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Shortly after seeing the movie adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s book, Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire, I rushed out and bought the book to see how the silver screen version differed from the book.As one might expect, there is no way for any movie, even one longer than two hours, to completely cover everything found in a seven hundred-plus page book. My friend, Josh, likened the movie to a stone skipping across the water of the source material. While I don’t entirely agree with that characterization, there are plenty of subplots removed from the movie for the sake of brevity and clarity.

However, the movie did a fantastic job of hitting most of the book’s important points. Not all, but most. That is probably the most we can ask of any book to movie adaptation. The visuals, are fantastic, of course. We could hardly expect less from a big budget cash cow of the WB empire. Unlike the Star Wars films, the writing and acting in the films is so much more natural that the visual effects complement the story rather than being the story. In short, the movie is great.

That is not to overshadow the book itself. There is a reason that millions upon millions upon millions of people old and young love the Harry Potter series. The fact is that J.K. Rowling has crafted some amazing stories. Her characters have some depth, her plots drive the reader forward, and the fantasy is tantalizingly close. The books seem to say, “We may be muggles, but wizards are among us.”

The Underdog: How I Survived The World’s Most Outlandish Competitions is one of the few books I’ve read in the last few years that made me laugh out loud.Joshua Davis’ book is both a metaphysical examination of his life, and a retelling of his experiences entering some of the world’s most unique sporting events. Unlike many books that delve deeply into the author’s musty mental attic, The Underdog doesn’t get bogged down in “Woe is me” whining and a misplaced desire to change the past.

Instead, Davis leaps fully into each challenge he accepts with a firm idea in his head that while he can’t change the past and the things he doesn’t like about his life, he can change the future. Fortunately for us, he chooses to charge bravely into the unknown by methods a bit less tried and true.

In the book, Davis claims that his great strength is his curiousity, his ability to ask questions. In reality, his great strength is his lack of inhibitions and his ability to ask the right questions. Most of us, when presented with the opportunity to enter a two-mile road race that is run backwards by its participants, would demure the invitation in public, and then scoff loudly behind closed doors about what a stupid idea a backwards race is. Not Davis. Instead of simply closing off his mind, he gathers himself and leaps completely into the challenge.

Join a national arm wrestling competition without any training or any real chance of winning? No problem. Wrestle sumo at 132 pounds against wrestlers who weigh 300 pounds or more? Where does he sign up? Travel to India to run backwards across a beach covered in human feces? When does that plane leave? A sauna contest where the ambient air temperature is so hot it hurts to breathe? Does the sign-up form have a space ffor a credit card number?

It isn’t so much that the events themselves are wacky; it is Davis’ retelling of his own involvement in the events that had me busting a gut several times. His recounting of his family’s preparations for, and participation in, the sauna contest just about had me falling out of my chair with laughter. It has been a long time since a book left me laughing that hard.

While The Underdog is not likely to win any awards for in-depth personal psychoanalysis, it is engaging and well-written. If you need a couple hundred pages of laughter and entertainment to fight the pre-winter blahs, few items short of plane tickets to Rio will fit the bill like this book.

Pietra Rivoli’s latest book The Travels of a T-Shirt in a Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade should be required reading for anyone interested in poltics, trade, and free markets (or the lack of the same).Rivoli is an economics professor at Georgetown University, but don’t let that frighten you away from this book. Rather than a dry, academic economics text, this book is written for the rest of us. In fact, as the book so aptly points out, there is little in the way of free markets and the like in the global economy today.

Rivoli deftly points out that the cotten, yarn, and apparel industries have gone to great lengths to essentially remove all market risks from their businesses. This allows them to survive in a global economy because their businesses are essentially written into the law. Instead of competing in various industries on a level playing field, it’s like they’re guaranteed sixty points before they even step on to the field.

In addition to examining how those industries avoid markets or rig them via politics to their benefit, Rivoli examines how US trade policy (or lack thereof) affects people in other countries. She shows how export quotas applied to one country affect life in another; she examines how so-called free trade pacts (NAFTA, CAFTA, and the like) are really anything but. In addition, she explores just how accurate charges leveled by anti-globalization activists are.

In the end, her book isn’t an in-depth examination of one specific industry or product; it is a book focused on how modern industry operates as seen through the lens of one specific product. Rivoli’s goal isn’t to enlighten the world about the T-shirt market. Her goal is to get people thinking about national and global trade policies.

Chelsea Handler’s book, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands is one woman’s memoir of her various bedroom encounters over the years.Supposedly, this book is a hilarious recounting of one woman’s sexual escapades through the years. She sleeps with a well-endowed midget in Mexico, a teenage gymnast on a five-day cruise, doesn’t sleep with various men for a variety of reasons, and single-handedly keeps the nation’s various liquor wholesalers in the black.

Quite frankly, the book is so repetitive that I couldn’t even finish it. How many times can you read about how a woman decides to sleep with someone for her own (generally selfish) reasons, and then dumps on that same someone in a variety of heartless ways. Are we supposed to be impressed at her casual and uncaring treatment of others? Since when is getting drunk a wildly hilarious act in and of itself? Is the mere mention of dildos and vibrators supposed to send us into paroxysms of laughter?

Sorry, Chelsea. You’ve got to work harder than that; as a comedian, I’m surprised you don’t realize it. Your opening bit is funny, but it’s all downhill from there. Unlike a twenty minute stand-up slot in a club, you can’t afford to save some of your best material for the end of the act. Books allow the reader to walk away at any point and if you save all your best material for the final twenty pages, chances are good that few readers will discover the gold at the end of the rainbow.

Ever since I heard about it, I’ve been very interested to read Sarah Vowell’s book, Assassination Vacation. When my name finally floated up to the top of the library’s reservation queue, I rushed over to check out a copy.The book covers a bit of Vowell’s fascination with the assassinations of American Presidents. Apparently, she spends a good portion of her time traveling around the nation visiting sites both closely and tangentially related to the dead and their killers.

Quite frankly, the book isn’t nearly as funny as I expected that it would be. Given Vowell’s funny and insightful stories and commentary on This American Life, I expected that her writing would closely mirror her radio work.

Unfortunately, while her writing is insightful and interesting, it just isn’t very funny. Even though I could hear her distinctive voice in my head while reading the book, the text on the page just didn’t strike me as unceasingly funny.

While the book isn’t likely to supply a laugh trck to a hit sitcom any time soon, I would still recommend it. Vowell’s commentary on how American society produces, nutures, and then shuns assassins is insightful. Her abbreviated history of how McKinley and Garfield were first elected, and then gunned down is something that most people probably don’t know. If nothing else, readers can get an easy-to-swallow dose of American history from reading the book.

“I am a stranger in a strange town, and the man standing beside me has just removed his pants.”

Thus opens Michael Perry’s latest book, Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets, and Gatemouth’s Gator.Unlike Perry’s last book, Population 451: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, Off Main Street is a collection of previously published material. Much of the work was published in the mid to late Nineties in a variety of periodicals.

Perry is a salt-of-the-earth writer. He appreciates truckers, country music, hunting, and home cooking far more than he appreciates the nodding approval of coastal book critics. His style is a curious mix of everyday slang and those relatively uncommon words–like “perspicacity”–writers love to sprinkle in their works to flex their linguistic muscles.

In general, this book is much weaker than Population 451. That’s less an indictment of this book that it would seem; it is more praise for the earlier book. Population 451 was a very compelling work and one that I would recommend to nearly anybody.

Perry’s evolution as a writer can be seen when one compares some of the earlier essays in this collection with his later essays and books. The lack of a unifying theme also seems to hurt his writing as many of his essays sound particularly preachy when they don’t have as much room to stretch out and find their center.

That’s not to say that Perry’s work is worth skipping entirely. He does have some cogent things to say. His writing about the 9/11 attacks could very well be applied to the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast today:

[T]he battle will not always live up to the telethon. Resolutions of substance generally require heavy lifting and extended attention to the mundane.

His essay detailing his battle with a kidney stone is both wince and grin inducing.

[W]hen I looked across the median of I-80 during a recent road trip and saw a westbound semi emblazoned with the words American Kidney Stone Management, I got so misty I nearly left the roadway. Somewhere out there someone else was gasping like a scuppered carp, and here, apparently piloted by angels, was a white Kenworth, its hood ornament aimed at kidney stones everywhere. Sweet, sweet relief, hammer down.

There is something about Perry’s writing that makes me feel like I’m curled up on a sofa in a remote mountain cabin reading before a wood fire while snow gently falls outside. Perhaps it’s his subject matter; perhaps it is the fact I know he writes from his home in northwestern Wisconsin. That is a mystery I have yet to solve.

Regardless, I recommed that you read this book if you need a few generally well-written essays to bridge the long, upcoming winter to next spring.

After working my way through the 1100+ pages of James Mills’ book, The Underground Empire there remains no doubt in my mind that the United States Government is intimately involved in drug trafficikng.Mills’ book was published in 1986 and is now out of print. And, while many of the specific stories it covers are now old news, the trends and policies are not.

It is clear that the Federal government, acting through the CIA, has deep and long-.lasting ties with large, powerful drug smugglers around the world. The CIA uses these ties for a varieties of purposes: intelligence gathering; government destabilization; weapons smuggling; and the like. In many cases, these activities are essentially underwritten by drug addicts in America.

This is not to imply that CIA planes and boats bring narcotics into the USA and that CIA agents are dispensing coke and crack on street corners. What the CIA does do, is protect the upper levels of the large narcotics smuggling organizations from prosecution. This helps those organizations maintain their money, connections, and institutional memory, thereby making those organizations more resilient, durable, and flexible.

In one specific instance, the CIA facilitated the smuggling of drugs into the US from a particular smuggler’s network. The profits from the drugs were then turned into weapons. The weapons where then exchanged with Central and South American rebels in exchange for more drugs. The rebels would then use the weapons to destabilize the governments in their home countries. The now destabilized governments would then turn to the US Government for help restoring order within their borders. That was the ulimate goal of the program: enticing foreign governments to forge tighter military ties with the US Government. That the program was paid for by US drug addicts, instead of US taxpayers, was just a bonus in the eyes of many.

In many ways, the US government’s generally ineffective “War on Drugs” is a reflection of its involvement with smuggling. The vast majority of arrests made in the War on Drugs are low-level smugglers and dealers; the people moving a half-pound of pot or a couple ounces of cocaine. The number of so-called drug kingpins indicted and tried in this country, given its high-tech investigative techniques, broad military powers, and numerous police agencies, remains pitifully small. Are we seriously to believe that one guy operating out of Columbia, Mexico, or Peru can outwit the US Government for ten or twenty years without ever making a mistake? What about all of the low-level dealers and smugglers? Why don’t they turn in their higher-ups? Why don’t those higher-ups then turn in their higher-ups? Why can’t we just go up the drug smuggling food chain until we reach the top? How often does that happen? About never.

Clearly, there are some major questions that remain unanswered in the so-called War on Drugs. While Mills does not, and can not, answer all of those questions, he does ask them.

The books primary voice is that of the people in it. Mills does little to no editorializing. In fact, the vast majority of the book is dialogue spoken to him or others. He only interjects his own voice to help move the story along from place to place or to consolidate long periods of time and distance down to a reasonable length for an already large book.

While the size of the book, its relatively abstract subject matter, and its long-past publication date might dissuade some from picking up this work, they would be missing out on something by passing it by. The Underground Empire is a book that I will remember for a long, long time and it has certainly altered many of the ways I think about the so-called War on Drugs.

I’ve been working my way through a book that’s just a bit over 1100 pages long. However, as I near the end of that epic journey, a book I had requested through the library became available. I set aside the massive tome yesterday to focus for a brief time on a graphic novel, V for Vendetta.Some of you may be aware of the fact that the Wachowski brothers of The Matrix fame are making V for Vendetta into a movie. While the movie has been delayed into 2006, I decided to jump into the novel and see the original story for myself.

V for Vendetta tells the story of an England set in the 1990′s (though, it really should have been set in the ever-so-common “not too distant future” to keep from dating itself so quickly). England has become a fascist state where all the Jews, homosexuals, blacks, Asians, and the like have been consigned to concentration camps. Those that are deemed pure enough to remain English citizens are subject to regular doses of fear, intimidation, and propaganda.

It is into this world that “Codename V,” as the character is known throughout the book, is thrust. V acts as an agent of change and his tools of choice are murder, explosions, and mayhem. It is V’s struggle against a totalitarian society that forms the framework of the book.

The story takes some shocking twists and turns, each of which seems natural and completely unforced. The book itself is told in a series of stories as the book is simply a collection of the original stories bound into one volume. Some of the stories are related as songs (complete with musical scores); others are told as rhyme; still others feature long stretches of action set to Shakespeare’s “MacBeth.” As you might guess, this book isn’t your run of the mill graphic novel.

While the action and story are interesting, the book is really a mouthpiece for the author’s politics. Politics and political theory form the backbone of many characters’ decisions. There is extensive discussion of how and why a supposedly educated and civilized people let such a society form. And, of course, there is discussion about how to best break-up and build anew that same rigid society. If you’re looking for a book that won’t challenge you while it entertains you, look elsewhere.

V for Vendetta now finds itself placed on my mental list of books that I would recommend to nearly anyone. Reading the book may spoil the movie, but there is so much information and philosophy in the book that I can’t imagine the movie will even begin to plumb its depths.

A disclaimer: I am not currently, nor have I ever been, an Alabama Crimson Tide fan.

Having said that, I found Warren St. John’s book Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer to be a funny, entertaining book.Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer is both a discussion of what makes sports fans act like they do and a memoir of one fan’s relationship with his team.

The fan is St. John and his team is the Alabama Crimson Tide football team. Over the course of a season, St. John travels to all of the Tide’s games while drinking, eating, and talking with die-hard Tide fans. While you don’t need to eat, sleep, and breathe football to understand the book, it helps to at least know which part of the field is the end zone and how many attempts a team gets to travel ten yards. In other words, you’ll need some basic football knowledge.

On the other hand, while action on the football field certainly is part of the book, it is only part. A great portion of the book is spent examining what is going on off the field. After all, there aren’t many fans to be found playing in the game itself. The fans are all in the stands, the sports bars, and the like.

You can read the book’s introduction on-line, but here is an excerpt to prime the pump:

It would be easy, perhaps, to dismiss such hardcore fans as freaks, except for the fact that the world is practically brimming over with them. Open your daily paper’s sports pages to the box scores. You might want to pause and ask yourself why your hometown paper devotes an entire section to sports. The implication is that the readers’ need to know the outcome of sporting contests ranks up there in importance with their need to know about global politics, business and the arts. Compare that with the amount of column inches per week on religion; it’s not even close.

In the excerpt below, St. John attends the first Alabama game of the season on a blisteringly hot and sunny day. The opponent is Vanderbilt.

Pretty soon, the players come barreling onto the field, and when they do, it’s perfectly clear who will win. Vanderbilt, the home team, is wearing solid black jerseys, while Alabama is in white. We don’t even have to try; we simply have to wait until sunstroke kicks in and fells their entire team.

…

But there’s only so long even a well-trained athlete can endure temperatures of ninety-something degrees and blistering midday sun in shoulder pads, a helmet, and a photon-slurping black jersey. Apparently, the limit is about two hours and fifteen minutes, because that’s how long it takes before Vandy begins their collapse.

St. John’s writing is thick with information, yet easy to digest at the same time. The book is filled with clever turns of phrase and scientific studies packaged up for mass consumption.

While this book certainly isn’t one of the great works of American writing, it is a good read and you’ll feel happy with yourself for taking the time to read it.

After finishing Pat Cadigan’s cyberpunk novel, Synners my only question is:

Where and how did a story with so much potential go so horribly wrong?Spoilers Included In the Following Review

Let’s start with the dumbest part of the story first. The big bad in the story isn’t the corporation bent on world domination. Neither is it the forces of chaos or entropy. Rather, it is a stroke (no, really!) that somehow manages to become virtual and enter the worldwide network.

Yes, that’s right. A stroke. You know, the medical condition that is generally caused by starvation of blood to a particular part of the brain, usually by a burst or clotted blood vessel. Who knew that not only are strokes sentient, but they seek to be freed from our tiny little skulls so that they can travel the world, see the sights, eat at some great restaurants, and kill off a few million people along the way?

Beyond the laughably awful “villian” that threatens our characters, the characters themselves never reach their full potentials. Cadigan had some real gold ready to mine in these characters, but she instead focuses on just how she’s going to get this intensely personal medical condition out into the wider world. So, some characters that had real potential are simply dumped along the wayside while we watch The Stroke get into the vast network of computers that runs LA’s traffic system. That traffic system itself had such potential, and it shows up so often in the book, that by the end we’re just waiting for the terrible or awesome events that surely are just around the bend to unfold around that system. Instead, the sense of expectancy that Cadigan has created around the system throughout the book is casually tossed out the window like an apple core from a speeding car, never to be seen again.

It’s not clear to me where it all went so wrong. Maybe Cadigan decided to avoid the predictable “large, heartless corporation seeks world domination” angle, and was left grasping for straws. Maybe someone in Cadigan’s life had a stroke and this was her own answer to the problem. Maybe she was high on mind-altering substances for the entire period of time while she wrote this book. Quite frankly, there has to be an explantion.

So, if you’re looking for a book that leaves you feeling a bystander at multi-car pile-up involving a poultry-hauling semi, read Synners. The rest of us will be over here trying to keep our athlete’s foot fungi from virtualizing and taking over the world.

James Bamford’s book, Body of Secrets, is marketed as an inside look inside at of the nation’s most secretive intelligence gathering bodies, the National Security Agency.And, while the NSA does play a key role in the book, it is far from the only character in the book.

In fact, most of Bamford’s most potent dirt has little to nothing to do with the NSA. His revelations about Eisenhower’s duplicity, and the treasonable actions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at various times in the fifties and sixties have essentially nothing to do with the NSA. In many other instances, some of the most compelling stories in the book have little to no NSA involvement.

That’s not to say that the NSA is a very small character in this book. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages devoted to covering the NSA. However, some of those pages are also among the book’s dullest.

The stories of “moon bounce” communication networks, code-breaking, “black bag” operations, and the like make for interesting and compelling reading. Long lists of amenities available to NSA workers inside Crypto City are nothing more than that, long lists. Most people just don’t get excited reading long lists of mundane items.

While I learned plenty about decisions the government made, or didn’t make, with regards to a variety of geopolitical situations in the middle part of the Twentieth Century, I don’t feel much more knowledgeable about the NSA itself. Much of the “inside” information presented by the book felt like the kinds of information one could get simply by talking to NSA employees about generally non-classified, daily activities inside Crypto City. One good way to summarize that feeling is that I felt like I had a better chance of predicting the NSA’s cafeteria menu than I did the motives and goals of the agency and its employees.

So, while I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the USA’s covert intelligence agencies and/or the history of government actions during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, those seeking a truly inside look at the NSA should simply apply to work there.

The final installment in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series generally lives down to the standards set in the penultimate book, Song of Susannah.After reading Wizard and Glass it was clear to me that King was going to have a very difficult time maintaining the standards he had set. While Wolves of the Calla was a worthy attempt, all subsequent books are nothing but dim shadows of those preceding them.

In the final installment of the series, the Dark Tower is finally within the reach of our gallant, yet flawed, heroes. Now all that remains is moving over the final few miles, opening the door, and climbing the stairs to reveals what lies at the top of the Tower.

Without revealing too much about the book’s twists and turns, it is difficult to fully analyze the book here. However, much of the book feels contrived with characters taking actions and stances simply because it was convenient for King. Rather than acting as we might expect the fully developed characters would, the characters often abruptly about-face and do things that don’t fit their personalities.

The method King uses to overcome the character’s final obstacle is lame and contrived. It is as though King was looking for a clever way out of the problems he had created, rather than letting his characters work their way out using their own methods and means.

All in all, I almost wish I had stopped reading the series after Wolves of the Calla. Much like the third Matrix movie somewhat tarnished the reputation of the first two, the last books of the Dark Tower series have tarnished the reputation of those that have gone before them.

Stephen King’s Song of Susannah is possibly his lamest effort ever.Coming on the heels of some of King’s best writing in Wolves of the Calla and (one of my all-time favorite novels) Wizard and Glass, I had really high expectations for this book. Unfortunately, this book does not even begin to compare to the two volumes of the The Dark Tower saga that preceded it.

Let me start by decrying King’s lame, corny, sad, awful, unforgiveable decision to include himself as a character in the book. Ever since Sarah and I suffered through most of a Clive Cussler audiobook in which Cussler appeared as a (supposedly) suave, rich, mysterious character I have been very leery of authors who write themselves transparently into their books. King appears in the book as one of the pillars of the universe with God like powers. What claptrap.

It was difficult to soldier on through the portions of the book in which King appears. King’s appearance as a character really shattered the illusion he was trying to craft. Instead of a rich fantasy world, we’re left with Stephen King writing about himself in a too glib fashion and then futilely trying to shoe-horn that self-examination into a fantasy novel. If I wanted to find out what Stephen King thought of himself, I’d find an interview with the man. I don’t read his books because he does such a great job portraying himself in them; I read his books because he creates wonderful illusions. As soon as he destroys the illusion, there isn’t much point in continuing to read the book.

The book’s Coda is more of the same nonsense. If Kings wants to detail how the book got written, fine. Put it in an Author’s Notes section. Interested readers can then find the information while those who wish to skip it can do so. By writing the Author’s Notes into the Coda, King forces everyone to read his Notes just in case something important to the story arc is buried in there.

The other problem with Song of Susannah is that very few Things Happen in it. Plenty of Things nearly Happen. Other Things almost Happen. Heck, there is even some getting ready for Things to Happen. But if you go digging through four hundred pages of text looking for Things Happening, you’ll have to look carefully as Things don’t Happen much in this book.

In the end, Song of Susannah is four hundred pages of self-indulgent yuck and exposition. I can only hope that Things Happen in the seventh volume of The Dark Tower series or readers like myself will be left feeling like King led us down a dead-end path.

Bruce Schneier’s book Beyond Fear should be on everyone’s reading list for 2005 if you have not already been enlightened by it.Most common analyses of security in the United States structure themselves around two key questions:

1. Will the security measures being contemplated “keep us safe?”
2. Will the security measures being contemplated “keep us safe?”

Ironically enough, the answer to either of those questions (and yes, I know they are actually the same question) doesn’t even have to be yes. Take the USA PATRIOT Act, for instance. Are we measureably safer because the FBI can examine our library records without our knowledge? Has such a measure been proven to reduce the terrorist threat? Have terrorists been caught and punished because their library records were examined?

Of course not. The FBI always had the power to examine library records. It just needed a subpoena to do so. Now, however, they can saunter on down the library any old time they want and examine the records of whomever they choose. In addition, those pesky librarians must keep their mouths shut (by law) about FBI activities. The net effect of losing the privacy of our library records is that the cost of terrorism went up nearly imperceptibly. Now, instead of checking out books at the library and keeping them for four weeks, terrorists will be forced to buy new and used books and keep them indefinitely. I’m sure Osama is shaking in his sandals.

Bruce Schneier has been known for years in computer security and cryptography circles. Now, he has given us a remarkably well written and accessible tome about security in general.

In Beyond Fear, Schneier provides remarkably lucid analysis of security problems and solutions. He breaks down what security really means to various people and how it can be (hopefully) obtained in a clear and structured manner.

For instance, he analyzes the various countermeasures taken by homeowners to prevent burglary. Some measures (door locks and window bars, for instance) are cheap, widely available, and effective. Others (alarm systems, surveillance cameras, and armed guards) are expensive and offer very little to the average homeowner. Some measures (putting a minefield in your yard) are effective but illegal. At some point, nearly everyone makes decisions about the security of their home. I know people who do not lock their home during the day while they are at work because they live in a town where burglaries are very uncommon. For those individuals, the hassle of a locked door is worse for them than the fear someone will break into their home. By comparison, I prefer to lock my doors when I leave home though I am in no way considering putting bars on my windows.

In addition to general security, Schneier carefully dissects commercial aviation security:

The current airline security process isn’t perfect. Because the government has removed the responsibility of security from the airlines, the airlines have a different agenda. Their goal is not to do the best security job possible, but rather to do the cheapest job that follows the letter of whatever government regulations they are required to follow.

security against terrorism:

Here’s the bottom line when you realistically and unemotionally assess the risk to your personal security of a terrorist attack: If you don’t live in a major coastal metropolitan city or next to a nuclear power plant or chemical factory, you’re more likely to die of a bee sting than a terrorist attack. Even if you do live in a big city or next door to a power plant, the odds of being a terrorist victim are still vanishingly small. Any precautions you take should be directed toward and in proportion to those risks.

security against cyberterrorism:

But imagine for a minute the leadership of Al Qaeda sitting in a cave somewhere, plotting the next move in their jihad against the U.S. one of the leaders jumps up and exclaims: “I have an idea! We’ll disable their e-mail….”

and even security as practiced by members of the animal kingdom:

A rabbit’s primary defense is running away. It’s a fine defense, a useful countermeasure that almost everyone has used at one time or another. But it only works, of course, if you can outrun your attackers–by being faster, by being able to run longer, or by being clever about losing your pursuers….Most herbivores tend to win on distance, which is why carnivores spend so much effort trying to sneak up close to their prey.

Clearly, the book is wide ranging. And, while Schneier condemns policies and procedures created by the current Administration, he really has no partisan axes to grind in this book. He couldn’t care less about who implemented useless security; he just cares that the security was both useless and expensive. The book’s agenda is not to bash one person, party, or government agency; the book’s agenda is to make people think about security in a deeper and more meaningful way.

For instance, since reading the book, I’ve come to realize that my local video rental store has a fundamental security problem. They want to both identify customers (to make sure that we’re who we say we are) and authorize customers (to make sure that we’re allowed to rent movies). Towards that end, they require some form of picture ID when an account is created (identification). Once the account is created, a card is given to the customer as a form of authorization.

Once that card is handed out, customers can use it check out movies without proving their identity again. So, if I lost my card and it was recovered by someone else, they could rent (steal) movies in my name and the video store would be none the wiser. In other words, using this procedure they can authorize people but not identify them.

However, if a customer attempts to rent a movie without their card, the clerks request a photo id from the customer. The photo on the ID is checked against the person standing across from the clerk while the name on the ID is then checked against the computer record to authorize the customer. This method is significantly more secure. The authorization token is the computer record which cannot be carted around and lost by customers. In addition, identification is nearly almost always positive since the picture on an ID can be checked against the customer standing there. Of course, one could provide a fake ID, but who is going to fake an ID in my name just to steal a few videos from Video Station?

The local video store obviously did some security calculations in another part of their business, however. There used to be just two checkout locations on one side of a square front counter. Customers paid for videos and then were handed the videos on the other side of an anti-shoplifting device.

In recent months, the anti-shoplifting device has gone away and customers can now pay for their videos on two sides of the square counter. This doubled the number of possible checkout lanes from two to four. Clearly, the store determined that it was more important to their bottom line to limit the amount of time customers spent in line than it was to guard against some relatively small amount of shoplifting.

Everyone should read this book. With security policies and procedures becoming more commonplace all the time, the United States has a vested interest in having an informed citizenry that can intelligently think about and debate security policies, procedures, risks, and trade-offs. Beyond Fear is a truly interesting and accessible starting point towards that end.

For some reason, Baseballissimo, by Dave Bidini, seems to be a book that people either love or hate. And yet, very few people seem to have read it.Perhaps the biggest reason that very few people have read it is that the book is available in very few libraries. The copy I read came via interlibrary loan from a library in San Mateo, California.

Most of the book reviews online are reasonably polarized. Some critics hate the book while others praise it as one of the best sports books of 2004.

While I didn’t love the book, it certainly was worth the effort to fill out forms at the library to get it. Bidini has a liquid, flowing writing style that blends humor and insight well. The humor in the book is generally subtle, but sprinkled throughout quite well.

If you are not terribly familiar with the game of baseball, you might not enjoy this book as much as someone who lives and breathes the game will. Bidini is a name dropper, but not as though he has met everyone whose name he drops. Rather he drops names as a form of shorthand for various physical or mental traits.

I also found that there if one looked beneath the clever prose and sporting surroundings, one could find real human emotions suffused throughout the book. From the attitudes and actions of those players stuck riding the pine, to those of fireball pitchers and hot shot young outfielders, nearly all types of people can be found somewhere in this book.

Recently, I picked up Ross Leckie’s Hannibal: A Novel from my local library branch. Hopefully, you will not replicate my error.

If you are one of those folks who really like the Faces of Death videoes, this book is for you. Most of the book seems to be Leckie trying to figure out how to bridge one depiction of torture to the next. Impalings, crucifixtions, suffocations, gential mutilation, strangulation, maiming, they’re all here. And not much else is.

Halfway through the book, I didn’t feel anything at all for any character in the book. It’s rather like reading a gruesome, badly written textbook that covers the so-called glory years of Carthage.

Life is too short for this type of trash. Get almost anything else from the library instead of this tome of torture.

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan is another book in the universe inhabited by Takashi Kovacs of Altered Carbon fame.Unlike Altered Carbon, Kovacs motivation in Broken Angels seems muddy and forced. It’s as though we can see Morgan pulling Kovacs strings; an unpleasant look behind the curtain, if you will.

Even after I finished the book, I never felt like I bought in to Kovacs’ motivation. And, if one fails to understand the motivation of the main character, just how good can the book be?

Yes, the book has some interesting action and plot points, but if you don’t care much for the characters, those two are just artifices. It’s somewhat like watching someone affix really fancy chrome parts to a rusty Pinto. Those chrome parts can only do so much for the rust bucket underneath it all.

So, if you enjoyed Altered Carbon, good for you. Stay clear of Broken Angels and wait for Morgan’s next book. Let’s hope it is better than this one.

Last week, I finished reading Peter F. Hamilton’s book, Pandora’s Star.The straightest, shortest dope on this book is this: If you don’t normally read science fiction, this book is not a good place to start.

Having said that, let’s get into the heart of the matter.

Some reviewers of this book complained because some of the aliens in the book powers that could only be explained by the use of “magic.” Of course, those reviewers forget Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quotation:

Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Think about what Victorians might make of modern computers. If you could show them a modern movie with plenty of computer generated graphics (Spiderman 2; X-Men 2; The Matrix; etc.) on a laptop, those Victorians would be absolutely convinced that some form of magic was present.

What would true Vikings think of a modern aircraft carrier conducting flight operations?

What would Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan make of a modern armored division?

All of these technologies would be so far beyond any sort of experience that those historical figures would have that they would most likely be forced to consider the technologies magical.

How then, can we judge the possibilities of future technology in the here and now? If someone asked Ben Franklin what he thought of the Internet, could he even begin to offer an informed opinion? Of course not. Even though Ben was a smart guy, the Internet was so far beyond his knowledge and experience that he would have nothing to offer us on that topic.

To then say that aliens performing tasks X, Y, and Z several thousand years in the future requires magic, is the act of a very small mind.
To say that humans would require magic to travel from point A to point B using technology C requires one to prejudge both practicality and possibility of technologies that we have not even envisioned yet, much less attempted to build.

The book itself is a good, solid read. There are sections that seem more than a bit, um, unnecessary. And when a book is 768 pages long, even a few extra subplots can seem like egregious padding. However, Hamilton has a reputation for tying those seemingly unrelated subplots into the larger whole, so I’m trying to reserve judgement until the second book arrives on the library’s shelves in 2005.

At some point in the recent past, I learned that the 9/11 Commission Report had been nominated for a National Book Award.

Rather than pay a bookstore ten dollars for a pre-printed copy, I downloaded the various chapters and printed them on my computer. Even as the paper started spewing out of my printer, I found the document hard to put down.I’m about half-way through the report and I can ununequivacably state that unlike every other government document I’ve ever read, and I’ve read more than my fair share, the 9/11 Commission Report makes for compelling reading. The first chapter is as taut as anything a modern thriller either tapped out on a keyboard. Perhaps what makes it so interesting is that all of the events actually happened and weren’t just passing phantoms in the writer’s imagination.

Government actions, committees, and agencies are examined in reasonably harsh light. If something worked, or more likely did not work, as designed or intended, the writers of the report say so in plain english. Such frankness is almost unheard of in a government report on itself.

Since it seems that at least some major subset of the recommendations in this report will become law/policy, and since the report is such good reading, you could do worse than to pick up a copy of the report and peruse it in your spare time.

A telling excerpt from Dogs Behaving Badly by Dr. Nicholas Dodman:

My sister told me a story about her young German shepherd, who thrilled in chasing squirrels in her backyard. Fawn never actually caught the squirrels but would chase them up trees and off the property and then bark in lengthy exclamation. Both dog and owner were satisfied with this arrangement until one day a fleeing squirrel became entwined in the tennis net.With the dog advancing from the south and the tennis net blocking the northern escape route, the squirrel was spinning its wheels in desperation. As Fawn loomed closer, the squirrel suddenly flopped down motionless, playing possum, so to speak. Fawn had never seen anything like this before and cocked her head in disbelief, creating an image of the RCA-parlaphone signature dog. My sister, an animal lover, saw the squirrel’s plight and called Fawn off in a stern tone. “Leave it, Fawn. Leave it alone!” A confused but well-trained Fawn obeyed by taking a pace back and in so doing taking her eyes off the squirrel for a split second. The squirrel, making its second error of the day, then leaped at Fawn, attaching itself firmly to her lip. Fawn howled in pain and ran around in circules attempting to detach the half-crazed rodent. She was eventually successful in this quest and, having shaken it loose, now knew exactly what to do. In fell swoop, she snapped its neck with her powerful jaws. Game, set, and match to the dog. That squirrel will not be passing on its genes to the next generation.