Tasha Alexander's books are best read somewhere warm and sunny, preferably while drinking a beverage which includes a little umbrella. That's not to say they can't be enjoyed while commuting on a snow-delayed bus. It's just that while sitting in traffic, cold and surrounded by grumpy people, Emily's adventures provided too much contrast to my situation.
Still recovering from the injuries sustained at the end of Tears of Pearl and chafing under her mother-in-law's disapproving eye, Lady Emily finds solace in long horseback rides. At least, that is, until she comes across the mutilated body of a young woman. The local police think that it's the work of Jack the Ripper; Emily's husband Colin Hargraves isn't so sure. With the help of Emily's friend Cecile du Lac (and Sebastien Capet, the burglar/pretender to the French throne), Emily and Colin discover that the dead woman was a distant cousin to Mrs. Hargraves's odd neighbors and had escaped from a mental asylum. I spent the last third of the book convinced that I'd figured out the killer, and the motive - only to find out that I was completely wrong. On a mystery level, it's the best Lady Emily book since the first, and after a book featuring none of Emily's friends, I was happy to see Cecile, but I miss Ivy, Margaret, and Jeremy, and even Emily's overbearing mother. I don't have the next installment yet, but I hope it returns Emily to London where she (and we) will once again spend time with them.
Monday, February 17, 2014
Double Indemnity
The Postman Always Rings Twice disappointed me. On a technical level, it deserves its reputation as a noir classic, but it left me cold. Double Indemnity lived up to my expectations. The characters were no more likable, but they were more compelling, perhaps because they inhabited a more complex plot. Walter Huff stops by a client's house to renew his car insurance policy. Mr. Nirdlinger isn't home, but Mrs. Nirdlinger is, and she asks about taking out an accident policy on her husband. Huff knows what this means, but as he begins an affair with Phyllis Nirdlinger, he plans the perfect "accidental" murder of her husband.
And it works - until Phyllis's stepdaughter Lola points tells Huff that her mother died in Phyllis's care. Huff begins to question his accomplice, but the plan's going well, right? Then Huff discovers that Phyllis is having an affair with Lola's boyfriend, and a trap springs on the wrong person. Or does it? Like a good noir, "double-crossing" doesn't even begin to describe the plot twists, and the ending foreshadows Jim Thompson's The Getaway. At about 150 pages, Double Indemnity can be a one sitting read, and is definitely worth the time. Now, I just need to see the movie...
Thursday, February 13, 2014
As Easy as Pi
I had a Pale and Geeky Christmas - my cousin gave me a sonic screwdriver, friends gave me a Doctor Who miscellany, and my parents gave me a Doctor Who t-shirt, a puzzle book, and four very geeky books. One was As Easy as Pi, a volume of number trivia. It's a perfect commute book, with essays ranging from a paragraph to a few pages on number-related topics. From explaining where numerical phrases came from (or may have come from) to why buses seem to come in threes, it's diverting and unchallenging. Just the thing to read during snow-lengthened commutes.
The Rough Collier
Several years ago, I read a really bad mystery. The title was a clear attempt to cash in on a then-bestseller, the plot was ridiculous, the main character had too many "colorful" attributes (grad student AND bike messenger AND nude model for art classes AND lost her virginity to her professor-mother's colleague in a book-lined study - and all this by page 10), and the writing style was inappropriately flowery. It was awful, but it was fun to read.
The Rough Collier is a better-written book, but less memorable and less fun. Peat diggers find a preserved body, assume it's a recently disappeared local man, and a courtier visiting his mother deduces that it's not. So what happened to the missing man? It turns out he was murdered, but I never got interested enough in the characters to care how or by whom. The Rough Collier isn't a bad book, but it's mediocre and dull. I'm not going to look for any other books in the series, and I'm donating it to the Book Corner.
The Rough Collier is a better-written book, but less memorable and less fun. Peat diggers find a preserved body, assume it's a recently disappeared local man, and a courtier visiting his mother deduces that it's not. So what happened to the missing man? It turns out he was murdered, but I never got interested enough in the characters to care how or by whom. The Rough Collier isn't a bad book, but it's mediocre and dull. I'm not going to look for any other books in the series, and I'm donating it to the Book Corner.
Simplexity: Why Simple Thing Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid
My office mate is a big fan of simplification. He can take any issue, boil it down to a single yes-or-no question, and declare victory when the person with whom he's arguing cannot give a 100% positive answer. He should probably read Sipmplexity, but I doubt he ever will. Jeffrey Kruger has an interesting premise - everything exists on a bell curve, between complete chaos and complete order, and the sweet spot is in the middle. Every system needs enough flexibility to accommodate the variations from the norm, but not so much so that predictability falls too low. Human perception complicates matters - we place too much value on the rare event (like plane crashes) because they stand out and not enough on common events (like car crashes) because they fade into the background. Kruger applies the rules of simplexity to several situations, from language acquisition to sports scores and from consumer electronics to why low paid jobs aren't actually low skilled. I don't know (and it may be impossible to know) how accurate his conclusions are, but it's an interesting book.
My office mate is a big fan of simplification. He can take any issue, boil it down to a single yes-or-no question, and declare victory when the person with whom he's arguing cannot give a 100% positive answer. He should probably read Sipmplexity, but I doubt he ever will. Jeffrey Kruger has an interesting premise - everything exists on a bell curve, between complete chaos and complete order, and the sweet spot is in the middle. Every system needs enough flexibility to accommodate the variations from the norm, but not so much so that predictability falls too low. Human perception complicates matters - we place too much value on the rare event (like plane crashes) because they stand out and not enough on common events (like car crashes) because they fade into the background. Kruger applies the rules of simplexity to several situations, from language acquisition to sports scores and from consumer electronics to why low paid jobs aren't actually low skilled. I don't know (and it may be impossible to know) how accurate his conclusions are, but it's an interesting book.
The Upleasentness at the Bellona Club
Dorothy Sayers is one of the masters of the classic, Golden Age mystery, and The Unpleasentness at the Bellona Club is, on one level a typical example. On Armistice Day, General Fentiman's grandson finds him dead, in a comfy armchair at the Bellona Club. A few days later, General Fentiman's lawyer asks Lord Peter Wimsey (who was at the Bellona Club when the body was discovered) to unravel a problem. The General had reconciled with his estranged sister hours before his death, and she had changed her will. Lady Dormer had also died on November 11, and if she had predeceased her brother, he inherited the bulk of her estate (£12,000 would go to Lady Dormer's niece Ann), which would then pass to his grandson Robert, minus £2000 to his grandson George. If Lady Dormer predeceased the General, Ann would inherit her estate, minus £7500 to each of General Fentiman's grandsons.
So far, it's all fairly straightforward, except the General's body was moved after death, throwing the time of death into question. That, in turn, opens up the question of how he died - did his heart simply give out after the emotional meeting with his sister, or was he murdered? And by whom? George and Ann benefited if the General died before Lady Dormer, Robert if the General last, and all three inherited a substantial amount. Lord Peter, of course, solves the mystery, and the murder's identity would have been a surprise if I hadn't read the book twice before and seen the BBC adaptation half a dozen times.
I said that this is a classic mystery on one level, and it is. On another level, it's a fairly early depiction of PTSD. Most of Sayers's novels refer to Lord Peter's shell shock, and he has a breakdown at the end of Whose Body. Lord Peter, has money and position which help provide coping mechanisms. George Fentiman's situation seems calculated to make his shell shock worse. He's a "gentleman" who now has to work, but keeps losing jobs because of his condition, and he's living in an era when PTSD is seen as a sign of weakness, not as an illness. Modern readers are used to a little bit of social commentary in genre fiction, but I don't think it was quite so common 90 years ago. This is why I re-read mysteries, particularly classics. The second or third time around, I don't just see the puzzle but also the framework, and gain insights into the world as it was.
So far, it's all fairly straightforward, except the General's body was moved after death, throwing the time of death into question. That, in turn, opens up the question of how he died - did his heart simply give out after the emotional meeting with his sister, or was he murdered? And by whom? George and Ann benefited if the General died before Lady Dormer, Robert if the General last, and all three inherited a substantial amount. Lord Peter, of course, solves the mystery, and the murder's identity would have been a surprise if I hadn't read the book twice before and seen the BBC adaptation half a dozen times.
I said that this is a classic mystery on one level, and it is. On another level, it's a fairly early depiction of PTSD. Most of Sayers's novels refer to Lord Peter's shell shock, and he has a breakdown at the end of Whose Body. Lord Peter, has money and position which help provide coping mechanisms. George Fentiman's situation seems calculated to make his shell shock worse. He's a "gentleman" who now has to work, but keeps losing jobs because of his condition, and he's living in an era when PTSD is seen as a sign of weakness, not as an illness. Modern readers are used to a little bit of social commentary in genre fiction, but I don't think it was quite so common 90 years ago. This is why I re-read mysteries, particularly classics. The second or third time around, I don't just see the puzzle but also the framework, and gain insights into the world as it was.
Monday, January 20, 2014
The Devil in the White City
The Devil in the White City opens on the Olympic, where Daniel Hudson Burnham, one of the architects of the 1893 Great Exposition in Chicago decides to send a message to his friend Frank Millet who's crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction, on the RMS Titanic. Eric Larson presumes that while waiting word of his friend's survival, Burnham's thoughts drifted back to their great project, the 1893 Great Exposition in Chicago. One of Chicago's most innovative architects and the man who figured out how to build skyscrapers on Chicago's soft soil, the Exposition committee chose Burnham to oversee the construction and operation of the site, and Larson devotes about half the book to the troubled construction and ultimately successful execution of Chicago's grand step onto the world stage.
Larson does a good job of describing the difficulties, both political and weather-related, which plagued the construction of what came to be known as the White City, and his description of the Exposition communicated the sense of awe visitors must have felt when they saw the first ever Ferris wheel and the gorgeous buildings filled with curiosities. He leavens this sense of awe with creepy but engrossing chapters about H. H. Holmes, a pharmacist and landlord whose wives, secretaries, and business associates seem to disappear. Holmes has an explanation for everything - they went back to their families, or ran away to marry, or followed another business opportunity. Sure, his apartment building had odd, soundproofed rooms, and maybe the gas jets looked a bit odd, but no one put anything together.
No one, that is, until 1895 when Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia detective investigated a case of insurance fraud. H. H. Holmes had taken out insurance policies on his business partner Benjamin Perzel, who disappeared soon afterward. Holmes then took Perzel's children on a trip from which they never returned. This last section reads like a tightly written police procedural, with solid detective work and a few lucky breaks. Geyer captured America's first known serial killer.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Hotel Pastis
Sometimes I just want to read something that makes me smile. Something lightweight but not disposable, a book in which I can immerse myself and imagine that I'm not riding a commuter train in the dark both to and from work. A book where I can feel the sunshine and taste the multi-hour meals. When I'm in that sort of mood, I reach for Peter Mayle. After careers in advertising and educational books (he wrote the "where did I come from?" books my grade school teachers used for introductory sex ed), Mayle moved to Provence in the late 80s and chronicled his year of renovation. More travelogues followed, and then Hotel Pastis. It's about a recently divorced ad man named Simon Shaw who falls in love both with Provence and a woman with whom he opens a hotel. Oh, and there's a gang of bank robbers disguised as a cycling team doing training runs, and the son of Simon's former firm's biggest client who's not sure if he wants to win the Tour de France or earn three Michelin stars. Add in an extremely competent assistant, an old man with a high ladder, an ex-wife who reappears every few months, avaricious fellow ad men, a disreputable relative, assorted tourists, a sour-tempered "journalist," the mayor's beautiful daughter, a commanding female chef, and a bull terrier, season with lavender, basil, and champagne, and sit back. It's a pleasant vacation disguised as a 380-page paperback, and place to revisit every few years.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine
There cannot be two kinds of medicine. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not.
- Marcia Angell
The above quote by the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine sums up my attitude towards alternative medicine - either it works or it isn't medicine. It's no coincidence that Dr. Paul Offit used Dr. Angell's quote to introduce his chapter on nutritional supplements. As he points out, some of them may work, but because they're generally untested, we don't know which ones work, and what side effects they may cause. Unlike Ben Goldacre whose Bad Science took on several affronts to science and sense, Offit focuses on supplements and the anti-vaccination movement, where he can focus on facts rather than outrage. I'm not saying that Offit isn't outraged or that Goldacre didn't support his work, but the books have very different tones. In contrast to Goldacre's slightly snarky wit, Offit writes in a more clinical voice.
Part of me understands why alternative medicine is so appealing. It's personal, calming, and (mis)uses the word natural. Clinical medicine is, well, clinical, dispensed by people whose demeanor usually ranges from slightly distant through cold to a combination of arrogant rudeness with a dash of God complex. Natural remedies don't list adverse events; pharmaceutical ads include a laundry list of frightening side effects. And many drugs originally came from plants, so supplements must be both effective and safe right? Well, no, that's not true, and simple logic should tell you that.
Simple logic, however, can't stand up to repeated assaults by celebrities, by doctors who should know better, and by a federal law protecting supplement makers. I was working in a testing lab and considering law school in 1994, and thoroughly horrified when I read that the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act passed. Basically, anything not classified as a drug can be marketed with no testing whatsoever, and cannot be withdrawn until a critical mass of dead bodies can be traced to its use. It's perfectly legal for your supplement (which you think will improve your memory or increase your energy or just make you healthier over all) to contain no active ingredients, or to have failed every well-designed effectiveness study, or to be contaminated with known toxins (or, as the New York Times reported this week, may contain entirely different herbs than are listed on the label). For the most part, this modern snake oil just drains the consumer's wallet, but due to the lack of testing, we just don't know which supplements are toxic or allergenic - and thanks to the DSHEA, we cannot know. Offit tells us why this is the case - a supplement-loving Senator (Orrin Hatch) from a supplement-producing state (Utah) pushed through the law against the advise of the FDA thanks to the general weakness of scientific knowledge among the general public.
That lack of scientific knowledge explains why people are willing to believe B-list actresses rather than doctors when it comes to autism and menopause. Jenny McCarthy now co-hosts The View, so her false claims that vaccinations cause autism are once again front-page news. They are wrong, they are hazardous, and, as Offit explains, are just one item in a laundry list of potentially dangerous claims which charlatans use to prey on desperate parents. Suzanne Sommers has been relegated to the infomercial circuit with her bio-identical hormones, and that probably makes her less of a threat. Her position that bio-identical hormones (basically, the same molecule but from an herbal source) are safer and more effective than commercially produced pharmaceuticals, though, just doesn't make sense. If it's the same molecule, it should have the same effect - and the same risk of side effects. She's profiting from the ignorance of the general public.
Supplement producers, McCarthy, and Sommers are dangerous, but at least they're working from their own ignorance. What about those who should know better? Offit criticizes Dr. Oz for highlighting faith healers and therapeutic touch practitioners (therapeutic touch was disproved by a middle school student's science fair project) by providing a national platform for their unverified (and unverifiable) but deeply moving stories. Andrew Weil - another doctor who should know better - promotes herbal cures based on small, badly designed studies. There's no evidence they help anything other than Dr. Weil's financial well-being.
Offit also criticizes the late Dr. Linus Pauling, calling him both one of the greatest scientists and greatest quacks of the 20th Century. A brilliant chemist and renowned peace activist, Dr. Pauling became a vitamin evangelist in the 1970s. Clinical trials conduced in the ensuing decades, however, showed that high doses of anti-oxidant vitamins shorten life spans and increase cancer rates. Too much of a good thing can kill you, but Pauling's earlier brilliance overshadows the hard facts put forth by faceless university academics.
Most of this is familiar territory. Where Offit differs from other debunking doctors is that he explains how and why alternative remedies work. Goldacre mentioned regression to the mean (we reach for remedies when we feel our worst and would feel better soon no matter what) and the placebo effect. Offit actually explains what should really be called the placebo response. Pain isn't all in our minds, but we can use our minds (through relaxation and trickery) to release endorphins. These naturally produced pain killers can dull pain and cause other physiological responses. When acupuncture or a supplement works, it's because we've fooled our brains into releasing endorphins, dulling our pain but not fixing the cause, be it a pulled muscle, an infection, or cancer. This is why I think Do You Believe in Magic may be slightly more effective than Bad Science in convincing the public that most alternative remedies are ineffective. Offit seems to understand why people want to believe in magic when Goldacre just snarks at their ignorance. Goldacre is a more entertaining writer (Offit is perhaps a bit too clinical for some), but he's probably more likely to turn off those who need to hear his message. I'm cynical enough (even when my office mate isn't expounding on health theories which only show he might not pass 4th grade science), though, to think that they're preaching to the choir.
Part of me understands why alternative medicine is so appealing. It's personal, calming, and (mis)uses the word natural. Clinical medicine is, well, clinical, dispensed by people whose demeanor usually ranges from slightly distant through cold to a combination of arrogant rudeness with a dash of God complex. Natural remedies don't list adverse events; pharmaceutical ads include a laundry list of frightening side effects. And many drugs originally came from plants, so supplements must be both effective and safe right? Well, no, that's not true, and simple logic should tell you that.
Simple logic, however, can't stand up to repeated assaults by celebrities, by doctors who should know better, and by a federal law protecting supplement makers. I was working in a testing lab and considering law school in 1994, and thoroughly horrified when I read that the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act passed. Basically, anything not classified as a drug can be marketed with no testing whatsoever, and cannot be withdrawn until a critical mass of dead bodies can be traced to its use. It's perfectly legal for your supplement (which you think will improve your memory or increase your energy or just make you healthier over all) to contain no active ingredients, or to have failed every well-designed effectiveness study, or to be contaminated with known toxins (or, as the New York Times reported this week, may contain entirely different herbs than are listed on the label). For the most part, this modern snake oil just drains the consumer's wallet, but due to the lack of testing, we just don't know which supplements are toxic or allergenic - and thanks to the DSHEA, we cannot know. Offit tells us why this is the case - a supplement-loving Senator (Orrin Hatch) from a supplement-producing state (Utah) pushed through the law against the advise of the FDA thanks to the general weakness of scientific knowledge among the general public.
That lack of scientific knowledge explains why people are willing to believe B-list actresses rather than doctors when it comes to autism and menopause. Jenny McCarthy now co-hosts The View, so her false claims that vaccinations cause autism are once again front-page news. They are wrong, they are hazardous, and, as Offit explains, are just one item in a laundry list of potentially dangerous claims which charlatans use to prey on desperate parents. Suzanne Sommers has been relegated to the infomercial circuit with her bio-identical hormones, and that probably makes her less of a threat. Her position that bio-identical hormones (basically, the same molecule but from an herbal source) are safer and more effective than commercially produced pharmaceuticals, though, just doesn't make sense. If it's the same molecule, it should have the same effect - and the same risk of side effects. She's profiting from the ignorance of the general public.
Supplement producers, McCarthy, and Sommers are dangerous, but at least they're working from their own ignorance. What about those who should know better? Offit criticizes Dr. Oz for highlighting faith healers and therapeutic touch practitioners (therapeutic touch was disproved by a middle school student's science fair project) by providing a national platform for their unverified (and unverifiable) but deeply moving stories. Andrew Weil - another doctor who should know better - promotes herbal cures based on small, badly designed studies. There's no evidence they help anything other than Dr. Weil's financial well-being.
Offit also criticizes the late Dr. Linus Pauling, calling him both one of the greatest scientists and greatest quacks of the 20th Century. A brilliant chemist and renowned peace activist, Dr. Pauling became a vitamin evangelist in the 1970s. Clinical trials conduced in the ensuing decades, however, showed that high doses of anti-oxidant vitamins shorten life spans and increase cancer rates. Too much of a good thing can kill you, but Pauling's earlier brilliance overshadows the hard facts put forth by faceless university academics.
Most of this is familiar territory. Where Offit differs from other debunking doctors is that he explains how and why alternative remedies work. Goldacre mentioned regression to the mean (we reach for remedies when we feel our worst and would feel better soon no matter what) and the placebo effect. Offit actually explains what should really be called the placebo response. Pain isn't all in our minds, but we can use our minds (through relaxation and trickery) to release endorphins. These naturally produced pain killers can dull pain and cause other physiological responses. When acupuncture or a supplement works, it's because we've fooled our brains into releasing endorphins, dulling our pain but not fixing the cause, be it a pulled muscle, an infection, or cancer. This is why I think Do You Believe in Magic may be slightly more effective than Bad Science in convincing the public that most alternative remedies are ineffective. Offit seems to understand why people want to believe in magic when Goldacre just snarks at their ignorance. Goldacre is a more entertaining writer (Offit is perhaps a bit too clinical for some), but he's probably more likely to turn off those who need to hear his message. I'm cynical enough (even when my office mate isn't expounding on health theories which only show he might not pass 4th grade science), though, to think that they're preaching to the choir.
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