Books on Marco's Blog

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (J. Toobin)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:28:46 +0000

I waited for the paperback edition of this book to come out, and I did well. This is a book best read with a bit of distance to the events described.

A history of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in recent times. Once an institution of minor rank, over the 20th century the Supreme Court transformed itself into a powerhouse of societal transformation, pushing the nation forward towards equality and the rule of law. Never mind that most of the justices were appointed by conservatives: they ended up veering sharply to the liberal side once appointed.

Uncertainty (D. Lindley)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:58:04 +0000

There is no topic in elementary physics as odd as quantum mechanics. Once you learn the formalism, it is easy to apply (although the mathematics required can be daunting). The experimenters say, on the other hand, that the results you get from quantum mechanical computations are accurate within the limits of measurement.

Problem is, there is no reason for that. We are all a little surprised by how accurately QM models the world. It’s as if God in his or her infinite wisdom had decided to choose QM as the infinitesimal model of the world on a whim.

The Armchair Economist (S. Landsburg)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:30:49 +0000

I felt like an addition to my review of Landsburg’s book was in order after completing the read. I am as enthusiastic as I ever was, but I think I have a more nuanced look now.

First of all, I read the book as an attempt to popularize both economics and its fundamental tenets. In that attempt, Landsburg succeeds spectacularly: the way of thinking of economists, which is probably the most important thing right now about their achievements, is brought forth with great clarity and persuasive power.

The Armchair Economist (S. Landsburg)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:28:55 +0000

I love economists. They are a special breed of scientists. They tower high above all the other ones in their all-knowing wisdom and dispense it to the rest of the world in little parcels, mostly at dinner parties and economic summits.

Ok, maybe I don’t love economists in general, only some of them. People that tell me something that is unexpected, especially when they combine an obvious piece of information with another one and come up with something totally unexpected. The Peter principle, for instance, is a really good example.

Superhumans on the Rise - Orson Scott Card and Ayn Rand

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:47:39 +0000

Really, this should be a review of my latest read, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow. After thinking about it for a while, though, I realized any review would be meaningless if it didn’t look at things from a broader perspective. I changed the scope, changed the title, and you know the background.

Over the years, I’ve met plenty people that were fervent enthusiasts, passionate about Orson Scott Card’s novels or Ayn Rand’s own ones. Oddly enough, there was little of the typical polarization that usually goes hand in hand with passionate fervor. Instead, the majority of people I spoke with remembered both or either writer as an also ran.

Four Novels of the Sixties (P.K. Dick)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:15:27 +0000

The Library of America (loa.org) decided it was time to honor Philip K. Dick and published four of his most famous novels in one volume. Good choice, since Dick’s novels are in general quite short and publishing only one would have left the reader dissatisfied, given the tomes that are usually produced in the series.

The 60es were a crazy time by anyone’s reckoning, at least in the United States (in Europe, the 70es would assume the same significance). Philip Dick, who was genuinely mentally troubled, works well as a paragon of the time – Dick and the Sixties, a match made in heaven.

Dreaming in Code (S. Rosenberg)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:51:15 +0000

Confession: I had the hardest time understanding relativity. Not such a big deal for the average Joe, but quite a handicap for a physicist like me. I could certainly apply the equations, that was straightforward enough. The inner logic of it all, though, escaped me.

Take the twin paradox, for instance: one of two twins leaves for an extended trip to another star, and the other one is left behind. When the traveling brother sees the other one on screen, the latter’s speech is slowed down, a relativistic effect. I saw that on Ustinov explaining relativity. The Earth-stuck twin, in turn, sees the fast brother talking at twice the speed. Says Asimov.

The Lost Painting (J. Harr)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:55:33 +0000

I had the good venture of spending my high school years in Rome, just at the time when you get acquainted with the fine arts. My memories are still vivid with entering the churches of San Luigi dei Francesi and Santa Maria del Popolo and seeing the Caravaggios in there.

They are an unforgettable sight. They hang high up, far out of reach, and you have to drop a coin to turn on the lights that allow you to see them. And when you do, get ready for them, because they are not what you’d expect in a church.

The Game Players of Titan (P. K. Dick)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:33:52 +0000

Get ready for a flood of P.K. Dick novel reviews, since I am getting caught up on old reading. I even went out of my way to order all the ones I didn’t buy yet on powells.com, and they are going to arrive any time soon.

The Game Players of Titan is the typical P.K. Dick novel: an uncertain society after a catastrophic development, extraterrestrial life (in this case not imagined), a mystery to solve, and an unusual setting with a great many surprises.

Anthem (A. Rand)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:52:47 +0000

There you go: buy a 400 page book, and then discover that it’s a 100 page book plus 300 pages of “original material” with commentary and other stuff. Disappointing, not because it’s really only 100 pages, but because I had packed it for the beach – and I can definitely read 100 pages in under an hour, leaving me without much to do but counting grains of sand and waves crashing onto shore.

A Maze of Death (P. K. Dick)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 13:56:04 +0000

Some authors you just love reading because they transport you away into another real world. As a writer, you need imagination and creativity to create a completely new world, and it usually ends up being something that is entirely invented – the more bizarre, the better. Take Tolkien, for example, or even Calvino.

Not so for Philip K. Dick. His science fiction novels mostly entail worlds that are “real” – they play in some distant future, but they have all the ugliness and baseness of our own world. Usually it is a catastrophe that forms the background of the story, something that humans have done to themselves. And on this background, Dick paints a subtle portrait of people just trying to survive, struggling to make ends meet, and somehow they always manage to touch the sublime with a fingertip, before they have to let go again.

The Satanic Verses (S. Rushdie) - Partial Final

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:17:06 +0000

Ok, I give up. After 40 years of slogging through any book I’ve had to endure – including War and Peace, the Bible, and various heavy-weight textbooks on theoretical physics, I finally found one that could outlast me. The Satanic Verses couldn’t hold my interest for more than 2 pages at a time, and the prospect of having to read all 561 pages of it was just way too much. At that rate, I would have read that book for more than three quarters of a year!

The Satanic Verses (S. Rushdie)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:18:01 +0000

Well, it’s a bit early for a review of The Satanic Verses just yet, since I barely have dented the first 20%, so forgive me for sharing preliminary thoughts. On the other hand, the first impression is probably what is going to be leading into the final review, so I probably should share how the beginning feels, alright.

I always wanted to read this book. Mr. Rushdie had been heralded as one of the greatest writers of the century, and not having read anything by him was a little dirty secret that I couldn’t confess to anyone, even to me. I was going to read him, one day, I swore, constantly forestalling the moment whenever I ran into The Satanic Verses at any bookstore.

Plan of Attack (B. Woodward)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:45:17 +0000

It’s been a while that I wanted to read the Bush trilogy that Bob Woodward put together. In three volumes, the celebrated co-reporter of the Watergate affair describes the inner workings of the Bush administration with the kind of depth that only a journalist with access to the original sources can have.

It sounds like President Bush was eager to have this reporting going on. Maybe he was trying to ensure that there was a full account of what had been going on, so that history could judge on its own with full disclosure, instead of relying on opinions of the uninformed. In any case, the trilogy has been heralded as the definitive account of Bush at War, its tag line.

His Dark Materials (P. Pullman)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:22:58 +0000

I had completely missed out on this series, and if it hadn’t been for the movie The Golden Compass and the resulting review in The Atlantic, I would have probably gone on with my life without ever getting to meet Mr. Pullman’s writing.

I read the trilogy in Hawai`i, on my last trip. As a matter of fact, I spent most of my daylight time reading the three volumes, and I sincerely regret not having made more of it. Sure, the books are a good read, but they are after all for a young audience, and it shows.

Basilica (R.A. Scotti)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:35:03 +0000

There are two periods in Italian history that would make for exciting movies and novels. One has been taken for good by Umberto Eco, whose masterful telling of the times of upheaval in the Middle Ages in The Name of the Rose define that very time in most people’s minds.

The early modern era, which in Italy coincides with the Renaissance, is the other period whose trials, tribulations, and poisoned victims make for good reading and viewing. There is nobody, though, that staked a claim to that period yet.

My Name Is Red (O. Pamuk)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:09:59 +0000

Tough review, this time. I bought the book by fortuitious circumstance a few weeks before Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize, and once the whole bruhaha about his receiving the award happened, I set the book aside not to be biased by it.

In Hawai`i, I had plenty time to read, and I took this book and went from end to end in record slow time. Which is part of what makes this a hard review to write down.

Daughter of Fortune (I. Allende)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:26:41 +0000

There is always something magical about South-American writers. They seem not to have forgotten how to write a novel – that it takes a story, then some chuzpa telling it, and a pinch of mystique in the presentation. All those things together make a compelling world in which you can get lost no matter where your physical self is.

The young Marquez had the gift, as the gigantic Isabel Allende. When you read their stories, they sound a lot alike: full of characters that are always described with humor in the mind; redolent with thoughtful and thoroughly researched descriptions of worlds the author does not know; filled with tension that finds its release on time, and slowdowns that never last too long.

jPod (D. Coupland)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:14:43 +0000

jPod is the kind of book that makes me feel very ambivalent: lots of promise, but a lot of annoyance going along with it. In this, it reminds me of {moscontentlink:Eggers}: an ambitious novel, some excellent writing, but a lot of stuff that is completely unrelated to the main thread. In other words: it could have been a great book, but its shortcomings make it just enjoyable.
The story line follows a bunch of game developers whose last names start with the letter J – they are all placed in neighboring cubicles in a forced cohabitation from which they cannot escape. The jPodders are very different from each other, and their families play active roles in the novel.

What's the Matter With Kansas? (T. Frank)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:54:56 +0000

Eureka! Finally a book that manages to be original and not controversial!

Despite frequents jabs against his own home state, Mr. Frank manages to give us an outstanding introduction to how Kansas turned from the most progressive state in the Union to one of the most conservative and (in the eyes of the authore) most backwards states.

And the reason is: elitism!

Would you have thought that possible? Mr. Frank traces the average Kansan and finds out that the class warfare that made Kansas lean to the left is a thing of the past: there are not enough workers to make a majority anywhere.

Acts of Faith (P. Caputo)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 20:47:34 +0000

Sometimes a book can be astonishing. Acts of Faith, a story of relief agency work in the misery of South Sudan, is such a work. In one fell swoop, it clears the mystery surrounding the actual state of affairs in Sudan, and makes a compelling case for the uniqueness of the situation. Nobody comes off as the good guy in this book, and not many as the bad guys.

Sudan is one of those places, like Rwanda a few years ago, where you only hear bits and pieces of a catastrophe unfolding. Whenever you hear something, there is a bit of truth to the lies on both ends, and you are none the wiser. On one end, a repressive regime is trying to ethnically and religiously cleanse the country of blacks and Christians; on the other end, a terrorist militia is recruiting children for the dirty work of attacking a sovereign government.

1453 (R. Crowley)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 06:43:08 +0000

{moszoomimglink:1453}There are moments in time when history looks over your shoulders, and you know it. The whiff of history hit me twice: once in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell right in front of my eyes; and then years later, when I was part of the Internet Bubble and could see with my own eyes fortunes made and unmade in days.

The year 1453 had one of the most astonishing event of that kind: Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, a bulwark against the world domination of Islam since the days of the prophet Muhammad, fell to the invading army of Mehmet II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

The Flanders Panel (A. Perez-Reverte)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 20:29:26 +0000

Et tu, Amazon? The infallible suggestion engine decided I should read Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel, a European (Spanish) novel of chess and murder. I guess that having read The Eight was a hint in the right direction, as both books focus on chess as a key to solving a murder case.

My review of The Eight was not too positive, particularly because the novel fails to deliver the promise of the publishing house. In all, though, it’s a readable novel that makes sense and is entirely enjoyable. Where the plot makes little sense, big adventures in the Sahara clearly make up for it.

Blink! (M. Gladwell)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 30 May 2006 23:38:29 +0000

The Tipping Point was already a real pleasure, and (I won’t make you wait for the verdict) Blink! is even more coherent.

Malcom Gladwell, well respected author for the New Yorker, decides to go out and explore the power of intuitive thinking. Unlike his first big success, this book talks about one thing only, and succeeds in captivating with concrete examples.

Of course, this captivation is entirely of desire: we want to be dazzled by our own ability to understand things we can’t possibly understand, and now we have a logical reason to do so.

Running with Scissors (A. Burroughs)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 27 May 2006 09:53:07 +0000

Renowned because of the shocking content, this book was an excellent follow up on Frey’s {moscontentlink:A Million Little Pieces}. Another crazy autobiography, this time of the kid of a psychotic mother who is brought up by the crazy family of the mother’s shrink.

Now, the premise sounds interesting, and there are lots of sound bites and stories that are captivating and novel. The mother will formally hand over guardianship over her only son to the psychologist; the psychologist’s family is as crazy as any of the patients; and the little kid discovers at 13 that gay sex is not all what he thought it to be.

A Million Little Pieces (J. Frey)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:50:48 +0000

James Frey is an addict. A multiple addict, doing anything from alcohol, crack, PCP, and a dozen other illegal drugs. He seriously screws up his life, almost dying from an overdose, and is sent to a treatment camp. Here he will do well.

All in all, the book is a champion of the ability to get better. It reads like one way of getting rid of addiction: by confronting it. I wonder how many of the readers that actually face addictions actually have followed the advice in the book – regardless, the history is well told and eminently readable.

Skipping Towards Gomorrah (D. Savage)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 06 May 2006 08:12:19 +0000

Considering that Dan Savage is all the rage (and has been for several years) here in San Francisco, I am actually surprised I waited so long to read a book of his. Known for his satiric outlook on society and conservatism, Mr. Savage is a gay Al Franken.

This particular book was inspired by Robert Bork’s “Sloughing Towards Gomorrah,” a “realistic” look at today’s America. Mr. Savage points out quite credibly that conservatives have a history of painting a picture of moral doom, denouncing the current nation, only to turn around at the last second and declare how much they love America.

The United States of Europe (T.R.Reid)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 07:25:24 +0000

Being a European (still), I just couldn’t resist the temptation of buying this book. Mr. Reid obviously knew something I didn’t, his title suggesting that Europe was on its way to equal the United States (of America) in global power, no less.

Turns out that the book could have been titled: “The European Union, A Force Not to Be Neglected Any Longer.” Not as catchy, of course, and the whole tone of the book is sensationalized to attract readers to a fairly dull subject matter.

Leonardo da Vinci : Flights of the Mind : A Biography (C. Nicholl)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 08:55:08 +0000

{moszoomimglink:Verrocchio – head of David}Leonardo is quite the character. For most of his life a beautiful charmer, surrounded by pretty boys in search of a career, we remember him mostly for his old age, a bearded man with long straight hair. He is almost as iconic as his creations, who became true symbols of art and science to a degree unparalleled before and ever since.

Yet, the man is a little elusive. He is from an age too far in time to have dutifully recorded all his comings and goings, and despite his fame, many of his works have not survived. Biographies came late, mostly at the hands of people that had only a scant acquaintance with Leonardo, or even never met him.

Cryptonomicon (N. Stephenson)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 05:18:36 +0000

First things first: don’t read the paperback edition. The print is tiny, and the book huge – the perfect recipe for a painful headache.

I heard about Cryptonomicon first in a personal ad, in the category last read. The title sounded interesting, so I bought the book and read it on my last trip to Hawai`i. Which ensured that I had plenty time to read with no distraction or better things to do.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (T. Ryan)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 08:53:36 +0000

Ok, I’ll give it away immediately: this is one charmer of a book! It’s the story of a woman who escapes an abusive husband and chronic poverty by participating in contests and winning prizes in a big way. She is so good at it, she makes a living with it and eclipses her husband’s earnings.

All in all, though, it’s at the same time the story of ten kids that have to suffer through a childhood full of strictures just to find themselves a wonderful family that will stick together forever. This is all told with the honesty that accompanies American family biographies, revealing all in a humorous tone.

Collapse (J. Diamond)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 10:48:54 +0000

“Guns, Germs, and Steel” counts as one of those eye-opening books that correlate things you hadn’t thought about before, just like “Godel, Escher, Bach” a while back. I enjoyed it immensely, and I was looking forward to whatever Jarred Diamond was cooking up next. Which turned out to be the present book, Collapse.

Guns was about how European societies dominated the world because Europe benefited from climatic benefits that no other area of the world had. While the premise was deeply flawed (China had none of the benefits, rose much faster than Europe, and then declined), it was a very interesting read, since it pretty much said that any culture would have made it to the power of Europe if it had had the advantages that Europe enjoyed.

Dress Your Family … (D. Sedaris)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 07:47:09 +0000

… In Corduroy and Jeans. David Sedaris’s 2004 book continues the series of stories from the author’s family, including early childhood memories and recent memories of life in France with his partner, Hugh.

I find it astonishing how the same man can write 5 books on his family life and still have more to say. I guess everyone else would run out of things to tell, but Sedaris’s family can be counted on for one more little funny story every single time. Or maybe the commentator on the jacket is right: even when given the phone book as material, David Sedaris would know how to make that sound funny.

Nickel and Dimed (B. Ehrenreich)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:38:41 +0000

A MUST READ. I don’t care what you have read this year, you HAVE to read this book.

An incredible account: successful journalist decides to descend into the bowels of mankind and tries to balance her budget by working like a low earner and spending like a low earner. She finds out that’s impossible.

What is really shocking is that she really, really tries. Barb goes in and tries herself at waitressing, at house-maiding, at Wal-Marting. And she fails. She fails, and she fails, and ultimately she fails. She just can’t make ends meet. Sometimes it’s the job that kills her, sometimes the housing market, sometimes her ailing health.

Into Thin Air (J. Krakauer)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:16:34 +0000

Do you think an expedition to climb Mt. Everest sounds fun? Well, if you do, you should read this book.

Jon Krakauer is very sympathetic to the plight of mountaineers. He understands very well why people are attracted to high mountains, their rarified atmosphere, and to the incredible opportunities to die. And the latter are the most remarkable things about this book.

Sent by Outside magazine to discover the thrill of Everest climbing, Mr. Krakauer sets out with a group of unprepared humans and a set of sherpas and guides to climb the highest of Earthly mountains. The expedition succeeds, and all but a handful make it to the top.

Wicked (G. Maguire)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 05:37:18 +0000

I am terrified!!!

Ok, so there is a story about the Wicked Witch of the West from Wizard of Oz memory. Funny looking binding, Garamond-ish old-style font – I was so sure it was going to be ironic-sarcastic-amusing!

I start reading, and someone I don’t smile. After the first chapter, I slowly start realizing this is not going to go anywhere else. It is going to stay what it started as. Horror. A serious story of the Wicked Witch of the West. I am not kidding! It’s like a weird cross between the Wizard and Harry Potter, all full of social strife and injustice, tyrants and martyrs, terrorism and salvation.

Me Talk Pretty One Day (D. Sedaris)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 16:02:07 +0000

Yet another humorous gay book.

David Sedaris is very well-known in this city (San Francisco), as one of the funniest of the bunch. This book, in turn, is quite well-known for being one of his masterpieces. So it goes.

Let me tell you: it is funny. More the grin-and-smile kind of funny, witty, articulate, smart in places, but nothing of the promised outright heartsplitting laughter I thought I would get out of it. Not even in Hawai’i, reading after dark with my camp light on.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (D. Eggers)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 15:55:06 +0000

Ah, a Talented New Writer! An autobiography of one such genius! What privilege! What happenstance!

I have rarely had such a mixed impression of a book as with this particular one. Dave Eggers is an excellent writer: he has a wonderful voice, attention to the humanity that is happening around him. Still, I found myself deeply dissatisfied, and I had a hard time accepting why at first.

Reading on, things became clearer. The human material that weaves the book is staggering, indeed. The story, for the most part, tries to describe the author’s family. Ravaged by the sudden loss of both parents due to cancer, the young women and men have to find a life somewhere.

Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 16:44:13 +0000

There is something distinctly non-American about the narrative in “Life of Pi.” A flow of story that writers here seem to have forgotten: an seemingly infinite expansion when the story becomes wide and sweeping; a narrowing speedup where the story starts rushing like a rapid. Unpredictability is hence the motto, and it serves the story well.

Life of Pi is a narrative that brought me closer to life, to nature, to humanity. It is probably the best work of fiction I have read this year, by a wide margin. Throughout the reading, I felt reminded of writers like Italo Calvino, who by force of their language evoke a world that does not exist, and make us believe in it for the split second we can give them our undivided attention.

Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (J.S. Spong)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 05:42:23 +0000

The most outstanding thing an alien from Western Europe notices when crossing the border to the United States is the degree to which Puritanism has influenced the world view of the common human in this country. Literal fundamentalism is something virtually unknown where I come from, and the Bible as a whole is read as a book illustrating the divine, not taking it for granted.

Indeed, Western Europe has spent a great many years and a great many deaths on finally convincing itself the earth is not flat, the sun does not revolve around the earth, and that God did not create the world in seven literal days. Here in America, though, people seem to genuinely believe that the Bible is the literal word of God (which it claims for itself only in special circumstances). In addition, people here seem to believe that any iniquity or inaccuracy is justified if they can find a verse in the Bible that seems to hint in their direction.
John Shelby Spong is an Episcopal bishop who tried to give the common human two things: first, a basic understanding of the message of the Bible, particularly of the New Testament; second, a series of arguments against the possibility of a literal reading of the Bible.

The Tipping Point (M. Gladwell)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 05:22:12 +0000

I had heard about this book, “The Tipping Point”, for a while and decided to give it a read. At first, I thought it was going to be something like “Built to Last” or “First, Break All the Rules”: a book with a single message that could have been written as two sentences, but is fluffed up with examples and discussions. Not the case here.

A tipping point, according to the author, is a sudden change in the state of a mass of humans according to which something that was not popular just before the tipping point is popular after. The tipping point fits in the theory of the chasm, according to which there is a strong difference between the first people that adopt a technology and the next group. This book is about what kind of things help moving across the chasm and generating a tipping point.

A Short History of Nearly Everything (B. Bryson)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 02 May 2005 19:07:04 +0000

What a fun book to read! Mr. Bryson succeeds in the almost impossible: he writes a book that both explains science and history of science in context, jumping randomly from one topic to another based on personal relationships between the main actors, and succeeding in reconstructing pretty much all there is to know about modern science.

What a kick. I followed the book page for page, amused at the links between the scientists and benefactors, seeing how one discipline would gain from the loss of the other; how fashions drive the pursuit of knowledge; how progress in one area facilitates progress in another.

The Rule of Four (I. Caldwell & D. Thomason)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 02 May 2005 05:15:56 +0000

Sometimes a book is just killed by its own hype. You will read the book cover and find some absurd hyperbole, and the content has no chance of measuring up to the expectation. For this to happen, the book has to have a certain amount of mediocrity, and the hyperbole must be spectacular.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened with The Rule of Four. If Umberto Eco, Dan Brown and Scott Fitzgerald had collaborated on a book, the result would have been this one. Highly unlikely, I would say. Instead, it turns out to be a lame mystery based on a lame plot with lame figures.

The Fabric of the Cosmos (B. Greene)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 01 May 2005 16:28:28 +0000

In ‘The Elegant Universe", Mr. Greene hints at the fact he is writing a book about the meaning of space and time, the twin brothers that define the physical universe. That’s actually a book very well worth writing, since space and time are entirely strange concepts in physics, radically different than anything else.

For one, the twins are usually constructed a priori and simply entered into equations without discussion. That’s troublesome enough. Then, to make things worse, we know there is something called equivalence of space and time, but if you go and look at the equations, there is a strange commutation factor in time that makes the whole equivalence look frightening.

The Eight (K. Neville)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 13:01:46 +0000

The female counterpart to ‘The Name of the Rose’? I don’t think so. But at the same time, a well-written book that succeeds in translating a numerological fixation into a compelling tale of adventure. Kudos to the author!

I should mention: chess is the non-numerological fixation. Everything in chess revolves around the number 8, so that the combination of game and number actually buffers the book pretty well.

There is a lot to like about this book, and a lot to dislike. On the ‘like’ side, some phenomenal descriptions of the North African countryside, and a plot that moves and turns around, but that has a clear intent and coherent speed.

Sophie's World (J. Gaarder)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 17:02:42 +0000

A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Now, THAT sounds boring, doesn’t it?
A philosophy teacher falls into deep ennui out of his students’ boredom and decides to write a book that makes the history of philosophy an interesting topic. To achieve the result, the book is about a high-school student and her familial problems. And philosophy is the solution of the problem.
Sounds a bit contrived? Well, that’s the story behind Sophie’s World. Not the plot, mind you, but the raison d’etre. The story itself is even more contrived, and ends on a formulaic note of the existentialist kind. It’s like reading Michael Ende, but without any fantasy involved.
In the end, the book is just a replacement for a text book for challenged youth. The story doesn’t flow, doesn’t make any sense, and still remains predictable. Of course, all of this is not true if this book is your first encounter with philosophy, and you do care about 14 year old girls and their outlook on life. Then the distant father figure moves you; the dialogues on philosophers become interesting, and even the leaden description of the characters takes a back seat. It’s like going back in time and reading “The Name of the Rose” all over again.
Ok, so I have to admit I learned about the history of philosophy in high school. It was more fun there, when we could talk with our teacher about all those speculations and reasons. When we could follow the wacky lives of a great many philosophers: their love affairs, their mysterious escapes, their poverty, their craziness. There seemed to be no philosopher that didn’t have a serious issue in life, and we highlighted those with gusto.
Just like ‘Troy’, the movie, omitted the Greek gods and with them all the fun, this book has no relevant embarrassment in store for the philosophers. It is all very clean, as if the author was really trying to get the book approved as text book.
All in all, disappointing. Read something else, if you know about philosophy. And if you don’t, please get yourself a real history of philosophy. They are much more fun, anyway.

An Adventurer's Guide to Number Theory (R. Friedberg)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 15:05:04 +0000

Ok, this one is quite a disappointment. To be short, this book is a simple treatise of elementar number theory with very apt vignettes on the major players in this field of mathematics interspersed where appropriate.
In the end, it is quite an interesting book for high-school kids that want to move on to college maths. The examples are very cogent, the flow of the logic easy to follow, the structure well-articulated and managed.
At the same time, there is no adventure or an adventurer in this book. Maybe a humbler title would have helped its cause. In any case, there are better books on elementary number theory, as well as better histories of mathematics.
I am not sure why you would want to read this book.

Bringing Down the House (B. Mezrich)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 15:01:11 +0000

Geeks applying maths to lead a luxurious life in Vegas? Who could resist a book like that? “The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Miilions” sounds like too good to be true. And since you are probably used to my review spoilers by now, I will confess it isn’t.
Ben Mezrich tells the story as the first-person reporter who finds out about this group and has the unique chance to report about it. The writing is compelling, never too technical, always quite realistic, which makes the tension and suspense very believable.
Turns out the six M.I.T. students in the title are part of a group of players at the college that learned how to exploit a weakness in blackjack, the only winnable game in Vegas. They become “card counters”, that is they offset low cards with high cards and keep track of a running score. If a particular deck is particularly positiive (more low cards have been played than high cards), then game theory shows the player is likely to win against the house.This was very well known in player circles, and card counting had become a profession for a short while. Of course, once the casinos got wind of the trick, they prevented professional players from ever playing again. But of course, the weakness of the game persisted, and Vegas and the counters became embroiled in a technology war.
A team of players could easily outperform a single player, because some players could simply sit and wait at tables until the count became high. Once there was a positive signal, a different player (a Gorilla) could be called in. The gorilla would always play against a good deck, hence bet a lot. So there wouldn’t be the fluctuation in betting that gave the older pros away.
Well, we are talking about riding a multi-million dollar game. Mezrich does a really good job at portraying the kids – young, overachieving college students from one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The game has everything they could ask for: it requires smarts, it yields lots of cheap money, it involves weekends of wild parties, and of course it is a fun adventure, stacked against the odds of a mobster mentality that in the end wins the game.
Mezrich doesn’t really take sides in the story. While we sympathize with the kids, we experience them as real humans. They disagree, they betray each other, they fall out with each other and reconcile. The forces of evil are not as bad as they seem at first. The encounter with casino executives never resembles an execution, and on multiple occasions the kids are let go with their wins, with the simple admonition never to come back.
In the end, the casinos win the technology war. The six students that could have to retire and give up gambling, have to find themselves in the normalcy of a life that seems so unreal after the surreal life in Vegas and other joints around the country.
Well done. It is a book of research and portrayal, one that makes Vegas look better than it should. In the end, knowing about blackjack the way I do now, even I feel inclined to play a gamble at the blackjack table.

The Book of Eleanor (P. Kaufman)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 15:11:46 +0000

Isn’t it a bit scary if the heroine in a book about the Middle Ages looks airbrushed? I thought so, too. And yet, this novel is not a fake. Eleanor of Aquitaine is certainly a wonderful character to portray in a novel, and Pamela Kaufman does an outstanding job at clarifying a life that seems at odds with itself and its times.
Eleanor grows up the hier of the Duke of Aquitaine, one of the most powerful duchies in France. Intrigues and deception dominate her youth, just as courtship and love do. Just as she finds the love of her life, she is to marry the future King of France in a marriage that is to wed the riches of her duchy to the power of the king.
Alas, turns out the king is a real bore, domineered by clerics who want to evince a life of frustration from him. Eleanor is annoyed and wants out, since the king is after her land and not after her beauty.
She ends up following the fool to the Holy Land, where his ineptitude almost crushes the entire army. She’s got the love of her life with her, so he gets a chance to prove how wonderful he is. Of course, that causes the king’s ire, and everything almost comes to an abrupt end.
Later on, she gets an annullment feigning consanguineity and depravity. The king marries another woman, and just when Eleanor thinks she can get the love of her life, the King of England marches in, rapes her, gets her pregnant and carries her off to his home land.
As it were, that’s where the book starts. Eleanor has once more committed some heinous act of betrayal and is to be carted off to Wales to die in a rotting tower. She will survive and write this book as a memento.
Ok, and I started saying it was credible, why?
Maybe it’s the fact that the vast majority of successful writers certainly focus on the female sex when writing. Eleanor quite doesn’t seem credible as a warm and gentle woman. To survive in the climate of the time, she must have been ruthless and cruel, at times, but in this book, only the bad guys are.
There’s nothing wrong with a classic plot line of good vs. evil in a novel about the Middle Ages, so I can’t really fault the author. Still, I wonder how much the book would have benefited from a more balanced look.
The writing itself is very compelling, and the pace in the story quite easy to follow. Pamela Kaufman surely deserves her bestseller status, given the craft and sheer intelligence she brings to the development of the story.

The Elegant Universe (B. Greene)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 14:55:13 +0000

What would you read on a week’s long vacation to Maui? You know, sunshine, palms, sand and an inviting ocean? Well, your truly chose (amongs others) The Elegant Universe, a pop-science book by one of the more outstanding string theorists.
Boring? Certainly not. I am a physicist by trade, and I always had a hard time finding the patience to deal with string theory. At some point I knew I would have to do it, and this one was as good an attempt to learn as any other.
String theory is famous for two main reasons:1. It has a successful explanation as to why we experience two sets of forces (gravity on one end and all other elementary forces on the other one) in one single reality2. A very weird view of the world, in which there are infinitesimal dimensions that are curled up, just so that some esoteric mathematical property of spaces beyond a certain dimension holds.
It all sounded too much like the desire to form the universe after the model of the theory. In particular, the extra dimensions seemed to complicate things too much for my pleasure, especially because no observable was associated with these extra dimensions, only mathematical properties.
Then, thinking again, I realized that quantum mechanics must have sounded pretty crazy in the day, too; and there is not the slightest doubt that QM is the best theory in the world when it comes to measurements. The same is true for relativity, another crazy idea in the day.
Who should read The Elegant Universe? It is a very scientific book, trying to explain cover to cover how things work, who is involved in string theory, and how all this edifice came into being. You will sorely miss the prickly debate and the juicy commentary that many other science books offer. This one explains one and only one thing: who came up with string theory, why, and how.
Even if you noticed that’s actually three things, you won’t get much more satisfaction from this book than that. I remember reading a great many attempts to popularize special relativity, even watching Peter Ustinov’s documentary, and getting more confused than before I watched.
Then, one day in the library in Aachen, I discovered the original 1905 ‘Annalen der Physik’ where Einstein published the original theory. All of a sudden everything was clear, and I found that all the attempts to clarify were muddying the waters ever since.
You see, before Einstein came, the laws governing special relativity were all there. What Einstein brought to the equation in this case was simply an overarching explanation that rationalized all the strangeness.
String theory, it seems, needs to find its Einstein. It is a beautiful theory, but it doesn’t really explain much – at least reading this book. One day, if we are lucky and this theory holds, someone will come and explain just why things are supposed to be this way. And that person will make string theory obsolete by simply explaining it in terms outside of it.
Until then, everyone should probably know something about it. This is as good a book as any one.

Angels & Demons (D. Brown)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 13:08:52 +0000

How would you like the subtitle: “Robert Langdon’s first adventure?”
After reading “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, I realized how hard it would be for Dan Brown to repeat the success of The Da Vinci Code. Indeed, Angels & Demons does not reach the same levels of depth as the predecessor, and falls back on a great many trappings of Brown’s work.
We have the struggle between science and religion, who becomes a stand-in for the debate between technology and politics in the early Brown novels. We have the beautiful but frigid heroine that meets the hunky but geeky hero at the beginning of the tribulations. We have a plot full of twists and turns, and a grand finale in which rationality wins.
Surely, Angels and Demons is a step up from Brown’s early novels. Unfortunately, though, since he writes the background history all by himself, it’s not coherent and compelling. Again, we are made to run through a novel with no reason, chasing after the solution of a case that will leave us without as much as excitement.
I wish Dan Brown good luck finding another ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’. Once he finds another compelling background story he can narrate to, he will have another hit of the magnitude of The Da Vinci Code.

Deception Point (D. Brown)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 12:58:27 +0000

Probably the first of the very successful set of novels written by Dan Brown, Deception Point opens with a series of themes that will be recurrent throughout Brown’s work. We find the hero and heroine couple to be, meeting at the beginning of the book and forging an unlikely alliance. The hero will be someone that has sworn not to fall in love again; he will be handsome but learned, desired but humble. The heroine will be stunning but too smart to deal with commoners.
The father figure shows up very prominently. In this case, that’s not the heroine’s actual father, who doesn’t ever behave father-like in the whole novel. Instead, it’s the heroine’s boss. This is a prelude to more similar figures throughout the series, and implicates that an almost Oedipal relationship with older men is what prevents the heroine from binding to one of the multitude of men seeking her.
Twists are another recurring item. In Dan Brown’s work, the plot twists like a snake recoiling in a captor’s hand. What seemed good becomes evil, and who seemed friend becomes foe. This need for twists in the plot line gives Brown’s novels a level of ambiguity they share with a lot of thrillers: since you are never sure about the goodness of a character, morality becomes very ambiguous.
Research is another one of Brown’s naturals. When he talks about scientific or technical matters, he sounds very convincing. Despite this, to the expert all his stories have severe logical flaws that render them virtually indistinguishable from Hollywood movies, whose written memento these books seem to be.
Deception Point is a story about a meteorite used to justify the existence of NASA. It is about a close presidential race, in which the incumbent is honest but losing, the opponent cunning but dishonest. And finally it is about a spy and an oceanographer who fall in love despite being both very much the classical Brown misanthropes.
In the end, Deception Point fails on many levels. The premise of the story, a fake meteorite, is too unbelievable to be true. Despite the admonition that all technology in the book is real, placing a meteorite under and ice shelf seems too much a complication to be acceptable.
As a novel, Deception Point is too unevenly paced. Descriptive elements will be inserted in high-paced sections, and where a slowing of the pace would allow for a credible description of the characters, Brown rushes as if hit by an evil editor seeking to cut the end in half.
As a thriller, Deception Point is too predictable. While there are a great many actors in the drama, the premise of the hidden meteorite points directly towards the ultimate culprit. Even if you wouldn’t want to believe his (or her, I don’t want to spoil your fun!) guilt, you are still faced with the realization there are only two other characters that can be at fault.
If you have read all books by Dan Brown, read this for comparison. If you haven’t but intend to read them all, then start a chronological progression. If you are just curious about Dan Brown, read The Da Vinci Code – an almost perfect zenith of his writing, spoiled only by the realization that it’s going to be quite impossible for him to reach the same levels.

The Da Vinci Code (D. Brown)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 08:33:14 +0000

Imagine the disappointment that I felt when I bought ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ and found out that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (TDVC) was a mere novelization of the former!
I thought Dan Brown had outdone himself, collecting information as U. Eco had done for ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’. As a matter of fact, TDVC read like what Foucault’s Pendulum would have wanted to be. Where the latter lacked in a compelling reason to exist and was essentially a manifesto of rationalism (BORING!), the former looked into the exact same historic thread, revealing the same masterful connections in a bright shining light.
TDVC is a novel of deeply historic concern. Based on actual research, the author follows a hero and his heroine on a quest for the Holy Grail. As usual in Brown’s books they meet just for the purpose and didn’t know each other prior to the story’s beginning, which is set in the Louvre.
From the Louvre, the plot ripples all over France, reminding me of the later novels of the Mr. Ripley series. In the end, we find out that Jesus Christ had a family, that they fled Palestine for France, settled there, and created a lineage that goes on to this day.
Now, the historic facts behind this plot line are all taken from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is written as a documentary book. The embellishments in the plot are typical Dan Brown: a heroine in distress, an erudite and good-looking hero, a conspiracy that tangentially involves our new-formed couple, but sucks them into a vortex of danger, death and disillusion.
If you had analyzed things, you would have come up with exactly this scenario. Mr. Brown’s evolution as a writer goes from the seriously overwritten Deception Point to the streamlined Digital Fortress; from there to Angels and Demons, where religion is discovered as a new and compelling theme. In all these books, though, plot lines are tactical and not strategic. There is a certain lack of thematic uniformity (read: message) that makes all those books interesting reads, but not compelling ones.
Thematic continuity is certainly the dominant character of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. On the other hand, the strict documentary nature of the book relegates is to the realm of non-fiction readers. And the story is just to compelling to be put on the same shelf as the latest self-help tome or the newest business theory.
Combined in TDVC, historic fact and formulaic novelization combine into a killler package. TDVC has both the romantic interest that binds the female readership as well as a reason to keep you interested in the story. Well done – but very, very hard to repeat.

Digital Fortress (D. Brown)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 08:19:01 +0000

Digital Fortress is a fast-paced thriller with a strong technological background and an odd location in National Security circles.
Before Dan Brown moved to religion as a topic, security and espionage were his main themes. Both Digital Fortress and the earlier Deception Point deal with the interaction between espionage and politics, bringing the delicate balance between good and evil to attention.
Dan Brown loves twists. The plots of his novels are the conventional spy novels, in which a good pair/couple deals with a series of ambiguous and powerful characters. Readers are required to think that these powerful characters are on the good or the evil side depending on the torque of the plot’s twists at the moment.
Digital Fortress is about a secure encryption algorithm and the need to have a trap door into any such algorithm. There is one historic fact behind this story line: the FBI demanded that any encryption algorithm have a secured trap door, such that nobody could encrypt anything that the FBI couldn’t read.
Unfortunately both for the book and the FBI, that’s a little bit like asking to create a lock that can always be opened by a master key, but that is supposed to be secure: the good guys will use it, exposing themselves to the bad guys that stole the master key; the bad guys aren’t going to be as stupid as using an encryption mechanism that is easily decoded.
As a result, the technical part of the novel is deeply flawed and not too interesting. The plot, though, is acceptable in its fatal twists and turns. The characters are sometimes believable – allthough Dan Brown would be well-advised to research the ‘eternal father figure’ in his books. Is it something that he came up with, or is it the brainchild of an editor?
In any case, Digital Fortress ends up being a little formulaic. I am glad Mr. Brown found a much more compelling environment in the Catholic Church.

The Perfect Store (M. Cohen)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 08 Feb 2004 20:49:08 +0000

The Internet is built on the resilience of four big players: Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, and eBay. I had the good luck and fortune to work for Yahoo! for two years and got in touch with the inner working of the Internet in a very exciting way. But if I had to say what company exemplifies the power of the Internet more than any other one, it would be eBay.
Networks accelerate transactions. That’s true for social networks, where you can find romance or a new job much faster than if you were all by yourself. Computer networks work the same, accelerating the rate at which people that want to interact can find each other.
eBay works its magic for the most common transaction between strangers: buying and selling. Imagine you have something you want to rid yourself of. Someone else on Earth most certainly needs exactly that thing. Unfortunately, until eBay came into being, there was no way that you and the other person could know about each other’s need.
It’s as simple as that. It’s so simple, it’s magic indeed. And behind all this sits a single Frenchman, Pierre Omidyar. A genius of insight, or just a lucky guy – nobody will ever know now. Pierre created eBay, realized its power, sat through all the travail and the tribulations, and finally launched himself as a commoner with (literally) several tons of cash into a boring existence in France.
We are left over with a company that could not fail, although it surely tried a great many times. Pierre hires Skoll, Skoll and Pierre hire Meg Whitman, and it’s a story with a happy ending.
Cohen seems quite objective with his writing, and succeeds in making the history of eBay alive and kicking. Sometimes he sounds a bit naive (like when he writes for the tenth time that, this time for sure, the management team had understood the value of community, just to fail again after a few pages). Still, the book quite doesn’t compare with other descriptions of the Internet startup world.

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (P. Bronson)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:56:36 +0000

There you have it! What a wonderful, funny book!
Po Bronson is an amazing author. His prose reads very smoothly, he strikes the right balance between patronizing and geeky (which may be just because I am in the same balance point) and he is amazingly witty.
The First $20 Million is the story of a group of geeks that create their own startup doing … Java. Well, in the book it’s something entirely different, it’s a cross-platform scripting language that compiles once and runs everywhere. Sounds familiar?
Po (I’ll just call him that) captures the essentials of nitty-gritty Silicon Valley. The greed, the idealism, the passion of the geek. He makes a nerd’s writing code for days without sleep plausible; he conveys what it is that makes these social derelicts (and I am one of them) able to function and thrive in an environment that nobody else likes.
And he is funny. Not laughing-out-loud funny, more grin-to-smile funny. Frankly, given the subject matter, not easy to accomplish nonetheless.
I like it. I liked his other famous book, “The Nudist in the Late Shift” better, because it was more varied. Somehow Po is more the short story kinda guy.

First, Break All the Rules

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 15 Dec 2003 10:23:59 +0000

Have you ever read a book that seemed to say the obvious, but whose words of wisdom you then started using as a day-to-day framework to explain to others what seemed so obvious to you?
Well, “First, Break All the Rules” is a book like that. It explains how management should be handled, and more importantly how it should NOT be handled, and takes a stand against Dilbertism of all kinds. Should seem obvious, but Dilbertism is quite entrenched in a lot of corporations, and a book with a lot of quotable sentences comes in handy.
To the content: Gallup is famous as a polling company. They have been polling a lot of employees of companies, though, and provided management support services by creating cross-sections of best practices. This book is the summary of that experience.
There are a few surprising results that come out this book. The very first one is that the immediate manager of anyone is the main focus of attention. If you like the way you are managed, you will like the company you work for, and vice versa. This means that all the best speeches from upper management are worth nothing unless they change the behavior of your manager.
The second thing that is really surprising is that the best management style is to reward the able and to punish the unable and lazy. That hardly seemed surprising to me, until I worked myself under a manager that thought everybody is entitled to the same treatment.
With these two pearls, I pretty much summarized the book. Everything else is a list of examples of managers and their real life interaction with their managed. And of course an enormous list of validation. Lots of quotables, as mentioned, will help you get through your day. Whether it’s worth it, your choice. I found the book way overpriced and wished they had a softcover edition.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (A. Franken)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 06 Dec 2003 17:51:25 +0000

Once in a while there is a book that leaves a strange taste in my mouth. This year, it was Al Franken’s “Lies”, a self-declared “Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”.
It’s my first book by this author, and I read it on a fabulous vacation in Maui. The fact itself I finished it is witness to the fact it was, if nothing else, interesting. But the taste…
The premise is that the right consistently accuses the left of all sorts of things, while claiming for itself virtue and honesty and competence. Of course, so the book goes,if you look closely, a lot of it is lies.
Franken goes through a lot of different chapters where he ‘debunks’ a lot of conservative myths, demolishes a lot of conservative people and writes to anyone’s funny bone. A lot of the time you have to agree with him, a lot of the time he is totally hyperbolic, and a lot of the time it’s up to you to guess whether he is closer to one end or the other.
Rarely have I seen something that seemed entirely wrong, albeit I confess most of the time I have to go for his research, since I don’t have time or desire to do it on my own.
And that’s pretty much where the strange taste came in. Now I feel the only way to be fair is to read a book by a conservative author, and none of the ones I have seen so far is in any way funny or humorous. If you know one, please tell me!

Aztec Autums (G. Jennings)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 18:45:52 +0000

Oh, what high praise was lavished on this book! It seemed the entire elite of the Nation threw itself on these few hundred pages, naming Mr. Jennings the greatest writer of history in the land.
Well, not much to deserve. The story is that of a warrior in a far-off city in Northern Mexico who decides he wants revenge and decides to defeat the Spaniards who killed his father, burning him on the stake under the eyes of his (unknowing at that time) son.
There are many reasons why the book doesn’t work. First, the development of the story is extremely uneven, with those parts that the book should have amplified (given the fictitious premise it is an account of the glory of this man) largely neglected; then, the opinions of the main character are more from the view point of the U.S. moralist of the 20th century that the fresh voice of a Mexican of the 16th; finally, while its predecessor was indeed a page turner, this one is as bad an attempt to copy the former success as is typical in a different genre, in movies.
No need to comment further. Stay away, if you don’t need to read this book.

Baudolino (U. Eco)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 18:35:59 +0000

Yet another Umberto Eco novel that plays in the Middle Ages. This one has the advantage of touching one of my dearest subjects in history, the fall of Byzantium, but otherwise, well…
This is the story of Baudolino, a character that makes it from the humbles upbringing to becoming adoptive son to the greatest of all German emperors, Frederick Barbarossa (“red-beard’). Frederick needs to go on a crusade, so Baudolino does. But Baudolino has the added mission to discover the Holy Grail.
Eco has always been very fond of the closeness of truth and invention. In his first novel, “The Name of the Rose”, the classical whodunit tale spins in a medieval convent, where everybody lies to advance themselves in some way. The plot is master, and the development of characters and ambiance suffers.
His second novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum”, was much more of my liking, although it didn’t reach the same success that its predecessor accomplished. I liked it so much, indeed, that I completed a translation into Esperanto, soon killed by malevolent colleagues.
His third novel, “The Island of the Day Before”, fared even worse. I bought it in Italy, but was so bored by the premise that I never read it to the end. And I had given up on Eco for good.
Now, Baudolino. In Foucault’s Pendulum, the main characters (if there are such) invent a history and by doing so modify the present. They decide to guise a plot that ties the Templars with the Rosicrucians, and thence to the present. And although the plot is made up, the consequences are real.
In Baudolino, the making up is integral part of the story, and it is unclear at all times what is true and what isn’t. The narrator doesn’t know, we don’t know, and the book doesn’t know. It was indeed fascinating to be swayed on this long journey of discovery.
Yet, somehow the book ends up being flat. It doesn’t reveal anything but the fact that people lie, and that’s not a revelation that is good enough to carry 300 pages. And the more crazy the assertions go, the less we are going to believe them. Baudolino ends up in the land of monsters? Sure enough, it’s just a novel.
If the book were not just a mere continuation of the other novels, it is made even worse by the translation. William Weaver is really unimaginative when it comes to Italian, and he is not willing to follow the switch from vernacular to high Italian in the original. Some of the characters will speak their dialect throughout the book, but the translation reveals that only in odd phrases.
There is a reference to something being not more important than a dry fig. Funny expression, isn’t it? Well, in Italian “non me ne importa un fico secco” means “I really don’t give a damn’”, and has as much to do with dried figs as comparing apples and oranges has with apples or oranges. Why Mr. Weaver didn’t weave this into his translation, I can’t guess. It gives me a chance to get rid of a horrible pun.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (P. Hoffman)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 18:19:58 +0000

Admittedly, the life of a mathematician doesn’t quite make a likely beach reading. I was surprised by myself as I packed it in my backpack on the way to Kona, but surely do not regret it.
Mathematicians, as the book quotes, are all a bit out of their mind. Their make wonderfully eccentric characters that charm you even where the subject matter of their work bores you. That was the case with Alan Turing (Enigma), John Nash (A Beautiful Mind), and a lot of other mathematicians.
This book is about Paul Erdos (pronounced ‘Erdish’ much to my surprise) and his vagaries in number theory. Somehow number theory has become an immensely boring branch of mathematics, where the weapons at hand are so much bigger than the problems that you wonder why you would want to enter the field.
Paul Hoffmann loves Erdos the way only we lesser intellects can love those we would adore if we actually had met them. It is wonderful to feel with him how he goes through all the details of the eccentricity, but still has to admit this was a more than brilliant person. What a marvel!

Baudolino (U. Eco)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 22:04:24 +0000

There is something that always fascinated me about Umberto Eco: he manages to remain faithful to his main theme, to focus more and more on it, to become a better writer, to accomplish more and better things; and yet he is tied to trail his own success with his first novel.
“The Name of the Rose” was an admirable exercise in medieval crime novel, and was so successful that it spawned an enormous following of second and third (and fourth) tier colleagues. The monk-as-detective became all the rage, and the movie from the film was a huge success.
Despite all of this, the book suffered heavily from the lack of experience of the writer: descriptions would end up taking pages and pages and interrupt the flow of narration at the most inopportune times; the actors were wooden and caricatured instead of portrayed; the story was a bit predictable and too much like a classical ‘whodunit’.
So one would think, when he improves on all these elements, Eco would be more successful. Wrong guess! His second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, was no match for his audience. The third, the Island of the Day Before, was too dull even for me; and finally, Baudolino, has barely been acknowledged.
Yet Baudolino succeeds as a novel. The storyline is coherent and well orchestrated. No longer does Eco bore us with endless enumerations just when we need to know what happened to the hero; no more is the hero barely able to have a relationship with anyone – this time there are lots of aventures amoureuxes.
Should you read it? If you have an interest in late medieval history, of course. If not, not really worth it. And I can tell you for sure – I have read the book with gusto, because I am really fascinated by the period and the location (Constantinople around 1204); but somehow the book fills me with a generic: ‘so what?’ that none of the other ones did.

Hawaii the Big Island Revealed

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 21:44:42 +0000

I am taking a week off in September to celebrate my birthday by myself and chose my favorite vacation spot: Hawaii. This time it’s going to be the Big Island herself, largest mass in the Central Pacific by far. And of course I needed a good guide book.
Wizard Publishing has a wonderful set of books, created and written with care (if with a tiny bit too much enthusiasm) on three of the major Hawaiian islands. They started out with a Kauai Guidebook that blasts any competitor away, and then followed up with a volume on Maui and the Big Island.
I haven’t been to the Big Island since I read the book, so of course I won’t be able to critique appropriately this book and the value of its information. I will still take the time and talk about the two other books, and how much they have made fact gathering and fact traveling easy.
For one, the detail of the books is incredible. If there is a hike to any place, there is very accurate description as to how to get there, and all the circumstances of the fun. Of course we were a bit disappointed as we saw that the marvelous pools in West Maui were quite stagnant and filthy, and that the famous blowhole was merely fizzing a few droolings – but all in all, it is easy to navigate with the information provided.
Just as important though is the negative criticism. Sometimes it’s mere complaining for the complaint’s sake, but most of the time, there is good reason for the disappointment. The authors will warn you not to go some place, and you better heed the advice!
Will add more info once I come back.

The C++ Programming Language (B. Stroustrup)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 08:34:51 +0000

Sometimes the inventor of a specific thing is the best person to explain it. There is no better way to learn about relativity than to go back to the original article written by Einstein; how better could anyone explain the value of existentialism than Sartre; Kernighan and Ritchie did a wonderful job at explaining C.
Stroustrup is not one of these. I recall the first time I read his book, back twenty years ago or so. I found it entirely unreadable, with so many exceptions added to the rule that you barely could remember either. There seemed to be no logic in the concepts, everything was very haphazard and unplanned.
Now, with twenty years of experience, a lot of programming languages in the back of my mind, I set out on a voyage of rediscovery, trying to impress myself with a book that I found cryptic and that I now would find insightful and revealing.
Not so. I read all of it for a second time, end to end, marking relevant sentences and trying to absorb the flow. There is none to speak of. The book is still cryptic. Only that now I know there are languages that are better designed, better executed and surely better described.
What made learning C++ so difficult, the astonishing number of rules and exceptions, is in hindsight poor design. Stroustrup tried to squeeze as many options into his language as possible, making C++ look and feel as bastardized as Perl would look after its 5th release.
The compiler tries to be smart, and does a lot of translation implicitly. Of course, this causes all sorts of weird errors, since it may become smarter than the programmer. To obviate, C++ allows you to override behaviors.
In general, C++ sounds like a language written at a time people still thought of memory as a precious commodity, while they were still not sure what they needed of the constructs provided by object orientation.
Take templates, for instance. Hard to tell what they are good for, if not to define collections and default operator behavior. But both cases would have been better served by a different approach, in which collections and operators are handled differently by the compiler, as native language types instead of as constructs.But aside from criticism to the language, the book itself is not well written. There is no general introduction to a concept, just an astonishing amount of rules that are listed in monotonous sequence, barely distinguished by their importance to the programmer. It somehow feels as if Stroustrup considers all rules children of his, and he doesn’t want to favor one over the other.
The book, again, suffers from a lack of structure. Headings, highlights, emphasis are not well distributed, adding to the overall impression of an amorphous entity that becomes inextricable.
C++, as it emerges from this book, is a language for the initiated that has no desire to use any different tool. It is the Perl of the eighties, the language that everyone mucks with, but that very few actually understand.
If you have ever worked in a larger engineering group that uses C++, you’ll have seen those frustrated emails come about, in which a poor chap asks why this piece of code doesn’t work, and there is always some guru that (in the most arrogant tone so typical of the Initiated in the Arcane) tell you about some rule that is on the footnote of a page in the Stroustrup.
It is no surprise that languages with more explicit approaches, like Java and C# are moving on and winning converts all over. C++ seems, in hindsight, a really bad idea.

Inside Intel

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sat, 02 Aug 2003 08:18:36 +0000

One would have thought it quite unnecessary to read yet another book on Intel after reading “Only the Paranoid Survive”. The latter, though, is written by exactly the person that is responsible for all the odd confrontationalism that is so typical of the company, so that I needed one more voice to get clarity.
Well, as I expected to be true, Inside Intel is indeed much more objective about the company, relating very extensively how the bully nature of the CEO could mold the company into a litigious, litigant and confrontational work environment.
The author spares nothing: how Grove pushed his legal team to sue without merit, just to prevent competitors from succeeding in the market; how Grove threw people out because he thought they were no longer fit, which meant they had fallen out of grace of their managers; how Grove introduced a host of measures to make the company an annoying place to work for – late lists being the most famous.
In the end, after reading about Oracle, Sun, Intel, and of course Microsoft, it seems that you need to be an egomaniac to be successful. I have not met any of the leaders of those companies, I admit, and I am just relating what books tell me.
The author compiled a compelling set of events into a dark and unfavorable history of Intel. If you want the dish, it’s there. Successes seem to be falling out of the blue sky, while all failure is homegrown. You decide whether you want to believe that or not. The writing is good, the usual technical blunders aside. Why is it that people writing about technical companies never use a fact checker?

A Short History of Byzantium (J.J. Norwich) - 2

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Fri, 04 Jul 2003 08:09:01 +0000

I finally finished the History of Byzantium and feel compelled to add a few comments to the previous ones.
Nothing changed in my assessment of the author’s capabilities: the final chapters are as intriguing as the initial ones, and at no time was the infinite list of names confusing. Norwich succeeds in making all the parties involved come to their own life, personalizing each appearance of any of them and thus making it possible to discern the infinite list of Constantines, Michaels, Johns, etc.
While the first part of the book described an empire, the last part of it described a desperate culture trying to survive. The once powerful emperors of Byzanz find themselves required to send embassies to the rulers of the West, who will ignore them repeatedly, for centuries. The sadness of the situation is incredible, and the sympathy of the author for this lost cause is touching.Of course, from a neutral perspective the demise of the Byzantine empire just meant the ascension of the Ottoman one, which ultimately proved to be the real successor to Rome, reaching power and size that the Byzantines were able to held only for short periods of time. Neither can be forgotten that every peaceful moment of the empire’s history was spent on fairly stupid intrigues, succession rules and theological disputes. Where the West had a Pope that commanded unity, the East was very happy with being disunited.
The history of Byzantium is somehow the typical history of an empire in the middle: at times it can grow extremely rich and powerful because you have to pass through it, but in the end the pressure from all sides eventually will destroy it. Happened to Poland, happened to the Habsburg empire, will happen in the future.
And yet, as much as I rationally knew there was no chance for the empire to survive, the final fate of the little despotate that once was so great moves me profoundly. Reading how the last emperor, Constantine XI, worked on the defence of the city, how the last mass was read in St. Sophia, to be interrupted by the invader pillaging and murdering – that all fills me with an infinite sadness, not mitigated by knowing that the Byzantines would have behaved the same, to enemies and to themselves, too.
The final days of anything are sad. The final days of an empire that lasted over one thousand yeats to die a slow, hemorrhagic death… Well, there are no words to express historic sorrow.

A Short History of Byzanz

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Sun, 29 Jun 2003 09:18:21 +0000

Midway through the abbreviated version of the history of Byzanz. The author started out with a three volume history that he had to abridge for the general public – and since I am general public, that’s what I chose to read.
First things first: the history of Byzanz itself is immensely fascinating. We are talking about an empire that understands itself as the SOLE successor of Rome (with a certain appropriateness), but is actually not a real power player. Instead of expanding and conquering, this empire never reached the size and power of its predecessor. Instead, it started shrinking early on, besieged as it was by enemies on all frontiers. Still it managed to thrive and survive for over thousand years, almost beating its forebear.
This said, the book is clearly an abridged version of a much more thorough oeuvre. The casual museum stroll that is so typical of history books feels like on fast-forward, and what would otherwise be an endless recount of things and events, with footnotes sprinkled left and right to make the reader feel appropriately bored, turns into a fast-paced, exhilarating experience.
Style: maybe it’s the morbid nature of (at least this) man, but the hints to the disgusting tortures, unspeakable depravities and incredible religious finickiness in the face of overpowering forces are amazing. I am sure if there were a mini-series on the Eastern Empire, not one episode would be boring.
It stands to be asked what part of this amazement is an accomplishment of the author. Regardless, he is able to bring a dead world alive, and to make it feel real. An incredible achievement, considering how little we care any more about Byzanz, Constantinople and all that happened there until it became Istanbul.
Must read for anyone that thinks history needs to be boring.

Only the Paranoids Survive (Andy Grove)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Thu, 26 Jun 2003 05:16:48 +0000

That’s one book that came with high praise!
Only the Paranoids Survive is the kind of book you have to have read to be able to keep up with everyone else that constantly talks about it. And like any required reading, I was a little uncomfortable with this one, trying to fend it off and push it away as long as I could.
The first chapter than did it for me. A long rant about things that I already intimately knew, with definitions of things that were absolutely obvious: PLEASE!
Turns out that what was so familiar to me actually required definition, and that from that first chapter of setting the stage, the book soon entered incredibly valuable territory. Grove charted what was tantamount to one of the most radically success stories in today’s business world, proving how there was method behind the choices that Intel had made.
All in all, the book was an amazing read. FInding out that Grove’s team thinks of conflict in meetings as a way of expressing creativity was refreshing, considering the level and ‘nice’ way of behaving in the Valley. That there actually had been a major crisis in the company BEFORE the Pentium debacle; not only had I forgotten that, I was reminded by the book that it was quite a terminal danger for the company.
Towards the end, the book starts looking at the present and past, and starts reading like Nostradamus’s prophecies. As long as they talk about the past, everything is in perfect order and logic reigns supreme; but as soon as the then present and the then future are concerned, predictions are random and arbitrary and ultimately, in hindsight, plain wrong.
The one chapter on the Internet is particularly interesting, given that the book was published in 1998. It shows, at least, that indeed Intel must accept better judgement, since the company did not follow the predictions of the chairman.
The language of the book is very narrative and gets lost only when Grove talks about abstract things or the future. As many leading business people, he is best where he is comfortable, and his passion surely comes out best when he talks about Intel and Intel’s achievements.
Oh – the title: it is meant in a much nicer way than I had interpreted first. Sounds like ‘Only the Paranoids Survive’ just means: ‘Watch Out, Or They’ll Eat You’. Nothing of the world conspiracy that it seemed to imply.
All in all a ‘must read’ for people in the computer business. Or people stuck in a culture in which consensus is a must, niceness a requirement, and hence everything needs to be dumbed down.

Frederick II (Abulafia)

marco@mrgazz.com (Marco) — Mon, 09 Jun 2003 13:57:05 +0000

Closing in on the end of Abulafia’s famed biography of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Two Sicilies in the XIII century. Fascinating book, with all the factual accuracy that one could wish for, and a much more realistic view of the emperor than in any other book I have read so far.
Frederick and I date back very far. Turns out his home town of Waiblingen is actually just a few commuter train stops from Ludwigsburg, where I (partially) grew up. Add to this his dual nature as German and Italian, his neutral stance to religion, and you have concocted enough to make him very endearing to me.
And then there was Dante. In the Inferno, Dante places Frederick with the heretics – even in class they would tell us, though, that it was all politics of the guelfo Dante. Still, it compelled the rest of the bunch to swing all the other way around, and secular historians made Frederick a model of perfection: learned, wise, just, curious; in the end, he exemplified the Renaissance monarch more than two hundred years before the Renaissance.
Frederick’s life was one of war. He was constantly involved in campaigns against his foes, and there were foes aplenty. He participated in a crusade, battled against his lords in Sicily, against revolting communes in Lombardy, agains the German feudal establishment. Cities hated him for taking away their rights, the Church hated him for taking away its rights, the lords hated him… you guessed it.
So, although Abulafia is strongly on Frederick’s side, he can’t conceal the fact that this Emperor with a vengeance was percieved by everyone as a nuisance. I guess if we want a revisionist bio, we’ll have to wait for another twenty years.