jmadigan

• Rated 3 stars

“The full title here is Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time by Valerie Bertinelli. Yes, that's right. I read an autobiography by Valerie Bertinelli, she of One Day at a Time fame, countless made-for-TV movies, and a marriage to a certain Van Halen member. Let's chalk it up to expanding my horizons and stepping outside my usual reading comfort zone.

And actually, it's not a particularly BAD book. Bertinelli tells her life's story (so far), following what I can only assume is the typical celebrity autobiography template: she talks about her parents, her roots, her childhood, her coming of age, the train wreck her life becomes, and how she stepped up to pull things back together and be happy (and thin). All through the narrative is the theme of her obsession with her weight, and she sprinkles numbers throughout that serve as both measures of her weight and sign posts to various crises in her life. Personally, I'm surprised that she could remember with such precision how much she weighed 20 or 30 years ago, but apparently she was obsessed with that kind of thing.

The most interesting parts of the book were the early chapters where she talked about her childhood and how she broke into acting through a stumbling start with a few commercials and eventually landing her role as Barbara Cooper on One Day at a Time. The middle part of the book where she describes juggling a TV acting career with a doomed rock star marriage was actually pretty boring, and only served to make me realize that I'd actually rather be reading a biography about Van Halen. But Bertinnelli really only lived on the periphery of that story, so we got very little gossip or insight there. The last 20 pages are so are dedicated to her joining the Cult of Jenny and becoming a spokesperson for the Jenny Craig weight loss system.

The book isn't helped by the fact that Bertinelli isn't a particularly great writer, though I've certainly read worse. The theme of how her weight related to her self-esteem provided a common thread to all parts of the story, but personally I got pretty sick of hearing numbers tossed around and all the constant "BLECK! Jalapeno cheddar poppers! I WAS SO FAT! Jordan almonds! AAACK!" At times it felt less like a real story and more like the extended script for that Cathy comic strip I used to always think was not funny as a kid. She also breaks off into non-sequeter screeds against poparatzi and George Bush that seemed to come out of nowhere.

So, on balance the book wasn't bad, but it's the kind of itch that could probably be scratched by watching any random episode of E True Hollywood Story or possibly VH1 Behind the Music. If you're there for some kind of personal insights or triumph, you're going see them coming far before Bertinelli gets them, and get tired of them well before she's through with you. But if you're particularly interested in her as a person, go for it. She seems like a pretty nice person and I was left feeling glad that things seem to have worked out for her.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, March 13, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“In The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, author Steven Johnson calls forth a number of players, but if we had to pick out one main protagonist it would probably be Joseph Priestly. You may (or may not) remember Priestly as an 18th century contemporary of folks like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to whom credit is often given for isolating gaseous oxygen. Interestingly, he was also the first person on the planet to realize that the oxygen that makes air breathable to us isn't something that is de facto just there; rather, it's produced by plants. In this way, Priestly isn't just the father of modern chemistry, but the whole science of ecology --the study of how organisms and environments interact with each other.

But let's back up a little bit. Much like he did in The Ghost Map, Johnson uses The Invention of Air to examine a wider set of interrelated subjects through events that seem unrelated at first. We get information about British coffee house culture, natural philosophers, coal mining in northern England, photosynthesis, burgeoning American revolution, riots over Unitarianism, the blending of religious faith and science, giant ferns from Carboniferous Era, Thomas Kuhn's codification of the scientific method, and the aforementioned founding fathers. Priestly is at the center of most of this, with the unifying theme that all these things interconnect and affect each other --a concept parallel to Priestly's own discoveries about the ecosystem involving oxygen, animals, bacteria, carbon dioxide, and plants.

So far, this sounds a lot like a history of science that you'd think I would enjoy if you were familiar with my reading list. Unfortunately while it's an interesting topic and approach, The Invention of Air falls kind of flat for me. It's just that Priestly either isn't that interesting a person when you get down to it, or Johnson fails in his job at storytelling and keeping things interesting enough. I found the big ideas here to be full of promise, but the execution just left me with my mind wandering off time after time. To continue the Ghost Map comparison, it didn't have a strong hook like a cholera epidemic to really pull you in and keep you there. It really needed something like that to make it both educational and entertaining at the same time.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, March 13, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“The Kite Runner is a kind of coming of age (and then some) story by Afghan-cum-American author Khaled Hosseini. It tells the life's story of Amir, a native of Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul. The novel starts with Amir's childhood, predating much of the country's civil and international strife with which more modern readers may be familiar. It was actually a pretty nice childhood, most of which Amir spent with another boy named Hassan, who despite being from a lower caste and being the son of Amir's household servant, is a good friend.

Things fall apart, though, after Hassan experiences a brutal attack that Amir might have been able to stop if he had been more brave and able to reciprocate half the loyalty Hassan has for him. This failure and the crushing guilt that comes with it haunt Amir and changes not only his relationship with Hassan but his entire life. To say more would spoil things a bit, but suffice to say that along with exploring some severe daddy issues, the rest of the book is spent seeing Amir's life go around the globe and coming full circle to redress his wrongdoings.

I enjoyed The Kite Runner well enough, and Housseini is a competent author with a good sense of pacing. It's very readable and things zip along quickly enough outside of a few bits where there's too much tromping around Northern Californian flea markets. And Amir is certainly a complex character who swings through a number of development arcs. Most of the book's energy comes from exploring his nature and seeing him pursue dreams and wrestle with the guilt that he can only bury, not shed. And there's some interesting stuff going on with his relationships --with his dad, with Hassan, and with others.

I also enjoyed learning about Afghanistan, its culture, history, and people. It was a new setting for me, and one that the author did a pretty good job of describing. One complaint that I have in this area, though, is that Housseini went WAY overboard with injecting phrases from the Afghani language into the narrative. I can see why he does this: it adds color and authenticity. And it's fine when referring to nicknames, cuisine, places, or anything else idiosyncratic to the culture. But when he injects Afghani words for common words like "souveneir" or "street" then it just gets distracting kludgy. It actually reminded me in that way of how bad fantasy novels will lamely inject phrases from dwarven or elven or whatever made-up language in an attempt at local color. What's worse is that Houssini doesn't really need to do this; he paints the culture vividly enough with other brushes so that he didn't have to over rely on this old trope.

Still, The Kite Runner is on balance pretty entertaining and different enough from stuff I normally read to be interesting.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, March 13, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“No, this isn't about the video game. The full title on this one is The Halo Effect ...and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers. In it, author Phil Rosenzweig sets out to take the business press and best sellers to task for a list of flaws in their thinking and chest thumping. Basically, it's a list of fallacies that you could compile from the chapter titles in most books on psychology, decision-making, and behavioral economics:

1. The Halo Effect (inferring other traits on the basis of one trait, like performance)
2. The Delusion of Correlation and Causality (assuming correlation means causation)
3. The Delusion of Single Explanations (not realizing that it's all a rich tapestry; every outcome has multiple causes)
4. The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots (a.k.a., selection bias; the habit of studying only successes)
5. The Delusion of Rigorous Research (substituting research quantity for quality)
6. The Delusion of Lasting Success (forgetting that the nature of business means very few successes are permanant or even long-lasting)
7. The Delusion of Absolute Performance (not realizing that company performance is relative to your competition, not absolute)
8. The Delusion fo the Wrong End of the Stick (attributing success for a trait that both successful and unsuccessful companies share)
9. The Delusion of Organizational Physics (Failing to realize that human systems like the marketplace are too complex to predict perfectly)

I liked this book quite a bit, in part because I just like exploring these little kinks in human nature, but also because Rosenzweig fully committed himself to a no bullshit, no pulled punches critique of the silliness you see in the business press and best-selling books like Built to Last or Good to Great (which I thought was transparently terrible, too). His diatribes are replete with real-world examples, quotes, and data compilations, but also always cogent and centered around one of the delusions above (though sometimes they bleed together, as you might expect). He spends a fair amount of time splendidly savaging people like Jim Collins (of Good to Great fame and fortune), calling him on the carpet for making sure that facts, science, and sound methodology don't get in the way of telling an uplifting story. It's great to see someone with both the moxie to say stuff like this and the scientific training to substantiate his critiques. If the Journal of Applied Psychology were more like this, I'd read it cover to cover every issue.

My only substantial complaint about the book is that it's almost all criticism and has very little in the way of solutions beyond "don't fall into this faulty mode of thinking." The subtext of the book is that business performance is gosh-darn hard to measure and even harder to predict or influence. So what do you do? How DO you identify the qualities that make businesses better? Clearly, some are better than others. What are the methodologies by which we can evaluate things in the absence of truely scientific experiments? The Halo Effect isn't much help there. But at least the author criticizes the ways NOT to do it in an entertaining and enlightening way.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, March 13, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 1 stars

“ Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy and the New Science of Desire is written by advertising mogul Martin Lindstrom and if you believe the dust jacket it aims to explore the emerging field of "neuromarketing," where advertisers and their consultants draw upon brain scanning technologies like fMRI to understand how brains react to advertising and how to to better market to them. The author claims to be the driving force behind three year's worth of this neuromarketing research, involving subjects from around the globe and Lord knows how many millions of dollars.

That's not a bad hook. The problem is that while the book is set up to be a scientific exploration of this new field or at least an exploration of the research couched in terms accessible to the interested layman, Lindstrom seizes that premise and twists it into marketing and advertising gobbledygook. It's clear from the offset that he's not a scientist or competent consumer of researcher by any stretch, yet he puts on a figurative lab coat and stomps around the territory making unsubstantiated and even nonsensical claims like "the statistical validity was as strong as could be." Words like those have very specific meanings in a scientific context, but the author here just slings them around like marketing jingles. He also stomps around knee-deep in other fallacies like confusing correlation with causation and changing the definition of his terms (such as "product placement") to suit his predetermined conclusions.

But as bad as all that is, it's not the worst thing about this bad book. That honor goes to how Lindstrom seems incapable or unwilling to turn off his marketing speak. The entire book reads like a breathless advertisement for the author himself and his super amazing totally MIND BLOWING NEW RESEARCH!! With each new topic and chapter, the author blathers on about how you're going to be totally amazed and shocked by what he has to tell you about the mysterious, murky happenings within the brain and how it forces you to buy a new iPod or bag of Doritos. The tone of the book is one of over the top zealotry and overselling the GEE WHIZ nature of research that in all likelihood a) wasn't done by him, and b) misinterpreted anyway. Perhaps most annoyingly Lindstrom implies or outright states that marketing and advertising literally force you to behave irrationally, a concept that any person with a brain worth scanning in the first place would tell you is exaggerated at best and hysterical at worst.

Ironically, the only redeeming quality of Buyology comes from the parts that have nothing to do with neuromarketing. While he obviously knows jack divided by squat about scientific research, Lindstrom DOES obviously know about advertising, marketing, and brand development. And when he talks about the novel and surprising ways that companies engage in those activities, it's often interesting. Learning how cigarette companies pay night clubs to decorate with certain colors and shapes in order to subtly advertise certain brands of cigarettes is fascinating, for example, as is hearing about how grocery stores pump in the fake scents of baking bread in order to trigger our appetites. That's really pretty cool if insidious stuff, and it has nothing to do with neuromarketing. I could have done with a lot more of that kind of stuff without the author's faux science veneer and frenzied trumpeting of his own horn.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, March 13, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

2 of 2 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 2 stars

“Spanning about 1900 to 1928, The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the Compsons, a family with deep Southern roots, but which is falling on hard times and whose pride is now suffering from self-inflicted wounds. The family patriarch is an alcoholic. One of the Compton brothers, Benjy, is severely mentally retarded while another, Quinten, is mentally unstable. The third brother Jason is mentally healthy, but a real jerk. And finally sister Caddy is sweet and loving, but sexually promiscuous to the point of scandal and unwanted pregnancy.

One of the things that makes The Sound and the Fury remarkable outside of being a period piece that allows the Compsons to stand in for many other fading families in the U.S. South during that time is its avant-garde structure. Each of the book's four sections follows one member of the story, and two of them are told in a dizzying stream of consciousness style. The fact that these two sections stream along with the abnormal minds of the mentally retarded and mentally ill brothers makes the book all the more challenging and impenetrable at times, since things bounce around in time and place to the point where you really have to study passages hard to keep track of what's going on.

In the end, I'd have to say I appreciated The Sound and the Fury but I didn't enjoy it at all. This is obviously the work of a master, and you can see the skill and effort that went into constructing this elaborate work. There's also a lot of symbolism, allegory, and commentary going on in the work, and that stuff is hard to do subtly. But in the end the story told by the book is both too uninteresting and too difficult to pull out to make it actually enjoyable, and the rest of the rewards are too difficult to separate from the style to appreciate. For me The Sound and the Fury mattered most as an experience and a visit to a historic sign post on the literary landscape --a suffocating plunge into the stream of consciousness, unreliable narrator, and multiple narrative styles that became all the rage in the early to mid 20th century.

Finally, I'll address a post script to anyone who has ever told me that reading audiobooks is a poor substitute for reading print: this is one of the few works where I think you're right. The printed version of The Sound and the Fury would be challenging enough, but the audiobook version I listened to was often an impenetrable literary block upon which I couldn't find any purchase. This is the kind of book where you NEED to be able to re-read sections and flip back and forth to appreciate how the different points of view fit together or, more importantly, how they don't. This just isn't something you can do with audio. ”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, December 26, 2008. ( reply | view 1 replies | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“You may remember that fairly recently comedian and minor TV personality John Hodgman wrote a parody of reference books called The Areas of My Expertise, which [a href="http://www.jmadigan.net/2006/12/book_review_the_areas_of_my_ex.html"]I reviewed[/a]. Hodgman's dry wit and ability to generate random and sublimely absurd claims made that book funny enough, so when he released his follow-up More Information Than You Require I grabbed it up.

In just about every way, More Information is more of the same. Indeed, Hodgman even continues the page numbering from his prior book and claims that more volumes will follow, and that some day you will be able to combine them into some kind of Voltron-like omnibus full of jokes about hobos, mole men, and U.S. presidents with hooks for hands. The problem is, I feel like I've seen a lot of this before, and the freshness and absurdity of the first book is pretty worn off. As any carnival freak show owner who has spent too much time in one town will tell you, things get less absurd with repeat viewings. Hodgman even seems to be going back to the same well that watered his previous books. For example, instead of a list of 700 hobo names like in the first book, More Information the author includes an exhaustive list of mole men names, making use of pretty much the same kind of shtick.

That's not to say that the book isn't funny in places. Hodgman's dry wit still hits hard on occasion, and I did laugh out loud more than a few times. Most of the jokes are hidden in the footnotes of the text, as well as 365 little dated inserts that he includes so that when you're done with the book you can use it as a "fact a day" daily calendar.

The problem is that this is all starting to feel a little well worn. I also grew to hate Hodgman's habit of switching to all capital letters SEEMINGLY AT RANDOM throughout the BOOK, which was funny once or twice, but generally JUST BROKE UP THE FLOW and was ANNOYING. I'd like to see him tackle something in a little different style rather than than what seems to me to be stream of consciousness and joke making that just throws everything against the walls to see what sticks.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, December 26, 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler is another attempt to balance out my literary diet with something from the classics buffet, and while I think it fits that bill I wish I had enjoyed it a bit more. Set in the late 1930s it's Yet Another Book About How Communism Sucks, featuring a retired (mostly by virtue of being jailed) revolutionary named Rubashov who is imprisoned and questioned about his activities as they relate to revolting against the rvolution that revolted from the revolting totalitarian regime of the turn of the century Russia. Well, presumably. Neither Russia nor communism are ever overtly mentioned, but the implications are pretty strong.

During his imprisonment Rubashov ponders his past life as a revolutionary, recalling how he betrayed and sentenced people to death in the service of his ideals and how he had to make so many hard choices for the greater good. He's also questioned about these decisions and moral quandries directly by his tormenters during scenes of interrogation and psychological manipulation --with which Ruboshov has personal experience on both sides. The book worked best for me as an examination of these kinds of sticky and morally vague intersections of big ideas and little people. If you have an ideal, what kinds of tragedies are acceptable in its defense and pursuit? There's also a lot of stuff in there about communism, democracy, individual versus group needs, and a lot of other similar themes.

Where the book didn't work so well for me was when it got bogged down in philosophical exploration of these topics through the literary technique of two talking heads. There would be long passages where Rubashov and his interrogators would engage in protracted philosophical sparring, each one making points and counter-points and it was easy to lose track of what was actually being discussed among all the abstractions and debate tactics. I suppose this was largely the point Koestler was trying to make in some ways, but the end result was that I got bored a lot. I much prefer the approach that some other authors have taken when dealing with largely the same topic: tell a story and illustrate the gist of your philosophy rather than delivering it in monologues and dialogues.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, December 26, 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Terry Pratchett's Pyramids is part of this Diskworld series, which means that pretty much by definition it's an amusing parody of the fantasy genre. But this one differs from the other Diskworld books I've read in a couple of ways. First, from what I can tell it's essentially a stand-alone tale, featuring a cast of characters who never make any repeat appearances later in the series. And second, it seems to mark the point in the books where Pratchett starts to step away from simple parody of fantasy tropes and move into more social satire in general. For sure, we've seen social satire before, practically from the beginning. Equal Rites tackled gender inequality head-on, for example, but Pyramids seems to be the first book that handles multiple threads of social satire at once and make them the entire point of the exercise.

The book tells the story of Teppic (or "Pteppic," if you prefer), the heir to an river kingdom based on ancient Egypt. Teppic is sent to the city of Ank-Morpork to be trained as a professional assassin, more out of just something to do and to get him out of the palace than anything. When Teppic's father the god-king dies, the son returns home to take over the kingdom, which is just as well since in the course of his final exam he decides that assassination doesn't square quite right with his moral fiber. Unfortunately spending his formative years in the big city has given Teppic some ideas for social progress (such as plumbing or mattresses) that clash wildly with the attitudes of his tradition-bound subjects. Furthermore, the river kingdom's ancient High Priest, Dios, does everything to block the new king's flights of fancy since he is a stickler for tradition himself and thinks that actually ruling is quite beneath any king's dignity. And also, there is an enormous pryamid that, through its pyramid-edness, ends up warping reality to a truly uncomfortable degree.

Even though Pyramids is a stand-alone book, it's probably one of the more enjoyable ones I've read --perhaps because it's a one-off that Pratchett can wind up as he sees fit. The theme of tradition versus progress and blind dogma versus actually thinking things through are ones that the author has a lot of fun with, noting through one of his characters that "Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid."

In fact, Pyramids is one of the more quotable Diskworld books that I've read, and Pratchett's wit and ability to turn a phrase are fully on display once again. I particularly like his knack for amusing similes, like this one:

All a camel has got is a pair of industrial-strength lungs and a voice like a herd of donkeys being chainsawed.

Or this one:

I knew the two of you would get along like a house on fire. Screams, flames, people running for safety...

And, of course, there's self-depracating lines like this one, which lie sprinkled throughout every one of his works:

There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification.

So, big thumbs up from me. I enjoyed this one a lot, and if you want a good sample of the taste of the whole Diskworld series you could do a lot worse than Pyramids.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, December 26, 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“Just After Sunset is Stephen King's latest collection of short stories, containing a hodge podge of different tales that with one exception had been previously published in various magazines or anthologies. I've liked Stephen King's similar works in the past, despite the fact that some of his so-called short stories have clocked in at novella or even full novel length. This collection, however, contains relatively short works that can all be easily read in one sitting. Unfortunately I didn't care for hardly any of them.

What we have here seems to be more like a collection of literary doodles or proof of concepts that just kind of fell out of King's brain. Most of them seem like either short little vignettes that don't seem to have much point or outlines for larger works that King never quite got around to fleshing out. You know, the kind of thing that you might find in the last 50 pages of a full-length novel after he'd spent hundreds of pages building character, place, backstory, and tension.

Only one of the stories, N., really did anything for me. It's King's homage-slash-fanfiction for H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos where he links obsessive-compulsive disorder with rituals that in reality keep otherworldly horrors at bay for the select few that are unlucky enough to be chosen as guardians for the "thin places" between worlds. It's a really neat concept, and he executes it well.

On the other hand, one of the other stories, Stationary Bike is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen put down on paper. Really, it's incredibly stupid.

So, it's going to be hard for me to recommend this one unless you're a Stephen King completionist like myself.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, December 26, 2008. ( reply | permalink )