Half Changed World

For Hanukkah, T gave me an audiobook of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  I must have looked at him skeptically (I was pretty skeptical), and he said, "It's like This American Life, but with zombies!"

That's actually a pretty good description of the book.  It's a series of "interviews" with different people — politicians, doctors, soldiers, civil servants — about their experiences in combating a massive global epidemic of the living dead.  It's published as a regular book as well, but it's perfect for an audiobook, with different actors playing each of the characters.  (Alan Alda was immediately recognizable, but I missed Mark Hamill, and all of the actors playing non-American characters were unfamiliar to me.)

We drove to Florida and back for the holidays, and this was about the perfect thing to listen to driving down I-95 at 3 am with the boys sleeping.  (I also listened to parts of it with the boys watching videos with headphones on — the content of this is definitely not appropriate for small children — it's about zombies for pity's sake.)

Apparently there's a movie being made of it.  It will be interesting to see whether they manage to keep the sly political commentary, or if it just becomes a shoot 'em up (or rather, slug them in the head with something heavy and pointy) movie.  The audiobook doesn't have a hero or a plot in the conventional sense, and I'm pretty sure that they will feel compelled to have one in a movie.  And two of the narrators are wildly unreliable, and I'm not sure how that works in a movie.  (Although it seems that Waltz with Bashir makes a go at it.)

The other audiobook that I brought down with me is Eat, Pray, Love, and I'm clearly going to get my chick license revoked, because I hated it so much that I didn't get through the first disk.  I found Gilbert whiny and self-obsessed.  And I'm fundamentally not impressed by traveling around the world to find yourself — I'm far more interested in people who stay home and build buildings or wipe snotty noses and still manage to find themselves.

What does it say about me (or modern life) that when I read Judith Warner's column last week about the use of brain-enhancing drugs my first reaction was to wonder how one goes about getting some Provigil?  (It's an anti-narcolepsy drug, which apparently allows one to maintain brain functionality in spite of sleep deprivation.  And for the record, the only drug I'm actually taking is claritin.)

I'm not a scientist, and I don't know what the side effects of these drugs are.  But a few months ago, after being up most of the night with one of the boys, I went to work, and was pretty fuzzy around the edges.  And then I realized that I had spent a good two years or more in that kind of a fog every single day.  And if someone had offered me a drug to make it go away (other than caffeine), I'm pretty sure I'd have jumped for it.

If asprin were invented today, it would probably require a prescription — between its blood thinning action and the potential for Reye's syndrome, it's easy to make the case that it's too dangerous to be available without control.  Caffeine is ubiquitous, but I could argue that it's as much of a mind-altering substance as Provigil or Ritalin.  I think the editorial in Nature arguing for legalizing these drugs for people who aren't "ill" is pretty convincing.

*If you're wondering about the title, it's a reference to Nancy Kress' excellent sci-fi novel Beggars in Spain, where she explores what happens if some people are genetically engineered not to need sleep, and thus have an advantage over the rest of us.  Pills are certainly more egalitarian than genetic modification.

On the plane last week, I finally had the chance to read Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America.  Tough is a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and this is his expanded coverage of the Harlem Children's Zone, which he's reported on over the years.  Obama has said he wants to create 20 Promise Neighborhoods, modeled after the HCZ, so I thought it was important to read the book.

HCZ is an attempt to change the odds for kids in a poor neighborhood by providing an extensive range of services, everything from parenting classes to preschool to charter schools to summer programs.  What makes it different from most other attempts is:

• it tries to cover kids from birth through college, on the assumption that no program lasting just a few years is going to keep kids on the right track in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  This is in many ways an implicit rebuke to the extravagant claims sometimes made for  Head Start or  home visiting  programs.
• it tries to reach enough kids — ideally it would be at a scale to reach every kid in the target neighborhood — to change the culture of the neighborhood for the better.  Canada explicitly argues that the well regarded KIPP charter schools encourage students to separate themselves from the community as a whole

Tough doesn't hide that he's a believer in the HCZ approach.  In general, the book is overwhelmingly positive about Canada and the HCZ, although a long section is devoted to the struggles at the charter middle school they operate, and the choice to give up on the first class of students after two years of disappointing results. 

I think HCZ is a fascinating experiment, but Whatever It Takes isn't quite a fascinating book.  It's a solid book, well-reported, with a decent popular summary of the academic literature behind the theory.  But, fundamentally, the story of HCZ is really only in its first chapter, with no one knowing how it will turn out.  Geoffrey Canada's personal story is quite intriguing, but Canada himself has already written that book.

If you like to listen to the radio, I might suggest the coverage of this book on This American Life or Talk of the Nation instead.

The New York Times gave a heck of a review to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. I love Bechdel's reaction. Dang is right.

I'm watching the movie of Sex and the City while I write this.  It's truly awful, and I say this as someone who was a fan of the series.  (I'm still watching it because I've got a pile of laundry to sort.)

I wonder who else falls into the intersection of people who read DTWOF and watch SATC.  While the characters are at close to polar opposites of the cultural spectrum (crunchy politically obsessed anti-materialist lesbians in Minnesota vs. fashion obsessed consumerist heterosexuals in search of true love in New York), the stories actually have a lot in common.  Both are soap operas, and both portray worlds where friendships between women endure over time in spite of relationships, jobs, kids, and everything else that life throws at you.  And, in spite of name of the show, most of the time SATC passes the Mo Movie Test — women talk to each other about things other than men (usually shoes, but I still think that counts).

I've developed a standing pattern of reporting each year on which books I've read from the NY Times list of notable books.

This year, I've read:

• A Most Wanted Man
  
• Unaccustomed Earth (don't seem to have blogged about this one, but I liked it a lot)
• Predictably Irrational (having read even more books about behavioral economics, this one stands out as particularly good)
• Trillion Dollar Meltdown (an important book, but not the most readable one)

I started reading The Lazarus Project, but couldn't get into it and so have given up on it.  I'm also still in the middle of Nixonland.

This year, from the 2007 list I read The Abstinence Teacher and The Maytrees.

So many books, so little time.

Today's book is A Most Wanted Man, by John LeCarre.  I'm not going to give away the ending, but I don't think it's possible to talk about the book without spoiling it a little bit, so if  that's going to make you crazy, stop reading now.

Like all of LeCarre's books, this is a spy novel, although only one of the main characters is a spy master in the sense of LeCarre's cold war novels.  A young man half-Russian, half-Chechen with a history of imprisonment in Russian and Turkish jails finds his way to Hamburg.  Is he a terrorist?  A humanitarian refuge?  Just an ordinary illegal immigrant?  The novel never shows his point of view, so the reader is as much at a loss as the people who move in his orbit — an idealistic young lawyer, a pragmatic spymaster, a middle aged banker who is not as jaded as he thinks he is.

The characters were interesting, but never quite fully developed.  (The banker is the most fleshed out, and I think is LeCarre's stand-in in the novel.)  What interests LeCarre is the situation, and the philosophical questions: is the leader of a charitable organization where 5 percent of the money is diverted to terrorists entirely bad, or 95 percent good?  Does it matter?  (See today's headlines.)  Does old-fashioned spycraft still have a role to play in world of electronic eavesdropping and bombs on public transportation?

The ending approaches what a teacher of mine used to call a "beer truck ending" — an ending that comes out of nowhere, without connection to what has come before.  But it's not a matter of laziness on LeCarre's part.  He's making a very specific point about the fact that we live in a world where people can get run over by beer trucks in spite of their best laid plans.

This week’s book is Mother on Fire: A True Motherf#%&ing Story about Parenting, by Sandra Tsing Loh.  I had high hopes for this book, as I generally enjoy Loh’s essays in The Atlantic, in particular those about how she sent her kids to public school in Los Angeles and the world didn’t collapse. 

Unfortunately, Loh’s decision to send her kids to public school is the conclusion of this book, not the beginning.  Most of the book is an extended meditation on how terribly unfair it is that two artists don’t earn enough to send their kids to fancy private schools.   I can’t say I’m terribly sympathetic.

The book is based on her one-woman show, and it does have some funny moments.  My favorite was her discussion of how she suddenly became famous when she was fired from public radio for cursing on the air.  But it’s not a good sign when, of the four humorous quotes on the back of the jacket, three of them show up in the first chapter.  And making fun of the pretentiousness of ultra-expensive liberal private schools is shooting fish in a barrel. 

Because of the vagaries of school schedules, it happened that my kids both had school today, and I had the day off from work.  Since it was my birthday as well, when T. headed out to take N to preschool, I got back in bed and finished reading Stephenie Meyer’s The Host.

I got The Host out of the library after reading Flea’s review.  The only thing that I feel compelled to add is that I didn’t think the premise was all that original, having read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series.  But it was well done, and kept me turning the pages.

The other novel I’ve read recently is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski.  This has been getting all sorts of rave reviews, but I have to admit that I was underwhelmed by it.   I could tell from the beginning that it was loosely based on Hamlet (characters named Trudy and Claude sort of give it away), but when the ghost of Edgar’s father appeared, much of my willing suspension of disbelief went away.  Oh yeah, and the Ophelia character is a dog.

D was speculating on what it would be like to have a personal robot, so I took my parental prerogative to insist on reading some of I, Robot to him.  I had forgotten how old the stories were.  The copy we have was Tony’s mother’s — it’s the first Signet paperback printing, dated 1956, with the cover reading "Man-like machines rule the world! Fascinating tales of a strange tomorrow."  The collection as a whole is copyright 1950, with the first story (Robbie) originally published in 1940 (and supposedly taking place in 1998).

The stories remain quite readable, although the vocabulary is a bit hard going for a 7 year old, even with me reading to him.   Seeing where, and how, Asimov’s predictions were off is fascinating.  While the "primative" nursemaid robot of Robbie remains far out of
reach, the "talking robot" that can answer factual questions is well
within our capacity.

Even beyond the robots, there’s a whole bunch of technologies that he assumed we’d have which we don’t — jet cars and space travel.  But at the same time that he’s predicting these things, the concept of a miniature audio recorder seems to have escaped him: "I was taking it down verbatum on my pocket-recorder, trying not to show the knuckle-motions of my hand.  If you practice a bit, you can get to the point were you can record accurately without taking the little gadget out of your pocket."

Since I think I’ll be a bit distracted on Tuesday night, I’m posting this week’s book review tonight.  The book is The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, Charles R. Morris.

Morris wins a huge amount of credit for having written this book last winter, before everyone and her brother was talking about credit derivative swaps.  That said, his crystal ball wasn’t perfect — he spends a fair amount of time worrying about what will happen if other countries decide not to invest in the dollar anymore, while what seems to have happened is that everyone seems to have decided that the US Treasury is the one safe place to put your money in a world gone mad.

I definitely learned some useful things reading this book.  Nothing else I’ve read on the current economic collapse points out that there was a previous crash of collaterized mortgage obligations crash in 1994 when the Fed raised rate by 1/2 a percent.  But even more interesting than reading what Morris thought in February would happen in September would be to find out what he now thinks will be happening next March.

In the rush to get a full-length book out in a matter of months, the editing also suffered a bit.  Morris has some great lines: "That is the Greenspan Put: No matter what goes wrong, the Fed will rescue you by creating enough cheap money to buy you out of your troubles."  But at other times, he falls into a bit of jargon: "Similarly, the notional value of a derivative refers not to the derivative but to the size of the portfolio it is referencing."

Planet Money remains my pick for translating economist-speak into English.