Blind Descent by Nevada Barr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Naked people of all shapes and sizes dangling from ropes over a pint-sized paradise; the picture so tickled Anna she had to think dark thoughts to keep from giggling."

Since I liked Nevada Barr's Blood Lure quite a lot I have reached for another book in the series, Blind Descent (1998). Each novel in Ms. Barr's Anna Pigeon series is set in a different national park in the U.S, which is music to the eyes of this ardent fan of the National Parks System. Descent is located in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, but not in the developed and tourist-accessible part of the park, which - as Ms. Barr writes - feels like "a Disney creation," but in area of Lechuguilla Cave, the seventh-longest explored cave in the world (source: Wikipedia), open only to scientists and National Parks service personnel.

Anna Pigeon, currently employed in the Mesa Verde National Park, is called to Carlsbad Caverns National Park as a member of a rescue team to evacuate an injured caver. Ms. Pigeon suffers from a serious case of claustrophobia so she would not volunteer to participate in the rescue mission, but the seriously injured caver is Frieda, her friend from Mesa Verde, who insists that Ms. Pigeon be a part of the rescue. All this sounds rather implausible at first, but when we learn that Frieda suspects that her accident was in fact attempted murder, the setup of the plot becomes somewhat believable.

The reader follows Ms. Pigeon's laborious underground trip to reach Frieda, crawling through miles of narrow spaces that barely allow to squeeze one's body through, almost one thousand feet below the ground. The description of the traumatic underground escapade is by far the best part of the novel. I have no way of knowing how factual the map of the cave printed on the inside covers is, but it is helpful in tracking the events and accompanied by well-written prose compounds the claustrophobic feelings in the reader. In addition to the sense of being buried alive we are treated to an underground rock slide - a vivid and realistic scene - and an actual murder.

While the underground scenes are great - worth at least four stars - the rather amateurish detective work by Ms. Pigeon outside of the Lechuguilla Cave is not that interesting and I have to confess to having skimmed some pages. The denouement is quite clever if perhaps not the most plausible but - unfortunately for me - it includes a standard, totally cliché climactic scene that would work better in a movie than in a novel.

The author offers the reader a richness of caving detail: techniques, folklore, terminology and while I am unable to verify how accurately all these things are portrayed, it certainly reads realistic, including the juicy details of what the cavers do with their urine and feces when they have to spend many days entombed in underground corridors just a few feet wide.

A good read, definitely recommended, but mostly for non-mystery reasons. I will look for further National Park installments of Ms. Barr's series.

Three and a half stars.


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The Best American Science Writing 2005 by Alan Lightman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Given that nearly half of Americans disavow evolution..."
(A really scary statistic from the preface to Darwin or Not by David Quammen.)

A disappointment! I expected much more from The Best American Science Writing 2005, the first volume of this apparently long-running series that I have read. I had an appetite for a good number of brilliant, thought-provoking, awe-inspiring essays on modern science, but among the 26 pieces in this set I found just one great essay, and only four or five strong ones, including a fascinating and quite curious non-science item. In my arrogance I think that several essays included here do not even deserve to be in a collection that has "best science writing" in its title.

To me Frank Wilczek's essay Whence the Force of F = ma from Physics Today clearly stands out. The Nobel Prize-winning quantum theorist uses short sentences, simple language, and refers to knowledge many of us get in a high-school physics course (F = ma) to discuss - on just five pages - the vagueness of the concept of force, apparently fundamental in physics. There is depth and grace in this piece and a tremendous pun on physics in its last sentence:

"A big part of the explanation for its [force's] continuous use is no doubt (intellectual) inertia."

On the opposite end of the spectrum I find the essay by David Berlinski, a famed philosopher, mathematician, and science writer. His overlong essay On the Origins of the Mind uses florid language that obscures the points I believe the author is trying to make, and lacking any depth attempts to dazzle with terminology instead. It also contains an astounding statement that "differential equations" "govern a flow of time." Huh?

Small Silences by Edward Hoagland, an incongruous piece in this collection of science writings, is a lyrical yet rich and earthy ode to the beauty of nature. The essay is even more fascinating because of its strangely sexual undertones - I am too obtuse to figure the point of these but even so I loved the non-scientific prose.

To briefly mention few other worthwhile pieces: Atul Gawande writes about the last cases of polio in a poor region in India and raises a momentous issue: eradicating polio may be a great human achievement yet poverty, hunger, lack of sanitation continue to kill many times more people. I have read the essay The Genome in Black and White (and Gray) with deep sadness about how the currently prevailing PC ideology prevents furthering research that could help people of all colors. The Biology of Hope cogently discusses the so-called placebo effect. Aging Research's Family Feud reads almost like a mystery: the dispute between two scientists is recounted in a captivating yet rather non-scientific way.

Many "meh" pieces or obligatory contributions towards ideology trends round up the collection. The Wilczek's essay and the Hoagland's prose will stay with me for a long time. I lost interest in reading any more writings of Dr. Berlinski. But the most important benefit that I have derived from reading the set is my awoken interest in checking whether the points the authors made 12 or 13 years ago are still valid. I will attempt to read current writings on several of these topics. The potential for stimulating the readers' interest is the only reason I marginally recommend the collection.

Two and three quarter stars.

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Kosygin Is Coming by Tom Ardies
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"He decided that he has fallen into the hands of the Russian version of the Keystone Cops. They were the damndest bunch of idiots he had ever run across. Nothing they did or said made any sense whatsoever."

Exactly! The last sentence of the above quote from Kosygin is Coming (1974) serves as an apt characterization of the novel. Past a certain point in the story nothing that any of the characters says or does makes any sense whatsoever. In my naiveté I have again fallen prey to the Fake Beginning Swindle, where the author cleverly sets up the plot, builds some tension, introduces apparently interesting characters to then let the plot deteriorate to sheer idiocy. Welcome to the Mickey Mouse world of political assassination!

I read the first fifty or so pages of with interest: the plot seemed promising and the writing competent. The action begins in the Canadian War Amputees Association Club, where the amputees are not your usual veterans - many of them seem to be working for intelligence organizations. Interesting. But then something strange happens with the novel: the author begins creating plot twists. First batch of twists are still acceptable, but then there happen twists on twists and starting about page 80 the plot completely stops making sense and becomes a random sequence of events not connected to others in any way. Good bye logic! Good bye common sense! Good bye reason! All characters behave like complete idiots and - worst of all - the main character alternates between being a moron and a genius of survival. Deaths and escapes from certain death abound. One of the characters, a giant named Goliath (how inventive), lifts the entire engine block over his head and throws it into the water to help dispose of a corpse. Another character is named Bjsgrkowski - indeed Polish names have an overabundance of consonants, but certainly not these consonants. Readers may find it interesting to learn what a full colonel of a powerful national intelligence organization does while he is working - here it is:

"[...] he held his arms outstretched, pretending he was airplane, and he started running around the living room that way, making the sounds of the engine [...] 'Rrrrrr. Rrrrrr....' Suddenly he veered and dived headlong into the sofa. 'Ka-boom!'"

The novel could have possibly been funny - the unusual amputee setup is so promising - yet the humor is forced and involves caricature characters or lame jokes about human excrement.

The quarter of a star that I am awarding is for the interesting beginning and for the mention of Squamish and its vicinity: long time ago my family and I spent a memorable night on a camping in this Canadian town on our way to Banff via Lilloet and Kamloops. Otherwise the novel - hailed as a "tightly wound thriller" in the cover blurb - is a disgrace to the genre and a complete waste of time for the reader.

One and a quarter stars.

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Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt by Marcus O'Dair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...]Robert has achieved spectacular success by another definition: longevity without compromise. In politics as in music, he has become a byword for integrity [...] In fifty years of making music, there seems not to have been an insincere note."

For once I agree with the critics. Marcus O'Dair's Different Every Time: The Authorized Biography of Robert Wyatt (2015) won accolades from British music critics: it was selected as the music book of the year by Guardian and Times, among other British newspapers. Indeed it is an excellent book, extremely informative, well-written and captivating.

Robert Wyatt, "one of the greats of English music," is mostly known as the drummer for Soft Machine, the extraordinary British band, during their 1966 - 1971 period. The detailed history of Soft Machine can be found in another outstanding book Out-Bloody-Rageous , which I review here on Goodreads.

Different is remarkably rich in details: we read about the artist's bohemian childhood, how he met his future bandmates in the secondary school, and we learn about his interest in Rimbaud's poetry, Thelonious Monk's and Igor Stravinsky's music, and paintings by Georges Braque. In 1965 Mr. Wyatt becomes a member of Wilde Flowers, one of the founding bands of the Canterbury Scene characterized by "jazz-tinged, pastoral and very English psychedelic rock." In 1966 Soft Machine is born and the band creates some of the best music of the era (to me absolutely the best - but then I am heavily biased).

Yet soon the musical trajectories of Mr. Wyatt and Soft Machine diverge: in fact he is basically fired from the band. The separation is not all the band's fault - Mr. Wyatt has always wanted to play songs rather than the cerebral music based on jazz, avant-garde influences, and technical virtuosity. Depressed and suicidal he creates the Matching Mole band, its name being a superb pun, based on the French translation of "soft machine". He meets a Polish émigré Alfreda Benge, the woman of his life, but then a horrible accident happens: he falls out of a window and gets paralyzed from waist down for the rest of his life. Thanks to Alfreda he survives and spends 40 further creative years in a wheelchair making wonderful music - which includes recording eight successful albums - on the boundaries of pop and avant-garde.

While one needs to distinguish Robert Wyatt the artist from Mr. Wyatt a person, the biography makes it clear that certain amount of crossover cannot be avoided. Usually the artists' strengths come from their force of conviction and in Mr. Wyatt's case the conviction is mainly political in nature: he has always been a left-winger, and quite radical at that. However, even being myself on the left side of the political spectrum I am unable to understand Mr. Wyatt's long-time membership in the Communist Party of Great Britain. Joining the party in 1970s, when the extreme range and depth of Soviet crimes against humanity were well known, can only be treated as lunacy. The author calls Mr. Wyatt a "Marxist jazz fan" but to believe that any communist party is guided by any ideas other than grabbing and wielding total power is akin to hallucinating. Still, even if I am eager to call Mr. Wyatt a complete idiot for his communist sympathies, I admire his music and his singing.

A very good book, meticulously researched and referenced. A great source of information not only about one of the most important and serious artists of British popular music but also about the times from the early 1960s to the current day. No gossip, no tabloid stuff, no name dropping. A sincere and focused book in which the author is basically invisible: almost a five-star book - maybe I will change my rating over re-reading.

Four and a half stars.


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A Bitter Feast by S.J. Rozan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] threadbare and thin villagers choose cold, hungry, two-month trips in the lowest holds of cargo ships, all packed in the same windowless, rolling room, breathing stale air, never coming on deck, for their chance to work sixteen hours a day on the slopes of Gold Mountain [...]"

My fifth novel by S.J. Rozan - and coincidentally the fifth installment in the Chin/Smith series - has turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The amazingly good Winter and Night set the expectations bar pretty high and the next three novels that I have read and reviewed here on Goodreads were disappointments. Luckily in A Bitter Feast (1998) the author is back to form with an interesting, well-written, and almost cliché-free novel.

The plot opens with a strong scene: members of the Chinese Restaurant Workers' Union are marching for "Justice and a Living Wage" and picketing the Dragon Garden restaurant. Lydia Chin's friend hires her to look for four Dragon Garden employees who disappeared. Since one of them has been an union organizer it is quite likely that the disappearance is related to the labor issues. Other clues also point to a powerful Chinese businessman, H.B. Yang, as having connections to the case.

Soon the pace of the plot picks up, Lydia is assaulted in her office, her employment is terminated, but in a strange twist she is almost instantaneously re-hired by Mr. Yang himself to continue her assignment. Lydia goes undercover as a dim sum lady in the Dragon Garden restaurant. In the meantime a bomb explodes in the union headquarters, and some connections with government agencies begin to emerge. The ending is a bit hard to follow because of several meandering conversations, but relatively plausible until the cinematic climax occurs with its mandatory shootout. Why, oh why?

Despite the silly and pointless shootout I like the book quite a lot: there is much more in it than just a clever criminal plot. The reader is bound to appreciate all the hardships of Chinese immigrants' lives. The oblique, allusive, circuitous ways of Chinese conversations are portrayed convincingly and the reader can even learn a little bit about a dim sum place as seen from the waitress' side. But, most of all, Lydia Chin is a really compelling character who comes across as a real person, with her various quirks and biases. Bill Smith is more in the background in this novel, which is a plus because his character has so far felt not quite convincing. Had the author omitted the gunplay I would have rounded the rating up.

Three and a half stars.

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The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court by John W. Dean
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"There ought to be a woman judge. Lots of women, and it's economic. I'm not for women, frankly, in any job. I don't want any of them around."
(R.M. Nixon, according to transcript of recorded conversations)

John W. Dean was one of the crucial figures in the Watergate affair of the early 1970s, the affair that ended R.M. Nixon's presidency. Of all the principal actors in the affair he might be the one who contributed the most to exposing the President's knowledge of all machinations. The Rehnquist Choice (2001) is not a book about Watergate, though. Mr. Dean writes here about President Nixon's other contribution to political history of the U.S. - one that that might have had even a more significant impact - the nomination of William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court in 1971. As Mr. Nixon said himself in a TV speech to the nation:

"Presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court - through its decisions - goes on forever."

Mr. Rehnquist eventually became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the author aptly summarizes the importance of President Nixon's decision:

"The Rehnquist choice [...] has redefined the Supreme Court, making it a politically conservative bastion within our governmental system. Rehnquist's many years of service, and his ability as a legal scholar, have brought about the rewriting of fundamental aspects of the nation's constitutional law."

The book contains extensive excerpts from the transcripts of the infamous "Nixon tapes" that eventually sealed the President's fate and forced his resignation in 1974 - recordings of conversations taped in the Oval Office.

The title of the book is a little misleading since more than half of the book recounts the history of all Nixon's nominations to the Supreme Court. Out of eight seriously considered candidates two were rejected by the Senate, two were deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association, one withdrew himself, and three nominations were successful: justices Blackmun, Powell, and Rehnquist.

The book is rich is historical details and I will focus only on its two main emphases. The author's first central point is that it was in fact he, John W. Dean, who sold the idea that Mr. Rehnquist should become nominated to Supreme Court to people who had significant influence on the President and the selection of nominees. One has to keep in mind that Mr. Dean's narrative may conceivably be biased. I have no way of assessing the veracity of the message: it might be true but neither is it impossible that Mr. Dean aggrandizes his role in history.

The other central idea is that Mr. Rehnquist did not tell the entire truth about his past judicial record during the confirmation hearings and that the truth did not come out because the entire process was conducted in haste. The author's argument is very strong but I am certainly not an expert to take sides. If the message is indeed true, it would make me less happy about the robustness of the confirmation process.

One aspect I do not like is that the distinction between transcripts of Nixon tapes and Mr. Dean's recollections of conversations that had not been taped is not made more explicit. The reader, knowing that most of the dialogues in the book come from tapes, may form an impression that Dean's private conversations are rendered verbatim. But, in fact, the author could have made them all up. I am absolutely not claiming that he did any such thing, I just regret that the distinction is not more clear.

The look behind the curtains of the nomination process, evidenced by conversations caught on tape, is quite revealing. One can really confirm the ugliness of the political process, things like catering to minorities: focusing on whether the candidate is Catholic or Protestant, African American, Italian, Jewish or Polish, and, of course, trying to nominate a woman. Let me quote another passage from President Nixon's rant:

"And she's the best qualified woman but she's not qualified for the Supreme Court. Jesus, that's great. That's great."

We may never know if other presidents tape their private conversations in the White House. If they do, I have no doubts that Mr. Nixon wouldn't be the only one with despicable quotes.

And finally, let me observe how extremely non-partisan the senators were in these times - often voting against the party line on both sides of the party divide. Nothing even remotely similar would be possible in today's polarized political climate.

Three and a half stars.


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Blood Lure by Nevada Barr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] fog white as drugstore cotton began pouring down, feather-light liquid in stasis, from over the jagged mountain face to the east. Slow and silent in sinister majesty it cloaked the crags, slipped between them and flowed toward the meadows."

National Park system is one of the best things we have in this country; my wife and I have now visited 30 out of the 59 national parks in the U.S., several of them more than once, and we cherish the memories of our trips. So when I started reading Nevada Barr's Blood Lure (2001) and realized that the plot is located in Glacier National Park I got really excited. Indeed, the first part of the novel is, to me, absolutely spellbinding. Ms. Barr writes about places I vividly remember from two stays in the park: Going-to-the-Sun Road, Lake McDonald, Cathedral Peak, and others. Even Kootenai Pass makes its appearance, and I still remember the Kootenai country from Blue Heaven and from our Montana trip. The setup of the plot is absolutely first class and I was unable to put the book away until after 2 a.m.

Anita Pigeon, a ranger in the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, is "on loan" to Glacier National Park - the U.S. part of it located in Montana as the park has also its Canadian part - where she works on a project concerning grizzly bear DNA. Ms. Pigeon, accompanied by Joan, the researcher, and Rory, a young park volunteer, embark on a five-day hike to collect bear hairs from hair traps, set up new traps and furnish them with fresh lure, a smelly blood-and-fish-guts mixture. On the second night they have a dramatic encounter with a bear; the scene is really well written. Rory disappears and, having been alerted by the park's chief ranger, Anita and Joan find a body of a victim of a brutal attack, half of whose face is gone, "cheekbone and teeth [...] exposed, bone and enamel crusted brown with dried blood."

To me the first half of the novel was a totally compulsive read: not only was I captivated with the mystery of the ravaged dead body but the park's forbidding yet magnificent landscapes that I remember from the two visits, the nature, plants and animals, came alive on the pages. Then the author acknowledges that this is a crime novel after all, and begins creating and dropping a number of unusual clues. The criminal plot rapidly grows at the expense of the national-park component of the story. We have several suspects and Ms. Pigeon's investigation even involves such distant places as Florida and Seattle. All this is pretty mundane and ordinary and the second part of the novel has not really interested me that much. The denouement has a rather low degree of plausibility but I imagine it must have been extremely hard to reconcile and successfully explain all the numerous and often contradictory clues.

Hence, even though at the beginning I was certain this would be an above-four-star novel, my hopes have been shattered by the unremarkable second half. Still, Blood Lure is a good read, and the non-mystery bits are quite interesting, like the one about bears and their food sources that very rarely include humans but often the cutworm moths. One can even find a pretty insightful sociological observation (remember, this is 2001):

"Americans were happily forfeiting their freedom of choice for imagined increases in security. [...] People as individuals were giving up their decision-making power because they did not want the responsibility."

I have now learned that each installment of the "Anita Pigeon series" of novels takes place in a different national park. Wow! I have just found a new must-read author.

Three and a half stars.


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