2023年7月7日 星期五

"The Body" by Bill Bryson (2019)


"Epilepsy likewise is a perpetual mystery, but with the additional burden that sufferers have been shunned and demonized throughout history.  Well into the twentieth century, it was commonly believed by medical authorities that seizures and infections -- that just watching someone have a seizure could provoke a seizure in others."

Bill Bryson has written many, many books on many, many topics.  I swear I've read other books by the same author, but the only one reviewed here is One Summer: America 1927.  Which of his other books have I read?  For the life of me I can't remember.

Bryson is, by the way, an American author.  If he sounds British it's because he's lived there most of his life.  I didn't find his writing style in One Summer: America 1927 to be particularly British, but while reading The Body I often wondered which side of the Atlantic he was writing from.

In The Body, a book I found slightly less engaging than One Summer, Bryson takes us on a tour of the human body.  Along the way he discusses various breakthroughs in medicine, surgery and our understanding of how our bodies function, all of which he summarizes in two separate discussions of birth and death at the end of the book.

Very few of the physiological details introduced in this book were new to me, though I did find the anecdotes regarding forgotten doctors, barbaric medical treatments and other oddities very interesting.  Who knew that the medieval cure for gallstones was so horrific?  Who knew that so many doctors and scientists could be so petty when it came to credit for certain discoveries?  It's these little bits of trivia that make The Body worth reading, even if some of the descriptions of bodily processes are only there to pad out the book.

On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd give The Body a solid 7.  It's not as absorbing as I thought it'd be, but I never found it dull.  Compared to the other book by Bryson that I can actually remember reading, it's definitely an inferior effort, but in Bryson's case an inferior effort is still a very readable book.  He shows a characteristic command of his subject throughout, he's obviously done his research, and if a better book on the same subject is out there we'll just have to hope we stumble across it.

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2023年6月22日 星期四

"Ninth House" by Leigh Bardugo (2019)


"He started her small -- with Aurelian.  Darlington figured the big magics could wait for later in the semester, and he knew he'd made the right choice when he came downstairs at Il Bastone to find Alex perched on the edge of a velvet cushion, gnawing feverishly on a thumbnail."

Leigh Bardugo is known as an author of young adult novels.  Her "Shadow and Bone" novels seem to be the best known, though she's written two other duologies and several companion books.  Ninth House is her first attempt at adult fiction, and it has already been optioned by Amazon Studios.  A sequel to Ninth House, Hell Bent, is due out this year.

The novel is centered around "Alex" (Galaxy) Stern, a freshman at Yale who can see ghosts.  She's been recruited into Yale for the sake of overseeing magical rituals on campus.  The Yale of Ninth House is run by several magical societies, and the rituals these societies perform affect everything from the stock market to U.S. foreign policy.

Is it a good book?  I would say that yes, it is but with the reservation that the narrative structure could have been more chronological.  But with this said, Alex Stern is an interesting character, and the author leaves enough room in Alex's backstory for the kinds of questions that keep readers invested.  The ending is also surprisingly good, and I'd probably read the sequel.

Stephen King really seems to prostitute himself on book covers though.  Is there any novel he didn't like?  Is there any writer that he doesn't think is the future of horror?

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2023年5月30日 星期二

"Pathogenesis" by Jonathan Kennedy (2023)


"The Christian faith skyrocketed because it provided a more appealing and assuring guide to life and death than paganism during the devastating pandemics that struck the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries CE."

Jonathan Kennedy is a professor at Queen Mary College in London.  He teaches Politics and Global Health, and he has a PhD in Sociology.  Pathogenesis is his first book.

In this book the author charts both the evolution of human beings and the evolution of human societies in conjunction with the occurrence of pandemics throughout our history.  Yellow fever, malaria and the plague feature most prominently in this narrative, with later chapters focusing on more modern maladies such as cholera, AIDS and COVID-19.  The book concludes with a short chapter on future pandemics, and how our current institutions might address the appearance of such pandemics by putting more collective emphasis on public health.

It's a very readable book and I got through it very quickly.  I was, however,  a bit disappointed by the weight given to both Antiquity and the Age of Exploration, since I was reading the book for more perspective on COVID-19.  A historical analysis was definitely warranted, but this book doesn't have much to say about pandemics during this or the previous century.  That, I think, was the kind of discussion this book should have been building toward.

I'd recommend Pathogenesis, but this really isn't the sort of post-COVID retrospective I was looking for.

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2023年5月19日 星期五

"To Rule the Waves" by Bruce D. Jones (2021)


"Even assuming that the US Navy's presence in the Near Seas is only to defend the Law of the Sea Convention (and the US no longer even really maintains that stance), these "freedom of navigation operations put US warships in a position to subsequently impede China's military options in the Taiwan Strait, and across the South and East China Seas.  And so, from the late 1990s onward, China focused its energy and effort on building out its capacity to push back, to defend its interests in the Near Seas, and frustrate or limit USN freedom within those waters."

Bruce D. Jones works at the Brookings Institution.  He has also served as advisor to the World Bank.  Aside from To Rule the Waves he's written one other book on his own, 2014's Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint.

To Rule the Waves, which isn't even included in the author's Wikipedia entry, outlines how various world powers attempt to control the seas, both along their own coastlines and in an international context.  It places issues such as international shipping, territorial disputes and oceanography in the context of climate change, and does so in a well-researched manner that doesn't fall too heavily on one side or the other.

After a short introductory section the author divides his study into three parts, these being a) the ports, routes and companies most relevant to international shipping, b) piracy and international disputes involving the demarcation of national vs. international waters, and c) the study of oceanography in the context of climate change, and how our understanding(s) of climate change plays into all of the topics covered up to that point.

It is, all in all, a very balanced account of both how the sea is relevant to our daily lives and how this same sea continues to shape our future.  Everything from Maersk to the Aegis radar system is discussed, and the author seems especially well-informed with regard to the US Navy and its role in world trade.

I have a few complaints, however, which hopefully the author has already anticipated and which he will address in some future, still more comprehensive book.  

My first complaint is the lack of detail with regard to China's government, its military, and most specifically its navy.  The workings of the US Navy take up a lot of space in this book, and a lack of detail with regard to China's side of the equation is particularly glaring.  I realize that China's government and military aren't as transparent as their US equivalents, but this book often returns to a contest between the US and China for control of the seas, and more information on China's side of this contest  would have been helpful.

My second complaint is the page-long description of Taiwan's history.  This description omits a few important things, and leads one to believe that China has more claims on the island than it actually does.  Dates of immigration, Taiwan's loss of UN membership, and the details of various treaties are all relevant to larger discussions of tensions in the South China Sea.

My third and last complaint is the exclusion of the fishing industry from this book.  Fisheries are discussed in passing, but the fishing fleets of the various world powers, especially those operating in the South China Sea, should have been explored to some extent.  "The flag follows trade?"  What about "trade follows fish?"  Disputes over fisheries inform several disagreements between nations, and including some of these disputes would have rounded out some of the sections nicely.

Yet aside from these complaints I still think that To Rule the Waves is a good book, and moreover a book well worth reading.  If, like me, you live in East Asia, you'll find a renewed understanding of many essential topics in its pages, alongside some trivia you may not have come across before.

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2023年4月19日 星期三

"2034" by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis (2021)


"He did, however, feel a small surge of satisfaction that the complex mix of cyber cloaking, stealth materials, and satellite spoofing had kept his fleet well hidden. While the Americans surely suspected them of heading for the vicinity of Chinese Taipei, their old adversary had been unable to develop the precise targeting data required for a counter-maneuver. Eventually, the Americans would find them. But by then it would be too late."

Elliot Ackerman served in the Marine Corps for eight years, after which time he became a White House Fellow and then embarked on a career in writing.  James Stavridis is a retired U.S. Navy admiral who's also written several books.  I'm new to both authors, but judging by what I've seen online 2034 is the best known book either author has written thus far.

In 2034 the Chinese and U.S. navies finally confront one another after an altercation in the South China Sea.  The U.S. Navy, discovering a Chinese ship in distress, find themselves under attack soon after, and from that point on the conflict escalates to include both the use of nuclear weapons and the invasion of Taiwan.

As this kind of book goes 2034 isn't bad.  It's written with a certain succinctness, the characters are consistent, their motivations are clear, and the story builds to a gratifying conclusion.  What disappointed me about 2034, however, is its lack of detail.  Considering the careers of its two authors, you'd think that this book would be crammed with military details, but what it offers instead is a fairly bare bones story leading to (or almost leading to) World War III.

Another, minor complaint I have is that this book allows itself two "miracle exemptions."  One of these exemptions, in the form of a Chinese superweapon, would have been acceptable, but adding to this another exemption, in the form of a "third force" which miraculously appears near the end of the novel, is stretching things a bit too far.  Either exemption on its own would have been fine, but having both present in the same narrative strains its credibility.

If you're looking for a lighter tale of near-apocalypse I'd recommend this book.  I got through it relatively quickly, and I never had any trouble figuring out what was going on.  This said, those looking for a deeper, more believable dive into East Asian geopolitics will be disappointed by it.  The authors, I think -- or at least the editor -- could have offered us something more substantive.

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2023年4月6日 星期四

"The Third Pillar" by Raghuram Rajan (2019)


"The pillars are seriously unbalanced today. Communities have been especially impacted. In the United States, minority and immigrant communities were hit first by joblessness, which led to their social breakdown in the 1970s and 1980s. In the last two decades, communities in small towns and semirural areas, typically white, have been experiencing a similar decline as large local manufacturers close down..."

Raghuram Rajan is a Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago. He's also served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. The Third Pillar is his fourth book.

And what, you ask, is this "third pillar?"  The "third pillar" is the community or communities we live in, which collectively make up the social landscape in which we live our lives.  The other two pillars are government and the market.  In the author's thinking many of the world's problems are reducible to an imbalance between the three pillars, with the government or the market often overwhelming the community's role in the individual's life.

For this reason the author sees strengthening the community as central to improving circumstances in a variety of national and international contexts.  Democracy, in other words, in its most participatory form.  Related to this idea is his concept of inclusive localism, in which communities interact and effect change within both the government and the market, resulting in better outcomes for those involved.

But.. how to get there from here?  Few would argue against the author's conceptions of the three pillars and inclusive localism, but it is the application of these ideas that poses the real problem.  The Third Pillar ranges from India, to the United States, to China, and along the way the author arrives at some arresting conclusions, many of which make one feel that we could be on the brink of change, but when you think downward to real places and real communities you can't help but wonder at the mechanics of bringing those communities to the forefront of daily existence, and how the various dysfunctions present in these communities can be separated from what, if anything, makes them work.

I would encourage anyone looking for a pair of fresh eyes on national and international relations to read The Third Pillar, but don't expect a clear roadmap to the future.  This book could be called a beginning, but we're far from a practical start with respect to fixing what's wrong with our societies, our governments and our economies.

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