Book review: "Just the Right Size" by Nicola Davies

"Just the Right Size" is an enjoyable and educational 58-page book that helps explain, according to the subtitle, "Why Big Animals Are Big and Little Animals Are Little."

Nicola Davies' book is aimed at kids but I'm sure that plenty of adults like me can learn something. I certainly did. 

The book shows why the "superpowers" of tiny animals —  the rhinoceros beetle can lift 850 times its own weight, for instance —  can't simply be transferred to larger animals. It explains how larger animals have advantages in retaining heat and storing food for later use. It looks at clever animal adaptions such as fish gills, which pack oxygen-grabbing folds of skin into a tight space. 

Clever and fun graphics help accentuate points. The book even has index, which could prove helpful to anyone using this as a teaching tool. 

Book review: "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown

 Note: This review contains spoilers!

"The Da Vinci Code" is a book overflowing with plot twists, and nearly all of them are set up smartly to deliver maximum surprise ("Why didn't I see that coming?," I wondered more than once). But one of the plot twists — the biggest, in fact —  is a real head scratcher.

Near the end of the book, a character named Leigh Teabing, a wealthy religious scholar, suddenly turns against the two main characters in the book, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu. He pulls out a gun and orders them to help him find the Holy Grail, which in this book is described as a treasure of relics and documents related to the founding of Christianity.

But here's the thing: Robert and Sophie had been helping Teabing on the hunt for the Holy Grail. The three of them had been working together. Much of the book followed them as they tracked down clues and solve riddles scattered across France and the United Kingdom. So what was the point of suddenly using a gun to order Robert and Sophie to do what they were already doing? It just doesn't make sense.

Sure, if Teabing wanted to keep the "treasure" to himself, he might turn on his companions — but only after they'd actually found the Holy Grail. 

There's a hint from author Dan Brown that Teabing was worried about the fact that his manservant, Remy, had been revealed to be a traitor. Maybe this would cause Robert and Sophie to suspect Teabing's motives, too? But that would be a weak justification for pulling the gun. Robert and Sophie, in fact, had no suspicions about Teabing, and he should have known that.   

It pains me to focus on this plot flaw, because the rest of "The Da Vinci Code" is a brilliantly conceived and elaborately designed story. Brown weaves layer upon layer into the plot, vividly embellishing a tale that sprouts from a single murder into an international scheme that somehow manages to involve Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, multiple popes, Francois Mitterand, the entire Catholic church and much more.

Puzzle lovers will love the story for the many coded clues that the characters must crack to keep the story moving forward. 

Brown outlines a centuries-old conspiracy by the Catholic Church to support the concept of a divine Jesus, while attempting to obliterate all evidence that he was simply human. Jesus was, in Brown's telling, married to Mary Magdalene and had children, and some of his offspring live among us today. The church, according to the author, has gone to extraordinary lengths to suppress this history, as it would undermine much of the foundation of the faith.

Brown, in the opening of the book, says that it is all true. I don't know if it is, but the way he tells it, it sure seems to make sense.

Still, "The Da Vinci Code" has a plausibility problem and it has nothing to do with Brown's elaborate conspiracy theory. The problem is that Brown wants us to believe that almost all the events in the book happen in less than half a day. In fact, about 80% of the action supposedly happens within about a five-and-half-hour period.

This includes the Paris police rousing Robert in the middle of the night, bringing him to the murder scene in the Louvre where he tries to help the police crack the extensive and puzzling clues left there. Sophie, a cryptologist, enters, adds more to the discussion, tells Robert his life is danger, then sneaks away and meets him the men's room for more discussion. They start to flee the museum, but then return to sneak around looking for more clues, are almost caught by police, but cleverly get away. Robert and Sophie flee in a taxi, try to reach the U.S. embassy but find it's blocked by police, go to a train station and buy fake tickets to throw off authorities, get back in the cab, drive out of town, then change directions. Then they hijack the cab after the driver gets suspicious, drive to a Swiss bank, crack a code to get inside a vault, sneak out of the bank, fight with a bank director who points a gun at them, take an armored car, then drive to Teabing's elaborate estate. 

There, they engage in long discussions about the history of the Holy Grail, which themselves would probably require two or three hours, then fight with an intruder named Silas and tie him up, flee the police by driving through the woods in the dark, go to a private airport, climb on board Teabing's private plane, and fly to England where the odyssey can continue. All, supposedly in just five and half hours. 

Give me a break. 

In all, there's a lot to like about this book. And two things not to like. 

Words With Friends 2: When bad things happen to good games

I have long enjoyed playing Scrabble, so when my friend Ulysses suggested I try the online game Words With Friends, I gave it a try. 

Logging into Facebook, I opened the game and connected with Ulysses to play. Though Words With Friends is not identical to Scrabble, it's pretty close and pretty fun. 

After a few months, I found a new WWF partner: Carolyn, a friend of my wife's. We played about three times before Carolyn suggested that we try Words With Friends 2.

I didn't even realize there was more than one way to play Words With Friends, but I was willing to give it a try. I downloaded the app, then started games with Carolyn and, soon after, two strangers. 

And ... I hated it.  Let me count the problems with WWF2.

1. The app interrupts periodically to tell you've earned 25 gold coins or some such. "You've met your daily goal" is one message, accompanied by more gold coins. Huh? Who cares? I just want to play.

2. After every play, an ad appears and you often can't close it for at least 30 seconds. These are usually particularly annoying ads with cartoon characters running back and forth on the screen. 

3. WWF2 allows players to swap tiles without losing a turn. This is an extraordinary departure from the rules of both Scrabble and the Facebook-based Words With Friends. The ethos of the game has always been that you play the tiles you get. If you're totally stuck, you can swap some of your tiles, but you lose your turn in the process. This new feature — called "Swap+" — completely undermines that. 

I tried "Swap+" a couple times in WWF2, but it felt like cheating. And then I realized it was even worse than that. While the game allowed me to use Swap+ it a couple times for free, it soon became clear that if you wanted to use it regularly you would have to pay for each use. In other words, players with money can buy a competitive advantage. Yuck.

4. WWF2 also has a feature called "Word Radar" that shows you on the board where you can play. Again, this feels like cheating. The challenge of the game is to find the best place to play on your own. And while I only tried Word Radar once, I see that continued use will —   sure enough — cost cash. Yuck II.

5. The board in WWF2 is 15 by 15, a total of 225 squares, almost twice that of the 11x11 (121 squares) board in Words With Friends. At first I thought this was exciting because it seemed to open the potential for a lot more play. But now, frankly, the games just go on too long. Words With Friends is a nice compact competition. WWF2, by comparison, seems like a marathon trudge.

6. In Words With Friends, when you play a tile that creates two invalid words (one vertical and one horizontal), it tells that both are wrong. That's helpful and you can move on to find correct words. WWF2, however, will only tell you one of the two words is wrong; only through more trial will you discover the other word is invalid too. This is a step backward.

7. In Words With Friends, if you want to move a tile back to your rack you just click on it. WWF2 requires you to drag it back. Again, this is a downgrade.

8. You can play Words With Friends on your phone or on a computer. But WWF2 can only be played on a phone. 

This is the last you'll hear me complaining about WWF2. Once I finished my three games — I won two and lost one — I deleted the app.

Book review: "Alone on the Ice" by David Roberts

Warning: This review has spoilers

In the field of great Antarctic explorers, the name Douglas Mawson is rarely mentioned alongside the much-heralded figures of Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton. But in "Alone on the Ice," author David Roberts makes a compelling case that it should be.

"Alone on the Ice" tells the story of the 1911-1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, an ambitious undertaking led by Mawson to reach into vast unexplored portions of the frozen continent. Seven different teams, each with three or four men, were sent out on separate journeys by foot and dogsled to explore areas never before seen by human eyes.

The dramatic heart of the story involves the three-man party led by Mawson himself, The men are 315 miles out from base when one man, Belgrave Ninnis, falls to his death in a crevasse, along the team's best dogs and a sledge filled with food and supplies. Mawson and his remaining teammate, Xavier Mertz, are suddenly left in a desperate situation with insufficient food and no tent. 

The two men head for base, but Mertz dies of hunger and exposure, leaving Mawson to slog the last 150 miles alone. The subtitle of the book calls it "The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration," a phrase used by Mt. Everest conquerer Sir Edmund Hillary to describe Mawson's journey home.

At one point, the solitary Mawson, already weakened by hunger and freezing temperatures, falls into a crevasse. His sledge catches him, leaving him dangling by a rope 14 feet down an icy hole.  Fortuitously, he had earlier tied knots at intervals in the rope, giving him something to grip on his slow, agonizing climb up.  Just as he reaches the surface, the snow at the lip of the opening gave out and he fell in again. 

It is a compelling story, but still only one part of the expedition that is well-told in this 2013 book. Roberts touches on all aspects of the venture to various depths, relying on the men's diaries and other historical accounts to produce a remarkably complete tale. I particularly liked how he gradually introduced the many characters, allowing the reader time to learn each man's personality one a time. 

Roberts also smartly gives the story historical context. The second chapter tells the story of an earlier expedition, in 1908-09, in which Mawson and two companions attempted to reach the magnetic South Pole. Much like the later trip, this one turned into a desperate race for survival and was nearly every bit as much of a page-turner.

I previously read Roberts' 2011 book "Finding Everett Ruess," and enjoyed it. But "Alone on the Ice" is a much better story

The weak points in the book come near the end and the beginning.  In the first chapter, in which Roberts tells the first part of the Mawson-Ninnis-Mertz trek, the story is slowed by overly detailed descriptions of similar days. I skimmed through parts.

Similarly, Roberts goes on too long in the last chapter (before the epilogue), recounting the team's final overwintering at its base camp. The only notable part of this final winter is that one of the team members goes essentially insane. This is notable to be sure, but Roberts offers an excessive number of examples to make the point. 

One the more intriguing questions offered up by this book is the assertion of the subtitle, that it is "The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration." Mawson's desperate trek, first with Mertz, and then alone, is certainly an amazing accomplishment. But to call it the "greatest" invites comparisons with other stories that also have compelling cases.

This could be a great bar argument. Is it a greater story than the Antarctic odyssey of Shackleton and his men in 1915-16? How about the six men in the book "The Long Walk" who trekked 4,000 across Asia deserts and mountains after escaping a Soviet prison camp? Or what about the amazing stories described in "Miracle in the Andes," "In the Heart of the Sea," "Skeletons on the Zahara," or "Unbroken"?

I could go on with more examples. For now, I'm comfortable with calling Mawson's trek one of the greatest survival stories.