My Nerdy Friend

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff

Is Michael Wolff a daring, insightful journalist or a water-cooler gossip? Is Fire and Fury an illuminating exposé of the Trump White House or a trashy retelling of stories we already know? Is the writing eloquent and astute or is it condescending and convoluted?

Spoiler alert: gossip, trashy,  and condescending.

It’s hard to pinpoint what is the most annoying thing about Michael Wolff’s book (from the many, many choices), but my money is on his excessive overuse of the hyphen. He uses this punctuational diversion to insert random “clarifying” content into the middle of sentences, on average about once every paragraph. Here is one of the most nauseating examples of this writing “style”:

During a dinner of Dover sole, haricots verts, and thumbelina carrots — Kushner, seated with the Chinese first couple, Bannon at the end of the table — the attack on Al Shayrat airfield was launched.

For the love of god.

Wolff also has a not-very-endearing habit of insinuating things that might be going on without really ever telling you what the details of those things are. For instance, he went on the talk-show book tour and stated that Trump was having an affair with one of his staffers. He insinuated that the book would revealed who the affair was with, but to find out the details, you would have to buy the book and then “read between the lines”.  When asked out-right by the talk-show hosts to say who it was (since he brought it up, after all), he would just smirk and repeat that the answer was “in the book”. He is literally a child. No wonder he was overlooked for so long while he lurked about in the White House … Trump probably thought they were on a play date.

I imagine a conversation with Wolff in high school going something like this:

Michael Wolff: I was in Mr. Taylor’s closet  and I heard him talking to Mrs. Stephens.

Classmate Who Foolishly Engaged: Really? What did they say? Wait, why were you in the closet?

MW: I was …er …. doing homework. They were talking about the students in their classes! It was so mean that I’m going to write about it in the school newspaper!

CWFE: What did they say?

MW: Mean things! It will be in the newspaper.

CWFE: But, what mean things did they say?

MW: You will never believe it! It was so shocking and mean! It will all be in the story.

CWFE: Why can’t you just tell me now?

MW: I did just tell you. I told you it will be in the story. Probably in the form of an indecipherable puzzle.

CWFE: What?

MW: Yeah, that way nobody can say I said anything, even though I’m saying everything! I am so amazingly smart and you are all so stupid!

CWFE:

MW: … so there …

Rating: Please, just skip it. Your best bet is to just walk away now. Don’t make the mistake of engaging.

Additional note to exposé authors: I have yet to read a unauthorized exposé that hasn’t made me lose more respect for the author than the person they are trying to expose. Just sayin’.

Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation is a very weird book, but it doesn’t start out that way. It starts out just everyday-weird, like a kind of scifi mystery leading you to mildly wonder what could be causing the unusual things that are happening? Is it alien? Human experimentation? Evolution gone awry? But instead of drawing you closer to an answer, it just exponentially ramps up the weirdness. This is what the graph of weirdness looks like as you read further along in the book:

Eventually you feel like you know less about what’s going on that you did when you started. I wasn’t worried, though, because I was going to see the movie which I figured would help. It didn’t. If anything, the movie was even weirder than the book. It also wasn’t so much based on the book as (very) loosely inspired by it. Again, it starts out promising, doing an interesting job of translating a very cerebral book into a very visual movie while managing to maintain some of the mood and suspense. But before long it, too, soon falls off the edge into crazy-land. The only clarifying the movie seems to do is to confirm that the weirdness is of alien origin. Don’t get me wrong, apart from one Revenant-channeling scene the movie wasn’t un-enjoyable, it was just … weird. Really freaking weird.

But I do have to give kudos to Alex Garland, the screenwriter/director. He manages to take random snippets from the book and create a whole new, equally but differently, strange movie. There are still the women scientists (5 instead of 4, and with names in the movie which they are not given in the book), there is still the village of people-shaped plants, there’s a lighthouse (which, in keeping with the oddities, is never actually ascended), and there are animal/human(?) hybrids. There’s also the creature which in the book is referred to as the Crawler and in the movie is … god only knows. Some kind of kaleidoscope, or a Mendlebrot set, that might also be a person? Or a copy of a person? Or maybe a refraction?

You get the idea. Or rather, you don’t get the idea even at all, which I think might be the point.

Rating: If you are a fan of scifi, then totally read it. There are two other books in the series which I plan to read, at the risk of becoming even more baffled, in the hopes of having even one thing explained.

Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari

In keeping with the argumentation style of this book, let’s jump straight to the conclusion.

Rating: Skip it.

I can only presume that Harari bases Homo Deus on a solid foundation of clearly articulated arguments laid out in his earlier book, Sapiens, and that he assumes this justifies his sweeping generalizations and excessive conclusion-jumping in this most recent one. Or, it’s just a badly written book. Regardless, if you want to be scared shitless about our future amongst the artificially intelligent robot nation, then read these two blog entries instead. They are lengthy, but much shorter – and much better – than Harari. If “scared shitless” is not your personal goal, then just read the first one and do not, under any circumstances, read part II.

The AI Revolution Part I: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

The AI Revolution Part II: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

I don’t want to review this book per se. There is a LOT to say, but I’m not really qualified, and there are George Eliot scholars out there who can do a much better job. In fact, one of them – an actual George Eliot scholar – is coming to our book club meeting …. SQUEEE!! Instead, with the help of a few mocked-up timelines, I want to talk about things that surprised me, several of which were things that maybe shouldn’t have.

ASIDE: I just want to say how much I love timelines. I love way they provide visual representations of events in relation to each other in a way that my brain seems incapable of doing. I wish high school history had been taught this way, instead of memorising a list of events related to Napoleon’s rise and fall (what year did he get exiled to Elba, again? I have no freaking clue!) My favourite timeline ever was found in the Star Trek: Experience attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton, although I’m sure that’s a surprise to exactly no one. /aside

One surprise for me was how knowledgeable George Eliot was on current directions in medical science, particularly in the treatment of specific illnesses such as fevers. She was also well versed in a trend towards what I will call the Separation of Diagnosis and Dispensation. But, then again, Mary Shelley was extremely well informed on the topic of medical science, and Frankenstein was published the year after George Eliot was born. So perhaps it was not uncommon to be so learned.

It also surprised me that in the time of the early 1830’s they would be building a railway across the country, but as the timeline reveals, the first railway actually opened in the mid-1820’s. In the 1830’s, it appears a bit of a publicity stunt was held, where a race horse was pitted against a steam locomotive (the horse won). Apparently we humans have a strange and long-standing tradition of racing incongruous things – during Shark Week 2017, Discovery held a race between Michael Phelps and a great white shark (sort of).

And then there is George Eliot’s knowledge and awareness of the political situations in Great Britain, and how she weaves these into her story. During the time frame of the book, Britain passed a parliamentary reform bill that addressed several inequalities in the voting structure and enfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters. But again, many interesting political events were happening during her life that may have contributed to her interest, including Catholic emancipation, Napoleon declaring himself emperor and anti-slavery movements, including the American civil war.

Finally, I am curious as to why George Eliot felt it necessary to publish her books under a male pseudonym, when so many important books by women were published during her life, like Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Little Women to name just a few. Maybe it’s because her book shows such depth of knowledge on topics women were not expected to know or understand? I am hoping our honoured book club guest can speak to this.

Rating: Buy it! Fair warning, it’s 800 pages of Victorian-style writing, and if you are going to read it, you are best advised to set yourself a modest daily goal. But it’s absolutely worth it in the end.

What Happened is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s account of the 2016 Presidential campaign and the events leading up to her shocking election-day loss to a complete idiot.

Personally, I believe what happened was the result of a 40 year campaign of misogyny and sexism, starting with her original decision to keep her own name (where she eventually relented because it was considered damaging to her husband’s career) through her efforts in 1993 to create a healthcare reform package as First Lady (when she was told to keep her place and stay out of public policy matters), to her current run for president (when anti-Hillary sentiment included t-shirts that read Trump That Bitch). This campaign went to such extremes as accusations that she arranged the assassination of people who interfered with her ambitions.

What is amazing (a sentiment that for some reason gets very little airplay) is that Hillary has been under insane scrutiny for 4 decades and the worst thing anyone has been able to find is a fairly common, albeit misguided, use of a home email server used for government correspondence. Even a trumped-up  (pardon the pun) Benghazi scandal failed to produce anything of import, despite the best efforts of Republican dissenters during an 11 hour hearing before the Select Committee. She has not been found to murder people, steal money from her family’s Foundation or even lie excessively, despite the very best attempts of her enemies to prove otherwise. And if someone with that much relentless dirt-digging still comes through fairly clean, then what is wrong with the world? She should be sainted, for crying out loud! She’s certainly more sincerely devout than most of public figures on the religious right. So what are we left with? We hate her because she’s a “Clinton” and we hate her because she’s a woman. What else is there?

Meanwhile in her book, in her usual gracious way, Hillary is thoughtful and introspective, addressing a myriad of additional factors that contributed to her defeat, including several for which she takes personal responsibility (such as being a poor campaigner and underestimating the effect of a reality-TV election). A lot of her personal stories brought back vivid memories of similar stories in my life and career.

Suddenly one of the men reached across the table, grabbed me by my turtleneck, and yanked me toward him. He hissed in my face, “Just shut up.”

When I was fairly young and new to my engineering career, I was in a meeting with a male colleague (an MBA graduate – not particularly relevant except it put me off MBA grads more or less for good). I don’t remember the conversation we were having exactly, except that I was objecting to much of what he was saying because it didn’t make sense for the company and suddenly, during one of my objections, he thrust his finger into my face and said “You just shut up. Just. Shut. Up!”  At the time, I was shocked and livid, and sat in stone-cold silence until the meeting was over at which point I basically got up and stomped away. Of course, today I would have told him where he could shove his stupid finger if he didn’t get it the hell out of my face and it bugs the crap out of me that I didn’t do that back then. However, by telling her own story, maybe Hillary will enable some other young woman to stand up and demand to be heard, no matter who is trying to silence her.

And that’s really the point. I know Hillary lost the election. But it’s possible that this loss, to the worst kind of person imaginable, has rallied women to work together and to say “enough” and to finally realize that our voices have power. In the days following the election, a movement began that ultimately became the 2017 Women’s March, held the day after the inauguration. 500,000 people marched in Washington with 4 million more across the United States and 5 million world wide. The March, while intentionally not naming the new president as its target, was very definitely protesting the policies of the new government. This March has now become an annual,  global event.

And that wasn’t all. Within the wave of protests and demands to be heard, we also saw the scientific community come together under the threat of false science doctrine, global warming denial, and “clean coal”. They launched the March for Science on Earth Day, April 22, 2017, which has also become an annual event. Additional protests took place throughout the 2017 year to speak out against detainment of refugees, travel bans, immigrant deportation, US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and so on.

Then, in October of 2017, following the revelations of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement began, and once again women were rallying together and demanding to not only be heard, but to be believed. Women were speaking about rampant sexual misconduct in industries ranging from entertainment to government to academia. It didn’t stop there. #MeToo lead directly to #TimesUp, which embraced taking a stand for acknowledgement and recognition and adding a pointed call for action. Individual women defied misogynist strongholds by running for public office and winning. And in just the most recent example of public outcry and protest, the student survivors of the Stone Douglas school shooting have started a movement to defy the NRA and demand measures for gun control. These teenagers, in just two weeks, have held rallies, travelled to town hall meetings in an effort to hold politicians accountable, organised school walkout protests across the US, influenced at least 15 companies to sever ties with the NRA and motivated 2 retail outlets to voluntarily stop selling assault rifles and to require a minimum age of 18 to buy any gun. There is a growing feeling, along with a body of recent evidence, to suggest that these protests are working and this, in turn, may be inspiring even more people to join the fight.

Resist, Insist, Persist, Enlist

I don’t necessarily believe that the current swell of activism started just because Hillary lost the election. But I do believe that the extenuating circumstances of her loss played a major role. Because, despite whether you are one of those people who fall on the “hate her” or “love her” side of the coin, most of us can relate to the shitty ways she was treated during the campaign:

• Losing a job for which you are the most qualified candidate by far to a completely unqualified buffoon
• Being intimidated by a man who lurks menacingly behind us while we are simply trying to complete a task
• Struggling to maintain a professional discourse while a man makes jokes about your height, weight, hair, looks or clothing.
• Constantly being interrupted in the midst of a logical argument about which you are highly educated by man yelling “you’re wrong!”

Maybe Hillary’s battle and her loss resonated a little more deeply with us than anyone expected. I admire Hillary immensely for her resilience in the face of forces that I couldn’t imagine having to bear. But watching her face the onslaught with such dignity and stoicism made me think that yes,  I could do it too, and maybe that’s what has inspired everyone else as well. History will look back on these days and try to attribute a catalyst to the sudden uprising of movements working to change the world and I think it’s possible that the catalyst they find will be Hillary Clinton. Her quest to become the first woman president of the most powerful country on Earth may well alter the course of history, and this is what will be her legacy.

And for this, Hillary, we owe you our thanks.

David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell

I’m a bit done with Malcolm Gladwell. I really enjoyed Outliers (still do) but each subsequent book as been less and less enjoyable. I suspect it’s how he tends to play a bit loose and fancy free with the data he collects.

In this book, he explains the story of David and Goliath not as an underdog victory so much as a victory due to incorrect assumptions as to how the battle will be met. In the D&G case, Goliath assumes David will meet him in close combat where he, Goliath, has the obvious advantage. In fact, David chooses to battle using his sling shot from a distance where the advantage is reversed. However, Gladwell also claims David won this fight because Goliath was suffering from a pituitary tumour. His point seems to be that we often get these kinds of stories wrong.

Gladwell then proceeds argue that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Not exactly a revolutionary idea, there, Malcolm. He supports this claim by making much of the inverted U curve, but it’s really a simple idea that’s even told to children in the Goldilocks fairy tale: too little of something = bad, just enough of something = good, too much of something = bad.

Gladwell almost tricked me into being impressed with his thesis when he makes the argument that when deciding which school to attend for your post-secondary education, you should pick the one where you have the best chance at being at the top of your class, and not the school with the best reputation. In other words, a second-tier school where you might get 80% is better than attending Harvard where you might get 60%. However, if you take this argument to it’s next extreme, you quickly see that this is not that brilliant a deduction. Would you be better attending a school where you might get 70% in your degree program, or a school where you might fail? Suddenly, the answer seems pretty obvious, even without Gladwell’s help.

Rating: Skip it.

The Culture Map, Erin Meyer

The Culture Map is a non-fiction book that attempts to explain cultural differences between societies (mostly countries) based on 8 separate measures. Meyer convincingly argues that every society falls somewhere on a continuum and how people interact and perceive each other is dependent on where they fall on the continuum relative to each other. For example, on the disagreeing scale, Americans tend to see Germans and Italians as confrontational, and Italians see Germans as also confrontational, however Germans would tend to see Italians as confrontation-avoiders. This is because their relative positions on the scale are:

[confrontational end]   German —— Italian —– American   [non-confrontational end]

The measures that Meyer explores are:

• Communication
• Performance evaluation and negative feedback
• Persuasion
• Leadership and Hierarachy
• Decision Making (Big D versus Little D)
• Trust
• Disagreeing
• Scheduling and Time Management

The book provides some good guidelines for “getting along” with people from various cultures, or at least understanding why they behave the way they do. It does presume a certain amount of desire to understand and work effectively with different people, which not everyone possesses. If you’ve ever heard someone say “why can’t they learn to just do things our way”, then you know someone who might not appreciate being given this book as a gift.

My one selfish complaint is that Canada doesn’t appear among the list of countries on enough of the measures. I can pretty much pretend that Canada falls somewhere between the UK and USA, is that really always the case? There is a surprising mismatch between countries that are emotionally expressive yet simultaneously non-confrontational (such as Mexico or India), so could a similar mismatch exist for some of the measures for Canada? Disappointingly, the book doesn’t say.

Rating: If you work in a multicultural environment of any kind, buy a copy.

The Curve of Time, by M. Wylie Blanchet

After her husband passed away, “Capi” Blanchet packed her 5 young children up onto their 25 foot motor boat and embarked on a series of travels in and around the inside passage of western British Columbia, in search of old Indian villages and other bits of Canadian history. The amazing part of this story is that this was in the late 1920’s!

The individual essays in this book were remarkable, interesting, daring and unbelievable. Capi and her children had close encounters with wildlife (bears and cougars), treacherous tides, and poor weather but at the same time met kind strangers living in the remote forests of BC’s west coast and followed in the footsteps of some of Canada’s earliest explorers and settlers.

The book, however, is really not much more than a personal travel diary. It lacks the benefit of an insightful editor who might have been able to suggest an overarching theme to tie all of the stories together and provide some kind of denouement. Reflecting on my own travel diaries, of which I have many, I can see they really serve more as personal memoirs than essays for public consumption. That said, I believe there is enjoyment to be found in reading a travel diary as it happens if you have a vested interest in the person travelling or the places being travelled to. As stories of past events, however, aren’t they just a little ponderous? Maybe the trick with Blanchett’s book is to read one entry per day, and pretend events are playing out in real time.

Rating: If you are an overachieving outdoors-person or lover of the wilds of the BC west coast then buy yourself a copy. Otherwise borrow it, or even give it a pass.

Last year my goal was to read a book a week, and made it to 49 or 51 (depending on how you count). You can read about it here. This year I decided to read at my leisure and see where I landed. The answer is 37 books, or about 3 per month. Admittedly, this is better than I expected – I would have guessed closer to 24 books for the year.

A quick summary: 10 Book Club books, 8 mysteries, 4 nonfiction, 4 pure science, 8 scifi (2 of which were dystopian) and 1 spy novel. Some surprises:

• I thought I would read more science books, but I am happy that I fit more in than last year.
• My scifi count is WAY higher than I expected, since I consider myself more of a fantasy reader than scifi. Which leads me to ….
• ZERO fantasy! Damn.
• It appears that my guilty pleasure is mystery novels.

I’m doing it again this year, but I plan to set a few goals this time. I will read fewer book club books (which are, in a sense, books you read for other people), I will increase my science books to at least 6 (one every other month), and I WILL find a fantasy series that I love!

1. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene (blog entry pending)
2. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
3. Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson
4. All The Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda
5. The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells
6. The Girls, Emma Cline
7. The Travelers, Chris Pavone
8. Persons Unknown, Susie Steiner
9. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown
10. Missing, Presumed, Susie Steiner
11. The Gene, An Intimate History; Siddhartha Mukherjee
12. Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery: Even More of the World’s Most Outrageous Scams, by Andreas Schroeder
13. The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton
14. The Perfect Stranger, Megan Miranda
15. Sojourner: An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission, Andrew Mishkin
16. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
17. My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
18. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
19. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
20. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi
21. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
22. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim, Jane Christmas
23. The Likeness, Tana French
24. Passion on the Vine, by Sergio Esposito
25. Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
26. The Daily Show (the book), by Chris Smith
27. The Particle at the End of the Universe, Sean Carroll
28. The Murder Wall, by Mari Hannah
29. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
30. I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh
31. Foreigner, Robert J. Sawyer
32. The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood
33. Fossil Hunter, Robert J. Sawyer
34. Far-Seer, Robert J. Sawyer
35. The Widow, Fiona Barton
36. No Time for Goodbye, Linwood Barclay
37. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two, Jack Thorne