How many statisticians does it take to change a light bulb?

 

Answer A: This should be determined using a nonparametric procedure, since statisticians are not normal.

Answer B: One -- plus or minus three (small sample size).

 

delightful, clear production of a witty, fun play

 

This fully dramatized production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is delightful. Shakespeare's wit comes through in full force (especially in the Beatrice-Benedick storyline): I love that the words from hundreds of years ago can evoke my laughter today. This play is immensely fun and the performance is excellent.

The enunciation of the lines is clear and the voices of the different characters are distinct, but - not being a Shakespeare expert - I found it invaluable to read over the synopsis included in the liner notes, since the audio performance does not include any stage directions or character identification (as in "Beatrice:" and "Claudio:").* With that small help, however, my enjoyment was unhampered.

I highly recommend this dramatization!

* Indulgent tangent: The occasional confusion resulting from a lack of character identification reminded me of a wonderfully clever passage in Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book (the sequel to The Eyre Affair) in which a fictional character hiding out in the real world is revealed due to his inability to follow "undedicated" dialogue (i.e., dialogue without explicit attribution as to who is speaking). Fforde's books are wonderful, silly fun for the Shakespeare and other literature lover; the passage I refer to is on page 360-361 of the paperback edition.

1. A histogram of how many reviews have 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 star.
2. An excerpt from the most helpful favorable review (4 or 5 stars)
3. An excerpt from the most helpful critical review (1, 2, oe 3 stars)

I just read A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, author of the wildly popular The Kite Runner from a few years back. I wrote the 802nd Amazon review of the book, so I'm clearly the pivotal opinion. Still, I keep telling myself that I write these reviews mostly to help me process them (and for you, if you read this blog). This book wasn't always easy to read, but Hosseini is all about redemption, so you can count on him for a feel-good ending (unlike Kiran Desai and her Inheritance of Loss or Rohinton Mistry and his Fine Balance: I guess people in Afghanistan have happy endings but people in India don't: if that were true, I'd expect more India-Afghanistan migration than we currently observe...).

intensely engaging story of women’s struggles in Afghanistan

 

This is the story of two women in Afghanistan and their intersecting lives. It seeks to capture a glimpse of what life for women was like there from the 1960s to the present. The glimpse isn’t pretty. One reviewer expressed it this way: “Hosseini's depiction of Mariam and Laila's plight would seem cartoonishly crude if it were not, by all accounts, a sadly accurate version of what many Afghan women have experienced” [1].

 

As in The Kite Runner, Hosseini knows how to tell a compelling story. I couldn’t put the book down and read it in about two days. I missed my subway stop on the way to work as I read, I read it while I walked down the street, it’s a true page-turner. Also like The Kite Runner (but even more obviously so here), Hosseini brings the story full circle and ties up every loose end, leaving something of a contrived feeling.

 

That said, as the New York Times review put it, “Mr. Hosseini’s instinctive storytelling skills…[mow] down the reader’s objections through sheer momentum and will. He succeeds in making the emotional reality of Mariam and Laila’s lives tangible to us, and by conjuring their day-to-day routines, he is able to give us a sense of what daily life was like in Kabul — both before and during the harsh reign of the Taliban…. In the end it is these glimpses of daily life in Afghanistan — a country known to most Americans only through news accounts of war and terrorism — that make this novel, like ‘The Kite Runner,’ so stirring, and that distract attention from its myriad flaws” [2].

 

I found the story to be just as compelling as The Kite Runner but the subject matter here was of even greater interest. Hosseini successfully gives a window on a place few Americans know much about and does so in the context of a compulsively engaging tale.

 

(For an interesting but in no way as engaging non-fiction account of family life in Afghanistan, read The Bookseller of Kabul.)

 

[1] Jennifer Reese, “Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns,” Entertainment Weekly, 15 May 2007.

 

[2] Michiko Kakutani, “A Woman’s Lot in Kabul, Lower Than a House Cat’s,” New York Times, 29 May 2007.

 

Note on content: the book has some war and domestic violence and a couple of sexual scenes. None of these are fun, but each plays an important role in demonstrating relationships in this society. I did not find them excessive (just real).

sad, powerful illustration of women's struggles in West Africa

 

A recently widowed Senegalese woman (Ramatoulaye) writes a diary in the form of a letter to her best friend, in which she recounts both her and her friend's experience with their husbands' taking a second wife. Through the narratives, the author explores the roles of women in society and the differences between the sexes (as she does here, "whereas a woman draws from the passing years the force of her devotion,...a man...looks over his partner's shoulder. He compares what he had with what he no longer has, what he has with what he could have"). Underlying the narrative is the power and value of friendship between two women who have seen each other through years of trial.

The two stories are saddening and compelling. The protagonist is nuanced. Even after being burned by polygamy, she considers becoming a second wife herself. She and her friend made very different choices in the face of their marital trials, and each must find what peace she can.

Occasionally the narrative structure bothered me, only because it is easy to forget that the book takes the form of a letter but is in fact a diary (as is stated in the second sentence of the book). If mistaken for a true letter, the detailed recounting of the letter addressee's experience feels contrived.

That is a small critique, however, of what is overall a powerful illustration of the trials of West Africa's women. I can see why the book is currently required school reading in several African countries (Sierra Leone and the Gambia at least) alongside Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

[And it's short: just 90 pages. What do you have to lose?]

Another awfully good British author, the late Douglas Adams of the successful Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series, confronted a comparable question a few years back. One of his fans asked about the kind of computer one of his characters used. He replied, in part:

 

"The book is a work of fiction. It's a sequence of words arranged to unfold a story in a reader's mind. There is no such actual, real person as Arthur Dent. He has no existence outside the sequence of words designed to create an idea of this imaginary person in people's minds. There is no objective real world I am describing, or which I can enter, and pick up his computer, look at it and tell you what model it is, or turn it over and read off its serial number for you. It doesn't exist."

 

I'd disagree with that a bit. It does exist – in the minds of any reader who wants it to exist. And that's what you're interfering with.

dry wit and real world examples make this a mostly enjoyable introductory course in economics

 

Harford offers us an introductory course in economics with a dry wit and lots of interesting, real-world examples. There are a few dry stretches (such as the extensive treatment of agricultural land prices), but the book is mostly engaging and some parts are very entertaining. For example, Harford's treatment of price targeting and how supermarkets and Amazon have used technology to target customers is intriguing and fun. I also found the treatment of stock valuations insightful. In explaining the reasons that poor countries stay poor, he tells quirky (albeit disheartening) tales of his time in Cameroon. It isn't quite as fun a read as Freakonomics, but it does a better job of teaching fundamental economic principles. (Freakonomics shows that economics can be interesting and can answer questions you wouldn't expect it to; The Undercover Economist shows that economics can be pretty interesting and answer fundamental questions that you would expect it to!)

Harford is refreshingly aware of the weaknesses of the free market but does a solid job of characterizing its strengths. Sometimes the analysis is simple (the history of China's recent development, for example) and may miss important points. The key to remember is that Harford is teaching basic principles with a great deal of explanatory power but not with _all_ explanatory power. Take away the principles from your reading, but don't treat the analysis of a given application as definitive.

Relative to a similar volume, Landsberg's Armchair Economist, this is more enjoyable: Harford relies more on real-world examples and empirical research (not entirely, but more) than does Landsberg with his hypothetical scenarios, although I also enjoyed Landsberg. (I guess this isn't surprising: would you rather shadow an Armchair Economist or an Undercover Economist? The answer is clear!) I have yet to read some of the others, such as Naked Economics (I'd rather _not_ shadow a Naked Economist, given most economists I know) or Discover Your Inner Economist.

Robert Ian MacKenzie does a good job reading the unabridged audiobook, which consists of nine compact discs.

1. Con una abuela como la mía no necesito enemios -farfulló el muchacho.

2. ...procedía a masticar alguna golosina...

3. No podía negar que eran adictos a esas truculentas historias.

4. Había olor a gasolina, nieve sucia sobre la acera y una ventisca helada que golpeaba la cara como agujas.

5. ...a pesar de su aspecto más bien sucio y famélico

6. Revisó cada prenda de ropa con pasmosa lentitud.

7. ...pero ninguna chica con dos dedos de frente [ve el significado #15] se interesaba...

8. Todavía era un chiquillo imberbe, uno de los más bajos de su clase.

9. ...café rancio y fritanga.

10. -¡Te he dicho que no me llames abuela! -lo increpó ella.

entertaining, educating analysis of snap judgments (but it's no The Tipping Point)

 

A few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very entertaining book, The Tipping Point. He had a central thesis, and while it was plausible, I wasn't particularly convinced. BUT Gladwell is one of the best writers around at making psychology experiments and other social science studies fascinating and accessible, so the book was interesting and fun to read.

That brings us to Blink, in which Gladwell seeks to demonstrate that our split-second first impressions can be incredibly insightful but that sometimes they are not, and how we can train ourselves to move toward the insightful side. The book is not particularly convincing (even less than Tipping) on the final aspect of the thesis that we can train ourselves to do better. But along the way, he presents fascinating cases of how these snap judgments can be right on (and why they're wrong when they are). The research isn't quite as interesting as in The Tipping Point, but I was still engrossed, entertained, and instructed.

For an example of a psychology writer who also makes research fascinating and accessible (and funny) but is much more convincing on his hypothesis, read the excellent Stumbling on Happiness, by Harvard psychology professor Dan Gilbert. He also reads the audiobook himself and does a fantastic job.

Despite my critiques, this was still good enough that I'll read whatever Gladwell gives us next.

She walked by several churches: Jehova's Witnesses, Adventists, Latter-day Saints, Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals. ... and if you joined in a little harmless chat of language lessons (all the better to translate the Bible, my dear...), that was it -- they were as hard to shake off as an amoeba. [p254]

He was a minister of indeterminate denomination, a truth Headmaster Havermeyer forbade him to disclose or even indirectly allude to during his Friday morning service, in order to avoid offending the one kid whose parents were Latter-Day Saints. [p385]

Then the anesthesiologist drops by for a visit, peddling his wares with all the soft-spoken earnestness of a Mormon missionary.

a powerful telling of one refugee's story and how it fits into a broader disaster

 

Over several years, a refugee (named Achak) from Sudan who has resettled in the United States (one of the "lost boys of Sudan") told his story to Dave Eggers. Eggers wrote a novel based on the story, and the result is excellent. Leaping back and forth through time, the fictional Achak tells of how he is forced from his village by the Sudanese civil war, travels hundreds (thousands?) of miles on foot from country to country and refugee camp to camp, and then how he arrives in the United States and adjust to life there.

Several times early in the reading I wondered, Why didn't Eggers just write the story of this guy's life rather than a novel "based" on it? Eventually I could see that the novel allowed Eggers to bring in characters, sub-stories, and dialogue to teach us not only Achak's story but also about the broader conflict, the other Sudanese conflict in Darfur, and the problems encountered by a broader net of re-settled refugees. Eggers seeks to (and I believe manages to) give enthrall us with Achak and convey an impressive amount of information at the same time.

I found one of his narrative devices mildly distracting: Achak narrates from the present-day, resettled in the USA, and most of flashbacks are in the form of his mentally telling people around him his story. For example, he meets someone at his work and imagines telling them about the time his buddy got eaten by a lion. But that's a quibble.

The audiobook reading by Dion Graham (published by BBC Audiobooks America) is very well done.

Note on content: Much of this book takes place in a war zone, so we see violence and intense human suffering. And in the USA, there is a mugging that involves lots of strong language (all in the book's first 50 pages).

 

No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana.