W. R. Maples and M. Browning, M. Dead Men do Tell Tales (1994)

     W. R. Maples and M. Browning, M. Dead Men do Tell Tales (1994) A forensic anthropologist’s memoirs. Maples doesn’t acknowledge Browning’s role in the writing, so it’s not clear how they collaborated. Maples begins with a summary of his life, and ends with a plea for more resources for forensic anthropology. In between he tells tales of his more interesting or horrific cases in more or less chronological order. While I believe his claim that he finds it emotionally easy to look at remains, it’s clear from his editorial comments that he can well imagine the agony of the victims whose final moments he can read in their bones.
     He has no pity for murderers (at one point he calls reference to an abused childhood “the latest excuse”). He’s a “Christian”, and like most fundamentalists believes in capital punishment. He also as a justifiable pride in his professional skills, and admires the men who taught him his craft. He helped identify Pizarro’s remains, and the bones of the Tsar’s family excavated from a bog near Ekaterinburg. An ongoing project is the identification of American soldiers’ remains recovered from Vietnam and other places, a task that he says will come to an end as identification of the pitifully small collections of remains becomes impossible. An interesting read, and must reading for any current crime writer, I think. He mentions that licking a suspected bone fragment will differentiate it from rock, something that Peter has also told me. I will be sending this book to him. *** (2003)

Ellis Peters. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. (1965)

   Ellis Peters. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. (1965) Reprinted in 1988, this is clearly an early work by Peters, who is better known these days for her Brother Cadfael stories. This book is more of a romance with a mystery element than a true police procedural, which the superscription “Detective Inspector Felse investigates” leads one to expect. An eighteenth century tomb is opened, and two bodies are found in it, while the expected C18 corpse is missing. So there are three mysteries: who killed the newest body, who is the other dead man, and where is the missing squire? All three are satisfactorily resolved, and along the way Peters provides us with family secrets revealed, a couple of love stories, miscellaneous treasure, and so on. The whole thing is fun, Peters is a very inventive writer, and her characters are well drawn, while her love stories tend to towards the sentimental. In her Cadfael mysteries she also indulges her taste for sentimental romantic love, but her focus on the detection is better, and her incidental background and back stories are better controlled. She has the knack of creating a believable fictional world, in other words, which makes this book worth reading. **-½ (2003)

Bill Hayes. Steam Trains of the World (1981)

     Bill Hayes. Steam Trains of the World (1981) The title’s a misnomer, since most of the book deals with England. True, English engineers pioneered the railways, and railway practice around the world bears the signs of English dominance in the early development of rail. But a book with “world” in it title should have more than half of its pages devoted to railways outside of the British Isles. I read the captions, and the few paragraphs of text. The book has the usual selection of old pictures, and the captions display a reasonably thorough and accurate knowledge, especially of British railways. But a few silly mistakes about US railways cast doubt about the reliability of the information about other ones. Still, it’s a nice book, and some of the photographs are spectacular. A good basic resource for the middle grades, so long as the student doesn’t pay too much attention to the “interesting” trivia, where the mistakes show up. ** (2003)

Steven Pinker. Words and Rules (1999)

     Steven Pinker. Words and Rules (1999) Pinker explain and supports his thesis, which is that language is structured in two ways: it consists of words, and there are rules that govern their structure and combination. His evidence consists of experiments that show people perform differently in various language tasks depending on whether the words are regular or irregular in inflection. Work with people who speak uninflected languages show similar differences performance, but related to syntax (eg, the insertion of syntactic markers).
     He makes his case, but since he writes for the non-specialist, the book is very light on actual data. I would like to see more tables, even statistical graphs. Nevertheless, the book is important, since it provides hard data supporting the common and intuitive conviction that language does indeed consist of parts, and that grammar is the rules of how these parts are put together to make meaningful utterances. Along the way, it also provides data in support of the hypothesis that language is a separate system, and not merely a side effect of humans’ general learning ability (or “intelligence”). The Chomskyan Thesis gets more and more support as time goes on. The book also provides support for the conviction that behaviouristic explanations for language learning and behaviour are incomplete. If responses could in fact be shaped without pre-wired internal processing, then damage to the brain would not impair language skills as it in fact does, nor would we find that specific language deficits run in families (and if we construct a family tree, the distribution of afflicted family members would not be the kind we associate with dominant genes or gene-clusters). That is, language behaviours are shaped with insufficient stimuli. In other words, language behaviours pre-exist in generalised form, and the environment gives them their specific shape. **-½ (2003)

Model Railroad Planning 2003

     Model Railroad Planning 2003 (Kalmbach Publishing) The theme this year was book-case layouts, micro-layouts, if you will. As always, Iain Rice leads off with a lovely and ingenious design. He devises a layout consisting of a box with hinged ends that fold up and over. This doubles the available length to six feet, and within that he does his usual magic with a small station, yard, and cluster of industries. His designs work well not so much because of their structure (he uses simple and oft-used track arrangements), but in his ability to see the whole layout, and sketch it so that we see it too. His designs have personality and atmosphere. His work is worth study because he designs complete layouts, not mere track plans. The other contributions to the theme are also very good, but lack the total concept that Rice provides.
     The other articles range from a story of a mushroom plan that squishes 240' of mainline into a garage; a large but very conventional point to point layout based on the L≠ an example of light-box layout design based on a Parry Sound area lumber line; a weird seven-layer N scale layout that encircles a bay-windowed dining room (whose owners use it two or three times a year for dining); a long narrow oval based on Kentucky coal haulers; and the usual little bits and pieces.
     This issue of Model Railroad Planning and Great Model Railroads 2003 show that there are only a few basic track plans. It’s not the track plan that makes a layout great, it’s a clear concept based both on prototype practice and the builder’s preferences. The oddities (such as the round and round layout in a dining room) merely underline this. And the attempts to extend mainlines (and so increase operation) by building multi-deck layouts, have at best limited success. It also helps to be somewhat obsessive. ** to *** (2003)

Witold Rybczynski. One Good Turn (2000)

     Witold Rybczynski. One Good Turn (2000) An extended essay on the origins of the screw driver and the screw. This is the only Western device not also invented independently elsewhere in the world. Rybczynski writes gracefully, and lets the discussion flow and ramble in the same way his researches did. The result is a pleasant and informative read, which among other things reminds us that the many of the most significant features of our civilisation are ignored because they are ubiquitous. The screw and screw driver have made manufacture of all kinds possible; and the screw-making machine was one of the earliest examples of industrialisation, which is marked not so much by the proliferation of power driven machinery as by the transfer of control of the work piece from the human hand to the machine. Skills come to inhere in the machine, not in the worker, a fact that has had huge consequences socially as well as economically. But Rybczynski does not explore these implications of his little book. He contents himself with tracing the development of a most useful device, and some related ones. He leaves the rumination upon consequences to the reader. *** (2003)

John Mortimer. Rumpole on Trial (1992)

     John Mortimer. Rumpole on Trial (1992) Seven stories, all beautifully plotted, all starring Rumpole as narrator and hero. I like these stories, they feed my cynicism while entertaining me with witty writing, and scads of poetic justice, the only kind we are ever likely to find, as the justice system is neither a system nor concerned with justice.

     The title story ends the collection. Rumpole, suffering from toothache, says a few things to the judge that he had better not say, at least not for the record. Claude Erskine-Brown, prosecuting, overhears Rumpole’s apparent interview with his witness, who has not yet finished his testimony. Claude lodges a complaint, hence the trial before the Benchers. Mizz Liz Probert, junior defending counsel, winkles out the crucial fact that Rumpole was talking to his dentist, a fact Claude did not know since he hadn’t actually seen Rumpole speaking, merely overheard him. Thus, Rumpole’s plans to be retired from the bar come to nothing, and he must continue to seek briefs and interesting murders as he has done all his life. **** (2003)