The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June."

What a wonderful way to begin the second half of 2021! John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021) is the best book I have read this year so far, and only my second five-star rating in six months. The book is a collection of 46 short essays on various manifestations of human life and human culture. (In a gimmick that will sound familiar for us Goodreads members, the author provides a rating for each such anthropocene manifestation on a five-star scale.)

Anthropocene is usually defined as "the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment." Yet, the book is not really focused on human influence on the environment. Yes, the author makes it clear that the human race has been succeeding in its job of destroying the planet, but this is not his main point. I love the book so much because he shows that despite all the infinite and perpetual human suffering - pain, disease, pandemics, failure, fear, loneliness, and eventual death - life is beautiful and the world is beautiful. We just need to look carefully.

Being a "word person" as opposed to an "image person" (to me, one right word is often worth a thousand images; and in most cases I care more how the authors write than what they write about), I admire John Green's prose. In the unforgettable essay Sunsets, he defends the appreciation of "the clichéd beauty of an ostentatious sunset":

"It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, [...] And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself [...] It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you've been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That's bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunset five stars."

In one of the most moving essays, Auld Lang Syne, where the author mentions the death of his friend, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the reader will find the following passage of evocative prose:

"And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past -- seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them -- and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us."

This is not to say that it is just the writing that I admire in Anthropocene; in all the essays there is so much wisdom about life and about being human. Lascaux Cave Paintings is, to me, the best essay in the collection. The author writes about Palaeolithic paintings made by people who lived about 17,000 years ago. Some of the paintings are the so-called "negative hand stencils" that all kids produce at some point of their childhood. John Green writes:

"[...] the hand stencils say, 'I was here.' They say, 'You are not new.'"

While the members of each human generation - the Boomers like myself, the Millennials like my daughter, or Gen Alpha like my grandkids - want to think that they and their times are unique in history, we all are really the same, and the Lascaux Cave artists are our great-great-... repeat about 600 times... -great-great-grandparents. We are human, we live, we love, and we die.

There is so much more in the collection! Great Gatsby, velociraptors, scratch 'n' sniff stickers, air conditioning, Jerzy Dudek - the Polish goalkeeper of Liverpool F.C., Doi's circle drawings, and more and more. And there is even laugh-out-loud humor:

"I don't labor under the delusion that the United States is an exemplary or even particularly exceptional nation, but we do have a lot of the world's largest balls."

This is a book full of beautiful prose, sweetness, and love of life and of the world. I guess the only way to enhance the reading experience would be to listen to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World while reading.

I would like to thank my outstanding former student for giving me this book as a birthday gift.

Five stars.

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Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"William Taubman's monumental, long-awaited biography of Nikita Khrushchev is the most important book on Khrushchev to appear in English since the deposed Soviet leader's own memoirs in 1970. It is rich in analysis and factual detail, shedding new light both on Khrushchev's life and on the Soviet state."
- Robert Cottrell, New York Review of Books

A personal reflection: Khrushchev was the first politician whom I remember from childhood. Until the 1990s, Poland was in the Soviet sphere of influence so the Soviet party leaders were bigger than God for us, the Polish children. I remember one night in October 1964 when my mother woke me up saying "No more Khrushchev!" and it was like the end of the world. I remember exactly how the room looked from my bed when I heard the news.

This is the eleventh book on Russian and Soviet leaders that I am reviewing here on Goodreads. The full list is included below the rating. Also, it is the second biography of Nikita Khrushchev that I am reviewing, and a very different one from Medvedev's work. I completely agree with the sentiment expressed by the professional reviewer and quoted in the epigraph. Let me steal yet another blurb, this time from Simon Heffer in The Spectator:

"A monumental book....A masterpiece, magnificently researched and well written, bringing out the true dimensions of his subject"

Note the use of the word "monumental" by both reviewers. Yes, that's indeed the best adjective to describe of William Taubman's Khrushchev. The Man and His Era. (2003) Not only is the biography monumental - in size, scope, and depth of detail - but it also is "definitive," in the sense that it will be next to impossible to improve upon. When reading the bio one is overwhelmed by the breathtaking thoroughness and completeness - almost as if every month of Khrushchev's life and every aspect of his activities has been meticulously documented. Note the volume of the book: 651 pages, plus over 200 (!!!) pages of notes, bibliography, and index.

Not being a historian, political scientist, or a writer, I am not qualified to properly review a superb biography. I will just offer a few comments on some of the fragments of the bio that made the strongest impression on me.

Khrushchev (three years younger than my grandmother) spent his youth in rural Russia, in extremely primitive living conditions, which would be unimaginable for most modern people. Not only poverty - which is ubiquitous today even in the richest countries - but also famine and hunger-driven cannibalism. Add to this the extreme political persecution - extreme as in never-ending mass killings of so-called political enemies. If anything seems more shocking than eating other people to survive, it is having to sentence other people to death in order not be sentenced to death. The passages about Khrushchev, a young activist rising in the ranks of the Communist party, calling for executions of "enemies of the party and nation" during Stalin's purges are extremely hard to read.

Soon after the purges comes World War Two and the blood-curdling stupidity of Stalin, the "Greatest Genius of All Times and Nations," which cost millions of people their lives. When the mass-murdering tyrant finally dies in 1953, Khrushchev gradually grabs the power. The author's detailed explanations about why it was Khrushchev who won the succession power struggle are fascinating. In particular, I have been captivated by the detailed discussion of the so-called "anti-Beria plot," with its double twist.

Khrushchev's famous "Secret Speech" on February 25, 1956, when he began disclosing the unimaginably huge extent of Stalin's crimes against humanity and, in particular, against his nation, was the beginning of the great ideological thaw that stopped the avalanche of political killings and brutal persecution in Eastern Europe (naturally, the persecution remained unabated as it is one of the essences of human nature, but became less lethal).

In a particularly depressing fragment of the book the author writes about the people's of Soviet Georgia unyielding love for their Greatest Son, Stalin, who - despite that the Greatest Son spilled more Georgian blood than that of any other region - "carried flowers to the Stalin monument" during protests against Khrushchev's Secret Speech; twenty people died during protests against sullying Stalin's immortal name.

The Berlin Crisis of 1961: Thanks to reading Mr. Taubman's work I feel as if I finally understand the exact dynamics of the political events of that year, although I acutely remember the concern and nervousness of the Polish radio broadcasts 60 years ago. Almost immediately after this, the Cuban missiles crisis happens, when the world gets the closest to being destroyed in a global nuclear war. I have read about the crisis in several other books, yet Mr. Taubman offers new insights and details, especially on the bumbling execution of the Soviet plan to bring nuclear missiles to Cuba.

The Cuban crisis was one of the major factors in the unraveling of Khrushchev's political leadership. The author describes the events preceding and surrounding Khrushchev's ouster in October of 1964 with great clarity. Finally, in a harrowing passage, we read what the deposed Soviet leader regretted about his life:

"'Most of all the blood [...] My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.'"

It is a strong indictment of the failure of human race that Mr. Khrushchev, despite being instrumental in his youth in executing hundreds of people for fictitious political crimes in order to save his own life, undoubtedly deserves credit and praise for greatly contributing to ending Stalin's brutal reign. Mr. Khrushchev had laid the foundations for future reforms by Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Reading about humanity's lukewarm response toward Stalin's crimes makes one notice how constant the human nature is. Millions of people in ex-Soviet Union still cherish Stalin's memory. I know of another country where tens and tens of millions of people have voted for an utterly incompetent, corrupt, and failed politician.

Four-and-a-half stars.

My previous reviews of books on Soviet leaders:

Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure - by Robert G. Kaiser

The Struggle for Russia - by Boris Yeltsin

Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin - by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson

The Andropov File - by Martin Ebon

Against the Grain - An Autobiography - by Boris Yeltsin

Lenin to Gorbachev: Three generations of Soviet Communists

Brezhnev, Soviet Politician - by Murphy

Khrushchev - by Roy Medvedev

Gorbachev and His Revolution - by Mark Galeotti

Andropov - by Zhores Medvedev

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Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Machine Learning is the science (and art) of programming computers so they can learn from data."

It is December 27th, four days until the end of the year, and I am four books short of my Goodreads 2020 Reading Challenge goal of 60 books. Never abandon hope! I will review two computer science books that were tremendously important to me and my students in 2020, books that helped me return to the field of neural networks and machine learning in general and helped my outstanding research student complete her challenging and advanced research project with extraordinary success.

I worked with neural networks (NN) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and even co-taught a psychology/computer science course on neural network learning. However, in the 1990s it had become clear that the limits of what the then traditional NN architecture can achieve had been reached and the scientific community basically abandoned NNs as the preferred approach to machine learning. Yet beginning in the first decade of the 21st century we witnessed the rebirth of the NN idea, primarily via various multi-level NN models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) developed by Le Cun, Hinton, and others. Currently, CNNs achieve truly spectacular (without exaggeration one can say 'superhuman') results in various areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The recent explosion of research and commercial interest in ML resulted in an avalanche of books published on the topic, particularly "popular" books (ones that can serve as tutorials of sorts), addressed to computer science practitioners of various level of preparation, from complete novices to advanced. The range of quality of the books is even more vast. I worked with, read, or at least scanned thoroughly over 20 ML books and to me Hands-On Machine Learning is by far the best text, one that can serve for a wide variety of purposes: on one hand, it can serve as an ML textbook, on the other it can be used as a tutorial for particular methods of ML. (I will review the other great ML book, one that focuses purely on NN, the day after tomorrow. By the way, I was amazed how many bad, totally useless ML books have been published. Christmas spirit prevents me from listing their titles.)

Aurélien Géron, the author of Hands-On Machine Learning, comes with impressive industry credentials. He served as the Product Manager of YouTube video classification at Google, and held several senior positions in artificial intelligence engineering in various companies.

The first two chapters of the book, which belong to the first part entitledThe Fundamentals of Machine Learning, are an absolute must read for anyone interested in studying ML. The author presents the 'landscape of machine learning' and shows a typical ML project 'end-to-end', including data preparation and preprocessing as well as selecting, training, and fine-tuning the model.

The next six chapters of Part I focus on specific ML approaches and their mathematical background. We read about the methods of classification, the Support Vector Machines approach, including the 'kernel trick,' decision trees, ensemble learning and random forests. I love the solid yet very accessible presentation of the math background in the chapter on gradient descent, various types of regression, and regularization. Part I closes with a nice chapter about dimensionality reduction, which focuses on the method of Principal Component Analysis.

Part II of the book, titled Neural Networks and Deep Learning, gives a great overview of the so-called 'deep learning' approach: the reader will learn about the 'classical' NN approach, and then will be gradually introduced to the multi-level NN architecture, CNNs, recurrent NNs, and autoencoders.

The author's reliance on the production-ready Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow Python frameworks rather than on developing own toy versions of various algorithms is commendable. Scikit-Learn, a free software library of machine learning tools, is one of the best things developed in computer science in the last 50 years. It is a splendid manifestation of the power of open-source software.

From a teacher's point of view, the book is excellent! I believe Hands-On Machine Learning is great for the students too. It comes with a lot of interesting Python code samples, in the form of Jupyter notebooks. And the code works! The students can learn a lot by rewriting and extending the sample code.

Very, very highly recommended book! And I am going to round up my extremely high rating of

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Gail had a gift for intentness. She could caress shapeless moments [...] as if she was stroking a puppy, until they wriggled into life and sucked your fingers."

[This review is dedicated to EVK, my outstanding student, who gave me this book.]

Lorna Sage's Bad Blood (2000) is an extraordinary literary work! I could not believe that it is non-fiction. I felt everything was so real as if it were a work of fiction by a great writer. Non-fiction books almost never feel real to me because they do not transcend the particular, the specific, the individual. Their meaning and reach are constrained by the connection to concrete facts, like a balloon that wants to soar high in the sky but is tied to a child's hand. Fiction books are able to much better convey the truth since they allow the reader to focus more on the humanness in general rather than on particular people or concrete events.

Ms. Sage's prose is fabulous! She is an extraordinarily accomplished writer with a wonderful turn of the phrase. Just take this "caressing shapeless moments until they wriggle into life" phrase from the epigraph. Reading this I instantaneously recalled people who had this gift. How many of us, though, would have the talent to describe them in this apparently frivolous yet extremely precise way? A metaphor like that carries more meaning than a faithful and detailed account of real-life behavior.

But wait, there is more: Ms. Sage has written one of three best accounts of childhood and adolescence that I have ever read, along with J. Joyce's and J.M. Coetzee's (which are perhaps more universal and realistic as they are at least in part fictional). Playing doctor in the bushes, the horror of braces, schooling torture and malevolent teachers, like the one in the following, unforgettable passage:

"One day he lined up his class and went down the line saying with gloomy satisfaction 'You'll be a muck-shoveller, you'll be a muck-shoveller...' and so on and on [...]"

Still more: the magnificent account of the first school dance, a momentous event in a schoolchild's life. For me, also the mention of Paul Anka's song Diana! The event must have taken place about 1962. Well, I had my first school dance around that time too, and I also remember the horrors of worrying who, if anyone, I would dance with; and I also counted one, two, three, under my breath while "dancing." And, yes, Paul Anka's Diana was there too! A sort of disclaimer is needed: maybe I like the memoir so much because the author belongs to my generation?

The author's grandparents on her mother's side are the main focus of the memoir. Their hatred towards each other is the dominating motif:

"So married were Grandpa and Grandma that they offended each other by existing and he must have hated the prospect of gratifying her by going first. On the other hand she truly feared death, thus he could score points by hailing it as a deliverance and embracing his fate."

The entire thread of the grandfather's diary is stunningly well constructed and presented. The diary itself and the author's commentary seamlessly move from one to the other.

I could keep enumerating the literary values of the memoir, but the review is already too long. Let me only mention that we get an evocative account of life in deeply provincial Great Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Oh, and my three favorite sentences:

"[...] it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends [in a story], because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that way madness lies."

And what about

"He too was only fifteen, but he smoked and drank, and was fed up with being so young."

And let's end with the best quote about the ending:

"It's the sense of an ending that's timeless.

Four-and-a-half stars, and I am rounding up. Yay! First maximum rating since February.

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Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen."

In Preface, the author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist and a philosopher of science, addresses his book to "those who know little or nothing about modern science." Although I am an applied mathematician, an engineer, and have even taught a course on mechanics (a classical part of physics), I know very little - really next to nothing - about modern physics. I have learned a lot from that tiny book (total of 81 pages!) and I absolutely love Dr. Rovelli's amazing way of making some basic tenets of contemporary physics almost understandable by amateurs like myself. This is the best popular science writing I have ever read!

The first lesson deals with "the most beautiful of theories" - Einstein's general theory of relativity. We read wonderful passages like

"[...] the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that spaceitself."

We then read about curvature of space and that "it isn't only space that curves; time does too." The second lesson focuses on quantum mechanics, which in layman's terms posits that energy is discrete rather than continuous. And it is here that to my delight (and likely to screams of horror of many people) randomness and probability appear! Dr. Rovelli states at the end of the chapter that the equations of quantum mechanics and their consequences "remain mysterious," and suggests an idea that "reality [of the physical world] is only interaction." So cool!

I am omitting two next chapters in my summary, Architecture of the Cosmos and Particles (with its Standard Model, confirmed experimentally in 2013 yet still considered unsatisfactory). The Fifth Lesson focuses on the contradictions between the current form of the two main theories of physics - general relativity and quantum mechanics - and on the current efforts of physicists to combine the two theories. One such effort is the loop quantum gravity theory and Dr. Rovelli, in extreme modesty, neglects to write that he is one of the founders (if not the main founder - that I do not know) of the theory.

Naturally, the lesson titled Probability, Time, and the Heat of Black Holes, is my favorite! Even a mention of the word "probability" makes my heart beat faster and here it becomes a central mechanism of physics. Dr. Rovelli writes

"This bringing of probability to the heart of physics, and using it to explain the bases of the dynamics of heat, was initially considered to be absurd."

And what about the following stunning passage:

"[...] the intimate connection between time and heat. There is a detectable difference between the past and the future only when there is the flow of heat. Heat is linked to probability; and probability in turn is linked to the fact that our interactions with the rest of the world do not register the fine details of reality."

Finally, in the lesson called In Closing, the author writes about "ourselves" - us, the humans. He dwells on the nature of consciousness and the issue of free will. In a passage that unfortunately becomes more and more relevant with each passing year he points out the "incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture." He also offers a sobering prediction that "our species will not last long" and alludes to the damage that the species keeps doing.

A beautifully written book about Very Difficult Things.

Five stars.


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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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Looking for Alaska by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to support her every endeavor."

A beautiful sentence from a wonderful book. A few months ago I reviewed Uglies, a very good novel in the Young Adult genre, recommended by a student of mine. I was astonished by how much I liked the book and became quite embarrassed of my generally disdainful attitude towards the genre. So when the same student highly recommended another YA novel I could not wait to read it. John Green's Looking for Alaska (2005) is a terrific book; although it is addressed to young people, it treats them as they should be treated - as adults.

We meet Miles Halter as he leaves his "family and Florida and the rest of [his] minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama." He refers to François Rabelais' last words when he says

"That's why I am going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps."

Miles' adventures at the Culver Creek Preparatory School provide the plot of the novel. His roommate, Chip, aka "the Colonel," introduces him not only to the school's social structure but also to Alaska, "the hottest girl in all of human history." The plot is riveting and amazingly plausible to the very end.

This is a wonderfully mature book in how it handles serious topics and would do well as mandatory reading for all teenagers. Had I known the book twenty-something years ago, when my daughter was in her early teens, I would have wanted her to read it. I haven't found anything naive, cheap, condescending, overly simplistic, or brazenly didactic in the novel. It is amazing how much good stuff, how much common sense it packs with regard to life advice. And how well it handles the topics of sex and sexual initiation for which - as I understand - it got into some trouble with the self-proclaimed guardians of morality who attempt to perpetuate their own sexual hangups in their children. No vulgarity, no titillation with the subject, no guilt; just the healthy way of treating Things That Need To be Dealt With.

Completely unexpectedly I found a passage that touched a theme which would naturally belong to the type of Books for Very Old People that I love to read but which I would never expect to find in a YA novel. Take the quote that seems to come straight from Cees Nooteboom, the greatest scholar of human impermanence:

"Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow.

The novel is imbued with the love of books. It mentions so many great authors: François Rabelais, Gabriel García Márquez (a quote from The General in His Labyrinth provides a sort of motif for the entire novel), Kurt Vonnegut (his Cat's Cradle is one of Alaska's favorite books), poetry of Auden. While the author provides a charming description of Alaska's physical beauty - from which I took the epigraph - it is her love of books that adds a more important dimension to her "hotness."

Many wonderful passages in the novel: let me just mention the touchingly sweet Thanksgiving scene at the Colonel's mom. Then, there is all the humor, which made me laugh out loud so many times. True, I like to laugh and I probably laugh much more than an average person but I do not remember ever in my life laughing as hard as when I was reading the scene of the Great Prank during the Speaker Day at Miles' school. When Lara, the Romanian student, tells the speaker to "subvert the patriarchal paradigm" and he proceeds accordingly I got a hysterical attack of laughter which lasted 10 minutes and almost ended in suffocation. Oh, how I wish I were a part of a prank like that!

A beautiful love story whose poetry will be understood by young people, yet a mature and wise story. I am not quite sure what's going on with me: while always so stingy with the rating stars I am going to round up my 4.5 rating, even though the novel has not been written by any of the usual suspects like Joyce, Coetzee, Nabokov, Vonnegut, García Márquez, White or Nooteboom. Thank you, EK!

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Ascension: John Coltrane And His Quest by Eric Nisenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] the more one listens to Transition the more one hears a diamond-hard beauty unlike anything else in music. That something so roiling can also have such beauty is one of the paradoxes of Coltrane's art. A lot of great twentieth-century art, since it reflects its time, seems to confront and challenge its audience: Guernica, Finnegans Wake, The Rite of Spring. Like those modern masterpieces, much of Coltrane's work [...] has a modern grandeur unlike anything that has come before it.

Just last month I reviewed here Bill Cole's John Coltrane - a pseudo-research book full of New Age mumbo-jumbo and Fela Sowande's gibberish - which escaped the minimum rating on the strength of possibly interesting musicological analysis. Since I love John Coltrane's music and unreservedly admire what he stood for and what he tried to achieve in his art, I had to erase the anger caused by Mr. Cole's painful failure of a biography. In the ultimate contrast Eric Nisenson's work, Ascension. John Coltrane and His Quest is a totally wonderful book - deep, balanced, thoughtful, and focused.

I vividly remember the day (in 1966, I believe) when I first heard John Coltrane's music: I can see the room in my mother's small apartment when suddenly manic saxophone shrieks and wails came on the radio, immediately followed by utterly beautiful music. I remember my total fascination with the sound and with the raw power and deep passion of the music. Eric Nisenson begins his wonderful biography with an account how he first saw and heard John Coltrane live with his classic quartet (McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Jimmy Garrison) at the Half Note:

"Coltrane [...] played roiling arpeggios alternating with ribbons of intense lyricism often accentuated by saxophone cries and wails. [...] He seemed to be not in this world, and I, as well as most of the audience, [...] felt we had long left it far behind, too. [...] My body felt exhilaration, transport, even as much as my mind and spirit."

The story of Coltrane's life and his music is told traditionally, in a chronological manner. The author focuses in more detail on transcendent and timeless masterpieces in Coltrane's opus, such as A Love Supreme or Transition. Mr. Nisenson has the courage to call out failures as well, such as the audacious yet unsuccessful attempt to enter the realm of free jazz, Ascension or the bizarre artifact of the Sixties, Om.

The passages about A Love Supreme are some of the most compelling writings about music:

"[...] the last section on A Love Supreme [...] creates the impression of perfect stillness, like a man on his knees with his head bowed. It is utterly radiant and transcendent, at times pleading, almost sobbing in its need to be with God. It is one of the few works of art that, like the Sistine Chapel or Chartres Cathedral or Bach's St. Matthew's Passion is itself a religious experience."

The subtitle of the biography refers to Coltrane's quest, which - as most music critics agree - was the "quest to reach and find God through seeking within." Yet the author is careful to explain that Coltrane was not worshipping any particular God but rather "a personal synthesis of [...] ideas basic to all religions," Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and others. Mr. Nisenson also points out that Coltrane's quest was more of spiritual than religious nature and that it might have been a search for the universal truth.

Coltrane's personal statements about wanting to be a "force for good," his continual search for that perfect sound, and the fact that never in his career had he made any concession to popular taste or cared what the audiences wanted to listen to tell me that his quest was for the three Transcendentals: Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Certainly not for things that we, mere mortals, crave: Money, Power, and Fame.

A great biography! I will round the rating up.

Four and half stars.


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Herzog by Saul Bellow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] he wasn't stable enough, he could never keep his mind at it. His state was too strange, this mixture of clairvoyance and spleen, esprit de l'escalier, noble inspirations, poetry and nonsense, ideas, hyperesthesia - wandering about like this, hearing forceful but indefinite music within, seeing things, violet fringes about the clearest objects."

I have finally read Saul Bellow's Herzog (1961-1964), one of the most acclaimed novels written in this country in the 20th century. A very difficult book to read but fully worthwhile the effort. I would venture a guess that of all fiction books I have ever read in my life this one may have the highest amount of content per page. I had to focus almost as much as if I were reading a math textbook. It took me a whole week to read the mere 340 pages and - at the end - I was sad that it was over.

Herzog is thoroughly un-American: it is mainly about human failure. Failure as an academic, failure as a spouse, failure as a father. Failure and its consequences in the form of a near nervous breakdown and depression. Failure is the most interesting of all possible topics in literature: we all fail, constantly, continually, and inevitably as we tend to always want more than we can get. A mathematician/computer programmer in me would say: failure is the human default while success is a random event. Mr. Bellow puts it succinctly in one of the greatest sentences I have ever read:

"Looking for happiness - ought to be prepared for bad results."

Moses E. Herzog, a once promising assistant professor of history of literature, author of an outstanding PhD thesis and an unfinished book on the history of Romanticism, now teaches in an adult-education night school in New York. He is twice divorced and his second wife, Madeleine, an aspiring academician herself, cheated on him with his best friend. Mr. Herzog does not have much contact with his two young children. Struggling with his emotional and intellectual crisis he seeks help of a psychiatrist. He also seeks contact with women to satisfy his sexual needs but having been burned by two failed long-time relationships he is unable of emotional engagement.

Characters in the novel are superbly portrayed - those are real, full-bloodied people. Characterization of Madeleine, "a highbrow broad", is an absolute masterpiece. I am totally convinced I personally know her and I feel I have personally witnessed her predatory, manipulative, and egotistic behavior. By the way, it would be so cool to read a novel written from her point of view, all about Herzog's faults.

Herzog is technically a novel but there is really no plot to speak of until the ending of the book when a few events begin to happen. This is another reason of my sadness at the ending fragments of the book - I have found reading the ravings of a defeated intellectual much more interesting than his life story. Juxtaposing Hegel's or Kierkegaard's philosophical arguments with Madeleine's caprices and misdeeds is absolutely priceless. The narrator's letters to philosophers, scientists, writers, public officials, (some dead like Nietzsche, Schrodinger, or Teilhard deChardin, some contemporary like Eisenhower), his colleagues, friends and adversaries, constitute a substantial portion of the text. These are wonderful letters - Mr. Herzog is a wonderful writer, just a failed one. Having myself been an aspiring intellectual and having failed at it I can vouch to the truthfulness of the following quote:

"Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick."

I love the literary device of mixing the first- and third-person narration, similar as in another masterpiece The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B . This simple device yields wonderful effect: it makes the novel sound not like a story of one particular person but rather the story of the times.

Based on what I have written above one might think that Herzog is a relentlessly dark and grim read. Absolutely not! It is in fact (painfully) funny in many places. Observing a human being thrashing about searching for happiness has a strong comic component. We suffer, we struggle, we fail, and then we die. Yet there is good news, sort of. Mr. Bellow writes:

"Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is."

Wonderful! The emergence of a plot at the end of the novel prevents me from assigning the maximum numeric rating but I would have to be insane not to round it up.

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Often the dying become extremely severe. We will still be here when they're gone and it's not easy for them to forgive us."

Finally I have begun to fill a huge gap in my Great American Literature education: I have just read my first novel by Saul Bellow - Ravelstein (2000). What a great read it has been! True, the first 20 or so pages are highly intimidating: the author assumes the reader's erudition and complete focus, and the text almost overwhelms with hyper-intellectualism. But having survived the beginning pages many readers should get accustomed to the challenges of the prose, like I did. However, I need to offer a warning: this novel may be better understood by older people, and by 'older' I mean people for whom death is no longer an abstract concept but a conspicuous event on the horizon.

The narrator, known as Chick, a seventy-something writer, is obviously an alter ego of Mr. Bellow himself (the author was in fact 85 when the novel was published). Professor Ravelstein, for whom Chick is the closest friend, is "a major figure in the highest intellectual circles," an internationally renowned professor of philosophy, and the author of a best-selling book that expounds his conservative views about the decline of American culture. The book made millions for Prof. Ravelstein and now he can afford flying to Paris to buy Lanvin jackets and custom-made silk shirts. He also happens to be gay and suffers from AIDS complications. He wants Chick to write his memoirs.

In his writings Professor Ravelstein captures "modernity in its full complexity" and the human costs of modernity. He criticizes the mass-market aspect of cultural modernity and juxtaposes it with culture of the olden days, writing about people who read "Stendhal's novels or Thomas Hardy's poems", instead of sucking garbage flowing from TV, Facebook or Twitter. He recommends interest in Plato and Thucidides rather than current celebrities:

"I like to say when I am asked about Finnegan[s Wake], that I am saving him for the nursing home. Better to enter eternity with Anna Livia Plurabelle than with the Simpsons jittering on the TV screen."

Particularly sharp is Ravelstein's critique of the modern education system and the fact that the "liberal education had shrunk to the vanishing point." The universities are excellent in sciences and engineering but a failure at liberal arts. At this point I realized that Mr. Bellow's Ravelstein is modeled on the real-life philosopher and classicist, Allan Bloom. And indeed I have found out that the author and Dr. Bloom were friends and colleagues at the University of Chicago. The life story of Ravelstein and that of Dr. Bloom are in fact parallel. Yet let us remember: this is a novel, not any kind of Dr. Bloom's biography. By it being beautifully written fiction I find the novel much more realistic than any non-fiction biography could be.

Scattered throughout the novel are wonderful morsels of truth about human life and especially death. We the geezers will appreciate the mention of one of the main problems of aging - "speeding up of time." We the geezers may also be able to understand the sentence I quoted in the epigraph above. It's a hard truth to swallow and very painful. Ravelstein is a great novel. My "to read" shelves will now gather other Bellow's works.

Four and three quarter stars.

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The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B by J.P. Donleavy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"'Yes sir, I know that my redeemer liveth. I know it.'"

One of the most unforgettable books I have read in my life! J.P. Donleavy's The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968) combines breathtaking prose, lyricism, and biting humor with sobering reflections on the human condition. It also has the potential to offend many readers on many levels. Descriptions of pre-adolescent sexuality, numerous risqué scenes, and taboo topics make the novel perfect fuel for barbecues in fundamentalist communities. There have been documented cases of Slaughterhouse-Five burnings in this Land of Freedom of ours; Mr. Donleavy's work is a way more deserving book-burning material but - fortunately - not many people have heard about this wonderful novel.

In the grim days of Internet-generated uniformity of opinions, intimidation by political correctness, "safe zones" on campuses and the like, I found this novel a refreshing deviation from the safe-to-read-for-everybody, lukewarm, agreeable pap that dominates the so-called culture these days. We need more rather than less of controversial art to prevent the inbreeding of popular ideas - ideas that most everybody likes.

The novel recounts the first twenty-something years of Balthazar B's life beginning with his early childhood in Paris when he was raised by nannies in a very rich family. His father had died in the boy's early years and the mother was mainly focused on preserving the vestiges of youth. The boy attends exclusive public schools in England and the famous Trinity College in Dublin, and faces the tribulations of the early adulthood. Ostensibly the author focuses on the romantic and sexual aspects of Balthazar B's life: a boy's coming-of-age usual stuff - masturbation, school pranks, pubic lice, first love - but a discerning reader will notice that underneath the titillating facade of the novel the author tackles more important life issues.

The novel is exceptionally rich in humor in its entire range: subtle and understated funny phrases, sentences, and passages are intermixed with laugh-out-loud fragments. From the childhood memory of the Enema Anglaise, through the utterly hilarious scenes of public school housemaster excoriating smuttiness ("concerning things between the legs") and combating boys' masturbation, the live demonstration of dangers of pubic lice for medical students at the Sorbonne, to one of the funniest scenes I have ever read - the neighborhood vigilantes interrupting a carnal coupling:

"'Sir, gurgling and groaning and some cries have been heard out in the garden.'"

Yet underneath all this ribald humor there is so much understanding of human foibles, so much compassion that there is no doubt whatsoever about the author's intentions.

The portrayal of Balthazar B is subtle, nuanced, and realistic. A child, a boy, and a young man in search of love. "While others are cunning and deceitful," Balthazar "remains always [...] kind." B's best friend is Beefy, also an unforgettable, vivid character, always in search of "pleasurings." For reasons of public decency I can quote only one of the many beatitudes coined by Beefy:

"Remember, blessed are they who are willing victims of the whip for they will scream to high heaven."

It may seem that the novel is light-hearted and fun all around. Absolutely not! It is full of lyricism, melancholy, and even sadness. Miss Fitzdare thread is bittersweet and makes an old man want to cry. And I have left the best thing for last: the extraordinarily accomplished prose. When I read books I mostly care about the beauty of the prose and the author's mastery of the literary craft. This is what makes me round my rating up to the rare maximum, reserved only for masterpieces.

Four and a half stars.



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The Aunt's Story by Patrick White
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"But on a morning the colour of zinc old Mrs Goodman died."

Patrick White's novel The Eye of the Storm which I read over 40 years ago is one of the books I love the most, one that touched me in the strongest way possible and made me realize that great literature is the apex of all arts, encompassing both beauty and truth. Of course I need to re-read it, but the 600-page volume intimidates me. So instead I decided for now to read shorter works by Mr. White, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1973. And I am ecstatic that I chose The Aunt's Story (1948), one of the earliest books by Mr. White. I am completely in awe of the magnificent prose and so very happy to assign the rare highest rating.

The novel, divided into three parts, relates the story of one woman's dissolution of identity and her descent into madness. We meet Theodora Goodman as a fiftyish spinster, an aunt to her sister's children. The first part recounts Theodora's childhood and youth. The story is so beautifully told that I was unable to put the book away. Theodora is a disappointment to her mother, the "old Mrs. Goodman" because she was an odd, sallow, and ugly child, and has not fulfilled the mother's hopes. Theo's pretty sister, Fanny, leads a comfortable and utterly conventional life. Theo takes care of Fanny's children and also of her aging mother. As she is socially awkward and unattractive, men are not interested in her; only one man courts her but he probably needs her only as yet another item on the long list of his material possessions. The closest she gets to love is when she has an epiphany of sorts during a concert of a Greek cellist - a sublimation of her needs to be close to another person.

The dreamlike, phantasmagoric second part of the novel takes place in Hôtel du Midí somewhere in Europe where Theo goes after her mother's death. She meets a number of strange and interesting characters in the Jardin Exotique at the hotel. Or does she? The hallucinatory atmosphere of unreality is so overwhelming that the reader will be right to ask whether all these people exist only within Theo's mind. Of course she herself may not know whether they are real. The boundary between her consciousness and the so-called real world has disappeared. The third part takes place somewhere in the United States, where Theodora is in the final stage of her journey into madness. Unable to adapt to any conventional norms of society she disposes of the last components of her external identity.

While the story is powerful and deeply affecting, it is the phenomenal prose that made a tremendous impression on me. Virtually on every page the reader will find a delicious nugget of truth packaged in a wrapping of stunningly original prose. In my long years I have never read a book so rich in fresh and vivid metaphors and metonyms. The following is one of the most extraordinary paragraphs of prose that I have ever read:

"All through the middle of America there was a trumpeting of corn. Its full, yellow, tremendous notes pressed close to the swelling sky. There were whole acres of time in which the yellow corn blared as if for judgement. It had taken up and swallowed all other themes, whether belting iron, or subtler, insinuating steel, or the frail human reed. Inside the movement of corn the train complained. The train complained of the frustration of distance, that resists, that resists. Distance trumpeted with corn."

(After the five-star rating I include three other fragments of Patrick White's breathtaking prose.) The novel is exactly 70 years old yet it does not feel dated at all. It could have been written last year. It reads completely fresh despite references to Hitler's annexations of countries in the 1930s or to Lenin and Kerensky from the times of the Soviet Revolution of 1917.

A magnificent novel!

Five stars.

"In Paris the metal hats just failed to tinkle. The great soprano in Dresden sang up her soul for love into a wooden cup. In England the beige women, stalking through the rain with long feet and dogs, had the monstrous eye of sewing machines."

"But Theodora did not reject the word. It flowed, violet and black, and momentarily oyster-bellied through the evening landscape, fingering the faces of the houses. Soon the sea would merge with the houses, and the almost empty asphalt promenade, and the dissolving lavender hills behind the town. So that there was no break in the continuity of being."

"She walked out through the passages, through the sleep of other people. She was thin as grey light, as if she had just died."

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At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression."

So begins Flan O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), an outrageously unusual book, breathtakingly different and daring. I am sure there are Master's and Ph.D. theses dedicated to the novel and googling the title yields numerous hits with serious literary analyses of the work. The Guardian lists it among the 100 greatest novels written in English. Time magazine placed it on its list of 100 best English-language fiction books since 1923. Being totally unskilled in the craft of literary analysis, I will just say that it is probably one of the three most unusual books I have read in my almost 60-year reading career, a remarkable and completely unforgettable novel.

I had not known Flan O'Brien - a pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan - until I read his The Third Policeman , a phenomenally hilarious, unconditionally five-star book. At Swim, not that funny but deeper, is an extremely ambitious exercise in the literary art. Many critics consider Flan O'Brien to be an early representative of post-modernism in literature, although others classify him as a modernist, along with, say, James Joyce.

At Swim is clearly intertextual and metafictional - two of the main characteristics of literary post-modernism. It contains three separate beginnings and three endings (antepenultimate, penultimate, and the ultimate one). The narrator - a student of University College in Dublin - is writing a novel in which a certain Dermot Trellis writes a novel which borrows characters and motifs from ancient Irish folk tales and legends. One of the characters in this novel is Trellis' son, who writes about his father at the suggestion of other characters from the novel. Since Trellis' literary powers disappear while he is asleep, the characters in his novel conspire against him: they use his periods of rest to have a good time. In fact, they arrange to simulate the actions that Trellis wants them to perform in his story rather than actually carry them out. We have four "levels" of authorship: Flan O'Brien creates the narrator who creates Trellis who creates characters among which we have his son who writes about Trellis. So who really writes the story?

The novel - a set of loosely connected stories and vignettes might be a better term - is written in a wide variety of styles. It contains an abundance of pomes (i.e., poems), staves, and verses. and it includes figures of speech followed by their identification, for instance

"[I expressed] my whole-hearted concurrence by a figure of speech.
Name of figure of speech: Litotes (or Meiosis).

There are passages of utter hilarity: for instance (note the ſpelling):

Horſe, with a round fundament, why does he emit a ſquare Excrement? Happineſs, what is it? Lady diſturbed in her Bed, your thoughts of it? Light, is it a Body?

Perhaps my most favorite passage of the book begins with "There is nothing so important as the legs in determining the kangaroolity of a woman" and goes through ascertaining that a deceitful kangaroo can shave the hair of her legs, assuming she is a woman, and then - by the way of the mathematical concept of geometric progression - proceeds through truth, which is an odd number, to the fugal and contrapuntal character of Bach's work

And what about a breathtaking passage that seamlessly (and intertextually) combines quotes from John Milton, "What neat repast shall feast us light and choice of Attic taste" with "What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?" by Keats. And the unforgettable monologue by Finn MacCool about the sweetest of all music - the music of nature, a passage that incorporates calls of various birds of the Irish landscape.

While I suspect not every reader will be amused by At Swim I am in awe of the sheer audacity of the author's undertaking, and I am rounding the rating up to - yay! - five stars.

Four and a half stars.

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The Natural History of Nonsense by Bergen Evans
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Irrationality must come close to being the largest single vested interest in the world. [...] In fact, everyone in our society not directly engaged in the production and distribution of necessities, transportation, artistic creation, elementary teaching or the maintenance of public order, to some extent, and more or less consciously, preys upon ignorance and delusion."

Finally I have had the opportunity to re-read the book that like no other - with the possible exception of some works by Stanislaw Lem - influenced my thinking during the teen years and helped shape my worldview. I first read Bergen Evans' The Natural History of Nonsense (1946) when my mother gave it to me as a Christmas gift in 1963 or 1964: it shook me and since then I have always tried to follow the lessons of skepticism with respect to a great number of popularly held beliefs.

The author himself calls the book "a study in the paleontology of delusion." His goal is to systematically debunk a wide range of common prejudices and beliefs and to be an advocate of skepticism, which he aptly defines as "the life spirit of science." Yes, the book is heavily dated, but before I discuss some of the prejudices and misconceptions exposed by the author, let me first point out how relevant the author's theses became with the ubiquity of Internet.

Mr. Evans recounts a hoax perpetrated by H.L. Mencken in 1917 when he had published an article about the 75th anniversary of "the first bathtub installed in America." In his article he wrote about the initial resistance of the society to the invention, condemnation as "a menace to health and morals," and the slow acceptance of the invention. Mencken's story was so catchy that it was retold and reprinted thousands of times, and referred to as fact by public authorities. Even when in 1926 Mr. Mencken confessed that the story was a hoax, not many people believed him. Even the second confession did not help. People repeated the story for years and years (it was used as late as 2008). One hundred years later the Internet gives us thousands of fake stories, nonsense, and pure garbage every day. And we do believe these stories. I personally know a Ph.D. in sciences who believes that the contrails of planes are really chemtrails sprayed by "gubmint." I know serious and intelligent people who believe that vaccinations cause autism. The power of nonsense has not changed over 100 years.

The only weakness of the book is that the selection of commonly believed nonsense is quite dated. Hopefully fewer people now believe that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, that lemmings march to their deaths, that there exist "piscatory downpours" (raining fish), that animals know when their death is near, that dogs can find way back home from thousand of miles away, that elephants have phenomenal memory, that children can be raised by animals, that weather conditions during conception influences a person's future, that the so-called "death rattle" commonly accompanies human expiration, that hair can turn white instantaneously, and many others.

While all these examples of nonsense may sound mild and inoffensive, Mr. Evans talks a lot about serious issues: prejudices about race, how physical characteristics presumably determine the intellectual ones, etc. He lampoons the 1940s racial stereotypes of blacks, Jews, Asians, and others. Now we know more about these prejudices, but in 1940s this writing must have been quite courageous.

Not only is the book a loud cry for rationality, it is also frequently hilarious. Some stunning examples: the author quotes a traveler to Java who writes that infants there throw away their cigarettes when they are ready to suck mother's breasts. My absolute favorite is the 1920 research article by Prof. Adolf Gerson who traces the development of human menstrual cycle to the lunar cycle and the fact that early men hunted for their females on moonlit nights. Also, I am not sure if the author used the following example on purpose or just did not notice the atrocious pun it creates: he writes about the hairy Ainus people of Japan who value hirsuteness in their women. I apologize for being offensive if I did not catch the joke.

So yes, it is quite a dated book but since the advent of Internet seems to have strengthened the global embrace of irrationality and confirmed the human propensity for nonsense it remains a vey strongly recommended text.

Four and a half stars, which I round up. I am happy about my first five-star rating in half a year (55 books ago).

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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds..."

I read Lolita for the first time in high school and now, after my current re-read, it seems to me that I had then read a completely different book. It should not be a surprise: there is no way that awkward teenager of 1960s and this cynical geezer of 2017 are the same person. While the teenager was fascinated with the taboo topic and oh-so-adult plot, the geezer could not care less about the taboos and the story but is awed by the magnificent prose. So these two different people agree that - for different reasons - this is indeed an extraordinary work, and its inclusion in various lists of best English-language novels and the most celebrated books in the history of literature is justified.

In his Lectures on Literature (according to Martin Amis' The War Against Cliché) Nabokov tries to teach people how to read, tries to make the readers "share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author." In my own uneducated way I have been following this advice, caring less about what the authors are writing about and more about how they write. In simpler words, when reading a serious book I focus on the prose. And from the lush and lovely alliterations of the first paragraph to the ending invocation, Lolita is an amazing, jaw-dropping celebration of English language. One can find a dazzling language jewel on each of the three hundred or so pages and spend hours deciphering the elaborate structures of word plays, allusions and puns. I have been amazed by the unparalleled virtuosity of style, the constant changes in literary conventions and narrative structures and strategies.

This very dark comedy is a vicious satire on the American popular culture, the moronic world of commercials, the travel industry, road trip literature, etc. But then there is the ostensibly main topic of the novel that has offended and disgusted thousands and thousands of readers and I should at least mention the general subject of Humbert Humbert's (HH from now on) "pederosis." Yet unlike that teenager with whom I share the body, now I can only view the subject from the perspective of art, Nabokov's exquisite art of language. When reading I often make little notes to myself and when I read through the scene that happens on the candy-striped davenport, after HH catches the apple that Lo has been eating, I just sat there in amazement, and wrote in big letters on my note paper "I am stunned." Yes, some the most extraordinary pages of English prose I have read in my life.

A perfect novel then? Oh no, definitely not! The "afterword" entitled "On a Book Entitled Lolita", where the author seems to defend the novel, weakens the book's impact. As a work of art - great art! - the novel completely defends itself. Also, the author writes:

"Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss [...]"

Maybe I am obtuse but what then does Nabokov mean when he quotes "an old poet":

"The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty."

Of course, Nabokov is right when he says that literature is not in the business of conveying "morals", but then - as I see - he seems to flout his own rule.

I actively dislike the very short fragment that takes place in Beardsley School when HH notices "another girl with a very naked, porcelain-white neck," and the text suddenly escapes the world of metaphors where the rest of the novel safely resides and moves for a moment, along with Dolly's red-knuckled hand, to the physically literal sphere. The movie-style ending also seems incongruous with the rest of the novel: the film adaptations have cheapened the novel enough.

So while it feels unnatural to assign any rating lower than maximum to Lolita, my reverence is muted by reservations.

Four and a half stars.

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Roads to Santiago by Cees Nooteboom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

" We are in too much of a hurry to remain dead for so long."

Another phenomenal book, non-fiction this time, from my favorite writer. While one cannot expect masterpieces every time from even the greatest authors Cees Nooteboom's Roads to Santiago (1993) reaches the upper regions of my rare five-star rating and deserves extremely slow reading to take full delight of the writing and to wallow in exquisite detail. I made notes about virtually each of the book's 340 pages and my review was originally four times longer - what follows is just a haphazard abridgement.

Mr. Nooteboom describes his travels in Spain - parallel travels as he points out: one in his rented car and another through the past. He is "a pilgrim on the Great Way to Santiago de Compostela"; he retraces the journeys of the faithful on the Camiño de Santiago, also known as St. James's Way, the main Catholic pilgrimage route that dates back well over one thousand years, to the 9th century. The motion through time-space yields a history book - history of Spain, a country with complicated Roman, Visigoth, Arab, Jewish, and Christian roots, yet a uniquely European country. Never in my life have I learned so much about a country from a single book. Mr. Nooteboom writes not just about the famous historical figures, like Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragón and Castille or Philip II, people that most of us have heard about. We meet scores of lesser known personages and - more importantly - the author guides us through the historical processes that were occurring throughout the roughly 1300 years. We are not just reading about Spain - we get immersed in its history and culture.

Travel book, history book, but also a book of remarkable wisdom. On the social scale the author contemplates the nature of history, its relationship with time, and the role of an individual in history, even if - as he points out in a sobering thought - most people believe they have nothing to do with it. In the psychological domain Mr. Nooteboom - who often retraces his steps from his previous trips in Spain - explains, for instance, why people need to relive the experiences from the past: the reason is human "desire to weave a strand of eternity into your own life." Art history is a frequent focus as is, of course, literature: Homer, Cervantes, Nabokov, Borges' universes, and his perplejidad that is life. Incredible!

So many passages took my breath away. The author visits El Burgo de Osma where a copy of the Codex Beato is displayed, also known as Commentary on the Apocalypse: the book contains a map of the world drawn in 1086, "inscribed with Visigothic lettering." In the little village of Santiago de Peñalba he finds a perfectly preserved Mozarabic church dating from 919, with the date carved in stone. How insignificant are the sound and the fury of today when one can touch human-made objects from one thousand years ago! To me the most stunning fragment in the entire book is the study of Las Meninas, a famous painting by Velásquez ("Velásquez paints the truth not as it is but as it appears to be"). How can I ever thank the author for showing me the harmonies, the structures of truth and beauty I have never been aware of?

On the La Mancha plateau Mr. Nooteboom follows the footsteps of Cervantes and his heroes: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Dulcinea. He has "an appointment with those fearsome adversaries, Don Quixote's windmills" on a long range of hills near Consuegra. He visits Dulcinea's home in El Toboso and offers the stunning line:

"To enter a house that once belonged to someone who never existed is no small matter."

Indeed. The author visits Extremadura and we read - in a rare non-European digression - about Pizarro and the ambush in Cajamarca, Peru, where the conquistadors massacred 2,000 unarmed Incas to commence the wholesale obliteration of Inca civilization. It is a disaster when we lose all our data on a hard disk. We mourn prehistoric paintings when they are defaced. Can we imagine the total destruction of a flourishing civilization? The people, their culture, their mythology, their gods. All gone forever.

And the magnificent, spellbinding, spine-tingling last paragraph of the book - a long stunning forceful paragraph that almost manages the impossible: summarize Spain in awe-inspiring prose. I could go on and on with my raves. The best non-fiction book I have ever read? Yes, I believe so.

Five stars.


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A Perfect Vacuum by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] And the only subterfuge the evasive Lem might still avail himself of would be a counterattack: in the assertion that it was not I, the critic, but he himself, the author, who wrote the present review and added it to - and made it part of -'A Perfect Vacuum.'"

Whenever I begin a re-read of a Stanislaw Lem's book I am afraid of disappointment. Lem was by far the most favorite author of my youth, some 35 to 55 years ago, and I have been worrying that in re-reading his works my enthusiasm may diminish for the Polish philosopher and futurologist who is best known for his incomparable science fiction books, such as Solaris. I am happy to report there have been no disappointments so far and A Perfect Vacuum (originally published in 1971) is one of the best books I have recently read, maybe even better than Lem's His Master's Voice which I rated with almost five stars.

A full review would take too much space so let me just offer a few remarks about this impressive work. A Perfect Vacuum is set up as an exercise in metafiction where Lem offers a collection of reviews of non-existent books. In the author's stroke of genius, the collection even includes a review of the book that contains the review - how's that for advanced self-referentiality? On a similar note, in the review of (fictitious) Gigamesh Lem provides delicious satire on literary criticism that indulges in looking for non-existent references: after all, it is true that any reference to anything can be found anywhere if one looks hard enough.

Lem creates the author of Gruppenführer Louis XVI who writes about artificial reality of 17th century French royal court created in Argentina by SS officers who escaped Germany. Any older Polish reader will immediately recognize this as satire on the so-called communist government in Poland that created an artificial reality for the citizens. A contemporary reader, on the other hand, may easily make a connection to the current situation when it seems that about half of all people are unable to distinguish the artificial reality of TV shows from the actual reality. Another fictitious book under review, Rien du tout, ou la conséquence, pushes the meta-literature to the extreme positions: narration is eliminated to the extent that only pure language remains. The piece also contains a hilarious passage about an author who wrote Don Quixote from the scratch and obtained exactly the same text as the one produced by Cervantes.

Now about my three favorite pieces. The review of De Impossibilitate Vitae, a fictitious work halfway between mathematics and total lunacy, is a playful take on probability theory (the subject that I teach, by the way). Lem presents the author's clear and convincing explanation that his existence is a result of chains of events so improbable that it is not at all possible for him to exist. Neither is it for any other person (De Selby's observations presented in The Third Policeman come to mind).

Non Serviam, perhaps the deepest piece in the set, reviews a book about personetics - science and technology that enabled people to create personoids, sentient beings that exist as executing programs, computer models implemented in software. Nevertheless they are completely real to themselves; they build their culture, philosophy and even religion that seeks to embrace the Creator of their Universe. Lem, as the reviewer, emphasizes the monumental moral and ethical dilemmas of those sentient creatures' creators. Alas he takes an easy way out and only glides over the crucial issue of the origin of self-awareness.

Finally, in New Cosmogony Lem quotes the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of a physicist and philosopher who is one of the pioneers of a new model of cosmology - Universe as a Game - where the oldest civilizations are the players who apply minimax strategies to construct the "laws of nature." It is also here that Lem, through the fictitious physicist's words, states the audacious yet utterly brilliant thesis that the expanding Universe serves the purpose of keeping the distance between new civilizations and the existing ones, which would cleanly account for the so-called Silentium Universi. Physics of the Universe as a by-product of sociology - it is not possible not to admire the author's (and the author's author's) cheek!

Despite Lem's usual hang-ups about sex, the piece Sexplosion exudes sheer hilarity with its memorable mentions of unchastity belts, sodomobiles, cybordellics, gomorcades (my own translations as I read the book in its original Polish version), and many, many other vehicles of pleasure. Perycalipsis is also a hoot with its spiritual masturbation, that is getting off on promises rather than releases. Phenomenal stuff!

Great book: funny yet deep and thought-provoking. In fact, now I love it more than 45 years ago. Despite my stinginess with top ratings here's the second one in just one week! Maybe I am getting soft in the head faster than I think.

Fours and three quarter stars.


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