Pun Salad

Continuing my "Read all these Clifford D. Simak books I bought long ago and never read" project… This was a 60¢ Ace paperback, purchased in the early 1960s. (It might be good for a couple more readings before it falls apart.)

Wikipedia calls City a "fix-up novel", a collection of eight short stories originally published in Astounding between 1944 and 1951. The tales span thousands of years, and they are linked by learned commentaries from scholarly robot-aided dogs. (The scholars have names like Bounce, Tige, and Rover.) Man has long since vanished from the scene, so long ago that human existence is seen as probably a myth.

The stories tell how technology allowed humanity to abandon cities, and eventually Earth itself. Each details a step in Man's progress, eventually leading to his (near?) demise. Or at least to a location where he's not easily found. A continuing character throughout is the robot "Jenkins", who's responsible for giving dogs the power of speech. (The doggies still need robots for their manual dexterity, though.)

Simak's prose is pretty flowery at spots, very unexpected for a no-nonsense SF mag like Astounding, I would have thought. I was not as captivated as I should have been by some of the later yarns.

Based on Bryan Garner's column in a recent issue of National Review, I was gonna check out the book he wrote with Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. But when I picked that up off a shelf of the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, I quickly discovered it was a very dense reference work aimed at lawyers. So I checked out this one instead, an unusual choice for me, but a pretty good one.

I don't often quote book cover blurbs, but this one has an excerpt from SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan's lovely foreword:

I envy the reader who has picked up this book, as I once picked up [Nino's] opinions, not knowing what he or she will find … In these last few years, I have missed the enjoyment and excitement — even the exasperation — that came from thinking about Nino's latest opinion. I doubt that anyone who turns the final page of this book will wonder why. No one has ever written quite like Nino, and no one ever will … So … learn from the contents of this book. And equally, challenge the contents of this book. (Nino would have wanted you to.) But above all else, enjoy them.

I do not dissent from Kagan's opinion.

The book is a compendium of Scalia's SCOTUS opinions (including dissents), as well as some articles and lectures he gave over the years. It's a great overview of a fine legal mind, who also happened to have a knack for a well-turned phrase. There are no howlers, but his prose is full of sly wit that made me smile. (And, rarely, he will be obviously annoyed with the other side in his dissents, and the resulting zingers are pretty good too.)

I was somewhat surprised at the occasional makeup of the justices concurring with Scalia's opinions. I had not appreciated his strict views on criminal protections. For example, his decision about thermal-imaging a pot grower's house without a warrant, Kyllo vs. United States, was joined by David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer. Not the usual lineup.

A final section of the book deals with "administrative law", the regulations promulgated by executive agencies powered by handoffs from Congress. It opens with a 1989 speech, where his first line is "Administrative law is not for sissies." I admit, just about all of the argument in this section flew over my head, so I definitely count myself as a sissy here. Apparently, Scalia's views on "Chevron deference"—a doctrine which SCOTUS "overturned" last year—evolved over time. But I only got a vague notion of the issues involved.

I guess I've been on a David Mamet kick over the past few days. I linked his Free Press article (with a title I won't share with the sensitive souls at Goodreads). That caused me to rent Heist, a movie he made back in 2001. All that concurrent with reading this book.

The main takeaway I had from the book: Gee, showbiz folks sure do talk dirty. It is the polar opposite of "polite company".

Mamet discourses on his moviemaking memories, and the colorful characters he's met along the way. (And movies he's seen and, mostly, admired.) It's a series of short chapters, and I'm not sure if there's a coherent theme in any of them. Each has the feel of a transcribed oral stream-of-consciousness monologue. This sounds like a criticism, but it's not; Mamet is interesting even when I can't follow exactly what he's talking about.

Lots of anecdotes, my favorite being the one about Don Rickles and Frank Sinatra. Page 65.

It also contains numerous Mamet-drawn cartoons, all funny, some laugh-out-loud funny.

Mamet may be (see his subtitle) embittered and dyspeptic, but that seems to be directed mainly at anyone in the credits with the word "producer" in the title. For everyone else in the biz, he's mostly complimentary, and sometimes laudatory.

This is the conclusion to Don Winslow's "Danny Ryan Trilogy", so I figured I might as well read it. My reports on the first two entries: City on Fire and City of Dreams.

As the book opens, Danny's unlikely odyssey has brought him to Vegas, and he has translated his ill-gotten gains from the previous book into successful resorts, so he's a multimillionaire. He dotes on his young son, and is making big, ambitious, plans to set up another resort by purchasing an old-school casino further up the Strip. But a different mogul also has his eye on the property. And both Danny and his wannabe competitor have mob ties from previous years. And those ties eventually turn out to be useful, and then destructive. There is also a vengeful FBI agent who wants to bring Danny down, and a courtroom drama as the fate of a murderer in the previous book is decided.

It's a change from the previous books, which (as I seem to recall) had soap operatics and mayhem throughout. This one eventually gets to some imaginative violence, but the body count remains stuck at zero for hundreds of pages. (There's a one-punch fight on page 38, but that's about it.) How interesting do you find spats over Las Vegas real estate? Read this book to find out!

The book flap says "Winslow has announced that City in Ruins will be his final novel." Why? Well, stories at the time indicated that he wanted to get involved in (anti-Trump) political activism.

(I follow him on Twitter. Where he's as interesting and insightful as your average earnest, rage-fueled, Brown University sophomore girl.)

Anyway, he seems to have had second thoughts about his career. The Final Score, containing "six short novels" is coming out next year.

The author, Michael Huemer, is a philosophy prof at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I got the relatively cheap paperback edition of this book, it being one of those self-published, printed-on-demand deals. (It's slightly cheaper on Kindle.) I've read a couple of his previous books, Ethical Intuitionism and The Problem of Political Authority. (I found the former kind of daunting, the latter less so.)

Progressive Myths, however, is completely accessible to the lay reader. It is (more or less) a wide-ranging corrective to the worldview promulgated by left-wingers in the media and in positions of political power.

An initial chapter deals with "myths about individuals" that were endlessly reported in the news in past years: allegations that Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Jacob Blake were murdered by racists; that Amy Cooper and Kyle Rittenhouse were motivated by racism. Huemer does a good job debunking those cases. And, to his credit, he adds in three "non-myths" where the left's narrative was more factual: George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Breonna Taylor.

Subsequent chapters deal with more general topics. A sampling: the male/female "wage gap"; racist police shootings; transgender ideology; anthropogenic global warming; progressive taxation; government regulation. And more.

Why is this important? Huemer's final chapters discuss how progressive mythologies are particularly corrosive to American society, pushing the oppressors/oppressed binary narrative: whites oppressing blacks, males oppressing females, the rich oppressing the poor, the straight oppressing the not-so-straight. (Yes, we well-off white male heterosexuals are evil, I might as well confess.)

I didn't find much new information in the book; Huemer is mostly repackaging and summarizing progressive-refuting arguments that have previously been made by others at greater length and detail. Still, it's a useful and perceptive overview of an ideology that seems to depend on a largely fanciful view of reality.

Huemer also has a substack, Fake Noûs. Heh!

I got this book via Interlibrary Loan from the University Near Here. Originally from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. Thanks to all involved.

The author, Matthew Hennessey, is the WSJ's deputy op-ed editor. And occasional columnist. The book was a finalist for the 2023 Hayek Book Prize given by the Manhattan Institute.

Hennessey's style is informal and laced with humor and personal reflections. He takes the reader over the basics, chapter by chapter, showing how (see the subtitle) free markets "miraculously" produce prosperity via the action of billions of individuals that are making choices, responding to incentives, usually just trying to make an honest living. A penultimate chapter looks at the "anti-marketers" (e.g., Senator Bernie) and refutes their arguments.

Particularly charming: the story of how his parents, after years of various jobs, became small-businesspeople after buying a local bar, slowly turning it from a dive into a respectable joint. (I'm reading between the lines a bit here.)

Readers who have read other pro-capitalism books might find this one to be a little basic. Hennessey writes that his initial plan was to write this book for his kids, as an introduction to basic economics. And I can heartily recommend it for bright youngsters (or oldsters, for that matter) who are looking for such a thing.

This is an impressively researched, detailed look at the 1986 destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which took the lives of its crew: Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Greg Jarvis, and New Hampshire's Christa McAuliffe. The author, Adam Higginbotham, examines the lives of the people involved, nut just the astronauts, but relevant NASA personnel, contractors, and (eventually) accident investigators. The (very mistaken) decision to launch Challenger after freezing weather degraded the effectiveness of the O-rings that were supposed to seal the solid rocket booster joints is meticulously described, and how the judgment of the Morton Thiokol engineers was overruled by NASA bureaucrats.

It is a horrifying story all by itself. It is bookended on one end by the story of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire in 1967, which killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. And on the other end, a very brief retelling of the 2003 loss of the shuttle Columbia on re-entry, which killed astronauts Laurel Clark, Ilan Ramon, Michael P. Anderson, Rick Husband, William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, and David Brown.

It is an obvious, trivial fact that manned space travel is risky. But Higginbotham persuasively shows that all these deaths were avoidable. These 17 astronauts were, essentially, victims of the pressures of politics and bureaucracy. A major driver of the shuttle program was the need to "do something" post-Apollo: keep the budgetary money flowing to NASA and contractor facilities and personnel across the country. It's also hard to avoid the obvious PR gimmickry of the "Teacher in Space" effort. (And, although there's no evidence that it killed anyone, NASA's efforts of ensuring a "diverse" crew were pretty blatant.)

I was wondering how (or if) Higgenbotham was going to deal with a particularly nasty rumor: that the White House pressured NASA to launch on January 28, 1986 in order for Reagan to mention it in his State of the Union address scheduled for that evening. He does, briefly, noting that the most prominent advocate of this theory, Senator Ernest Hollings, pushed it with no evidence, and drew an angry rebuttal from William Rogers, head of the investigatory commission. (Higginbotham does occasionally express his contempt for the Reagan Administration, notably for the "star wars" effort. Easy to ignore.)

For some reason, I got hooked on this series, the continuing adventures of Molly Gray, a maid at a posh Manhattan hotel. She's neurodivergent, which has caused her problems in the past, but that seems to have been toned down a bit for this entry. She's worked her way to the top of her department, she's assembled a team of loyal colleagues and friends, and she's about to marry the hotel's gifted pastry chef, Juan. (They're "living in sin", a little surprising, but OK.)

And the hotel is about to host an episode of the "Hidden Treasures" TV series, where a couple of charismatic gay appraisers evaluate objects brought before them. On a lark, Molly contributes some knickknacks she and her late, beloved, grandmother Flora accumulated, including a prominent object from the previous novel. And the revelation of its true provenance shocks everyone, especially Molly. Even more shocking: (book flap spoiler a-coming) a daring and mysterious heist is perpetrated during its auction!

Molly's narrative is interspersed with chapters from Flora's discovered diary, in which her riches-to-rags story is detailed. (The author, Nita Prose, is pretty skilled at giving Flora her own "voice", very flowery, and distinct from Molly's.) It's pretty lurid, with an eventual murder.

Not my usual cup of tea, not even when served up in my favorite china cup. But, as I said, I'm hooked.

I ordered this book from Amazon back in December. It came auto-delivered to my Kindle on the release date last month, and I noticed that at some point a subtitle had bee added: The Final Arkady Renko Novel.

And a few days later, via the WSJ's book review, I learned that the author, Martin Cruz Smith, had died on July 11.

Well, darn. I still have the $3.95 paperback of Gorky Park I bought and read back in 1982. And I've been a diligent follower of Smith's diligent Russian investigator, Arkady Renko, since then.

As the book opens, Arkady needs to get his adopted computer-whiz son, Zhenya, out of the clutches of the Russian FSB. He was nabbed for protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine, calling it a "war" instead of the approved term, "special military operation."

I thought this observation was pointful enough to share at Goodreads:

Once more, Arkady thought, you needed only one book to really understand Russia. Not Tolstoy or Pushkin, not Dostoyevsky or Lermontov, but one his mother used to read to him as a child: Through the Looking-Glass, otherwise known as Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

Well… those are two separate books, I think. But otherwise, spot on. Of course, you'd need to add a lot more violence, thuggery, and terror to the Alice books to really get it right.

Soon enough, Arkady is given a murder case: a lower-level defense minister has been brutally murdered at the Hotel Ukraine. Arkady's investigative skills (and a little bit of happenstance luck) draw him to the father/son team of Lev and Ivan Volkov, who run the paramilitary "1812 Group". (Think a barely fictionalized version of the Wagner Group, and its (late) leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, and son Pavel.) Arkady and his longtime lady friend, journalist Tatiana Petrovna, take a dangerous trip to Ukraine, discovering atrocities committed by 1812. (And those are barely fictionalized too.)

Soon enough, both Arkady and Tatiana find themselves in extreme peril from Volkov, the 1812 Group, and their allies in the FSB. Leading to a very cinematic showdown in the sewers and subway tunnels of Moscow.

I will miss Arkady Renko and Martin Cruz Smith a lot. I might do a re-reading project.

Well, I learned a new word, one I've never encountered before, almost certainly will never encounter again: "otolaryngologist".

I will use it in a sentence: "If you require an emergency skin graft from an otolaryngologist, do not make pre-surgical anti-Semitic slurs that might apply to their spouse."

Anyway: this is the standard Carl Hiaasen adult novel. A protagonist with anger management issues, but the good news is the people he's angry with are cartoonish stock characters from the Hillary Clinton Shopping Basket of Deplorables: dirty politicians, corrupt regulators, neo-Nazis, Florida developers, etc. There are, additionally, drive-by slams at Fox News, Ginni Thomas, and (of course) Donald J. Trump. Our hero is aided by a beautiful wisecracking receptionist, and a hooker with a heart of … well, probably not gold, but it's eventually in the right place.

There is a lot going on, but the main plot thread involves a group of those neo-Nazis getting utilized by one of those corrupt pols to suppress voter turnout at an assisted living facility on election day, thereby assuring the re-election of the incumbent GOP Congresscritter/substance abuser/white supremacist/pervert.

So, bottom line: if you've read more than three Hiaasen novels, you've pretty much read this one too. And (worse), the hardcover edition of this book clocks in at (according to Amazon) 384 pages. That's just too long, and it feels very padded.

No disrespect to Hiaasen, he's got his publishing contract, he fulfills it with clever abandon, or at least he's got a pretty good AI trained on his oeuvre to do it for him. I admit, he got a few chuckles out of me, just as he did with Tourist Season, decades back.

The reviews I've seen seem to welcome the book as kind of psychotherapy. I assume the same motivations behind the folks who are still watching The Daily Show