Books for dad

Sh*t My Father Says
by Justin Halpern, MacMillan, $30
Aged 28, the author, kicked out by his girlfriend, found himself living with his parents in their San Diego home. He rediscovered that his father, 73, irascible in a kindly sort of way, was wont to make rather startling observations whenever he spoke. So he started a blog of these "gems", now followed by more than a million people on Twitter.
I can only assume that the average age (real or mental) of these followers is about 10. Halpern senior is incapable of uttering even the briefest of homilies without including at least two expletives. A couple are mildly (very mildly) amusing, but only one incident is actually funny - when father starts instructing about sex in a crowded restaurant, to the amused fascination of those in hearing range.
As for the rest - they are as tedious as they are tasteless.
The Invisible Gorilla
by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, HarperCollins, $40
Did anyone who saw the film Spartacus notice that some of the slaves were wearing watches? Or who saw Pretty Woman and noticed that Julia Roberts picks up a croissant but takes a bite out of a pancake? Or that in The Godfather, Sonny's car is riddled with bullets, yet just seconds later the windscreen is miraculously repaired?
There are other examples. The point the authors are making is that, in general, we see what we expect to see, and miss what should be obvious to us.
About 12 years ago, the authors - both Harvard University professors - conducted a simple experiment. They made a short video - less than a minute - of two teams of basketball players, one team dressed in white, the other in black. Their students were asked to count the number of passes made by the players in white, and to ignore those in black.
Halfway through the video a female student wearing a gorilla suit walked into the middle of the players, faced the camera, thumped her chest, and walked off. She was on screen for nine seconds. None of the watching students noticed her at all.
Other examples in the book are far more disturbing - like police making mistakes and beating up the wrong people, and witnesses in court cases "remembering" things they saw or did not see.
It's a fascinating book - serious, disturbing, and amusing. The authors won the 2004 Nobel Prize in psychology for their initial experiment - titled Gorillas in Our Midst.

The Fallen
by Ben Sanders, HarperCollins, $30
This is the debut novel of a young Auckland writer. We will hear more of him. His second novel is expected later next year and I'll be astonished if that is the last. Sanders has talent and imagination.
The book is of the police detection genre, and owes much of its style to American novelist James Lee Burke. One of Burke's characters is a maverick police detective named Dave Robicheaux. The main character here is a maverick Auckland police detective called Sean Devereaux.
Robicheau has a friend and ally who is tough and skilled in violence and who operates outside the law, but for the forces of good. His name is Clete. His Auckland counterpart is John Hale, a former policeman turned security specialist.
There are two parallel plots in this book. The first is the murder of a 16-year-old schoolgirl from a good and wealthy Mt Eden home. The second involves Deveraux's solo-mother neighbour who is being watched by criminals. Why? Are they after her, or her young son? And what do either of these matters have to do with the hijacking, from police officers, of a few million dollars some years before? Sanders' writing also owes something to Burke - the laconic dialogue, the violence, and the frequent descriptions of scenery or weather.
It's very readable, and sets a high standard in local crime writing. One quibble - the ending is somewhat convoluted, and there are just too many corpses for either comfort or credibility.