Thoughts

moving to a new blog

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 05:07:22 GMT

I'm finally giving up on Windows Live Spaces. It's hard for people to post comments here, it's hard to embed photos, and other small things. I will miss a few things...but not many.

Please join me at my new on-line home.

the funniest movie trailer I've seen in a while

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:02:09 GMT

This is from the guy who made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it looks really funny. Check it out.

giving up on another Allende AND the best/worst last line ever

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:44:52 GMT

This week I finally gave up on Isabel Allende's first foray into youth fiction, La Ciudad de las Bestias [The City of the Beasts]. I don't remember ever reading a book so full of cliches and stereotypes. And it was boring. Man! That's the second Allende book I've given up on: the other was Inés del Alma Mía, which was boring and anachronistic (rather than boring and cliched). Someday I'll read some of her "good" fiction, like La Casa de los Espíritus.

And speaking of poor prose, we can always remember the best / worst last line ever in a work of fiction. At the end of Dan Brown's absurd Angels & Demons (which I admit to having consumed in a matter of hours), Brown leaves us with: "Vittoria slipped off her robe. 'You've never been to bed with a yoga master, have you?'" Thank you, Dan. Let's hope that makes it into the screenplay.

A couple of weeks ago, I also gave up (for the millionth time) on Guns, Germs, and Steel again. I've been trying to read that book for years. I've tried the audiobook three times, I own a print copy: and I just can't do it. It's just too boring to me. So if you want to know about long-term human history, talk to someone else. Or borrow my copy of GGS; I won't be reading it.

statistician / econometrician joke

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 02:20:30 GMT

A colleague at work forwarded this to me; it's not bad at all.

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).

150th amazon review: wow

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 02:17:12 GMT

Just over a year ago, I posted that I had written my hundredth Amazon review. Tonight I posted my 150th review.

Many of the reviews don't have much impact on the Amazon site (such as tonight, when I posted the 43rd review of Atul Gawande's Better). Yet a fair amount of the traffic on this blog comes from people searching for a book review for a given book, so they get seen somewhere. And - I keep telling myself - I remember a lot more about the books as a result of writing out some thoughts before they fade.

In the course of the last year, I wrote my most helpful and my least helpful review ever: 79 of 80 people liked my review of the development economics book The Bottom Billion, and 0 of 9 people liked my review of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. When I started, I had a reviewer rank of 950,000. A year ago, I was 4,815. Tonight, I am 3,462. (Who am I? 24601!)

And so it goes...

[Here are all the reviews.]

play review: a bit of the bard

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:21:05 GMT

A few days ago, on a whim, I picked up from the library an audio dramatization of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It was lots of fun. I don't listen to lots of Shakespeare, but I may mend my ways (at least with the comedies). (Right now I'm listening to essays by a surgeon; he's a good writer, but - I mean - who can compare...) Here is what I wrote for Amazon:

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.

a nice innovation in book reviews

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:55:43 GMT

I love books, and I love reading thoughtful book reviews as well. Thus, I was pleased to see that Amazon has made a neat innovation to the way it organizes customer reviews. If you go to a book, just below the title is shown the average rating and then an identification of how many reviews that rating is based on, e.g. "(802 customer reviews)". If you click on that number, it takes you to a page which shows you

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

And then it lists the review in order of most to least helpful (you can also sort from newest). Here is the page for A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Of course, if you really enjoy well-written book reviews, check out Metacritic, which gathers the professional reviews for lots of new books.

old friend (almost) arrested in Pakistan

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:07:28 GMT

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule a few days ago, "rounded up hundreds of opposition and human rights activists and introduced tight media regulations" (source). If you look at this article on the situation from the UK newspaper The Guardian, the human rights activist being arrested is my old classmate Aasim Akhtar, who works organizing poor farmers to achieve basic human rights. Apparently he somehow managed to escape the attempted arrest in the photo and is now in hiding.

I hope that the international community will put serious pressure on the Musharraf government to end the "emergency rule" and hold the planned elections in mid-January.

development book review: another wildly compulsive (i.e., I couldn't put it down) tale from the author of The Kite Runner

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:44:51 GMT

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).

if i were looking for a church to join...

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:09:05 GMT

...this is the one I'd go for!

development book review: So Long a Letter, by Mariama Ba

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:00:53 GMT

When I was in Sierra Leone recently, I scouted around for some fiction by Sierra Leonean writers. I only found one, and her books were too expensive for me. So I bought a cheap paperback copy of what is required reading for Sierra Leonean schoolchildren (and Gambia schoolchildren, I learned later in the trip). It was very well done and - at 90 pages - a pretty swift illustration of some of the challenges faced by women in polygamist households in West Africa. Polygamist households are not a thing of the past nor of poorly educated or rural persons. When I was in the Gambia, I met major government workers who had two or so wives.

Here is what I wrote for Amazon on this book:

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?]

talking about your characters after the book ends

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:01:12 GMT

So you may have read that JK Rowling has commented that she always thought of Dumbledore as being gay. I've been reflecting a bit on that revelation (which is different from what I imagined of Dumbledore, although I did wonder about the apparent celibacy of both him and the other Hogwarts teachers) and on some of her other revelations (e.g., about Harry et al's careers, which did coincide with what I imagined).

A writer for the Dallas Morning News makes the argument that if it's not in the books, then readers have the right to think whatever they want. In the course of it, he recalls an interesting anecdote about Douglas Adams:

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.

I think this is an interesting general question about writers and their relationship to their characters outside of the books. Ultimately I'd argue that it's better to let readers take over once the books are ended. (Of course, Rowling may not have finished with the books, as she's talked about writing an encyclopedia-type reference with a lot of what's in her head.) Much as I wanted to know what happened to Tom Joad after the last page of The Grapes of Wrath, I'm kind of happy that Steinbeck left it alone. That said, I was unsatisfied with the ending of the final Harry Potter and the lack of information about careers, so I enjoyed hearing Rowling's thoughts. But my enjoyment of one such revelation doesn't make it good!

In this particular case, what with the multitude of media articles and blog entries (like this one), I ultimately feel like, well, who really cares? I'm a big fan, but it's just a made-up wizard. (I'm reminded of people who were deeply upset by the Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, when it added a biological element to the force, which they had always conceived of being purely spiritual. Again, I'm a fan, but...who cares?)

UPDATE: I just saw this quote from JK Rowling in response to the negative feedback on her outing of Dumbledore: "He is my character. He is what he is and I have the right to say what I say about him." I certainly agree that she has the right to say whatever she wants, but I'm less certain that he is "her" character. I'm not sure that's how fiction works.

But I think the key, however I feel about this, is that I can't just reject authors' post-publication views when they don't conform to what I already believed about a character. (Or maybe we can. Maybe, once they're published, the characters are in the public domain and I can choose exactly what to believe about them. Consistency may not be called for here.) Sorry, I've gone on a bit long about this.

book review: The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford (narrated by Robert Ian MacKenzie)

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:41:36 GMT

Every once in a while I feel like I need to read an economics book, and I couldn't resist this seductive title. Here is what I wrote for Amazon:

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.

pictures from Sierra Leone

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:27:22 GMT

Here are a few pictures from my recent trip to Sierra Leone. I didn't have time to take photos in Tanzania, and in the Gambia I was going to take photos but then my batteries died and when I went to buy new ones, almost all the shops were closed because of the holiday to celebrate the end of Ramadan (the Muslim fasting season) and the one open shop sold me batteries for 15 cents which lasted exactly 1.5 seconds in my camera. So I'll get a few in those countries next time.

prueba de vocabulario

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:33:05 GMT

Aqui hay diez palabras que encontré en el libro La Ciudad de las Bestias, por Isabel Allende. Haz click en la palabra para ver la definición (en otro window). ¿Cuántas sabe?

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.

chocolat vs chocolat

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:37:21 GMT

Some time ago, I added to our Blockbuster on-line queue the film Chocolat, a 1988 film exposing the unfairness of the social order in French colonial Africa. Last week the film arrived in our mailbox with the correct sleeve, we slipped it in, and what came on? The 2000 Chocolat, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. Fine, my wife had never seen this one before, we enjoyed it and reported to Blockbuster that they had sent us the wrong DVD.

Blockbuster then sent us another sleeve for the 1988 Chocolat, but once again with the Juliette Binoche film inside. I think it might be a corporate conspiracy to cover up the colonial legacy. But it won't work.

[This time I sent a detailed email to Blockbuster and they said they'd look fix it and gave me an extra free rental coupon. Free rental! Colonial legacy? What? I'd like to see a change somehow but I'm a little busy right now...]

book review: Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:17:06 GMT

While I was traveling to Tanzania, I read Malcolm Gladwell's second book. He's always fun and informative (even when not convincing). Here is what I wrote for Amazon. Mine is the 819th review, so I know I'm really influencing public opinion.

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.

mormons in literature: The Inheritance of Loss and Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:25:19 GMT

I'm always interested to encounter mentions and portrayals of my church in literature. This morning I encountered this passage, in Kiran Desai's Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss:

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]

Wow! She passed both a Latter-day Saint church and a Mormon church. (These are the same church.) That said, LDS missionaries in many countries do teach language lessons as a way to meet people and can be persistent. (I can't say how hard it is to shake off an amoeba since I can't see or feel amoebas.)

Recently, in Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I came across this line:

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]

I'm not sure what that means exactly, except that maybe the Mormon kid's parents would be upset at the not-religious-enough nature of the minister. Okay. I guess the author needed to pick some really religious religion.

Finally, I encountered this line a few years ago in the excellent memoir Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood:

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

A fine compliment, even if in the context of an uncomplimentary comparison (Steingraber is not a fan of the anesthesiologist).

development book review: What Is the What, by Dave Eggers (narrated by Dion Graham)

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:17:31 GMT

A few weeks ago I finished this very good book, a novelized account of a Sudanese refugee who has resettled in the United States. I highly recommend it. Here is what I wrote for Amazon:

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).

the truth about fruit

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:59:47 GMT

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

from The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

Photo Album: Sierra Leone

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:23:04 GMT

Sierra Leone


Youths hanging out and having a good time on Sunday afternoon	More beach view	My barracuda steak at Lumley Beach in Freetown	Care for a drink?
fishers of fish		Mottos on boats and minivans in Africa are like Americans with flag stickers stuck to their car windows: omnipresent	I met this crow-type bird and many of her siblings many times, both in Sierra Leone and in the Gambia.
Congo Cross Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Freetown.	DSCN1394.JPG

More Photos...

Photo Album: Ugandan wedding

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 07:04:17 GMT

Ugandan wedding

J and a schoolfriend

The groom's entourage enters the bride's home!

Dancers lead the way

...and keep dancing

The bride and her company enter. She's the one in green!

Gentleman recites a brief history of Uganda and praises the bride's family

Two serious singers

J observes the proceedings

Me and The Wedding Singer (John)

Friends of the groom

More Photos...

Photo Album: Cape Town

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 03:19:33 GMT

Cape Town

The view of Cape Town from Table Mountain

Top of Table Mtn

Photo Album: my commute

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 23:58:38 GMT

my commute

our local hotel

photo shoot

A Day in the Life of an Orange (no joke, that's the name of the shoot)

canine class disparity

Book List: Books I'm reading

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:40:16 GMT

Books I'm reading

Book List: Books I'll likely read

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:25:15 GMT

Books I'll likely read

Custom List: Links

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:30:16 GMT

Links

My Amazon reviews

Custom List: Development resources

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 07:42:43 GMT

Development resources

Datasets on developing countries
This page links to many households surveys, firm surveys, and more from all over the developing world.
Center for Global Development
This creative group continually analyzes how aid could be more effective.
Global Health Policy blog
African Impact Evaluation Database

Custom List: Leave a comment?

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 22:39:25 GMT