The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath

The Dawkins Delusion is a rebuttal to Richard Dawkins’s  The God Delusion, which I found to be an intolerant and grating vituperation against religious people of all ilk that failed to distinguish between the lunatic fundamentalist fringe and the vast majority of religious folks who, it seems to me, are much more tolerant than Dawkins about others who may have different ideas than them.

This book is a learned rebuke to Dawkins’s book and idea which, in a wonderfully calm and measured manner, refutes the arguments made by Dawkins. No, it’s not child abuse to teach children about religion. No, believing in god is not  equivalent to believing in Santa Claus. No, science has not disproved the existence of god.

If you were disturbed by the crusade-like intensity of Dawkins’s attacks this is a welcome book. It would be good to hear directly from other atheists (some of whom are quoted in this book, thankfully) that not all of them advocate the raging extremism of Dawkins. Just like religious fundamentalists do not represent the bulk of religious people, Dawkins does not represent the bulk of atheists who are rather mild and even kindly-inclined people.

They don’t play Stickball in Millwaukee by Reed Farrell Coleman

In They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee a college student vanishes and his uncle, a private investigator, goes looking for him in a small Northeastern college town to encounter a drug ring, bodies everywhere, and a young woman who inexplicably throws herself at him, giving rise to hot, ridiculously gratuitous sex scenes when he really should be out there investigating. Bodies galore, transparently devious or saintly characters, and an ending that is way too neatly arranged ruin the book.

The Cradle by Patrick Somerville

I liked The Cradle but I would not completely believe in it. I liked the idea of the young father-to-be setting out on a quest for his wife’s long-lost cradle. I liked the way he becomes a father in an unexpected way during the quest. I liked how his story as an abandoned and abused child  is held in check, but helps him save another child snared in the same predicament.

But many details just don’t work. What ATM dispenses $1000 at one pop? What wife would forget to ask about the cradle she so desperately wanted, even if many other adventures have intervened? Too bad there are cracks in the story for this is a rare treasure: the story of a good, sweet, nurturing father who is not a wimp.

In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent

In the Land of Invented Languages is a hilarious book, although it’s not always clear that the author intended it to be so funny, about made-up languages. I could only think of one when I picked up the book — Esperanto — but it turns out that hundreds of inventors have tried to create a simple, universal language, and that for centuries. None of them have had any success, with Esperanto being by far the most successful. Enough said.

So what’s so funny about these repeated failures? It’s their creators. All geeks, as we would call them today, they hold the strong belief that logic can win it all. So they try crazy schemes, including trying to create a universal classification of all the concepts in the universe. If you thought that was difficult to do for plants and animals, it turns out that language is particularly ill-suited to this exercise. Who says that editing and printing are part of “corporeal actions”? Others tried to create language by using affixes (the opposite of prefixes), thereby creating monstrously long words that seem impossible to pronounce or remember.

And those creators that actually were successful, such as with Esperanto and a funny and brilliant sign-based language called Blissymbolics, refused to admit that their new, pristine, logical creations could actually be modified by its speakers. It turns out that speakers of any languages (and for the sign-based language I should say users rather than speakers, since most were non-verbal, severely handicapped children and adults) like to make jokes and create shortcuts, hence the complexity and lack of logic of other, real languages.

Languages, it turns out, are too much fun to be left to geeks and gramarians.

Another good book for language nerds (like this one) — perhaps best read in small doses.

The Happy Minimalist by Peter Lawrence

A minimalist book (with fewer than 100 pages) to describe a minimalist lifestyle that the author studiously described as his own and not a prescription to others,  The Happy Minimalist would probably do best as a feature article than a book, however short. The author lives with a handful of belongings that would fit in his car (yes, he owns a car), which means no furniture, sleeping on the floor in his beloved sleeping bag and making do with folding chairs for himself and his guests. The best bits of the book hark back to the classic Your Money or Your Life, which the author recommends as a good exercise to see what it really costs, in time of effort, to buy a TV or a “lifestyle.” The rest is, well, boring. It’s hard to get truly interested in the logistics of sleeping on the floor. Some parts are rather touching, as when he sets out to describe how his lifestyle is not bad for the economy. Others are simply silly, as when he tries to prove that owning lots of stuff doesn’t make you happy because people who lived a century ago did not have many of the so-called modern conveniences but were nevertheless happy. Funny that he also says he could not live without his computer…

Your Call is (not that) Important to Us by Emily Yellin

Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us talks about my people: the people who provide customer service in millions of call centers in the US and increasingly around the world. It starts with the usual horror stories about atrocious customer service but quickly move to more interesting topics including a history of telephone operators that highlights how easy it is to treat people badly over the phone. And apparently in the early days of the telephone cursing at an operator could mean removal of your phone service. Sounds like a good idea to me! It also includes a great chapter on proper customer handling skills (as good as what I teach, I’d say!) and many observations on how call centers are managed (I’ll come back to this) and how cultural differences make offshore agents seem not as empathic as they could be (when you leave in a country where late is normal, it’s hard to understand why a US customer is screaming about a package being an hour late.)

The book explains how poor management creates poor customer service, especially call centers’ obsession with cost cutting and especiallycutting the  cost per contact, although it doesn’t say much about its twin evil: ridiculous scripts that no one can possibly use and still sound like a human being. It also explains how the obsession to get customers routed to automatic attendants fuels rage and is ultimately counter-productive.

Two areas are curiously neglected: one is the very healthy segment of customer service that’s done in writing, via email or chat. The other would be a deeper analysis of how truly horrendous service can happen. Her examples of customer service agents and managers are all glowing (with one exception, and the hint is that the agent won’t be kept long in the job.) Surely the horror stories she starts with can be connected  something more than cost cutting efforts.

The book ends with a full eight pages of acknowledgments. Certainly it takes a while to thank all the customer service agents and managers the author interviewed but eight pages? Perhaps she would have a productive career as a very caring customer service professional?

A wonderful book about an often dismissed profession.

Soul Patch by Reed Farrell Coleman

Soul Patch is another Moe Praeger mystery, this time set in New York, but once again revisiting long-ago crimes. This time the story is a complicated mob and corruption affair that left me at times confused and others simply not interested. Still there’s an interesting cast of characters, most of them hopelessly dishonest (and many who end up dead.)

Redemption Street by Reed Farrel Coleman

Redemption Street is a mystery that stars Moe Prager, a retired New York City cop, private investigator, and owner of a wine shop who travels to the Catskills to find out the truth about a fire in the sixties that killed a couple of young women — but are they really dead? In the process he encounters white supremacists, militant Jews, corrupt politicians, all for an enjoyable story that stays twisted until the end. Full of wise cracks about life, a la “We were still as close as brothers: Cain and Abel” to describe a not lamented ex-colleague.

Books of the Month – June 2009

It’s official: there’s no way I can limit myself to just one great book per month so from now on it will be BookS of the month. For June, I recommend

• The Housekeeper and the Professor, a delightful, kind story of the love between a professor who’s losing his mind and his hoursekpeer (and her son)
• Not Becoming my Mother, a slim, tender tribute to a mother who became beloved only after her death

And two more for

• mystery lovers: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, a funny debut of a very young English detective
• language lovers: The Origins of the Specious, because summer’s a great time to wonder about grammar and vocabulary

Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg

Home Safe is the story of a sixty-year old writer who loses her husband and her writing inspiration and focuses instead on making her daughter’s life miserable. She starts with innocuous annoyances, like buying her clothes she can’t wear, but graduates to prying into her boyfriends and her life, all under the cover of being a caring mom. She even gets her out of bed one night because, gasp, she went to bed still wearing her clothes (the daughter is a successful career woman, who, I’m sure, can decide wheat to wear to bed.)

There are many formulaic passages, starting with the opening when the budding writer starts her career at age nine (!) reflecting on her life at that age. There’s the description of the improbable house her husband built for her (thousands of miles away and without telling her) that reads like a bad real estate ad. There’s inane dialog with her long-suffering friends that include some gems as ” That house sounds literally incredible. I now it was important for you to go alone.” What friend would ever say that? There’s the inevitable tragic death in the Twin Towers on September 11th.

If all that doesn’t make you want to avoid the book, I’m not sure what will.