War is a Racket

Back in 1935, retired General Smedley Butler told it like it was.  If only we had more retired generals with this level of curiosity for how war works and compassion for those affected by it.  85 years later this short book will probably not come as a surprise or shock to most folks, accustomed as we are to cynicism about every part of our government.  It is still worth the quick read for the wonderfully ironic suggestions Butler makes about how we might stay out of wars.  For example, why not stipulate that anytime there is a draft, every politician and every executive of a company that sells to the Pentagon are to be paid the same wage as the soldiers?  These are, after all, the people who actually undertake the decision to go to war and profit from it, without any risk to their own lives.  Wouldn't we have fewer wars if they were asked to sacrifice something as well? 

The Road to Reality

I didn't actually read all 1,136 pages of Roger Penrose's magnum opus.  I'm only writing a review now because I know I never will.  Not that the book was so atrocious or anything.  I actually quite enjoyed the first 300 pages and learned a lot.  Penrose, however, bit off more than most of us can chew.  He wanted to give a high level, but still mathematically accurate, view of all of the laws of physics in a single volume.  This is not just undergraduate physics here, but extending all the way up through general relativity, the standard model, and string theory, etc ...  

A noble, but ultimately somewhat quixotic goal.  Just who is the audience he is tilting at here?  I know more physics than approximately 99.8998% of Americans (33.4% of people have a bachelor's degree, 0.3% of those degrees are in physics).  I followed the first 250 pages reasonably well, though Penrose presents some of the things I vaguely remember learning 25 years ago in a completely different light (this is not necessarily a critique).  I sorta followed the next 50 pages, but shortly after his math outran what I remember learning his explanations became too terse for me to really understand what was going on.  I did enjoy the fact that the math at the beginning of the book was presented as a physicist, rather than a mathematician -- as something one wants to understand intuitively and ultimately use, not simply a bunch of definitions and arid proofs with nary a hint of why anyone would ever get interested in anything as abstract as the Riemann Sphere.  In fact, this last was really the high point of the book for me.  I never knew what these surfaces were, and yet they were just beyond what I'd learned, so his explanations were enough to give me some glimmer of how interesting the structure is.  After that, as he moved in Grassman algebras and his own special type of tensor notation, it became pretty hard for me to follow.  I guess we can conclude that he was writing for the .001002%?  Talk about being an elitist!

The Obelisk Gate

The second book in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy is not as tightly woven as the first.  It kinda reminds me of the second Matrix movie in this respect -- a few really interesting new ideas are introduced, if not quite fully developed, but there's a whole lot more fighting.  Maybe this specifically befits the setting of the deeping Season in this novel, or maybe this is just a general problem with the second books in trilogies; they are always the hardest to get right.  It's still a very fast and entertaining read though, so I will certainly see whether the third book can surpass the execrable third Matrix.  Rusting Earth, I hope so!

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles' classic about an American trio traveling in North Africa just after WW2 actually gets off to a really slow start.  Not that the first half is completely uninteresting, but it has a sort of pedestrian feel to the way it sets the scene.  I won't say much more than that here for fear of ruining the twist that really sets the novel off and running midway through.  By the way, don't read the introduction.  The rest is a highly recommended, almost existentialist, study in the creation (or lack thereof) of personal meaning.