the Constitution is properly interpreted by a form of originalism based on original meaning, as opposed to original intent. He argues persuasively that the arguments against originalism which target original intent do not work against original meaning. I found this part much more persuasive than Part 1, and I think he has formulated a consistent and rational methodology of Constitutional interpretation that takes seriously what is written in the text.
Part 3, "Constitutional Limits," is where things start to get really interesting. Barnett examines the judicial history of the "necessary and proper" clause of Article I, Section 8, and argues that the Supreme Court made a wrong turn way back in 1819 in McCulloch v. Maryland by adopting an expansive interpretation of this clause where "necessary" meant "convenient" and "proper" was virtually ignored. He extensively reviews contemporary sources to argue for the meaning of this clause and that it requires judicial review of laws to make sure they are grounded in specific powers granted in the Constitution. Barnett begins this section with a quote from Justice Clarence Thomas in FCC v. Beach Communications, showing that Thomas has bought completely into the view that there is a "presumption of constitutionality" for acts of the legislature, whereas Barnett favorably cites Justice Stevens' response to Thomas that "judicial review under the 'conceivable set of facts' test is tantamount to no review at all."
Barnett also argues that the "privileges and immunities" clause of the 14th Amendment was used incorrectly (too narrowly) in the 1873 Slaughter House cases, but the "due process" clause of the same Amendment was used correctly in Lochner v. New York in 1905. He argues that both federal and state legislatures which act to limit the liberties of the people need to show that it is within the enumerated powers of Congress or within the police powers of a state, respectively, and otherwise overturned by the courts.
Finally in this section, Barnett turns to the meaning of the Ninth Amendment, which reserves unenumerated rights to the people, and takes issue with Footnote 4 of the 1938 case United States v. Carolene Products. The current methodology of the courts under Footnote 4, according to Barnett, is to begin with a presumption of constitutionality for acts of the legislature, unless there is a specific enumerated right in the Constitution that is violated, in which case the legislature must justify that violation. The requirement of a specific enumerated right was then expanded in Griswold v. Connecticut by allowing additional rights not specifically enumerated, but found in "emanations and penum