I'm a rock, I'm a rock, I'm a rock

There's a better video of an octopus pretending to be a rock out there somewhere, but this is pretty damn amazing of overall camouflage ability:

 

Too Many Words About Piketty

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tackling wealth and inequality, this was one of the best selling and least read books of the summer. Not that I'm mocking anyone here, I kept putting it down and took perhaps 5 months to finish and another month to get motivated to write this review (which is itself open to criticisms based on length).

It's a strange book to be a best seller. It's got three sections which basically consist of an idea, some data, and a policy pitch. More on the idea and policy pitch below, but the data section is interminable. The detail is something I respect on some level but if you're not the sort to read about national income level comparisons between different states and time periods already, I think you could do with perhaps three charts and a comment along the lines that "Similar trends were seen by most nations. Most other factors were minor."

Oh, also it's not really focused on inequality.

Watership Down

This wasn't in our household as a kid so I read if with no nostalgia factor.  In fact, I knew so little about it that I assumed there was water and ships involved.  As well as rabbits, which I somehow knew.  Maybe all the rabbits got on a boat and had whacky adventures or something?  Well, no, and the title is definitely *not* referring to something capsizing.

My unbiased, cynical opinion for those who read it when they were 12 and have fond memories: You are 100% correct.  This is just a great adventure book, written by someone who is clearly fond of adventures, humans and rabbits all at once.  (Could be nicer to dogs & cats though.) You get camraderie and perseverance and watch characters grow into roles thrust upon them by circumstance.  Hazel, not the strongest or the smartest, becomes such a great leader in such a plausible way that I was totally unsurprised to find that any number of people are willing to give you management lessons based on the book.  The chapter where Bigwig stands his ground is worth the price of admission on its own--it's the most thrilling performance by an underdog in a literary fight since Enkidu went 15 rounds against Gilgamesh and drew a majority draw.  Could have used more female rabbits, and one good joke gets used twice, but those are perhaps the only mis-steps I saw.

Bottom line: Read this book if you haven't, get it for your kids if there's not a copy in the house.

The Year Civilization Collapsed

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The late Bronze Age had a remarkable trading network established¹--ships were sailing hundreds of miles to move goods around different polities the eastern and central Mediterranean, including pottery, fabrics, copper and tin. The was the age of the palaces and kings that Odysseus would have lived in and that gave rise to tales of the Trojan War.

Around 1177 BC, the Sea Peoples descended out of nowhere (or maybe Sardinia and Sicily) and looted cities across the region, hitting places so quickly that pleas for help were written but messengers didn't have time to leave the city with them. Ramesses II of Egypt was able to defend his state, but every where else succumbed and absent trade civilizations withered.

Except not quite. Cline says that recent archaeology suggests cities' destruction might span a century from perhaps 1200 to 1130 BC. And some of the destruction was by earthquakes, probably, and when there was violence it's not clear whether it was internal or external and when it was external often we can only speculate as to whether it might have been the Sea Peoples. There was a collapse but the causes (all of the above, plus drought and climate change) can best be summarized as "it was complicated." Cline eschews sensationalism and I ended up reading it as a history late Bronze Age. Except for chapter 4 (which was for me an overly-detailed catalog of layers of destruction and rebuilding in various cities) an enjoyable account.


¹In an unnecessary attempt to make things relevant, this is compared to our current interconnected world. At one point Cline loses track of the metaphor and refers to this as the first "truly global" trade network in the world, which is a slight bit of hyperbole for an area that sort of covers places touching the southeastern periphery of today's EU.

Terror at the Shore

Terror at the Shore by Seamus Cooper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author of Mall of Cthulhu tells a story about a family that takes a seaside vacation at Dagon Heights, NJ.

Families should not take vacations at places called Dagon Heights.

Tongue-in-cheek horror tale (a riff on Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, if you missed the reference), there aren't enough outright jokes to call this a comedy--it's more a very light thriller and reading it is a perfectly good way to spend an evening.

It could also double as the novel version of a teen horror flick (just as Mall of Cthulhu could have been the pilot for a Buffy-knockoff TV series.)  There is the requisite morality play built in, but happily Cooper is enough of a mensch that in his world smoking dope and having sex are not the sins that get punished.

Battle Cry of Freedom

Excellent and very readable account of the Civil War. It starts at the end of the Mexican-American War, and covers the rising tensions tensions in the 1850s--including 'Bloody Kansas', the Dred Scott decision, and the splintering of American politics into a primarily sectional dispute. The war itself is primarily an account of the campaigns, interspersed with chapters on the economy, political disputes, emancipation and other domestic concerns.
Presumably because it's part of the Oxford History series, it ends rather abruptly with the end of the war in 1865, leaving the narrative thread that was leading towards complete emancipation (not to mention the black vote) incomplete, though sparing the reader the depressing story of the abandonment and reversal of those arcs during reconstruction.
Various points:

• I hadn't realized how much the later war in the Virginia theatre started looking like WWI. Weapons had improved and soldiers had dug in, so assaults became brutal.
• This might have happened even earlier, but Union leaders in the east before Grant tended to retreat after a failure and Lee would pursue them. Grant simply held the line and attacked again.
• Along these lines, McPherson argues that suggesting Grant's goal was a war of attrition (where the Union was guaranteed to win) is wrong. Grant’s maneuvering and assaults were intended to push Lee out so he could be decisively beaten. Which failed until Sherman’s southern advance made Lee desperate, when it succeeded.
• Lee, Jackson, Sherman and Grant come off well as military leaders. McClellan as an excellent administrator with no nerve for combat and Hooker and Burnside as incompetents.
• Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery changed over his lifetime but very rapidly during the war. Even more dramatic were his thoughts on blacks where he went from an explicit (if fairly indifferent) racism towards being in favor of black voters and defending black troops and POW’s. (See also The Fiery Trial, which I should review sometime, for much more on this.)
• There were many morbid ironies in the war, among them that the South’s perseverance and early success guaranteed the end of slavery. If McClellan had won in 1862 slavery would have lasted in some form for a generation or two at least.
• The British elite were basically willing to recognize the South but wanted to wait until it was quite certain the North would admit they were stalemated, which they generally expected to happen ‘soon.’ Napoleon III wanted to recognize the South but didn’t want to go it alone.

The song is jauntier than the book, which was often a brutally depressing read.

Hammered

Hammered by Kevin Hearne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought this was easily the weakest entry in the series so far. What I thought was an ongoing throwaway joke ("Thor's a real asshole") is taken at face value and becomes the plot. I kept waiting for a punchline that never came.

Some of the individual scenes are good, though there's not enough of the wolfhound Oberon. The beer Atticus shares with Jesus is funny enough in concept to overlook mediocre execution.