- Ferrigno, Robert.
Heart of the Assassin.
New York: Scribner, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-4165-3767-0.
-
This novel completes the author's Assassin Trilogy, which began with
Prayers for the Assassin
(March 2006) and continued with
Sins of the Assassin
(March 2008). This is one of those trilogies in which you really
want to read the books in order. While there is some effort
to provide context for readers who start in the middle, you'll miss so much
of the background of the scenario and the development and previous
interactions of characters that you'll miss a great deal of what's
going on. If you're unfamiliar with the world in which these stories
are set, please see my comments on the earlier books in the series.
As this novel opens, a crisis is brewing as a heavily armed and
increasingly expansionist Aztlán is ready to exploit the
disunity of the Islamic Republic and the Bible Belt, most of whose
military forces are arrayed against one another, to continue to nibble
away at both. Visionaries on both sides imagine a reunification of
the two monotheistic parts of what were once the United States, while
the Old One and his mega-Machiavellian daughter Baby work their dark
plots in the background. Former fedayeen shadow warrior Rakkim Epps
finds himself on missions to the darkest part of the Republic, New
Fallujah (the former San Francisco), and to the radioactive remains of
Washington D.C., seeking a relic which might have the power to unite
the nation once again.
Having read and tremendously enjoyed the first two books of the
trilogy, I was very much looking forward to this novel, but
having now read it, I consider it a disappointment. As the
trilogy has progressed, the author seems to have become ever more
willing to invent whatever technology he needs at the moment
to advance the plot, whether or not it is plausible or consistent
with the rest of the world he has created, and to admit the
supernatural into a story which started out set in a world of
gritty reality. I spent the first 270 pages making increasingly
strenuous efforts to suspend disbelief, but then when one of
the characters uses a medical oxygen tank as a flamethrower,
I “lost it” and started laughing out loud at each of
the absurdities in the pages that followed: “DNA knives”
that melt into a person's forearm, holodeck hotel rooms with
faithful all-senses stimulation and simulated lifeforms,
a ghost, miraculous religious relics, etc., etc. The first two
books made the reader think about what it would be like if a
post-apocalyptic Great Awakening reorganised the U.S. around Islamic
and Christian fundamentalism. In this book, all of that is swept into
the background, and it's all about the characters (who one ceases to
care much about, as they become increasingly comic book like) and a
political plot so preposterous it makes Dan Brown's novels seem
like nonfiction.
If you've read the first two novels and want to discover
how it all comes out, you will find all of the threads
resolved in this book. For me, there were just too many
“Oh come on, now!” moments for the result to be
truly satisfying.
A podcast
interview with the author is available.
You can read the first chapter of this book online at the
author's Web site.
- Vallee, Jacques.
Forbidden Science. Vol. 2.
San Francisco: Documatica Research, 2008.
ISBN 978-0-615-24974-2.
-
This, the second volume of
Jacques Vallee's journals,
chronicles the years from 1970 through 1979. (I read the
first volume, covering
1957–1969, before I began this list.) Early in the narrative
(p. 153), Vallee becomes a U.S. citizen, but although
surrendering his French passport, he never gives up his Gallic
rationalism and scepticism, both of which serve him well in the
increasingly weird Northern California scene in the Seventies. It was
in those locust years that the seeds for the personal computing and
Internet revolutions matured, and Vallee was at the nexus of this
technological ferment, working on databases, Doug Englebart's
Augmentation project, and later systems for conferencing and
collaborative work across networks. By the end of the decade he, like
many in Silicon Valley of the epoch, has become an entrepreneur,
running a company based upon the conferencing technology he
developed. (One amusing anecdote which indicates how far we've come
since the 70s in mindset is when he pitches his conferencing system to
General Electric who, at the time, had the largest commercial data
network to support their timesharing service. They said they were
afraid to implement anything which looked too much like a messaging
system for fear of running afoul of the Post Office.)
If this were purely a personal narrative of the formative
years of the Internet and personal computing, it would
be a valuable book—I was there, then, and Vallee
gets it absolutely right. A journal is, in many ways,
better than a history because you experience the groping
for solutions amidst confusion and ignorance which is
the stuff of real life, not the narrative of an historian
who knows how it all came out. But in addition to being
a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and (later)
venture capitalist, Vallee is also one of the
preeminent researchers into the UFO and related
paranormal phenomena (the character Claude Lacombe,
played by François Truffaut in Steven Spielberg's
1977 movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
was based upon Vallee). As the 1970s progress, the author
becomes increasingly convinced that the UFO phenomenon cannot
be explained by extraterrestrials and spaceships, and that it is
rooted in the same stratum of the human mind and the universe
we inhabit which has given rise to folklore about little
people and various occult and esoteric traditions. Later in the decade,
he begins to suspect that at least some UFO activity is
the work of deliberate manipulators bent on creating an
irrational, anti-science worldview in the general populace,
a hypothesis expounded in his 1979 book,
Messengers of Deception,
which remains controversial three decades after its
publication.
The Bay Area in the Seventies was a kind of cosmic vortex of
the weird, and along with Vallee we encounter many of the
prominent figures of the time, including
Uri Geller
(who Vallee immediately dismisses as a charlatan),
Doug Engelbart,
J. Allen Hynek,
Anton LaVey,
Russell Targ,
Hal Puthoff,
Ingo Swann,
Ira Einhorn,
Tim Leary,
Tom Bearden,
Jack Sarfatti,
Melvin Belli,
and many more. Always on a relentlessly rational even keel, he
observes with dismay as many of his colleagues disappear
into drugs, cults, gullibility, pseudoscience, and fads
as that dark decade takes its toll. In May 1979
he feels himself to be at “the end of an age that defied
all conventions but failed miserably to set new standards”
(p. 463). While this is certainly spot on in the social and
cultural context in which he meant it, it is ironic that so many
of the standards upon which the subsequent explosion of computer
and networking technology are based were created in those years
by engineers patiently toiling away in Silicon Valley amidst all
the madness.
An introduction and retrospective at the end puts the work into
perspective from the present day, and 25 pages of end notes expand
upon items in the journals which may be obscure at this remove and
provide source citations for events and works mentioned. You might
wonder what possesses somebody to read more than five hundred pages of
journal entries by somebody else which date from thirty to forty years
ago. Well, I took the time, and I'm glad I did: it perfectly
recreated the sense of the times and of the intellectual and
technological challenges of the age. Trust me: if you're too young to
remember the Seventies, it's far better to experience those years here
than to have actually lived through them.
- Woodbury, David O.
The Glass Giant of Palomar.
New York: Dodd, Mead, [1939, 1948] 1953.
LCCN 53000393.
-
I originally read this book when I was in junior high school—it
was one of the few astronomy titles in the school's library. It's
one of the grains of sand dropping on the pile which eventually
provoked the avalanche that persuaded me I was living in
the
golden age of engineering
and that I'd best spend my life
making the most of it.
Seventy years after it was originally published
(the 1948 and 1953 updates added only minor information on the
final commissioning of the telescope and a collection of photos
taken through it), this book still inspires respect for those who
created the 200 inch
Hale Telescope
on Mount Palomar, and the engineering challenges they faced and
overcame in achieving that milestone in astronomical instrumentation.
The book is as much a biography of
George
Ellery Hale as it is a story of the giant telescope he brought
into being. Hale was a world class scientist: he invented the
spectroheliograph, discovered the magnetic fields of sunspots,
founded the Astrophysical Journal and to a large
extent the field of astrophysics itself, but he also excelled
as a promoter and fund-raiser for grand-scale scientific instrumentation.
The
Yerkes,
Mount Wilson,
and
Palomar
observatories would, in all likelihood, not have existed were it not
for Hale's indefatigable salesmanship. And this was an age when
persuasiveness was all. With the exception of the road to the top
of Palomar, all of the observatories and their equipment promoted
by Hale were funded without a single penny of taxpayer money. For
the Palomar 200 inch, he raised US$6 million in gold-backed 1930
dollars, which in present-day paper funny-money amounts to
US$78 million.
It was a very different America which built the Palomar telescope.
Not only was it never even thought of that money coercively taken from
taxpayers would be diverted to pure science, anybody who wanted to
contribute to the project, regardless of their academic credentials,
was judged solely on their merits and given a position based upon
their achievements. The chief optician who ground, polished, and figured
the main mirror of the Palomar telescope (so perfectly that its
potential would not be realised until recently thanks to
adaptive optics)
had a sixth grade education and was first employed at Mount Wilson as a
truck driver. You can make of yourself what you have within yourself
in America, so they say—so it was for
Marcus Brown
(p. 279).
Milton Humason
who, with
Edwin Hubble,
discovered the expansion of the universe, dropped out of school at the
age of 14 and began his astronomical career driving supplies up Mount
Wilson on mule trains. You can make of yourself what you have within
yourself in America, or at least you could then. Now we go elsewhere.
Is there anything
Russell W. Porter
didn't do? Arctic explorer, founder of the hobby of amateur telescope
making, engineer, architect…his footprints and brushstrokes are
all over technological creativity in the first half of the twentieth
century. And he is much in evidence here: recruited in 1927, he did the
conceptual design for most of the buildings of the observatory, and his
cutaway drawings of the mechanisms of the telescope demonstrate to those endowed
with contemporary computer graphics tools that the eye of the artist is
far more important than the technology of the moment.
This book has been out of print for decades, but used copies
(often, sadly, de-accessioned by public libraries) are generally
available at prices (unless you're worried about cosmetics
and collectability) comparable to present-day hardbacks. It's as
good a read today as it was in 1962.
- Dewar, James with Robert Bussard.
The Nuclear Rocket.
Burlington, Canada: Apogee Books, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-894959-99-5.
-
Let me begin with a few comments about the author attribution of
this book. I have cited it as given on the copyright page, but
as James Dewar notes in his preface, the main text of the book
is entirely his creation. He says of Robert Bussard, “I
am deeply indebted to Bob's contributions and consequently list
his name in the credit to this book”. Bussard himself
contributes a five-page introduction in which he uses,
inter alia,
the adjectives “amazing”, “strange”,
“remarkable”, “wonderful”, “visionary”,
and “most odd” to describe the work, which he makes clear
is entirely Dewar's. Consequently, I shall subsequently use “the
author” to denote Dewar alone. Bussard died in 2007,
two years before the publication of this book, so his introduction
must have been based upon a manuscript. I leave to the reader to judge the
propriety of posthumously naming as co-author a
prominent individual who did not write a single word of the main text.
Unlike the author's earlier
To the End of the Solar System (June 2008),
which was a nuts and bolts history of the U.S. nuclear rocket
program, this book, titled The Nuclear Rocket,
quoting from Bussard's introduction, “…is not really
about nuclear rocket propulsion or its applications to space
flight…”. Indeed, although some of the nitty-gritty of
nuclear rocket engines are discussed, the bulk of the book is
an argument for a highly-specific long term plan to transform
human access to space from an elitist government run program to
a market-driven expansive program with the ultimate goal of
providing access to space to all and opening the solar system to
human expansion and eventual dominion. This is indeed ambitious
and visionary, but of all of Bussard's adjectives, the one that sticks
with me is “most odd”.
Dewar argues that the
NERVA B-4 nuclear
thermal rocket core, developed between 1960 and 1972, and
successfully tested on several occasions, has the capability,
once the “taboo” against using nuclear engines in
the boost to low Earth orbit (LEO) is discarded, of revolutionising
space transportation and so drastically reducing the cost per
unit mass to orbit that it would effectively democratise access to
space. In particular, he proposes a “Re-core” engine
which, integrated with a liquid hydrogen tank and solid rocket
boosters, would be air-launched from a large cargo aircraft such
as a
C-5, with the
solid rockets boosting the nuclear engine to around 30 km
where they would separate for recovery and the nuclear engine engaged.
The nuclear rocket would continue to boost the payload to
orbital insertion. Since the nuclear stage would not go critical
until having reached the upper atmosphere, there would be no
radioactivity risk to those handling the stage on the ground prior
to launch or to the crew of the plane which deployed the rocket.
After reaching orbit, the payload and hydrogen tank would be separated,
and the nuclear engine enclosed in a cocoon (much like an
ICBM reentry vehicle) which would de-orbit and eventually land at
sea in a region far from inhabited land. The cocoon, which would float
after landing, would be recovered by a ship, placed in a radiation-proof
cask, and returned to a reprocessing centre where the highly radioactive
nuclear fuel core would be removed for reprocessing (the entire launch to
orbit would consume only about 1% of the highly enriched uranium in the
core, so recovering the remaining uranium and reusing it is essential
to the economic viability of the scheme). Meanwhile, another never
critical core would be inserted in the engine which, after inspection of
the non-nuclear components, would be ready for another flight. If
each engine were reused 100 times, and efficient fuel reprocessing
were able to produce new cores economically, the cost for each
17,000 pound payload to LEO would be around US$108 per pound.
Payloads which reached LEO and needed to go beyond (for example, to
geostationary orbit, the Moon, or the planets) would rendezvous with
a different variant of the NERVA-derived engine, dubbed the
“Re-use” stage, which is much like Von Braun's
nuclear
shuttle concept. This engine, like the original NERVA, would be
designed for multiple missions, needing only inspection and refuelling
with liquid hydrogen. A single Re-use stage might complete 30 round-trip
missions before being disposed of in deep space (offering “free
launches” for planetary science missions on its final trip into the
darkness).
There is little doubt that something like this is technically
feasible. After all, the nuclear rocket engine was extensively
tested in the years prior to its cancellation in 1972, and NASA's
massive resources of the epoch examined mission profiles (under the
constraint that nuclear engines could be used only for
departure from LEO, however, and without return to Earth) and
found no show stoppers. Indeed, there is evidence that the nuclear
engine was cancelled, in part, because it was performing so well
that policy makers feared it would enable additional costly
NASA missions post-Apollo. There are some technological
issues: for example, the author implies that the recovered
Re-core, once its hot core is extracted and a new pure uranium
core installed, will not be radioactive and hence safe to handle
without special precautions. But what about neutron activation
of other components of the engine? An operating nuclear rocket
creates one of the most extreme neutronic environments outside
the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Would it be possible to choose
materials for the non-core components of the engine which would
be immune to this and, if not, how serious would the induced
radioactivity be, especially if the engine were reused up to
a hundred times? The book is silent on this and a number of other
questions.
The initial breakthrough in space propulsion from the first generation
nuclear engines is projected to lead to rapid progress in optimising
them, with four generations of successively improved engines within a
decade or so. This would eventually lead to the development of a
heavy lifter able to orbit around 150,000 pounds of payload per flight
at a cost (after development costs are amortised or expensed) of
about US$87 per pound. This lifter would allow the construction of
large space stations and the transport of people to them in
“buses” with up to thirty passengers per mission. Beyond
that, a nuclear single stage to orbit vehicle is examined, but there
are a multitude of technological and policy questions to be resolved
before that could be contemplated.
All of this, however, is not what the book is about.
The author is a passionate believer in the proposition that opening
the space frontier to all the people of Earth, not just a few
elite civil servants, is essential to preserving peace, restoring
the optimism of our species, and protecting the thin biosphere of
this big rock we inhabit. And so he proposes a detailed structure
for accomplishing these goals, beginning with “Democratization
of Space Act” to be adopted by the U.S. Congress, and the
creation of a “Nuclear Rocket Development and Operations
Corporation” (NucRocCorp), which would be a kind of private/public
partnership in which individuals could invest. This company could
create divisions (in some cases competing with one another) and
charter development projects. It would entirely control space
nuclear propulsion, with oversight by U.S. government regulatory
agencies, which would retain strict control over the fissile
reactor cores.
As the initial program migrated to the heavy lifter, this structure
would morph into a multinational (admitting only “good”
nations, however) structure of bewildering (to this engineer)
bureaucratic complexity which makes the United Nations look like
the student council of
Weemawee High. The lines of responsibility
and power here are diffuse in the extreme. Let me simply cite
“The Stockholder's Declaration” from p. 161:
Whoever invests in the NucRocCorp and subsequent Space Charter
Authority should be required to sign a declaration that commits
him or her to respect the purpose of the new regime, and conduct
their personal lives in a manner that recognizes the rights of
their fellow man (What about woman?—JW). They must be made
aware that failure to do so could result in forfeiture of their
investment.
Property rights, anybody? Thought police? Apart from the manifest
baroque complexity of the proposed scheme, it entirely ignores
Jerry Pournelle's
Iron
Law of Bureaucracy:
regardless of its original mission, any bureaucracy will eventually
be predominately populated by those seeking to advance the interests of
the bureaucracy itself, not the purpose for which it was created. The
structure proposed here, even if enacted (implausible in the extreme)
and even if it worked as intended (vanishingly improbable), would
inevitably be captured by the Iron Law and become something like, well,
NASA.
On pp. 36–37, the author likens attempts to stretch
chemical rocket technology to its limits to gold plating a nail
when what is needed is a bigger hammer (nuclear rockets). But
this book brings to my mind another epigram: “When all
you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Dewar
passionately supports nuclear rocket technology and believes that
it is the way to open the solar system to human settlement. I
entirely concur. But when it comes to assuming that boosting people
up to a space station (p. 111):
And looking down on the bright Earth and into the black
heavens might create a new perspective among Protestant,
Roman Catholic, and Orthodox theologians, and perhaps lead
to the end of the schism plaguing Christianity. The same might
be said of the division between the Sunnis and Shiites in
Islam, and the religions of the Near and Far East might benefit
from a new perspective.
Call me cynical, but I'll wager this particular swing of the
hammer is more likely to land on a thumb than the intended nail.
Those who cherish individual freedom have often dreamt of a
future in which the opening of access to space would, in the words of
L. Neil Smith, extend
the human prospect to “freedom, immortality, and the
stars”—works
for me. What is proposed here, if adopted, looks more like, after
more than a third of a century of dithering, the space frontier being
finally opened to the brave pioneers ready to homestead there, and
when they arrive, the tax man and the all-pervasive regulatory state
are already there, up and running. The nuclear rocket
can expand the human presence throughout the solar system.
Let's just hope that when humanity (or some risk-taking subset of it)
takes that long-deferred step, it does not propagate the soft tyranny
of present day terrestrial governance to worlds beyond.
- Derbyshire, John.
We Are Doomed.
New York: Crown Forum, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-307-40958-4.
-
In this book, genial curmudgeon
John Derbyshire,
whose
previous two books were popular treatments of the
Riemann hypothesis and the
history of algebra, argues that
an authentically conservative outlook on life requires
a relentlessly realistic pessimism about human
nature, human institutions, and the human prospect.
Such a pessimistic viewpoint immunises one from the
kind of happy face optimism which breeds enthusiasm
for breathtaking ideas and grand, ambitious schemes,
which all of history testifies are doomed to
failure and tragedy.
Adopting a pessimistic attitude is, Derbyshire says,
not an effort to turn into a sourpuss (although see
the photograph of the author on the
dust jacket), but simply the consequence of removing
the rose coloured glasses and looking at the world as
it really is. To grind down the reader's optimism into
a finely-figured speculum of gloom, a sequence of
chapters surveys the Hellbound landscape of what passes
for the modern world: “diversity”, politics,
popular culture, education, economics, and third-rail
topics such as achievement gaps between races and
the assimilation of immigrants. The discussion is
mostly centred on the United States, but in chapter 11,
we take a
tour d'horizon and find
that things are, on the whole, as bad or worse everywhere
else.
In the conclusion the author, who is just a few years my senior,
voices a thought which has been rattling around my own brain for some
time: that those of our generation living in the West may be seen, in
retrospect, as having had the good fortune to live in a golden age. We just
missed the convulsive mass warfare of the 20th century (although not,
of course, frequent brushfire conflicts in which you can be killed
just as dead, terrorism, or the threat of nuclear annihilation during
the Cold War), lived through the greatest and most broadly-based
expansion of economic prosperity in human history, accompanied by more
progress in science, technology, and medicine than in all of the human
experience prior to our generation. Further, we're probably going to
hand
in our dinner pails
before the
economic apocalypse
made inevitable by the pyramid of paper money and bogus debt we
created, mass human migrations, demographic collapse, and the ultimate
eclipse of the tattered remnants of human liberty by the malignant
state. Will people decades and centuries hence look back at the
Boomer generation as the one that reaped all the benefits for themselves
and passed on the bills and the adverse consequences to their
descendants? That's the way to bet.
So what is to be done? How do we turn the ship around before
we hit the iceberg?
Don't look for any such chirpy suggestions here: it's all
in the title—we are doomed! My own view
is that we're in a race between a
technological singularity
and a new
dark age
of poverty, ignorance, subjugation to the state, and pervasive
violence. Sharing the author's proclivity for pessimism, you can
probably guess which I judge more probable. If you concur, you
might want to read
this book,
which will appear in this chronicle in due time.
The book includes neither bibliography nor index. The lack
of the former is particularly regrettable as a multitude
of sources are cited in the text, many available online. It would
be wonderful if the author posted a bibliography of clickable
links (to online articles or purchase links for books cited)
on his
Web site,
where there is a
Web log
of comments from readers and the author's responses.
- Paul, Ron.
End the Fed.
New York: Grand Central, 2000.
ISBN 978-0-446-54919-6.
-
Imagine a company whose performance, measured over almost a century
by the primary metric given in its charter, looked
like this:
Now, would you be likely, were your own personal prosperity and that of all of
those around you on the line, to entrust your financial future to their
wisdom and demonstrated track record? Well, if you live in the United States, or
your finances are engaged in any way in that economy (whether as an investor,
creditor, or trade partner), you are, because this is the chart of
the purchasing power of the United States Dollar since it began to be managed
by the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Helluva record, don't you think?
Now, if you know anything about
basic economics
(which puts you several rungs up the ladder from most present-day
politicians and members of the chattering classes), you'll recall that
inflation is not defined as rising prices but rather an increase in the
supply of money. It's just as if you were at an auction and you gave all of
the bidders 10% more money: the selling price of the item would be 10%
greater, not because it had appreciated in value but simply because the
bidders had more to spend on acquiring it. And what is, fundamentally, the
function of the Federal Reserve System? Well, that would be to implement
an “elastic currency”, decoupled from real-world measures of
value, with the goal of smoothing out the business cycle. Looking at this
shorn of all the bafflegab, the mission statement is to create paper money
out of thin air in order to fund government programs which the legislature lacks
the spine to fund from taxation or debt, and to permit banks to profit by
extending credit well beyond the limits of prudence, knowing they're backed up
by the “lender of last resort” when things go South. The Federal
Reserve System is nothing other than an engine of inflation (money creation),
and it's hardly a surprise that the dollars it issues have lost more than 95%
of their value in the years since its foundation.
Acute observers of the economic scene have been warning about the
risks of such a system for decades—it came onto my personal
radar well before there was a human bootprint on the Moon. But somehow,
despite dollar crises, oil shocks, gold and silver bubble markets, saving and
loan collapse, dot.bomb, housing bubble, and all the rest, the wise money guys
somehow kept all of the balls in the air—until they didn't. We
are now in the early days of an extended period in which almost a century
of bogus prosperity founded on paper (not to mention, new and improved pure
zap electronic) money and debt which cannot ever be repaid will have to be
unwound. This will be painful in the extreme, and the profligate borrowers
who have been riding high whilst running up their credit cards will end up
marked down, not only in the economic realm but in geopolitical power.
Nobody imagines today that it would be possible, as Alan Greenspan envisioned
in the days he was a member of Ayn Rand's inner circle, to abolish the paper
money machine and return to honest money (or, even better, as Hayek recommended,
competing moneys, freely interchangeable in an open market). But then, nobody
imagines that the present system could collapse, which it is in the process of
doing. The US$ will continue its slide toward zero, perhaps with an inflection point
in the second derivative as the consequences of “bailouts” and
“stimuli” kick in. The Euro will first see
risk premiums
increase across sovereign debt issued by Eurozone nations, and then the
weaker members drop out to avoid the collapse of their own economies. No currency
union without political union has ever survived in the long term, and the Euro is
no exception.
Will we finally come to our senses and abandon this statist paper in favour of
the
mellow glow of gold?
This is devoutly to be wished, but I fear unlikely in my lifetime or even in
those of the koi in my pond. As long as politicians can fiddle with the money
in order to loot savers and investors to fund their patronage schemes and line
their own pockets they will: it's been going on since Babylon, and it will probably
go to the stars as we expand our dominion throughout the universe. One doesn't want
to hope for total economic and societal collapse, but that appears to be the best
bet for a return to honest and moral money. If that's your wish, I suppose you can
be heartened that the present administration in the United States appears bent upon
that outcome. Our other option is opting out with technology. We have the ability
today to electronically implement Hayek's multiple currency system online. This
has already been done by ventures such as e-gold, but The Man has, to date, effectively
stomped upon them. It will probably take a prickly sovereign state player to make
this work. Hello, Dubai!
Let me get back to this book. It is superb: read it and encourage all
of your similarly-inclined friends to do the same. If they're coming
in cold to these concepts, it may be a bit of a shock (“You
mean, the government doesn't create money?”), but
there's a bibliography at the end with three levels of reading lists
to bring people up to speed. Long-term supporters of hard money will
find this mostly a reinforcement of their views, but for those
experiencing for the first time the consequences of rapidly
depreciating dollars, this will be an eye-opening revelation of the
ultimate cause, and the malignant institution which must be abolished
to put an end to this most pernicious tax upon the most prudent of
citizens.
- Lyle, [Albert] Sparky and David Fisher.
The Year I Owned the Yankees.
New York: Bantam Books, [1990] 1991.
ISBN 978-0-553-28692-2.
-
“Sparky” Lyle
was one of the preeminent baseball relief pitchers of the 1970s. In 1977, he became
the first American League reliever to win the
Cy Young Award.
In this book, due to one of those bizarre tax-swap transactions
of the 1980–90s,
George Steinbrenner,
“The Boss”, was forced to divest the New York Yankees to
an unrelated owner. Well, who could be more unrelated than Sparky
Lyle, so when the telephone rings while he and his wife are
watching “Jeopardy”, the last thing he imagines is that
he's about to be offered a no-cash leveraged buy-out of the Yankees.
Based upon his extensive business experience, 238 career saves, and
pioneering in sitting naked on teammates' birthday cakes, he says,
“Why not?” and the game, and season, are afoot.
None of this ever happened: the subtitle is “A Baseball
Fantasy”, but wouldn't it have been delightful if it had?
There's the pitcher with a bionic arm, cellular phone gloves
so coaches can call fielders to position them for batters
(if they don't get the answering machine), the clubhouse at Yankee
Stadium enhanced with a Mood Room for those who wish to mellow
out and a Frustration Room for those inclined to smash and break
things after bruising losses, and the pitching coach who performs
an exorcism and conducts a seance manifesting the spirit of Cy Young
who counsels the Yankee pitching staff “Never hang a curve
to Babe Ruth”. Thank you, Cy! Then there's the Japanese
pitcher who can read minds and the reliever who reinvents himself
as “Mr. Cool” and rides in from the bullpen on a
Harley with the stadium PA system playing “Leader of the
Pack”.
This is a romp which, while the very quintessence of fantasy
baseball, also embodies a great deal of inside baseball wisdom.
It's also eerily prophetic, as
sabermetrics,
as practised by
Billy Beane's
Oakland A's years after this book was remaindered, plays a major
part in the plot. And never neglect the ultimate loyalty of a
fan to their team!
Sparky becomes the owner with a vow to be the anti-Boss, but discovers
as the season progresses that the realities of corporate baseball in
the 1990s mandate many of the policies which caused Steinbrenner
to be so detested. In the end, he comes to appreciate that any boss,
to do his or her job, must be, in part, The Boss. I wish I'd read that
before I discovered it for myself.
This is a great book to treat yourself to while the current World Series
involving the Yankees is contested. The book is out of print, but used
paperback copies in readable condition are abundant and reasonably
priced. Special thanks to the reader of this chronicle who
recommended
this book!