Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall *** 1/2

Wolf Hall is a historical novel that takes place during the reign of Henry VIII, specifically the period during which he sought to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. I'm not usually a reader of historical fiction, but I am a fan of Hilary Mantel and Wolf Hall won the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

The main character is Thomas Cromwell, who rose from humble beginnings to become the King's most powerful  advisor. The book tells a well-known story from a new angle. Mantel is more interested in character than in plot, which is good for me but fans of historical fiction might find it a bit too slow moving. 

For the most part, Mantel's writing is beautiful without drawing attention to itself. However,there is one pervasive problem with the prose: it is often difficult to determine who the word "he" is referring to. It's a problem Mantel must be aware of, because she sometimes resorts to saying "He, Cromwell, ..."

I've now read three books by Hilary Mantel, all enjoyable and all very different: a contemporary thriller about expatriates in the Middle East (Eight Months on Ghazzah Street), a satire about a fat psychic whose spirit guide is an obnoxious drunkard (Beyond Black), and this historical character study. I don't know what to expect when I read a Mantel book, except that I will like it.

Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs ** 1/2

Moore's collection of short stories, Birds of America, made me a fan of her sardonic writing style. The first few chapters of A Gate at the Stairs shared that quality, and I enjoyed them. About 75 pages in, however, the book started to lose its way. The writing began to sound self-consciously literary, and the narrator showed too much insight for a twenty-year-old college student fresh from the farm. For example:

Contents may shift during the flight, we had been told. Would that be good or bad? And what about the discontents? Would they please shift, too? And what if oxygen deprivation in the cabin caused one to think in idle spirals and desperate verbal coils like this for the rest of one's life?

Ick. What happened to the clever, funny prose of the early pages? After a strong start, the book was a definite disappointment.

Michael Brooks, 13 Things that Don't Make Sense ** 1/2

This book describes 13 experimental results that scientists can't explain and that could therefore be the seeds for future Kuhnian paradigm shifts in science. As the epigraph from Isaac Asimov says, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!,' but 'That's funny...'".

It's a fascinating subject to me. I am a connoisseur of world views, and I'm intrigued by how world views change in the face of recalcitrant reality. Unfortunately, though, only a few of the chapters deal with persistent mysteries that pose real problems to our best theories. The others deal with results that can't be consistently repeated (cold fusion, life on Mars, signals from outer space) or with philosophical mysteries that don't challenge existing theories per se (free will, the meaning of death, the persistence of homeopathy).

The best chapters dealt with challenges to our theories of physics, because the anomalies are widely recognized and suggest that we might be missing (or misunderstanding) something fundamental. The final chapter, on homeopathy, was one of the weakest, but it did refer to some interesting research about the structure of water that I plan to follow up on.

For the record, the 13 things that don't make sense are:

1. The universe appears to contain only about 4 percent of the matter we'd expect it to based on our theories of physics.
2. The trajectory of the Pioneer spacecraft we launched in the 1970s suggests a force other than gravity is pulling on them.
3. The phase shifts in the light from distant stars suggest that some universal constants may actually vary in different parts of the universe.
4. Some experimenters have managed to create "cold fusion" reactions that appear to put out more energy than was put into them.
5. We don't know how to create life, or even define what the term means.
6. The Viking spacecraft initially found evidence of life on Mars, but was it valid evidence?
7. We once received a signal from an empty region of space that looked like one from an intelligent source.
8. A researcher in England discovered a giant virus that looks more like a bacteria.
9. We can't explain the evolutionary logic of death.
10. We can't explain the evolutionary logic of sex.
11. All scientific research suggests that we don't have free will. But we do, right?
12. We don't have a good explanation for the placebo effect.
13. Homeopathy is patently absurd, but it's still going strong after a few hundred years.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist ** 1/2

Nothing much happens in The Anthologist: a minor poet procrastinates instead of writing an introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry. But nothing much happens in many of Nicholson Baker's books, and the lack of incident allows Baker to focus on the minutiae of everyday thinking. I love some of Baker's earlier examples in this genre, especially The Mezzanine. I think The Anthologist lacks the attention to detail of Baker's earlier work.

The book does exude a love of poetry and has a few interesting critical ideas in it. It made me want to read more poetry. Also, aptly for a book about poetry, the language is often beautiful.

Michael Sandel, Justice ****

Michael Sandel is a professor at Harvard, and Justice is based on his course in political philosophy. I think it's a great introduction to the subject. He identifies three main ways of defining justice — based on equality, freedom, or values — and illustrates the principles (and their complications) using contemporary examples such as the debate over same-sex marriage, government bailout of the banks, and immigration reform. Highly recommended.

I hope to write a more detailed summary of Sandel's arguments and my reaction to them soon and post it on our website, mike-n-evelyn.com.

James Ellroy, Blood's a Rover *** 1/2

Blood's a Rover is the third and final chapter of Ellroy's "Underworld U.S.A" trilogy, following American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. These books give an alternative history of America during the 1960s and 1970s, a history in which all conspiracy theories are true and the course of our nation is determined by violent, cynical men pursuing their obsessions and perversions. They are written in Ellroy's distinctive staccato style. To give you a flavor, here's a section from a page chosen completely at random (page 142). The action takes place at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago:

The Frogman slipped Crutch a hash brownie. Their driver was an on-duty cop. The riot-zone Chicago tour boded all-time blast.

It was Mesplede's idea. He ran into Crutch in the lobby. Crutch was up for it. Bowen was in jail. Buzz was working the listening post. Observe History, sure.

The red-flag boys. The no-bra girls. The cops with stubbed cigars. The nymph chicks tossing bouquets at National Guardsman.

The cop driver swigged Old Crow. His cruiser was air-conditioned. They got the picture show devoid of night heat. 

It's jarring at first, but eventually you succumb to its rhythm.

The characters are all typical Ellroy. Every man has an event in his past that haunts him. Because of it, he pursues some cause or some woman — most likely both — obsessively. But he keeps his obsession a secret from his compatriots, as they keep their obsessions secret from him.

Personally, I prefer Ellroy's "L.A. Quartet" to his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy. Those earlier books, which included his most famous one L.A. Confidential, featured the same sorts of characters and the same general world view as the later books, and the last L.A. book, White Jazz, was where he refined his style. The "L.A. Quartet" books had more mystery to them, because the plots were more local and less concerned with incorporating real-life events. You wondered what was going to happen rather than how the story would explain the Kennedy assassination.

I liked Blood's a Rover better than the other two "Underworld U.S.A." books for the same reason: there is more personal story here than I remember in the previous two. In fact, the world-historical part of the story ends at the conclusion of Part IV, with three parts left to go.

If you are interested in James Ellroy, I recommend starting with Black Dahlia and working forward from there.

Jonathan Raban, Bad Land **** 1/2

As he did in one of my favorite travel books Passage to Juneau, Raban combines historical narrative, natural history, and personal observation in a seamless way to paint a vivid picture of a place and how it came to be the way it is. In Bad Land, the place is the plains of eastern Montana. In the early part of the 20th century, the railroads and the US government encouraged Montana homesteading, establishing towns every dozen miles or so along the railway and granting land that was essentially free. However, the romantic picture of honest toil converting the arid plains into a new Eden met with the reality of dry summers and harsh winters. Raban shows how the homesteading experience has colored the mindset of the western United States, much as the legend of the cowboy has. My only complaint is that Raban explicitly repeats his theme too many times — perhaps the chapters originally appeared as separate articles?

This book is a good companion to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. It provides a ground-level illustration of the difficulties that John Wesley Powell warned about.

Ron Currie Jr, Everything Matters! ** 1/2

Even before Junior Thibodeau is born, he knows that the world is going to come to an end when he is 36 years old, when a comet smashes into Earth. How can he deal with this knowledge? Can he find meaning in his life?

The book got off to a strong start, with an eye for quirky detail and solid character development. However, it wasn't long before wild plot developments overwhelmed the basic realism. Every carefully delineated character underwent an event that transformed him or her into a completely different, more programmatic, person. Junior's brother becomes the best baseball player in the major leagues; Junior becomes the fourth smartest person in the world, who manages to create a world-saving device and cure cancer. I was much more interested in the real family at the start of the book  than the cartoons in the later parts. I'd rather know how a regular person would deal with the awful foreknowledge of impending doom.

The reviews quoted on the cover mention Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as Currie's obvious models. That's definitely the company Currie wants to keep, but Everything Matters! is not as comic as Vonnegut nor as insightful as DFW, and the "final triumph that reconfigures the universe" is kinda lame.

Jenn Ashworth, A Kind of Intimacy *** 1/2

The inside flap tells you everything you need to know about this book. The narrator is a delusional woman who is determined to interpret whatever happens to her in a positive light, despite all evidence to the contrary. Annie is making a new start after "losing" her husband and daughter, and she knows that her new neighbor's friendliness means he is infatuated with her. No matter that he has a live-in girlfriend.

The reader's enjoyment comes from the mismatch between what is obviously going on and Annie's interpretation of it. She is a master at building an alternative narrative with herself at the center. When she hears her neighbor making love to his girlfriend, she knows it means he is getting ready to give her the bad news about leaving her for Annie.

Annie's voice is very entertaining, and frequently funny even though you know this has to end badly. The book runs a bit too long, with repetitive incidents clogging up the middle once you've started to see where the story is going.

Shusaku Endo, Silence ****

Silence tells a simple story in a powerful manner. The story takes place in Japan in the early 17th century, during a time when Christianity was banned and Christians subject to fearful persecution. A pair of Portuguese priests sneak into the country to provide solace to the underground Christian community and to discover the true fate of their spiritual mentor, who was reported to have apostatized under torture. The priests witness the cruel tactics of the Japanese authorities first hand, and it leads one of them to question how God could remain silent in the face of the Christians' suffering.

The strength of the book is the way it juxtaposes physical description of the natural world with the theological questions of Father Rodrigues. It reminded me of a Terence Malick film like The Thin Red Line. The story didn't always go where I expected it to, due to the ingenious way in which the Japanese use psychological methods rather than physical torture.

Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism ** 1/2

In this very short book, the philosopher who first got me hooked on modern philosophy (Putnam) considers the philosopher with whom I feel the closest kinship (William James). The book consists of three short speeches, which provide an overview of the reasons James remains relevant to current debates. As Putnam says, it is not a real study but rather "an advertisement for that project." I was disappointed at how cursory the discussion was. I would have had a hard time following it if I hadn't already read more detailed work from both men. Its main benefit for me was to confirm that I properly remembered the key positions of both philosophers.

Ben Marcus, Notable American Women ****

You've never read a book like this one. Do you like reading books that lack many of the crutches you usually rely on when reading — like a clear plot or the assurance that English words mean what you think they do? In its own words:

This book fails the Wixx/Byner comprehension test. This book eludes the Ludlow Plot Distribution Requirement Phase detection, which sleuths linear progression and character continuity in texts purporting to be fiction, of which only a small number actually are. By a wide margin, the book fails to meet the Coherency Requirement for Machinery Manuals as determined by the Ohio Clarity Foundation. The Reader Memory and Nostalgia Club, from Ohio, score this book a six out of a possible twenty-five points, yet this book induced 415 false memories or recollections from members of this club, who were prone to insert events from their own childhood into the plot of the book. The book required seven Simplification Batch Processes on the Language Cleaner Machine in order to render a legally binding one-hundred-word summary of its contents for the Annual Brochure of All Texts. (p 53)

Nonetheless, the book provides a unique perspective on the world and includes innumerable examples of elegant language. The narrator is a boy being raised on a farm in Ohio by a group of Silentists. Silentists are women who believe that the air turbulence created by speech is the cause of larger weather patterns and usually harms people and birds. They have invented their own "women's language" consisting solely of vowels (which are less violent than "the rough consonants and abrupt acoustical stops [of English], which inevitably result in the choppy air so prevalent whenever a man is speaking"). They have also developed techniques for suppressing emotions, which tend to promote the need for speaking and other violent movements. The ultimate goal for Silentists is to take the Promise of Stillness, vowing to stop speaking or moving completely. The narrator might be mentally handicapped, or it may be that he's just not suited to the Silentist regimen (being male as he is).

I enjoyed being constantly surprised by the ideas in the book, and by the creative use of language. I enjoyed the first half more than the second half, perhaps because I did not eat the proper diet for appreciating the later chapters:

Food plays an important role in how words enter the body, and what these words come to mean.... Nuts, when consumed in bulk, create a grammar sympathy that is nearly off the map; almost any idiom can be understood through the regulated intake of these items.... Milk, on the other hand, if properly prepared and consumed, increases sensitivity to unusual locution, dialects, and accents, while flat bread baked in hot salt for a day can aid with problems of believability. (p 72)

I also liked the moments of tenderness than shone through the experimental prose:

If I had to take my thousands of desires and their millions of horribly unquenchable offshoots and digressions and contradictions,... and from these innumerable desires choose only one that I would forever have addressed whenever and wherever I liked, ... an instant satisfaction I could summon with a button, or the clap of my hands, that desire would be to have my head handled, to have it scratched and rubbed and cradled, washed with a soft rag, wiped dry if wet, moistened if dry, kissed, kissed, kissed forever, scratched, covered with fine stuff, the most expensive velvet, rich creams, discussed in discussion groups, analyzed by long-bodied men in coats, whispered about by girls from another country, never forgotten. ... If only my head could no longer suffer a boundary with other people's hands. (p 51)

Amen, brother!

By now you know whether you are interested in reading Notable American Women or would rather that the author "give everyone concerned a needed breather from the exhausting obligation of his existence" (p 12).

William T. Vollmann, Poor People ** 1/2

I had high hopes for this non-fiction meditation on the subject of poverty. Vollmann is a writer who I've been meaning to read, and he took an intriguing approach to a subject I am interested in. In disparate parts of the world, Vollmann would meet poor people and ask them. "Why are you poor?"

The first few chapters — wherein Vollmann describes his first few encounters and outlines the issues that arise when thinking about the nature of poverty, its causes and possible cures — are thought-provoking. He quickly discovers that poor people are not the most articulate chroniclers of their situation. He deftly describes the contradictory impulses that arise for a rich person in the presence of poor people. Unfortunately, subsequent chapters are more impressionistic and less engaging, despite Vollmann's strong descriptive skills. The final few chapters regain some of the early strengths, but I remain disappointed by the book overall. I might recommend reading Part 1 on its own.

Neal Stephenson, Anatham ****

Anatham is a 900+ page science-fiction novel whose main theme is epistemology, how we know what we know. There is plenty of action — political intrigue, illegal polar immigration, love affairs, alien spacecraft — but the most pressing concern is whether our knowledge is metaphysically real or constructed in our minds. It presents the most interesting and convincing arguments for the existence of Platonic mathematical entities that I have ever read.

I also enjoyed the world that Stephenson builds on the planet of Arbre. Pure scientists live in convents and only have contact with the outside world once a year (or once a decade or once a century, depending on the order), to prevent their contamination by real-world politics. The details of the society were fascinating to me, although I could imagine others finding them tedious.

For a book so concerned with epistemology, it is ironic that its biggest flaw is that its characters jump to unwarranted conclusions that turn out to be true. It is a common plotting problem that I associate with Dean Koontz: a character learns some small fact, comes up with an outlandish explanation, and immediately starts acting as if that outlandish explanation is established fact ("the mutant child must be telekinetic!"). And it turns out to be right! A few such moments happen in Anatham, notably when our hero Fraa Erasmus and his girlfriend Suur Ala discover an orbiting object that changes direction as it passes across the sun. It must be an alien spaceship! What other explanation is possible? Well, actually, I can think of plenty that comport better with Gardan's Steelyard (to throw in some Arbre jargon).

Another flaw, also common to adventure books, is how the main character and his friends end up at the center of the world-shattering events. They are essentially teenagers, far less qualified than others for the tasks they are given. 

The story includes innumerable philosophical speeches, like an Ayn Rand novel. I imagine most people would identify this as the flaw that bothers them most. But you know, I kinda liked most of the speeches. I found them interesting enough that I could look past their minimal motivation in the story.

Despite these flaws, and despite the length, I enjoyed Anathem. I appreciated the combination of pulp action story with abstract philosophical debate.

Michael Tanner, Nietzsche ***

I followed up the Rawls book with this book about Nietzsche from Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series. Its strengths and weaknesses are a mirror image of the Rawls book. Whereas Rawls gave a solid description of the philosopher's ideas with a minimum of style, Nietzsche is a stylishly written book that doesn't really include details about the philosopher's positions. It is really more an impression of Nietzsche than an introduction to this thought. However, I did enjoy Tanner's provocative style, which fits his subject.

The first chapter talks about how "people of the most astonishingly discrepant and various views have sought to find justification for them" in Nietzsche. So perhaps it is not surprising that the impression I came away with is that Nietzsche is largely a pessimistic pragmatist. That is, he recognizes that our views (especially our moral views) have no objective foundation and that we have to choose to live our lives in a way that best comports with our desires. The biggest difference between him and his near contemporary William James is in their temperament: Nietzsche was a cranky pessimist molded under the influence of Schopenhauer, and also steeped in the emotive style of Romanticism. The fact that we have no real foundations tended to drive him to despair, which he fought against by trying to cultivate its opposite, rapture.

I am also left with the impression that I would not care for reading Nietzsche. He lacks an organized system or organized presentation of his views. On the other hand, I find Schopenhauer's unrelenting pessimism to be hilarious, so maybe I'd enjoy Nietzsche's as well.

Paul Graham, Rawls ** 1/2

This book from the "Oneworld Thinkers" series is exactly what I was looking for: a survey of John Rawls' work with just the right level of detail, sympathetic explanation, and critical commentary. Unfortunately, it is not very well written and fails to develop many of the most tantalizing ideas.

Rawls is a philosopher best known for his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, which Graham characterizes as "one of the most influential books in moral and political philosophy published within the last one hundred years."

"Rawls changed the discipline of political philosophy...by changing its topic from a parochial concern with the meaning of moral terms to the framing of a 'big' question: what constitutes a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation?" (p 6)

Rawls' theory has two aspects: a method for deriving the principles of a fair society and a claim about what principles would be derived by following that method. The essence of his method is to imagine people convening to decide on the rules their society will follow. Each person participates in the convention behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents them from knowing what position they will have in society. The veil prevents participants from rigging the rules based on their self-interest.

Rawls claims that this method would lead to a pair of basic principles: equal opportunity for all; and the "difference principle," which says that any social or economic inequalities are to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (pg 48). In other words, when equality fails (or is impossible), the rules of the society must favor the disadvantaged.

The difference principle is the obviously controversial part of the proposal. However, Rawls says it follows from a rigorous attention to the apparently uncontroversial idea of equal opportunity. For example, university graduates are socially advantaged, so you want the social good of university to be equally available to everyone. Not just technically available to everyone but actually available to everyone. Students from wealthier families make up a disproportionately large part of the student body, largely because they are better prepared. If you take equal opportunity seriously, you have to look at ways to compensate for the advantages that rich children have in preparing for university.

"When you try to pin down the concept [of equal opportunity] and establish what it requires in terms of redistribution, it becomes clear there is a continuum from a weak idea of equal access to favorable positions through a strong notion of state intervention in family life." (pg 54)

Rawls is serious about his egalitarianism. He rejects the idea that different people deserve more money or social resources because they are smarter or work harder:

"No one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting point in society. The assertion that a man deserves a superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic: for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit." (Rawls, quoted on page 57)

"Desert is tied to effort: we get something if we do something. Rawls argues that we are not responsible for our 'natural endowment' — strength, looks, intelligence and even good character — and so we cannot claim the product generated by that natural endowment. Under the difference principle one person may earn fifty units and another fifteen units, but not one unit of that thirty-five unit difference is justified by reference to desert." (p 75)

Now that is thought-provoking! Most people want success to be based on the choices a person makes and not on factors outside of their control. Rawls' radical notion illlustrates how hard it can be to tell the difference between the two.

The biggest problem I had with Graham's book is that his prose always remains abstract. He doesn't provide many concrete examples to explicate Rawls' abstract concepts. For example, Graham criticizes Rawls for a "failure to provide an adequate account of how people come to value things, such as a way of life or personal relationships." (p 88) That sounds like a valid criticism and an interesting idea, but I'm not certain I understand what he is getting at. Other important underdeveloped areas are Rawls' distinction between "rational" and "reasonable." the nature of human autonomy, the question of whether human beings are fundamentally free and equal (as opposed to a natural aristocracy based on native endowments; cf pg 58), and the relative priority of the right and the good.

Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die ****

The first book I've read from the third member of the holy trinity of detective novels (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald), purchased at BookPeople in Austin TX. It is one of Macdonald's earlier works (1951), and it reads very much like a Raymond Chandler story. His detective, Lew Archer, has a more explicit moral sense than Chandler's Marlowe, but otherwise the story has similar locales, similar plotting, and similar characters. Which is a good thing on the whole — although I did figure out the basics of the final resolution fairly early.

So, if you like Raymond Chandler you'll almost certainly like Ross Macdonald. And he wrote more novels than Hammett and Chandler combined! For my next Macdonald book, I'll choose one of his later ones from the 1970s.

Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian **** 1/2

The subtitle of this excellent book is "John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West." It tells the story of Powell's famous trip down the Colorado River and the consequences that flowed from it. Major Powell and his team learned a lot about the realities of the West, especially about "the Plateau Province" that spans Colorado and Utah, and Powell spent the rest of his life trying to get the rest of the country to recognize the realities instead of acting on naive fantasies. In particular, he demonstrated that homesteaders were doomed to failure without irrigation, no matter how hard they worked.

The first half of the book combines equal parts of adventure, geography, science, history, and politics. History and politics take over in the second half, giving an interesting new perspective on the period of westward expansion after the Civil War. I was surprised to learn how the seemingly neutral topic of topographical mapping ended up at the center of a battle over the proper role of (federal) government. The introduction by Bernard DeVoto gives a very accurate summary of the book's argument; it is possibly the best preface I've ever read.

I have only two criticisms of the book. The latter chapters lack the adventure and the interesting discoveries of the earlier chapters. It's hard to fault Stegner for that, since it's just a fact about the history and Powell's life story.     Second, Stegner often seems like a Powell apologist, unquestioningly taking the Major's side in every argument without considering the merit of the other side.

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places ****

Dark Places is a very good thriller that falls just short of literary excellence. The characters are compelling (albeit unheroic), the Midwestern setting is well painted, and the story kept me guessing until the very end. Flynn's writing is a cut above most pulp writers: I was interested enough in Libby's character that I would almost read her story without the thriller plot.

When Libby Day was seven years old, her family was murdered in their Kansas home. Her testimony helped convict her older brother of the crime. Twenty-five years later, Libby still suffers from the effects of the horrific crime. She needs money, so she agrees to re-investigate the crime — for a fee from a club that believes her brother is innocent. The story alternates between the present-day investigation and the days leading up to the murders.

I appreciated Libby's cynical motivations and the realistic stresses that her family endured before the crime. The only thing I didn't care for was the surfeit of major plot developments that all happened on the day of the murder. One of the present-day characters even mentions it:

Doesn't this all seem too weird, like we are missing something obvious? A girl tells a lie, a farm goes under, a gambler's bets are called in by a, jeez, by a Devil-worshiping bookie. All on the same day. (p 283)

It's a typical problem with this sort of book — the author needs to provide several possible motives to keep the reader guessing — but it stuck out particularly because Dark Places is otherwise so credible.

Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology *** 1/2

The expression "historical ontology" refers to the study of (abstract) objects that come into existence or go out of existence over time. Consider, for example, "child abuse." Certainly there have always been acts of violence toward children, but the idea that these acts fall into a category we call "child abuse" began around 1960 (p 69). Did child abuse exist before we started calling it that? Did we discover a category that already existed, or did we create something new? Is the concept part of "the furniture of the universe," to borrow a phrase from Richard Rorty?

In this book, Hacking explores the question of realism versus nominalism. Realism is the view that our words and concepts correspond to aspects of the real objective world; nominalism is the view that our words and concepts create the categories they name, which would not exist without our naming. Over the years I have become convinced that nominalism is correct for most of the categories that really matter to our lives, but it is definitely the counterintuitive view and I recognize the difficulties it presents in a strong form. That's why I am interested in books that explore where the truth lies between the two extremes.

Simplifying quite a bit, I'll say that Hacking is a realist with respect to the categories and concepts of natural science and a nominalist with respect to the categories and concepts of human and social sciences. The key difference between the natural sciences and social sciences is that the former has engaged more intimately with "recalcitrant experience," to borrow an expression from Quine. He suggests that we need to investigate "thick" concepts in the social sciences, in the manner of Michel Foucault (the hero of this book).

"Tired old cultural relativism in morality has been with us (it feels) forever. No jejune relativism had comparable currency among those well acquainted with a natural science. Then Kuhn came bounding in... Compare the abstract topic headings of metaphysics and ethics. We have reality, truth, fact, ... on the one hand, and right, good, justice,... on the other. In the natural sciences we have been taking a look at the material circumstances under which truth, reality, and fact are constructed from case to case (with no obligation to tell the same story in every case). This meant investigating not truth, reality, and fact, but truths, real things, and facts. In ethics, especially in English, there has been too much fixation on the abstract, one the good, the right, and the just. ... Moralists [need] to examine 'thick' concepts rather than abstract notions." (p 66 - 67)

Hacking suggests that we can avoid "jejune relativism" by recognizing that objectivity flows from our styles of reasoning. That is, the characteristics that define objectivity are constructed (if you will) from the ways we reason about things. Kant said that all experience takes place in space and time because these concepts are built into our understanding of experience; Hacking says that our concepts are objective because objectivity is built into our modes of reasoning. Or something like that.

Hacking also suggests (around page 32) that we can escape from nominalism by focusing not on how we think about categories but on how we interact with them. I am intrigued by this glimmer of an idea, because it ties together well with two other parts of my worldview: the pragmatic view of truth and with the idea of basic levels in categorization.

In passing, Hacking mentions that "language" is a historically recent term and not a natural kind. What does this mean about the search for the biological basis of language? Or about linguistics in general?

"Life, labor, and language are concepts formed... in the nineteenth century as the material of biology, economics, and linguistics. These sciences have objects that don't correspond with or map onto their predecessors of natural history, the theory of wealth, or general grammar. Those fields of inquiry, in turn, have no parallel in the Renaissance, says Foucault. Such non-mappings result not so much from new discoveries as from the coming into being of new objects of thought for which new truths and falsehoods are to be uttered." (p 78)

I am intrigued by the questions that Hacking addresses in this book and in the other book of his that I read, The Social Construction of What? The book is littered with interesting insights. I agree with him that the most interesting work in this area is detailed historical analysis of individual concepts. In fact, my main complaint is that the book does not include enough of that analysis; it talks about it instead of doing it.

Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise ****

The third book in the Aubrey-Maturin series has all the strengths and weaknesses of the first two books.

On the plus side, the books are unparalleled in their ability to conjure up a time and place (just after 1800 on a British naval vessel). In addition to O'Brian's vaunted attention to detail, the secret is how even the narrator's voice stays true to the milieu: the text never goes out of its way to explain the odd terminology or practices for a modern audience. If you miss a reference, so be it. The characters are well drawn, especially the two principals, and the action sequences are exciting. No matter how many naval engagements happen, I always learn something new about war strategy in the age of sail.

On the down side, I imagine that many readers would find the quotidian details about sailing and life aboard the ship to be dull. The long heart of this book is a comparatively uneventful trip from England to Bombay. I relished the time O'Brian took to describe the trip, just as I loved the sequence in the first book (Master and Commander) when Jack Aubrey learns about his ship and trains his crew. But less geeky readers might find it interminable. Less forgiving readers might also complain about the lack of a compelling, overarching narrative: the books have the unstructured feel of real life rather than a clear beginning or end.

The first few chapters of H.M.S. Surprise seemed comparatively rushed to me, as if O'Brian was impatient with the plot details necessary to send the ship on its way to India. Even the dramatic rescue of Stephen Maturin from a French prison felt that way.

You can be sure that I will read the next novel in the series soon!

Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea ***

In the early 1990s, Greg Mortenson got lost on his descent after an attempt on K2. The people in the small Pakistani village where he ended up took such great care of him that he promised to come back and build them a school. With luck and persistence, he was able to fulfill this promise, and he went on to build many other schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. The moral is that one person can make a significant difference.

The first half of the book tells the story of Mortenson's dawning vocation in vivid, novelistic fashion. (In the third person, surprisingly, given that Mortenson is listed as the primary author.) It is a strong story about a guileless, naive, and somewhat passive protagonist learning about the difficulties of his chosen quest. Once he has completed the first school, the book takes on a more journalistic tone. It is a less strong story that paints Mortenson as a saint who gets things done. Everyone Mortenson meets, from US Congressmembers to Taliban leaders, declares him remarkable and donates to his cause.

I think Mortenson's life provides fantastic material for a finely shaded character study. This book opts for hagiography instead.  He clearly has a magnetic personality that leads people to like him instantly. I suspect his clumsy naivete makes people want to care for him. I can't deny the success he has had, but I believe that the reasons for it are different from the reasons he believes they are.

I would be interested in a biography of Mortenson that explored his talents and faults in equal measure, and thought about how they work together to account for his successes and failures. I think there is a story along the lines of All the King's Men there. I sense some corruption and incompetence even through the positive spin. For example, after Mortenson's foundation gets a huge influx of cash, he uses it to provide a scholarship for one of his lieutenant's daughters. More generally, it seems like Mortenson uses his personal preferences to determine where money is spent, and he takes unnecessary risks to preserve his self-image.

Roberto Bolano, 2666 ** 1/2

Roberto Bolano is a very talented writer who deserves all of the critical attention he has received since The Savage Detectives was translated into English. As it says on the back cover, "With 2666, Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel...deploying encyclopediac knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it." In other words, 2666 is akin to Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, or the recently reviewed Life: A User's Guide, and as with these other masterworks, I found more to admire than to love in 2666. I often found myself slogging through its 893 pages.

The book is divided into five major sections, linked by common characters, locales, and motifs. The best, and longest, and arguably the most draining section is the fourth, which concerns a decade-long series of killings in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa. The shared theme of all five sections — and of The Savage Detectives, if I think back to it — seemed to be how people organize their lives around absences: the absent author Archimboldi, the absent wife of Amalfitano, and so on. There are also multiple artists confined to mental institutions, suggesting a message about the role of the artist.

For me, Bolano's best feature as a writer is his way with sensory metaphors. For example:

They dug up the barbecue, and a smell of meat and hot earth spread over the patio in a thin curtain of smoke that enveloped them all like the fog that drifts before a murder, and vanished mysteriously as the women carried the plates to the table, leaving clothing and skin impregnated with its aroma. (p 130)

 When the visitors returned to the surface... they were divided into two groups: those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naivete of the human race. (p 680)

Daniel L. Everett, Don't Sleep, There are Snakes ** 1/2

In 1980, Dan Everett moved with his wife and three young children to a remote village in the Amazon. They were missionaries whose intent was to learn the language of the Pirahas and translate the gospels into that language. Over the decades that he spent (on and off) with the Pirahas, he came to believe that their language belied certain central tenets of modern linguistics. He also came to lose his faith, a subject I wish he had elaborated on more.

When Dan writes about the challenges of adjusting to the jungle and the culture shock — which he does for the first 70 pages and in short bursts thereafter — the book is a riveting adventure. When he turns his attention to anthropology and linguistics, on the other hand, the book sounds surprisingly sophomoric.

I assume that Dr Everett, the Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University, knows what he is talking about. However, the anthropological descriptions sound like they come from a student paper. ("There is no official coercion in Piraha society–no police, courts, or chiefs. But it exists nonetheless. The principal forms I have observed are ostracism and spirits." [pg 111]) The linguistic analysis seems suspect to me. He claims to have discovered a language that violates proposed language universals in not just one way but in phonology, semantics, and (a complete lack of) syntax. The examples in the book don't compel the conclusions he makes from them. In some cases I think he has counterexamples: for example, he claims that the Piraha cannot talk about events that no one present witnessed (the "immediacy of experience" principle), but he also claims to have produced a translation of the Gospel of Mark and shows the Piraha talking about spirits. Everett is rightly intrigued by the differences in our cultural worldviews and the resulting differences in language. I think he has translated his lack of interest in the universal aspects of language into a belief in the non-existence of those universal aspects.


On the other hand, Everett is a trained linguist, and he has submitted his claims to independent confirmation. Perhaps the more technical literature depends less on vague principles like the "immediacy of experience."


UPDATE: Not surprisingly, other linguists are not convinced by Everett's claims. Here is the abstract from a 2009 paper by Andrew Ira Nevins, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues:

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying "inexplicable gaps", that these gaps follow from an alleged cultural principle restricting communication to "immediate experience", and that this principle has "severe" consequences for work on Universal Grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language (especially the rich material in Everett (1986; 1987b)), we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical "gaps" supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world's languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of wh-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993; 2000; 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the "immediate experience" restriction. We are left with no evidence of a causal relation between culture and grammatical structure. Pirahã grammar contributes to ongoing research into the nature of Universal Grammar, but presents no unusual challenge, much less a "severe" one. 

Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual ***

I put this novel in a category with Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, and D'Arconville's Cat: big, ambitious, experimental novels that attempt to catalog the entirety of human endeavor in a single story. They are novels that I admire but do not really enjoy.

In the case of Life: A User's Manual, the jumping off point is an apartment building in Paris. Each chapter describes the contents of one of the rooms in fastidious detail. Objects in the room — be they art works or knickknacks belonging to the occupants — lead to digressions and stories that carry us far afield in time and space. Periodically, repeated details made the chapters seem like puzzle pieces that fit together.

I was intrigued by the story of Bartlebooth, which occupied a central place in the story and seemed to be a key to the interpretation of the whole. Bartlebooth devises a life plan for himself. He spends 10 years learning to paint watercolors; for the next twenty years he travels to sea ports around the world and paints a watercolor at each one. He sends the watercolors to a friend, who makes them into 750 piece jigsaw puzzles. Bartlebooth spends the next 20 years reconstructing the puzzles, after which he has them reconstituted as watercolors and sent back to the place they were painted with intructions to dissolve the paints and return to blank paper.

I found the author's voice to be too static (even when telling shaggy dog stories) and the various catalogs to be too long. I was not engaged enough to pull the many digressions into a coherent piece of art.

Brandon R. Schrand, The Enders Hotel ***

The Enders Hotel is a memoir about growing up in the small town of Soda Springs, Idaho. Brandon's family owned the town hotel along with its cafe and bar, so he lived in the hotel. Since Soda Springs is in the middle of boom-and-bust mining country, and since Brandon's grandfather founded the local AA chapter, the hotel was a waystation for many colorful characters.

The book provides a vivid portrait of a fairly ordinary childhood in an out of the way place. There is very little narrative drive, just a string of incidents. The cast of down-on-their-luck characters (Brandon's family included) makes the story feel like it takes place during the depression or immediately post-WWII, so it was always a bit of a shock when Brandon made contemporary references like going to see the movie Gandhi or listening to Motley Crue. In fact, Brandon was born in 1972 so the story takes place mostly in the 1980s.

Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper *** 1/2

Beat the Reaper is an entertaining comic action novel, narrated by a former hit man turned medical doctor. The quoted reviews on the cover capture the tone when they compare it to a Coen brothers movie.

The best thing about the book is the narrator's voice and his numerous interesting asides about matters both medical and criminal. For example: "'iatrogenic' (physician caused) and 'nosocomial' (hospital caused) illnesses... together are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States" and "Michael drops the gun after shooting the cop in The Godfather because the kid drops the gun after shooting the cop in Battle for Algiers." He never fails to be engaging, and the story moves along unpredictably.

On the other hand, I sometimes had a hard time suspending my disbelief. A hit man goes into Witness Protection and goes to medical school? (Was there time for that?) A protected witness against the mob moves back to New York? The chapters didn't always hang together. The hit man chapters and the hospital chapters felt like separate stories glued together roughly -- and that's not even counting the trip to Auschwitz.

So, in the end, Beat the Reaper was an enjoyable page-turner peppered with fun "facts" (which the author warns us not to trust), but you shouldn't expect too much realism.

Paul Heiney, The Last Man Across the Atlantic ***

This memoir describes the journey of an amateur sailor in his fifties who enters the OSTAR Single-handed race across the Atlantic. He is a cruising sailor, in it for the test of his seamanship and mettle not to compete in the race. The book focuses far less on the sailing technique than on the mundane aspects of the arduous passage: making lunch, going to the bathroom, tracking the (lack of) progress, staving off loneliness, and fighting the urge to return to cozy home ports rather than brave the wide Atlantic. This focus is all to the book's credit, because it makes Paul seem more accessible as an everyman and makes his achievement seem more possible for anyone who feels the need to try it.

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct ****

The first several chapters of this book provide a great introduction to the concerns and major conclusions of modern linguistics. Pinker is an excellent writer, with just the right balance between intriguing examples, clear metaphors, and technical details. I definitely recommend the book to people interested in the subject.

The only major area of linguistics that I wish Pinker had included is sociolinguistics. He is a psychologist by training and is making an argument about human nature, so the lack of sociolinguistics is not surprising. However, the chapter about "The Language Mavens" offered him a perfect opportunity to address the subject. Instead, that chapter is the weakest one. It seeks to discredit prescriptive "experts" instead of discussing how prescriptive rules and standard dialects affect our language use. I didn't care for the negative tone (not present elsewhere in the book), and I was unconvinced by his specific counterexamples.

I read The Language Instinct in a Harper Modern Classics edition. I was excited to see that the bibliography of this "modern classic" includes Jack Hawkins' Explaining Language Universals — a book that includes an article by yours truly! I was hoping for a direct citation to my article, but I guess my influence on Dr Pinker was in the background.

My rating system

I rate each book on a five star scale:

***** : One of my all-time favorites.

**** : An excellent book that exceeds expectations. I recommend it.

*** : If you like books of this genre, you'll probably like this one.

** : A bit weak.

* : Hated it.

I use half stars as well. For example, if I read a standard police procedural that has one unique and interesting twist to it, I might give it three and a half stars.

If you look through my reviews, you'll find more ratings above three stars than below three stars. This is not grade inflation but rather reflects the fact that I have ways to avoid books I'm likely to dislike. If I actually read a one-star book, it's a failure of my early warning system which should kick in at the book store before I even start.

Welcome to my blog!

Back in the days when framesets were the height of web site design (and "Web site" was capitalized), I religiously posted reviews of the books I read. I stopped a while ago, so the list of "What I Am Reading Now" at http://mike-n-evelyn.com is well out of date. I plan to start posting reviews at this blog, which is a much more suitable place for them. In the spirit of a blog, I'll also post any literary-oriented musings that occur to me.

Reading is by far my most common leisure activity. I don't go anywhere without a book. I alternate between fiction and non-fiction; in a future post, I'll try to characterize my taste so that you can more easily judge how seriously to take my recommendations.