Category: Articles

Categories
Review

“The John McPhee Reader”

John McPhee

To date, The Control of Nature remains my favorite McPhee book, and the one I’m most likely to recommend to a new reader, but this is a very strong contender. It is, as the title implies, something of a sampler platter of his work; subsections of a variety of pieces, and as a result, covering a far broader topic area than any of his other books. The books are usually more focused, tied around a single theme; in this one, that single theme is John McPhee.

It’s a broader swathe of his work than I’ve read before; if you skim through what I’ve read of his in the past, it definitely has that naturalist perspective locked in, but I haven’t spent time with his “focus on a single person” type things, or his sports coverage. It’s an interesting change of pace; I don’t really expect I’m going to dive into those as much as I have the outdoors, but I won’t go out of my way to avoid it, either.1

One part really captured me, and immediately added a book to my wish list: the excerpt from The Curve of Binding Energy. Somehow I hadn’t yet found out that he did an entire piece on the progenitor of Project Orion. My favorite nonfiction author, writing about one of my favorite topics? Sign me up.

Overall, I continue to love everything McPhee wrote. I’ve got another of his books in my queue, but I’m deliberately holding off on it, trying to space them out. If I haven’t yet convinced you to read some of his work, give this one a try; it is, like I said, a great introduction to his writing.2

  1. And I figure I will eventually read his entire oeuvre, it does seem to be what I’m working my way towards at this point. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Urban Trails: Portland”

Eli Boschetto

This was something of an impulse buy, but in the spirit of something I’ve been trying to do more of lately: ‘be a tourist in your own city.’ Get out and explore, find new things that you didn’t know about, generally just get yourself out your ruts.

Now, I’m aware that this post is going up at maybe not the best time of year for being outdoors in the Pacific Northwest, but that’s not a permanent state of affairs, and it’s a perfectly reasonable time to start putting together a todo list for nicer weather. And hey, some people are into the rainy-and-cold outdoorsmanship!1

Regardless, this was a fun read, and I’ve definitely taken notes for areas I’d like to explore myself. I also had the chance to do some of the exploring already—as I’m writing this, it’s the afternoon of a day where I spent the morning wandering around Hoyt Arboretum, entirely on the recommendation of this book. It’s a good little piece of reference material, and I recommend it!2 I’m also looking at another book by the same publisher about biking in Portland, because the mentions of biking in this one are something of an afterthought.

  1. I am not one of those people, but I’m told they exist. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 31”

(Various authors)

I’m not a big fan of the whole ‘death of the author’ thing, and this book really drove home just why I feel that way. It’s a great example of it, really. It’s a collection of stories written by different authors, so surely we can view it separately from the name on the cover, right?

But to set aside the name on the cover, you have to set aside a great deal of context. The people choosing which stories made it into this collection… work for the L. Ron Hubbard foundation. They chose to work there. They looked at that name, and the legacy of it, and thought “yes, I want to be associated with this.” And, a step beyond that, everyone who submitted a story to this contest did so having, again, looked at the name L. Ron Hubbard and thought “yeah, I’m fine with being associated with that.”

That’s a lot of context to throw away, is it not? And it provides a certain amount of explanation for why some of these stories were the way they were. There’s one in here that reminded me of what I don’t like about Orson Scott Card—it treats the female protagonist as if her only purpose for existence is to make babies. Given that the setting feels like it started from the inspiration “what if Handmaiden’s Tale, but in space?” it takes some gall to have the story end with “anyways then she found the right man and they had kids and then happily ever after!”

When it comes to science fiction, I’d rather read hopeful things. This anthology did not deliver on that; I think the most hopeful story in there was one that’s a man in a mental institution, starting to recover from the fact that his sister responded to their parents dying by trying to murder him for the inheritance. Cheery!

Unlike most of my reviews, I’m not gonna end this with a call to action. This wasn’t a good book. Don’t pick it up—Hubbard’s legacy doesn’t deserve that kind of support. Go look for an anthology of queer fiction instead, those are usually better.

Categories
Review

“The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet”

Becky Chambers

The first chapter sorta set me on the wrong mindset for this book; I think, actually, that’s why I bounced off it the first time I tried reading it. It feels like it’s going to be a lot grittier than the book turned out to be. Someone with Secrets, having just done Crimes to escape their Mysterious Past? That’s a very specific vibe, one that, quite frankly, feels rather generic at this point.

That isn’t what this book is.

This book is a study in characters. It’s an exploration of cultural differences on all sorts of different scales, from the ancestral privilege enjoyed by the Martian subset of humanity to the interspecies differences in what the concept of love means.

It’s about found family, and biological family, and how the former can help replace the latter, or heal the wounds imposed by them.

It’s a collection of vignettes, a journey—no, an odyssey—of over a year, the moments of excitement along the titular long way to what does turn out to be a small and angry planet.

Overall, it’s an absolutely beautiful read. I devoured it in an afternoon, and finished reading it watching the sun set and the stars come out, and that’s maybe the perfect way to have done so. It fit the flow of the story. So much of the science fiction I read is about action sequences and big things happening. ‘Ordinary people reacting to extraordinary circumstances.’ This felt like it was starting to fall into the other side of that quote—‘extraordinary people reacting to ordinary circumstances.’ For all that the setting is so very, very much built around the fact that it’s in space, in the future, that isn’t important. What’s important is the people you’re traveling with, and the way you feel about one another.

I loved this book, and I highly recommend it. Go give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”

ed. Kevlin Henney

Reviewing a “collected wisdom” book like this is rather difficult, as not only is there not a single plot line throughout it, there’s not even a single core idea to it. It is, in fact, 97 core ideas, each told in a couple of pages. Which does make it easy to pick up and put down, and read in fits and starts. The quality and relevancy of the advice varied, although not in precisely the way you’d expect—there’s a fair few that, with what they referenced, felt very dated but gave advice that remains useful, and then there were a couple that felt dated and gave dated advice. Itself a useful reminder that, for all the field likes being the latest and greatest, newest shiniest, age does not mandate that a piece of wisdom has grown less useful over time.

So hey, the book club at work continues to provide interesting books to read, and this was another one. Give it a read – you can pick up a physical copy1 or read it online through the O’Reilly library.

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Negotiating the Impossible”

Deepak Malhotra

As with every business book, it’s certainly of the genre, and that winds up coloring my review with a certain amount of “for a business book…” a lot of the time. Still kinda applicable here, in that you have to know it’s a business book, but Malhotra actually does a great job of not feeling like he’s writing a business book most of the time. It’s impossible to entirely escape the trappings, but he at least avoids the “this is a backdoor memoir of someone who isn’t actually that interesting” problem that plagues a lot of these. Turns out, using stories from history and politics makes this kind of thing a bit more interesting! Use your own stories occasionally, but—especially with the amount of non-disclosure agreements clearly in play—they aren’t actually as interesting as hearing about, say, how JFK approached the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The actual “business advice” aspect isn’t bad, either. You can tell the guy is a teacher, and has had time to practice teaching this in order to actually boil it down well. I can actually kinda feel the structure of the class, which unit happens at which part of the term, each chapter being a week or two of class. The ideas have been boiled down through that practice, and he’s got a nice overview kind of thing at the end of each section.

All in all, this was a surprisingly interesting read, and I do recommend it. Can’t hurt to know a little bit more about how to handle negotiations, as they’re more common in life than you’d think. Give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Quantum”

Patricia Cornwell

This was a slow burn of a book; I nearly gave up on it multiple times at the beginning, but I wound up totally caught up in it, and very glad I’d stuck through. The writing style takes a lot of getting used to—it feels very stream-of-consciousness, but in a specifically neuroatypical way. Neuroatypical, and very stressed out, which fits very well with the actual events in the book. Especially given, as I realized something like 230 pages in, the entire contents of the book, a whole lot of events, took place in a single day. I, too, would be feeling fragmented and jittery if my day started with a morning presentation to an audience that included a surprise four-star general and ended after midnight with being part of Mission Control for a particularly dangerous spacewalk!

There’s also the core aspect of crime thriller to the book, and I also found that quite engaging once it actually started up. This book has my favorite bit of foreshadowing I’ve seen in quite a while, and I spent a large amount of my reading time repeating that one line to myself, waiting for the protagonist to figure it out. Because, like I said, she’s having a very long day; I am comfortably at home, doing some leisurely reading, but she is cramming two weeks’ worth of events into one 30-hour day. It makes sense that she’d miss it.1 It was so very satisfying to see that one line come back to help things click together.

My only complaint with this book is that it feels like it ended too early. There’s a sequel, of course, which I suspect I’m going to pick up at some point, but the amount of threads remaining doesn’t feel quite right for that. I don’t feel enough closure at the end of this book for it to be complete, but I also don’t feel enough open questions that I think there’s room for an entire second book. It’s the “cliffhanger at the end of the season” thing, really, it feels contrived to get you to come back next time. The story itself doesn’t want another book, it just wants another 100 pages.

Still, that’s not a terrible complaint to have, and I did very much enjoy the read. The setting is cool, the use of flashbacks—and, eventually, flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks—is a really interesting way to develop the backstory, and all the characters feel like real people with real problems. It was a good read, check it out.2

  1. Here’s the spoiler: the line is “playing musical cars today, ma’am?” It registers as a throwaway line from a background character who is particularly an asshole, and so with all that context it, again, makes perfect sense that the protagonist misses it. But oh, the payoff… ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Velvet Rage”

Alan Downs

Somehow I thought this book was a history of the gay rights movement, and I didn’t so much as read the subtitle to disabuse myself of that notion, so once I got into the book proper, it was a heck of surprise. Although, really, “the book proper” is the wrong way to put it, because, out of everything, I found the preface to be maybe the most powerful part. It certainly made for an effective hook!

For the majority of gay men who are out of the closet, shame is no longer felt. What was once a feeling has become something deeper and more sinister in our psyches—it is a deeply and rigidly held belief in our own unworthiness for love. We were taught by the experience of shame during those tender and formative years of adolescence that there was something about us that was flawed, in essence unlovable, and that we must go about the business of making ourselves lovable if we are to survive.

It was at about this point in the book—you know, a handful of pages into the preface, not even the introduction yet, that I realized I may have been wrong about what the topic of the book was.

Very few of us feel the shame, but almost all of us struggle with the private belief that “if you really knew the whole, unvarnished truth about me, you would know that I am unlovable.” It is this belief that pushes us, even dominates us with its tyranny of existential angst. In our own way, young and old alike, we set about the business of “earning” love, and escaping the pain of believing we are unlovable. It is this damned quest that pushes us to the highest of highs, and simultaneously brings us to the brink. This is both the creator of the fabulous gay man and his destroyer.

The thing that it brings to mind most, for me, is my favorite article of political coverage I have ever read—that description of Pete Buttigieg as the Best Little Boy In The Whole World. And it really is the same concept:

What would you like me to be? A great student? A priest in the church? Mother’s little man? The first-chair violinist? We became dependent on adopting the skin our environment imposed upon us to earn the love and affection we craved. How could we love ourselves when everything around us told us that we were unlovable? Instead, we chased the affection, approval, and attention doled out by others.

I’ve selected quotes, almost exclusively, from the preface. It was unquestionably the most powerful part of the book, and, again, an immensely effective hook. Which isn’t to say that the remainder of the book had no value—it’s just less quotable, and less immediately impactful. It’s a great example of one of the key points the book makes, actually: here’s the problem, and here’s the much more drawn-out solution. As with most things, solving the problem is a lot harder than just identifying it, and is the sort of thing that takes lots of small changes over a long time.

All in all, I am very glad I read this book. It opens with so accurate a summary of the gay experience that, as I said to someone, “I thought I was going to read this book, but instead it read me.” Or, to go with the more memeable syntax, the text message I sent to someone with the first quote, above: “this book walked into my living room and shot me”

If any of the quotes above hit for you like they did for me, go read this book.1 Right now. There’s no immediate, change-your-life-by-snapping-your-fingers advice in there… but 1% better, every day, adds up real fast. Or, as the last line of the book says:

I invite you to consider making a change for the better.

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0: Origins”

Randolph Lalonde

The problem with a book being Book 0 is that you know it’s all setting you up for something. It’s a prologue! Prologues don’t tend to end on “and then everything was great and there was no major conflict left, they all lived happily ever after.”

Which was pretty rough, because I absolutely loved this book and the characters. This feels like the love-child of my favorite parts of Star Trek and FTL. From the former, you’ve got a cast who are all very smart people that are passionate about what they’re doing; that sense of exploration, of a great big galaxy in which there’s trillions of people living their lives, and this group in particular is doing their best to make it a better place for all of them. And from the latter, that feeling of building up, starting with a Default Starship and then customizing it into a lean, mean, fighting machine.1 And, as the plot goes on, the feeling that even after all the upgrades you’ve put into it, there’s still always a bigger bad out there — you remain the scrappy underdog, punching above their weight class, trying to fight the evil hypercorporation.

This is a really fun universe to play around in, is the thought I kept having. I want to see more of it, I want to see where else the characters go to explore. It’s book 0, and I think right now there’s something like 9 more, and I’m hooked; at some point, once I finish reading through my whole gigantic backlog, I’m gonna have to pick up at least Book 1 and see how it is.2

All in all, I loved this book; my biggest complaint is that it was setting me up for the rest of the series, and if the series turns out to be this good, that’s a pretty nice problem to have. Give it a go.3

  1. The fact that the hull is made of “ergranian steel,” which has the never-really-explained property of being able to regenerate when charged with energy from the reactor, adds to that videogame-y feeling – you can heal up in between fights! All it takes is energy, which you have a limitless free supply of courtesy of “the reactors” and some big collecting scoops on the front of the ship that gather space dust. ↩
  2. The transition from Prologue to Main Story feels like it’s gonna be something on the other side, and that’s about all I’m gonna say to avoid spoilers. ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Byzantium: The Decline and Fall”

John Julius Norwich

I do like this bit from the epilogue, as Norwich sums up the various rulers the empire had over its 1,100-odd years of existence:

Of those eight-eighty [emperors], a few – Constantine himself, Justinian, Heraclius, the two basils, Alexius Comnenus – possessed true greatness; a few – Phocas, Michael III, Zoe and the Angeli – were contemptible; the vast majority were brave, upright, God-fearing, unimaginative men who did their best, with greater or lesser degrees of success.

Just the word “unimaginative” in there really got to me. What a painful legacy to leave!

It is, though, pretty fitting. A lot of the events of this book boil down to “and then something else went wrong, which would’ve been quite manageable if the Emperor had been slightly better at being Emperor.” Though, admittedly, there’s also a whole lot of them where the “would’ve been quite manageable” leads instead to “if the Who’s Who of Constantinople could’ve taken a break for one month from squabbling with each other in order to keep the Empire from slowly dissolving.” So much of the decline of the Byzantine Empire feels like a testament to selfishness. The Emperor is off trying to consolidate the recapture of some of the critical agricultural heartland of the empire? Sure, that’s probably important and all, but it also means he’s distracted, and now’s your chance to stab him in the back!

I think I’ll place this book at second place of the trilogy; the first was just overwhelming, the second did a better job at storytelling, and the third did an even better job at telling the story… but by this point in history, it was a really depressing story. That said, if you want to read about the slow decline of the Byzantine Empire, this is a pretty solid way to do so, and you’re welcome to give it a try.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
Categories
Review

“Byzantium: The Apogee”

John Julius Norwich

Continuing my reading of history, we’ve got Byzantium Part II. (Although, really, Byzantium is Rome 2.) I found this more readable than the previous book, which I suspect has a great deal to do with the fact that this one is covering less ground. One emperor per chapter, roughly, worked well as a way to split things up, though it did occasionally make for strange ends and beginnings of chapters when there was a great deal of action taking place in the changeover. Someone dies and their son assumes the throne with no arguments, perfectly fine; someone is assassinated by their wife and her lover who wants the throne, but wait, maybe there’s someone else who’s going to take the throne, and oh wait the Church has arrived to add some drama… less of a coherent chapter split.

I did at some point realize that I need a bit more visual of this and went to find some maps of the Byzantine Empire at various points in time, which helped; probably should’ve done that before, oh, the second-to-last chapter or so. Hard to visualize the changing borders when I’m not great at geography to start with, and all the names are different because it’s 1,000 years in the past.

Reviewing the empire itself, rather than the book, there’s still a feeling of “1,000 years, three continents, and somehow there’s only 4 first names to go around?” to it. I would not have survived as a history major, I simply cannot deal with the repetition. I’ve also got a great deal of frustration for some of the wondrous things that were built and utterly lost to history; there’s a description in the book of a throne room full of mechanical animals that I would love to see, but alas, we have yet to invent a time machine that would allow that. Science should really get on that.

Overall, this was a much nicer read than the first book, and I may actually jump right into the third as a result; I didn’t end the book feeling like I’m still interest yet need a break. So hey, this time, I’ll go ahead and recommend that you check it out.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Flavor Bible”

Karen Page, Andrew Dornenburg

As it turns out, this book was uniquely ill-suited for an e-reader; this is a book that was written around the concept of being heavily laid out, and it didn’t make it through the process of ePUB-ification very well. Get the print edition, if you’re going to get it—while there’s something to be said, with this format, for searchability, it’s all alphabetized, so the print edition doesn’t lose much that way.

Entertainingly, the thing I kept thinking off all through the book was Pokémon type charts. (Really, go grab that link to see the example, I’m not going to be able to explain this well.) Basically, take a list, repeat it as both the rows and columns of a table, and then throughout the table mark which things go well together and to which degree. A very small example, off the top of my head:

Balsamic Vinegar Chocolate Strawberries Zucchini
Balsamic Vinegar x ★ ★ ★
Chocolate x ★ ★
Strawberries ★ ★ ★ ★ x
Zucchini ★ x

That’s kinda what the book is, on a much larger scale. Look up an ingredient, see a couple quick facts about it, where it falls in some broad categories, maybe a few recipe ideas and some anecdotes from chefs… and then get a list of which things it works well with.

Honestly, I think this would make a pretty good coffee-table book, and a useful reference if you’ve got one ingredient in mind and want some inspiration for what to make using it. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Sweet Dreams are Made of Teeth”

Richard Roberts

I have to admit, right here at the beginning, that I didn’t finish this book. Which is generally grounds for disqualification from my writing a review, because I can’t exactly have a fully formed opinion based on an unfinished book!1 I’m making an exception this time, though, both because of the quality of the writing and because the reason I didn’t finish it.

Let’s start with the latter: this book is creepy. Read the title; that alone should’ve warned you going in. It’s a book about nightmares. And I… am not at all a horror person. My sister tried to convince me to watch The Haunting of Hill House on the grounds that “it’s not scary, it’s sweet!” and she was absolutely wrong. The first couple episodes now permanently occupy space in my brain, lurking there to pop back up and make sure I can’t sleep. My brain’s repository of nightmare fodder is already much fuller than I’d like it to be, and will gladly expand to make room for more; I do not want to give it that opportunity.

But the former, oh, the former. I really wanted to read this whole book. I mentioned earlier that it’s about nightmares; what really made it shine, in the amount of creepy that I made it through before I had to give up, was how, exactly, it’s about nightmares.

Each of the characters we meet early on is a specific nightmare. They have names, but they’re shorthand, because these are conceptual characters. The protagonist goes by Fang, but really what he is is running and running, and it’s right behind you, all you can see is a glimpse of teeth, and you keep running but you can never get away. We meet him hanging out with his friend Jeff — a little boy, well-dressed, blond hair, sitting quietly eating, and everything seems fine but then you get up close and see what he’s eating, and what his teeth look like. There’s a love interest, of course, and frankly I didn’t make it far enough to know if she’s got a name, but what she is is a long hallway in a decrepit house. eyes open in the walls when you aren’t looking, but they hide when you try to catch them staring. you walk past dozens of rooms but never find an exit. sometimes, in the hall, you see statues; people, frozen in the act of trying to escape the walls. you’re never sure if there in the same place or if they’ve moved, changed positions. in the distance, faint sobbing. if you walk far enough, you find her—a girl in a dusty dress, weeping quietly into her hands. she doesn’t look up when you enter the room, doesn’t seem to hear you at all. if you get close, you can see she has no eyes.

It’s a book about nightmares, about what they’re thinking when you’re caught up in a nightmare, about what they do in their spare time. And it all has that dreamlike quality to it, that sense that you can turn a corner and find yourself somewhere completely different. That things don’t have to make logical sense, they just have to be able to string together enough of a story that you don’t realize you’re asleep.

That’s what really captivated me about the book, and what kept me trying to fight through my natural distaste for horror. I wish I could’ve finished it, and at some point I may come back to chip away at it some more, but for now I had to give up. But if you, unlike me, can tolerate being creeped out—or, god help you, enjoy it—then I absolutely recommend it. I really have no idea where the plot was going, or what happens next, but I did like the setting and the way the characters were described. It was interesting. Give it a go.2

  1. Or, at least, not one that I think is worth sharing; “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” applies to book reviews, too. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
Categories
Review

“Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”

Robert B Cialdini

Another one from the book club at work! I think this is the one I’ve enjoyed least so far, frankly. It reminds me of some of the pop psychology books I’ve read, though somewhat better-researched—which makes sense, I suppose, given that Cialdini is a name you’ll see a lot if you’re looking through academic papers in this field. Where the book falls down for me, though, is that it feels like Cialdini hasn’t really considered some of the implications of his work as well as he should. Then again, I’m coming at that thought with the perspective of someone living in 2023, and the original version of this was published in, like, 1980something.

The key point where that thought coalesced for me was the chapter on authority. It’s a long discussion of the impact of authority on how we think about someone’s trustworthiness, but it somehow gets through that entire discussion without ever seeming to acknowledge the concept of a power differential. One of the key examples he cites is a study about how well people listen to someone telling them to stand in a slightly different place on the street. Some low percentage listen if it’s a random person asking that; a higher percentage listen if it’s someone in a security guard’s uniform asking. Which is, sure, something of a useful data point, but he just stops there. Do a follow-up study with different uniforms! Use something other than a security uniform—do people listen if they’re in a paramedic’s outfit? Scrubs? One of those airline pilot hats? Y’know, any uniform that doesn’t carry all the cultural baggage of “this is a person somewhat trained to and distinctly more likely to apply violence as a solution to their problems.” Is it really the uniform that made people listen, or is it the implicit threat of that specific uniform?

Similarly, people are apparently more cautious driving behind a luxury car than an “economy” model. Cialdini attributes that to the aura of authority inherent in the luxury car, but again, is it an “aura of authority,” or is it the background knowledge of who’s likely to be driving that? If you get in a fender-bender with someone driving an economy car, it’s one thing; someone driving a $200,000 Porsche, though, has the implicit weight of “they can afford a lawyer and I can’t.”

Beyond that, I feel like Cialdini didn’t do enough to dissuade people from misusing the techniques he discusses. There’s the apparent disgust with people using them as sales techniques, but it never feels like he truly considers them being used for anything worse. And, here in 2023, that feels… deeply naïve. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

Still, it’s an interesting overview of the psychology of persuasion, and I did appreciate that there’s a bit towards the end of each chapter discussing how to try to immunize yourself to the technique, so it may be useful. It’s worth skimming through, at least.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Atomic Robo”

Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, Lee Black, Ronda Pattison, Nick Filardi, Anthony Clark, Jeff Powell

Atomic Robo is one of my favorite comics, one I’ve been reading long enough that I wish I had some way of figuring out exactly how long I have been reading it. It’s getting a review now, however, as I recently did an all-the-way-through reread.1

Here’s the concept of the comic: Nikolai Tesla built a nuclear-powered, fully sentient robot. He’s creatively named Atomic Robo Tesla, and generally goes by Atomic Robo, or just Robo to his friends. Being a bulletproof, super-strong robot, he gets into some adventures! Being an ageless machine, those adventures occur across a wide range of time. Being a world where it’s possible for Nikolai Tesla to build a nuclear-powered, fully sentient robot, those adventures involve a whole lot of pulp science fiction—there’s an entire comic early on where Robo spends a few hours fighting giant insects while having a discussion via radio about why giant insects are impossible.

Basically, it’s some of the most fun science fiction I read, and I absolutely love it. There’s some really interesting storylines, and there’s also some really funny storylines. Just about everything that Dr. Dinosaur shows up in absolutely hilarious—everything else in this world feels like it’s following some rules, though different ones than our world, but Dr. Dinosaur is just running around inside his own personal reality distortion field. And he shows up precisely often enough to maintain the hilarity of how well he plays off of Robo.

So, hey, if you’re at all interested in any of this, go read the comic. The nice thing about webcomics is that it’s all free online! And, honestly, I really recommend starting from the beginning—it makes the most sense that way, and while there’s some early references to stuff that shows up again later, it’s more little hints that make it better on reread.2

  1. Well, in April; these reviews aren’t exactly timely. (Which I usually avoid admitting to, but in this case, the specific things going on in the comic at the time were what set me off rereading from the beginning, I wanted to remember what was being called back to. ↩
  2. Seriously, I had a moment on this most recent reread where I realized that something really early on had been foreshadowing of a storyline that happened, in publishing time of the comic, something like a decade later. Their ‘about’ page says “Everything that happens will fit into the larger setting; everything that happens will happen for a reason” and they mean it. ↩