Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Somehow, despite hearty recommendations from friends, I had never read anything by Neal Stephenson. I even went so far as to buy Snow Crash a few years ago, but it's sat unopened on my bookshelf.

So it might seem odd that my first Stephenson book was Anathem, but I forgot to pack a book for a trip, most of the books in the airport bookstore were unappealing, I recognized Stephenson's name, and it was a nice long paperback.

I would say I was impressed by Anathem, but "impressed" is not really the right word: blown away was more like it.

Anathem is intellectually rigorous without sacrificing any entertainment value. I won't spoil the plot, but I will tell you that this book will give you a basic understanding of concepts like many-worlds, the quantum mind, directed acyclic graphs, Platonic realism, configuration space, and the "long now". In many ways, this novel is like a mix of the intellectual rigor of Eco, the world creation of Tolkein, the social variety of Vance, and the epic storytelling of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Although some people will surely find it excessively didactic, rest assured that this is excellent modern hard science fiction.

LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy

After blasting through A Wizard of Earthsea a week ago, I naturally had to read the sequels, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. Although neither sequel gave me quite the emotional punch I got from the first novel, both are good in their own rights.

Like A Wizard of Earthsea, both sequels could be considered coming-of-age novels even as they portray Ged's growth and maturity.

In The Tombs of Atuan, Ged is really a secondary character; the story centers on a young girl named Tenar. At a young age she is determined to be a reincarnation (similar to a Tibetan Buddhist tulku) of Arha ("the eaten one"), the high priestess of the "Nameless Ones", old gods who have fallen somewhat out of favor. In stark contrast to the first novel, which ranged across the known world, this is a claustrophobic story, confined to a small area around the eponymous tombs, and taking place largely in underground caverns and within Tenar's mind. In the end, Ged's role in this novel seems to me to be almost a deus ex machina plot device, rather than really playing a part in the story, and for that reason, I found it somewhat unsatisfying.

The Farthest Shore introduces us to Ged as an older man, mature not only in his magical powers but also in his decision-making. The story is told from the perspective of a young prince, who, in the course of the story, develops the self-confidence that he would need later as king, but is really about Ged's transformation from a life of doing to a life of being (similar to the Taoist concept of wu wei). This is an engaging story, but in many ways it revisits themes covered in the first novel.

Altogether, the Earthsea trilogy is excellent children's fantasy. Though the quality drops somewhat from the first novel, they are all well worth the short time it takes to read them, and all are head-and-shoulders above the majority of both child and adult fantasy.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin

Last night I had the tremendous pleasure of reading Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea (which, sadly, appears to be completely out of print, but can likely be found at most used book stores).

I've only read it once before, more than 20 years ago, when I also read Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy and Eric Frank Russell's Wasp within the same 24 hours. The other two I've come back to many times over the years, but for some reason, I hadn't re-read LeGuin's novel until yesterday.

For what ever reason, last night I pulled this book off the shelf with the intention of reading a few chapters and then going to sleep early. Just like the previous time, however, I wound up devouring the book in one sitting! Beyond that, it was so good that I felt compelled to write about it, producing my first posting here in two years.

Although my edition clocks in at a slender 181 pages, this is a superb coming-of-age story about a powerful but undisciplined young wizard (LeGuin says that the book was in part a response to the image of wizards as ancient and wise, and to her wondering where they come from). Too often, juvenile fiction is either overly moralizing (as in C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia) or mindless adventure. Here, LeGuin has threaded that needle perfectly, producing a rivetting adventure story in which we see the protagonist overcome his hubris. Although it is a children's novel (probably most suitable for 6th grade and up, though appropriate for advanced readers as early as 3rd grade), adults will also find it quite engaging; this is a must-read for anyone who enjoys fantasy.

Compelling material, poor layout

PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions From Ordinary Lives
by Frank Warren

Begin with the concept. The website says:

"You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Create your 4-by-6-inch postcards out of any mailable material. If you want to share two or more secrets, use multiple postcards. Put your complete secret and image on one side of the postcard."

PostSecret is a compelling website, and so I looked forward eagerly to the book, which promised a selection of the best submissions shown online as well as others not previously displayed. It lives up to the hype in all respects except one. The selection truly does contain many of the best submissions, however the layout leaves quite a bit to be desired. In many cases the postcards (originally 4" by 6") are enlarged to fill a page, or even to stretch across two pages. For a book in which the visual element is so key, the bad layout is a major handicap. Nevertheless, it is an intruiging look into the secret lives of others -- many of which look strikingly familiar.

Retirement should have come sooner

The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus
by Harry Harrison

The latest installment in Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series begins with the title character, a.k.a. "Slippery Jim" DiGriz enjoying a comfortable but boring quasi-retirement with his wife and sometime partner Angelina. A picnic is interrupted by a mysterious man offering Jim a job to alleviate his boredom and, of course, augment is personal fortune substantially. Is this autobiographical? Like his famous character, Harry Harrison has been quite successful at his career for many years, leaving him with a solid reputation and the means to live comfortably. Whether he was motivated by money or boredom I don't know, but just as Jim should have turned down the job, Harrison should have known better than to write this book. The first Stainless Steel Rat book was as fresh and exciting as Slippery Jim. Other books in the series, such as The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You!, exhibited a keen sense of humor. Although Jim is still skilled at the misdirection and sleight of hand that made him a successful criminal, Harrison's writing has become dull and predictable. At the end of this book, Jim indicates that he may retire permanently. I hope this signals an end to the series, because like Jim the series has grown old and tired.

Totally unique!

The Good Soldier Svejk: and His Fortunes in the World War
by Jaroslav Hasek

I read a tremendous amount, but I've never come across anything like this novel. This book is a funny anti-war adventure story, but also so much more. It gives the reader an excellent sense of what it might have been like to live in the Austrian Empire in 1914-15. I know it sounds strange, but after reading this, Kafka begins to make sense. Read this book once for sheer entertainment, but then read it again and give it some thought. It's well worth it!

Fails to refute moral relativism

Moral Courage: Taking Action When Your Values Are Put to the Test
by Rushworth M. Kidder

While this book contains many interesting and illuminating anecedotes of personal courage (or the lack thereof), it fails on one key point.

Kidder argues against moral relativism, suggesting (based on interviews) that honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion are universal values. These are just words, however, and they can mean very different things to different people. To people in a very communal culture, responsibility might be used to mean the individual's responsibility to the community. In more individualistic cultures (and in the philosophy of Ayn Rand) it would more likely mean responsibility to self. To some fairness means equality, while to others it can mean extreme discrimination. A refutation of moral relativism demands that different people agree upon the same meanings, not merely the same words.

With this failure, Kidder's entire case falls down. He presents moral courage as "the string" holding together the pearls (of moral values). When those very values are in question, moral courage becomes undefinable.

Tags: book, review, nonfiction, ethics

Good drug legalization analysis

Between Politics and Reason: The Drug Legalization Debate
by Erich Goode

In this brief analysis, Goode takes the reader beyond the value statements and ideology that characterize most conversation about drugs in the US, analysing the real cost in dollars and lives, and how the equation might change under various legalization proposals. He thoroughly presents the physical and social effects of most of America's commonly abused drugs, including cocaine, heroin, marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol. In the end, Goode suggests a number of ways to mitigate the damage of tobacco and alcohol, many of which have been implemented since the book's publication.

The book's shortcoming, if any, is that it completely ignores America's most commonly used drug, caffeine. He gives just half a sentance on the drug, saying that it is a mild stimulant with no euphoric effect.

If you have any interest at all in the subject, you will find this a valuable book. It is concise, but offers thorough references, and aside from the above-mentioned suggestions, reads like a recent publication.

Tags: book, review, nonfiction, drugs

Enjoyable and unpredictable

The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger

This is hands-down, the best recently-written novel I have read.

Henry DeTamble is an adverturous librarian involuntarily and unpredictably travels through time. Clare Abshire is the artist he marries, who life is natural and sequential. This is the story of their life together across 72 years of Clare's life and 18 years of Henry's.

The book raises, without answering, several curious circularities caused by this time travel. Most notably, the first time Henry meets Clare, she is looking for him because she grew up with (older) time displaced Henry. The first time Clare meets Henry, he is already married to her and goes to see his wife's childhood. (He does not strictly control the time displacement, but he tends to visit times and places that are somehow important to him.) Niffenegger largely ignores this causal dillema, though the characters do spend some time considering time-displaced causation.

More interesting (and subtle) is a red herring, which I will not go into in detail, regarding Henry's death. Suffice it to say that a heavily forshadowed event does not go down as the reader is initially led to expect.

On the whole this is quite an enjoyable novel, and a rather unpredictable plot.

Tags: book, review, fiction, romance, Science Fiction

A moving tale

The Kite Runner
by Khalid Hosseini

Although the principal setting may seem exotic to many American readers, the themes of betrayal and redemption are as old as the Mullah Nasrudin jokes the characters tell, and they may never have been as well-told as here.

This is a particularly difficult book to comment upon without spoiling the plot, although perhaps that would not be a bad thing.

In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered. When Hassan and I came home after watching a Hindi film at Cinema Zainab, what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba, or the myriad of Baba's friends -- second and third cousins milling in and out of the house -- wanted to know was this: Did the Girl in the film find happiness? Did the bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become kamyab and fulfill his dreams, or was he nah-kam, doomed to wallow in failure?

Was there happiness at the end, they wanted to know.

I am in America, however, not Afghanistan, and so I will not reveal the end of this story here.

For its 370 pages this book is a remarkably quick read, and not overly demanding. Khalid Hosseini develops his story patiently, never rushing it but not letting it drag either.

Tags: book, review, fiction, Afghanistan

Good to Great, by Collins

Good to Great
by Jim Collins

Because Jim Collins writes such a great deal about the research supporting this book, this review will focus on the validity of, and possible flaws in, that research.

Although apparently thorough, Collins’ research process is questionable at a number of points. He limited his pool of companies to “Fortune 500” listees (p 220), he excluded companies without an “obvious shift to breakthrough performance” (p 222), he eliminated Coca-Cola and Pepsico for not substantially exceeding their industry (p 227) rather than considering that these two dominating companies may have driven the strong industry performance, he improperly applies the scientific method, and he appears to have ranked acquisitions subjectively (p 259-260). These combine to weaken his otherwise strong argument about the nature of “good to great” companies.

Limiting the pool to only Fortune-listed companies is justified by the statement that the Fortune list only includes large companies, and that most Fortune firms are publicly traded (this was an implicit screen). However, many publicly traded companies of a reasonable size have not been listed in Fortune, or may have come on and then fallen off the list in years he did not survey (Collins only looked at the 1965, 1975, 1985, and 1995 lists). By limiting his “company universe” in this way, Collins created the possibility of a selection bias.

It is entirely possible that a company’s stock value would show a gradual shift from “good” to “great”, and in fact 19 companies from the limited universe did. If Collins had included the 18 of these companies with no other elimination criterion, it is possible that his finding may have been different. For example, he compared the company performance to the apparent breakthrough in the hatching of a chicken from an egg. In these additional companies no breakthrough was present, but a gradual shift did occur. Perhaps he might have asked why some companies appeared to make the gradual shift, while for others a breakthrough appeared.

Collins’ exclusion of Pepsico and Coca-Cola appears to reflect a misconception of industry v. company performance. The truth is that an industry is simply a grouping of like companies, and if the larger industry players are successful the industry will appear to be successful. As dominant companies, it should be expected that Coca-Cola and Pepsico would not substantially exceed their industry performance; rather that they would pull the industry average up with them.

Finally, Collins improperly applies the scientific method. He emphasizes repeatedly that his recommendations are not based on any preconcieved notion, but solely upon research. This actually undercuts, rather than strengthens his case. Proper application of the scientific method would call for his hypotheses to be tested against data, but he has turned this backwards and created hypotheses to fit his data. One way around this might have been to split the study group in two, using one group to establish the hypotheses, and then "testing" the hypotheses against the other group. Since it is obviously too late for that, another good possibility would be to use the additional years of data that have accrued since he completed this study to identify new "good to great" companies, and test the hypotheses against them.

Despite these shortcomings in methodology, Good to Great is well formatted and provides highly useable suggestions for how to make the transition in any type of organization. Possibly the most helpful sections were those in which Collins gave non-business “good to great” examples, such as his wife in the Ironman triathlon and the high school track team, because they demonstrated the broader applicability of his findings.

Tags: book, review, business

Execution, by Bossidy and Charan

Execution: The discipline of getting things done
by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

One of the most intriguing elements of this book was the basic concept. Is execution really a major element in corporate success or failure? Why Smart Executives Fail suggests that it is not, arguing that execution expertise can be quickly purchased (p 5). One answer to this difference of opinion may be the nature of the businesses studied. Why Smart Executives Fail studied instances in which successful companies failed, while Bossidy and Charan tell us that good execution must occur to achieve any success. In other words, most or all of the companies studied in Why Smart Executives Fail probably had a record of successful execution prior to their collapse. Johnson & Johnson’s stent business is a prime example of these divergent viewpoints, and Finklestein wins this argument through his (apparently) more wide-ranging and in-depth research. Despite this, many of the recommendations in the two books are very similar, for example, Bossidy and Charan say, “Insist on realism,” (p 57) and Finklestein gives “They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t 100 percent behind them” as Bad Habit #4 (p 226).

Bossidy and Charan present their ideas well, and give a good theoretical framework for successful execution. Their advice on how to integrate the people process with strategy and operations is particularly valuable, and they follow their own advice by breaking down their theory into operable steps. Their evidence in support of execution as a competitive advantage is thin, however, resting largely on personal experience. Other examples are much weakened by anonymity. In the end, Bossidy and Charan are not convincing in their argument that “Most often today the difference between a company and its competitor is the ability to execute.” (p 5) While a fundamental level of execution is clearly necessary for success, in most cases it is not sufficient; other elements of strategy play a large role.

Tags: Business, books, business books

Predictable Surprises, by Bazerman and Watkins

Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming and How to Prevent Them
by Max H. Bazerman and Michael D. Watkins

A major shortcoming of Bazerman and Watkins’ book is the failure to provide adequate evidence to support their arguments about what they call “predictable surprises”, which they define as “an event or series of events that take an individual or group by surprise, despite prior awareness of all of the information necessary to anticipate the events and their consequences.” Bazerman and Watkins build their case substantially on just two examples: aviation security failures leading to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and auditor independence concerns leading to the collapse of Enron and Arthur Anderson. Several other examples are discussed in less depth throughout the text, however many of these are not actually predictable surprises under the definition provided. For example, global warming is discussed a number of times; however global warming has been in public discussion since the 1930s, and today a substantial majority of people believe not only the concept of global warming but that current warming is man-made. By 2050, this subject will have been under study for 120 years and popular consensus will have been achieved for 50-60 years. This is certainly predictable, but hardly a surprise. The United States’ looming crisis in entitlement spending also falls in this category.

Flaws exist in other anecdotal support as well. For example, Bazerman and Watkins cite aviation security failures as an occasion when overly discounting the future lead to a predictable surprise. Quick calculation based on figures provided in the book show that, using equal discount rates for the expected future cost of security and the future cost of disaster, even with a disaster probability as high as 10% for any given year, the airlines would be ahead on a cost basis. The total destruction of both World Trade Center towers and the massive ensuing death toll was not reasonably foreseeable by the airline industry; based on the typical passenger plan carrying 78 people, this was the equivalent of an absurd 41 simultaneous aircraft disasters! Given the cost of implementation and the low probability of such a large disaster, even at a full cost of nearly $50 billion, the airlines’ decision to oppose security measures on a cost basis was reasonable. The full scope of this surprise was unlikely enough that it should not be termed “predictable.”

Despite some good analysis of reasons predictable surprises occur and ways to avoid them, this book is critically weakened by its lack of evidence. Bazerman and Watkins try to make it stand largely on just the aviation security and auditor independence failures; however these are insufficient evidence for their broad analysis and conclusions, particularly given the weakness of those arguments provided. This book would be substantially more persuasive with more anecdotal support.