Category: Book Review

Good Reads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 4.16 by 6029 cinematizens.  

Genre: SciFi; Species: Hard.  

DNA: NASA.

Verdict: SETI, indeed. 

Tagline:  Less can be more.  

Dr Bored missed a place among the astronauts and now monitors satellite data from distant and demoted Pluto, when….   Something happens that makes no sense. The titular object appears and does not behave according to the laws of physics legislated by the Solar System.  Are the Plutocrats up to something? Someone is going to have pull it over and give it a traffic citation.  Who better than the first to see it.  

That narrative is interrupted, deflected, and slowed by backstories, sidestories, understories, and overstories, which all too often crowd out the front story.  On the plus side, there are no cardboard villains gumming up the works as plot devices.  Those who are unenthusiastic about Dr Bored’s mission have reasons which are fully explored. 

There is a lot of trip and then the Arrival. Remember Encounter at Farpoint? 

P.S. ‘Hard’ means lots of STEM-speak. Lots.  None of it contributes to plot or character and all of it was lost on me.  One has been warned.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages rated 4.03 by 3930 litizens.

Genre: Non-Fiction. Species: musings.

DNA: Teutonic.

Verdict: Mad, bad, and brilliant.  

Tagline: ‘Nietzsche will teach’ya.’ 

Nietzsche (1844-1900) has two reputations: First, as a harbinger of Naziism with his Übermensch, and this book folds into that.  It is sometime erroneously supposed that he meant by the title that the Übermensch need not be bound by any morality.  As is often the case with popular interpretations, he means the opposite.  That the ordinary moralism of churchmen, editorialist, school teachers who label things ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is superficial, failing to plumb the depth and complexity of the lifeworld.  In reality evil can come from good and good from evil, rather than being opposites these two intersect, interact, and sometimes one nurtures the other: yin and yang.  If we accept and stop with the simple labels of these everyday moralists without question, we will never understand the deeper and disturbing reality.

His second reputation is as an obscurantist.  It is certainly true that he makes demands on readers.  Mainly because he so categorically rejects conventional wisdom, but also because he is not a systematic thinker (like Kant, Hegel, or Marx). He rejects and reviles such an approach. He contradicts himself, is inconsistent, and is incomplete and admits it, because life is like that. 

But, if a reader relaxes and lets him flow there are rewards to be had without subscribing to his weltanschauung. 

Part of his message is that a lived morality must be self-consciously chosen by the individual, akin to the message in the book of Matthew of the New Testament:  Don’t do things because Christ tells you to do so, do them because they are right.  It is a message as old as Aristotle: do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reason (because it is right).  Nietzsche thought only a few people could accept this responsibility and do it.  They who can do so should be, in fact, are the leaders of society.  This kind of selection is only possible in authoritarian, aristocratic societies, so like Tocqueville, he preferred that social structure, in contrast to Matthew who thought everyone could and should do this or Tocqueville who did not assert his preference onto others. Nietzsche has no such restraints.   

(By the by, this same message can be found in Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, but Nietzsche reviled Kant so much he would not admit it.  Nietzsche often refers to the Chinaman, and that is his racist contempt for the man from Königsberg. That is, Kant was so determined to maintain the consistency of his elaborate system that it became detached from reality, like the European stereotype of a Chinese emperor.)

There is no doubt that Nietzsche was not a man of our time and the pygmies have made careers out of proving that obvious fact.  For him race, class, gender all had decisive meaning. He justified slavery. Smelled the herd in democracy or socialism. He regarded women as barely human.  He drank deeply of Richard Wagner’s music, imbibing a heady Teutonic mysticism, which he denied while wallowing in it.  Some of this is shaded by contemporary translators who elide, soften, gloss, mute these declamations.  

All that said, still his prose burns bright.  Here are a few illustrative passages with my comments beneath, after the dash. 

Preface. ’all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.’

– it takes time for new ideas to be accepted, but once they are accepted, they wander further all around the world. 

’22. Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist  from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but ‘Nature’s conformity to law’…exists only owing to your interpretation…. Scientific findings are not matter merely matters of fact, but a human interpretation and invention.

– truth consists of concepts not naturally occurring facts, e.g., an average, the atom, gravity, ….all are concepts.

28. ‘But how could the German language, even in the prose of Lessing imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his ‘ll Principe’ makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo,  perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of contrast he ventures to present – long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts and a tempo of the gallop, and of the best, most wanton humour.’ 

– Machiavelli’s prose has a cadence, true, but the air of Florence was seldom fine along the sewer the Arno often was. 

42. ‘as far they allow themselves to be understood – for it is their nature to wish to remain something of a puzzle – these philosophers of the future’

– did he anticipate the wizard Martin Heidegger who do not want to be understood because that would reveal that there is nothing behind the curtain to reveal. 

44. ‘Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future – as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken?’  

– ditto above.

46.  religion represents a suicide of reason 

– compare to H. L. Mencken on the body count of religions. 

’63. He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously and even himself – only in relation to his pupils.’ 

– few meet this requirement.  

144. ‘When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if I may say so, is “the barren animal”.’

– sounds like a contemporary US Republican which party will soon ban women from higher education. 

146. ‘He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.’

– you become what preoccupies you. 

169. ‘To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself.’

– talk can be a way of not communicating. 

206. ‘The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the destruction of the exceptional man….’   

– ever more about ever less.

‘the objective man’

‘the lulling poppy of scepticism’

 ‘the conceited ape’

‘a kind of safety police’

214. ‘we firstlings of the twentieth century’

‘good conscience is the respectable pigtail of an idea.

– loved all the above bons mots.

219.  ‘The practice of judging and condemning morally is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow and it is an opportunity for disguised malice.’ 

– the mediocre scholar delights in deprecating great achievers. 

228. virtue has been more injured by the tediousness of its advocates than anything else.

– ditto 

English happiness [utilitarians]

footsteps to self-knowledge

239. unlearns to fear

– this one reminds me of a passage in Machiavelli.  

252 ‘They are not a philosophical race – the English: Bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit generally, Hobbes, Hume and Locke, an abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a “philosopher” for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant uprose and raised himself; it was Locke of whom Schelling rightly said, “Je méprise [I despise] Locke”; in the struggle against the English mechanical stultification of the world…’ 

253.  ‘There are truths – which are best recognised by mediocre minds because they are best adapted for them, there are truths which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre spirits.’

– intellectuals can’t see the obvious. Instead all too often offer elaborate explanations of the dead obvious. 

260. master-morality; slave-morality

‘According to slave-morality, therefore, the “evil” man arouses fear, according, to master-morality, it is precisely the ‘good’ man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being.’

• what rouses the mediocre scholar is not an evil man but a good one, whose example is an embarrassment to his small mind, so he endeavours to bring the great low.  

273. ‘A man who strives after great things, looks upon everyone whom he encounters on his way either as a means of advance, or a delay and hindrance – or as a temporary resting-place.’

• users all.

274. ‘He who does not wish to see the height of a man, looks all the more sharply at what is low in him, and in the foreground – and thereby betrays himself.’ 

– the valets of the world, pace Hegel. The 3rd reader! 

***

While browsing in the Argyle Emporium in Goulburn I came across this cantankerous old frenemy.  Idly, I picked it up and flipped a few pages and started to read, and kept reading, so I decided to buy.  I once had a copy of it in a collection of his works that I shed when I downsized from the university office, thinking I would not get back to it.  

P.S. Nietzsche did warn us in the Genealogy of Morals about the blond beast of prey that pounces on a population with terrible claws driven by insatiable egoism.  If any of that sounds familiar go the head of the class.  

P.S. The opening quotation is from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), Bruce’s song.  

Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008) by K. A. Bedford.

Good Reads meta-data is 390 pages, rated 3.58 by 531 litizens. 

Genre: krimi.

DNA: WA aka Sandgroper.  

Verdict: I couldn’t resist the title.

Tagline: ‘Are we there yet?’

‘It’s a job,’ says the technician who needs both the money and the distraction that work brings.  The machines themselves are simple but the regulations from the Department of Time and Space are not.  Then there are the punters who can be unbelievably stupid. Just as they drive cars like the fools they are, so, too, they drive the time machines!  

Quick primer on Time Machines for those who skipped that class in Future History.  They travel in Time, that is why they are called time machines. Doh!  They do not travel in space.  If your time machine is parked next to the car in your garage in Perth, that is where it stays.  You can set it for 1660 or 1912, yes, but when it arrives at that time, it is still at that very same spot. Most time travel is backward (1) where people go back to change things for better (and always fail: Kismet) and (2) tourism to witness events.  There is little forward time travel since there is no tourist draw, and most do not want to find out about themselves in the future.  Yet there are exceptions. 

Technician is having a bad day: Very. His McKinsey manager is tsk tsking about his Key Performance Indicators. His estranged wife wants more money.  The new apprentice is even more hopeless than the last one.  No matter how expensive the beans, the workshop coffee machine produces brown dishwater. Just when he thinks things can’t get worse, they do. His latest repair job is….  Well, his latest repair job revealed a corpse in the time machine. Ah, that would explain why it didn’t work. Usually a corpse in a time machine is a bird, rat, or a cat. Not this time. Bad, very. 

Worse, the corpse and machine seems to have come – sit down – from the future.

***

Technician is weighted down with the mandatory tiresome backstory. 

Isaac Asimov’s End of Eternity came to mind.

Gave up in confusion, needed a flowchart, run-sheet, and a scorecard. About halfway my confusion became terminal.

John Rossi, The 1964 Phillies: The Story of Baseball’s Most Memorable Collapse (2005). Rev. ed. (2024).

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 3.0 by 1 litizen. 

Genre: History: Species: Baseball.    

DNA: Philly.

Verdict: [Here I go again.]

Tagline: They were all out!  

In 1964 an unprepossessing Philadelphia Phillies baseball team led the National League for 74 consecutive days in the home stretch, World Series tickets were printed, and…the Cinderella Cardinals from St Louis won it all.  Huh?  That result set two records.  For the Phillies: it was longest lead that late in the season to dissipate, and for the Cardinals: the largest deficit overcome in the shortest time.  

The Phillies lost ten straight games in the last fortnight of the season and sank from view. It all started with Chico Ruiz, who stole home, when he shouldn’t have. Tsk, tsk, tsk.  (I have decried this event in other posts and will not add further salt to that old wound.)

Much ‘If only’ second guessing, inevitably, fills the pages about rosters, pitch calls by the catcher, pinch hitters, pitching rotation, use of the windup rather than the stretch, line up cards, batting order, even leads from first base, each and all in an effort to solve the mystery of the debacle. 

But, at the end, as the author admits, there was no mystery.  Or rather the mystery is how an average team like the Phillies, played well enough to lead the balanced Dodgers, the big bats of the Giants, and the laser pitchers of St Louis for so long.

In 1964 only two Phillies made the National League All Star team for the only time in their careers.  The one Hall of Fame player on the roster, pitcher Jim Bunning, had started slowly, and was not an All Star that year, but later he carried the team much of the way. (Stock broker by winter, in the season Bunning always wanted the ball. Two days between starts was fine with him.) Further evidence for the mediocrity of the team is that in the following years it sank still further and still faster, as did most of the members of the 1964 roster who disappeared from view.  

The success in 1964 was a compound of good luck, good management, and some grit.  Though of course in unfailing hindsight the manager — Gene Mauch — was blamed for the defeat, rather than congratulated for the successes of his tactics of ‘little ball.’

‘Little ball?’ asked the fraternity brothers, who have forgotten everything and learned nothing. It means advancing the runner and playing for one run at a time, and relying on defence and pitching to keep the game close. Ergo it involves hit-and-run, hitting behind the runner, bunting for hits, squeeze bunts, tag ups for sacrifice flies, advancing on fielder’s choices, double steals, going deep into pitch counts, and delayed double steals, playing the infield in, pitch outs, double cutoffs, and so on. It also places a premium on defence in the middle of the diamond with a sound double-play combination, a strong-armed centre fielder, and a smart catcher who can block the plate. The final piece of the puzzle is a bullpen of strike-throwing relief pitchers.  

Manager Mauch also played ‘money ball’ avant le mot by  platooning in several positions, notably left field and first base, to give hitters an advantage.  

As the day-by-day, game-by-game report in this book shows the Phillies ran out starting pitchers in August.  Instead of five, as the coach’s manual says, they had two.  The others had one problem or another. Things were so desperate that the starting pitcher in one crucial game during the slide was an 18-year old called from the minors getting in his first major league game.  A promising left-hander had a shoulder injury in June that made every pitch painful. The two other right-handers in the pre-season planning each became unreliable. One had lost confidence in himself (later compounded by the Ruiz incident): he overthought everything and simply did not want the ball in baseball speak. The other, much less experienced pitcher, seemed resigned to losses before he threw the first pitch and the manager lost confidence in him. 

While Rossi refers to the crowds attending games, and quotes often from the press, there is little about the social impact more generally on the city. It was a year of turbulence and, I have seen it asserted elsewhere, that the Phillies’ successes had a positive influence on the communities of the city by giving disconnected people something in common that transcended their own grievances and adversities.  

Christopher Buckley, Little Green Men (1999).

Good Reads meta-data is 317 pages rated 3.66 by 3,658 litizens.

Genre: Satire.

DNA: D.C.

Verdict: Reality.  

Tagline: They beamed him up, but not for long.

TV Host is the Prince of D.C., then….  His smug ever so polite attack journalism irritates a minion in an deep state agency so secret it may not exist.  In a fit of pique Minion hits the keyboard and things are never the same for Host again, nor for Minion. Host’s wealth, his status, his influence, his marriage, his friends, his sponsors, his home, all are soon lost.  But like Phoenix he rises to become leader of the Abductees Alliance. Yes, you read that right. The little Green Men got him and he is going to make them pay.

Meanwhile, rejected by the deep state for his ill discipline, Minion joins forces with Host to reveal….  But wait, it is not that simple….   

It is a satire on the D.C. establishment, but how can one parody what is already absurd. Buckley tries very hard to do so and does succeed in landing some stingers, but by and large, read today, it seems understated.  

Oh, and when it is finally resolved the plot holes are big enough to accommodate the starship Enterprise.  

Yes, of that Buckley, born with a silver keyboard in hand.

Howard Mosher, Disappearances (1977)

Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages rated 3.91 by 663 litizens.

Genre: Magic Unrealism.

DNA: North Woods; Species: Vermont.

Verdict: Picturesque.  

Tagline: They went thatta way! 

The escapades of the ever optimistic Quebec Bill and his coming of age son Wild Bill told in episodes.  Many involve the unseen border between ‘Canady’ and US in the news now.  Different taxes, different laws, different religions, different languages, different women, different police, are all reasons to cross that boundary, even in depth of winter. Some of their adventures defy one or more laws of nature, but suspend disbelief and go along for the roller coaster ride. Think of it as a cousin of Latin American magic realism with snow, ice, sleet, floes, sheer, piercing winds, hungry critters, and other wintry delights.  

Quebec Bill comes up with one fantastic scheme after another, and each one…fails more spectacularly than the one before, but his glass remains half full.  

***

This was Mosher’s first novel in the sequence of Kingdom County.  I had read four or five others before I backtracked to this one. Ripley, the book explains a lot about both the Vermont Country Store and Bernie Sanders.  

I couldn’t help thinking how fragile the ego of some readers must be when I read the comments on Good Reads from those who scored this book ‘1.’  They seemingly cannot let go enough to suspend disbelief. ‘Tant pis,’ as Quebec Bill might say. I have heard it said that it takes all kinds but I can’t see why in many cases.  

Make Russia Great Again (2020) by Christopher Buckley.

Good Reads meta-data is 220 pages, rated 3.68 by 2,145 litizens.  

Genre: Satire.

DNA: Old Money.

Verdict: Ugh!

Tagline: It has happened (t)here.  

A fictional account of the 7th Chief of the White House Staff in 3 years, as part of his rehabilitation in a Federal prison. Told absolutely deadpan.  The author’s delight is obvious in having the great manure pile all to himself and he feasts on it.  And it is sharp and deadly, but…well, reality is worse than fiction. Intended as a Swift satire, reality has overtaken it since publication.  The most garish, stupid, outlandish, vile things in the book seem childish compared to what has happened since.  

All those Dr Frankensteins, large and small, who created this monster with votes and donations in the mistaken belief they could control it, will be proven wrong.  It is an old story, quite unknown to fools, that the monster always bites the hand that feeds it. Since that is the closest hand, it starts there.  

Enuf said.  

Buckley has a long list of novels to his credit and I might try another when the dust settles from reading this. Starting with Little Green Men.

Little Siberia (2018) by Antti Tuomainen

Good Reads meta-data is 278 pages, rated by 3.67 by 2,278 litizens. 

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Finland.

Verdict: Deep and dark in the forest primeval. 

Tagline: Vroom!  

Much more serious than any of his I have read before.  Deep and dark in the deep and dark north woods 20 miles from the 1944 imposed border with Russia. 

Hero is a pastor (though which church and who employs him is left in the clouds, but probably Lutheran) in a small community among the lakes and forests.  He tries his best, though like Miguel Unamuno’s Father Emmanuel he has lost the vocation.  A few years earlier he volunteered for service as a pastor with a contingent of Finnish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. That experience marked him.

First he had to extend the compulsory military service training he had done earlier with additional training in hand-to-hand combat and desert survival. In the field he went along on patrols and saw things that, well, if God let this happen, then he had no use for that God. He also got shot with some long term consequences.

But he does not advertise any of this, not even to his new wife.  Most the villagers take him at face value, a well meaning but insipid fellow.  Nice enough, but not a buddy among the manly elk hunters, loggers, fishermen, woodsmen, trappers, and the other hardy souls who endure 20 hours of darkness 6 months of the year.  

Then comes the meteor!  Yep.  Act of God or what? From heaven or the devil’s spawn?  Or both?

There are some exhilarating scenes of F1 driving that set the tone.  Most of the early material plays into the plot, though the plot is, to this reader, overdone, as is the cynical ending.  But I did finish it and I am glad I did.  

I never did get what happened to the gym owner or why such an elaborate set up was needed.  

Amo, Amas, Amat, and More (1985) by Eugene Ehrlich

Good Reads meta-data is 329 pages, rated 3.80 by 188 litizens.

Genre: Reference.

DNA: Latin.

Verdict: nihil obstat.

Tagline: ab initio.

Reading a history of Latin last week reminded me of this well-thumbed book on the desk reference shelf, and so, in an idle moment, I retrieved it.  It is an alphabetical list of Latin tags. It has a detailed index for seekers of the right phrase.  

It makes an important distinction, that partly justifies the exercise, between the translation of a Latin idiomatic phrase and its meaning.  The example is ab asino lanam, literally ‘wool from an ass.’  Ehrlich renders it equivalent to the English idiom, ‘blood from a stone.’  The meaning is that the impossible cannot be done. That is a salutary reminder that some of those magisterial Latin tags come from the barnyard.  

The cover boasts an introduction by William F. Buckley, Jr. What wise and witty things might this über maven offer to those of us who do not have the good fortunate to be him?  Hmm, 0 is the answer.  It runs to just over a page and is mostly about his favourite subject, himself.  What a surprise. 

Considering that the book has been in print for 40 years, I expected more raters on Good Reads.  The WorldCat lists in 1445 libraries in 13 editions. By contrast Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin is found in 800 libraries.