Martin Edwards. The Life of Crime.

    This is, practically, an encyclopedic sourcebook, which provides a short introduction to the authors of the detective fiction. Like Gian Piero Brunetta's "History of Italian Cinema" it is practically useless without knowing the background works but it is a very good exhibition of the periods and the development of (largely) English-language detective fiction (whodunnits, but also other subgenres). As is usual in such a wide canvasses, it is sometimes wanting in its accuracy. 

       For instance, for the creator of Maigret, Georges Simenon -- the only foreign author with a detailed exposition in the book -- his Nazi collaboration is mentioned in a few oblique and incorrect words. In fact, during the Nazi occupation of France the literature of the kind "How to uncover a Jew" (Communists, Resistance members, etc.) was flourishing and Simenon was one of the most prolific authors. These were not some anti-Semitic rants for which more famous collaborators (Brasillach or Mac Orlan) were known, but detailed instructions of what to ask children (how you spent your last Christmas, can you sing carols for me, etc.), or how to recognize forged ID papers. 

I thank Edwards profusely for mentioning R. van Gulik and putting him in the context of the Dutch detective tradition. Yet, he fails to mention that van Gulik's fame was created by his magisterial non-fiction treatise "Sexual life in Ancient China", which stirred quite a shock in the  puritan 1950s and immediately put its author on the literary map. 

Obviously, in a treatise of such magnitude as Edwards' errors in fact and judgment are inevitable but they cast a shadow over accuracy of other facts, with which I am not familiar. 

Tim Palmer. The Primacy of Doubt.

"With four adjustable parameters, I will 
make you an elephant. With five, I
can make it wiggle its trunk". 

                              N. Wiener

      This is a strange book written by a beautiful mind, a genius who is a little bit crank. The most objectionable part of the book is his disquisitions about the quantum gravity. And not because he does not understand it. He studied for his PhD under the same Dennis Sciama who was also Hawking's dissertation adviser and had to suffer Robert Penrose's questions at his defense  -- but it used to be a tradition that one presents her/his ideas first to the professional community, and only when they are accepted, peddles them to the laypeople.  Palmer's desire to use fractal geometry and p-adic numbers is commendable, though I, understandably, cannot understand most of it. And his description in a book is lucid, as always. If I gather his intention correctly, his program must include formulation of the Quantum Field Theory on the fractal embedded into the manifold, which is locally isomorphic to the Minkowsky space, at least at some scale. Then he must build the field operators using p-adic coordinates on that fractal. 

        This program, to the degree of my limited comprehension, was already proposed by V. S. Vladimirov in the USSR, like Palmer, a member of the National Academy, a contributor to the Soviet counterpart to the "Manhattan project", but also a brilliant teacher, and a vicious anti-Semite (Владимиров В. С., Волович И. В., Зелёнов Е. И. P-адический анализ и математическая физика М., 1994). I cannot judge the success of this program but, at the first glance, it should not allow the existence of black holes because the points with strong gravity, which are close in our physical space, can be very distant in the p-adic metric. Or, so I think. And, after 2018, their existence is an experimental fact. 

    Using that much space to criticize the book (better to say, expressing DOUBTS on its treatment) I must say that Palmer is an excellent storyteller. Because of his main field of mathematical meteorology, he is biased towards gigantic models with billions of parameters and he wants more. But, as my epigraph suggests, and everyone in the field of deep learning knows, there is such problem as overfitting. With sufficient slack in a model and sufficient computer power, one can fit anything to everything. The unparalleled brilliance of the General Theory of Relativity was precisely the fact that Einstein's construct was so tight, not allowing variations, for instance, in the velocity of gravitational waves, or in relativistic corrections to the orbit of Mercury. 

            Unlike quantum physics, where I am an enlightened amateur, I understand next to nothing in meteorology. So I cannot question Palmer's assertion that gigantic agent-based models with umpteenth parameters can be as useful in biostatistics for propagation of epidemics, traffic control and finance, if only we reach a sufficient computing power. 

His proposal of a "stochastic computer", which uses thermal noise in semiconductors to simulate random processes is quite interesting, and he claims that the specialists in that field already appropriated his ideas. I believe him. 

 

Ben Wilson. Urban Jungle.

      

        Well-intentioned but self-contradictory book. In one place, the author praises XIX century Paris for its boulevards, and New York's Central Park in other places he critiques modern cities including London and New York city for the lack of greenery. In some places, he praises city-bound agriculture, in others -- the wild and unrestrained growth of weeds. 

Wilson's book cover shows a highrise adorned with story-wide vegetation but brackish water and mosquitoes are hardly conducive to a healthy habitation. In 90s and 2000s, the Chinese experimented with collection of rainwater in residential buildings. The houses and their rooftop gardens became damp hothouses for mosquitoes. Newer buildings disposed with this environmental friendliness. Mosquito is a veritable flying bioweapon dispersing a panoply of viruses and blood parasites. Density of urban populations amplifies their nefarious influence many orders of magnitude. 

Swamps, which Ben praises as reservoirs for biodiversity breed mosquitoes, gnats, snakes and other kind of vermin. Urban swamp areas are intrinsically unhealthy, especially for the dense populations. Fertilizers for urban agriculture pollute rivers and further increase populations of vermin, rats especially, and invasive species. 

While making modern cities better places to live is a commendable goal, the one size fits all approach is bad and utopian. 

Evan Mandery. Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us

 The book is a well-intentioned narrative about the perpetuation of the inequality by the top universities (appr. Ivy Leagues + Stanford + Chicago). First, the title is appropriate -- it is not clear whether there is "us" or "US". Second, the discussion is up to the point. But, on the whole, his reasonable suggestions are similar to the oncologist asking his patient to treat his eye cataracts first. 

All modern societies but the US the fastest are quickly transforming into a "new feudalism." The fastest growing sector of employment in the US and, probably, UK is domestic help. Now it is not limited to butlers, cooks, cleaners and nannies. Billionaires and runner-up families quickly expand personal companies for managing their finances, staffs of retainer lawyers, accountants and personal shoppers. 

US Congress practically eliminated taxes on capital gains. Interest write-offs on self-dealing loans are perfectly legal, if one is rich enough to hire high-powered lawyers to structure these deals. That created an incentive for the rich people to establish corporations essentially occupied by providing services to themselves. 

Education in the United States had long served as a great equalizer. Yet, once you establish a privilege -- a practically guaranteed career to the graduates of Harvard, Princeton and Yale -- be sure that the wealthy would find a way to skew it in their favor. As this happened with the sexual services. Once Hollywood began to clean its act, and the wealth migrated from industrialists into haute finance, the strawberry patch of the rich and powerful shifted from Southern California and Florida to New York based model industry. And it  allows underage girls to work! When I look at the careers of Harvard graduates published in the university's digest from 50s and 60s, bankers, politicians and white shoe lawyers surely predominate, but there are also military retirees, poets and gardeners. News of recent graduates are uniform; investment banking, private equity, politics, lobbying and high-powered law firms with a sprinkling of academics is all that left. When I view at the obituaries of the prominent physicists in the "Physics Today", their undergraduate education is dominated by big names, but there are also public universities and lesser name schools. Obviously, in olden times, high-falutin schools accepted the best and the brightest from a lesser contestants, the ladder, which has now been thrown away. 

The recipes provided by Mandery are mostly geared towards underrepresented minorities. Their chances were steadily improving but now the Supreme Court undercut this path of social ascendance as well. Understandably "Students for Fair Admissions" ruling will cause a new flurry of the byzantine admission practices by the admissions offices, extricating the same information from the resumes, publicly available data and student essays. Like the old affirmative action their policies will be cynical, counterproductive and liable to lawsuits. 

The only remaining way for social ascendancy are the over-bloated armed forces and intelligence services of America, now constantly at war. As with the Roman Empire, the future is less than promising. 

Jeff Lieberman. The malady of the mind.

                                                                 Psychiatrists, people very remote from medicine.

                                                                                                      Popular, amongst doctors

    Jeff Lieberman is pretty enlightened for a psychiatrist. He correctly dispenses with witch remedies for schizophrenia.[1] Usually, in the US medical profession, disparaging the colleagues in words like "your previous physician was an idiot" means the end of the career. Even if it were so, American physician must use oblique phrases like "In view of the lack of progress, I would recommend a different course of action". Obviously, not so among the psychiatric profession. He describes the doctors who treated some of his patients in the most diminutive terms. 

    His book is a paean for clozapine. The problem with it, as with all antipsychotic medications, is their terrible side effects. Lieberman spends only a couple of paragraphs out of 300+ page book on this subject. Yet, reticence to use psychopharmacology has little to do with lack of medical enlightenment as Lieberman suggests. These are terrible side effects of antipsychotics, which cause many people to disconnect treatment or avoid it altogether. They include extreme forms of akathisia and fatigue so severe that patients contemplate suicide. Not because of a mystical "suicide ideation" but because of a quite real helplessness. And this not to mention a weight gain, interactions with numerous other drugs, sometimes lethal as with MAOI antidepressants, ticks, convulsions, incurable tardive dyskinesia and numerous other adverse effects. 

Why the book uses long-outdated definitions of schizophrenia from DSM-II and DSM-III in its appendices is a mystery. 

[1] Lieberman's vituperations against Freud are totally misplaced. Would we dismiss Galileo because he did not have a clue of the Second and Third laws of Newton (he invented the First law himself) not to speak of Quantum Mechanics? Galileo even did not fully appreciate the laws of Kepler, his younger contemporary. His epigraph to the chapter about Freud saying that Freud was a medical novelist is quite accurate but misguided. In Freud's times there was no possibility to help psychiatric patients but also no scientific analyses available for diagnostics and, consequently, no clinically-based language. Indeed, Freudianism failed miserably as a therapeutic method. Yet, as an integrative theory of personality it is pretty much the foundation of all the modern approaches.