The Wojina Monologues -- Main

Sunday, August 10, 2008, 1:40 am Night Soldiers, by Alan Furst

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this "spy novel", as I expected I would -- all the smart people I know who like spy novels either own it or recommend it or both. It's sort of a personal story and a sprawling story at the same time, covering the whole of World War II in its timeline, and doing a great job of giving a sense of the European perspective on that war. In particular, the middle-school history version of World War II (Hitler started killing people, so England and Russia and the U.S. stepped up) is shown to be a farce: the political tumult underlying the war is both far more complicated than that, involving ethnic groups and ideologies and religions and nations (whatever those are) that have been at war for thousands of years in Europe. One tries to be happy while there is no fighting, but most of the time, one just tries to survive.

I put "spy novel" in quotes above because there's almost no spying. the protagonist is a former spy for Russia, but pretty early on, he strikes out on his own, in part because he's not a True Believer and in part because of the internal power struggles that characterize Russia's approach to this unique Europe-wide turmoil.

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Sunday, August 10, 2008, 1:30 am The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A brilliant book for the first 80%, but I think Chabon would have been better served to tell the story of Landsman without taking the plot into the fantastical direction he did toward the end, and thus forcing himself to rely too much on not-so-sly allusions to modern politics and religion in the public sphere. Perhaps he felt that he needed such a grand end to the plot to justify his alternate-universe premise.

But really, that's a minor quibble, because the rest of the book is a sight to behold. Each character's speech patterns are unique, starting with Landsman's self-consciously hard-boiled-detective and extending over to even minor characters such as the newspaperman's stilted Yiddish, full of flowery bluster.

Chabon clearly took care with each and every phrase, sentence, and paragraph. The effect of this is frequent hilarity and vivid physical and emotional descriptions giving the reader a panoramic picture of this imaginary world and the characters that populate it.

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Sunday, August 10, 2007, 1:15 am The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

Really mediocre. The cover promised that some people consider it the single best science fiction novel of all time. I don't know who those people are, but they're wrong. The book has positive attributes, in particular Bester's depiction of the social and economic chaos caused by an advance in human understanding resulting the ability of nearly everyone to teleport.

But as for the story, and the protagonist? The lead character is simply unbelievable. I don't buy him in the slightest. And the story is not terribly compelling. I've learned that good stories and characters have arcs. Note the word: it implies a certain smoothness, a continuity. No such thing exists here: the protagonist is a binary creature -- he begins the novel at point A and at some point he turns into point B, but we never see the change, we just see A and B. And the plot sort of proceeds the same way, in fits and starts, like a step function rather than a nice smooth continuous one.

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Thursday, July 24, 2008, 11:30 am Barry Siegel's "Claim of Privilege"

Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets by Barry Siegel

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Really good, actually -- Siegel writes about law in a way that doesn't make me immediately think, "Oh, this guy isn't a laywer," which is rare. How many newspaper stories or books have you read where the writer just doesn't seem to know how to put legal words together in the same way that a lawyer does? Siegel avoids that.

More importantly, though, Siegel tells a story that draws clear parallels between the dawning of the Cold War and the post-9/11 era without beating us over the head with it. He makes the story much more personal, a sad tale of the government lying to three widows and largely getting away with it. But he doesn't ignore the larger ramifications, either -- he weaves them in skillfully, pointing us in the right direction without making the book his own crusade for truth and justice.

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Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 1:15 pm Yale's deleterious effect?

Brian Leiter says that Yale's disproportionate number of alumni entering legal academia compared with other schools is "clearly having a deleterious effect". I wish he'd explain the effect, because I'm not sure it's as "clear" as he thinks it is.

Sunday, July 13, 2008, 2:00 pm Legal cynicism in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

To set up: it's 1950's Connecticut, a New York suburb, where Tom Roth's formerly wealthy grandmother has recently passed away. The probate judge has received a challenge to the will from Edward Schultz, who claims that the grandmother promised him her house in return for service for the remainder of her life (which he provided). The judge's name is Saul Bernstein.

Saul Bernstein walked into the First National Bank, which was the biggest building in South Bay. ... He walked to the rear of the bank, opened a gate in a low partition there, and approached the desk of Walter Johnson, the president. "Good morning, Walt," he said. "I'd like to find out the bank balance of two men: a Mr. Thomas R. Rath and a Mr. Edward F. Schultz."

...

As he waited for Johnson to get him the figures he had requested, Bernstein reviewed for the hundredth time the possibilities, the different combinations of circumstance, which theoretically could have led to contradictory documents. ... His real responsibility, Bernstein felt, was to discover which of these circumstances had actually happened. Until he knew that, it would be impossible to tell what paragraphs in the thick law books which lined the walls of his inner office should be chosen to justify a decision in the case.

[Bernstein discovers that Schultz had set up arrangements with certain merchants in town to pad the old lady's bills, splitting the excess amounts between himself and the unscrupulous merchants.]

... One couldn't refuse to allow a man to inherit a house simply because he had padded bills and saved money, but Bernstein felt he was beginning to see the tortuous road to justice more clearly.

A major theme of the novel involves cynicism vs. idealism, and it's interesting to see it in its more positive form in the legal world: the judge could take the two documents and go to past cases and whatever statutes he has to determine the formal winner, but he instead delves into the facts (not entirely properly, I'm sure), finds out "what's really going on here," as my Contracts professor would say, and fits the precedent to the situation.

Cynicism or realism? Where's the line?

Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 6:45 pm New host == ads

I've moved this site from wonka, a server at Hampshire, to a free host, so that the site will actually be hosted rather than being forwarded/masked. The fact that the host is free means that we've got some text ads in the posts now (that's the green double-underlined stuff), and there may be a banner on the way as well, although I'm not sure.

But I've also done the awesome and added Haloscan comments and trackbacks to the site. It seems like nobody uses trackbacks anymore, and I'm certainly not doing it, mainly because I'm doing this blog using a homebrew python script that generates static pages, so it doesn't have any of that fancy functionality like sidebars and searching and trackbacks that are a staple of other blogs. That's mostly because this isn't the most serious of blogs, and also because I kind of wanted to try it to see if it'd work. (I'm rather proud of myself to have created a functioning RSS feed, for instance.)

Anyway, that's the administrivia. Back to your regularly scheduled (one post per month) programming.

EDIT: It seems that the other kind of ad you'll see here is an interstitial. Sorry about that. But I'm not about to pay for hosting for this little thing at this point.

Monday, June 23, 11:15 am Brian Leiter on Stanford's new pass-fail system

Leiter speaks from personal experience in saying that the pass-fail system (a) is really a "pass" system; and (b) thus creates a mentally checked-out apporach to law school in a substantial portion of the class.

First thought: a substantial portion of every law school class is mentally checked out, whether there are grades or not, because law schools don't fail people. Once you're admitted to Stanford, nothing else matters whether there are grades or not because you can get almost any job you want even at the bottom of your class. Thus, I don't think pass-fail will change anything.

Second thought: he says that Yale might be special because its selectivity allows it to choose the best of the best, thus creating an atmosphere where the intellectually curious will overwhelm those who check out despite the pass-fail thing. Because Stanford is (slightly) less selective, he wonders whether the same will happen there. But isn't Boalt perhaps a better comparison here? Boalt is less selective than either Stanford or Yale, and it seems to be happy enough with it's no-grades approach (I infer this from the fact that it hasn't reinstituted grades).

Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 12:15 am If you don't want to be disillusioned about law professor brilliance, don't read this

Rick Hills's post and the comments.

Sunday, May 25th, 3:30 pm Orrin Hatch on judicial nominations

Here. Some highlights:

Hatch is disingenuous:

A dozen of those nominees were not confirmed because President Clinton withdrew them. He actually withdrew them. That was not my prerogative as chairman. That was his prerogative as President. It continues to baffle me how the Judiciary Committee chairman can be blamed because nominees who no longer exist were not confirmed.

Senator Hatch surely knows that withdrawals are not often made simply of the President's own accord, but because of political pressure. Whether Hatch himself was the one applying the pressure on any of these dozen I don't know, but to say that it was simply the President's prerogative is silly.

Hatch finds it necessary to mention the ethnicity of the nominee to head the Civil Rights Division: "[Grace Becker] is a Eurasian woman with whom I think nobody can find one iota of fault." As for whether fault can be found, see this NY Times editorial, mentioning that Becker supported the Indiana Voter ID law, the impact of which will be felt most by the ethnic minorities her office is supposed to protect. It should also be noted that this is largely symbolic, since she's currently the acting head of the Division anyway.

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