Review of Dark of the Moon (Hardcover)

Dark of the Moon is a new book by John Sandford, author of the great Lucas Davenport series. Sandford uses a co-author in this novel that features Virgil Flowers, a cop working with the Bureau of Criminal Aprehension where he is assigned the hardest cases. Flowers has been divorced a lot, is somewhat afraid of guns, and takes pride in wearing quirky t-shirts. The book opens as he is traveling south to investigate the murder of a harmless ederly couple when he drives upon a house being devoured by flames. The house was set on fire to cover up the murder of the ederly, feeble and hated Bill Judd. Virgil teams with Jim Stryker, an old buddy and the current sherriff, and they start investigating the crimes. A lot is going on in this novel. Stanford throws a lot at the reader.

Dark of the Moon reads just like a Lucas Davenport book. Incredible plotting, tons of characters in the small town, you get to know the town and the feeling that everyone DOES know everyone else. Virgil is a funny guy, all Sandford books have an underlying humor to them. You can tell Sandford is having fun when he writes.

Flowers hooks up with Stryker's sister Joan and has a good time with her, while at the same time wondering if Joan or Jim could be the killer. In fact, everyone Flowers encounters has a motive or a reason to be a killer. Sandford fans will love this book. It is fast pace and full of twists. Flowers' wit always keeps you entertained as well.

With a new Davenport book due in the spring, fans of the author won't have long to wait for another great book. Hopefully, Sandford can continue to write novels featuring Flowers as well.




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Review of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

Thomas Barnett is a remarkable and very admirable fellow who has written a book that should certainly be read by more Americans.The book is well-written and Barnett comes across as someone who sincerely wants to improve the security of the United States and the world.Barnett has a powerful and inspiring (some may say intoxicating) vision of the role of the US in the 21st century.The only problem is that his approach is not workable.

Those who've read the likes of Martin Van Creveld and Thomas Friedman will find some familiar thinking in this book.The author's main contention is that "disconnected" countries, those that aren't connected via information and economic networks to the rest of the world, are a huge source of danger.Such countries are usually run by a nasty elite who essentially tyrannize their populations who are left poor and angry.Having been left poor and angry, these disconnected people are ripe for becoming terrorists and their nations ripe for the location of terrorist networks, crime syndicates, and so forth. Hence, we need to use military force to go in, defeat the nasty people running things, and enforce a new order that will give the oppressed people of these societies hope so they won't need to bomb us.In the process, we'll give them new law enforcement agencies that will crack down on criminal syndicates.

Reactionary types will accuse Mr. Barnett of being some kind of neo-imperialist or perhaps a global fascist.Nevertheless, I personally think that Barnett sincerely believes that what he is proposing would be a "good thing" and that it would improve the lives of the people he seeks to liberate.I'll leave the name-calling to someone else, as there are unquestionably lots of people running around who are willing to do just that.While the moral dimension to Mr. Barnett's proposal is fascinating and worthy of serious discussion (far different from the name-calling and character assassination I've heard up until now) my primary concern is whether or not the proposals in this book are cost-effective or even feasible.

I'm afraid that what Mr. Barnett is proposing is far more complicated, sophisticated, and expensive than what he leads the reader to believe.Barnett frames the issue in either doing something (what he proposes) or doing nothing.He points out that in light of September 11, 2001, we can't do nothing.And then he implies we're only left with his proposal.But he doesn't fully entertain the consequences of failure.Those consequences would be lots of dead young Americans, even higher levels of anti-American sentiment around the globe, and billions of dollars wasted.And due to the complexity of what Mr. Barnett is proposing, failure is more likely than success.

The essential problem here is one of complexity.Mr. Barnett's strategy focuses on the US spending extreme amounts of resources to bring order to troubled lands to harmonize them with current global economic realities.But the universe naturally tends towards disorder.As Mr. Spock pointed out, "Logic suggests that it's easier to destroy than to create."Chaos and disorder come naturally; order takes a significant input of resources.In attempting to create order in disordered places, the United States would be left extremely vulnerable to potential rivals and enemies who would simply try to create or enhance disorder in those places.This process would cost potential rivals very little but could have extremely high costs on the US on a sustained basis.An example would be Iraq, where we are hoping a mere $100 billion will bring about some kind of order.Anyone who wanted to harm us could spend far less money just to destroy that delicate order we've struggled to create.And in looking at Iraq right now, there's no guarantee that we are anywhere close to creating an orderly society.

As Mr. Barnett makes a big point about "disconnectedness defines danger" he doesn't really adequately bring the importance of this back to the home-front of American society.In an increasingly interconnected world, the US benefits not just from additional connectedness to others but to additional connectedness to ourselves.Improvements in infrastructure, a better business climate, improved efficiency, and so forth all serve to make the US a more competitive place on the international level and also serve to make the US a more attractive place for international capital and human resources.Barnett wants to put off making the US more connected in a highly dicey proposition to makedysfunctional societies more safe for international capital and human resources.Considering how intractable so many of our own various social problems have been it's rather presumptuous to assume we can go about fixing other places.And the cost/benefit analysis is lacking and, at least on the surface, not all that appealing.

For all my criticisms of Mr. Barnett's proposals I need to stress that I don't necessarily think his approach will lead to catastrophe on a nationwide scale.I just fear it will be exceptionally costly and put tremendous strain on our society, our military, and our economy.All for results that are highly improbable and quite unlikely to be successfully obtained.In short, it's a prescription for a gigantic waste of resources that even if it were successful would be possibly not worth the price. There are arguably more cost-effective and sure-fire ways of achieving a more secure future for the United States.

Americans who are interested in the future of US strategy need to be familiar with this book.While I strongly disagree with Mr. Barnett's proposals I also very well realize that they are and will continue to be highly influential.If you don't know what Barnett's talking about you can't even begin to understand the future debates about the US's role in the world.If you want to be a part of the discussion, get your hands on this book and become familiar with one of the most highly influential proposals available for the future of the United States and the world.



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Review of Oxford American College Dictionary (Hardcover)

This 2002 book is an abridgement of the excellent New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD, published 2001), with a price in line with other college dictionaries.Unfortunately, there seem to be a few problem areas.

The first thing that will strike many college students and graduates is the almost complete absence of etymologies.A few of the more interesting ones are highlighted with the heading WORD HISTORY; for example, this is one of very few sources that make clear why the Dutch for "the cage" appears in English as DECOY.A few other etymologies appear with the heading ORIGIN.For the most part, you won't find any.It would seem that such information would add a lot to many entries, such as UBUNTU, TRIFFID, GROK, TOHUBOHU, and thousands more.One consequence is that the usage note for ESKIMO refers to a deleted etymology.Granted, the etymologies in most competitors have a lot of fluff; they'll show two of numerous older spellings of "dog" before implying that the trail grows cold in Old English; a simple "<OE" or "OE<?"should be enough.The datings that appear in a few competitors and some other Oxford dictionaries would be a fine addition.

In a brief survey of one-word lowercase entries from LI to LIEDER in this and three comparable (college) dictionaries, it appears that coverage in this dictionary is nearly as good.It is, however, the only one to omit LIAISE, LIBELANT, LIBELEE, LICENSURE, and an adjectival form for LIBATION (but the competitors disagree, two showing LIBATIONARY, one LIBATIONAL).This dictionary relegates LIBERALISM to a run-on, a word for which the competition had relatively long entries; the difference is partly offset by a longer entry for LIBERAL.But it was the only one not to relegate LIBERTARIANISM to a run-on.It has only run-ons for LIBERATION, LICHENOLOGY, and LIBRETTIST (the precise relation between a librettist and a libretto is not one of the senses given elsewhere for the suffix -IST).Two competitors explain the missing LIDLESS, a poetic form that may well still be met in colleges.It is the only one to list LICENSED, a form unlikely to be sought.Elsewhere, it is not hard to find entries that all the competitors omit; WAQF and CINQ will intrigue Scrabblers.

More than a dozen pages are blank.This is certainly a surprise, since most publishers allot their lexicographers however many pages can be printed affordably for the intended sales price, and they scramble to squash the available material into what seems to be too small a space.Larger Oxford dictionaries would provide plenty of material for filling these pages up.

No doubt Roger Staubach is pleased to have an entry, and would be even more so if his name were spelled correctly.It's unclear whether users would expect to find anything about him in a dictionary, but this one tries to include a lot of currently famous sports and entertainment personalities, and users might enjoy this feature.Cal Ripken makes an appearance too, but since the entry hasn't been updated, his 2001 retirement is unnoted.The space devoted to Perry, a tennis star from the thirties, might have been better devoted to Commodore Perry in a college dictionary, and there are many similar examples.

Unnecessarily in my opinion, an illustration for skyscraper has been edited to remove the World Trade Center.There are quite a number of illustrations, many adding little besides a break in what some readers might consider monotonous text.Whoever drew the picture for hyperbola has little appreciation for asymptotes.Every country comes with a large map, showing very few cities other than capitals, and mostly useless.The result is that the Northern Mariana Islands are shown with greater detail than in the National Geographic Atlas, while most of the largest U.S. cities appear on no map whatever.It's unclear that dictionary users expect maps, and those that do will probably look elsewhere.

Inevitably a new work has slipups here and there,of them possibly attributable to the abridgement.The entry for the noun SHANKS' MARE reads "used to walking"; you need the complete entry from NOAD to make any sense of the definition, which in itself is more of an explanation than something that can take the place of a noun.The symbol for SECOND didn't survive intact.The entries for GOODNESS and SAKE disagree on the punctuation of"for goodness' sake".Only the illustrative citation for Spartan hints that its metaphoric usage is now usually uncapitalized.And the spelling Stonehendge appears.At times one feels that one is the first human to be reading certain entries in their current form.Information for REIS, BO, SH, ADELGID, etc., is present, but not anywhere you are likely to look.On the other hand, "Sly" is cross-referenced to Stallone.

Kudos to Oxford for its sensible treatment of the spelling or usage of such entries as miniscule, flout/flaunt, plaintext, back seat, hopefully, disinterested, under way, supercede, they, and dozens more.Hopefully a future edition will have something to say against the spelling KI for the word pronounced CHI and now usually spelled QI.And hopefully we won't have to wait long for the Second Edition of this dictionary, a more patient and careful abridgement of NOAD.Except for price and portability, nearly all the pluses of this work are found in NOAD, while most of the minuses mentioned above are not in NOAD.For now, if you can afford only a college dictionary, I would have to recommend one of the others.



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