# 24: The Broker

John Grisham

There is nothing like a Grisham thriller to read while on the beach! This book came to me courtesy of el maestro Koziner, both Guchi and I read it.

It started very well, quite funny, a true thriller. Then the book basically became a tribute to Italy - to the people, the food, the language, the architecture, and the lifestyle. The main character is forced to hide in Italy and lean to language - Grisham himself in the the author's note comes clean and says that in order to research the book he spent months in Bologna. It shows.

Well, the book was a quick read and with nothing to profound. The end is sort of strange with a couple of twists that are somewhat hard to believe. But hell, it is a quite quick read and really makes you think about spending some time in Italy!

# 23: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Thich Nhat Hanh

Thanks to Vero for sending me this book. I read it on the beaches of Thailand, a primarily Buddhist country, and I must say I enjoyed the book quite a bit.

I have been trying to get into meditation and live a more "mindful" life. But for some reason I have a very hard time finding the time to mediate and to read books about mediation and Buddhism. I am very glad I was able to read this one. It is a short read and divided into three sections: the first is about personal mindfulness and meditation, the second about how to deal with your emotions within this framework, and third about how to make changes in the broader world (by first changing yourself).

I hope that after reading this I will continue to focus on my breathing, smile more, and try to live in the present. After all happiness is now, it is not something in the future.

# 22: Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season with the Wild Turkey

Joe Hutto

It would be fantastic to meet Mr. Hutto, a true lover of nature. An article in the New Yorker led me to get this book, here is a man who raised wild turkeys by having himself imprinted on them.

He dropped everything in his life and dedicated almost all waking hours to being with these turkeys, and what he learned and passed onto us in his book was well worth it. Hutto basically learned how to communicate with these animals, and developed an understanding of how they view the world.

I was amazed by the amount of inherent knowledge these birds have, there is a long memory in their genes and when they are born they already know to avoid snakes and hawks and also know what to eat (just about everything). Amazing.

I have to say that the book was a bit repetitive at times .. since it was based on his field journal in which he described the days activity. And there were many days that were just a slight variation of: they woke up, they "foraged", saw a snake and then returned back home to roost.

But it is still a very good read and recommended, just for the opportunity to try and understand how other animals might view the world.

# 21: Next: The Future Just Happened

Another Michael Lewis book

Interesting take on the social implications of the Internet, written in 2001! It is cool to read these books with the vantage point of 5 years. While reading this book, Time magazine named "the individual" as person of the year due to the way the world has changed and people have been able to express themselves on the Internet. And Lewis himself focused on the power of the individual and how the power of the "elites" is diminishing.

The book is about 4 stories: a 14-year old day-trader, a 15-year old "legal expert", the development of TIVO, and one on the dangers of technology.

I must say that Lewis is a very insightful and a pleasure to read, the story of the day-trader and his parents was particularly good.

# 20: Nemesis

Bill Napier

Awful, awful, awful.

If this book can be published, then I should really spend some time trying to write, because the publishing bar is obviously much lower than I thought.

I have many more reviews to write before the year end, so I don't really want to go into the details of the book. Here is the quick summary: Astronomer hero, much jargon, stilted dialogue, totally unbelievable plot, a monk from 400 years ago ?, a caricature of people falling in love, plot reversals that make no sense. Please, save yourself the trouble, don't read it.

I actually left my copy in a hotel in Coral Island, Thailand, I pity the next person who might pick it up!

# 19: Homicide

David Simon

I arrived at this book because I got really into "The Wire", an excellent TV series on HBO. David Simon (along with Ed Burns) is one of the co-creators of the series.

Simon took a year off from the police beat at the baltimore Sun and effecitvely joined the Baltimore Homicide Department as an "intern". He was the eyes and ears of a year's worth of murders in the City, and put these experiences into a very solid book.

# 18: The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

Michael Lewis

Excellent. Truly a delightful read. Made me go out and buy other Michael Lewis books that I had not yet read.

I originally thought the book would focus on the evolution of the left tackle position in football. This position has gained strategic importance over the past twenty years, Lewis traces its emergence to the need to stop the new type of linebacker epitomized by Lawrence Taylor as well as the development of the "west-Coast" offense made popular by Bill Walsh. Lewis shows how strategic thinking question the football status quo and changed the relative importance of the players in the game. This section of the book is interesting and well-written and somewhat in the vein of moneyball.

However, most of the story is about Michael Oher. This is where this book shines. Michael is an athletic "freak of nature" with a an amazing story. Born into a terrible inner-city Memphis world: crack-addicted mother, living in and out of foster care, 13 siblings, never knew his father before his death, and rarely attends school. Michael is adopted (at first emotionally and then literally) by a white upper-class family when he is in the 9th grade. Truly a heart-warming and beautiful story - his interaction with his siblings, with his teachers and friends, college recruiters, all of it . Michael is currently the starting left tackle at the University of Missouri and by all accounts is expected to succeed in the NFL.

Read this book! It is very good.

# 17: Why?

what happens when people give reasons ... and why

Charles Tilly

Goddamn ... I finally finished this sucker. It was quite painful. I must say that this is not a good book, it is a very hard read and is quite disjointed. I do not want to spend too much time summarizing this (I hardly spend much time even on the books that I enjoyed) so I will make it quick and painless.

Or friend Tilly divides up given reasons into 4 overlapping categories (15):
Conventions: conventionally accepted reasons for dereliction, deviation, distinction or good fortune.
Stories: explanatory narratives incorporating cause-effect accounts
Codes: governing actions such as legal judgments, religious penance, or awarding of medals.
Technical Accounts: how a "professional" or a "specialist" might explain a given occurrence

He also puts together as a chart:
Popular Specialized
Formulas Conventions Codes
Cause-Effect Accounts Stories Technical Accounts

What I did find interesting is how the giving of reasons also works to "claim, confirm repair or deny social relationships". Think about how you expect different reasons from your spouse, friend, co-worker or a stranger.

Anyway ... check out the first review on Amazon (by Skisko). Just what I expected.

I also thought that the use of all the 9/11 stories is just some slick marketing to attract people to the book. They really don't connect at all to the rest of the book.

# 16: Las Viudas de los Jueves

Claudia Pineiro

Mi primer libro en espanol del año!! La verdad que me gusto mucho la novela .. la estructura de capitulos cortos con observaciones interesantes lo hace muy facil de leer. Es mas, lo devore, es muy dificil dejarlo! Ademas siempre es interesante leer sobre algo que conoces, y aunque nunca vivi en un barrio cerrado (todavia) conozco ese "tipo" o "esterotipo" de gente y si estaba en la Argentina durante la crisis del 2001.

Se los recomiendo, un libro divertido y bien escrito.

# 15: Climbing Mount Improbable

Richard Dawkins

This book has been sitting on my shelves, gathering dust for probably about a year. I finally got to reading it and have re-kindled my interest in evolution. I first starting reading Richard Dawkins in and right after college - the Selfish Gene is a classic. I hope that I will continue to read up on the subject, and maybe even find an on-line course or two to take. But as you know, there is often a difference between what one would like to happen, and what actually does happen.

Anyway, onto the book. He starts by talking about the fig, and how figs can be considered one of the pinnacles of evolution. A highly improbable peak that has been climbed very slowly and surely by the combination of heredity, variability, selection pressure and lots and lots of time.

This is Dawkins major point, he uses the metaphor of slowly climbing a mountain as an explanation for how the theory of evolution explains all the complexity and diversity of life. There are many, many intermediate steps - each providing for more "fitness" than the previous one - there can be no sudden leaps upward, and no going downhill. It is all very gradual, and the culmination of all these steps is the life we see around us. The reason all of this is so interesting to me is that, in a way, it addresses the meaning of life.

He address all sort of issues - spending many pages to show eyes have evolved anywhere between forty to sixty different times. This is a major challenge, because even Darwin had some doubts. Then he show how easy it is (relatively) for many species to develop flight, and pointing out that before the full fledged flight of an eagle, there is floating and gliding. There are "gliding" snakes to go with the frogs, lizards and squirrels in the forest. And in the water, not only flying fish, but even flying squid! All can be explained by small steps, going up the mountain slowly.

He admits that there is much more work to be done, and many mysteries remain to be solved. One of the interesting questions (chapter 6) is the debate between selection pressure and genetic variation. Is the pressure of selection enough to create anything? These are the selectionists. The other side agrees that selection drives evolution, but argue that it must have enough raw material (genetic variation) to work with. To the question as to why pigs do not have wings - the first camp would say that it is not an advantage for them to have wings, the other extreme would be to say that even if the pressure existed they would not have wings because there were never any "mutant wing stubs" for natural selection to work upon. This leads Dawkins to discuss his multi-dimensional "Museum of all Possible Animals", somewhat based on Borges' idea of a library with all the possible books in the world. He leans towards the selectionists, and feels that the empty corridors and space in the museum probably exist because selection did not go there. He also discuss magnets or "attractors", introducing the idea that there are pockets of "types" of animals or "types" of design which have been "created" by natural selection.

He then focus on the evolution of evolvablility - kaleidoscopic embryology - in chapter 7. He suggests that certain species may have a type of "embryology" that in some sense may be 'better' at evolving than others (224). These species in general work through segments and cluster of segments that are usually symmetrical and are arranged in a line from front to rear. His examples are the arthropods, mollusks, echinoderm and vertebrates. This "structure" provides a fruitful playing field for evolution to work on.

In Chapter 8 and 9 he re-hashes the "Selfish Gene" theory. In which he points out that the point of DNA is to replicate itself, and that you can make the argument that an elephant, bird, bee or flower is just an intermediate step used by the DNA to replicate itself. It is amazing to think that DNA is shared by all living beings - there are so many different ways for it to replicate itself.

And in the 10th chapter, he returns to the figs .. telling a truly amazing story of the complicated symbiosis between figs and wasps and underlying how evolution (going step by step) can climb the tallest, complex and improbable peaks.

Some other ideas that are worth following up:

Convergent Evolution: how different species arrive at the same general "effective" design in different environments

How Bill Bryson starts the brief history of time .. that everything alive can be traced back in a direct line for billions of years, back to the beginning of life. Our genes form an unbroken chain for all this time, and that we are all related to everything else that exists. Truly does blow the mind!

Pre-Adapatation: Is when an organ (or something else) is originally used for some purpose and then later in evolution is taken over for another purpose.

Natural selection can be a force against extreme perfection. If a species is trapped in a foothill and must go "down" before going up, it will never be able to escape to higher ground. Not too sure how this one works, might need to follow up.

People to read and follow up on:
- Robert Trivers
- John Maynard Smith: The Theory of Evolution
- SJ Gould and the theory of punctured equilibrium
- Some of the founders of Neo-Darwinism: Sewall Wright, R.A. Fischer, and J.B.S. Haldane.

# 14: The Last Town on Earth

A first novel by Thomas Mullen

Based in the Pacific Northwest, this novel was recommended as a hot pick for the fall in 2006 by an Amazon buyer. I think it has done ok, but today I checked and it is at sales rank #500. Is that good or bad? Probably not so hot, especially when you compare it to the Kite' Runner. That, by the way, is a hell of a book.

It is written in a simple vein, with some interesting moral dilemmas. I thought the book was ok, but it do not completely win me over. It is a book about war, the flu, isolation, paternalism, fighting the inevitable, unintended consequences and love. There are connections to the modern world, which from a US perspective is also facing war, the threat of bird flu, and creating fences along borders.

One interesting note: during the Great War (World War I, 1917) some Americans had gone so far as to rename sauerkraut "liberty cabbage", this is similar to the 2003 (?) when the US Congress cafeteria changes the name of "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries" (this is absolutely true, check out this link in CNN). Anyway, wars make people do some strange things.

Not to much else to say about the book.

Ciao!

Alex

# 13: Chain of Command

Seymour M. Hersh

Seymour, sos un crack. Another war-time correspondent, he was the guy who broke open the whole My-Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Like Jon Lee Anderson, he also writes for the New Yorker and has written extensively about the war on terror, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib scandal, Gitmo, and even about the Bush administration's plan to deal with Iran.

I admire people like Seymour who have the balls and ability to write about what is really going on. I am also very glad that he is not censored and then he has the right to write about these issues. This is important work that he is doing. Apart from my agreement with many of his conclusions, and dismay at some of the mistakes and actions taken by people in the government, I felt that the book is very solid and with a great deal of substance.

This is a strange "book", in that it is really many different articles, some of them connected and many of them not. As is usually the case, I did not read the intro or even the back-cover, so I was confused for a while, until I realized that this was not meant to be a book in the traditional sense. I was seeking an overlying theme which is not meant to be there.

Be careful when you read this, the torture will make you sick to your stomach. It makes me angry to see how the US is losing moral clarity by torturing people for questionable intelligence. When combined with the perspectives of the Guerrillas (see previous post) you realize how complicated these questions are, and that the insurgency in Iraq is simply not going to go away.

I did spend a month or two into heavy political thought while I read these books and watched the 34 day Israel-Hezbollah war. I don't want to revive those days - all I needed was one night of trouble sleeping due to this to make me realize that enough is enough - so I won't delve into heavy politics. However, I have a recommendation: read the article by James Fallows called "Declaring Victory" in the Atlantic Monthly.

Would you like me to summarize "Chain of Command" ...

The Bush Administration is full of fuck-ups.

# 12: Guerrillas

Jon Lee Anderson

I like Jon Lee Anderson, I devoured his biography of Che Guevara at Business School. He also writes in the New Yorker, and I am struck by his type of reporting. This is a man who is goes to the hotspots in the world: when the Israelis are bombing Lebanon and people are fighting to get out of there, Anderson is flying into Beirut and reporting from there. When Afghanistan was a mess, there he was

Unfortunately I finished the book over a month ago, I know, I have been a bad boy with respect to my posts, so I am not sure how much I remember about this specific book.

The subtitle is: Journeys in The Insurgent World. Anderson has a serious ability to enter the world of different groups of guerillas around the world - he writes about guerillas in El Savador, the Mujahedin fighting in Afghanistan, the Karen of Burma (fighting an independence war for over 50 years), the Polisaro of Western Sahara (this is a strange case, they basically have their own country and rarely fight at all), and finally a group of Palestinians struggling against Israel in the Gaza Strip.

He enters these world's and writes about their experiences, their world-view, their philosophies. I fought it very vivid and quite eye-opening. These are people who have taken up a cause and are willing to both die and kill for it. It was interesting to see the fights forgotten by the world (Burma) and others that are always in the news (Gaza). It was interesting to see how the mujahedin have developed a culture that glorifies death and makes it a very acceptable outcome. The FMLN in Salvador understood the political aspect of the battle, how they needed to also win the hearts and minds of the people in the countryside. I also began to understand how if someone loses their parents and sisters to the enemy, they are sucked into the battle and find no other meaning in life other than to fight. In its purest form, violence simply begets more violence.

This a good read. It will leave you thinking.

# 11: American Pastoral

Philip Roth

'You get them wrong before you meet them,'' Zuckerman says of ''people'' in general, ''while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.''

Zukerman has a particular image of Swede Levov, a high school legend. Roth dives into the Swedish life and we learn that all is not what it seems. His daughter Merry, grows into an angry teen-ager and blows up the post office. She then goes underground and the Swede and his wife, a former Miss New Jeresy (she would hate to be described like that), suffer. Suffer was a capital S.

What do you do if your child becomes a murderer?

The book is considered a classic, a "tour de force". I think that Roth writes very well, but I did not come under his spell. I think this might a book for a different generation, but still a pretty good read.

# 10: The Last Shot

Dacry Frey

Another one of my passions - Sports. In the vein of Hoop Dreams (a fantastic movie), this book is about the struggles of a couple of high school ball players in Coney Island.

A couple of tidbits:
- the importance given to basketball in the community, it is almost all they have
- the quality of play in the pick-up games on the court known as "The Garden", this is a public court, but with snap-back top quality rims.
- the poverty
- the difficulty for these young kids to score even a 700 on the SATs (you get 400 for writing your name)
- these are tough lives, and it is pathetic that basketball seems to be the only solution. Does it do more harm that good? It is hard to say .. it really might. But who I am to say.
- the focus on succeeding, how hard they work, and the mom who forces her son to stop seeing his girlfriend, since he may lose his focus. It isn't right to have so much pressure at such a young age.

Towards the end of the book, Stephon Marbury, freshman phenom at the time, makes an appearance. A cocky kid, # 4 or 5 in the line of potential Marbury's that have all failed, he is the weight of all his family on his shoulders - amazing to read this account of him while he was 14 or 15 and knowing that he made it, he is an all-star in the NBA and has made millions.

# 9: The Plot Against America

Philip Roth

After seeing so many of his novels in the top 20 American novels of the last thirty years (NY Times), I decided to give this one a try. The novel touches upon one of my favorite subjects - "What if " scenarios. In this book, Charles Lindenberg beats FDR and is elected president of the United States in 1940. The plot is driven by the fact that Lindenberg is basically a Nazi sympathizer and takes the United States down an isolationist and anti-Semitic path. Young Philip Roth, as the narrator, reveals how this affects his middle class Jewish family in Newark. The anti-semitism increases at a slow but believable pace, reaching the level of pogroms and deaths.

I enjoyed the novel, I think the Roth writes very well and makes this alternative history quite real. I do feel like the ending was hurried along .. with a resolution that sort of arrives out of nowhere. Other than that, I would say that it was quite and enjoyable read.

As a matter of fact, I am in the middle of American Pastoral and will report on that soon.

Random thoughts about the book:
- ability to enter a kid's mind and make it very real
- the righteousness of Mr. Roth, and his unshakeable believe in being "American"
- the cousin jacking off in the basement
- the complicate politics of race and religion, and how even it can tear a family and a nation apart
- the traitor rabbi, doing what he thought was right, but eventually allowing atrocities to be committed
- the complexity and realness of the characters .. Roth brings them to life and makes them three-dimensional

# 8: The Rule of Four

Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

Well, Well, Well ... I am back. It has taken my forever to finish my next novel. I actually started Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson but could not finish it, I battled and battled but then read some reviews on Amazon and realized that I was not the only one who thought it was excruciating slow and in need of an editor. I started it because I had read Cryptonomicon which I thought was quite good, there were some very interesting parts to it. I also started Gladwell's second book, Blink, but have not finished it yet.

Anyway, the Rule of Four. As mentioned in a previous post, I have been trying to find another Da Vinci Code page-turner and was recommended this book. It was ok, but the lesson is: don't try to find another Da Vinci type page-turner. I am basically 0 for 2

It was interesting to be brought back to my Ivy League college days. The book took place in Princeton and involved these eating clubs. I often wonder what would have changed in my life if I had been accepted into the Porcellian at Harvard. Anyway, that could make for an interesting story.

I did enjoy the final prize - the reason why the blood was spilled and the book was created- a collections of masterpieces that had been lost to modern civilization. An excerpt: "He finds thirty-eight plays of Sophocles, twelve by Euripides, twenty-three by Aeschylus, all of them considered lost today." And much, much more - philosophical tracks, works from prophets and marvelous paintings. Can you imagine what it would mean to the modern academic world if something like this was found? It would be just awesome.

There really wasn't too much else of note. The good news is that I am wolfing down my next novel, so I should be back soon!