The Quick Red Fox (book)

John D. MacDonald The Quick Red Fox (1964) A Travis McGee book. Travis has to find the source of porn pictures taken at an orgy in which a famous film star participated, and which are being used for a spot of blackmail. The star's amanuensis accompanies him, and they have brief and very good affair. He traces the people involved, most of whom have come to a bad end. There are recent murders, which complicate the case. Travis eventually solves it, more by luck than by brains. The murderer is the very young wife of one of the orgy participants (who like the other men Travis tracks down is really a wimp.) Travis's woman is hit on the head, which changes her personality so that she doesn't want him any more.
     Having read this, I know why I have avoided this author. I did read him years ago, and haven't since. The book is too obviously fantasy., especially when it comes to women and Travis's fighting skills. MacDonald tries for the world weary, tough-guy, tarnished knight atmosphere, but doesn't quite pull it off. Every now and then Travis explains some philosophical point(s), which may reflect MacDonald's p.o.v. If so, I don't like him. He's homophobic, patronising towards ordinary folk trying to make an ordinary life, and typically American in his worship of sex as the highest communication between people. He's also sentimental, which is not necessarily a flaw, since the genre is sentimental at its core, but in this case raises a whiff of hypocrisy. The book also reeks of mid-60s prurience. Other people do this kind of thing much better. ** (1999)

The Body Farm (book)

Patricia Cornwell The Body Farm (1994) A mystery. The investigator is Kate Scarpetta, a lawyer and forensic pathologist. The victim is an 11-year-old girl, and it seems the murderer is a serial killer who has escaped from prison. He may be planning revenge on Kate and her team members. The sub-plot involves Kate's niece, framed for a break-in into a secure area and computer system (on which she is working). The murderer turns out to be the girl's mother (Munchhausen syndrome at work.) The personal relationships continue on from previous books, and will no doubt continue into subsequent ones. The 1st person p.o.v. doesn't always work, partly because Kate is undemonstrative (countering the Italian stereotype), and partly because Cornwell mixes genres, love-romance with mystery.
     On the whole, though, the book works. The procedural bits are convincing, the dialogue both characterising and plot-structuring, Kate is a sympathetic hero who is beginning to be damaged by her profession, and knows it. She also suffers from a dysfunctional family that for once doesn't seem inserted for dramatic effect, but fits her character and helps account for her life history (what little we get of it in one book.) The bleakness of her mood reminds one of the noir PI novels of Chandler and his followers, but it's really intended to be more elegiac. Like many modern crime writers, Cornwell assumes her readers are familiar with the genre and doesn't bother explaining the obvious. This occasionally makes for an unsettling abruptness and a need to reread a passage. I'll be reading more of these. *** (1999) Update 2012: I did read a few more in this series, but was eventually put off by the unvarying formula, and Cornwell's taste for gore. Scarpetta's backstory became more melodramatic, too, which didn't help.

The First World War (book)

John Keegan The First World War (1998) A very good book, with some flaws. Keegan surveys the political and military development. He has a knack for telling the story of battles so that one can follow them. He includes the human dimension, both of the soldier in the trenches and the generals behind the lines. He doesn't comment much on the actual destruction of life, nature, and property, but the few references to these things are enough. There aren't enough pictures, and apart from titles on the picture pages there is no attempt to key pictures to chapters in the book. The maps are deficient, since they do not show all the places mentioned in the history, which is especially irritating when a battle hinged on a particular place. I suspect that production budget limits had a hand in this, as coloured maps are really the only way to convey the information properly.
     Keegan's style is elevated and in places almost elegiac. I learned a lot of things, eg, the number of generals sacked, especially by the French and Russian commanders; and the lack of co-ordination between front line and commanders, most of it caused by limited or absent technologies. On the other hand, too many commanders were unwilling to listen to their technical staff and fully exploit what technology they had.
     Several things stand out for me. One, the effect of the structure of government, especially in Germany and Russia, which had a lot to do with the precipitation of the war. Two, the long time it took for commanders to learn the lessons of their own defeats. Three, the superiority of German warmaking, even though the German commanders made the same mistakes as their French and British counterparts. Four, the indecisiveness of the outcome. It was the entry of the USA into the war that tipped the balance in favour of the Allies, and so forced the Central powers to accept defeat. Without the USA, there would, I think, have been peace negotiations among equals, for by the fall of 1918 both sides were worn out, both sides had depleted their human and material resources, and both side were facing a collapse of morale. As it was, the Allies had the upper hand, and, unused as they were to this situation, they gave in to their desire for revenge (almost always in previous European wars, peace came about not so much because one side won, but because the two sides decided there was no advantage to be gained by continued fighting). The first world war settled nothing, and so made the 2nd inevitable. It also created conditions that made a Hitler possible but not inevitable; so that Hitler made the war worse when it did come, but did no more than trigger it. The TV series Fall of Eagles (1971) covers much of the same ground in its last four or five episodes, and is worth seeing in conjunction with this book. **** (1999)

Stardust (Robert Parker, 1990)

Robert P. Parker Stardust (1990) (Borrowed from BR library.) A TV star is being harassed. Spenser takes on the job of protecting her, and then finding the murderer of her stunt double. After a series of vignettes typical of the genre, the case is cracked more by luck than skill, as the star goes to LA to be with a mobster who fathered her child. It transpires that her own father molested her when she was a toddler, which explains a lot of course.
      Good fast hard-boiled smart-ass style. Spenser is the scarred knight of American detective fiction. Parker knows the genre, and does a skilled job. The chapters are short, with good dialogue; the whole thing is very cinematic –  almost a script. As is usual with this genre, the love-interest is mere decoration (Spenser's lover is a psychologist, and you would think she could give him some relevant information, but she is definitely on the sidelines.) There is a politically-correct Black, Hawk, who is Spenser's good buddy, as expected in books of the 80s and 90s. The pathetic fallacy runs strong, again as required by the genre. Parker has an eye for telling detail, and the landscapes are nicely described. I read this book because a friend told me his book was more in the style of Parker, so I wanted to find out what this meant. *** (1999)

2026-06-10: Cover image added, and minor editing.

Murder and it Consequences *Mulisch, The Assault, 1985)

     Harry Mulisch The Assault (translated 1985) In 1945, a police commissioner is murdered by the Dutch underground. A family is killed in retaliation, with the exception of the youngest boy. The story tells of the night of the murder, then of a number of incidents that remind Anton Steenwijk of that night and enable him to assemble the pieces into a coherent picture of exactly what happened and why. Beautifully written. Psychologically subtle and profound. The evening after I finished it, I heard part of a CBC documentary on the children of the Nazis (in The Loss of Innocence series.) The book resonated even more.
     The story works because it focuses entirely on the after-effects of the murder and the Nazi retaliation for it. The absurdity of clinging to established procedures in the last days of the war, the routines of everyday life maintained despite the incursions of a war descending into defeat, the superficial normalcy overlaying a deep malaise, all are presented in a straightforward style that catches you and doesn't let you go.

I think this book would help a lot of people understand the effects of Nazism and WWII, of the effects of occupation and war, as well as the distortions inflicted on social connections by totalitarianism.  Mulisch's mother was a Jew who died in a concentration camp; his father was an Austrian who was convicted of collaboration with the Nazis. Heavy baggage. ****

The Elegant Universe (book)

Brian Greene The Elegant Universe (1999). About string theory. Excellent overview of Newton --> Einstein --> Planck, and summary of problems with the Standard Model: The incongruity between general relativity and quantum theory. Although Greene goes to great lengths to stress what isn't known, he more than half convinces me that string theory (or one of them, anyhow) is right. For one thing, he explains the hidden dimensions so well. However, absent experimental data, and absent any near future likelihood of getting any, the whole thing is beginning to look suspiciously like medieval scholasticism, spinning elegant and consistent theories about matters that can't be observed. Except of course that in principle string theory is experimentally confirmable, unlike theories about angels.... Oh well, it's fun, and it suggests all sorts of SF story ideas. *** (1999)

The American Dream: the 50s (book)

Richard B. Stolley & Time-Life Books editors. The American Dream: The 50s (1998) In Our American Century series. Very Ameri-centric. Touching, in some ways: the T/L editors avoid anything that might seem like taking sides or making moral judgements (with one exception -- see below). Decisions are generally presented as natural events, that just happened. Fallout shelters are shown, but their utter uselessness is not mentioned. The McCarthy era is shown as a Bad Man doing Bad Things, but with no attempt at analysing why McCarthy was so successful for so long. And so on.
     The photos are all interesting, and some are superb. The book is best at conveying the naive optimism of a society that has just discovered the joys of consumerism. The consequences of this lifestyle are a long way off – and the few who are warning about it are shown as endearingly weird avant-garde artists, and therefore not serious critics. In fact, the whole notion of criticism is absent (except in terms of the inexplicably bad people). That the social structure itself might be founded on illusions and lies is never hinted at. I guess when you don't want to take responsibility for the society that you participate in, the only way to explain evil is that it is the result of bad men doing bad things. That social change is an ongoing critique of the past is an idea that one may draw from the evidence of this book, but it is not an idea that it is in the book. A book of great strengths and great weaknesses. **1/2

Science Fiction: The illustrated Encyclopedia

John Clute, et al. Science Fiction. The Illustrated Encyclopedia(1995) A coffee table book: thick glossy paper, beautifully printed, lots of pictures, well designed. And quite reliable and informative. It appears the text is by Clute, and he had a team of people helping out with the pictures, fact checking, etc. It is of course not as scholarly and inclusive as a true encyclopedia would be, but within its limits it's well done. It should have a more complete section on authors (the ones included get mini-critiques, so there was obviously a space problem.) Clute's judgement of films is defective IMO; among other things, he just doesn't like Star Trek, and over-values Star Wars. He has a bias towards hard SF, and gives high marks for humour - which makes his omission of Spider Robinson curious. Maybe he just doesn't like Robinson's smart-alecky tone. The tone of the book is a bit too earnest for my taste. All the same, it's a book any serious reader of SF should have. A similar book on (science) fantasy would be welcome. *** (1999)

Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning. Vol. II: Patterns of Plausible Inference

George Polya Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning Vol. II: Patterns of Plausible Inference. (1954). I skipped Vol. I, which deals with mathematical induction. The two books are intended as texts, either for self-study or for a course. This purpose of this volume can be seen in this example. Given A -> B and B, what can be deduced? By formal logic, nothing; i.e., the truth of A cannot be inferred from the truth of the consequence. (However, if B is false, then A is false.) Polya shows that in fact the truth of A will be more or less credible depending on a number of relevant factors. For example, if the truth of B is less credible without the truth of A than with it, then B supports A. Or, if B is more credible, then A is more credible; and so on. IOW, the truth of A lies somewhere between 0 (false) and 1 (true).
     Polya notes that credibility of A depends in part on the judge's experience and background. He is very close to fuzzy logic here, but he doesn't take the next step because he can't see any supportable way to compute that value. Fuzzy logic formalises that personal judgement, and so can provide computations (which are used to control machines, e.g.) Polya uses probability theory, interpreting probability as credibility, and thus provides strong support for his POV. He's also interested in the use of plausible reasoning in mathematical research. An interesting book. I like its assumption that its subject is worth pursuing. Polya writes very clearly, and I was able to follow about half of the math. The general principles of plausible reasoning seem to me to be obvious. *** (1998) Update 2012-12: It seems to me that Polya was a pioneer of what became fuzzy logic, but I can’t recall any acknowledgement of this in the fuzzy logic text I read.

Factoring Humanity (book)

Robert Sawyer Factoring Humanity. (1998) SF. The premise is that the Alpha Centaurans have sent a message to Earth. Apart from the first four pages, it's indecipherable. Heather Davis, a psychologist working on it, figures out that the rest of the message represents a plan for tiles which are assembled into squares which are assembled into a 3D projection of a tesseract. She discovers that the chemicals specified in the early part of the message are piezoelectric, so that the unfolded hypercube is in effect made of circuit boards. The device transports her into 3D space, but the 4th dimension is in fact psycho-space, and human beings are 3D projections of parts of the Overmind, which is all of humanity, past and present. Cute ideas, and the science isn't too far out in left field.
     Heather's voyage through psycho- space enables her to determine that her husband Kyle is not guilty of the molestation his daughter accuses him of. The family is healed by each member being able to see the world as the others see it. There is also a Centauran Overmind, and when Humanity makes contact with it, it becomes capable of genuine empathy, which percolates into the psyches of actual humans, so that we get peace and loving kindness everywhere.
     The ideas in the book are interesting. There are obvious parallels with heaven as union with God, etc. Sawyer quotes geneticists' objections to Chomsky's theory of the language instinct, but seems unfamiliar with M Gopnik's work. The writing is generally workmanlike, and moves the story along, but the most alive bits are the everyday scenes, eg, of Kyle on his way to the office buying a hot dog. The exposition is sometimes well handled through dialogue, but on the whole the characterisation is not as well done as Sawyer apparently thinks it is. I read a review of his subsequent novel, Flash Forward, in last Saturday's (Aug. 14, 1998) Globe. It was unnecessarily snarky and petty. Sawyer is not a great novelist, but he writes decent SF. ** (1998)

A Sleeping Life (book)

Ruth Rendel A Sleeping Life (1978) A Wexford mystery. Well-written, but a bit light on the police procedures (as Rendell herself has admitted.) Wexford is more of a private eye than an inspector. Murdered woman turns out to have led a double life as male author of quasi-historical novels based on Elizabethan plays. Female secretary, in love with male persona, discovers the role playing, and kills woman in a fit of confused shock and rage. Wexford's elder daughter is going through a bad patch in her marriage, and her comment about women's success requiring eonism puts Wexford on the right track. Well-plotted; but Wexford's private life seems grafted on, and the link with murder plot seems a little too pat. The TV show based on this novel had a more consistent p.o.v. I think a lot of this kind of fiction works better on TV or film; these media can tell the story faster, and the visuals can create atmosphere and character more completely. **1/2 (1998)

Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity book)

John Manners, ed. Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (1990) Survey from the early Church to present. A frustrating read. Very patchy. Several authors contribute: unfortunately, they assume varying amounts of knowledge in the audience, and most write in academese, not English. The result is an often impenetrable narrative, that obscures where it should clarify.
     The excellent and very detailed chronology refers to events and people not mentioned by the authors. Major heresies and doctrinal positions are not explained - one is supposed to know them I guess - nor are the reasons for them elucidated, and there is a slew of specialised jargon, often limited to a particular tradition, used without explanation. There is very uneven treatment of social and political influences and effects: some authors focus on these, others ignore them almost entirely. Major world events are often ignored, oddly enough: e.g., I'm sure the two world wars had a lot to do with the loss of faith in Europe (just listen to people of a certain age!), but they are hardly mentioned.
     There is no attempt at relating the pictures to the text (the pictures in many ways are more informative than the text!) Some authors are obviously rehashing an academic controversy; unforgivable in this context. The best chapters are the last two, but they hardly make up for the rest. All in all, well below the expected standard of an Oxford history. Not worth buying, hardly worth reading. * (1998)