My Nerdy Friend

Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery: Even More of the World’s Most Outrageous Scams, by Andreas Schroeder

Some history on Andreas Schroder that I picked up from Google: Since 1991, Andreas Schroeder has been a regular on the very popular national CBC-Radio show “Basic Black” with Arthur Black. Each month, Schroeder recounts, with wry understatement, yet another outrageous scam or particularly notable rip-off, leaving his listeners speechless with disbelief, amusement, and even grudging admiration.

Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery is his third collection of these stories, building on the popularity of his two previous books. It’s an interesting and decent enough book but not really that thrilling, or maybe just not my thing. There were a couple of stories that stood out as particularly entertaining.

The Picasso forger Elmyr de Hory becomes so infamous that people start to forge his own forgeries! He becomes so prolific over a “career” spanning several decades that it’s not only possible, but entirely likely, that his forgeries of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, and Braques hang in museums around the world, nobody being aware that they are not actually authentic. To me, this brings up an interesting question. If nobody can tell if something is a forgery, does it really matter? Are we going to museums to see grand works of art, or are we going because of who painted them? This is tricky question for me because on the one hand I have gone to museums specifically to see works painted by Leonardo Da Vinci and I would be exceedingly disappointed to discover they were forgeries. On the other hand, I have zero interest in the debate over “who was William Shakespeare” because I don’t really care. I love his plays, and we know they were written by someone going by the name of Shakespeare, but I don’t care if they were actually written by the specific person we’ve come to understand was him. I guess other than trying to identify a descendant, I’m not sure it really matters. Maybe this is a topic for an old-style “salon” discussion.

In another story, an ingenious and peculiar bomber going by the name of Dagobert Duck (German for Scrooge McDuck) held hostage one of Germany’s largest department stores for years. The is recent enough that I feel I should remember news about it, but unfortunately I don’t. However, the story is still intriguing for his ingenuity, understanding of police process and precise planning for all contingencies. In fact, the police failed on 30 separate attempts to capture Dagobert at various money-drop locations he proposed, but he always managed to elude them (although he also failed to pick up the money as well … hard to day who was more ridiculous). This is definitely worth your time to visit a Wikipedia page about it, or read about it here.

Rating: Maybe borrow it, if this type of thing interests you.

The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton

One of the most surprising things about this book is not that it was written by a woman, but that she was a teenager at the time she wrote it. It has such amazing insight into the lives of two groups (not quite gangs) of boys from opposite sides of the tracks. The Socs (short for Socials, and pronounced similarly) from the richer part of town and the Greasers from the poorer side. The bulk of the story takes place after an unfortunate sequence of events leaves one Soc dead and two Greasers on the run from police. Ultimately, members from each group break from the bounds of their class by performing acts of personal courage, and their reasons for doing so form the moral basis of the book.

After reading this book, my book club watched the original 80’s movie, which was chock-full of the heart-throbs of the day; Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez. The movie made we want to rewatch Breakfast Club, Ghost and St. Elmo’s Fire again. Ah, the 80’s. Good times!

Not much else to say about this book other than if you’ve never read it you should do so right now. Due to alleged “controversial themes” of gang violence and underage drinking/smoking, the book has been banned in some places, which is all the more reason to read it. I am intensely opposed to the banning of books. My home town was Peterborough, Ontario, and a short distance a way was a town called Lakefield where Margaret Laurence lived for many years. One of my towns greatest shames, IMO, was when a group of parents (some of whom were friends of my parents) tried to get The Diviners banned in the high school libraries for being “obscene” and “blasphemous”. (Blasphemous!!!??? WTF?? Blasphemous shouldn’t even be a thing.) Some of these parents hadn’t even read the book, as is often the case with book-banning vigilantes. And the author lived just down the road! We should have been celebrating her proximity to us, not embarrassing ourselves. I was glad to leave that town…

Rating: Buy it. You should have this one in your permanent collection, next to The Diviners and Catcher in the Rye.

The Perfect Stranger, Megan Miranda

Why does it seem that in every story about a single woman embroiled in a mystery, especially if there is an element of personal danger, there is a handsome, unattached police officer with whom she hooks up? It’s just so … predictable. But despite that (or because of it?) I always find myself liking it. Maybe this is just my thing. Some people have their vampires and werewolves, some have their creepy manipulative sex adicts and I have my handsome working-the-case detectives. It would actually be a lot more convenient for me if these were actually classified as a type. “Detective Romances” of “Mystery Affairs”. When I have my own used book store it’s going to have this as a section. Right next to the Science Fiction & Fantasy shelves.

Anyway …. this particular version of the Detective Romance had one added bonus in that the author doesn’t spend any time describing the female lead, as most of them do, as “tall” and “blond” and “thin” and “green-eyed”. Certain details come out as a matter of course, forming part of the basis of the mystery, but there are thankfully no lengthy paragraphs extolling her beauty. This makes her much more relatable because she could be anyone. The story itself has quite a few unexpected surprises without resorting to one giant twist, making it hard to “spoil”. I found it an enjoyable summer read and in fact, I finished it on a flight to Ireland for my summer vacation. If mysteries are also your perfect summer read, then this is a good choice. People will wawnt to compare it to Girl On The Train or Gone Girl, but really the only things in common are that there is a mystery to solve and that the lead character is a woman who appears to be involved in some way. I suspect it would also probably make a good movie (which, by the way, is not necessarily the highest compliment for a book…).

Rating: Borrow it.

PS If you are one of my friends waiting to borrow this book, PM me and I’ll get it to you.

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow

I’ve heard about Cory Doctorow, but never really knew what he did. Turns out he’s a writer! And a Canadian, and a computer geek and a proponent of free sharing of all digital media. In some ways, I am very sheltered.

Needless to say, Little Brother is the first of Cory’s books that I’ve read. For context, I want to point out that this book was written in 2008, which was the year of the US subprime mortgage crash and subsequent global economic collapse, Stephen Harper formally apologized to Canada’s First Nations People, CERN comes to life and SpaceX makes orbit with the Falcon 1, and Barack Obama is elected 44th President of the United States.

Within this backdrop, Little Brother is a terrifying account of how easily the USA (or a part of it) could become a police state in the aftermath of a terrorist event and how quickly, in turn, it becomes a matter of course to monitor and track the activities of every single citizen looking for anomalies in order to identify and arrest potential terrorists. In the book, the police are the Department of Homeland Security, and, they whittle down the freedoms of San Franciscans in the name of “national security”. This is a Young Adult book, so of course it takes the precocious computer talents of a 17 year old high schooler to find the cracks in the armour of the DHS’s high tech security and eventually bring the system to it’s knees.

The terrifying part is how 9 years later, under the 45th President, Donald Trump, we are closer than ever to that becoming a reality. Donald Trump is gas-lighting America, and they don’t even know it. He’s already managed to convince people to believe whatever “truth” they want and to disregard the rest as “alternative facts” or “fake news” and NRA has eluded to the idea that using their precious guns to shoot democrats and “liberal elites” would be good for the country.  In Little Brother, they find a way out of the insanity. I hope we will be as lucky…

Rating; READ THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW! Buy many copies and give them away. In fact, if you asked, Cory Doctorow might even let you have electronic copies for free. Just tell him M1k3y thought it was a good idea.

My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem

The last Gloria Steinem book i read was Revolution From Within, at the age of 27, when I thought a was having a crisis of existentialism and aging. Hahahahahhaha!!! [sigh]

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that our society doesn’t stop to learn enough from our own elders. I wonder why that is? Gloria, who has spent her entire life traveling the road, talking to people, and learning from them, shares vignettes of her life and experience with us in this book. It’s an interesting approach, and the result is a mix of tidbits ranging from things I have little interest in to things I wish she’d write an entire book about on it’s own. What it does do is take us traveling with her through her tales of life on the road.

We had a wonderful book club discussion about this book, even though at the time of our meeting not one of us had managed to finish it. Our club is an interesting mix of vibrant and intelligent women. One is becoming a wine connoisseur, one is an engineer, one holds multiple degrees including one in theology and one is a senior sales executive. Or, to look at it a different way, one is a young millennial and 3 are in or about their fifties. And yet another: one has children and three do not (soon to be two and two).

There have been many ways in which our lives and experiences have separated us (and joined us), all of which have lead to more enriching book club discussions, but one that never before occurred to me was my experience of growing up privileged versus their childhoods. In my case, I had the good fortune of parents who stayed married at least until I left home for university, a single home for my entire childhood, enough (although not an excess of) money to do and have more or less anything we wanted. In their case, they had to struggle through broken families rebuilt with step-parents and siblings, financial difficulties, frequent moving from place to place, immigrating to a new country and struggling to find a home. The struggles faced in their respective childhoods have lead to survivalism and determination to accomplish what perhaps felt out of reach at one time. In my case, with a seemingly solid family base remained intact until after I left home, I was very fortunate to have a pretty easy life. Our discussion was a good reminder to me of that.

I wasn’t without difficulties of my own difficulties, but they were a bit different. When I started high school, my childhood best friend suddenly “unfriended” me and became the ringleader of a group of students who picked on me for the next 5 years. I navigated through the bullying, made new friends and was pretty happy, and then my high school best friend got a ride home from grade 12 prom with my date and got all make-out-y with him in the car. Now, this is a kind of high school right-of-passage thing that’s probably happened to everyone, but to my mind I had two best friends in my life to that point and I was betrayed by both of them. Today, I realize, I have acquired a fair number of behaviours that are all tactics designed to protect myself from that kind of betrayal again. It’s survivalism, in a way, but it’s protectionism, not determination, and I admire that determination in my book club friends. They are such strong women and they should be proud of who they have become.

No matter what you might think of Gloria Steinem and her politics and activism, it can’t be denied that she has a great power to listen to people and cause them to reflect on their own lives and choices. I love that.

Rating: Buy it. You’ll want to read bits of this again.

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is not a very nice man, in the nicest way of putting it, or is a raging homophobe and racist, in the less nice but more accurate way of putting it. After having read his book, I’d hazard a guess that he’s also a wee bit of a misogynist.

Reading Ender’s Game, it was very difficult to separate the man from the book, especially with delightful  quotes such as “A few girls. They don’t often pass the tests to get in. Too many centuries of evolution are working against them.” And OSC doesn’t make it easy. The books starts out kind of child abuse-y, with Ender, at 6 years of age, being whisked away to an off-world Battle School where he is trained to be a military soldier. Turns out he’s one of many young prodigies, one of whom must rise to become Commander of an invasion fleet sent to do battle against an alien enemy. The young children learn to fight through battle simulations and some unhealthy isolation and competition where teenagers beat the crap out of 7 and 8 year olds. Charming.

Eventually, Ender gets a bit older (let’s say 11 or 12) and the book gets easier to read and more enjoyable as a result. I think it’s because it’s less creepy and disturbing to envision a 12 year old prodigy learning to fight space battles than a kid who should just be learning rhyming words. It’s a bit of a shame because the story itself is clever and engaging otherwse. There are two more books in the series, but the first one wraps things up well enough that there’s no particular or compelling need to read the others, and I doubt I will. But I don’t regret reading this one at all.

Rating: Borrow it. Be very careful to borrow it, and if it’s gifted to you then pass it on to the next person you see who hints they might buy it. Let’s keep the money out of OSC’s pockets and donate it to an LGBTQ organization instead.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

A group of oppressed black maids join forces with a quirky, ostracized white woman in Mississippi to write a tell-all book about the families for whom they work. [Before I go further, in this post I do not mean to undermine or minimize in any way the obstacles and dangers that these women faced by putting their stories down on paper and I fully understand and am aware of my own privilege. And with that said ….]

OMG this is a DREAM! To find like-minded people working for assholes who push them aside, take credit for their work, make sexist remarks in front of them and their peers, don’t listen, interrupt them, undermine or ignore their promotion opportunities, and bad-mouth them to coworkers (not to mention steal, bully, lie and threaten) and to be able to put all of these stories anonymously into a book would be so liberating and therapeutic!!! I SHOULD TOTALLY MAKE THIS HAPPEN!

The Help (specifically, the actual maids from the book) faced, and possibly still face, challenges for which my contemporaries have no parallels, ranging from being fired, to being framed and arrested for theft, to murder. What we potentially face is backlash in terms of limited future job prospects through damaged reputations within our chosen industries because most people’s bosses have more powerful connections that we ourselves to. This is a big difference, but it’s still not nothing. I suspect many, many people not only have stories to tell, but stories they WANT to tell. God knows I do!

I loved this book. I loved how a group of black maids rose above the racism and fear, and how a group of women rose above sexism and exclusion, to create something wonderful.

Rating: Buy it.

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

Paul Kalanithi was on his way to becoming a neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in his last year of residency, at the age of 36. The book was written after his diagnosis, and describes his personal journey to find meaning in his life in the face of imminent death.

I feel strongly that anything but glowing praise for this book is somehow blasphemous but to be totally honest, I didn’t love it. Kalanithi gets a little too metaphysical for my taste, and his writing is a little too awkward. Obviously the basic story is sad, and the pain he has to endure is real. And there are little anecdotes which reveal aspects of end-of-life thinking that were unexpected (for example, he and his wife decide to have a baby using sperm frozen prior to his chemotherapy, and they have to clarify with the clinic that they don’t want any extra embryos created during the insemination process in order to spare his wife from having to decide what to do with the last of his living DNA … gawd!!). But then there are other stories that make you ask yourself “what was he thinking??” (for example, weak with stage IV terminal cancer he makes the decision to resume his residency, doing gruelling 14-16 hour days of work during which he can barely stay on his feet which cannot have added to his extremely limited lifespan). But then, who am I to judge the choices one makes in such a situation?

Ultimately, Kalanithi’s writing is just not that inspired, which is almost more sad than anything, since that was one of his life goals. Surprisingly, there is an epilogue written by his wife Lucy that is actually lovely, and the best and most moving part of the book.

Rating: Skip it. Unless you love metaphysics, then I suppose you could consider it …

Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

I read this book before reading What The Psychic told the Pilgrim and it may be partly why my judgement of Pilgrim was so harsh, because Into Thin Air is a breathtaking book of the life and death challenges of facing a completely different kind of hike. Jon Krakauer shares his story of joining a world-renowned mountaineering expedition to climb Mount Everest in 1996, a tragic year that saw more people die on the mountain than any other.

Similarly to the way people are attracted to the Camino by the thousands, by 1996 Everest had become a mecca for many barely qualified people with a spirit of adventure (and a lot of money). Aas a result, Everest had become not just uncomfortably busy but dangerously so. Long lineups of people waiting in freezing temperatures with limited oxygen, desperate to make the last push to the summit, meant more opportunity for people to get caught out in unexpected storms or make bad, high-risk decisions. As well, the desire to summit after having paid lots of money, having made several failed attempts or wanting to make a name for your adventure company may also contribute to poor decisions and greater risk-taking on a mountain trek that is ultimately unforgiving.

Krakauer is more self-aware than Jane Christmas, acknowledging in one (short) section that he, as a journalist climbing Mount Everest to write about the trek in a popular outdoor magazine, probably also contributed to the ego-based, poor decision making on his ill-fated trip. However I don’t believe his presence alone could fully explain everything that went wrong that day. Just like with an airline crash (as I have learned from watching numerous episodes of Mayday), accidents like this almost never result from a single malfunction or wrong decision. This May 9-10 tragedy, being no exception, was an accumulation of bad choices, preparation failures, lack of adherence to pre-established plans and some very unfortunate weather. Any single mistake would likely have been recoverable, but as the mistakes compounded, so did the danger and, ultimately, the death toll.

The Everest climb was Krakauer’s personal pilgrimage and his spiritual growth is in the retelling of an event for which he still carries great degree of guilt. It compels the reader to appreciate and respect the enormity of what an Everest hike entails. 1 of every 4 people who attempt to climb Mount Everest die in the attempt, almost a third of whom are Sherpas hired to lead expeditions, carry load and break trail. When I started at University, we held an assembly where we were told to look to the person on our left and the person on our right and know that one of the 3 of us would not make it to graduation. I don’t know if people who are about to climb mount Everest are given the same speech (with the slight change from “won’t graduate” to “will die”) and I wonder, if they are, how many people would still do it? I have to wonder – aren’t there safer but still spiritually or physically rewarding things to do? Why yes! Yes there are! The Camino, for one! I, for one, would choose that.

Rating: Read it.