Category: bookreviews

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Cadillac Desert was pretty awesome. Marc Reisner tells a story (in sometimes overwhelming detail) of the American West, and how we have explored, settled, and altered it. And how it was maybe a little idiotic to do it the way we have.
The Mormons were the first to understand and refine large-scale irrigation projects. Later we get into the geographic discoveries of the Powell expedition, the explosion of Los Angeles and California farming during the Mulholland era, the massive federal projects of the Depression and World War decades, and the competition between two federal agencies that LOVE to build: the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Where great rivers ran we now have dams and reservoirs—around 75,000. Not to mention canals and levees and aqueducts. They’re a mixed blessing at best. Aside from the environmental impact, the amount of political maneuvering, folly, thuggery, and outright deceit that has gone into some of these projects is just incredible. Very few of the projects would have been possible without Federal involvement (read: subsidized by Eastern tax dollars). I don’t even consider myself “environmentalist” but still found it all pretty outrageous. Great book.

Die Stadt (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Another set of woodcuts from Frans Masereel (last Friday I took a look at Die Sonne). Die Stadt was first published in 1925. The impressions of war-torn Europe cover the range of everyday life: the birth of a child, a man with a prostitute, parents with their children, medical students at the morgue, street scenes both peaceful and violent. They are almost all dense with the detail and distractions that cities offer. You can see the full set of images from Die Stadt at Graphic Witness. These are some of the woodcuts that I particularly enjoyed…
[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity—good luck finding it]

If you look at this image in the original size, you can see the faces of the men walking about. With just a few cuts here and there, he managed to make them unique with mustaches, beards, long noses, weak chins. Most of them are in profile, which probably helps.

I like the perspective in this one, monstrous city receding but growing taller.

Different architecture for each walk-up. Sunlight filtering through the trees.

This one is probably my favorite overall. A slight curve in the edges gives this incredible softness to her skin and clothing. Really amazing.

Die Sonne (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ 3 Comments

A man chases the sun through city, sky, and sea in this wordless story by Frans Masereel. Here’s my favorite sequence from Die Sonne:
[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity—you’ll have to trust me that it’s worth your time]

Take a look at some other woodcuts from Die Sonne. This is the first of four Masereel books that I recently picked up at the Emory library. I’m sure I’ll enjoy the others over the next week or two.

The Definitive Drucker (review: 2.5/5)

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It’s almost always the anecdotes that bore me in business books. The Definite Drucker is a sort biography of the ideas of Peter Drucker, the late consultant and management guru. I like a lot of the theory and philosophy, but when we get to the struggles of Motorola’s supply chain or decreasing overhead at Colgate-Palmolive, I tune out a little bit.
But it’s not at all hard to cherry-pick some good stuff, and Drucker is full of good ideas. Here’s one line in particular that I’d really like to bust out in a meeting: “What would it take for us to seriously consider this idea?”

There’s another interesting bit about specializing in what you’re good in, “core competencies” if you must. The analogy is to distinguish between your “front room” and “back room”. The last line is great:

The first step in structuring a collaboration is to identify your company’s ‘front room,’ which Peter defiined as your strengths, or the activity that is most important for you to do—that which stirs your passion and shows off your excellence. Everything else is your backroom, and it can be almost everything. One of Peter’s famous quotes is, ‘the only thing you have to do is marketing and innovation.’

If you’re sufficiently focused, “the only thing you have to do is marketing and innovation.” What a great goal.

The last little tidbit I really liked is about management style, bureaucracy, and decision-making. Again, the last line is fantastic:

It is part of our basic strategy to maintain the kind of working atmosphere that is attractive to the high-talent people we need to serve our clients well. Such an approach should include a philosophy of relying on autonomy and responsible self-government by the individual just as far as we can. Operationally, this means that the burden of proof should always rest with the proponent of centralized control and bureaucratic rules.

Update: Oh, and one more line that I twittered the other day: “It is good to do one thing right. Don’t do too much.”

Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library (review: 3/5)

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If you’ve ever worked in a library (I’ve put in a couple years), or if you just like libraries and spend inordinate amounts of time there (I’ve put in a couple dozen years), Don Borchert’s book may give you a bit of d?©j?† vu. Somehow he got the same customers I got, even though he works in Los Angeles and I worked in suburban Georgia.
One of my favorite lines in the book appears when he’s talking about a custodian in his branch. Mr. Weams is hard-working, old, ornery, given to speeches about the injustice of the whole system. One night he was called in to do some emergency cleaning and shared some rants with Borchert the next day:

“Mr. Weams is so close to retirement that it makes absolute sense to him that the city deliberately puts him in harm’s way. His anger is like a big multivitamin for his immune system.”

His anger is a multivitamin. Ha! Love that. Borchert is a hardened librarian, beleaguered but still feisty. As he describes himself, “I know I could be a better human being, but I am an old dog content with my many shortcomings. I do not automatically try to cheer up small children because they are pouting, nor do I pander to adults because they are petulant and acting like small children.”

But he’s able to share the absurdities of modern public libraries with some heart. Not all of the stories are disaster scenarios. In one story he finally gets to know a little bit more about a regular troublemaker. Turns out the kid is from a crappy home situation. “Damn this stupid kid, I thought. He is no longer two-dimensional.”

Quick read. Good stuff.

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Each chapter of Faint Praise features a measured, workmanlike argument about topics like book selection, or matching reviewers and books, or the ethical minefields of the industry. Surprisingly thoughtful but not exciting. Gail Pool doesn’t work up much outrage or seem very enthusiastic about the status of the book reviewing trade. She doesn’t spend a lot of time critiquing (or celebrating) review per se; the focus is more on the industrial machinery and how book reviews get squeezed. But occasionally in this “towering achievement” she does offer “compelling” indictments of modern reviewing crutches, rendered in “luminous prose” that “leaves the reader breathless” (for example).
The final verdict is that book reviewing is important, it’s needed, and it’s under-valued, but that won’t change until… uh, things change.

Read more in James Wolcott’s better review:

If Faint Praise has a virtuous flaw, it’s that it thinks too small, is too practical-minded, and doesn’t make ample room for the occasional healthy rampage. It lays so much stress on the stringencies of book reviewing, the shortfalls and iron deficiencies of the form, that it is hard to understand why anyone other than a masochist, a worker drone, or an antennae-quivering opportunist would take it up except to notch a byline. Its funky sense of battle fatigue reflects the mood in the editorial trenches, where nothing beckons on the horizon except more bad news. Even the title, Faint Praise, sounds wan and droopy, as if the most that reviews can achieve now is to rack up small yardage, provide a useful service. We’re going to have to make do with making do, is the book’s sober message.

It’s sober, all right. Where is the swashbuckling fun, the exploding scoreboard, the whisking pirouettes? So focused is Faint Praise on institutional woes, incremental change, and improvements in quality control that it scants the virtuoso individuality that makes book reviewing a more interesting activity than, say, raking leaves.

The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese (review: 3/5)

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Each chapter of The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese takes on a broad topic, like criminal law, tort, money, or sex. Author Adam Freedman brings up the main vocabulary (habeas corpus, misdemeanor, legal tender) and some of the more obscure ideas (per stirpes, res ipsa loquitur), exploring their roots along the way, and most importantly, grappling with why in the world we accept such tortured language.

The legal system and lawyers are convenient punching bags (I would be more surprised if Freedman had a difficulty finding things to puzzle over), but I didn’t expect the book to be quite so funny. He often seems like a stand-up comic: introduction, development, punchline. It seems like every paragraph had some bit of goofiness. Plenty of the jokes were just corny, but much of it was good. I also like that Freedman keeps a few running gags across sections and chapters of the book, like the recurring “four-hour erections” bit from an early chapter on legal disclaimers.

I don’t expect to buy it or ever read it again, but it was perfect for a few mornings on the train to work. You can read an excerpt from the first chapter to get a feel for it, or take a look at Freedman’s blog of the same title, The Party of the First Part.

Why Mars & Venus Collide (review: 3/5)

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Why Mars & Venus Colllide is about stress and communication between men and women. Our modern lifestyle is breakneck-paced, relationship roles have changed, our responsibilities and stress levels grow as our time to deal with them decreases. Welcome to today, nothing new. So what do you do?
According to John Gray, the first step is to wake up and realize that men and women have different biochemistry going on, stress affects our chemicals in different ways, and we recover from stress and replenish ourselves in different ways. But we’re clueless: “Women mistakenly expect men to react and behave the way women do, while men continue to misunderstand what women really need.”

We each feel better when our personal chemical stockpiles are filled up. This is how it works: in a nutshell, women de-stress by talking, connecting, processing, sharing their ills—which restores oxytocin. Men de-stress by zoning out, shifting gears, detaching from the day’s troubles—which allows testosterone reserves to fill up again. These seem like competing solutions.

Women can’t just shut down and forget about it for a little while like men. Going ninja and crossing more items off the to-do list doesn’t work, either, because “in a woman’s brain there will always be more to do.” They need to talk—it’s biological. They’re wired to process and men need to respond:

Without understanding this, a man’s testosterone levels would drop when he passively listens to his partner’s feelings or her resistance to his action plans. Just listening to her feelings seems a no-win situation. When women talk about problems, men start to become restless, irritable, and then depressed… Men need to learn the art of listening without interrupting to solve her problems.

And when men convert to seeing attentive listening as a problem-solver in itself… then we’re on to something. Man gets the satisfaction of “doing something,” woman gets the satisfaction of being heard.

A man’s desire to make a woman happy is greatly underestimated by women, because women have such different motivations.

The rest of the book is about exploring these differences and finding sensible compromises that allow each partner to relax and emote in healthy ways. Gray paints with a pretty broad brush, but anecdotally, most of it squares with experience. I like this bit on the relationship scoreboard:

“At a subconscious level, a woman is always keeping track of how much she gives in contrast to how much she receives. When he gives to her, she gives him a point, and when she gives to him, she gives herself a point.” And this begins an extended and probably-not-intentionally hilarious section on how to “rack up the points on Venus,” even providing a “One Hundred Ways…” list that would be at home here on the internet.

(What I learned about craftsmanship in) The Violin Maker (review: 4/5)

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Stradivarius: legendary quality, mystery. It’s upper-crust and exotic. How did Stradivari make such wonderful instruments? What sort of alchemy was involved, and why haven’t we solved it yet? John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop talks about the mysteries and realities of violin-making. His book follows the work of violin maker Sam Zygmuntowicz as he works on a violin for Gene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet.
There’s a good bit about the history of violin making, and the experience of playing and hearing a fine instrument, but the bulk of the book is about Edward Heron-Allen‘s challenge: “Given: A log of wood. Make a violin.”

It’s those bits about craftsmanship really got my attention. For all the magic and mythology about great violins, it boils down pretty easily. Zygmuntowicz:

It’s a very foreign idea that violin making is not all that mysterious, but it is one of those things where the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago. The requirements haven’t changed, and therefore the results haven’t changed and therefore it’s a very complex custom that is only learned through long application and a great deal of knowledge. It’s not arcane knowledge; it’s something any guy can learn—if you spend thirty years doing it.

You could probably say the same for writing, drawing, sculpting, cooking, building relationships, any number of things. The not-so-secret is good old-fashioned hard work, deliberate attention. If only there were shortcuts! In one passage Marchese talks about a day with Zygmuntowicz near the end of the violin making process:

I spent a whole afternoon watching him work on the final thickness graduation of the violin top with a scraper that removed wood not in pieces, not even in shavings, but in grains. He’d weighed the piece before he started, scraped and scraped for several hours and weighed it again when he was finished. The sum difference in his day’s work was three grams.

Three grams! For reference, 3 grams, give or take a few tenths, is about the weight of a U.S. penny. Metaphorically speaking, I don’t know that I’ve ever paid 3 grams/day worth of attention to any one thing. But the heart of craftsmanship is right there in the attention to detail. Quoting Zygmuntowicz again:

If there’s anything I can measure, I measure it, on the theory that it will become interesting in later years. I’ll make some varnish notes, and some evaluations of the sound, and if I can I’ll follow up and see how the sound might have changed over time… Some guys take two measurements and that’s it. I think I’m kind of a maniac.

It’s a work technique. Not a particularly efficient one, but we’re not judged on high efficiency—which is a very good thing. I wouldn’t survive, or I’d certainly have to alter my work style, if I had to be more efficient.

But it’s all part of a process of becoming—I don’t know what you call it—I guess a more subtle worker. The thing is that you start to care more and more about less and less.

Another spot I loved was Marchese quoting Sir James Beament discussing rare, expensive violins versus work-a-day models: “They do not make any different sound, and no audience can tell what instrument is being played. But if a player thinks he plays better on such an instrument, he will… Audiences are even more susceptible to suggestion than players.”

I went to a photography lecture a couple weeks ago, and in the Q&A session were the inevitable questions about gear. What camera? What lense? What film? What paper? There’s no shame in wanting to use better equipment so you can work better, but it’s dangerous to give in to the lazy thought that equipment trumps the process of attentive labor and the work ethic that drives it (rolls of film shot, hours in the studio, drafts revised, face-time with customers).

Lastly, I liked Zygmuntowicz’ comments on how originality and style develop over time: “When people talk about personal style a lot of what they’re talking about is slipping away from the original—people were trying to do it just like the original but they didn’t.”

The Braindead Megaphone (review: 4.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 3 Comments

There’s potential for a doctoral dissertation about The Rhetorical Use of Capital Letters in the Writing Of George Saunders. The usage comes in a couple flavors. There are the ineffable concepts, like Freedom and Humility. There’s the personalization of general categories, like Writers and the Little Guy. There’s the tongue-in-cheek categorization of human sub-groups, like, oh, People Who Analyze Capitalization. And it also appears when it’s simply more amusing, e.g. “Oversize Bright-Colored Toy Ships and Trucks.”
This was only my second try at Saunders. I aborted my attempt of In Persuasion Nation. Maybe it’s good. (I think I read so much non-fiction that I have trouble turning the switch every now and then.) And it wasn’t funny. But The Braindead Megaphone is funny. And it stays funny even though he writes about Serious Things and has a really earnest style.

To wander my way back to the Capitalization Issue, it reminds me of what Daniel Day Lewis said in a recent interview: “Perhaps I’m particularly serious because I’m not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I’m doing.” I think satirists like Saunders might agree. While the writing isn’t always serious, it is sincere, and I get the sense that he really kicks his own ass to come up with this stuff. Most of it is really, really good.

As for the meat of the book, the titular essay is a brilliant take on banal popular media. What’s really wonderful is the way he hedges and offers concessions along the way through his thought experiments. What could be a canned, all-too-familiar diatribe becomes a nice little Journey with George.

Another essay that I liked was about Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five. In one part he talks about how Vonnegut gives up on detail:

“Vonnegut was skipping the lush physical details he had presumably put himself into so much danger to obtain. He was assuming these physical details; that is, he was assuming that I was supplying them. A forest was a forest, he seemed to be saying, let’s not get all flaky about it. He did not seem to believe, as I had read Tolstoy did, that his purpose as a writer was to use words to replicate his experience, to make you feel and think and see what he had felt. This book was not a recounting of Vonnegut’s actual war experience, but a usage of it.”

Later, in an essay on Barthelme‘s short story, “The School,” Saunders offers his own thoughts on the writer-reader relationship:

“The writer is right there with us—he knows where we are, and who we are, and is involved in an intimate and respectful game with us. I think of this as the motorcycle-sidecar model of reading: writer and reader right next to one another, leaning as they corner, the pleasure coming from the mutuality and simultaneity of the experience.”

In addition to those gems, there’s some great writing on patriotism in a mock-academic “survey of the literature”; a welcome twist on the tired Letters To & From An Advice Columnist genre; reporting on Minutemen and border patrol; and probably my favorite of a bunch, an awesome essay on what’s so difficult and wonderful about Huckleberry Finn. The only real duds for me were the foreign reporting essays in Dubai and in Tibet. Skip those, and read everything else.

Clyde Fans: Book One (review: 5/5)

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Clyde Fans: Book One, by the cartoonist Seth, is split into two halves. Each half tracks the memories and relationship between two brothers, both of whom worked for the family business, the Clyde Fans Company.
In the first section, set in 1997, we see the older Abraham walks from room to room in the old Clyde Fans storefront. Abraham keeps a constant monologue. As the only speaker in the first section, and perhaps the only family member remaining, he’s both narrator and the only repository of family history. Abraham reminisces as he wanders throughout the old building telling old jokes or digging up old stories—as you might daydream through your own past, stopping every now and then to pick up a memory and turn it in the light before you move on to another. Although he controls the story, he leaves the building only briefly.

Like Abraham’s nostalgia, Simon’s memory has him trapped, too. The second section rolls back 40 years to follow an anxious Simon, finally given a chance as a company salesman. His narrative, following him as he hoofs it from place to place with display sample in tow, always circles back to his memories: the high expectations of his brother, brush-offs from failed sales calls. The combination of his recurring flashbacks, his obsessive recall of failure, and his own expectations cripple him.

Beyond Seth’s good writing is the attention to detail that helps you trust his writing in the first place. It’s the subtle attention that wins you over. Take a look at this image from the first page. You can see the stars high up in the sky, and as in real life, the lights from the street make it hard to see stars closer to the horizon. There’s that band of darkness that shifts into a field of stars:

night city scene from Clyde Fans: Book One

And further into the first part of the book, there’s a stream of water from a faucet. Seth illustrates that sweet spot of water flow. At a certain water pressure, the flow is slow enough to not be forceful and straight, but fast enough that it escapes from the thin trickle. Seth draws that exact moment that makes the cool spiraling, helical column:

bathroom scene from Clyde Fans: Book One

And the faucet handles even have shadows playing on the tub. Seth drafts some great architecture throughout the book. There are the cityscapes and building snapshots to make the setting, of course. But like the faucet shadows, in the interior scenes you can find all sorts of little details that make the time and place come alive, like molding at the joins of floor and ceiling, or wainscoting, or the floor tiles that aren’t standard squares, but octagons with little diamonds between them. And shadows, always wonderful soft shadows falling and bending together.

The worthy detail makes it happen. When you can trust the writer as an observer, you can trust them as a storyteller that much more. You don’t have to draw or write every detail—Seth leaves out a lot—but a few well-chosen particulars make the rest of the story that much more compelling.

The Road (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The novel centers on a father and son who, realizing they can’t survive another winter, start moving through the southeast towards the coast, trudging through snow and ash with their belongings in a scavenged shopping cart. Where they leave from, where exactly they are going, and what they hope to find are never made completely clear, just as the cause of society’s downfall is unexplained. But the beauty of the story is in everyday purpose they find in each other despite the struggle. There are a few tense moments avoiding bands of thieves and cannibals or other desperate nomads, but most of the book is a catalog of daily trials and conversations, simply and lovingly told.
McCarthy’s language is surprisingly simple and repetitive. It often called to mind a bit of the last stanza of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird“:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.

Like Wallace Stevens’ poetry, McCarthy’s book has something of music in it. At times, since the book has no chapters or divisions larger than a few paragraphs, it reads like a very long unbroken poem or chant or something you might read aloud. McCarthy occasionally disrupts this flow with some whiz-bang vocabulary (e.g. gryke, chary, kerf), but for the most part it’s just really wonderful.

Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 7 Comments

Flash Fiction Forward collects a bunch of stories that only take a couple of page turns to finish. One thing I thought was odd is how none of the stories take on a particular genre, and how many of them seem to have a contemporary setting. Why not a tight little detective story, or a scene from a Civil War battle field, or a nice little 13th century abbey? I’m all for penetrating meditations on modern relationships and culture and stuff, but it’s a shame to see such talent spent in a narrow range.
In any case, many of these stories are quite good, and the low cost of reading means you should take a glance. Some of the stories I particularly liked are:

“Before the Bath” by Ismail Kadare
“The Great Open Mouth Anti-Sadness” by Ron Carlson
“Rose” by John Biguenet
“The Old Truth in Costa Rica” by Lon Otto
“I Never Looked” by Donald Hall
“Fab 4” by Jenny Hall
“Words” by John A. McCaffrey
“21” by Jim Crace
“The Orange” by Benjamin Rosenbaum
“Geometry Can Fail Us” by Barbara Jacksha
“Bill” by Dan Kaplan
“00:02:36:58” by Bayard Godsave
“Traveling Alone” by Rob Carney
“The Death of the Short Story” by J. David Stevens

One final note: it’s incredibly disappointing how many of these stories are not (easily) available online.

You Don’t Love Me Yet (review: 3.5/5)

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At the heart of You Don’t Love Me Yet is a band. Well, a band without a name that hasn’t had a gig yet. The story follows Lucinda, the bassist, as she navigates the post-break-up phase with Matthew, the lead singer. The whole book is about process, creation, becoming, limbo, liminal states. The book starts after Matthew and Lucinda split, before the band ever makes it big, and each, in a way, has a new beginning that we don’t get to see. We get to see the shifting in between.
The band finally gets a little bit of traction when Lucinda steals ideas for lyrics from the Complainer, a guy who calls the complaint line where Lucinda works. The Complainer later insists on joining the band, which makes everything awkward because Lucinda has been dating him… and no one else knows that’s where the lyrics came from. (And Matthew abducted a kangaroo from the zoo, by the way.) Denise is the drummer, appropriately, the one trying to hold things together.

In one scene, Bedwin, the chief lyricist and creative, confesses that he’s struggling:

“I’ve been trying. I’m having a sort of problem with language.”
“What do you mean?”
“With sentences… words.”
“We know what language is, Bedwin,” said Denise, not unkindly.
The three had turned to Bedwin now, half consciously, as though reaching out to support someone freshly released from a hospital, a man tapping down a ramp on crutches.

I love those analogies that Jonathan Lethem comes up with. Throughout the book there are these really wonderful, roundabout, visual ways of describing how people act or move or gesture. Here’s a vivid fashion description: “his white shirts were uniformly crisp and bright, as if pulled from a dispenser like tissues.” Another scene describes returning to an apartment after a long absence, with the answering machine blinking and “the slaw of mail beneath the door slot.”

One other great moment worthy of mention is at the band’s brief climax, their big moment. The whole 8 or 10 page sequence is really sharp. Lethem switches narrative voice, and the musicians all lose their proper names. They become “the singer,” “the drummer,” “the women,” “the men,” “the band.” And it’s during that concert when the band finally achieves its own name. But while the band blossoms, their relationships start to fray.

You can hear Lethem reading a portion from the beginning of his book on NPR. Lethem also has a interesting film option for this book, surrendering rights for derivative works after a short waiting period:

I’ll give away a free option on the film rights to my novel You Don’t Love Me Yet to a selected filmmaker. In return for the free option, I’ll ask two things:

1. I’d like the filmmaker to pay (something) for the purchase of the rights if they actually make a film: two percent of the budget, paid when the completed film gets a distribution deal. (I’ll wait until distribution to get paid so a filmmaker without many funds can work without having to spend their own money paying me).
2. The filmmaker and I will make an agreement to release all ancillary rights to the film (and its source material, the novel), five years after the film’s debut. In other words, after a waiting period during which those rights would still be restricted, anyone who cared to could make any number of other kinds of artwork based on the novel’s story and characters, or the film’s: a play, a television series, a comic book, a theme park ride, an opera – or even a sequel film or novel featuring the same characters. For that matter, they can remake the film with another script and new actors. In my agreement with the filmmaker, those ancillary rights will be launched into the public domain.

I’m curious to see what comes of it.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ 4 Comments

Early on in his new book, Alex Ross identifies one thing that separates music from other arts: “At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, and crowds tend to align themselves as one mind.” Though Ross doesn’t say it outright, that also applies to crowds of composers.
Much of his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, is spent wrestling with the idea of the push and pull of the crowd and the “split between modernist and populist conceptions of the composer’s role.” There’s that clever insinuation in the title. Though the book brings up a lot of music, yes, but it’s also about listening to the era, the shifting alliances and rivalries among composers, the feedback loop of popular culture, ethnicity, politics, war.

And the buildup to and endurance of wartime dominates the much of the book. His description of the Teens and Twenties has some eerie parallels with today:

For anyone who cherishes the notion that there is some inherent spiritual goodness in artists of great talent, the era of Stalin and Hitler is disillusioning. Not only did composers fail to rise up en masse against totalitarianism, but many actively welcomed it. In the capitalist free-for-all of the twenties, they had contended with technologically enhanced mass culture, which introduced a new aristocracy of movie stars, pop musicians, and celebrities without portfolio. Having long depended on the largesse of the Church, the upper classes, and high bourgeoisie, composers suddenly found themselves, in the Jazz Age, without obvious means of support. Some fell to dreaming of a political knight in shining armor who would come to their aid.

Two recurring characters appear in the first half of the book. The first is Thomas Mann‘s book Doctor Faustus, about a composer who makes a bargain with the devil and whose fictional music owes a lot to the real music of Arnold Schoenberg. The second is the opera Salome by Richard Strauss, a scandalous early 20th-century opera. Opera comes up quite often. It’s easier to talk about the music with an explicit emotional narrative. Ross can let the libretto tell the story rather than relying exclusively on musical description or intuition. There are also long treatments of the operas Wozzeck, The Threepenny Opera, Peter Grimes, and Nixon in China.

It makes sense to talk about the big works, the standbys, the headlines. I don’t think he meant to create a comprehensive book, so of course there are some unfortunate absences. Ross mentioned that he regrets he could have spent more time writing about “conservative” composers. Rachmaninov, for example, only gets a few mentions. Though he’s a modern-day orchestral standby (and one of my personal favorites), he didn’t shake things up enough to make it to the book. Carl Nielsen and a bunch of the British also get passed over. Nonetheless, the depth and breadth of research that went into the book is consistently amazing, in part because it flows so well. I don’t think I’ve read non-fiction this enjoyable in a couple years.

Be sure to stop by his website. Ross has audiofiles for The Rest Is Noise on his website, as well as a video introduction. If you’re looking for a great sample, there’s an excerpt from the chapter on Sibelius.

A Whole New Mind (review: 2.5/5)

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I first heard about A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age when Joshua Blankenship posted this excellent quote from author Daniel Pink. Great stuff, so I found the book, which isn’t as great.
The premise is that the Information Age was led by left-brained, linear-thinkers. Now, as we enter the Conceptual Age, the balance is shifting such that right-directed, sympathetic, synthetic thinkers are more and more valuable.

To survive in this age, individuals and organizations must examine what they’re doing to earn a living and ask themselves three questions:

  1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
  2. Can a computers do it faster?
  3. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

Luckily the book isn’t about outsourcing paranoia, but about some soft skills and sensibilities you’ll need: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. The book is heavy on the anecdote, and generally light-hearted, but not particularly gripping. Like some other pop-business books I’ve read like The Long Tail and The Tipping Point, I think it would have been great as a long essay. As a book it feels a bit thin. I’ve heard excellent things about Pink’s other book Free Agent Nation, so maybe that’s worth a look.

Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan 99 (review: 3/5)

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Ray Bradbury‘s latest, Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan ’99, gathers a pair of unpublished novellas that he’s been brewing for a couple decades. The first story, “Somewhere a Band Is Playing,” revisits the usual Bradburyan perfect-yet-eery small-town America, in the form of a writer’s colony where there are no children. “Leviathan ’99” is a sci-fi reimagining of Moby Dick, with fanatics chasing a comet instead of a whale. They’re good stories if you can snag it from a library and just want to burn an hour or two. He’ll always give you a few great sentences, and he can pack some dense ideas in light prose. But there is no way I’d buy it at the $24.95 sticker price. It seems absurdly high for an 8×6 hardback that barely makes 200 pages. Like I noticed in his previous Farewell Summer, the publisher beefs up a fairly thin book with extra line-spacing, which probably annoys me more than it should.

The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed (review: 3.5/5)

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I enjoyed reading Moneyball last month, so I got the notion to explore some other baseball books. The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed is pretty good, and a surprisingly quick read. The author/ economist JC Bradbury runs Sabernomics, a baseball nerd blog that’s well worth your time.
As you might expect, Bradbury applies some statistical tools and good old-fashioned open-minded economic reasoning to various aspects of baseball. Topics for discussion range from why batters get hit by pitches in the AL more than the NL, the best ways to measure hitting and pitching, manager ejection theory, salary negotiations, whether MLB is a monopoly, etc. I have to say Bradbury does a pretty darn good job of breaking down the statistics and economics jargon he introduces. Marginal revenue product and regression analysis exist happily along with LOOGYs and the cup of coffee. The thought process behind the studies he’s developed is fascinating in its own right—sometimes it’s just cool to read how someone thought through an intricate project, accounting for variables and dealing with potential bias. I also give Bradbury bonus points for quoting from one of my favorite thinkers, Frederic Bastiat.

One last thing that amuses and delights me to no end: almost a full third of the book is dedicated to the most extensive back matter I’ve ever seen outside of purely academic texts. There’s an epilogue, acknowledgements, one two three four appendices, an endnotes section, a bibliography, and an index.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

I like books, and therefore tend to like books about books and the bookly experience. Enter Anne Fadiman‘s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. An excerpt from the first chapter from the book, “Marrying Libraries,” is available online.
Fadiman has a somewhat unique experience, growing up in a family that is pretty much insane when it comes to the written word (as evidenced by proofreading restaurant menus together, weekly quiz shows, keeping logs of book & newspaper errors, and so on), and marrying another booknut husband. All of the essays are couched in this experience. Despite her… interesting family, the undeniable pleasure of books like this is the experience of seeing myself. It’s like when you identify with a character in a movie, or when you read those silly descriptions about personality traits of your Zodiac symbol but you find yourself nodding your head, or just the simple joy of having a friend describe you accurately.

The essay that really got me was about compulsive proofreading. One of her editor’s daughters “manifested the gene at an early age by stopping at dammed-up streams during family hikes and removing all the dead leaves.” Oh, yes, that’s definitely me when I was a toddler. And I was still doing it when I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail this summer. Fadiman goes on, still talking about me in a roundabout way:

The proofreading temperament is part of a larger syndrome with several interrelated symptoms, one of which is the spotting mania. When my friend Brian Miller, also a copy editor, was a boy, he used to sit in the woods for long stretches, watching for subtle animal movements in the distance… Proofreaders tend to be good at distinguishing the anomalous figure—the rare butterfly, the precious seashell—from the ordinary ground, but unlike collectors, we wish to discard rather than hoard. Although not all of us are tidy, we savor certain cleaning tasks: removing the lint from the clothes dryer, skimming the drowned bee from the pool. My father’s most treasured possession is an enormous brass wastebasket. He is happiest when his desktop is empty and the basket is full. One of my brother’s first sentences, a psychologically brilliant piece of advice offered from his high chair one morning when my father came downstairs in a grouchy mood, was “Throw everything out, Daddy!”

Spotting, check. Dryer-lint cleaning, check. Throwing things away, check. Fadiman is singing my tune.

There’s another essay about sonnets and the struggle to write. In one passage, Fadiman looks over some of her sonnets and realizes that she “had mistaken for lyric genius what was in fact merely the genetic facility for verbal problem-solving that enabled everyone in my family to excel at crossword puzzles, anagrams, and Scrabble.” Been there!

The fifth chapter offers a disquisition on the care of books. Fadiman posits two schools of thought. There are the courtly lovers, who argue “a book’s physical self was sacrosanct, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller.” And then there are carnal lovers: “a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.” I used to be strictly courtly, but I’m loosening up a bit these days. Just a bit.

Some of my other favorites were a heavily-footnoted essay on plagiarism (quoting Robert Merton: “Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.”), and another one on the joys of reading aloud. So Fadiman is really brainy, but most of the book had me laughing, too. In an extended disquisition on reading catalogs, she mentions “although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money.” I’m sure that imagery will stick with me for a long time. It’s one of those books that leaves you smiling at the end. When I put it on my shelf, there’s that little tingle of joy knowing it was mine to take back down again. Sometime soon.

Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (review: 4/5)

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I finished this one a couple weeks ago, but never wrote anything. In Reading Comics, Douglas Wolk writes with an eye to the reader’s experience of comics. He avoids a lot of comics theory (“You already pretty much know what they are, and ‘pretty much’ is good enough”), focusing instead on loving criticism.
It was really good. Some of his criticism was lost on me simply because I didn’t know the comics he was writing about, but it was worth reading anyway. I don’t remember the book well enough to write a lot. Nevertheless, I wanted to make sure I shared some quotes I enjoyed:

  • “Anytime a French word comes into play in an English-language discussion, you can be sure there are some class dynamics going on.”
  • “The meta-pleasure of enjoying experiences that would repel most people is, effectively, the experience of being a bohemian or counterculturalist.”
  • “There’s a certain kind of rain that falls only in comics, a thick, persistent drizzle, much heavier than normal water, that bounces off whatever it hits, dripping from fedoras, running slowly down windowpanes and reflecting the doom in bad men’s hearts.” (aka eisenshpritz)
  • Following The Dark Knight Returns, “a sense of eschatology crept into superhero stories, as their battles became battles for the soul of modernity.”
  • “There are two kinds of horrors stories. One is matin?©e horror, in which some kind of monster or grotesquerie rages across a landscape of innocence until it’s finally destroyed and the natural order of things is restored. Its threat is neatly defined—it’s Frankenstein, a vampire, a werewolf, a plague of zombies, a serial killer in a mask; there are always specific rules for how it can be beaten. The pleasure of reading the story is the pleasure of seeing justice done and the formula cleanly executed.”

And that last one is broadly applicable to any genre. That’s why action movies and romantic comedies work. I like that idea of the pleasure of seeing it executed. Aside from any literary merits of the work, that is the reader’s experience. They generally know the expectations of the genre, the wonder comes from seeing how the author meets or betrays them.