EclectEcon

Stratfor is currently promoting a book, Ghost, by Fred Burton. You can read Chapter Two of the book here, where Burton tells about his first day on the job as a counter-terrorism agent.

In this chapter he relates how he was initially asked to read about the Hezbollah attacks on the U.S. Embassy and how each time the suicide bombers were successful in killing many people because they were able to breach the outer ring of defence.

I don't much enjoy his terse and disjointed writing style, but the stories are interesting. It might make for good airport reading.

Gabriel has tagged me in a form of book tag:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
Open the book to page 123.
2. Find the fifth sentence.
3. Post the next three sentences.
4. Tag five people.

I have a vague recollection that I might have been tagged in a similar game several years ago, at which time, as I recall, I copied out several very dry and boring sentences from some book on digital photography.

But I am going to cheat this time. The closest book to me happens to be David Henderson's Concise Encyclopedia of Economics... or maybe one of Ms. Eclectic's Sudoku puzzle books.

Instead, I am choosing one of the more hilarious novels I have read in the past few years, One for the Money by Janet Evanovich.

Being naked and handcuffed in front of my father wasn't something I could visualize.

If I called my sister, she'd call my mother.

I'd hang here and rot before I'd call my ex-husband.

Some people don't like being tagged in blogsports. So I will invite the following bloggers to participate:

• John Chilton
• Phil Miller
• Ironman
• Mike Moffatt
• Stephen Gordon
• and everyone else in my blogroll

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I've read stuff by maybe 10 or 20 of these writers. More, if any of them penned limericks on washroom walls. As a member of the ignorantia [Philistine Liberation Organization], I haven't even heard of a bunch of them.

The 50 greatest British writers since 1945
What better way to start the year than with an argument? The Times has decided to present you with a ranking of whom they consider the best postwar British writers, and are awaiting your responses

1. Philip Larkin
2. George Orwell
3. William Golding
4. Ted Hughes
5. Doris Lessing
6. J. R. R. Tolkien
7. V. S. Naipaul
8. Muriel Spark
9. Kingsley Amis
10. Angela Carter
11. C. S. Lewis
12. Iris Murdoch
13. Salman Rushdie
14. Ian Fleming
15. Jan Morris
16. Roald Dahl
17. Anthony Burgess
18. Mervyn Peake
19. Martin Amis
20. Anthony Powell
21. Alan Sillitoe
22. John Le Carré
23. Penelope Fitzgerald
24. Philippa Pearce
25. Barbara Pym
26. Beryl Bainbridge
27. J. G. Ballard
28. Alan Garner
29. Alasdair Gray
30. John Fowles
31. Derek Walcott
32. Kazuo Ishiguro
33. Anita Brookner
34. A. S. Byatt
35. Ian McEwan
36. Geoffrey Hill
37. Hanif Kureishi
38. Iain Banks
39. George Mackay Brown
40. A. J. P. Taylor
41. Isaiah Berlin
42. J. K. Rowling
43. Philip Pullman
44. Julian Barnes
45. Colin Thubron
46. Bruce Chatwin
47. Alice Oswald
48. Benjamin Zephaniah
49. Rosemary Sutcliff
50. Michael Moorcock

Sir Martin Gilbert is a noted historian, having studied and written extensively, primarily about Sir Winston Churchill but also many other 20th-century events and figures. He says he is always interested in how interpretations and analyses change when archives become available. From a recent interview (the link to the full interview is here),

[H]e stressed that archival sources consistently showed major discrepancies between what is really going on in world affairs and the inaccurate way in which events and personalities are perceived at the time.

"As a historian, I'm very cautious about anyone's claiming to know what any government is doing at the present time," he said. "I study archives as soon as they are open - normally 30 years after an event; sometimes a bit less. What you see when you do this is that the people you imagined had been strong were weak; the people you thought weak were strong; and things you thought couldn't possibly be taking place were taking place."

That was part of an interview in which he said that Lawrence of Arabia was a strong Zionist.

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If you can, take the time to read the entire interview; it is very informative.

notes: Sir Martin Gilbert has been visiting The University of Western Ontario off-and-on this academic year. [h/t to Pooh for the link to the full interview].

That is not a trick question in the title of this post (I hope), and it is nothing at all like the question, "Which weighs more: a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?"

It was stimulated by this piece in Salon (which I noted earlier):

Which is the better thing, to work in a fast-food restaurant or to work in a bookstore? I think to work in a bookstore. Because, I would say, What is better, a book or a hamburger? Who takes a hamburger home and studies it and finds after spending many days sitting in a chair with the hamburger that her life has changed a little bit, that she is suddenly, like a person waking from a dream, seeking a magical vision she found in the hamburger? Who reads a hamburger aloud to a lover? Who falls asleep cradling a hamburger lovingly in his hands? Who takes a hamburger to a radio station and presents it to the world? Who takes a stage at a cafe and says, I just made this hamburger and I want to share it with you? Who runs into a friend on the street and says, I have to tell you about this new hamburger? Who remembers 25 years later the difference a hamburger made in his life?

So I say to you, my 19-year-old friend, now that you are free to think as you choose: Think about what is valuable and what is not [Emphasis added]. Better yet, think about what would be valuable in 100 years and what would not. Think about a person visiting the museum of San Francisco in 100 years. Would he find the hamburger you served? Would he admire the culture that produced it?

... If you work at the bookstore, you will still be a number on some page of payroll expenses.

But you will be serving a higher-quality product to a more elite clientele.

Quite clearly the person who wrote that passage for Salon (Cary Tennis) is an elitist and an intellectual snob, willing to impose his/her preferences on others.

The correct answer to the question posed in the title of this posting is, of course, "It all depends":

• on utility functions and consumer surplus
• on who gets to define "valuable"

Cary Tennis may never have had a good hamburger or possibly doesn't appreciate a good fast-food burger from a major chain, at least not the way I do. I can think of lots of books I have gladly traded for enough money to buy some burgers. (like these, for instance)

He concludes,

Hamburgers don't change lives. Books do.

What a pile of tripe. He should take a book to Darfur and try to trade it for a burger (or the equivalent).

I am, in most ways, a non-intellectual. Not really an anti-intellectual (despite chairing the Philistine Liberation Organization); just a non-intellectual. I'm pretty ignorant of lots of things, and I love to watch sports and shoot-'em-ups on television, and I am blissfully unaware of the content of many of the classics in literature. Here, via Craig Newmark and from the NYTimes, is a list of the top ten novels or books or something of all time:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Yawn. I've read two of them and wasn't all that impressed by one of the two. I have a vague notion about maybe four more, but for those four I'm not about to rush out to buy the books, rent the movies, or scan the classic comics versions. And I don't really care if I never hear of the other four ever again.

As the NYTimes article says, there are always questions and challenges when a "top ten" anything list is compiled (just look at the NCAA BCS football arguments!), but I must say I didn't think I was as ignorant as this list makes me seem --- I haven't even heard of a couple of these books. If they're such good books, how come they're not more popular, huh?

Last month I finally had a chance to read The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. I had thoroughly enjoyed his two previous books, Liar's Poker and Moneyball, (both of which are well worth reading if you have not already read them), and I was looking forward to reading this one. Overall, I'm glad I did.

As so many other reviews have pointed out (this is a particularly good one by David Berri), The Blind Side details the evolution of the importance of football's left tackle position on the offensive line to protect the blind side of right-handed quarterbacks. The analysis and the writing are typical, high-quality Michael Lewis work. I learned a lot from the book, and I enjoyed reading this material.

But none of the reviews I've read has raised serious questions about the Michael Oher portion of the book. On the surface, the story looks like a rags-to-riches, Christian, giving, sharing story. A kid from the ghetto has the general physical tools and ability to become a left tackle, and a family takes him in, buys him clothes, and helps him get through a private high school and into a major university. Given his nearly complete lack of education, he pretty much has to cram all of grades K - 12 into three or four years of school, and his success came about primarily because of the dedication and wealth of his foster family. He worked hard, and so did they; and eventually he received a full ride to Ole Miss. From the telling of the story, it seems likely that they'd have done most of this regardless of whether he'd had the physical traits to be a left tackle, and so the story really does involve dedication and giving on the part of Oher's foster family.

Beneath that cinderfella story, though, we learn that his foster family hired tutoring galore for him, and that even after the tutors worked with him for several years, his reading comprehension and concentration were so low that he had to have major works of literature read aloud to him and explained to him so he (or a tutor?) could write out short essays about them. We learn that he was given a driver's license because he was a football player, even though he apparently failed the exam. We learn that even though his tested I.Q. score increased after a few years, his ACT score was still sufficiently low that he needed to take some remedial courses online (and get very high grades in them) to qualify for admission to university. We learn that his private tutors, despite all their time and effort in high school, had to go to university with him to help him maintain his eligibility there. We learn that he had several people working specially with him to teach him the playbook - that he didn't seem to be able to learn it on his own. And we learn that his rich step-father bailed him out of a difficult assault situation during his first year in university.

How many times has Michael Oher been given the message that because he might become an NFL left tackle, people will bend or break the rules for him. What message does this send to him and to others in a similar situation?

My hope is along with everything else, Michael Oher has learned or will learn a sense of personal responsibility: that in the end, Michael Oher and his foster family recognize that he got lucky, both physically and in being hooked up with the family. He received a chance that so many others in his situation will never receive. If/when he makes it to the NFL, I hope he uses some of his income and wealth to provide many, much earlier, educational opportunities for others from similarly destitute backgrounds.

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Roger Osborne has written a book summarizing all of Western history in 500 pages. From the NYTimes book review,

In “Civilization,” Roger Osborne speeds through more than 40,000 years of Western history in just under 500 pages, minus bibliography and index. This is definitely not a joke, although it comes close to being a stunt, an intellectual high-wire act that the author pulls off with deceptive ease.

Is anything missing? Apparently not. Socrates rates a long, considered look, but Mr. Osborne finds room for the lesser-known Cleisthenes. All the major rulers line up in good order, right down to Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Battles and wars, scientists and inventors, artists and tycoons, all get their turn in a smoothly rolling narrative that embraces Michelangelo and Fats Domino, Galileo and Dolly the sheep, the steam engine and the McDonald’s hamburger.

“Civilization” is not a recitation of greatest hits, or a checklist of events and dates. Mr. Osborne, with great skill, ties his disparate topics together into a coherent narrative, as absorbing as any novel, with felicitous turns of phrase, and tidy summations, on virtually every page. Theoretically it should be impossible to describe the life, thought and influence of Thomas Aquinas in less than two pages, but Mr. Osborne does it, showing no signs of strain. It would be hard to imagine a more readable general history of the West that covers so much ground so incisively.

... As he speeds through the history of the past 20 years, Mr. Osborne goes on something of a rant, teeing off against elitist art, abstract philosophy, the injection of moral categories into foreign policy, privatization of public industries and virtually everything else in sight, including and especially Western rationalism, a guiding light for 2,500 years.

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Susan is a former student of BenS. She highly recommends Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Here are her thoughts on the book, posted with her permission:

In the "Destructive Generation", the authors document a phenomenon that took root during the 60's, sometimes called the "counter-culture" movement. ...

Before that time, patriotism and pride in our democratic society was a given. The veterans of WW 2 came home with a very clear understanding of the value of democracy. During the 1960's, the war in Vietname corroded that understanding. This book documents the critical people and the mechanisms by which it became fashionable to openly call for the destruction of our way of life. As the authors document, there was no really clear plan for what was to happen after the state was destroyed. There was almost certainly a dimly understood Marxist idea that the State would wither away and everyone would live in a paradisal commune. However, the book shows that the will to bring down the state was there, including the idea of financing and encouraging the "real" revolutionaries in the Black Power movement to lead the way.

This may seem very far from Canada, but in literature students studied the "anti-hero". History as a course disappeared, and "Society, Challenge, and Change" took its place. This watered down sociology course examined contemporary problems like racism, and social inequality. The message was always the same. The dominant order was corrupt and the only answer was to subvert it. One of the required texts at Althouse [teacher's] College when I attended was "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" by Niel Postman. (By the way, he changed his mind and wrote a book many years later calling for a return to a more classical, structured education!)

The most refreshing aspect of the "Destructive Generation" is the ability of two intelligent people to change their minds in the face of contrary evidence. They thoroughly document how they came to understand that they, and many members of the baby boom generation were just plain wrong. However, most of the population has not changed its mind in the face of contrary evidence. It clings to the cliches of half baked and sometimes fully baked(!) Marxism which expresses itself now in a chronic Canadian leftism which assumes that anyone with power, wealth, education, or privilege is by definition exploiting somebody. That is why they are so willing to wear a hair shirt. Any disaster, whether terrorism or even the activities of a madman at Dawson college, has to be examined for evidence of persecution and oppression. These people believe that the only explanation for any kind of evil is that the poor wretch was made to feel so bad that the only possible thing to do was to bomb a restaurant or bus, or shoot students at random in a school. ...

There is a real need for Western Societies to begin to pick themselves up and stand up for the values which they have evolved and defended. This book by Horowitz and Collier gives a very clear idea of how the destructive ideas took root, which is the first step to weeding them out!

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I often order products from Amazon; sometimes I have found that the third-party vendors affiliated with Amazon sometimes offer products not available directly from Amazon and/or have lower prices and/or provide speedier delivery for some items. Until recently I have always been satisfied with my transactions with these third-party sellers (usually used-book sellers). In fact one of them was so good (prompt, efficient at checking on the order, courteous, etc.) that I specifically look for his listings.

Recently, however, I had a problem with one third-party seller. They advertised a product at a lower price than anyone else, and I ordered it from them. Their seller rating showed only that they were new and had no ratings from past customers, but Amazon offered a guarantee, so I figured, "what the heck?"

The place turned out to have been a fraud. Amazon was flooded with complaints as virtually no one who ordered anything from the place received their merchandise.

Two months later, after not a whole lot of trouble, I received a refund credit from Amazon to my charge card. I should be happy, I guess. But I'm not totally happy for two reasons:

1. As with any search process, I gave up the opportunity to purchase the item for the next lowest price when I tried to purchase it from the fraudulent vendor. The lowest available price now is higher than the second lowest price that was available back in August. Oh well....

2. I will be hestitant to order from new sellers on Amazon in the future. It wasn't a lot of hassle getting my refund, but it was a bit of a hassle. I would be far less hesitant if Amazon would implement a policy of holding receipts in escrow for 60 days for new sellers. Knowing this, I would expect that fewer fraudulent sellers would become Amazon affiliates; and as a result, I would feel more comfortable ordering from new sellers. I realize con artists could still build up some positive ratings and then put up thousands of fraudulent listings, but the probability of this happening would be lower if there were an escrow period for new sellers.

I submitted this suggestion to Amazon in several different e-mails, but received only computer-generated form letters in response — that probably ticked me off more than anything else, to be honest.

Details: the order was placed with Amazon.ca before there was any feedback. Here is the feedback to date. Yes, despite what you see there, I do know how to spell "expeditiously". My order was for this:

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I still haven't reordered it.

During my hour-long commutes to and from London, Ontario, I often listen to novels on tape (something recommended to me years ago by my friend at Southern Mississippi, George Carter). My latest was December 6, by Martin Cruz Smith, about an American who had been born and raised in Japan and what his life had been like, leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbour. I found it so entrancing, I am ordering the unabridged hard copy to read.

The title of this posting is a line spoken to the hero, Harry Niles, by his mistress, Michiko.

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Last month, I wrote about the controveries in physics over string theory. One of the books I mentioned was The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin. I recently learned of this review of the book by Kent Budge. It makes the book look interesting for us non-physicists. Here is one very brief clip from it:

[T]here isn't an observation that can't be explained by string theory, since with 1e500 string theories to choose from, you're bound to find one that matches the latest observation. String theory is no more predictive than intelligent design — which leads naturally into Smolin's next theme, the anthropic principle that is being embraced by a lot of string theorists. The idea is that our universe is how it is, not because some deep principle requires it so, but because ours is one of the few out of 1e500 universes that is conducive to intelligent life. Smolin argues that this kind of thinking is the antithesis of science.

Another fundamental objection is that string theory has thrown away Einstein's brilliant insight that geometry is nonstatic. All string theories presently being investigated are background-dependent: They are formulated under the assumption that there is a static, eternal, fixed background geometry that is very Newtonian in flavor. Almost no work has been done on background-independent string theory, because it's hard.

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Kent's review is not entirely positive. If you are interested in the topic, I recommend you read his review because it is one of the few I have seen that is both unbiased and by someone who knows what he is writing about.

MA sent me the link to this article about preparations to honour the holocaust victims in Babi Yar in the Ukraine, where 34,000 Jews were massacred in two days.

The massacres at Babi Yar were on a scale that defies comprehension.

Nearly 34,000 Jews, many of them elderly, women and children, were forced to gather at Babi Yar by German troops just days after the Nazi invasion. They were shot along the ravine's edge on September 29 and 30, 1941....

The ravine continued to be used for executions and up to 60,000 more people - Jews, resistance fighters and Soviet prisoners of war - were killed there until 1943.

Before retreating from the advancing Red Army in 1943, Nazi troops exhumed and burned the corpses at Babi Yar in a last-ditch bid to hide the atrocities committed there.

Reading this article reminded me of the very powerful novel, The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, which I read shortly after it was published back in 1981. The first half of it is pretty weird for my tastes, but the last half is an immensely captivating story about the events at Babi Yar.

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Rondi Adamson has tagged me in the latest version of blog book tag. The questions in this version are new and interesting. I hope these answers meet her expectations:

• A book that changed my life - There were several books that had a big impact on me at various stages in my life. Almost surely the greatest impact came from Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. I had been taught (unsuccessfully!) as an undergraduate that everything Friedman said was wrong, but a year after graduating (and a year before going to graduate school in economics), I read this book and realized Friedman was pretty smart and mostly correct. I have mostly been a Chicagoan neoclassical economist ever since then.
  
  Another book which had an impact on me in an odd way was Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis. I read it that same summer, while I was in theological seminary. After reading that book I realized that I, too, was being hypocritical (though I hoped in a less odious way) and decided that evening I would leave seminary, though it took me another year to implement that decision.
  
  In the mid-1970s, my conversion to being a Chicago-type neoclassical economist was speeded along by the conference volume, Industrial Concentration: the New Learning. In this volume, old-style east coast interventionist industrial organization economists (I call them Bainsians, since they subscribed to the Joe Bain "structure-conduct-performance" paradigm) were very effectively criticized by the Chicago-UCLA school of industrial organization, led by Yale Brozen and Harold Demsetz. It affected my entire research agenda and led to my doing more work in the field of Law and Economics.
  
  More recently, The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene raised enough questions about string theory and an 11-dimensional universe that I have drifted away from atheism toward agnosticism.
  
  Rondi mentioned On the Beach by Nevil Shute. I read it the summer after I completed grade 12, and it affected me, too. I remember putting the book down and crying for awhile. But I don't think it changed my life.
  
  
• A book I've read more than once - Mostly I read books more than once by accident. I sometimes find that I have read one but cannot remember that I have read it. After I start rereading it, I realize I have probably read it but cannot remember what happened in it, so I read it again anyway. Aren't the memory problems that afflict the aged fascinating? The most recent of these (that I can remember!) is Janet Evanovitch's Ten Big Ones.
  
  By choice, other than textbooks I use in courses I teach, I can think of very few books I have consciously chosen, ex ante, to read more than once. One is The Joyless Economy by Tibor Scitovsky, a book which challenges the core paradigms of neoclassical economics. Another is Johnson and Kiokemeister's Calculus with Analytic Geometry, albeit in different editions. The reason I read a math text twice is that when I decided I wanted to do economics for the rest of my life, I realized I really had to know how to do mathematics, so I took all the calculus, etc. courses a second time.
  
  
• A book I would take with me if I were stuck on a desert island - I really like Rondi's answer. But I might consider this one or this one.
  
  Seriously, I might take The Complete Calvin & Hobbes (or is that cheating to list a set of three volumes?), or maybe I'd take my copy of Beethoven's Nine Symphonies in Score. But maybe I'll think of something else later and update this item. Actually I'm sure some sort of "how-to" or survival book would be a much smarter selection.
  
  
• A Book That Made Me Laugh Ms. Eclectic says she knows when I am reading one of Janet Evanovitch's Stephanie Plum novels because I'm laughing out loud as I read it. All eleven of them have made me laugh, but the incident with the chicken in the first one, One for the Money, still makes me chuckle when I think about it.
  
  
• A Book That Made Me Cry - See On the Beach, in the first item above.
  
  
• A book I wish had been written - Probably any one of the three novels I started but gave up on because I keep going off on weird tangents every time I started writing them. Another might be, "It's Okay to Fight with Someone Who Has Cancer."
  
  
• A book I wish had never been written — I have to go with Rondi's choices here, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, etc. (these are Wikipedia links, not Amazon links in this category). I might also add, as I said when I first started writing this blog, "any religious screed that encourages its devotees to kill non-believers".
  
  
• A book I'm currently reading - Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. It is painfully and frustratingly and eye-openingly on the mark. I have mentioned it before on this blog, and I highly recommend it. If you want to understand what is happening with terrorism in England (and probably elsewhere), read this book.
  
  
• A book I've been meaning to read - Another by Tyler Cowen since I enjoy his writing on his blog so much. I know it isn't his latest, but the one whose theme has always appealed to me in my role as Chair of the Philistine Liberation Organization (PLO) is In Praise of Commercial Culture.
  
  
• What turned me onto fiction "Jax" Lucas, an English Literature professor at Carleton College and an expert on Hemingway turned me on to Hemingway. I think that was the first time I ever bought a novel (The Sun Also Rises) just because I wanted to read it, not because it was assigned reading or something I had to write a book report about.
  
  
• Whom do I tag? Every time I have joined in a game of blog tag in the past, a few people have had somewhat negative reactions, so please do not feel obligated in any way. I tag (how many am I allowed to tag???):
  
  
  • John Chilton, when he gets back to blogging
    
  • Kip Esquire, when he returns from Prague
    
  • Brian Ferguson
    
  • Dave Friedman
    
  • Stephen Gordon
    
  • Stephen Karlson
    
  • Rebekah K
    
  • Phil Miller
    
  • Ben Muse
    
  • Bill Polley
  
  and anyone else who wants to play.

Here are some convenient Amazon links for the books I have mentioned above:

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Phil Miller has an excellent, thorough review of Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. Here is one brief excerpt:

[R]eading this book, you might feel as if you are at the brewpub on a Friday afternoon, discussing the mind with your colleague Daniel Gilbert - only without the ensuing hangover and the threat of public intox. It's a very informative and enjoyable book that will appeal to a wide variety of readers. If you are the least bit interested in how the human mind works, this book is an excellent read.

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Here's the link (courtesy of Brian Ferguson) to a news item about the most recent winners of the "Dark and Stormy Night" contest, wherein people submit their attempts to write the worst possible opening lines to a novel. This year's overall winner:

“Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said ‘you’ve had your last burrito for a while’, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.”

Gee, I don't know. That sounds like the type of stuff I often read while traveling! (see here, for example)

Brian's favourite was the winner in the romance category:

“Despite the vast differences in their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labour Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their faeces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine

Monkeys on espresso didn't do it for me. But this one sure did:

“A single sparkling tear fell from Little Mary’s cheek onto the sidewalk, then slid into the storm drain, there to join in its course the mighty waters of the Los Angeles River and, eventually, Long Beach Harbour, with its state-of-the-art container-freight processing facilities.”

That is truly amazing prose, especially with the tag line about "state-of-the-art container-freight processing facilities."

The writer of the overall winning entry put the icing on the cake with this admission:

“My motivation for entering the contest was to find a constructive outlet for my dementia.”

Brian and I both agree that some of Peter Robinson's lines might easily have won, had they been submitted.

During my travels, I often pick up "airport novels" to read — the kinds of paperbacks you read in the airport while waiting for a flight. My most recent ones have been the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson. Last week, as I was reading Aftermath,
I burst out laughing, and laughed so hard I had to wipe away the tears from my eyes. Here's the line:

A vicious, cold rain slanted in from the iron sky, and waves from a North Sea the colour of stained underwear churned up dirty sand and pebbles on the beach.

That line, fortunately, is very atypical for Robinson's novels. But it is rivaled by this one from the same book, in which a character says,

"She could be cruel. Remember that time when she put castor oil in the coffee, the evening of my first book club meeting? Caroline Opley was sick all over her Margaret Atwood."

I know some people who don't need castor oil in their coffee to evoke that reaction.

Actually, Aftermath is the worst of the Robinson novels that I have read so far. I have to think that the plot sickened him so much he made up for it with these little jabs scattered throughout the text.
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The current online issue of the New Yorker [link courtesy of MA] has a very lengthy piece about Oriana Fallaci. Here are some excerpts.

She writes that Muslim immigration is turning Europe into “a colony of Islam,” an abject place that she calls “Eurabia,” which will soon “end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt.”

... Muslim immigrants—with their burkas, their chadors, their separate schools—have no desire to assimilate, she believes. And European leaders, in their muddleheaded multiculturalism, have made absurd accommodations to them: allowing Muslim women to be photographed for identity documents with their heads covered; looking the other way when Muslim men violate the law by taking multiple wives or defend the abuse of women on supposedly Islamic grounds.

... “If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression.’ But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination. If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a ‘Well done, good for you.’ But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched.”

... “Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us. . . . I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

I know the Canadian Education system is not terrific is many ways, but is it really this bad? From the Freakonomics blog:

Hello. I am Rohan Patel, I am 10 years old. Your book was amazing! I loved it, but I found one mistake in it. In the chapter “What Makes A Perfect Parent?” it says that changing schools does not have an impact on the child. This is untrue, as i moved from Canada to India. In India the school system is much harder, when I came here I was way behind. I am emailing my friends and they are behind me, what they learn is very different from what I learn. So changing schools makes a huge impact on the child, I myself am an example of this.

How many 10-year-olds do you know who can read, much less understand, Freakonomics?

Or is the letter a hoax?

This past weekend, I finally got around to reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton.

I guess it's okay. But I wasn't enthusiastic about it.

1. It certainly is gripping, as are all well-written novels about how the world will soon be destroyed if the hero doesn't, McGyver-like, escape many sure-death situations and, severely wounded and out-numbered, destroy the evil plot. I have read enough of these adventure-type, help-save-the-world-type of airport novels that I am actually put off by this form of the genre.
   
   Oh? What's this? Is the hero/ine trapped again in a sure-death scenario? Not again.... How will s/he escape from this one? Oh my, what a quick thinker, what a knowledgeable person!
   
   I am tempted to write "yawn", but that would be unfair because despite my finding this form of the genre boring, I was, indeed, captivated by this rendition of it.
   
   
2. Let's face it: the novel was a thinly veiled series of speeches about global warming by Crichton. Different lawyers, scientists, etc. may be delivering the speeches, but splice 'em together and you have a unified monologue. The device of using different characters to deliver the speeches is certainly preferable to the economics novels in which the hero does all the lecturing and quickly becomes boring to the point that you wonder why he has any friends [see Murder at the Margin, or The Invisible Heart].
   
   
3. The apparent theme of the novel is that all the global warming science suggests that there is little or no reason to think that (a) global warming is serious or (b) whatever global warming is taking place is human-induced. The novel may be a good way to sneak these ideas into the consciousness of people who might otherwise not read them, and the graphs and references are commendable. Let me also recommend Taken by Storm by colleague Chris Essex and Ross McKitrick.
   
   
4. The title, State of Fear, captures the essence of a series of speeches (again, thinly disguised as dialogue) by [gulp!] an emeritus sociology professor, Norman Hoffman, near the end of the book [pp500ff of the paperback]:
   

   Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last centure. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. they are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things they can't even see — germs, chemicals additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable!
   
   ...[T]he military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society. In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population — under the guise of promoting safety.
   
   ... Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless.

   
   Coincidentally, this book was most recently recommended to me by Jack, a former sociologist; another contributor to this blog, BenS, happens to be an emeritus sociology professor who has published widely on the media.
   
   If you are willing to entertain some doubts about the global warming hoopla, and if you like adventure novels, State of Fear is worth the effort. Me? I think maybe I'd rather watch curling.
   
   
   
   

What do you think has been the best Canadian novel ever written?

My present vote would be for Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler, but I can be convinced otherwise. Ms. Eclectic votes for The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

I would not vote for anything by fellow Clinton, Ontario, resident, Alice Munro, mostly because her work tends to be collections of short stories. I don't much like the work of Margaret Atwood, nor do I much care for The Diviners or anything else by Margaret Laurence.

...

That's probably because my tastes run more to what I term "airport novels". It's nice to know that with these tastes I am probably providing an indirect subsidy to Tyler Cowen.

In fact all of you unwashed-masses-happy-endings-loving viewers subsidize me. You support so much feel-good slop that when something meaty does come along, I am genuinely shocked and delighted.

Last week, Jack sent me this link to Wikibooks. These are books that are organized and produced the same way entries to the Wikipedia internet encyclopedia are. Roughly, anyone can write material, and anyone can edit the material.

As I looked through the titles and topics of some of the books that are available, I was really impressed. It makes me wonder the extent to which instructors will, in the future, place more reliance on internet textbooks instead of published, hard-copy texts [for example, see this economics text by former colleague, Preston McAfee. Also take a look at the open courseware provided by MIT, but that material generally does not include an online textbook].

As an example, here is a list of books available just in medicine:

MEDICINE - Medicine - Radiology - Diagnostic Radiology - OsiriX Online Documentation - Emergency Medicine - Internal Medicine - Radiation Oncology - Orthopedic Surgery - Test Prep for USMLE Step 1 - Test Prep for USMLE Step 2 -

It turns out, sadly, that many of these books, including the one on orthopedic surgery, have no entries yet. Much of the material is in the proposal stage or doesn't exist yet. And even the "books" that have been published are not very thorough [see for example, the book on Game Theory and compare with this].

As a result, my home-study programme to become an orthopaedic surgeon has been put on hold for at least one more term.

Dave Barry's new book, Dave Barry's Money Secrets: Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar? will surely become a must read. I've just ordered a copy on the basis of this excerpt. Here is one very short clip from that excerpt:

If our money really is just pieces of paper, backed by nothing, why is it valuable? The answer is: Because we all believe it's valuable.

Really, that's pretty much it. Remember the part in Peter Pan where we clap to prove that we believe in fairies, and we save Tinker Bell? That's our monetary system! It's the Tinker Bell System! We see everybody else running around after these pieces of paper, and we figure, Hey, these pieces of paper must be valuable. That's why if you exchanged your house for, say, a pile of acorns, everybody would think you're insane; whereas if you exchange your house for a pile of dollars, everybody thinks you're rational, because you get... pieces of paper!

He really does understand, doesn't he: Something serves as money only because it is generally accepted in payment for goods and services.

[h/t to King Banaian at SCSU Scholars]

. .

Here is the list from the NYTimes (reg. req'd) that will be published next month. At that site, there are links to reviews. Here are some brief notes and questions:

1. I have actually heard of one or two of these books.
2. Is it incestuous for them to list so many books by NYTimes op-ed writers?
3. How many of them do you think this man has read? My guess is about 35.
4. Are there any Canadian writers on the list?