Showing posts with label adult non-fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adult non-fiction. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

What Stands in a Storm by Kim Cross


Title: What Stands in a Storm
Author: Kim Cross
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!


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!

Erratum:
Page 109 "...right bicep..." should be "...right biceps..."

Most of what I review is fiction, however rooted in reality it night be, but occasionally I review non-fiction where I think it’s important, and those reviews tend mostly towards books about the environment. This one falls into that category and it’s the first one of which I haven't felt merited a passing grade.

Wikipedia has a brief introduction to this storm, but author Kim Cross (not to be confused with author Kimberley Cross Teter) makes it personal and goes much deeper so you get a real feel for what it might have been like to be there as this storm was brewing. There is a problem with this approach, however, in that a certain amount of fiction, however unintended, necessarily creeps into a story written this way. In my opinion, this fictional element detracted from the humanization of the story.

For example, a lot of conversations are reported where those conversations were not recorded as they happened, and are clearly made-up. By made-up, I mean reconstructed, not made-up to distort or misrepresent. They're constructed to convey what people were saying and feeling, and even though they're based on personal recollections, no one can recall verbatim what was precisely said and exactly felt at times like those. It’s interesting and important to know how people felt looking back, of course, but it’s also rather misleading to present recollection as though it was 'happening live".

Where we don’t have actual texts or recordings, these recollections are necessarily based upon what people reported after the fact, but they nevertheless are to one extent or another a fictional representation of events and conversations which are in this case and in my opinion, biased towards the emotional. For me, I felt that the story was emotional enough without this "augmentation", and while a tedious recital of plain facts would have done an equal disservice, I'm by no means convinced that this was the smartest approach to reporting these particular stories.

I know that the author comes from a journalistic background and journalists are all-but-brainwashed into going after the human angle, but in this day and age, people are more mature in their view of stories (although nonetheless gullible, unfortunately) and don’t necessarily respond in the same way to a traditional journalistic approach. The author does tell us that the quotations were taken from recordings in some cases and eye-witnesses in others, but eye-witness testimony is the most unreliable of all evidence.

I don’t doubt that the author conveyed her interviews accurately, and I don’t doubt that people told it they way they remembered it without consciously changing anything, but memory is an extraordinarily malleable entity. I don't believe that these people accurately recalled precise reactions and verbatim conversations from times when they were highly (and understandably) emotional and to represent it here as though they did seems unfortunately misleading at best.

It's not that they were lying or attempting to mislead or obfuscate, but the fact is that no-one save an eidetic can accurately report word-for-word conversations, especially not from traumatic events like these. I felt that the reporting here ought to have striven for less "verbatim" and more general representation of how people behaved, what they thought, and how they felt and reacted. For me that would have made a more authentic story and it would have been better for it.

The story is split into three parts: the storm, the aftermath, and picking up the pieces. We follow not only the people it affected, but also the weather forecasters who were trying to predict what it would do, and when and where, and the rescuers who had to find the victims after the storm passed. There had already been an outbreak earlier that same month - indeed, April 2011 currently holds the record for most prolific tornado month with a total of 757 reported overall. In the outbreak of 25 -27 April, 348 people died, 316 of these on April 27th, which spawned four EF5 tornadoes. The writer tells us that "Only one EF5 is reported in the United States in a typical year. In 2011 there were six. Four of these struck on April 27th." It’s pretty scary stuff even when stated baldly like that.

This was an horrific event by any measure. Or series of events more accurately. The storm-front spewed-out tornado after tornado, some of those splitting themselves. At least one of those which didn’t split grew to be a mile wide. When people thought it had passed, it meant only that they were in the eye (and remember this is a tornado, not a hurricane!), and the winds would come again, this time in the opposite direction, finishing off damage which the first massive wall of wind had begun.

A power transmission tower was literally bent in half, a school bus was stripped to its chassis. Not only were homes removed, but the concrete slabs beneath them were lifted. Motor vehicles took to the air. Entire apartment complexes were raised. It was lifting asphalt off the roads. It was lifting bulldozers and dump trucks. It lifted an SUV into a water tower. Community after community was savaged. In addition to the irreplaceable lives lost, property damage totaled eleven billion dollars.

The story mentions many forecasters and storm-chasers, but the weather forecasters it focuses most strongly on are James Spann and Jason Simpson, and there's some back story on Spann, which I skipped since it wasn't interesting to me. It may be more interesting to people who watch these guys on TV (apparently they have quite a following). I was much more interested in exactly what happened that day, and that's pretty gripping. Frankly I’d have preferred it if that story had not been broken-up with flashbacks. I’d also have preferred it if we had learned much more about it. To me this was one of several lost opportunities in this book.

The book focused tightly on people and personal experiences, and I can see why a journalist would take that approach, but in doing so, a much bigger and ultimately more important picture was missed in my opinion. The bigger picture concerns climate change, and personal safety in the event of a natural disaster. There was also a bigger picture in other dimensions, too. In focusing on people, nature was missed. We learn nothing of animals - wildlife, domesticated animals, and pets - it’s like they didn’t exist in this book. We learn something of damage to trees, but only in passing, and nothing of how nature suffered and eventually recovered afterwards. I was sad that all of this was lost in a welter of personal stories, important as those are.

Even on that personal level we missed a golden teaching opportunity to wise-up readers on how to avoid the mistakes and about poor decisions which people can make during catastrophes like this one. I can see how this would conflict with telling a tale of loss and tragedy: no one wants to say "your child/sibling/parent/relative died because they made bad decisions." Of course not, but people even in their best light do not act rationally when understandably overwhelming disasters envelop them.

Ultimately it’s more important and practical to try to prevent deaths than it is to dwell on the past, tragic as it was, and painful and meaningful as those losses were. A chapter on what might have been done to prevent, to ameliorate, to avoid, wouldn't have been out of place in this book. The author does touch on these things in a rather half-hearted and widely-scattered manner, but a solid statement in a chapter of its own would have been more useful and practical. How did those who survived actually survive? Why didn't those who died actually survive? People always ask "Why me?" after events like this, but this book not only fails to offer answers, it doesn't even attempt them. I think that was a sad omission and a disservice to those who died and those who survived them.

I think the role of religion was overplayed here too. Yes, churches do contribute in important ways at times like these, but that's the church. No god did anything to save lives here, and while a small issue was made out of a stained glass window which withstood the storm, four churches were completely demolished in one community (as well as others elsewhere, no doubt), yet this was rather glossed over because that one window was what stands in a storm! I found that distasteful.

Climate change, aka 'global warming' doesn’t necessarily account for every super-storm which breaks out, but what we can count on is that climate change will without a doubt exacerbate such storms; winters will become more harsh, summers will become more baking, and hurricanes and tornadoes will become more prevalent and stronger. This is why this is important, because instead of being a rarity, the events of late April 2011 could become the norm. I felt that a valuable educational opportunity was squandered when this book didn’t even mention climate, climate change, or global warming - not even once.

Be forewarned that a lot of this story is going to be really hard to read. It doesn't matter that this isn’t a news item on TV, that's it’s 'past history' - it was only three years ago and there are people out there still living with this as fresh and raw on their minds and hearts as if it happened this morning. The description of the tornado assault in part one is very well done, but I wished that there was more of it and more explanation for what it did and how it did it so people can understand it better and be better prepared for the future.

It’s the rescue stories afterwards - specifically the rescues that were already too late before the rescue teams even set out - that grab you, though. It’s the babies in the rubble and the loved ones lost, where not even experience can prepare you for the next one you find. And the next one. If we don’t want ever more of this in the future we need to start fighting now: fighting against climate change and fighting for safer buildings and a better educated public. I just wish the author had come down stronger on that.

As it is, I can't recommend this book. I think it got off to a strong start, but it faded quickly and became lost, for me, in parts two and three. The winds may blow differently for you.


Thursday, January 29, 2015

Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon


Title: Romantic Outlaws
Author: Charlotte Gordon
Publisher: Random House
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 a true story (if a bit overly dramatized here and there!) of two Marys: mother and daughter, the elder of whom, Mary Wollstonecraft, pretty much single-handedly founded feminism, and the younger of whom, best known as Mary Shelley, became famous for her novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, written when she was eighteen (and which was almost universally panned upon its initial publication).

The title of this book is oddly ironic since there's nothing either romantic or outlaw-ish about either of these two women unless you think of outlaw as the opposite of in-law and consider Mary the younger's circumstances once she eloped with Percy Shelley, the pretentious poet. Outlandish Scofflaws might have been a better title!

What this history is, above and beyond all else, is a shocking account of abuse, cruelty, and injustice heaped upon women by the very men they loved and counted on: Imlay, Godwin, Shelley, and Byron. Mary Wollstonecraft, before she ever met Mary Shelley's father, was doing a great job of being the very thing she stood for - a strong and independent woman, until she met a complete jerk by the name of George Imlay, whom she allowed to take advantage of her before he then abandoned her for someone younger.

She fell apart at this point, betraying her feminist principles, going into a funk, and twice trying to commit suicide, selfishly sparing not a thought for her young daughter, Imlay's daughter and Mary Shelley's sister-in-law, Fanny, who herself committed suicide later in her own life. This is the same woman who competed with men on equal terms as a writer, who lived in and lived through the French revolution, becoming perhaps the world's first foreign correspondent, working for a news and social commentary magazine.

In turn, Mary Shelley, who never knew her mother, spent her whole life missing her, and took off with Percy Shelley in what was superficially a romantic elopement, but which proved to be nothing for than delusional juvenile folly which turned into a dire marriage sabotaged by Shelley's selfish and self-absorbed inability to love, and exacerbated by Mary's crushing loss of her first two children. Mary was partly to blame for the death of her second child, William, since she knew that Rome was subject to the fever (malaria) in the summer but selfishly refused to move away from the city. She never forgave herself for that poor decision.

The contrast between these two women's lives is as stark as the similarities. Mary Wollstonecraft had to fight for everything she admirably gained only to lose it willingly as she allowed herself to become a slave to her ironic dependency upon Gilbert Imlay. Mary Shelley was spoiled rotten except for her perennial longing for her father's affection, which never came. She got everything she wanted, although it came with the pain of being in dire financial straits and with social ostracism for her running away with a married noble man who turned out to be about as ignoble as they come.

Percy Shelley seduced his wife-to-be, Harriet, blinded by some asinine "romantic" notion that he was saving her - a notion which came to him again when he met Mary Godwin, and yet again when he met an Italian noble woman while still married to Mary. As soon as Harriet, and then Mary became pregnant, Shelley pretty much lost interest in them since they were no longer romantic, and he evidently had no idea how to be anything other than a distant lover. He preferred to go off by himself writing grandiose, but ultimately shallow poetry than to sit with his bereaved and grieving wife and hold her hand. Mary's cold withdrawal after the death of William didn’t help. No romance there.

Mary and Percy's relationship was lived in the pale shadow of Mary's other half sister, Claire, who traveled with them everywhere, adding to the scandal under which they lived, making Mary look (and in some ways feel) like one of two female concubines to the poet. This pressure came to a head more than once in fights between Mary and Claire.

Lord Byron was no better. He joined them on their extended vacation, seducing Claire and then abandoning her when she had his child. This so-called god of the romantic poem was himself nothing but a lowlife and a complete jerk around women. Why he's held in such high regard today is a mysterious as it is scandalous. He was present that dark and stormy night when the four (Byron, Shelley, his doctor John Polidori, and Mary) all agreed to write a ghost story. Mary and John were the only two who actually did, and neither one of them actually wrote a ghost story. Mary came up with Frankenstein, which was disturbingly autobiographical in many (metaphorical) ways and John wrote a vampire story which in turn inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Polidori killed himself only a few years later.

Mary's father, Godwin, had no idea how to show affection to a child, and Mary felt the loss of her mother and her father's icy demeanor throughout her life. Godwin, supposedly a free-thinker and an advocate of free love, ostracized Mary after her elopement, even as he hypocritically harangued Shelley for loans to pay off his own debts! He did not come around until Shelley's wife, Harriet, killed herself, and Mary and Shelley finally married against their own "principles". Shelley then hypocritically tried to gain control of the two children which he had until then quite effectively rejected!

Later in life, Godwin appallingly withheld Mary's novel Mathilda, from publication, refusing to submit it and refusing to return her own manuscript to her. It wasn't published until 150 years after her death! In short, this is the story of two women who were remarkable, each in her own way, but who fell afoul of bad men and ended-up on bad relationships, yet who seemed unable to stick to their principles and extricate themselves.

To be fair, society and the law were harshly stacked against women in those times, even more so than they are now. It’s remarkable that these two Marys achieved what they did, and in the long term, both did prove to be strong. After her two suicide bids, Mary Wollstonecraft came back to life, restoring her career, meeting and became involved with Godwin, and finally giving birth to Mary, but dying shortly afterwards - the fate of all too many women back then.

Mary, having lost her step-sister fanny, lost her first two children, and been sorely used by Shelley, wrote many novels, survived the death, tragedy and suicides around her, survived Shelley's sad death in a boating mishap, and lived to fairly ripe old age, becoming revered and an institution in her own lifetime.

This is a long, long book - almost six hundred pages (of which about ten percent is chapter notes) - packed with detail, anecdotes, and pictures. It’s remarkable history of the lives and times of two remarkable and very memorable women. I recommend it.


Tuesday, January 13, 2015

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.


Tuesday, December 30, 2014

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!


Sunday, December 21, 2014

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.


Wednesday, November 26, 2014

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.


Wednesday, November 5, 2014

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!!!


Saturday, October 11, 2014

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.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

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!