Review of “The History of Large Federal Dams: Planning, Design, and Construction,” Published by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
This isn’t my usual reading fare, but I couldn’t pass it up because dams are fascinating to me personally. This book is a collection of essays written by engineering historians. They are all well written and easy to comprehend, even the chapter on dam design criteria.
Let the reader be warned, however; this is definitely a historical book, not a book about dams. The authors carefully describe the complex political, economic, and technological problems associated with the construction of hundreds of dams — that’s right, hundreds of dams were constructed by the Reclamation Bureau and the Army Corps of Engineers between 1930 and 1970. This is often referred to as the big dam era, really getting started with the commissioning of Hoover Dam in 1935. But it was far from an easy time for mega projects, and environmental and other considerations finally created enough pressure to end the epoch.
The big dam era was characterized by multipurpose dams, i.e., dams that provided hydroelectric power, flood control, irrigation, and/or river navigation. This collection of essays does a great job covering the entire period.
I never intended to read this book but I was fascinated; however, I skipped a lot of detailed historical facts. If you’re interested in American technological history, this book’s for you — if you can find it …
Review of “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Quanta and Fields” by Sean Carroll
I listen to Sean Carroll’s podcast, Mindscape, every week and he’s always referring to his series of popular science books. This is the second, which does a pretty good job of explaining all things quantum and how they’re applied to the physical world.
There is some math, but it helped me better understand the underlayment of our reality, what I call “subspace” (my phrase not his). The concept of EFFECTIVE FIELD THEORY (AKA quantum field theory) is a good example of the old adage, “what goes around comes around”: physicists are back to the ether concept, which was put to rest at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now, instead of one metaphysical field permeating space, we have an infinite number, which through their interactions create particles, atoms, molecules, and life.
There are a few tricky steps, but this book does a pretty good job getting the gist of our best theory of reality across to a reader who isn’t afraid of mathematics.
A few ideas weren’t explained sufficiently, probably because physicists take them for granted, so I had to resort to Wikipedia a few times. Of course, the probability of my remembering any of this is negligible, so I’ll keep this one on the bookshelf rather than donating it.
I recommend it but, if you aren’t familiar with classical (Newtonian) mechanics, I’d suggest watching these videos first.
Review of “ALL THE DARK WE WILL NOT SEE” by Michael B. Neff
If only my sore eyes, bloodshot from pollen, stress, and lack of sleep, had noticed the first ill omen, waving like a red flag on Waimea beach when surf’s up, on the scintillating cover of this book. A list of names that reads like the playbill for Superman, after he had saved the world yet again, whose meaning I didn’t grasp until my mind had been dulled by drinking in this tale of star-crossed lovers swimming in a shark-infested bay connected to an ocean filled by prehistoric behemoths, a vast chasm only glimpsed by their perspicacious intellects, unobserved by unsuspecting mental midgets like myself. The forbidding cover, a vigilant guardian of truth and their giant eagle, reached into the depths of my soul, like a Stephen King novel on a stormy night, and warned me as clearly as a sunny day, to go no further. Yet I was driven by the will of Vishnu …
Enough of that. My point is that this book is written like poetry, filled with allegory and metaphors. At first I thought this was a great way to reveal Edison Eden’s tragicomic perspective, but the author used it for the narrator … pretty much everyone whose point of view is displayed in this tragic tale of deception, manipulation, betrayal and outright insanity. The feelings of the characters are amplified wildly by the writing style. It was a bit much for me.
This is a well-written book with some annoying grammatical errors, e.g., systematic missing possessive apostrophes in the same person’s name. Almost like a machine wrote it. Probably the publisher’s editing software.
This is a work of fiction, so the Office of Special Counsel and several other whistleblower protection agencies, were replaced by the fictitious Office of Whistleblower Counsel in the novel. The author weaves a believable imaginary world around this dim space in a concrete bastion erected on K Street, populate by gods, demons, acolytes, and other celestial beings.
It isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s a good read if you like metaphorical writing …
Review of “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson
I’m not certain where to start. This long book (563 pp) is actually two books, one fiction, the other nonfiction, interweaved so that the reader can’t follow either story. The central plot involves a lonely middle-aged woman who finds a friend in the most unlikely of places. It follows her career with the Ministry for the Future over about 25 years. The title comes from the second, nonfiction, story wedged into the real story. This is the author’s vision of the world over the next few decades; global warming is a central theme, but there are many other questions. In fact the backstory takes over the book. About half the chapters are explanations of various economic indices, technologies, and social theories that relate to the current plethora of problems confronting earth and humanity. However, this nonfiction narrative is presented as fiction, i.e., no footnotes, references, or bibliography. I’m sure they tried to get all these details correct but I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t care for “what if” nonfiction.
The choice of narration style is confusing. In fact, there may be three books contained in these pages: the main story is told in a normal manner by a third person narrator, with multiple points of view (actually I think only two), and literary attention paid to mundane details in Zurich, Switzerland. But this is from the perspective of the central character, who loves Zurich, even though she never bothered to learn Swiss German (what?). I felt like I was learning German from all the street names and other paraphernalia.
The nonfiction book is a series of essays of various aspects of society and technology, including excruciating details about glacial mechanics (boring!), finance, etc. This is also told by a third-person narrator, like reading a technical report.
The third book is a series of comments and reflections by people who live through the time period presented in the book, all in first-person, often with no identification. They often have no bearing on the plot. Redundant. These are interspersed with metaphysical comments from … the sun, other nonliving agents. Kind of like poetic interludes. And there are the Socratic interludes, in which unnamed persons debate various philosophical points.
I see what the author was trying to do, but it doesn’t work for me. It reads like they had three manuscripts (or piles of notes) on their desk, and jammed them together. Thus there is no flow and the reader is always having to shift reading mode while looking hopelessly for a plot.
And then there’s grammar and punctuation. I was looking for a pattern here: run-on sentences that lost their subject on their meandering path; sentence fragments; quotation marks for dialogue … or not. I thought perhaps the three threads used different writing styles to punctuate their mood, but I found nothing. The main story used quotation marks haphazardly. I had to reread at least one sentence on every page, often more. This is a clumsily written book.
The cover proclaims that this is one of Barrack Obama’s favorite books of the year. I doubt he finished it, just like the person who gave it to me, three-quarters completed – I finished it, not because it was entertaining or a pleasant diversion. I’m just a stubborn reader.
I could go on, but it isn’t worth the effort …
Review of “Sleeping Giants” by Sylvain Neuvel
I’ve been reading science fiction in preparation for a writers workshop, focusing on the First Contact sub-genre. This commercially published book violates most of the rules that were introduced … we were also warned that publishing is a crap shoot. This isn’t actually as bad as you might think.
For one thing, this is a great title. It grabbed my attention on the lower shelf at Barnes and Noble, and that takes a lot of effort (kneeling down, trying not to be trampled). It was nestled between a lot of second and third books in trilogies. I guess not many people get past the first one. In fact, the fine print says this is book one of the Themis series. Fortunately, it is fine as a standalone story, ending on a hopeful note but giving the curious reader the chance to see how humanity screws up this galactic opportunity. I like the happy ending and skip the sequels.
The story begins with a little girl falling into an unexpected hole and landing in the palm of a twenty-foot hand. I thought the newspaper story style was convenient, but the entire book is written as interviews, reports, and diary entries. I eventually decided that the unnamed interviewer was the narrator and central character. As you might imagine, this killed the action scenes. They aren’t nearly as exciting when related after the fact. To reveal how the characters feel and their romantic lives, the narrator asks rather personal questions; they aren’t a therapist but only a program manager.
A lot of backstory is introduced by characters introduced simply to supply information. I felt I was missing need-to-know information because of this plot gimmick, until it was too late. Kind of like Perry Mason and his suddenly appearing witnesses.
There isn’t a lot of action, even accounting for the delayed reporting used, but there is a love triangle, jealousy, and even a suddenly psychotic evil scientist. The author’s choice of using an interviewer is interesting but it makes the entire story feel distant, like reading the newspaper, and that isn’t why I read novels.
I’m ambivalent about this story. It isn’t bad and, fortunately, not drawn out, so my recommendation is that it won’t put you to sleep … nor will it keep you on the edge of your seat. After what I said above (about the publishing business), I applaud a publisher willing to take a chance …
Review of “Dreams in the Eternal Machine” by Deni Ellis Béchard
There is no surprise ending to this speculative science-fiction novel. The secret is in the title and explicitly introduced in the first few pages. Everyone on earth, including the planet itself, has been assimilated by an artificial super intelligence whose rapid development far surpassed its creator’s imagination. So what is the plot?
Wrapped in a science fiction cover is a Shakespearean story of betrayal between young people who accidentally meet in an American divided by civil war. Their story is integrated with their separate experiences after assimilation into the machine, and it remains unresolved. The only other evidence of a plot is the general decline in cognitive and emotional wellbeing of the majority of people. This process is explored through several characters whose importance to the plot is never clear. In fact, no one really stood out as being the central character, other than the two young people mentioned above. Having a plot doesn’t require the central character to succeed; failure is the stuff of tragedy and perfectly okay, but no one really struggled against the antagonist (obviously the eternal machine). Their situation is hopeless and there is no chance of escape — not even the slightest. Hopeless.
Given the lack of a coherent plot or even a central character, this story is fundamentally about the response of people to a hopeless situation in which there are no threats of any kind. The machine not only feeds and cares for its dependents, it creates any world they want to see and experience. Spoiler alert: Heaven gets old after a few centuries.
The writing is very good, and the author doesn’t miss a trick to get an agent’s attention and produce a popular book. It seems to me that agents probably don’t think very hard about the books they represent. And, of course, the reader doesn’t find out until it’s too late, the money spent. That’s how I felt. As far as the reviews, I never cease to be amazed at the glowing reviews written about this novel; I guess critics don’t read books either.
Review of “Earth Abides” by George R. Stewart
This story unfolds in the aftermath of a global pandemic that kills 99.9% of humans. It was first published in 1947 but, as the cover shows, it is coming soon to streaming services; nevertheless it is grounded in the post-WWII era. The author does a reasonable job of making the story independent of the era. The central character, Ish, witnesses the regeneration of culture but not civilization.
This novel focuses on a graduate student who isn’t a genius, nor is he stupid. In fact he focuses on the intelligence of his fellow survivors continuously. He carries a weight of intellectual solitude throughout his long life, even as The Tribe grows in number. The author interweaves the emotional torment of Ish with the deterioration of the accoutrements of civilization, leading to a not-unexpected finale. The grammar is clumsy, probably because of a lack of writing skill, but the effect is (mostly) positive because of the disintegration of knowledge that can’t be learned outside the classroom , including written language.
Ish continuously contemplates many ideas that plague modern society over the course of this simple and repetitive story. Nevertheless the author does an excellent job of following one person’s interpretation of such a catastrophic event, even if he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is — that may be Stewart’s greatest achievement: no one is as smart as they think they are.
This is a good story that might even bring a tear to your eyes …
Review of “The Forge of God” by Greg Bear
This “First Contact” novel was published in 1987. The back cover was intriguing, so I found a used copy at ThriftBooks. It does not have a (very) happy ending; the story unfolds to a backdrop of hopelessness. The author didn’t wait long to introduce the antagonist. The protagonist was more difficult to identify from an ensemble cast of characters; they were pretty similar in their responses to the crisis. Just to add some spice, there are several characters who bring nothing to the plot other than their response to the end of the world. A lot of dead-end threads.
The grammar is simple but effective whereas the sentences are often awkward; I had to reread them too often.
There is too much going on in this story … and not enough. The author carefully described every character, even if they were only fillers. I appreciate what Greg Bear was (probably?) doing: he wrote a literary science fiction novel in the manner of Arthur C. Clarke (e.g. The Martian Chronicles). I never cared for Arthur C. Clarke’s novels, and this one goes even further, often for no obvious reason. It might work for someone else, however, because it is fairly well written.
I always wince when I see an epilogue. They indicate that the author is running too long and has to wrap up the story ASAP. That was the case here, and I was still left with fundamental, unanswered questions …
Review of “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
This review isn’t going to be as long as this literary classic (985 pp). I’ll skip all the usual analyses about the author’s commentary on contemporary Russian society (circa 1880), although it is set in a small village during the 1840s. The three brothers, Dmitry, Ivan and Aleksey, represent three types of character: rash and brutal; thoughtful and intelligent; emotional and sympathetic. The story centers on Dmitry, who has an ongoing conflict with their father Fyodor over his inheritance from his deceased mother. They are also in love with the same young woman. The tension is palpable and leads to violence. Eventually, Fyodor is murdered and Dmitry is tried for the crime and found guilty by a jury in a fair trial; the incriminating circumstantial evidence is simply too much to overcome. Enough of plot details.
No character is too minor to have their life described in detail, even if they have no relevance to the story. These ancillary stories make up about half the book, including entire chapters, filled with characters who serve no purpose other than showing something about life and death in nineteenth century Russia. The writing is extremely wordy. Some sentences are half a page long; some paragraphs several pages long; none of this makes sense from a literary perspective but appears to be whimsical. No thought by any character is left untouched by a narrator who claims to live in this village, but has the superpower of reading everyone’s mind. Nothing is left for the reader to figure out; every act, desire, emotion is fully explored through contrived scenes that make certain of this.
This book is considered a classic of existentialism for good reason: the characters make no attempt to change or even offer excuses; their innate personality is the reason for the most scandalous behavior — take me as I am or leave me alone! This is the appeal of this gritty story of bad decisions leading to foreseeable outcomes. The take-home message is that people cannot change who they are and should embrace their weaknesses as much as their strengths.
I cannot recommend this book. It is simply too long, filled with extraneous stories, and poorly written. However, if you want to have a taste of the Russian love of pain and suffering, I would suggest some short stories by Chekhov.
Revisión de “La Ciudad y los Perros” de Mario Vargas Llosa
No entendí este libro hasta que lo terminaba leer. El título lo dice todo. Es la historia de dos niños en el colegio militar. El clase de primer año se llama “perros.” Se exploran sus vidas por recuerdos mientras crecen entre otros estudiantes militares. Ellos se convierten hombres jovenes, aliadas y finalmente enemigos después de una muerte trágica. Sus diferentes vidas civiles enfocan en una nińa que crece una mujer joven como lo ven a través sus ojos. Muy confuso para una lectora española principiante como yo. Sin embargo el autora insinúa la diferencia pero pensé que … no sé … estaba confundido.
Este libro es una obra de ficción literaria. Las dos historias se les dice magistralmente: los descripciones de las escenas de colegio y ciudad, diálogos, pensamientos, sentimientos y lucha son excelentes y muy interesantes. Sin embargo nunca cerrarás el diccionario de inglés y español. El vocabulario es enorme.
El autora se mezcla varias temas suavemente: la vida en Perú durante un periodo preocupante; el contraste entre ricos y pobres; adolescencia; crimen y castigo; disciplina y camaradería; violencia y calmada. La lectora se queda con un final agridulce: algunas cosas cambian pero no mucho.
La lectora no se deja colgada: el último capítulo explica y diferencia los dos vidas. Me reí de mi ignorancia. Lo leería de nuevo … cuando mi español sea mucho mejor.
Timothy R. Keen 
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