Pun Salad

A few days ago I read a WSJ article with a headline claim: Dad Books Are a Dying Breed (WSJ gifted link). Well, Father's Day is coming up, and if any of you sons or daughters are in a quandary, I can recommend this book for a Dad Book. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I'm a dad. QED.

It's by Johan Norberg, a Cato Institute fellow, and the book is a paean to those historical societies that have managed, always imperfectly, to discover the wonders of liberty: free markets, free trade, and free minds. He looks at seven, in chronological order: (1) Athens; (2) Rome; (3) the Abbasid Caliphate; (4) Song China; (5) Renaissance Italy; (6) the Dutch Republic; (7) the Anglosphere. That last one is where I, and perhaps you, live today.

I was totally ignorant about (3) and (4). (They don't seem to come up much on Jeopardy!, whose writers instead seem to be fans of Those Darn Etruscans.) But Norberg told me a lot I didn't know about all seven, and his discussion was lively and informative, with occasional wry observations and interesting bits of trivia. And surprisingly timely in spots: you many have noticed that Xi Jinping mentioned the "Thucydides Trap" during President Trump's visit last month. That sent a lot of journalists scurrying to Google, but if you had read this book you would have known exactly what Xi was talking about! Norberg has a whole section about it.

A bit of trivia I picked up along the way: why the olive branch is a symbol of peace. After planting, olive trees take many years to grow and produce sellable fruit; their presence indicates the farmer has confidence that his property will not be ravaged by war or expropriation in the meantime.

And: after the fall of Rome, Western Europe essentially forgot the Greek language. That's where (I am not making this up) the phrase "It's Greek to me" comes from: a copyist hitting something written that funny alphabet could only shrug his shoulders in helplessness.

And: it doesn't hurt to be reminded about #3's contributions to the modern world: their mathematicians gave us the decimal numbering system, with its zero. And their language gave us the words "algebra" and "algorithm". But also "assassin", so it's a mixed bag.

Well, there's more. Including the huge Song mural of everyday life Along the River During the Qingming Festival, which as a "combination of the Bayeux Tapestry and Where's Waldo".

So it's a lot of fun. But a somber note comes in at the end: you'll note that the "Golden Age" examples 1-6 eventually passed away, a combination of murder and suicide. And it's not difficult to detect analogous symptoms in our own privileged Anglospheical times. Will we be different? Norberg doesn't mention Trump much, but…

I read a previous book by the author, David T. Beito, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights a couple years back; it detailed FDR's (and his Democrat co-conspirators) lousy record on civil liberties, concentrating on Japanese internment during WW2; warrantless snooping on political opponents; trumped-up "investigations" of critical newspaper and radio outlets. I enjoyed it … if "enjoyed" is the right word.

This book covers a lot of the same ground, but covers more of FDR's pre-presidential behavior, and also to his problematic behavior outside the civil liberty arena. As I said about the previous book: it's not a "warts and all" book: it's mostly just the warts. Beito's only unreserved praise is Roosevelt's brave handling of his polio affliction.

Beito finds that FDR's handling of the Depression was poor; although his policies were politically popular, they were ineffective in restoring the private economy. (And, as Milton Friedman taught us, the Federal Reserve also had a knack of making just the wrong monetary moves at the wrong time.) He was inexcusably indifferent to the ongoing abuse of Black America, not wanting to damage his political prospects in with white Southerners. He continued damaging protectionist policies, which probably caused ongoing economic misery in Europe, encouraging the rise of you-know-who. He thought he was good buddies with Stalin during the war, and encouraged see-no-evil policies toward the Soviet Union. Beito criticizes FDR's insistence on "unconditional surrender" of Germany and Japan, which (arguably) prolonged the war and caused additional American deaths, in addition to enemy soldiers and civilians.

And he was indifferent to the plight of European Jewry, passing up numerous opportunities to decrease their death toll.

So: a welcome addition to FDR bios, countering a lot of the usual hagiography.

This book was on the WSJ list of Best Mysteries of 2024. (WSJ gifted link). The author, Nova Jacobs, previously wrote The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, which I dismissed as "not my cup of tea" last year. Good news: I liked this one a lot better!

It is set mostly at CERN, site of much high-energy physics research. Most notable is its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), most famous for proving the existence of the long-theorized Higgs Boson back in 2012.

Ms. Jacobs adds some fictional interest, starting with a different kind of LHC discovery: the tunnel contains the corpse of physicist Howard Anderby, who seems to have been fatally irradiated in the LHC tunnel. Except nobody can figure out how he got in there, bypassing security. And nobody can figure out why the LHC got turned on at that time. It's sort of a double locked-room mystery.

CERN is located on the France-Switzerland border, in a kind of law enforcement limbo. To minimize bad publicity, CERN research group director Chloé Grimaud and Yvonne Faye, head of CERN, ask their erstwhile companion, private investigator Sabine Leroux, to see if she can track down the facts behind Howard's death.

Complicating things: the apparent cybertheft of CERN data by the competing supercollider group in China. And also another corpse found drowned in CERN's (fictional) water tank housing liquid xenon dark matter detection experiment.

The book alternates its timeline between events that happened before Howard's death and Sabine's investigation. The "before" timeline follows postdoc Eve, who becomes infatuated with Howard, and eventually discovers things about him that are … well … kind of Out There. By the time that's revealed, I was having too much fun to mind.

I wanted to read this thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's best mysteries of 2025 list. The Portsmouth (NH) Public Library didn't have a hard copy, but it was available via Kindle "Overdrive" download.

I didn't care for it much. It's the third book in the author's "Shona Sandison Mysteries" series, and it might have helped to have read the first two.

Shona is an investigative reporter, and here she is on the track of the mysterious "Grendel" project, a very hush-hush scheme that the schemers would prefer to keep under wraps … until it's revealed on their terms. They are (apparently) willing to murder anyone who gets too curious, including Shona. So she has a lot of close calls; a few of the other characters are not as fortunate. There is a subplot with an old spy seeking vengeance for a dead son.

I didn't care for the author's writing style. Goodreads reviewers tell me I'm not alone: "ponderous and overly ornate" … "too slow" … "disjointed" … I snipped out a couple bits:

The rattling tube ride from Notting Hill had been straightforward. The deeper into the city she delved, the more she thought of her last tentative connection with the gallery. A few years previously, she had written a story about a painting which had been given to the people of Scotland by an aristocratic family—Olivia Farquharson’s family. The painting was not what it seemed: instead of being a forgotten masterpiece by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the noted Scottish architect and artist, it was discovered to have been painted by his wife, Margaret.

Zzzzz. And:

It was warm in the car, but she knew it was cold outside.

I used to gripe about the late Sue Grafton adding ponderous, pointless detail to her prose. Reader, this author makes Sue look like Ernest Hemingway.

Somehow, a very old hardcover edition of Animal Farm wound up on my bookshelf. Published by Harcourt Brace, compyright 1946. Five years before I was born. No idea how I wound up with it.

Gee, I wonder if it's worth anything to collectors? Checking Google's AI…

Well, it's not going to send anyone to college, but my heirs probably won't want to throw it in the dumpster either.

Anyway, I first read Animal Farm as a kid, probably 60 or so years ago. (Not this edition. The edition I read back then was illustrated.) I was inspired to reread it, ironically, by Nicholas Clairmont's pan of the recent movie adaptation, which was characterized "the exact opposite of what the author intended." Orwellian!

But back to the book: it is an unsubtle allegory of the early history of the Soviet Union, starting with the oppressed beasts of Mr. Jones' "Manor Farm", inspired by the harangues of the old boar, Major, chasing off Jones and taking over themselves. Major's ideology drives them to rename their conquest "Animal Farm", they establish commandments, sing inspirational songs, and bleat the famous slogan: "Four legs good, two legs bad."

The parallels are many, and readers will pick up more of them the more they know about early 20th-century Russian history. (Or they can just peruse the Wikipedia page.)

Although Orwell's original subtitle of this work was "A Fairy Story", it's also horror-filled. Probably not the best bedtime reading to your toddlers, because things get explicitly violent. It is pretty much a fictionalization of Chapter 10 of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, "Why the Worst Get on Top".

Gearing up for Amaerica's 250th birthday, I guess, I've been reading a decent number of books about the Founders, the Constitution, the Revolution, etc. I'm also kind of a fan of Jonathan Turley, whose conservative/libertarian take on current events at his website closely matches my own. And I read and enjoyed his previous book, The Indispensible Right last year. So…

This one is a veritable pinball machine of topics. I find it difficult to summarize, but a major theme is "democratic despotism", the tendency of factions who knit together enough people-power to rule over, oppress, and even kill their opponents. Turley takes a close look at Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense pamphlet was one of the major drivers of the American Revolution. Great! But Paine's overall political philosophy rightfully worried founders like Madison, who (correctly) speculated about how it would quickly lead to violent mobocracy. It's pretty clear that America dodged a bullet despotism-wise, although it was a close shave. (One of Turley's anecdotes involves Declaration-signer/Constitution-writer James Wilson, whose patriotic bona fides were beyond question, but nevertheless nearly became a victim of a Philadelphia drunken mob in 1779.)

And Paine eventually absconded to France, where (despite not knowing French) he became a moving force behind their revolution. And, well, we all know what happened. In the words of Jacques Mallet du Pan: "Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children." (That quote is the book's epigraph.) Turley does a fine job of describing why the result was known as the Terror. (And might make the reader look askance at Jacobin magazine, influential on America's left wing.) Paine escaped with his life, but it was a (another) close shave. Returning to America, he never regained the respectability or influence he had in 1776, and died largely unmourned.

But there's a lot of other stuff going on in the book, too: a look back at the origins of democracy in ancient Greece (it didn't work well). And a look at the current state of affairs in America, where the enthusiasm for "democracy" seems to to invariably nudge people toward oppression of opponents and violence.

Turley views our AI/robotic future with some trepidation, worrying that we're headed quickly toward an era of mass unemployment. Could be! But America has had massive economic sector-shifts in the past, accompanied by similar predictions of doom, but that's been handled pretty well, albeit not painlessly. But (of course) this time could be different; see what you think.

This book made the WSJ's best mysteries of 2025 list. Not my cup of cocoa, unfortunately. I speculate (mean-spiritedly) that its inclusion was a sort of diversity initiative: "We gotta include something from the "cozy" subgenre!" So my mediocre Goodreads rating is just my personal reaction: you might find it swell!

It is set in post-WWII Britain. The protagonist, Nora Breen, is an ex-nun who is trying to determine the fate of another nun gone astray from her convent, Frieda. Frieda's letters to Nora back at the nunnery suddenly stopped without notice. So Nora decides to check into Frieda's last known location, Gulls Nest, a semi-seedy lodge full of offbeat characters, either suspects or potential victims. Nora begins her surreptitious investigation, takes up a cigarette habit, builds an uneasy relationship with the local police detective, befriends a local seagull, … and pretty soon the body count starts to increase.

Maybe I should rethink my habit of simply picking up those WSJ best-of books at the local library? Naw, I might miss something good that's outside my comfort zone.

Another book down on my Clifford D. Simak reading project. This one is from 1978, and my Science Fiction Book Club edition has sat, unread, on one bookshelf or another since then. This was Mr. Simak's first foray into Lord of the Rings-style fantasy, and contains no robots or spaceships.

There are, however, aliens. And it's set in a magic-enabled alternate version of Earth. The primary hero, Duncan, has been picked for an unlikely task. A manuscript, written in ancient Aramaic, has been discovered, purporting to be a complete journal of the life and times of Jesus. It promises to be a game-changer in the strucggle against the evil desolation visited on Britain by the Horde. But the manuscript requires verification, and that can only be accomplished via a pilgrimage through the Desolated Land to visit an elderly bishop in Oxenford.

It's a journey that few have attempted, and nobody has succeeded in completing. Dancan starts out with his friend and protector, the burly Conrad, faithful "war horse" Daniel. Along the way, he accumulates a diverse crew: a wannabe holy hermit, Andrew; an enchained demon, Scratch; a woman warrior, Diane (with her griffin, Hugo); a ghost; a goblin, Snoopy; and many others.

There's plenty of fighting, deception, disappointment, despair, and general peril. And occasional humor. I was slightly disappointed in the ending, but (on the whole) thought it was an OK effort.

This is third entry (and, according to the WSJ reviewer, the final entry) in Tana French's series featuring the protagonist Cal Hooper, a divorced Chicago ex-cop who has moved to the small Irish village of Ardnakelty.

Cal is somewhat less of a out-of-water fish in this book. He has accumulated a sorta-fiancee, Lena. And Trey, the semi-feral teenager in the previous books has become a sorta-daughter. But Cal feels, correctly, that situation is precarious on all counts. Ardnakelty runs on gossip and rumor, it seems. And that goes into full gear when young Rachel Holohan, goes missing; Cal finds her in a local river, an apparent suicide.

Which might have been the end of it, but Rachel was engaged to Eugene, son to Tommy Moynahan, a local rich bigshot. And it turns out that Tommy has a secret scheme in the works to mess with Ardnakelty's bucolic scenery. Did Rachel know too much about it?

Ms. French is one of the few writers that I consider to be auto-buys at Amazon. Here's a paragraph I snipped out of my Kindle version, describing the search for Rachel:

They have about two miles of road to cover, curving between dry stone walls and fields and the occasional farmhouse. They head back the way they came, sweeping the flashlight beams down the verges, over long grass and tangles of dead wildflowers. The dark is windless and silent; small things scuttle away at their approach, and watch from hiding as they pass. The air smells, more powerfully and intricately than by day, of ripe earth, sodden leaves, and manure. Far off, spread out across the fields, other small lights swing and zigzag. A long call comes to them faintly, too distant to hear the name, if they didn’t already know what it is.

I don't know about you, but those little tossed-off details, compactly told, put me there. It's only one example of how Ms. French describes characters and their environment. If you want to see a writer at the top of her game, there you go.

Not quite what I expected. I was expecting from the title that there would be more stuff about … y'know, engineers. But instead…

The author, Paul M. Kennedy, looks at the specific "problems" that the Allies faced in World War II in order to achieve their eventual victory. Conveniently organized into chapters: "How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic"; "How to Win Command of the Air"; "How to Stop a Blitzkrieg"; "How to Seize an Enemy-Held Shore"; and "How to Defeat the 'Tyranny of Distance'". Each had its unique challenges, and each (indeed) was "problematic" in the early days of the war. For example, victory against Germany absolutely required that hundreds of thousands of men and massive supplies of food and weaponry be reliably supplied to Britain across the pond. But German U-Boats had dismaying amounts of success at sinking merchant ships, sometimes just off American shores. New anti-submarine warfare tactics had to be developed. And (yes) some technology was involved; for example, the cavity magnetron, invented just in time to make small radar sets practical enough to be installed in sub-hunting airplanes. Within a few years, it was pretty miserable to be a U-Boat crewman.

Kennedy's approach to "engineering" is broad, including more than gadgetry. It's a holistic approach: innovation and flexibility was required in developing new strategies, tactics, and logistics in addition to having workable and effective weaponry in place to defeat the baddies. There are a lot of good stories along the way. For example, Stewart Blacker, inventor of the Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar; he got his start as a "schoolboy in Bedford", designing a mortar that sent a projectile (a croquet ball) 300 yards into a tempting target (his school's headmaster's greenhouse).

Other technical innovations spelled doom for the Germans and Japanese. Putting a Rolls-Royce "Merlin" engine into a P-51 fuselage, replacing the original Allison engine, turned the plane from a dud to a stud. Redesign of the Soviet T-34 tank made it incredibly effective against Germany. The Seabees, whose motto was (and is) "We Build, We Fight." The B-29. And more.

So, a pretty good read, although Kennedy's discussion gets bogged down in plain old history at times.