Book Review: RUSH

RUSH by Stephen Fried

Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father

Crown Publishing

Benjamin Rush - physician, educator, pamphleteer, occasional federal appointee and signer of the Declaration of Independence - is an unsung Founding Father. He led a remarkable life somewhat on the edges of the Revolution and first years of the Republic. His influence, however, went well beyond what anyone familiar with that history might know.

Author Stephen Fried presents a detailed, nuanced and fascinating portrait the competing strands of Rush’s life Dedicated doctor and accomplished scientist, his naïveté and pride often derailed his accomplishments. A thoughtful and ardent revolutionary, he damaged his relationships with Washington and others with intemperate outbursts. Through his dedication to the ill - most notably during a horrific yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia - he put himself and his family’s future at risk. 

With access to previously unpublished research, Fried shows how Rush’s actions around the edges of history helped shape the early days of the United States and the lives of the most well-known Founding Fathers. The book not only tells Rush’s worthy story, it adds to understanding of the major actions, decisions and foibles that led up to and immediately followed the founding of the United States. 

Rush also founded Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA - my younger son William graduated from there in 2015v with a classics degree.

Book review: Erebus, by Michael Palin

Michael Palin - best known to most from Monty Python and his televised trips around the world, from pole to pole, etc. - was also president of the Royal Geographical Society. All of this experience comes into play in ‘Erebus,’ a very detailed and delightfully engaging history of the Royal Navy ship Erebus, whose mid-19th-century voyage of exploration to the Antarctic was one of the most successful of the century, followed closely by a tragically unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Arctic.

Even though Palin dispenses with his Monty Python heritage with one memorable paragraph, his humor suffuses the book - his descriptions of the ships, their crews, their voyages and many letters home have a light but deft touch, giving the reader a clear-eyed but not maudlin of the  challenges and difficulties of years-long voyages in the age of sail.

The book starts with the construction and outfitting of Erebus and her sister ship Terror, both so-called ‘bomb ships,’ tough, small craft designed as floating artillery platforms. Palin’s painstaking research covers every phase of Erebus’ construction, fitting out and early career - a wealth of detail for those with interest. Once the mission to the Antarctic is set, he turns the same eye for detail and story to the selection of the crew, introducing us to several officers and seamen who remain important characters - along with the ship - throughout the book.

His story of the Antarctic voyage covers science, Victorian English manners, adventure, privations difficult but not fatal, the politics of the Royal Navy and the scientific establishment, and a seemingly endless list of animals discovered, captured, preserved and consumed. The result is a highly readable, fascinating and unique vignette.

Throughout the book, Palin makes modern-day visits to places where the ships traveled - the Falklands, the Antarctic Ocean and more. The descriptions of these locales offer a contemporary connection to the voyage.

The description of the second, ill-fated voyage to the Arctic, is much less detailed since all records went down with the ship. Nevertheless, Palin succeeds in bringing it to life. It is less compelling than the first part of the book but well worth the read.

Published by Greystone Books, available at your local independent bookstore - try Warwick's of La Jolla.

On Desperate Ground, by Hampton Sides

Hampton Sides is an excellent historian and an engaging writer. In this book, as in his others - In the Kingdom of Ice is one of the most compelling books I have ever read - he latches on to an incident about which many know a little. 

In On Desperate Ground, his detailed telling of the story of - and the stories around - t the ill-fated 1950 advance to the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea and the heroic, terrible withdrawal of the American forces, including the storied First Marine Division, gives a rich understanding of the event and also places it into a broader political and historical context. And, along with the events and the forces that shaped them, he adds finely drawn portraits of individual protagonists - politicians, generals, officers, fighting men and civilians. Even if you’ve read biographies of Truman and MacArthur, there are insights here. If you know the military history of the campaign, you will learn more. And if you have studied actions of individuals and groups under dire circumstances, this book holds new portraits of courage, gallantry, callowness and redemption.

Sides weaves these three levels of the story. First, the macro-political and strategic featuring Truman, MacArthur, commander of the First Marine Division General O.P. Smith and Army Major General Edward Almond who had overall command of American ground forces. Next, the intricacies and details of the preparation for battle on the home front and the battlefield. Finally, intimate and harrowing stories of what happened to those engaged in the battle - soldiers and civilians on both sides.

A true historian, Sides leaves the judgments about character, morality and success or failure to his readers. He is even-handed to a fault, even offering redemption to the most venal of the protagonists. He communicates the absolute horror of the battles and their aftermath without sensationalism, again leaving the reader to softly whisper ‘Holy shit’ at the endurance of the human spirit.

The book bears some poignancy. Sides interviewed survivors of the battle - the Chosin Few - as their numbers dwindled. The epilogue tells the stories of what happened to many of them in later life. Read it closely.

Like In the Kingdom of Ice, this is a very compelling read. Detailed enough to appeal to dedicated non-fiction readers and with characters, color and intricate stories that will appeal to those with a more casual interest.

Published by Doubleday. Borrow it from your local library, or buy it from your local independent bookstore - I recommend Warwick's of La Jolla.

Book review - Magna Carta, The Birth of Liberty - Dan Jones

Magna Carta
The Birth of Liberty

Dan Jones - Viking Press

A short and enjoyable read for anyone who thinks they (casually) know anything about the Magna Carta. In addition to a good description of what the document (or collection of documents) is and is not, the 200 or so pages have a vivid history of how it came to be, which involved a fair bit of combat and undermining (figuratively and literally) of enemies and allies of King John. There are some lessons for modern politics in here, although I can't quite draw a straight line from Runnymede to Brexit.

I'm not saying don't order it online, but purchasing from your local independent bookstore will make you a better person.

Book Review - Bucky F&%@ing Dent by David Duchovny

Book Review

Bucky F&%@ing Dent

David Duchovny

I don’t know why I read this book, but I did enjoy it. I generally do not read novels, but #PersonalBookAdvisor brought this one home for me. It sat for a while, then I saw David Duchovny plugging it on the Late Show. After a dozen or so pages I put it down, thinking “I’ll never pick that up again.’ The next night ,20 pages and a yawn. This went on until I finished it and I did not regret the time spent.

Part of the attraction is hearing Duchovney’s sardonic voice in my head. There are enough bright spots of writing to keep it moving along and interesting. Most of all, though, once I finished I realized there was a lot here. The story is about ambition thwarted by pride, potential done in (almost) by selfishness, and the redemption that comes from leaving history behind and getting on with what matters. And that’s only about the Red Sox pennant pursuit. Also, the inspiration of the story explained in the notes (go ahead, turn right to it) alone is worth the read.

If you are going to buy a book, go to your local independent bookstore. They can figure out what you want way better than an algorithm.

Diamonds – What Makes the Grade?

What gem labs have in common with Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, your ninth-grade science teacher and the IOC.

  

Lots of things are graded – students, movies, restaurants and Olympic champions. Grades from trusted authorities like schools, movie critics and Olympic judges help us understand the world around us (or at least the finer points of figure skating) and to make informed decisions about what movie to see, where to have dinner or whether we are making the best of our education.

The same is true for diamonds. Diamonds from jewelers and retailers often come with a grading report that evaluates the  elements that determine the gem’s quality and its value. A grading report that measures the well-know 4Cs – color, clarity, cut and carat weight – against universally-accepted standards can help  consumers compare one diamond to another and to understand what goes into the value of a particular gem. 

Unlike at the Olympics, where athletes don’t get to choose their judges, consumers have choices for diamond grading reports. Some jewelry retailers, like the venerable Tiffany and the new brand Forevermark, part of the group that includes diamond miner De Beers, have their own reports or certificates for the diamonds they offer for sale.

Other retailers will have reports from well-known grading laboratories like AGS, EGL, or IGI. These labs may be privately owned or affiliated with a trade organization. There are also reports from third-party organizations like GIA.

While each type of laboratory has different characteristics and some specialize in certain types of gems, they all use the same system international diamond grading system, based on the GIA-created 4Cs.

I work for GIA; this post is personal.

Hitting the reset button

I'm getting back to this blog after a little time and a few changes.

Since my last post, my younger son started college; the older one graduated and started working; I've changed jobs and we moved to San Diego.

I've been thinking about a few things, and thought I'd start this up again. Maybe this time a few people will read it!

Here is a general, including-but-not-limited-to list of potential topics:

• The United States and the world - how we relate to the world and how others relate to us.
• The gem and diamond industry - since this is what I do now, I guess I'll write about it.
• Books - what I'm reading and what I think about it.
• Running - maybe if I write about it I'll do more of it.
• California v. Texas - my on-the-ground observations of the difference between the 12th and 14th largest economies in the world.
• Energy - issues big and small, from the domestic gas and oil shale boom to home energy efficiencies to national policy.

Health care, money, economics and turning 50

Is it better to spend more money on fewer people if we all benefit in the end?

Last week I heard a former healh-care executive now in the power business (a seemingly odd transition, but since we have a competitive power sector in Texas, both are essential services) say that two-thirds of health care costs in the U.S. are due to diet, lack of exercise and smoking, so "If people quit smoking, ate less fast food and went for a walk every day, we'd save billions." Then I read an article in a recent New Yorker about data-driven health care. Digging into billing records (becase actual patient records are not digital and are not available for this kind of analysis) the analysts discovered that a very small percentage of patients accounted for a very large percentage of costs. That reminded me of another New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell that did the same analysis for homelessness. The conclusion is that spending more on prevention especially for those who either are or are likely to become the highest-cost consumers of medial or social services reduces costs and delivers better care. However, the political cost will be high because it directs scarce resources - health care and social service dollars - to people who superficially 'undeserving.' While society gets a long-term benefit, some individuals get a greater immediate benefit seemingly at the expense of others. It is more acceptable to spend millions (read the article - it is millions) providing ineffective treatment to a person in crisis than to spend thousands preventing that same person from getting to that crisis. We'll pay for someone with chronic asthma to visit the emergency room, but not for a health care or social worker to check in on them to make sure they had and are taking the medications (or making the life changes) to keep them out of the ER.

I'm not sure how to translate this to policy, but at least I can work on my own stuff. So - I'm tracking what I weight and what I eat on livestrong.com. Today I'm at 205.5 lbs. Until Valentine's Day, it's no alcohol and cutting red meat drastically. I exercise with the Rummel Creek Men's Bootcamp and Social Club two or three times a week. Two friends and I are signed up to run a half-marathon in Upstate New York in September in honor of my 50th birthday. Yesterday I jogged 5 miles with Anthony - took about an hour and my right leg is just a little sore. I don't smoke and I take my cholesterol meds every day.

We'll see how it goes.

We, the moderate people

The center determines who governs; that is the only national mandate; Dems and GOP - ignore at your peril.

The relatively narrow band of independent voters put Pres. Obama into office and took the House from the Democrats. They (OK, we) don't want one party in the White House and leading Congress (see Jonathan Rauch column in the NYT) . Neither party has a monopoly on hubris. Speakers Gingrich and Pelosi made the same mistake - winning the middle is not a national mandate for the positions that won a primary or district. If either party wants to get and keep the radical moderates of the middle they will need to govern, not just occupy government.

What I learned from my smart meter – so far

DISCLOSURE - I work for and buy my power from Reliant Energy.

Local electric distribution utility Centerpoint installed my smart meter sometime in July or August, I think. I don’t know the exact date because I must have missed the notice or doorhanger telling me when it would be installed. I knew something was up because the digital clock on my microwave was flashing ‘12:00’ one afternoon. That weekend I noticed the new meter and figured it out - they have to cut the power briefly to swap the meters. I admit I was a little excited, but, then, I’ve been tracking how much power I use every month since we moved to Texas in 2001.

So I wrote down all the pertinent information – the ESI ID and meter number – an headed to smartmetertexas.com, the web site sponsored by a consortium of electric transmission and distribution service providers (TDSPs) doing business in the state of Texas that lets you see how much electricity you use - in 15-minute chunks. Unfortunately (at least for me) it takes time – like 4-6 weeks – for the data from the meter to start showing up on the website.

So, several weeks later I registered, and could see a 24-hour chart showing how much electricity my house used every 15 minutes. Unfortunately there is no easy way to compare one day to the next, or one week to the next, and it doesn’t have anything about cost. But it does give me an idea of when we use the most power, even if it is delayed about 48 hours.

Once the data started showing up there, I was able to sign up for Reliant’s Weekly Summary Email. This free service for Reliant customers with smart meters has three things that I really like.

First, it estimates my monthly bill based on how much power I’ve already used. I’ve got average billing, so the amount I pay each month doesn’t change much, but knowing that month-end amount early on let’s me decide if I want to change something – like raising the AC a couple of degrees – to cut my use and save some cash.

Second, it gives me a graph that shows three different bits of information – the high and low temperature for each day; how much electricity I used and when during each day compared to the same day the week before; and our daily electricity cost.

Third, each weekly email has a tip on how to lower my bill – dropping the temp on the hot water heater, keeping my AC filters clean, etc.

I’ve gotten four of these emails so far – what have I learned?

1. I use almost twice as much electricity on a weekend day as on the other days of the week.
2. The outside temperature makes a difference.
3. Doing the laundry costs $3 - $5 in electricity.

Number one is easy to understand and makes sense. I’ve got programmable thermostats set to raise the AC temperature on weekdays when no one is home. It probably has the same setting on the weekend, but since there is usually someone in the house we use the over-ride to keep it cooler.

Number two makes sense as well – when it’s hotter outside your AC has to work harder to keep the same temperature.

The third took a little longer to figure out. I noticed that every Tuesday we used about $3 - $5 more in power and there was a morning and an afternoon spike. After a few weeks I got it – laundry day. My wife usually does the family laundry on Tuesday. She starts in the morning, does errands around mid-day, and finishes in the afternoon. One note – I do offer to help with the washing, but I’ve been judged incompetent in that area.

What have I learned? A few things:

o For what it does for us, power is pretty cheap. My average cost with the temperature in the upper-80s was $8-$9 each day. Even though that adds up to a lot for a year, it isn’t much for comfort and security at home.

o Change the temperature. Running the AC can make up as much as 50-60% of summertime electricity bills in Houston. Keeping the system well-maintained (change those filters) and cutting back on the amount of time the system runs will have a bigger impact that just about anything else. I tweaked the schedule on the programmable thermostat - we’ll see if that makes a difference.

o Time-of-use might make sense. Looking at that Tuesday laundry spike, I thought that shifting laundry to off-peak times – usually after 8 or 9 at night and all weekend long – might make sense. Reliant’s off-peak TOU price is about 14% lower than the peak price, so I could theoretically save fifty to seventy cents each laundry day.

What do I want to learn? A few more things:

o What does each appliance cost? A friend tells me that his pool pump costs him about $1000 (that is a thousand) each year. If I can measure that and cut it by just 10%, that would be worth it. If I know what each energy purchase decision (that’s what we do when we turn on something) costs, I’ll be able to make more rational and effective choices.

o What’s my ‘baseload?’ It would be cool to know how much power my house uses when we’re not doing anything – like at 3 in the morning. Maybe not all that useful, but still interesting.

o What are the trade-offs? If I know my clothes washer costs $1.00 of power per load (just guessing here) and I can buy one that claims to be more efficient, I can better make the decision if it is worth the expense of the new machine.

For those I’ll have to wait for the next device – a home energy monitor, hopefully coming soon.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Bill Bryson tells the story of life by describing his hallway

Bryson’s new book is a masterful balance of scale. He uses the layout and history of his small house – a former parsonage – in England as the framework for a story about why we live the way we do. Whether writing about the gifted amateurs who created some of the most enduring habitation-building techniques or the quaint sociology that allowed village parsons to live well – until they couldn’t – follows the tradition of Bryson’s best quirky, observation-based writing.

The Wave – In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean

Surfers and scientists chase giant waves - great read - no, really

Susan Casey’s subtitle could be about the mysterious giant waves that have wreaked havoc on unsuspecting ships and over-confident surfers, or about those surfers and the equally-obsessed scientists who actively seek out the unpredictable monster swells. I don’t know and I don’t care. This is a compelling narrative that mixes history, science, global surf-culture and manic behavior into an adrenalin-rush of a book.

Note to Pres - the EV jobs are in the network

To really reap the benefit of electric vehicles, we need infrastructure, not just battery manufacturing.

It's great that Pres Obama is highlighting the benefits of getting more electric vehicles on American roads, but to reap the real sustained benefits - lower imports of oil for transportation and reduced carbon emissions - and create significant numbers of jobs, we need to build the infrastructure. Broad adoption of mass-produced EVs and plug-in hybrids will depend on two things - the vehicles have to be accepted as 'real' mass market cars, and someone will have to build the ecosystem - home and network charging, and a cellphone-like value package, so that owing and operating an EV is easy and at least comparable in cost to a gasoline power vehicle.

Curve update 2010

Return to Prosperity, Arthur Laffer - Entertaining take on cap-and-trade, cash-for-clunkers by Regan-era economics guru

Summer help in the TX heat

Reliant Energy assistance for seniors and others in need http://tinyurl.com/2awjung

Simple, cheap energy savings

Reliant Energy customer home energy audit covered by Jeff Ehling Houston ABC 13 http://tinyurl.com/23zjm4x

The Billionaire's Vinegar

GQ writer on wine, Jefferson, 1990's style conspicuous consumption, self-reinvention and the perils of obsession - great read

Benjamin Wallace brings together history, fraud, people with more money than sense and some really colorful characters and looks into the briefly fascinating world of really old wine enthusiasts. Detailing what looks - in hindsight - almost farcical - heated bidding for bottles of uncertain provenance as trophies, Wallace blends Jefferson's bring French wine to the young America

Molly Ivins - A Rebel Life

very readable bio of TX journalist - great overview of political/culturtal changes in Texas and Houston

There is no doubt that authors Minutaglio and Smith - who make their personal ties to Ivins clear - venerate their subject - the warts and all treatment is credible, but the warts are really interesting. The narrative - near-debutante becomes back-room political reporter becomes national reporter becomes commentator - is compelling for the hard work that Ivins put in before she reached prominence and influence. Political commentary backed by solid reporting and experience. I'm not sure if today's media market could produce another like her.

American on Purpose - Craig Ferguson

Being an unlikely (American) patriot doesn't excuse decades of bad behavior, or this book.

Ferguson is funny, self-deprecating and genuinely in recovery. However, wrapping the tale of his transformation from lout to late-night through good-hearted women who do not suffer him long; family forbearance; and good fortune in a star-spangled kilt is a disservice to both the personal progress and his devotion to his adopted country. WE know he loves the U.S., I just cannot for the life of me figure out why.

Book Thief - Book Detective - Book Writer Book

Enigmatic thief, passionate dealer/detective, questing journalist; good book.

Much of 'The Man Who Loved Book Too Much’ by Allison Hoover Bartlett (to be published September 2009) reads like a police procedural – we all know the thief gets caught – the attraction is in seeing how, and how the thief and pursuer – equally obsessed – are alike and different. Some reads like a revelatory memoir where the author chronicles her shallow journey into the depths of rare-book obsession. Despite the clunky title that the too-much-information overtone of the author’s interspersed first-person narratives, overall enjoyable for anyone who likes (or is obsessed by) books – rare or not, or by well-depicted quirky protagonists, or by off-beat detecting.

I don't always buy books, but when I do I buy them at the Blue Willow Bookshop