Book Review 72: Ready Player One

Going outside is highly overrated.
-Anorak’s Almanac, Chapter 17, Verse 32

One day last fall, I glanced over at my Twitter feed and saw that Wil Wheaton (@WilW) was in Seattle that evening for a reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company. He would join author Ernie Cline (@erniecline)  to talk about Cline’s first novel -- Ready Player One. I  had to go.

It was fun evening. The author Q&A was awesome.Wil did the reading and was also awesome. I bought my copy of the book and got in line for the signing at the end of the event. I chatted with Wil and Ernie about my Atari shirt and their dealings with ThinkGeek. If you get the chance to see them, I highly recommend it. And by “them” I mean Wil and Ernie. Or ThinkGeek.  Either way.

Eventually, I worked through my reading queue and cracked open Ready Player One while having dinner at the Nine Fine Irishmen in Las Vegas during CES 2012. The book was quite good, but not quite as good as I hoped.  There are lots of things to love about it, but the book does have some flaws. That’s even more disappointing because, given the subject matter and the author’s presence at the reading, I wanted this to be the most awesome-est book I’d seen in years. It’s not. It’s still good, just not as awesome as I had hoped.

Still, if you’re a fan of 80s Geek Culture, you’ll likely enjoy the book.

The story takes place in a dystopian future where the Earth has suffered major environmental collapse.  The divide between the rich and poor is wider than ever. The most popular form of entertainment is the virtual world of the OASIS.  That basic setup is nothing new; we’ve seen it from William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Melissa Scott, Richard Morgan, and more. While the basic scene may be familiar, Cline takes it in a different way.

The OASIS is the heart of the story. It is a virtual land, not unlike Second Life or World of Warcraft on a much larger scale.  You have an avatar that you design, buy clothes for, equip with weapons and special gear, and then you interact with other characters on different planets and virtual locations in the OASIS. Where you are in the real world is irrelevant.  You put on your goggles, headphones, gloves, and sometimes your special suit, login, and you’re walking and flying around the OASIS.

The story kicks of with the death of James Halliday, a game programmer, entrepreneur, inventory of the OASIS world, and child of the 80s.  

At first, I couldn’t understand why the media was making such a big deal of the billionaire’s death. After all, the people of Planet Earth had other concerns. The ongoing energy crisis. Catastrophic climate change. Widespread famine, poverty, and disease. Half a dozen wars. You know: “dogs and cats living together . . . mass hysteria!” Normally, the newsfeeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major city vanishing in a mushroom cloud. Big stuff like that. As famous as he was, Halliday’s death should have warranted only a brief segment on the evening news, so the unwashed masses could shake their heads in envy when the newscasters announced the obscenely large amount of money that would be doled out to the rich man’s heirs.

Page 1

Halliday’s death is momentous because of his will. He leaves his company shares and all his wealth to a gamer who finds the Easter Egg. Basically, he hid puzzles throughout the virtual world. The player who solves the puzzles and wins the game gets everything.

This draws individuals, teams, and organizations who all want to win the prize and control the OASIS for their own purposes.  One of those egg hunters, or “Gunters” is Wade Watts (AKA Parzival) our narrator -- a poor, orphaned teenager who’d long been an OASIS denizen and is obsessed with the 80s.  Halliday is his hero. He lives through the crushing depression that many teenagers face.  But he takes on the quest.

He’s got the background for it because he identifies so much with Halliday.  When a reporter ask Halliday’s former friend and business partner for tips, he offers this advice.

“As the person who knew James Halliday the best, do you have any advice for the millions of people who are now searching for his Easter egg? Where do you think people should start looking for it?”

“I think Jim made that pretty obvious,” Morrow replied, tapping a finger against his temple, just as Halliday had in the Anorak’s Invitation video. “Jim always wanted everyone to share his obsessions, to love the same things he loved. I think this contest is his way of giving the entire world an incentive to do just that.”

Page 122

As is often the case, completing the quest isn’t what the character needs. The quest itself matters. That was certainly the case for our narrator.

Then the Hunt for Halliday’s Easter egg began. That was what saved me, I think. Suddenly I’d found something worth doing. A dream worth chasing. For the last five years, the Hunt had given me a goal and purpose. A quest to fulfill. A reason to get up in the morning. Something to look forward to.

The moment I began searching for the egg, the future no longer seemed so bleak.

Page 19

Our narrator pursue the challenge like many geeky teenage boys shyly falls for a girl and rival.

This is an interesting story bit. Cline writes about these feelings in way that feels really familiar from back in those days.

I didn’t, of course. My whole relationship with Art3mis was in defiance of all common sense. But I couldn’t help falling for her. Somehow, without my realizing it, my obsession with finding Halliday’s Easter egg was gradually being supplanted by my obsession with Art3mis.

Page 178

I’d heard all the cliched warnings about the perils of falling for someone you only knew online, but I ignored them. I decided that whoever Art3mis really was, I was in love with her. I could feel it, deep in the soft. chewy caramel center of my being.

And then one night, like a complete idiot, I told her how I felt.

Page 179

I especially like that last line.  It feels right in that context.  The other interesting thing here is the way Cline tells the story. The whole book is told in flashback.  Parzival tells us he’s going to tell Art3mis how he feels and that it will go badly several pages before we actually see that encounter.  Going into many sections of the book, we already have a sense of what is going to happen, but Cline still builds a feeling of suspense around it.

Why does he finally tell her?  Well, Cyndi Lauper has a little something to do with it.

Her avatar lost its human form and dissolved into a pulsing amorphous blob that changed its size and color in synch with the music. I selected the mirror partner option on my dance software and began to do the same. My avatar’s limbs and torso began to flow and spin like taffy, encircling Art3mis, while strange color patterns flowed and shifted across my skin. I looked like Plastic Man, if he were tripping out of his mind on LSD. Then everyone else on the dance floor also began to shape-shift, melting into prismatic blobs of light. Soon, the center of the club looked like some otherworldly lava lamp.

When the song ended, Og took a bow, then queued up a slow song. “Time after Time” by Cyndi Lauper. All around us, avatars began to pair up.

Page 185

This section of the book is revealing in a number of ways. I’ve ready criticism of the book that says Cline is an immature writer and that when he writes about emotions and feelings, it all comes across as juvenile and immature. I do get that sense throughout most of the book, but I’m not sure if that a limitation of Clines skill or an example of it. The book should sound like a teenager wrote it because it’s told from a teenager’s first person point-of-view. 

This section is also interesting because it plays with the OASIS world a bit.  In the passage, Cline shows us just some of the things that are possible in the digital world.  You can defy gravity. You’re form can convert into blobs of light. Avatars can interact in ways that would be completely impossible in the physical world.  And if your avatar doesn’t know how to dance, just  add some software.

The huge open space in the center of the sphere served as the club’s zero-gravity “dance floor.” You reached it simply by jumping off the ground, like Superman taking flight, and then swimming through the air, into the spherical zero-g “groove zone.”

Page 183

SInce the OASIS is only 1s and 0s on servers, it can be infinitely big. Adding more space is as simple as writing some code.

Early in the Facebook days, you may remember friends giving on another virtual sheep and other goods.  Users could pay for fancier ones. Games like Farmville and Pet Society let you pay real cash to get fancier farm equipment and furniture.  And what do you actually get for your money? Nothing but an automated entry in a database.  “Items” are simply conjured out of code, and if the game goes away so does all that merchandise.  

The virtual world of the OASIS works in much the same way, and Haliday’s GSS made a fortune on it.

In addition to the billions of dollars that GSS raked in selling land that didn’t actually exist, they made a killing selling virtual objects and hides. The OASIS became such an integral part of people’s day-to-day social lives that users were more than willing to shell out real money to buy accessories for their avatars: clothing, furniture, houses, flying cars. magic swords and machine guns. These items were nothing but ones and zeros stored on the OASIS servers, but they were also status symbols. Most items only cost a few credits, but since they cost nothing for GSS to manufacture, it was all profit. Even in the throes of an ongoing economic recession, the OASIS allowed Americans to continue engaging in their favorite pastime: shopping.

Page 59

There are thousands of worlds in the OASIS. The world where Parzival confesses his feeling to Art3mis is called Neo Noir.

There were hundreds of cyberpunk-themed worlds spread throughout the OASIS, but Neo Noir was one of the largest and oldest. Seen from orbit, the planet was a shiny onyx marble covered in overlapping spider- webs of pulsating light. It was always night on Neo Noir, the world over, and its surface was an uninterrupted grid of interconnected cities packed with impossibly large skyscrapers. Its skies were filled with a continuous stream of flying vehicles whirring through the vertical cityscapes, and the streets below teemed with leather-clad NPCs and mirror-shaded avatars, all sporting high-tech weaponry and subcutaneous implants as they spouted city-speak straight out of Neuromancer.

Page 181-182

Because of the ability to equip avatars and the scope of the universe, there are still differences between the Haves and Have Nots, even in the OASIS. And early challenge for Parzival is simply to figure out how to get to different parts of the OASIS without any money.

The kids who didn’t own ships would either hitch a ride with a friend or stampede to the nearest transport terminal, headed for some offworld dance club, gaming arena, or rock concert. But not me. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was stranded on Ludus, the most boring planet in the entire OASIS.

The Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation was a big place.

Page 48

So I remained stuck at school. I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

Page 51

As Parzival figures out ways around the limitations, he devotes himself full time to hunting the egg.  He spends more and more time in the OASIS.  Aside from basic biological needs, why leave?  Everything he needs can be delivered to his home. All his friends are on the OASIS, and he can even earn money there.

My apartment was on the forty-second floor, number 4211. The security lock mounted outside required another retinal scan. Then the door slid open and the interior lights switched on. There was no furniture in the cube-shaped room, and only one window. I stepped inside, closed the door, and locked it behind me. Then I made a silent vow not to go outside again until I had completed my quest. I would abandon the real world altogether until I found the egg.

Page 166

Capitalism would inch forward, without my actually having to interact face-to-face with another human being. Which was exactly how I preferred it, thank you.

Page 191

Cline opens one of the chapters with Groucho Marx prescient thoughts on the matter:

I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.

Groucho Marx

Page 167

One of the most popular features of the book is all the 80s and pop-culture references.  Parzival has a series of videos running on his “channel” within the OASIS for others to watch.

I pulled up my programming grid and made a few changes to my evening lineup. I cleared away the episodes of Riptide and Misfits of Science I’d programmed and dropped in a few back-to-back flicks starring Gamera, my favorite giant flying turtle. I thought they should be real crowd pleasers. Then, to finish off the broadcast day, I added a few episodes of Silver spoons.

Page 202

That stuff really resonates with me. Misfits of Science is where I developed my crush on Courtney Cox. I was never an A-Team fan, but I loved Riptide with its pink helicopters. I like the show even more when they added June Chadwick to the caste in the last season (I developed my crush on her during V: The Series).  Gamera was always my favorite Godzilla monster. I mean, come on, he flies by pulling his legs into his shell and turning his leg holes into jet engines. That’s awesome. I was a regular Silver Spoons viewer, too, but there were no crushes involved in that.

There are other references that amused me.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing ‘80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn’t part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.

Page 63

The only cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles that I’m familiar with are of course Molly Lewis and Kate Micucci, but I haven’t delved deeply enough into their back catalogs to know if they’re the ones Cline is referring to.

The whole book is built on 80s references and deep descriptions of the movies, video games, music, games of the era. It’s clear that Cline loves this stuff, and who can blame him? They 80s were an awesome time.

Sometime the references got to be a little too much for me, though. It wasn’t their volume that got to me. It was the way Cline explained all of them in a little too much detail. I’m undecided if I consider this a flaw of the book. It may have gotten to me because it feels like he was explaining stuff that was completely obvious.  The reason it’s obvious, though, is because I grew up with all this stuff.  Perhaps that level of explanation is important for those who were not children of the 80s. The deep dive did take me out and make me roll my eyes a few times.

While the book may not have been as awesome as The Empire Strikes Back, is at least as awesome as Return of the Jedi. It’s a great book to read, with a few flaws, and I look forward to Cline’s next book. I also look forward to the “Ready Player One” movie, should it come out.  If you’re a fan of light CyberPunk, or of 80s references, don’t miss this book.

Book Review 71: A Dirty Job

"Sometimes," he said to Lazarus, the steadfast golden retriever, "a man must muster all of his courage to simply sit still. How much humanity has been spoiled for the confusion of movement with progress, my friend? How much?"

Page 252

In “A Dirty Job” by Christopher Moore, Beta-Male Charlie  becomes a grim reaper, charged by mystical forces with collecting people souls when then die in parts of San Francisco. Several characters from other Moore books, including Jody and the Emperor from Blood Sucking Fiends and Minty Fresh from Coyote Blue put in in an appearance. This ties the book into the broader Moore-iverse of favorite characters.

This book has the weird zaniness all Moore books have, but it gets deeper. It’s a comical and sophisticated book.  One of the problems I had in writing this book is that there are fewer quotable phrases and line than there were in “Blood Sucking Fiends.” Many of the jokes just don’t have as much punch outside their paragraphs. That feels like a more mature style than we’ve seen in the past from Moore. The novel is less joke-y, but it’s no less funny. And that’s one of the things I like about it.

An example of this is Moore’s page-and-a-half description of the definition of can challenges faced by the beta-male.  Here is just a small part of it:

Charlie's problem was that the trailing edge of his Beta Male imagination was digging at him like bamboo splinters under the fingernails. While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes—size, strength, speed, good looks—selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastodons, the Beta  Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an angry, woolly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing  proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows. When Alpha Males set out to conquer neighboring tribes, to count coups and take heads, Beta Males could see in advance that in the event of a victory, the influx of female slaves was going to leave a surplus of mateless women cast out for younger trophy models, with nothing to do but salt down the heads and file the uncounted coups, and some would find solace in the arms of any Beta Male smart enough to survive. In the case of defeat, well, there was that widows thing again. The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha Male competition. The world is led by Alpha Males, but the machinery of the world turns on the bearings of the Beta Male.

 

The problem (Charlie's problem) is that the Beta Male imagination has become superfluous in the face of modern society. Like the saber-toothed tiger's fangs, or the Alpha Male's testosterone, there's just more Beta Male imagination than can really be put to good use. Consequently, a lot of Beta Males become hypochondriacs, neurotics, paranoids, or develop an addiction to porn or video games.

 

Page 31

It goes on from there.

The book isn’t entirely devoid of jokes. Moore uses this structure in several places:

Audrey was showing them around the Buddhist center, which, except for the office in the front, and a living room that had been turned into a meditation room, looked very much like any other sprawling Victorian home. Austere and Oriental in its decor, yes, and perhaps the smell of incense permeating it, but still, just a big old house.

"It's just a big old house, really," she said, leading them into the kitchen.

 

Page 340

And he does play with names, such as the fireworks merchant who lost two fingers that Charlie patronizes.

"The White Devil has finally gone around the bend," said Three Fingered Hu's eleventh grandchild, Cindy Lou Hu, who stood at the counter next to her venerated and digitally challenged ancestor.

'His money not crazy," said Three.

 

Page 117

The story starts with Charlie’s wife dying in the hospital after giving birth to their daughter. While Charlie is in her room in her final moments, a grim reaper comes into the hospital room to collect and object and is shocked when Charlie can seem him. No one else can see the reaper and neither can the security cameras.

Charlie goes home to deal with his grief, raise his new daughter as a single parent, and deal the quirky employees that work at his second hand shop. They start to question Charlie’s sanity as he claims certain objects in the store may be radioactive because they glow red in a way that only he can see.

Meanwhile, he can’t seem to keep any of his daughter’s pets alive.

Before long, strange notes appear at his bedside, in his own handwriting, and he is hearing voices come up from the sewer grates around the city.

In many ways, Charlie feels like a more grown up and more fully drawn version of Moore’s earlier San Francisco beta-male -- Tommy, from “Blood Sucking fiends.”  I mentioned “A Dirty Job” several times in my review of that book, because I find the comparison between the two fascinating. This book is not a sequel to the other, but they do exist in the same universe. Several of the characters cross over between the two, but you do not need to read one to appreciate the other. Putting them both side-by-side, though is a great way to look at the author’s growth.

I don’t want to go into any further detail, lest I spoil a surprise.  I do recommend this book, especially if you enjoy humorous novels about the supernatural. It’s a got a nice story, some great storytelling, and several really interesting characters. It’s definitely worth the reading time.

More of my book reviews are available here

Book Review 70: Blood Sucking Fiends

‘I’ve seen him,” the Emperor whispered. “It’s a vampire.”

Tommy recoiled as if he’d been spit on. “A vampire florist?”

‘Well, once you accept the vampire part, the florist part is a pretty easy leap, don’t you think?’

Page 37

Blood Sucking Fiends is an early Christopher Moore novel. Jody, a redhead in San Francisco becomes a vampire and relies on newly arrived, aspiring writer Tommy to take care of her needs during the day.

This is the second time I’ve read it. The first time was years ago, before I startedwriting my own reviews. It was also the first Christopher Moore novel I read. The reason I read it the first time was that it seemed like an interesting take on the vampire mythology and that it would also be funny. It was. The second time I read it was because I had just finished reading Moore’s more recent “A Dirty Job” where a couple of the characters make an appearance (review coming shortly). Reading it the second time, after reading other more novels, made the experience richer.

It’s an entertaining book, but it is not nearly as good as his later novels. Over the course of his career Moore improved as a story teller and humorist. That’s not to say Blood Sucking Fiends isn’t good -- it is. It’s just not as mature as his later books. Which makes sense. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect someone to be better at their job after 15 years of doing it.

The strength of the book is in its flashes of awesome paragraphs. Moore sketches out memorable characters and gives them some common voices. Among the common themes is that women are much stronger than men.

She thought, There must be a hundred thousand dollars here. A man attacked me, choked me, bit my neck, burned my hand. then stuffed my shirt full of money and put a dumpster on me and now I can see heat and hear fog. I’ve won Satan’s lottery.

Page 16


‘Is there something wrong with your food?”

“No, I’m just not very hungry.’

“You’re going to break my heart, aren’t you?”

Page 60


“Me too,” he said. He hung up and thought: She’s evil. Evil, evil, evil. I want to see her naked.

Page 78


Why in the hell was she being so mysterious? He opened the envelope and took out a stack of hundred-dollar bills, counted them, then put them back in the envelope. Four thousand dol-lars. He had never seen that much money in one place. Where did she get that kind of money? Certainly not filling out claims at an insurance company. Maybe she was a drug dealer. A smuggler Maybe she embezzled it. Maybe it was all a trap. Maybe when he got to the impound lot to pick up her car, the police would arrest him. She had a lot of nerve signing her note “Love.” What would the next one say? “Sorry you have to do hard time in the big house for me. Love, Jody.” But she did sign it that way: “Love. What did that mean? Did she mean it, or was it habit? She probably signed all of her letters with “Love.’

Page 83


The vampire let go of Jody’s arm, reached across to put his hand on Hair Plugs’s shoulder, and held him fast to his seat. The drunk’s eyes went wide. The vampire smiled. “She’ll rip out your throat and drink your blood as you die. Is that what you want?”

Hair Plugs shook his head violently. “No, I already have an ex- wife.”

Page 214

Moore’s male main characters often appear at one of two poles -- the overconfident, macho character or the insecure, obsessive, and not-too-bright character represented by Tommy in several of these passages. Moore’s jokes, entertaining phrasing, and absurd situations keep me interested in reading.

It’s not just the supernatural and aspiring writers that Moore takes on. What book about San Francisco would be complete without the obligatory digs at Oakland? He’s able to comment on Oakland while giving us a vivid sensation of the enhanced senses a new vampire experiences.

She spotted a pay phone; a red chimney of heat rose from the lamp above it. She looked up and down the empty street. Above each streetlight she could see heat rising in red waves. She could hear the buzzing of the electric bus wires above her, the steady stream of the sewers running under the street. She could smell dead fish and diesel fuel in the fog, the decay of the Oakland mudflats across the bay, old French fries, cigarette butts, bread crusts and fetid pastrami from a nearby trash can, and the residual odor of Aramis wafting under the doors of the brokerage houses and banks. She could hear wisps of fog brushing against the buildings like wet velvet.. It was as if her senses, like her strength, had been turned up by adrenaline.

Page 15-16

Ah, but I must be strong for the troops. It could be worse, I suppose. I could be the Emperor of Oakland.

Page 12

The Emperor of San Francisco is a favorite recurring character in Moore novels. He’s an apparently homeless man with two dogs who sees himself at the emperor of the city. He’s well-known to many of the random citizens who appear to humor and defer to him. He offers many the wisdom of a benevolent king and the street-level intelligence of someone who hears and sees things on the street that most other people never notice. The Emperor, for example, worries about business people going about their days, and how for many, there is no future:

“They have to look right or their peers will turn on them like starving dogs. They are the fallen gods. The new gods are producers, creators, doers. The new gods are the chinless techno-children who would rather eat white sugar and watch science-fiction films than worry about what shoes they wear. And these poor souls desperately push papers around hoping that a mystical message will appear to save them from the new awkward, brilliant gods and their silicon-chip reality. Some of them will survive, of course, but most will fall. Uncreative thinking is done better by machines. Poor souls, you can almost hear them sweating.”

Tommy looked at the well-dressed stream of businesspeople. Then at the Emperor’s tattered overcoat, then at his own sneakers, then at the Emperor again. For some reason, he felt better than he had a few minutes before. “You really worry about these people, don’t you?’

‘It is my lot.”

Page 91-92

Make no mistake; this is a good book. It’s weakness is more evident, however, in comparison to later Moore novels. Unlike later books, this one feels like a series of interesting characters and scenes attached to an internal structure or outline. There’s a certain shallowness about it. It’s less of a funny book and more of a book with great jokes. In addition to other books in the same universe Moore also wrote a couple sequels to this book, and they’re sitting on my shelf right now. I can’t wait to read them.

More of my book reviews are available here

Book Review 69: DIY U -- Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

There are two basic options the way I see it: fundamentally change the way higher education is delivered, or resign ourselves to never having enough of it.

Page IX

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz is an interesting book that feels a bit uneven. It’s really two different books -- one on the history of higher education and the conditions that have led to crazy price increases, and one about the alternatives to traditional higher education. I think my main problem with the book is that way it’s split. I picked it up expecting the book to be primarily about how individuals can completely change our current higher education system to make it more affordable, equitable, and effective for the future of our economy by embracing new technology and ways of thinking. I thought it would be more about the Do-It-Yourself University and the tools, peopel and organization that make that possible, than it turned out to be. There's definitely some of that. The problem is that it takes too long to get there in the text.

It seems like the author spends too much time building a case for changes to the system. I don’t think she needs to do that for this book. While some of it is needed, that fact that the reader has chosen to read this book already indicates they are interested in learning about different approaches.

That said, the sections where she builds the case and goes over the history of the higher education is still interesting and worth reading.

With those expectations appropriately set I can recommend the book, especially for someone who is interested in how we got where we are today.

At its heart, the book is about the “Edupunk” movement:

"Edupunk is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions, and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission," is the opening salvo of his [Jim Groom’s] first e-mail to me.

"Higher education has become a given for most high school students in our culture, and the fact that they have to pay out the nose has become a kind of unquestioned necessity to secure a job. But as we are increasingly seeing with big media, newspapers, and the like—traditional modes of information distribution are being circumvented, and higher education is just as as vulnerable in this new landscape... There remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of how easy it is to publish, share, teach, and even apprentice one another outside of the traditional logic of institutions. "

What edupunk—DIY education, if you will—promises is an evolution from expensive institutions to expansive networks; it aims to fulfill the promise of universal education, but only by leaving the university behind. Educational futurist John Seely Brown talks about "open participatory learning ecosystems.'"' Alec Couros at the University of Saskatchewan calls my blend of news sources contacts on Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and e-mail a "personal learning network."

Page 109-110

I found the author’s discussion of the history of higher education to be quite interesting. I never gave much thought the idea that today’s most prestigious universities weren’t that way for most of their history.

Any college that trumpets its "centuries-long tradition of academic excellence," however, is lying. Colonial colleges were established long before high schools, so they often filled classes with barely literate fourteen- or fifteen year-olds. Throughout the nineteenth century, "Nowhere were really challenging intellectual demands being placed upon [students]," Rudolph states flatly, and as late as 1904, "Dean Briggs of Harvard announced his preference for moderate intelligence'," preferring well-mannered and well-rounded gentlemen to grinds. Along with low standards, there was "little emphasis on completing degrees" well into the nineteenth century, writes University of Kentucky historian John R.Theun in his 2004 book A History of American Higher Education, something of a sequel to Rudolph's work. Students felt free to leave after a year or two of classes. The current college dropout rate of nearly 50 percent is actually pretty good by historic standards. Only a handful of colleges have ever done better.

Page 3

It’s helpful to keep this in mind. Traditional higher education is the standard in our country by tradition. And yet that tradition is only decades -- not centuries -- old.

A university degree is typically considered the way to advance and make life better in our society. The author reports that today that’s not the case. A degree doesn’t help someone advance; it just prevents them from falling behind. She explains that the value of a degree has declined relative to the cost of obtaining one. She also quotes a sociologist who calls financial aid a form of welfare and income redistribution, which is an interesting way to look at it.

Unfortunately, education alone has been the program, more or less, since the 1970s. Stanford sociologist Mitchell Stevens has called federal higher-education aid America's most ambitious social welfare program. "We don't call it welfare—heaven forbid! That's one of the reasons it's so popular. But if you think of welfare as a means of redistributing social resources or public wealth, there's no question this is a primary method in the post-World War II era," Stevens says. "In the twentieth century the federal government worked systematically to allow as many people as possible to lead middle-class lives. Obama's proposal for a majority of Americans to get a degree by 2025 is only an extension of a fifty-year-long federal government commitment to feeding prosperity through access, by investing in campuses and putting money in college students' pockets in the form of grants and federally subsidized or guaranteed loans." This is Becker's human-capital theory at work: invest in our young people and they will yield a return both for themselves and for the nation at large.

The problem is that it hasn't worked. In the decades since a BA became the primary visa for entry into the middle class, the middle class has only gotten smaller. We often hear about the $1 million average lifetime income premium for a college diploma." But if you look at median incomes by education since 1970, there's no increasing return to a college degree to go with the increased cost. There's a steep decline in the incomes of less-educated workers combined with flat or declining income for more-educated workers. That is, the noncollege penalty is rising, not the college reward.

Page 27-28

One of the items that makes a degree so important is just that -- the degree. It’s that it signals that the holder has completed the education process. Any plan or alternative to the traditional system that does not include that BA is doomed to failure regardless of how much or little education participant receives in an alternative system.

The signaling hypothesis says that whatever work earns you the diploma doesn't really matter. College is nothing more than an elaborate and expensive mechanism for employers to identify the people who were smarter and harder workers and had all the social advantages in the first place, and those people then get the higher paying jobs. Now that it's illegal to discriminate in employment by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, judging people by where and how much they went to school is just about the only acceptable form of prejudice left.

Page 35

A popular alternative that always comes up in discussions about how to fix the higher education system is to rely on more Community College, Vo-Tech, Apprenticeship programs, alternatives. They cost less, can provide skills people can use right away, provide more practical education than many University programs, offer alternative structures, and may be better suited for those whose expertise is not academic.

It seems like this is a great solution. When surveyed, people generally agree that this a great idea -- for other people’s children. Not for their own.

Carnevale has worked in the House, in the Senate, and for the AFL-CIO. He was named by President Clinton to chair the National Commission on Employment Policy and by Bush the younger to work on a similar commission, and he's also advised President Obama. Under Clinton, Carnevale was caught up in the sticky politics of trying to advocate paths other than four-year college. Clinton signed the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities work-based learning and partnerships. But key provisions of the bill—including the use of the word 'apprenticeship"—were weakened in Congress. "We took it to the Hill and the people who care about poor people and minorities said to US, 'Look. There are two education systems in America: one where people go to college and live happily ever after and the other, where people don't, and struggle. The worst thing that can happen IS that we have two systems that work, because we all know who's going to be in the other one.'" In other words, explicit vocational tracking is a no-no even if the outcomes for poor people are better, because they enshrine social divisions in law, something Americans have always been wary wary of doing. "In the end the truth is the public rejected the idea," of school-to-work, says Carnevale. "In all the focus groups, we asked people: do you think everybody needs to go to college? Seventy to eighty percent said no. But what we forgot to ask, and asked a few years later, was, Should your kid go to college? Eighty-five percent said yes."

Page 37

The solution, the author suggests, is likely somewhere in between. Restructuring the system requires a mix of Universities, for-profit colleges, and personal learning networks. Online resources make more of this possible every day. Universities provide credibility and employ thousands of brilliant people and knowledge experts. They play a major role in credentialing students. The question about how to mix all these different resources together for maximum effectiveness and to drive costs down.

Cost cutting in public higher education, it should be clear, is a moral imperative. State and federal subsidies helped create the tuition monster, and state and federal governments can combat it I if they work in partnership with institutional leaders—not with across-the-board, feast-or-famine cuts, but with rational changes that focus on incentives for affordability and productivity Families and students have a role to play as well. They need to become more informed consumers who aren't afraid to ask tough questions about the value of their degree.

Page 72-73

The same is happening in education. Since 2001, a growing i movement, from MIT, Stanford, and hundreds of other universities worldwide to insurgent bloggers and entrepreneurs barely out of school themselves, is looking to social media to transform higher education. They're releasing educational content for free to the world and enlisting computers as tutors. Google has scanned and digitized seven million books. Wikipedia users have created the world's largest encyclopedia.YouTube Edu and iTunes U have made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free.

Page 81-82

Online education is becoming more of a possibility every day. Even though the web has been accessible by the general public for more than 15 years, we are still only beginning to understand how to use it. We continue to put lectures online and try to use existing pedagogies in online university education, but it’s similar to how people thought after the invention of automobiles when we still referred to them as horse-less carriages. It requires new ways of thinking about and presenting material. Done well, it can have a transformative effect.

Online classes like these are an example of what David Wiley at BYU calls the "polo parable."Think about playing polo with ponies on a field, versus water polo in a pool. "They're both called polo and at a high level they're both the same activity," he says. "But no person in their right mind would think you can take a playbook and run the same strategies as in the pool. The idea that you can take tried and true teaching methods from the classroom onto the Internet and see success boggles my mind."

Page 95-96

Gardner Campbell, an open-education figure who was responsible for hiring Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington and currently teaches at Baylor University, does Wiley one better. He's argued in presentations that on the scale of disruptive technologies, the Internet is more than the printing press, it's the alphabet. "It's a new way of thinking. It's a meta-tool."

Page 128

The author does talk about a number of possible solutions, including expanding for-profit schools (which face some of their own perception troubles), start-ups partnering with existing small schools to leverage their accreditation,  and more.

For-profit colleges have led the way in innovations like self-paced, all-online programs, assessment-based learning, and student-focused customer service. They have the advantage of focusing exclusively on learning. They are free from the slightest hint of snobbery. John Holt, in his radical 1976 critique Instead of Education, speaks approvingly of the Berlitz language school, which judges itself by how well it serves everyone who wants to study, not by how much it discriminates in choosing students. He calls schools like these "schools for do-ers, which help people explore the world as they choose."

Dave Clinefelter, the provost of Kaplan University, would agree. Kaplan U has grown out of the test-prep company in just seven years I to enroll 68,000 students in associate's, bachelor's and master's degree programs on seventy campuses and online."Traditional universities : at yardsticks like how many students you denied entry to, what your peers think of you, and where your faculty published," he says. "We don't care about any of that. We care what our students learn and whether they get a job in their field. We want to be the best university in the world and we want to be able to prove it to people."

Page 125

A company called Straighterline already offers an important version of this idea: accredited online college courses for $399 per course, which includes ten hours of one-on-one tutoring. But the course credit is granted by just four small, unknown, community and for-profit colleges. This approach is half a step away from really blowing things up. It would just take a few more prestigious institutions getting on board to change the way people feel about online on-demand education.

Page 128

A complete program of education isn’t about going to a school for one thing. It’s about pulling together all sorts of different educations elements to enhance the learner’s knowledge, while still working to address the signalling issue.

The way I look at it, a complete personal learning plan ought to have four parts: finding a goal and the credentials or skills needed, formal study, experiential education, and building a personal learning network. Crabapple was kind enough to serve as my model and explain how she did each part her own way. '

Page 137

She includes a lot of resources in the book, and again, there’s a lot of useful bits in there. In fact, the last 15% of the book is all resources, bibliography, and Index. The book feels to me like it’s a collection of alot of stuff, rather than a straightforward story or how to get there. Still, if these are topics that interest you, it may well be worth reading the book. I did learn things.

I guess my problem here is that while it certainly has a lot of good points and information, they way it’s put together means that I can only give it an unenthusiastic recommendation.


You can find more of my book review here.

Book Review 68: Rapture of the Geeks

This book is about the future of technology and the evolution, coevolution, and possible merger of humans and computers. Some futurists and AI (artificial intelligence) experts argue that this merger is imminent, and that we'll be raising Borg children (augmented humans) by the year 2030. Others predict that supercomputers will equal and then quickly surpass human intelligence as early as 2015. We are accustomed to using computers as powerful tools, and we resist any invitation to think of them as sentient beings—and with good reason: Computers, even computers as powerful as Firefly, still just kind of sit there, patiently humming, waiting for instructions from programs written by humans.

Page 3

Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ by Richard Dooling is a disappointing book.  I had high hopes for a book about the singularity and the powerful role technology has for our future as a species. What I read was more of a rambling introduction of the singularity, punctuated by pointless and inaccurate Microsoft rants, and a narrative that appears designed to show us just how clever the author is. It’s the only book I’ve read in the last 10-years that I seriously considered abandoning half way through. I don’t recommend it.

There are some interesting observations in the book. It’s all focused around the idea of the Singularity, popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil.  The Singularity is the point at which computer processing power surpasses cerebral processing power and what the means for the human race. If a desktop computer can process data as fast as the human mind, does that mean computers are finally smarter than people? Can we then download our selves into computers and live forever?  These questions are more than just philosophical; they are likely to be serious, practical ones in a few years due to the advances in the computing power and the decline in computing cost.

If futurist Ray Kurzweil is right, by 2020 a computer with the computational capacity of a human brain will cost $1,000 and will be sitting on your desk. "

Page 77

This will raise the question of when do we stop being human and become a machine. At what point does a person become a Cyborg? Is it when they wear a Bluetooth head set? Is it when the have a prosthetic limb? Is it when they can control that limb with their neurons? Is it when they stop remembering things and instead rely on Google or their smart phone? The border between human and robot narrows each day.

The ancient Greeks used to ask, "How many grains of sand make a heap?" Start with one. Add another. And another. Is it a heap yet? We'll soon be asking the same thing about brain components. We have no problem thinking that someone with a hearing aid, cochlear implant, or a pacemaker is still human, but Steven Pinker takes it to the next level with a hypothetical that poses questions we may face within ten years:

"Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?''

Page 79

There is also an interesting and brief discussion about whether or not AI even makes sense. There’s and advantage to using people instead of machines.  

IBM has the scratch to pursue silicon brain making, but most governments and corporations probably would not spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to duplicate a human brain. As roboticist Hans Moravec put it, "Why tie up a rare twenty-million-dollar asset to develop one ersatz human, when millions of inexpensive original model humans are available?"'' Or as rocket scientist Wernher von Braun put it in a different context: "Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor."

Page 81

For all the interesting discussions that sneak into the text, there are other passages where the author starts to raise an interesting point and then squanders it in excessive snarkiness. Here’s one example about the nature of idleness.

Several hundred years before the first click on the first hyperlink, Pascal wrote: "All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." Little did he know at the time, but he had already built a primitive fossil of a machine (his calculator), which would one day lead to the mighty PC, which in turn would make it possible for us to sit still in a room for weeks, playing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, drinking Mountain Dew Game Fuel, and eating Snickers bars.

Page 55

The silly gamer commentary doesn’t do anything to further his point.

Some of those types of comments seem mildly entertaining, but there are so many of them, they lose impact.  Here’s another example where his point gets lost in the silliness.

When you're in a panic to make an appointment and you can't find your car keys or your billfold or purse, do you instinctively begin formulating search terms you might use if the real world came with Google Desktop Search or a command-line interface? Whoever created the infinite miracle we glibly call "the Universe" Is surely at least as smart as the guys at Bell Labs and U.C. Berkeley who made UNIX. The UNIX creators wisely included a program "called Find, which enables you to instantly find any file on your system, especially any file in your "home" directory. Another command-line utility, Grep, enables you to find any line of text in any file on your entire system.' Mac OS X uses Spotlight to do essentially the same thing with spiffy visuals, and even Microsoft finally included "Instant Search" in Vista. So why can't the creator of the universe come up with a decent search box? Why can't you summon a command line and search your real-world home for "Honda car keys," and specify rooms in your house to search instead of folders or paths in your computer's home directory? It's a crippling design flaw in the real-world interface.

Page 5-6

This passage is interesting in a few ways. First, the comment about the “crippling design flaw” is an interesting way to look at things, but it takes too long to get there, and in context, if feels too forced and clever.  The passage also takes the opportunity to snipe at Microsoft unnecessarily. And all that obscures the point he is making and the story he is telling about technology.

And that brings me to commentary on Microsoft.  

Roughly 88 percent of scanned consumer PCs are found to contain some form of unwanted program (Trojan, system monitor, cookie, or adware).
...
Funny too how these infection rates hover at near 90 percent, which matches the percentage of computers running the Windows operating system. One might safely conclude that virtually all computers running a Windows operating system are infected if they are also connected to the Internet; it's just a question of whether the spyware compromises performance to the point where the user notices and becomes annoyed. Often the only cure is to erase your entire hard drive and reinstall the operating system. The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group also estimates that 80 to 85 percent of incoming e-mail is spam. An innocent Windows user might be tempted to inquire how Moore's law will soon produce computers that are smarter than people, while expensive, "intelligent" software programs running on today's latest, greatest hardware are still unable to stop spyware, or e-mails with the subject line "Visit the giant penis store',"

Page 122

It used to be all you needed was a computer and an Internet connection. Nowadays, an unprotected PC hooked to the Internet can be infected and hijacked within minutes, which means that now you need $200 worth of programs-firewall, antivirus, anti-spyware-before you can safely connect to the new, evolved, and improved Internet.

Page 123

The author loses credibility for a couple of reasons here. In addition to being full of cheap shots, there are a number of things that are just technically wrong.

1. Cookies are not malware. Does your PC remember remember your password or user ID?  You’re enjoying cookies.
2. System Monitor? Really?  A tool so you can see how your system is doing? Now, I know he describes these at “unwanted programs” and not malware, he does go on to describe them as infections.
3. A few sentences later he refers to all these elements as “spyware” which simply isn’t true.
4. He cites a survey showing 80-85% of incoming email is SPAM. while it may be true that 85% of the email on the ‘net is SPAM, the vast majority of that never gets to a user’s inbox. SPAM filters, even in 2008, were already quite effective and diverting it. Further, he buries this in a MSFT discussion. SPAM affects Linux and Apple users just as much.
5. He goes on to say you need to spend $200 to keep a Windows machine safe. Even in 2008, when he wrote the book that wasn’t true. There were plenty of free, high-quality tools to protect users that didn’t require them to spend anything.

It’s hard to take him seriously after such a discussion.

It’s a shame because there are some interesting points he tries to make in the book. His overly clever writing and anger at Microsoft significantly diminishes the quality of the book. There are plenty of other books out there for those who want to learn more about the Singularity.  Check those out instead.

Book Review 67: The Dark River

Hollis handed Kevin the two hundred dollars and got up from the table. "Do a good job on this and I'll give you a bonus. Who knows? Maybe you'll make enough to fly to Paris."

"Why would I want to do that"?"

"You could meet the woman at the Eiffel Tower."

"That's no fun." Kevin returned to his computer. "Real flesh is too much trouble.

Page 163-164

The Dark River is the second book in John Twelve Hawks’ Fourth Realm Trilogy. You should read the first book, The Traveler, before reading this one. My review of The Traveler is here.

This book is just okay. The story isn’t as compelling as the first book in the series, and the overall theme drifts. Where the first book was all about the choices people make and the power of making decisions, this book is more about what happens to the characters and how we should fear the modern surveillance society.This book gets a little preachier and when it does that, it loses much of its impact. Still, if you liked the Traveler, you will probably want to read this one, too. And, while I haven’t started it yet, I do look forward to reading the next book in the series.

The book continues the adventures of Gabriel, Maya, Hollis, and their cohorts as they try to avoid the reach of the Tabula -- the vast surveillance organization and machine that seeks to control the world. Along the way, the try to find Gabriel's father, strike at the machine, and avenge those living off the grid. The novel takes us to the Arizona dessert, the tunnels of New York, the roof tops and squats of London, the craggy cliffs of Ireland, the catacombs of Rome, and the sands of Ethiopia. The novel also takes us out of our earthly realm (the fourth realm) and into others. There's adventure, violence, philosophy, violence, political commentary, and more violence.  The violence is not excessive for the story, but there is a lot of it.

One of the problems I have with the novel is one I also had with the first book. It’s just that here, it’s not overshadowed by other things. That problem is the tone of the writing. In many places, it feels immature. The author tends to write without subtlety, as though he wants to be extra sure that his readers “get it.”

The New Harmony operation had been good for morale; the necessary violence had unified a group of mercenaries with different nationalities and backgrounds.

Page 70

The Upper West Side was filled with restaurants, nail salons, and Starbucks coffee shops. Hollis had never been able to figure out why so many men and women spent the day at Starbucks sipping lattes as they stared at their computers. Most of them looked too old to be students and too young to be retired. Occasionally, he had glanced over someone's shoulder to see what project took so much effort. He began to believe that everyone in Manhattan was writing the same movie screenplay about the romantic problems of the urban middle class.

Page 162

Nathan Boone passed through the revolving door and entered the atrium lobby He glanced at the decorative waterfall and the small grove of artificial spruce trees placed near the windows. The architects had insisted on living evergreens, but each new transplant withered and died, leaving an unsightly carpet of brown needles. The eventual solution was a grove of manufactured trees with an elaborate air system that gave off a faint pine scent. Everyone preferred the imitation evergreens: they seemed more real than something that grew in the forest.

Page 200-201

There is a point to these passages, but it feels like the author is just trying too hard. Here’s another example where the author goes a long way around to make his point. As above, the imagery is solid, but it’s just a little too much. It feels like a stronger edit could have made the text better.

Something passed through the air and she gazed upward at the oculus—the round opening at the top of the dome. A gray dove was trapped inside the temple and was trying to escape. Desperately flapping its wings, the bird rose through the air in a tight spiral. But the oculus was too far away, and the dove always gave up a few yards from freedom. Maya could see that the dove was getting tired. Each new attempt brought another failure and it kept drifting lower—pulled down by the weight of its exhausted body. The bird was so frightened and desperate that all it could do was keep flying, as if the motion itself would provide a solution.

Page 280

At the same time, there are passages that sound like they are straight out of an action movie. And I mean that as a good thing. I can easily imagine these books being made into a series of movies. (Apparently, Warner Brothers is working on it.) They could be quite entertaining. Some of the heavy-handed exposition from earlier could translate well to cinematic imagery. Plus, there are some great movie lines in the book.

Hollis stood up and approached Naz. Although he held the shotgun with his left hand, he didn't need the weapon to be intimidating. "I'm not a church member these days, but I still remember a lot of the sermons. In his Third Letter from Mississippi, Isaac Jones said that anyone who takes the wrong path would cross a dark river to a city of endless night. Doesn't sound like the kind of place you'd like to spend eternity ..."

Page 58

"It's electronically activated." Mother Blessing scrutinized a small steel box attached to the wall near the door. "This is a palm vein scanner that uses infrared light. Even if we had known about this, it would be difficult to create a bio dupe. Most veins aren't visible beneath the skin."

"So what are we going to do? "

'When you're trying to overcome security barriers, the choices are either low-tech or very high-tech. "

Mother Blessing took the submachine gun from Hollis, removed a spare ammunition clip from the equipment bag, and slid the clip between her belt and waistband. The Harlequin pointed her weapon at the door and motioned Hollis to step aside. "Get ready. We're going low."

Page 332

Maya, the Harlequin, continues to be one of the heroes of the book.

Maya felt better when she finally got out of the building. Her favorite hour was approaching: the transition between day and night. Before the streetlights went on, the air seemed to be filled with little black specks of darkness. Shadows lost their sharp edges and boundaries faded away. Like a knife blade, sharp and clean, she passed through the gaps in the crowd and cut through the city.

Page 48-49

Even so, by about halfway through the book, her actions feel like they make less sense. The character is no longer driving the plot. Instead the plot drives the character. As a result, many of those actions don’t feel like those of the Maya we know from the first book or even the first part of this book. The way the author portrayed her in the first place doesn’t really fit with how she’s being portrayed later in the story. There are subtle elements of her character and thought process that seem to be missing.

There are still interesting things that happen here. For example, an orphan attaches herself to Maya.

What does she want? Maya thought. I'm the last 'person in the world to show her any love or physical affection. She remembered Thorn telling her about a trip he had taken through the southern Sudan. When her father spent the day with missionaries at a refugee camp, a little boy—an orphan of war—had followed him around like a lost dog. "All living things have a desire to survive," her father explained. "If children have lost their family, they search for the most powerful person, the one who can protect them. . . ."

Page 141

That assessment of orphan behavior can describe the rest of the citizenry as well, as they willingly surrender their lives to the vast machine.

John Twelve Hawks created a terribly interesting and terrifying cosmology with his books, and The Dark River is an interesting exploration of that. It’s an uneven follow-up to the first in the series, but is likely still worth reading.

This is the first time I’ve said this, but my ultimate recommendation about whether or not to read this book will depend on my opinion on the third book in the series -- The Golden City, which I haven’t read yet. If The Golden City turns out to be a great book, then I will recommend The Dark River as a way to advance the story. If it’s disappointing, then I’ll recommend stopping after The Traveller.

I’d better get on that.


You can find more of my book review here.

Movie Review 24: The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games is the antidote to Twilight. Over the weekend, The GF and I caught the first movie in the series at the Cinerama over the weekend. It's good film and one well worth seeing. It's based on a book of the same name, and the first one in a series. I haven't read the books yet,  but The GF has, and she reports the movie is a reasonably accurate adaptation.

The Hunger Games takes place is a post apocalyptic, dystopian North America. The ruling Capitol City of Panem defeated a rebellion by 12 districts 75 years prior to the start of the movie. As punishment for their uprising, each district is required to, once a year, send 1 boy and 1 girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to compete in the annual Hunger Games.  The Hunger Games is a reality TV show where all 24 teens must fight to the death while all 12 districts must watch the games play out on TV.

The point of the games is to continue to punish the districts for their uprising, intimidate them against future uprisings, and assert the dominance of the ruling party of Panem.

In Districts 1 and 2, children are trained from birth to win the games. As a result, the winner is usually from one of these districts.

The movie follows the story of Katniss Everdeen, the girl chosen from District 12. Her younger sister was actually chosen in the annual drawing, but Katniss volunteered to take her place.

The characters go through an intense personal journey as they meet the other tributes from other districts. In the time leading up to the games, they have to get used to the idea that they are going to die brutally soon, or that they are going to have to brutally murder other children soon. Most of them will encounter both fates since there can be only one winner.

As you can imagine, this is a violent movie. The focus is on children killing one another for the entertainment/intimidation of the entire society.

The violence is not even the driving theme for the movie.  It's the commentary on Reality TV.  The way the producers run the games and manipulate players is an important part of the movie.  It's not too difficult to imagine a show like this as the natural extension of what already airs on cable channels across the airways. It gets into fascinating areas of hope, love, story-telling, and more, in a very dark way.

In addition to the knowing-they-have-to-kill-each-other thing, the kids also have to learn to appeal to sponsors. Like on American Idol where winning fans is the key to success, appealing to fans and sponsors in the Hunger Games can mean bonuses during the game that make the difference between life and death.

That leads to another interesting aspect of the film. At times it reminds me of a role playing game as characters learn new skills and "level up" throughout the game. They acquire loot and gain experience points. That could just be me reading too much into forest quests with swords and bows, but it helped involve me deeper in the film.

The cinematography is excellent. The film manages to  maintain an intense feeling of fear and sense of violence, while minimizing the graphic nature of it through subtle camera work.  In the heat of a massacre, they are are still able to maintain a PG13 rating.

The sound design was even more impressive. They adjusted the sound to what the characters were hearing, made excellent use of background audio, and effectively created an immersive surround sound environment.

The Hunger Games is long movie. It may have been possible to tighten up the earlier parts of the film, but that's tough to say. There is a lot of background information the movie needs to convey. It tries to do that while minimizing the exposition, and that is a tough challenge.  According to The GF, they did leave out some of the key elements the book goes into. They're not essential to the plot, but do contribute to the overall atmosphere of the book.  It feels a little slow in the beginning, but the pace does pick up. It's a tough balance for the movie makers.

In this adaptation we do miss some of Katniss's internal monologue. Here character grows, but apparently not  in the same way she grows in the novel.

In short I like the movie. It's an interesting social commentary combined with a great story. I do care about what happens to the characters. I really want to see what happens in the next movie, and this movie makes me want to read the books.  Overall, I'd call it a success.

You can find more of my movie reviews here.

Book Review 66: iWoz: How I invented the personal computer, co-founded Apple, and had fun doing it

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that day, Sunday, June 29, 1975, was pivotal. It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on the screen right in front of them.

Page 166

Steve Wozniak’s memoir (co-authored by Gina Smith), “iWoz” is a great book for several reasons. It’s generally well written. It gives a nice overview of the history of the computer buisness in the 70s (and is a great compliment to Andy Grove’s, “Only the Paranoid Survive”), and it tells us a lot about Woz as a person. It’s a book with great geek appeal.

If you want to learn more about Apple’s design or marketing practices, this is a not the book for you. The recent Steve Jobs biography may be a better choice for that; Woz was largely done with Apple’s day-to-day operations when Apple became a design house. This book is more about the early days of the PC business and the evolution of electronics.

The biggest negative about this book is that at times Woz and coauthor Gina Smith seem to ramble or repeat things unnecessarily. While mildly annoying at times, this doesn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the book.

The thing that stands out most for me is how Woz can talk about how smart he is and how his inventions changed the entire industry and the world, and he does that without sounding arrogant or like he’s bragging. There is an innocent, matter-of-factness to his stories that is both amazing and charming. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone else pull that off.

So right there in that bowling alley I suddenly had this cool new goal. I was going to go back and start thinking about my first design that was actually going to put characters on a TV set. I remember how, way back in high school, I wondered how, if I ever did a computer, I would ever be able to afford one that could ever display characters on a screen. That was unfathomable back then. But now, I knew, something was different.

Everything had changed.

Page 141

So I designed this game Breakout.

Page 144

That was amazing because back then color TVs operated with circuits a lot more complicated than any computer was back then. And the funny thing is, that very idea came to me in the middle of the night at that lab at Atari. I did no testing on it, but I filed it away in my memory, and eventually that was exactly how things like color monitors ended up on personal computers everywhere. Because of my wild idea that night.

page 147

Every computer before the Apple I had the front panel of switches and lights. Every computer since has had a keyboard and screen. That’s how huge my idea turned out.

Page 160

The Apple II was the first low-cost computer which, out of the box, you didn’t have to be a geek to use.

Page 188

Woz’s father was an engineer in the Bay-Area aerospace industry, and he encouraged his son to learn the field where transistors were still new and computers were mamoth things fed by punch cards.

Engineering wasn’t just a good living -- it was a calling. There was a beauty and elegance to electronics and engineering. Technology was an end in and of itself.

I so clearly remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world, that someone who could make electrical devices that do something good for people takes society to a new level. He told me that as a an engineer, you can change your world and change the ways of life for lots of people.

Page 16

And I came to that same view when I was very young, ten or maybe younger. Inside my head -- and this is what has really stayed with me -- I came to the view that basically, yes, technology is good and not bad.

People argue about this all the time, but I have no doubt about it at all. I believe technology moves us forward. Always.

Page 17

As Woz grew up, he quickly picked up on computer programming. This discussion is interesting in a couple of respects. One is that he grasps the technology so enthusiastically. The other is the way he breaks down digital technology to the basic math.

Here’s what was amazing to me back then. I thought to myself: Hey, at my current level of fifth-grade math, I am able to learn math used by a computer -- De Morgan’s Theorem, Boolean algebra. I mean, anyone could learn Boolen algebra and they wouldn’t even need a higher level of math than I already had in fifth grade. Computers -- were kind of simple, I discovered. And that blew me away. Computers -- which in my opinion were the most incredible things in the world, the most advanced technology there was, way above the head, above the understanding, of almost everyone -- were so simple a fifth grader like me could understand them! I loved that. I decided then that I wanted to do logic and computers for fun.I wasn’t sure if that was even possible.

Page 34

This is one of the things that many people overlook about computers -- they all work on very basic principals of math. They’re nothing but collections of light switches where everything is on or off. The entire digital world economy is based on this simple construct. And those switches will only do exactly what the user and programmer tell them today.

Woz continued to develop his skills in technology. He developed such a deep affinity for technology, that eventually he could actually write in machine code.

This 1 and 0 program could be entered into RAM or a PROM and run as a program. The hitch was that I couldn’t afford to pay for computer time. Luckily, the 6502 manual I had described what 1s and 0s were generated for each instruction, each step of a program. MOS Technologies even provided a pocket-sized card you carry that included all the 1s and 0s for each of the many instructions you needed.

So I wrote on the left side of the page in machine language. As an example, I might write down “LDA #44,” which means to load data corresponding to 44 (in hexadecimal) into the microprocessor’s A register.

On the right side of the page, I would write that instruction in hexadecimal using my card. For example that instruction would translate into A9 44. The instruction A9 44 stood for 2 bytes of data, which equated to 1s and 0s the computer could understand: 10101001 01000100.

Writing the program this way took about two or three pieces of paper, using every line.

Page 164

Woz developed a particular knack for simplifying hardware and software designs. Whether due to the cost of chips or just the challenge of technology, Woz would redesign and improve systems by removing chips and simplifying code. He also approached it all as a learning opportunity. A lot of what he accomplished he did because it was something he didn’t necesarily know how to do. The reason he can talk about his accomplishments without it coming across as excessive bragging is that he never seems to act like he knows everything already. He’s perpetually curious.

This plywood was covered with parts and it was a huge project. And having a huge project is a huge part of learning engineering -- learning anything, probably.

Page 38

That made me realize that a million times a second didn’t solve everything. Raw speed isn’t always the solution. Many understandable problems need an insightful, well-thought-out approach to succeed. The approach a program takes to solve something, the rules and steps and procedures it follows, by the way, is called an algorithm.

Page 51

His desire to push the boundaries of technology wasn’t his only motivation. There was also the more basic need he felt, born from his own shyness. Communicating with people was always a challenge for him. He faced the traditional nerd challenge of making friends and building relationships. Technology was his solution to the problem.

In that sense, it was a great way to show off my real talent, my talent of coming up with clever designs, designs that were efficient and affordable. By that I mean designs that would use the fewest components possible.

I also designed the Apple because I wanted to give it away for free to other people. I gave out schematics for building my computer at the next meeting I attended.

This was my way of socializing and getting recognized. I had to build something to show other people.

Page 157

Woz also talks about his love for practical jokes. In college he discovered he could jam a TV signal in a rec room with a device. He would turn it on, the signal would go out, someone else would get up to try to fix it, Woz would turn off the device and really confuse people.

So anyone watching would think that, okay, hitting harder works better. They all thought something was loose inside the TV and that by hitting it hard with your hand you could fix it. It was almost like a psychology experiment -- except, I noticed, humans learn better than rats. Only rats learn it quicker.

Page 63

At one point he started getting phone calls from people who were trying to reach and airline. Woz started having fun with them.

I told some caller they could fly “freight.” But they had to wear warm clothing.

I kept a straight face because everyone always went for the lower fare. At some point I started telling them it was cheaper to fly on a propeller planes than jets. The first time I did this I tried to book a guy on a thirty-four hour flight to London. But he would have nothing to do with it. I did get a number of people to buy a cheap twenty-four hour flight form San Jose to New York City.

Page 135

Woz tells more about the early days of Apple, his relationship with Steve Jobs, his endeavors after leaving day-to-day operations at Apple, his family life and more. I’ve only scratched the surface here. Regardless of your feeling about Apple as an organization, this is a fantastic book, and Woz has had a fascinating life. Despite the occasional bit of rambling and redundant content. “iWoz” remains an excellent read.


You can find more of my book review here.

Book Review 65: Captain’s Log: William Shatner’s Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier as told by Lisabeth Shatner

“I guess the way I work as an actor -- I say ‘I guess’ because I don’t consciously have a methodology -- is to ask, ‘How entertaining can this be?’ How many levels of expression are there in a ‘Hello,’ for example? What is really being said in this ‘hello’? The person the character is saying ‘hello’ to -- how well does the character really know him? Does he really mean ‘hello’? What has gone before that he is saying ‘hello’ in his own life? So that ‘hello’ can have many variations. And you can play more than one variation in the very ‘hello.’ And so, in the interests of not only my character, but in the pure idea of entertainment value, I have tried to keep as many balls in the air as possible when saying a line. That’s how I approached playing Kirk.”
Page 28

"Captain’s Log: William Shatner’s Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier As Told by Lisabeth Shatner" is a fascinating look behind the scenes of the train wreck that was one of the 3 worst Star Trek movies in the franchise (Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek: Nemesis being the other two that vie for the title, depending on the day of the week). In this book, Lis Shatner spends time on the set chronicling the project from the initial development to the filming to the post production. She interviews here farther extensively, interviews the cast and crew about their experiences, and relates some of her own personal anecdotes about her complicated relationship with Star Trek.

This is a great book to read. It’s a look at just how this movie got made, and about how it could have been so much worse. If you've read a bunch of the other Star Trek cast memoirs and William Shatner’s earlier books, you are likely already familiar with some of the stories. For example, we hear about William Shatner stealing Leonard Nimoy’s bike again. Still, there is new material, and some additional perspective in this book that are worth the read.

If you haven’t read many other books about the franchise, this one is a great introduction and place to start. It covers some of the basic history of Star Trek production and how the franchise got to this point. If you find the material in this book interesting, then there are lots more Star Trek histories and memoirs to read for more details.

Lis Shatner starts discussing the challenges of growing up as Captain Kirk’s daughter. She talks about trying to avoid the connection and distance herself from her life as a “Shatner” as you might expect from a teenager or college student. As a kid, though, it was always part of her life.

When we got off, my father finally had had enough. “If I give you my autograph, will you promise to leave us alone?”he asked. “Yes, yes!” they cried, still jumping up and down. He hastily scribbled his signature on an eagerly proffered sheet of paper, and the girls magically disappeared. We were finally left as before, still trying to convince my mother to let us ride the Matterhorn. 

Page 11

At this point in my life, I felt a strange ambivalence towards “Star Trek.” I knew much of my father’s success as an actor was because of the series, and for that I was grateful and proud. “Star Trek” had also made him the magical, famous father who could sweep me out of my misery. But it was also “Star Trek” that had set me apart in the first place, making me an outcast and the target for so much criticism. I often felt that I had no identity other that “Captain Kirk’s Daughter,” and even joked that those words would be engraved on my tombstone. 

Page 14-15

A career in Star Trek often posed challenges for William Shatner’s family. He travelled extensively. It was hard to avoid fans. And his drive to always be working would sometimes distract him from personal concerns.

"It all became very apparent to me one day as I visited the special effects make-up artist, Kenny Myers, to check on the Vulcan ear molds. He showed me a pair of baby Vulcan ears, which we were going to use for the infant Spock. Then he said, ‘I heard the baby was sick.’ My immediate reaction was, ‘What—now one of the twins we’re using to play the infant Spock is sick? What else is going to go wrong?’ And Kenny said, ‘No, your daughter Leslie’s son.’ I felt an immediate, momentary relief that it was only my grandson that was sick! That’s when I knew the stress was beginning to get to me.” 

Page 69

The network almost didn’t air the original series in the sixties. The pilot’s plot was just not great. To here William Shatner tell it, his interpretation of the Captain Kirk saved the series and was responsible for it’s tone and direction.

So I went back to Hollywood and saw this pilot. I saw a lot of wonderful things in it. But I also saw that the people in it were playing it as though ‘We’re out in space, isn’t this serious?” I thought if it was a naval vessel at sea, they’d be relaxed and familiar, not somewhat pedantic and self-important about being out in space. It seemed to me they wouldn’t be so serious about it. And the fact that I had come off all these years in comedy -- I wanted it to be lighter rather than heavier. So I consciously thought of playing good-pal-the-Captain who, in time of need, would snap to and become the warrior. I broached this idea to Gene, and it seemed to strike a note. So the story was written, the pilot made, and ultimately it sold. The next thing I knew, I was to play Captain Kirk on a weekly basis. 

Page 27

It’s sort of a light-hearted version of Heath Ledger’s Joker saying, “Why so serious?”

Of course Shatner is making this movie more than 20 years after he created Kirk and he sought to portray the characters in a more serious manner and with greater symbolism. Of course, Kirk is always the most important one.

“Next, I introduced our three leading characters -- Kirk, Spock, and McCoy -- at Yosemite. It was only much later that I realized this rock climbing sequences was a mythological symbol of man’s trying to achieve greater heights, which is, of course, what the whole story is about. In any case, Spock flies up to visit Kirk while he’s climbing, then saves him as he slips and falls. McCoy watches the whole scene, and when Spock later brings Kirk back to the campfire from where McCoy has been watching, they discuss life and death, aging, whether Kirk was afraid, and so on as we introduce the themes of the movie.” 

Page 35-36

Perhaps it’s by focusing on these themes that the movie gets lost. Shatner unironically describes the movie this way:

“When they arrive on the planet the holy man has conquered, they try to reason with him. The reasoning escalates into fighting, and before it is over, the Enterprise is boarded by these primitives. 

Page 36

No one can argue that William Shatner is not committed to his vision, however. He insists on doing dangerous stunts just so they look perfect.

“Sometimes it’s just not worth it to do something dangerous because special effects can take care of it,” Ralph [Winter] commented as we watched preparations for the scene progress. “I wanted to do this in a matte shot … I don’t think I’ve sweated as much on a movie as I have today.” At this point, Ralph motioned towards the cliff. “I mean, look at this. I’d hate to think of how many people would be out of work if he hurt himself.”

Despite the objections, my father felt that there was simply no replacement for actually hanging off the cliff. “I know what I want to do is dangerous,” he said. “But I also know that if I get what I want, the shot will be spectacular. The audience can always tell if something is fake or not, and a shot of Kirk really hanging off a mountain is irreplaceable. My desire for this shot is overriding my tremendous fear of heights. I just keep reminding myself not to look down!” 

Page 111

Lisabeth Shatner asked Leonard Nimoy to compare his movies to the one Shatner was now directing.

Later in the movie, I asked him what the difference was between a Leonard Nimoy Star Trek movie and a Bill Shatner Star Trek movie. He replied with a laugh, “In a Bill Shatner movie there’s a lot more running and jumping.” 

Page 109

Shatner learned a lot of lessons in his first major on location shoot as a director in the desert. To begin with, he had to learn that the actors weren’t the only people that mattered on a film. His occupation was just a small part of a production.

At that point I thought, ‘I’ve always known directing was communicating to the actor. I never realized directing was also communicating to drivers and to everyone else.’ 

Page 122

Because the schedule was so tight and the budget so constrained Shatner did everything he could to get the shots he wanted and get them on budget. No one could accuse him of not working hard. Sometimes he worked a little too hard though and became too much of a control freak. He needed to learn not just how to communicate with non-actors, but to also let them do their jobs.

My father’s distress gradually mounted as he watched several unsuccessful attempts, until finally he exploded and started yelling. In a half-joking gesture of frustration, he even flung himself down on the ground and pounded the cracked earth. 

Unfortunately, his dramatic gesture didn’t solve anything. 

Page 119 

“Basically what happened was Bill crossed the lines … he was pushing too hard,” Ralph said. “I told him, ‘Your passion for the picture is both a blessing and a curse. The passion is what excites the crew, they like working for you … you make them feel good, you have a good time with them. But the downside is, you create panic. You’re trying to do their jobs. Let them do their jobs. Let Mike Woods decide where the fan is going to go. You tell him the way you want the wind to be in the camera, and let him figure out where to put it. Forget it. You get all worked up about it and it creates problems. Then you’ve got four cameras going; four operators, four lenses. four systems, four different exposures, and it just can’t all happen in a second … if we come back from location and it doesn’t look like location, then what have we accomplished’? Nothing … we have to show the vistas. We have to show that we were here. If it takes longer, if it puts us overschedule by a day or two, let’s do it. Because that’s what makes the movie great. 

Page 120

A Teamster strike complicated the film’s production. They had to use non-union drivers and other staff to get eqipment to location. The interesting aspect of this is that it highlighted the advantages of expereinced people because they lacked them here. Driving a truck and moving a wardrobe is about more than knowing how to drive and move things. Experienced staff develop other skills that don’t pop on a list of key skills. It’s about understanding the process and role better than those without experience. It’s about knowing what questions to ask and knowing all the “obvious” stuff that is only obvious with years of experience.

And there’s value to that.

The Teamsters are saying that it’s things like the expensive actors which are driving up the costs. So there is this dispute going on. But while some people may think the Teamsters are getting paid too much, the advantage is they very familiar with industry proceedings. They know to do certain things automatically, whereas people who haven’t worked in the business don’t. 

Page 126

Another fascinating aspect of the desert filming is that we learn Shatner really had no idea what a unicorn is in popular culture. Granted, he’s Canadian, but I don’t think Canadian and American cultures are that different with regard to unicorns. And Shatner had been living in the US for decades. But in the original interpretation of Sybok (originally named Zar), Shatner sought to come up with a symbol of Zar’s violent and evil nature. And the best beast to represent that was the unicorn. In fact Shatner envisioned a battle scene where the unicorn spears a guy and then continues the battle with the guy’s body still impaled on its horn.

However, in spite of making some of these major changes from the original story, they still kept some of the initial concepts my father had envisioned. The holy man, whom they called Zar, still was a relatively dark and violent character, who rode a unicorn throughout his interplanetary adventures. The unicorn was an extension of Zar’s violent nature, to the point where my father had envisioned a battle scene where the unicorn had speared an unfortunate soldier who lay writhing and screaming in agony upon the unicorn’s horn while Zar rode on in triumph. 

Page 51 

This change in Sybok’s personality and methods also spawned another development. “Once we changed his character we also had to get rid of the unicorn, since the unicorn was an extension of his violent nature,” my father explained. “Also, since I don’t go to many movies, I was unaware of how many unicorns had been used in some of these science fiction films.” 

Page 57

No one knew what color a Nimbosian horse (the former Unicom) was supposed to be, or at what height his horn should rest on his forehead. They went through several tests first painting the horses gold and placing the horn high up between their foreheads. After seeing the tests on film, it became apparent the gold color didn’t register well. The horses also balked at seeing the shadow of something strange between their eyes. 

Page 96

Budget and story problems would continue to haunt the film, even up to its climax. It still seems strange that the studios exercise so much control over the budget. As we see blockbusters in the theater today, it often seems like controlling budget is an afterthought, but perhaps that’s how it looks from the outside.

In this movie, the studio significantly reduced the scope of the ending, despite what Shatner wanted.

‘But each of those Rockmen were incredibly expensive. We had to make a latex suit in which a man could fit, and the latex had to look like rock. The estimate for all six was something like $300,000. It was way too extravagant. So the first thing 1 was told was that I could only have one Rockman. One! So here I had gone from this fantastic image of floating cherubim turning into flying gargoyles, then to six, hulking Rockmen, now down to one Rockman. It was one of the first lessons I had in the realization that the movie in my head was going to be different from the one in reality. But I basically had i no choice, so we went with it. And one Rockman was all I got.” 

Page 71-72

Lisabeth Shatner also interviews other members of the cast. There are some fascinating discussions in there that illustrate the relationships among the actors. Deforrest Kelly seemed the most positive about the film. Since she is interviewing them in the middle of production, it’s a little hard to tell. The film may also have looked great to the actors during the creation of it.

Q: What did you think of the script for Star Trek V? 

I think that it is interesting in that it’s entirely different from any of the others, which is refreshing. Four was a wonderful motion picture, and you think, what are you going to do after IV? My feeling about films is that you can never tell about them until they’re strung together and scored and you look at it. Very seldom do you ever hear anyone come back from dailies and say that the dailies look terrible. You don’t know until you see the final product. But in examining the script I thought that it had an awful lot of things going for it, and if it comes together the way we all hope it will, I think it’s going to have a little bit of something for all the Star Trek fans, and hopefully that thirty-five percent of the audience that we picked up in IV will enjoy it. We have a great deal of the humor of IV once again, there’s conflict, adventure, and some powerful drama. 

Page 180-181

Walter Koenig seems resigned the fact that Chekov remains an under appreciated character. It’s also interesting how he sees it as film about taking control of your own life and destiny.

Q: What do you think this film is saying? 

A: That ultimately you have to take responsibility for your life and for what occurs. I think that probably that’s what this picture is about... My feeling is that the principal statement of the movie is: You can’t rely on the supernatural and you can’t rely on forces beyond your control to shape your own life. You have to take it into your own hands. That isn’t to say you can’t have faith, religious faith, etc. But not to throw off responsibility and let some other entity assume it for you. I think this story—and I try to couch it in the most positive way—has to do with the three main characters. The supporting group is really ancillary to the story. … If it’s a story of family, it’s a story about the family of the three top guys. Maybe that’s supposed to be a microcosm of the greater family. Maybe it’s supposed to represent a larger type family, the entire seven crew members that the audience has gotten to know know, the entire Enterprise, the universal family. Maybe that’s part of the design in the screenplay. If indeed that is the case. it’s focused on the three main people, though. 

Page 189 

Q: What do you think your character will be remembered for? 

A: I don’t have the faintest idea … In several episodes and in three out of the five films, Chekov has suffered some kind of physical trauma [he laughs] and I am frequently asked “Why is Chekov always getting beat up?” I would like to think of Chekov as a character that has some sense of fun, that perhaps is not as institutionalized an officer as some of the others. That there’s some irreverence about him . . . and I don’t know what else to say because ; the opportunities have been limited as to how the character has been developed. 

Page 190

Jimmy Doohan is relatively positive about the experience, or at least appears to be investing little personal energy in it. His answers lack the anger that comes through in his own book. Again that’s possibly because his is talking to Lis Shatner during the making of a William Shatner movie. That may have had a negative impact on his candor. He tries to treat it just like a job and he’s looking forward to his next vacation.

Q: Any challenges in this movie? 

A: No, not really. I’m working. I’ve been an actor for forty-three years. At the end of twenty years, you’re supposed to be a complete actor. When I was about eighteen or nineteen. I started to feel that, because I’d been told that by my acting teacher. I said, “How long will it take?” And he said, “Well, depends on the type of work you get. It’s about twenty years.’ And you know what? I started to feel that, a sort of sense comes over you where you think, “Hey, I don’t care what they ask me to do, I can do it.” That’s the thrilling part of it .. And a powerful feeling, knowing full well that at this moment in the scene, even though you still have to rehearse it, they’re either going to be laughing about you making just one face or sound, or they’re going to be crying. Or all the feelings in between. That’s why when people ask me if I want to be a director, I say, “No way!”I’m satisfied being an actor. The rest of the time I’m terribly interested in seeing the country. My wife doesn’t understand why I want another motor home. Within twenty months, I drove 52,000 miles in one. I take trips to places like Phoenix and Portland and Sacramento, etc. and sometimes I’ll bring the whole family. I have six children all together. Four boys, two girls. Two boys are living with me in the San Fernando Valley. 

Page 200

This book covers a lot of ground without being too long. The reader can get an idea of how this movie went off the rails while it was being made. It also has a nice bit of Star Trek history in it. It’s a worthwhile and fun read for anyone who wants to know more about the movie and the franchise in general. Experts in Star Trek may find little new ground, but the perspective is still interesting. “Captain’s Log: William Shatner’s Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier as told by Lisabeth Shatner” is a worthwhile read.