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Lawrence M. Krauss, Beyond Star Trek: Physics from Alien Invasions to the End of Time: As the title implies, the book isn't that unified in theme, though there's rather a lot about Independence Day and the ridiculousness thereof. While it's readable, I didn't get anything much out of it, other than the author's own reasons for believing that alien contact is unlikely.
Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command: I'm not a Civil War buff, so I tend to forget the details from book to book. This one focuses, obviously, on Grant's command and thus on the winning of the war. It's engaging and generally pro-Grant, suggesting among other things that he was not the political innocent many thought him.
Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century: This is probably the most dishonest book I've read in a while. It didn't need to be that way; the basic thesis, which is that there's something a bit funny about elite critics of consumerism who probably wouldn't trade their cushy lives for lives two hundred years before, is plausible. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to 1850, for many reasons. But that doesn't mean I think life now is perfect, or sustainable, whereas Lebergott comes off so boosterish that Pollyanna looks like she ought to be on suicide watch by comparison. And he does it in ways that make me distrust him and his statistics. For example, by clever math he comes up with the result that !Kung and similar food-gatherers must work twenty hours a day for their lifestyles. Since this is in contradiction to direct reports (not to mention available sunlight), he ought to recognize that something's wrong with his underlying numbers, but instead he asserts that this is more proof of modern superiority, because we don't have to work as hard for our calories. Likewise, while he points out that a lot of formerly household tasks have been captured by the market (canning food, making clothes, etc.), his statistics on women's work in the home show a huge drop in hours early in the twentieth century, which is inconsistent with other things I've read. Because I distrust him, I suspect he's fudging the numbers by only counting "old" tasks and not new ones – less time sewing, yes, but more time driving husband and kids around to various places. At one point he suggests that driving time is more valued, as shown by the fact that women appeared eager to abandon hand-washing for mechanical washers and used the freed-up time to drive, and that's fine, but driving is generally still work, not leisure as he implies. And when he says that GNP per capita is a bad measure of welfare because it means that a country is better off when a person dies and worse off when a person's born – that's just laughable, which I think is why he only hints at the claim that you can't tell that the US is better off materially than China.
Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command: I'm not a Civil War buff, so I tend to forget the details from book to book. This one focuses, obviously, on Grant's command and thus on the winning of the war. It's engaging and generally pro-Grant, suggesting among other things that he was not the political innocent many thought him.
Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century: This is probably the most dishonest book I've read in a while. It didn't need to be that way; the basic thesis, which is that there's something a bit funny about elite critics of consumerism who probably wouldn't trade their cushy lives for lives two hundred years before, is plausible. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to 1850, for many reasons. But that doesn't mean I think life now is perfect, or sustainable, whereas Lebergott comes off so boosterish that Pollyanna looks like she ought to be on suicide watch by comparison. And he does it in ways that make me distrust him and his statistics. For example, by clever math he comes up with the result that !Kung and similar food-gatherers must work twenty hours a day for their lifestyles. Since this is in contradiction to direct reports (not to mention available sunlight), he ought to recognize that something's wrong with his underlying numbers, but instead he asserts that this is more proof of modern superiority, because we don't have to work as hard for our calories. Likewise, while he points out that a lot of formerly household tasks have been captured by the market (canning food, making clothes, etc.), his statistics on women's work in the home show a huge drop in hours early in the twentieth century, which is inconsistent with other things I've read. Because I distrust him, I suspect he's fudging the numbers by only counting "old" tasks and not new ones – less time sewing, yes, but more time driving husband and kids around to various places. At one point he suggests that driving time is more valued, as shown by the fact that women appeared eager to abandon hand-washing for mechanical washers and used the freed-up time to drive, and that's fine, but driving is generally still work, not leisure as he implies. And when he says that GNP per capita is a bad measure of welfare because it means that a country is better off when a person dies and worse off when a person's born – that's just laughable, which I think is why he only hints at the claim that you can't tell that the US is better off materially than China.
