8. Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

This is a book of short stories published after KV's death.  Most of them are stories about the goings on in POW camps towards the end of WWII, others are about the havoc that followed the allied victory and there are a couple of other random ones about different subjects.

The stories are all quite sarcastic in the traditional KV style.  I particularly enjoyed the title story which is about an institute that is set up on Oklahoma to proove that people are crazy because they are possessed by the devil.  The institute is backed by a rich oil magnate who pours his entire wealth into the thing and the "scientists" there conduct experiments - and one large scale clinical trial - with devices that are supposed to rid the body of the devil.  One device is a headset that shoots a low intensity current between the person's ears.

There is some controversy about how finished these stories actually were when they were found and how much work the author's son, Mark, put into finishing them.

7. John Christopher, The World in Winter

This is a PA love story (better reviewed by the Mount Benson Report and Olman's 50).  A sudden reduction in solar radiation results in a significant cooling of the northern hemisphere and the emergence of a new ice age.  The story centers around Andrew, David and their wives.  Andrew produces a television show and David is a mid-level civil servant.  They are introduced to one another at a cocktail party.  Andrew's wife subsequently leaves him for David and David's timid wife begins a loving relationship with Andrew even though it lacks intimacy.

As the weather gets colder, critical supplies begin to dwindle and violence increases.  The government gives up most of the country and establishes "green zones" around key cities leaving most of the population outside the zones to fend for themselves.  Carol, Andrew's ex-wife, leaves with their children and moves to Nigeria and soon afterwards Andrew and David's ex-wife move to Nigeria as well on the promise that David will follow them soon.  There is subtle social commentary throughout the book focused on racism in the west, this commentary is magnified when the elite white's move to Nigeria and find that they are the underclass and are forced into doing menial low paying jobs for their black task masters.

In Nigeria, after a dark false start, Andrew manages to land another television production job and begins to lead a good life for himself and David's ex.  At the same time his ex-wife becomes a live in prostitute for a wealthy Nigerian business man.  The Nigerian authorities concoct a plan to invade England and Andrew joins the mission and returns to London where he finds David's ex-wife who had left Andrew and moved back to England in order to be with David.

I have not described the soap opera aspects of this book in as much detail as I could but I think that you catch the drift.  It's a good book and a quick read.

6. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

In a word this book is gruesome, for example:

Two thick ropes of blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire.  The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast.

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree.  They were skewered through the cords of their heels with the sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and their brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes.  Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.

...those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts.  Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man's parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths.

Blood Meridian is the story of the wild west in the 1870s as told through the eyes of a 24 year old always referred to as the kid.  The kid joins up with a division of the army who doesn't want to give up fighting the Apaches even though the American-Mexican war is officially over.  The division wanders down into a valley and is promptly slaughtered by the Apaches.  The kid gets away and joins a band of protection for hire thugs who provide protection to, at this time, Mexican villages and towns and are paid by the number of scalps that they bring in.  The band does reasonably well, if you can call it that, indiscriminately killing whomever crosses their path - Apaches or otherwise - however, it meets its end when one day it is attacked by the Yumas.

As with his other books the writing is so light and fluid that one does not ever feel absorbed by the book.  Nevertheless, it is a great story that is well put together and nicely told.

5. Barbara Smit, Sneaker Wars

The subtitle - the enemy brothers who founded adidas and puma and the family feud that forever changed the business of sport - says a lot about what the book's about.  Adi (short for Adolf) and Rudi (short for Rudolf) Dasler founded a shoe company in the town of Herzegonaurach in what became West Germany.  At first the outfit can best be described as a cobbler's shop where Adi made custom sports shoes and Rudi went out team to team and tried to sell the shoes.  As the business grew the brothers and their wives began to feud until shortly after WWII they decided to split the company into two.  Adi came away with the manufacturing side of the business and Rudi came away with the sales side of the business.  Adi named his company Adidas (short for Adi Dasler).  Rudi was going to name his company Rudas (short for Rudi Dasler) but felt that the name was unwieldy and changed it to Puma instead.

The book recounts the early years of the sports shoe and apparel business, the competition between the two brothers' companies, the emergence of Nike and later Reebok, the decline of both Adidas and Puma and the re-emergence of both companies in their current form.  The most interesting part of the story takes place in the earlier years:  the fight between the two brothers and the transformation of the sports business from an 'amateur' enterprise to the big money business that it is today.  After that the book is not so interesting.

4. Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Underwater

I've lost track where this book falls in the Ripley series but I think that it falls immediately after Ripley's Game.  In this story two inquisitive Americans move into Ripley's suburban village and start making uncomfortably invasive inquiries about Ripley's life.  It later becomes clear that the Americans are on a mission to out Ripley.  I have to say that the suspense is a little more flat in this one and the ending is a little weaker.  Nevertheless it is an enjoyable book.

One, Two and Three

Cabeza de Vaca, The Shipwrecked Man

Georges Simenon, Inspector Cadaver

Michael E. Porter, Competitive Analysis

The Shipwrecked Man was given to me by Kate and Jason and since I really enjoy reading about Spain's colonial adventures in Southern and Central America I quickly got into it.  Admittedly at 145 pages or so it was a quick read.  This is the story of a mission to explore Florida and Mexico gone horribly wrong.  Led by an incompetent Governor the explorers land somewhere in southern Florida, their group is divided and the ones that remain on land slowly die from various diseases.  One man, the narrator, survives the ordeal and recounts his point of view in this book.  "They perished one after the other.  The survivors sliced the dead for meat...."

Simenon is my new Dick Francis.  His Maigret novels are simple yet suspenseful.  This tells the story of Maigret's assignment in a rural French farming town where a beautiful young girl's boyfriend has been murdered.  I really can't say more without spoiling the story.

Porter is an Harvard Business School professor who specializes in the theory of competition.  His books, which date back to the 1970s, have formed the backbone of this field and he is widely renowned as a great business theorist.  As with many business books they are more common sense than anything else.  This one lays out a framework for analyzing your own company's competitive position and applying the framework to your industry as well as the competitors in your industry.  Once you have done that then you will be in a strong position to further analyze and change your competitive stance in a way that will increase your chance of success.  Anyone involved in business should read this.

I Am Back!

I took a long break from reading and blogging.  I was just getting bored of it all and couldn't find anything to keep me motivated.  Then, earlier this year, I picked up a Patricia Highsmith book.  I chose it because the Ripley series are always an easy and entertaining read and are good to get you back in the game.  It did the trick.  I ploughed through it.  Then I turned to a Maigret mystery for the same reason and I killed it and now I am onto a couple of new books that I am enjoying.  I will blog about all of these in the next few days.  Right now, you should just be happy that I am back.

Just Awesome!

"Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig, the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, was arrested on ‘peeping’ and disorderly conduct charges based on allegations from an undercover police officer who was "investigating allegations of sexual conduct in the public bathroom" at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport.

According to the charges, Senator Craig initially stood outside a bathroom stall occupied by the officer, and then "look[ed] through the crack between the stall door and its frame into the stall that Sergeant Karsnia was occupaying," repeatedly "gazing into the stall" over a period of roughly two minutes. Craig allegedly "peered long enough" that the officer could “observe that the Defendant had blue eyes.”

After entering a bathroom stall next to the undercover officer’s, Craig allegedly moved his right foot from his own stall into the officer’s stall where he allegedly “touched Sergeant Karsnia's left foot” Next, the Idaho Senator was accused of swiping his hand under the bathroom stall divider three times with his palm up, moving it back and forth. The officer alleged that he "observed a gold ring" on the ring finder of Craig’s left hand.

Approximately six (6) minutes after he first observed Craig allegedly peeping into his stall, followed by the bathroom stall encounter, the officer reported showed Senator Craig “his police identification under the stall,” and Craig allegedly “exclaimed 'No!'”

As frequently happens in criminal cases, Senator Craig ultimately chose to plead guilty in order to settle the charges. He opted to represent himself (i.e., on a pro se basis), without the help of an experienced criminal defense attorney. In his plea, Craig admitted guilt only to the misdemeanor offense of disorderly conduct, paid $575, and was placed on probation.

In his defense, the Idaho Senator relatesed a statement contendng that "[a]t the time of this incident, I complained to the police that they were misconstruing my actions. I was not involved in any inappropriate conduct. I should have had the advice of counsel in resolving this matter. In hindsight, I should not have pled guilty.”

In 1982 when he was a Republican U.S. Congressman representing Idaho, Larry Craig issued a public denial against having improprieties with Congressional Pages. According to an ABC News investigation by reporter Carol Simpson at the time, “the names of Congressman alleged to be involved in the scandal have remained secret, but Idaho Congressman Larry Craig, concerned that his name had been implicated, issued a public denial:”

As this YouTube video shows, Craig’s public statements about the Congressional Page scandal included telling constituents that “persons who are unmarried as I am, by choice or by circumstance, have always been the subject of innuendos, gossip, and false accusations. I think this is despicable.”

ABC’s report followed the FBI’s interview with a then 20-year-old former Congressional Page who disclosed that the FBI interviewed him for two hours about allegations that members of Congress shared sex and drugs with Congressional pages in 1979.

According to Craig’s Senate website, he is now married to the former Suzanne Thompson, has three children, and nine grandchildren. Craig’s office says that he is "one of America's foremost defenders of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.""

There aren't enough words to describe how bizarre this is.

29, 30 and 31. Books I read between Christmas and New Year

29. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

This book is part business book and part pop psychology. The book is about a concept that the author calls "thin slicing," or what we normals would describe as how it is that people can make decisions about both trivial and important things based on very little data and sometimes be right about their decisions.

Setting the sound bite nomenclature that the author makes up aside, I found this to be a somewhat interesting book. I didn't learn anything that I could use in business but I was fascinated by some of the people that the author describes and their peculiar talents for thin slicing. I was most taken by the guy who was so subconsciously pescient that he could read minute inflections in people's facial muscles and figure out if they are telling the truth or if they were mad etc.

This is an interesting book but probably not for the reasons that the author intended. There is also a spoof book that is out called, "Blank: The Power of not Thinking All."

30. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

This book is about an average man living in a futuristic version of the late 1990s who has the ability to dream things that subsequently become reality. For example, one night he dreams that he owns a secluded get away home near a forest somewhere and when he wakes up he not only owns a home but he has also changed history so that he has always had that home.

The protagonist, Geroge Orr, however, cannot control these dreams and becomes scared by them and starts taking various drugs to supress his ability to dream. The big brother like system busts him for drug abuse and sends him to an enterprising shrink for treatment. The shrink picks up on Orr's abilities and starts using them to change the world. By hypnotic suggestion he makes Orr dream what he wants, for example, in one of the sessions the shrink makes Orr dream that there are no overpopulation problems and Orr responds by dreaming of a plague that has killed two thirds of the world. Orr, however, is not a willing participant in the shrink's enterprising ways.

The shrink is akin to a benevolant dictator who is a mixture of a benefactor with good intentions and a power hungry maniac. Le Guin suffuses the story with a thinly veiled ethical argument about whether the shrink's activitst benevolance is the right way to go or whether Orr's pacifist approach is better.

Excellent book.

31. The Vanishing by Tim Krabbe

This book is the inspiration for The Shining. It is a short, edge of your seat kind of psychotic thriller. Highly recommended for a good afternoon read.

The Beginning of the End?

There were news reports today that Canadian scientists discovered that the Ayles Ice Shelf snapped away from the coast of Ellesmere Island and became an ice island of its own. It happened in August 2005 but it took scientists 18 months or so to figure out when and how it happened. Apparently it took an hour for the ice shelf, which is the 66km in area or the size of 11,000 football fields, to break off.

28. The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson

Dr. Ferguson is a pop historian who’s stock is rising above even Simon Schama’s. This 1,100 page tome is a survey history of the late 19th and entire 20th centuries with a particular focus on the role of war in our society.

In general it is a good book but the problem with survey histories, I find, is that most readers will know a lot more about certain periods covered by the book than the author cares to get into, which means that sometimes hundreds of pages of the book should be skipped. For me, anyway, I found the book to be a little too much of a survey and a little short on the details that make history interesting.

If you’ve got the time, I would read it, but I wouldn’t make the time for it.

22 to 27. Books I Read on Vacation

22. Red Lights by Georges Simenon - This book was flat out awesome, the guy is such an amazing writer. This is the story of a young married couple who set out one Labor Day weekend to drive to Maine from New York to pick up their two children from summer camp. Written in the 1950s when there were far fewer prohibitions against drinking and driving, the husband and wife get into an argument about the husband's need to stop at the road side bars for drinks. And it gets darker after that.

23. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - This is a PA novel about the life of a father and son as they travel westward after some kind of massively destructive event has burnt out and killed most of North America. It is a superficial but entertaining novel.

24. Ernest Hemingway A Life Story by Carlos Baker - There are no shortage of Hemingway biographies but this one is widely acclaimed to be the best of the lot. Partially because it was written in the late 1960s when many of Hemingway's compatriots were still alive and were able to share stories about him and partially because the author doesn't hold back any punches. He portrays Hemingway as a literary genius but also shows him for the petulant self centered man that he was.

25. The Whistleblower of Dimona by Yoel Cohen - In 1986 Mordechai Vanunu gave information to the London Times who published a story disclosing, what many people already knew, that Israel was in fact a nuclear power. This book is the story of Vanunu his conflicted childhood and early adult years, his rejection of Judaism, his disclosure to the London Times and his eventual capture by Mossad agents. The author is a professor of mass communications so he spends a lot of the book discussing the details of how the Times handled the story which was not that interesting for me. The story of Vanunu himself, however, was fascinating.

26. Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon - This one is not as good as Red Lights but nonetheless it is better than most novels. This is the story of a successful business man in a loveless second marriage who one day disappears mysteriously and ends up living a seedy life in the south of France. It's a good quick read.

27. White Death by Robert Edwards - The badness of this book cannot be described and I was so looking forward to it. It is supposed to be the story of the Russian invasion of Finland in WWII but the author screws up the writing so badly that reading it almost resulted in my White Death.

My Take on the Mid-Term Elections

Democrats across America are seemingly overjoyed by their election victory on Tuesday. They shouldn't be, because a big reason that the Democrats won was because they fielded right wing candidates. For example, in Philadelphia the Senate candidate who beat the incumbent and absurdly Christian Rick Santorum, is pro-gun, anti-gay and anti-abortion. The Senate candidates who won in Montana, Virginia and Ohio share the same vintage. Further evidence of this is that one of the few anti-war candidates, the Republican Senator from Rhode Island, lost in his bid for re-election.

What has happened is that the Republicans have maintained the shift to the right introduced by the Bush II Presidency and the Democrats have also shifted to the right leaving Americans to choose between the far right and the center right.

So, what has happened is not necessarily good for left leaning liberals.

The good thing about the election is that it has ended the rule of the Neo-Cons in Washington and ended the Bush Doctrine that America should proactively promote democracy in foreign countries. The Neo-Cons's demise is signaled by the departure of Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement with Gates who served under the first President Bush and by the Senate's stated refusal to confirm John Bolton as Ambassador to the UN. It is further reinforced by the increasingly important role that Bush I stalwarts such as James Baker are playing in setting strategy for the government. With the Neo-Cons gone so goes the Bush Doctrine.

21. Parliament of Man by Paul Kennedy

Parliament of Man
Originally uploaded by buzby.

This somewhat superficial political history of the United Nations essentially concludes that it is a flawed entity but that it has been the source of much good in its 60 odd year history.

The author divides the work of the UN into three broad categories: world security, economy and charity.

The security council is the center of the UN's activities and its most powerful body but the ability of a single state to veto a security council resolution and, most recently, America's decision to do things without security council backing have left it quite impotent. The author is a little more kind on it than I am.

Throughout the cold war, as the Russians and Americans jockeyed for position the security council was totally hamstrung as either the Russians or Americans would veto resolutions backed by their adversary. There was a short rebirth after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the security council did a lot (some of it quite poorly) such as Bosnia, Somalia and Iraq 1 but with the emergence of Putin and the new order of world wide power politics that died. And today, as we see by the council's inability do anything difinitive against North Korea and Iran it is once again largely impotent.

Those countries unable to influence the security council embraced the economic and charitable realms of the security council where, again, the UN has done a lot of good but has been plagued by inneficiency and graft.

This is a reasonable book but one doesn't close the back cover feeling like you've learned something new.

20. The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

Another book that Mount Benson suggested that I read. This is one of Jack London's few science fiction books (although at 62 pages I think that it really is more of a short story). It was first published in 1912 London magazine and later as part of a book. It is the story of the world after almost all of its population has been killed by a devastating pandemic called the Scarlet Plague. The main character is an old man who is the last known person to have lived in the old world.

The author focuses on the general - moral, physical and sociological - decay of the world after the pandemic and is fascinated by how, in such a short period of time, civilization has been set back tens of thousands of years and has to rebuild itself to its previous majesty.

Even though it was written in 1912, London is stunningly prescient about what the future would look like. At the time of the pandemic which happened in about 2008 (note that today pandemic fears are all the rage) the world had eight billion people and there were motor cars everywhere according to London.

I highly recommend this book.

19. Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

Written in 1967 and set in 1999 New York city, this is the story of a cop, a beautiful woman and a Chinese boy as they struggle through their lives. By 1999 the world is severely over populated and replacable resources have come to an end. England is one giant city, New York has a population of 35 million, the rest of the US is similarly over populated, water has to be rationed, there is no more food as we know it today and people are basically at each other's throats.

I am not going to reveal the plot of the story as it would be too easy to spoil it for you. I do recommend this book it is an entertaining read.

17 and 18. Scarlet Surf at Makaha and Hang Dead Hawaiian Style by Patrick Morgan

I will quote what my good friend Mt. Benson had to say, "[n]eedless to say, you get more groovy babe-ballin', ass-kickin' surfer action once again with Bill Cartwright, agent for the secret undercover organization: Operation Hang Ten!" Both Excellent surfing action books.

Coup d'Etat

Coup
Originally uploaded by buzby.

Wow! It's been a long time since we had a good old cold war/third world style coup d'etat. The PM was in New York so the army, allied with the King, came in and overthrew him, took control of the television and radio stations and we're off to the races!

16. Globalized Islam by Oliver Roy

As with many books written in English by Frenchmen this is written in exceedingly complicated English to the point that many sentences deserved a second read.

The main thesis of the author is that Moslems living in Western Europe feel deterritorialized and their paradoxical way of Westernizing Islam is by reaching back to an imaginary super pure form of Islam that has never existed.  Consequently these Western Moslems are becoming even more extreme than their counterparts living in countries with a Moslem majority.

Similarly, Moslems living in the Middle East have become disenchanted with the ossification of Islam in the hands of the ruling elite and are reacting by also reaching back to a similar super pure form of Islam.

I am not educated enough on this subject to be able to tell you that his arguments are sound but they do sound reasonable.

Roy also makes another interesting point.  He explains that Western intellectuals often search for an explanation for the current world in Islam itself and suggest that it is an extreme religion which has always put violence on a pedestal.  He argues that this kind of thinking is wrong.  Instead he posits that the ruling elite of the Middle Eastern countries have taken command of Islam and have prevented it from growing with the times as other Western religions have grown.  He says that Islam has become an instrument of the Middle East elite and is not something that controls the elite.

I firmly believe in this part of his argument.

Shameless!

WASHINGTON -- President Bush acknowledged the existence of previously secret CIA prisons around the world and said 14 high-value terrorism suspects -- including the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks -- have been transferred from the system to Guantanamo Bay for trials.
Mr. Bush said the "small number" of detainees that have been kept in CIA custody include people responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 in Yemen and the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in addition to the 2001 attacks.
"The most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves," Mr. Bush said in a White House speech with families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks making up part of the audience. "It has been necessary to move these individuals to an environment where they can be held in secret, questioned by experts and, when appropriate, prosecuted for terrorist acts."

Bush and his cronies are taking liberal democracy turning it upside down and inside out all for the advancment of their own marginal and extreme ideologies.  Absolutely reprehensible.