(no subject)
Even if you don't usually read book reviews, if you or anyone you love gardens (or eats meat), read this.
Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health: This is possibly the scariest book I've ever read. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, which you've probably heard most about in its guise of mad cow disease, is a disease that literally eats holes in the brains of its victims, killing them in a terrible fashion. We know how it spreads: it spreads through cannibalism and through eating animals that have been made into cannibals by modern food production techniques. It gets into the brain and starts converting normal proteins into agents of death, like Vonnegut's ice-9 converting regular water into an unmelting solid, through a process that may be the same as crystallization (which you might have done in high school chemistry, turning a supersaturated solution into a solid by dropping a seed crystal into the liquid). The agents that cause TSE's spread are virtually impervious to heat, radiation, formaldehyde, years of isolation, and freezing. And, even with the example of Britain, which ignored the problem for years until the infection was firmly established - and at what level, we still don't know, because infections began in the early 1980s and the incubation time can be 2-3 decades - America is taking the same ostrich-like stance, refusing to fund testing and even preventing ranchers from testing in some circumstances. Rhodes tells the medical detective story, starting with the epidemic of kuru among New Guinea cannibals in the 1950s and 1960s through modern understandings of TSEs, and along the way delivers a powerful indictment of government unwillingness to act in the face of a profitable production mechanism. I'll leave you with a bit of advice you may want to pass along, a quote from the book:
"You know the bone meal that people use on their roses?" Gajdusek asked me then. "It's made from downer cattle [cattle that sicken and die for no apparent reason, which sometimes are infected with TSE]. Ground extremely fine. The instructions on the bag warn you not to open it in a closed room. Gets up your nose."
The Nobel-laureate virologist who knows more than anyone else in the world about transmissible spongiform encephalopathy looked at me meaningfully. "Do you use bone meal on your roses?"
I told him I did.
He nodded. "I wouldn't if I were you."
Martin Garbus with Stanley Cohen, Tough Talk: How I Fought for Writers, Comics, Bigots, and the American Way: There's not much of a market for lawyers' autobiographies, and this book probably won't help create one. Garbus gives fairly straightforward accounts of his career in media law, from obscenity prosecutions to libel cases to copyright cases to campaign finance. Most interesting are his attempts to justify positions that many - including significant parts of his client base - perceived as hypocritical or at least contradictory, such as his representation of one author's heirs to prevent the publication of an allegedly unauthorized story compilation and representation of a publisher who wanted to publish a version of a Samuel Beckett play against his executor's wishes, despite his endorsement of an author's absolute right to control the uses of his works. More troubling to many people, Garbus represented a rape victim in a libel suit against the New York Daily News, even though he had represented publishers against libel plaintiffs for years. The book does provide a good example of a lawyer's ability to convince himself that one case has nothing to do with the next.
Frederick Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes: Fred's a very smart man. Most of his work that I've read is about the First Amendment, but this book is about things like racial profiling and banning aggressive breeds of dogs. His basic point is powerful, important, and probably repeated a few too many times for my taste in this book, though it's so easy to forget that repetition with new examples is reasonable. That point is this: when we condemn things like racial profiling, we cannot be saying that it's wrong to treat someone as part of a group instead of as an individual. Rather, we must mean that it's wrong to treat someone as part of a particular group, such as one defined by race or gender. This is because, whenever we make predictions - about future likelihood of committing a crime, about the probability that a person is carrying drugs, about job performance - we are in fact basing our predictions on the probability of what someone with a particular set of characteristics is likely to do in the future. It's just that there are very good reasons to refine that set of characteristics beyond those objectionable, historically loaded categories, or even to exclude from our consideration a person's membership in those categories even if they might serve as a reasonable proxy for what we want to know. It's a good book, well written and easy to read. Among the particularly nice touches was Schauer's point that debates over whether to ban pit bulls have suffered by the ready availability of the "breed = race, ban = apartheid/racism" comparison, even though the issues are quite different.
Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR: Believe it or not, this is the second book about the history of the VCR that I've read, and by far the lesser one. Wasser traces the economic structure of the film production and video rental industry, arguing that the little businesses enabled by the rise of video rental got destroyed by the very movie culture they helped to produce - with a huge new source of income, movie production became more expensive and thus more centralized, with corresponding effects on distribution. He often treats consumer preferences as far too autonomous for my comfort, as if consumer demands were the sole explanation for what got bought and rented in stores. Still, the book is a good illustration of the principle that innovators define new markets, but they rarely make any money from them. Instead, established concerns, who were left reeling by the innovation, eventually recover and move in, and because they have more resources and more business savvy in general, they win in the long run.
Barbara Tuchman, The First Salute: This book is basically about the American Revolution from the perspective of the Dutch, British and French military and political men involved. Z. informs me that Tuchman didn't really finish the book; she wrote it when she was dying, though it was published when she was still alive. It is not a very good history. The order of events is very confusing, with lots of backing and filling, some repetition that editing would probably have corrected. In general, there's not a coherent narrative, though the presentation does enhance the impression that war is a series of accidents. Tuchman's prose occasionally shines, though when she referred to a man as "a husk of an ancient mariner," I really wanted her to go all the way and call him "a rind of an ancient mariner" instead.
Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: This book is a collection of columns Bryson wrote for a British audience after he returned to the US, specifically Hanover, New Hampshire, after decades in Britain. They can be pretty funny, though my absolute favorite moment comes in the introduction when Bryson's editor calls to inform him that he'll be writing this column, much to his surprise and dismay, and tells him that the column will be called "Notes from a Big Country," to which Bryson responds, "[Y]ou'll have to call it 'Big Blank Space in the Magazine' because I cannot do it." For some reason, the thought of "Big Blank Space" really grabbed me. Bryson occasionally stumbles, usually when he creates some fake government form, but his eye for the bizarre and wonderful in American life is usually sharp. He loves America in all its glories, excesses, weirdnesses and wastefulness.
David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor: Z. gave me this book as an example of good writing on the history of technology. It has one big through-line, which is the importance of context: technologies are successful (or failures) not based on pure technical measures, but based on the meanings that they have for the people using them. Thus, the Civil War battle of the Monitor versus the Virginia (or, as we Northerners think of it, the Merrimack), the first ironclad-only naval battle in history, is not a story of the technical triumph of ironclad technology - in fact, Mindell shows, the technology was deeply flawed, almost deadly - but the triumph of a particular way of looking at naval technology, such that the battle was defined as a success for ironclads and a death knell for wooden warships. Because of his theoretical orientation, Mindell spends as much time on the perceptions of Melville and Hawthorne about the Monitor as on the perceptions of military men, which provides an interesting contrast.
Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show, ed. Glenn Yeffeth. This book just goes to show that if you scratch a published writer, you get a fangirl/boy. The level of analysis is at best about equal to my friendslist the day after an episode. Spike has his partisans; Angel has his; even Riley and (my personal favorite) Wesley are offered as Buffy's best match. Tara is praised as well as buried. There's some non-relationshippy stuff, but not much. Once again, Jacqueline Lichtenberg makes me wonder what I saw in her writing when I was a kid by not only indulging in new-age psychobabble, but also referring to her own "award-winning" column ("[R]ead my award-winning SF/F review column from The Monthly Aspectarian which examines what can be learned about magical initiation by reading science fiction novels.") Just - no. Names I recognized: David Brin (actually, not bad, but not revelatory); Roxanne Longstreet Conrad; Sherrilyn Kenyon ("The Search for Spike's Balls"); Scott Westerfeld; Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (disappointing); Laura Resnick; Jennifer Crusie (Buffy and romance conventions); Sarah Zettel (interesting point about the Scoobies becoming insiders instead of outsiders over seven seasons, and how that's not actually of the good - the best essay in the book); Christie Golden; Jean Lorrah; Lawrence Watt-Evans; and Nancy Holder.
Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Working with records from Boston child protective agencies from roughly 1880 to 1960, Gordon explores the ways in which gender, class and nationality affected the definitions of child abuse and neglect. The records show the often biased and condescending ways in which the agency workers saw their clients, but evidence of the clients' attempts to control the kinds of help they got is also present. The agencies got power, legal and social, by denouncing physical abuse, but then they focused on a definition of neglect that disadvantaged poor families when, for example, they let their children play on the street, or expected their children to work and share in supporting the family. The definition of neglect also assumed that mothers were responsible for children; fathers' absence wasn't neglect, but mothers' work outside the home, even when that was the only way to get any income in the absence of a male breadwinner, was neglect by definition. Similar problems occurred with issues like sexual abuse of children, which was redefined by social work agencies as a problem of strangers on the street rather than one of intimate violence, especially after psychoanalytic theory became a standard explanation for why girls might accuse their fathers (or stepfathers) of molesting them. Worse, incest and wife-beating were often seen as problems created by a wife's nagging or frigidity; because women were the ones who talked to the social workers, the social workers focused on changing their behavior to solve problems in the home - and because the assumption was that support should come from a man, the idea of leaving the man to become dependent on the state (a likely outcome given the lack of well-paying jobs for women) was anathema, evidence of the woman's unfitness, rather than being an understandable escape from intolerable situations. If you want to know why an active feminist movement was vital to improving conditions for women and children, this book will show you.
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: Swofford was a Marine in the Gulf War, but the book isn't about combat. Swofford paints a profoundly disturbing and moving portrait of confused young men looking for direction, distrustful of authority, often blitzed on drink and drugs, and struggling desperately to think they're real men and to have others think so. It's hard not to feel pity for them even as Swofford describes their often cruel and dangerous behavior, because he makes the reader feel the pain that motivates it.
Anita Allen, Why Privacy Isn't Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability: As I grow older, I find it easier to stop reading books that are just like uncooked dough, thick and undifferentiated. Quick summary: what we do affects other people, including things like taking drugs that classic liberalism is inclined to regard as purely a matter of private choice. Thus, we may have moral and occasionally even legal obligations to others with respect to such private actions. Allen discusses accountability to family and race (for things like open/interracial adoption), health, and sex, and despite the deep interest those topics should inspire, I found myself unable to slog through the repetitive and usually far too abstract text.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything: Not quite, but an enjoyable and readable introduction into various aspects of the formation of the universe, the forces that keep our atoms together, the mysteries of geology and paleontology, and a bit of evolution on the macro scale - how we got from teeny protobacteria to physicists (if a person is a gene's way of making more genes, then a physicist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms). Not deep, but broad.
Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right: This book was funny for a while, and then it got depressing. Franken is at his best when he's explicitly slavering, as when he savages Ann Coulter for being a comprehensive liar (about New York Times stories, about her age, about history, etc., etc.). Or Rush Limbaugh's failure to register to vote, after all his whining. If I had stopped reading at page 100, I would have felt good about the book; later, when he reminded me how George W. had "changed the tone" in Washington, and how the repetition of a lie apparently is a great way to get people to believe it (like how many of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi - polls show people think it's at least half, while the actual number is zero), I got very, very sad.
William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law: Law and economics, which proposes to reduce law and, indeed, all human behavior to rational calculation and make law only that which promotes efficiency, has its hooks deep into the legal academy. Landes and Posner are in no small part responsible for that. Their economic analysis of antitrust law helped revolutionalize the field. Posner is also one of our most prolific writers, pumping out one or two books a year while also shouldering a disproportionately heavy load of appellate cases (he's a federal judge) and occasionally sitting as a trial judge by designation, just to keep from getting bored. He's a great example of the difference between intelligence and knowledge - he's brilliant, but flaky, and his economic orientation makes it hard for him to understand normal human behavior. In an earlier book, for example, he developed an equation that purported to tell whether abortion ought to be banned - if only you knew the values of the dozen variables, which included the value of fetal life and women's equality. Yeah, that was a big help. Landes & Posner's almost charming snobbishness jumped out at me especially when they discussed what they called the "obtuse narrator" in fiction, a person I (and I think many of us) would call the "unreliable narrator," unless the book involves mice or a guy named Quentin. See, the unreliable narrator is one of us; you might be an unreliable narrator, and I know I certainly am. The obtuse narrator? Heaven forfend we might be such. Landes & Posner are certain that, were they in the same situation, they'd *know* better. They are rational economic men. Anyhow, the book mainly discusses copyright law, with a substantial detour into patents and a smaller one into trademark. Their most interesting conclusion is that copyright ought to be renewable in perpetuity, but ought to expire if the owner doesn't care enough to pay a reasonably hefty renewal fee, and that would best balance the incentives to create and exploit works with the ability of others to build on what came before. If it didn't violate our international treaty obligations and had any chance of becoming law, it's an intriguing idea, though there's something in me that balks at the idea of Shakespeare's heirs still collecting money for the plays.
Edward Humes, Mean Justice: A Town's Terror, A Prosecutor's Power, A Betrayal of Innocence: I don't watch death penalty movies/shows and I don't read death penalty books. I can't stand them. If the man on death row is innocent, either something implausible happens right before the execution and everything is supposed to be fine, or he dies and that's worse. I already know how much the system bungles when it comes to death penalty cases. The problem is hardly limited to death cases, though; when the stakes are lower, there are even fewer controls on prosecution misconduct. Humes recounts the story of one murder case, a man accused and convicted of killing his wife despite what seems overwhelming evidence of his innocence and despite the prosecution's chief witness, a heroin addict who kept himself out of jail by fingering the husband, who contradicted himself a number of times, and who was primed by prosecutors to recite details he didn't at first "remember," all of which was of course kept from the defense's knowledge until it was too late. Interlaced with that are other accounts of misconduct in the same county, mainly in child abuse cases - remember the satanic abuse rings that supposedly permeated America in the 1980s, later revealed to have been almost totally fabricated as a result of aggressive questioning of young children who were rewarded for claiming abuse and punished for denying it? - and in a racially charged murder trial. Humes's outrage is genuine, but I eventually lost the stomach for reading the details of how the prosecution concealed evidence, revised its case to fit whatever evidence came out, and manipulated the jury. Basically, the book left me depressed, but if you like true crime, this is a good counterbalance to all those cases where the prosecution painstakingly sifted through the evidence to find the real killer.
Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health: This is possibly the scariest book I've ever read. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, which you've probably heard most about in its guise of mad cow disease, is a disease that literally eats holes in the brains of its victims, killing them in a terrible fashion. We know how it spreads: it spreads through cannibalism and through eating animals that have been made into cannibals by modern food production techniques. It gets into the brain and starts converting normal proteins into agents of death, like Vonnegut's ice-9 converting regular water into an unmelting solid, through a process that may be the same as crystallization (which you might have done in high school chemistry, turning a supersaturated solution into a solid by dropping a seed crystal into the liquid). The agents that cause TSE's spread are virtually impervious to heat, radiation, formaldehyde, years of isolation, and freezing. And, even with the example of Britain, which ignored the problem for years until the infection was firmly established - and at what level, we still don't know, because infections began in the early 1980s and the incubation time can be 2-3 decades - America is taking the same ostrich-like stance, refusing to fund testing and even preventing ranchers from testing in some circumstances. Rhodes tells the medical detective story, starting with the epidemic of kuru among New Guinea cannibals in the 1950s and 1960s through modern understandings of TSEs, and along the way delivers a powerful indictment of government unwillingness to act in the face of a profitable production mechanism. I'll leave you with a bit of advice you may want to pass along, a quote from the book:
"You know the bone meal that people use on their roses?" Gajdusek asked me then. "It's made from downer cattle [cattle that sicken and die for no apparent reason, which sometimes are infected with TSE]. Ground extremely fine. The instructions on the bag warn you not to open it in a closed room. Gets up your nose."
The Nobel-laureate virologist who knows more than anyone else in the world about transmissible spongiform encephalopathy looked at me meaningfully. "Do you use bone meal on your roses?"
I told him I did.
He nodded. "I wouldn't if I were you."
Martin Garbus with Stanley Cohen, Tough Talk: How I Fought for Writers, Comics, Bigots, and the American Way: There's not much of a market for lawyers' autobiographies, and this book probably won't help create one. Garbus gives fairly straightforward accounts of his career in media law, from obscenity prosecutions to libel cases to copyright cases to campaign finance. Most interesting are his attempts to justify positions that many - including significant parts of his client base - perceived as hypocritical or at least contradictory, such as his representation of one author's heirs to prevent the publication of an allegedly unauthorized story compilation and representation of a publisher who wanted to publish a version of a Samuel Beckett play against his executor's wishes, despite his endorsement of an author's absolute right to control the uses of his works. More troubling to many people, Garbus represented a rape victim in a libel suit against the New York Daily News, even though he had represented publishers against libel plaintiffs for years. The book does provide a good example of a lawyer's ability to convince himself that one case has nothing to do with the next.
Frederick Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes: Fred's a very smart man. Most of his work that I've read is about the First Amendment, but this book is about things like racial profiling and banning aggressive breeds of dogs. His basic point is powerful, important, and probably repeated a few too many times for my taste in this book, though it's so easy to forget that repetition with new examples is reasonable. That point is this: when we condemn things like racial profiling, we cannot be saying that it's wrong to treat someone as part of a group instead of as an individual. Rather, we must mean that it's wrong to treat someone as part of a particular group, such as one defined by race or gender. This is because, whenever we make predictions - about future likelihood of committing a crime, about the probability that a person is carrying drugs, about job performance - we are in fact basing our predictions on the probability of what someone with a particular set of characteristics is likely to do in the future. It's just that there are very good reasons to refine that set of characteristics beyond those objectionable, historically loaded categories, or even to exclude from our consideration a person's membership in those categories even if they might serve as a reasonable proxy for what we want to know. It's a good book, well written and easy to read. Among the particularly nice touches was Schauer's point that debates over whether to ban pit bulls have suffered by the ready availability of the "breed = race, ban = apartheid/racism" comparison, even though the issues are quite different.
Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR: Believe it or not, this is the second book about the history of the VCR that I've read, and by far the lesser one. Wasser traces the economic structure of the film production and video rental industry, arguing that the little businesses enabled by the rise of video rental got destroyed by the very movie culture they helped to produce - with a huge new source of income, movie production became more expensive and thus more centralized, with corresponding effects on distribution. He often treats consumer preferences as far too autonomous for my comfort, as if consumer demands were the sole explanation for what got bought and rented in stores. Still, the book is a good illustration of the principle that innovators define new markets, but they rarely make any money from them. Instead, established concerns, who were left reeling by the innovation, eventually recover and move in, and because they have more resources and more business savvy in general, they win in the long run.
Barbara Tuchman, The First Salute: This book is basically about the American Revolution from the perspective of the Dutch, British and French military and political men involved. Z. informs me that Tuchman didn't really finish the book; she wrote it when she was dying, though it was published when she was still alive. It is not a very good history. The order of events is very confusing, with lots of backing and filling, some repetition that editing would probably have corrected. In general, there's not a coherent narrative, though the presentation does enhance the impression that war is a series of accidents. Tuchman's prose occasionally shines, though when she referred to a man as "a husk of an ancient mariner," I really wanted her to go all the way and call him "a rind of an ancient mariner" instead.
Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: This book is a collection of columns Bryson wrote for a British audience after he returned to the US, specifically Hanover, New Hampshire, after decades in Britain. They can be pretty funny, though my absolute favorite moment comes in the introduction when Bryson's editor calls to inform him that he'll be writing this column, much to his surprise and dismay, and tells him that the column will be called "Notes from a Big Country," to which Bryson responds, "[Y]ou'll have to call it 'Big Blank Space in the Magazine' because I cannot do it." For some reason, the thought of "Big Blank Space" really grabbed me. Bryson occasionally stumbles, usually when he creates some fake government form, but his eye for the bizarre and wonderful in American life is usually sharp. He loves America in all its glories, excesses, weirdnesses and wastefulness.
David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor: Z. gave me this book as an example of good writing on the history of technology. It has one big through-line, which is the importance of context: technologies are successful (or failures) not based on pure technical measures, but based on the meanings that they have for the people using them. Thus, the Civil War battle of the Monitor versus the Virginia (or, as we Northerners think of it, the Merrimack), the first ironclad-only naval battle in history, is not a story of the technical triumph of ironclad technology - in fact, Mindell shows, the technology was deeply flawed, almost deadly - but the triumph of a particular way of looking at naval technology, such that the battle was defined as a success for ironclads and a death knell for wooden warships. Because of his theoretical orientation, Mindell spends as much time on the perceptions of Melville and Hawthorne about the Monitor as on the perceptions of military men, which provides an interesting contrast.
Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show, ed. Glenn Yeffeth. This book just goes to show that if you scratch a published writer, you get a fangirl/boy. The level of analysis is at best about equal to my friendslist the day after an episode. Spike has his partisans; Angel has his; even Riley and (my personal favorite) Wesley are offered as Buffy's best match. Tara is praised as well as buried. There's some non-relationshippy stuff, but not much. Once again, Jacqueline Lichtenberg makes me wonder what I saw in her writing when I was a kid by not only indulging in new-age psychobabble, but also referring to her own "award-winning" column ("[R]ead my award-winning SF/F review column from The Monthly Aspectarian which examines what can be learned about magical initiation by reading science fiction novels.") Just - no. Names I recognized: David Brin (actually, not bad, but not revelatory); Roxanne Longstreet Conrad; Sherrilyn Kenyon ("The Search for Spike's Balls"); Scott Westerfeld; Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (disappointing); Laura Resnick; Jennifer Crusie (Buffy and romance conventions); Sarah Zettel (interesting point about the Scoobies becoming insiders instead of outsiders over seven seasons, and how that's not actually of the good - the best essay in the book); Christie Golden; Jean Lorrah; Lawrence Watt-Evans; and Nancy Holder.
Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Working with records from Boston child protective agencies from roughly 1880 to 1960, Gordon explores the ways in which gender, class and nationality affected the definitions of child abuse and neglect. The records show the often biased and condescending ways in which the agency workers saw their clients, but evidence of the clients' attempts to control the kinds of help they got is also present. The agencies got power, legal and social, by denouncing physical abuse, but then they focused on a definition of neglect that disadvantaged poor families when, for example, they let their children play on the street, or expected their children to work and share in supporting the family. The definition of neglect also assumed that mothers were responsible for children; fathers' absence wasn't neglect, but mothers' work outside the home, even when that was the only way to get any income in the absence of a male breadwinner, was neglect by definition. Similar problems occurred with issues like sexual abuse of children, which was redefined by social work agencies as a problem of strangers on the street rather than one of intimate violence, especially after psychoanalytic theory became a standard explanation for why girls might accuse their fathers (or stepfathers) of molesting them. Worse, incest and wife-beating were often seen as problems created by a wife's nagging or frigidity; because women were the ones who talked to the social workers, the social workers focused on changing their behavior to solve problems in the home - and because the assumption was that support should come from a man, the idea of leaving the man to become dependent on the state (a likely outcome given the lack of well-paying jobs for women) was anathema, evidence of the woman's unfitness, rather than being an understandable escape from intolerable situations. If you want to know why an active feminist movement was vital to improving conditions for women and children, this book will show you.
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: Swofford was a Marine in the Gulf War, but the book isn't about combat. Swofford paints a profoundly disturbing and moving portrait of confused young men looking for direction, distrustful of authority, often blitzed on drink and drugs, and struggling desperately to think they're real men and to have others think so. It's hard not to feel pity for them even as Swofford describes their often cruel and dangerous behavior, because he makes the reader feel the pain that motivates it.
Anita Allen, Why Privacy Isn't Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability: As I grow older, I find it easier to stop reading books that are just like uncooked dough, thick and undifferentiated. Quick summary: what we do affects other people, including things like taking drugs that classic liberalism is inclined to regard as purely a matter of private choice. Thus, we may have moral and occasionally even legal obligations to others with respect to such private actions. Allen discusses accountability to family and race (for things like open/interracial adoption), health, and sex, and despite the deep interest those topics should inspire, I found myself unable to slog through the repetitive and usually far too abstract text.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything: Not quite, but an enjoyable and readable introduction into various aspects of the formation of the universe, the forces that keep our atoms together, the mysteries of geology and paleontology, and a bit of evolution on the macro scale - how we got from teeny protobacteria to physicists (if a person is a gene's way of making more genes, then a physicist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms). Not deep, but broad.
Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right: This book was funny for a while, and then it got depressing. Franken is at his best when he's explicitly slavering, as when he savages Ann Coulter for being a comprehensive liar (about New York Times stories, about her age, about history, etc., etc.). Or Rush Limbaugh's failure to register to vote, after all his whining. If I had stopped reading at page 100, I would have felt good about the book; later, when he reminded me how George W. had "changed the tone" in Washington, and how the repetition of a lie apparently is a great way to get people to believe it (like how many of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi - polls show people think it's at least half, while the actual number is zero), I got very, very sad.
William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law: Law and economics, which proposes to reduce law and, indeed, all human behavior to rational calculation and make law only that which promotes efficiency, has its hooks deep into the legal academy. Landes and Posner are in no small part responsible for that. Their economic analysis of antitrust law helped revolutionalize the field. Posner is also one of our most prolific writers, pumping out one or two books a year while also shouldering a disproportionately heavy load of appellate cases (he's a federal judge) and occasionally sitting as a trial judge by designation, just to keep from getting bored. He's a great example of the difference between intelligence and knowledge - he's brilliant, but flaky, and his economic orientation makes it hard for him to understand normal human behavior. In an earlier book, for example, he developed an equation that purported to tell whether abortion ought to be banned - if only you knew the values of the dozen variables, which included the value of fetal life and women's equality. Yeah, that was a big help. Landes & Posner's almost charming snobbishness jumped out at me especially when they discussed what they called the "obtuse narrator" in fiction, a person I (and I think many of us) would call the "unreliable narrator," unless the book involves mice or a guy named Quentin. See, the unreliable narrator is one of us; you might be an unreliable narrator, and I know I certainly am. The obtuse narrator? Heaven forfend we might be such. Landes & Posner are certain that, were they in the same situation, they'd *know* better. They are rational economic men. Anyhow, the book mainly discusses copyright law, with a substantial detour into patents and a smaller one into trademark. Their most interesting conclusion is that copyright ought to be renewable in perpetuity, but ought to expire if the owner doesn't care enough to pay a reasonably hefty renewal fee, and that would best balance the incentives to create and exploit works with the ability of others to build on what came before. If it didn't violate our international treaty obligations and had any chance of becoming law, it's an intriguing idea, though there's something in me that balks at the idea of Shakespeare's heirs still collecting money for the plays.
Edward Humes, Mean Justice: A Town's Terror, A Prosecutor's Power, A Betrayal of Innocence: I don't watch death penalty movies/shows and I don't read death penalty books. I can't stand them. If the man on death row is innocent, either something implausible happens right before the execution and everything is supposed to be fine, or he dies and that's worse. I already know how much the system bungles when it comes to death penalty cases. The problem is hardly limited to death cases, though; when the stakes are lower, there are even fewer controls on prosecution misconduct. Humes recounts the story of one murder case, a man accused and convicted of killing his wife despite what seems overwhelming evidence of his innocence and despite the prosecution's chief witness, a heroin addict who kept himself out of jail by fingering the husband, who contradicted himself a number of times, and who was primed by prosecutors to recite details he didn't at first "remember," all of which was of course kept from the defense's knowledge until it was too late. Interlaced with that are other accounts of misconduct in the same county, mainly in child abuse cases - remember the satanic abuse rings that supposedly permeated America in the 1980s, later revealed to have been almost totally fabricated as a result of aggressive questioning of young children who were rewarded for claiming abuse and punished for denying it? - and in a racially charged murder trial. Humes's outrage is genuine, but I eventually lost the stomach for reading the details of how the prosecution concealed evidence, revised its case to fit whatever evidence came out, and manipulated the jury. Basically, the book left me depressed, but if you like true crime, this is a good counterbalance to all those cases where the prosecution painstakingly sifted through the evidence to find the real killer.