It's time for the 2000 awards! The envelope please....
Book Awards
2000 awards are given for books read by Kevin in 2000, regardless of publication date. The winners are...
- Best fiction: 20 Years After, by Alexander Dumas. This was not a good year for fiction here at DrumCo, and it shows in my pick for best novel this year, a sequel to The Three Musketeers that was written over a century ago. To give it its due, I think 20 Years After is probably better than the original, and it really shows off the hard charging Dumas style that was at its peak in The Count of Monte Cristo. Thoroughly enjoyable. An honorable mention goes to The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which pretty much convinced me that all 19th century Russians were clinically insane, and Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe, a collections of essays that hit their target--and draw blood--more often than they miss.
- Best science fiction: Ender's Shadow, by Orson Scott Card. This is not a bad book, but once again it's #1 more due to weak competition than to real excellence. Ender's Shadow is a novel that runs parallel to Ender's Game, Card's classic novel of children learning to be soldiers in the near future, and describes the same action from the point of view of a different character. Ironically, the best part of the book is the first third, which has nothing to do with Ender's Game, and things start to go a little flat once Card is forced into the straitjacket of retelling the original story. Still, overall a decent read. Honorable mention goes to The Burning City, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, a good but uneven story of a magical world and a feral young boy who inhabits it.
- Best nonfiction: Actual Innocence, by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer. This book is harrowing not so much for its conclusion--namely that sometimes innocent people go to jail--but for showing just how badly justice can miscarry in America and how hard it is to get anyone to re-examine even clearly convincing evidence that someone has been wrongly imprisoned. From DNA testing (and the inexplicable resistance to it from many prosecutors and judges) to the dangers of eyewitness testimony to the disgraceful way that lineups are used by most police departments, the book is a chilling reminder that the public frequently just wants someone prosecuted, not necessarily the person who's actually guilty. The authors finish up with some common sense ideas for improving things, of which the most compelling, I think, is that video cameras should become omnipresent in all phases of law enforcement, from arrest to questioning to lineup to trial. The cost would be high, but not all that high, and it would force wholesale changes in the way criminal justice works in America.
- Honorable mention nonfiction: Shortly after I read Actual Innocence I read another book that brought the same point home in a very personal way: Last Man Standing, by Jack Olsen. Last Man Standing is the story of Geronimo Pratt, a former Black Panther who was jailed 30 years ago for a murder he didn't commit--a murder, it later became clear, that the FBI knew he didn't commit thanks to wiretaps they had on Panther headquarters. Pratt was convicted based on all the things that Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer warn about in their book: misuse of lineups by police, unreliable eyewitness testimony, ex parte (i.e., secret) evidence submitted to judges by the FBI, reliance on jailhouse snitches, and more. Pratt's treatment was truly horrific, and it's a sad commentary on our society that these things can happen and nobody in power ever seems to truly take an interest in trying to reform the system to prevent it from happening again. (A side note: it turns out that one of Pratt's lawyers over the years was Johnnie Cochran, and this book certainly paints a different picture of him from the one we all know from the OJ trial. That by itself was quite an eye opener.) Other worthwhile nonfiction this year includes The New New Thing, by Michael Lewis, an interesting look at Jim Clark, the man behind Netscape, and Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, a good biography of Charles Darwin.
- Worst book of the year: Forever Free, by Joe Haldeman. Just as the best from this year wasn't as good as previous years, so the worst was not as bad. Forever Free is a follow up to The Forever War and Forever Peace, and it was a pretty pitiful mishmash of stuff that really seemed to have no point at all. On the other hand, at least it's short and pretty readable....
A complete list of 2000 books, in the order read, is below:
| Title | Grade | Kevin's opinion |
| Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman | C | A revolutionary process turns (nearly) everyone into pacifists in this faintly ridiculous book. I found it neither convincing nor very compelling reading, but it did win both a Hugo and a Nebula in 1998, so a lot of people must have liked it.... |
| Forever Free, by Joe Haldeman | C- | Even worse than Forever Peace. A small colony of humans discovers an ancient race of shapeshifters that has lived on earth for thousands of years, after which they both run into God. Sheesh. |
| Mother Nature, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy | B | A pretty good book about how humans have raised children over the millennia. It posits lots of counter-intuitive ideas that make you think hard about western ideas of child rearing, but consistently avoids the temptation to sink into feminist cant. |
| Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sorbel | B | A pretty decent book about Galileo, told from the perspective of letters written back and forth between the great man and his devoted daughter, a nun who belonged to the order of the Poor Clares. |
| The New New Thing, by Michael Lewis | B+ | A very readable book about Tom Clark, the man who started Netscape. If Lewis is right, the venture capital business has gotten so crazy that a drawing on a napkin is literally all that's needed to raise millions of dollars--but only if you're Tom Clark. |
| The Limits of Family Influence, by David C. Rowe | B | A decent book about how parental upbringing influences the way children turn out, but not as good as The Nurture Assumption, last year's top award winner for nonfiction. |
| The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky | B | I found it hard to put this book down, but I also found it hard to comprehend. Maybe you have to be Russian to understand it.... |
| The Clustered World, by Michael J. Weiss | C | A potentially interesting book about how modern marketers categorize consumers, but in the end it was more exhausting than actually interesting. However, it's fun to find out what demographic group you belong to by entering your ZIP code at the Claritis Web site. |
| The Burning City, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle | B | A pretty good book about a feral young boy who comes of age in a magical world. Falls apart at the end a little bit. |
| The Emperors of Chocolate, by Joel Glenn Brenner | B | A surprisingly interesting book about Hershey and Mars, the two giants of American chocolate. |
| The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean | B- | A meandering book about orchid collecting in Florida. |
| Mao Zedong, by Jonathan Spence | B | A competent short biography of Mao. |
| Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace | B- | A collection of short stories, which unfortunately tends not to be Wallace's strongest suit. This collection has a couple of good stories, but most of them are uninteresting and sometimes just pretentious. |
| Three Seductive Ideas, by Jerome Kagan | C+ | Kagan does his best to poke holes in three popular ideas: (1) it is possible to generalize broadly, for example by studying monkeys for clues about human behavior, (2) early childhood experiences stay with us--and mold us--forever, and (3) human behavior is mostly motivated by a desire for sensory pleasure. I don't know if he's right or wrong, but he wasn't very convincing (or focused) in any of his three arguments. |
| Flashforward, by Robert J. Sawyer | B | A particle experiment gone wrong gives everyone on earth a glimpse of their own future. OK airplane reading. |
| The Terminal Experiment, by Robert J. Sawyer | B- | A scientist figures out how to record the point when a person's soul enters and leaves his body. This is more mediocre writing from Robert Sawyer, who seems like he might have a really good book in him if he spent some serious time on one instead of obsessively churning them out year after year as if on a schedule. |
| Understanding Depression, by Patricia Ainsworth | C | Unenlightening book about depression. |
| When China Ruled the Seas, by Louise Levathes | B | 600 years ago China had an oceangoing fleet bigger and more powerful than any in existence. Then, in one of history's greatest mysteries, the fleet was destroyed and China turned inward, to be forever left behind as Europe's renaissance began. This book does a decent job of relating what's known about the Chinese treasure fleets, but offers little more. |
| The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years, by John Brockman | C+ | Ask some friends to write short essays about the most important invention of the past 2000 years, and this is what you get: a bunch of people each trying to be more clever than the last. Late 20th Century Medicine? Public Key Cryptosystems? The Digital Ecosystem? Classical Music? Give me a break.... |
| Paradigms Regained, by John L. Casti | B- | A follow-up to Paradigms Lost, which explored the current state of seven big scientific questions (for example, is artifical intelligence possible?) This book updates the previous one by providing us with all the latest discoveries, but it's not very well done. |
| Illegal Alien, by Robert J. Sawyer | B | More medicore fiction from Robert Sawyer, Canada's greatest SF writer. |
| 20 Years After, by Alexander Dumas | B+ | The Three Musketeers are 20 years older and wiser. |
| The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searis, and David Weinberger | B- | A pretentious book about selling by four computer guys who seriously underestimate the power of modern consumer marketing. Basically, they think that if we all just relaxed and told the honest truth, more people would buy stuff from us. What they don't quite seem to get is that this works (maybe....) only within their own demographic group: smart, nerdish, technically literate men. If you must, you can read all about it at www.cluetrain.com, but the parody site is a lot funnier.... |
| How Men Think, by Adrienne Mendell | C+ | I bought this thinking it was an overview of current scientific research, but it turned out to be nothing more than pop psychology in the mold of "boys are brought up to play games and you need to learn to play games too." It's already been done better by others, notably Betty Lehan Harragan in Games Mother Never Taught You, published over 20 years ago. |
| Single & Single, by John Le Carré | B | A pretty decent spy novel. Not his best, but even Le Carré's worst is pretty good. |
| Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo | C+ | After I saw the cartoon version of Hunchback of Notre Dame, I decided to read the book. It turned out not to be very interesting. |
| Silent Witness, by Richard North Patterson | B | Airplane reading, but OK even so. |
| Blind Eye, by James Brewer Stewart | B | A chilling true story of a doctor who killed lots and lots of people. A worthwhile reminder of why important segments of society shouldn't be allowed to police themselves (something that should apply to doctors, lawyers, and police, but for some reason doesn't). |
| Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore | C | This is a classic alternate history novel in which the South won the Civil War. However, I found it completely uninteresting. |
| 1066 and All That, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman | B- | Famous satrical book about British history ("just the good bits"). I didn't get much out of it--and despite what they imply, you really do need to know quite a bit of British history to get the jokes. |
| The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston | B- | A story of how the U.S. Army wiped out a building full of monkeys that had the Ebola virus. Somehow, I didn't find it nearly as frightening as the book's author thought I should. |
| The Fifties, by David Halberstam | B | A very readable account of a decade that gets too little attention. |
| Database Nation, by Simson Garfinkel | B | The way that modern marketers use databases is truly frightening, but this book doesn't do the subject justice. However, the chapter on medical databases was genuinely interesting and a bit chilling. Too bad the rest of the book wasn't as good. |
| Actual Innocence, by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer | A- | Excellent summary of the shortcomings of the U.S. criminal justice system and what can be done about it. |
| Earth in the Balance, by Al Gore | C+ | Amazingly, this book by a politician was actually written by the politician himself, not a ghost writer. It turns out that much of what Gore has to say is unexceptionable (I thought), but unfortunately the book mostly reads like a pretty good term paper, not a real book. And despite what some Republicans inexplicably persist in saying, Gore has certainly been proven right about global warming. |
| Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore | B+ | A very good biography of Charles Darwin that tells his life story well and places it into its proper social context. Extremely enlightening. |
| Heroes, Rogues and Lovers, by James McBride Dabbs and Mary G. Dabbs | C+ | How does testosterone influence human behavior? This book has a couple of interesting insights, but not much more. However, I couldn't quite tell if that was the fault of the book or simply a reflection of our current knowledge. |
| Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, by Stephen Jay Gould | C | Another mediocre collection of essays from Gould. His last couple of collections haven't been that good, and it's probably all for the best that he's finally hanging up his columnist hat this year. |
| The Frailty Myth, by Colette Dowling | B- | A surprisingly uninteresting book about the physical strength of men vs. women. It turns out to be more feminist sociology than it is a review of current scientific thinking. Maybe I should have read the dust jacket more carefully before buying it.... |
| Marrow, by Robert Reed | C+ | A tedious novel about....oh forget it. |
| My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer, by Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum | A+ | The best (and only) biography in English of Denmark's greatest film director. |
| Last Man Standing, by Jack Olsen | B+ | Excellent account of the false imprisonment of Geronimo Pratt, a former Black Panther, for a murder he didn't commit. |
| The Power of Gold, by Peter L. Bernstein | B | A fairly interesting account of how and why gold became a store of value (the reasons aren't quite as obvious as they seem). |
| Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer | C+ | I bought this in the tiny English-language section of a Swiss bookstore because I had run out reading material for the flight home. That'll teach me. Really, Mailer is just annoying, and how this book won a Pulitzer prize is beyond me. |
| The Bear and the Dragon, by Tom Clancy | B- | Clancy really really needs to work with an editor who's not afraid to tell him to cut great big chunks out of his books.... |
| Time, by Alexander Waugh | B- | Mostly an account of why we keep time the way we do. Occasionally interesting, but not often. |
| Shrub, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose | B- | A short biography of George W. Bush by someone who knows him well. Unfortunately, it's just a straightforward liberal view of Dubya without much wit or humor. |
| Origins of Genius, by Dean Keith Simonton | C | A fairly tedious academic work about what qualities make people into geniuses. The short answer is, they have lots of different ideas and they make lots of associations. Overall, it wasn't that good, but it did introduce me to the Price law: in any group, half the creative output is generated by the square root of the number of people in the group. |
| The Mystery of the Aleph, by Amir D. Aczel | B | A pretty good book on an obscure subject: Georg Cantor and the invention of transfinite analysis. |
| The Best American Science Writing 2000, by James Gleick | B | A decent collection of science essays. About five out of 20 of the essays are truly first rate. |
| The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000, by David Quammen | C | A weak collection that--for some reason--seems to be more anti-science than anything else. "Back to the Land" is especially egregious, an idiotic essay that proposes we should all move back to agrarianism. |
| A Field Guide to the Yettie, by Sam Sifton | C | Tedious send-up of the denizens of Silicon Valley. |
| Tough Call, by Mike Loew | B- | A writer for The Onion makes prank phone calls. Occasionally funny, but only occasionally. |
| Batman: No Man's Land, by Greg Rucka | C+ | A novelization of a recent year-long Batman story arc. Just goes to show that comic book stories are really pretty dumb, and without the pictures they seem even dumber.... |
| Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe | B+ | A very good set of essays by our reigning master of essays. Sometimes Wolfe seems too glib, but when he nails something he really nails it. |
| Ender's Shadow, by Orson Scott Card | B+ | A pretty good parallel novel to Ender's Game: the same story told from the perspective of a different character. |
| Brunelleschi's Dome, by Ross King | C+ | The story of the building of the dome of Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral, the biggest masonry dome ever built. Unfortunately, the story just isn't all that interesting. |
Movie Awards
2000 awards are given for movies seen by Kevin in theaters in 2000, regardless of production date. Here are the 2000 winners...
- Best drama: Almost Famous. In a really bad year for movies, this stands out as a smart, watchable piece of social history. It might not be a movie I'll remember in ten years, but it's well crafted, deftly paced, and tells a surprisingly interesting story.
- Honorable mention drama: Wonder Boys didn't get much attention, and it deserved more. Good performances and a nice script make this a movie worth seeing. Other good dramas from 1999 that drifted into 2000 (for me anyway) included The Insider, with Russell Crowe portraying a former tobacco employee who turned against his industry, and The Cider House Rules, a surprisingly touching movie about orphans and abortion in 1930s Maine.
- Best comedy: This is even harder than the drama category this year, but I'll pick two anyway: Chicken Run and Shanghai Noon. The claymation Chicken Run wasn't quite what I expected, but it was nonetheless entertaining and, at times, even captivating. Shanghai Noon, the latest from Jackie Chan, had lots of funny bits and an excellent performance from Owen Wilson as Chan's nemesis/sidekick.
- Worst movie of the year: Nurse Betty was inexplicable to me. I have no idea what the makers of this film wanted it to be or what they wanted me to think, but I'm pretty sure they got it wrong regardless. A spectacular flop.
A complete list of 2000 movies, in the order seen, is below:
| Title | Grade | Kevin's Opinion |
| Galaxy Quest | B | Amusing send-up of Star Trek. There's not much here, but it's got some good gags along the way. |
| The Insider | B+ | Compelling story of how a tobacco company insider turned the tables and testified against his former employers with the help of 60 Minutes. |
| Wonder Boys | B+ | A good, understated movie about an English professor and one of his students. An overlooked movie from early in the year. |
| Fantasia 2000 | C+ | One or two good segments, but that's it. |
| The Next Best Thing | B- | An OK Madonna vehicle about a woman raising her child with a gay man, but it breaks down completely in its final third. |
| The Cider House Rules | B+ | A surprisingly good movie about a doctor at a Maine orphanage in the 1930s and the boy he teaches his profession to. |
| Erin Brokovich | B | True story of a woman who single-handedly discovers a scheme by Pacific Gas & Electric to cover up the contamination of entire neighborhoods by a deadly chemical byproduct from its plants. |
| Titan A.E. | C | Inane cartoon science fiction feature. |
| Chicken Run | B+ | A witty and unusual claymation feature that scores often enough to offset its overall meandering tone. |
| Shanghai Noon | B+ | A Jackie Chan slugfest with a very good supporting performance from Owen Wilson. |
| Mission: Impossible II | C+ | I know, it's not supposed to be realistic, but enough's enough. This was just stupid, and to make it even worse the action sequences weren't even all that good. |
| Space Cowboys | C+ | This was a really dumb, predictable movie. The fact that it has lots of lovable old codgers for stars doesn't make it any better. |
| Cecil B. Demented | C | This movie isn't really worth describing, and seems more like a student exercise than anything else. It's the kind of movie you almost walk out on. |
| Nurse Betty | C- | This was just inexplicable: a weird story of a woman who witnesses her husband being murdered and then....but why go on? Is it a comedy? A drama? Who knows, but the fact that Roger Ebert liked it makes me think that he'll fall for anything that can conceivably be called quirky.... |
| Remember the Titans | B | A solid movie about a black football coach taking over a white school in the early 70s. Predictable, of course, but overall pretty entertaining. |
| Almost Famous | B+ | An excellent look back at the music scene of the early 70s, with nice performances by the entire cast. |
| The Contender | B | A decent movie about a congressman who tries to derail the nomination of a political opponent to the vice presidency. Somehow, though, it never quite gelled for me. |
| Best in Show | B | An amusing look at people who compete in dog shows. Not bad, but not enough good jokes to really keep it moving. |
| Meet the Parents | C+ | Dumb and tedious--although perhaps not quite as bad as it looked from the ads. |
| Bounce | B | The plot is too complex to summarize here, but this is a decent story that depends on a great ending. Unfortunately, the payoff isn't quite there, or else this would have been one of the year's best films. |
| Unbreakable | B | Weird, sf-ish story of a guy who can't be injured. The surprise ending is, indeed, a surprise, but somehow it doesn't really matter all that much by the time we get there. |
This year was so dismal that I saw only 21 movies. Was it really that bad, or was I just tired all year? Maybe a little of both, but regardless I would have to dig so deep to list ten good movies that this year that I'm going to stop at six. For what it's worth, the final 2000 Top Six Movie list looks like this:
- Almost Famous
- Wonder Boys
- The Cider House Rules
- Shanghai Noon
- Chicken Run
- The Insider
This is by far the worst year for movies in at least the past five years.
Book and Movie Statistics
The total number of reviewed books was 57, up from last year's 48, and they broke up as follows:
- General fiction: 5
- Science fiction: 10
- Nonfiction: 42
This is a big change from normal years, which are usually split about 50-50 between fiction and nonfiction. Clearly, I need more good fiction to come my way in 2001.
The total number of reviewed movies was 21, way down from 37 last year. There were long stretches of the year where I would just stare at the newspaper trying to find a good movie (or even a mediocre one) but finally just gave up. Here's hoping that 2001 will be an improvement.
Grade distribution for books and movies in 2000 was as follows:
Note: a grade of B- is the cutoff point for recommendations: anything above it is recommended, anything below it is not, and anything that received a B- is on the edge.
Tennis Awards
2000 was a tough tennis year. I won only one set in the entire first half of the year, thanks to some nagging injuries and the side effects of some medication (don't ask). Things picked up a bit in the second half, and I won about 20% of the sets played, pretty close to my lifetime average against Dave. Unfortunately, I injured my knee badly enough over Thanksgiving that I decided to stop playing for the rest of the year, which left me with a year-end record of 8-58 and a winning percentage of only 12%. The good news is that things can only improve in 2001!
Complete 2000 tennis statistics are below:
| First Set | Second Set | YTD Score |
| 3-6 | 4-4 | 0-1 |
| 3-6 | 4-6 | 0-3 |
| 1-6 | 2-6 | 0-5 |
| 5-7 | 1-1 | 0-6 |
| 6-7 (7-9) | 0-7 | |
| 4-6 | 2-6 | 0-9 |
| 6-7 (5-7) | 5-3 | 0-10 |
| 3-6 | 4-6 | 0-12 |
| 4-6 | 5-5 | 0-13 |
| 2-6 | 4-6 | 0-15 |
| 2-6 | 6-4 | 1-16 |
| 2-6 | 1-6 | 1-18 |
| 5-7 | 1-6 | 1-20 |
| 2-6 | 1-6 | 1-22 |
| 3-6 | 2-6 | 1-24 |
| 1-6 | 4-6 | 1-26 |
| 0-6 | 4-6 | 1-28 |
| 6-1 | 3-6 | 2-29 |
| 2-6 | 1-6 | 2-31 |
| 3-6 | 2-6 | 2-33 |
| 1-6 | 1-6 | 2-35 |
| 3-6 | 6-3 | 3-36 |
| 1-6 | 4-3 | 3-37 |
| 6-7 (4-7) | 0-6 | 3-39 |
| 4-6 | 3-3 | 3-40 |
| 2-6 | 7-5 | 4-41 |
| 2-6 | 4-6 | 4-43 |
| 4-6 | 4-4 | 4-44 |
| 3-6 | 2-5 | 4-45 |
| 7-5 | 0-6 | 5-46 |
| 7-5 | 4-1 | 6-46 |
| 1-6 | 5-5 | 6-47 |
| 1-6 | 5-5 | 6-48 |
| 1-6 | 6-3 | 7-49 |
| 5-7 | 2-6 | 7-51 |
| 2-6 | 3-6 | 7-53 |
| 4-6 | 7-6 (7-5) | 8-54 |
| 3-6 | 4-6 | 8-56 |
| 5-7 | 4-6 | 8-58 |