http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Mon, 12 Sep 2005 00:58:32 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/12/005832.php D. Gordon SmithMy wife and I started reading this book together during the Tour de France in July. As she took her turn driving our Suburban across the U.S.&#8212my children in the back, immersed in DVDs&#8212I would read to her. Each night, we would check out the 2005 Tour's highlights on the hotel television and on the internet, then return to Coyle's account of last year's Tour while on the road. When we returned to Wisconsin in early August, we had completed about two-thirds of the book, and it rested unopened in my nightstand until this week, when we decided to finish the task. I am happy we did.Lance Armstrong has suddenly become current again, as rumors swirl regarding his possible return to competitive cycling. He is often compared to Michael Jordan because of they way both dominated their respective sports, and he can add another point of similarity by coming out of retirement. Of course, the purported impetus for these latest rumblings is Lance's frustration with recent doping allegations by the World Anti-Doping Agency reported in L'Equipe. The latest twist is that Union Cycliste Internationale is investigating and is not happy with the public release of test results.No matter whether this latest tempest peters out or gathers force, doping will never be far from discussions about Lance Armstrong. Indeed, doping is the dominant subtext of Coyle's account. Coyle covers Lance's close association with the notorious Italian sports doctor Michele Ferrari; Irish reporter David Walsh and his book, LA Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong; Lance's bizarre confrontation in Stage 18 of the 2004 Tour with Filippo Simeoni, who had admitted doping and testified against Ferrari; and Tyler Hamilton's two-year suspension from cycling after positive tests as the Olympics and the Tour of Spain. By almost all accounts, cycling is rife with doping, and although he does not draw any conclusions about Lance, Coyle offers an even-handed and straightforward account of the evidence, allegations, and refutations.Still, you don't need to read the book to get a primer on doping in cycling. Stories like that are everywhere. But I can think of two other reasons to read the book. First, Coyle offers a fairly intimate portrait of Lance, at least as much as we might expect from someone who followed Lance around for a year and spoke with Lance's friends, enemies, and competitors. Lance is a very complex person, and even though you won't be able to claim that you know Lance after reading this book, you will have a much better sense for the conflicts and contradictions that lie behind the public persona.Second, Coyle offers nice details about Lance's preparations and the day-to-day workings of the Tour de France. For newcomers to the sport of cycling, he provides accessible accounts of the need for a strong team and reveals some of the basic strategies. He also offers some fun details, like the riders at the beginning of the cycling season checking out their competitors with a "belly pinch" or an "ass check." I also enjoyed the transcript of the radio transmission from Johann Bruyneel during one of last year's time trials. Although much of the transcript consisted of Bruyneel repeating "Come on, Lance. Come on," it offered a nice insider's view of the ride chatter. Edited: PC Books35980@blogcritics.org Mon, 12 Sep 2005 00:58:32 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/02/171354.php D. Gordon SmithMalcolm Gladwell is a master story teller, and I found this book immensely entertaining ... at least when I wasn't looking for a coherent set of lessons. According to Gladwell, this is a book about "rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye." Gladwell more or less sticks to the theme, but what are we to make of rapid cognition? This is what I gather from Gladwell's book: * Sometimes rapid cognition is very useful * Sometimes rapid cognition is very dangerous * Sometimes rapid cognition provides important insights * Sometimes rapid cognition misses important insights * Sometimes rapid cognition just happens * Sometimes rapid cognition can be practiced and improvedThis book reminds me of an expression that my colleague Stewart Macaulay uses when explaining irreconcilable judicial opinions: rapid cognition is important, except when it's not. Unfortunately, Gladwell does not help us to understand when we can trust rapid cognition and when we can't. All of his wonderful and contradictory stories make this book more like The Toastmaster's Treasure Chest than a useful attempt at popular science. Books33546@blogcritics.org Tue, 2 Aug 2005 17:13:54 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/07/10/015051.php D. Gordon SmithFour people in my house have read every Harry Potter book, and the other three are not far behind. My oldest daughter became an early fan (by U.S. standards) when I purchased the first book for her at a Borders in Arizona. None of the clerks could tell me anything about the book at the time, except that is was popular in England and Borders had ordered a whole bunch of copies. It was heavily discounted, so I took a chance. When she reached her third reading of the book, we started wondering what it was about Harry Potter that was so enticing.When Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released, I happened to be in Salt Lake City. My oldest son and I had just finished a rain-soaked hike in the Uinta Mountains, but we managed to locate a Borders that was having a Harry Potter Party, and we purchased two copies at midnight. Although I eventually read all of the books, I am always the last to have a turn. My son and daughter (whom we retrieved from camp later that day) both read that book all the way back to Wisconsin.This year, we misunderstood the date of the release and went searching for the book in Sweden last month. Once we had the correct date, we realized that we would be on the road, somewhere between Wisconsin and New Mexico. So this Friday, our family will be staying at a hotel in Lawrence, Kansas, and we are on the waiting list at Borders for two copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.I hope they ordered extras. Edited: PC Books32325@blogcritics.org Sun, 10 Jul 2005 01:50:51 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/07/07/185041.php D. Gordon SmithThe publisher calls this history of Foveon Inc. a "rollicking narrative." Hardly. Instead, it is a rather disjointed history of the direct image sensor, an analog imaging technology with an uncertain commercial future. In his review of this book, Glenn Reynolds wrote, "The muddled nature of Foveon's story ... led me to wonder why Mr. Gilder chose to build a book around the company." Me, too.This book suffers greatly from the fact that Foveon's story is so far from finished. While reading the book, I found it hard to tell where all of the action was leading. When I came to the end, I realized that Gilder had led me to nowhere in particular. By all accounts, Foveon's technology can produce great images (like this strawberry), but Gilder's subtitle&#8212"How a Silicon Valley company aims to make all current computers, cameras, and cell phones obsolete"&#8212betrays the real story: for all of the technological brainpower behind Foveon, the company doesn't know what it's doing.Despite its flaws, Silicon Eye has moments of real interest. Gilder has a flair for writing about technology ("If your brain used metal gates, your head would weigh a ton, need a direct link to the power grid, and still couldn't recognize Grandma's face in a photograph."), and many of the characters are compelling (particularly Misha Mahowald). Moreover, at times Gilder effectively conveys the frustrations of entrepreneurship&#8212fickle business partners, extreme technological hurdles, cautious customers, and demanding investors. And, of course, no business history would be complete without a swipe at business lawyers. Gilder quotes Carver Mead: "The process took six months to close because once you get in the lawyers, they have to add value. They way they add value is to change the deal in such a way that it does not work anymore."In the end, however, Foveon was not a great choice for a business history. I suspect Gilder chose the company because of his long acquaintance with Carver Mead, but even though that makes writing the story convenient, it does not make reading the story worthwhile. I am a large consumer of business histories, and this one would not come close to cracking my Top 10. Books32214@blogcritics.org Thu, 7 Jul 2005 18:50:41 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/06/27/152513.php D. Gordon SmithWe all know in general terms what happened to Enron, but Kurt Eichenwald somehow manages to make this oft-told tale into a page turner in Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story. Although Eichenwald's expansive use of dialog makes me wonder how closely the book adheres to its aspirational subtitle, his description of the research underlying the book and his attention to detail throughout give the book an air of believability. Still, if you want details about Enron's accounting shenanigans, read The Smartest Guys in the Room or Power Failure (or one of the many academic papers out there describing Enron's wild accounting), but if you love a great story, this is the Enron book for you.Eichenwald's ability to make the story compelling and suspenseful, even when we know the outcome, is enviable. He creates tension by unfolding the story slowly through thousands of vignettes, each recounting a conversation, an email, a recollection, an encounter, or a development that reveals Enron's mounting troubles from the perspective of an omniscient insider. It is almost like a collection of polished research notes, and knowing the story in advance actually enhances understanding. (Indeed, if someone were coming to the Enron story for the first time through this book, they might justifiably complain that the book is disjointed.)With Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Richard Causey still awaiting trial, this book may shed light and the possible course of prosecution. In Eichenwald's telling, the primary engineer of Enron's demise was CFO Andy Fastow, who is portrayed as simultaneously incompetent and venal. He had plenty of help from other Enron employees like his wife Lea Fastow, "head of special projects" Michael Kopper, and treasurer-turned-lapdog Ben Glisan, all of whom are in prison or on their way. And then there are the outsiders, like David Duncan, Arthur Andersen's sycophantic partner in charge of the Enron audit team. And the investment banks, which recently have been settling claims by Enron shareholders for billions of dollars.But can we really lay primary blame for Enron at Andy Fastow's feet? In Eichenwald's version of the story, Ken Lay comes off as genial and willfully distant from the details of management. (Nelsonian blindness? Hardly!) But not criminal. Similarly, Jeff Skilling is portrayed as a person with enormous emotional baggage, but not criminal. Perhaps that's why the indictment of Lay and Skilling (along with chief accountant Richard Causey) was so long in coming and so limited in reach.In the end, you might come away from this book thinking that Enron is a perfect storm. A scheming deal guy (Fastow) wins the trust of an unwitting superior (Skilling), who is anointed for great things by the distant leader (Lay). Fastow follows Skilling up the management hierarchy, along the way assembling a team of minions whose gullibility and/or unscrupulousness enable him to pursue his strange and illogical accounting inventions and fleece the company of millions of dollars. Enron's market power keeps outside monitors (most notably, the auditors and banks) at bay, and the company's apparent success creates lax controls at the board and senior officer levels.The only problem is that Enron wasn't a perfect storm. Just think WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, etc. If Enron had been a solo scandal, Paul Sarbanes would be best remembered as the representative who introduced the first Article of Impeachment, for obstruction of justice, against President Richard Nixon, and Michael Oxley could be best remembered for ... what? I have no idea. What makes this book so engrossing is that Enron has already happened many times over and, despite the work of Messrs. Sarbanes and Oxley, it will happen again. Probably sooner rather than later. Books31660@blogcritics.org Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:25:13 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/05/19/131110.php D. Gordon SmithThe pressure to give this book rave reviews is enormous. Everyone seems to love it (the Freakonomics website will lead you to plenty of positive reviews), and Steven Levitt is an undeniably brilliant economist -- my hat's off to anyone who wins the John Bates Clark Medal. But this is not a brilliant book. And not just because the title is stupid. In the search for dazzling insights, the authors overreach. It reads like a journalist describing the work of a scholar ... which is exactly what it is.The chapter entitled "What Makes a Perfect Parent?" will serve nicely to illustrate my complaint about the book, but the problems are not confined to this chapter. The authors begin the chapter by chiding parents who do not allow their children to play with friends whose homes have guns, while allowing the same children to play at homes with swimming pools. More children are killed in swimming pools than in gun accidents, so these parents are irrational. Fair enough, though criticizing people for being horrible at risk assessment is an old game and one not limited to parents.The question the authors really want to answer, they claim, is this: "how much to parents really matter?" And they begin with this stage-setting thought: Clearly, bad parenting matters a great deal. As the link between abortion and crime makes clear, unwanted children -- who are disproportionately subject to neglect and abuse -- have worse outcomes than children who were eagerly welcomed by their parents. But how much can those eager parents actually accomplish for their children's sake?If neglect and abuse leads to bad results, then attentive, caring parents must matter a great deal. How much can such parents accomplish? I would think the answer should be: a tremendous amount. But this isn't the answer the authors are seeking. They want to find "the hidden side of everything," and such an obvious conclusion is not interesting. So, just after telling us that experts of all kinds exaggerate their claims because "an expert whose argument reeks of restraint and nuance often doesn't get much attention," the author press on with the implausible claim that parenting really doesn't matter all that much.How do they support this claim? Here they find the sledding a bit rough. They begin with a provocatice comparison between two boys, one from a model white family in the Chicago suburbs and the other from a dysfunctional and abusive black family in Daytona Beach, Florida. That last fact suggests that these are real people, but we don't find out until the epilogue that the black boy grew up to be Levitt's co-author (Roland G. Fryer, Jr.) while the white boy grew up to be Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. How ironic that a book claiming to be about data rests one of its main claims on anecdote.Indeed, the authors frankly admit that "[c]ertain facets of a child's outcome -- personality, for instance, or creativity -- are not easily measured by data." Indeed, I would say that the most important outcomes that I hope for in my own children (integrity, honesty, charity, compassion, etc.) are not easily measured. What we can easily measure, however, is academic performance. Test scores. And the rest of the chapter is devoted to that.A bit more than half of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of data gathered from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The analysis in the book is based on a paper by Levitt and Freyer, an abstract of which appears here. The paper is about the gap in test scores between black children and white children in kindergarten and after two years of school. When discussing factors that seem to be correlated (or not) with test scores, the book states:[A] mother who stays home from work until her child goes to kindergarten does not seem to provide any advantage. Obsessive parents might find this lack of correlationbothersome -- what was the point of all those Mommy and Me classes? -- but that is what the data tell us.I don't know a lot about Mommy & Me but their website talks about making children feel "happy, healthy, and loved," not about acing standardized tests. This is just a hunch, but I don't think that most mothers who decide to stay home with their children think, "This will really give Johnny the edge on standardized tests."And why use the demeaning term "obsessive parents"? Sprinkled throughout this chapter, the term is introduced with this unhelpful definition: "Obsessive parents know who they are and are generally proud of the fact; non-obsessive parents also know who the obsessive parents are and tend to snicker at them." Examples of things obsessive parents do: "trek to the local police station or firehouse" to have the car seat installed "just right"; take their children to museums even though such "culture cramming" does not improve test performance; and study parenting techniques. Now, these things may seem silly to someone who knows better -- or someone whose only metric for success is a test score -- but using a term like "obsessive parents" for well-intentioned acts like these is mean spirited.The authors conclude the chapter by listing eight factors that seem to be correlated with higher test scores and eight factors that are not. In looking at the 16 factors, the authors write: "To overgeneralize a bit, the first list describes things that parents are, the second list describes things that parents do." (emphasis added) Let's take a closer look. Here are the eight factors that are correlated with test scores (some with higher scores and some with lower scores), with my strikethrough on those that do not seem to fit their description:The child has highly educated parents The child's parents have high socioeconomic status The child's mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child's birth The child had low birthweight The child's parents speak English in the home The child is adopted The child's parents are involved in the PTA The child has many books in his homeThe main point the authors are trying to make is that child-rearing "technique looks to be highly overrated." This might be true, but why go about it in this bassackwards way? Admittedly, parenting techniques do not appear on the list, but I see a lot of things that parents can do: get an education, ensure that the mother has good prenatal care (to increase the likelihood of high birth weight), be involved at school, buys books for the home, etc. This list does not even remotely look like a list of things that parents "are," and their "overgeneralization" turns out not to be much of a generalization at all, but a distortion.Truth be told, this review is probably too negative. This is a highly entertaining book, and it contains lots of thought-provoking ideas, including Levitt's well-known argument linking Roe v. Wade in 1973 with a reduction in crime in the 1990s and an examination of cheating among sumo wrestlers. If you haven't read a lot of economics and never took statistics in college, I suspect that you would benefit greatly from this low-impact rendition of economic analysis. Just be aware that much of what you are reading is not driven by the data, but rather by an effort to be dazzling. Books29748@blogcritics.org Thu, 19 May 2005 13:11:10 EDT