Kourtney Heintz, The Six Train to Wisconsin ** 1/2

Kai is a telepath, and her husband Oliver worries that New York City is overwhelming her. All those people, all that misery; Kai even works at child protective services, giving her an extra dose of pain and helplessness. She is understandably suicidal. For the sake of her sanity, Oliver "kidnaps" her and takes her back to his hometown of Butternut, Wisconsin. Kai is angry that Oliver has pulled her away from her life's work, but eventually settles in to the slower pace of life. But of course there's drama: a secret in Oliver's past...

Ultimately, The Six Train to Wisconsin is about Oliver and Kai's relationship, and it stands or falls on how well it presents that relationship. Alas, it falls. A couple that can communicate telepathically should have a deep understanding of one another, but Oliver and especially Kai have a very immature relationship. Each character feels only one emotion at a time, repeatedly going "from hearts-to-hatred in fifteen seconds." The central emotional conflict is when Oliver kisses his old girlfriend during a difficult event and Kai responds by flirting with another guy. Both parties treat these events as existential threats to their marriage. Come on! That's teenager stuff.

Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide ***

Economics does a remarkable job of mimicking the format of a high-school textbook. Every page or two has a summarizing subtitle ("Transaction costs and institutions: the rise of New Institutional Economics"), key terms are highlighted in bold face ("the theory of comparative advantage"), and vast subject areas are dispatched in one or two paragraphs. As I read the book, I imagined the questions that would appear on the quiz.

The book is an introduction to the field of economics. The most interesting chapter summarizes the various schools and describes their strengths and weaknesses. The history of capitalism is pretty interesting too.

Chang claims that most public economic discourse is dominated by the Neoclassical school, which is not the appropriate approach in all situations and which smuggles in certain political assumptions.

Economics is a political argument. It is not –– and can never be –– a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. 

On the one hand, Chang argues that we need to choose different approaches and assumptions depending on the problem we're considering. On the other hand, he casually advocates specific positions that sound mostly Keynesian and developmentalist, certainly left-leaning.

Errol Morris, A Wilderness of Error *** 1/2

Years ago, I was involved in a murder case in Dallas that I was able to resolve. This case, often I don't know what to make of it. – Errol Morris

A Wilderness of Error revisits the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor convicted of murdering his wife and daughters in 1970. Morris has two major arguments: that MacDonald was convicted because the prosecution told a better story than the defense, and that the full set of evidence supports at least reasonable doubt about MacDonald's guilt.

I read Fatal Vision back when it was published – indeed, I'm a huge fan of the book. Fatal Vision is infamous for the way author Joe McGinniss started out supporting MacDonald but ended up portraying him as guilty. That is the strength of his book: you start out thinking there's no way MacDonald could have done it, and your doubts build slowly until the shocking denouement. McGinniss makes a convincing case, but I'm not at all surprised that it's somewhat fictional... or let's say speculative. The narrative works too well in literary terms, and MacDonald's protestations of innocence have always given me pause.

Morris makes a convincing case for reasonable doubt and the unfairness of MacDonald's trial. His analysis of the weakness of the physical evidence – the "impossible" coffee table, the holes in the pajama top, and so on – is especially compelling, because it is the physical evidence that provides the clinching arguments in Fatal Vision and ultimately doomed MacDonald.

Morris spends many, many pages on Helena Stoeckley, the woman who repeatedly confessed to being the "woman in the floppy hat." The judge ruled her testimony inadmissible, which seems prima facie prejudicial. However, the sheer number of pages dedicated to Stoeckley's confessions and retractions makes me sympathize with the judge's ruling that the "probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, ... waste of time, or needless presentation of cumulative evidence" (Rule 403).

Finally, Morris ridicules the idea that MacDonald had a psychotic break. Both versions of the story agree that MacDonald's prickly personality is a factor in people's conclusions, but MacDonald has never shown any sign of the type of personality disorder necessary to support the prosecution's version of the crime. I wish Morris had delved deeper into this aspect of the story.

The organization is a bit of a mess: Morris creates a fog of doubt rather than a reasoned argument. That's all a defense needs to do. I still wonder, though: Why was there so little evidence of four people trampling around the house on a rainy night? That's the question that started it all, the reason the prosecution never seriously investigated who the four people might be.

Tom McCarthy, Satin Island ***

From the first chapter to the last, Satin Island is filled with colorful metaphors about how connections create meaning and how we imbue things with meaning by positing connections. The narrator hopes to devise what he calls Present Tense Anthropology™, where you can understand the connections (and therefore meaning) in real-time, as you live. He wants us to understand our actions while they are happening.

The narrator's desire for real-time meaning shows his kinship with the narrator of Remainder, one of my all-time favorite books. However, Satin Island remains more abstract and academic than Remainder. The metaphors are entertaining and sometimes funny, but they aren't grounded to an actual plot. The stories "radiate with a prospect, with an overwhelming promise, of significance" -- very Remainder-ish.