W. J Burley. Wycliffe and the House of Fear (1995)

     W. J Burley. Wycliffe and the House of Fear (1995) An ancient and dysfunctional Catholic family’s house supplies the setting. Five years after the current scion’s first wife dies in a boating accident, the second wife appears to have committed suicide. Wycliffe, on convalescent holiday in the neighbourhood, is near enough the end of his leave that he’s assigned the crime. A typical Burley meditation on crime and criminals, moody, atmospheric, psychologically perceptive. Family history and misplaced pride causes the tangle of stupidity that triggers the crime; the perpetrator is clearly insane. I’d like to see more of Wycliffe’s marriage. Burley’s books are better in the setup than in the resolution, but are always interesting reading. **½

Eric L. Johnson The Iron Horse Comes to the Klondike (2012)

     Eric L. Johnson The Iron Horse Comes to the Klondike (2012) A labour of love, about as complete a history of the Klondike’s railways as we likely to get. It’s an expanded an updated version of Mining Railways of the Klondike (1994), including field research and new photos by friends of the author.
     Almost as soon as the gold rush brought people to Dawson City, coal mines were developed for heating and power generation. Narrow gauge railways and river boats transported the stuff. It was poor coal, but it served the purpose. It’s unclear just how much money was made and lost on these lines, but the few available figures indicate that the promoters must have made a fair coin on their commissions. There’s enough photographic evidence that one could build a credible model based on one of these lines, and a few drawings based on the extant bits and pieces rotting in the bush. Porter supplied most of the motive power.
     Much of the history is gathered from newspaper stories. The tone throughout these stories is boosterish and optimistic. The photos are well enough reproduced that one can tell that many of the older originals were I think mostly afterthoughts made when a photographer happened to be handy and had an unexposed plate or two left.
One of those wonderful books that gets written and compiled only because someone was willing to devote far too much time and energy in the project. ****

Jack Ludwig. Confusions (1965)

Jack Ludwig. Confusions (1965) Stories about universities in the 60s trigger nostalgia. Some, like this one, catch the spirit of the times so well that one forgives their self-indulgence. The narrator, a Jewish boy from deepest Brooklyn, after earning a graduate degree and teaching assistant position at Harvard, ends up at a California liberal arts college that prides itself on both scholarship and laid-back teaching. The jockeying for status within the English Department is nicely drawn. A Grand Old Man of impeccable Southern ancestry lords it over the merely educated Mid-westerners, but the narrator’s wife, a Radcliffe grad, trumps his social status. A (respectable) hippy-type turns out to have even higher social status. And so on.
     The satire is sharp, several of the characters remind me of professors I have known, and the plot, such as it is, exposes the venality of a college administration that places possible donor dollars over safety, when the narrator discovers that one of his students is schizoid with a history of violence, and will no doubt go beyond silly practical jokes to real doing real damage.
     Reading the book briefly took me back to the time when I was a grad student, not footloose and fancy free, but still in that state when attention to the serious business of committing to a career seemed something that could be put off for a little while longer. Encyclopaedia Britannica indicates that the book got mixed reviews. I’m not surprised. It’s uneven, more a series of anecdotes than a structured novel, the narrator too often is a whinger, plot points are tossed out and left behind, and so on. But all the same, the book works. It’s a satire, and satires are by definition  mash-ups. Fun to read. Not an excellent book, but a very good one. Out of print, but worth the search for a 2nd hand copy.***

Alfred Bester. Star Light, Star Bright (1978)

    Alfred Bester. Star Light, Star Bright (1978) Anthology of Bester’s best, volume 2. Bester is a clever writer. He likes to take on new challenges, in theme, genre, motif, plot, and so on. The result is usually entertaining, sometimes thought-provoking, but never moving. I didn’t reread a number of stories that I’d read before; the ones that were new to me passed the time pleasantly enough.
     The plots are what I call gimmick twists. For example, the title story is about a kid whose talent is wishing. He doesn’t realise this, of course, but the results are spectacular. His friend wants to use his telescope in the rain, so the kid wishes he had a telescope that would see through the rain and clouds. It does. This and other gadgets  attract the attention of the government, who want to use him as some kind of weapon. He wishes these and other people who bother him would just go away and leave him alone. So they end up on a road forever going away. *½ to **½

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)