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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