The High Window

by Raymond Chandler

1942

In the third Philip Marlowe book, a bilious, dipsomaniac widow hires the sleuth to track down a very rare and valuable coin, which she believes has been stolen by her estranged daughter-in-law. He soon finds out that the job includes being accosted by the woman's ineffectual son, who still loves his wife, and by her timorous, neurotic secretary, for their own reasons. There's even another detective on the case, a cheerful but clumsy fellow, and two murders later Marlowe is checking in with the criminal classes to see what they have to say. He gets along with them better than he does the widow.

This is an astonishing feat of writing. These books aren't whodunits in the traditional sense; they aren't even noir, really. Marlowe is a genre unto itself, with original and self-assured writing that constructs a labyrinthine plot, but isn't really about the plot at all. A man confesses to a murder he didn't commit; later he'll recant and the murder will go cold and unsolved. Marlowe helps a lady in distress as far as he can. He also maybe helps another fellow get away with murder. Maybe the victim deserved it. Who's to say? Not Marlowe. "The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find." 

five stars

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

The author, a sportswriter who runs but finds himself constantly injured, goes to several sports doctors to find the reason why. They tell him the same thing: after a certain age and at a certain weight, running is bad for your body, period. Unsatisfied with this bad news, he seeks answers in other areas, eventually stumbling upon a Mexican desert tribe called the Tarahumara, who run hundreds of miles a week as a daily routine, even into late middle age, and seem to never get injured. This discovery leads to McDougall hearing of a mysterious American called Caballo Blanco who lives among these people and has adopted their ways and diet. Once an article about this man is published, it sparks a new interest in the largely hidden and unknown Tarahumara in several of ultra-marathoning's top figures. Eventually, a race is set up between the bravest of American athletes and the top Tarahumara runners, a race filled with drama and surprises, which no one except the participants and the few townsfolk near the race area ever see.

The story is indeed dramatic, but the lily is gilded by the author's style. It is written in a very sensationalist tone: everything is the best, the most nutritious superfood, the most dangerous remote location, the highest town, the most capable humans, the toughest. McDougall is definitely not a just-the-facts type of writer. Every meeting has to be earth shaking, every character has to be larger than life. However, the book has everything, and it has it in copious detail. There is a cast of extremely quirky characters, there is serious medical data on the benefits of running barefoot, there’s criticism of the Nike sneaker industry for deliberately perpetuating bad running, there is the personal journey and breakthrough that the author goes through (along with practical step-by-step plan which the reader can copy to improve his or her running), there is the trove of historical tidbits and fascinating anecdotes about the limits of human endurance, and of course there’s the stars of the show, the Tarahumara themselves and their fascinating way of life and how it makes them such amazing athletes. Plus some American super-athletes. And a lot of data about the benefits of a vegetarian diet. Even evolutionary biology. Quite a lot. And thus we come to the raison d'etre of the book: according to the evidence McDougall cites, humans are evolutionarily created to run. We have the right ligaments, buttocks, and feet to run, and if we don't run, we are destroying ourselves with heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. It's a tall order. But McDougall seems to have interviewed everyone remotely connected with the race, or runs great distances, or the science of running, or the running tribes, and the book is both marvelously entertaining and informative from beginning to end. It gets a little corny and quasi mystical near the end when the race reaches a climax, but chalk that up to a runner's high. I don’t have the knowledge to debate the veracity or debunk or support some of the wilder claims, and the author is prone to depict detailed visuals and conversations for which he was not present. That said, taken at its face value it is a superb book. 

five stars

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World

by Steve Brusatte

The author, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, covers hundreds of millions of years of biological history, from the pre-Cambrian to the latest Cretaceous (a fun phrase to say, by the way), explaining in lucid prose the story of the dinosaurs. Brusatte writes with the infectious giddiness of the young geek he still is; his informative chapter on T. Rex in particular is breathless in admiration for "the king." There's almost too much history and discovery for Brusatte to cover, so wide is his scope and excitement. He tells in vivid detail about the two great extinction events (the second, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, is confirmed in his account by a layer in the ancient rock of iridium that had to come from outer space). He explains how the ponderous sauropods grew so huge (fast growth, light bones, and most interestingly their birdlike lungs, which allowed them to take in both oxygen on inhalation and exhalation). He discusses the unfortunate and bizarre episode known as the "Bone Wars," in which eccentric 19th-century natural scientists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marshand (they had such great names back then) let their rivalry for glory overcome their desire for scientific advancement. Brusatte also makes clear the now accepted theory that birds are dinosaurs.

Considering the vastness of the subject and the amount of explanation required to lay everything out for the layman (including the required background knowledge on Pangaea, climate change, evolutionary adaption), this is a brilliantly written book. Sometimes Brusatte's excitable authorial voice made me wish he would slow down and lay things out a bit more slowly. He also spends valuable page time on very brief biographies of some of the paleontologists across China, Eastern Europe, and America whom Brusatte admires and works with – all fine people, I am sure, but I really don't care if one affects dandy clothes and listens to the Doors or if another loves to dance at techno clubs. I also would have liked a more in-depth look into the best guess on why only bird-dinosaurs survived the asteroid and not a single other true dinosaur species, while reptiles and mammals did. Still, these are minor complaints; Brusatte's book is probably the best complete overview of what the world of the dinosaurs was like.