Six Years by Harlan Coben | LibraryThing

Six Years by Harlan Coben | LibraryThing:

 "A college professor, Jake Fischer, has a summer fling with Natalie. He falls head-over-heels in love only to have her marry Todd Sanderson at the end of the summer. Natalie asks Jake to promise he won't bother them or try to contact her, but six years later he runs across an obituary for Todd. Wanting to see Natalie, he attends the funeral but discovers that Todd was married to someone else and had a different family. Natalie is nowhere to be found.

**Possible Spoilers** I don't want this to sound like I didn't like the book, but as the conspiracies surrounding Natalie disappearance and the link to her father's vanishing many years earlier, not to mention the increasingly large (huge) number of people who seemed to be in on the secret, we merged into merge into fantasy land. And the idea that Minor's son, who wanted to go straight, and who wanted to retrieve the papers proving he had plagiarized because they proved he was as bad as his father, would kill the professor over the papers? Proving he's a good guy? WTF? 

Not to mention that Jake had promised Natalie at the wedding he would not ever try to find her. And he receives a message during his search asking him to hold to that promise. He should have: a promise is a promise. Would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

The motivations of the killers I thought were really quite lame. *Spoiler*:  Why would they want to find her if she was lost to the system, completely hidden, and very unlikely to ever testify against anyone. And the ending.  I mean really.  Natalie makes several head shots with a pistol from thirty yards.  Bullshit.

Fun read, though."

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The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering by David P. Billington | LibraryThing

The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering by David P. Billington | LibraryThing: "A classic!

After reading this book I wanted to quit work and return to school to study civil engineering. Of course, I made the mistake of mentioning this to my wife, who fell into paroxysms of laughter, saying she had seen some of the stuff I had built at home, and there was no way she would ever go on a bridge that I designed.

Billington discusses the interrelationship of efficiency, economy, and aesthetics and how great engineering works combine all three of these to the exclusion of none. The great designers manage to balance beauty with simplicity and cost. Frankly, I found this book riveting (pun intended, although he really celebrates the use of concrete as opposed to steel) and never fail to look carefully at bridges with a new eye."

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Dark of the Moon (A Virgil Flowers Novel) by John Sandford | LibraryThing

Dark of the Moon (A Virgil Flowers Novel) by John Sandford | LibraryThing:

I do like this series better than the Sandford's long-running Davenport books, which has become a bit too redundant. This title is the first of the series. Virgil Flowers is with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (kind of a state FBI but with a totally weird name - it really exists.) He has has been sent by Davenport (head of the BCA who always makes cameo appearances in the Flowers' novels) to investigate the killing of a local physician and his wife. The murders have the feel of a revenge killing. On his way there, on the outskirts of town, he stops to watch a fire of the Judd residence. Judd had been hated by most everyone in the community and it's clear the fire is an arson; the amount of accelerants estimated to have been some 20 cans of gasoline used to get things going. That had me wondering. I've lit a pile of brush sprinkled with about a quart of gasoline and damn near singed my eyebrows when it went off. The idea of spreading gasoline around a house with pilot lights etc., and then lighting it makes me wonder how anyone could have done that and escaped injury.) As the investigation progresses, another man and his wife are killed and Virgil is scrambling to find a link between them. 

We briefly see the killings from the point-of-view of the killer, (totally unnecessary, I thought) identified only as Moon which may be a link to a Man-on-the-Moon party that had happened many years earlier or perhaps it relates to the victims all being staged to face to the east. No one knows, but one old senile woman keeps mentioning the man-on-the-moon.

Couple all of that with the DEA and a meth-lab bust, not to mention a local church devoted to a whites only message, a sheriff who wants to get re-elected, one suspect the sheriff is dating and another Virgil is sleeping with who happens to be the sheriff's sister, and you have an explosive mix.

I listened to this. Excellently read by Eric Conger.



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Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Antonin Scalia | LibraryThing

Justice Scalia has once again embarked on a defense of textualism, the theory of interpretation that argues one must look back at the original text and stick to the text when deciding a case. There is an enlightening debate between Judge Richard Posner and the book's co-author, Bryan Garner in the pages of The New Republic (see cites below,) which spilled over into several online blogs including the National Review Online.

All of us seek objectivity from the courts. That justices would want to base their decisions on some objective standard is laudable. Yet, we also want some common sense flexibility. Posner believes that Garner and are being obtuse if not disingenuous. Take the example of a statute that says, “ No person may drive any kind of vehicle in the park.” Now let’s say someone in the park is stricken with a heart attack. None of us would want to prohibit an ambulance from driving into the park, yet that’s a clear violation of the statute and a true textualist would *have* to permit prosecution of the driver, yet even Scalia and Garner refuse to go that far, so the line between true textualism and broader interpretation is variable indeed.

Garner and Scalia insist that legislative history and debate should not be a source for judges when making decisions, yet Posner show how Scalia has made exception to this dictum on numerous occasions. This, Posner suggest, hobbles legislatures and predisposes them toward smaller government. Well, duh, isn’t that already the predisposition of conservatives (I hesitate to align small government with conservatism since government has often grown exponentially during the tenure of supposedly and self-anointed conservative presidencies.) Ironically, one might argue that a textualist approach to the ambulance problem cited above would lead to more rather than less regulation since the legislature would be forced to create new regulations defining vehicular exceptions to the original rule. Yet, legislative history showing that the purpose of the legislation was to prohibit ambulances would certainly be on-point.

Context can also not be ignored. The word "draft" depends for its meaning on context. It could refer to curtains blowing in the wind; conscription during wartime, the preliminary sketch of a book; or even a bank note. Scalia and Garner insist that meaning will come from other text in the statute. Nonsense, says Fish. "No, it won’t. Take the sentence, “Let’s avoid the draft.” It could mean “let’s get out of military service” (a fourth meaning of “draft”), or it could mean “let’s go inside and diminish the risk of catching cold,” or it could mean (as spoken by a general manager of a professional sports team) “let’s bypass the unpredictability of the draft (a fifth meaning of draft) and trust in free agency,” or it could mean “let’s not do a draft of the bylaws (a sixth meaning of “draft”) but get right to the finished product.” The text does, as Scalia and Garner say, take it meaning from its purposive context, but the text won’t tell you what that purposive context is."

Scalia, in the meantime, has gone on the offensive. "Scalia denied that he uses legislative history in his decisions: “We are textualists. We are originalists. We are not nuts.”

Personally, in reading the decisions of Heller and MacDonald, and in listening to the oral arguments, it seemed to me that both sides were looking to original intent and legislative history for their own cherry-picking and from differing time periods, the mminority looking to the fear of slave rebellions and hence the need for militias in 1789 while the majority focused on the need for individual armament for blacks to defend themselves against mararauding whites after the Civil War. Posner, in his rebuttal, takes Scalia to taks for doing just that: " I said that “when he [Justice Scalia] looks for the original meaning of eighteenth-century constitutional provisions—as he did in District of Columbia v. Heller, holding that an ordinance forbidding people to own handguns even for the defense of their homes violated the Second Amendment—Scalia is doing legislative history.”

Stanley Fish, in his praise of the book, perversely also noted that the “thesis that textualism is the one mode of legal interpretation that avoids subjectivity and the intrusion into judicial realm of naked political preferences” is wrong. Fish also scolds Scalia, "in NFIB v. Sebelius, Scalia the justice rejects the canon Scalia the author defends — but there can be little doubt that Roberts has canon #38, or something very much like it, in mind when he writes, “every reasonable construction must be resorted to in order to save a statute from unconstitutionality.”

Posner ends his review with, “Justice Scalia has called himself in print a “faint-hearted originalist.” It seems he means the adjective at least as sincerely as he means the noun.”

I wondered if Scalia was wise to embark on writing this book. It would seem that his theological canons make him a target for some serious textual parsing.

Regretfully, I fear that Michael Dorfman's comments may be closest to the mark, another validation of confirmation bias. "The core claim of Scalia and Garner is that textual originalism is determinate in a way that other interpretive methodologies are not. If that claim were true, one would expect to find that the votes of judges and Justices who describe themselves as textualist do not strongly correlate with their ideological views, while judges and Justices who reject textualism do vote in ideologically predictable ways. Yet in fact, all judges vote in ideologically predictable ways."

Me? I just want fairness, common sense, and to be left alone. But I sure love the debate. Reading the differing points of view has provided this old man with several very entertaining hours of pleasure.

http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/books-and-arts/106441/scalia-garner-reading-...

Garner's response: 
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-scalia-posner-fight-20120918,0,7108932.st....

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-scalia-posner-fight-20120918,0,7108932.st...> and Posner's response: 
The">http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/107549/richard-posner-responds-antonin-scalias-accusation-lying

The National Review's response to the Posner review. http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/315643/richard-posner-s-badly-confused...

Stanley Fish: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/intention-and-the-canons-of-lega...

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The Accounting by William Lashner | LibraryThing

The Accounting by William Lashner | LibraryThing:

I seem to be reading a spate of books lately whose plots revolve around a man on the run, or hiding something, or looking for something, and he has to dig himself out of a hole he's dug for himself.  Not a bad thing, just that it's a well-worn device that usually works.

You know things are off to a good start when the narrator flies in to Las Vegas to check on an old friend and has to remember what signature he used at the bank to open the safe deposit box where cash and the gun was stored. He finds his old friend dead on the bed and some goons out to get him. Realizing that those the three friends had ripped off decades earlier have finally caught up to them, Jon Willing knows he has to abandon his family and disappear. It's not like he wasn't prepared.  But then as is typical, things go wrong, people aren't what he expected, etc.  It's hardly a spoiler to reveal that things work out in the end.  They always do, don't they?

One thing that kept niggling at the back of my mind was the relatively small amount of money involved.  Admittedly, when they stole it it would have been a lot, but after 25 years and with much of it gone, we're really not talking about much.  Nevertheless, this was a real page turner as the chapters flew by, Jon facing some new hurdle his naivete had failed to anticipate.

Shades of Harlan Coben

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