A Real-Life Mystery

Stella and I often shop together for presents for our respective birthdays. This is easier in several ways: our birthdays are close (July and August); we both know the "rules" (books are the preferred gifts, used books are just fine, nothing excessively expensive, etc.) and we tend to prefer the same bookstores; we can always ask about a particular item because the intended recipient is there to see it; our memories are both ancient enough to have forgotten the specific gift by the time the birthday arrives, allowing some element of surprise; there's hardly ever an unsuitable gift; etc. It's almost foolproof. Almost.

E. Roosevelt

When I began unwrapping my gift yesterday, I had a pretty good idea that it was Eleanor Roosevelt's autobiography: I had seen it, held it in my hands at the bookstore, read a few paragraphs, and thoroughly approved of Stella's choice (yes, she found it; yes, she knows my tastes that well).

H. W. Brands

But that's not what it was. When the last of the tissue and ribbon headed for the floor, I found to my surprise that I held in my hands H. W. Brands's Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With due respect to Mr. Brands, a UT history professor who has a couple dozen books to his credit and a following in his field, and notwithstanding my acknowledgment that many of "his [Roosevelt's] class" really did think FDR a traitor to it and a radical, I have to say it was not a book I'd have bought for myself. Hey, it's a free country (or so I'm told); you have to allow me my own approach to political hagiography... and this book doesn't appear to fill the bill. Now please, no lectures about reading challenging books; life is short and getting shorter birthday by birthday.

So, there are two questions. First, how did this happen? Stella admits she paid to have it gift-wrapped at the bookstore; the swap might have been accomplished there, though that still doesn't explain why the substitution was made. Second, and harder to answer, what do I do about it?

Part of me feels I should want to read the book, even if I don't really want to read it. This copy is a signed first edition, which may appeal to the collector in you, but that collector is absent in me. And it's visibly (gently) used, giving credibility to the notion that its previous owner read and appreciated the book. But part of me just wants my E.R. autobiography that I so briefly held that day a few months ago. What to do?

Binge-Reading Ms. Klein

I haven't slept well the last couple of nights, and have devoted the otherwise wasted time to an attempt to finish Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine before I turn 67 years old tomorrow. In sheer number of pages, I have not that far to go, but the entire book is truly depressing reading, and it is so packed full of information and examples that one gets the most out of it by reading every word. And of course Ms. Klein, of necessity, takes the reader back to the George W. Bush presidency, which was IMNSHO even worse than the Obama era. Ah, well; I have plenty of good, cheap wine on hand, and an undeniably good book, to see me through the evening...

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AFTERTHOUGHT: let me clarify. Obama has been disappointing to me, while GeeDubya and crew were utterly disgusting. Got it?

Krugman Quote

I've been reading a rather dated (1999) Krugman book, more for the segment he appended in later editions about the crisis of 2008, but the whole thing has been an education for me, as is usual with his books. Here's the quotation:

"But hype springs eternal..."

— Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics / and the crisis of 2008, p. 146.

You know, I think I really like the guy...

Piketty On Atkinson And A More Equal Society: How We Can Get There From Here

Piketty
(Wikipedia)

Most of you know of French economist Thomas Piketty and his by now famous Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Warning: "famous" means "also not cheap" no matter what format or medium you choose.) This month, in the previous issue of the New York Review of Books (thanks, Barbara B!), the estimable Monsieur Piketty reviewed a book by economist, Oxford scholar and inequality expert Sir Anthony B. Atkinson titled Inequality: What Can Be Done, summarizing Atkinson's last several decades of work on that subject, both analysis and field work, concluding with some concrete proposals for a course of action.

Atkinson
(Wikipedia)

Tonight, with Stella's help (she gifted me some coupons she could obtain as part of her B&N membership), I actually got my hands on a copy of that book. B&N being what it is, and the book being from Harvard University, the list price was almost $30 and B&N's starting price was that very list price, so even allowing for Amazon shipping it would have been a couple dollars cheaper to order it online, but I was impatient and Stella, mindful of our approaching birthdays, was willing to help, so I can start skimming Atkinson's Inequality soon. It may be a while before it reaches the top of my serious reading list, but at least I don't have to wait for HPL to acquire a copy and then wait still longer on a hold list for my scant three weeks' visit with the book: this is clearly a book worth owning if you are an amateur economist or even a progressive political activist.

Inequality is fast becoming the issue of the day, and could serve as a significant wedge issue emphasizing the D/R difference in the 2016 elections. Stay tuned!

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AFTERTHOUGHT: Perhaps it would be helpful to offer a sample of Piketty's review, so you can see for yourself how it tempted me to go to some lengths to obtain Atkinson's book (the bolds are my own):

To fully appreciate this book and its proposals, we should first place it in the larger setting of Atkinson’s career, for he has mainly produced the work of an infinitely cautious and rigorous scholar. Between 1966 and 2015, Atkinson published fifty or so books and more than 350 scholarly articles. They have brought about a profound transformation in the broader field of international studies of the distribution of wealth, inequality, and poverty. Since the 1970s, he has also written major theoretical papers, devoted in particular to the theory of optimal taxation, and these contributions alone would justify several Nobel Prizes. But Atkinson’s most important and profound work has to do with the historical and empirical analysis of inequality, carried out with respect to theoretical models that he deploys with impeccable mastery and utilizes with caution and moderation. With his distinctive approach, at once historical, empirical, and theoretical; with his extreme rigor and his unquestioned probity; with his ethical reconciliation of his roles as researcher in the social sciences and citizen of, respectively, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the world, Atkinson has himself for decades been a model for generations of students and young researchers.

[/Steve takes a deep breath] Then by all means, let him instruct and inspire me as well in my limited pursuit of economics. Politically, these are times as parlous as the world has ever known; I can use all the inspiration I can find, from Atkinson or any comparable scholar.

Chance Juxtaposition?

I just visited Michael Moore's site. In a banner across the top is an ad for his autobiography (a delightful book, BTW), Here Comes Trouble.

Immediately below that is a larger ad: Hillary for President!

I'm not going to say anything...

‘The Payoff’

 Seldom does a Washington lobbyist, lawyer and power-broker write a book. Even less often do I bother reading such a book. But it looks as if I am going to finish Jeff Connaughton's The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, in record time. It's not a page-turner for the author's writing (middling at best), his great personal charm (none that I can see), his admirable character (maybe, but like most wealthy people, he has some other aspects) or the novelty of the plot (I suspect this crap was going on long before our republic was a gleam in its founders' eyes), but because I find it simply dumbfounding that Wall Street essentially runs unregulated, and has the power to do literally anything it wants.

Read it and weep: we are wholly owned. Don't buy the book; I found it at the corner library, and you probably can, too.

Book (Re-)Marks

No, not "bookmarks"; I have no problem with those. But I am almost phobic about permanent marks or notes in books; as a rule, I will not even buy a used book that has been heavily highlighted in screaming yellow or defaced with a reader's notes completely unnecessarily scribbled in ink. It seems somehow sacrilege in a more-or-less permanent object to render it useless for a possible future reader. If I need to mark a particular passage or annotate it, I use sticky notes; carefully applied, they can be removed later. Just don't let me see you enter Our House with a yellow highlighter in your pocket! But as usual, I have been reading a lot of books and "books" worth mentioning...

• Dean Baker's The End of Loser Liberalism (.pdf) is meeting or exceeding every expectation. Many of the facts are known to all of us on our side of the political spectrum, e.g., that the current crisis is not due to structural problems, that wealth is being transferred, by design, to the wealthy from everyone else, that the banksters are partially to blame, that criminal acts are not prosecuted if the perpetrators are wealthy, that the center of the problem... lack of demand... has scarcely been addressed by the Obama administration and most certainly not by the GOP, that we as a society know perfectly well how to address such a problem but Republicans and Democrats alike tacitly refuse to do so because of their dependency for campaign money on the top 1%, and so on. What is particularly admirable about Baker's work is his concise but thorough documentation of every point he makes. If you've been subjected to the circle jerk of right-wing nut-jobs, which you have been if you have so much as watched the evening news or the weekend pundit chatter on any TV network (it's not just Fox now), you will find Baker's book refreshingly candid, reality-based and well-documented. And the price is right: just download it free in .pdf format, or for your Kindle or other e-book reader.

• Ken Freeman and Geoff McNamara's In Search of Dark Matter (Springer/Praxis, 2006), a thin large-format paperback, is a book by astronomers and for would-be astronomers. It is not primarily a cosmology book, though inevitably one learns some of that in reading it, nor is it a particle physics book, but it is an excellent introduction to the sheer depth of creativity that scientists display in facing problems that stem from lack of data... and dark matter is such a problem, in spades. Freeman is one of the (forgive me) stellar lights of the dark matter field; Geoff McNamara is a regular author of astronomy- and physics-related books. This book is a quick read if you typically read longer popular science books, but by no means does "quick" imply "shallow" ... you will finish it knowing more than you thought you would about the 95% of the matter in the universe that cannot be seen through any sort of telescope.

• Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (W. W. Norton, 2003) has emerged as a classic in the field described by its title. If you're new to superstrings (I'm not exactly an old-timer myself), Greene, himself a working physicist in that field as well as a true craftsman in the, er, elegant use of the English language, will lead you through its major aspects... and believe me, if you're new to it, you need guidance. There are lots of diagrams that are to the point and well-connected to the text. As with every popular science book these days, there is a scarcity of mathematics; I have mixed feelings about that, but it does render the volume accessible to a lot more readers. I enjoyed this book so thoroughly that I have arranged to receive another of his books (The Fabric of the Cosmos) for my birthday in a few days.

Happy reading! Ditch the highlighter and concentrate your mind...

Book Break, Redux

This is a brief followup on the post Book Break, below. If I am scarce on the blog, it is because I am determined to finish the books mentioned in that post before the library reclaims them.

Regarding Complexity: A Guided Tour, I finished reading it today. Dr. Mitchell discusses at least a dozen different examples of "complex systems" by various measures of complexity and occasionally by consensus. Although the book is well-written and well-organized, I felt a sense of vague disappointment that there are not more acknowledged (and thus explored) commonalities among different types of complex systems. I freely admit that many of the ones discussed were previously unknown to me. And after all, the field is only a few decades old, and even then under a variety of names. I am glad I read the book.

Most distressingly, there is apparently a grudge in at least some of the scientific community that led the staid but generally respected journal Scientific American to publish what appears to be little more than a "hit piece" against the entire field of complex systems, a slur of the sort we encounter so often in politics in conservative rags both newsprint and slick-cover. Mitchell herself complains of selective quoting by the author who interviewed her, as if he had a conclusion already in mind and shaped his information-gathering and -filtering to "justify" that conclusion. If that is true, it is a hell of a note for an old-line popular scientific publication.

I began Carole Nelson Douglas's Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta this evening, and it's a mainstream Midnight Louie mystery, her latest, apparently available only in hardback. (Ahem. People like me who are on a limited budget: visit your local library now; buy the paperback when it comes out.) If I recall correctly, Midnight Louie appears in four "playing card series" novels, two compatible books Catnap and Pussyfoot, and Bast alone knows how many alphabetical series novels running from B to V (and yes, she intends to go through Z). My recommendation: start with Catnap and Pussyfoot, then read perhaps three or four of the alphabetic novels. You will then have sufficient character and long-term plot arc background to read the latest ones.

Men who cannot abide the very thought of reading a romance novel should avoid the Midnight Louie series; the series began more as romance than as mystery. Gradually, mystery and adventure came to predominate over romance (but not to replace it!) as the series continued, and I find even the early novels inoffensive on that score. Most of the books are page-turners, though compared to other writers of cat mysteries (e.g., the late lamented Lilian Jackson Braun), Douglas is rather longer-winded... expect to spend several evenings reading any of the middle and later Midnight Louie series novels.

Book Break

Now that I have access to the public library a block away, thank the good Dog, as I did not for the year I was wheelchair-bound, I am starting to catch up on some reading. Monday is always a good day because the library is open until 8:00PM, and this last Monday was, as anticipated, quite a success:

• Mitchell, Melanie. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford, 2009.

This is a book for ordinary mortals with an interest in the new ways we think about information. Mitchell points out that in the 17^th and 18^th centuries (the age of Newton and his immediate predecessors), humanity, or at least a small part of it, fathomed the mathematical laws of very large objects, e.g., the motion of the planets in the Solar System. In the early years of the 20^th century, with the advent of quantum mechanics, the science of very small things... atoms and subatomic particles and their simplest combinations... began to be understood, at least mathematically. (I don't think one can fairly claim that the 20^th century developed a reliable intuition for the truly bizarre phenomena detailed by quantum mechanics; indeed, quantum intuition is still a scarce commodity.) So... what was still missing, even in broad outline, from the physical sciences? Everything in between: the areas sometimes called "emergent" phenomena, not able to be explained by a formerly typical reductionist approach to science, nor grand enough to be described by the physics of Newton or even Einstein. Living things and their subsystems (brains, immune systems, etc.) are good examples. These areas are at last getting their due, often through expanded notions of "information" and "computation" initiated as early as my college days (late 1960s, early 1970s) as applied to physical systems. This is the primary focus of Mitchell's book.

• Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity. Viking, 2011.

I have read this book once before, fairly recently, and may have mentioned it on the blog. Since reading it, I have read Deutsch's earlier book, The Fabric of Reality, which provided a better context for this more recent book. The content of this book is extremely diverse, not to say scatter-shot, ranging from the understanding of science as explanation (what things can be included and what things must be excluded from our current concept of science), to the multiverse (in one of the senses of that word, the concept that quantum mechanics is an expression of the operation of a gigantic multitude of parallel universes differing only in very local particulars), to a fictional dream of Socrates, and so on. It is the only book I know in which the last chapter is titled "The Beginning". Like most books of popular physics, I anticipate that this one will repay a second reading many times over.

• Nelson Douglas, Carole. Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta: A Midnight Louie Mystery. Forge, 2011.

Some things never change. I lapsed in reading the Midnight Louie series, a combination mystery series with at least one cat detective (a la the late lamented Lilian Jackson Braun) and romance series possibly... possibly... suitable for preteen girls, depending as always on the girl and her parents. But the lapse has done me no harm. Nelson Douglas's human protagonist Temple Barr (now there's a name for you!) is still the publicity wizard of Las Vegas; "her" cat Midnight Louie ("her" in only a very limited sense) still is the super-intelligent descendant of Egyptian tomb cats who plunges into investigations of human misdeeds for a variety of reasons, Ms. Barr's social life is apparently still divided between the same two men of very different sorts, etc. etc. From the jacket notes alone, I can tell it's going to be a romp... and that I missed very little by skipping the dozen series novels in between.

Anyway, I have a lot to read, and four weeks to read them (including renewal, which HPL allows one to do at initial checkout if one's record is clean), so if I'm not on the blog as often, please forgive me.