Pun Salad

Another book down on the "reread Crais" project. Amazon tells me I bought the Kindle version on January 23, 2012, and my original book report is here. It remains a pulse-pounding story filled with violence, suspense, and ace detective work from both Elvis and his partner Joe Pike.

Unlike many Crais books, the title is pretty straightforward about what's going on in the text. Kidnapping, not eminent domain.

And I didn't remark on this back in 2012: an ATF agent leaves a message on Elvis's phone, identifying himself as "Kim Stanley Robinson". Do actual ATF agents use SF-author pseudonyms? Wouldn't put it past 'em.

Well, this finishes off my mini-project to read the New York Times Best Mystery Novels of 2021. It was the only book on that list that the Portsmouth (NH) Library didn't own, so I splurged on a used copy at Amazon ($6.08).

The usual clichés apply: Wish I had liked it better. Not my cup of tea. Your mileage may vary.

The author is Willa C. Richards. The book My Antonia is referenced at one point, so I'm wondering if that middle initial stands for "Cather"? Maybe.

The book is narrated by Peg, member of a very dysfunctional family. It is set in Milwaukee, and jumps (mostly) between two timelines, one in 1991, the other in 2019. What makes this book a "mystery" is the 1991 disappearance of Dee, Peg's sister. This happens during a whirlwind of bad decisions involving infidelity, kinky sex, copious substance use, and firework displays.

As a backdrop, Dee's disappearance is overwhelmed by another horror: 1991 Milwaukee is also the setting of the discovery of Jeffrey Dahmer's string of grisly murders. (The Milwaukee cops are not only preoccupied with Dahmer, they are also defensive about their ineffective and corrupt behavior.)

In 2019, Dee's trail is colder than ever, but the family is driven to hire a very expensive psychic. Who (eventually) presents his theory of the case, spurred by an object Dee once owned. Peg is more broken than ever.

Sample of Ms. Richards' prose as Peg and Dee watch that 1991 fireworks display:

The first firework was a ghoulish green that turned us both fluorescent. I imagined we were divers swimming in a bioluminescent bay. The night felt heavy anyway, like water pressure bearing down on us. I imagined we were anywhere but Milwaukee. I didn't know what to say to Dee, so I started making promises.

Fairly or unfairly, I think of this as "Look, Ma, I'm writing!" style.

Back in October, I linked to this Free Press article, which described how an advertisement for this book, Israel Alone, was initially accepted by a booksellers' trade publication, Shelf Awareness. only to be abruptly cancelled. Apparently too pro-Semitic.

My reaction: "I think I'll ask the Portsmouth Public Library to get this."

And I did. And they did. Good for them. It's a valuable counterweight to (for example) Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (which, according to the online catalog is available both at PPL and Portsmouth High School), and similar titles.

The author, Bernard Henri Lévy, centers his book on the Hamas pogrom of October 6, 2023; he calls this an Event-with-a-capital-E; it was "unprecedented in form". And, it is strongly suggested, going back to business as usual is no longer an option. His descriptions of the Event are stomach-turning, and dare you to shudder and avert your attention in horror. In case you missed them the first time around.

We'd like to report that the world came together afterward to aid Israel in obliterating the barbarians of Hamas. That happened to a certain extent. Initially. But what also happened, to a surprising and outrageous extent, was a resurgence of explicit anti-Semitism, both in Europe and America, sometimes leading to violence. And, as the initial shock wore off, the default behavior re-established itself: attempts to hold Israel to impossible and dangerous standards, with (at best) perfunctory requests made of the terrorist organizations and gangster countries to stop being so mean. And the latest indignity: the UN-backed "International Court of Justice" issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

Lévy makes the case for Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state; he has long supported a "two-state solution" for the conflict, and continues to do so, even as that hope seems increasingly forlorn.

The one sour note comes on page 91, where Lévy pooh-poohs "evangelical Christians" who are "nominally 'Zionists'". Ah, but "only to the extent that they expect on Judgment Day to take Israel's place on the very land where the Jewish state presently and provisionally stands."

It's much more common to see this bit of theological trivia deployed as an anti-Israel argument. "You know they were big supporters of moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, right? The better to bring about Armageddon, my dear!"

There's also a drive-by slamming of embassy-mover Donald Trump as a false friend of Israel. Because he (allegedly, over 30 years ago) said he preferred to have "short guys wearing yarmulkes" counting his money. Again, Bernard, that's the best you can do? When the alternative was Kamala "I've studied the maps" Harris?

For longtime Connelly readers: this is cover-billed as a "Ballard and Bosch" novel. More accurately, it's a "Ballard, Bosch, and also another Bosch" novel. It's mostly Renée Ballard. Harry Bosch does make some critical appearances. But I think his daughter Maddie actually shows up on more pages.

There are multiple plot threads. First, Ballard returns from her morning surfing to find that her car's been burgled, with the perpetrator stealing her wallet, cop badge, and gun. This is terrible news, because she has enemies in the department just waiting for her to make a mistake like this, using it to stymie her career. So she has to solve this on her own… or maybe call in some assistance from an ex-cop who had similar battles in the past! And it's not long before her off-the-books investigation leads to much more serious criminality.

Second thread: Renée heads up the LAPD's "Open-Unsolved Unit", tasked with using new investigative techniques on crimes that stumped previous investigators. And they have discovered a DNA link to the "Pillowcase Rapist", who had a reign of terror over LA a couple decades back. That link turns … complicated, uncovering a lot of scandalous and unsavory behavior in Pasadena.

And one plot thread doesn't start up until page 147 or so, and I won't spoil it. But it's a biggie.

One cute thing when Renée is searching through a storage locker, and finds a book collection containing "several authors she recognized, including some she had even read: Child, Coben, Carson, Burke, Crumley, Grafton, Koryta, Goldberg, Wambaugh,…"

Notice anyone conspicuous by their absence? Yes, I guess in the parallel universe where Ballard and the Bosches exist, Michael Connelly cannot.

(For Tom Petty fans: yes, it's the hardest part. Says so on page 142.)

I approached this book with some trepidation. I haven't had a lot of luck with nonfiction authors whose first names begin with Y. Good news: this one, by Yascha Mounk, is pretty good; his prose is clear and interesting, and he makes a lot of sense.

His title is taken from an interview he did with a German TV news show, referring to the unprecedented influx of immigrants of different religions, races, and ethnicities into democratic countries worldwide. He noted the accompanying stresses on previously monocultural countries, many of which were becoming more authoritarian in response. And he dubbed the overall process "a historically unique experiment."

Well, that did it. Opponents of immigration seized (yes, seized) on that word "experiment". And they pounced. Boy did they ever pounce. Because when you've got an experiment, that implies experimenters. Who are the white-coated pulling the strings clandestinely? It's a conspiracy, I tells ya! Using our countries as guinea pigs!

Mounk denies a conscious conspiracy. The mass migration is the result of unforeseen forces, and took everyone, even those in charge, by surprise. Fine. But now what? Are we (here in the US) doomed to follow many European countries into authoritarianism? (Usually this is dubbed "right-wing" authoritarianism, but that seems inaccurate.) Or can we look forward to increased animosity and possible violence between the incoming minorities and the intolerant majority?

Yeah, "probably" on the authoritarianism, "maybe" on the violence. But Mounk makes the argument that bad things need not happen. His arguments are straightforward; examples (good and bad) are drawn from worldwide history.

I'll just mention one bit: one chapter is titled "Demography isn't Destiny", and it's dedicated to debunking the notion that US population trends will inevitably relegate white people into permanent minority status, and that will, in turn, put the Democratic Party in the unassailable driver's seat, forever. Mounk calls this "the most dangerous idea in American politics"; it's a recipe for that resentment and possible violence mentioned above.

This book was written in 2022. Given the 2024 election results, his argument here seems prescient, especially given the inroads the GOP made into the people-of-color vote.

Now Mounk is a Democrat, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that his "what is to be done" concluding chapter doesn't reflect that. Although (good news) he rejects the dreadfulness of race-conscious government programs, that just means they should be aimed at everyone. And paid for by taxes on (who else but) the rich. We need to improve the education of minorities? Why, just send their government schools more money!

This seems to be aimed at reassuring his fellow party cohort: hey, I'm still one of you! I wish he'd look at tearing down some of the government-created barriers to social mobility: mostly regulations that protect incumbent positions at the expense of strivers: land-use restrictions, occupational licensure, environmental rules, business regulation, etc. And (of course) a hefty dose of school choice policies, giving low-income families the freedom to escape dysfunctional government schools. (A freedom better-off families have always had.)

I put this book, by Booker Prize winner John Banville, on my get-at-library list thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's Best Mystery Books of 2023. I get that: it's very literary! The reviews are uniformly positive! But it just wasn't my cup of tea.

(I previously read Banville's The Black-Eyed Blonde, a Philip Marlowe novel commissioned by Raymond Chandler's estate. I thought it was OK.)

Part of my problem (and it is my problem) is exemplified by sentences like this (page 89):

She was wearing too much makeup, and specks of face powder clung to the tips of the tiny, colorless hairs on her upper lip.

Banville is describing a flight attendant on a plane about to land in Dublin, who has just denied a request for a brandy from an arriving passenger, one of the main characters. It is an irrelevant and uninteresting detail. It doesn't have anything to do with anything. We never see the lady again.

Banville does a lot of this.

One of the protagonists here, Dr. Quirke, is a long-running Banville character. This is the third book that also involves Detective Inspector John Strafford. Some references to events in previous books are made.

But anyway: the book opens with a sad Nazi at the end of World War II, trying to escape, well, justice at the hands of the Allies. He succeeds with the help of the head of a local Catholic monastery in the Italian Alps. Then we are taken to 1950s Ireland, where the cops are looking at Rosa Jacobs, who has been found in her car in the titular "lock-up" rented garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. An obvious suicide? Not so fast, says pathologist Dr. Quirke; he's detected indications that it was actually murder.

Eventually, we find out the perpetrator. At the very end of the book.

But along the way, the characters have a pretty miserable time of it. Everyone has rocky relationships with each other, due to loads of psychological dysfunction. Strafford and Quirke are not a classic detective duo; in fact, they don't like each other very much. The crime investigation seems half-hearted at best; instead we get a lot of damaged people fumbling their relationships. Nobody here is that interesting or likeable.

No spoilers, but if you prefer the kind of mysteries where diligent detective work finally uncovers the evil-doers, you may find this book disappointing.

Another entry on the "wish I had liked it better" list, which is pretty long this year. I was tempted to grab the Kindle edition thanks to Iona Italia's long review at Quillette a couple months back. I think I should have read her review more critically before I sent my $10.49 off to Amazon.

The author, Derren Brown, is apparently very famous in England.

It's long, 491 pages of main text in the print version. Affer a pretty decent beginning, I found it a slog, I kept finding things to do other than reading it. Putting it off until bedtime reading, and pretty much immediately dozing off.

But that's me. You could like it better. Most of the reviews I've seen are very complimentary.

Things start off well, with a debunking of a couple flavors of popular self-help nostrums. And there's a whirlwind tour of the past 2000 years or so of philosophy and psychology, concentrating on stoicism, the philosophy closest to Brown's heart. (He has some minor criticisms later in the book.)

But most of the book is a rambling, not particularly coherent, self-help text, full of Brown's advice on how to pursue happiness. Near the end, Brown lays out five numbered bits of advice, one paragraph each. I'll just quote the first sentence of each:

1. If you have something to "come out" about, come out.
2. You'll never regret falling in love.
3. If you work in a creative field, and you are faced with a choice of doing a job for the money or doing a job for the fun of it, take the fun one whenever you can.
4. Don't be a dick.
5. Look at what takes up your time and see what is worth doing and what is not.

Fine. I might have found these bromides insightful when I was (say) sixteen in Omaha. Now they just seem like clichés, sorry.

Brown devotes an entire chapter to issues of fame. about 40 print pages. Mostly, whether to pursue it; it's not all it's cracked up to be. But also how to deal with fame once you attain it. Might be useful to the 0.01% of the population in that boat.

On page 443, part of his (very) long musings about death:

Dying (and taxes, according to Woody Allen) is something we all must face.

Um. I know he's a Brit, but has Brown never heard of Ben Franklin? And, according to Wikipedia, this observation wasn't even original with Ben! But a decent editing job would have caught the misattribution. Also would have caught the misuse of "begs the question" on page 214.

Once again, a loosely-themed book from "America's funniest science writer", Mary Roach. And that loose theme is humanity's love/hate struggles with the other living species with which we share our planet.

Mary bounces around a lot. The first chapter ("Maul Cops") has her attending a training session (given by Canadians in a Reno casino) on predator attacks on people. (What's the best way to shoot a bear who's trying to eat your father-in-law? How do you tell if a victim has been mauled by a bear, cougar, or wolf?)

You may remember a few years ago I reported on the book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear; the author had a great deal of fun with the onetime libertarian-dominated town of Grafton NH, which tried to draw a cause-and-effect arrow from the town's budget-cutting to its difficulty dealing with bears. Reader, Mary travels to Aspen CO, not known for its libertarian leanings (except for drugs), and describes bear problems there. Bottom line: if they live near your town, they are gonna visit your town, looking for pic-a-nic baskets. Stay clear.

But bear problems in America are nothing compared to elephant problems in India. They kill about 500 humans every year. Mary travels to investigate. And discovers monkey bites. And dog bites. And (whoa) snake bites kill 40,000 Indians per year. (She's usually funny; she isn't here.)

And lest you think she concentrates on the animal kingdom… well, OK, she does. But she also has a chapter on killer trees. A lot of people die because they are in an unfortunate spot when a tree decides to die and take someone with them. And there's another chapter on killer beans.

Fun fact: the CDC estimates that 10,000 Americans are killed or injured every year in trying to avoid hitting an animal. Next time you see a squirrel in the road ahead, just say Sorry little feller, it's either you or me and keep driving.

The one yarn I especially liked was the US Navy's battle against Midway Island albatrosses. Worried about birds that might have a fatal encounter with arriving or departing planes, they tried all sorts of abatement procedures over years, some of them quite amusing. (But, often, not for the albatrosses.)

Bottom line: "Naval Air Station Midway" closed in 1993. It is now "Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge". Yes, the gooney birds defeated the might of the United States Navy.

My previous reports on Mary's books: Gulp, Grunt, Spook, My Planet, and Packing for Mars. I still have a couple to go: Stiff and Bonk. Portsmouth Public Library has them both, so maybe I'll be getting to those next year. And maybe she'll come out with something new. I hope so.

About that "America's funniest science writer": I'm pretty sure she's the world's funniest science writer. Prove me wrong.

A short (albeit dense) book that's a very mixed bag.

The author, Philip Goff, starts from the observation that the fundamental physical constants that govern how the universe behaves seem to be "fine-tuned" to support the presence of life on our planet. (And, although I don't think Goff makes this argument, probably other planets too.) If, for example, the "strong nuclear force" were a little bit weaker than it is, we'd have no atomic nuclei at all, just protons whizzing around. And if it were a little bit stronger, then stellar nuclear fusion would have burned up all the hydrogen, leaving nothing for blimps. Or water.

If you're a believer, the reason behind this is pretty straightforward: thank God. Or some other intelligent designer. See the Discovery Institute for their take.

Goff is not convinced by that, devoting a chapter to why God (who he calls the "Omni-God") probably doesn't exist. He also mentions alternate efforts to explain fine-tuning: the anthropic principle, multiverses, and explains why he doesn't like them.

Instead, he is a fan of panpsychism, which is the notion that the concept of "mind" is present in all things, down to the lowliest neutrino. For elementary particles, and simple arrangements thereof, their "mind" is limited to minding the physical laws we know and love. Once things get more complex (nervous systems, for example), the idea that things have a mind of their own grows more plausible.

And, of course, once you get to really complex things, like the whole universe, the associated "mind" gets really sharp and powerful. And can be said to have the ability to engage in purposive behavior.

At which point I was dubious. Thinking that it's pretty amazing the lengths to which even smart people will go in order to avoid the God explanation. Still, Goff presents his argument well, deals with objections, honestly says why he prefers his viewpoint. Even while admitting any actual evidence for it is lacking.

But, sad to say, things kind of crash and burn in the last part of the book, which veers into politics and economics for some reason. It's a pretty much standard progressive/democratic socialist jeremiad against free-market capitalism, with the usual swear words: "Reagan", "Thatcher", "neoliberalism". etc. This argument would not survive two minutes in the ring with (for example) The Myth of American Inequality by Phil Gramm et. al. Goff should not have even tried.

But as an entertaining aside, he puts in a plug for legalizing psychedelics. Saying, "I took psychedelics a lot when I was a teenager." Bravely daring readers to even think about thinking: Well, geez, that explains a lot.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of legalizing psychedelics too. I'm just dubious of getting profound insights that way.

Things really fall apart in a final postscript, titled "Is Taxation Theft?" Spoiler: his answer is "no". But his argument is hand-wavingly poor. A natural, obvious, question behind "Is taxation theft?" is (or should be) how is taxation different from theft?

Obviously: taxation is accomplished under the political authority of the state, and theft is not. That's pretty much the only difference.

But what is the justification for the political authority of the state? Since I read Michael Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority back in 2013, I'm pretty sure there isn't one. What I said then:

We would not tolerate our next-door neighbors suddenly assuming powers of taxation, legislation, punishment for misbehavior, etc. Especially if (at the same time) they claimed that we had some sort of patriotic duty to submit to their demands and dictates.

In fact, we'd consider our next-door neighbors to be crazy and dangerous.

So don't we need at least a good yarn about how existing states might have justifiably claimed the same powers?

And we simply don't get one from Goff. I'm unsure whether he even notices the problem.

Funny story: I had forgotten why I'd put this on my get-at-library list. And for the first 66 pages or so, it seemed to be mostly a gentle sendup of pretentious, earnest guerilla gardeners in New Zealand.

And then on page 67, things take a sharp right turn into thriller territory. And (as it turns out) the reason I put this on my get-at-library list was its presence on the WSJ's Best Mysteries of 2023. If you click over to the Amazon page, you'll note other raves as well.

It's a thriller, sorry for the spoiler, although it's described that way on the book flap. But it's a very literary one. In fact, it will probably be the only one where John Rawls' views on equitable wealth distribution are briefly derided (page 146).

Another literary feature: at the end, you'll find there are unanswered questions and loose ends aplenty. A lot of action happens off-page, left to your imagination. In fact, I went to the Google with my questions; had I just missed something? No, as it turns out.