Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions - Edwin Abbott

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Category: Mathematical fiction from the 1880's. Acquired: borrowed from the Todd & Betsy library Read: August 2008 Briefly: Glimpses of three imaginary worlds that are limited to one, two and three dimensions, respectively. As they interact, each has great difficulty grasping that there could be more to reality than what they're seeing.

Comments: I had heard of this book eons ago, but never ran across a copy until now (exploring T&B's library is always a highlight of our visits there). The story starts with the main character - a rectangle - explaining the basics of his flat world - a paper-thin world of length and width, but no height. He discusses what the inhabitants are like, how they live, and some of their history. In his world, people are geometric shapes: lower classes are thin triangles, with higher classes adding more and more sides (square, pentagon, hexagon, etc.) right up to the ruling classes, who are nearly circles. Homes are flat, multi-sided shapes with openings in the sides. He spends quite a bit of time explaining how they learn to recognize each other, given that, in a totally flat world, you observe everyone and everything from an edgewise viewpoint only, and thus see only straight lines.

Once you've wrapped your mind around that, the real gymnastics begin. The Flatland narrator encounters folks from Lineland, a one-dimensional world where everything exists along a single straight line. You can almost feel the frustration as the Flatlander tries to explain to the Linelanders that what they're seeing isn't all there is. The conversation is captivating and even amusing, but alas, the differences are too profound, and the Linelanders are never able to comprehend.

Then, in a later chapter, the Flatlander meets someone from Spaceland, a 3-dimensioned world like ours, who likewise tries to explain to him how much he's missing. The conversation goes much the same: "I'm not a circle, I'm a sphere"... "what's a sphere?"... "it's like a circle, but it has length, width and height"... "what is height?"... etc. So, the Flatlander ends up being on both the giving and the receiving end of futile attempts to explain an extra dimension that the other person has never experienced.

So, it's interesting and fun, but is it worthwhile? What struck me while reading is that maybe it's not so far-fetched. Here we are, living in three dimensions - four, if you include time. If there were Someone who lived outside those dimensions, perhaps a Being unconstrained by time, would we be able to really comprehend that? This book suggests that we'd have a hard time; we might accept the truth at face value, but we'd have great difficulty grasping what it really meant. As a result, we'd be puzzled by things like predestination, infant salvation and eternal security - all of which are problematic to our time-constrained way of thinking, but for Someone who resides entirely "outside" of time, they'd be complete non-issues.

Pretty deep stuff from an 80 page, 120-year old book.

The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury

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Category: Fiction Acquired: borrowed from the Todd & Betsy library Read: August 5, 2008 - all in one day. Briefly: Earthlings colonize Mars in the early 21st century, and demonstrate that their ability to develop new technology far outpaces their ability to use it wisely. By the end of the book, they've basically snuffed out civilization on both planets.

Comments: I'm not really that much of a sci-fi fan. While the genre is good at bringing up interesting and even important questions about the future, the visions they present are so often dark and pessimistic that the stories can be real downers. Ray Bradbury is particularly like that.

So why do I feel that this is one of the best sci-fi books ever written? Maybe it's because I first read it at an impressionable age, somewhere around age 12. Maybe it's because it connected so well with the space-race fever we were all feeling in the 1960's. Maybe it's because the stories are just so darn good. Really - "Usher II" and "There Will Come Soft Rains" are still among my favorite all-time short stories. As I was reading them yesterday for the first time in ten years, I was literally finishing sentences in my head as I turned the pages.

The book was written in 1949, by the way, and Bradbury's idea of the 'far future' is the time span from 2002 to 2005, when most of the action occurs (each chapter begins with a date). His vision of where our technology would be in 50 years is overly-optimistic (often humorously so), while his vision of how badly we'd mess things up is likewise (thankfully) pessimistic. At least, Los Angeles hasn't been incinerated by a nuclear bomb yet, last I heard.

The DMZ - Jeanette Windle

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Category: Fiction Acquired: SPCC Church Library Read: August 2008 Briefly: Jungles, terrorists, kidnapings, escapes, snakes, bugs, bullets.

Comments: This book stands out from the typical Christian novel in a couple of ways. For one, the plot itself isn't totally implausible. OK, maybe it is, but at least it's interesting. Islamic terrorists form an alliance with Columbian guerrillas in order to strike at the US from the same hemisphere, yada yada. Hey, it's a lot more believable than some Romanian guy becoming dictator of the world.

Beyond that, I thought the characters had some decent depth to them. The woman (a journalist) grew up as a missionary kid, and had baggage - deep doubts and bitterness about whether the sacrifice was really worth it. The male protagonist (Army Special Ops) was a ghetto kid whose conversion to Christianity had re-formed his outlook on life. No quick fixes here - the author takes her time (and 500+ pages) gradually breaking down the cultural gulf that separates the characters, and leading them through lengthy conversations that eventually peel back the issues and create some honest confrontations. Part of this comes about as the journalist spends a month in a guerrilla camp, observing people whose commitment to a cause has driven them to even greater sacrifices than the ones she has made. It's well done, actually, and not hokey.

Best of all, the inevitable romance doesn't develop until the final 50 pages, and can be safely ignored because it's not that important to the plot. You can just skip right by it and give all your attention to the cool, shoot-em up finale.

Longitude - Dava Sobel and William Andrewes

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Category: Biography Acquired: Borrowed from Dennis O'Brien Read: July 2008 Briefly: the subtitle says it all: "The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time".

Comments: In the middle of the 18th century, one of the greatest scientific problems facing humankind was navigation - finding your location on the globe. Without an accurate way to determine latitude and longitude, sailing across oceans would continue to be a risky proposition.

Latitude wasn't the problem, because it could be easily calculated from the sun's position. Longitude, on the other hand, perplexed the most brilliant scientific minds. Why? It, too, was calculated from the sun's position, but that had to be done at a precisely-known time. If you were a minute too late, your calculated location would be off by dozens of miles. The problem was that clocks built in the 1700's could gain or lose many seconds per day - completely inadequate, when multiplied by a 40-50 day transoceanic voyage.

So, while longitude was the great problem, the desperately-sought solution was a clock that could stay accurate through the jarring motions and temperature changes of an ocean voyage. The need was so great that, in 1714, the British Parliament offered a 20,000 pound reward for a suitably accurate device.

This book tells the story of John Harrison, who spent most of his life developing a series of five such clocks. It's a story of brilliant engineering (he pioneered techniques still found in clock mechanisms today), of famous people (Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley have roles), and of political intrigue (due to conflicts with the head of the reward committee, it took him over 40 years to receive his money).

It's a good read, with plenty of photos and diagrams, and just enough technical detail. You'll come away appreciating how something we take entirely for granted today - accurate time-keeping - was once a seemingly impossible dream.

Oh, and you'll also learn what the word horology means.

In His Image - Paul Brand (with Philip Yancey)

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Category: Medical, devotional Acquired: Smokey Point Comm. Church Library Read: July 2008 Briefly: Humanitarian doctor shares some of the scriptural truths that have become more real to him over the years as he has observed the workings of the human body.

Comments: Amazing guy, amazing book. Dr. Brand spent most of his life in India as a medical missionary, working almost entirely with lepers - because nobody else would. Working year after year to reconstruct damaged limbs, he's responsible for greatly advancing medical knowledge on the workings of the human hand, and is known for his pioneering techniques in restorative surgery.

This book isn't his biography, though - for that info, you might start with the chapter about him in Yancey's book Soul Survivor. Instead, it's more like a devotional - each chapter begins with a discussion of some aspect of the human body, and then develops that background to illustrate a spiritual theme.

For example, there's a fairly indepth discussion about blood - its composition, its functions, its roles within the body, etc. (One thing I liked about the book is how simply he describes incredibly complex processes - even with no medical background, the concepts are completely understandable). After presenting those topics, he then talks about the message of blood in Christianity.

In particular, he takes issue with those who say that blood is primarily symbolic of the pain and suffering that Christ underwent on our behalf. Wait a minute, he says - blood is a far more positive symbol than that. It's responsible for bringing nourishment to the other cells. It facilitates the healing of sick or damaged parts. It's also the primary mechanism by which the immune system protects the body from attack. Starting to see the point? When Christ's blood becomes a part of us, we are likewise nourished, healed and protected, by virtue of having received a transfusion of His blood. Cool.

For insights like these, and many more, I can heartily recommend this book. Incidentally, it's actually a follow-on to the original Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, which I understand was written along much the same lines. Too many lessons for just one book, I guess. Hopefully my favorite church librarian can scare me up a copy of that one, too.

The Call of the Wild & White Fang - Jack London

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Category: Books that everybody else read in high school. Acquired: Half-Price Books, Everett Read: July 2008 Briefly: Two stories, one about a domesticated dog that returns to his wild roots, and the other about a wild dog that ends up domesticated. Does that mean they cancel each other out?

Comments: I didn't pick this up for any particular reason, except that I've never read anything by London and sort of wondered what the fuss was about. I'm not even a particular fan of animal stories, but do have some interest in the historical setting, namely the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1904.

Anyway, being the last person on earth to read these books, I don't have much to say about the stories themselves. What I did find interesting about this particular edition was the introduction, written by a professor of American literature at Vassar. She discusses London's (well-known) interest and support for Socialism, and then proceeds to cite passages from the books that (to her way of thinking) illustrate and even validate the Socialist world view. Example: the wolf pack that stalks and eventually overwhelms the two dog sledders at the beginning of White Fang demonstrates that workers who organize (i.e. the wolf pack) will have greater success than those enslaved by the ruling class (i.e. the mushers, who are carrying a cargo for a rich family). What foolishness, as she totally misses the point. She doesn't even see the irony in the Jack London letter she quotes later, where he pitches his idea for White Fang to his publisher, raving about how many copies it's going to sell. Ahhh... Socialists make such good capitalists.

So, check this book off my list of books I should have read long ago. What's next? Who knows, maybe it's time to pick up some of the Shakespeare plays that went straight over my head in high school.

Moneyball - Michael Lewis

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Category: Sports, non-fiction Acquired: Suggested/loaned by Ben Z. at work Read: July 2008 Briefly: Unique ways of judging player talent keep the Oakland Athletics perennial contenders in the AL West, despite having one of the smallest payrolls in the Major Leagues.

Comments: I've always been a little skeptical of baseball statistics, particularly the ones popularly used to compare players, but which clearly don't tell the whole story. For example, a pitcher's W-L ratio can have as much to do with his team's offensive performance as it does his own pitching skill. A player's batting average fails to reward those who get on base in other ways - walks, in particular - which are just as useful as hitting singles.

This book, written by a Bay area author, describes how A's GM Billy Beane developed his own ways of judging talent, ignoring traditional metrics and even setting aside the traditional wisdom of his scouting staff. He shocked the Major Leagues by drafting and trading for players who were unimpressive by conventional standards. As a result, he was able to get maximum mileage from his salary budget, for which the numbers are impressive - typically half that of most teams.

While there's no doubt that the A's have been a team to reckon with for the past 10 years or so, it's a little hard to say that it's been specifically because of this approach. The proof just isn't there. Nonetheless, this book is an interesting read because of the insights it gives into how teams choose players, and how they wheel and deal in their back rooms when it's time to trade. There are also a few nice character studies of players who were chosen against all odds, and who did indeed become the contributors that Beane predicted.