jmadigan

• Rated 4 stars

“Outside of Terry Pratchett and a brief dip into Stephen Erickson, I had largely given up on the whole fantasy genre for all the obvious reasons. I kept hearing about Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, though, usually accompanied by the pithy but intriguing description "It's the Napoleonic Wars, except with dragons." Indeed, it turned out to be just that: a story from the war between France and Britain set in an alternate history where enormous dragons form air corps on all sides and thus rewrite the rules of warfare. This post covers the first five books in the series: His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, and Victory of Eagles.

The story starts when British sea Captain Will Laurence captures a French ship bearing an unusual dragon egg. When Laurence is unable to get into a friendly port before the egg hatches, the newborn dragon Temeraire imprints on him, linking the two together. This is at first an unwelcome shock to Laurence, who is faced with the prospect of giving up a hard-earned and lucrative career as an officer in the British Royal Navy and replacing it with the wild and largely mysterious life of an Aviator and dragon handler in the air corps. Bur Laurence rises to the challenge and warms to his new life when his training as an Aviator begins and his relationship with the curious, noble, and intelligent Temeraire develops.

From there, the books arrange themselves into basically a set of serial adventures, with Laurence and Temeraire moving from one predicament to the next and having to see their way through. Part of Novik's formula for each book usually involves a fantastic new location and travels for the dragon and his crew, so that we don't get much time to settle into one location or situation before moving on to a fresh one. The second book has them on a sea voyage to China on a diplomatic mission, while the third book has them leaving China overland through the Ottoman and Prussian empires, and the fourth has them braving the interior of Africa in order to find a cure for a deadly draconic plague that's threatening to wipe out England's air corps. The fifth book returns home to England, where Laurance and Temeraire's fortunes are reversed and they desparately try to repel an invasion by Napoleon's armies, who are proving to be much more clever at adapting dragons to the cause of warfare.

Those subplots aside, two meta plots have run through all five of the books so far. The first is Temeraire's (and eventaully Laurance's) fight for draconic equality. The dragons are intelligent and possessed of free will, but are often seen and used as mere tools or beasts of burden by their owners. Like, say, a ship or cannon that can talk and breed. Novik draws several parallels here to the problem of human slavery, which England was also wrestling with at the time. The second thread tying all the books together is the war with Napoleon, with skirmishes and major battles providing the climax for more than one book.

I liked these books well enough, not only because they're set in a time period mostly unknown to me and NOT in just another Middle Earth knockoff. But also largely because they manage to eschew many of the tired standards of the fantasy genre. Here are some of the things that you will NOT find:

* An epic storyline to save the world (Napoleon aside)
* Multiple points of view tracking multiple characters (Novik doesn't break form Laurance's point of view until book 5, and then only temporarily)
* A protagonist who starts as farm boy but who is secretly of high birth (both Laurance and Temerare are already of high birth)
* An apprenticeship to some wise teacher who awakens a hidden power
* A quest to destroy/reclaim some magic foozle
* A king being corrupted by a wicked adviser

Instead, we get a fairly small and personal story about Laurence and his journey into a new career set against a more epic backdrop. There's also some interesting world building going on, with Novik's descriptions of how warfare changes when you have thirty ton dragons on the battlefield, each capable of carrying an entire squad of riflemen and bombardiers in addition to their own teeth, claws, and occasional breath weapon. I also liked that dragons are the only magical things to appear in the books, and even then they're treated largely as intelligent animals. It's fantastic enough to be exciting and fanciful, but different enough from the usual tripe to keep your attention.”

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

• Rated 4 stars

“Outside of Terry Pratchett and a brief dip into Stephen Erickson, I had largely given up on the whole fantasy genre for all the obvious reasons. I kept hearing about Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, though, usually accompanied by the pithy but intriguing description "It's the Napoleonic Wars, except with dragons." Indeed, it turned out to be just that: a story from the war between France and Britain set in an alternate history where enormous dragons form air corps on all sides and thus rewrite the rules of warfare. This post covers the first five books in the series: His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, and Victory of Eagles.

The story starts when British sea Captain Will Laurence captures a French ship bearing an unusual dragon egg. When Laurence is unable to get into a friendly port before the egg hatches, the newborn dragon Temeraire imprints on him, linking the two together. This is at first an unwelcome shock to Laurence, who is faced with the prospect of giving up a hard-earned and lucrative career as an officer in the British Royal Navy and replacing it with the wild and largely mysterious life of an Aviator and dragon handler in the air corps. Bur Laurence rises to the challenge and warms to his new life when his training as an Aviator begins and his relationship with the curious, noble, and intelligent Temeraire develops.

From there, the books arrange themselves into basically a set of serial adventures, with Laurence and Temeraire moving from one predicament to the next and having to see their way through. Part of Novik's formula for each book usually involves a fantastic new location and travels for the dragon and his crew, so that we don't get much time to settle into one location or situation before moving on to a fresh one. The second book has them on a sea voyage to China on a diplomatic mission, while the third book has them leaving China overland through the Ottoman and Prussian empires, and the fourth has them braving the interior of Africa in order to find a cure for a deadly draconic plague that's threatening to wipe out England's air corps. The fifth book returns home to England, where Laurance and Temeraire's fortunes are reversed and they desparately try to repel an invasion by Napoleon's armies, who are proving to be much more clever at adapting dragons to the cause of warfare.

Those subplots aside, two meta plots have run through all five of the books so far. The first is Temeraire's (and eventaully Laurance's) fight for draconic equality. The dragons are intelligent and possessed of free will, but are often seen and used as mere tools or beasts of burden by their owners. Like, say, a ship or cannon that can talk and breed. Novik draws several parallels here to the problem of human slavery, which England was also wrestling with at the time. The second thread tying all the books together is the war with Napoleon, with skirmishes and major battles providing the climax for more than one book.

I liked these books well enough, not only because they're set in a time period mostly unknown to me and NOT in just another Middle Earth knockoff. But also largely because they manage to eschew many of the tired standards of the fantasy genre. Here are some of the things that you will NOT find:

* An epic storyline to save the world (Napoleon aside)
* Multiple points of view tracking multiple characters (Novik doesn't break form Laurance's point of view until book 5, and then only temporarily)
* A protagonist who starts as farm boy but who is secretly of high birth (both Laurance and Temerare are already of high birth)
* An apprenticeship to some wise teacher who awakens a hidden power
* A quest to destroy/reclaim some magic foozle
* A king being corrupted by a wicked adviser

Instead, we get a fairly small and personal story about Laurence and his journey into a new career set against a more epic backdrop. There's also some interesting world building going on, with Novik's descriptions of how warfare changes when you have thirty ton dragons on the battlefield, each capable of carrying an entire squad of riflemen and bombardiers in addition to their own teeth, claws, and occasional breath weapon. I also liked that dragons are the only magical things to appear in the books, and even then they're treated largely as intelligent animals. It's fantastic enough to be exciting and fanciful, but different enough from the usual tripe to keep your attention.”

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

• Rated 4 stars

“Outside of Terry Pratchett and a brief dip into Stephen Erickson, I had largely given up on the whole fantasy genre for all the obvious reasons. I kept hearing about Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, though, usually accompanied by the pithy but intriguing description "It's the Napoleonic Wars, except with dragons." Indeed, it turned out to be just that: a story from the war between France and Britain set in an alternate history where enormous dragons form air corps on all sides and thus rewrite the rules of warfare. This post covers the first five books in the series: His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, and Victory of Eagles.

The story starts when British sea Captain Will Laurence captures a French ship bearing an unusual dragon egg. When Laurence is unable to get into a friendly port before the egg hatches, the newborn dragon Temeraire imprints on him, linking the two together. This is at first an unwelcome shock to Laurence, who is faced with the prospect of giving up a hard-earned and lucrative career as an officer in the British Royal Navy and replacing it with the wild and largely mysterious life of an Aviator and dragon handler in the air corps. Bur Laurence rises to the challenge and warms to his new life when his training as an Aviator begins and his relationship with the curious, noble, and intelligent Temeraire develops.

From there, the books arrange themselves into basically a set of serial adventures, with Laurence and Temeraire moving from one predicament to the next and having to see their way through. Part of Novik's formula for each book usually involves a fantastic new location and travels for the dragon and his crew, so that we don't get much time to settle into one location or situation before moving on to a fresh one. The second book has them on a sea voyage to China on a diplomatic mission, while the third book has them leaving China overland through the Ottoman and Prussian empires, and the fourth has them braving the interior of Africa in order to find a cure for a deadly draconic plague that's threatening to wipe out England's air corps. The fifth book returns home to England, where Laurance and Temeraire's fortunes are reversed and they desparately try to repel an invasion by Napoleon's armies, who are proving to be much more clever at adapting dragons to the cause of warfare.

Those subplots aside, two meta plots have run through all five of the books so far. The first is Temeraire's (and eventaully Laurance's) fight for draconic equality. The dragons are intelligent and possessed of free will, but are often seen and used as mere tools or beasts of burden by their owners. Like, say, a ship or cannon that can talk and breed. Novik draws several parallels here to the problem of human slavery, which England was also wrestling with at the time. The second thread tying all the books together is the war with Napoleon, with skirmishes and major battles providing the climax for more than one book.

I liked these books well enough, not only because they're set in a time period mostly unknown to me and NOT in just another Middle Earth knockoff. But also largely because they manage to eschew many of the tired standards of the fantasy genre. Here are some of the things that you will NOT find:

* An epic storyline to save the world (Napoleon aside)
* Multiple points of view tracking multiple characters (Novik doesn't break form Laurance's point of view until book 5, and then only temporarily)
* A protagonist who starts as farm boy but who is secretly of high birth (both Laurance and Temerare are already of high birth)
* An apprenticeship to some wise teacher who awakens a hidden power
* A quest to destroy/reclaim some magic foozle
* A king being corrupted by a wicked adviser

Instead, we get a fairly small and personal story about Laurence and his journey into a new career set against a more epic backdrop. There's also some interesting world building going on, with Novik's descriptions of how warfare changes when you have thirty ton dragons on the battlefield, each capable of carrying an entire squad of riflemen and bombardiers in addition to their own teeth, claws, and occasional breath weapon. I also liked that dragons are the only magical things to appear in the books, and even then they're treated largely as intelligent animals. It's fantastic enough to be exciting and fanciful, but different enough from the usual tripe to keep your attention.”

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

• Rated 4 stars

“Outside of Terry Pratchett and a brief dip into Stephen Erickson, I had largely given up on the whole fantasy genre for all the obvious reasons. I kept hearing about Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, though, usually accompanied by the pithy but intriguing description "It's the Napoleonic Wars, except with dragons." Indeed, it turned out to be just that: a story from the war between France and Britain set in an alternate history where enormous dragons form air corps on all sides and thus rewrite the rules of warfare. This post covers the first five books in the series: His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, and Victory of Eagles.

The story starts when British sea Captain Will Laurence captures a French ship bearing an unusual dragon egg. When Laurence is unable to get into a friendly port before the egg hatches, the newborn dragon Temeraire imprints on him, linking the two together. This is at first an unwelcome shock to Laurence, who is faced with the prospect of giving up a hard-earned and lucrative career as an officer in the British Royal Navy and replacing it with the wild and largely mysterious life of an Aviator and dragon handler in the air corps. Bur Laurence rises to the challenge and warms to his new life when his training as an Aviator begins and his relationship with the curious, noble, and intelligent Temeraire develops.

From there, the books arrange themselves into basically a set of serial adventures, with Laurence and Temeraire moving from one predicament to the next and having to see their way through. Part of Novik's formula for each book usually involves a fantastic new location and travels for the dragon and his crew, so that we don't get much time to settle into one location or situation before moving on to a fresh one. The second book has them on a sea voyage to China on a diplomatic mission, while the third book has them leaving China overland through the Ottoman and Prussian empires, and the fourth has them braving the interior of Africa in order to find a cure for a deadly draconic plague that's threatening to wipe out England's air corps. The fifth book returns home to England, where Laurance and Temeraire's fortunes are reversed and they desparately try to repel an invasion by Napoleon's armies, who are proving to be much more clever at adapting dragons to the cause of warfare.

Those subplots aside, two meta plots have run through all five of the books so far. The first is Temeraire's (and eventaully Laurance's) fight for draconic equality. The dragons are intelligent and possessed of free will, but are often seen and used as mere tools or beasts of burden by their owners. Like, say, a ship or cannon that can talk and breed. Novik draws several parallels here to the problem of human slavery, which England was also wrestling with at the time. The second thread tying all the books together is the war with Napoleon, with skirmishes and major battles providing the climax for more than one book.

I liked these books well enough, not only because they're set in a time period mostly unknown to me and NOT in just another Middle Earth knockoff. But also largely because they manage to eschew many of the tired standards of the fantasy genre. Here are some of the things that you will NOT find:

* An epic storyline to save the world (Napoleon aside)
* Multiple points of view tracking multiple characters (Novik doesn't break form Laurance's point of view until book 5, and then only temporarily)
* A protagonist who starts as farm boy but who is secretly of high birth (both Laurance and Temerare are already of high birth)
* An apprenticeship to some wise teacher who awakens a hidden power
* A quest to destroy/reclaim some magic foozle
* A king being corrupted by a wicked adviser

Instead, we get a fairly small and personal story about Laurence and his journey into a new career set against a more epic backdrop. There's also some interesting world building going on, with Novik's descriptions of how warfare changes when you have thirty ton dragons on the battlefield, each capable of carrying an entire squad of riflemen and bombardiers in addition to their own teeth, claws, and occasional breath weapon. I also liked that dragons are the only magical things to appear in the books, and even then they're treated largely as intelligent animals. It's fantastic enough to be exciting and fanciful, but different enough from the usual tripe to keep your attention.”

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

• Rated 4 stars

“Outside of Terry Pratchett and a brief dip into Stephen Erickson, I had largely given up on the whole fantasy genre for all the obvious reasons. I kept hearing about Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, though, usually accompanied by the pithy but intriguing description "It's the Napoleonic Wars, except with dragons." Indeed, it turned out to be just that: a story from the war between France and Britain set in an alternate history where enormous dragons form air corps on all sides and thus rewrite the rules of warfare. This post covers the first five books in the series: His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, and Victory of Eagles.

The story starts when British sea Captain Will Laurence captures a French ship bearing an unusual dragon egg. When Laurence is unable to get into a friendly port before the egg hatches, the newborn dragon Temeraire imprints on him, linking the two together. This is at first an unwelcome shock to Laurence, who is faced with the prospect of giving up a hard-earned and lucrative career as an officer in the British Royal Navy and replacing it with the wild and largely mysterious life of an Aviator and dragon handler in the air corps. Bur Laurence rises to the challenge and warms to his new life when his training as an Aviator begins and his relationship with the curious, noble, and intelligent Temeraire develops.

From there, the books arrange themselves into basically a set of serial adventures, with Laurence and Temeraire moving from one predicament to the next and having to see their way through. Part of Novik's formula for each book usually involves a fantastic new location and travels for the dragon and his crew, so that we don't get much time to settle into one location or situation before moving on to a fresh one. The second book has them on a sea voyage to China on a diplomatic mission, while the third book has them leaving China overland through the Ottoman and Prussian empires, and the fourth has them braving the interior of Africa in order to find a cure for a deadly draconic plague that's threatening to wipe out England's air corps. The fifth book returns home to England, where Laurance and Temeraire's fortunes are reversed and they desparately try to repel an invasion by Napoleon's armies, who are proving to be much more clever at adapting dragons to the cause of warfare.

Those subplots aside, two meta plots have run through all five of the books so far. The first is Temeraire's (and eventaully Laurance's) fight for draconic equality. The dragons are intelligent and possessed of free will, but are often seen and used as mere tools or beasts of burden by their owners. Like, say, a ship or cannon that can talk and breed. Novik draws several parallels here to the problem of human slavery, which England was also wrestling with at the time. The second thread tying all the books together is the war with Napoleon, with skirmishes and major battles providing the climax for more than one book.

I liked these books well enough, not only because they're set in a time period mostly unknown to me and NOT in just another Middle Earth knockoff. But also largely because they manage to eschew many of the tired standards of the fantasy genre. Here are some of the things that you will NOT find:

* An epic storyline to save the world (Napoleon aside)
* Multiple points of view tracking multiple characters (Novik doesn't break form Laurance's point of view until book 5, and then only temporarily)
* A protagonist who starts as farm boy but who is secretly of high birth (both Laurance and Temerare are already of high birth)
* An apprenticeship to some wise teacher who awakens a hidden power
* A quest to destroy/reclaim some magic foozle
* A king being corrupted by a wicked adviser

Instead, we get a fairly small and personal story about Laurence and his journey into a new career set against a more epic backdrop. There's also some interesting world building going on, with Novik's descriptions of how warfare changes when you have thirty ton dragons on the battlefield, each capable of carrying an entire squad of riflemen and bombardiers in addition to their own teeth, claws, and occasional breath weapon. I also liked that dragons are the only magical things to appear in the books, and even then they're treated largely as intelligent animals. It's fantastic enough to be exciting and fanciful, but different enough from the usual tripe to keep your attention.”

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

• Rated 4 stars

“After enjoying my first exposure to David Sedaris in When You are Engulfed in Flames, I clicked on over to grab something else by him and decided on Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Like the other, Dress Your Family is (presumably) autobiographical collection of humorous essays, but it's much less eclectic, choosing as it does to focus on tales from Sedaris's childhood. It's still great, though.

Well, on balance. Like When You are Engulfed in Flames, this book has its near misses as well in the form of stories that just didn't seem to click with me and which felt a little bit padded out, like when he discussed talking with his sister about being the subject of so many of his essays or the time he helped a child carry some coffee up to a hotel room. On the other hand, I was literally howling with laughter during "Six to Eight Black Men" in which Sedaris illustrates the absurdity of other country's version of Santa Claus (and, by ironic extension, the American version as well). And the author's younger brother, who is some kind of cross between Shakespear's John Falstaff and Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies, puts in a couple of sublimely hilarious appearances as a foil to Sedaris's whole effete, gay intellectual shtick. When Sedaris hits, he hits really hard.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, November 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“I'm a bit of a latecomer to the David Sedaris fan club, which is a shame. I kept seeing his When You Are Engulfed in Flames on best seller lists and decided to try the audiobook, which Sedaris reads himself. Immediately upon hearing his voice I realized that I had heard him before doing funny little stories for National Public Radio. I'm now a certified fan.

This book, like his others, is a collection of humorous and largely autobiographical essays dealing with a hodge podge of topics. Kind of like what a blog would be if it were done by someone who was actually talented, ambitious, and living in Paris with his boyfriend. The variety of topics is impressive, ranging from living next door to a crazy mean lady, getting into a fight with a fellow airline passenger, learning Japanese in Japan while trying to give up smoking, brewing coffee without running water, memories of a ghastly baby sitter, buying a human skeleton, coaching his social climbing parents on how to collect "real" art, and a lot more.

What I like about Sedaris's style is that he's not only funny, but completely open and without conceit about so many things. He cops to a lot of rude and embarrassing thoughts and reactions of the type that we've all probably had but would never admit. How would you really feel if your first class, transcontinental flight paired you with a man who couldn't stop crying over a death in his family? How do injustices done to you as a child really stack up when viewed through the lens of adult experience? How much at fault are you really when you end up sitting naked in a doctor's waiting room among other flabbergasted (and clothed) patients? It's the kind of honesty and open storytelling that makes you feel that at some level you kind of know the guy and you can commiserate with him and appreciate his self deprecation in the name of comedy.

And Sedaris often is pretty funny. Some of the essays really fell flat with me and felt like filler, but there are several in which he really had me rolling. One in particular where he makes use of a crossword puzzle to engage in passive aggressive exercises after refusing to swap seats with another airline passenger was sublime, matched only by another bit where he explains how he uses the French equivalent of "Okay, sure" as a response to every Frenchman's question he doesn't understand just to see where things go. It's funny stuff, thanks in large part to Sedaris's delivery and perceptive sense of humor. I'm definitely going to go back and read his other essay collections.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, November 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )

2 of 2 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“Up through about the first three quarters of Stephen King's Cujo, I really didn't care for it. This was mainly because it didn't really feel like a Stephen King novel, much less one from early in his career when he still liked to really break out the supernatural elements. There's no haunted hotels that turn people into murderous psychopaths. There's no little girls who can burn your face off by looking at you. There's no classic cars possessed by malevolent spirits. There's no everyman who can tell your terrifying future by touching your hand, even though Cujo is more or less an indirect sequel to The Dead Zone. Instead, we get some dumb dog.

Granted, this isn't an ordinary dog. It's a huge St. Bernard weighing in at almost 200 pounds and it's been driven completely feral by rabies. Through a cascade of unfortunate coincidences, housewife Donna Trenton and her four-year old son Tad end up isolated and trapped in their clunker of a car by Cujo, having to deal not only with the animal's vicious attacks, but also the 100-degree summer heat. There's also some more mundane drama in the form of two marriages on the rocks, including Cujo's owners and the imperilled Trentons themselves. Husband Vic Trenton, in another one of those unfortunate coincidences, is out of town trying to salvage a business deal while his wife and child fight for their lives.

So, as I said, I didn't care much for this setup for most of the novel. Having a 4-year old child myself I didn't much care for the fulcrum King chose to leverage our fears this time around --parents' promising a child that he or she is safe from imaginary monsters only to be seriously tested on their ability to protect him or her from a real one. This hits pretty close to home. I don't begrudge King for this (I'm free to exit this joy ride any time I want), but it still made me uncomfortable and without any kind of horror schlock or pizaz to distract me, my opinion was one of vague dislike. Aside from some silly business with a maybe kinda sorta maybe haunted closet in Tad Trenton's bedroom, Cujo has no supernatural elements at all --just a really big and really angry dog that wants to tear somebody's guts out.

But in the last quarter of the book, things started coalesce and I started to see what King was up to. Not only did things get more exciting as the standoff with Cujo reached its tragic climax, but I began to appreciate that the book was actually an example of pretty clever plotting. Up until that point I had been annoyed with King for slinging around what I had taken for random and gratuitous plot threads. For example, there's a jilted ex-lover who takes his revenge on Donna Trenton's empty house, and at the time I considered the scene to be unnecessary padding. But that act leads to a new situation that led other characters to go where King needed them to be in order to advance the story, and it was done in a very believable way. Nobody was going from point A to point B at exactly time C just because that's what King needed them to do to get to some climactic scene. It was all very organic and believable in a way that lesser authors (heck, even King himself at other points in his career) couldn't pull off.

I also started to appreciate more about the contrasts that King set up between the sundering of the Trentons' family and the dissolution of another family, the Bannermans, who are also affected by Cujo's rampage. At the same time that Cujo is savaging one family and breaking it forever he's allowing another one to escape a dead end and move into more hopeful territory. It's subtle and the kind of thing that floats to the top of your thoughts some time after reading the book, which is a fair bit more than you might expect from horror pulp. Which, I'm always, saying, King's stuff isn't. Well, not often.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, November 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Much like Predictably Irrational from earlier this year, Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman's Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior seeks to educate us on quirks of the human mind that lead us to engage in decidedly irrational behavior. And it covers a lot of the same topics: confirmation bias, first impressions, loss aversion, diagnostic bias, sunk costs, and more.

The brothers Brafman do take a slightly different approach to the topic, though. They use these kinks in human nature to answer a variety of questions that they set up with short vignettes. What causes college football coaches to doggedly stick to losing strategies? What caused a jet pilot to risk his life and the lives of his passengers just to save a little time? How does the U.S. Supreme Court manage its own group dynamics to ensure that dissenting opinions are heard? Why would someone pay $200 for a $20 bill? Why would a studio audience deliberately sabotage a contestant seeking a "lifeline" in the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Why would a dot com millionaire sit and watch all his newfound wealth slowly trickle away when he could stop it any time he wanted? Why would subway commuters ignore a free concert by a world-class musician playing on a priceless Stradivarius violin? Read this book and you'll not only find out, but you'll start to see where you're guilty of similar crimes of irrationality in your own life.

Ultimately, though, I didn't like Sway quite as much as Predictably Irrational because the authors seemed intent on keeping the language and the approach too mainstream. Instead of relying on descriptions of scientific studies that prove their points, the authors rely more on stories and case studies to make most of their points. This is fine and they're good enough storytellers to keep your attention, but being trained in psychology and the associated research methods myself, I kind of a geek for descriptions of study designs, hypotheses, and the like.

But maybe that's just me and Sway is the more accessible book for most people. The voice that the authors use manages to strike the right balance between educational and breezy. They're often cheeky, too --you gotta respect any authors who, after listing blurbs and quotes by experts in praise of them on the back cover of the book, tell you that if you buy the book because of these quotes you're being completely irrational. (But, they say, you should totally still buy the book.)”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, November 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“After reading Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, I decided that while that particular subject left me kind of weirded out and uncomfortable, I liked Roach's style and tone quite a bit. She was both funny and educational, which is a hard combination to pull off. So I decided to give one of her earlier books a turn and picked up Spook: What Science has to Say About the Afterlife. I liked it quite a bit better.

Basically, the approach is similar to what she took with Bonk in that Roach sets out both to document the scientific study of the afterlife and to do a little exploratory action research herself. So we learn about early natural philosophers and anatomists who tried to measure the weight of a soul by loading up a dying man on a scale and squinting at the dials during the moment of expiration. We learn about scientific debates over what bit of the brain houses the soul, fueled by case studies of head trauma and, unpleasantly enough, vivisection. We learn about surgeons who put laptop computers up above the operating table, but with their screens facing the ceiling so that a patient who reports having his consciousness float above his body can prove it by reporting the contents of the computer's display. And then there's the part where a cryptologist hatched a plan for proving that one can commune with the dead by encoding a message that was indecipherable without the key that he would only provide from beyond his own grave.

What I really admire about Roach's books, though, is that she's not content to just summarize her Google searches on a particular topic. Instead, Roach actually jumps right in with two feet and a wry smile. We see her travel to India to ride along to rural villages with a researcher looking for scientific proof of reincarnation. We hear about her trek out to the site of the Donnor party tragedy with a group of people showing how they can use tape recorders to receive hidden messages from the deceased. And in my favorite part of the book she travels to England to attend a 3-day workshop full of crackpots trying to learn how to run seances and communicate with the dead. It's hilarious to see Roach as the lone logical wolf biting her tongue amid a room full of sheep doing their best to convince themselves that the can hear the voice of your old Aunt Millie when both your parents were only children.

And it's pretty clear that Roach isn't buying any of this, as she gently (and sometimes not so gently) mocks the researchers and mediums she encounters. In her own very piercing and funny way she's quick to point out errors in their reasoning, biases in their thinking, and fatal flaws in their research design. But a friend of mine once said that the best scientists are those who can be two opposite things at once: completely open to any idea, and utterly skeptical about everything. Roach comes pretty close to this ideal. She's willing to entertain all kinds of claims about the afterlife --reincarnation, messages from the dead, ghosts, the existence of a soul that persists after shedding its mortal coil, out of body experiences, and more. But she's also the kind of person that demands real, scientific proof before she'll buy into it. She doesn't report getting that kind of proof in Spook, but she has a lot of fun looking for it. So did I.”

jmadigan wrote this review Friday, November 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )