The United States of Excess by Robert Paarlberg

Title: The United States of Excess
Author: Robert Paarlberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Errata
"different" page 11 is rendered as "di__erent" (underscore added for clarity)
"conflating" on page 13 is rendered as "con__ating, and "confirmed" rendered as con__rmed
"first" on page 14 became __rst"
"reflects" on page 35 became "re__ects"
I will not point out any more of these, but it seems like every single instance of 'ff', 'fi', and 'fl' was blanked out. Obviously something got lost in the translation to PDF format! The iPad version was fine.

When a writer writes, and a publisher publishes, a book the topic of which the primary subject is excess, you'd think some thought would be given to whether excess is involved in the very production of the book! I skipped the introduction because they contribute nothing, for me, to the topic, and by the time I'd skipped through all the other lead-in pages, I was on page 22. That's eleven sheets of paper which have little or nothing to do with the meat. Each of these pages comes from a tree, which are the environment's best bet right now, for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Every excess page in a book contributes to destroying yet another of these trees!

In an ebook this doesn't matter, of course, because no paper (indeed, no page - we now have screens and locations!) is used, but if a book goes to a print run, and if the run goes to a large printing, then it does make a difference. And yes, I know that both tradition and organizations like, for example, the Library of Congress, demand a certain layout of a book, but screw them, I say. The environment is more important than any book-printing tradition, and it's far more important than the Library of Congress's antiquated book of ancient rules.

I say all this not to chide this publisher or this author, because this kind of thing is common place practise, especially in books of this nature. Instead, I point this out to illustrate just how easy it is to be excessive, and how blind we are to it in our habits. It's not just the pages, either - it's how much of the page we use. Naturally you don't want to produce a book where every blank space is crammed with tiny print. That would be foolish no matter how well-intentioned, but do we need to have so much white space? It's worth thinking about if your book is likely to end-up printed.

Even a book about excess isn't above carrying excess white space:

We could cut this back and save a tree - and help reduce the carbon dioxide pollution which is warming the globe.

But I digress! What does this book mean by excess? Well, two things primarily: Americans emit twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as the Europeans and the prevalence of obesity in the USA it twice that of the world average. This is despite modest declines in both in recent years.

The US is not he only nation with these problems, but it is the world leader. Is this how we want to be considered exceptional?! This change, we read, happened over the course of the first fifty years of the 20th century. It would seem that the USA was the only nation in the world which profited from two world wars. By 2008, even the poorest state in the union (Mississippi) "...had a GDP per capita greater than the E[uropean]U[nion]".

These issues are bad just from the bare facts, but what's worse is that the US is doing less than any other wealthy nation to combat these problems, but it isn't alone in inaction. We read here that although 40 nations have adopted carbon-pricing policies, these account for only a fifth of overall carbon emissions. Without dramatic measures to curb carbon dioxide emissions, it's already too late. We are going to start seeing catastrophic climate issues by 2050. This doesn't mean we should give up. It's not too late to start making important changes.

This book covers both excessive use of gasoline and excessive consumption of food. There are some connections and parallels. In a nation where 50% of the ads aimed at children are for food, is it surprising that obesity costs the USA alone $147 billion annually? The American Beverage Association (ABA) has spent literally tens of millions to thwart taxes on sugary carbonated beverages. Maybe we should organize a write-in campaign to have them rename their organization to American Sugary Soda Haven for Anti-Taxes?!

We learn that where federal government has failed to act to protect our children, local school boards and state government has, once again, stepped in - in some cases. The problem is that when you try to do things to engender healthier kids, Big Business™ objects. They'd rather have unhealthy kids and a healthy bottom line. This is why, in the USA, pizza is officially classed as a vegetable, and fries are very nearly considered to be an essential food croup. But, children get less than a third of their caloric intake in school, however, so there's a limit on what can be done there.

The book reveals that success can be had for those nations willing to discipline themselves. Hungary elected to tax foods with high sugar, salt, and caffeine content, using the tax money to fund health-care measures. It appears to be working. You gotta love the poetry of a nation with a name that sounds like 'hungry' addressing the obesity problem by taxing certain foods!

From chapter to chapter, we get an overview of what's going on with oil and over-eating, both looked at in a variety of ways. The USA, we learn, is the world's third largest producer of oil after Saudi Arabia and Russia, but the tax on gasoline in the US is only about 13% whereas in Europe it’s some 60%. Is this why the US burns four times as much gasoline as Europe? It's not quite that simple.

This book raises the disturbing question that perhaps one reason for rich nations dragging their feet on climate change is that out of 233 nations surveyed, the top twenty most at risk from deleterious effects of climate change were developing nations, not rich ones. The smallest voice and the most to lose.

The authors pull in many factors for consideration when trying to understand the large gulf which separates the US from other nations when it comes to controlling carbon dioxide emissions and weight. One fact which may not immediately come to mind is religion. The USA is one of the most religiously fundamentalist nations on the planet, which is hilariously ironic given that one of the tropes we're expected to buy is that people flocked here initially to find religious freedom!

A study showed that every one percent increase in soft drink consumption increases the obese adult population by 2.3%. The US is the second most guzzling nation - 31 gallons per person per year. Only Mexico beats the US at 43 gallons per year and they, too, have a severe obesity problem. We learn that out of all the well-off governments, governments, that of the US is uniquely designed to fail when it comes to top-down action.

It seems to me that we need a progressive health tax on foods, whereby healthy foods are tax-free, with taxes becoming the most punishing on items which are really bad for health. These dollars would then help pay for the health problems down the road which the food-abusers developed through unhealthy consumption!

Here's another issue: "Many governments around the world place restrictions on the advertising of food to children, but not the United States" (page 95)! Why would a nation which goes out of its way to protect kids (by having bright yellow school buses and elaborate halting of traffic whenever the bus discharges passengers, for example) not want to safeguard children's health? Is it the US government's official position that it's not okay to kill a child instantly by hitting them with a vehicle, but it is okay to kill them slowly by fattening them up to an unhealthy degree?! It makes you wonder, doesn't it?

As judged through a series of religiously-oriented questions, the US showed itself to be 50% more religious than the Israelis, and twice as religious as Europeans. Some 70% of US adults believe in the devil - which might make it easier to understand how polarized their view of the world is, viewed as a simplistic battle between good and evil. How easily such a precept can be transferred to other spheres of life! Despite some 90% of US adults believing that science and technology make for a better life, the mistrust of that same discipline when it comes to issues like climate change and evolution is stark. We're irrational! Nothing new there!

The authors provide a wealth of topics and issues, and of information and ideas, many of which might be as new or as surprising to you as they were to me. For example, families are consuming fewer meals at home, consuming more meals alone, and consuming more foods while driving. Women entering the workforce has had a surprising effect on our diet. That the large decrease in smoking has had a negative effect on weight isn't so surprising, but it may surprise you to learn that those who attend church or a Bible study group once per week are 50% more likely to become obese, and that there's a disproportionate increase in minority women gaining weight as compared with minority men.

So these issues are complex, and this book does an excellent job of laying out the facts and drawing solid conclusions. It's an important voice, and I'd recommend listening to it.

Transport Beyond Oil Edited by John L Renne and Billy Fields

Title: Transport Beyond Oil
Author: John L Renne and Billy Fields
Publisher: Island Press
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This is one of two book reviews on books about the oil crisis which I am posting today - and yes, it is a crisis. Oil has powered civilization for getting on for two centuries, believe it or not (the first commercial oil was discovered in 1859), and it needs to stop. The US uses a fifth to a quarter of the world's oil. Believe it or not, this is less than it used to be, and it's very likely to be overtaken by the Chinese before long. Some 90% of the oil in the US goes, one way or another, into cars and trucks.

So obsessed is the US in prolonging its oil crisis that it's now using technology to frack the hell out of Earth's crust to suck out the last expensive, nasty, sludge-caked barrels of this vile substance - and who cares if it pollutes the water table? So what if some people turn on their taps and have "water" come out which you can literally set alight?

If you want to see an example of this, watch the documentary: Gasland. It's on Netflix. There's a preview you can watch on YouTube. It’s very revealing of the extent of our oil addiction and how much cheap oil has blinded us, that the US, which prides itself on being a technology leader, is offering no leadership whatsoever on alternative means of powering transportation.

Island Press is a non-profit organization dedicated to "…stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide." That's a fine-sounding statement, but when a publisher publishes a book with thirteen or fourteen pages - most of which are significantly, if not completely, blank - before chapter one even begins, I have to wonder how well thought-out is this commitment is to solving environmental problems! That's thirteen pages which come from trees, which are the environment's best bet right now, for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and every extra page in a book contributes to destroying yet another of these trees!

Yes, in an ebook this doesn’t matter, but if a book goes to a print run, and if the run goes to a large printing, then it does make a difference. I skipped those thirteen pages and went straight to chapter one. I don’t do forewords, introductions, prologues and what-not because they rarely, in my experience, contribute a single thing to the reading experience.

And yes, I know that both tradition and organizations like, for example, the Library of Congress, demand a certain layout of a book, but screw them, I say. The environment is more important than any book-printing tradition, and it's far more important than the Library of Congress's antiquated rule book.

Those observations and gripes aside, the topic of this particular book is one of critical importance because the massive bulk of oil use in the world is in powering transportation, particularly that of road vehicles. So what are the alternatives? As this book makes disturbingly clear, the alternatives are known - we’re just not moving to them.

Bio-fuels are being pushed as an alternative, but these are still carbon dioxide producers! They reduce emissions only 10% - 20%, and how are we going to grow them? Are we going to cut down more trees to make room for growing the bio-fuel plants? Are we going to cut back on food production? Actually it wouldn’t hurt to put the USA on a diet as the other book I review today will show.

The only truly clean alternatives are vehicles which use electricity or those which use hydrogen fuel cells. Electric vehicles, though, are only as clean as the fuel which produces the electricity they use. If the plan is to go all electric, but to use electricity generated from coal-fired electricity plants, then this is actually a backward step! This book discusses all of this.

Of course, you can argue that burning coal produces sulfur dioxide, which acts as a coolant on the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight, but this is a short-term "solution". The carbon dioxide we’re putting into the air now will still be here a century hence. Do you really want to screw your children and their children just so you can be selfish now? I hope not.

This book goes beyond a simple look at what we burn in our motor vehicles. Chapter two focuses on how we live and travel, surveying six cities and comparing how they developed and how the advent (or lack) of, for example, light rail, impacts something as seemingly unconnected as housing finance, and how the ability of people to live and work might be pressured by fluctuating oil prices.

The cost of using oil isn’t just a matter of what we pay at the gas pump - which in the US is a way-too-low spoiled-rotten price. Right now, in the US, where the price of a gallon is (as of this writing) significantly below two dollars, would be a good time, in my opinion, to slap a tax of ten or twenty cents per gallon on the gas and use that money to finance an alternative fuel infrastructure, diminishing our dependence upon oil and creating jobs at the same time. Of course, this is never going to happen in real life, not in the USA.

Chapter three considers the hidden costs of our chronic dependence upon oil. How about $25 billion to $50 billion per year in assorted subsidies? How about between two and four dollars of subsidies of one sort or another per gallon? Is it cheap now?

When was the last time you saw one of the big petroleum corporations running a deficit? Compare that with how many times they've proudly reported record profits to their shareholders. How many children would fifty billion dollars feed? How many homeless could it house? How many jobs could it create? How much of a clean fuel transportation infrastructure could it build? How much would a gallon of gas cost if it were not subsidized?

In a chapter on oil security, writer Todd Litman points out this startling fact: In 2009, the US had a $381 billion trade deficit. Of this, $253 billion (66%) was from oil imports. Another 21% of the total was from vehicle and vehicle part imports. Almost 90% of our trade deficit is tied to the oil nightmare! Imagine what it would do for all of us if the US really did become a leader in non-gasoline dependent transportation technology!

Other chapters in this comprehensive overview cover the role of walking and biking as alternatives to using motorized transportation, the economics of bio-fuels, and building an optimized freight transportation system. There's more, and extensive end-notes after each chapter facilitate those who want to verify facts or do more reading.

The bottom line for each of us is that we do not have to wait for technology to arrive or for blind governments to act. There are ways we can all start cutting back on burning oil now in our vehicles, and in our home.

I recommend this essential contribution to kicking the oil habit.

The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan

Title: The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood
Author: Diana McLellan
Publisher: Libertary Co.
Rating: WORTHY!

This book is a deeply-researched look at the sometimes very (and sometimes not so) private lives of actors, directors, producers, screen writers and others throughout the 20th century, but focused quite tightly on a limited few in any detail, with a host of other names drifting in and out as the years pass. I highly recommend it because it is full of information about events and activities which too many people may not realize were taking place - even as early as the first decade of last century.

The dramas unfold around a select few well-known names, such as Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo, all of whom were bisexual with a marked preference for female companionship, and around the people closely associated with them, some of whose names are not well known at all. This list includes Josephine Baker, Joan Crawford, Mercedes De Acosta, Dolores Del Rio, Eva Le Gallienne, Katharine Hepburn, Billie Holiday, Ona Munson, Alla Nazimova, Natacha Rambova, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lilyan Tashman. Men aren't absent either, with names like Douglas Fairbanks, Henry Fonda, Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, Rudolph Valentino, and even John Wayne being dropped into the mix.

Don’t expect it to be a titillating detailed erotica-fest. It’s not. It tells, artfully, humorously, perspicaciously, and unashamedly of the lives of women and men who were free to live the life which felt perfectly natural to them in a time which was far more closed than is ours today. But note that those times were not always tightly-closed. Indeed, some periods were surprisingly (at least to me!) liberal, but overall, it was a roller-coaster during which the lives of these people were easier, then harder, then easier, but never as free of condemnation and as free to live as they are today. It all depended upon which way the wind was blowing and what religiously-motivated government legislation sought to hand-cuff (and not in a nice way!) people at any given time.

In the earliest part of the century, and through the twenties, things were quite liberal, but legislation came down, and it sent people into hiding or certainly into two lives: their public and their private. Thus arose what are known as "lavender marriages" where a lesbian and a gay guy would marry to present a 'normal' public persona, from behind the somewhat precarious safety of which, they could live their separate natural lives without so much worry.

But the novel is far more than just that. There are spy stories here, fear of communism, intrigue over jewelry (specifically that of which Marlene Dietrich came into possession. There are stories of physical and emotional cruelty, of nyphomaniacal behavior, of stage politics, and of manipulative "friends" such as Sasha Viertel, who controlled Greta Garbo almost like a glove puppet, and became her sole voice to the world for years. There are also images, which look a lot better on an iPad than they do on a smartphone!

The stories are funny and sad, scary and heart-warming, easy and brutal. There are stories of German-born Dietrich offering to shoot Hitler, and of winning the Medal of Honor, of Swedish-born Garbo leading-on men while seducing and then casting off women, of those two women refusing to acknowledge they'd ever met when in fact they'd been in a film together in which they'd shared scenes (and perhaps more?), of devotion to the stars from subordinates and underlings, of life-long romances and disastrous break-ups. There are hilarious observations both from personalities like Noel Coward and from the author herself, and scary stories of obsessive pursuits and seductions.

The amount of almost incestuous interaction and partner-swapping amongst these stars, activities which over time tie all of them together in one way or another is quite dizzying! It’s a warning in some ways, that power corrupts, but it’s also sobering to know that these people are no different from anyone else except in that they had the money and freedom to be able to live the life they chose (or in the case of Garbo, as she evidently decided at the end, to live the life she wasted!), but still managed to be unhappy and frustrated a lot of the time. In the end, money can’t buy you love! Who knew?!

The book is long and detailed, so you might want to keep it to hand and dip into it periodically, with a visit to some other book in between, but it is very readable and entertaining. One thing I found most peculiar in perusing this is how private these people managed to keep their real lives, in an era when revelations about them would have been truly sensational and ruinous. Contrast that with today, when leading that same kind of life causes few eyebrows to be raised, yet the media is more obsessed than ever with pursuing "scandal". How huge of a Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot is that?! And what more will we learn when Dietrich's secret papers are finally released in 2022? I recommend this history for anyone who's interested in having their mind opened as wide as their jaw might drop!

The Undertaker's Daughter by Kate Mayfield

Title: The Undertaker's Daughter
Author: Kate Mayfield
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

If it's the 21st day of December, this this has to be a novel starting with 'U'!

Though the title sounds like one of those pretentious 'literary' works of fiction that medal mills love to lavish their trinkets upon, or perhaps the title of an Audrey Niffeneggar novel, unlike most of my reviews, this isn’t one of a fictional work. You could make a decent argument here that the author is subsuming herself under her father in titling it the way she does: making herself a sub-unit of her father rather than her own person. But the author gets to name their novel, so this is her choice - unless Big publishing™ stepped in and wrenched even those reins from her.

Talking of which, the names have been changed, as they say, in this story, but it is a true story of one woman's upbringing in a funeral home in the sixties and seventies. She was the first person in her family to be carried from the hospital where she had recently been born, directly into a funeral home - where her family lived, and where her life effectively and paradoxically began!

Once the family had moved to a new residence, where her father opened his own funeral parlor on the ground floor of his own home, life became interesting. Her father operated both the funeral home and an ambulance service - not unusual in those days - and they had multiple telephones; they could not afford to disrespectfully miss an important call about someone's dear departed or about someone who needed urgent delivery to the hospital.

It was just as well he didn't ignore the call from a mother-to-be, alone and about to give birth, on a day when the snowy weather was so atrocious that not even the police wouldn't respond! That was the day the undertaker not only made it out there to the house, but learned how to deliver a baby in a hearse, when the child decided it didn't want to wait for the hospital.

There were strict rules in place for conduct in the funeral home. When the funeral was in progress, life upstairs almost went into hibernation: the phones were muted, cooking was carefully monitored to avoid strong smells which might permeate downstairs, movement was reduced to tip-toeing, and conversation trimmed to a whisper, with TV and radio turned off.

The author had a rather strict upbringing, especially by modern standards, and her mother's intransigence and disciplinarian attitude eventually forced her into her spending more and more of her time in her father's funereal domain. It's strange to think of it like that, isn't it: to think that an environment can be so unappealing to you that you'd rather be in a funeral home?!

On that score, humor isn’t absent from this story. There are endless stories to be enjoyed here, and there's a sly (and occasionally not so sly) vein of humor running through them. The tone of the novel is perky and vibrant throughout. Curious asides about "the Egg Man" (long before The Beatles sang it!) and interesting phrases like "enough hairspray to kill a cat" abound making this a really engaging and interesting read.

The humor is matched equally with sadness, not just from the upset of people dying who were known to the family, and young children dying who were known personally to the author. There's also racism and the desegregation that really wasn't. On top of all that, there's a rivalry between her father's funeral services and those of the other guy in town. Note that this was not the guy who took care of black funerals, with whom her father got along famously, if secretly. No, this was rivalry with the guy who had the ear of the hospital's director, and some rich businessmen who had financial interests in burials for one reason or another.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this. This book is very different form my usual fare, and it;s probably because of that that i enjoyed it so. I recommend this book as a good read, a trip through history, and a very personal account of life in the sixties and seventies.

The Price of Thirst by Karen Piper

Title: The Price of Thirst
Author: Karen Piper
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

This book is "The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists...", and if it's all true, it's truly scary.

Since author Karen Piper is professor of post-colonial studies in English and adjunct professor in geography at the University of Missouri, I'm going to come down on the side of veracity, backed up by the extensive end-notes in this book. Karen Piper has received a Carnegie Mellon Fellowship, a Huntington Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Humanities Award, the Sierra Nature Writing Award, and a Sitka Center residency. I'm guessing she knows what she's talking about!

For a planet which is 70% larded with it, you wouldn't think water shortage would be an issue, would you - but it's more than just water - it's clean, potable (and portable!) water that's the issue, and that's where the contention and cost come in. Talking of contention, it's long been mine that energy and water will be serious flash-points in the near future and that's why my blog, which is mostly about fiction writing, takes time now and then to review non-fiction books that I consider important. This book is one of them.

This was an advance review copy, which means one doesn't expect to be perfect, but I have to report some serious formatting issues here and there. I don't know what the original typescript looked like, but it didn't seem to have transitioned well for my Kindle. Unfortunately, there are no location or page numbers in this edition so I can't quote them, but Kindle search will find them.

One problem I found was "This dust has been shown to cancer cause cancer..." (too much cancer!) and a little bit later, "...his own p e ople" (spacing within the word 'people'). There were some other instances of this nature )oddball line breaks and so on) which I hope will be eradicated before the final version goes to the press (as it were). Other than that, it's very well-written, and the photographs accompanying the text looked good in the Kindle version, but the serious problem here is not the errors: it's that cancer. This is one side-effect of water shortage which you do not typically expect.

The cancer issue was raised as part of a report about the San Joaquin valley, which is drying up because the local water has been pumped out and nothing has been done to replenish it. This is an increasing and common problem with water tables. When places like Tulare Lake and Owens Lake are pumped dry, it exposes things like heavy metals which were - not so much safely, but at least held - in the lake bed, and they began blowing all over, particularly into people's lungs. Another issue with parched land is dust storms which can not only completely block visibility, hampering transport and causing accidents, but which can also unleash disease vectors, such as "Valley fever" which has quadrupled in the area over the last decade.

That's not even the scariest part of this book, believe it or not. The scariest part for me came in the beginning - not the introduction (I don't do introductions or prologues), but the beginning of the book proper, where we learn that uncomfortable and disturbing facts of water privatization. In 2001, five water corporations controlled three-quarters of the world's privatized water - but how much is that really? Well, a decade from now, a fifth of the world's population will be dependent upon corporate water and in the US, it will be more like double that. That frightens me.

The book comes with extensive end notes, and a conclusion which offers numerous solutions to help alleviate water problems. One of these which is not so obvious is one which I embraced a long time ago: become vegetarian. Eighty percent of the world's water is expended upon agriculture, and as the author quotes Sunder Lal Bahuguna saying,

If you use one acre of land to grow meat...then you will get only 100 kg of beef in a year. If you grow cereals, you'll get 1 to 1.5 tonnes. Apples you get 7 tonnes. Walnuts 10-15 tonnes.

The bottom line is that we're wasting water by feeding grain to animals so we can, in turn, eat meat - and we're robbing people of water in doing it. Here are some articles (URLs were good at the time of posting this blog) featuring or by this book's author to give you a little taste of what you can expect from the book itself:
Revolution of the Thirsty
No money, no water - not in Africa, but in Detroit!
People without water are more likely to become extremists
Water is the new oil
Explore the frightening landscape where water and thirst are political, and drought is a business opportunity.
Water Privatization Overlooked as Factor in Egypt's Revolt

I highly recommend this book. It may be a bit dry and fact-filled in parts, but overall it tells an engrossing and terrifying story about a problem which is not only not being competently handled, it's being actively mishandled. Any science story about the origin of life specifies right up front that water is critical to life as we know it, and that not only applies to origins, it applies to life ongoing. Water isn't a "resource", it isn't a "commodity". It's isn't a privilege. In my opinion, it's a human right to free, clean, and readily available water. Any other approach is sadism, period.

Shopping for Water by Culp, Glennon, & Libecap

Title: Shopping for Water
How the Market Can Mitigate Water Shortages in the American West
Author: Peter Culp
Author: Robert Glennon
Author: Gary Libecap
Publisher: Island Press
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

It began to pour with rain last night where I live, which makes it deliciously ironical that I'm reading this today! It’s long been my feeling that within the next fifty years there are going to be two major crises in the USA (and elsewhere in the world): water shortage, and energy shortage (this ignores more unpredictable problems such as acts of terrorism and disease outbreaks), so when I saw this book which addresses one of these serious issues, I was very interested in reading it.

When I say water shortage, Earth doesn’t have a water shortage per se - seventy percent of the planet is covered in the stuff for goodness sakes, but clean fresh water with no salt in it? Not so much! As the authors point out in a great summary which opens this book, the USA southwest is in major crisis, and has been for well over a decade.

Living in Texas (home of the Rio Sand) as I do, where we have routine water restrictions every single summer, they didn’t have to remind me of a problem which, as they point out, has over time caused nearly thirty billion dollars worth of economic damage, but perhaps for others it has been far less front and center. It certainly hasn’t been a major talking point in politics or in the news.

As the authors make clear, it’s not just ranching and agriculture which are hit by the shortage. Silicon valley is right in the middle of the dry zone, and their water needs are dramatic. Of course, with a lot of US electronics manufacturing going to the sweat-shops (nay, sweat cities!) of China and other so-called "low cost" areas, the problem is nowhere near as large as it could be, but there is still significant electronic production here in the USA, and it requires copious amounts of water. There is also, as the authors highlight, a significant demand (in both water and energy) in the growing use of "server farms" - massive facilities containing nothing but Internet server and storage computers for corporations like Google

California is worse off than Texas and unlike Texas (and as the authors note), California produces about half the USA's fruit, nut, and vegetable needs, yet their water shortage is far worse even than Texas. There is no sign of improvement. The authors seem to look forward to a time when the crisis will alleviate ("Even after the current drought ends…" p8), but personally, I'm far from convinced that it ever will! Climate change is now in the driving seat, and all bets are off, but whether this drought ever does alleviate or not, the water shortage is not going away. Like the energy shortage, it needs to be addressed now.

The authors give a disturbing example on page nine, of how ridiculously bad the situation is. They relate that the level of the Sacramento river became so low this year (2014) that salmon fry could not navigate it downstream to reach the sea. Believe it or not, thirty million fry were transported in climate-controlled tankers, hundred of miles to the ocean! How they'll ever find their way back, having had their exposure to their home river severely curtailed, is anyone's guess. The authors also offer more heartening examples of cities (such as Phoenix, Arizona, the Yuma area, and Santa Fe, NM), which have sustained growth by expertly managing their water use, so it's not all bad news.

The text deals only with what is, not what could be, and by that I mean the authors admirably address current issues and offer examples of solutions that are already being explored or in place. One thing which they didn’t cover was the obvious one: those areas in the southwest which are experiencing the worst of the drought, also receive copious and regular sunlight, and are next-door to the ocean. Solar-powered desalination plants would be expensive to build, but economical to run, and would solve the water crisis in these areas.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can ignore other solutions, or that we should do nothing but build desalination plants, but it would have been nice to have seen this option explored and put on the table. Some 16,000 desalination plants throughout the world already provide water for 300 million people - coincidentally, about the population of the USA. Israel produces 40% of its water from this method. A plant in El Paso, Texas, produces over 27 million gallons a day at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant which is, this being Texas, the world's largest inland desalination facility, but it produces only 4% of El Paso's water. California has 17 plants "in the works". Texas has 44 such plants and is planning on building ten more, and these don't even use sea water, but saline ground water. This isn’t prototype or experimental science any more.

However, this book does a great job in exposing and exploring a real problem, and in considering real solutions to it. I recommend it. Right now (as of this blog post) the book is free on Amazon. Go get it!!!

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

Title: How Google Works
Author: Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by the author. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!

The only reason I'm rating this book positively is that I want as many people as possible to read it - not for what's overtly written, but for the corporate subtext, for the hypocrisy, and for the sheer gall of it.

I skipped the foreword, the introduction, whatever. If the writer doesn't think it's worth putting in chapter one, then this reviewer doesn't think it's worth reading. I went right to chapter one - which isn't identified as such, but seemed a likely candidate (maybe the book needs a good search engine?!).

There I was treated to a story which seemed to me to completely undermine the entire philosophy espoused in the rest of the book: Google co-founder Larry Page was sitting in his office trying out search terms to see what the Google ad generator came up with, and the ads really didn't apply to the search terms, thereby failing epically.

The conceit promoted by the writers in this book is that Page didn't call a meeting because Google has a different culture. He didn't sit around jawing about it. Instead, he used the stealth method to guilt people into fixing it. He wasted paper printing out the ads, highlighted the problems he found, and stuck them on the break-area bulletin board. By Monday, a handful of people working through the weekend had come-up with the first steps towards a solution. Meanwhile Page was home taking the weekend off. I know all about that corporate culture.

But contrast this with co-author Schmidt's statement in an interview here:

In the book, we mention the women we work with who have a terrible burden, if you will, of working in a start-up: it's intense, but then they also have the majority of the family duties, typically. Somehow, they're able to get through it with help and so forth. We observe in the book that, for example, they'll go quiet for a few hours while they're busy taking care of the family or whatever it is they're doing, and then they emerge at 11 o'clock at night, working hard to make sure that their responsibilities are taken care of.

Seriously? How is that corporate culture in any way, shape, or form better than what we find in every other business? The authors proclaim that this (Larry Page posting problems on the bulletin board for someone else to fix) was a huge success story, but it's actually a story of a failure - at least initially. It means that when the coding was put in place to achieve this objective to begin with, it was never properly tested - yet the product was turned out into the market-place.

Later we get the other side of this coin when the authors try to claim that it needs to be done right, not put out wrong to win market share and then incrementally fixed, which is the Microsoft corporate method. Lack of detail in following up this problem also suggests that this initial failure (and the reason underlying it) was never addressed - at least not according to what I read in this book. The authors seem to have a blind spot, conflating 'culture' with 'indentured servitude', and seem unaware that they're promoting what they perceive as successes and largely glossing over how they generated and fixed, or got past, failures. They seem not to grasp that the right culture will spontaneously arise when employees are treated like people instead of pack mules. You can't force it into place by posting print-outs on bulletin boards and then enjoying your weekend while other work their tails off for you.

David Packard may well have said (as the authors assert) that companies exist to do something worthwhile and make a contribution to society, but the bottom line for very nearly every corporation in the civilized world is the bottom line and that's tied to keeping shareholder or ownership happy. It's that simple. It doesn't mean they can't be decent places to work, but it does mean that profit will override decency every time, and this is an inescapable fact, because those companies which don't follow this rule go out of business.

It's funny that the authors contrast Packard's statement with one made by Lehman brothers - and then mention that the latter went out of business as if a poorly worded mission statement was completely to blame. Hewlett-Packard is still in business, but it's hardly an exemplar of stellar corporate conduct as the 2006 spy scandal showed.

The authors launch into a series of items claiming that these are what helps Google work better: crowded, messy conditions, rich, free snack rooms, and cafeterias with gourmet food (no word on healthy food, just on gourmet). While this might well work at Google, and Apple, and similar places, such conceits do not work in manufacturing because messy workplaces are dangerous workplaces, and companies which run on razor-thin margins simply cannot afford to splurge on luxuries even if they would love to.

Indeed, Google's culture flies in the face of very successful Japanese corporations who operate on precisely the opposite principles: ones built around cleanliness and orderliness. The authors indirectly admit this when they later praise Toyota, one of these very corporations! It's just downright insulting to imply, as these authors do on page 44, that if you can't cope with messiness, you're just stupid.

I found it interesting also on page 44 to read of Google's expanding product line, where every product was advertising! Not one of the things mentioned had to do with information storage and retrieval (unless you count advertising as such!). There's an interesting review of this book in Britain's The Guardian newspaper where Steven Poole points out a discrepancy between Google's 1996 The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine paper and their current tight focus on advertising. Google becomes an ad agency!

Of course it's easy to criticize. One reviewer took Google to task for having 70% of the corporation male, and 61% of it white, but that same reviewer never compared Google with other, similar, corporations. Is Google doing evil because other businesses have much more equitable percentages in those areas, or is it merely not doing good because it's on par with others? Maybe it's ahead of others and therefore while these statistics rather blow, Google isn't exactly the worst place to work? The reviewer is silent.

OTOH, it's easy to criticize when there's a lot to criticize. The author's comments on page 39 made me wonder why Google isn't based in Texas, where the 'work ethic' they espouse seems to fit precisely. They actually say that the best cultures invite people to be overworked - but in a good way!! Seriously? They don't say a word about how this "culture" responds when people need time off, or what checks and balances they have in place to prevent a culture of routinely overworking your employees (but in a good way) from getting out of hand.

I think it's wonderful that Google has confidence in overworking people and trusting that these people will know best how to squeeze in a hour or two of quality family time before the go back to slaving over a hot computer at midnight - probably barefoot and in the kitchen, close by the coffee machine, too. Then, when they're caught up on their work from eleven to one, they can no doubt grab a few hours of sleep before they get back into the office at six am. What a joyful work group that would be. This from the same authors who decried working from home because it doesn't work: people need to be able to reach over the wall of their tiny, messy cube and tap their colleague on the shoulder.

No wonder Google is happy to give their employees (oh sorry, are they called associates to make it more palatable?) 20% of their work week for their own projects. If they're already putting in sixty-six hours, including weekends - to meet the corporation's bottom line, what does Google lose by allowing the other sixteen hours of their overwork to go to waste - especially if it turns into a project that can net them even more cash to go towards their annual half trillion (or so) revenues (and for which the employee receives no bonus).

Yes, it's fine for working moms to be literally forced to work at home because they're forced to own this overwork they've been required to take on. I can't help but wonder why Schmidt and Rosenberg can espouse this about spouses without offering even a glimmer of a question about why it is that women are the ones bearing this burden instead of sharing it equally with men. Do they care? Or are they so far up the pay and benefits hierarchy that their own spouse doesn't actually need to work?

I mentioned earlier that a reviewer had remarked that Google's 'associates' (or whatever they're euphemistically termed without changing reality at all) are 70% male, but the reviewer never mentioned how pay compares between genders and interestingly, neither do the authors of this book. For all I know, Google is sterling in this regard, and better than comparable employers, but having seen the details of their "culture", I have to confess that I have my doubts.

The authors talk about employee day trips/team-building exercises like they're cheap and every company can afford them. Wrong. When the margins are slim, these things don't happen. When the economy downturns, these things are the first things to go. The bottom line rules and it always will, or the company goes bust. It's called capitalism.

On page 56, the authors discuss examples of corporations where senior employees have been observed doing "menial" tasks, such as picking up some errant trash they may have seen in the hallway, or wiping down a counter. Rightly or wrongly, do rest assured that this is the exception, not the rule, regardless of how it may be perceived by employees, but contrast this with Larry Page's behavior described in the opening paragraphs of this book: he perceives a problem, notifies no-one, sticks some printed pages on the bulletin board and goes home for the weekend. That's egalitarian? I have to mention how impressed I am: never in the field of human endeavor have so many contradictions been packed into so few many pages by so few!

The authors relate a story about Kevin Systrom. He had no degree in computer science and so was refused the chance to go into Google's Associate Product Manager program. Subsequently he left Google and founded Instagram. Google lost him through short-sightedness, and the authors admit this, but they also talk proudly about hiring the best computer scientists straight out of school - forget about experienced people, forget about gifted amateurs, go for young, inexperienced turkey cocks with degrees and hope they'll produce something innovative and magical! Hypocritical much?

I found it interesting that the authors quote Eric Schmidt's Novell experience such a lot since Novell went into a huge decline post 1995, and was eventually bought up by the Attachmate group. Of this, wikipedia says, Analysts commented that the primary reason for Novell's demise was linked to its channel strategy and mismanagement of channel partners under Eric Schmidt's leadership. Schmidt also worked at Sun, which declined from a 140 billion dollar industry to a seven billion dollar one by the time Oracle bought it up. I'm not sure how much of a recommendation that is for a business model.

Moreover, you won't find a word in here about Steve Jobs going ballistic at Schmidt over what he called "bait and switch" whereby Google came up with their own phone, and then changed it so that it looked very similar to Apple's iPhone. You'll have to read Steven Levy's In the Plex to get details of that. You can read a bit about it here. You can read more about it in Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs. You won't hear about it from Schmidt.

Here are some enlightening quotes all from a few pages:

We've both worked with young moms who go completely dark for a few hours in the evening. Then, around nine, the emails and chats start coming..." (culture means 'always on'!)

...if you're working your butt off without deriving any enjoyment, something's probably wrong." (not definitely, only probably!) (page 50)

Everyone's fun when they're dancing to Billy Idol and swigging an Anchor Steam." - page 50
(seriously? What age range does this company hire?)

...core beliefs: excellence in everything they do, superior customer service, and respect for the individual. - page 54
(if you have to spell these out, there's something wrong with your culture! I've noticed that that last one rapidly goes out the window when the corporation is having a - what's the pc term for it? Oh yes, Force reduction.

As Eric was leaving, an assistant brought Mark [Zuckerberg]'s dinner and placed it by his computer. There was no doubt where his commitment lay. - page 56
(to indentured servitude and chained to your work?)

...which translates from Hebrew as "Follow me". Anyone who aspires to lead a smart creatives needs to adopt this attitude. - page 56
(that everyone else is sheep? What happened to "smart creatives"?)

...the company's "Don't be evil" mantra..." - page 56
(why would a corporation which hires the best people it can, even need that as a mantra? One reviewer pointed out that there appears to be a discrepancy between this so-called 'mantra' and Google's activities in Europe where it is under repeated scrutiny from government overseers. The authors appear to admit that by recounting a meeting where an engineer had to quote this mantra because the corporation was ready to plow ahead with an advertising revenue scheme. Apparently no one had bothered to chant the mantra while thinking it up, and even when it was brought up by the engineer, it was still the subject of a "...long, sometimes contentious discussion..."! Apparently one person's evil is another one's stock-in-trade.

"...we won't presume to tell you how to create a business plan. But we can tell you with 100% certainty that if you have one, it is wrong." - page 58

In short I highly recommend this exercise in foot-in-mouth acrobatics. It's better than watching the clowns at the circus.

The Fine Print of Self-Publishing by Mark Levine

Title: The Fine Print of Self-Publishing
Author/Illustrator: Mark Levine
Publisher: Bascom Hill
Rating: WORTHY!

I had some really mixed feelings about this book. In the end I decided to rate it positively, because it does what it promises in that it offers, in general, what appears to my amateur eye to be solid advice about self-publishing. Overall I believe it's of benefit to anyone who wants to get some inside information about the publishing business. Frankly, one of the tipping factors for me was the reference to Sarah Kolb-Williams in the acknowledgments. I happen to respect Sarah, and I reviewed her book on editing positively back in May so this gave the book some street cred for me!

The book goes into extensive detail about all aspects of the publishing industry, and there are multiple appendices and URLs to allow for follow-up for yourself if you wish. There is a really useful grade card on self-publishing companies towards the back of the book where someone actually contacted two-dozen of those businesses with valid questions about self-publishing. The companies were rated on how (or even if!) they responded. There are some 'A's and some 'F's in there, so this book is worth it just for that information!

Here's the list of contents:

The Basics of Self-Publishing
Self-Publishing Essentials
From Manuscript to Publication
The Profile of a great Self-publishing Company
The Fine Print of Publishing Contracts
E-Book Publishing
Marketing Your Book
Apples to Apples Comparison of major Self-publishing Companies
(Appendices A through I)

That doesn’t mean I didn’t have some issues with the book, however, some of which were mild or matters of opinion, and others more serious. One section where the information seemed incomplete was in purchasing an ISBN for your book. I have dealt only with Create Space so far, and they offer a multi-tier approach. You can get their ISBN for free, which obviously costs nothing but limits your right to use the ISBN, or you can buy one for only $10, which you own. The caveat here is that Create Space will not make available some of their services if you buy your own ISBN! Strange but true, I know, but those of us who are not best-selling authors (which is pretty much all of us!) are very much at the whim of the tides and currents, aren't we?

In a newly revised section on ebook publishing, the author says that he "...can't imagine a scenario where it would be beneficial to not publish an ebook version of you book." I have seen, however, some really poor ebook versions of novels and books. Typically these have been ARC (Advance Review Copy) books, but in this day and age of electronic publishing, and spell-checkers, I can’t imagine even an ARC looking as bad as some I've seen. Plus there is another issue. My Kindle shows only grey-scale, not color, and the screen is very small. It’s great for reading your usual chapter book, which is what I typically read, but it would be useless for a coffee-table book!

If your book has color images of significant size, then it’s not going to look good on my Kindle. Even smaller images with little contrast will look muddy. Indeed, a lot of ARCs I've seen are simply not available for review on the Kindle at all. The only way to read them is to download them and use Adobe Digital Editions on my computer, which tends to render them very well, but which isn't available for Linux, only for Mac and Windows, sad to say. Plus, as the author himself makes clear, ebooks are not yet in the majority in terms of sales. Obviously this will change, but the print book isn't dead yet, and I personally suspect that its death, if it ever comes, will be a long, drawn-out, lingering process!

When I published my own book, Poem y Granite (which has only simple, grey-scale images), I was so disappointed in the ebook version that I ended-up stripping-out all the images, and reformatting it as text-only for the e-version. I was not about to let it get published like it was initially. It looks great like that in print (IMO!), but it was horrible in the ebook version. Poem y Granite was designed from the off as a print-book and it didn’t translate well at all, so yes, Virginia, there are scenarios where the ebook version isn’t going to work - at least not as is!

There's another issue touching on this which makes me feel rather hypocritical to mention because I really don’t care for book covers in general. I don’t 'review the cover' as many reviewers do since the author has little to do with the book's cover (unless they self-publish!). In this case it’s worth a mention because the author himself mentions book covers (not in any detail, but often), and the disconnect between the author's comments about the need for a professional-looking cover, and this book with the cover it has, struck me as amusing to say the least. In addition, on my Adobe Digital Editions reader, the bottom edge of the cover was cut off (see my cover image above). Yes, this is an ARC, so there can be unresolved problems at that stage, but this seemed to me to be one which could have been avoided.

So what else didn’t I like? Well, while I appreciate someone in a book like this who doesn’t sugar-coat advice, there's a difference between straight-talking and outright insulting the reader, and in my opinion this author crossed the line in Chapter two. Evidently, in his opinion, I'm a fool for designing my own book interior and cover, and so is everyone else who does this. While I do take his point about the need for professionalism, I thought this was unnecessary to say the least. It carries the unwarranted underlying assumptions that everyone who would like to self-publish is a). Really stupid and incompetent, and b). So well-off that they can afford to spend several thousand dollars on what might well be, at the bottom line and despite the best intentions, a purely vanity pursuit.

Well, guess what, you can’t generically label everyone like that. I want to publish books, but if I have a couple of thousand dollars, it goes on buying food and clothes for my kids, and on making house and car payments! It doesn't go on satisfying a potentially self-obsessed or maybe arrogant compulsion to underwrite publishing my work, and I'd be willing to bet that I'm far from the only person in this category. It’s just not nice to insult people who, while perhaps not acting in the most professional manner conceivable, at least have their priorities straight about how to expend their limited budget.

While I felt that was bad, it wasn't anywhere bear as bad as the section where the author gives an example of a book cover which he experienced and has the gall to say, "No straight man would be caught reading a book with that cover". I don't know what culture he comes from, but I found that comment to be condescending at best, and verging on homophobic at worst. Do not tell me what kind of a 'man' I am, or what kind of book I should be reading judged by its cover.

I've seen far too many professionally published books and novels with atrocious covers and which were really poorly written and/or badly edited, so this is far from a hard and fast rule, because when all is said and done at the end of the day, the bottom line with professional publishing is the bottom line: Big Publishing™ wants to make money, and all-too-often is not-too-particular about the quality of their product. Self publishers, while perhaps naïve and certainly experience-challenged, are (and admittedly with some exceptions) highly motivated to try and do the best they can within their personal means. I do not see any fruit in packing all of them in with the precious few who truly are basket cases.

I know that a lot of readers, particularly it seems amongst the young-adult crowd, do coo like doves over book covers, The authors themselves sadly enable this habit by having 'dramatic' cover reveals on their website, like it's some Earth-shattering event, but to me a cover isn’t anything more than the call of a Siren, trying to lure you in!

Yes, some are beautiful, some are trashy, but to me they're unimportant and all-too-often misleading. I’d rather have a really good novel in a lousy cover than a beautiful cover with nothing inside that's worth reading. What's important to me, and what my blog is about, is the writing, because in the end it’s all that matters. I think it's our job as authors to seduce them with the writing, not try to mesmerize them with a cheap bauble of the cover which typically has no more intrinsic value than costume jewelry (as publishers themselves demonstrate by changing covers so frequently on the same book!).

OTOH, marketing is everything, and Big Publishing™ does have that market cornered, so my advice to you would be to do the best job you can with cover and interior design, write the best book you can, and spend any cash you honestly do have to spare on the marketing. People will forgive you far more readily for giving them a slightly sloppy book cover and interior, but that offers a really good story than ever they will for giving them all sparkles and glitter with a lousy story inside! So there's your idea for a next-big-thing website: start one with nothing but books from self-publishers. No buying and selling, no glitter covers, just a blurb and a sample to give the self-published a shot at a market!

So how to rate this book? Well, for the sake of this review, I decided that I'm going to ignore the parts I found objectionable since they were few and minor (in terms of the amount of text they ate up), and which were outweighed in a practical sense, by the wealth of information, tips, links, and advice this book offers. So I'm going to rate this positively and have faith and hope that there will be some judicious re-writing before the sixth edition comes out!

HIIT It! by Gina Harney

Title: HIIT It!
Author: Gina Harney
Publisher: Demos Health
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

The HIIT It! invitation on the cover refers to high intensity interval training, not to hitting on the woman in the picture! Normally I review only fiction on my blog, but I'm seriously in need of some aerobic exercise - more than I get already, that is - and I thought this would be a good way to combine both blogging and my own personal agenda! Evil ain't I?!

I wasn't disappointed. Naturally with a book like this, you can't simply review it and let it go. With a novel, you can tell if it's working as you read it, but with a book like this, a proper review would give feedback about whether the information and techniques in here actually provided any benefit in the real world - that's part of the review after all! All I can advise you on at this point is whether the book appears to deliver value, and the answer to that is yes, as far as I can gage without having pursued a several-month course doing what the book advocates. I'll get back to you on that part of it at a later date!

In terms of value, what the book does deliver is detailed information on what this is all about, including work-out plans for minutes, days, and months, along with detailed information about what's going on in your body (or what isn't, if you don't exercise!), about muscle groups, about how to work this into your schedule, how to even split the minimal 30 minutes into smaller time-slots and still get something back, about the best time of day for work-outs, about safety and exercising smartly - including what to do with your work-outs if you're sick - what to eat and what not to, copious work-out plans, and the latter portion of the book includes recipes - and it doesn't diss by omission gluten-free, vegan, and vegetarian diets either, as too many of these books seem to do, so major kudos for that. It includes photographs showing positioning and technique. I don't doubt that I've missed many things from this list, but it ought to give you a good idea of what's delivered.

All-in-All, there appears to be everything here that you need to get going - all that's missing is your own will to do what this book suggests; as always, that's all on you! Plus, Gina Harney is an author who gets that it's bicepS! I could name a score of YA authors who could benefit from reading this just for the anatomy lesson! I recommend this book.

Moranthology by Caitlin Moran

Rating: WARTY!

After reading and loving Moran's How to be a Woman which I reviewed recently, I ventured into this volume with a sense of warm expectancy, but I quickly came to discover that there is at least two ways of pronouncing Moran, and the second isn't very complimentary.

I discovered to my dismay that this book is nowhere near as entertaining and engrossing as the previous volume. This one is nothing more than a collection - as its title suggests - of largely unimpressive newspaper puff-pieces, and after feeling like my time's been wasted with nothing more than boring gossip, I'm pretty much done reading anything by this Moran now.

Some of the pieces were interesting, and one or two were mildly amusing, but some were just boring or plainly dumb, and some were directly contradictory of one another. For example, on page 116, she bemoans the sorry state of the sluggish rise to true equality for women, which I also bemoan, but unlike me, Moran doesn't wonder, not even for a minute, if it's high time for women to be taking the reins into their own hands after several decades of "liberation" instead of sitting back and writing newspaper pieces bemoaning the lack of hand-outs as Moran seems to think is appropriate in this article. Equality isn't a one-sided coin.

Yes, I do know that women are excluded far too often by one means or another, from various avenues, but not all avenues are closed. Some of them are simply not interesting to women otherwise they would have - one assumes - taken a stroll down them. Moran seems incapable of grasping that whilst men and women should unarguably be both perceived and treated as equals for all practical purposes, the two genders (and indeed all those in between) are not, in fact, equal at their most fundamental level. If they were, we would all be women - or we'd all be men.

The bottom line is that no matter how equal we're treated, we're neither genetically nor biochemically equal, and therefore we will not have one hundred percent coincidental aims, interests, goals and attractions. Moran's hypocrisy becomes starkly highlighted as we move to the very next article on page 118 where, after just getting done complaining that women aren't yet equal, next bemoans the loss of chivalry in society whereby men for example, stand-up when a woman enters the room, or give up their seat on a crowded bus rather than let a woman stand.

Excuse me? Do you want equality or not? If not, then by all means men can stand for you and give up their seat, but if you want equality, then men don't stand for women demanding extra benefits. It's really that simple, as indeed is Moran if she believes otherwise. You cannot redefine equal just because you're a woman who demands to be "first amongst equals"!

On page 109, Moran complains about burqas and blames everything on men. Seriously? Burqas aren't so much about men per se as about religion, because, in every religion women come off badly. It's always been that way. Now you can waste time arguing that men start religions, but if you want equality, you'd be a lot wiser to quit harping on about dress codes, and focus upon severing the stranglehold which organized religion has upon women. The simple act of conflating these two major, but separate issues isn't going to fix anything.

The rest of the anthology wasn't that impressive at all. A goodly chunk of it was boring. She writes like no one has ever thought of the things she writes about, or has experienced them, or has been thrilled or disgusted by them. The most irritating trait is that she writes like she was, is, and always will be poor yet drops designer fashion names into her writing at every opportunity. It's not adequate for her to simply say, "She was wearing four-inch heels." No, she has to say, "She was wearing four-inch Manolos." If there's one thing I can't stand it's snobbery.

Some of the stuff is retreaded. For example, there's an article about Lady Gaga which is pretty much exactly the same thing as appeared in How to be a Woman. Too much of it is so boring that once I'd read the first couple of sentences I yawned and moved on the the next article.

I still recommend reading How to be a Woman because that was genuinely original, funny, and completely engrossing, but this one? Give it a pass - of the wind variety.

Waking Up by Sam Harris

Title: Waking Up
Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm a huge fan of Sam Harris's writing, but I was not impressed by this effort when I first began reading it. He is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, and Lying, all of which I've read and enjoyed, but this one initially imbued me with the feeling that I wasn't going to end up with a worthwhile take-home message. Having finished it, I still feel like that, but I was impressed by the chapters that came after chapter one. I found them fascinating, and this is why I think this is a worthy read.

This is subtitled "A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" yet there are critics who quite evidently have paid no attention to Harris's explanation of what he means by that. His basic thesis is that spirituality has nothing to do with religion and we can lead spiritual - useful, content, fulfilling lives imbued with a sense of joy and wonder at the universe - without having to delude ourselves that there's a magic giant in the sky who, despite being the creator of literally everything (so welre expected to believe), has consistently shown himself incapable of subduing evil!

I agree with Harris's thesis, but I'd take issue with the wisdom of his decision to employ the term 'spirituality', which has evidently confused way too many people because of the baggage with which it comes so effectively larded. I don't know: maybe Harris is trying to reclaim it for secularism? Good luck with that!

Harris meditates, and offers some guidelines to how to do it in this book and on his website. He doesn't do it to link to 'the godhood' or some numinous higher consciousness. He simply does it to center himself and bring a balance to his thoughts and actions, and there's no better reason.

I'm not a meditater myself. I believe you can get to precisely the same place by employing any number of more mundane methods: listening to your favorite music, occupying yourself with your favorite craft or hobby, watching a good movie, taking a stroll in the countryside, reading a loved book, pursuing your favorite sport, enjoying an art gallery, cooking your favorite meal or treat, playing with your kids or your pets, conversation with someone you care for, any any other number of pursuits many of which l'm sure I haven't even considered, but Harris offers evidence for his perspective, so maybe this is another option.

The advantage of meditation of course, is that you can pretty much do it anywhere. It's rather harder to read a book when you're at work (that's an advantage of working in a bookstore - which are sadly in decline), or watch a movie (again, with the decline of video rental stores it's a lot harder to work in a place that lets you play movies isn't it?!).

Harris tells an interesting tale, but for me he spoiled the purity of his message with too many asides. That's what most annoyed me in chapter one. The book reads more like a scientific paper than a guide to secular spirituality, and this detracted too much from his message for me. I also think he did the scientific theory of evolution a disservice, not because he doesn't accept it - he does - but because the terms he employs when talking about it are so easily distorted by its ignorant detractors.

Given the number of times people of scientific backgrounds have been abused by the profound dishonesty of religious nut-jobs in taking the words of scientists and thoroughly warping and distorting them (when they're not outright and knowingly misquoting them), I find myself in askance that so many people of science still speak so loosely.

Harris, for example says, "25 percent of Americans believe in evolution (while 68 percent believe in the literal existence of satan)." thereby equating the fairy tale of religion with the fact of evolution! Evolution isn't a belief, it's an honest acceptance that the fact of common descent cannot be denied by any honest, rational person. It's not a belief. It's not dependent upon faith. Claiming that 'Satan' is real is a pure faith assertion because there's no more evidence for a satan than there is for a god. To equate those desperate delusions with a scientifically established fact by using the word 'believe' is a serious mistake. Shame on Harris for making it.

The discussion of what is self and what is consciousness in the chapters succeeding chapter one were what really changed my mind about this book because to me they were fascinating and in some instances revelatory, particularly the discussion of how each of us is, in a very real way, a split-personality by dint of the fact that we have a split brain. This book is worth reading for that discussion alone. I recommend it.

Now You're a Publisher by Inscribe Digital

Title: Now You're a Publisher
Author: Inscribe Digital
Publisher: Inscribe Digital
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Since my blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, I sometimes review materials which are non-fictional but which I think might be of use to people in the same position as myself. This is one such review for free book from Barnes & Noble and also from Amazon. I also reviewed The Indie Author's Guide to Book Editing by Sarah Kolb-Williams back in May.

Inscribe Digital is a division of Isolation Network Inc., and is "...a seasoned team of book professionals and leverages a decade of experience delivering music and other digital media assets to leading retailers worldwide in an evolving publishing industry", so make no mistake in thinking that this is an unbiased look at publishing. It's much more of a promotional publication, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't mean that there's nothing useful to be learned here!

This is a really short book (30 pages) and it talks you through the services Inscribe can provide, including chapters on how to create an ebook, the metadata mindset, sending your content worldwide, and even how to create an ebook bestseller - which is certainly of interest to all of us writer wannabes right?!

The booklet contains all kinds of useful information - such as how to validate your ebook as industry standard, although I have to say that some of the links were not functional, such as the one for the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum), and the one for the Kindle publishing guidelines. My links here worked as of the publication date of this review. Presumably Inscribe will double-check all links before final publication of this booklet.

All in all, I recommend this because you can never know too much when it comes to finding a way to get your story idea (or indeed other content ideas) out to the world, and all of us can use some help every once in a while!

The Last Beach by Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper

Title: The Last Beach
Author: Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Note that this book has a lot of interesting and disturbing photographs illustrating the author's case. I don't have permission to post any of those, though I wish I did. However, I have substituted two images tagged as free to re-use on Google to illustrate the same concepts. To substitute for one related to sand (or beach) mining which I would have liked to share, please take a look at this website. To substitute for the images showing the difference between a beach which is driven on and one which is not, check out this page, in particular the images at middle right (which looks just like the one used in the book) and the one at bottom left.

This book, which is available from November 2014, isn't fiction. It's our future. In a no-nonsense, if slightly dry tone, this densely-packed book takes you through the facts of what we are, as a civilization, doing to our beaches through mismanagement, horrifying pollution, and our appalling dependence upon oil.

It takes a few pages to get to the meat. There are several pages of drawings before the foreword, three pages of that, and then five pages of preface, all of which I skipped as I routinely do with prologues, etc. This message is too important to delay. When you have a story to tell that's this powerful, preamble just hobbles it.

The story of our beaches is rich with startling images. It's tempting to use the cliché that it's "lavishly illustrated", but the images, while beautifully photographed are actually horrific because of what they show. They reveal, in the most graphic way, how we are hanging, drawing and quartering our beaches - the locations so many of us claim to love the most.

This is an advance review copy, and hopefully odds and ends will be, unlike our beaches, taken care of before this finally gets published, but the page numbering was sadly off in Adobe Reader. The cover is numbered as page 236, and some other pages are numbered seemingly randomly. Indeed, changing pages by typing a new page number into the bottom of the screen seemed to confuse Adobe Reader completely. I don't know why that is, but it's definitely another indictment of ebooks!

I was contacted by a representative of Duke University Press on this aspect of my review, all but demanding that I delete these comments, but that's not how this blog works. Publishers don't get to tell me what to blog or how to blog, and if that means I get no more review books from that publisher, then that's too bad. My comments stand because we're no longer in the era of literal galley proofs where metal type has to be set by hand and laboriously changed out to correct errors. We're in the era of word processing, desktop publishing, WYSIWIG, spell-checkers and grammar checkers, and there is no longer any excuse for sub-standard "proofs". I will, however, post the comments I got from Duke University press verbatim below

I would very much appreciate it if you would remove your criticisms of the book's design until you can see a final copy. There will be a properly formatted e-book available by the end of the year and a print book in November. The "filler pages" you refer to in your review are standard paper book formatting in order to fit required cataloging information.

Frankly I'm not sure what that last sentence means. There's a difference between pages which contain cataloguing and publication information (i.e. not filler pages), and having several pages of unnecessary drawings (filler pages), but if I see this as a print book somehwere this coming November, I will revisit this review and comment on it again then. Until then, my original comment (pagraph below) still stands and I still recommend this book.

There are several filler pages at the beginning of the book which I felt were unnecessary. This book is about a very serious environmental concern, and to me it detracts from that when we add unnecessary pages, each of which will use up part of a tree in the print version. I felt that this sent the wrong message, but maybe that's just me!.

The content of the book is what really won the day for me. The chapters come thick and fast, every one of them with a indictment of our insanity when it comes to how we treat our beaches. People agonize over rain-forest and wilderness, but beaches, for some reason, are ignored, undervalued, and treated like some vulgar relative.

In rapid succession, the stupidity of beach mining is exposed, along with the insanity of building houses upon sand, the failure of so-called 'beach replenishment', algal blooms, the disgusting trashing of beaches from a variety of sources, including the beach tourists who use those same beaches for recreation, the potential for horrific disease inherent in the misuse of beaches, the abusive driving on beaches of both 'official' and unofficial vehicles, and finally with the extensive and unforgivable oil and tar pollution.

Each chapter is exhaustively documented and supported by research as the appendices detail, and some of the information is as bizarre as it is disturbing. Did you know, for example, that there's an international trade in beach sand? That beach users have died from causes as disparate as flesh-eating bacterial infection and being run-over by a police SUV? That sea walls aimed at preventing beach erosion actually exacerbate it? That debris from the 2004 "St Stephen's tsunami" is still washing up on beaches across the Pacific, and right behind it is debris from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that took out a Japanese nuclear reactors - a disaster which itself was caused by poor waterfront management and thoughtless construction?

The underlying message, just like the underlying sand, is that beaches are not the static environment we encounter when we go out there on a weekend or once a year on vacation. We think of the sea as restless, and ever in motion, yet we never see the shoreline in the same way. Why not? Beaches are vital and dynamic, and nothing we can do is ever going to change that, or stop it, or overcome it. You cannot control a beach any more than you can really control the activities of beach-goers, and any hard management scheme is doomed to fail. The only thing which works is the realization and appreciation of the value of the beach, and throwing all our efforts into protecting the natural ebb and flow, rather than foolishly trying to make it come to heel.

Pilkey and Cooper have done us all a huge service in drawing this to our attention and I recommend this book.
Update:
Article in NYT on disappearing beaches.