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.

David Vinjamuri, Operator and Binder ***

Operator starts out promisingly. The instigating mystery is refreshingly modest (Did Michael Herne's ex-girlfriend kill herself?), and the story of Herne's motivations for joining the military ring true. He currently works as an intelligence analyst, and that life too sounds realistic. But it doesn't take long before we learn that Herne is the best there ever was, beating top snipers during training, learning martial arts from a secret sensei in Japan, and speaking multiple Afghan dialects flawlessly. Of course his former girlfriend had stumbled onto a vast Russian conspiracy (based in a small town in the Catskills?) involving human sex trafficking and the blackmailing of government officials. And of course Herne single-handedly bests dozens of the most dangerous criminals in the world.

As befits a sequel, Binder features a more global conspiracy and wilder action sequences. At one point, Herne escapes from the white supremacists who tortured him on a motorcycle, jumps the cycle off of a 1000-foot high bridge, lands on top of a BASE jumper's parachute, and lands in the whitewater river below. That's a small part of what he does to thwart the supremacists' plot, which involves operations in a South African nuclear power plant, several coal mines, oil refineries, and a runaway train.

The author writes action well, especially hand-to-hand combat. The over-the-top stories conform to the conventions of the genre, albeit with more product placement than usual. (Is Blackhawk! military gear a sponsor?)

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution *** 1/2

A palette cleanser following two long books. The Final Solution is a novella, a long short story really, about an 89-year-old Sherlock Holmes tracking down a stolen parrot and incidentally solving a murder.

The story is unabashedly typical of the genre and is nothing to write home about. However, Chabon's prose makes it a fun and worthwhile read. You can swallow the whole thing in the course of an afternoon.

Balashov and Rosenberg (ed.), Philosophy of Science ****

This collection of "Contemporary Readings" is a solid overview of the major issues in the philosophy of science. Nearly all of the selections are clearly written and not too technical. The readings are not the primary sources (except for Quine's Two Dogmas), but are often shorter summaries from the original authors (such as Nagel and Kuhn).

The key takeaway is that the relationship between scientific theories and the actual operation of the world is complex and controversial. Do the abstract entities such as electrons and the electro-magnetic force actually exist, or are they conceptual models? What do we mean when we say that science "explains" a phenomenon? Can we observe anything without presupposing a theory of what we're looking at? How do we know that our current understanding is (mostly) right, especially considering the long history of discarded theories?

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. (Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism")

I enjoyed reading this book for three reasons. First, I like considering the world from different perspectives, what I usually call "trying on different world views." The philosophy and history of science is littered with theories that explain the same phenomena in different ways. Second, I felt well educated because I was familiar with most of the topics and precedents covered. The philosophy of science has a kinship with the philosophy of language. Lastly, Philip Kitcher's essay "Theories, Theorists and Theoretical Change" defends a view similar to my own about how to reconcile the meaning and reference of terms, and provides a clear mechanism for handling its content-sensitivity.

Terry Hayes, I Am Pilgrim ***

Terry Hayes can write a killer set piece. I Am Pilgrim starts with an excellent description of a murder scene in a seedy New York hotel, and Part II vividly evokes the city of Jeddah as it recounts the formative event in the villain's childhood (the public beheading of his father). He also writes exciting action sequences, at both large and small scales. But you know what?

I've lost interest in stories that pit a master detective against a master criminal. In this genre, the characters invariably have nearly magical powers that make them the best in the world at their craft. The subsidiary characters stare at them in disbelief and admiration, while I share only the first reaction. Hayes' dialogue scenes also feature the ridiculous tonal shifts that are typical in the genre.

In I Am Pilgrim, not only are Pilgrim and the Saracen the greatest hero and villain respectively, but the supporting cast includes a New York cop/9-11 hero who is able to track down the "best intelligence agent there's ever been," a colorful and infallible hacker, "the best case officer of his generation," and even the "highly intelligent, personable, and modest" businessman who became the reluctant dream President of the United States. It seems like everyone does their job perfectly, after overcoming some trauma that they tell you about in detail when they first meet you in the midst of a crisis.

I Am Pilgrim is 600 pages long. That's because it contains enough story for a whole series of Pilgrim novels: a perfect murder in New York, a terrorist's coming-of-age story, several episodes from Pilgrim's spy past, a plot to release weaponized smallpox in the United States, both 9-11 and the Holocaust, a billionaire plunging to his death in Turkey, and backstories for many of the characters. Of course they all turn out to be related, and the book ends with chapter that brings together all of the characters Pilgrim has bonded with for a triumphantly sappy conclusion. But not before hinting about his nemesis in the sequel!

Drew Beisswenger, Fiddling Way Out Yonder ***

Fiddling Way Out Yonder is a sociological study of the West Virginia fiddler Melvin Wine. Melvin is an acclaimed "old-time music" fiddler, 90 years old when the book was published (in 2001). The author is a local music librarian and folklorist.

The book is a work of academic sociology with a thin veneer of narrative added to entice a more general audience. It gives a biography of Melvin and a portrait of mid-century life in rural West Virginia, but Beisswenger is compelled to explicitly put every point into proper academic context: historical population data for Braxton County, Appalachian barn styles, moonshining, and lots of references to other studies of Appalachian culture.

The saving grace was generous quotations from Melvin himself. His voice comes through loud and clear in transcripts from interviews.

I liked the descriptions of West Virginia life best. Melvin's biography, which takes up the first chapters, is much more interesting than the musical chapters, which primarily offer a detailed catalogue of features (keys, time signatures, bowing direction, and so on) without any analysis of how Melvin's style compares to other fiddlers or other styles.