Book report: Spook Country, by William Gibson

Book report: Spook Country, by William Gibson

[Although I’m publishing this on Halloween, the title has nothing to do with ghosts. More like clandestine activities, and the mood of the country, I think.]

I can’t read William Gibson’s books only once, and Spook Country is no exception. When I got to the end, I immediately started back at the beginning again. I just had to.

Gibson started out writing science fiction, “Neuromancer” being the most famous example. He helped create the genre of cyberpunk, and coined the word “cyberspace.” What he writes these days isn’t science fiction: there are no omniscient computers, surgically implanted telescopes, clones, or arcologies. But there is still the sense of the uncanny about his stories. In a Gibson world, everything is significant, everything connects, and everything reflects the whole of human civilization to that point. While I’m reading a Gibson book, I find myself narrating everything I see and do, but nowhere near as well as his characters can.

I’ve mentioned before how Gibson can use a few words to describe something, and yet leave you with the impression that you now understand something vast and significant. Here’s an example: one of the characters enters an upscale cafeteria at an art gallery, and then there’s this: “The people ahead of them looked as though they could each identify a dozen classic modern chairs by the designer’s name.” Isn’t that brilliant? Doesn’t that immediately give you a sense of these people and this place and the kind of circles they move in and the culture as a whole that has all this?

How about this one, a character recalling the windows of storefronts in his native Havana, Cuba: “There had been no glass in those windows. Behind each crudely articulated metal grating, at night, a single fluorescent tube had cast a submarine light. And nothing on offer, regardless of daytime function: only carefully swept floors and blotched plaster.”

Finally, this, where someone moving from their apartment in NYC deliberately leaves a vase behind, on a hidden shelf up on the roof of the building: “He stood the vase on a shelf, shifted a can aside, put the vase against the wall, then moved the can back, leaving the vase concealed between two cans. In the way of these rooftops, it might be found tomorrow, or remain untouched for years.” To me, that just captures something about New York, and about how people are.

I’m in awe of prose like this. For many writers, the description is the most boring part of the book. Not for Gibson. His description is an invitation to a world of special knowledge.

And, as a bonus, there are also characters and a plot in this novel!

Each of the three main characters is in service – perhaps willing, perhaps unwilling – to someone else. Hollis Henry is the thirtyish former lead singer of the 1990s rock group The Curfew, and she keeps running into former fans and other people who know her face from an iconic poster of the band. These days, she’s trying to make ends meet as a freelance journalist, which brings her into the service of millionaire advertising guru Hubertus Bigend, who recruits partially-willing strangers to carry out spy-like missions to satisfy his curiosity about mysteries he stumbles across/causes. (Bigend was also in Gibson’s previous book, “Pattern Recognition,” where he employed Cayce Pollard on a similar operation.)

Tito is a young Chinese Cuban man who was relocated to NYC as a child when his large extended family fled Cuba. He was raised doing spy tradecraft the way other kids are raised doing fingerpainting. He has formidable physical and observational skills, which his family has put in the service of “the old man”. He carries out assignments unquestioningly, knowing almost nothing about the vast machinations of which he is a single, but vital, cog.

Milgrim is a well-educated man who formerly held fairly important government positions where his skill as a Russian translator was put to good use, but now he’s a Valium addict, living only for his next dose. He is a veritable slave to an operative named Brown, who is following and watching Tito and “the old man,” and providing Milgrim with a steady supply of Ativan so that Milgrim can translate the family’s peculiar dialect of Russian text messages. Milgrim is a scavenger and a kleptomaniac, stealing whatever he can, either to resell for drugs, or to escape Brown’s blunt and monosyllabic domination. Brown is working for unknowns whose purposes run counter to the old man’s.

The old man is the one driving this plot. As we eventually learn, he is a former senior US intelligence official who has branched out on his own as a vigilante/prankster. He has his own agenda, which includes discommoding the wealthy who profit from America’s wars illegally and (almost) untouchably, and his plans are complex and ingenious. He’s having a fun retirement.

Hollis is a congenial companion as she uncovers various layers of Bigend’s latest mystery, which turns out to intersect with the old man’s current operation. She interacts with former bandmates Reg Inchmale and Laura “Heidi” Hyde in a way that makes us feel that we’re behind the scenes of some rock documentary. There is one scene between Hollis and Heidi that is simply priceless, a gem.

This is a fun book, a little light on plot, but full of good will, and Gibsonian excursions into esoterica like locative art, GPS tracking, and the peculiar world of shipping containers. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, and it leaves us wanting to know what happens next for all of them. That’s my definition of a good book.

Highly recommended

book report: A Game of Thrones (the book), by George R.R. Martin

Everyone at work is talking about the TV show Game of Thrones, so I thought I’d watch it. But before watching it, I thought I’d like to read the book first. Sometimes the book is very different from the TV show or movie based on it.

A Game of Thrones (the book) is part of a series of books about the same characters. So far, there are 5 books in this series, and 2 more are said to be forthcoming. The stories take place in what I would call the Middle Ages – knights, castles, kings, queens, and so forth – except that it isn’t set in Europe, or even Earth. Martin has created a whole other world to contain these characters, places, and events. Luckily, the parallels aren’t that hard to pick up. The main action takes place on a land mass called Westeros (which would be Great Britain on Earth), and some action also takes place on the land mass to the east, called Esteros (Eurasia). My guess is that Martin did this because he wanted to write about Middle Ages-type stuff, but didn’t want to be handcuffed by actual history.

The book shows events through the eyes of several of the principal characters. Different characters see things in different ways, which is interesting. Here are the main ones:
• Eddard Stark is the lord of Winterfell, a castle that rules book-Scotland. He’s a heroic and powerful warrior and leader, who helped his friend Robert defeat the evil king 15 years earlier. Robert is the King now, which is fine with Eddard. But King Robert now wants Eddard to become his right-hand man (think: COO) and run things for him, so he can concentrate on getting drunk and impregnating barmaids with illegitimate children. Eddard agrees, in order to help the kingdom. Eddard is noble and law-abiding, so you can be pretty sure he’s going to get it in the neck at some point. You can’t let people like that become king!
• Catelyn Stark is Eddard’s wife, a lady of another noble house herself. Her main concerns are caring for her five children, and shunning Eddard’s bastard son, Jon. She’s also worried about Eddard, and for good reason. She’s shrewd, brave, and capable: she’d make a good queen.
• Sansa Stark is the oldest daughter, in love with the idea of dashing knights, noble deeds, and fashionable clothes. She wants nothing more than to marry King Robert’s son Joffrey, become a Princess, and eventually Queen. She’s basically clueless, and by far my least favorite character, even including the guy whose job is beheading people.
• Arya Stark is the youngest daughter. She essentially wants to be a medieval ninja, and she’s pretty good at it. She has no patience with Sansa, clothes, sewing, or any of that nonsense. She’s my favorite character. I could read about her all day.
• Bran Stark is the middle son. He’s a happy-go-lucky kid who loves climbing the walls and towers of Winterfell, where, unfortunately, he one day sees something he shouldn’t have. Then he becomes less happy and far less go-lucky.
• Jon Snow is Eddard Stark’s bastard son, conceived in extremely mysterious circumstances. He mixes with his half-siblings well, but Catelyn sees him as a constant reminder of Eddard’s infidelity. He makes up his mind to leave Winterfell, and strike out on his own. He’s a smart and tough kid who understands a great deal, and cares about people.
• Tyrion Lannister is the brother of Queen Cersei and of knight extraordinaire Jaime Lannister. Tyrion is a dwarf, excluded from and mocked by society. He is very shrewd and clever in succeeding in difficult situations. His sister and brother are scheming to get the kingdom away from Robert and anyone else in their way, but his aims are far more modest: a relatively normal life. I like him next to Arya. It’s always interesting to see what he’s up to.
• Daenerys Targaryen is the daughter of the evil king who was defeated by Eddard and Robert. Her brother Viserys considers himself the rightful king, and acts like it. They live on other people’s charity in Esteros, exiled from Westeros forever. Viserys has a scheme to marry barely-teenaged Daenerys to Khal Drogo, a Genghis Khan kinda guy who commands legions of mounted warriors. Viserys wants Drogo's men to fight to regain the kingdom of Westeros for him, and doesn’t really care if he has to sacrifice his sister to do it. Daenerys is tougher and more resilient than he imagines, however, and matters take a very different turn from what Viserys plans. Her story goes in a direction I never imagined.
By the end of the book, one of the above characters is dead. Unfortunately, it’s not Sansa. Lots of other people die, too. It’s that kind of book, or maybe that kind of society.

Besides the knights, battles, political intrigue, and sexual shenanigans, there’s some other weird stuff going on. Seasons last for years in this land, sometimes decades. And it looks like winter is coming, which could mean decades of snow, cold, famine, death, lawlessness, and other unpleasant things.
Plus, I hate to drop the z-word, but there seem to be some distinctly formerly dead folks roaming around up north.
Not to mention some beasts that are definitely mythical on Earth, but aren’t quite so mythical in Westeros.

I knew that this was part of a series when I started reading it, but I was still disappointed when this book ended with a whole passel of cliffhangers. Not disappointed in the sense of, Oh, boy, I can’t wait to start the next book to see what happens. More like, Wait, I have to wade through another 500-page book just to see what happens – and that one no doubt ends in a cliffhanger too – and the series isn’t really done: he could string us along for years.

So, while I enjoyed A Game of Thrones (the book) and look forward to watching Game of Thrones (the TV show), I don’t know if I’ll keep reading the books. We’ll see. I do want to see how Arya’s doing.



Recommended if you like people saying, “My liege” and drawing their blade from its scabbard.

Book report: The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion

Book report: The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion

Genetics professor Don Tillman has trouble relating to people. He has his life scheduled down to the minute and eats exactly the same meals every week. He’s inflexible and human nuance is beyond him. When he gives a lecture on Asperger’s syndrome, he doesn’t notice that he has all the symptoms.

Still, he’s trying to meet the right woman, despite a series of dates that go hysterically bad. He comes up with the idea for The Wife Project, designed to administer questionnaires to large numbers of women, weed out the obvious mismatches, and produce a shortlist of wife candidates.

Then he meets Rosie.

Rosie is a mismatch in every possible category. Except that, he likes her and has fun with her.

Rosie has her own problems. First among them is trying to figure out who her biological father is. Her mother is dead, and never told her, and her life seems to be stuck until she sorts this out. That’s why she first connects with Don: as a geneticist, he can help her do the DNA testing of men she suspects might be the one.

Don helps Rosie collect and analyze DNA samples. He also finds himself drawn closer to Rosie, and changing in ways he never thought possible.

All of this is told from Don’s point of view. He misinterprets EVERYTHING he comes in contact with, but it’s always clear to us what’s really going on. The result is very funny. The adventures of Don and Rosie grow more and more outrageous and involved. And Don grows also, affecting everyone around him.

This is a sweet, fun book.

Highly recommended.

Book report: As She Climbed across the Table, by Jonathan Lethem

Book report: As She Climbed acrossthe Table, by Jonathan Lethem

I am a theoretical physicist by training, if not by job. I love reading about the origins of the universe, cosmology, particle physics, and so forth. But I never dreamed these things could be part of a novel that isn’t science fiction.

“As She Climbed across the Table” is a love story, in fact a love triangle. Alice is a physicist, one of the scientists studying – well, they don’t really know what it is. It seems to be a gap, a void, in our universe that they call the Lack. Alice is fascinated by the Lack. So fascinated that she’s actually, well, in love with it.

This dismays her actual boyfriend Philip, a professor at the same college as Alice, but not a scientist. He has no idea what the Lack is either, but he does know that it’s replaced him in Alice’s eyes.

From this spins a wonderful tale of unrequited love of several kinds. The experiments to try to determine just what the Lack is are both funny and intriguing. So is the rest of the cast, including two bickering men who are blind (or are they?), the discoverer of the Lack (who has no idea what, if anything, he’s accomplished), a woman Philip tries not to pick up in a bar (who aims to replace Alice), and any number of absurd academics (or is that redundant?).

I’m tempted to use the name Alice as a fulcrum to compare “As She Climbed across the Table” with “Alice in Wonderland,” but I don’t want to force the pieces of one puzzle into the frame of another. Still, by the end of this zippy read, you’ll find yourself plunged into at least three universes, and will simultaneously have *no* idea what just happened, yet understand *exactly* what just happened. It’s a Heisenberg’s kittycat kind of book.

Recommended

book report: Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This book totally stunned me. It was so much not what I expected. Knowing it was published in 1866, I expected the kind of novel written in 1866: old-fashioned, with stiff, stilted characters, and a kind of laughable innocence about the ways of the world. Not at all. This novel could have been published yesterday, it's so modern, which is to say: real. The characters talk and act and think like real people do.

A lot of novels aren’t like that. The characters are utterly predictable, which is not what anyone I know is like. The bad guy kidnaps the girl, so James Bond goes after him. A woman's husband mistreats her, so she divorces him. You see what I mean? Simple. You know exactly what's going to happen.

But that’s not how Dostoyevsky's characters act. They might do this or they might not. Raskolnikov might rob the old woman, he might not. He might kill someone, he might not. He might confess to the police, he might not.

This is how real people behave. Think of all the thoughts and decisions you make every day about what to do from one minute to the next. You will or you won't. Now, or later, or never. You'll sit watching TV, or you'll go out and take bassoon lessons.

This is what Dostoyevsky's characters are like. Real. Thoughtful. Impulsive. Unpredictable, even to each other. One of the major sources of tension is a police official who interacts with Raskolnikov. Does he know what R. did or doesn't he? Is he toying with R. or isn't he? R. doesn't know any more than we do, and it drives him crazy: this the "Punishment" part of the title.

Here's the thing. When I say that this novel sounds "modern" and not "old-fashioned", I don't think it's because Dostoyevsky made some great leap into writing novels the way that modern authors do. I think it's the other way around: after Dostoyevsky, authors couldn't write novels the same way anymore. He did something new, and he's influenced everyone who came after him, even if they don't know it.

That's not the only thing he came up with, either. When you read "Crime and Punishment", you realize that he is tantalizingly close to what we would call "stream of consciousness" writing. He tells us so much about what and how his characters are thinking that he very nearly beats James Joyce to the punch by 50 years.

Dostoyevsky isn't a one-trick pony, either. He presents certain characters and scenes without their thoughts, and it's brilliant. There's one scene where we follow a character around for a night, and all we see are his interactions with certain people, but we're absolutely sure that he's going to kill himself. The effect is uncanny and, as I said, stunning.

After reading this book, I learn that the Russian word translated as "Crime" in the title actually means something closer to "Trespassing", with the connotation of stepping over some line you're not supposed to. I think that's a better indication of the idea of the book than simply the abstract "crime": there are lines you don't cross in this world, in civilization, and when you do, this is what happens: consequences, both from the outside and from the inside.

Pedantic rant #1: Those Russian names! In Russia, people tend to have 3-part names: their last name or family name, their first name or given name, and their middle name, which is usually derived from their father's name, like Petrovich, meaning "son of Peter". Plus any nicknames. What Russians call each other depends on their relationship. Strangers would use one form of the name, acquaintances another, friends yet another, and lovers something else again.

Here's my point: these distinctions are meaningless for a non-Russian audience, which, of course, all translations are for. For us non-Russians, trying to follow who is talking about who is maddening. So why not make it easy on us? Call each character by one name, maybe two. The last name for all but intimate associates, who get to use the first name. This would save a lot of frustration and confusion.

Pedantic rant #2: This novel is modern, but its modernity is undercut by the translators' use of old-fashioned expressions unnecessarily. For example, they'll say a character "has rooms at X's house". Why not just say they "rent an apartment at X's house"? Or they'll say X "vouchsafes" something to Y. Nobody vouchsafes anything to anybody anymore. X "tells" Y something, period. Modern it up.

Okay, back to the report. Bottom line: This book blew me away. I recommend it highly.

Except for those Russian names. Oy.

Book report: A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

Book report: A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

This is one of those books that I was assigned to read in school, but that I never did read. I have an ongoing project to try reading them now, to see if they’re actually any good. Most of the time, such books turn out to actually be quite worthwhile, although my teenage self would probably have not appreciated them. That’s not the case here. I was right to avoid this book then.

A Farewell to Arms (AFTA, hereafter) is the story of an ambulance driver during World War One, serving on the Italian front. It is supposed to be autobiographical, because Hemingway actually was an ambulance driver during World War One. The main character (Lieutenant Henry, a name we don’t learn until chapter 5) is a self-centered young man who thinks he knows everything about everything. In this sense, the story is either funny or pathetic, depending on your state of mind, because he is wrong about almost everything. Every decision he makes, every action he performs, turns out to be wrong. But I don’t think Hemingway thought so. Almost all the other characters in the story cater to Henry and give him special attention, for no apparent reason. The one character who ever challenges his behavior, a head nurse, is portrayed as a villain. Oh, right, there’s another minor character who challenges him. Henry shoots him. Hemingway is clearly on Henry's side.

Henry is fortunate enough to meet the most compliant woman on earth, a nurse in the hospital where he’s recuperating from a battle wound. They begin sleeping together immediately, and she spends the rest of the book apologizing constantly for no reason, and submitting to whatever he wants her to do. I happened to read, just before this book, a Jane Austen novel, and I can’t help thinking that this guy wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds with an Austen female character. She would have pegged him – correctly – as a self-involved narcissist, and dismissed him without a second thought by chapter 2. Unfortunately, this book was not written by Jane Austen.

I liked the parts about the war best. Hemingway’s style is suited to action, to short sharp shocks. Not so much to ordinary life or conversation. You could certainly never write comedy with language like this. And now that we’ve wandered into Hemingway’s style, it’s time to tackle the elephant in the room.

Hemingway, of course, writes in a very distinctive and well-known style. Simple declarative sentences with subject, verb, and object. Little description. Nothing to clutter up the dialogue like “he said” or “she said” or “inquired” or “with a raised eyebrow”. A very limited palette of words. And leaving out a lot of things, some pretty significant, from the story, and leaving readers to puzzle them out on their own.

Now, there are some pluses to this. It never hurts to cut back on your writing. Heaven knows, I could probably slash ten percent of my writing and not hurt anything, and maybe another ten percent, and another ten percent on top of that. And, true, one of the well-known dictums of writing is “Simplify, simplify”, for which Hemingway is the poster child.

But I think Hemingway goes overboard. The words “stark” and “spare” are probably the kindest way to describe his results. But closer to the truth are “dull” and “monotonous”.

He subscribed to a theory of writing that said: The more you cut away, the finer is the story that is left. Logically, then, if you cut away the whole thing, you would end up with the finest story possible. Unfortunately, Hemingway didn’t go this far with his writing. Instead, we’re left with a kind of literary homeopathy, where whatever is left is somehow supposed to be more powerful than the really interesting and significant material that’s been taken away.

Again, according to this theory, cutting the most important parts out is also supposed to strengthen the story. You see what this means, right? It means that what’s actually on the pages of AFTA does not include the most important parts. Which means that, really, we don’t know what this book is actually about. It seems to be about people coping with war. But that, logically, is not the most important part, because the most important part has been left out. Bottom line, nobody can possibly know what this book is actually about. It could be about soybean futures. It could be volume K of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It could be an early draft of Horton Hears a Who. There’s no way to tell.

Plus, that whole limited-palette-of-words thing gets to be unutterably monotonous. By the end of the book, I was so tired of reading the word “fine”. Everything is fine. The dinner is fine. The evening is fine. The room is fine. Hemingway would have fit right in with the 1984 Newspeak initiative. Being limited to a vocabulary of “good”, “plusgood”, and “doubleplusgood” wouldn’t have fazed him at all. But for a poor reader having to slog through a 350-page novel using only 47 words, it’s something like having to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed on spoons. I’m sure it can be done, but, my gosh, why bother?

The fact is, I think that Hemingway was an intellectual bully. He would talk about whether writing was True or not, which would absolutely intimidate readers, writers, and critics into going along with whatever he said. If you didn’t, my God: you were going against Truth! So, now there’s an entire intellectual elite who pretends that reading the word “fine” every other paragraph is some kind of treat, rather than a failed experiment. Don’t get me wrong: if Hemingway wants to stake out the minimum-vocabulary end of the spectrum, that’s okay with me. Just let the rest of us have the million other words he isn’t using, without making us feel like we’re sinning against Truth.

It’s kind of like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” all over again. If you don’t pretend to see the emperor’s clothes – the excellence of Hemingway’s writing – you’re ignorant and uncouth, and certainly not among the intellectual elite. He actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has got to be the ultimate example of “you can fool some of the people some of the time”. Well, I don’t see the clothes. I like plot. I like description. I like adjectives. And Hemingway just doesn’t deliver.

There are a few other nits I need to get out of my system with AFTA. People sure do drink a lot in this story. If the characters had all been clean and sober, this book would only be half as long. Hemingway seems to regard drinking a lot as some kind of an accomplishment.

He’s also laughably amateurish about expressing some things. Having painted himself into a corner with a 3^rd-grade vocabulary, he has a tough time expressing things like sadness or difficulty. So he makes it rain. Constantly. Whenever there’s a sad situation or a difficult situation, it rains. This is such a common thing in his writing that there’s actually a Hemingway version of the chicken crossing the road joke:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Isn’t it possible for people to be sad when it’s sunny out? Or cheerful even if it’s raining? Not in Hemingway’s world. It makes me wonder if he had Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m not kidding. He lived most of his life in Key West and Cuba, two very sunny places. Maybe he had to. Looked at this way, AFTA isn’t so much a novel as a cry for help.

Bottom line, AFTA is an unpleasant book, made dull by vocabulary and stylistic obsessiveness.

Recommendation: Leave it. In the rain.

Book Report: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli

Book Report: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli

To start with, this is a well-written book. The author writes lyrically about some of the most fascinating aspects of modern physics. Also, it’s short: only 81 pages. For non-experts, this could be the perfect intro to many of the physics topics that crop up in the news lately, including quantum mechanics, black holes, the Higgs boson, and dark matter.

However, for these same reasons, it’s a little light on details. It’s rather like a buffet of appetizers: many tasty morsels, but not very filling.

Now, I happen to have a background in physics, including a PhD in theoretical physics. I’ve been a college professor, taught science and calculus, and published in journals. Not that I’m at all well-known or accomplished: but I do have a slightly different view of these topics than the average non-expert reader. And what strikes me most about them isn’t what the author says, but what he doesn’t say.

For example, he tells the story of Max Planck performing a certain calculation, and using for the first time the concept of a “quantum” of energy. But what he doesn’t tell you is why Planck was doing this, or why he tried using the quantum to get the right answer. The reason is simple: the physics of the time had failed miserably to get the answer right. Physicists put everything they knew about electricity and light and energy into their calculation, and they were spectacularly wrong. They were so far off that the problem was called the “ultraviolet catastrophe.”

Similarly, he tells the story about Einstein also using the concept of a quantum of energy as a way to explain the photoelectric effect, where light falling on metal causes electricity to flow. Again, he doesn’t reveal to us why Einstein was doing this. It was because, once more, the physics of the time had failed utterly. Using everything they knew about light and electricity, for example, physicists had predicted that, if you shined light on a metal, it would take a few minutes for the light to cause the electricity to flow. In reality, the electricity starts immediately. This is incomprehensible in classical physics, and only the use of the quantum gives a satisfying explanation.

Finally, he talks about Niels Bohr coming up with a picture of the atom that leads to electrons being in set, stable orbits, and making the now-famous quantum leaps between orbits. What he doesn’t talk about is why this idea is necessary: because ordinary physics predicts that all electrons should spiral into the nucleus in a thousandth of a second: there would be no stable atoms, ever.

Why does the author omit discussing these motivations for the advances in physics he presents? I don’t know, of course, but I suspect that he wants to present physics as a magnificent edifice of marble and bronze, perfect and eternal. To this edifice, giants such as Planck and Einstein and Bohr contribute new wings, and every student of physics can aspire to offer some small improvement.

It’s a noble image, and one that probably impresses the tourists, but it’s absolutely false. In reality, physics is a ramshackle hodge-podge cobbled together with chewing gum and baling wire. It works remarkably well, and with more rigor than any other science, but it is far from perfect and even far from consistent. This leads to some howlers in this book, such as “the equations of the [quantum] theory finally appeared, replacing those of Newton”. Um, not really. The equations of quantum mechanics are good almost solely for phenomena about the size of an atom or smaller. For everyday life, Newton’s equations work just fine, thank you very much.

I wonder if the author is presenting this shining exterior to win readers over to his viewpoint, which is thoroughly materialistic. Materialism is the philosophy that the world consists of inert matter subject to the forces of nature, and that’s it. In materialism, there is nothing of the spiritual, of the soul, of the mind. To a materialist, human beings are something like complex machines, and anything produced by a human being is something like the result of a printing press, not of any individual creativity. The author seems to value music, art, and literature, but, as a materialist, he must believe that these are simply the by-products of the biochemical reactions of the brain.

In fact, he states so much in this book: you are your brain. There is nothing of you besides what goes on in that organ.

I don’t know how a materialist can esteem certain human beings, such as Planck or Einstein or Bohr. Surely, their brains were simply doing what their brains came into being to do, right? Why should they receive any special acclaim simply for performing the process they had no choice but to perform?

He goes even further: “An individual is a process.” In other words, you are something like a rusting can, or a rock being eroded by water. No more, no less.

It’s not surprising that such a bleak view of life leads to a bleak view of the future. “I believe that our species will not last long,” he states. Given this view, one wonders why he would bother to be interested in unraveling the mysteries of the universe, or indeed, why he would want to gain adherents for his views. Why would it matter (rimshot)?

Still, those of us who believe there is more to human beings than physical and chemical reactions can still value his descriptions of the magnificence of the universe, and the singular and amazing fact that we can actually understand some of how it all works.

Recommended, but mind the gaps.

Book report: This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein

Book report: This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein

I usually write book reports about books that I’ve actually read. In this case, I want to write about why I didn’t finish reading the book.

This is a book that purports to be about how capitalism must change if we want to solve the climate crisis. Maybe it is. I wouldn’t know, because I gave up reading it. I started out reading it. Then I started skimming pages. Then I started skipping whole sections. Finally, I gave up and looked for the payoff at the end. I never found it.

Now, I happen to know something about writing non-fiction that gives solutions to problems. I’ve published more than 200 magazine articles on technical topics, and they basically all have the same kind of form: introduction to the problem, some possible solutions to the problem, why some of the solutions don’t actually work, what the solution turns out to be, and how that solution plays out.

My problem with this book is that we never get to the solution. We’re given the problem. And more of the problem. And still more of the problem. And yet more of the problem. And why the problem’s hard.  And why the problem’s bad. And why the hardness and the badness of the problem make it really hard and bad. And how some people think X will help, but they’re wrong and stupid and pointless and wasting energy that could go toward the REAL solution, whatever that might be. And others think Y will help, but they’re even worse. And I’m only 2/26ths of the way through the alphabet.

There was a glimmer of hope at one point. She began talking about certain European countries, such as Germany, that are making real strides in expanding their use of solar power and wind-generated electricity, for example. I thought we might be onto something. But no. Back to how bad the problem is, etc. etc. etc.

Another issue I have with this book is the repetitiveness of its construction. A typical sentence sounds like this: “Joquanda P. Kantt-PronounceIt, Executive Director [everyone in this book is an executive director: in this world there are more executive directors than fast-food workers] of The International Amalgamated Committee on Rectifying Everything Wrong with This Benighted World Preferably Using Tofu, is quoted as saying, “[400 words here, none of which would make a good t-shirt or poster slogan]”. There’s at least 5 of these kinds of sentences on every page and, believe me, it gets tedious after a while. A short while.

She also has a typical structure to every section. It starts with her jetting in (on one of those non-polluting jets with no carbon footprint) to either (A) a spiritually and historically significant gathering of some of the world’s finest thinkers and most compassionate souls (if she agrees with them) or (B) a diabolical cartel of soon-to-be-indicted war criminals whose only thought is to loot the planet and kill baby bunnies (if she doesn’t agree with them). She gives us the weather report, some details on whatever snack she’s picked up, and then starts quoting executive directors.

For 577 pages.

Klein has apparently never discovered the Delete button on her keyboard, and we’re the ones who suffer the consequences. There’s just too much of this book.

And, mind you, I’m pretty much on her side in this debate. I WANT to find out what the solution is. Why won’t she tell me?

She repeatedly (and repeatedly and repeatedly) voices her astonishment that the entire human race didn’t instantaneously change direction when we discovered that humans were changing the climate for the worse. Really? Really? Human beings have been around for about 200,000 years, just doing things the way they always have. In the last 50 or so years, we’ve started to notice the effects of our petroleum-based technology on the climate. And she expects 200,000 years of momentum to change course like that? That’s like expecting a race car to careen to a stop because a ball bounces a fraction of a millimeter from the front bumper. Sorry, but it ain’t gonna happen.

I agree that it’s regrettable that we haven’t been able to respond as quickly as we’d like to the crisis. But is it really surprising?

Her attitude is that this “inaction” is due to moral failings, greed, and a lack of vision or courage. What about plain old human nature? This is the way people are. You can bemoan it all you want (and she does: her default setting is “Bemoan”), but that’s reality. You can’t accomplish more than people are capable of assimilating, period, in any field of endeavor. Ask cops. Ask teachers. Ask doctors. Ask lawyers.

To sum up: there might be a solution in there somewhere. I didn’t find it. But if it reflects her flawed idea of what humanity is capable of, I’m dubious of how practical or effective a solution it will be.

Bottom line: this doesn’t change anything.