An Unkindness of Ravens (Rendell, 1985)

Ruth Rendell An Unkindness of Ravens (1985) Joy Williams, neighbour and acquaintance of Dora Wexford, tells her that “Rod is missing”. At first, it looks like Rodney Williams has done a bunk. He’s a sales manager for a paint company, and shortly after his disappearance a letter of resignation is sent to his boss. But then his car turns up abandoned and partly cannibalised.

The investigation is complicated by a group of militant feminists who believe in sexual apartheid. Mike and Jenny Burden are expecting their first child, which causes stresses that Mike doesn’t know how to handle. The Williamses are a dysfunctional family who keep secrets and bend facts. It’s one of Wexford’s most frustrating cases, taking several months to solve. But it’s one of Rendell’s better Wexford novels, with a nice repetition of a paint colour motif, and a well done placement of red herrings. Recommended. ****

Getting Away With Murder (Engel, 1995)

 Howard Engel. Getting Away With Murder (1995) Abram Wise, Grantham’s premier (and never charged) gangster summons Cooperman and engages him to discover who wants him dead. Cooperman has doubts, but Wise was right: he turns up dead a few days later. Cooperman’s failure to protect him doesn’t stop him from trying to find out whodunit. With a little help from his Grantham cop friends, he solves the case (of course). The roots of the crime lie far in the past. The solution explains why Wise has been untouchable.

Engel’s talent is for misdirection, amusing side-trips, and multiplication of characters and subplots. Cooperman is a likable private eye, with a realistic understanding of the perils he bumbles into. Engel has written a first class entertainment. ***

A Kidnapping, but by Whom? (The Puzzled Heart by Amanda Cross, 1999)

 Amanda Cross. The Puzzled Heart. (1997) Kate’s husband Reed is kidnapped. The kidnappers want Kate to publish a renunciation of feminism, “or else.” Thus begins a novel that’s merely interesting until Reed is liberated about halfway through. His minders are three female undergrads who tried to seduce him, in order to get salacious photos which would further embarrass Kate. The girls have no idea who is behind the prank.

So now the puzzle is, Who stage-managed the show, and why? An acquaintance suggests that it’s someone whom Kate somehow offended many years ago. It’s too personal to be merely a prank by religionist agitators for family values. At this point, I began to want to know more about Kate and her background, always a good sign. Kate and Reed end up with a St Bernard puppy, as was utterly predictable from the first entrance of the fluffball.

The books ends better than it began, but it’s not Cross’s best work. **½

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. ***