Category: Reviews

The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part history, part biography, part call-to-action, The End of Average isn’t your average non-fiction book. Then again, there’s no such thing as an average non-fiction book, nor, according to author Todd Rose, is there an average person. So why compare people to averages?

Most of us of a certain age (say, older than 30, maybe even younger) are products of a system that sought to evaluate, sort, and assign us based on our abilities compared to an average. The problem is two fold: the “average” is artificial, representing no living person, and the average is a distillation of many different abilities lumped together and labelled with an otherwise meaningless “grade.” So a person who is good at Math (A) but bad at English (D) has the same average grade as someone who is bad at math but good at English. We say those two people are of the same class.

In fact, the very instruction given to those two people was probably based on the way an “average” person learns, which is why the one was evaluated “bad” at math and the other “bad” at English. Rose, and all of the research he quoted, claims that there are better ways to teach.

And it’s all very compelling, and as a new father, a subject I am keenly interested in. I, myself, did not have the best experience in high school (oh, I “excelled,” but that was despite my teachers’ best efforts). I have every intention of taking a large role, if not the largest role, in my son’s education. That there are institutions are developing ways to personalize learning for the individual is, frankly, inspiring.

Rose discusses not only education, but job recruitment and performance as well. Companies from small startups to behemoths like Google and Microsoft are shifting their focus away from treating employees according to efficiency-based averages and allowing for more individualization, which has led to increased innovation, employee satisfaction, and a stronger bottom line.

The End of Average is not very long, somewhat repetitive (not necessarily in a bad way) and well supported with a long list of references. A quick, informative, good read.

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Out on the Cutting Edge by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Matthew Scudder used to be addicted to alcohol, but now he’s sober. Lawrence Block, however, is still addicted to killing young women, waiting for a several months, and then sending Scudder on a cold trail to find them. I don’t have a problem with this. (I mean, in terms of reading mysteries, I’m not advocating of murder in general, obviously.)

Here we are in the 7th Scudder novel, and we’re sort of returning to form. The first 4 novels had a Scudder who investigates, frequents bars, feels a kind of malaise. Then Block shook things up and gave us a look-see at Matt struggling with his alcoholism. And now, in Out on the Cutting Edge, instead of frequenting bars, Scudder frequents AA meetings. A decent author would probably be able to rewrite the earlier novels so that the bar visits were all AA visits too: and Block is a very decent author.

Which is what I mean when I say we’re returning to form. Existential Angst gave way to Struggling With the Human Condition and now, thankfully, we’re back to Angst. Not quite as Existential, but verging on the Absurd (not the “silly” absurd, but the “there’s no explaining things so why bother” absurd). Block achieves this by giving us a two-fer in Cutting Edge: two mysteries instead of one.

And the cynic in me wants to holler “but Deus Ex Machina!” at how those mysteries end up solving one another, and the handy little “I’m done writing so here’s the end” bow that Block puts on it at the end of the book. But I’m just glad we’re back to the good old Scudder novel, less than 200 pages, not too demanding on the morality front.

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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my third Michael Lewis book, and I’m starting to detect a pattern. There’s always a guy, near the beginning, who figures “it” all out and writes as much in a newsletter, or blog. In Moneyball, “it” was that OBP was more important than batting average; in The Blind Side, “it” was that the left tackle was probably the most important player on the field after the quarterback; in The Big Short, “it” was that our nation’s economic backbone was run by incredibly stupid people.

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but “stupidity” was the overlying theme of The Big Short. Who knows, maybe Michael Lewis decided that “out-and-out” fraud was too libelous, and even guys who crashed the stock market still had enough money left over to sue him a few dozen times over. Indeed, one wants to believe the folks who run billion and trillion dollar companies are villains, not idiots. It fits a better narrative and, in the long run, is way less scary.

But what you get out of The Big Short is that the people at the top of the money-food-chain are too arrogant and complacent to see the through the many layers of obfuscation they’ve built to disguise their utter greed. And the result of this was little guys, at the bottom of the chain, finding a loophole and exploiting it.

Michael Lewis does a pretty good job explaining something that literally only a handful of people in the world really understand. More or less he beats you over the head with it, but stacking the story into a character-driven narrative and repeating the malfeasance of the corporate elite over and over again. Trust me, you won’t get it the first time he explains credit-default swaps. By the tenth time, you might.

You know what the truly horrible part of the this book was, for me? Even though all those “too-big to fail” companies failed, the stock market went kerflooey, and the US Government gave away hundreds of billions of dollars to slap a band-aid on what should have been a better regulated system… my life wasn’t really all that effected. In 2008 and subsequent years, my middle-class lifestyle was as it ever was and has been since. And this is horrible, because I’m not the only one, am I. All that money, all the stupidity, and for most of us, the only take-away was: oh goody, another Ryan Gosling movie.

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When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s a heck of a thing, reading the last book in a series when the previous book was the last one and there’s still eleven books to go. I mean, it’s a good thing that I know, for a fact, Lawrence Block did not read my review of Eight Million Ways to Die and then decide to return to form for When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes in response to my complaints.

I understand that Eight Million was supposed to be Matthew Scudder’s final act. With Sacred, we get to go back to the beginning: Matt the drunk, Matt the guy who does “favors” for friends, Matt the guy who tithes wages and time alike in whichever random church he comes across when he needs to sit for a spell.

But Block’s approach to the old Matt is in the style of the new Matt, which is to say, Sacred is a more nuanced, complicated story than any of the four books leading up to Eight Million. It’s a kind of transition novel, in that we get our old familiar Matt to guide us through this new kind of Matthew Scudder mystery.

I say all of this without having read any of the other books in the series yet, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. But I fully expect to have a different itch scratched by those books. Which means I’ll miss the old Matt. So it was nice to see him again, one last time.

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Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Was reading this and thinking I would say something about “A pimp with a heart of gold.” But then Block beat me to it, right there on page 259. Oh well. Guess I’ll have to find some other way to be glib. Like how this book’s twice as long as any one of the previous Matthew Scudder novels. How you like that for a review?

All things considered, Eight Million Ways to Die follows the same formula: someone is murdered, the police are looking in the wrong place if they’re looking at all, and Scudder is hired, agreeing to the job against his better judgement. There’s prostitutes, and a booze, and coffee, and those dirty New York City streets.

However, layered on top of that, is one man’s struggle with his addiction. And this is why the book is twice as long as it needed to be. I say “needed” because the alcoholism and the murder mystery don’t really intertwine in any way. Oh, there’s a little bit of overlap, but nothing to get too caught up in. This is, sort of, two different books.

Which is not to say that they are two different books that stand alone. After all, the formula has Matt Scudder walking around, talking to people, drinking, following leads, drinking, jumping to some conclusion that the reader doesn’t have enough information to figure himself, and drinking. Except this time, instead of drinking, Scudder tries not to drink– and apparently that takes way more words to describe.

Who knows, maybe Block got paid by the word this time. The guy wins awards, so obviously it’s appreciated, switching from existential-angst to AA-angst. Upping the ante, as it were. I’m not complaining, but I’m not saying I love it, either. I never thought the drinking was all that much of a problem in the previous Scudder novels. There didn’t seem to be any consequences– so why fix what ain’t broken?

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A Stab in the Dark by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve made a mistake: I started reading 8 Million Ways to Die before I write this review for A Stab in the Dark. So I apologize if the one leaks into the other. I’ll do my best. Not really sure what to say about Stab that I didn’t already say about the first three books in the Matthew Scudder series.

Matt’s an ex-cop and an unlicensed PI. He drinks and he solves crimes. This time he’s been asked to solve a crime that happened 9 years before. The usual theme: cops probably won’t bother, this is more about peace of mind than justice, etc. Along the way Matt makes a friend and of course you know how that’s going to go. Don’t worry, it’s not bloody, just sad.

Of course Scudder solves the case, with some leg work and some patience. This is a work of fiction, after all, so you knew he would. And so what if there’s a convenient coincidence that helps things out. And so what if there’s some justice at the end that’s maybe a little far-fetched. We don’t drink these drinks for our health, do we. You don’t exactly get drunk, reading these crime novels. But you can get a little buzzed.

Then again, it’s a sort-of existential buzz, a kind of comfortable-melancholy. I realize “angst” and “comfort” and all that compatible, but when you’re following around a guy who stays on the job even when no one wants him to, you identify with his tenacity. You keep reading, not because you want to know whodunnit, but because you feel like you’re where you’re supposed to be, curled up around your e-reader.

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In the Midst of Death by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Third book in the Scudder series, and so far we’re three for three with suicides. Yeah, that’s a spoiler, but this book was written more than 40 years ago, and I ain’t gonna say who it was or why. Besides, if you’re going to read this third book, it’s because you’ve read the other two already. And if you’re not, you won’t bother with them either. I ain’t spoiled nothin.

More of the same is what we have here in this novel: Matthew Scudder drinks all the time, although he doesn’t get drunk very often. One of the things I like about Lawrence Block’s writing, though, is that when Scudder IS drunk, you can tell without being told– its a simple matter of word choice and sentence length. Its subtle and subliminal.

Scudder himself goes with his gut and trusts his instincts, so it’s kind of nice how a reader can do the same thing, reading these novels. Block has a precise touch. And it’s used to describe a depressing world full of bad cops and dive bars. You can’t win for losing in a Matthew Scudder novel.

For what it’s worth, suicide aside, there’s a tiny bit of happiness for ol’ Matt in this one, for a change. Not much, and it doesn’t last, and that’s not a spoiler either, that’s just another trope Block’s trying on for size. What’s it all for in the end? I don’t know. You never know you’ve had too much until you’ve had too much.

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Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

When the main character of a novel has things all figured out, but there’s still half of the novel left to go, it’s hard to buy in. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad in any other kind of story, but when it’s a mystery told in first-person, that lack-of-page-count can kind of make it hard to willingly suspend one’s disbelief.

And then there’s the jaded cynic in all of us who knows better than to accept the first “solution” to come along, even if the main character is willing to accept it. Don’t get me wrong, I like an unreliable narrator, even and especially when that narrator is the main character in the book. But I want that unreliability to stem from good writing, not just from stacking up tropes.

Truthfully, though, that’s not even my biggest problem with Time to Murder and Create. I didn’t like the ending at all. As denouements go, it put heavy emphasis on the “anti” in “anticlimax.” I call myself jaded and cynical, and certainly I wouldn’t be satisfied by a whiz-bag Hollywood-style ending filled with blood and mayhem. But something more than just, well… I don’t want to give anything away. I get the impression Block wrote himself into a corner, and decided to go ‘realistic’ (you know, “gritty”) instead of farcical.

On the other hand, do we really read books like this for the story itself? Or do we devour them for their tone, mood, that aforementioned grit? I guess the latter. This second Matthew Scudder novel’s got all that. And I’ll keep reading them.

It could be the case I’m judging this book against the better ones he wrote later. And yet, by the time he’d written Time to Murder, he’d already written, literally, more than 50 other novels. So it shouldn’t have read like a sophomore effort.

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The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In order to write this review of a book I finished reading a few minutes ago, which itself was written in 1976, I had to go back and re-read my reviews for some of his other novels– if only to keep from repeating myself. Lawrence Block is just that kind of consistent, solid writer, that it would be easy to say the same things again and again about how he writes.

But one thing I said about his Keller series is also true for Matthew Scudder: “Block’s gifted at matching his prose style to the personality of his character. “

It’s 2016, 40 years since The Sins of the Fathers was written. By now, the whole alcoholic depressed ex-cop thing has gone from challenging to trite to cliched to trope. But give Block credit for, if not exactly inventing the archetype, or even perfecting it, at least not overusing it. Scudder’s burnt-out and washed up, but, in his own words, “If I didn’t [regard suicide as a sin] I probably would have killed myself years ago.” That prose style I mentioned doesn’t hit the reader over the head with angst- you get out of it however much you want.

This is your basic detective procedural, with enough lurid details to be pulpy but just enough moralizing to avoid lasciviousness. That’s a fine line to straddle, and it’s no wonder Block has won all those writing awards. This is, apparently “Urban Noir,” a lable which strikes me as unnecessarily redundant, but then you can’t call it “modern” to differentiate 1970s New York from the 1930s, I guess.

I’ve read a lot of Lawrence Block over the course of my own 40 years (I’m older than that but didn’t start reading him on day one, obviously) but for some reason never got around the the Scudder novels. But there’s 17 more to go– I expect they’re all good reads like this one; the hard part’s going to be finding a way to write 17 more unique reviews.

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The Antipope by Robert Rankin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was poking around Goodreads, looking at the books I’ve read. A sidebar told me “People who’ve read Douglas Adams have also read Robert Rankin!” Well, gosh. I used to read Douglas Adams all the time. I better check this out. Kindle Unlimited offers a metric butt-ton of Robert Rankin, so I grabbed me a download of The Antipope.

It’s silly. That’s a short review, and if you know me, praiseworthy. Here’s another glib description: A British version of David Wong’s John Dies at the End (in spirit, anyway). One more: Maybe what H.P Lovecraft would have written if, rather than born in Rhode Island and terrified of the female anatomy, he was instead born in a small Middlesex hamlet and terrified of sobriety.

Rankin’s obviously having fun with this very English novel. I say very English because there’s the pub culture, the shades of xenophobia, the anti-catholicism. There’s trysts and malevolent bicycles and put-upon language, how Shakespeare would have more modern men speak if he was tired of all that damned poetry.

There’s not much of a plot, and several scenes written for the pure absurdity of it. Lots of fun. This is not a book for sitting down and examining. This is a novel for consuming indulgently, like an entire bag of chips or a tub of ice-cream. And, best of all, if you like the read, it’s the first of a nine-novel trilogy. Silly indeed. Just like Douglas Adams.

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