The Wailing Wind (Hillerman, 2002)

Tony Hillerman. The Wailing Wind (2002) A homicide stirs up memories of a cold case. Chee and Leaphorn both believe the two are linked, but it’s a long and winding road to the proof, through fading memories, lies, incomplete testimony, and the usual mix of greed, passion, and fecklessness. Hillerman’s novels are as much about the characters’ responses to the evil they encounter as about the puzzles that must be solved to reach some sort of just resolution. The title refers to an appalling mistake that cost an innocent woman her life. But the chain of decisions that lead to that death began with her husband’s obsession with gold.
Recommended. ****

States of War (Lapham's Quarterly 01-1, 2008)

Lapham’s Quarterly 01-1. States of War. (2008) (A re-read) The first issue of LQ, and an excellent collection of texts and images about war. But depressing.

     Part 1, “Calls to Arms”, shows that war has almost always been justified as a struggle against evil personified in the enemy, who worship different gods, and are therefore obviously the servants of whatever Satan the warmonger imagines. Looting and other entertainments may be offered as enticements, but the warmongers rarely acknowledge them as the prime goals of invading one’s neighbours.
     Part 2, “Rules of Engagement”, deals with lessons in strategy and tactics, based on experience. There’s advice about how to prepare for war, and advice about how to wage it. The recognition that ultimately all armed conflict tends towards total war comes early in history.
     Part 3, “Field Reports”, shows us the brutalities of war, both on the battlefield and off it. From the beginning, non-combatants have suffered as much as or more than the fighters. Prisoners were taken only if they had some value, such as possible ransoms for the self-styled nobles who led the slaughter, and sometimes as hostage status for other ranks, but usually as slaves, if they weren’t too badly damaged. Slavery was the usual fate of any surviving defeated civilians.
     The last section, “Postmortems”, offers some hope, if only in the reactions of the surviving conscripts who wanted nothing more to do with war. But as often, the survivors saw the peace as  merely a pause on the fighting, good for regrouping and preparation for the next engagement with the enemy.

     “Further Remarks” presents four essays about wars past, present, and probable future. They didn’t do much to improve my mood.
     Is war inevitable? Many people think it’s species-specific behaviour, part of our territoriality, which is also expressed in our tribalism. In evolutionary terms, war has weeded out the more pacific strains of our species, leaving the ones that are willing to use violence in control. In the short term, the quarter–million years of our species’s existence, that’s made for survival. But our technical ingenuity, and our inability to act collectively except when threatened by another collective, plus our unwillingness (or inability, you choose) to give up immediate reward for long-term survival, these traits taken together suggest that evolution has tossed up a species that is likely to destroy the ecosystem that sustains it. We may turn out to be one of Mother Nature’s failed experiments.
     Depressing. But recommended. ****

We All Live In A Bubble (The Reality Bubble, Tong, 2019)

 Ziya Tong. The Reality Bubble (2019) We all live in a bubble created by our brains. The bubble includes the simulation of physical reality and the social and psychological realities we’ve learned to think of as just the way things are. But these realities have blind spots. Tong begins with the visual blind spot and spends a good deal of time describing what we can’t or don’t see because of our limited sensory and cognitive equipment. Science provides methods for filling in the blind spots, but it’s limited by the social and conceptual environment of its time, and its results are always tentative and incomplete. But it’s the best tool we have.
     Tong builds on this insight to describe the blind spots that make the bubbles dangerously comfortable places to live. The most serious blind spots are in our images of our relation to the non-human world. We see ourselves as different and separate from our environment. But that environment is our life support system. Misconceiving that fact will destroy human life as we know it. It’s already destroyed huge swaths of non-human life: in the last century, about 90% of wildlife has disappeared, partly because we’ve hunted it, but mostly because we’ve converted their habitats into agricultural land.
      Tong’s facts and insights range from exhilarating to depressing. Her final explicit message is that we must see what the blind spots hide from us, else we will continue to make suicidal choices. I don’t see good odds of that change happening. Policy makers are abysmally ignorant of the most basic science, and the rest of us are not much better. Economics is fatally flawed. The Friedmanites believe that efficiency means converting as many costs as possible into externalities, which don’t show up in profit-and-loss statements. So-called capitalism assumes that profit is the sole purpose of business. Very few economists show any kind of awareness of science and technology other than as a means of increasing profits. The natural world is perceived as a bundle of resources to be converted into cash as efficiently as possible. Not doing so is considered wasteful.
     In general, people believe that a rising GDP and increased productivity are signs of economic health. GDP merely tracks the money, not what it buys. Increasing productivity requires increasing consumption, not to mention that much of what’s produced satisfies mere whim. We believe that having more stuff means a better standard of living. Etc. And ever and again we are told that we must balance economic values against environmental costs, as if the economy were independent of the environment. That particular delusion amounts to insanity.
    Buy or borrow the book and read it. ****

Quick Math Course (Math Hacks, Cochrane 2018)

Rich Cochrane. Math Hacks (2018) 100 math concepts and theorems present in two-page spreads showing an overview (explanation in math terms, often some history), a shortcut (some details to clarify ), and a hack (brief summary, sometimes with a pointer to related math). Nicely done graphics, good history, well done examples, and a few annoying typos.
Recommended. ***

Language: A close examination (The State of the Language, 1980)

 Leonard Michaels & Christopher Ricks. The State of the Language (1980) In what sense can one talk about a language as an entity that exists? What does “exist” mean? A rock exists. It’s a passive existence. Wind and weather slowly eat at its substance until it ceases to exist. An animal exists, but the processes that keep it alive also wear it out, and these plus the ravages of wind and weather eat at its substance until it too ceases to exist.
     But language? Language is something people do. It’s not passive like a rock. It’s not active like an animal. Language exists while it’s spoken. We observe as well as understand it, and those observations, sorted and classified, compared and contrasted, create a concept. Since concepts must correspond to entities, language must be an entity. That’s the logic of “concept” and “entity.” And so a language exists, and we speak about as if it changes passively like a rock or actively like an animal. A pretty delusion, but it serves to help us discuss how people’s speech habits have changed over time. Thus the “State of the Language”,  a collection of such discussions.
     Most of the essays are by academics, the rest by practitioners. The academics too often write to test or develop some theory. The practitioners enjoy recording their observations. A few indulge in satire, some catalogue and analyse so earnestly that they slip into self-satire. But all take talk about language seriously. Class, trades and professions, psychology and philosophy, the desire for novelty, the literary traditions, these and many other influences on the development and uses of language all get a look-in. All focus on how people speak and write English. All assume, mostly tacitly, that people are what they speak, no matter what they profess to say.
     In the 40-odd years since this book was published, English has become established as the world's lingua franca. Speakers of other languages have adopted and adapted English words. Native English speakers risk misunderstanding when they use their idioms and allusions. Psycholinguistics has come into its own as the study of how language both expresses and shapes experience. The phrase “human language” is now necessary because ethologists have discovered  complexities of animal communication that resemble some features of human language. The link between self-awareness and language is established, but not understood. The creation of large-language-model pattern generators (misdescribed as artificially intelligent) have prompted rethinking of what human language and intelligence are.
     “In the beginning was the word”. So begins the Gospel of John. Whatever else these essays teach us, they show that language not only makes us human, but creates the experience that we call reality.
     A collection worth keeping. ***

Canadian National Treasures (Callwood, 1994)

June Callwood. National Treasures (1994). Vision TV received its licence in 1987, and began broadcasting from its very modest studio a few months later. In 1991, June Callwood discussed an interview show with them. Her guests would be National Treasures, or at any rate people that she thought should be recognised as such. Most of her guests were drawn from her circle of friends and media acquaintances (she was a journalist and social activist). The show was a success, and helped Vision TV grow its audience. It’s now a money-making property owned by ZoomerMedia, with a more secular and marketing approach than the religious and multi-cultural service that its founders had promoted.
     This book consists of edited transcripts of nine of these interviews. They’re interesting as documents of a certain time and sociopolitical ambience that has passed. They trigger nostalgia for what looks like a simpler time, which it wasn’t. The cultural landscape simply felt smaller back then. But the transition to the larger and less easily encompassed  Canada of today was already underway.
     Callwood is a pleasant conversationalist, which makes for easy reading, but I don’t get the sense of personal or other revelations that I’ve had from Eleanor Wachtel (Writers and Company) or Mary Hines (Tapestry) interviews. However, the interview with William Hutt did change my perception of him. The others confirmed or expanded what I already knew (or thought I knew) about them. Recommended for anyone who wants to know more about the 1990s in Canada. All the interviewees have relevance today. ***

How Money Began... (Whitehead and Baskerville, Money, 1975)

 

     Geoffrey Whitehead & Patricia Baskerville. Money (1975). Subtitled How Money Began and How it Works, which is a nice summary of the book’s intentions. Apparently aimed at the curious middle-schooler, it succeeds. At the time it was written, very little was known about the origins of money, and despite a few lucky finds since then, we still don’t know much. By the time Middle Eastern city states codified law, money was already in use, and the laws designed to promote fair and honest trading were brutal. It seems that the propensity for cheating is somewhat stronger in us than for fair and honest dealing.
     Within its modest aims, the book is a success. I learned a few new details about coinage and paper money. The book is strongest dealing in physical money, and weakest in its explanations of how money works, skimming over the psychology (as economic theories generally do). The authors make a distinction between wealth and money early on, but don’t mention that the money-is-wealth superstition was a factor in the inflation caused by Spain’s importation of huge amounts of gold and silver in the 15/1600s. The Spanish did not grasp that these "precious" metals were only as valuable as what they could buy, which was less and less as the supply of silver and gold increased.
     The authors mention the usual concepts of money as a medium of trade and store of value, and talk about money as measuring prices. The printing is excellent. Recommended if you can find a copy. This one will be donated to the library’s book sale. **½

Death (Lapham's Quarterly 06-4, 2013)

  Lapham’s Quarterly 06-4: Death (2013) The many ways people have died and been done to death, musings about death, religious warnings and promises about life after death, the decay of the body and the waning of memories, the consolations and pain of grief.... Death is a large subject.
     Much of what we do is an attempt to either thwart death or to ignore it. A few minutes ago, I read an article reporting that cancer deaths in Canada are down overall while some cancers are increasing. More screening is one reason. The tone of the report suggests that somehow the defeat of cancer will prevent death. But of course it won’t. The odds of dying from cancer are about 1 in 7 or 14%, but the odds of dying from any one of the myriad causes are 1 in 1, or 100%.
     Meanwhile, we plan our lives as if they will continue at least until the next scheduled event. Life must go on.
     An excellent collection, as usual. ***

Fake News (Lapham's Quarterly special issue, 2018)

Lapham’s Quarterly: A History of Fake News (2018) As far back as we have writing, there’s been fake news. I suspect there was fake news well before any was recorded in writing. There’s also been pushback. Much of ancient fake news was merely exaggeration of the sponsor’s importance. Near eastern relics show that as often as not the new regime defaced their predecessor’s fake news and replaced it with their own.  Some of has this leaked into sacred texts: Ancient Israel was not as significant politically or economically as the Old Testament suggests.
     Quite early on, fake news has been both deliberate, and a mere side effect of more important objectives, such as attracting readers and advertisers in order to increase cash flow. The Hearst chain was notorious for starting the Spanish-American War for just this purpose. Electronic media have merely magnified these tendencies, as they have magnified all communications and accelerated their effects. This collection gives us mostly insider reports on how fake news was generated, with occasional confessions of unease or shame. It’s both entertaining and appalling. Like the news itself. ****

Stamboul Train (Graham Greene, 1932)

 Graham Greene. Stamboul Train. (1932). Green called this novel an “entertainment”, and it’s certainly that. A mix of characters travel from Oostende to Stamboul on the Orient Express. Carleton Myatt’s purpose is to complete a business deal in Stamboul. The other characters all somehow cross his path. A chorus girl, a political idealist, a murderous thief, an English shop-keeper couple on holiday, and so on.
Green’s invention is prodigious, enough for several novels. The story edges close to farce here and there, but human weaknesses always jerk it back into reality. Or maybe life is a farce, and Greene adds a dash of high realism.
     There is no poetic justice here, despite Greene;s claim that it’s merely an entertainment. Greene is a ruthless observer of the failures of  human nature and the systems we’ve invented to control it. Love and betrayal, greed and generosity, political paranoia and ignorance, meanness and naivete – it’s a rich stew of humanity. Green’s deprecation of his work may been a ploy to forestall criticism. It may also have prevented recognition that it is one of those apparently second-rate books that rise to the level of art.
     I thoroughly enjoyed the book. There were two film adaptations. I think a 4- or 6-part video series might do it justice. ***

Fred Pohl's Best (The Best of Frederik Pohl, 1975)

Frederik Pohl. The Best of Frederik Pohl (1975) Pohl wrote his first SF stories while still in high school. After a few stints as editor, he withdrew, but re-emerged some years later. The range and weirdness of his invention reminds me of Philip K. Dick, but his tone is lighter, and his satire milder than Dick’s. Pohl is interested in the effects of technological and social changes. He’s also interested in projecting current trends into the future and developing them to absurdity. He’s especially annoyed by advertising, by the relentless push to produce and consume more and more. He knows the tricks of manipulation using language, and his best stories demonstrate their effectiveness rather too well.
     Like many SF writers of the time, he tends to ignore of ecology, usually because ecology would complicate the story. “The Midas Touch” for example supposes a system of over-production and hence over-consumption. As satire on the consumer society, on the unquestioning assumption that ever-increasing production is the purpose of the economy, it’s well done. But the system would have collapsed from ecological exhaustion long before it reached the absurd levels of consumption portrayed. So Pohl ignores the ecological implications of over-consumption because he wants to make another point: That we are trapped in boxes of our own making, and so we persist in solving problems that would simply disappear if we changed our assumptions.
     The motif of unsuspected invasion by hostile aliens figures in several of the tales. Some critics have suggested this is an expression of the Cold War fear of Communist subversion. But the stories work just as well, and perhaps better, read simply as warnings that the Universe is likely a very hostile place. I enjoyed (re)-reading these stories Recommended. *** to ****

Easy read (Find Me A Villain, Yorke 1983)

Margaret Yorke. Find Me A Villain (1983) Nina, blind-sided by her husband’s demand for a divorce after 20 years of what seemed like a solid marriage, accepts a house sitting job in a much too bucolic village. The complications involve the gardener, who may be a serial killer; a shell-shocked ex-Navy man and his fussing protective wife; the vicar (of course); Nina’s children (who detest their father); and so on. The blurb indicates the there is “high tension” and terror, but I found neither. In fact, it took me three tries to get far enough into the story that I wanted to see how the author disentangled the knots she had crafted. So there’s that. The style is functional, best when the author strives for ambience. The characters are barely 2.0D, even Nina, who is the narrative centre of most of the book. I’m writing this about ten days after I finished the book, and had to skim a few pages to remind myself of what it was about.
      Yorke had a successful career as a writer. If this book is typical, one can see why: It’s a mildly engaging entertainment, the kind that people used to buy to while away a train journey. The occasional waspish remarks about the Other Woman and the psychological costs of marriage suggest that Yorke was writing from experience.**

Natural Light Photography (Ansel Adams)

 Ansel Adams. Natural Light Photography (1952) Adams was one of the greatest photographers of all time. He understood the technical problems of the medium thoroughly. In his quest for photographs that reproduced what the viewer of the scene perceived and felt he manipulated exposure, development, and printing shamelessly. Nowadays, the algorithms built into our digital cameras perform calculations and judgements similar to his. The result is that we can make technically nearly flawless images. The onus is now on selection of subject and composition, which is, not at all paradoxically, a more difficult and intuitive an art than technical perfection.
     This book, #4 in a series of six on Basic Photography, is a valuable reference for anyone making photographs with film, especially if one has the filters listed by Adams. His Zone system of determining exposure is essential. Our digital cameras, which use multi-point exposure and algorithms, perform the Zone system calculations for us. His discussion of how to compensate for the different light sensitivities of different films remind us that the sensors in our digital cameras suffer from the same inconsistencies, and the algorithms can’t always compensate. As with film, we may have to wait for changes in the light, or manipulate it.
     Even for digital photography, Adams’s insistence on paying attention to the light is his most valuable contribution. It’s the light that creates the impression we want to see in the final print. Whatever technology the photographer uses, they must know and understand how their devices capture the light. The flat light from an overcast sky or open shade, the brilliant light from a clear sky or direct sun, the reflected light from nearby walls, trees, snow etc, all these affect how the final image will look. Adams knew from long experience and careful note taking how to use his “instruments” to make his pictures.
     Despite the obsolescence of many of the technical specifications, this is still an essential book. Skip the tech data, and concentrate on what Adams says about light and its effects.
     The printing technology used is basic letter press and halftone images. These cannot reproduce the subtle range of greys of the photographic prints. Even so, study of the pictures will help anyone wanting to make better images.

     Recommended. ****

Note 2026-05-12: I think it's a good idea to set the digital camera to black and white mode for a dozen or two pictures every now then. Seeing the structure of the image without the distraction and interference of colour should help one see the essence of the image.