"Japan 1941"

Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy (Eri Hotta)

I got this book for Christmas, and it was a nice surprise; in my continued quest to read all about the less reported on facts of history, this book fills in a sizable gap. My schooling covered the leadup to WW2 in the Pacific in a super quick sketch (Oil embargo > Pearl Harbor > Midway > A-bomb > Pokemon), and this book is a interesting if depressing look at the Japanese decision making that lead to Pearl Harbor.
I learned a lot from this book - surprisingly, Tojo comes out looking okay, possibly better than Prince Konoe, the previous prime minister, who is painted as weak willed and paralyzed by tough choices. (The villain of the piece is foreign minister Matsuoka, architect of the Tripartite Pact that made Japan one of the Axis powers.)  Just about the only two figures who escape unscathed are Yamamoto (the unwilling planner of the Pearl Harbor attack) and the Emperor Hirohoto himself, who was anti-war but so powerless that about the most he could do is ask skeptical questions and recite a anti-war poem.
All in all, this isn't the kind of blockbuster you need to run out and pick up immediately, but I'd recommend it (doubly so if someone else buys it for you, I suppose).

Grade: B

"Lenin's tomb"

Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (David Remnick)

I've heard it said that "the plural of anecdote is not data", and this is what I kept thinking while reading this book. It's kind of a mess; Remnick's narrative history pieces aren't in order, and the 2 - 3 page anecdotes he keeps dropping in feel totally disconnected from the surrounding material. I could see this book working either as a straight narrative history or as a collection of essays, but the length of the anecdotes didn't really work for me, and between that and Remnick's jumping around, the book never really cohered into anything interesting. There's no thread or premise holding the book together, and I dumped it after fifty puzzling pages. Avoid.

Grade: D-

"Dragon Keeper"

Dragon Keeper (Robin Hobb)

I tried with this book, I really did. This is another free Kindle e-book, a genre which I have not exactly enjoyed in the past. In this case, I tried to make it 50 pages (this is not easy to measure with the Kindle's "location" system), and after three and a half chapters I just couldn't stand it anymore. Reading this book is like wading through hip-deep mud: It's slow, heavy, turgid, and your mind constantly wanders to something more interesting. The book opens badly, starting with a bunch of dragons cocooning themselves, but they're all weak and dazed and half of them die, and it's so ham-handedly GUYS THIS IS SAD that it becomes silly; I couldn't help but imagine these dragons drunkenly bumbling around to comical music.
Then we switch to focus on a deformed harpy girl and her dad, and nothing happens, and while reading this part I was missing the dragons stumbling around. After a bunch of pages of nothing of interest happening we switch to focus on Alise, our mary sue who LOVES DRAGONS GUYS, and while reading this I was somehow missing the earlier parts about nothing happening to a deformed harpy girl. At this point (I was reading the book in the bathroom) I would have rather just listened to the various gross sounds coming from the next stall than continue reading this book, which I guess is very mean to say, but there you have it.

Grade: F

"The Riddle of the Sands"

The Riddle of the Sands (Erskine Childers)

I have to give this book credit: It takes real confidence to apologize, around page 70 of your 250 pages, for the book being boring up to that point. This is not a good sign, and yet I still finished this book. I'm not sure if you can chalk this up to me being a glutton or punishment, or (more likely) the fact that this is a weird, interesting little historical curio. This is an "invasion" novel (and I guess a well-known one as it's mentioned on the wiki page about them), a book written in 1903 about a imaginary German plan to invade England. This genre is usually mentioned offhand in history books, and I have to admit I've always wondered about reading one. The problem with this one is that it's full of a lot of yachting stuff. This is a book either for big history nerds (cough), or yachting fans, and I don't know that either group is going to be  entirely happy with it.
As for how I liked it - well, I finished it; I can't really recommend it unless you belong to one of the above groups, as it just moves too slowly and has too much sailing in it. The most entertaining parts, I dare say, are in seeing some of the ways that language and society has changed since the book was written; The subtext between our hero and his friend with the yacht, I'm sure, was meant to be two bronzed Anglos sailing around doing ultra manly stuff, but comes off as a bit, umm, hmm. Let's just say that towards the end of the book when the narrator is re-united with his pal and is felt up in the dark with his big knobby hands, it certainly adds some subtext to the earlier scene where our hero sees his friend's "wistful face on the quay" and then "heard his grim ejaculation". To be fair, this is very juvenile, but the author isn't helping with his steady stream of what I'm sure is meant as perfectly harmless patter ( "'Mud-holes!' he replied, with a contemptuous laugh." "'Pull it out,' said Davies"). All I'm saying is these guys really love sailing.

Grade: C-

"Full Body Burden"

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (Kristen Iversen)

You can probably tell what the book is about from the title - Iversen packs both her own autobiography and a history of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility into this book. This technique could go disastrously awry as the two aren't exactly intricately intertwined (Iversen getting a temp job at Rocky Flats near the book's end is a blase anticlimax), but it mostly works. I say mostly because at times it can be annoying when Iversen is in a groove either detailing Rocky Flats or her own life and cuts away to pick up the other narrative. Now to be fair, complaining that you're enjoying the book so much that you're annoyed that you're not immediately getting more of it isn't really much of a negative, and Iversen is wise enough to omit what must have been boring material (the stretch of her life where she goes to Germany basically boils down to "I went to Germany and came back"). In fact, I guess my only caveat is that this is another depressing book, but I suppose nobody picks up something with a title like this looking for a breezy read.

Grade: A-

"In the Garden of Beasts"

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (Erik Larson)

This book is the anti-Agent Zigzag; Where there I had no expectations and loved the book, here I heard this book getting praise up and down and, well. I guess my first clue should have been the fact that all of two weeks after the book came out my wife found a free copy sitting out on the curb. As it turns out, this book ended up in my own donation pile after blazing through it, and I feel bad for anyone who spent $10 on this thing. I don't get what all the hype was about, as I found this book to be boring, plodding, and - worst of all - pointless. If you have even a cursory knowledge of the subject matter, you already know everything in this book, and you've probably read it in a more entertaining form. Even if the material in this book is a surprise, the author's tedious framing device does it no favors - the American ambassador is, like almost everyone in the book, a flat character  and his daughter sleeping around seems completely disconnected from the rest of the book. Bizarrely, the book is about the ambassador, but only covers the brief period of time that is his tenure up through the Night of the Long Knives, then hits the fast-forward button on the long rest of his term before coming to a baffling ending. In short, stay away.

Grade: F

"Bushwhacked"

Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America (Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose)

I love how when you go to the Amazon page for this, it screams
Only 5 left in stock (more on the way).

I mean, I don't want to be rude, but is there a really huge demand for this book? To sum it up in one word - one devastating word, in the world of politics - it's (bum bum bum bum bum bum)

Dated. 

It's well written and entertaining, but let's be honest here: No matter how big an asshole move it is, do people remember old W as one of the worst presidents because he refused to ratify Clinton's workplace ergonomics legislation? I'd say no, and this book was published before the epic, presidency-destroying bungles of, say, Iraq's disastrous occupation, and eating birthday cake while New Orleans was destroyed. Going back and reading this book now, the two things that leap out are Enron, and the very start of the Iraq war. Everything else, horrible as it is, seems like small potatoes compared to what W ended up doing before we got a responsible adult in the white house again (wow - more like bite size political opinions.blogspot.com! -ed). 
So should you read it? If you find it for free like I did, sure, but given the age of the material, this is hard to recommend otherwise.

Grade: B? Yeah, let's go with that.

"Ready Player One"

Ready Player One: A Novel (Ernest Cline)

Ready Player One is the worst kind of frustrating: A great first third that turns into a disaster. The book is about a reclusive billionaire who dies and wills that his heir will be the person who finds an easter egg hidden in the virtual reality that he's invented. The first third of the book is our hero, a poor kid with a dream of finding the easter egg, putting some clues together and getting started on his quest.
And it's good! At times the novel does threaten to become "Hey, Remember the 80's? The Book", but this first third is thrilling, and I was really rooting for our hero. So what happens? Well, all the chaercters in the book are one-dimensional, and this isn't much of a problem when it's our hero against the simulation. But when the author writes the dread sentence "I realized I was in love with Art3mis", well, that's where the book goes in the toilet, and while it does eventually recover somewhat, it never becomes as good as the first third. Honestly, I don't know that finishing the other 2/3rds is worth it to find out what happens, but I was interested enough to do so. The momentum from the premise and the first third was enough to drive me through the slog that is our hero, having made it in the virtual world, pining for his girlfriend. Sometimes less is more, and without the romantic subplot, I might have been able to recommend this as a classic. As it is, take my recommendation with a large grain of salt.

Grade:
First Third: A
Middle Third: D
Final Third: C
Overall: C+

"Ghost in the Wires"

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker (Kevin "Free Kevin Mitnick" Mitnick)

If you grew up at a certain time, you may have witnessed the at-times ubiquitous Free Kevin movement of the late 90's and early 2000s. Mitnick had - has? - a reputation as a famous evil computer mastermind wizard, but reading his book, I was struck at how more times than not, he got the information that he needed by practicing social engineering instead of any computer skills. In fact, by the second half of the book, you'll be reading "I social engineered" easily double the amount of times he's actually hacking in anywhere.
That's not to say the book is any less interesting - Mitnick's titular adventures, which include time on the lamb after the FBI gets wise to him, is gripping stuff. Since this is Mitnick's own book, he of course comes off as the hero, but I have a lot of sympathy for him regardless, since his hacking is presented as a form of curiosity (he's not using stolen credit card numbers or anything). My only caveat is that the book is a little bit technical - Kevin and his co-author usually stop to explain the more in-depth concepts, but if you don't know what a BBS or a phone phreaker is, you may find yourself a little lost. With that said, I really enjoyed this book, and I'm confident it's a great read for fellow nerds, if maybe not this author's mom.

Grade: A