Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!

A present from Will, I greatly enjoyed this book of Feynman's reminiscences!  I was familiar with some of the tales, which I enjoyed re-reading, and I was delighted to read many new accounts of Feynman's insatiable curiosity and lively sense of fun.  As a child during the Depression, he bought many broken radios and repaired or recombined them - and then was hired by relatives and, eventually, stores, to repair their radios and other appliances.

Sometimes his ingenious inventions created gigantic and very humorous consequences, as when he devised a rapid-fire string bean slicer and, enthusiastically demonstrating it for the head chef, cut his finger, releasing blood into an entire bowl of beans, dooming his invention! His adventures in drumming, safecracking, deciphering Mayan codices, art, and frequenting topless bars are all absorbing and very entertaining.

The book ends with a transcription of his commencement speech to graduating Caltech students, titled Cargo Cult Science.  I have read this before and again found it interesting; he describes the difference between real science and "phony" science - but his concluding advice was dishearteningly relevant to much of today's academic research:

So I have just one wish for you - the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity.  May you have that freedom.

This is really a very enjoyable read!

House of Earth

Woody Guthrie's only full-length novel, written in 1947, languished in a closet until ferreted out by author Douglas Brinkley and actor Johnny Depp, who edited it and brought it to publication.  The interesting backstory is available in a NY Times story and a very nice piece from NPR.

The novel tells a bit of the story of the dirt-poor,  farming couple Tike and Ella May Hamlin.  Tike and Ella May are struggling to make a home for themselves, struggling against the harsh midwest dustbowl conditions and the even harsher exploitation of bankers, politicians and landowners.

The book is one of the most interesting, least interesting books I have ever read.  It falls into the category of least interesting because there is very little plot - essentially nothing happens for 150 pages, until the story of Ella May's childbirth is told - which ends the book.  The cornerstone of the book is the dream of building a house of earth - one made from the very earth they live on, out of adobe bricks, as described in a government pamphlet that never leaves Tike's body.  The thick, solid walls of the house of earth would provide protection against the elements  - and also insulation from the exploiters, as it could be built at little cost, through their own labor.  At the conclusion of the book, the house of earth remains a dream, though perhaps one that could be realized in the future.

Of least interesting books, though, House of Earth is one of the most interesting!  The voice of Woody Guthrie is very distinctive - descriptive words and events are strung together in near rhyming, streams of consciousness - and these drones of words sometimes convey powerful emotions or evocative portraits of the land and life of Tike and Ella May.  It is also surprising that the 1947 book is very frank, sexually.  Not lurid, but definitely earthy and very human.  Interestingly, one of the thousands of songs written by Woody Guthrie is entitled House of Earth - and this song asserts that prostitutes play a valuable role:

Come here to my house of good rich earth if you

Would like me teach your wife a thing or two.

The Man of Two Tribes and The Will of the Tribe

Finished two more enjoyable Napoleon Bonaparte mysteries.  The Man of Two Tribes was quite interesting, but the mystery was thin, so it was really more of an adventure tale than a detective story. Bony is called to investigate the baffling disappearance of a woman, recently acquitted of murdering her husband.  His investigation leads him to become trapped in an unusual colony comprising the Released Murderers Institute.  Bony quickly deduces who has entrapped him and these other very interesting characters, so the story focuses largely on the fascinating psychology of the fellow prisoners and the group's effort to escape rather than the unraveling of a mystery.   Interesting and pleasant, but lacking the driving force of the better Bony mysteries.

The Will of the Tribe was a stronger mystery, though the solution ended up being more of a deus ex machina rather than following from the initial facts and suspects.  Still, the story centered around a cultured aboriginal girl, adopted and educated by an Australian family, who ends up facing conflicting pulls from her adoptive family and loyalty to her tribe - highly intriguing and worth reading.

The Emperor of All Maladies

My bookclub's most recent book (recommended to me by dad) is The Emperor of All Maladies, an unusual piece of nonfiction which reads like a novel, and which the author calls a "biography of cancer." This tale spans the entire known "life" of the disease(s) we call cancer, from the earliest ancient references (Herodotus recorded the strange tale of the Persian Queen Atossa's breast cancer) to the latest advances in medicine and technology. Mukherjee is a masterful storyteller (and a wise person), and weaves a riveting and at times heartbreaking tale of the hundreds of years of scientific inquiry (and ignorant butchery) which form the largest part of cancer's story. It is a frightening tale but ultimately a hopeful one, and I highly recommend this surprising page turner to all.

Dad's review here.

Women & murder

Over the summer I read five great page-turners. Although I picked each out for different reasons, they all coincidentally fit a grisly theme:

NOS4A2 - Our teen heroine, who rides her bike across a bridge/portal to "find things," goes looking for trouble. She finds a mass-murder who kidnaps children away to "Christmasland." She escapes but doesn't really get away.  Recommended in a NYT article by Janet Maslin.

The Shining Girls - Our young heroine escapes a mass-murder who finds his victims across time using a house/portal. She has to track him down and thwart him. For my office book club.

The 5th Wave - Our teen heroine has survived the first four waves of an alien invasion that murders 99% of humanity. She has to stay alive and rescue a kidnapped kid. Recommended in a NYT article by Janet Maslin.

The Rook - Our heroine wakes up with no memory, surrounding by the bodies of people who were trying to kill her. She has to figure out who was trying to kill her while running an intelligence agency that combats supernatural foes. Recommended by a friend.

The Cuckoo's Calling - A famous model is murdered. Our hero, a down-on-his-luck PI, tries to crack the case. The new book by JK Rowling.

I'd highly recommend all of them - they're fun and fast.

Fathers and Children

Lauren has already reviewed this book by Turgenev , often published under the title Fathers and Sons, providing a nice summary of its depiction of two generations of Russians, the idealists of the 1840's (the Fathers) and the nihilists of the 1860's (the Children).

Turgenev's portrait of the self-proclaimed nihilist Bazarov provoked huge controversy: opponents of the utilitarian nihilists reviled Turgenev, denouncing Bazarov as a villain.  Most nihilists dismissed the portrait as a laughable caricature, though a few actually praised him as a "new man" of the type who would rejuvenate Russia.

 "Your sort, you gentry," Bazarov tells Arkady, when the two friends come to the parting of the ways, "can never get beyond refined submission or refined indignation, and that's a mere trifle.  You won't fight.....but we mean to fight.....we want to smash other people!"

Interestingly, one of the few people in Russia who seemed to accurately understand Turgenev's portrayal was Dostoevsky, who saw Bazarov as a tragic character, doomed to unhappiness by the contradiction between his sterile and brutal intellectual beliefs and his human needs and longings. Dostoevsky's praise and understanding helped forge a strong but brief friendship with Turgenev, which, however, was quickly dashed to pieces by their widely divergent views on religion and whether Russia's future lay in adopting western ideas (Turgenev) or seeking guidance from the true Russian character, which, in Dostoevsky's view, derived from a deep faith in Christ.

I really enjoyed the book, which is lyrically written, with great sensitivity to human love and loneliness. Though Bazarov is infuriating in his brutality, he is captivating in his passions and deep emotions.

Notes from Underground

In the 1840's, Dostoevsky was part of an intellectual movement in Russia that was heavily influenced by European thought.  This movement, spearheaded by Belinsky and Herzen, originally endorsed Christian Socialism, but later advocated a very rational and idealistic socialism that denied and denounced religion.  Dostoevsky identified with these intellectuals because of a common commitment to social reform, particularly to liberation of the serfs. He participated in a semi-revolutionary group that aimed for reform, perhaps even via overthrow of Tsarist rule, and in 1849 was arrested, sent before a sham firing squad and then exiled to Siberia for four years in a prison camp, four more in exile in Siberia as a petty military officer, and finally allowed to return to St. Petersburg only after two more years of banishment from that city.  The prison experience had profound effects on him, intensifying his own Christian faith and strengthening his belief in the deep wisdom of the Russian people - which he saw as a direct result of their belief in Christ.  Further, the extremes of behavior of other prisoners that he witnessed during his years in Siberia convinced Dostoevsky that the human need for self-expression, for free will, is stronger than any other human force or need.  Accordingly, he became increasingly distrustful and scornful toward those intellectuals who, in his view, were tainted by Western philosophy, especially when based in atheism and motivated by a belief in determinism.

Dostoevsky came to believe that the westernized, misguided idealism of the 40's, which he had originally shared, led directly to these utilitarian, mechanistic views of radical leaders in the 60's,  Notes from Underground is a powerful attack on the intellectual ideas of the 40's and 50's, forcefully depicted through the complaints and experiences of the Underground Man - but depicted through sharp satire and parody, which were misunderstood by the vast majority of readers.  Such misunderstandings were abetted by changes demanded by the censors that disrupted some of the logic of the presentation. Not a pleasant read, though occasionally punctuated by sharp humor.  Nevertheless, a powerful depiction of how social philosophy can distort character.