The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think."

The Last Lecture (2008), a New York Times bestseller, is a wonderful book indeed. For once, even such an avowed cynic and elitist as this reviewer agrees with most other readers. The book was written by a professional author, Jeffrey Zaslow, from tapes recorded by Randolph Pausch, a professor of computer science who died of cancer before reaching the age of 48. The book expands on the main topics of the actual last lecture that Dr. Pausch gave at Carnegie Mellon University after he had been given a diagnosis of only a few months to live. Yet The Last Lecture is not about dying, but an upbeat meditation on how to live:

"I lectured about the joy of life, about how much I appreciated life, even with so little of mine left. I talked about honesty, integrity, gratitude, and other things I hold dear."

The leading motif in Dr. Pausch's book is the life-driving importance of striving to achieve one's childhood dreams:

Whatever my accomplishments, all of the things I loved were rooted in the dreams and goals I had as a child... and in the ways I had managed to fulfill almost all of them."

Naturally, there is a lot about teaching in this short book and as a university professor myself I read these passages with great interest. I agree with the author that although

"[i]t is an accepted cliché in education that the number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn"

a better teaching goal is

"...to help students learn how to judge themselves."

One will find a lot of first-class, non-trivial advice on how to live, where some of the recommendations are real pearls of wisdom. Just take this:

"I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every time, because hip is short-term. Earnest is long term."

And the deepest and most beautiful sentence in the entire book about one of these things that make life worth living:

"It's a thrill to fulfill your own childhood dreams, but as you get older, you may find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun."

Down-to-earth, simple wisdom is there too, for instance about shortcuts to success

"A lot of people want a shortcut. I find the best shortcut is the long way, which is basically two words: work hard."

Very, very strongly recommended read.
(This review is dedicated to EVK.)

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Brain Droppings by George Carlin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"They say if you outlaw guns, only outlaws and criminals will have guns. Well, shit, those are precisely the people who need them."

Note to myself: Never again read a collection of George Carlin's musing on the trolley, when commuting to work! The trolley was quite crowded, only one available seat which I took, my co-passengers cramped and then I started exploding with laughter. I did everything to contain myself: to no avail! Poor people around me were stiff with fear of this giggling maniac in their midst.

Not everybody will like Mr. Carlin's humor: dark, cynical, deeply disappointed with the human species. George Carlin, famous for his "seven dirty words" routine, is one of the most influential stand-up comics of all time. Extremely opinionated and ruthless in his criticisms of all manifestations of human stupidity, hypocrisy, and evil:

"This species is a dear, hateful, sweet, barbaric, tender, vile, intelligent, confused, virtuous, evil, thoughtful, perverted, generous, greedy species. In short, great entertainment."

I am also opinionated and my opinions coincide with his in almost every aspect of his criticism of the human race. I am just thousand times less funny than he is and also I do not have the courage to express my opinions out loud. Take the epigraph quote about guns: why would any normal, average person need a gun? How would I ever use a gun in my life? I believe that only outlaws and criminals really need guns. I am certainly for outlawing guns for regular people.

Mr. Carlin is merciless particularly about us, the "Americans":

Traditional American values: Genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods."

Also:

"The keys to America: the cross, the brew, the dollar, and the gun."

In addition to making bitter fun of people's fascination with violence, religion, sports, television, etc. the main target of Mr. Carlin's hard-hitting satire is the language. First, he attacks the various language inconsistencies, clichés, oxymorons, and redundancies, like in

"Unique needs no modifier. Very unique, quite unique, more unique, real unique, fairly unique and extremely unique are wrong, and they mark you as dumb. Although certainly not unique."

But it is the critique of euphemisms ("I don't like euphemisms. Euphemisms are a form of lying." Precisely!) and politically correct speech that is the most devastating. I do not have the courage to quote Mr. Carlin's musings in this area. But I certainly agree with him.

The reader will find some bittersweet humor, slightly tinged with melancholy, like in:

"There's an odd feeling you get when someone on the sidewalk moves slightly to avoid walking into you. It proves you exist. Your mere existence caused them to alter their path. It's a nice feeling. After you die, no one has to get out of your way anymore."

and also completely silly yet unbelievably hilarious quotes like

"One time, a few years ago, Oprah had a show about women who fake orgasms. Not to be outdone, Geraldo came right back with a show about men who fake bowel movements."

The reader will also find the famous monologue about "stuff" in its entirety.

George Carlin's Brain Droppings (1997) is the third most hilarious book I have read in my life (after Wstep do imagineskopii (not translated from Polish to English, and most likely untranslatable) and The Third Policeman . I am rounding the rating up. Yay!

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Introduction to Probability: Second Revised Edition by Charles M. Grinstead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"One may summarize these results by stating that one should not get drunk in more than two dimensions."

The above is the most extraordinary sentence one can find in a university textbook on advanced mathematics! Charles M. Grinstead's and J. Laurie Snell's Introduction to Probability (Second Edition, 1997) is indeed a most remarkable textbook, by far the best text that I have ever used in my almost 40 years of teaching undergraduate mathematics and computer science. Probability was my favorite field of mathematics during my own studies in the early 1970s, but I somehow avoided teaching it, most likely because I had not found a textbook that I really liked. Until Grinstead and Snell.

Standard textbooks heavily focus on the combinatorial aspects of probability, which do not interest me too much. When I teach the upper-division probability course I love to emphasize the calculus-based approach, particularly when it involves multidimensional calculus and its applications to joint probability distributions. Grinstead and Snell's approach is virtually tailor-made for my probability course.

The second factor that makes me love the textbook is the emphasis on random numbers and pseudo-random variables generation. Having worked in the field of mathematical modeling and simulation for over 40 years I believe this is a natural approach to ground the probability course in. Grinstead and Snell's geometry-based problems that use the cumulative distribution functions to find the densities are a wonderful teaching tool: the students can also appreciate the applications of calculus: many of my students seemed to like discovering the connections.

Yet another great feature of the textbook is its emphasis on the moment generating function. Naturally, it is used to prove the Central Limit Theorem, the fundamental theorem of probability and the foundation of statistics. I follow the mathematical argument in class every time I teach the course so that math majors can appreciate a little more elaborate proof than the usual toy ones.

I also love the inclusion of a chapter of random walks (from which the epigraph is taken). When teaching partial differential equations (another of my favorite fields in math) I often discuss the Tour du Wino method of numerically solving the Laplace equation, which uses the random walks approach. The authors provide the famous proof by Pólya, which shows that a random walk must eventually return to the origin in one or two dimensions, but not necessarily for higher dimensions.

Of many other nice features of the textbook I should mention the authors' clear treatment of the Bayes' Theorem and the fascinating Historical Remarks that accompany many chapters. A truly wonderful book! The best textbook I have ever used!

Five stars.


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The Sea by John Banville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark."

"The past beats inside me like a second heart."

John Banville's The Sea (2005) offered me one of the most remarkable literary experiences of my life. After just a few pages I knew I was reading a magnificent novel. By mid-book I was absolutely certain this was one of the very best books I had ever read. And I kept reading, very slowly, savoring the masterful prose. And then... Then the ending came, the last few pages where the author suddenly decided to explain things, and some of the extraordinary charm of the novel instantaneously dissipated. Real life turned into a story; human truth turned into a plot. What a disappointing moment!

The Sea is a masterpiece fully deserving its Man Booker Prize; I will naturally round the rating up to five stars, but - to me - it is no longer a novel unique in its greatness, which it had been until the ending. In this inept but heartfelt review I am trying to convey my early feelings about the novel before the very ending broke the spell.

There is no linearity in life; life is not a story. Things in life occur for no reason and for no reason they do not occur either. Life is a jumbled collage of events that had once happened. The present is the accumulation of the past, but they also exist concurrently and one flows through the cracks of the other:

"[...] it all has begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present."

Max Morden, a retired art historian, is an 11-year-old boy, playing on the beach with the Grace family, his wife Anna is dead, the boy falls in love with Mrs. Grace while Anna is dying "leaning sideways from the hospital bed, vomiting on to the floor," and the boy falls out of love with Mrs. Grace during an erotic experience at the beach, Anna is getting the death sentence from the doctor and the magical moment with Mrs. Grace - the culmination of the boy's love - begins to happen

"[...] in that Edenic moment at what was suddenly the centre of the world [...] and blonde Mrs. Grace offering me an apple [...]"

But the magic of the moment is broken by a hurricane of events. And it all begins and ends with the sea, the great infinity that created us and then absorbs us.

So deeply human the novel is that - although nothing even remotely similar ever happened to me - I feel all these events belong to me as they belong to all people. I feel that my past and everybody else's past merge with Max Morden's past in the universal human past. The truth of the elderly art historian, a grieving widower who is the 11-year-old boy in love with a mature woman is my truth and the truth of all people.

There is so much more in the novel: there is Claire, Max's "ungainly, unpretty daughter," and there are unforgettable Miss Vavasour and the Colonel. The boy's disgust at the mingling of God and sex, and a fragment seemingly taken straight out of another of my favorite authors, Cees Nooteboom:

"We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while [...]"

There also is the absolutely stunning passage about Max becoming aware of the dichotomy between himself and that what is not-himself:

"In her I had my first experience of the absolute otherness of other people. [...] the world was first manifest for me as an objective entity.

Luminous, breathtaking prose.

Four-and-three-quarter stars.

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