Books finished in August:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004) by Bill Bryson. Great book. Popular science history from the Big Bang to the present. Recommended.

Odalisque: The Baroque Cycle #3 (The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver) (2006) by Neal Stephenson. Final part of the 17th century historical novel Quicksilver. We initially get back to Daniel Waterhouse, the scientist from the first part (which is also named “Quicksilver”), now becoming a member of the English court. Eliza has financial and other success in the French court. Much high politics involving England, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The catholic king James II is finally deposed in the Glorious Revolution with the help of William of Orange. Entertaining, and it is always good to learn some science and history.

Family Life: A Novel (2014) by Akhil Sharma. Ajay moves with his parents and older brother from India to the land of opportunities US. The accident in which the talented older brother becomes brain damaged changes current and future life of the family. Hardship and lost dreams. OK.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in July:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (The New Cold War History) (2007) by Vladislav M. Zubok.

Zukor is professor of international relations at LSE. I enjoyed learning some more about the Soviet Union and Russia, although I guess much, though not all, of the material is well known for people who are knowledgeable about the subject. Zubok writes about the general secretaries of the post WWII period, and claims that the Soviet leaders were often less scheming and more influenced by both ideology and domestic concerns than Western observers often assumed. The first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, said in 1949 that the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” I would not bet on the incoming secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg making similar remarks.

I found the last part, about the Gorbachev period, most interesting because I found it easier to relate to this newer material. Zubok writes sees Gorbachev as inconsistent, without a plan and no big statesman, but that he was nevertheless important. He writes of Gorbachev that: “His first priority […] was the construction of a global world order on the basis of cooperation and nonviolence. This places Gorbachev, at least in his image of himself, in the ranks of such figures of the twentieth century as Woodrow Wilson, Mahatma Gandhi, and other prophets of universal principles (p. 315).” The way these somewhat idiosyncratic beliefs influenced the general secretary made him have profound historical importance.

Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle No. 1) (2006) by Neal Stephenson. We follow the fictional character Daniel Waterhouse, a close spectator of the scientific revolution taking place in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and the Enlightenment in general. Daniel is a friend and aide of Newton, a member of the Royal Society, and encounters several scientifically significant characters, like Leibniz, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and John Wilkins. This first book of the trilogy Quicksilver ends when Daniel seems to arrive from the US back to England, to which is summoned by Princess Caroline (of Ansbach) to help repair relations between the two great men Newton and Leibniz. Enjoyable.

King of the Vagabonds: The Baroque Cycle #2 (2006) by Neal Stephenson. Second part of the first (long) novel of Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle”. Centered on vagabond and adventurer Jack Shaftoe. One must love this fellow who when he was a kid earned money by hanging on the legs of people sent to the gallows in order to hasten their death, and later tried the equally morbid profession of test-living in pest-infested houses, but the story was far from as entertaining all the time, and I was happy when I reached the end. I look forward to when the arcs from the two first parts are brought tohether in the third instalment “Odalisque”.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in June:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Imperial Life in The Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (2006) by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Heavy indictment of the American civilian administration in Iraq during the occupation 2003-04. The amount of groupthink, suppression of dissent and intentional conformity pressure present that Chandrasekaran details is almost hard to believe. Republican party connections and a right-thinking attitude were the most important qualifications for employees to have. Of course the situation involved many genuinely hard decisions that did not have one “right” answer, but the administration did not seem to have had the humility to admit this. Chandrasekaran is a bit quick to dismiss the efforts at economic reforms as misguided-these had to involve hard trade-offs one way or the other, but it is clear also they were approached haphazardly: A German working on the privatization of state-owned East-German entities in the German unification says they had 8000 people working on it; the privatization in much more chaotic Iraq was managed by three people. Recommended.

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) (1995) by Neal Stephenson. Largely entertaining, but I completely lost the thread among all the subplots. The most interesting theme for me was how artificial intelligence could help to educate kids by giving them appropriate challenges and lessons.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2005) by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Impressive work about Stalin, who at all times was some combination of cynical, ingenious, paranoid, brutal and mad. Purges work some of the time, but give personnel challenges. I should read this again to get more of the history.

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (2014) by Nikil Saval. A history of the office and office jobs, from nineteenth century clerks, to todays “knowledge workers”, going through different management fads, worker aspirations and status, design ideas, office frustrations.

A Deepness in the Sky (2000) by Vernor Vinge. A great book. To begin with, it has a fantastic plot in which two different human cultures, the largely sympathetic traders Qeng Ho and the at least governmentwise unsympathetic authoritarian Emergents, are on their way to a planet with newly discovered alien life. The inhabitants of the planet have the forms of spiders, but are in other aspects very much like humans on Earth in the 20th century, when atomic energy, space flight, video imaging and other technologies were on the verge of being invented. This provides the ground for topics like governance, research and the benefits of public knowledge, drugs, slavery, free markets, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, all amidst a curious mix of new technology like localizers, focus, and mindscrub and the more known ones emerging among the spiders. Recommended.

Rainbows End (2007) by Vernor Vinge. Near-future novel set in 2025. Augmented reality – implemented by smart clothing and contact lenses – has become ubiquitous, but is also a tool for controlling others. Noah Smith sold this book as being about future labor markets where seniority rules do not apply and older people must go back to high school, but to me it was mostly a confusing mix of conspiracies, literature nostalgia and family affairs. It did not catch me.

Permutation City (1995) by Greg Egan. Mind-boggling novel about personal identity and artificial life and evolution. Mind uploading has become possible, but being such a “copy” is not a fulfilling existence for most. Part of the story is about a scientist who designs a program within which lifeforms could be capable of evolving. In what must be a reference to Asimov’s I, robot, the evolved creatures do not accept the hypothesis of having been designed. Complex and difficult to follow at times, but recommended nonetheless.

The Gold-Bug (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe. Short story. A man decodes a cryptographed message. According to Wikipedia, Poe played a role in popularizing cryptography.

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
(1999) by James Gleick. About how everything goes faster and faster. I found the book disappointing. Some people’s obsession with having accurate watches is different from being in a hurry. Gleick criticizes value of time calculations, but what is the alternative when evaluating the costs of seatbelts, road safety, etc? He validly criticizes a confusion between saving time and doing more on the part of other authors. Even though the benefits of the acceleration is mentioned at times, they should have figured more prominently. E.g. many of us wants to do more.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in May:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade (2013) by Adam Minter. A fascinating account of the globalized trade in junk. Illustrates how trade connects parts of the world with different specializations. Repeatedly comes back to the fact that the trash trade has an undeservedly bad reputation: Minter several times acknowledges that there are problems with pollution and lack of labor regulations many places, but emphasizes that the trade allows materials to be used again rather than be used as landfills. If the trade in junk was not there, we would see a lot more environmentally harmful mining to extract these materials, that is something to think about for greens denouncing the garbage trade. Recommended.

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014) by Nicholas Wade. An interesting book. Wade argues that genetic factors are seriously undervalued and indeed repressed as an explanation for human societal diversity. He claims that different social tendencies at the race level have evolved fairly recently and explain much of today’s economic world. His view is a subtle one – these tendencies are not god-given, but have evolved in response different societies’ needs (-“human evolution has been recent, copious and regional”). However, I think he should have gone more deeply into the point that as in the past, whether traits are good or bad depends on the context, both today and in the future. There was an interesting discussion about the book on Andrew Gelman’s blog.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2010) by Dan Ariely. Ok. Often lacking is a discussion of how various seemingly irrational behaviors may not be so dumb in a larger context, but the book is fine enough, good popularization of many findings.

Red April (Vintage International) (2006) by Santiago Roncagliolo. Set in Perú in 2000. Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar investigates murders purportedly carried out by the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso. Meets and creates several difficulties. The conflict and violence in the novel are modelled on the real world. Despite this, the book was not really my style.

The Atrocity Archives (A Laundry Files Novel) (2007) by Charles Stross. Occult IT expert Bob Howard starts his journeys in the British intelligence organization “the Laundry”. Charlie Stross’ blog is here.

The Jennifer Morgue (A Laundry Files Novel) (2009) by Charles Stross. Second book about Bob Howard working in intelligence organization the Laundry. This time he outlandishly finds himself in a literal James Bond plot, the idea behing which is a little difficult to follow at times.

How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (2010) by Paul Bloom. “[…] people naturally assume that things in the world – including other people – have invisible essences that make them what they are. Experimental psychologists have argued that this essentialist perspective underlies our understanding of the physical and social worlds, and developmental and cross-cultural psychologists have propposed that it is instinctive and universal. We are natural-born essentialists. (p xii)” Evolution moulded us this way, and our essentialism determines much of how we experience pleasure from food (how old we believe a wine to be), sex, art (the real painting, not a fake); even if many pleasures evolved as by-products. Maybe, but much essentialism still seem quite silly. It was interesting to learn about an experiment by McClure et. al (2004) which showed that difference areas in the brain lighted up in fMRI scans when people knew as opposed to did not know whether they drank Coke or Pepsi.

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) by Joseph Conrad. Disappointing. About anarchist terrorists in London around the end of the 19th century, but one hears little concrete of either anarchism or terrorism, only about the not too interesting characters. One of the characters is supposed to have been an inspiration for the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski.

Enigma (1996) by Robert Harris. Picked up this novel set in the codebreaking center Bletchley Park during world war II as a follow-up to reading Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I learnt less than what I had hoped about cryptography. And I do not find historical fiction in which the protagonists contribute major efforts to historical episodes that interesting. Not recommended.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. We follow two groups of people, one that is attempting to conceal the fact that the Allied powers have broken the German code system Enigma during World War II, and some of their relatives who try to launch a digital currency in the 1990’s. Cryptography plays important roles in both storylines. In contrast to the books of Ramez Naam, which I recently read, the lack of threats of torture is conspicuous and made the plot seem less realistic. The book is good enough, but one should note that it is so long that one can read several other books in the time that it takes to read it.

Ratings and old books are in the library.