Loon by Jack Mclean

A disappointing purchase and way over-priced.

One of the really positive benefits of the self-publishing revolution has been the number of memoirs being published.  Obviously many not polished, but interesting and of considerable historical value.  Some are very good, indeed. Others less so.  This one  felt like a book one expects to have been self published; I looked, and was surprised to see the Random House imprint.Mclean, who was at Andover with George Bush, (of National Guard and cocaine fame,) struggled through Andover and when he wasn’t accepted by Harvard or Yale, or Stanford, was at a loss as to what to do. So he enlisted in the Marines.   He was born just a month before me, so the dates brought back many memories.  Getting out of Parris Island, he was sent to California for a few months to learn supply, much to his relief, but everyone in the Marines eventually wound up in Vietnam, and, sure enough, his orders for that quagmire came through.

Mclean was urged to write this memoir when his wife discovered the letters he had written home over the months he was in Vietnam. The very short section, barely a couple chapters, dealing with the horrific, if futile, experience on LZ Loon, was seemingly thrown in almost as an afterthought, rather than the highpoint (or low-) of his experience, his life even. Clearly the experience of writing for him personally must have been necessary and cathartic, I hope. 

There is a good story in here and perhaps with a good editor, it could have been teased out. Some chapters are very well written but often there was little transition to the next. The book as a whole lacked focus and at times wandered between being critical and stand-up-salute-your-flag bravado. Finding a theme was difficult.   There are many other Vietnam memoirs out there that I feel are much better.  And I got a little tired of hearing that Sid was dead six weeks, two days, several weeks, later. Once has devastating impact.  By the fourth time, it brought a yawn.

'via Blog this'

Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Prague Fatale

It’s 1941 and Bernie is back in Berlin from his work with the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the intelligence arm of the SS (the Kripo, Kriminalpolizei,  or German equivalent to CID, were under the SD.).  Having been exposed there the the truly awful ethnic cleansing and  retribution of the “special action” squads who were killing rather indiscriminately, he’s considering suicide. Always skeptical of Naziism, he’s dragged into an investigation of a railway worker who had been murdered and then left on the tracks  to be dismembered by a train.  It gets complicated when he saves a bar-girl from what he thinks is a rape, only to discover she’s linked to Czech terrorists being sought by the Gestapo.  There may be a connection as well to the man on the tracks.

But then things get worse when General Heydrich demands his presence in Prague to act as his quasi-bodyguard. (Reinhard Heydrich, also known as the “Butcher of Prague” was probably one of the least sympathetic characters to come out of Nazi Germany.) When one of Heydrich’s adjutants is murdered in a locked room, Bernie gets permission from Heydrich to be as impertinent as necessary in order to solve the crime. Here the writing sparkles with wit as Bernie gets to mouth off and intimidate all the SS generals. To complicate things even further, Bernie learns everyone except the adjutants and himself, has been invited to the Prague Castle because they are under suspicion as being a traitor running a radio link with the British.

I listened to this as an audiobook.  Very well read (except for some German mispronunciations -- I do wish they would get readers who are at least quasi-fluent in foreign language words that appear in the books they read ), but I found one peculiarity.  Throughout the book, which was not translated, but written in English, Hitler is referred to as “the Leader,” a literal translation of “Der Führer.”   I think we’ve all become so accustomed to the German title that using “leader” somehow grates.  Especially when other words, like Kripo, Kirche, Herr, Kommissar, Wehrmacht, and others are left in German.

Very entertaining. I’ve read many of the Bernie Gunther series and like them all, although the Berlin trilogy, the first three, a.k.a. Berlin Noir,  are perhaps the best of the bunch.  This is listed as #8.

'via Blog this'

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

Thomas sets the stage by describing economic and social conditions. During these two centuries, massive poverty and appalling health were the norm. Most children died before age six and the average life-span was only twentyseven so health was a concern. Every religion uses miracles or magic — perhaps a redundancy — to help define its monopoly on the truth. By the time of the Reformation, even though the church did not, as an institution, claim the power to work miracles, it was saddled with a tradition of saints who could, and appeal to them to ward off ill-health was commonplace. St. Wilgerfort (St. Uncumber) " eliminate husbands of those discontented wives who chose to offer her a peck of oats." The mere representation of St. Christopher, " said to offer a day' preservation from illness or death to all those who looked upon it." Saints were, after all, specialists, rather than general practitioners.

The association of magical powers with church ritual was not ostentatiously promoted by medieval church leaders; in fact, it' often through their writings refuting such claims that we know about them. But the imputation of magical powers was a logical result of church actions. In their intense desire to convert the heathens, the church incorporated many pagan rituals into religious practice. Ancient worship of natural phenomena was modified: hence, New Year' Day became the Feast of Circumcision, the Yule log became part of Christmas tradition and May Day was turned into Saints' Days, for example.

Theologians made a distinction between religion and superstition, but superstition was loosely defined as any practice having magical qualities that were not already designated as religious ritual. The church had the power to define what constituted legitimate and what it denied became heretical. The Protestant Reformation had a significant effect on how the populace regarded miracles and magic. By elevating the individual' faith in God, and denigrating ritual, a new concept of religion was created. The ignorant peasant had had no need for knowledge of the Bible or scripture; the rituals and rites of the church had become the "" of the supernatural and evidence for his/her belief. " was a ritual set of living, not a set of dogmas." The Protestant theologian insisted on a more personal faith, so it became necessary to invent a theology that explained the threat of plague, natural disasters, and the fear of evil spirits. One could no longer call on the " solutions offered by the medieval church." The solution was predestination. Everything that happened was God's will. Evil became a test.

Thus every Christian had the consolation of knowing that life was not a series of random events; there was purpose in everything. This also required scapegoats. There had to be a reason for calamitous events, and the moral degradation of your neighbor must be the cause behind the lack of rain for the past several months. Or it' because of the Jews in town. Get rid of the neighbor and the Jews and all will be well. Or, the calamity could be seen as a test of one' own faith. Righteous personal behavior was out of fear that God would avenge wickedness. Many of Pat Robertson' homilies could have been written in the middle ages. A whole genre of diarist writing arose out of the need for Puritans to document the hand of Providence. His interference could be seen in happy coincidences, accidents to the wicked, and deliverance from personal illness.

These judgments could be used as political weapons also. One party issued a whole list of calamities on land and sea that must surely be a sign from God that the Royalists were evil and should be overthrown (shades of Robertson). Of course, Catholics blamed calamities on the Reformation. Handy. But is was ultimately " observer' point of view which determined whether, and by whom, an event was held as a judgment or deliverance. . . the belief in providence degenerated into a crude justification of any successful policy. . . . The doctrine of providences was a conscientious attempt to impose order on the apparent randomness of human fortunes by proving that, in the long run, virtue was rewarded and vice did not go unpunished."

The Reformation did not put an end to prophecy and the association of miracle working to religious supremacy. The period following Elizabeth and during the Civil War reflected growing unease with social inequities. Women, normally excluded from political debate and discussion, used prophecy and dream interpretation to express political dissatisfaction. A virtual army of pseudo-messiahs appeared, claiming all sorts of personal relationships with God. Mostly they were the targets of humor unless their messages conveyed secular political implications. Punishment for heresy (the last burning for heresy occurred in 1642) could be a useful tool to eliminate political opposition. Common prayer served as a useful mechanism to bring people together for the purpose of harnessing group perceptions and action against a common social ill or malady. It became an act of solidarity.

The danger for the ruling elite comes only if the belief is that God is on the opposition=s side and it foments radical social dynamism. Religious fervor could be tolerated only as long as the voice of the people could never be confused or associated with the voice of God. Today=s efforts by some on the Religious Right to confound religion with politics plays right into the hands of political leaders because then religion can be manipulated to political ends. That is what often happened in Europe.

The Anglican Church, by this time, was in a seemingly impregnable position. It was intricately entwined with the ruling political structure, it was a crime not to attend church, one was born into it and the church service itself helped to maintain the social divisions: the rich sat in front, poor in the rear and even the quality of communion wine varied according to social standing. In 1543, one parson even preached there were three heavens, one for each level of prosperity -- Jerry Falwell would have approved -- and the Church was immensely wealthy, actively participating in making political decisions. From the book: " difference between churchmen and magicians lay less in the effect they claimed to achieve than in their social position and in the authority on which their respective claims rested."

Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe by Michael Shermer

This is a joint review of this book and How We Believe

Shermer postulates that humans have evolved a belief module that helps us find patterns in what appears otherwise to be a meaningless universe. (Why we feel compelled to find meaning in everything continues to puzzle me.) Until about four hundred years ago, when the process of science gave us a method to determine the difference between patterns that are real and those that are mere illusion, the tautologies myth and religion, (a tautology) explained the relationship of man to the universe. Despite the rise of science, humans continue to hold all sorts of unsupportable beliefs: 90% believe in heaven, 72% believe in angels, 67% believe they have had a psychic experience (Wall Street Journal, January 30, 1996). Mostly we have adopted the fruits of science, i.e. technology, without teaching or employing the principles of scientific thinking.

The reason, Shermer suggests, lies in the evolution of the “ module.” Several million years of evolution were required to change the fist-sized brain of Australopithecines to the cantaloupe-sized brain of the Homo sapiens sapiens, and civilization as we understand it has been around for only about 13,000 years. Evolutionary psychologists believe the conditions of our existence shaped the brain. The brain is basically a collection of computational devices that evolved to “solve” problems regularly encountered by our huntergatherer ancestors.” Shermer argues that “belief” evolved to help interpret patterns. Recognition of patterns has survival value, e.g., being upwind of an animal means one is more likely to be discovered, etc. These are meaningful. Other patterns such as drawing images and magical thinking may reduce anxiety but are essentially meaningless or irrelevant from a survival standpoint. In short, we developed two kinds of thinking: type 1, believing a falsehood or rejecting the truth and type 2, not believing a falsehood and believing a truth.

Magical thinking evolved as a necessary corollary to causal thinking, a spandrel, if you will. (A spandrel is the space formed by the intersection of two arches — it looks to be structurally essential but are not) between seeking answers through magic, i.e., religion and other nonevidentiary- based beliefs and fact-based conclusions. That magical thinking and making mistakes in order to eventually correctly interpret patterns is undeniable. Shermer cites several examples of superstition and magical thinking among indigenous peoples to support his hypothesis. For example, among the Yanomamö peoples of South America superstitions and taboos related to the Jaguar even when incorrect serve a useful purpose because the jaguar is the only animal that hunts people, and the superstitions help to convey the power and danger of the animal that presents a very real danger.

Bronislaw Malinski, in his study of the Trobriand Islanders, found that rituals and superstitions increased as they ventured farther out to sea. He drew the conclusion that thinking derived from environmental conditions finds magic wherever the elements of chance and accident are present. “The emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range. We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes. . . There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic.” During the Middle Ages, given the uncertainties and vagaries of daily life, and that almost 90% of the people were illiterate, superstition and belief in magic were ubiquitous. Plague was believed to be caused by a misalignment of the stars, and when a person died, all the water in the house was discarded lest the soul of the departed drown, etc. (For more see Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic "Only religion could rival astrology as an all-embracing explanation for the vicissitudes of life."

The rise of rationalism and science following the sixteenth century did much to replace superstitions as an explanation for the unknown or uncertain. The twentieth century is not immune to superstitious belief, and the more uncertain an activity, the more likely there are to be superstitions associated with it. Take baseball. Hitting a baseball is so difficult that even the best players fail to get a hit seven times out of 10 at bats so many hitters have harmless superstitions associated with their batting. Fielders, on the other hand, who succeed catching a fly ball almost nine times out of ten have few — until they come bat. In France there is a company that provides emergency guests for any dinner party of triskaidekaphobes who discover that they number thirteen at table. Bad things happen to good people, and good things often happen to bad people. Conspiracy theorists are simply trying to bring order to a complex world containing such dissonances. It's a way of bringing order to what appears random. Surely JFK could not have been killed by a lone gunman. It's impossible! (G. Gordon Liddy said that two elements were required for a conspiracy: competence, a rare commodity, and secrecy, a secret can be kept among two people only if two of them are dead.)

Almost any kind of bizarre unrelated event then becomes "evidence" for the conspiracy. Our belief modules in action. Shermer argues the best "regulator" of the Belief Module is science. It is the best method for determining the difference between falsehood and truth. "Does extract of seaweed really cure cancer? All the anecdotes in the world will not answer the question. You need 100 people, all properly diagnosed as having the same type of cancer. Then have 50 of them eat extract of seaweed and 50 take the placebo." If none of them knows what they are taking and none of the experimenters knows (double-blind) and the results show a statistically significant difference then you might have something.

Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of In Cold Type

Anyone who has  followed publishing and the current battles between publishers and retailers, first Borders and Barnes and Noble, and now Amazon, will realize there is a fundamental shift going on in the publishing world, each side claiming the high ground and righteousness in the unending quest for more profits.  If you dig a little deeper into the quagmire, the name Shatzkin will pop up. I’ve been following Mike Shatzkin’s blog for several years and it’s become obvious, as a consultant for the publishing industry, he looks at the world through their eyes. When a comment I made on the blog regarding changes I thought needed to be made in the publishing industry to maintain profitability, he simply dismissed most of it by saying I didn’t know what I was talking about and recommended this book, by his father, Leonard, who had worked in the industry for many years, and whom Mike had a tendency to quote perhaps a bit too often given the radical changes now occurring more than a decade after Leonard’s death.

“In Cold Type” is very good. Written for the layman as well as the industry --I’m a primarily a reader although as a librarian and micro-micro-micro publisher whose uncle was president of Silver Burdett, I have been fascinated by the economics of publishing all my life,-- it’s a wealth of contrarian information about the industry as it existed in 1982, just before the cataclysm began to occur.  Indeed, it comes with its own publisher’s disclaimer, not so unusual now, but then, before everyone became afraid to even remotely associate  himself with any kind of idea, rare, indeed.

First, my biases.  I’m a reader, and therefore have an interest in a vigorous and competitive market for books. I’m also not wedded to any particular format, being primarily interested in content. It’s what’s written that makes the book, not whether it’s used, hardcover, paperback, clay tablet, or ebook.  My preference currently is solidly in the ebook camp since I can carry around my whole library on any number of electronic devices. (Did I mention I love electronics, too?)  I think ebooks have many, many advantages for authors and their incomes.

So I remain astonished at the continued inefficiency of the publishing world and its resistance to change. The remainder system is stupid.  Even in 1982, Leonard saw that: “For every copy of a hardcover book sold at its normal retail price, one book is sold as a remainder-- a book that goes from the publisher to the remainder dealer for less than the cost of producing it and with zero income to the author. No other industry can make this claim.  And it's truly insane.”  That particular inefficiency raises costs for everyone, but it has an even more insidious effect as it removes accountability from the buyer for trying to estimate how many copies of a title s/he might be able to sell.  If there is no penalty for over-ordering, what the heck, order tons.

Another of my biases is warehousing, particularly after the IRS decision that products warehoused would be taxed (the infamous Thor decision.)  That makes storing stuff expensive.  POD, i.e. printing on demand, and ebooks have the potential to eliminate warehousing;  IF, publishers move away from printed copies, or change to POD. Why not have a POD machine in the bookstore. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, I saw one of these deliver a bound, trade paperback with color cover in just a few minutes.  Those machines are now going for less than $100,000 last time I looked.  The downside to that is the cost per book remains flat, whereas, for example, the last book we had printed in a 2,000 copy run (I did say micro-micro…) provided us with a declining cost per copy over 500 copies and would have been much less per copy for 10,000. One type-setting, etc. have been costed out, the printing is really cheap. That was 15 years ago.  Today, I wouldn’t bother.  I don’t want inventory so POD and ebook would be the way to go and the initial investment is much less, even after accounting for copy-editing and design.  That “should” permit higher royalties for the author.

Shatzkin’s first chapter is devoted to a review of problems in the industry in 1982: 1.)Remainders, which distort the market by providing for expensive distribution, a devaluation of the book when people wait for the price to drop soon after release, and competition from remainder stores that compete with full price independent bookstores; 2.) Books are too expensive, resulting from “antiquated book production methods and “poor distribution and poor production,” and he believes with more efficiency retail prices could be “half their present level.”  Consumers deal with this by waiting for the book in a cheaper edition or buying remainders.; 3.) Consumers leave stores disappointed, not finding what they went in to get, from the “skimpily stocked stores that make up the majority of retail shops.”  He cites surveys showing this number of disappointed people may be as high as thirty percent.  4.) Competition from chains.  In those days he cited B. Dalton and Walden, both of which are now gone. Publishers like chains because distribution is more efficient  and “dealing with the chains seems so much simpler and less expensive.”   5.)  General lack of profitability in book publishing, where most of the profits come from selling subsidiary rights providing a stronger push toward the “blockbuster.” 6.) Not being able to provide support for excellent writers, the horrifying example of Confederacy of Dunces being an example; 7.) The short life of the trade book caused, he says, by an inefficient distribution system that means “as many as 90 to 95 percent ...are stone cold by the end of their first year.”  Thirty percent of books are returned unsold and 25% never make it to bookstores, going directly from warehouse to remaindered.  (Another thirty percent go to libraries, a problem he worries about but I won’t deal with here except to say that a New Yorker article years ago reported that the trade book market would collapse without libraries.) 8.) How all these factors enter in to making lousy editorial decisions, “Tens of thousands of titles published into an unstructured distribution system, millions of unpredictable negotiations between sales reps and booksellers, the happenstance of a book getting into a particular store, together with unforeseeable outside influences—reviews, attention by celebrities, quirks of public taste—lead to results in which chance is the dominant factor.  The remaining chapters go into detail about each aspect of the industry and the problems he has identified.

Now what’s interesting is that the ebook revolution solves every one of those problems but one:  libraries.  Distribution is cheaper, no returns, online stores can stock literally everything, prices are less, and theoretically dealing with a store like Amazon solves their “simplicity” problem. The long tail and a book never going out of print means a book can technically sell forever removing  the incentive to seek the blockbuster and books need never go out-of-print. With ebooks one could literally publish just about everything (that’s what’s happening with the rise of digital self-oublishing.) One can only surmise how profitable and better the industry would be today had they fully embraced  the ebook revolution instead of fighting it.

There are some independent publishers opting out of the traditional morass so well described by Shatzkin. I know of one small publishing company devoted to high quality young adult and middle grade reader books, namelos.com, run by the famous editor Stephen Roxburgh of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (he was Roald Dahl’s editor) and Cricket Books who is doing just that.  His new company is publishing in POD and ebook formats only.   That means he has difficulty in getting his books into bookstores, but they are widely available online.  Whether he’ll be successful or not remains to be seen.

Be forewarned.  My view of the industry is biased.  I’m a reader.  On the other hand the symbiosis between readers and authors is essential. The mediation of a publisher/’gatekeeper perhaps less so.  Leonard’s warnings might have helped stave off catastrophe for a while.  Whether they will be heard today with a vastly different environment remains to be seen. I hope so.

P.S.  I read this book on my Kindle. In one of life’s lovely ironies, the ebook comes with a big, gold QED Approved sticker promising the highest quality assurance. So not a few pages later I laughed when I saw the following: “...the methods of pofit [sic] and loss…”  On the other hand, the new technology such as Amazon’s Createspace and digital delivery would permit virtually instant revision, even so far as to make changes to the purchaser’s copy in his device.

A book well worth reading.

'via Blog this'