MarysLibrary

The Mysterious Howling

Maryrose Wood has a winner with this new series of books for children called The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place. The Mysterious Howling is the first.

I'm giving away no secrets when I tell you the howling is that of three children who have been found in the woods of the Ashton estate. From the blurb:

Of especially naughty children it is sometimes said: "They must have been raised by wolves."

The Incorrigible children actually were.

Discovered in the forests of Ashton Place, the Incorrigibles are no ordinary children. Alexander keeps his siblings in line with gentle nips; Cassiopeia has a bark that is (usually) worse than her bite; and Beowulf is alarmingly adept at chasing squirrels.

Miss Penelope Lumley, age 15 and a graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, is hired as their governess and she does a remarkable job of whipping them into human shape. But they must be ready to appear at a Christmas ball in only a few short weeks and that means they must master social chit chat, table manners, and how to dance the schottische.

If anyone can achieve this metamorphosis it is Miss Lumley, called by the children Lumawoo. In times of trouble she falls back on the sayings of Miss Swanburne: "Complaining won't butter the biscuit" or "If it weren't so tempting it wouldn't be called chocolate cake."

The book is full of major and minor mysteries: Who or what is behind the wall in the attic? Why does the mysterious coachman, Old Timothy, lurk in the woods when the children are playing? Who are these children in the first place and why were they being raised by wolves? Why does Sir Frederick say, "Finders keepers," and insist they stay at Ashton Place?

This is book is so wry, so charming, so full of unanswered questions. I can't wait for the next in the series.

 

Cyber War

Right before the Fourth of July holiday [in 2009], a coded message was sent out by a North Korean agent to about 40,000 computers around the world that were infected with a botnet virus. The message contained a simple set of instructions telling the computer to start pinging a list of US and South Korean government websites and international companies. Whenever the infected computers were turned on, they silently joined the assault. If your computer was one of the zombies, you might have noticed your processor was running slowly . . .

[Selected] US websites were hit with as many as 1 million requests per second, choking the servers. The Treasury, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, and Department of Transportation web servers were all brought down at some point between July 4 and July 9. The NASDAQ, New York Mercantile, and New York Stock Exchange sites were also hit, as was the Washington Post.

This is not science fiction. It actually happened. It was a DDOS, a distributed denial of service. The US government has not been able to directly attribute this attack on the North Korean government but it wasn't just a worm sent out to the Internet by a lone hacker. Someone purposefully directed this attack, which also shut down South Korean government sites and banks. By July 10, 166,000 computers in 74 countries were sending messages to selected targets.

Richard A Clarke tells us about this episode, among others in Estonia and Georgia which were much worse. As a terrorism adviser for Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W Bush, it was his job to know the capabilities of potential enemies - whether independent groups or national governments - and as cyber attacks became more feasible and more threatening he was asked by Clinton to advise him on infrastructure protection as well.

In Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to do about It, Clarke points out that the US is open to attacks on our computer systems which run our banking system, air and rail traffic, food distribution, water supplies and sewage systems, Wall Street, and a great deal more, the most important being our electrical grid. A serious attack on the grid would close down the entire country and it might be months before the damage could be repaired.

In the What to do about it section of his book he makes concrete recommendations that he calls The Defensive Triad.

1. Install filters on the Internet and the backbone ISPs, the large systems that provide service to our local ISPs.
2. Harden the controls of the electrical grid.
3. Increase the security of the Defense Department's networks and the integrity of its weapons.

These are expensive fixes but they are overdue because the US is remarkably vulnerable right now, as small attacks like the one in 2009 have shown. Unfortunately our government is attending to other matters and infrastructure, whether physical or electronic, is way down on the list of things politicians are interested in at the moment. 

 

The Big Short

Around noon one day last week Wilhelm brought home from the library Michael Lewis' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. A day and a half later I was turning the last page. Once again the author of Liar's Poker has explained to readers like me the complex world of Wall Street, in this case credit default swaps, mortgage bond tranches, BBB ratings, and interest-only negative-amortizing adjustable rate sub-prime loans.

Lewis looked around for some people who predicted the collapse of the mortgage bubble and of course he found lots of folks who claimed to have done so. But he wanted to meet somebody who put his money where his prediction was; he found a few. These guys took bets of different kinds on the eventual defaulting of millions of holders of mortgages that they couldn't possibly pay. They played the big short and they won. Big.

This book is that rare thing, a non-fiction page turner.

While you're waiting to work your way down the long waiting list at the library you might want to read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds just to warm up.

So Many Books

I've read a great many books since the beginning of the year and I haven't posted a word about half of them. I liked or even loved most of them (or I wouldn't have finished reading them) but I've become lazy about finding the right words to blog about them.

For example, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan. She is the book reviewer for NPR's Fresh Air program and she has a PhD in English literature and she talks and writes about books very cleverly. She tells us touching stories about the adoption of her daughter, funny stories about teaching at Georgetown University, heart-warming stories about her large Irish-American family, analytical stories about re-reading books she first encountered in Catholic school as a girl, nostalgic stories about her friends in the Irish neighborhood where she grew up in Queens. Her understanding of the books she talks about is great.

But once I've said that what is there to say? She writes exceptionally well. Of course. She organizes her book a bit loosely but that's not really a problem. It annoyed me that she believes that anyone on the right, or even in the middle of the political spectrum is seriously lacking in moral and ethical fiber. Oh, and she calls Harriet Vane, after her marriage with Lord Peter Wimsey, Lady Wimsey, when everyone knows she has become Lady Peter.

And there you have it. I enjoyed the book and look forward to another from her, soon I hope. I gave it a 4 on my scale of 1 to 5.

Only 35 books to go.

The Music Stops

As you can see by glancing to the left, I keep my list of links to other blogs very short. These blogs are particularly important to me and  one of the important ones has been Books Do Furnish A Room. The choice of books there and the comments on them have been particularly useful and entertaining. I've learned about new books of the sort that I enjoy and have been inspired to re-read some old favorites.

Alas, Lindsay is suspending his blog. I'm hoping he finds time once in a while to go back and post about what he's been doing, and especially about what he's been reading. Many of us will miss him.

 

Muriel Spark

Well, my copy of the new biography of Muriel Spark by Martin Stannard arrived and I sat down immediately to read it. Alas, I'm disappointed.

It's written in a sort of monotone. The author goes on and on about her lover of the moment and her frequent arguments and he quotes at some length from their letters, and frankly I couldn't tell one man from another. The story of those years when she was living in an unheated garret or the equivalent and trying to make it as a writer should be full of drama and anguish. They aren't.

Spark's unexpected conversion to Catholicism is treated almost off-handedly and her episode of hallucinations and paranoia is simply announced and the author moves on. Since Stannard teaches literature I expected him to be at his best when discussing the novels but so far I haven't picked up any new insight about The Comforters, her first novel, which I'm re-reading as I read the biography. There's much more insight into what Spark was thinking and how she anguished over her mental breakdown in that obviously autobiographical novel than in the biography.

The reviewers are saying that the defining moment of her life, her conversion, was in reaction to the ambiguity she felt about being half Jewish. The ambiguity isn't particularly strong in Stannard's telling and her conversion seems to have no connection to her past.

Well, I'll read it anyhow since I'm very interested in Spark's books and there is something to learn about them from her life since she used so many people and incidents and personal emotional experiences in her writing. But this book could have been so very much better.

Bureaucracy

Americans have always hated bureaucracy. One of the charges against King George III in the Declaration of Independence was that he “has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Who wants to be ruled by a national DMV? It is costly, inefficient, and, well, bureaucratic.

“It is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but their distribution, that good government is effected,” Jefferson warned. “Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.” - Matthew Spalding

Signs

.

Some of these are priceless.

.

An Entirely New Art Form

.

You must see this.

.

Wild Romance

What fascinating characters - what a convoluted plot - what suspense. And it's non-fiction!

Wild Romance: A Victorian Story of a Romance, a Marriage, and a Self-made Womanby Chloe Schama is the story of Theresa Longworth and William Charles Yelverton. They meet on a cross-channel steamer, Theresa starts a flirty correspondence, they fall in love (or not), and he marries her (or not).

He wanted her when he was around her and cooled appreciably when he wasn't. She followed him to the Crimea and lived in a convent and nursed the wounded in the Crimean War. His army unit was sent to Edinburgh and she followed him and it was there then that they took advantage of a, to me, bizarre Scottish common law ceremony and were married. This entailed nothing more than their announcing to one another, without witnesses, that they were married.

Theresa wasn't satisfied with this so when they went to Ireland she insisted a Catholic priest marry them. But again, there were no witnesses except the priest and as Yelverton told her that he would lose a family stipend if he married they told no one about it.

It wasn't long before he left her and to her shock and dismay married someone else. So of course she took him to court. Various witnesses on each side testified, including Yelverton and Theresa. It was a sensation with enormous crowds outside in the street, extensive coverage in the press, and a packed courtroom in Dublin's Four Courts.

And it was there, when the trial was nearly over, on page 61, that I stopped reading because the book was due at the library and couldn't be renewed. Arrgh!