Fairhaven, The River

Book Reviews (Tempting Faith, Mao, and Vachss)

Tempting Faith by David Kuo.

This is a fast easy read.  The book is mis-represented by most of the reviews that I have read.  They greatly over-emphasize the fact that politicians exploit the religious.  The reviewers use this as more proof of the evil of Bush.  The sense of the book is more that this is inherent in all politicians (both left and right) and that both the Democrats and the Republicans have exploited their religious supporters (the religious right and the black churches respectively).  There is not a sense of outrage.  There is a sense that this is the inevitable nature of politicians, and that the religious should understand this and not fall into the politicians traps.

Kuo points to the "Screwtape Letters" as a prime example of how this exploitation was clearly visible to CS Lewis as well.  It is the stronger message of Kuo and Lewis that the religious should not look to politics as the path to build a better world.  They should build a better world through their own efforts, using politics as a secondary or defensive mechanism.  He looks at the many politically oriented messages and finds very little of the Christian virtues that he loves.

Mao, the untold story
This is a massive tome.  The tone is very hostile towards Mao, who is uniformly a narcistic, evil man. His life seems to be that of the successful psychopath, leaving misery in his wake.  He has even less personal appeal than Hitler or Stalin.

It does make clear the extreme obsession with "secret communist sympathizers" found in the 1950's cold war.  A great deal of Mao's final success in seizing China rested on having fully penetrated the Chinese Nationalists with sleeper agents who were activated after many years of secrecy.  The origin of the success was the chaos after the collapse of the Chinese empire into a mass of competing warlords.  The creation of the Chinese republic out of this chaos left many openings for the planting of sleeper agents.  I had earlier thought this as irrational behavior.  It now seems just to be an over-reaction to the Chinese experiences.

It is well written, easy to read, and a good overview of Chinese history during the Mao period.

Mask Market, Vachss

Another Burke book.  This is a lesser effort.  It's worth reading as a continuation of the Burke series, but it is not as powerful or involving as most of the earlier books.  It is not a good introduction to either Vachss or the Burke series.

Book Report: The Unquiet Grave

The Unquiet Grave : The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country by Steve Hendricks. The writing of this book is OK, perhaps slightly above average. The content and style reminded me of all the stories that I read about the lynchings, police misconduct, governmental suppression, etc. of the American South in the 50's and 60's. Only this is the Dakota plains and instead of the FBI being the "good guys" investigating the oppressive government the FBI is now one of the bad guys.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with COINTELPRO or the oppression of war opponents in the 1960's.

As a history, there are better ones on COINTELPRO. But it does cover one niche of that era.

Book Review: The Diamond Cutter

The Diamond Cutter is one of the better business self help books that I've read in a while.  This means less than you would think at first blush.  About 90% are so terrible that I skip through the pages and then skip the book.  This one is in the top 5%.  It uses real sentences rather than sound bytes.  It is even dominated by complete coherent paragraphs that are fully on topic.

I found several good ideas in it, and about half of it was worth reading.  I found the Tibetan Buddhism aspects rather difficult to follow, but easy enough to skip.  If you are interested in Buddhism, read some other book.

In one way it reminds me of the core operating principles for Polaroid.  It had a simple four part corporate master policy.  The purpose of the company was to:

1. Earn a reasonable profit and deliver dividends to the shareholders.
2. Sell high quality products that are of value to the customers for a fair price.
3. Provide a rewarding work environment for the employees.
4. Provide benefits to the community.

It was recognized that managing one of these four was easy.  The management challenge is to meet all four goals.  (For a while Polaroid actually succeeded at this balancing act, but eventually management was not up to the challenge and they went bankrupt.)

Book Review: The Moral Center, David Callahan

A very disappointing book. I didn't bother finishing it. It started with a little bit of evidence that the author has an understanding of the non-liberal, non-progressive viewpoints. But it almost immediately degenerated into a long series of: anecdote, conclusion, anecdote, conclusion, ....

There is almost no real discussion of evidence, nor any significant analysis or evaluation of theory. It's just anecdotes and assertions.  What a waste of time. 

(First of various book reviews. My now retired doctor (henceforth RDoc) claimed that part of maintaining health was reading at least one book per month. According to RDoc this needed to be a real book, not magazine or newspaper articles, and not something read for work. This was to maintain mental alertness and skill.)