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Over the past week I read through Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believ About our Schools -- And Why It Isn't So by the (rightish) Manhattan Institute's Jay P. Greene. The phrase "special interest" is only really used on the cover, and inasmuch as organized groups are implicated at all in education's issues only the teacher's unions are specifically brought up. The book cites sociological research to make a point, largely that adding funding hasn't historically improved schools but current research on voucher programs suggests they help. This wasn't really a light fluffy read but it was still pretty well-written, and if the subject matter sounds interesting to you it's probably worth a read.

( Criticisms )

In all, this seemed like a worthwhile book to me. It visibly has a position (which you can guess from the cover and table of contents). I don't have the background to really tell if it's covering almost all of the relevant research or a specific subset, or if the author's research is totally legit. Still, it made an argument supported by data, and there's always something to be said for that.

I re-read Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine after my UK trip. The second half of the book does make a big deal of the (Australican) Great Western Paraline Authority, and its worship of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and its engineers' fanaticism over seven-foot-gauge rail vs. standard gauge...some two thousand years after "Britancal heretics" tore up the last broad-gauge rail on the real Great Western in AD 1892. I'm not really clear if McMullen is mocking present-day GWR fanatics in a way that only hard-core rail geeks would get, or if it's supposed to be making a statement about post-Greatwinter Australican society, or what. It's very vaguely plot-relevant at one point (item relevant to very high level plot is stuck at a particular place because the rail gauge changes), and it turns out that the Brunel worshippers do know things that everyone else has worked very hard to find out, but it just seems somewhat gratuitous to me.

I'm still trying to work out how the Wanderers destroy anything moving larger than twenty-nine and a half feet in Colandoro in The Miocene Arrow but they let the Australican galley trains run without issue.

I finished reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I liked this quite a bit. Atwood seems to be a good author for people who like science fiction but want to wander into the Reputable Authors section of the bookstore/library; the three books of hers I've read all have some sort of SF component. (Of the other two, The Handmaid's Tale is an alternate-future story; I thought The Blind Assassin was just depressing the whole way through, but there's an SF-ish story woven through it.)

Oryx and Crake is an alternate-future story about what happens if the pharmaceutical/bioengineering companies get out of control. The world has ended, approximately, and there's one Real Human left, who has figured out how to live without the comforts of the now-ruined civilization and fend off the newly created wildlife. A lot of the story is spent in flashbacks, but this basically means that there are three plotlines, all of which do succeed in moving forward. Crake is the protagonist's boy-genius childhood friend, who gets into both computer and biological hacking; Oryx is a girl who appears first in adolescent-viewed porn.

The world is believable and well-developed, though, and the story is entertaining for being post-apocalyptic. Atwood does seem to be good at verbal humor, and so I will leave you with the following:

The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs.

I'm not normally much on the book review thing here, but I finished Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil last night. The plot made no sense beyond the first chapter that introduced his concept, which could have been a good one. But wow the sweeping generalizations brush comes out. And if you know, or happen to be, someone of the female body-type that you consider a generally respectable human being not totally driven by their reproductive organs, you'll probably find most of the book pretty offensive. Blech. Really just not worth the effort.

Right now I'm working through Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold (of Miles Vorkosigan fame). It's reasonable, with only one problem: it's clearly a sequel to The Curse of Chalion, and it's been a while since I've read that. In between I've read Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy, and Sean McMullen's Moonworlds, uh, bilogy (odd in that Voyage of the Shadowmoon is "Book One of the Moonworlds Saga", Glass Dragons is "A Tale of the Moonworlds Saga"). So now I'm mixing events between worlds, and trying to remember that mages don't need to be registered with the guild and that nobody's trying to build a magical wall that circles the world...

Entries tagged with books

Book review: "Education Myths"

Post-apocalyptic broad-gauge rail

Who brought the cat?

Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil

Mixing worlds

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