When I started posting here again a while ago, I had decided to mostly post about books and concerts but I just read an article that deserves a mention - Kenneth Pollack's latest article on Iraq. There have been a lot of criticisms of the Bush government's actions before, during and after the Iraq invasion but this stands out as the clearest, most concise and best backed up explanation of what went wrong with the reconstruction. Pollack has done a lot of writing on Iraq - he wrote both the best case for the invasionand the best explanation of why everyone thought Iraq had WMD when it really didn't. Both of these are excellent examples of well thought out, non-partisan pieces of analysis - something that is generally lacking in the news coverage, the pundits writings and the blogs on Iraq. Anyone who really wants to know what is going on and why things happened the way they did, needs to be familiar with Pollack's research and arguments.

One side effect of a book is to inspire me to read more in a related area. It doesn't even have to be the best book to do this. For example, I mentioned The Relic below . This inspired me to look into other archaeology related novels and I found The Visitantby Kathleen O'Neil Gear and W. Michael Gear. The authors are both former archaeologists and have written a number of books, many focusing on early Native American cultures. The Visitant is the first one in a new series combining current day archaeoligical activities and a mystery centered in the lives of the Anasazi people of the Southwest.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book. The mystery part was fairly interesting and kept me reading till the end but the modern day material seemed under-developed and the Anasazi sections suffered from a very anachronistic feel - the Anasazi felt like modern people with odd names rather than an actual prehistoric culture. An obvious example comes early in the book when one of the first victims was found and the discoverers worry about whether she is going into shock. Did ancient people in the Southwest actually understand what it meant when a person goes into shock? Somehow, I doubt it. Things like that really throw off the feel of those parts of the book.

Finished over New Year's - Maximum Light, Dinosaurs in the Atticand Marvel 1602. Maximum Light is a dystopian science fiction book by Nancy Kress. The gist is that the cumulative effects of synthetic chemicals has reduced human fertility to a unsubstainable level while also causing a much higher number of low functioning children. The government is covering things up and a few persistent citizens find out the truth. It's not one of her best works but it's an OK read. Neither the future she creates nor the characters are particularly interesting and the cover up is fairly obvious from early on.

Dinosaurs In The Attic is the non-fiction book about New York's Museum of Natural History that I mentioned below. It does a good job of presenting the museum and it's history, particularly the interesting expeditions that produced many of the musuem's extensive collections. The last (and only) time I was in New York, I focused more on art museums but if I make it back, the Museum of Natural History will definitely be on my must see list.

I picked up 1602 from the library on a whim. It's a graphic novel and a mostly pointless exercise in "what-if" with a number of Marvel's main superheroes living lives in 1602. For example, the X-men make an appearance but are called "witchbred" instead of "mutants". Neil Gaiman wrote it and he does an OK job of creating a 17th century feel instead of having the characters act in a more modern fashion.