Tainted Evidence by Robert Daley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'You have to understand that nearly all of your clients are guilty. The evidence will only convict them. [...] stay as far away from evidence as you can.' [...]
'Once you empanel the jury you want, [...] you have only to play to their prejudices, their preconceived ideas.'"

Tainted Evidence (1993) is the second novel by Richard Daley that I have read. I have found it weaker than Wall of Brass that I reviewed here few months ago. The author, who had used to serve as the Deputy Commissioner of the New York Police Department before he embarked on writing career, is certainly an expert in all matters related to city government. The portrayal of office politics in the police department and in the office of district attorney is plausible, insightful, and relatively well written. I also like the enthralling account of the history of Harlem and how it became the center of violent crime, homicides, and drug use. However, the psychological portraits of main characters are shallow and cliché-ridden: these are not real people.

The beginning four chapters introduce the main characters and locations. We meet detectives Dan Muldoon and Mike Barone and a senior assistant district attorney, Karen Horne. The main thread of the plot begins when Muldoon leads a group of detectives on a mission to capture a dangerous criminal. The raid is horribly botched, there is a shootout, there are victims, and while the criminal has been captured, the case against him is not that clear cut. The case has been tainted by gross incompetence of police.

The second half of the novel is an account of the trial. One of the best lawyers in the country, famous for winning civil rights cases, leads the defense team. The case against a vicious criminal morphs into a case against police corruption and mismanagement. Politics permeates everything; personal career considerations trump law, justice, and fairness.

Alas, the human-interest threads are lame. Clichés abound. We are told that detective Muldoon is a slob. Then we constantly read about him doing slobby things, uttering slobby phrases, and saying 'fucken' all the time. The thread about Barone's erotic conquests is excruciatingly boring. Lame humor, like in the "wok joke," does not help either.

I like the cynical quotes about the legal system that I used for the epigraph. They come from the lawyer's speech given to law students. Otherwise, the novel is a marginal recommendation from me. People who read police or legal thrillers for the plot will probably like it more.

Two-and-a-half stars.


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The Great Movies III by Roger Ebert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I believe good movies are a civilizing force. They allow us to empathize with those whose lives are different than our own. I like to say they open windows in our box of space and time. Here's a third book filled with windows."

How do I review a collection of movie reviews? How do I write about writings of the best movie critic ever? A movie critic whose reviews were not only deep, thoughtful, and incisive, but also beautifully written. This review mainly quotes passages from The Great Movies III by Roger Ebert, his third set of reviews of movies that made the strongest impression on him. I selected only four of the hundred films praised by Mr. Ebert in this collection, the four that I like the most. In fact, the first three would place among the Top Twenty Movies I have ever seen, were I to venture compiling such a list.

First, 3 Women:

"Robert Altman's 1977 masterpiece tells the story of three women whose identities blur, shift, and merge until finally, in an enigmatic last scene, they have formed a family, or perhaps have become one person. I have seen it many times, been through it twice in shot-by-shot analysis, and yet it always seems to be happening as I watch it. Recurring dreams are like that: we have had them before, but have not finished with them, and we return because they contain unsolved enigmas."

Yes! An absolutely stunning movie: enigmatic yet beautiful and so very human! I could say exactly the same about The Double Life of Veronique (1991). Kieslowski's film is beautiful and impenetrable, yet resonates deeply with human subconsciousness - perhaps "not-quite-consciousness" would be a better phrase. Here's how Rogert Ebert explains it in one of the best passages of movie criticism that I have ever read:

"Here is a film about a feeling. Like all feelings, it is one that can hardly be described in words, although it can be evoked in art. It is the feeling that we are not alone, because there is more than one of us. We are connected at a level far, far beneath thought. We have no understanding of this. It is simply a feeling that we have."

Then comes Mike Leigh's (see my review of The World According to Mike Leigh) masterpiece Secrets and Lies (1996). Full psychological truth about "regular" people who suddenly find themselves in an unusual situation. Phenomenal acting and direction. Mr. Ebert writes

"The kind of fascination Mike Leigh generates is unlike almost anything else in the cinema, because it takes such chances, goes so deeply, explores the human comedy for its tears."

And finally Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985), to me a totally underappreciated gem, little known but great black comedy. Mr. Ebert, as usual, masterfully explains his fascination with the movie:

"After Hours approaches the notion of pure filmmaking; it's a nearly flawless example of -- itself. It lacks, as nearly as I can determine, a lesson or a message, and is content to show the hero facing a series of interlocking challenges to his safety and sanity."

All 100 reviews in the book are wonderful! A great read! I will soon read and review the two previous volumes in the series.

Four stars.

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In the Midst of Death by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"I cradled the phone and tapped the bourbon bottle for another small taste. My head ached dully and I suspected that bourbon was probably not the best thing in the world for it, but I couldn't think of anything better. "

While I usually enjoy Lawrence Block's novels and I rather like the Matthew Scudder character, particularly in the earlier novels, I have found In the Midst of Death (1976) a minor disappointment. This is officially the third novel in the series, but the second published, and I rate it way below The Sins of the Fathers, which opened the series. I am writing this review just a few weeks after I had finished reading and I barely remember the plot.

Matthew Scudder is hired by a police detective who faces a charge of extortion. The detective is trying to find out who stands behind the accusation. Since he had been helping a special prosecutor with investigating police corruption it seems possible that the charge has been brought as retaliation by someone from the police force. Meanwhile, when a prostitute with whom the detective has had frequent contacts is killed, he is booked on suspicion of murder.

Mr. Scudder investigates the complex case and, naturally, solves it. Yet I have serious reservations about plausibility: several people in the novel voluntarily tell Scudder various secrets. People like federal attorneys share confidential information with an unlicensed private eye. Hardly likely. I find the denouement forced and contrived. The author provides sort of a cascade ending, though, and some of the twists are interesting.

This being an early Scudder story, alcohol is obviously in the foreground. The novel portrays a high-functioning alcoholic well. The reader will find several interesting observations of an alcoholic's psychophysiology, for instance, about the relationship between dreams and DTs. I am disappointed, though, that while in many books Mr. Block's prose is richer than is needed to just advance the plot, in this novel I have found just one passage that transcends the utilitarian writing:

She looked at me, and for a short moment we challenged one another with our eyes. I didn't know then and do not know now precisely what happened, but our eyes met and exchanged wordless messages, and something must have been settled on the spot, although we were not consciously aware of the settlement or even of the messages that preceded it.

Overall, I am unable to recommend this novel.

Two-and-a-quarter stars.

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The Martian's Daughter: A Memoir by Marina von Neumann Whitman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Searcher for levers. Newspapers devourer. Economic Portia. Full employment of mind."
(a characterization of Ms. von Neumann Whitman by C. Jackson Grayson, the U.S. Chairman of the Price Commission in the early 1970s.)

The main reason I reached for Marina von Neumann Whitman's memoir The Martian's Daughter (2012) was that - being sort of a mathematician - I wanted to learn more about her father, John von Neumann, one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, often called the "smartest man alive." He was a key player both in the Manhattan Project and in the development of the hydrogen bomb. He was the one who chose the targets of the American A-bomb in the war against Japan. He was the father of game theory and one of the pioneers of digital computers. His development of the "von Neumann architecture" was one of the pivotal developments in the history of computing. I wanted to know more about him from his daughter.

I have not learned much about John von Neumann that I had not known before. Yes, Ms. Whitman's memories of the family life in Princeton are charming. For instance, she writes about Albert Einstein:

"He was visible mainly at a distance during the afternoon teas that took place daily in the institute's Fuld Hall, and his fame rested not only on his brilliance but also on his eccentricity, symbolized by his wild hair and the fact that he didn't wear socks. He had one close friend among his colleagues, Kurt Gödel, with whom he walked daily to and from the institute, deep in conversation as they went."

We learn a lot about the troubled marriage of Ms. Whitman's parents and about an unusual child custody arrangement they had after the divorce. The reader also gets a fascinating portrayal of life in the U.S. during 1939 - 1940, the first two years of World War II. While the U.S. was not yet at war the entire Europe was and since von Neumanns were immigrants from Hungary their observations are particularly sharp. They describe the situation through European eyes.

I find the memoir much more interesting when Ms. Whitman writes about her own career and spectacular achievements. She became one of the foremost economists in the U.S., advised president Nixon on economic issues, served on the boards of directors of corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Unocal, Manufacturers Hanover Bank, and several others, served as vice president and chief economist of the General Motors corporation. She also served as a director of leading multinational corporations and research and policy institutions.

So while I do not recommend the book as a source of information about John von Neumann, I certainly recommend it for the extremely critical picture of major U.S. corporations in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Particularly critical is Ms. Whitman's assessment of the top executives, including CEOs of some of the biggest corporations in the world, like General Motors or similar business giants. The stories of gross incompetence of the top management in many famous companies made me really angry. Hard-working, competent people, like, for instance nurses, earn less than $100,000 while the utterly incompetent top executives earn hundreds or thousands times more. If nurses were as inept as the CEOs, they would be fired after a few days, without "golden parachutes."

To me, Ms. Whitman's book provides strong evidence for the celebrated Peter's Principle. The principle states that in every organization employees rise through promotion until they reach their level of incompetence. In other words, incompetence at the top levels in any organization is not coincidental but virtually mandatory.

There is yet another layer of the memoir, perhaps one that the author emphasizes the most. Gender discrimination that existed in business and academic world in the times that Ms. Whitman developed her academic, government, and business career was staggering. Through her talent, intense focus, and dedication she became the trailblazer for all women after her.

Finally: why "Martian's daughter"? "Martians" was a humorous term for five Hungarian Jewish physicists, Szilard, Wigner, von Neumann, Teller, and von Karman, who spent most of their scientific lives in the United States and made fundamental contributions to the Allied victory in World War II.

"[...] some other participants in the Manhattan Project, speculating on how there came to be so many brilliant Hungarians in their midst, concluded that these colleagues were really creatures from Mars who disguised their nonhuman origins by speaking Hungarian."

Three-and-a-half stars.


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G is for Gumshoe by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"'The Slabs?'
'Ah, doesn't ring a bell. [...] The Slabs are out on the Mojave, to the east of the Salton Sea. During the Second World War, there was a Marine base out there. It's gone now. All that's left are the concrete foundations for the barracks, known now as the Slabs. Thousands of people migrate to the Slabs every winter from the North.'"

Reading the first third of Sue Grafton's G Is For Gumshoe was a riveting experience for me. Along with my family and friends, I used to pass next to the Slabs, now called Slab City, every year between 1990 and 2010, when driving to our well-hidden New Year's Eve camping place in Chocolate Mountains. I often wondered about the daily life of people coming from Canada or northern parts of the US to stay in their trailers in the Mojave.

And then, on page 38 of my paperback edition, I see:

"In the distance, to the right, I caught sight of a hillock of raw dirt, crowned by an outcropping of rock painted with religious sentiments. GOD IS LOVE and REPENT loomed large."

Yes, the place is still there, only now it is a full-blown tourist attraction, called The Salvation Mountain. Highly recommended! The book also mentions a motel in Brawley, and the locality called Niland, on the shore of Salton Sea. I know all these places so well!

Back to the novel. A woman hires Kinsey Millhone to check on well-being of her mother, an 83-year-old woman, living alone in Slab City. At the same time, Kinsey learns that there is a contract on her life. A felon whom Kinsey helped to convict and put in prison wants her killed. When she drives on Highway 111 (so many memories for me), she is shot at and run off the road. Kinsey acquires a bodyguard to ensure her safety.

The scenes of Kinsey's conversations with Agnes, the old woman, are the best parts of the novel. The dialogues ring true, and the psychology of the character reads plausible. As opposed to the entire thread of Kinsey evading the killer and the somewhat lame romantic thread between Kinsey and her bodyguard. Connections to events from the deep past (1940s) emerge and there is a lot of action. A lot of action! We even have passages like:

"Blood and torn flesh bloomed in his chest like a chrysanthemum, shreds of cotton shirting like the calyx of a flower."

Well, quite visual, yet a bit cheap! I like the novel, but mainly for the locales on the east shore of Salton Sea and for the Agnes character. Without these, I do not think it would be a highly readable novel.

Three stars.

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The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

""Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning. Neither is the structure of time what it seems to be: it is different from this uniform, universal flowing."

It is not Carlo Rovelli's fault that I don't rate his The Order of Time (2017) as high as the absolutely outstanding Seven Brief Lessons on Physics . The reason may be that my amazement about finding an author who can write about contemporary physics in a convincing and accessible way has worn out a little. Also, naturally, there is some repetition between both books. Still, Order is a wonderful treatise on the nature of time from the viewpoint of cutting-edge physics.

I find the book amazingly readable; since it is also short, 211 small-format pages, I have devoured it in two short sittings. I love the verses that open each chapter: they come mainly from Horace's Odes, translated by Giulio Galetto

"The brief arc of our days,
O Sestius,
prevents us from launching
prolonged hopes. (I,4)

But back to physics. Dr. Rovelli tells us strange things full of wonder. As humans we are immersed in the stream of our perceived linear time, yet the universal "now" (i.e., the present) does not exist. The "speed at which time flows changes from place to place." The arrow of time appears only in connection with heat. "Spacetime is the gravitational field - and vice versa." Time is granular.

Dr. Rovelli, a world-famous physicist, is one of the main researchers in the field of quantum gravity. He has offered major contributions to the loop quantum gravity theory, which attempts to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity. I find Part II of the book, The World Without Time particularly fascinating. The author stresses that

"The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

Then he explains the basic tenets of the loop quantum gravity, which I am too hesitant to summarize because of my deep ignorance of contemporary physics. I am happy, though, to emphasize the connections of the theory with probability, which is the branch of mathematics that I love the most, and with the concept of entropy. In 1972 I was taking the thermodynamic course from Prof. Jerzy Rutkowski at the Warsaw Institute of Technology. I will never forget the professor running around the auditorium and yelling "Entropy is the spirit that governs the Universe." And now, almost 50 years later, I read in Dr. Rovelli's book:

"It is the growth of this entropy that powers the great story of the cosmos."

And to make things even more explicit:

"Traces of past exist, and not traces of the future, onlybecause entropy was low in the past. [...] the only source of the difference between past and future is the low entropy of the past."

As I tend to easily get into overly somber mood I will not write much about the last chapter, beautifully written The Sister of Sleep, about human impermanence and our fear of death.

An absolutely wonderful book!

Four-and-a-half stars.


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