Alex & Me, by Irene Pepperberg

A few days ago I finished reading [i]Alex & Me[/i], by Irene Pepperberg. It's her story of 30 years spent training an African gray parrot to a pretty amazing level of conversational and cognitive ability. It's also the story of how little support she's received from academia, due to some combination of the multiple fields she works with (from biology to psychology, while her degree is actually in chemistry) and the jealousy that her success has engendered in her colleagues (or so she says).

The book's a good read, mostly for the anecdotes about what Alex could do. He could identify numbers, colors, and shapes. He could measure whether things were similar or different. He could add small quantities.

What I was most impressed by were the things that he did spontaneously.

For example, he seemed to come up with the concept of "none" to mean zero all on his own (after having used it in a different context). On another occasion, when his trainer was teaching him phonemes he spontaneously started sounding out words.

As is often the case with animal intelligence work, there was disagreement over whether he'd been trained or just conditioned to respond to specific stimuli. Frankly, I think a lot of that disagreement originates in speciesism: people don't want to admit that creatures other than humans can be intelligent because it throws their whole world view into disarray. From what I've read, I'm pretty confident that Alex learned.

The Last Kashmiri Rose, by Barbara Cleverly

This morning I finished The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly. It's a mystery novel set in 1921 India, and the first of a series starring police detective Joe Sandilands.

I generally ask that my mystery novels do two things. First, they should move quickly, entertaining me without ever slowing down. Second, they should contain an interesting and fair mystery, with some surprising twists that a particularly clever reader might have sussed out.

It's rare for me that a mystery book successfully manages both criteria. The Spenser novels and the alphabet novels are both quite quick-moving (Spenser moreso than Millhone) but they don't have particularly fair mysteries. In the Spenser novels, there isn't any particular attention paid to setting up a solvable mystery, while in the Millhone novels, things come way out of right field too often.

The Last Kashmiri Rose has a good mystery with some good twists, but it was slightly on the slow side.

And, in retrospect, I'd generally prefer a quick-moving mystery-less Spenser than a slower mystery-ful Sandilands. However, I expect I will try out the next in the series at some point.