Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (3 stars)

Starship Troopers is a classic of the Sci-Fi genre.  It won the Hugo in 1960, and was made into a movie in 1997 by a director who, rumour has it, didn't even finish reading the book.

Having seen the movie first, I was quite surprised to find this book was as much about the war with 'the bugs' as Animal Farm is about animals on a farm.  Heinlein uses the futuristic war as a minor plot device to present his philosophy on government, crime, and punishment.  He essentially blames the crime problems of the late 20th century on bleeding heart liberalism that avoided harsh punishments for minors.  In Heinlein's society all crime is sorted out quickly with a good flogging (literally).

Heinlein's crime-free society of the future is governed by veterans - only those who have served a term in the military are 'citizens' and have a right to vote.  Unlike most cases in history where a small class of people have reserved the right to vote and make decisions, the rights of those who can't vote have been perfectly preserved and the 'citizens' haven't sought any advantage for themselves.  Hmmm...

The implausibility doesn't stop there.  While I liked the sentiment of reducing the number of armchair officers in the army and deploying every single person into battle, I just don't think it would work as presented by Heinlein.  If your most senior generals and strategists who are running the war can 'buy a farm' all at once in a fight on the ground, as easily as a private, it is going to be pretty difficult to maintain cohesion and long term strategy.  Not to mention that the senior leadership holds the most valuable information and would be equally as prone to capture as the most junior grunt.

In any case, I found the book interesting, but probably would have liked it a lot more if it actually was a Sci-Fi novel, not a philosophy discussion with a Sci-Fi framework.

3 stars.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (5 stars)

1980s GREED in New York! The main character in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman McCoy, is a brilliant depiction of 1980s greed: he has a multimillion-dollar income as a bond salesman at Pierce and Pierce on Wall street, a huge apartment on Park Avenue featured in Architectural Digest, a complete inability to describe what he actually does for a living, and a stupendous ego and arrogance as a self-described 'Master of the Universe'.

Sherman comes to strife in the Bronx with his deliciously evil mistress, and the reader follows as his life unravels and he rides the rollercoaster down into the territory of the downtrodden Bronx legal system. This arc brings him into contact with great characters like sleazy criminal defense attorney Thomas Killian, and Larry Kramer who believes his best chance at getting chicks is to impress female jurors with a showy TV-style trial manner and strong sternocleidomastoid muscles.

As Sherman's star falls, Peter Fallow, the epitome of unethical tabloid journalism, rides his story to success with the help of the morally dubious Reverend Bacon. I loved the description of Fallow's life before his big story, and his attempt to bury the monster of his shame in alcohol (preferably paid for by someone else):

Something had happened last night. These days he often woke up like this, poisonously hung over, afraid to move an inch and filled with an abstract feeling of despair and shame. Whatever he had done was submerged like a monster at the bottom of a cold dark lake. His memory had drowned in the night, and he could feel only the icy despair. He had to look for the monster deductively, fathom by fathom.

Wolfe's writing is masterful. I enjoyed his depiction of Sherman's social failure, 'a social light of no wattage whatsoever', at the high-society Bavardages' dinner party amidst the 'hock-hock-hock' and 'haw-haw-haw' of fake laughter from the society automatons. The description of Sherman and his wife's transport to the party captures the ridiculous lifestyle of New York's extremely rich. Having discounted taking a cab as too low-brow, and not even considered walking, the McCoys (remember this is 1980s dollars):

...had hired this car and this driver...who would drive them six blocks, wait three and a half or four hours, then drive them six blocks and depart. Including 15 percent tip and the sales tax, the cost would be $197.20 or $246.50...

I loved this book. I was going to complain about the abrupt ending, but somehow it seemed fitting to have Sherman 'dressed for jail' and completely embracing the loss of everything in the midst of the mob.

5 stars.

Seabiscuit: an American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand (5 stars)

I came to this true story with a fair degree of skepticism, since I have a complete disinterest in horses and horse racing. So how did I come across this book? Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit is at number 11 on Amazon when you rank all books by average customer review. This is pretty amazing, considering Harry Potter is at #1 and #2, followed by some self-help books.

At the start of the book, Laura Hillenbrand delivers you into the early 1900s to witness the first troubled steps of the auto industry, led, in San Francisco, by Seabiscuit's future owner Charles Howard. Automobiles were considered such a menace to horse traffic that:

The laws of at least one town required automobile drivers to stop, get out, and fire off Roman candles every time horse-drawn vehicles came into view.

You follow Seabiscuit through the atmosphere of the 1920s and 30s and learn lots about horses, jockeys, and racing along the way. I have much more respect for jockeys as sports-people, and really had no idea of what they put themselves through to make weight:

To make weight in anything but high-class stakes races [where imposts were higher so jockeys could weigh more], jockeys had to keep their weight to no more than 114 pounds [52 kg]...Red Pollard went as long as a year eating nothing but eggs. Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons confessed that during his riding days a typical dinner consisted of a leaf or two of lettuce, and he would eat them only after placing them on a windowsill to dry the water out of them. Water, because of its weight, was the prime enemy, and jockeys went to absurd lengths to keep it out of their systems...For jockeys who were truly desperate, there was one last resort...you could get a hold of a special capsule, a simple pill guaranteed to take off all the weight you wanted. In it was the egg of a tapeworm.

I also found the on-track racing tactics and strategies fascinating: the need for split-second timing, positioning, and an innate feel for the horse and its capabilities.

Seabiscuit's story is one of the classic underdog: he was short, knobby-kneed, and totally underrated by the news media and racing professionals, but adored by the public. At the height of his fame after his classic battle with War Admiral (the race of the century), and before finally claiming the Santa Anita Handicap, Seabiscuit was drawing crowds of 40,000 just to see his training sessions. Seabiscuit was more than a household name, he was a superstar in a great East-coast vs. West-coast battle with War Admiral:

A study of news outlets revealed that the little horse had drawn more newspaper coverage in 1938 than Roosevelt, who was second, Hitler (third), Mussolini (fourth), or any other newsmaker.

Hillenbrand has done a fantastic job in bringing Seabiscuit's story to life. I'll skip the Shirley Temple film The Story of Seabiscuit, described by Hillenbrand:

Hollywood took the tale of Seabiscuit's life, deleted everything interesting, and made an inexcusably bad movie..

in favour of the 2003 version, but I don't expect it will be able to hold a candle to this book.

5 stars.