Dr. Bloodmoney

What a great Philip K Dick novel. I’d put it up there with his best work. It is meandering and strange, and yet very beautiful. Like all good Dick novels, I can’t really explain it by trying to describe it. It’s a post-apocalypse book, but it’s really not like any other such book. It’s more of a poem in a certain sense. Anyway, go read it.

Incidentally, the title is quite unfortunate. Apparently, Dick’s editor changed the title to sound vaguely like Dr. Strangelove. It’s a bit sad that, this late in his career, Dick was still subject to that sort of thing.

Dr. Bloodmoney (Dick)

Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital

This is a well-researched history of New York’s Bellevue hospital. The author cleverly uses what is ostensibly a sort of biography of Bellevue to explore the history of medicine since the 18th century, and to explore the relation between hospitals, the government, and the public in the United States. It’s fascinating stuff.

Bellevue (Oshinsky)

Uncharted

Caveat: I have met and like one of the authors, so I am biased.

I enjoyed this book, though I worry time will treat it poorly, as it has already been victimized by the authors’ success. This book is basically a description of how the authors (and others) created google ngrams. It’s not just technical stuff either – it’s a lot of their philosophy of what they find interesting.

The problem is that a lot of the book consists of interesting patterns and correlation they found using ngrams. The correlations are neat, but given how popular ngrams has gotten (and especially its spike in popularity a few years ago, the examples don’t feel as exciting as they must’ve when the book first came out. This isn’t exactly a knock against the book, but it does make some large sections of it less interesting than they might’ve been.

Uncharted (Aiden, Michel)

It Can’t Happen Here

This book by Sinclair Lewis has been recommended online a lot lately (since it has to do with the idea of a sort of populist fascist coming to power in America). I’m a bit torn on it.
On the one hand, there’s some cleverness in the portrayal of the leader’s rise. And, given that the book is from 1935, in some sense it predicts the nature of fascism as it rose, at least in other countries.

On the other hand, it’s about as subtle as an Ayn Rand novel. Generally speaking, the characters are simplistic and predictable, and (it seemed to me) there was very little cleverness in explaining exactly how the fascist leader character was able to dismantle all the other centers of power and bureaucracy in Washington.

It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis)

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

A delightful history of how the book The Sun Also Rises got written. It’s basically a slice of Hemingway’s early life, right up until that book made him famous (and a tiny bit afterward). My only gripe is it participates in this notion about Hemingway that I’m not quite ready to sign up for – that he was some sort of master of image creation. I’m sure he put forward an image of himself, but that’s true of every writer. It’s not obvious to me that he does it more than just about anyone else, and I don’t see him as especially calculating about it. I mean, he did put forward an image, but he also really actually liked drinking hard and watching bullfights.

Still, it’s well-researched and tells a great story about a great story. If you’re interested in Hemingway, you’ll like it.

Everybody Behaves Badly (Blume)

My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles (Dover Recreational Math)

I finally got myself into Martin Gardner, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. My only complaint (and, it’s a bullshit complaint) is that I really prefer a particular type of puzzle – the kind that is simple enough to easily hold in one’s head, and which doesn’t benefit from having pencil and paper. Some of the puzzles had interesting results, but really just required you to sit and write out a little algebra.

My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles (Gardner)

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

This book was a bit light, but still very enjoyable. The thesis is that play and pleasure very important to the history of science, technology, and culture. As an example, Johnson argues that interest in automata helped lead (if a little indirectly) to the development of computers. Apparently, Babbage was quite interested in these early robots as a child, and it probably influenced his work. Johnson discusses other topics, such as the spice trade and the development of the Jacquard loom.

I found this book fun, though I’m not quite prepared to buy the thesis as such. After all, anything that reaches fruition as a technology must first have been imagined. It’s hard to think of any interesting contraption whose origins couldn’t be traced back to something fun, in part (I suspect) because fun things tend to be easier to make. It’s hard to think of space-rockets coming into existence without someone first making toy versions. Furthermore, people play with all sorts of stuff that, of course, does NOT lead to technological revolutions.

Wonderland (Johnson)

Neurocomic

This is a short comic, which provides a quick sort of overview of some basic neuroscience and history of brain studies. It’s an interesting idea, but it didn’t really work for me. The artwork is very rudimentary, and the concepts are fairly straightforward. It didn’t feel to me like the ideas especially benefited from a comic format. The book did have an interesting sort of dreamy feel, in which a man goes through a sort of Alice in Wonderland style world of the mind, but ultimately I didn’t feel the concept paid off so much as provided occasional enigmatic bookends to sections.

Neurocomic (Farinella, Ros)

The Master of Auschwitz

What a weird and fascinating memoir. Basically, while the British held him after the war, Höss wrote out a memoir, a few short documents, and some letters. They are collected in this book, which through its strangeness becomes a sort of lesson in evil. It is remarkable how utterly banal much of his descriptions of Auschwitz are. Much of his writing dwells on what are basically HR problems, having to do with lazy employees or employees who did a good job but created a bad work environment.

When the methods of mass murder are described, they are done in a remarkably clinical manner, almost as if he’s describing any sort of factory equipment, in terms of its efficiency and effectiveness.

There’s also a sense of incompleteness borne of inconsistency here. At times Höss seems prepared to apologize and admit he lost his way. At other times, he reaffirms his commitment to national socialism, or makes comments about how dangerous Jews are. He also, perhaps most inexplicably, complains about the bad treatment he felt he was receiving as a prisoner.

Definitely worth reading, as it is a sort of window into a particular form of deranged compartmentalization.

The Master of Auschwitz (Höss, ed. Pastore)