The Man Who Knew Too Much

Once upon a time, in my youth, I was the quintessential math nerd. Who am I kidding? I was a geek through and through in STEM fields. My life was a cross between That 70s Show and The Big Bang Theory and if you mind-melded together the characters of Eric and Leonard, it would pretty much describe my life. This book about mathematician Alan Turing stirred up a lot of old memories of fun times solving math problems. No, that's not an oxymoron, people!

Turing was one of the key figures in Great Britain's WWII effort to decrypt the secret communications of the German armed forces using the Enigma device. There's a pretty good description of the strategies employed and the counter-strategies that the Germans attempted to stay one step ahead of their foes.

One of the interesting things the British did to help them decipher the code was to plant mines in particular locations specifically chosen so that the Germans found them easily. Then, when the Germans sent messages back to headquarters to report the discoveries, the British knew what the content had to include (locations), and were able to use these as a key to decipher the rest of the message.

Turing was a homosexual, back in the times when that was still a criminal act in England, and he eventually may have committed suicide after being convicted of unnatural acts, chemically castrated by the government, and denied permission to work for the government in any capacity from that point forward due to security concerns. The book spends an awful lot of time interpreting nearly everything that Turing wrote, spoke or accomplished in terms of his sexuality, but if you ignore most of that, it's still an interesting, though tragic, story.

Fun quote:

"In Newman's laboratory, the walls were covered with brown tiles in what F.C. Williams, his partner in the project, called, a 'late lavatorial' style."

One of Turing's early creations, a computer called "Baby" was set to the initial task of testing Mersenne primes, a task which involved many man hours of calculations. Turing envisioned a time when his machines would become almost human, but I don't think he really had any concept of what the computer revolution would accomplish, and even though Siri sounds almost human at times, computers still have not evolved consciousness, nor have they become inventive or creative.

He also had the odd idea that computers could be taught by  method similar to the one we often use to raise children, with both reward and punishment.

I've certainly been tempted to punish mine...but I think it's got the upper hand.

As You Wish by Cary Elwes

 I'm afraid this is about the sweetest dish-free celebrity bio I've ever seen. I can accept that Cary Elwes is a genuinely nice guy who thinks the best of everyone, but I simply can't believe that the entire making of The Princess Bride went smoothly and without any conflicts between cast members, directors, crew, and so forth.It boggles the mind.

According to Elwes, Rob Reiner was the soul of goodness and light, Robin Wright was continuously noble, Andre the Giant was indeed a "gentle giant", and Mandy Patinkin was the most worthy competitor in the greatest sword fight ever filmed of all times.

About the only things even remotely untoward which happened were one of the little folks playing an ROUS who got hauled off to the clink for driving under the influence, and the incredible attack of flatulence which should have flattened the castle walls in the scene where Westley is recovering from being "mostly dead".

If you're a serious Princess Bride geek, however, this will be a good read, just to fill in the background and to learn some new trivia.

I had always thought that the names that the Man in Black and Inigo Montoya toss out during the sword fight were just made up, but it turns out that guys like Capo Ferra and Agrippa actually were master sword fighters who wrote treatises on the art of fencing. Very cool. Elwes and Patinkin actually spent nearly every spare moment they had over months of filming just training with a couple of master fencers and stunt men to get ready to film the best three minutes and twenty seconds of swashbuckling ever seen on film.

A fun, quick cotton-candy read.

Postcards from Europe by Rick Steves

This doesn't happen often...a trifecta of non fiction, with no SF or Fantasy read and reviewed in the meantime. Maybe next week I'll go all fiction, ok?

I've been a big fan of Rick Steves' travel shows for a long time, and at least one of his guides was extremely useful when we traveled to Portugal a few years ago. This book has been out for about fifteen years, and contains some of his reminiscences and insights on European travel. I've obviously watched too many of his shows, because when I was reading this I could hear him narrating it, in his own inimitable style the entire time.

Steves begins in Holland, and works his way south through Europe to Germany and on to Italy and France, then Switzerland in this tale.

An interesting quote about business in Germany follows.

"Looking exhausted and burnt out, he (hotel owner Kurt) says, 'It's the new cook. He's always sick. A cook costs me four thousand deutsch marks [$2500] a month. He gets one month paid vacation and up to six weeks paid sick time. Doctors say the best way for a German employee to stop being sick is to start his own business.'"

and a new German proverb for you,

"German men say a man without a belly isn't a man. A German saying is, 'Better to have a big belly from drinking than a broken back from working.'"

Venice is definitely one of Steve's favorite places to visit, closely followed by Florence.

On comparative gastronomy:

"Ilaria says, 'For me the French cheese is the Italian cheese with mold. If we have cheese that nobody buys, it gets moldy. After some days, it becomes the perfect French cheese.'
Raising my glass of wine I offer a toast to Italian food. 'To la cucina Italiana.'
Manfredo follows that, saying magnanimously, 'To bacon and eggs.' We all agree that American breakfasts are unbeatable.
'Omelets, hashbrowns,' Roberto reminisces. 'On my last visit to New York, I gain four kilos in three weeks.'
Raising our glasses, we make another toast. 'To American breakfasts.'"

This is not a travel guide, but more of a series of vignettes which tells us a great deal about Rick Steves and his attitudes about travel.

The Everything Store by Brad Stone

 I have been playing around on Goodreads, adding as many of the books as I can recall having read to my shelves, aided by the list of books that are actually present in my personal library. Fairly often, I've run across authors whose works I absolutely loved, and was following closely, and realize that I missed the last few (or more) books in a series.

For those of you who are too young to comprehend how something like this could happen, who were born too late to recall how things were, B.A. (Before Amazon), let me tell you how things were, back in the olden days. Unless you lived in a major metropolitan area, most cities had perhaps two or three family-owned small bookstores, that had to be careful how much inventory they brought in, because if it didn't sell, it mostly counted as a loss (I'm not going to get into strip-covers here). If you were lucky, and the book store owner either liked the same authors that you did, or you were tied into fandom well enough to be fully aware of what books your favorite authors were coming out with next, you might get new books via special order, otherwise you ended up pretty much at the mercy of random chance in finding works by authors you liked, unless they were bestsellers - not a common occurrence in Science Fiction and Fantasy in those days.

I recall how, when I moved away from my home town and discovered the amazing phenomenon of used bookstores out in the wide wide world, I went plum crazy, buying tons of books that I never saw back home in the local stores. My book collection grew exponentially during those early years, but it was still pretty random whether I could find a particular author's latest works by anything other than pure serendipity. Amazon changed all of that...forever.

Biographies come a number of flavors. There's the hit piece, where the author tries to dish on all the dirt about the celebrity - think Kitty Kelly, and there's the puff piece, where the author shows us how wonderful their subject is. There are also the dry, historical and scholarly works, like a recent biography of Heinlein I recall, and there are also some that are meant to be amusing and entertaining. I think Stone strikes a good balance here between assassination and puffery, as well as showing that while he admires Jeff Bezos' accomplishments, he still sees a flawed and often controversial human being.

So, at this point, we're all aware of just how massively the 800 lb gorilla called Amazon has influenced the publishing and internet marketing businesses. Bezos' success is not a surprise, though it wasn't always that straightforward, and required some out-of-the box thinking.

"One early challenge (1995) was that the book distributors required retailers to order ten books at a time. Amazon didn't yet have that kind of sales volume, and Bezos later enjoyed telling the story of how he got around it. "We found a loophole," he said. "Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn't have to recieve ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, 'Sorry, but we're out of the lichen book.'""

I learned a couple of new terms early on,

"He (Bezos) later famously admitted to thinking about how to increase his "women flow," a Wall Street corollary to deal flow, the number of new opportunities a banker can access."


In a 1997 speech to HBS students, Bezos said,

"I think you might be underestimating the degree to which established brick-and-mortar business, or any company that might be used to doing things a certain way, will find it hard to be nimble or to focus attention on a new channel."

Especially with the rapid pace of change we are seeing today, you've got to be flexible to adapt and survive, much less to anticipate the trends and to remain profitable.

Regarding work/life balance for Amazon employees,

"The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority. That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can't excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you."

One of the most difficult times for Amazon was right after the dot-com boom. One thing that many people forget is that the dot-com boom was also accompanied in all of the high tech industries by the "tech boom". Computer and network hardware manufacturers couldn't keep up with the demand, nor could any of their suppliers, so huge amounts of manufacturing capacity were brought online, and cutthroat hiring practices abounded, until things fell apart in 2001.

"There were several immediate reasons for the stock market's reversal. The excesses of the dot-com boom had begun to wear on investors. Companies without actual business models were raising hundreds of millions of dollars, rushing to go public, and seeing their stock prices roar into the stratosphere despite unsound financial footing...nudged along by other events over the course of the next two years, like the collapse of Enron and the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Bezos gained a reputation as a ruthless competitor, and demanding customer.

In negotiations with UPS, Amazon's people threatened to go to Fedex if their demands weren't met, and UPS officials tried to call their bluff.

"In twelve hours, they went from millions of pieces a day to a couple a day. The standoff lasted seventy two hours and went unnoticed by customers and other outsiders...UPS execs caved and gave Amazon discounted rates."

I've noticed recently how, even when you don't select the "rush" type of shipping from Amazon, items still arrive far more quickly than estimated.

In 2003  "click-to-ship time for most items in the company's FCs was as minimal as four hours. The standard from the rest of the e-commerce industry at the time was twelve hours."

Why doesn't Amazon get called out like Wal Mart does over worker issues? In their distribution centers temporary workers only make $10 to $12 per hour, with high pressure to deliver and a point system which penalizes workers for minor infractions.

"The number one thing standing in the way of Amazon unionization is fear. Employees are afraid they'll fire you - even though it's technically not legal. You're the one who has to fight to get your job back if they do."

There are several great chapters on the rise of eBooks towards the end of Stone's book, which explain a number of things I've found puzzling about the industry. I remember the early faltering times, and I've been pleasantly surprised to see where things have gone so far, though costs are still, in my opinion, too high.

A good read. Even if you hate Amazon, I wouldn't bet against Bezos and his team.

Things that Matter by Charles Krauthammer

 I had imagined that this book was going to be an autobiography, but it was not. It is actually a collection of Krauthammer's columns, written over the decades, on subjects as diverse as the utility of a pithy "F" word and its two and three word combinations, "the deuce is the preferred usage when time is short and concision is of the essence" to reminiscences about historical figures as diverse as Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill.

His writing is very much like his speech, carefully considered, in measured breaths, perhaps governed by his difficulty breathing after being paralyzed in his youth.

He covers the "central axiom of partisan politics - Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." with phrases like this one, "Liberals believe that human nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next seven-point program for the social reform of everything."

On the marathoning craze of triathlons, decathlons and grueling "mudders", he writes, "Now that everyon can afford status symbols like designer jeans, conspicuous consumption gives way to conspicuous exertion. Sheer exhilarating length becomes a value in itself."

On Bush Derangement Syndrome, "Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean's sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that 'the most interesting' theory as to why the president is 'suppressing' the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it's time to check on Thorazine supplies."

We may be seeing some of that flowing the other way now from partisans who believe the current president to be Satan incarnate.

On Sensitivity Training:
"This project for the inculcation of proper human feelings through behavioral technique is either sinister or idiotic. It is sinister when it works, as in Communist China, where they have learned how to break one's character through the extremes of coercion, deprivation and torture. These means are not yet available to American educators and family therapists. Which explains their low success rate."

One hears of the mob storming the Bastille during the French Revolution. Did you realize that it only held seven prisoners - the Marquis de Sade had already been set free a week earlier.

Krauthammer echoes something I've long thought, "I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to, or assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within. Marriage needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide, thank you."

Congratulations to those homosexuals who are now free to marry...and fight...and divorce...and ruin their children's lives. Bon voyage!

Though many of his essays on Iraq and the wars we fought there were written some time ago, he seems prescient in his cautionary tales here, foretelling the total disaster we are seeing right now as the vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal after the Obama administration failed to negotiate a SOFA was filled with Al Qaeda affilliated jihadists wreaking havoc.

On our brief stint as the sole global power:

"American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself."

Unfortunately, we have lost our way in determining our national interests and seem to have no coherent or cohesive foreign policy left, not surprising when the likes of Hillary and John Kerry are in charge of State.

And, he says,

"Americans have a healthy aversion to foreign policy. It stems from a sense of thrift. Who needs it? We're protected by two great oceans. We have this continent practically to ourselves. And we share it with just two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent on moving in with us."

That's the funniest thing I've heard about our illegal immigration crisis yet.

Educational, and fully worth the time invested in the reading.

Brainiac by Ken Jennings

 Ken Jennings' semiautobiographical (Hey! That word ought to be part of a jeopardy question about twenty-letter words!) book works for me on a number of levels. Jennings happens to be my all-time favorite Jeopardy champion, closely followed by Tom Nissely and Colby Burnett, and, like Vanna White's bio, Vanna Speaks, his book evokes pleasant memories of my younger self's post-dinner entertainment.

Ken has been a trivia geek his entire life, and has created a fun an interesting meta-tome of trivia about trivia and the lives and careers of fellow trivia lovers, from the quiz bowl contenders and coaches of the college games to the professional Hollywood writers of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. He also takes us on a trip through the factoids of trivia history, where the first book of trivia, published in 1830, was Sir Richard Phillips' A Million of Facts, and into the golden age of radio trivia shows.

 Each chapter title, by the way, is phrased in the form of a question. Every chapter is also a trivia quiz, with answers at the end, for us trivia buffs to test our knowledge.

If you're looking for a guide to how to be a Jeopardy champion, this isn't it. Unless you have made trivia your life, like some of the people Ken meets and gets to know in his story, you probably won't be motivated enough in the first place. In fact, he spends very little time talking about the games, except in an epigrammatic way, as an introduction to each chapter, when he shares out a crumb or two of interest.

I don't know if he invented it himself, but Jennings presents a 9 point classification system for trivia questions and answers:

• The Plain Vanilla Recall
• Plain Vanilla with Hot Fudge
• The Superlative
• The Unique One
• The Huge Number
• The Meaningless Coincidence
• The Elusive Everyday Recall
• The Trick
• The Puzzler

I think I've run across nearly every one of these types, in various trivial pursuits. Speaking of Trivial Pursuit, he devotes a portion of a chapter to the board game which swept America back in the eighties, and tells us what happened to those intrepid souls who invented it.

My favorite quote:

"Knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing, but they do live in the same neighborhood."

A charming and witty read, in Ken's usual self-deprecating style.

My Inventions and Other Writings by Nikola Tesla

 My first impressions from Tesla's own writings, published originally by Hugo Gernsback (often regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Science Fiction publishing industry) in The Electrical Experimenter, were that the man was a bit of a grandiose braggart, as well as being completely obsessive-compulsive. Perhaps his saving grace was that his obsession with his projects led him to pursue them so diligently that he often came up with incredible inventions, though it is difficult to understand how a man so brilliant could also be convinced of the truth of some radically improbable, even mystical, ideas.

One of the amazing things about Tesla's mind was that he had developed the ability to completely visualize in his head a working model of whatever piece of machinery he planned to build - a mental CAD, if you will.

As a very young man, fresh out of school, he was hired by the telegraph office of the Hungarian government and put in charge of designing and implementing their telephone exchange.

"I made several improvements in the Central station apparatus and perfected a telephone repeater..."

He was the first to perfect a method of generating alternating current and running electrical machinery with AC, as well as inventing a turbine engine, and radio transmission long before Marconi's feat.

This is a difficult book to read. Although Tesla prided himself on his very organized mind, and way of thinking, his writings do not reflect that, and seem to bounce all over the place, with unfinished thoughts and gaps in logic throughout. Brilliant but erratic. His tendency to believe that he could accomplish anything he could imagine, and he accomplished a great deal, make it difficult to sort out which of his ideas are mere flights of fancy, and actually not possible, versus those he merely never got round to completing. Transmitting electrical power wirelessly around the world?

One of his more intriguing ideas seems to presage the whole idea of mutually assured destruction that dominated the Cold War. He envisioned a fleet of dirigibles which contained a machine designed by him which would call lightning from the sky, wreaking utter destruction on ground targets below. Whichever country obtained it first could enforce peace upon the world.

Still searching for a good Tesla bio.

One Smart Cookie by Debbi Fields

 When Debbi Fields was growing up, she had the feeling that all of her siblings were more special, more skilled, than she was, and it left her wanting to accomplish something that was truly her own. She had an underlying need to be a people pleaser, and she spent hours perfecting her own chocolate chip cookie recipe. As a young married woman, she would hand them out at social events to her husband, Randy's business associates, and eventually the crazy idea was born that maybe other people would pay good money to enjoy her cookies.

It wasn't easy, and convincing the bankers to loan them the money for Debbi's dream was tough, but she opened her first store in a shopping mall in Palo Alto in 1977 and her business eventually grew beyond her wildest dreams.

At one of Randy's meetings, she relates a story about a group of business executives who had asked ahead of time if Debbi was going to bake cookies for their meeting.

"Who better to ask? So I said to them, 'What would you think about my starting a business to sell these cookies to the public?'
'Bad idea,' they said, their mouths full of cookies, what had been a plateful only minutes earlier now reduced to crumbs they were artfully dabbing up with genteel thumbs. 'Never work,' they said. 'Forget it.'"

There are plenty of important points about customer service and business ethics one can learn from reading her book.

She worked at a Mervyn's as a teen, and was very well-liked and productive there. She says,
"At Mervyn's, I just kept pushing and striving, and they kept noticing. The more they acknowledged my efforts, the harder I tried to make things perfect. Some employees - I know from personal and sad experience - do not see the world in this way. I am making x amount per hour,  they figure, and therefore I will give them x percent of my effort. Why do people who think that way even bother to go to work in the first place?"

I always found that Debbi's philosophy of always working to make things better, of giving your entire effort, and not just the effort you feel your wage buys, to be very effective.

Like so many of us, Debbie was already experiencing, back in the 70s, the depersonalization of the shopping experience in the big box stores, and reminiscing fondly about spending time and money in an establishment where people really wanted to help you, and would likely know your name, and your family's history - not like the creepy big brother thing we've got going on now.

"...Randy's clients and my friends and both our families and lots of bankers were right in their belief that you didn't sell cookies in order to get rich. I didn't care about the money. It was an experience I wanted to create, some kind of gift to people - a lot of whom I felt were exactly like me, cheated of the emotional value of their money by big stores, fast food, systems without affection."

While still in her first location, Debby hired her first employee when she found someone at another business who "had a knack for engaging strangers in brief but delightful conversations".

"We had a terrific thing together, working side by side in the store. And as others joined us, they were brought into what amounted to a conspiracy to have a good time, to turn a job into play and make it at least a small joy to come to work every morning."

What a great corporate culture!

Debby relates to us a great governing principle, put simply, "The more we did for our customers, the more they did for us. I had always been taught that life was the other way around - that you had to make sure you got what was coming to you - but in practice the opposite was true."

In contrast to the way many franchises do business, Mrs. Fields doesn't just give employees the rote task of putting together a pre-portioned, bulk produced, assembly line style cookie.

"What we do is teach people all over the world, on four continents, how to be excellent, artful, instinctive bakers."

Her company's motto, "Good enough never is", encourages people to go above and beyond, to produce an excellent product, and never to settle for just good enough.

This book is chock full of not just chocolate chips, but tasty morsels of savvy business advice for anyone who really truly wants to chase their dreams of excellence.

Nikola Tesla by Sean Patrick

So, this book was not at all what I was expecting. I've been looking for a good biography of Tesla to enjoy for a while. He was an amazing man, responsible for many inventions, including A/C power generators, which we use today, and also somewhat of a mystery, as he is reputed to have invented some things that never saw the light of day again after his death, when his papers disappeared and/or were destroyed.

Instead, it contains a much abbreviated bio, sandwiched between Patrick's sales pitch for some other book he has written about how to harness your creativity and inner genius. I noticed he has some other purported biographies available on Amazon, which most likely are the same sort of thing. The most positive thing I can say about this book was that it was free.

Still searching for a good Tesla bio, for a reasonable fee.

The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

 I think this book was recommended by Alan Caruba, a prolific writer of political columns, and reviewer of multiple genres of books, but I can't be sure at this point. The book reads more like a novel than a bio, with some pretty solid recreated dialogue, well-appointed interior and exterior scenes, and a third party omniscient point of view throughout, although the thoughts and motivations of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, remain obscured here.

It becomes obvious fairly quickly, however, that Mezrich's main sources were all of the "friends" that Zuckerberg screwed over on his way to becoming one of the youngest billionaires ever. The first to bite the dust were a trio of upperclassmen at Harvard who attempted to hire him to develop a social media web site with them, targeted at the dating world. He seemed to agree to work with them, then spent his time developing theFacebook.com, the earliest version of the famed site, limited to Harvard students, instead of working on their idea. He put off their requests for progress reports until his own site was launched, then claimed he'd never agreed to work with them and that their site was substantially different than his own project. Some years later, as a result of a lawsuit they brought, he settled with them for millions of dollars, according to this book.

Perhaps the worst betrayal described in the book was the one he dropped on his best friend at Harvard, Eduardo Saverin. Eduardo was in from the beginning with Mark, and even put up his own money in order to rent servers and support the business in the early days. While Eduardo was in New York between semesters, trying to scare up advertisers for theFacebook, Zuckerberg moved to California and was seduced, so to speak, by the high flying tech star, Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, into the world of venture capitalists. The company was restructured, and Eduardo's 30% interest was diluted away by stock offerings to early employees and Parker, himself. Of course, Zuckerberg screwed Parker over, too, a short time later.

I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of any of this, but it's an interesting take, anyway, on one of the billionaire bad boys of the era.

A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O'Reilly

 A number of years ago, some friends recommended that I watch The O'Reilly Factor, and I started watching it fairly religiously, as its host seemed to truly operate a No Spin Zone, and there were some excellent debates between different political players, and Bill tried to keep everyone honest, seldom letting anyone weasel their way out of a question with empty phrases. But after a while, the show began to be more about O'Reilly than about anything substantive, and it seemed that he spent more time talking about personal attacks he was dealing with, and plugging his books and Factor Gear than he did actually talking about the issues of the day. So I tuned out.

It's funny, speaking of that, that people who are very conservative tend to think O'Reilly is too liberal, while the progressives complain that he has a conservative bias. I tend to think he's pretty darned close to the middle of the spectrum, given those gut responses from left and right.

You might wonder why, if I got tired of O'Reilly on O'Reilly, I'd pick up an allegedly autobiographical work to read. Well, there's a difference between hearing endless self-focus on the air versus reading amusing stories about a person's childhood, and A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity is more about the latter...at least for a while.

It was interesting to hear about Bill's childhood in Levitton, PA, and his adventures in Catholic school with the nuns, as well as his college years, plus a few anecdotes from his early days in broadcasting. I was hoping to get a more personal feeling for the man, perhaps something about his wife, his home life, his children, but he really doesn't divulge much on those subjects - are they painful, or just intensely private?

The book is a little unfocused, bounces from subject to subject, darts back and forth in time like the Tardis, but it may give you a feel for who O'Reilly really thinks he is, anyway.

Tough Times

I checked out several books from the library, that had been on my to-read list for a while. Unfortunately, a couple of them just didn't make the grade, as far as being worth finishing.

A number of years ago, I truly enjoyed the first books in the Stainless Steel Rat series, by Harry Harrison, which featured the master criminal, Slippery Jim diGriz, in a number of sarcastically related adventures. Once again, either the series just went on far too long, and Harrison ran out of good ideas and worthy plots, or Harrison himself went on too long, and began to lose his touch in his later efforts. The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell was about Jim and his sons, James and Bolivar, rushing to the rescue of his wife Angelina, who has been sent to Heaven, or reasonable facsimile thereof, by an con artist turned preacher. Frankly, don't bother.

I can't recall where I found the other book recommended, but I wish I could, so I'd take further recommendations with a grain of salt. Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang was advertised as a fresh, irreverent, refreshing (and probably a few other meaningless adjectives) look at the immigrant experience and success in America. I couldn't even make it past his childhood. I was far too busy raising my own children during his childhood to pay any attention to the cultural icons which he twists slightly and riffs upon, so I didn't get any of his witticisms, and the quips I did comprehend were mostly rude, crude, and simply unacceptable. Couldn't keep pressing on, sorry.

Vanna Speaks by Vanna White

I'd had this one on my to-read list for a long time (as you might imagine, since it came out in 1987). Turned out like an eclair - quick, fluffy and not much substance. One of the things that was entertaining about reading Vanna's autobiography was that she was pretty much a contemporary, about the same age as the cheerleaders I had crushes on in high school, and coincidentally she was a cheerleader as well. Her younger brother graduated the same year I did. So, most of the musicians and pop culture she describes as part of her background is very familiar to me.

Vanna had always wanted to be a model and actress, and she had some early success soon after graduating from high school in the Atlanta area, working trade shows and other gigs. When she decided a few years later to move to L.A., things were pretty tough for a while, and she didn't really hit the big time until she got the job on Wheel of Fortune, where she's been ever since.

Though she seems to have led a fairy tale life with her success in Hollywood, she's been hit pretty hard by a number of personal tragedies, beginning with her mother's death from cancer just as she was beginning to achieve personal success, followed a few years later by her boyfriend, John Gibson's, death in a fiery plane crash. She and Gibson, a former Chippendale's dancer, were very close friends with Hugh Hefner of Playboy Magazine, and she was quite surprised when Hugh betrayed her trust by publishing some early lingerie photos she had thought long buried and forgotten after claiming he'd never do anything to hurt her. No honor among playboys, eh?

The main purpose of this book seems to be to answer all of the common questions that Vanna gets asked in her fan mail, all in one convenient location.

Interventions by Kofi Annan

Something odd struck me, as I was reading this autobiography. It seems that many who write their stories have these deep insights into who their parents were, and what motivated them, what sort of inner conflicts they faced, and so forth. It occurred to me that I really have no idea who my parents were in that sense. I can relate their basic history about where they grew up, in what era, and so forth, but inner conflicts...emotions? We never spoke of such things. Probably never will.

I found this a difficult book to push on through and finish. It seemed that Annan went into deep details at times that weren't all that interesting to me, while glossing over things quickly that I'd have been interested in hearing more about, and he also assumed a little too much historical knowledge on the part of his readers regarding some of the conflicts on which he focused. I lived through all the years he was Secretary General of the UN, but I was busy raising a family most of the time, and our mediocre media here in the US has not done a great job of covering world events - Michael Jackson and Lindsay Lohan and Beyonce's lip synching are far more important.

I found it interesting that though he condemns Israel quite harshly in the chapters actually dealing with the Palestinian question, he has something different to relate in an earlier chapter about the civil war in Lebanon.

"I concluded that 'whatever other agendas they may serve, Hizbollah's actions, which it portrays as defending Palestinian and Lebanese interest, in fact do neither. On the contrary, they hold an entire nation hostage.'"

He's also quite frank about the source of many of Africa's problems, even though he looks to the West to provide (as always) more funding.

"In a telling, if tragic - sign of Africa's many false starts on the path to development, it is widely recognized that the two principal obstacles to African development are energy and infrastructure. To recall how clearly this was understood forty years ago is to realize the price all Africans have paid for bad governance ever since."

and regarding the Africa Report,

"It emphasized the failures of the international community, too, including the UN's failure, in helping the peoples of Africa, the failure of all to help them ensure peace and create the conditions for sustainable development. But it stated these failures as orbiting features of a core problem: internal African politics and African leadership."

and,

"The problems of Africa, however, have always stemmed from a lack of institutions: a lack of the institutional resources necessary to deal with the complex political, social, and economic problems faced on the continent. But irresponsible, unaccountable personalized systems of rule are the enemy of these. Cultivating the authority of a single individual over an entire and diverse population means that any institution that empowers the population's various constituencies has to be blocked or crushed. It means institutions that uphold a system for the peaceful transfer of power between political parties and between leaders have to be eroded or eradicated. Civil society institutions, organizations, and activists independent of the state, and so beyond the control of the Big Man, can never be allowed to flourish. Free enterprise, underpinned by free societies and systems of regulation and law independent of the day-to-day whims of the leader - an essential feature for private sector driven development - cannot be allowed."

The applications implicit in that last passage seem a bit scary to me, given the hero-worship some on the left have for the Obama presidency.

Annan was, it appears, responsible for the changing mission and vision of the UN in the modern era. As he says,

"Before 1988, only a dozen peacekeeping missions were launched in all of the UN's forty-three years. But in the brief period between 1988 and 1992, the Council created another ten."

The ideas below are, perhaps, what alarms some folks in this country - we seem to be quite jealous of our sovereignty, having won it a couple of centuries ago through blood and sacrifice. He whines a bit about how the U.S. would never agree to submit itself to the authority of the International Criminal Court. Given the composition of the General Assembly and most of the commissions established by the UN, I can't see that it would be a good thing, myself, as far too many of the rogue states would like nothing better than to drag our leaders and soldiers into trials there.

"the opportunity that the crisis in Kosovo provided: to draw a new line in international affairs, to set a new standard in how we held states responsible for the treatment and protection of the people within their own borders. We had to make clear that the rights of sovereign states to noninterference in their internal affairs could not override the rights of individuals to freedom from gross and systemic abuses of their human rights."

I found his take on the situations in places like Somalia and the Sudan enlightening.

"...civil wars have a security impact far beyond their source. They suck in their neighbors, send thousands of refugees spilling into other countries, create havens for armed groups and terrorists, and they cause the spread of criminal networks and cross-border lawlessness, including piracy."

One interesting thing regarding Iraq's intransigence when it came to allowing the UN weapons inspectors to fully verify that all of the WMD's had been destroyed,

"Tariq Aziz...once asked a senior member of the UN's inspection team...'You know why we can never allow you to certify that we've rid ourselves of our weapons of destruction, don't you?' The UN official replied incredulously that this was the entire purpose of the inspections, and that once free of the stigma, Iraq could come in from the cold. Aziz replied, 'The Persians and the Jews.' For Saddam, in other words, sustaining the fear that he possessed WMD was all about deterring Iran and Israel, two countries that he considered mortal enemies."

Holy guacamole, Batman! It's all about face in the Arab world.

All you international affairs freaks might enjoy this one, and I felt it was good to hear Annan's perspective on things.

An Enduring Love by Farah Pahlavi

When I was in my first year of college, my roommate was from Iran. This was the year that the Iranian revolutionaries, under the direction of Khomeini, stormed the U.S. Embasssy and took our diplomats hostage for over 400 days. So, I found Farah Pahlavi's book interesting on a semi-personal level.

By most measures, Iran under the Shah was slowly working its way into the 20th century, leaving behind its tribal origins and building modern infrastructure, schools, and hospitals, and liberalizing its political structure gradually.

"(In 1925) The country was in the hands of tribal chiefs and large landowners, and the only law was the law of the strongest. The main resources had been handed over to foreigners: the British operated our oil; our army, or waht was left of it, took orders from Russian officers in the north and British officers in the south; Belgians ran our customs services, the Swedes our police, and so on...A quarter of a century later, the Iran I knew had schools, universities and hospitals; if the roads wer not all paved yet, they did at least exist; finally, the Trans-Iranian Railway linked the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. There was certainly a lot yet to be built, but for my parents' generation, who could see how much had been achieved, Reza Shah had given his country what Mustafa Kemal Attaturk had given Turkey: a bloodless industrial and cultural revolution."

Farah grew up somewhat privileged in a politically-connected family whose power derived somewhat from their descent from the Prophet Mohammed, though her father passed away when she was quite young. Of her father's illness, she writes:

"I was told Father had gone to Europe for treatment. It was a lie. He had died."

A cultural thing? It seems very strange to me that they would continue the fiction for several years.

When she was invited to attend a communist rally in Paris as a student there, she could not understand why all Iranians did not venerate the Shah, as her family did. It occurs to me that the royalists in Iran and elsewhere were, of course, strongly anti-communist - for their own preservation - and that the roots of the West's support of strong authoritarians in the Middle East most likely dates back to the Cold War, in a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort of way. As long as the Assads, Hussein and Pahlavis opposed the Soviet threat, our governments did their best to keep them in power, even if it meant ignoring the need for democratic reforms and the human rights violations taking place there.

The Shah's previous wife had been unable to bear children, so obviously Farah was selected in hopes she'd be more fruitful, and she did, indeed, bear him four children, including a male heir. However, as a well-educated, somewhat modern, woman (she studied in Paris after finishing high school), she was probably responsible for many of the improvements that came to pass for the general population of Iran under his rule, especially in the area of women's rights.

"I inspected, I opened buildings and institutes, but while doing so, I watched, I listened and I learned. At the same time I received a lot of correspondence. These letters were extremely affecting; the often awkwardly expressed accounts of tragic situations enabled me to learn about the problems of the moment. In the farthest provinces people were still suffering great poverty, infant mortality was high, schools were few and far between, children lacked hygiene and were weakened by malnutrition."

To counter these problems, in 1962, the Shah announced his White Revolution, which included six great reforms:

• Agrarian reform - those with extensive land holdings were required to sell certain portions of their property to the government, which parceled it out to the peasants. Governmental land registrars were also put into effect, replacing the role of the Islamic clergy - which cut off a major source of their income. (This obviously had repercussions later on because of the hostility of the imams. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the Shah's father had implemented civil law to replace sharia law, also reducing the authority and income of the clergy.)
• Privatizing some state enterprises.
• Nationalization of forests and pasture lands.
• Reserving twenty percent of the shares in Iranian companies for workers and managers.
• Giving women the right to vote and become candidates for election.
• Creating a Literacy Corps, responsible for bringing literacy to remote areas. In the 1960s, the illiteracy rate in Iran was at 70 percent. Over the next twenty years, the problem was vanquished, and early successes with this program were responsible for the establishment of a national Public Health Corps and a Development Corps which taught modern farming methods.

Regarding western attacks on the pace of democratic reforms, the shah,

"...believed that Iran's economic awakening was still to fragile to survive a complete liberalization of society, a Western-style liberalization. 'The country still needs a decade of stability to get to that stage,' he would say, 'but I want my son to reign in a different way from me.' He had hoped to pass on to Reza a state that was ready for democracy."

Irony:

"The most violent opponents of the monarchy were precisely these young people who had received state scholarships to study in the United States or Europe...within and without the country, the clandestine Communist Party and the extreme left continued recruiting young idealists or fanatics who wanted to overthrow the regime and install a popular dictatorship on the Soviet or Chinese model."

Sound familiar?

When the revolution heated up:

"...it became clear that 'liberals' and leftists, many of whom had nothing in common with the mullahs, adhered to their movement for access to the wider population. And so religion was shamelessly used as a tool to stir up the people, in particular by the communists, who had the banning of religious practice as one of their aims if they came to power. Each component of this heterogeneous revolutionary coalition...had an opportunistic interest in allying themselves with the others, but it was obvious that if one day they took control of the country, none of them would stop until they had eliminated their former associates - which is exactly what happened."

If, like me, you grew up during the 70s, and never really got the word from our negligent mainstream media about what really went on in the middle east, this book should prove interesting. Couple it with Queen Noor's book, and you'll begin to see some patterns.

An American Son by Marco Rubio

I'm usually interested in reading what political figures on the national scene have to say about themselves, so I reserved a copy of Rubio's bio, and was looking forward to it coming in at the library. I have to say, I was a little bit disappointed, even before I finished it. I think it was mostly the quality of the writing, which seemed targeted at almost a junior high audience. Rubio never really shows any substance to his deeply held conservative convictions, though he does discuss his Catholic faith a bit. The whole flavor of the book seems like "What I did on my summer vacation", in my opinion.

He covers his family's history, as Cuban exiles, in great detail, and tells the tale of growing up in Miami, then Las Vegas, and returning to Miami to finish high school. College and law school get a bit less airtime, before his foray into politics, beginning with local offices, on to the state senate in Florida, and eventually being elected to the U.S. Senate, consumes the second half of the book.

Some points of interest for me were his descriptions of how the political process shapes what the state and local governments are really able to accomplish. In one case, Rubio and his associates were trying to push through some legislation that would have helped parents of disabled children to get more help with their treatment. The Florida House put together a bill that would have done what they asked for, sent it up to the Senate. The Senate, however, delayed nearly to the end of the legislative session, then killed the bill, sending back one of their own to the House that only covered autistic children's needs. With time running out, Rubio and his allies were forced to accept the Senate bill just to get anything at all done, and disappointed his constituents with children with disabilities other than autism.

Another situation was when Rubio was pushing forward serious tax reform in Florida. Most voters felt that property taxes were too high, and Rubio's proposal would have eliminated them (or maybe a large proportion of them). To make up the state revenues lost, he proposed a VAT tax (or something similar). The legislation later failed, but his political opponents in later races claimed he supported a huge tax increase - because of his proposing the consumption tax - to discredit him. His original idea was a tax reduction, coupled with offsetting the revenue loss in other ways, but the only part that got any notice was the increase.

Anyway, it's good read in some ways for political junkies, but I found it very difficult to plod through..

The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

Wow! This is a TOME! Reading The Snowball occupied many of my waking hours for several weeks. Ms. Schroeder has done a great job of thoroughly chronicling the life and times of Warren Buffett, one of the U.S.A.'s leading billionaires - one who has been much in the news of late, and who may be immortalized by the Buffett Rule being proposed by the Obama Administration.

Buffett's formative years were in the era of the Great Depression, and it may be the single most important factor in determining the man he became. Of course, in the nature vs. nurture debate, the other factors were his relentless pursuit of information, reading every bit of information on a subject that obsessed him, and his urge to collect. He has lived around Omaha throughout his life, and never felt any need to move to the centers of financial and political power - people he needed to see tended to come visit him, instead.

Buffett's main claim to fame, of course, is the holding company he founded and controls, Berkshire Hathaway, which has created phenomenal wealth for those who placed their trust in him decades ago. At one of the legendary shareholders meetings, Buffett shared the following bit of wisdom, which we can all take to heart.

"What you're doing when you invest is deferring consumption and laying money out now to get more money back at a later time. And there are really only two questions. One is how much you're going to get back, and the other is when. Now, Aesop was not much of a finance major, because he said something like, 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.' But he doesn't say when."

Buffett began his habit of earning and investing money when he was quite young. In 1942, he convinced his sister to go in on an investment with him, and when the price dropped, then recovered mildly - at which point he sold the stock - and then it went on to much bigger gains, he learned some valuable lessons:

"One lesson was not to overly fixate on what he had paid for a stock. The second was not to rush unthinkingly to grab a small profit...And there was a third lesson, which was about investing other people's money. If he made a mistake, it might get somebody upset at him. So he didn't want to have responsibility for anyone else's money unless he was sure he could succeed."

Young Warren, unsurprisingly, was a touch socially inept, and Schroeder relates wryly,
"He bought a ukelele to compete with the uke-playing boyfriend of a girl he was pursuing, but wound up holding only the ukelele instead of the girl."

Buffett figure out one thing at an early age - the effect of compounding on money - and he always used it to his favor. In fact, he was extraordinarily frugal in his personal life for someone his age. When he went off to get his MBA at Columbia 1950,

"...he found the cheapest lodgings available: joining the YMCA for a dime a day and paying a dollar a day for a room at the Y's Sloane House on West 34th Street, down near Penn Station. He was far from broke, enriched by $500 from the Miller scholarship and $2,000 from Howard (his father), a graduation gift and part of a deal not to start smoking. He also had $9,803.70 saed, some of it placed in stocks...But since Warren looked at every dollar as ten dollars someday, he wasn't going to hand over a dollar more than he needed to spend."

Another time when Buffett thought about compounding differently than most everyone else was when he bought a house for his growing family.
"Warren paid $32,500 to Sam Reynolds, a local businessman and promptly named it 'Buffett's Folly.' In his mind $31,500 was a million dollars after compounding for a dozen years or so, because he could invest it at an impressive rate of return. He felt as though he were spending an outrageous million dollars on the house."

If more of us thought like this, it would be great for our pocketbooks, but perhaps not so great for the real estate business.

By the way, "profiling" has been going on for a long time, sometimes quite profitably.

"GEICO sought to make auto insurance cheaper by marketing through the mail without an agent...To make it work, GEICO needed a rule that would allow it to avid the folks who drive thirty miles over the speed limit after downing half a bottle of tequila at three am. Borrowing an idea from a company called USAA that sold only to military offices, GEICO's founders, Leo Goodwin and Cleves Rhea, had decided to sell its insurance only to government employees because, like military officers, they were responsible individuals who were accustomed to following the law."

I'm not sure that last sentence is true any more, but it worked for a while.

One great Buffett quote:

"Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre...It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price...when buying companies or common stocks, we look for a first-class business accompanied by first-class managements."

Buffett loved businesses like insurance companies with "float" - they take in large amounts of cash up front in premiums, and there may be a long delay before they have to pay out benefits. In the meantime, that money can be successfully placed in investments with high rates of return, and allowed to compound. When he and his business partners gained control of such a company, they used the cash to buy other companies, or stock in them. "It was a homeostatic business model - the idea of grafting float onto a holding company so that it could respond internally to the changing environment...(and)...the power of compounding, as float and investments doubled and redoubled over time" that made Berkshire Hathaway owners very wealthy.

Buffett seemed to know instinctively something our politicians never did. In the context of a local minority banker who wanted Buffett to subsidize home loans for poor minorities, "he knew the bank couldn't help anyone by relaxing its lending standards and making uncollectible loans, which would only teach the wrong financial lesson."
We could have avoided the whole housing crash if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the regulators had kept this in mind.

Schroeder does tend, every once in a while, to go off on tangents about people with whom Buffett was involved in business deals at various times, which can be distracting, and certainly adds to the time it takes to read this 800 page plus extravaganza. Kaye Graham, Walter Annenberg, and Bill Gates all get extensive coverage here.

On a slightly political note, Buffett hasn't always been concerned about the plight of the middle class working stiff. When he and Charlie Munger managed to turn around the fortunes of the Buffalo Evening News in 1982, "Buffett and Munger went to a meeting of employees at the Statler Hilton downtown. Somebody asked about profit sharing. 'There is nothing that anybody on the third floor' - where the newsroom sat - 'can do that affects profits,' Buffett said...The workers got a paycheck for the time and effort they put in - no more, no less."

Buffett has been talking about his secretary's wages far longer than I'd realized. He mentioned that she paid more of a percentage of her wages out in taxes than he back in 2001. You'd think maybe he could have done something about the way she is compensated by now, wouldn't you?

This was an interesting read, fascinating at times, but it was a long haul.

God, No! by Penn Jillette

I was led to this book by a quote from it on one of the blogs I frequent, and thought it might be interesting. Ummm...interesting...may be the most appropriate word to describe it. WARNING! This book is filled with profanity, obscenity, debauchery, and all sorts of things that many of you may find offensive. If you are easily offended, do NOT read this book - and maybe you shouldn't even read this post.

Jillette is an atheist, militant and emphatic. He was actually raised in a very faithful family, but around the time he was a young adult, he began to question his faith, and when the pastor couldn't answer his questions about matters biblical, the pastor recommended that he not hang out with the church youth group any more.

His family eventually also broke with the church, over a dispute within the church about removing a female pastor who was suspected of being a lesbian. Hmmm...his church was so biblical that they didn't pay any attention to the scriptures that state that a woman should not be placed in a position of leading a congregation, but finally the sticking point was her sexual orientation? Something is wrong with this picture.

He says, "Reading the Bible is the fast track to atheism...I'm sure there are lots of religious people who've read the Bible from start to finish and kept their faith, but in my self-selected sample, all the people I know who have done that are atheists."

Indeed. It's been my experience, in my associations with many Christians over several decades, that reading the Bible consistently and persistently leads to a greater understanding of its message and a deeper, more meaningful relationship with God. I'm almost certain, from my own self-selected sample, that those non-believers who claim to have read the Bible cover to cover were exaggerating, at best.

Jillette is an entertainer, through and through, and often writes very witty passages and fun, self-mocking anecdotes. He talks about attending, at one point, the Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey clown college, where he didn't do as well as he hoped.

"I came into the college as a great juggler, and I left as a great juggler, but I never got to be even a passable clown. That's right, I failed as a f**king clown. (asterisks mine - jon)"

On the subject of tattoos, Jillette has a suspicion I've long entertained:

"I figure the Asian logogram that the trendy guy thinks means 'truth' probably means 'round-eyed sodomite,' but what do I know?"

On the other hand, he says, "...ink says, 'f**k you' to god. Tattoos and big fake tits are a way to say to yourself and the world that the way you ended up, even the way you think you were created, is not as important as your free will."

While I grew up in an era when body art wasn't nearly as common as today, and had some social stigma attached, I think that tattoos are about the same as wearing stylish clothing, or adding bling to your ride, just a way of personal expression, that most often has nothing to do with religious feelings, negative or positive.

He mentions the author Mary Roach, whose book, Packing for Mars, about astronauts was fascinating, in the context of his going on a flight to experience free fall.

Penn writes an interesting passage about the political Left and Right.

"The liberals I know will say that medical marijuana is a foot in the door, the first step to legalizing marijuana for everyone. And when the right wing accuses them of wanting that same exact thing, they ridicule the right wingers and say 'What about the people suffering horribly from cancer who need to toke?' My liberal friends think the literal reading of the Bible is nonsense and we should celebrate the other religions and cultures, and when the right says 'They're trying to take the Christ out of Christmas,' liberals go bug-f**king-nutty. Just about everyone who writes and produces comedy on TV is a f**king lefty and is pushing the agenda of gay rights and liberal causes, and my liberal friends - even though they're against the f**king corporations running TV - are thrilled with those writers, but when the f**king psycho right wing says the TV writers are doing just what they're doing, my liberal friends scoff. I think that's why my lefty friends are so comfortable calling the Tea Party people racist, even though the Tea Party doesn't say they themselves are racist. My left friends just assume that everyone lies about their real agenda."

No comment necessary.

And, the quote that lured me to this book in the first place:

"It's amazing to me how many people think that voiting to have the government take away moeny by force through taxes to give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering poeple is immoral, self-righteous, bullying laziness."

I might not agree with Penn on much, but he's nailed this one - he's a small L libertarian.

Had a minor flashback when Penn mentions what a rip off Kreskin's magic kit was.

One amusing quote is from the 40s mentalist, Denninger.

"To those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, no explanation is possible."

Faith and Atheism, in a nutshell.

This book is vastly entertaining, and very funny, in places. Tread carefully, though, if you' can disgusted  or offended by matters of faith, sexuality, morality, or politics.

Core of Conviction by Michele Bachman

I ran across this one a little late, from the perspective of the election cycle, as Mrs. Bachman had already dropped out of the primaries. However, just to satisfy my curiosity and find out what she had to say...

She and I are very nearly the same age, so many of the things she describes experiencing as a child and young lady seem very familiar to me - growing up in small town Idaho and Iowa are not all that different. I'd say that her early life was quite idyllic, were it not for the fact that her father abandoned the family and divorced her mother while Michele was about fourteen. For some time, she had the experience of being part of a family struggling to make ends meet, which should resonate well with most Americans.

Though her mother thought she should just take a secretarial job after graduating from high school, Bachman pursued her dream to go on to college, where she met her future husband, Marcus. Eventually, she would get her degree, then finish law school. She took a job as a federal tax attorney, working for the IRS, which gives her an interesting perspective on our tax code. Her husband became a christian counselor, and they ran a successful counseling business together, while raising five children together.

I think one of the most impressive things that they did during this time period was also to provide homes for twenty-three foster children, while raising their own. They both definitely have a heart for others in need, and it really takes a special kind of person to invest in the lives of at-risk teens over a significant portion of their lives. No matter your opinion about her other political stances, you have to admire that in Mrs. Bachman.

Eventually, she was drawn into politics on a local level at first due to her concerns about the decline of education in Minnesota and around the nation. She became active on the grass roots level in a campaign to demand more local accountability and less federal government interference. When an incumbent state senator refused to listen to her concerns and those of others like her, she pretty much accidentally ended up running against him herself in the republican primary, and won.

Mrs. Bachman makes a very clear and unabashed case for her own core Christian and Conservative principles, upon which she bases her political and personal decisions. She seemed to have problems expressing those as effectively on a national stage, under the spotlights, but that's politics.

Becoming Ray Bradbury by Jonathan R. Eller

This is an extraordinarily complete and comprehensive account of how Ray Bradbury was inspired and created all of his stories and novels. Painstakingly filled with details, it's a very slow read.

Bradbury began writing while quite young, and was heavily involved in the science fiction fan community in the Los Angeles area. The book is full of information about his relationships with many of the players in the early SF field, such as Leigh Bracket, Henry Kuttner, August Derleth, Hannes Bok, and many others.

Unfortunately, it tends to loop back upon itself chronologically at times, which can be a bit confusing.

One quote I found amusing:

"Late in 1945, he would remark to (August) Derleth, 'God, are there no happy big-time writers?'"

It seemed to take him a while, personally, to find happiness, as he lived with his parents and even slept in the same bed with his older brother until his marriage at age 27.

The book mentions "Franz Werfel's perennial bestseller The Song of Bernadette", which I found interesting. I am not alone in having nominated Werfel's Star of the Unborn as the all-time worst SF novel ever published.

Another interesting passage:

"He (Bradbury) was able to use the evolving Dark Carnival collection to signify that a literary author had emerged from a genre where writers were often seen as entertainers rather than authors..."

I tend to enjoy "entertainers" more than "authors", myself. Non-fiction reading keeps me well aware of the miserable state of most human experience. I much prefer to read to escape from reality.

A great book for the serious Bradbury student.