A VERY fact based book, intensly footnoted. A very compelling read. Not such a conspiracy laden narrative as some of the other books on crude, but compelling none the less. She does not shy away from calling a spad a spade though. I recommend this book to anyone who wants “just the facts” on what is going on with crude. Here are some choice tidbits:

“For each barrel of tar-sands oil (in canada), no less than two tons of sand and clay must be mined…extracting oil from the sands sucks up two-thirds of the energy they ultimately render…Producing a single barrel of oil from the tar sands emits no less than six times more carbon dioxide than producing a barrel of conventional oil.:

“Burning over 2 million barrels of oil every week, the U.S. forces crushed the Hussein regime within weeks.”

“Because methane sucks up so much more heat than carbon dioxide, if even small amounts leak into the air – unburned – they could intenify global warming by twenty-three times more than the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. As Jeremey Leggett points out, “just a 3 percent leakage of gas from the production, transportation, distribution, and use of gas and you would lose the advantages its lower carbon intensity with respect to oil.”

“By 2010, the International Energy Agency predicted, the amount of methane wafting out of the oil and gas industry’s leaky pipelines would be as effective at warming the plante, over a century’s time, as the burning of over 3.8 billion barrels of oil.”

natural gas is bad.

Just saw this movie (ok well behind my friends, but I am busy!). My friend Richard Titus helped get this made and I am very glad he put his own money into this. The story of American auto/petroleum industry killing innovations that threaten it is long. The GM EV1 is just one more chapter. You get some of the history and verse in the movie as well which is very helpful. Near the end you get a glimpse of the future. Tesla motors and other INDEPENDENT companies that will make these cars a reality. GM can’t make a profit on a car that sells less than 300,000 copies. Just like Hollywood has trouble making money on small movies. Remember, GM has three retired employees for every one currently working. GM is basically an pension plan that makes cars and car loans. The innovations will come from the start-ups who don’t have that legacy costs. Go buy a Tesla. I am.

I was expecting lots of summer action and a thin predictable plot. I got the later and not enough of the former. What I got instead was a healthy helping of new camera angles, mixing of film formats (high film quality interspersed with home movie quality), and some innovative sound work. What struck me most about this movie was the technical aspects of the film making. Not the story. Not the characters. Not the action. That is ok for a film geek. Bad for the overall user experience. Give this one a pass.

Another airplane book. Was back and forth from the east coast twice in last week, so picked this up in Newark. Very engaging and lots of unexpected twists. Good summer entertainment. I rank 3 of 5 stars.

So with all the war going on I have had a desire lately to hear fro m the front lines. Saturday while on my way to surf in Westport, I stopped at a Starbucks by McCord Air Force base and talked with a guy in desert fatigues in line. Over the weekend I also finished this great book. Fick was a Captain in First Recon USMC, the toughest of the tough grunts. He starts the story at Dartmouth and through training, into Afghanistand and over to the initial invasion of Iraq. There is no empty cheering. Just what feelings and thoughts going through his head. His internal struggles with being an officer, learning to lead men and dealing with military buracracy. Very engaging reading. I recommend it whole heartedly.
I rate 4 of 5 stars

This book is on all sorts of “best of” list including “Dr. Peter Boxall’s 1001 books you must read before you die”. I guess you need alot of titles to make a list that long and most people will die before they finish. I recommend dieing before you read this one. It was completely and totally unengaging and uninspiring. Maybe it is a great example of a certain type of fiction at a certain time that was once important for some technical reason (like the invention of the pan shot in movies) but now seems totally passe. The characters are insipid, boring and totally self involved. The time is so long gone bye european aristocracy that no-one will recognize it. And the ending is short, expected and stupid. I rate as 0 of 5 stars.

Ever heard of Malta? No, not MaltoMeal the drink. Malta, the country in the middle of the landlocked ocean. Neither had I. But reading this it is clear how important it is and has been to world history. Especially european interests in Africa and the far east. And to oil. Malta has historically been the strategic epicenter of mediteranian security and commerce. And in large part the key to oil in the mid-east. That is why Germany wanted it so bad, for access to the oil and to expansion to russia. It all comes back to oil.

My father suggested the book as background to our current struggle for oil. I wouldn’t recommend the book for that. It is written by a british military historian and too full of ship names for me. The focus on battles and equipment takes away from the real intersting parts which were why bother? what was at stake. No I wouldn’t recommend reading this book to anyone. But I just was in Mexico for a week and it made for a nice break.

If you want to know what it is like on the ground in the mid-east with the CIA read this book. If you want a blow by blow of how the agency (under clinton) eviscerated the human field operatives in favor of “technology”, a move that lead to our TOTAL blindness to 911, read this book. There is no option to human intelligence. Even if you don’t like the thought that America “spies”, it is necessary for us to know what the hell is going on in the world. Even today there are many countries where we have ZERO human intelligence agents, many across the mid-east. When we invaded Iraq we had exactly ZERO on the ground agents. We based everything on ex-pat reports and third hand intelligence and “analysis”. Look what we got.

After reading this book and others I am more convinced than ever we need to strengthen our intelligence services at home and abroad.

I give it a 4 of 5

Chandler started by writing short stories for pulp magazines. These are some of the more readable ones. The Lady in the Lake is the best and could have been a whole novel. If you want bite-sized Chandler, this is it! I ate it on the plane back from Hawaii tuesday last week.

I rate 4 of 5 stars.

This is one of those books I didn’t want to end. One of the two best Chandlers (along with The High Window). I have read this one so many times that the middle pages of the paperback came out this time. A note in the front inside cover says I read it first back in 1992. I need to get a hard-backed version. The majority of memorable Marloweisms come from this book. Here are a couple:

on bad TV: “I turned to another channel and looked at a crime show. The action took place in a clothes closet and the faces were tired and over-familar and not beautiful. The dialogue was stuff even Monogram wouldn’t have used. The dick was a coloured houseboy for comic relief. He didn’t need it, he was plenty comical all by himself. And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.”

On marriage: “The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programmes they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich – small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday, and the Reader’s Digest on the living-room table, the wife with cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big, sordid, dirty, crooked city.”

I rate 5 of 5 stars.