Review: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't by Nate Silver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was afraid much of this would be outdated, but, while it obviously talks about issues only until 2012, the information is pretty evergreen. Obviously much has happened since then (Trump, Coronavirus), but most of the information still stands. He mentions how forecasters who don't inform themselves about the issues cannot hope to do well (just looking at charts isn't enough, and you need to understand the human factor).

I also really like his explanation of probabilities and Bayes' theorem, and how they work (and should be taught more in school).

Probably a must-read for people interested in forecasting and prediction in any field.

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Review: Anselmo d'Aosta: La vicenda umana di un grande monaco del medioevo

Anselmo d'Aosta: La vicenda umana di un grande monaco del medioevo by Enzo Marigliani
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think I bought this book over 10 years ago (at Diffusione del Libro, in Lido di Camaiore), and for many of those years I had been wondering why I bought it. So I finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and read it, to find out once and for all if the purchase had been worth it.

Well, it turns out it was. Anselmo d'Aosta (known as Anselm of Canterbury in English) was a very interesting person, personally called to England by William the Conqueror to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and a precursor to many other more famous religious thinkers (Abelard, Aquinas, among others). There was also plenty of drama in his life, despite the fact that all he wished to do was to retire to a monastic lifestyle.

I found myself underlining several passages discussing his philosophy on monotheism, how to know God exists, etc.

A good quote concerning teaching younger pupils (translated) “A youth is like a piece of wax. If too hard or too soft, the impression of the seal will not be clear." (p.44)

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Review: Orkney Twilight

Orkney Twilight by Clare Carson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

For a mystery/thriller, nothing really happens until page 140 or so (and even then only in fits and starts until the end).

For a book about Orkney, it mentions quite a few locations and their ties to the Vikings, but otherwise not much at all. In fact, the closest person we meet to a "local" is actually a Norwegian fisherman.

Otherwise I found it a book with odd, not very plausible, characters. Maybe it's just a different mentality or something, but they seemed at times brilliant and at times extremely dull-witted. I understand the father and daughter had issues, but when an obvious international spy makes death threats to you and your father, why not at least mention it to your undercover cop father to get his take? But maybe that's just me.

Too bad, I was looking forward to a book about Orkney, and a mystery novel at that.

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Review: The Elephant Vanishes

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Give yourself a treat and, after you read each story, do a google search for the story title. Chances are you'll come across someone's essay/analysis/presentation about the story with some new, excellent insight.

Here are some of the ones I came across:
"The Last Lawn of the Afternoon": https://www.davidpublisher.org/Public/uploads/Contribute/5b31baf46ea05.pdf

"The Dancing Dwarf": https://prezi.com/umuiatvdxscy/the-dancing-dwarf-analysis/

"TV People": https://www.soullessmachine.com/2007/06/tv-people-by-haruki-murakami.html and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJgsvpg_g0g

"Family Affair": http://outsiderjapan.pbworks.com/w/page/9758366/Family%20Affair


My favorite stories:
"The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women" (possibly because it reminded me of the book "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle")
"The Second Bakery Attack"
"On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning"
"Barn Burning"
"TV People"
"A Slow boat to china"
"The Last Lawn of the Afternoon"
"The Silence"

As you can see, that is most of them.

Also, what's up with the name Noburo Watanabe??

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Review: Memoirs of Hadrian

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. What a book. Probably as good as it can get for any book along these lines. The memoirs that Hadrian could (would?) have written on his deathbed, to his successor, Marcus Aurelius.

For an extra treat read the bibliographical note at the end on how it took decades of Yourcenar's life to actually write this book.

I knew very little about this book going in. I had seen it in a used bookstore, and wondered if it really had been written by Hadrian. But then I came across it several times in other pieces, most recently in Qiu Miaojin's "Last words from Montmarte", so I thought I ought to try it.

It starts off as quite heavy, and I supposed it continues like that, but you notice it less and less as you read more and more. This is the story of Hadrian's life and his thoughts surrounding it, as told by him. It draws you in more and more as you keep reading.

Some of my highlighted sections:

"It mattered little to me that the accord obtained was external, imposed from without and perhaps temporary; I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself." (p. 97)

"All nations that have perished up to this time have done so for lack of generosity" (p. 114)

"I was incensed by man's mania for clinging to hypotheses while ignoring facts" (p. 208)

"No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of the divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of the Deity, who contains all" (p. 234)

"Judaea was struck from the map and took the name of Palestine by my order" (p. 249)

"There is some excess in all that, but excess is a virtue at the age of seventeen" (p. 269)



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Review: The Muse Asylum

The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this up at the Bookrack in Charlotte, completely on spec. I wanted a not-too-long fiction book. These gambles rarely work, but this was an exception.

I disagree with some other commenters, who say they didn't like the dialog. That might have been one of the first things that grabbed me. It wasn't common, nor awkward, but quick, erudite and witty enough to keep me going.

The story itself dragged me into it, including the "madness" sections, and I thought I had figured out the twist, and then, turns out I hadn't.

Anyway, I'm very happy I discovered this author, and I shall be searching for more of his books.

I find it amusing to read that the author was a student of Joyce Carol Oates', who describes the book as post-modern, when there is a scathing commentary within the book on terms like "post-modernism".


Also, I really wanted to read all the short stories mentioned in the book.

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Review: President McKinley: Architect of the American Century

President McKinley: Architect of the American Century by Robert W. Merry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

McKinley is probably the most underrated presidency thus far (n.b., I wrote "presidency", not "president", which I still think is Garfield), especially as regards international expansion (colonialism?). Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Samoa were all added/conquered during his presidency. Not to mention the meddling with China along with the Europeans and Japanese. To his credit, he disavowed colonialism, and actually tried to promote independence and elections in Cuba and the Philippines. NOT to his credit, he did no such thing in Hawaii, Puerto Rico or Samoa.

To be fair, it seems as though if the US hadn't taken control of Hawaii, Japan almost certainly would have (much like they did with Okinawa), with 30,000 Japanese immigrants already in Hawaii. And apparently Germany and Britain were also eyeing it.

This biography was excellent, in that it delved into much detail with regards to his presidency. In fact, I probably didn't need to know the maneuverings behind each and every bill and every trip he took to Canton. However, in some areas it seemed remarkably lacking. The taking over of Samoa only gets one paragraph and is never mentioned again.

Also, Mckinley's assassin, Czolgosz, isn't even mentioned until 10 pages before the end of the book (aside from a brief dramatic cameo in the introduction). It says he hung out with anarchists and was inspired to assassinate McKinley based on a speech by Emma Goldman, but almost nothing else about her. I can't understand why these points would be basically brushed aside.


Some interesting notes I took:

During the Spanish American war, combat deaths for Americans were only 281, while nearly 2,500 died from diseases (p. 320)

Interesting also to note how protectionist the Republican Party was back then. "Since its inception, the Republican Party, Mckinley's party, had been the party of protectionism" (p. 7). At some point it became the party of open markets and free trade, although now I guess it has come full circle back to protectionism.

Another interesting passage:
"Indeed Republicans were the progressive party, comfortable with the application of federal power in behalf of major national goals: protecting the voting rights of blacks..." (p. 106) Times have changed.

Apparently Mckinley was the first president to make his own campaign speeches (not write, actually make them, which wasn't done back then).

The author also doesn't seem to like Roosevelt, who apparently downplayed McKinley during his presidency, and presumably this is why we barely remember him nowadays. He may be right.


Edit:
After reading up a bit more on Leon Czolgosz and Emma Goldman I'm all the more perplexed as to why they didn't feature more in the book. Czolgosz had a history of mental illness and, while he identified as an anarchist, he wasn't accepted in anarchist circles. In fact, he showed up once at Goldman's house asking odd questions, so they assumed he was a government infiltrator and sent around notices to other anarchists to beware of him.

Once he was arrested he stated Goldman's speech inspired him, so Goldman was arrested and held for 2 weeks, but no ties were found between her and Czolgosz, so she was released. After release, however, she wrote an article comparing Czolgosz to Brutus, and so she was shunned not only by the public, but by other anarchists as well, and withdrew into seclusion.

At Czolgosz's trial, he refused to talk to his lawyers, so Loran L. Lewis, his defense attorney, made a 27 minute address, not defending Czolgosz, but defending his own status in the community (he didn't want to be villified for defending Czolgosz).

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Review: Catilina: Ritratto di un uomo in rivolta

Catilina: Ritratto di un uomo in rivolta by Massimo Fini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting recap of Catiline's life and the second conspiracy, albeit very biased 'toward' Catiline. The way Fini tells it, Catiline was doing this purely for the Res Publica, and not because he had no hope of being a consul anymore, was pretty much broke, and had quite a few disaffected ex Sulla soldiers ready to follow him.

Also, with regard to Cicero's childhood, Fini states, verbatim: "E come ogni primo della classe che si rispetti leccava il culo al maestro..." (p.23) Ok.. Bonjour finesse...
As well as (still regarding Cicero) how a man with limited horizons cannot understand the idealistic soul of Catiline (p. 32)

Evidently the author is trying to be contrarian, which is interesting, but he is being a bit too forced and obvious about it.



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Review: Tyll

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I get the impression that this book was a lot of fun to write. The author obviously knows a lot about the history of this time period, at least as pertains to this novel, and spent some time tying together all the various threads. Unfortunately, at least for me, this didn't make that good of a story when tied together. As a story about Eugenspiegel, the back story seemed much too extensive, and the various threads traversing time and space at times took a while to tie together, which made it a bit awkward for me.

Probably this was most interesting taken in snippets, since some of the scenarios and dialog were excellent. Not least among these were the different narratives of the same story by different people, showing how even recent history can be distorted a great deal.

The denouement at the end didn't really work that well for me, although I did enjoy how Liz the queen handled herself in what seemed like a lost cause.

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