Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1999) - two reviews (updated post)

     Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1999) A pleasant collection of articles on the barmaid’s brain and other subjects of interest. Ingram writes well and clearly, and never forgets that scientific investigations are always unfinished. The answers are always merely the best available, and usually raise more questions. A  potato chip book: when you finish one article, you immediately want to read another. The title essay discusses an interesting finding: that while Munich barmaids can remember dozens of orders, they do badly on visualising the level of beer in a tilted glass (they think the surface of the beer is tilted, too). The inference is that by improving one ability, they disimprove another, an inference not in fact supported by this study. The barmaids may just be in the 40 to 60% of the population that makes the same mistake.   **½  (2007)
     Update 2013: Very little of this book is out of date. The last 14 years have added to the puzzles, and clarified a few of the questions Ingram raises. E.g. it's pretty certain now that the senses are the first level of processing, and that one's view of the world, and one's Self within it, are illusions, fabricated by the brain out of the filtered data that the senses deliver.

In 2008 I read the book agian, and wrote this review. You'll note I rated the book higher this tim e. Maybe I was just feeling more mellow:
     Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1998) Ingram likes science and scientific puzzles. His knack for explaining the puzzle and its (possible) solution is similar to Stephen Gould’s, but he casts his net wider, and unlike Gould doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond Science is Fun. He also doesn’t mind having to say “Answer unknown and possibly unknowable.” The hunt for answers is as important to him as the answer itself. The book is aimed at anyone with a high school education, although interested middle school pupils will have little difficulty following the discussion (with the occasional help of a dictionary). I bought this book at the BR Library book sale in July 2007, and gave it to Cassandra after reading it. Now I’ve read it a second time at her house, and a good read it was too.
     The Barmaid of the title is the beer waitress at the Oktoberfest, who despite her experience with beer thinks that the surface of the beer is not always level when the beer is poured, but who can remember a dozen or more orders distributed over several tables. Waiters had almost as high an error rate as waitresses, and both scored well below the average person. The essay also shows how the preliminary results suggest variations on experiments. It seems that believing water can tilt in a tilted glass is not wholly an innate mistake after all, but depends on the kind of container seen or visualized when the question is put: When presented with a drinking glass, about 50% of respondents believed that water can tilt, but when presented with a neutral container (such as a Petri dish), 30% or fewer made that mistake.
     Thus, context (i.e., environmental cues) is crucial. Even the memory feats of waitresses appear to be tied to context: When one experimenter set up a miniature cocktail bar to test people’s ability to remember many facts, waitresses did exceptionally well. Ingram doesn’t report on any control milieu; I would like to know how remembering changed when it was, say, a miniature street-scape. I suspect that a waitress would score only about average on the task of recalling items such as benches, bus stops, hydrants, shop fronts, etc. However, a cop might score higher, since it’s a cop’s job to notice things on the street. Or maybe not; it’s actually his job to notice what’s out of place, and an ordinary street doesn’t have much if anything out of place. Consider the recruiting test at the beginning of Men in Black, where Will Smith shoots at the schoolgirl figure, since a schoolchild reading about quantum physics is somewhat unusual, while the monsters were run-of-the-mill Hallowe’en types. *** (2008)
 

John H. White. Early American Locomotives (1972)

     John H. White. Early American Locomotives (1972) White.a curator at the Smithsonian, has selected 147 examples of 19th century mostly American locomotives. The cuts are drawn from professional magazines of the time, and are not only precise but also beautiful renderings of these machines. There are few locomotives by non-US builders. White’s captions summarise the histories of the engines as far as is known. A book that pleases the eye as well as satisfies the railway enthusiast's thirst for technical knowledge. *** (2007)

M. H. Scargill. Modern Canadian English Usage (1974)

     M. H. Scargill. Modern Canadian English Usage (1974) Although the subtitle is Linguistic Change and Reconstruction, there’s precious little discussion of this topic. The book lists the results of a usage survey administered to some 14,000 English speaking Canadians, with nearly equal samples from each province. Why the scholars felt it necessary to use nearly the same number of respondents from every province is not explained. Statistically, it’s pointless. Anyhow, the samples are adequate to draw some conclusions about Canadian usages, the  best grounded being that vocabulary varies a good deal more than syntax. There were no attempts to test the statistical properties of the results. A cursory glance suggests that most of them are barely significant, if significant at all.
     The book is a nice example of what happens when mathematically naive people attempt statistics. Scargill and his committee chose not to survey recent immigrants or children of immigrants, which makes the results useful as a baseline for measuring changes in the last 30-odd years. But a survey of immigrants would I think have been useful as a possible indicator of the influence of immigrant usages. * (2007)

Charles Osborne. Black Coffee (1997)

 

    Charles Osborne. Black Coffee (1997) Osborne has adapted Christie’s first play as a novel, clumsily. A famous scientist is poisoned after revealing that the formula for a powerful explosive has been stolen. Poirot, whom he had summoned, enters minutes after the death. There is a marriage on the rocks, a mysterious foreigner, a suave private secretary, a bright young thing who delights in shocking her elders, an impassive butler, and of course Hastings and Inspector Japp. A couple of subplots are left unresolved. If Christie had “adapted the play as a novel”, she would have expanded on these, making for a more complex plot and puzzle, and a more depth to the characters.

    What Osborne has done is convert the stage directions into narrative. He’s careful to tell us where everybody sits, when they leave the room, when they move around, and so on. He describes their expressions and gestures as if he reporting a stage performance. But basically he can’t write, and we get no sense of character, despite these details. Christie’s strength was dialogue; her stories move swiftly because she knows how to make dialogue seem natural even as it propels the plot. This is the reason they make such entertaining movies: one can use the dialogue almost exactly as written as a first draft of the script.
     True, Christie has a tin ear for characteristic speech, for the rhythms and turns of phrase that make it personal and revealing. But she has a shrewd eye for the telling detail (it’s no accident that this is one of Poirot’s strengths as a detective). The effect is to make the story matter to us while we read it. Almost all of this is missing in this book. I guess that Osborne was afraid to expand the script. An actor can put a lot of meaning into a single word. The novelist must supply that information by other means. Osborne doesn’t do this, whether from too much respect for Christie’s script or lack of talent is hard to say. I suspect the latter.
     Osborne apparently had a minor career as an actor (he actually played in Black Coffee one summer), before making a name for himself as a critic. The blurb claims international fame for him, but that fame has not extended as far as Northern Ontario.
     Osborne wrote a biography of Christie, which fact seems to have persuaded Christie’s grandson Matthew Pritchard that Osborne could do the job. Not that the job was necessary. The script shows through the threadbare patchwork of prose, and it would be more interesting to read that. But then Pritchard would have to forgo the royalties on this book. It must have had quite a sale as a “new” book by Christie. I bought this copy at the library’s book sale for fifty cents. That’s about what it’s worth.
     Poirot’s mania for straightening things gives him the clue he needs to find the stolen formula: it has been torn up and rolled into spills for lighting the fire. Christie used this motif again. In fact, she reused the concept of this play, but I can’t recall which book. *  (2007)

Sue Grafton. E is for Evidence (1988)

     Sue Grafton. E is for Evidence (1988) Kinsey Millhone just can’t do a major case without serious bodily harm. In the first case, she comes within an inch or two of death. In this one, she is blown up twice, and escapes both times. What is it with this girl? Or is the physical punishment some kind of compensation for some subtle childhood trauma suffered by the author?
     Anyhow, Kinsey is framed for an insurance fraud, so she becomes her own client. The murderer is a paroled psychopath, who has changed his name and made a career for himself. But incest and other family failings arouse his wrath, and he sets out to destroy the family that employs him. The fraud is the first move in his game. Kinsey just happens to be a pawn. Unfortunately for him, she is as smart as he is, and luckier. She survives, he doesn’t. The $5K he deposited in her account to implicate her in the fraud stays there.
     By this time, Grafton’s series was settling into well worn grooves, which makes for competence in the plotting and narrative, but for a lessening of tension, both intellectual and psychological. OK, but not great. Still, I’ll be reading all the others in the series. Pat gave me this one, so I can now move up to I. I don’t have J. **½ (2007)

Gertrude Chandler Warner. The Boxcar Children (1942)

     Gertrude Chandler Warner. The Boxcar Children (1942) A teacher, Warner wanted to write an interesting  story for beginning readers. She succeeded. Her readers loved the independence of the children in the story. Orphans  Henry, Violet, Jessie, and Benny Alden are on the run because they don’t want to be found by their grandfather, whom they believe to be a mean man. They find a boxcar to live in, and a wounded dog for company. Henry, who is old enough to do so, goes into town to work part-time for a doctor, who eventually reunites them all with their grandfather, who is anything but mean. So they live happily ever after. Except that the readers wanted more stories about these children. Warner obliged with a string of mysteries; eighteen more books are listed here. This edition dates from1950, with well done silhouetted illustrations by Kate Deal.
     Warner’s style is simple and straightforward, as is her narrative, which she spices up with a few hints of possible dangers and events that aren’t explained until the end of the tale. She glides over a few improbabilities (less improbable then than now), and the characterisation is about as simple as can be. A good deal of the story is carried by dialogue. I’m not surprised that beginning readers enjoyed the book, and wanted more. I suspect that Warner’s skills improved, and would like to find a later book to see whether that in fact happened. *** (2007)

Ellis Peters. The Will and the Deed (1960)

    Ellis Peters. The Will and the Deed (1960) A diva dies, her presumptive heirs fly to England, but a storm brings them down on an alpine meadow in Austria. The will is read, and it’s not at all as expected. The residual heir is murdered, and the evidence points to the nephew, who is actually provably innocent. The murderer was the lawyer, who stole what he thought were crown jewels, but in fact they are paste costume jewelry.  He dies trying to save them, since he has destroyed his career by committing the theft. So there are two deaths, two near deaths, and a shattered career, and all for £100 worth of glitz. But the two youngsters that should fall in love do so, and with the money from the dead woman will be able to set up a very pleasant life.
     Peters is a competent constructor of entertainments, this time a mystery romance. A keeper only because I’m collecting her books. ** (2007)