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mburnamfink's reviews
2005 reviews
Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn
3.0
I am disappoint. Everybody says these are the best of the Star Wars EU books, before it goes totally off the rails. The book follows the protagonists of the movies, Luke, Leia, Han, and Lando, as they attempt to build up the fragile New Republic against the predations of the cunning and brilliant Grand Admiral Thrawn. Unfortunately, for me the space combat didn't have any sense of scale or zip, along with most of the characterization. Thrawn is as awesome as internet rumors lead me to believe, but the other of the new characters (Talon Karrde, Mara Jade), fall flat, and the beloved Star Wars protagonists feel kinda flat. Guess I'll stick with EU books I'm actually nostalgic for.
The Techno-Human Condition by Daniel Sarewitz, Braden R. Allenby
4.0
Disclosure time: Sarewitz and Allenby are two of my favorite professors, and I generally believe that they're very smart. That said...
The Techno-Human Condition starts by examining transhumanism, the belief that human being can and should improve their bodies using technology, and the common arguments for and against it. Allenby and Sarewitz soon drop the idea, as both sides hold flawed and simplistic views about technology and its ability to solve problems. They advance a theory of Level I, II, and III technologies. Level I technologies imply a simple cause-and-effect relationship: cars allow you to get from Point A to B easily. Level II, technosocial systems, have more complex effects: many cars create traffic and a lack of parking. Level III, Earth systems, are almost unknowable in their implications: cars redesign cities and ways of life, create foreign entanglements in pursuit of gas, and change the composition of the atmosphere with unknown effects.
Coping with Level III technological conditions is the aim of the book. Allenby and Sarewitz propose flexibility and options above all else. Since the effects of technology are prima facia unknowable, we must be ready to change direction at any moment, not to forestall debate, and to always be prepared to reflexively examine our values. This is an ambitious program, and its ambition and ambiguity weakens its real-world relevance--people with simple solutions will always implement their plans faster than those with more complex ideas. But it also might be the only way to survival.
The Techno-Human Condition starts by examining transhumanism, the belief that human being can and should improve their bodies using technology, and the common arguments for and against it. Allenby and Sarewitz soon drop the idea, as both sides hold flawed and simplistic views about technology and its ability to solve problems. They advance a theory of Level I, II, and III technologies. Level I technologies imply a simple cause-and-effect relationship: cars allow you to get from Point A to B easily. Level II, technosocial systems, have more complex effects: many cars create traffic and a lack of parking. Level III, Earth systems, are almost unknowable in their implications: cars redesign cities and ways of life, create foreign entanglements in pursuit of gas, and change the composition of the atmosphere with unknown effects.
Coping with Level III technological conditions is the aim of the book. Allenby and Sarewitz propose flexibility and options above all else. Since the effects of technology are prima facia unknowable, we must be ready to change direction at any moment, not to forestall debate, and to always be prepared to reflexively examine our values. This is an ambitious program, and its ambition and ambiguity weakens its real-world relevance--people with simple solutions will always implement their plans faster than those with more complex ideas. But it also might be the only way to survival.
Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi
4.0
Agent to the Stars is a cute book, that's the only way to describe it. Kind, professional, sarcastic Hollywood agent Tom Stein gets the ultimate job, introducing a race of blob-like aliens to the world, while at the same time dealing with every egomaniac, diva, and paparazzi in LA. The characterization is more charicaturization, but the plot pops and sizzles, and Scalzi is at his best taking wacky ideas and throwing them at the wall. And hey, it's a free ebook, so what do you have to lose?
The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara
3.0
Well, this is certainly a book. I can't say much more, due to the elliptical multi-narrators stream of consciousness style, but it's about Black faith healers somewhere in the South, and um, something happens, I don't know what. Guess my Patriarchy Pants are just on too tight.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct by Thomas Szasz
3.0
Szasz makes a frontal assault on the power of psychiatry, arguing that mental illness is a myth and that the power accorded to psychiatrists to decide if people are legally responsible for their actions, have them committed to hospitals, and prescribe various psychotropic medications is fundamentally misfounded. The basic premise of his argument is that only organs can be sick, and the mind is not an organ. Rather, what we see as mental illness are the results of rule-breaking behavior by "mentally ill" people, an attempt to game their social interactions to receive the socially beneficial role of a "sick person" as accorded by Judeo-Christian morality and modern standards of care.
While there is some benefit to challenging the hegemony of mental illness (a recent paper says "Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year."), Szasz's argument fails on two major grounds.
The first is modern understanding that cognitive events are linked to neurological events, or in other words, that mental illness are in some way brain disorders. We can draw a spectrum from something totally neurological--Parkinson's disease, to something totally psychological--Borderline Personality Disorder, say, and put things like schizophrenia, depression, bipolar, and their related pharmacological treatments and neurological origins somewhere between them. It's unfair to hold a book published in the late 1960s to modern beliefs, but again, Szasz doesn't have much to say about this.
The second problem is more damning: even if we accept Szasz's belief that the mentally ill are just playing the game of life by different rules, what is to be done with them? As any good historian of mental illness knows, the lines between insane, criminal, and sinful are far from clear. Psychiatry is the modern way of dealing with malcontents, of offering a source of power and authority that people can draw on to change their lives and social behaviors. Szasz might be right in his argument that psychiatry probably isn't medicine, and it certainly isn't science, but he doesn't engage with the notion that psychiatry is something, and that it performs a socially necessary role. Rather than assailing psychiatry as an evil system of fraud that makes people crazy, we must ask how unhappy people can be helped, how their complex problems can be untangled, and what resources are necessary for that to happen.
While there is some benefit to challenging the hegemony of mental illness (a recent paper says "Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year."), Szasz's argument fails on two major grounds.
The first is modern understanding that cognitive events are linked to neurological events, or in other words, that mental illness are in some way brain disorders. We can draw a spectrum from something totally neurological--Parkinson's disease, to something totally psychological--Borderline Personality Disorder, say, and put things like schizophrenia, depression, bipolar, and their related pharmacological treatments and neurological origins somewhere between them. It's unfair to hold a book published in the late 1960s to modern beliefs, but again, Szasz doesn't have much to say about this.
The second problem is more damning: even if we accept Szasz's belief that the mentally ill are just playing the game of life by different rules, what is to be done with them? As any good historian of mental illness knows, the lines between insane, criminal, and sinful are far from clear. Psychiatry is the modern way of dealing with malcontents, of offering a source of power and authority that people can draw on to change their lives and social behaviors. Szasz might be right in his argument that psychiatry probably isn't medicine, and it certainly isn't science, but he doesn't engage with the notion that psychiatry is something, and that it performs a socially necessary role. Rather than assailing psychiatry as an evil system of fraud that makes people crazy, we must ask how unhappy people can be helped, how their complex problems can be untangled, and what resources are necessary for that to happen.
Bat 21 by William C. Anderson
3.0
It's pretty much what it says on the tin. Lt Col Hambleton goes down behind enemy lines in the midst of the 1972 Easter Offensive, and after 12 days manages to make his way to safety. This book is readable enough, but some of the dialog is, well, maybe fighter pilots did talk like that, I don't know, it's hard to believe. Lots of square-jawed USAF heroics, a few swipes at politicians and hippies, but all in all a decent enough account of a tense operation. Unfortunately, one of the major characters turns out to be a composite, and while I understand the literary reasons for doing that, it really weakens the emotional resonance of the book.
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
4.0
Gleick manages something incredibly, a deeply scholarly work that is also highly accessible. Today, information is like air, or water to a fish, so omnipresent we do not even see it. But Gleick traces the origins of this strange concept back through the technologies of the difference engine, telegraphy, writing, and speech; and the theories of mathematican Claude Shannon and a host of allied thinkers. Information has infected biology, physics, psychology, mathematics, and almost every other science, placing limits on what can be known.
The history of technology and science is well-done, but Gleick doesn't quite live up to his potential in examining the social and political consequences of information. Words and their flow have shaped the course of history. What does it mean now when every object is linked to a stream of information? Has information theory truly overtaken and unified science? (CERN and the Human Genome Project, both epicenters of 'Big Data' might argue so). Has the immense agglomeration of facts, and the news ways in which they are created, made us better, worse, or just different? In the face of these big questions, Gleick retreats to platitudes, but that doesn't detract from the scope and power of the rest of the work.
The history of technology and science is well-done, but Gleick doesn't quite live up to his potential in examining the social and political consequences of information. Words and their flow have shaped the course of history. What does it mean now when every object is linked to a stream of information? Has information theory truly overtaken and unified science? (CERN and the Human Genome Project, both epicenters of 'Big Data' might argue so). Has the immense agglomeration of facts, and the news ways in which they are created, made us better, worse, or just different? In the face of these big questions, Gleick retreats to platitudes, but that doesn't detract from the scope and power of the rest of the work.
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
4.0
The book (review) everybody has been waiting for! Unless you've been under a rock, you know that this is the fifth book in A Song of Ice and Fire, that the fans have been waiting six years for it, and that the last one, A Feast for Crows, was not very good. Is aDwD a worthy addition to the series, or has GRRM lost his mojo?
Well, maybe. On the one hand, everybody's favorite characters are back, the plot is advanced, and Shit Happens. on the other hand, too much time is spent wandering around the East for little to no reason, and the plot stops right before The Shit Hits the Fan. Think A Clash of Kings, if it ended right before the Battle of the Blackwater.
Martin's characterization and description are as good as ever, and the exotic East is a fun setting to explore. A Feast for Crows relied on cheap cliffhangers and unnecessary sex to keep us reading, and while there's some of that in A Dance with Dragons, it's balanced with character and plot progression. Not a perfect book by any means, but a step in the right direction.
Well, maybe. On the one hand, everybody's favorite characters are back, the plot is advanced, and Shit Happens. on the other hand, too much time is spent wandering around the East for little to no reason, and the plot stops right before The Shit Hits the Fan. Think A Clash of Kings, if it ended right before the Battle of the Blackwater.
Martin's characterization and description are as good as ever, and the exotic East is a fun setting to explore. A Feast for Crows relied on cheap cliffhangers and unnecessary sex to keep us reading, and while there's some of that in A Dance with Dragons, it's balanced with character and plot progression. Not a perfect book by any means, but a step in the right direction.
The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold
5.0
Do you think you're hard? Do you think you're some sort of Tier Zero Modern Warfare Elite Ops Deniable Badass? Do you even think you know about such people? Until you've read this book, you don't know shit.
Cu Chi was a district just 25 miles from Saigon. Starting from the French Indochina War, local guerrillas carved tunnels out of the strong laterite clay that made up the district. By 1968, the Iron Triangle had over 200 miles of tunnels, with three and four level base camps including barracks, hospitals, and weapons shops. This book covers the Vietnamese men and women who lived and fought in the tunnels, and the American soldiers tasked with going in and smoking them out, the stone crazy tunnel rats.
The authors have compiled an extensive body of interviews with veterans on both sides of the conflict, bring forth the survivors own words as they describe living without sunlight or fresh air for months on end, and the terror of chasing the enemy into the bowels of the Earth. A secondary topic is weapons, from madcap high-tech schemes to destroy the tunnels, to the trained wasps and snakes that the VC used to defend their bases. Both the human and military elements are well-represented.
In the end, America never learned how to fight in the tunnels. Instead, in the wake of the Tet offensive, the army simply obliterated the entire district, first with defoliants, then with Rome plows, then with B-52 strikes that blew 10m craters in the ground. The guerrillas were essentially destroyed, but only at the cost of the entire region. The Tunnels of Cu Chi is a fascinating micro-history that amply demonstrates the fractally fucked up nature of the war.
Cu Chi was a district just 25 miles from Saigon. Starting from the French Indochina War, local guerrillas carved tunnels out of the strong laterite clay that made up the district. By 1968, the Iron Triangle had over 200 miles of tunnels, with three and four level base camps including barracks, hospitals, and weapons shops. This book covers the Vietnamese men and women who lived and fought in the tunnels, and the American soldiers tasked with going in and smoking them out, the stone crazy tunnel rats.
The authors have compiled an extensive body of interviews with veterans on both sides of the conflict, bring forth the survivors own words as they describe living without sunlight or fresh air for months on end, and the terror of chasing the enemy into the bowels of the Earth. A secondary topic is weapons, from madcap high-tech schemes to destroy the tunnels, to the trained wasps and snakes that the VC used to defend their bases. Both the human and military elements are well-represented.
In the end, America never learned how to fight in the tunnels. Instead, in the wake of the Tet offensive, the army simply obliterated the entire district, first with defoliants, then with Rome plows, then with B-52 strikes that blew 10m craters in the ground. The guerrillas were essentially destroyed, but only at the cost of the entire region. The Tunnels of Cu Chi is a fascinating micro-history that amply demonstrates the fractally fucked up nature of the war.