Tag: book review

The Fellowship of the Frog by Edgar Wallace

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

I love mystery stories. I think it’s because they are immune to being kitschy. It seems that the more tackier a mystery can be, the more I want it. The shady gentlemen, the clever yet unconventional detectives, the femmes fatales – I can’t get enough of them. If a mystery has these things, I will read it.

But I have a tough time writing or talking about mystery novels. I feel like I should admit that it’s a lowbrow genre. I mean you’ll never see a Noble being awarded for a series of mystery books (Right? I haven’t done my research.). But at the same time, the features that can make a highbrow novel unreadable, can make a mystery all the more enjoyable. Mysteries, in my view, can easily get away with stereotyped characters and cheesy dialogue. In any other sort of genre, thrillers included (Hi, Dan Brown!), these features will hurt the value of the writing. In mysteries, on the other hand, they are expected and encouraged, in my view at least. But on to the case!

The Fellowship of the Frog starts out with the murder of an undercover detective at the hands of the Frog, the mysterious leader of an ever increasing group of tramps. The Fellowship, so called because of the frog tattoos on the members’ hands, has become so expansive that they threaten the international affairs of England.

The Frog sprechen the Deutsch?

Enter Dick Gordon and Elk, the rozzers on the case of the Frog. Gordon is dashing, Elk doesn’t play by the book. Gordon wants the girl, Elk wants a promotion. In other words, they’re perfect for me. But the questions they have to answer are many:
Who is that strange American who keeps turning up at interesting places?
Who is the Frog and how can they stop him?
Is the Fellowship of the Frog really the coolest name for mystery novel? (Yes. Sweet baby Jesus, yes.)
Will Dick Gordon and Miss Bennett be able to live happily ever after?
Is Elk’s mangling of important historical dates funny way to round out his character? (Ugh, no.)
Will all of these questions be neatly wrapped up in the end? (You better believe it. The Frog is no match for my rules of good mystery writing)

I don’t see much point in running down the whole plot for you. After all, you’re either going to read the Fellowship of the Frog, or you’re going to read a mystery like it. Besides being an enjoyable read, there’s nothing about Fellowship to really set it apart from other mysteries, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. One of the things I liked best about the book was most likely due to the time it was written. Apparently, in 1920s mystery novels, a man didn’t merely sit down, he “dropped with a sigh to the Chesterfield”. Also, in Frog-ravished England, facial hair is whiskers, telephones are ‘phones, and omnibuses are ‘buses. Ah, those were the days.

Fellowship does have some short-comings, though. One of the most obvious is the way it has only two female characters – a safe, gentle one and a dangerous, provocative one. Guess which one the detective gets in the end? This two-women-only syndrome isn’t as bad as it is in the Bond films, but it’s very obvious that these women are not really characters at all. The one oohs and aahs, the other woos and wails. But I suppose novels like Fellowship weren’t really written with women in mind.

For those of you that are interested, Fellowship was made into at least one movie (as were 160 of Wallace’s other books, including King Kong). I can’t say whether the dialogue remains true, but I can leave you with some of the original.

One of my favorite lines from Fellowship comes in a character’s description of Lola, the appropriately named saucy female of the story. He says to her, “… I like you. There’s something about you that is very attractive – don’t stop me, because I’m not gong to get fresh with you, or suggest that you’re the only girl that ever made tobacco taste like molasses…” If a guy complimented you like that, girls, would you stop him?

I didn’t think so.

Up next: Eye Scream by Henry Rollin. Check it here.

The article originally appeared on Better Than Sliced Bread

The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Joe McVeigh4 Comments

When I was a teenager, I got into chaos theory (yes, I was that cool). It taught me two things. One, I should not be a mathematician and, two, statistics can be misleading so you should always be wary when someone tries to use them to prove their point.

I’ve been putting off writing this review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers because it made me so angry while reading it. Halfway through, I wanted to toss it out the window. I thought this rage might go away if I let his points sink in a while, but it hasn’t. I still can’t think or write coherently about Outliers because of how stupid it is. So if this article is disjointed, excuse me and blame Gladwell. All you need to know is that if you have even the slightest ability to think logically, you should not read this book.

Outliers is Gladwell’s attempt to explain success by combining statistics with stories of natural talent, hard work, and opportunity. His basic idea is that talent and hard work alone are not enough to make anyone great at anything. If that sounds obvious, it’s because it is. For some reason, Gladwell is utterly amazed that hard-working, talented individuals statistically do better than the rest when given an opportunity. This is the first part of Outliers that angered me. He just can’t get over how talent and determination are not the only factors in achieving greatness.

The second part of Outliers that I found offensive was the patronizing tone Gladwell uses. It’s as if he expects the reader to feel ridiculous that they didn’t think of something so obvious. Like, hey, write a book about everyday facts of life and make millions. Touche, Monsieur Malcom.

Then there’s the italics, the icing on the crap cake that is Outliers. Don’t get me started on Gladwell’s use of italics.

Gladwell starts Outliers with some eerie stats about how most of the players on the two best junior hockey teams in Canada are born in the early parts of the year. He claims that if you look at “any elite group of hockey players […] 40 percent of the players will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December”. This is based on work done by a Canadian psychologist and it sounds amazing. Gladwell, however, says it’s not amazing – because young hockey players in Canada are grouped by the year they were born and so kids born in January will be older and more developed than kids born in December. These bigger kids will then get scouted to play for better teams where they will receive better coaching, thus giving them an advantage to better develop their talents. What’s the real reason that Gladwell’s claim is amazing? It’s not true.

Gladwell says (with those fucking italics, in case you didn’t notice, dummy) that “any” elite group of hockey players will fit the Outliers/Canadian whack-job shrink model. So just out of curiosity, I decided to look at the rosters of the teams Gladwell uses to “prove” his point, the Medicine Hat Tigers and the Vancouver Giants. Guess what percentage of the players were born in the first three months of the year. Less than 40 percent for both teams. Shocking, I know. How about the 2010 Canadian National Olympic team? They’re pretty elite, right? The percentage of players born between January and March is 13%. That’s not quite 40%. And on six randomly chosen NHL teams (the first six on the nhl.com scoreboard when I looked), the average percentage of Canadian players born between January and March is 26%. Point is, Gladwell is a hoser and the theory is bunk.

Not letting simple facts stand in his way, Gladwell next adds other examples of “opportunity” to his young Aquarius Canucks. He explains that having to play eight days a week in Hamburg made the Beatles a better band. This is the so-called 10,000 hour rule you may have heard about. 10,000 hours is apparently how long it takes for a naturally talented person to become really great. Hence the Beatles went to Germany, played all day and all of the night, and then hit it big in the US. This works if you’re a Beatle, but Gladwell conveniently fails to mention what to do if you’re a Rolling Stone, a Beach Boy, or a Jackson 5. Basically, Gladwell spends tens of pages to say what three words can: practice makes perfect.

The way that this is profound news to Gladwell is, as I’ve said before, irritating. At this point in the book, his don’t-you-see tone, his italics, and his shock and awe at the obvious really got to me. The next chapters on opportunity were more of the same. He actually writes, “successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.” No shit, Sherlock. Being born in Canada instead of the Caribbean was a big help to Sidney Crosby’s hockey career. When children or stoners find this stuff amazing, it’s ok. They have excuses. What’s Gladwell’s? Who knows, and really, who cares? (In case you were wondering, Crosby was born in August)

The rest of the book reads like it was written by someone who was caught in a lie and then trie to lie their way out of it. Chapters Six and Seven continue with more of the obvious. The basic idea is, well, pretty basic: people from certain cultures act a certain way and these cultural rules can lead to problems when their cultures clash. To sum up, when in Rome…

In Chapter Eight, Gladwell argues that Asians are better students than Westerners for two reasons. One, the way they say numbers makes it easier to do simple math in their heads. Two, rice farming is a year-round, painful job which demands determination. Therefore, centuries of growing rice to survive means lots of determined Asians. Gladwell even tries to pitch ancient Chinese sayings against ancient Russian sayings to prove his point. The one that he relies on (and leads the chapter with), “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich” goes up against the Russian “if God does not bring it, the earth will not give it.” Number of days in a Chinese year = 354. If he botched the Chinese saying so bad, chances are he botched the Russian one too. I wonder why didn’t he just use a good old English saying like “no pain, no gain”. Oh, right.

Gladwell also lists international test scores to prove his point that since Asians have better number-words and sayings, their students do better on tests. But there are two reasons why he’s full of crap here. First, mainland China doesn’t even take part in the test he uses, but that doesn’t stop him from saying “the fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong rank so highly suggests that the mainland [China] would probably also do really well”. Yes, and because Sweden, Finland, and Russia do well in international ice hockey tournaments, one would think Norway is also good at hockey. So go ahead and bet on them this Olympics. (On a side note, in the very next paragraph after the quote above, Gladwell admits that no one knows if students in northern China are any good at math. But that’s not enough to stop a little speculation, now is it?)

The second reason Gladwell is full of it in his surmises is because he only mentions one of the two major international student tests, the TIMSS test. Why wouldn’t he give the results for the other test, the OECD’s PISA test? Well, simply put, because he’s a hack. But more importantly, the results from the PISA test don’t exactly fit his conclusions. The top ten countries in the math section of the PISA results is full of countries with awful sayings and no history of growing rice, like Finland and Canada.

Wait a minute, if the Canadian hockey players born in January were also doing well in the PISA test, then that means… nothing. That means nothing.

That’s the major problem with Outliers (besides those italics). Gladwell tells about some interesting people, cultures, and anomalies (and misleadingly begins a terrible book off with hockey), but when he tries to tie these things together, he runs into trouble. The relationships between the different aspects of his theory are strenuous at best and so they make his conclusions seem false (which they are). The sheer obvious nature of all of this is the last nail in the coffin for Outliers. It’s too bad because this book came highly recommended and I really wanted to enjoy it. Maybe Gladwell’s next book, tentatively titled Shit Rolls Downhill, will be better.

UPDATE March 15, 2014: Thanks to a discussion on reddit and /u/erroristswin for helping me realize that it is completely arbitrary to split the Canadian players into teams as Gladwell does. If his theory about 40% of Canadian players in “any elite” league is to be tested, the group of players should be taken as a whole. So in the spirit of being complete (and because it took all of an hour to check, including the time spent learning LibreOffice), I decided to check if Gladwell’s theory holds up when it’s done correctly. We already know it doesn’t for teams, since that is what I did above (because I didn’t realize it was the wrong way to do it).

I grabbed the full rosters of every NHL team from nhl.com. These players may not play every game, but they’re on the roster, so they’re on my list. Which means that my list is basically every NHL player for the 2013-14 season. After I made the list, I filtered out all the players not born in Canada. Then I sorted the players based on their birth dates and calculated which percentage of players were born in which month. Here’s what I found:

Birth month # of players % of players
Jan-Mar 277 29.88%
Apr-Jun 289 31.18%
Jul-Sep 213 22.98%
Oct-Dec 148 15.97%
Total 927 100.00%

So the theory doesn’t hold up. Surprised?

Up next: The Fellowship of the Frog by Edgar Wallace. Check it here.

This article originally appeared on Better Than Sliced Bread.

Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

How do you name a play Murder in the Cathedral and still make it boring? Ask T. S. Eliot.

Mr. Eliot and I have had our run-ins in the past. We first met over his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the title of which made me want to vomit. Mr. Eliot did nothing with the contents to make me feel any different. We next saw each other over his poem The Waste Land, which had enough foot notes to make even the dumbest kid in the class realize that all the modernist mumbo jumbo about “bring poetry to the layman” was a total crock. Was the satire supposed to be criticizing the pompous Victorians by being even more pretentious than them? I had to vomit again. Eliot most likely pissed himself by alluding to the ancient Sumerian god of wet cotton and stinky denim, which he then explained in a footnote, of course.

But I believe that everyone deserves a third strike, so I decided to give Eliot one last try. [Editor’s note: The real reason the Mr. McVeigh bought Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot is because it cost only twenty-five cents. Do not let him fool you into thinking his morals or a forgiving attitude outweigh his cheapness. He will buy anything for twenty-five cents. Anything.]

With a title like Murder in the Cathedral, it would be better if Eliot’s book was a Perry Mason novel. Then again, so would a lot of things. Instead, Murder is a boring play about the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket. Fortunately, it is a short, boring play about the assassination of Becket. It’s the difference between watching an infomercial for an hour and watching an infomercial for a day or, say, between reading Prufrock and reading Waste Land.

All of the reviews for Murder agree that it was a “high point in T.S. Eliot’s dramatic achievement,” but sometimes “drama” is a nice way of saying that despite having knights, a king, an archbishop, an assassination, and a true story, there is no reason that anyone should ever read this awful, tedious, shitstorm of a play. Again, good thing it’s short.

Eliot starts the play the characters who make up the Chorus, a gaggle of townspeople who feel “some presage of an act.” Let me guess, Becket’s gonna get it. No shit. This would be excusable if Eliot only did it once. But just like they start part I, Eliot drags them out to start part II (of only two parts) with more tired lines like “we wait and the time is short, but waiting is long.” Whoa. Deep, man.

If you didn’t think those lines were Nobel worthy, how about, “What day is the day that we know that we hope for or fear for? Every day is the day we should fear from or hope from”? A Parkinson’s sufferer doing the robot would be less disjointed than those lines. You have to reread them just to realize how idiotic they are. And no one should have to reread lines like those.

But I can’t say the whole play is bad. The most famous line from the work, “the last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason,” is really great. The only problem is it’s surrounded by really terrible prose. It’s not so much a diamond in the rough, as it is a speck of gold in a dung heap.

I’m sad to say that Eliot’s stilted Murder did not change my feelings for him. He still sounds dry and unimaginative to me. The play was written on the request of a friend for the Canterbury Festival in 1935 and it sounds uninspired and half-assed. I really have no idea how anyone finds his works interesting. Was there no one else writing poetry in the first half of the century? One second thought, don’t answer that.

Next up: The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Check it here.

This article originally appeared on Better Than Sliced Bread.