Doug Cornelius .com

I admit that I have a fascination with infrastructure. It seems so natural that I could jump in my car in Boston and be in Florida 24 hours later. I’m already forgetting the snarls and confusion in Boston during the Big Dig and the new harbor tunnel.

At the dawn of the automobile age, cross-country travel was virtually impossible for the average person. Actually, travelling outside the city was not much easier.

The Big Roads traces the development of the modern interstate through the eyes of some of the key architects of highway travel. Mostly that falls on the shoulders of Thomas Harris MacDonald and his protege, Frank Turner. They lead the efforts at the federal level to develop the big roads.

The book also debunks some myths of the interstate. Most prominently, it discredits Eisenhower with its creation. Sure he signed the law, but the system was already far along in design before that happened. Swift points out that Eisenhower was an advocate solely for rural interstates that did not come into the city itself.

The other aspect of the book is the portrayal of some of the bad things highway designers did to the urban core. Baltimore is the central story point as the design for getting interstates through the city destroyed neighborhoods, but rallied citizens to find a better solution.

I don’t think the book was entirely successful in focusing the narrative on the key people involved. Most of the central characters are career government bureaucrats and they come across as the grey, generic paper-pushers you would expect.

If you are interested in how our highway system came to be, you will find the book fascinating.

Sylvia Longmire worked as a senior intelligence analyst for the California state fusion center and the California Emergency Management Agency’s Situational Awareness Unit, focusing almost exclusively on Mexican drug trafficking organizations and southwest border violence issues. For the last six years, she has regularly lectured on terrorism in Latin America at the Air Force Special Operations School’s Dynamics of International Terrorism course. She has packaged some of her knowledge on the US-Mexico drug war in Cartel.

When the publisher offered me a copy of the book to review, it caught my eye because of last year’s travel warnings about violence in Mexico. From news reports, it seemed that the violence around the drug wars had spilled over into previously safe tourist areas. Longmire theorizes that the Mexican cartels are behaving more like the Colombian cartels and combining traditional criminal activity with insurgency against the government, military, and law enforcement.

The big insight I picked up from the book is the US contributions to the Drug War. There is the obvious contribution of cash from the purchasers of the drugs. The other big contribution is guns. Lots and lots of guns. The easiest source of weaponry for the Mexican cartels is at the lax gun shops in the southwestern United States. At one end you have the very strict gun sale laws in California. At the other, you have the gun-friendly state of Texas, with a limited background checks, no waiting periods, and no license requirement. There is little inspection on the way south into Mexico to stop the flow of guns.

Longmire paints a bleak picture for the future of Mexico. Even the current enforcement by Mexican president Felipe Calderon seem to have mere displaced the violence into other areas of Mexico. This week’s Economist put together a great infographic showing the huge number of murders and the changes in murder rates throughout Mexico.

It’s probably not fair to Longmire that I read Cartel after just finishing Michael Lewis’s Boomerang. Lewis is master of weaving his thesis around characters to create a coherent narrative. Longmire’s narrative reads more like a collection of blog posts. What I found lacking was detail on the major cartels themselves. Longmire provides only a little insight to the people behind them and their history.

If you have even a passing interest on Mexican violence, Cartel is worth a few hours of your time.

Ben Mezrich is back. His latest is “the amazing story behind the most audacious heist in history.” A NASA coop student stole a safe full of moon rocks and tried to sell them. After pilfering the lunar samples, he placed one under his bed sheets and …. Well…. I guess you can figure out where the name of the book came from.

The book is fun and sprightly. We saw what a gifted director can do with one of Merich’s books. David Fincher turned The Accidental Billionaires into the Oscar-worthy The Social Network. Bringing Down the House became the mediocre 21.

Sex on the Moon reads more like a screenplay. I expect we will see some version of it the theaters with a “based on a true story” label.

What the book misses is what motivated Thad Roberts to engage in theft. There is an interesting dynamic there and an even more interesting tale of human vice. But Mezrich doesn’t bother to dive that deep into the research to find this. That would just slow down the flow of the story.

The publisher sent me a copy of the book to review.

I sat down to watch The Tillman Story after Netflix gave it high marks as a recommendation. It was a blistering story about the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire in Afghanistan.

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” – Aeschylus

I wanted to learn some more and remembered that Jon Krakauer had written Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. Tillman was the starting free safety for the Arizona Cardinals when he decided to enlist in the army. Although he didn’t want the attention, he was transformed into an icon of 9-11 patriotism. A legend, foregoing millions to serve his country. Neither the movie nor this book squarely address why Tillman decided to enlist. It seems clear that it was very personal decision, only truly know by Mr. Tillman and his wife.

What the movie failed to portray was Tillmana person. That was the focus of the book. What I didn’t realize was the intellectual prowess of Tillman. He is portrayed not as a meathead jock who wants to shoot things. He comes across as thoughtful and introspective.

Besides the portrayal of Tillman as a person, Krakauer spends large chunks of the book setting the background on other key players. There is great background on history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan going back to the Soviet invasion. Many of the weapons used against US soldiers likely came from U.S. funding of the Mujahideen during their battle against the Soviets. Then there is the rise of Osama bin Laden and his desire to draw the Unites States into Afghanistan. There were plenty of missed opportunities during the Clinton administration to counter the rise of bin Laden. Perhaps he was distracted by the Lewinsky scandal?

With the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan, along came propaganda to support the war effort. The prelude to the Tillman incident was the Jessica Lynch incident. She was initially portrayed as a hero, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, fighting to death and taking multiple gunshot wounds and stab wounds. Later, a Special Operations force swept in and rescued her from torture and abuse by her captors.

Unfortunately, the truth is that she sustained her wounds when her Humvee crashed into another truck in her convoy. She never fired a single shot because her gun jammed. During her stay in Saddam Hussein General Hospital she was treated as any other patient. The doctors were the ones who told US forces that Lynch was in the hospital. When the huge Special Operations force arrived at the hospital, they met no significant resistance.

Tillman played a very minor role in the Lynch “rescue.” But the propaganda success of the Lynch incident played a big role in what happened after Tillman was killed by friendly fire thirteen months later.

Tillman’s enlistment generated good headlines for the war effort. The military leaders and the White House assumed that painting his death as the saga of a fallen hero would create a media frenzy. Tillman was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and promoted to corporal for his bravery in the combat that took his life.

A commanding officer assured Tillman’s brother that whoever was responsible would pay dearly. “This would turn out to be the first in a long string of broken promises and self-serving lies proffered to the Tillman family by commissioned officers of the U.S. Army.”

Having read Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, I expected some solid writing. Krakauer has proven he can craft a true story into a page-turner of a book, bringing depth to the participants and providing insights to their motivation. He delivers again.

Where Men Win Glory is worth your reading time.

It’s July, so that means there will be lots of cycling at the Cornelius estate. These days there is much less time spent on the saddle and much more time spent on the couch, watching the Tour de France.

To get ready for the race, I just finished reading It’s All About the Bike by Robert Penn. The title is a clear stab at Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike. But the book is not making a counter-argument, it’s merely a story about Penn’s bike. He was looking to build a custom-made bicycle and, through that process, provide some insight about bicycles, their history, and how they’re made.

Penn is not looking to have the lightest or the fastest bike. He calls those obsessed riders “weight weenies.” The lightest bike is important if your job is getting up a big mountain very fast. Penn is looking for an heirloom bike, custom for him, that will last for decades.

The starting point is a custom frame, meticulously measured and fit to him by Brian Rourke Cycles. Add on a classic drivetrain, a Record groupset from Camagnolo. That powers the wheels hand-built by Gravy using a Royce hub and Continental Grand Prix 4000S tires. Penn will change directions using  Cinelli Ram handlebar attached to the bike with a headseat by Chris King that feeds into a Columbus Carve fork. His backside will rest on the Team Pro Saddle from Brooks.

The Bike

Penn clearly ends up with a beautiful bike and tells a good story along the way. His affection for cycling overflows from the rather short story. I wish he wrote more in the book. It seems that there are lots of untold stories about how he chose the components he did and more ways he could integrate the history of cycling.

If you like bikes, you’ll like this book.

(The publisher provided me a copy of this book to review.)

At the Millers Kill Community Center, five veterans gather to work on adjusting to life after returning home from the overseas deployment. Reverend Clare Fergusson has returned from Iraq with a head full of bad memories and a drug and alcohol problem. Dr. George Stillman suffered a head wound and is trying to convince himself that it won;t affect his practice. Officer Eric McCrea has bottled up all of his rage from his stint as a guard at prison camp and his failure at anger management is affecting his life as a cop, and as a father. The young Will Ellis is looking for some reason to keep on living after losing both legs to an IED. The doomed Tally McNabb has brought home a secret. To this motley crew, add Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne who just wants Clare to marry him.

That’s the set up for Julia Spencer-Fleming‘s latest book, One Was a Soldier. It sounded interesting enough to read, so I picked it up from the stack that the publisher made available. I enjoy a good mystery.

This was an unusual mystery. The crime does not happen until nearly the midpoint of the book. There is much more focus on the the problems of returning home, the burden of guilt, and the burden war. That means there is plenty of rich character development and intrigue to keep you interested before it turns into a mystery.

Since I do quite a bit of reading on the train during my daily commute, I spent some extra time in South Station squeezing in the end of a chapter in the morning and nearly missing my stop a few times in the afternoon. Not wanting to put a book down is a sure sign of a good book.

The characters are richly drawn and intriguing. They have apparently been around for a while. This is the seventh book that has put Chief Cal Alstyne and Reverend Fergusson together. I haven’t read any of the prior books and it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story. There seemed to be some obvious references to the prior books. You’ll notice them, but it doesn’t detract from this one.

If One Was a Soldier sounds interesting, you can read an excerpt online. You will have to wait until April 12 for it to go on sale.

Legend tells us that this help wanted ad appeared in a California newspaper in 1860:

Wanted.
Young, skinny, wiry fellows. Not over 18.
Must be expert riders. Willing to risk death daily.
Orphans preferred.

The tales of the Pony Express are legendary. It turns out that there are more legends than truth. Most of that is largely because of Buffalo Bill Cody. His traveling show of the wild west was a huge international attraction and spread the legend and grew the legend of the Pony Express. Christopher Corbett brings this all together in his book, Orphans Preferred.

Mrs. Doug is from St. Joseph, Missouri, the eastern starting point of the Pony Express route. The rider would mount in front of the Patee House, then charge downhill to a ferry that would take him across the Missouri River and head out to Salt Lake City and on to Sacramento, traveling almost 2,000 miles. In 1860, the Missouri River marked the beginning of the West and the end of American civilization. The railroads and telegraphs ended here.

I find the Pony Express is a great example of the evolution of communication, especially in the current explosion of web-based communications. There is plenty of hype and legend about the evolution of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others. The legend is bigger than reality in these money-losing ventures. Perhaps if the Pony Express founders had venture capital money and IPOs they would have turned out differently. Instead, the experiment lasted only 18 months and lost hundreds of thousands of 1860 dollars.

On October 24, 1861, the president of the Overland Telegraph Company sent a two sentence message across a wire from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., telling President Abraham Lincoln that the telegraph has been completed. Two days later, the Pony Express went out of business.

For that short period of time, the Pony Express brought California ten to twelve days closer to the rest of the civilized world.

Thomas E. Kennedy paints a satirical picture of the people affected by a downsizing at a Copenhagen company. Martin Kampman is the hard-edged CEO of the Tank, Frederick Breathwaite is the down-sized manager and Harald Jaeger was promoted but has deep troubles with his romantic life. Kennedy adds in some family members and few other characters. Each tells their part of the story.

I usually don’t enjoy books with multiple protagonists. It works if they have distinctive voices or if they are giving different viewpoints on the underlying story. I found Kennedy to be mildly successful in using each character. They really don’t begin taking form until the second half of the book.

The real star of the Falling Sideways is the city of Copenhagen. Kennedy has spent most of the last three decades living there. The story is thick with the experience of living in his adopted city.

The publisher was nice enough to send me an advance copy of the book to read and review. It came through GoodReads First Reads program.

Although I enjoyed the book, I found it lacking. It’s supposed to be a satire, but I didn’t find much satire. There is not much of a story. It’s about how the characters interact. I was hooked into continue reading to find out what happens to them when a vocational obstacle falls in front of them. I was hoping for a payoff.

One of my goals for 2010 was to read a book a week. For the calendar-challenged, that meant 52 books for 2010. I was happy to hit my target in October and ended up with 61 books for the year.

Even with all of that reading, the list of books I want to read has not gotten any shorter. Actually, it’s gotten longer. The more I read, the more I want to read and the more attention I pay to new books being published.

The Kindle

I picked up a Kindle this year and managed to read seven books on it. I’m ambivalent about it. It fits nicely in your hand and makes it easy to read a book with one hand.

But the Kindle lacks the substance, feel and permanency of a paper book. I find it inferior. I expect to pay less for a Kindle book than I would for a hardcover book. I found instances where the Kindle edition cost more than the hardcover.

I originally bought the Kindle in anticipation of our canceled trip to Belgium. I definitely understand the advantage of a Kindle holding lots of books and how that could be better than traveling with a thick stack of books.

I do like the immediacy of the Kindle. I can find the book I want, buy it and start reading it minutes. That is a big timesaver.

GoodReads versus LibraryThing

My continuing quest for a way to track the books I read and the books I own continues. [See Catalog your Books Online.] I have been using LibraryThing for several years and it contains nearly all of the books in my library. I have also been using GoodReads concurrently to track my library.

I found that LibraryThing did a better job organizing my books and GoodReads had better tools to interact with fellow readers. I was ready to jettison GoodReads because very few people I knew were using it. Then I found that several people at work use GoodReads. So the social side of the site started adding some value.

I’m still adding the books I own and the books I read in both platforms.

My Books

From looking at the list, you would have a hard time seeing much in the way of themes in my reading.

I read the Percy Jackson book series to The Boy, so those five books ended up on the list. I also read the first three Harry Potter books to him. He seemed to lose interest in Book 4 so we are stalled in completing that series. I thought these books had enough substance, so I included them in the list. There were lots of other books we read together that I thought did not have enough substance to include on the list.

I also jumped into the Walking Dead graphic novels so those five books made it on the list. They contain fewer words and more images than your typical book but they have incredible depth, interesting themes and complex story lines. Plus, I like zombie literature.

Fifteen of the 61 were given to me by publishers in anticipation of a review. Those were a mixed bag. Some were really good and some were really bad.

The Books I Read in 2010

	Title	Author	Date Finished	Rating
	Makers	Cory Doctorow	Jan 4, 2010
	Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust	Chris Brogan	Jan 7, 2010
	Wake Up Dead: A Thriller	Roger Smith	Jan 11, 2010
	The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)	Rick Riordan	Jan 15, 2010
	Planets X and Pluto	William Graves Hoyt	Jan 17, 2010
	Crossing The Gates Of Alaska	Dave Metz	Jan 23, 2010
	Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities	Frank Jacobs	Jan 26, 2010
	The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 2)	Rick Riordan	Jan 29, 2010
	Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed	Gregg Easterbrook	Jan 30, 2010
	Escape from the Deep: A Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew	Alex Kershaw	Feb 3, 2010
	In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic	David Wessel	Feb 10, 2010
	The Titan’s Curse (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 3)	Rick Riordan	Feb 13, 2010
	Collect All 21! Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek – The First 30 Years	John Booth	Feb 15, 2010
	The Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 4)	Rick Riordan	Feb 28, 2010
	Shades of Grey: A Novel	Jasper Fforde	Mar 2, 2010
	In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto	Michael Pollan	Mar 12, 2010
	The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book 5)	Rick Riordan	Mar 12, 2010
	Face of Betrayal (A Triple Threat Novel)	Lis Wiehl	Mar 16, 2010
	The Informant: A True Story	Kurt Eichenwald	Mar 30, 2010
	Eye of the Red Tsar: A Novel of Suspense	Sam Eastland	Apr 3, 2010
	The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine	Michael Lewis	Apr 7, 2010
	Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Book 1)	J.K. Rowling	Apr 12, 2010
	The Strangler	William Landay	Apr 22, 2010
	Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	Apr 29, 2010
	Sleepless: A Novel	Charlie Huston	Apr 30, 2010
	Money for Nothing: How the Failure of Corporate Boards Is Ruining American Business and Costing Us Trillions	John Gillespie	May 13, 2010
	No Sleep till Wonderland: A Novel	Paul Tremblay	May 16, 2010
	The Girl who Played with Fire	Stieg Larsson	May 21, 2010
	The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right	Atul Gawande	May 27, 2010
	Mixed Blood: A Thriller	Roger Smith	May 29, 2010
	Warning the Witness: A Guide to Internal Investiations and the Attorney-Client Privilege	David Z. Seide	Jun 3, 2010
	The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest	Stieg Larsson	Jun 10, 2010
	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2)	J.K. Rowling	Jun 12, 2010
	Seaworthy: A Swordboat Captain Returns to the Sea	Linda Greenlaw	Jun 17, 2010
	Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World	Matthew Fraser	Jun 25, 2010
	WAR	Sebastian Junger	Jul 2, 2010
	Boston Noir	Dennis Lehane	Jul 7, 2010
	World Without End	Ken Follett	Jul 19, 2010
	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3)	J.K. Rowling	Jul 29, 2010
	Accidents in North American Mountaineering 2010	Jed Williamson	Aug 4, 2010
	The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World	Niall Ferguson	Aug 16, 2010
	The Walking Dead, Book 1 (Bk. 1)	Robert Kirkman	Aug 27, 2010
	Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn	Larry D. Rosen Ph.D.	Aug 30, 2010
	The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean	Susan Casey	Sep 5, 2010
	The Walking Dead, Book 2	Robert Kirkman	Sep 5, 2010
	The Walking Dead, Book 3	Robert Kirkman	Sep 6, 2010
	The Walking Dead, Book 4	Robert Kirkman	Sep 7, 2010
	The Walking Dead Book 5	Robert Kirkman	Sep 9, 2010
	Gilded: How Newport Became America’s Richest Resort	Deborah Davis	Sep 18, 2010
	Pride and Prejudice and Zombies	Jane Austen	Sep 29, 2010
	Miles Away… Worlds Apart	Alan Sakowitz	Oct 9, 2010
	The Little League That Could: A History of the American Football League	Ken Rappoport	Oct 19, 2010
	The Hunger Games: Book 1	Suzanne Collins	Oct 29, 2010
	Impact	Douglas Preston	Oct 31, 2010
	Ten Hours Until Dawn: The True Story of Heroism and Tragedy Aboard the Can Do	Michael Tougias	Nov 13, 2010
	The US Private Equity Fund Compliance Guide	Charles Lerner	Nov 23, 2010
	Memories of the Future, Vol. 1	Wil Wheaton	Nov 30, 2010
	America Bowl: 44 Presidents vs. 44 Super Bowls in the ultimate matchup!	Don Steinberg	Dec 7, 2010
	Cleopatra: A Life	Stacy Schiff	Dec 10, 2010
	The Familiars	Adam Jay Epstein	Dec 28, 2010
	The Good Son: A Novel	Michael Gruber	Dec 30, 2010

In 2010, an historic collision of timelines happened in Southern Florida. Super Bowl XLIV was taking place in Joe Robbie Stadium Pro Player Park Pro Player Stadium Dolphin Stadium Land Shark Stadium Sun Life Stadium while the 44th president was sitting in the White House watching the game. The line of presidents started in 1789 with George Washington. The line of Super Bowls started in 1967 with a battle between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Don Steinberg saw this collision coming and decided to have these two American institutions battle each in America Bowl. He mashed together the relative quality of each president with the relative quality of each Super Bowl. The result is odd mix of American history, sports history, presidential trivia and football trivia, as odd as the original inspiration.

As a kid, Steinberg had little plastic statues of the presidents. Since he was a boy, he of course pitted them in battles against one another, turning them into fighting action figures. He was destined to be a political science major in college. From there he found his true passion as a sports writer.

Steinberg finally found a way to combine his passions. “It’s the most fun you can have learning about America’s presidents and Super Bowls without having to read two separate books.”

I won’t give away the ending, but you can guess the one-sided start. It took a few years for the Super Bowl contests to become great games. Super Bowl III was a tremendous battle just before the merger of AFL and the NFL, pitting the Colts against the brash Jets. Unfortunately for the that football contest, it is lined up against Thomas Jefferson. The top of the presidential order is unstoppable: Washington, Adams and Jefferson.

I think the book is targeted to younger readers, filled with snazzy quips and graphics. Each contest is squeezed concisely into two pages. I was hoping to have more details on the games and the presidents.  (But I’m not a young reader.) I had fun with it.