Pun Salad

Another (number 11) in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. And, although I've liked all the ones I've read, this one struck me as clearly above average.

A brief opening chapter describes the bad guys disposing of a troublemaker by helicoptering him—still alive—out to the Mojave and dropping him from 3,000 feet. Ouch! Those bastards...

Days later, Reacher is nonplussed by the anonymous deposit of $1030 into his bank account. He recognizes this as a code sent by an ex-Army colleague, Frances Neagley, asking him to get in touch and provide assistance. (MPs use 10-30 as a "Request assistance" code, but I see a few that might have been more appropriate.)

It turns out that, like Neagley, the victim, Calvin Franz, used to be part of Reacher's investigative unit. It hardly needs be said that Reacher and Neagley take Franz's death personally, and begin to make plans to find the perpetrators and extract extralegal vengeance.

Neagley and Reacher attempt to reach out to the remaining members of the team. But they are unresponsive. Could they also be the victims of foul play? And who is in the cars following them around?

Eventually it all gets sorted out, but, in these books, the journey is the reward. Albeit a journey filled with violence, betrayal, gunplay, etc. Reacher is a stellar investigator, and it's a joy to watch him peel away the layers of the onion to reveal the nefarious plot that the evildoers are attempting to bring to fruition.

I got this book, by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus, on Interlibrary Loan from Boston College, due to many, many plugs from the Blogfather. And he's right, it's quite good.

Their thesis: America's best days could be ahead of us, if we (a) embrace the best bits of our Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage and (b) jettison the increasingly creaky and unsustainable misfeatures of overly-centralized government and other sclerotic institutions.

The authors jam a lot of history into a small number of pages to make their argument. And I'm going to simplify even further. "America 1.0" was the original US operating system, with a small Federal government, westward expansion, rural life, and a strong farm economy. "America 2.0" was the transition, starting around the Civil War, into a more centralized, bureaucratic, collectivist, paternalistic government, urbanization, industrialization, etc.

Our transition to America 3.0 [the authors claim] is in progress, and will undo many of the 2.0 features: decentralization, a return to individualism and voluntarism, strengthening of state and local government at the expense of the Federal.

This won't be without pain: most notably, what the authors term the "Big Haircut"—essentially bankruptcy proceedings—as Federal expenditures are brought into line with revenue, bondholders and pensioners get less than their "entitlements", and many of the functions run from D.C. are spun off to the states, localities, and individuals. The megacorporation would also become a (more) endangered species, as technology and innovation would give the advantage to more nimble and flexible entrepreneurs.

The central government still runs foreign policy and national defense, but with a more realistic goal: "maintaining the freedom of the global commons of air, sea and space." (The authors have little patience with nation-building adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan.)

The book seems a little repetitive in places, and can occasionally get bogged down in less-than-fascinating detail. (Defense procurement reform. Yes, I'm for it, can we move on?) But overall very worth reading.

I don't know if they're right, however. I hope they are. It sounds plausible. But as Neils Bohr said: predictions are difficult, especially about the future.

Amazon kindly informs me that I bought this book on September 22, 2004, over nine years ago. That's how far behind I can get on my reading. (And I'm pretty sure there are older books further down the pile.)

Fortunately, the book's arguments are timeless. That's what I keep telling myself anyway

Richard Epstein has been my nerdy hero especially since then-Senator Joe Biden held up his book Takings during the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas as an example of what no decent human being, let alone a prospective Supreme Court Justice, could subscribe to. Epstein's thoughtcrime in that book was to object to government's unlimited eminent domain power.

Epstein didn't, mind you, object to eminent domain totally. In fact, he held that some sort of eminent domain power was necessary for the proper functioning of government. But he argued that many government activities should be regarded as "takings" of private property, and therefore meet the requirements of the Fifth Amendment: that they be for "public use", and that there must be "just compensation." And to Biden, the notion that the state could not do whatever struck its fancy in the economic sphere was complete heresy.

Since then, Epstein has written a series of books defending "classical liberalism", (he has a new one coming out next month, I see). As befits a University of Chicago Law Professor, his arguments tend to discuss things from a legal perspective, as opposed to a philosophical or economic one. He contends that the law (properly understood) contains features of an "emergent order", where centuries of messy practice and evolution have assembled into a coherent working system. Like the parallel economic system, what results isn't flawless. It's just far superior than what could have resulted from the top-down design fantasies of utopians.

In this book, Epstein first lays out his views of the classical liberal vision: strong respect for individual autonomy and responsibility, and private property rights. The state's role is to provide physical and legal infrastructure (backed up by, yes, eminent domain when called for) and protection of the citizenry against aggression and monopoly. This is a somewhat more expansive role for the state than envisioned by libertarians that lean toward anarchy, but Epstein's arguments are strong.

In the remainder of the book, Epstein lays out his rebuttals to a various modern challenges to classical liberalism: attacks on its moral foundations and its assumptions about human nature. And, as far as I can tell, he does a fine job there too.

Because I have to be honest: the book is very heavy intellectual lifting. Epstein is a vigorous participant in high-level intellectual debates that have been going on for decades, some of them centuries. This book presumes an everyday familiarity with the topics that many more casual readers (specifically: me) lack. Not saying I couldn't get up to speed by reading me some Amartya Sen, Joseph Raz, etc. And then pursuing a law degree. And then rereading relevant sections of this book. But that's not likely to happen.

Arguably, Epstein could have written more accessibly. Less legal-brief prose, more like Jonah Goldberg or Kevin G. Williamson. He's no Milton Friedman either.

Never mind that, though. Epstein's still one of my heroes, even if I can't understand him as well as I would like.

When a House stenographer was recently yanked out of the chamber for ranting about Freemasons, you could have figured out what she was talking about by a quick check of the index of this book.

It's by Jesse Walker, and it is an extremely entertaining history of popular American conspiracy theories. Which means it's a pretty good history of America generally. It takes off from Richard Hofstadter's 1964 famous article, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", where it was argued that "angry minds" at the extreme fringes were wont to worry about various schemes being carried out behind the scenes, hidden from the general populace. Wake up, sheeple!

Except (as Jesse shows) in America, conspiracies aren't exactly fringe material at all; people from left, right, and center buy them, and it's been going on ever since colonial times.

President Obama, it should be remembered, darkly hinted about the "them" trying to "hijack" his agenda: "The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their elections, and you can’t stand by and let the special interests drown out the voices of the American people.” Continuing: It could be the oil industry, it could be the insurance industry, it could even be foreign-owned corporations. You don’t know because they don’t have to disclose. Now that’s not just a threat to Democrats, that’s a threat to our democracy.” Eek!

Now (it should be said) sometimes conspiracy theories aren't always bunk. (Although when Obama espouses them, it's a pretty good bet that they're cynically-constructed demagoguery for his low-information followers.) For example, there's the one where a small band of conspirators plotted to overthrow the established form of American government by hijacking a reform effort, replacing it with a totally new and more centralized scheme, and inventing a rule whereby the new system could be enacted under a relaxed standard.

Oh, wait: that's pretty much how the US Constitution happened.

Walker has a good taxonomy of paranoia: there are Enemies Outside, plotting outside the gates; Enemies Within, where you can't tell your innocent neighbors from the evil plotters; Enemies Above, where the elites at the top scheme against you; and Enemies Below, where the undertrodden are looking to take over. Finally, there's the "Benevolent Conspiracy", a "secret force working behind the scenes to improve people's lives." You know, like Google.

As I said: very entertaining, and you can learn stuff.

I saw the movie based on this book three years back, and I (now) can attest it was a remarkably faithful adaptation.

The book is set in the 1950s. Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Marshal, off with his new partner, Chuck Aule, to Shutter Island, a (fictional) Boston Harbor Island. Shutter houses a prison/hospital for the criminally insane, and one patient, Rachel Soldano, has gone missing. Out of a secure facility, without anyone noticing. How did she do that?

But things are not what they seem. For one thing, Teddy is a widower, his wife having died in a fire set by one Andrew Laeddis. Andrew is also a prisoner/inmate at Shutter Island, and Teddy would like to kill him, in order to resolve his own inner mental turmoil. But Laeddis is as hard to find as Soldano. Also, there's a very bad hurricane bearing down.

Are the inmates actually running the asylum? It seems that might be the case. Shutter is filled with creepiness, danger, colorful insanity, and amateur cryptography. It all is based on some very vile and shocking behavior.

Dennis Lehane is a fine writer; I got hooked on his Kenzie/Gennaro private eye series years back. Shutter Island might be a tad overwritten, but is a compelling page-turner. I don't know if you should take the effort to read it if you've seen the movie, though.

I used to live in the Washington DC area. Although I was a poor graduate student at the time, there was a great source of cheap entertainment back then: the American Film Institute Theater, nestled in a corner of the Kennedy Center. It was a great way for a wannabe film buff to see definitive versions of old movies on the big screen. And it was there that I saw The Searchers, one of the best Westerns (some say the best) ever.

It was kinda-sorta based on a true story: the abduction by Comanches of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker from a Texas settlement in 1836, where most of the rest of her family was killed. Her uncle James spent fruitless years trying to find her. But Cynthia Ann became one of the wives of a Comanche chief, and lived with the tribe until 1860, when she and her infant daughter Prairie Flower were "rescued" in another massacre, this one by Texas Rangers, perpetrated on mostly women and children.

Glenn Frankel does something kind of neat in this book: exploring not only the true story of Cynthia Ann, but also the entire sweep of subsequent events, up to the present day. He is a meticulous researcher. The original story is far too grim and bloodsoaked to make a popular movie. Admirable characters were thin on the ground of mid-19th century Texas. (One decent guy appears, only to be shot in the back later that same paragraph.)

Cynthia Ann died only a few years after returning to the white world, probably spurred by the illness and death of Prarie Flower. All indications were that she was miserable the entire time.

But her older son, Quanah Parker, went on to become a Comanche chief himself. Although he probably killed his share of white people as a youngster, he eventually grew to become an advocate of peace. Although this was probably because he could see any other path was hopeless. He grew to (relative) fame and fortune, entertaining Teddy Roosevelt at his home.

Cynthia Ann's story was heavily mutated/adapted into the novel The Searchers, by Alan LeMay. And that book was (after much more tinkering) used as the source for the movie by the (um) colorful director John Ford, starring John Wayne as the uncle in search of the kidnapped child.

Frankel makes all this fascinating, equally at ease describing the mutual atrocities in 1836 Texas and the petty tyrannical genius of John Ford. Thankfully, he spares us any grand theorizing about What It All Means About America. In an epilogue, he describes how the remnants of the Parker clan, both red and white, celebrate their ancestors' lives. And it's very touching.

Some people claim that William Shatner did a poor job of acting in his portrayal of Captain James Kirk.

I say this is nonsense.

Why? Because, friends, I've seen how Captain Kirk behaved. And, like it or not, he always behaved exactly like William Shatner did in portraying him.

Okay, so this argument was a lot tighter before Chris Pine came along.

But now we come to Dark Light, the 2006 book by Randy Wayne White, the thirteenth entry in his series chronicling the adventures of Marion "Doc" Ford. A number of Amazon reviewers bemoan the unusual turn of this book. But I say to them: friends, I've seen how Doc Ford behaves. And, like it or not, he behaves just like Randy Wayne White has described. You may wish he had done something else, or acted differently. But he didn't.

So anyway: in this one, Doc does not travel far from his Dinkin's Bay home. He and his neighbors are trying mightily to recover from a recent hurricane that ripped up much of their community. Things are complicated by Bern Heller, ex-NFL jock, and recently-arrived marina owner. At first, Heller seems to be simply a dishonest scammer, plotting to use the hurricane to illicitly take control of the still-valuable boats in his domain. But, as it develops, he's also a homicidal sociopath, straight out of Travis McGee-land. Something about Florida attracts them, I guess.

The hurricane has also (literally) uncovered a sordid bit of World War II-era history: the sunken yacht Dark Light, missing since 1944. A brief initial dive has brought up Nazi-linked artifacts. There's a possible link to Heller's ancestors. And also to a mysterious woman who's moved into a secluded beach mansion. In addition to dealing with Heller's murderous intentions, Doc must also unravel what happened over sixty years previous.

Well, at last I've caught up with Sue Grafton's alphabet-based Kinsey Millhone novels, now that I've read V is For Vengeance! …

Oh, wait a minute. Make that almost caught up.

Anyway: this book has a short prologue where a cocky, albeit stupid, young man goes to a loan shark to finance a Vegas gambling trip. Things do not work out well for him, and he gets tossed off the roof of a parking garage.

Fast forward to "today" (Where "today" is 1988.) Kinsey's in a department store and notices something the store cops don't: two women are busy shoplifting expensive stuff. She alerts security. One woman is apprehended, the other escapes, but not before nearly running over Kinsey in her Mercedes.

Normally, that would finish things for Kinsey. But once the captured shoplifter makes bail, she is found deceased, having apparently jumped from a tall bridge. Or was she, like the doofus in the prologue, tossed off? I know which way I'd bet. Her ex-boyfriend hires Kinsey to investigate. Soon she's up against the loan shark and a hostile cop.

Kind of a below-average outing, the characters Kinsey meets aren't very sympathetic or interesting, but that's OK.

A recommendation from my lovely and literate daughter, available at the library of the University Near Here.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is sort of a geek mystery. The protagonist, Clay Jannon, is unemployed in the Bay Area when the book opens. He was working as a web designer for the bright startup company, NewBagel, an effort by ex-Googlers who "wrote software to design and bake the platonic bagel: smooth crunchy skin, soft doughy interior, all in a perfect circle." Unfortunately, the market yawned, the ex-Googlers soon did too, and Clay started looking for work.

He happens upon the unlikely shop in the title. He is taken on as the store's second employee: Clay, Mr. Penumbra, and the other guy work 8-hour shifts, every day. The store has a smattering of normal books, but it soon becomes clear that the real purpose of the store involves the volumes on the impossibly tall shelves, a library from which a series of oddball customers return and check out volumes every so often.

Clay's curiosity gets the best of him; against the rules, he starts trying to make sense out of the special tomes. This turns out to be a life-changing quest, involving Clay's friends. (One of whom has made a small fortune with CGI software to realistically render the female bosom; he is, Clay confides, "the world's leading expert on boob physics.") We are very soon confronted with a mysterious worldwide cult/corporation, which operates in the nexus between typography, cryptography, and immortality.

The book is unusually technically accurate on some geeky details. For example, Clay is a whiz Web programmer, and his language of choice is "Ruby". Which (yes) is an actual thing commonly used for Web development.

It's a lot of fun, and (for UNHers) I've returned the library's copy, so you can snap it up.

One of my reading projects is near the end. Cinnamon Skin is the penultimate novel in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. I see the books are in the process of being reissued in paperback, with an introduction by Lee Child. And truly, I see some similarities between Child's hero Jack Reacher and Travis.

In the previous book, Travis's economist sidekick Meyer was deeply traumatized in the final showdown with the villain. He's still under a dark cloud here, morosely schlepping up to Canada to give a lecture series. But things get worse: Meyer lends his yacht, the John Maynard Keynes, to his newlywed niece, Norma and her husband Evan. Headed out from the slip to do some fishing, the Keynes blows up, obliterating all souls aboard. Soon afterward, a terrorist group takes credit for the bomb, revenge for Meyer's giving advice to Chile's dictatorship years previous.

So inept terrorists miss their target, killing some unintended victims instead. A neat story, but some little things about it nag Travis. Eventually he and Meyer get a bead on the actual baddie, trying to get on his elusive, murderous, trail. This takes them here and there: Texas, upstate New York, finally down to Mayan ruins near Cancún. Suspense builds, and there is a thrilling and satisfying climax.

Along the way, MacDonald expertly paints the locales and people they meet. Even minor characters come alive as actual people. Jeez, I miss him.

It's short: my book club hardcover from the mid-80s is slightly over 200 pages. Today's publishing contracts demand more, I think. But not better.

Hey, just a thought: Carl Hiaasen's next book should be titled Cinnamon Skink, in tribute to John D. Whattya think?