Review: The Red Car

The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The Red Car" feels kind of whimsical, very much like a Murakami novel. Helping me make that comparison is the multiple mentions of Murakami by the characters in this novel, and a character that reminds the reader of Murakami near the end of the book. By the time I got to that point, I had the feeling that the author was trying too hard -- the twists got too odd and were followed for too long. I found this interesting, and fun in a way, but I think I prefer the Murakami.

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Review: The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture

The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You learn a lot of detail of Webster’s life in this biography. Much of what you learn isn’t flattering to the dictionary scion. He comes across as a fellow who thinks he should always be the center of attention, and acts increasingly bizarrely when he feels he isn’t getting his due. He is obsessed with a series of things in his life, from his books, magazines, and newspapers, initially aimed at literature-loving colonists, later becoming news and political organs. Webster seems like the kind of person that you occasionally run into at parties, introduced by someone who quickly disappears, leaving you to figure out what you have. Personality-wise, he was kind of a loner post-revolutionary (war) Steve Jobs-type, who great thing was, in the end, language, specifically American English. He doesn’t appear to be the kind of person I personally would want as a friend.

You do learn a lot in this book about Webster’s times. The story of his Speller was quite interesting, involving burgeoning copyright laws and national publishing contracts which show that Webster could be a suave businessman on occasion. It just didn’t happen regularly, as he squanders his law career to be a publisher. With a large family, his need for money drove him, but not to the safest and most lucrative path. He was a culture warrior, 200 years ago. Interesting book of an interesting time with a not-so-likeable character.


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Review: Dick Francis's Bloodline

Dick Francis's Bloodline by Felix Francis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoy the way Dick Francis would include some details of the horse life, perhaps how a jockey spends his off day, or how an artist making horse trophies blows glass. He always mixed two or three of these kinds of deep dives together to build a plot. In this Felix Francis extension of the Francis franchise, we get detail on television race commentators. A lot of detail. I figured out how the crime would be solved based on the first scene, even before there was a crime. So this wasn’t one of the better ones in the series. Much of the book dragged with repetition. I will say that beyond the stretching of the story through repetition and the occasional plot oddity, this showed some signs of good storytelling. Some of that was seeing plot points familiar from early books in the series, but some was interesting writing. I look forward to reading more by Felix as he learns his new craft.

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Review: Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing

Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing by Martin Erwig
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A couple of years ago I read a similar book, Christian’s “Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions”. It overlapped with this book by about 40% in terms of what was covered – search algorithms being a major common topic. The difference is that Christian’s book was focused on applying algorithms to personal decisions and Erwig’s book was focused on teaching computer science terminology. Both used stories to do this – Christian uses anecdotes, where Erwig uses comparisons to movies and books. I found Christian’s book entertaining and memorable. I didn’t enjoy Erwig’s as much. The examples he used were mostly not uniquely appropriate. For instance, he uses Sherlock Holmes to explain some search algorithms, but this seemed not the best example to me. Then with recursion he uses the movie “Groundhogs Day”. This seems quite obvious. (I will say that I appreciated his listings of different movies/books that had repeating days and the different “rules of science” those replays had – I have noticed that and have written about that as well.) The book starts with an example from Hansel and Gretel of using shiny stones to find their way back home, and drilled down to how Hansel made each individual decision on how to proceed. I was surprised that the author had so few different examples illustrating the computer science and math concepts. I’d say about half of the book was very basic computer science lecture without comparison to a particular story, and half was using one of those three stories to help illustrate a concept. Personally, as someone who has taken many computer science classes, the concepts were not new to me, and the book didn’t seem that helpful for learning new concepts. The terminology was still difficult covered as completely as the author has done here. I expect this book was aimed at the textbook market for the Computer Science version of the “Physics for Poets” classes at university. It would be interesting to test its effectiveness compared to more traditional textbooks.

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Review: 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation

40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation by James Carville
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This one has some age on it, and the years haven’t treated this book well. I was greatly disappointed. I was expecting, given the title and description, that this would be a cogent book about changes in politics driven by statistical analysis. Kind of like Zogby’s “The Way We’ll Be” with better stories. Something that hints at a major, long lived review of trends that would have implications for decades. And given the author, I expected some good stories, but knew to expect some tilt to the left. This ends up being primarily a diatribe against the Bush White House. Mixed in to the ranting are some statistical forecasts based on, primarily, two data points. Kinda hard to predict with two data points – so this is no science. And most of the diatribe revolves around name calling. The author leads with name calling, and it precedes any attempt at forecast. It became obvious that this is a textbook case of “preaching to the choir”.

I did finish the book. Carville ends the book with his story of surviving the hurricane in New Orleans and his temporary move to Dallas in its aftermath. This last chapter was well reported and with a little less of the bluster of the bulk of the book. That chapter was informative, mostly as an example of the post-Katrina living conditions of displaced New Orleans residents. Overall, though, the book is not something I’d recommend.


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Review: The Dark Wind

The Dark Wind by Tony Hillerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve bounced around reading this series, and now that I’m back to an earlier book, I find that it has more of what I like. Hillerman uses Indian religion and ways, and the unique locations in reservation territory to add some mystery to this mystery. I’ve noticed in later books that he don’t seem to include as much content related to the peoples or the location. I enjoyed this earlier story, where I found the different ways of life had to be explained and understood in their context. Reading this earlier book I feel I learned something, while Hillerman’s later books were more just entertaining.

I listened to this on abridged audio. I avoid abridgments normally, but ended up with this one. Unlike many abridgments, this one seemed to flow pretty well. Good job.

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Review: Retirement Fail: The 9 Reasons People Flunk Post-Work Life and How to Ace Your Own

Retirement Fail: The 9 Reasons People Flunk Post-Work Life and How to Ace Your Own by Greg Sullivan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are many books on retirement released every year. There are many that are substantially identical, covering the basics of planning or describing issues. This is one that focuses on some of the issues that you don’t hear about as often in these books, at least not in the dozens that I’ve read. This covers things that people don’t always think about, like overspending on second houses, dealing with divorce, and getting the correct insurance, trusts, legal coverage, and advisors. The author has a confident and at times humorous voice, and I enjoyed reading this. Given I am well read on the topic, I didn’t find anything entirely new to me, but I did appreciate hearing a different advisor, with different anecdotes, pointing out possible pitfalls. This will help me avoid those problems in the future.

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