If only all science books were as entertaining as Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson explains the major scientific theories known to man with masterful storytelling skills. Weaving in richly researched details on the lives and characteristics of the foremost historical scientific figures, Bryson discourses on everything from the big bang theory and quantum physics, to paleontology and plate tectonics. As he put it, the book is about ”...how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” Not just detailing what we know, Bryson describes how we learned what we now know.

As an undergraduate Earth Sciences major 20 some odd years ago I remember one of my geology professors describing how the theory of plate tectonics had at that time recently turned the entire Geology field upside down, and how as a theory it had been utterly reviled for years, until the evidence was so overwhelming it had to be accepted and embraced. According to Bryson, this violent resistance to breakthrough ideas appears to be a pattern often repeated.

I have a few things to say about the audiobook. I listened to the abridged version from Audible.com which was narrated by Bryson himself. He has a lovely voice. So lovely and calming in fact that I nearly fell asleep several times while driving and listening to the book. The content of the book is extremely interesting, so much so that I kept on pulling my hair to feel some pain so that I could stay awake to listen to it. I’m serious. This is a great book. There must be something in his voice; I bet if it were analyzed it would be found to trigger the alpha and beta brain waves conducive to sleep. My mother was listening to it as well and I had to wake her up several times. We finally had to take breaks from listening. They cut a lot out to make the abridged version 5 hours down from I think 17? I’m planning to buy the book to see what I’ve missed.

In Freakonomics, authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner turn a spotlight on to some touchy areas – abortion, crack dealers, parenting, the KKK, cheating by school teachers, guns in homes. They present a view that if you remove the lens of morality and how things “should be”, many phenomena can be explained through basic economic principles. As a business professional with graduate degrees in both economics and business, I couldn’t agree more. Yet the book is in a word, lightweight. A little over 200 hundred pages and presented in large, easy-to-read print, Freakonomics can be read in a couple of hours. And if you understand anything about economics that you could pick up in a college survey class, you won’t be that surprised by their analysis. I can only think that the reason this book has been on the NYT best seller list is because most people don’t understand the basic tenets of economics.



The author’s assertion that a main contributor to the falling crime rates across the country in the mid 90s was due to unwanted babies not being born twenty years earlier will rankle many, especially conservative Catholics and right-to-lifers. This is not a new theory, nor was Levitt the first person to think of it when his paper on the subject was published in 2001. However, the popularity of Freakonomics may be was gets this theory more out into the mainstream and collective consciousness of this country. By the way, although Levitt presents his theory on crime and abortion almost as if it is “the truth”, it is not a fact, but a theory, albeit one with compelling evidence and arguments.



All in all I was amused and intrigued by much of what is presented in this book but think that it could and should have been twice as long given the cost of the book.

What a howler. Reminiscent of Mickey Spillane, Carl Hiassen’s Skinny Dip starts with crooked sleeze-ball Charles Perrone throwing his wife off a cruise ship miles away from the coast of Florida. Unbeknownst to Chaz, his wife Joey, was a champion swimmer and athlete in college, and turning her fall into a dive, survives the fall, swims to near exhaustion, eventually latches on to a floating bale of marijuana, and is picked up out of the ocean by a retired cop Mick Stranahan. Joey doesn’t understand why Chaz tried to kill her and spends the bulk of this hilarious story with Stranahan figuring out why and taking revenge by driving her husband crazy. The book is filled with great character sketches – Tool, a pain-killer addicted hired thug who gets reformed by the terminally ill old lady whose meds he tried to steal, Red Hammernut, the agribusiness tycoon who is paying off Chaz to falsify water quality records so he can keep his polluting enterprise up and running, and Karl Rolvaag, the homicide detective who keeps two albino pythons and when they escape is disturbed when the yappy dogs of neighbors go missing.



Joey is a force to be reckoned with, and gives new meaning to the saying, “don’t get mad, get even.” Boy does she and how.



I listened to the abridged audiobook from Audible.com read by the author himself. Hiassen does a superb job narrating this story. He and the story remind me of the great old radio drama shows. It’s so entertaining, you can pick it up almost anywhere in the story and be racked with laughter. In fact, I played some for my dad while driving and he was still chuckling 20 minutes later.

That Louise Erdrich likes to tell stories becomes obvious from the reading of her novel The Master Butchers Singing Club. She never races through a tale, but takes her time, dissecting every nuance in delicious detail. The book’s central character is Delphine, whom we meet as she is returning home to Argus, North Dakota in the early 1930s with her balancing act partner Cyprian to care for her father, the town drunk. Delphine is a survivalist – a hard working, tough love, feet-firmly-planted-on-the-ground woman. She befriends Eva, the wife of the local butcher, Fidelis Waldvogel, who had immigrated to Argus from Germany after the first world war. Fidelis starts a singing club, the members of which make up many of the contributing characters of the story.



I had expected that the book would be about Fidelis, as the title had suggested “The Master Butcher”. And it is, in that all of the stories and subplots relate to Fidelis and his family. But the novel really centers around Delphine and her struggles to survive and to help the people she loves. The novel is rich with subplots involving the various residents of Argus – Clarisse, the town mortician, Hawk, the love-struck sheriff, Step-and-a-half, the town rag collector, Tanta, Fidelis’s spiteful spinster sister, and others. At times the novel reminded me of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, with its bizarre midwestern characters all not-so-loosely connected.



I’ve read some other reviews of The Master Butchers Singing Club that didn’t like the wandering subplots. I for one found the novel deeply satisfying. Erdrich writes simply and well. She paints vivid scenes that become etched in one’s mind. I can see Tanta in her shiny silver suit, striding forcefully through the town looking for a job. I can see Delphine’s father’s house so layered with garbage, vomit, and piss that it takes months to clean out. I see Step-and-a-half’s notions shop with the brand new sewing machine in the corner. Sometimes Erdrich lingers too long with the inner thoughts of some of the characters. My reaction when that happens is, this is a woman writing. Men don’t write this way. I don’t think my father would have the patience for this book. But my mother would love it.



In the end, The Master Butchers Singing Club is about love, loyalty, tragedy, and redemption. It is about how small actions of good will can change the course of lives. I highly recommend it. The audiobook, in particular, is well done – read by the author herself.

Iain Pear’s The Dream of Scipio follows the lives of 3 men, all men who are deeply thoughtful and philosophical, all who must face terrible decisions which try their deepest beliefs, and all men who lived in France’s Provence in three different centuries of great upheaval. Manlius Hippomanus, a wealthy Roman aristocrat, suppresses his own Greek philosophical training to become a Bishop in the mid to late fifth century AD, the period during which the Roman empire is collapsing and Gaul is abandoned to the Visigoths. 900 years later Manlius’ writings are studied by Olivier de Noyen, a poet in the service of Cardinal Ceccani, during the brief historical period in which the pope resided in Avignon – the mid 1300s, and during which time the great plague decimated a third of Europe. 600 years later again, Julien Barveuve, a classics scholar unearths de Noyen’s writings in the Vatican. Like the men before him, Julien’s life is turned upside down as his world collapses during the Nazi invasion of France. Each man is also passionately in love with a powerful woman, and each passion leads to disastrous results.



This intricate novel is not a light summer read. It took me two thirds of the way through it to consistently keep track of who was who and which century we were in. Once the characters were finally established in my brain as to which century, which conflict, and which woman, the novel began to come together. And after finishing it, I picked it up to read it again, this time with more appreciation and less confusion. Once beyond the complexity of juggling three stories simultaneously, the novel became quite interesting, mostly because of the horrendous moral choices each character had to make. In each situation the main character performs a brutal betrayal and endures a great sacrifice to do what he thinks is right. Each has high moral ideals that are compromised by political realities. The fundamental philosophical questions that each has devoted their lives to examining are called to bear in their own lives.

In Shah of Shahs Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski turns his focus to the former Shah of Iran, the CIA supported dictator whose oppressive regime led to the revolution that took Americans hostage in their own embassy, caused the shah’s exile, and resulted in the fundamentalist Islamic government that runs Iran today. Kapuscinski published this book in 1982, just a few years after the revolution. In his unique style Kapuscinski weaves history, stories of individuals, and his own observations and interpretations.

And Savak meant, above all, torture of the most horrible kind. They would kidnap a man as he walked along the street, blindfold him, and lead him straight into the torture chamber without asking a single question. There they would start in with the whole macabre routine – breaking bones, pulling out fingernails, forcing hands into hot ovens, drilling into the living skull,, and scores of other brutalities – in the end, when the victim had gone mad with pain and become a smashed, bloody mass, they would proceed to establish his identity. Name? Address? What have you been saying about the Shah? Come on, what have you been saying? And you know, he might not have said anything, ever. He might have been completely innocent. But to Savak, that was nothing, being innocent. This way everyone will be afraid, innocent and guilty alike, everyone will feel the intimidation, no one will feel safe.

The first two thirds of Shah of Shahs focuses more on the historical background leading up to the revolution. The last third concerns the revolution itself. In this section Kapuscinski offers reflections on the nature of revolutions; he has experienced first hand dozens of them around the world. One observation of note is that the people who come to power after the revolution aren’t the same people who brought the regime down. In the case of Iran, people with a democratic vision took the greatest risks, suffered the most oppression, and caused the downfall of the Shah. Iran however could not support a democracy, as the majority of the population preferred Islamic fundamentalism. So ultimately that’s what they got in the Ayatollah Khomeini.



Well written, as all Kapuscinski’s books, and essential reading for anyone truly interested in current Middle Eastern conflict.

September 11th made it clear that thousands of Afghans that we had armed and trained had become terrorists with the US now in their sights. How did Afghanistan become a training ground for terrorists? George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War is the story of how one man, U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson, Rep. Texas, almost single-handedly launched the several billion dollar CIA operation in Afghanistan to force out the occupying Soviets, without a vote in Congress, and without the clear approval of the President. What started as barely a nuisance campaign turned into the greatest covert operation in CIA history.

Charlie Wilson’s War is a highly entertaining, eye-opening, sobering book. Entertaining because of Crile’s journalistic writing and the indepth character studies of the main players: Charlie Wilson – a charismatic, boozing, womanizing, ruggedly tall and handsome, ne’er-do-well Congressman from the Texas bible belt and Gust Arvakotos – a street-fighter Greek-American CIA agent whose aggressive and “earthy” behavior clashed with the blue-blood establishment at Langley. Highlighted as well are a string of beautiful, seductive women who inspired and accompanied Charlie to the Mid East, Michael Vickers – a brilliant strategist whose approach of diverse weaponry led to the ultimate Soviet retreat, and many many others. Eye-opening because of the exposure of all the back-room politics that went into play in order for this war to get off the ground. Trading favors and buying influence is how things actually get done in Washington. If you want to be where the power is, sit on the Defense Appropriations Committee. They’re the ones who dole out the bucks – defense contracts in your state. Sobering because well, the escalation of conflict in that area caused the deaths of thousands of Russian solders and hundreds of thousands of Afghans. And, after the Soviets pulled out, in the power vacuum that was created, the Afghans turned on each other with the weapons and training we gave them.

This book is a great read. I spent three nights in a row up until 1:30 a.m. reading it, only putting it down when the words started to blur.

Smithy Ide is a 43 year old drunk – overweight, friendless, and when he can think, disgusted with himself. After the funeral of his parents who die in a car accident, Smithy finds an unopened letter to his parents from a mortuary in California. The letter says that the mortuary is holding the body of Smithy’s sister Bethany, an indigent whose identity they’ve been able to match with dental records. Still in a drunken fog, Smithy finds his old Raleigh bike in their garage, and sets off down the road, flat tires as all. Thus he unintentially sets off on a bike journey across the country and in the process comes to terms with his life and the loss of his beautiful sister who couldn’t escape the voices in her head.

I downloaded The Memory of Running from Audible.com based on the hundreds of positive ratings readers gave it. For the first several hours of listening, I didn’t like it at all. Here were the ramblings of a pathetic, do-nothing loser. Where was this story going? But gradually, it wore on me. As Smithy sobered up his story drew me in. Smithy had let himself go to pot, so to speak, and as his story unravels we learn that he is basically a simple, moral person. Author Ron McLarty notes in the audiobook’s afterword that Smithy’s one gift is that of the ability to listen. It’s through this gift that we meet many people on Smithson’s journey and are touched by their unique stories as well.

The Memory of Running is meant to be heard, not read. Author Ron McLarty is professional actor, playwright, and narrator and does a terrific job narrating this story. I’ve read some reviews criticizing some of the writing in the book and I think I would be more critical too, if I had read it rather than listened to it. As it is told in the first person, the book is written how Smithy thinks; sometimes he’s not all together coherent. He’s not particularly articulate. He’s a regular Joe, and critics aside, most people aren’t English majors. The book requires surrendering to the character. It requires patience to hear out the story. Fortunately McLarty is a skillful storyteller.

On the Water: Discovering America in a Row Boat – In the spring of 1999, Nat Stone set out in a row boat from near the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan to row his way around the Eastern half of the United States – up the Hudson through the Erie Canal, down the Alleggheny and then the Mississippi, around Florida, and back up to Brooklyn and up the coast of Maine. The trip was motivated by a lifelong love of the water and boats, and by the need to fulfill a dream of following the route of Howard Blackburn, a nineteenth-century Gloucester fisherman. (Blackburn had lost his fingers after the froze to his oars while he rowed for 5 days straight to come in from the sea in a storm. Blackburn subsequently taught himself how to sail and rigged a boat that took him up the Hudson, down the Mississippi, and around Florida.) Nat’s trip included one 9 mile stretch of portage, in which, hooked up to a harness, Nat pulled the boat over land. The trip was also broken up into two parts. The first part took Nat all the way down to the point that the Mississippi empties into the sea, begun in April 1999 and completed in August 1999. To complete the ocean journey Nat would need a boat that wouldn’t so easily capsize in ocean swells. He returned to the Bayou in January 2000 and picked up his journey again.

When I close my eyes at night I see the Mississippi River. No shore, no boat, no sand bars. Only water, silty brown and swirling, so close in my mind it seems I could reach into it with my hand and watch my fingers disappear into alluvial opaqueness. The river melts the land and carries it. It is a river of water and soil, Ol ‘Muddy, running southward through the continent, starting so far to the north you’d have to drive through Pennington, Minnesota, on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, hardly seventy miles from the Canadian border, to cross the country without bridging it. Yet it is not a still frame of water I see with closed eyes, but an endless shifting of myriad sub-currents, of whirlpools the size of saucers, smoothly flowing mushroom domes of upwelling water thirty feet wide, and countless other zephyrs of liquid movement, constantly morphing and eddying, an ever-changing puzzle of water. Looking down from a bridge one sees the river as a single, steady whole. But its flow is in fact incalculably complex, and it is this motion that puts me to sleep.

Quiet and inspiring, highly recommended.

Links:
Nat Stone’s website with photos of the journey

So many people had recommended Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser that I bought the audiobook on Audible.com and listened to all 9 hours. I have mixed opinions about it. On the one hand Schlosser does a wonderful job describing the history of the fast food industry with terrific case studies of McDonalds and Carl’s Jr. Visionary entrepreneurs brought America efficiently prepared meals at prices low enough to make the food affordable to all. Schlosser also expertly delves into the the structure and participants of the entire industry, from the meatpackers and potato farmers to the franchisees and corporate marketeers. The research effort that went into this book are well deserving of praise. I was especially bothered to learn about how in-bed fast-food marketers have become with our public schools, with the schools pimping junk food to students in order to raise revenue. It is shameful that we are trading off the health of our children for the tax dollars that should be going into our schools.



On the other hand, and perhaps this is a result of my listening to a narrator read the book rather than reading it myself, I found that Schlosser often sensationalized many parts of the book when the facts could well stand on their own. Schlosser comes across as partisan anti-Republican and in most cases, anti-business. He identifies a “victim” and magnifies their position, rather than give balance by providing insight into the fuller story. As a political moderate, an MBA, and a businesswoman, I was annoyed with the tired “big bad corporate American” position that Schlosser took throughout much of the book. Perhaps it was the narrator with an overly dramatic tone. Whatever it was, the book was often annoying and I could only handle listening to so much at a time. Don’t get me wrong; everyone should read this book. The facts revealed are important for all of us to know to make better public policy decisions. The message of this book is more important than its tone.