Author: John Roberts

State of Play makes a journalist (Russell Crowe) the hero in a corporate/political thriller that tries very hard. Sometimes, the movie succeeds. But with its reconciliation of the hard-core newspaperman and the young blogger and the final credits rolling over whirring presses as the newspaper prints the damning truth…State of Play felt like the modern re-make of All the Presidents’ Men that it is, with an elegy for the newspaper woven in.

Metacritic offers a just better than mediocre 64. Two weeks after seeing the movie, I’d agree… it’s slipped a few points for me since my original reaction.

At the same time I found a volume of three lectures by Wallace Stegner, I picked up American Places. Originally published in 1981, this collection from Wallace Stegner and his son Page Stegner was re-released in 2006. I enjoyed these essays several weeks ago.

Father and son share an ethos that quietly, insistently urges a change in the way Americans enjoy and exploit America. But I wonder if being quiet does the trick. As Wallace writes in one chapter, “Last Exit to America,”

The unexamined life is not worth living, but it is precisely the life toward which Americans as a people desparately yearn. (page 53)

Without a jolt, stasis rules. Coming up on thirty years after these essays were written, all is recognizable, for better and for worse.

The first chapter sets the historical stage for how Americans use America, scanning many stages of exploration and exploitation over more than 500 years. The final chapter gazes slightly forward in time, with hope (albeit) faint for change. Each of the 11 chapters along the way narrows to a single place.

The chapter about the Great Salt Lake, “Dead Heart of the West,” taught me a lot about a anomalous fixture I’ve only skirted once, late at night on Interstate 80. It also reminded me that I want to read Stegner’s history of the Mormons (Mormon Country and, later, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail).

The Stegners live in these words: both writers use personal history in their work. Their human relationships serve as a lens to focus attention on landscapes and environments. I wonder if their friends and colleagues accepted being grist for the mill. Not that the authors diminish these people in any way, but their lives become symbols, small and large.

By blogging my enjoyable encounters with the books (1, 2) of Alan Furst, I gave my cousins an idea for a gift: The Good German, by Joseph Kanon. Score!

A menacing, heartening mystery, set in Berlin as World War II has rattled to a close, The Good German collapses a very personal reunion with the rumblings of geopolitics.

More of a police procedural than a spy story — albeit with a journalist leading the investigation — this novel weaves in the larger realities. Again and again, the mundane details of larger issues are bluntly laid out for review: assigning blame for the Holocaust, the whitewashing of the sins of weapons developers, and the ominously clear rising conflict between the West and the Russians.

And it does all that in prose more direct and readable than my own. My thanks for the gift! I never saw the movie made from this book, but now I’m curious.

With the title The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity, Stefan Klein echoes my own thoughts about the years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds skipping or struggling by.

Klein is a science journalist who’s found success in taking on big topics with catchy titles. I haven’t read The Science of Happiness or All by Chance, but The Secret Pulse of Time read like a Malcolm Gladwell book, with a few differences.

Klein covers his topic more broadly and often deeper than Gladwell’s investigations. That’s not always positive — Klein’s book lacks Gladwell’s sense of narrative and purpose. Where Gladwell’s books at times feel like the extended, but focused, magazine articles they often are, Klein forces a bundle of research on his reader. Fortunately, I embraced this topic, so the tidbits and esoterica rewarded my perseverance. I looked forward to this book (a Christmas gift), but I didn’t fly through it. It’s a reference book, not a story. It may reward skimming in the future.

Below are some tidbits I marked along the way.

Increasing the volume of a uniformly ticking sound makes the listeners think the beat is accelerating, too. Klein calls this the Bolero affect. (p. 39)

Goethe complained about the undue focus on speed, and the increasing pace of communication…in 1825. (pp. 151-152)

“When Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction classic 2001 – A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, the movie’s boldly rapid cuts pushed the viewing habits of moviegoers to their limits. Today, we tend to lose patience with those same shots of spaceships gliding slowly through the universe to classical music, which move far too slowly for our current pace.” (pp. 152-153)

“Multitasking is a trap.” (p. 183)

“A lack of control distresses people far more than having a great deal demanded of them, as countless studies have shown. … ” (p. 204)

“Having small children in the house means living with endearing egocentrics who are not willing to delay their needs for a single moment, thus fragmenting their parents’ routine to an extreme. This also explains why many mothers and fathers feel rushed, although they theoretically have plenty of time to get things done.” (p. 205)

“Feeling rushed is decidedly unpleasant. You are obliged to do something, such as to take care of the children, but you don’t feel like doing it. This lack of motivation constitutes the third member of a trio of debilitating time wasters, along with the inability to concentrate and the feeling of being overwhelmed by stress.” (p. 219)

“Our everyday language is revealing: In describing time, we use words from the world of finance. We have and save and invest and waste it.” (p. 264)

Dreaming in Code covers three years of software development, without bearing witness to a final release. That’s really the whole story: software is hard, unpredictable, and never finished.

The book, by Scott Rosenberg, aspires to match Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the classic record of a technology team overcoming the hurdles of innovation to deliver a product to market. While James Fallows makes that analogy explicit in his cover blurb, Dreaming in Code fell short for me.

Rosenberg chose Chander (an email/calendar/lifestream program…at least originally) because it was an open-source project with a different structure: more centralized, and funded generously by Mitch Kapor. But the team members changed throughout the three years plus that Rosenberg followed the project, and the software wasn’t delivered during this period, either. Because the cast of characters changes significantly, I lost interest in the people — and stories of this kind are really about the individuals melding (or not) into a team. Without software in people’s hands, there’s no sense of accomplishment, and no closure, either. Chandler continues, but simply with diminished ambitions and a disinterested audience.

The fits and starts in the development provide Rosenberg plenty of pages to delve into the research and writings about software development. These sidebars weren’t necessarily new to me, but more enjoyable than reading about Chandler’s failure to cohere.

Those in the technology realm will nod their heads at the tales of failure here, but I’m not certain about its appeal to a broader audience. Scott’s blog Wordyard is worth following, though. And I see his next book, about blogging, is due this summer. I admire his willingness to dive in again on a topic that is very much not finished.

History gets written to react to the present.

So when Juan Cole, a professor at Michigan wanted a new way to comment on the Middle East (beyond his blog), he wrote a book.

Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East chronicles the French attack and occupation in 1799-1800. Napoleon was smart enough to scoot back to France, leaving his troops mired in a war that was neither lost nor won. Cole connects the two Western invasions as direct parallels. I’ve read a lot about the Napoleonic era, so I picked up this book…but the overbearing overlay of America in Iraq dampened my enthusiasm. Cole isn’t wrong, but he’s heavy-handed. I hadn’t read his blog before, and I’m not starting now.

Cole’s blog about the book offers some of the original sources, which I applaud.

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam might also have been subtitled “the forgotten war.” Vietnam dominates modern political and military history in this country. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan elicit comparisons to Vietnam time and again. But Korea provided an earlier example of what happens when political and military goals are not aligned and coordinated. For all the discussion about troop withdrawals from our current engagements, let’s not forget the thousands of American troops still in Korea today, 50 years after our entry into the peninsula.

Halberstam’s book focuses on the follies of MacArthur, and the political battles fought between the general and the political leaders from President Truman on down. The military battles command attention, and a few are fully documented, to chilling (literally) effect. But it’s the political back-and-forth domestically which drives us into war, and then — sadly — makes ending the fighting so damn hard.

I learned a lot from this history, even when I wondered how much information came from secondary sources rather than primary sources. Enjoy a few pages with Google Books. The numerous maps helped, too.

Katherine Neville wrote The Eight more than 20 years ago. Thanks to The Da Vinci Code, this form of modern-day treasure hunt for mythical historical artifacts found a new audience (its first?). Neville’s book was reprinted and can be easily found in bookstores.

I picked it up on the way to Hawaii in February, and read The Eight on the plane and at the beach. And I left it in the rental house. (My apologies to the next poor soul drawn in by the jacket.) Generally, schlock. The historical vignettes brim on enjoyable at times, but the modern (1970s) characters don’t even approach interesting.

Learn from my mistake and avoid the hype here.

In contrast to Murakami, I’ve read most of Wallace Stegner’s fiction, and embraced his non-fiction, too.

So, finding a new-to-me slim 1987 volume of three lectures thrilled. The American West as Living Space at its heart explores how water — and its absence, often enough — defines the region.

We’ve endured our third dry winter in a row in California. Pleasant enough to “endure” at the time, but the state needs the rain. Drought fills the news, including this article published while I was reading these essays in February. I live in a city whose very existence depends on shipping water nearly 200 miles from its source. Stegner blitzes by this fact in one sentence.

San Francisco drowned the Hetchy Hetchy Valley, which many thought as beautiful as Yosemite itself, to ensure its future water supply. (p.50)

In a light, skipping survey of a topic he knows so well, Stegner captures the environmental risks in trying to overcome the region’s inherent arid nature.

It’s a gloomy view, overall, but even when Stegner admonishes, he can’t help but notice the defiant optimism which shapes so much of the region. Convinced it can’t last, Stegner still understood the attraction of the West, in myth and reality.

The brief bibliography points to a few dozen sources, including his own biography of John Wesley Powell, Powell’s own report of his surveys, and Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert. I look forward to following up on these trails.

I haven’t read a word of the fiction that makes Haruki Murakami famous. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running logs the author’s real-world training for the New York City Marathon. The structure of the training journal doesn’t bound the words or topics, though. Subtitled “A Memoir,” the book explains the start of Murakami’s running, and tries to illuminate why the sport (and the related one of triathlons) still offers him so much.

I only captured one quote when I read the book back in mid-February (!). Twitter would actually be good for capturing the quotes in the moment… have to try that more often.

Flipping through the small volume again now, I enjoy for a second time the simple, direct prose on a topic I know very well: running. I don’t share my thoughts with such eloquence or even such consideration. Yet I see the different motivations which keep Murakami putting one foot in front of another are not so different from some of my own.

Reminders of the common pace and similar “race” we all share improved this memoir notably. I haven’t made the (full) transition to acceptance of my athletic decline yet. But Murakami’s thoughts on why he runs when each year gets slower and harder are not unknown to me.

This one will stay on the shelf for future re-readings.