Reviews of Books, Movies, and Other Stuff

David A. Wheeler

Here are reviews of random books, movies, and other media. I certainly don't agree with everything in the media below, but if they encourage me to think new thoughts, they are interesting to me. The ones I find really interesting and recommend reading/seeing I've marked with "!!!!".

I've certainly read many more books, and seen many more movies, than what's listed below. I just don't have time to comment on all of it, and I've only just started to put this page together. But perhaps you'll find pointers to interesting media here, even though this is quite incomplete.

Oh, I've included links so you can immediately go to Amazon.com and buy them in some cases. If you buy it by following the link, I get a small cut - which I then use to buy more books. So if you do follow a link and buy it, my thanks in advance!

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Alternate History

• The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein, as well as the Peter Jackson movies based on them, are fabulous. 'Nuf said. !!!!!
• Foundation Series (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) by Isaac Asimov. Old and good. The premise is that Hari Seldon develops a science (psychohistory) that can predict future human events, then uses that to establish "foundations" to change those future events. Later books in the series were (in my opinion) lousy. !!!!!
• The Matrix (movie). Okay, the sequels weren't so great, but the first one was wonderful. Loved it. This is not okay for kids; it's rated R for a reason. See my essay Man as the World-Builder; or for a lighter note, see How to Throw a Matrix Party. !!!!!
• 1632 by Eric Flint (part of the "Ring of Fire" aka "1632" aka "Assiti Shards" series) This is an alternate history series in which the inhabitants of a small town in West Virginia ("Grantville") are transported back to Central Germany, May 1631, with no way back. This thing is a riot - it's a lot of fun. Basically, the people of Grantville decide to start the American Revolution 150 years early, and it's a fun intellectual exercise to figure out what modern technology works in this setting... and what doesn't. This is actually the beginning of a huge number of books and stories, written by many people, which are both fact and fiction: 1633, 1634: The Ram Rebellion (Assiti Shards), 1634: The Bavarian Crisis (The Ring of Fire), 1634: The Galileo Affair (The Ring of Fire), 1634: The Baltic War, The Grantville Gazette, Grantville Gazette II, and Grantville Gazette III. Note that 1632 is not for kids; there's more than a little gore, language, and a honeymoon-night scene. At the least, 1632 and 1633 are especially good. There's a big fan website where people discuss the fictional world, 1632.org, where there are lots of interesting essays and stuff like dead horses, Sarah Wendell's "The Ring of Fire and the Money Supply" and Voice of Europe/America's interval signal. !!!!!

Computing

• Programming Pearls and Writing Efficient Programs by Jon (Louis) Bentley. Bentley is really good at giving insights into software development. These books are old, but the concepts are still current. !!!!!
• The Mythical Man-Month and No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks. Yes, they're classics. They're classics for a reason. !!!!!
• Debugging by David J. Agans. Good book; see my separate review about Agans' Debugging. !!!!!
• Secure Programming with Static Analysis (Addison-Wesley Software Security Series) by Brian Chess and Jacob West discusses static analysis tools in great detail. I just got the book, so can't really post a review yet; I'll post more once I've had a chance to really consider it.

History

History presented as a "list of facts" is worthless. But analysis of history to explain what happened (examining cause and effect), sufficient that it can help us understand the present, predict the future, or tell us what we should do next, is deeply interesting. If a book has a theory that explains (parts of) the past and predicts the future (think psychohistory), then it's an especially interesting book to me.

• Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by Neil Howe and William Strauss. This book posits a simple theory that each human generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. It then examines U.S. history to see if this theory models U.S. history well, and the book is an extraordinary good case that it does model it well.
• What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis. A fascinating (and saddening) examination of the Islamic world. He describes an ossified culture, often unable to deal with modernity, and where violent men advocate even more retreat from modernity in the perverse belief that it would help. Every trivial issue seems to be controlled by jurists' rulings, and constantly prevents them from taking up even many small improvements. (For centuries they couldn't even stay in the West to learn from them, and even now rulings seem to forbid critical improvements and freedoms.) According to Lewis, freedom of thought is quite limited; religious minorities have been tolerated, but not in Saudi Arabia, and though there's a verse about not compelling someone into a religion, it's a capital punishment to leave the muslim faith (those who try, or tell muslims about other faiths, are killed). Political freedom is unavailable in most such countries also. A small example is illuminating: wheeled vehicles, commonly used in the area before Islam, gradually went out of use in Islamic Middle Eastern countries until they were re-introduced by the West. "This was a symptom of a bigger problem. A cart is large and, for a peasant, relatively costly. It is difficult to conceal and easy to requisition. At a time and place where neither law nor custom restricted the power of even local authorities, visible and mobile assets were a poor investment. The same fear of predatory authority - or neighbors - may be seen in the structure of traditional houses and narrow alleyways, the careful avoidance of any visible sigh of wealth... the advent of paved roads and wheeled vehicles in modern times brought no alleviation of the larger problems" (p. 157-158). Indeed, the whole notion of separation of church and state is completely absent from their thinking (with notable exceptions, such as Turkey which is doing comparatively well). Blaming the U.S. or Israel is common, yet they appear to be mere scapegoats; they didn't even exist before the area's decline.

  "To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom - freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny - that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But the road to democracy, as the Western experience amply demonstrates, is long and hard, full of pitfalls and obstacles. If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination... For the time being, the choice is their own." !!!!!

• The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis. More insights; really good; 'nuf said.
• Storm from the East: The Struggle Between the Arab World and the Christian West (Modern Library Chronicles) by Milton Viorst. It takes a whirlwind view of history, so at time it can be a little rough to follow, but it's very good at noticing the many failures on all sides, and the repeated lost opportunities. There's a particularly nice inight on page 127, discussing 1963: "The three most powerful Arab states - Nasser's Egypt, Syria, and Iraq - were committed to a Pan-Arab ideology. So, apparently, were the Arab masses. Yet the unification that had once seemed inevitable never occurred... Each of the Arab countries held firm to its own national identity. Pan-Arabism's failure demonstrated that Arabs could pledge their bond to the Arab community, to the umma, while at the same time embracing the nationalism of the state in which they lived... Arabs were at ease in the 1960s giving their loyalty to Pan-Arabism as an ideology, without surrendering their identity as Iraqis, Syrians, or Egyptians. Most seem to feel that way today." Another quotable is on page 133: "Arabs had no good explanation for the disaster of 1967 and many took the easy route of blaming... the West. A few brave thinkers adopted the unpopular position that Arabs should look for the blame within themselves, or at least within their culture. But Arab society, historically resistant to change, is not by nature introspective. Arabs were generally unwilling to upset conventional values, so many of them rooted in history and Islam. The catastrophe produced little in the way of useful insights." Page 153: "[In the 1980s] Islamic nationalists from around the world mobilized in Afghanistan [against the USSR]... though not quite admitting the U.S. as their ally, they gladly accepted American weapons... Thanks in large part to the United States, the Afghan coalition emerged victorious." Page 165, on why democracy is not working in Iraq: "To succeed, democracy requires individuals to make their own judgements. Sectarianism, tribalism, and regionalism are its enemies... few Iraqis voted as individuals. Shi'ites voted as Shi'ites, Sunnis as Sunnis, Kurds as Kurds... the elections provided no advancement toward a stable society..." Page 174, "The solution may well lie in the president's willingness to turn to the Arab community for help. The Arab states, every one of them volatile, recognize the jeopardy they themselves face in Iraq... [they] share with America an interest in keeping Iraq's society and territorial integrity intact."
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New Edition by Jared Diamond is stupendously interesting. He explains that many events of history - particularly the rise of the West over societies like those in the Americas and Papua New Guinea - are well-explained by examining the resources available to them. He also pleas for the creation of a "science of history", in which the scientific method is used to create theories of causation that can be tested (he's arguing for something like "psychohistory" in Asimov's Foundation series, though surprisingly never mentions that). One problem with this book is that it doesn't sufficiently admit the strong impact on history from areas other than environment, such as human ideas/culture (think Middle Eastern Islam vs. European Christianity), and stupendously gifted individuals (think Alexander the Great). Perhaps that's necessary; he's trying to find all important causes not due to these things, and by putting on such blinders, he manages to delve deep. In any case, it's really insightful, and worth a read.

  There's a very interesting National Geographic series based on it (your local library may have a copy, and certainly Netflix does) - but of course the book presents much more material. You can buy your own copies of the Guns, Germs, and Steel DVDs as well. !!!!!

• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. This book focuses on errors and deliberate omissions in history textbooks, as well as the whole omission of controversy and the use of the "authoritative" tone that makes history textbooks so bad. I agree with him that history should not be taught as facts and dates to memorize. I believe that history must concentrate on analyzing the causes and effects of important events, ideas, and people; though he'd say things differently I think we'd agree on that. Some of his arguments aren't persuasive to me. E.g., he says that textbooks routinely omit the fact that Native American cultures swiftly feel to the Europeans because most of them died from European diseases (95% in many places). I agree that's critically important, and apparantly many books he looked at didn't note it, but I certainly recall knowing that information in high school; clearly this "lie of omission" is getting out somehow. I also knew that Columbus absolutely conquered the natives in horrific fashion where he arrived - there's no secret there. His obvious strong leftish political beliefs lead him to imply things as "truth" that I certainly wouldn't agree. He seems excessively fixated on class, seems to believe that no one can ever better their circumstance, and his tone implies that he believes that any difference in income between people is morally wrong. Yes, there are certainly major income disparities, but if you want to see class structures really in action, examine rural India or 17th century England, where it is/was not possible to change your circumstance no matter what. In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled at how in the U.S. people had much more equality of social conditions than elsewhere; it wasn't fully equal then or now, but it still provides more opportunities than most. Because Loewen is concentrating on "lies", he ends up with an angry tone that manages to concentrate on the bad things in U.S. history - not the good things that have made it great (he does mention that briefly, but the mention doesn't really counteract it). The result is quite lopsided. His claim that everyone should spend time arguing stuff in class is less persuasive; there's not enough time already, it's hard to argue issues until you understand the facts, and there's plenty of causes and effects that are understood and agreed upon that can be covered. You can cover debates without having a free-for-all; just explain the different viewpoints even-handedly (Wikipedia's policies show it's hard but possible). Still, this book is a useful antidote to the many history textbooks that omit "uncomfortable" truths in U.S. history. Certainly it makes sense to scrap the current set of history books (which have boatloads of errors), and replace them with texts that emphasize what's actually important, ideas, causes and effects, primary sources (with many long quotes from them), and accuracy.
• The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This book is a "history" of the modern limited-liability, joint stock companies, and it's interesting on several levels. First, it's a history about one of the most influential ideas of modern times, that nevertheless doesn't normally get examined as its own history (companies are legally a fictional person... so why not treat their history the same way?). Indeed, the book claims that "the most important organization in the world is the company [not the state, commune, or political party]." Though business has been going on for a long time, the full-fledged limited-liability joint stock company only dates from the mid-1800s... and it's completely taken over. Second, it turns out that many of the issues discussed today about modern multinationals aren't new... they've been raised for a long time. President Rutherford B. Hayes: "This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer... it is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations." Edward I in 1279 issued the Statute of Mortmain, to stem the flow of assets to the "dead hand" of corporate bodies. The conflict between owners and the company managers (agents), known as the "agency problem", has been discussed and never fully solved right from their beginning.

  Yet the authors do a good job arguing that companies have actually become (on average) more ethical, more humane, more socially responsible than in the past; they also argue that the concept of the company has been one of the West's great competitive advantages. Indeed, they strongly make the point (page 186) that "the modern company still needs a franchise from society, and the terms of that franchise still matter enormously. From the company's point of view, two clouds have gathered... corporate scandals and... social responsibility." Companies now often do good works, in part because they fear what will happen if they do not. And perhaps the best thing about companies is that they have developed ways to create products and services that are far more affordable than they were before, giving wealth to us all.

  Ronald Coase's 1937 article "The Nature of the Firm" argues that the main reason why a company exists is because it minimizes the transaction costs of coordinating a particular economic activity; bring all the people in-house, and you reduce the costs of "negotiating and concluding a separate contract for each exchange transaction." But these gains must be balanced against "hierarchy costs" - the costs of central managers ignoring dispersed information. This is interesting to consider when examining open source software projects, which also enable coordination of economic activity, and tend to use wide-open mailing lists to counter hierarchy costs.

Business/Innovation

• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen is startlingly good. It describes how well-run companies can be completely destroyed by disruptive technologies, because they are well-run. Be careful: the term "disruptive technology" doesn't mean what a technologist might think - a technology might be radically different and risky, but sustaining and not disruptive given Christensen's definitions. In his terminology, a disruptive technology is one where the innovation results in worse product performance as traditionally measured in the near term, but they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers want... and have the potential to grow into eventually providing adequate product performance. "Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use." Since the customers for such products are new, and typically small, the "big guys" won't serve them... yet those who do will grow the technology until it's sufficiently capable to upset the established players. It doesn't have to be better under the old measures - just good enough, and with other advantages (such as being much cheaper or flexible). Eventually the upstarts grow the technology until it's a threat to the "big guy" - by that point it's too late, and the "big guy" vanishes. !!!!!
• Thinking Inside the Box: The 12 Timeless Rules for Managing a Successful Business by Kirk Cheyfitz. Good overview of the fundamentals for running a business. It's all too easy to chase after fads in business, and that's a mistake. This is an antidote, focusing on the basics: profits, cash flow, cutting expenses is always more certain than increasing sales, customers are boss, hiring smart (instead of managing hard), results are more important than process, and so on.
• The undercover economist: exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor, and why you can never buy a decent used car by Tim Harford. This book is really much more about the big picture of economics, and how to apply that insight, than an attempt to justify weird things. This is much better than Freakonomics - I find his explanations and justifications much more compelling, as well as easier to apply broadly.
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This is okay, but I wasn't as impressed by this book as some others are. Its basic idea is that you can answer interesting questions about how people really behave (not how they say they behave) by studying quantitative data. Well, yes, but that's not new. What's more interesting about the book is the various questions they ask, which certainly cover many different areas, and the way that they find and analyze numbers to get their answers. Some of the questions they ask and answer are interesting, e.g., "Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?" (the answer: only a very few dealers make all the money; the rest make nearly nothing, but do it anyway in the hopes of becoming the few rich ones). Their claims that abortions reducing crime aren't as strongly supported, I think and of course just because people do something doesn't suddenly make it right. Which brings me to another point. They discuss how they caught cheating teachers, who rigged kids' answers to make their classrooms appear more effective... by analyzing the class answers to find evidence of cheating. Since I work to analyze stuff quantitatively where possible, this was certainly not new or eye-opening... but if you haven't thought about how to analyze real life, this might be an interesting book.

Miscellaneous

• The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman. "Maus" is really good - it even won a Pulitzer prize. It's a non-fiction graphic novel that tells two stories: the story of how his father survived the World War II holocaust, and the story of the relationship between father and son. I have the two-volume bookset, though it's now published as a single work. It is poignant and deep. The story of his father's survival through a combination of incredible presence of mind and luck is gripping (and disturbing). But the more-recent timeframe lets the author explore a lot of the complications that are really hard to express. Some people are fooled into thinking that this is a work of fiction, because as an artistic convension he depicts all the people with animal heads (mice for Jews, cats for Germans, pigs for Poles, dogs for Americans, and so on). He really starts to exploit and make fun of this convention as he goes, poking fun at our stereotypes. This is one of those "you must read this before you die" books.
• Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It by Dr. Warren Farrell. This is definitely not politically correct, but it is full of detailed studies and statistics that don't seem to be discussed elsewhere. Many claim that "women earn less than men doing the same thing", but according to the data gathered into this book, that's wrong -- instead, women tend to not do "the same thing". Past studies only compared titles, which often turns out to be very misleading. By digging deeper, Farrell has found that women tend to make choices that lead to lower pay, so they tend to not do the same thing in the first place! When women intentionally make such trade-offs, that's great, but often women seem to make choices without realizing that they are choosing the lower-paying options. He uses lots of statistics and stories to show what it takes to earn more. Higher-paying fields tend to involve technology (vs. arts or social sciences), hazards, sleet and heat (vs. indoors and neat) when little education is required, work you can't "check out" from at the end of the day, work with lower personal fulfillment (engineer vs. child care), higher financial/emotional risks, the worst hours, unpleasant environments, ones that require constant updating, and specialized subfields. To make more money, you need to work more hours than others, have more relevant years of experience, and be absent less often. People who relocate tend to make more. And of course, taking on bigger responsibility, requiring less security, and producing more all tends to result in more money coming back in. This is not a victim's book, but really a book on "what can you do to earn more". He doesn't say this, but it all boils to down to supply and demand - workers who are in high demand and short supply (due to danger, difficulty of gaining the prerequisites, etc.) tend to earn lots more! Note that simply saying "the same field" isn't enough - the person willing to relocate, or work for many more hours each week, may have the "same" title as someone else but is likely to be earning more money. Frankly, all of these factors seemed obvious to me, but apparantly these factors aren't obvious to many others. Though there are many statistics in this book, one of the many stories illustrates the point (p. 38): "While I was writing... a Goodwill rep called to cancel a pickup at my home... the driver said it was too dangerous for her to travel with her truck down the narrow, curving streets to my home... A year or so later I called again and Goodwill came. No problem. But also no woman driver." There are also some interesting comments about military service that, if true, are very concerning if you want a military to win instead of being politically correct (PC). This isn't a book justifying paying women less; quite the contrary, it's a guidebook for women so that they can be sure they fully understand the impacts of their choices, which in my mind is the best idea. Money is not the be-all; in many cases it's a good idea to forgo money for something more important to you, and it can give you peace of mind if you understand your choices. It's actually a pretty interesting book for men trying to make income trade-offs, too. It's not PC, but it's a compelling case, and certainly mind-opening. Very interesting.
• How Wars Are Won: The 13 Rules of War from Ancient Greece to the War on Terror by Bevin Alexander. The author claims that there are 13 rules which win wars (striking at enemy weakness, feigning retreat, and so on). He then devotes a chapter to each rule, describing the rule and various battles that illustrate it. He's very insightful on some of his comments, though I don't completely agree with some of his prognostications. His rules, though, are very sensible for explaining the past. His rules are: striking at enemy weakness, defend then attack, holding one place (and) striking another, feigned retreat, the central position (this one is really surprising), employing a superior weapon (though too many generals have mistakenly thought they had one), driving a stake in the enemy's heart, blocking the enemy's retreat, landing an overwhelming blow, stroke at a weak spot, caldron battles, uproar east (then) attack west, and manuevers on the rear. He includes not just successes, but failures to apply these principles. For example, he notes that Germany in World War II needed oil, and if they took the Soviet's oil fields (in the Caucasus and along the shores of the Caspian sea) it would cripple the Soviet Union while strengthening Germany. Yet Hitler required his soldiers to do both that and seize Stalingrad - hundreds of miles away, and completely unnecessary if his goal (as stated) was to stop the flow of oil (capturing the Caucasus would have done that too!). By dividing his strength, he failed to do either. Of course, much of this is not new (Sun Tzu said in the 5th century "make an uproar in the east, but attack in the west"), but it's an interesting summary.
• Born on a Blue Day: A Memoir by Daniel Tammet. This is an autobiography by Daniel Tammet, an extraordinary autistic savant who can describe (to a limited degree) what is going on in his own mind. He has extraordinary gifts (he's able to learn Icelandic in a week, memorize Pi to over 22,000 places, and so on) yet other things (like living independently of his parents) is very hard for him. To me, what's especially intriguing is that he perceives each number specially, i.e., 11 is friendly, 4 is both shy and quiet, 23 is big, 333 is beautiful, 117 is tall and lanky, 9 is towering and filled with immensity. And it's great that he's managed to at least partially overcome his difficulties to live his own life. Parts are not for children (he talks briefly but directly about his homosexuality). I first learned of Tammet through the documentary Brainman, which is interesting as well.

Fun

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Special Edition) (movie). One of the best comedies of all time. Actually, the best comedy of all time. Not for kids. If you haven't seen it, go buy it. Now. !!!!!

Notes

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