Category: bookreviews

The Trouble with Physics (review: dnf)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I learned a lot from this book. But at this point, I have neither the time nor the brainpower to finish it off. The half that I read is quite good, though, so I’ll share a bit from that. The title of Lee Smolin‘s book foretells much: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next.
Smolin starts off with a an overview of science—what it is and ought to be, the greatest remaining puzzles in physics, what it means to truly solve them, the nature and power of theory, and a history of the major advances in physics since around the Renaissance. Smolin does a great job here. He really takes his time, assumes little, and has a clever way with analogies. Next comes the early development of string theory in the 70s and 80s, its rapid progress in the following decades, and current stagnation. Which brought to the part where he starts talking about branes and M-theory and super-symmetry and… I realized I would never make it. I would need a bit more focus and fewer compelling distractions tapping their foot impatiently in my To-Read queue.

Anyway, here’s a good riff from Smolin on the human side of science:

It seems to me more and more that career decisions hinge on character. Some people will happily jump on the next big thing, give it all they’ve got, and in this way make important contributions to fast-moving fields. Others just don’t have the temperament to do this. Some people need to think through everything very carefully, and this takes time, as they get easily confused. It’s not hard to feel superior to such people, until you remember that Einstein was one of them. In my experience, the truly shocking new ideas and innovations tend to come from such people. Still others—and I belong to this third group—just have to go their own way, and will flee fields for no better reason than that it offends them that people are joining in because it feels good to be on the winning side… Luckily for science, the contributions of the whole range of types are needed. Those who do good science, I’ve come to think, do so because they choose problems that are suited to them.

I’m pretty sure I’ll come back to this book maybe a couples months down the road. See also my post from last September with some stringy links.

The Starfish & the Spider (review: 3/5)

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The Starfish & the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations is another book along the lines of Wikinomics. This book has the typical anecdotes punctuated with bullet points that you’ll see in other business books. It’s breezy and well-paced. It covers the principles of decentralization (e.g. “when attached, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized,” or “it’s easy to mistake starfish for spiders,” and “an open system doesn’t have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system.”), and their implications for the business world. While this one isn’t nearly as tedious as Wikinomics, it’s also not as wide-ranging or historical. In this case, I think that’s a good thing.

Interaction of Color (review: 4.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

The Yale University Press recently reprinted an expanded version of Josef Albers‘ classic book Interaction of Color. Unlike many books about color, this one eschews most discussion of optics and wavelengths and the physics of light. It’s not about theory and systems.
Instead, this one is meant to be a very hands-on book—experiment and observation. Each small chapter is dedicated to a particular color concept, a sort of visual consciousness-raising, if you will. Though it only takes an hour or two to read the book and ponder the examples, actually following through with the projects takes hours and hours of cutting out paper samples and ceaselessly arranging and rearranging.

To offer one tiny quibble, the layout of the text
really threw me for a loop.
The sentences are arranged in such a way
that they don’t continue to the true margin
on the side of the page,
neither making a justified block of text
or a comfortable right-ragged edge.
I’m not sure of the reasoning
for this decision.
But it really made the whole thing harder to read.

That aside, it’s a fantastic book.

The Surrogates (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

There are a couple little perks that made me like this book right off the bat. The Surrogates is set in Atlanta. It was written by a local named Robert Venditti, and it’s published in nearby Marietta over at Top Shelf Productions. Cool. AND it’s a really cool story. I haven’t seen a lot of sci-fi comics, but this one makes up for the absence.
The Surrogates is set about 50 years from now. Technology has advanced such that humans can stay home safe and sound, while remotely controlling their electronic replacements, their surrogates, to take care of work… and play. Some folks don’t like it. So there’s some terrorism, some politics, and a good bit of gumshoe detective work. Luckily, Venditti’s writing doesn’t dwell too much on the heavyhanded dystopian riff, and the best meditative moments come out naturally in the characters’ conversations and interactions. Mixed between the chapters are Watchmen-like interludes, “primary documents” that help to flesh out the story, including sales brochures, editorials, news articles, and television transcripts.

I love Brett Weldele’s artwork in this book. Besides the sensitive work the the lettering, speech bubbles, and very spare sound effects, the coloring is especially good. It reminded me a bit of Dean Motter’s book, Batman: Nine Lives, with its restrained palette. One great set of panels show a crime scene inside a major industry lab. The lights have been tampered with, so the lab is drawn in a wash of a dark blue and grey, except for flashlight glare as the investigation goes on. A couple dozen panels later, the lights have gotten fixed, and the wash turns to a warm yellow. It’s a simple, but very cool effect. I read it all the way through the first time I started it. I predict that will happen again and again.

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It (review: 3.5/5)

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Reading Ben Yagoda‘s latest book is like having a good friend analyze every word that comes out of your mouth. But it’s not a book about Grammar Rules and Policies. I was relieved to find this sentence in the first dozen pages: “Ultimately, the issue of correctness just isn’t very interesting.”
When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech for Better and/or Worse is more of a progress report on our English language. Each chapter covers a part of speech: Adjective, Adverb, Article, Conjunction, Interjection, Noun, Preposition, Pronoun, Verb. Yagoda spends an enjoyable 30 pages on just a, an, and the. I think of it as sort of reverse dissection, where the language becomes more alive as you pick at it.

Yagoda is not a real stickler for rules, per se, but certainly has a strong sense of taste. More than that, he shows a real appreciation for how we actually use our words. He pulls from a number of resources: famous authors, The New Yorker (particularly the Harold Ross era), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Bible, sports television, a variety of dictionaries & style guides both old and new, popular music, advertising, film, etc. I love the variety of research material. One chapter begins, “Any unified theory of interjections—the words that, all by themselves, express reactions or emotions or serve other purposes in discourse—would have to start, like much else, with The Simpsons.”

Some miscellaneous trivia I enjoyed:

  • The “&” symbol comes from the ligature of letters e and t in the Latin word “et” (“and”). That’s not a huge surprise. But as recently as the 1800s, & was also the 27th letter of the alphabet!

    • When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself], ‘and’.” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.”

  • The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer coined at least 55 –age words, such as “agreeage, kissage, and weirdage.” Who knew there was one source for all that appendagage?
  • Quoting some good advice from C.S. Lewis: “Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—they should diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise).”
  • The word ye comes from a misprinting of the word ?æe. The þ character is called thorn, and used for th sounds. Back in the day, when printers typically didn’t always have the sorts for every symbol, “it was usually replaced by putting the letters t and h together, but sometimes y was used because it was felt to look similar.”

Great book. I’ve really had fantastic luck with my recent readings.

Dreaming in Code (review: 4.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

“Software is a heap of trouble”. That’s the abridged version of this book.
You’ll find the full story in Scott Rosenberg‘s fantastic Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. One part of the tale follows the progress of the Open Source Applications Foundation project called Chandler; the other wends back through the history of computer science and software development. The story takes a good chunk of paper, around 350 pages + notes. None of it is terribly technical.

Chandler started with Mitch Kapor (known for Lotus 1-2-3, among other things) and the dream of the ultimate personal information organizer. E-mail, scheduling, calendars, notes, workgroup sharing & more, all in one cohesive and flexible system. In light of Rosenberg’s Law and its corollary (“Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And the only software that’s worth making is software that does something new.”), Chandler has proven a daunting task. It’s been over 4 years since Rosenberg started observing the OSAF team. As of this writing, Chandler is currently still only in version 0.7alpha4.

That creeping glacier of code raises the question: is it the team or just the nature of the job? Probably both. Rosenberg uses the hiccups and foibles of the OSAF team to explore some of the recurring issues of software development: the inherent mental difficulty of abstraction on a mass scale, the programmer’s tendency to “glance at existing code and declare authoritatively that they could do it themselves, faster, easier, and better,” the mythical man month, attempting progress without planning, the discouraging truth of Hofstadter’s Law, and the need to reinvent the wheel (and fire and stonecutting and agriculture, etc.). Luckily, Rosenberg doesn’t pose the Chandler team so much as the butt of the joke but the foil for the argument: software is hard.

One interesting thread in this book is the idea of programming as creative writing. Quoting Richard Gabriel:

We should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artisits… What do people do when they’re being trained, for example, to get a master of fine arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don’t look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don’t look at their design. You don’t study the lives of great software designers. So you don’t study the literature of the thing you’re trying to build.

The software industry doesn’t have a strong sense of history. Part of that lack is cultural—many just don’t care that much—and part of that is a necessary commercial evil whereby code is protected to protect profits. But I love that idea of the literature of software, the somewhat hidden heritage. This brings to mind the idea of artist qua collector and the idea of amassing influence. But for better or worse, there’s already way too much to learn just to keep up with the present. So the programmers plug on “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” if you’ll pardon the drama.

A Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ 4 Comments

The subtitle says it all, really: For Every Guy Who Wants to Be One/For Every Girl Who Wants to Build One. If you’ve ever been confused or frustrated by a female, you’ll probably find some help here. I was surprised by how much I liked this one. Felicity Huffman and Patricia Wolff managed to put together a book that’s both informative and legitimately hilarious. I can’t think of very many books that I’ve dog-eared more than this one. There are great lines throughout. For example…

  • A woman’s emotional checklist reads more like a Russian novel.
  • Love up her body the way you find it, or find a body that you can love up.
  • Any flat surface where people might perch, she will want to ‘pillowize’.
  • Can we please discuss that apr?®s-pee shaking?
  • The thing you do isn’t only the thing you do; it represents something else.
  • Guys seems able to carry a bigger load of irritants than we can… The BF shrugs, shakes his head, and files it under ‘Oh Well,’ that big category made up of a lot of manila folders, all of which are bulging and ripping at the seams.

The whole thing is written in this conversational tone, and it’s all pretty straightforward. I daresay females could learn a good bit as well. The authors don’t claim to have all the answers, and they don’t make a lot of apologies either. The whole book seems to square with real life. I had plenty of head-nodding, plenty of Aha! moments, and quite a bit of fun. Read this!

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (review: 2.5/5)

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Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything was pretty much a disappointment. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it bad. I was just hoping for a less history and a more speculation. Unfortunately, if you’ve been paying a moderate amount of attention to the internet/ social software/ business world for the past few years, you won’t find much new information.
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams have done a good job of rounding up the big trends, their so-called Principles of Wikinomics: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Much of the work is a sort of biography of these paradigms and the companies & products that embody them. You probably know their names: Linux, Wikipedia, Google, Flickr, IBM, BMW, Best Buy, etc.

Each chapter reviews a new trend, fleshes out the history and summarizes by way of canned, italicized guidelines for business. I wish I hadn’t returned the book to the library already or I’d quote a few. Anyway, they also mix in a few Trendwatching-like neologisms, like “Ideagoras” and “New Alexandrians”. By far the most intriguing part of the book was Chapter 9, discussing the “wiki workplace.” Perhaps that’s because the idea is still the most nebulous and little-tested: “We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm” That’ll be an interesting process to see over the next few years. I think free agent/ consultant/ collaborative culture will become more and more popular.

The Little Book of Plagiarism (review: 3.5/5)

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Richard Posner is an appellate judge and also a lecturer at the University of Chicago. In The Little Book of Plagiarism gives a quick 100-page tour of the historical and legal aspects of an issue that was more complicated than I thought: plagiarism. Coming from the legal world, there’s plenty of critical wordplay here, defining and refining what exactly plagiarism is and how it relates to copyright infringement, in particular.
The definition that Posner works towards in the first half of the book is most simply described as “fraudulent copying,” which he supposes isn’t always a legal misstep (or shouldn’t always be, anyway). But it’s certainly a grievous ethical lapse. One interesting aspect of plagiarism that I hadn’t thought about is trying to suss out exactly who the “victim” is. With copyright violations, the victim is simply the author whose words were stolen and who lost recognition for or control their work. With plagiarism, the works of competing, legitimate authors are put at a disadvantage, and the reader is also misled. The plagiarist gets an unfair leg up on the competition and fools the audience.

A couple other items of note are Posner’s tangential comments on universities and scholarship: “Scholars are self-selected into an activity that requires them to write, although not to write well (which means, however, that good writing is not highly valued in most scholarly fields).” Just like any other humans, it’s plausible that some professors don’t particularly worry about writing really, really well. I hadn’t thought about that before, though I’ve certainly read my share of bad scholarly writing. (And written it as well, I’m sure… but I tried).

History offers us a few obvious examples of flagrant, unapologetic borrowers: Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr., T.S. Eliot, etc. Posner’s take on the issue: “We need to distinguish between “originality” and “creativity,” stripping the former of the normative overtones that rightly attend the latter.” The source material may be old, but it’s what you can do with it that counts. There’s an object lesson here, I think. One that relieves a bit of the creative’s burden. You don’t have to be the first, just do it well.

How to Walk in High Heels (review: 1.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

It’s kind of interesting to read books from left field every now and then. How to Walk in High Heels: The Girls Guide to Everything is a teach-all book for ladies (of a certain mindset), complete with liberal doses of pink, hip inked illustrations, and the omnipresent heel. I realize I’m not the target audience, but I still thought it was pretty bad. Well, I have to give it credit for not taking itself too seriously. There is plenty of sarcastic humor to be found, but the advice was too self-consciously prissy and fashionable for my liking.

The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures (review: 2.5/5)

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Louis Theroux‘s debut in publishing has him retreading the ground he covered in the days of his BBC documentaries. In The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures he tracks down his old subjects and finds out what they’ve been doing since he last spoke with them. Theroux’s travels place him in paranoid anti-government communes, porn studios, UFO conventions, white supremacist parades, self-help seminars, and more humdrum locales like ghettos and brothels.
Part of the awkwardness of this book, and it seems clear that Theroux wrestled with this, is that he is sometimes unsure of his own role—whether he’s doing ethnography by immersion or straight, dispassionate journalism. The struggle comes from his work to maintain relationships that he obviously appreciates (despite their quirks and foibles, his subjects are just human), but maintaining a healthy skepticism. It’s a tough balance of challenging his interviewees and basically trying not to piss them off.

I was a bit surprised to find this book is at its best within its more subjective and personal moments. I expected to be more entertained by the sheer idiocy of white supremacist ideologues or what a headcase Ike Turner is, but what I really liked was Theroux’s reflection on his own precarious balance of friendship—giving comfort and company to these self-appointed outcasts—with the more professional interests of getting a good story and writing a good book. In the end, what really comes out is not a just a study of these subcultures, but what it is like to actually know them, insofar as an outsider can.

Curses (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

I lucked out again. Curses is a delightful collection of comics by Kevin Huizenga. This collection fits in the “slice of life” category, but mixed with the occasional bout of the surreal, and thankfully free from most the angst and ennui that crept in some other comics I’ve read recently. My favorite of the stories was “Jeepers Jacobs,” with a sketch about a golfing theology professor who writes about Hell. A close second is “Not Sleeping Together,” about passing the time with one you love.
I love the artwork—Huizenga draws these clean, spare lines that still feel kind of loose and earthy, somehow. There’s some pretty incredible suburban skylines, even managing to make suburbia look kind of interesting. But the art is only half the battle, and the pictures and the words really work so well together here. I think part of it is Huizenga’s willingness to put a lot of text in his panels when he needs to. There’s no timidity about using a lot of block narration. And the silent panels are able carry their own weight.

I guess the best thing I can say is that I’d want to write comics like this. Well done!

Bonus: A few days ago Kevin Huizenga did a brief interview with Publisher’s Weekly.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

This book reminded me how much I love science fiction. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which, per Cory Doctorow‘s tradition, you can download for free) takes place in a transhuman future. Poverty, scarcity, and sickness have been pretty much eliminated. Our hapless narrator-hero, Julius, has been killed (again) and his rivals are trying to take over one of his pet projects where he works at Disneyland. He fights back with the help of tenuous friendships and ill-formed plans, and it’s pretty much wonderful the whole way through.
One of the best parts about great science fiction (and I think this one counts) is just taking a few ideas and seeing where they lead, a sort of narrative thought experiment. Luckily Doctorow doesn’t get too explicitly philisophical, but there is some great hypothesis-spinning daydream material here. What if we were all networked, able to be really, individually connected to each and every other person? How does society recalibrate value where material scarcity no longer exists? If you could freeze your life for 500 or 10,000 years and wake up later, well… what would that be like? What’s the effect on human relationships? All this, and more. Go read it.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (review: 3.5/5)

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I don’t know how Chuck Klosterman can get away with it. In his recent book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, he presents some of the most scattered, whimsical, subjective, and infuriatingly delightful musings on pop culture. The collected essays cover the gamut, jumping from the Lakers/Celtics rivalry, Pamela Anderson, the life of a Van Halen tribute band, and one on the classic afternoon television show of my generation, Saved by the Bell, and more.
So we’ve got 200 pages of chatty memoir and Gen X riffing. It’s such a good balance of over-the-top opinion and declaration (e.g. “The desire to be cool is‚Äîultimately‚Äîthe desire to be rescued” or, “Clearly, video technology cages imagination”) that doesn’t so much convince but overwhelms with torrential amusement. Despite the thorough, detailed pop culture analyses, what Klosterman really does well is the personal side of things. Maybe that’s my human-ness speaking, but his writing about his own experiences is when his stories really pick up, whether it’s being fired from coaching Little League or discovering a bit of Life’s Meaning from playing the Sims videogame. If only there were more of it.

Letter to a Christian Nation (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Atheism seems to have caught a little buzz in recent years, I’m not sure how. There was that unfortunate survey, and books by Dawkins and others made a little splash, and there’s the cover story on a recent issue of Wired magazine, in particular. Sam Harris’ extended essay, Letter to a Christian Nation, joins the crowd with a missive to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.”
Harris has some really great moments in this book, and it’s a pretty compelling read. He starts with a heavy does of scripture, analyzing the Christian moral paradigm, delighting in the Bible’s weaknesses and cherry-picking the incriminating and contradictory parts. I’m certainly (absolutely) not a Bible scholar, but I think he’s a bit too reliant on quoting from the Old Testament, where Big Bad God and the harshness and shortcomings of ancient civilizational mores are far too easy to pick on. You have to keep in mind that he’s targeting the literalists more so than religious liberals and moderates. But there’s also some interesting sociological examination of religion: “Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/ out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.”

I think he’s effective when he’s talking about the practical, day-to-day implications of religion more so than his examination of the particulars of doctrine. He has a nice section on the ethics of life, discussing abortion, cloning, and biomedical research. And of course, there’s an obligatory passage on evolution and intelligent design. Here’s one line that really got me: “The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it’s intellectual honesty.”

The last section is a gloomy look to mankind’s future on an increasingly religious, conflict-ridden planet.

It is easy, of course, for the representatives of the major religions to occasionally meet and agree that there should be peace on earth, or that compassion is the common thread that unites all the world’s faiths. But there is no escaping the fact that a person’s religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like “compassion.”

Practically, is there really room for tolerance? He wraps up with a big, brilliant question, “How can interfaith dialogue, even at the highest level, reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible and, in principle, immune to revision?” The stakes are indeed very high.

50 Things Every Young Gentleman Should Know (review: 3/5)

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John Bridges and Bryan Curtis offer a succinct guidebook targeted towards the young and clueless: 50 Things Every Young Gentleman Should Know: What to Do, When to Do It, and Why. It’s certainly a tidy little volume, with 200 pages of guidelines in an almost-pocketable 5×8 inch format. It covers the basics from saying “please” and “thank you,” proper silverware & napkin management, asking permission, giving compliments, tying a tie, accepting bad gifts, opening the door for people, and it even covers topics like “winning well.” Each section comes with a tidy format:

  1. A description of the situation
  2. You Do
  3. You Don’t
  4. Why

If I have any complaint, it is only that the book is a little boring. The book reads like it was aimed for those perhaps 12‚Äì16 years old, but most of the humor fell a bit flat. And I’m not sure why a middle-schooler would be reading an etiquette book, anyway. But those who do find it will hopefully learn a little something. It only takes maybe a half hour to get through it, so never hurts to have a little refresher on what you should have learned already.

Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (review: 3/5)

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I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. I’m not really sure how you review something like this, so I’ll just say it’s a cool, encyclopedic book. Bruce Sterling calls it a “dizzyingly comprehensive chunk of treeware,” which sounds about right. Worldchanging is the meatworld reference book associated with the collaborative Worldchanging website.
Inside, you’ll find short articles on about a million green-related topics. Let’s see… forestry, women’s rights, microfinance, product design, DIY, bioplastics, sustainable ranching, social entrepreneurship, climate change, etc. It is a very pretty book: full-color throughout, nicely designed on heavy paper, and with lots of photos (though woefully short of cool, original infographics). The obvious problem is inherent to an encyclopedia, where no topic is covered in depth, and no entry can be as refined or nuanced as it ought to be (e.g., only 7 pages on “Understanding Trade”). It’s an honest start, and there’s some inspiration to be found if you’re already inclined.

Just for Fun (review: 3/5)

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Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and eventually one of the godfathers of open-source software development, tells all in Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. I don’t care much for biography, but this one did pretty well for itself. It starts off with the story of young Linus, growing up playing on his grandfather’s computer–and never really stopping. The subsequent years are a typical nerd routine of sleeping, eating, and computing away in a dark room. He developed Linux as a side project, an exercise in operating system development and exploration in low-level PC hardware. The first public release was a tentative version 0.01 that managed to catch the interest of a couple other folks involved in that geek niche.
And from there Linux just kept growing and growing, with its steadily improving quality and open-ness as its only real advertising. It’s that “accidental” aspect that makes it so interesting–Torvalds didn’t really set out to start an empire, and doesn’t really seem to want one now, either. Torvalds on Bill Gates:

I’m completely uninterested in the thing that he’s he best in the world at. And he’s not interested in the thing that maybe I’m the best in the world at. I couldn’t give him advice in business and he couldn’t give me advice in technology.

I like this bit on the freedom that open entails, freedom from mega-personalities, control freaks, and their whims:

The point about open source has never been that I’m more accessible than anybody else. It’s never been that I’m more open to other people’s suggestions… the issues is that even if I’m the blackest demon from Hell, even if I’m outright evil, people can choose to ignore me because they can just do the stuff themselves. It’s not about me being open, it’s about them have the power to ignore me. That’s important.

Near the end, there are a couple of philosophical chapters on intellectual property, control, and some industry prognostication. I like this gem from the intellectual property section: “The patent system of today is basically a Cold War with IP instead of nukes.” Most of the book isn’t that dogmatic, but just as enjoyable.

Take a Nap! Change Your Life (review: 3.5/5)

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My grandfather can fall asleep in about 12 seconds. It’s amazing to watch, and he just might be on to something big. Take a Nap! purports to be “The scientific plan to make you smarter, healthier, more productive”.1 Sara Mednick starts off with some nap advocacy, the usual bit about how we run ourselves into the ground with self-destructive habits, etc. The best part falls in the next section dedicated to the science of sleep, which I think is pretty fascinating.
I first started getting interested in sleep as means-to-dubious-ends when I stumbled on Steve Pavlina’s journey into polyphasic sleep and further reading into the Uberman sleep schedule. I was hoping for a ringing endorsement of these fringe adventures, but sadly, Mednick is not a big fan.

Mednick walks us through the stages of sleep, starting from mild alpha waves, to that embarrassing twitching when you first go under, to transitional stage 1 sleep, the recurring soup of light stage 2 sleep, then to the deep slow wave sleep of stages 3 and 4, and onward to that REM where so much magic happens. The cool thing is that sleep research indicates that each of these stages has unique benefits to your health. And when you know that, you can learn to calibrate your sleep to get what you want. And we all love to get what we want.

If you take a look at the cover of the book, you’ll see a cool little nap planning wheel. It’s actually a plastic disc that you can spin around according to when you woke up that day, and that will let you customize your napping for the results you have in mind. There’s even a recipe for the “perfect nap”. Of course, self-improvement takes some work. Mednick has a program to walk you through some self-assessment you can do over a couple weeks, which of course I didn’t do. But I learned a lot from reading through it.

All in all, it was actually was a pretty good book. I nap on the couch2 at work every day, but never really put much systematic thought into it. At the least, this book has been a good lesson in self-awareness. I love the idea that we can learn about these physiological mysteries and apply our knowledge to everyday demands. Every now and then, science really comes through for us.

—
1. Those with good taste in music will be reminded of Radiohead’s tune, “Fitter, Happier” (lyrics).
2. We used to have this incredible cot that would instantly put me to sleep. Alas, the cot was taken away in order to keep things from looking too tacky. We have to keep up appearances.