The Diamond Eye

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This book made the WSJ's best-mysteries list for 2022. And it's not too shabby, a definite page turner. Even though I was turning some of those pages pretty fast to get to the action I knew was coming up at some point.

It's a fictional take on the life of Mila Pavlichenko, a very deadly sniper for the USSR during World War II. Once a bookish Ukrainian student looking to become a historian, her career plans are knocked for a loop when Germany invades. She immediately volunteers to defend her homeland. Fortunately, she's got mad sharpshooter skills, and a knack for stealth. She becomes known as "Lady Death".

The war story intertwines with a thriller plot. Her 300+ confirmed kills bring her to the attention of Moscow, and in 1942 they send her off to America as part of a delegation to lobby FDR to open a "second front" in Europe to take pressure off the USSR. This actually happened as well. But, fictionally, there's a nasty assassination scheme afoot! An anonymous hitman, also a sharpshooter, has been hired to take out FDR and frame Mila for the deed. Thereby wrecking USA-USSR relations, sowing isolationism, and setting the stage for a fascist coup. The actual details about the plot's string-pullers, and how this was all supposed to work are left hazy.

While on tour in America, Mila becomes acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt. I couldn't help but wonder if Eleanor would attempt to make her an intimate acquaintance, if you know what I mean. No spoilers here!

There's also a (heterosexual) romantic thread! In her teens, Mila was cruelly seduced and impregnated by Alexei, an egotistical doctor. Alexei is a full-time cad, has no interest in being a dad, so they separate but never quite divorce. Mila becomes intrigued with a charismatic Red Army officer…

So there's a lot going on. There are occasional resigned nods to the reality of Stalinism, one brief mention of the Holodomor. I found myself wondering if we'd get a neat plot twist: the Kremlin is revealed to be behind the assassination plot, placing USSR-sycophant Henry Wallace in the Oval Office. But no.

The Cold Cold Ground

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I can't for the life of me remember why I bought this book. Amazon tells me it was $5.50 used; the stickers on it tell me it used to belong to the Sedro-Woolley Library out in Washington state. And Google Maps tells me that Sedro-Woolley is about halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, a few miles off Interstate 5.

Anyway, it's pretty good. And just the first entry in (Amazon claims) a seven-book series. So far. I'll have to think whether I want to invest the time.

It's first-person narrated by Sean Duffy, a detective in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the year 1981. And it's very much the Bad Old Days in Northern Ireland. Part of Duffy's daily routine is to check his Beemer to make sure that nobody's attached a mercury tilt-switch bomb in its undercarriage. Riots, bombings, and arson: business as usual. Hunger strikes by Irish inmates in the Maze prison outside Belfast stir up more trouble. So it's almost a relief when there's a murder that seems to be a straight-up case of homophobic rage. Clues abound: the body has a bit of sheet music stuffed up where the sun don't shine, his hand has been cut off, the killer sends Duffy a deranged note, and (soon enough) another body is found with the same MO.

The Constabulary is largely Protestant, and Duffy is a Catholic. Not a devout one, but that doesn't seem to matter much. Corruption is taken for granted. Nobody seems to respect them; it's clear that the paramilitary forces on both sides wield the real power, thanks to their general ruthlessness.

It's a challenging case, and Duffy is driven to the edge of sanity by it. He also has to confront personal issues, including an out-of-the-blue revelation in Chapter 13. (No spoilers, but I did not see that coming.) There are violent showdowns, and a very dizzying plot twist as the killer is finally tracked down and confronted.

The World Itself

Consciousness and the Everything of Physics

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The author, Ulf Danielsson, is a Swedish theoretical physicist, but (it turns out) he's also quite the student of philosophy. The book was originally published in Swedish, and the translation to English was done by Danielsson himself. (Which I'd like to think explains some of my head-scratching at some of his phrasings. There is an obvious alternative explanation that I'd prefer not to entertain.)

Near the end of the book, he characterizes his theme as a "single long argument" against dualism. Not only classic Cartesian mind-body dualism; that's an easy target. But more subtly, for example, the desire of (some) theoreticians to look for "beauty" or "simplicity" in their models of the Way The World Works.

He also (gently, politely) inveighs against confusing those models, and their associated mathematics, with reality. After all, to a pretty decent approximation, Newton's laws of gravity describe how planets move, how satellites orbit, and how apples fall on your head. But it's not like those objects have some sort of internal computer that tells them where to go and how fast; they just do it.

Or to use an example I saw in this book: solving Schrödinger's equation for a thulium atom's 69 quantum-entangled electrons is daunting for even the fastest computers; but each and every tiny thulium atom just… does it.

The book jumps around a lot, is slightly repetitive, and (as I said above) the prose seems murky at times. One interesting bit: Danielsson seems to think that "consciousness" is a real thing, not a mere illusion. But his final five-page chapter looks at "free will" and says—as near as I can telli—says nej. That's a bold stance, and I have to admit I did not follow exactly what he was trying to say.

I will say he had a pretty jaw-dropping anecdote about Douglas Hofstadter dropping by his institution and posing the following puzzler, to be solved with integral A, B, and C (this may not translate well on Goodreads, sorry):

A + B +C = 4



B+C C+A A+B

"The answer may surprise you."

The Last Devil to Die

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This is the fourth in Richard Osman's "Thursday Murder Club" series. I've been hooked from the first; it's a definite get-at-library for me. Newbies should start with #1; it's not something you want to jump in the middle of.

This entry is (I think) darker than its predecessors. I'm pretty sure the body count is higher. And there's a very serious and somber subplot; be warned that it's not all tea and cakes for the club members.

But the main plot thread is straightforward. An antiques dealer known to the club, Kuldesh Sharma, has a small but profitable sideline as a go-between for heroin dealers. It's been low-risk for a while… until it isn't. Not much of a spoiler: on page 2, he's killed by a gunshot to the head. The box containing the heroin has gone missing, however. Concerning both the people who gave it to Kuldesh, and the people who expected to get it from Kuldesh.

The core group from the Cooper's Chase retirement community are all here: Elizabeth the ex-spy; Joyce the ex-nurse; Ron the ex-labor activist; and Ibrahim the shrink. And the allies (and some antagonists) they've managed to pick up along the way: a couple of cops that have been bigfooted out of the investigation of Kuldesh's murder by the British equivalent of the FBI (I think).

An amusing subplot involves another resident, Mervyn, who has fallen in love with a Lithuanian lady on the Internet. Which involves him sending her a lot of money. It is completely obvious to everyone he's being scammed; can they rescue him and retrieve his cash? Yes, they can, as it turns out, and there's a cute interaction with their main case near the end.

Osman's next book doesn't involve the TMC, but he promises they'll return someday.

The Long Goodbye

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The blog's eye candy points to the Kindle edition, simply because I like the garish cover art. And it's a deal, a mere $3.00 as I type. I read the paperback I purchased back in the early 1970s, for a mere 95¢, and it also has a very cool cover, art by Tom Adams,. who—not that it matters—was also known for his Agatha Christie book covers.

The book's Wikipedia page claim that "some critics" don't like it as much as The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely; I'm with the "others" (and Chandler himself) who consider it his best novel.

Our hero/narrator, Marlowe, becomes unlikely friends with Terry Lennox when his (temporarily ex-) wife Sylvia kicks him out of her Rolls-Royce, disgusted at his inebriation. Marlowe drags him home, sobers him up slightly, and their relationship is born. A while later, he finds out that Terry and Sylvia have remarried. But by page 19 (in my edition) Terry's at Marlowe's door, asking/demanding to be driven to Tijuana. And that happens, but it soon develops that Sylvia has been brutally murdered. And that puts Marlowe in accessory-after-the-fact trouble with the LA law.

Amazingly, that seems to resolve itself relatively quickly, but not before Marlowe interacts with thuggish cops, a threatening gangster, a nosy reporter, and a shady lawyer working for an anonymous client. Pretty soon he's on to his next major case, tracking down a famous missing novelist who's a notorious drunk. And that seemingly has nothing to do with Terry Lennox… or does it?

Slight spoiler: of course it does.

As noted, I think Chandler's at his best here, with Marlowe's insightful cynicism about southern California. He also does some pretty crackerjack detective work here. (I think this is a marked contrast to The Big Sleep, where things, more or less, just happened, with him as observer.)

And there's a very surprising twist at the end. (Well, maybe you won't find it surprising. I still remember being surprised myself, around 50 years ago.)

“Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”

Resistance to Change in Higher Education

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If I had $3610 I wanted to get rid of quickly, I'd buy a hundred copies of this book and gift them to key figures associated with the University Near Here: the president, trustees, appropriate legislators, department chairs, etc. (Maybe with instructions on what parts would be better ignored.)

The author, Brian Rosenberg, was a longtime president of Macalester College, out in St. Paul, Minnesota, and his experiences there qualify him for commentary on the challenges faced by colleges in an era of declining enrollment (and, I'd add, increasing irrelevance). The book's title, of course, is taken from the song sung by President Wagstaff (Groucho Marx) in the classic movie Horse Feathers. (You can see the movie clip here, you're welcome).

The book's overall argument is summed up in a quote I once heard (and unfortunately can't find anymore) to the effect that the political leanings of college faculties are heavily to the left; but when it comes to the governance of their own institutions, they become extremely conservative. Innovation is resisted, producing stasis in the face of crisis. And a system that fails a significant fraction of its customers/students, but saddles them with (you may have heard) piles of debt.

Rosenberg tells his story with punchy prose and humor (and, occasionally, a taste of bitterness). On lecturing:

Consider, for example, the lecture, "the style of teaching that has ruled universities for 600 years." 600 years ago, barbers were still performing surgery. Scott Freeman […] traces the history of the lecture back even further to 1050, when universities were founded in Western Europe and when barbers were just starting to perform surgery.

Or:

The largest and most influential universities in the United States combine undergraduate and graduate teaching with research institutes, hospital systems, professional schools, semiprofessional sports teams, major real estate holdings, and who knows what else. In some sense Harvard is like Pfizer with a football team, bringing together under the same brand multiple activities that have little or nothing to do with one another.

Another telling point: US News and World Report started ranking colleges in 1983. Top five then: Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley. Their latest top five: Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale.

Contrast this with the Fortune 500. In 1983, their top five were: Exxon, GM, Mobil, Texaco, and Ford. The most recent: Walmart, Amazon, Exxon Mobil, Apple, and United Health Group.

Whatever their faults, private companies prosper via innovation and competition, and the result is perpetual churn. Universities do not. Rosenberg notes that the incentives are all wrong for them; they have no reason to experiment. As Rosenberg notes, the odds of success are low, the price of trying is high. UNH is never going to vault into the US News top five, and (unless something very unexpected happens) Harvard is never going to leave.

Another quote:

Regardless of the fact that nearly every presidential job description and nearly every presidential search committee speaks to the desire of a "change agent," the truth is that an actual change agent is something that only the most desperate college communities want—and even the desperate ones are not sure about it.

Rosenberg's great on his theme… and, unfortunately, awful when he strays off it. His discussion of faculty tenure (another barrier to reform) wanders into "academic freedom"… and then falls into the pit of First Amendment issues. According to Rosenberg, all that free expression stuff can be "the right simply to act like a jerk." His footnoted "good example" of that is Stuart Reges, a computer science facule at the University of Washington. When encouraged by the unversity administration to include a "Native American land acknowledgement" on his syllabus, he went this way:

I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.

As you can imagine, the excrement hit the air circulation device. It escalated into a legal issue, and I encourage you to read the discussion at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) site. Make your own call about whether Rosenberg is being fair or accurate about this being a case of "the right simply to act like a jerk."

That caused me to look up Macalester College on FIRE's Free Speech Rankings. It is in position #211, with a "Below Average" speech climate. Reader, that's not far from the bottom (currently occupied by Harvard, at #248).

Rosenberg also takes a number of drive-by swipes at various conservatives/libertarians. "Drive-by" in the sense that they don't contibute anything to his overall thesis, and seem to serve mainly as signals to his (presumably leftist Democrat) tribe: "Don't worry, I'm not one of them, I'm one of you."

So: ignore that, and the book's pretty good. In the final chapter he outlines possibilities for reform, identifying six "long-standing and widespread assumptions" about higher ed: (1) "The faculty are the university." (2) "Higher education is a meritocracy." (3) "The university stands 'at a slight angle to the world.'" (4) "Students need a major." (5) "Offer lots of different stuff." (6) "Higher education can't change."

It probably has to change.

Crack-Up Capitalism

Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

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Another attempt to keep myself honest, and read something that won't simply reinforce my biases toward free-market capitalism and personal liberty. The author, Quinn Slobodian, is a professor at Wellesley. His book-flap thesis is alarming: "the most notorious radical libertarians—from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel" plot to subvert and eliminate "democracy" by setting up "different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones." Examples are many: the author endorses the so-called Open Zone Map to demonstrate their ubiquity. There's almost certainly one near you.

There is one near me, although the map's description differs somewhat from the description provided by the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs. All, or parts of, 9 NH counties are considered "Foreign Trade Zones"; as the page explains: "For the purpose of assessment and collection of import duties, foreign imported merchandise entered into a zone is considered not to have entered the commerce of the United States, so duties are not paid while the merchandise remains at the site." Granite State democracy does not seem to have been seriously threatened. As yet.

The author presents a number of case studies, from historical to present-day: Hong Kong, London, Singapore, South Africa, Lichtenstein, Somalia, Dubai, Silicon Valley, and "the cloud". These are interspersed with profiles of some of those "radical libertarians": not only Milton Friedman, but also son David, and grandson Patri. And a host of others in addition to Thiel: Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, James Dale Davidson, Hayek, Mises, etc.

Let's get some stipulations out of the way:

(1) The interactions between governments and businesses are well-known to be rife with rent-seeking, corporate welfare, and corruption. Slobodian does a fine job pointing this out.

(2) Libertarians generally do not hold "democracy" up as an ultimate good. For example, Cato's Human Freedom Index notes a strong international correlation between freedom and democracy. But it cautions "Unrestrained democracy can be inconsistent with freedom." And it sends you off to Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" for explication, if necessary.

(3) There's an awful lot of libertarian thought devoted to imagining utopian liberty-maximizing social structures. This is blue-sky stuff, and it's full of possible models and guesswork. And (see above) "democracy" might show up in them, and it might not.

(4) There's also an awful lot of libertarian criticism of current systems, nation-states running their fiat currencies. Some of that can get overwrought and apocalyptic, because that sells books. (I have a number of those on my bookshelves from previous decades predicting many imminent economic/social disasters that never happened.)

(5) There are a number of grifters and crackpots in the libertarian movement.

Slobodian tries to gather all these messy features into a coherent whole. It's far from a perfect fit, and at times his thesis resembles one of those dot-connecting conspiracies, corkboards with ragtag newspaper clippings, pushpins, and connections in red yarn. He imputes way too much importance and influence to libertarians, especially the ones outside (say) the Reason magazine-mainstream.

Slobodian never really engages with libertarian worries about "democracy" and its possible threats to liberty and prosperity; he just treats those worries as self-evidently misguided.

("And, yes, David Friedman is a longtime member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Your point being?")

Occasionally, Slobodian lets some level-headedness creep into his discussion: he grants that nation-states are a relatively recent development, and they could well be replaced by "something else". He treats that as obviously bad; I think it might be inevitable. As that process unfolds, you really want people thinking about the best ways to preserve human freedom and well-being along the way.

The Curse of Pietro Houdini

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The latest novel from Derek B. Miller. It's totally unlike his other books, except for its general excellence.

It is mostly set during World War II in Italy, and follows the odyssey of a young Italian orphan whose parents were killed in an American bombing run in Rome. The orphan flees to the town of Cassino, gets choked and left for dead in a gutter, rescued from that gutter by Pietro Houdini ("not his real name") and enlisted in Pietro's outrageous scheme to save priceless Renaissance paintings from Nazi looters. Those paintings are up in Montecassino Abbey, home to Benedictine monks, a storehouse of centuries of art.

You can see the paintings that Pietro wants to save here.

Pietro warns that it's going to be dangerous. In fact, it involves a great deal of violence, lies, accidents, and the general horror of war. Pietro accumulates a number of accomplices along the way in addition to the orphan, including a mule named "Ferrari", and … sorry, they don't all make it to the end of the book.

The book is a mixed bag of fiction and fact. The town of Cassino and Montecassino Abbey are real, and the wartime events Miller describes actually happened. Specifically, the Allies bombed the abbey into ruins in February 1944, killing zero Germans, and a couple hundred Italian civilians seeking refuge there.

When I started the book, I worried that it was going to be too "arty" for me. There's a lot of narrative trickery involved, and some garish descriptions. I should not have been concerned; Miller knows what he's doing.

No spoilers, but page 338 in the hardcover is magical.

Voters as Mad Scientists

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I'm a Bryan Caplan fanboy, having read his "real" books The Myth of the Rational Voter and The Case Against Education; his "comic" book (with Zach Weinersmith) on immigration, Open Borders; and his three previous collections of (mostly) his EconLog posts Labor Econ Versus the World, How Evil Are Politicians?, and Don't Be a Feminist.

This book is the fourth in that series, The general theme is Caplan's antipathy toward politics and resulting statism. The opening essay (and the book's title) describe the overarching problem: in a democracy, we give the voting collective coercive power over our lives. With two complications: (1) the collective has systemic biases (most specifically anti-market biases) that would make everyone worse off; (2) they, like mad scientists, are "unselfish" in expressing those biases. They are for our own good! You're welcome, no charge, it's on the house!

Along the way, Caplan hits some of my favorite themes. One is that we hold government to "absurdly low standards", resulting in high costs and low performance. To paraphrase the Lily Tomlin character Ernestine: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the state."

I also very much enjoyed a pair of articles where a libertarian and a conservative act as "missionaries", each trying to convert the other. I am often in that middle territory myself, and darned if I didn't find myself nodding in agreement with both these articles.

Guess I will always find myself in between the camps. (Currently I'm running 71%-29% libertarian. Approximately.)

The downside of Caplan's format is that it's disjointed. Putting together blog posts (typically 2-3 pages) on paper don't necessarily make a coherent whole.

Quibble one: It appears, as before, that the hyperlinks in the original blog posts have been auto-converted to footnotes in the book's text; this is (to put it mildly) less than convenient if you're interested in following them. I would have, at least, included the posts' URLs as well.

Quibble two: I also noticed a couple typos; there are probably more that I missed.


Last Modified 2024-02-24 6:50 AM EDT

Chasing Darkness

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Another book down on my "reread Crais" project. First read back in 2008 and I don't have too much more to add to what I said then:

This is Robert Crais's latest Elvis Cole novel, and it's pretty good. Elvis has mostly recovered from his breakup with his true love, Lucy, and also getting seriously shot up a couple books back. So he's back to being the World's Greatest Detective. (It's not clear whether he inhabits the same universe as Spenser; in that case, he'd be the World's Greatest Detective, Except Possibly For a Tie in Boston.)

As the book begins, Elvis is getting threatening phone calls. Worse, a couple of cops show up asking about an old case where he was able to exonerate a sleazeball on a murder charge. Now, it appears very much as if the sleazeball was guilty of that murder, and a number of others. Can the World's Greatest be losing his touch?

Not likely. Elvis takes it upon himself to figure out what's going on.

A number of characters from previous books show up: the resourceful and taciturn Joe Pike, and cop Carole Starkey, who's seriously in love with Elvis. (Neat writer's trick: although Elvis is the book's narrator, and the narration makes Starkey's feelings for Elvis obvious, Elvis himself remains oblivious to it.)

I'll just add that the plot is intricate and twisty, and the cast of characters large, but fortunately everything's easy enough for me to keep up, even at my age.

Elvis discovers a corpse midway through, and although it's finally obvious whodunit by the end, I don't think that was spelled out. Maybe I missed it.