The Blue Hour by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"He lay still and remembered fishing with his uncles, his dad making pancakes on Sunday mornings, the creases on the back of his mother's blouse as she walked, Barbara's expression as she came down the aisle in the church where they were married, his first dog, what the world looked like from the tail gunner's position of a B-29 thirty thousand feet above Korea."

A serial killer is stalking women in Orange County. The women disappear; only their purses are found as well as blood-drenched spots on the ground near Ortega Highway. The county sheriff-coroner asks the retired Newport Beach detective, Tim Hess, to help with the investigation. Tim, who is in treatment for cancer, will be paired with Merci Rayborn, a detective on the Newport Beach police force, an "aggressive, bright, and a little arrogant" woman, highly unpopular with most deputies as she has sued one of them for sexual harassment.

The Blue Hour (1999), T. Jefferson Parker's seventh novel, also happens to be the seventh book of his that I am reviewing here on Goodreads. To me, Mr. Parker is the quintessential Southern California author of the late 20th century, in the same way as Ross Macdonald had been about a third of the century earlier. I very highly rate their prose and believe that their novels provide more than just entertainment - they convey deeper truths about the human species. I find The Blue Hour one of Mr. Parker's best novels. As usual, I do not care much about the whodunit aspect of the plot; I am mainly interested in realism of characters' psychology and realistic depictions of human interactions and their motives.

I found so many aspects of the novel memorable! First of all, Merci Rayborn is to me quite a believable character; I feel she is an actual human being rather than just a template built of words constructed to embody the author's design. Tim's portrayal is perhaps a tiny bit less plausible but still, considering the low standards of the mystery/thriller genre, where characters serve only the purpose of advancing the plot, he also comes across believable. Mr. Parker was 46 when the novel was published yet I think he very well captured a much older person's thinking. The Merci-Tim relationship thread must have been very difficult to write, particularly the later portions of it, yet Mr. Parker pulled it all off, without resorting to cheap histrionic.

It is clear that the author did his homework researching such "exotic" topics as chemical castration by the Depo Provera treatment and the technology of embalming human bodies. The topics are covered matter-of-factly rather than with the purpose of titillating the reader.

I absolutely love the sudden appearance of Francisco (no spoilers from me!), which adds a sweetly whimsical touch. I remember my strong reaction of disbelief when I first read the Francisco passage, but massive appreciation soon followed. I love it when an author surprises me! The thread featuring the Romanian émigré is captivating, but it seems to me that for legal reasons the media would not be able to follow the situation from up close and in real time so in my view the thread loses plausibility.

To sum up: we are getting a solid portrayal of Merci, plausible dynamic of Merci-Tim relationship, unforgettable Francisco with his harquebus (yes!), castration, embalming technology, highly accomplished prose, and more. The book even works as a mystery/thriller, so my rating is quite high

Four stars.

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Neural Network Projects with Python: The ultimate guide to using Python to explore the true power of neural networks through six projects by James Loy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we are constantly interacting with AI in one way or another. And neural networks and deep learning are driving these AI advances. Powered by neural networks, AI systems are now able to achieve human-like performance in many areas."

Two days ago I posted an enthusiastic review of Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & TensorFlow (I am "borrowing" a portion of this paragraph and the entire second paragraph from that review). This is the other book that was important to me and my students in 2020, one that helped me return to the field of neural networks and machine learning in general and helped my outstanding research student complete her challenging and advanced research project with extraordinary success.

I worked with neural networks (NN) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and even taught a course on neural network learning. However, in the 1990s it had become clear that the limits of what the then traditional NN architecture can achieve had been reached and the scientific community basically abandoned NNs as the preferred approach to machine learning. Yet beginning in the first decade of the 21st century we witnessed the rebirth of the NN idea, primarily via various multi-level NN models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), developed by Le Cun, Hinton, and others. Currently, CNNs achieve truly spectacular (one can say 'superhuman' without exaggeration) results in various areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

James Loy's Neural Network Projects with Python is a modest yet a very good text on developing NNs in Python with the Keras, pandas, NumPy, and TensorFlow libraries. The publisher's blurb on the cover, "The ultimate guide to using Python to explore the true power of neural networks through six projects," accurately characterizes the text, if we remove the hype word "ultimate." This is a perfect text for a serious student. The projects are well selected and clearly explained; the book comes with complete and meticulously checked set of instructions which help the reader - in case the reader is a Python beginner - with installing Anaconda, the free and open-source distribution of Python and its libraries. Then, it guides the reader through setting up the Python virtual environment, including all needed libraries. Setting up the environment took me only about 15 minutes and proceeded without any hitch.

The book consists of eight chapters. The first chapter, Machine Learning and Neural Networks 101 provides a nice introduction to the topic and presents the toolkits/libraries used in the projects. Then come six chapters each covering a specific project: beginning with the multilayer perceptrons, through deep feedforward networks, convolutional NNs, autoencoders, recurrent NNs (in particular, LSTM, long short-term memory networks), to Siamese NNs. The practical applications of the projects include: predicting diabetes, predicting taxi fares in New York City, image classification (the "cats versus dogs" problem), removing noise from images, sentiment analysis of movie reviews, and facial recognition system.

The last chapter, What's Next?, summarizes the projects, presents some newest methods, for instance, the fascinating GANs (generative adversarial networks) that can generate images of fake human faces indistinguishable from photographs of real people, and discusses the possible future directions of ML and AI.

I am highly recommending Neural Network Projects. A small, modest text fully delivers on its promise and gives great samples of code.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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Pacific Beat by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] the lopping shears moved into his field of vision, opened and shut like the mandibles of a great ant, and moved between his legs.
[He] summoned everything he had. It was a blind surge, a screaming release of fear that brought his torso up level with the floor and guided his hands for the neck of the man with the cutters."

T. Jefferson Parker's third novel Pacific Beat (1991) also happens to be the third book in my TJP Re-read project (it is the sixth novel by the author that I am reviewing here on Goodreads). It follows the weak Little Saigon - a classical case of the literary sophomore curse - and is indeed better than the predecessor, alas still very far from the stellar quality of California Girl or more formulaic yet still excellent Where Serpents Lie or The Fallen.

Jim Weir, an ex-sheriff's deputy, now a treasure hunter, returns home to Newport Beach from Mexico, where he was trying to locate a sunk pirate ship and where he got arrested by Mexican police on made-up drug charges. He lost his boat and got severely beaten, but he is coming back to a much worse disaster. His 39-year-old sister Ann had been killed and her body was found on the beach, brutally violated. Jim's brother is a detective on the Newport Beach police force and Jim is helping in the investigation.

The author masterfully sets up the plot and as the story progresses it does not lose much plausibility, although quite a lot is going on: an escapee from a mental asylum becomes one of the protagonists, and snippets from Ann's diary show she had a secret life that Jim had no idea about. There emerges an issue of ocean chemical pollution; we also read about machinations of city politics. We even have a sarcastic mention of a certain Donald J. Trump in connection with wealth and politics. The torture scene (see the epigraph) is well written so it manages to escape classification as gratuitous violence aimed at titillating the reader.

Mr. Parker's prose, absolutely brilliant at the beginning of the novel, remains in good standing throughout the entire book. As I mention in every review of Mr. Parker's work, his novels wonderfully convey the sense of place of Southern California, in particular of Orange County. However, in my view, the later part of the story that eventually leads to denouement is not very plausible. There is too much of the deus ex machina feeling to the plot twists. While it is not as bad as in Little Saigon it left me with a sense of disappointment.

Still, I recommend the novel for the good prose, solid main part of the plot, and well painted Orange County Pacific coast landscapes.

Three stars.


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Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Machine Learning is the science (and art) of programming computers so they can learn from data."

It is December 27th, four days until the end of the year, and I am four books short of my Goodreads 2020 Reading Challenge goal of 60 books. Never abandon hope! I will review two computer science books that were tremendously important to me and my students in 2020, books that helped me return to the field of neural networks and machine learning in general and helped my outstanding research student complete her challenging and advanced research project with extraordinary success.

I worked with neural networks (NN) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and even co-taught a psychology/computer science course on neural network learning. However, in the 1990s it had become clear that the limits of what the then traditional NN architecture can achieve had been reached and the scientific community basically abandoned NNs as the preferred approach to machine learning. Yet beginning in the first decade of the 21st century we witnessed the rebirth of the NN idea, primarily via various multi-level NN models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) developed by Le Cun, Hinton, and others. Currently, CNNs achieve truly spectacular (without exaggeration one can say 'superhuman') results in various areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The recent explosion of research and commercial interest in ML resulted in an avalanche of books published on the topic, particularly "popular" books (ones that can serve as tutorials of sorts), addressed to computer science practitioners of various level of preparation, from complete novices to advanced. The range of quality of the books is even more vast. I worked with, read, or at least scanned thoroughly over 20 ML books and to me Hands-On Machine Learning is by far the best text, one that can serve for a wide variety of purposes: on one hand, it can serve as an ML textbook, on the other it can be used as a tutorial for particular methods of ML. (I will review the other great ML book, one that focuses purely on NN, the day after tomorrow. By the way, I was amazed how many bad, totally useless ML books have been published. Christmas spirit prevents me from listing their titles.)

Aurélien Géron, the author of Hands-On Machine Learning, comes with impressive industry credentials. He served as the Product Manager of YouTube video classification at Google, and held several senior positions in artificial intelligence engineering in various companies.

The first two chapters of the book, which belong to the first part entitledThe Fundamentals of Machine Learning, are an absolute must read for anyone interested in studying ML. The author presents the 'landscape of machine learning' and shows a typical ML project 'end-to-end', including data preparation and preprocessing as well as selecting, training, and fine-tuning the model.

The next six chapters of Part I focus on specific ML approaches and their mathematical background. We read about the methods of classification, the Support Vector Machines approach, including the 'kernel trick,' decision trees, ensemble learning and random forests. I love the solid yet very accessible presentation of the math background in the chapter on gradient descent, various types of regression, and regularization. Part I closes with a nice chapter about dimensionality reduction, which focuses on the method of Principal Component Analysis.

Part II of the book, titled Neural Networks and Deep Learning, gives a great overview of the so-called 'deep learning' approach: the reader will learn about the 'classical' NN approach, and then will be gradually introduced to the multi-level NN architecture, CNNs, recurrent NNs, and autoencoders.

The author's reliance on the production-ready Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow Python frameworks rather than on developing own toy versions of various algorithms is commendable. Scikit-Learn, a free software library of machine learning tools, is one of the best things developed in computer science in the last 50 years. It is a splendid manifestation of the power of open-source software.

From a teacher's point of view, the book is excellent! I believe Hands-On Machine Learning is great for the students too. It comes with a lot of interesting Python code samples, in the form of Jupyter notebooks. And the code works! The students can learn a lot by rewriting and extending the sample code.

Very, very highly recommended book! And I am going to round up my extremely high rating of

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Little Saigon by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" Frye was sure that Nha's screaming and the sirens wailing in his own eardrums were enough to bring down the walls. Come down, he thought, come down and bury us and make this all untrue. "

Little Saigon (1987) is yet another novel in my new literary déjà-vu project. I am re-reading books by T. Jefferson Parker, an Edgar Award winner for Silent Joe, to me the quintessential writer of Southern California crime fiction of the late 1980s to 2000s. This is Mr. Parker's fifth novel that I am reviewing on Goodreads; my previous ratings are very high (for crime fiction): three four-star scores and a three-star one. Alas, this book is clearly the weakest of the five.

Chuck Frye, an aspiring journalist and an ex-reporter fired from Orange County Ledger, has lived his entire life in the shadow of his older brother, Bennett. Bennett, a Vietnam War hero and a very successful businessman, has always been the parents' favorite. Chuck's life has been marked by a string of failures. He is an excellent surfer, but even there his main claim to fame is being only "the second-best surfer of Laguna Beach."

We meet the brothers during a birthday party in Westminster, CA. This Orange County city has the largest Vietnamese population outside of South-East Asia, thus it is called "Little Saigon." Three men armed with machine guns storm the party, there is shooting, and Bennett's wife, a Vietnamese singer, is abducted. Potential connections with national politics emerge - the situation of Vietnamese refugees in California is a touchy issue in the US - Vietnam relations. FBI is involved in the case, yet also connections with local business are suspected.

While the plot in the first three-fourth of the novel develops plausibly I find the last hundred pages or so very disappointing. I value Mr. Parker's writing highly so it hurts me to call the avalanche of twists and turns of the plot moronic, yet it is a fitting term. Why do we need twists and turns in crime novels? It seems to me that Mr. Parker had quite a good novel but then he noticed the absence of plot contortions and added a lot of them, not caring whether they make sense.

Mr. Parker's prose is, as usual, outstanding. In particular, the beginning scenes at the party are beautifully written. So are the surfing scenes, for instance:

"It was a right-top-heavy, cylindrical and adamant, the sweet-spot rifling toward him as he shot through, rose to the lip and aimed back down for a bottom turn of such velocity that thoughts of disaster peeled from his mind and he finished in balls-out rush that sent him and his board rocketing skyward, then down with a splash."

Another outstanding feature of the novel is the author's sense of location. I happen to know Orange County a little and I recognize it on the pages of the novel. I also like the author's pearls of wisdom about politics, for instance:

"Communism. Democracy. We both know by now that they are only words. They are two fat old women fighting over a bowl of rice."

Very, very marginal recommendation because of the ridiculous fourth quarter of the novel.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Catherine the Great: A Biography by Joan Haslip
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] the obscure little German princess who had completed the work of Peter the Great and made Russia into an European power."

I am coming back to reviewing books after an almost three-month hiatus caused by the demands of remote teaching. Contrary to common perception, I have found out that remote teaching takes way more time than in-person instruction, especially if one wants to do it well (virtual lectures will never be even close in quality to in-person ones, but one should try the best). I simply did not have time. Anyway...

Being Polish by birth I might be expected to have in my blood an intense dislike for Catherine the Great, the 18th-century Empress of Russia. After all, she was instrumental in arranging consecutive partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, which resulted in the disappearance of my native country from maps of Europe for well over 100 years. Yet it is obvious to me that we, Poles, ourselves brought the Polish state to ruin 250 years ago by following unwise politics, in the same way as the majority of my ex-compatriots seem to be doing it now, in 2020.

As to Catherine the Great: I am deeply impressed by the political talent of this "obscure little German princess" who "made Russia into an European power." I have to admit to a bias, though. I am blatantly sexist and I believe that it is the women who should be in charge of everything in the world while men should only engage in drinking beer, watching football on TV, pretending to be experts on everything, and some other low-responsibility activities. Thus Catherine's life story, which may appear unusual to many people, seems natural to me.

Joan Haslip's Catherine the Great (1977) is a traditional, perhaps even "old-style" biography that recounts events chronologically and reports on all aspects of Catherine's life - political, historical, and also personal (in a few places the author is quite gossipy). We follow the future Empress's life path from her birth in Szczecin (then Stettin) in 1729 as Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, through the crucial event in 1744, which changed her life and affected European history, when the then Russian czarina Elizaveta Petrovna invited teenage Sophia to come to Russia and make the Romanov's dynasty secure by marrying the grand duke Peter and producing a heir (which eventually happened in 1754).

Catherine gradually became interested in politics. She saw her chance to get to the very top and never let it go. People sometimes say "if you want something bad enough, and you work for it hard enough, it's going to happen." That's obviously not true; one has to be clever in working for "it" and one has to be very lucky. Catherine was extremely clever in plotting and scheming - for instance, she had an uncanny ability to convincingly tell clever lies on the spot - and she indeed was very lucky. Czarina Elizaveta Petrovna died at a time that was most opportune for Catherine. Peter III, who ascended to the throne, was too sympathetic to Prussian interests for Russian liking, so that Catherine could arrange an almost "patriotic" coup d'état to soon become Catherine II, the Empress of Russia.

The author recounts Catherine the Great's reign (1762 - 1796) with great attention to detail. I am not qualified to summarize the events, so let me just use a quote from Wikipedia "The period of Catherine the Great's rule is considered the Golden Age of Russia."

Ms. Haslip pays lots of attention to Catherine the Great's romantic affairs or rather one should say sexual liaisons. The empress was known for her insatiable sexual appetite and we read about the long array of her lovers. There are authors who use salacious details to titillate the reader. This is certainly not true about this biography. Ms. Haslip focuses on how the empress' erotic affairs influenced her politics and the European affairs in general. I will use an example of the fate of Poland and the affair between Catherine and future Polish king, Stanislaw Poniatowski. Ms. Haslip writes:

"[...] it was an evil day for Poland when this cultured dilettante came under the spell of a woman as fascinating and as unscrupulous as the grand duchess."

The residual effects of this affair facilitated the dismemberment of Poland, during the "first partition" in 1772, when Russia, Prussia, and Austria took large chunks of Polish territory. According to Ms. Haslip, the second partition of Poland in 1793, as well as the third and the final one, when Poland - one of the most powerful countries in Europe - disappeared from the maps, also were at least partly affected by Catherine's erotic affairs. Ms. Haslip also writes the following about Prince Potemkin, one of Catherine's most famous favorites and lovers:

"Had Potemkin lived, the second and third partitions of Poland would never have taken place."

While this might sound reasonable, one has to realize that, first of all, any partitions of Poland were possible mainly because in the 18th century the powerful segments of Polish society - the aristocracy and top echelons of nobility - cared only about their own interests rather than about the good of the country as a whole. But I am again digressing. I am supposed to write about the book.

I find the biography very readable and certainly learned a lot from it! Ms. Haslip's writing style is likely not my favorite, but I recommend the book highly and without hesitation.

Three-and-a-half stars.


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