A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace's book of "essays and arguments" is, if nothing else, a fantastic way to enrich one's vocabulary. Luckily, reading Wallace is much more than a lexical exercise -- he's engaging, wryly funny, insightful, prone to digression, and given to self-examination and introspection. In other hands, the consistent footnotes and self-glossing could be distracting, but all of these essays flow quite well.

The collection is without a unifying theme, although there are two essays on tennis -- one on Wallace's experiences as a regional junior player from roughly twelve to eighteen (from twelve through fifteen, he was "near great"), and the other on Michael Joyce, at the time ranked in the 80s in the world. The latter is dated several years later, and Joyce so impresses Wallace that Wallace resolves not to mention his experiences on the junior tennis circuit, where he (Wallace) had been highly ranked in his small corner of Illinois.

The capstone and eponymous essay uses copious footnotes, and is an extremely in-depth followup to the previous essay on the Illinois State Fair (a magazine had sent Wallace to the Fair the previous year, and had liked the results so much that he was sent on a luxury cruise to attempt to duplicate his hyperliterate-fish-out-of-water act). Unfortunately, it's also the only essay in the collection where Wallace moves from wry observer to neurotic complainer, as his interactions with the crew (and his reflections upon these interactions) display paranoia. He is able to laugh at himself, but it's a little unsettling.

Overall, this is an extremely engaging and diverse collection of essays. While two (television and literary criticism) can be a bit dense, they're all worth reading. It's also interesting to see the differences in style -- the early essays lack footnotes, the television essay uses them for their ordinary intended purpose (cites), the Lynch essay uses them extensively (and is delivered in vignetted form), and the title work uses them on nearly every page, with occasional sub-notes (!). Extremely engaging and thought-provoking.

The Black Hole War

It's difficult do decide how I feel about Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole War. On the one hand, Susskind should be commended -- it's a pop cosmology book that does not read like a textbook (as someone who has read his share of physics textbooks, I certainly would know), and contains many cogent explanations of physics (mostly quantum mechanical) principles and problems for the layman. On the other hand, it's boring as hell.

This isn't to say that the subject Susskind covers is uninteresting -- far from it. It seems that since Carl Sagan popularized it, cosmology has exploded in popularity, and has kept up the pace even as interesting and original voices (such as Sagan's) pass into history. The particular subject of this work is black holes and information loss, which certainly doesn't sound bland. Unfortunately, much of the book is devoted to unfolding the problem and related issues in the slowest manner possible, along with repetition of the mantra "I knew Stephen [Hawking] had to be wrong, but I couldn't quite place my finger on why." Additionally, there's a lot about Susskind's personal life and experiences, which are exactly as scintillating as one would expect from a prominent theoretical physicist. (Ok, that's a bit of a cheap shot, but shouldn't digressions be either interesting or related to a semi-relevant topic? Susskind makes interacting with Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, two titans of physics, and interesting characters in their own right, seem like pulling teeth.)

One major redeeming factor of this work is the lack of emphasis on string theory. While Susskind does trot it out towards the end of the work, as a possible theory of everything, he doesn't dwell on it throughout as "the truth". (As an aside, he does offer at least one experiment to test string theory, which is refreshing; unfortunately, said experiment would involve a particle accelerator the size of the galaxy. Not quite as feasible as I would like) This isn't to completely dismiss string theory, as parts of it are falsifiable, but it's instructive to remember that models are typically wrong, but some are still useful. To that end, it's tedious to be lectured on the nuts-and-bolts of a difficult to falsify model, which Susskind manages to (mostly) avoid doing, until the later chapters.

Another major feature of the work that I can't decide is a positive or a negative is the amount of time Susskind will spend to illustrate a point. Descriptions of gravity, Schwarzschild radius, special relativity, quantum mechanics, and other physics concepts receive myriad examples and much explanation. I vacillate between thinking that this is a positive thing for those readers who are unfamiliar with such concepts, and that it's tedious for those of us who are familiar with them. While these are complex concepts that do require in depth explanation (I'm certainly not going to claim to understand quantum mechanics. Susskind does quote Feynman here: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."), it can be frustrating to have examples taken to an extreme, as Susskind does in initially explaining gravity.

The meat of the book is devoted to a debate between Susskind (among others) and Stephen Hawking (among others) -- what happens to the information in a black hole if the black hole evaporates? Is it lost forever, or does it return to the universe in the Hawking radiation? If it returns to the universe, how does it return from beyond the event horizon? Why is information loss important? (Because if the information is lost, that would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics by reducing the overall entropy in the universe. This is a Very Bad Thing (tm). Additionally, quantum mechanics and relativity predict very different things happen as objects approach and pass a black hole's horizon. Invalidating either one would deal a major blow to the state of physics. These are all very interesting questions, and while Susskind does a (relatively) good job answering them, what prevents this book being better than it is is that he has to explain so many concepts to get to the heart of the conflict, and this, combined with much digression, is enough to make the book meander.

A final point The Black Hole War's favor is that it's very thorough -- at no point in the book did I feel that a concept was underexplained. It's not a dense book -- it's light on math, and although the concepts can be difficult, especially for the uninitiated (Schrodinger's cat is thankfully not mentioned. As an aside, here is the front and back cover of the textbook I used for Quantum Mechanics), Susskind does provide many (perhaps too many) examples. Overall, probably one to avoid, unless one is very passionate about information theory, cosmology, or a huge fan of Leonard Susskind.

Physics of the Impossible

Fourteen year old me would have loved to have had access to Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible -- it's a handy science fiction encyclopedia, dealing with the feasibility of many of the standard sci-fi tropes. Time travel, teleportation, superluminal velocity, and telepathy are all here, and are explored and explained in detail. This is an invaluable book for the layman, as it glosses over the underlying math while expounding on the effects of said math. I would have liked more rather than less math, but I realize that Maxwell's Equations aren't easy reading for those who haven't taken a few physics courses.

The book is divided into three sections: what Kaku terms "Class I, II, and III Impossibilities." Class I covers things that are technologically impossible today, but do not violate any known laws of physics. This category includes "Force Fields, Telepathy, Starships, and Antimatter," among others. (As an aside, some of the chapters here are a bit disappointing. For example, the chapter on telepathy is mostly concerned with MRIs and the electrical activity of the brain, rather than telepathy without the aid of technology.) Class II covers technologies that "sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. If they are possible at all, they might be realized on a scale of millenia to millions of years in the future." Examples of these include superluminal travel and parallel universes. Finally, Kaku classifies Class III impossibilities as technologies that violate the known laws of physics. These include perpetual motion machines and precognition.

This book really is a pleasure to read -- each chapter unfolds quickly and logically, with Kaku laying out the issues with the subject, adding possible plans of attack, difficulties to overcome, and adding examples from science fiction, or from research in that area. The only complaint I have here is that an inordinate amount of examples seem to be from Star Trek, but so it goes. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in physics or science fiction.

The Drunkard's Walk

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives illustrates the difficulties of writing a popular book on statistics: before getting to one's point, one must spend several chapters introducing concepts in successive layers, to build a foundation for the reader to understand the eventual point. Leonard Mlodinow does this here, with the first nine of the ten chapters building the foundation for the tenth. Although such a narrative structure could prove awkward and threaten to capsize, each of the ten chapters here are engaging, filled with historical anecdotes, and clearly explain the concepts and tenets of statistics and probability. Unfortunately, the final, eponymous chapter, while the realization of all the concepts discussed previously, feels almost truncated, because since the author spent nine chapters getting us to this point, it feels like its assertions could be fleshed out over several more chapters, rather than being terminated where it is.

This is certainly a good starting point as a popular introduction to statistics -- although many of the concepts introduced are counterintuitive, they're explained and fleshed out relatively quickly and easily -- I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Bayesian probability in this regard. While not nearly as mathy as it could have been -- the mathematics of probability are glossed over (none of those hideous upside-down 'u' symbols) -- The Drunkard's Walk does feature paragraphs liberally sprinkled with numbers. The only issue here is that any math is free form, and some pages read like giant word problems. Rarely is everything tied together neatly with equations, which can make for necessary re-reading. However, as a popular primer, one would be hard-pressed to do better. (A slightly more in depth look at similar themes is available in Chances Are . . . by Michael and Ellen Kaplan.)

Tyrants

Marshall N. Klimasweski's Tyrants is an uneven collection of short stories, likely due to the stories being written over the course of several years. "Jun Hee" was first published in 1991 in The New Yorker, and "Nobile's Airship" was first published in 1999 in The Yale Review. I'm assuming that some of the stories are more recent than that, but I'm not going to check. Klimasewiski does not provide initial publication dates in the acknowledgments, and I don't feel the need to plug story/author names into Google (and it's not in the edition notice either. So it goes.)

"Nobile's Airship", which opens this collection, is unquestionably a highlight -- it follows Ugo Lago, a Fascist journalist, and his experiences in the days leading up to Nobile's expedition, as well as his experiences while accompanying said expedition. The shock of foreign culture and climate, his solitude as a passenger on a zeppelin, and how superfluous a writer rather than a (sailor? aeronaut? crew member?) is on an airship are very well conveyed. A coda of airship accidents and the end of Nobile's life is also well done. My major issue is the lack of punctuation for speech used here, which makes the text marginally more difficult to read. Since Klimasewiski's other stories do use quotation marks, I have to assume that this is a recent affectation that I cannot support, regardless of what Gertrude Stein may think. (Two novels that I have read and enjoyed that did not use quotation marks -- The Tango Singer, by Tomas Eloy Martinez, and Death with Interruptions, by Jose Saramago. Of course, that may be a function of the translation, and either of those gentlemen can write circles around Mr. Klimasewiski.) Regardless, "Nobile's Airship" is a fine story, but unfortunately not much of a harbinger of what is to come.

Following "Nobile's Airship", we have a trio of stories concerning a man and his relationship with his fiancee and her parents, taking his son in tow to a lovers' rendezvous, and finally the son's experiences with women and his memories of the father. These are crap, crap, and crap. This is followed by a surreal story about a woman's experiences with Stalin during the Second World War, which is a step up from the previous three stories, but isn't any great shakes. That's followed by another trio of stories, concerning a couple's relationship, and the stresses caused by being from different backgrounds, illnesses of parents, desires and dreams. I'd say this trio is a step up from the previous trio, but it fails to grab me. The final story is "Aeronauts", which I can't decide if I like or dislike -- it's not so much a story as it is a series of out-of-sequence short acts, as if from a play, interspersed with letters and commentary from the principals. It turns out that this story depicts a real personage, and much of the dialogue and letters are historical record, but fiction is interpolated into his life to color his acts appropriately. So what in actuality is poor planning, becomes in fiction a romantic and desperate beacon. While I did like the execution, I'm unsure if this cheapens the life of the historical personage depicted.

I really wanted to love this collection, especially after the beginning of "Nobile's Airship", but I just can't. I may be alone here -- the reviews on both LibraryThing and Amazon are largely positive, as are other reviews around the web. While there's some good stuff here (the opening story, parts of the other stories), this collection fails overall to make much of an impression on me. The title of the collection is meant to evoke how people act in the shadow of an autocrat, which helps the stories concerning Mussolini and Stalin, but the stories fall flat on their faces when confronted with the softer and more subtle tyrannies of sex and domesticity. There is material here to like, but I can't say that I'll be picking up Klimasewiski's next novel, unless I read something to change my mind in the interim.

SEMPER ego auditor tantum?

(with apologies)

" . . . but the disk space will still be wasted."