The new book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes looks like it could be a good one. More at MSNBC.
Category: books
The Devil in the White City (review: dnf)
It hurts so much when you want a book to be fantastic, but it’s not. Before I go there, I’ll mention a couple saving graces for The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. There’s a great quote from one of the main characters, architect Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
And there’s a cool literary connection. The book takes place during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The main grounds were known as the “White City” for the use of pale stucco on the buildings, and the first widespread use of streetlights. If you’ll recall, there are a bunch of flashback narratives in Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth that also take place during the Chicago exposition. So it was cool to read Devil with some of the sense of wonder and awe and hardship in Chris Ware‘s comic.
I couldn’t finish the book, though.
I hate it when authors don’t trust the story or trust the audience to follow along without prodding. One example I’ll never forget is in the film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Evil armies are on the march, folks are going to take refuge in Helm’s Deep. Gandalf has to run an errand, but he says to Aragorn, “Look to my coming, at first light, on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the East.“
And what do you know, a couple dozen scenes later, evil is at the door and prospects are bleak. But then Aragorn looks at a window with the morning sun shining in, and you get this ham-handed, idiotic Gandalf voiceover… “Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the East.” Uggghhh. Easily one of the worst parts of the whole trilogy. No trust in the audience to remember a great line, no subtlety.
In that vein, Devil author Erik Larson (no relation) does two things that drove me nuts. For one, he subdivides chapters into even smaller chunks. That doesn’t normally bother so much, but his mini-sections get as small as a paragraph or two, or even a lone sentence. Too choppy. The second nuisance—and this is what killed me—is the frequent use of a teaser phrase at the ends of these mini-sections.
- Why anyone would even want a soundproof vault was a question that apparently did not occur to him.
- But even he did not, and could not, grasp what truly lay ahead.
- But again, that was later.
- It was one more sign of a gathering panic.
- Which terrified her.
- Hays grew suspicious and watched Mudgett closely—albeit not closely enough.
Come on. The book’s jacket tells me there’s a serial killer in there. Foreboding is already built-in, no need to pile it on.
Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture (review: 2/5)
I heard about Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture in Believer Magazine a while back. It’s funny at times, with some good illustrations. I enjoyed being able to point to parts of the emo taxonomy and say “I know someone like that… and that guy… and that one…” And for the emo consumer, there’s a pretty good round-up of what you should be listening to, where you should buy your clothes, etc. The writing is really chatty, though, and I couldn’t help but feel that they were stretching to make a target word count.
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (review:3.5/5)
I’m prone to reading phases, veering off on thematic streaks. Do other people do this? For example, in the past year I read through the Edward Tufte corpus pretty much back-to-back (reviewed Beautiful Evidence and Envisioning Information), all but one of Steven Johnson’s (reviewed The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You), the Scott McCloud comics trilogy (Understanding Comics, Making Comics, Reinventing Comics), etc. I’ve also had a religion/science kick and a language/grammar phase within the past year.
So after wrapping up Michael Lewis‘ The Blind Side, this weekend I finished his earlier book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The question at hand: “What is the most efficient way to spend money on baseball players?”
The central character is the hands-on Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane. His story—that of the gifted athlete adored by scouts who crumbles in the majors—sours him on old-school baseball scouting and management. Beane discards baseball’s long heritage of subjectivity and gut instinct (e.g. “the good face“), and tries the objective, stat-crunching approach.
Winding in and out of this story, Lewis explores the work of baseball writer Bill James, the roots of the Society for American Baseball Research, and touches on sabermetrics. If anything, I wish there were more numbers in this book. I would have loved to dig in to some tables and really follow the statistical arguments. But at its heart, Lewis’ book is not a peer-reviewed research article, but a story. A pretty good one.
And as a tangential bonus, Lewis gives an little off-hand bit of writing wisdom:
“If you write well enough about a single subject, even a subject seemingly as trivial as baseball statistics, you needn’t write about anything else.”
Robert Jordan died a couple weeks ago, which confirmed suspicions that he never was going to wrap up the Wheel of Time saga. But apparently his family knows the details of the 12th and final book, A Memory of Light, so we just might get some posthumous closure one of these days.
The letters of Flannery O’Connor and Betty Hester
Emory University held a Flannery O’Connor celebration this week. The highlight was the first public exhibition of the nearly 300 letters between Flannery O’Connor and Betty Hester, which had been under seal for the past 20 years. Brenda Bynum gave a dramatic reading of O’Connor’s letters. I was late for it, unfortunately, but what I saw was fantastic. In addition, lots of good material from her life is on display at Woodruff Library. Letters, notes, photographs, and things like her complaints about the cover chosen for A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I love it when schools do things well.
Bonus: Georgia Public Broadcasting had a show about O’Connor in August. And earlier this year NPR talked with Steve Enniss, the director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, about the O’Connor–Hester relationship.
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (review: dnf)
I love the cover of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures: Stories. That’s what made me pick it up, and that’s what I’ll remember best about this book. As for the contents, I pushed beyond the first couple of awkward and disappointing pages, enjoyed myself off and on past the half-way point, and then just didn’t want to read it anymore. The stories were kind of interesting, the writing wasn’t.
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (review: 4/5)
I have never cared that much about football. Playing can be a blast, but I never watch it and I have only a vague sense of when the college & pro seasons begin. So, I was surprised that I enjoyed this book so much. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game has a couple of stories going on. One, it’s about the evolution of football. And it’s also about race and class in America.
Michael Lewis starts with the evolution of the NFL strategy and the market for players. The NFL has roots as a rushing game, but later changes in official rules and informal bias led to the rise of passing and the notable West Coast offense. The new passing offense of the NFL befuddled some observers—quarterbacks thought to be below-average were able to perform well beyond expectations. And great quarterbacks, even better. It was the system, with all the right parts in place, that made it all work.
With passing as the preeminent strategy, you need premium quarterbacks. And with high-value quarterbacks, the opposition fields players (e.g. Lawrence Taylor) who want to destroy those quarterbacks. Which means that the formerly hum-drum role of left tackle becomes essential, as the protector of the quarterback’s blind side. And the demand in the NFL trickles down through college and into the high school level.
Enter Michael Oher, one of the top left tackle prospects in years. Explosive, nimble, flexible. Oh, and also 6’6″ and 322lbs. But he could have been stereotypical fall-out of inner city neglect. He was one of 13 kids with no father raised by a junkie mother in a blighted, predominantly black area of Memphis. Not good, all too common. But, through happenstance he got connected with a white family with money, social connections, high expectations, and a deep, abiding love—a social version of the West Coast offense. A potential statistic becomes a potential star.
The Book on the Bookshelf (review: 4/5)
The Book on the Bookshelf is a book about books… and shelving. If that doesn’t catch your attention, then there’s no hope. I’ve lost you already.
It’s a study of part of our relationship with books, the ways we created, studied, shared, and stored them. Henry Petroski touches on developments in bookbinding, the evolution of outward-facing spines, and the history chained books, among other things.
I love the research that Petroski did. In many of the chapters scrutinizes old photographs, architecture, and especially the illustrations that can be found in old books—Renaissance scholars in their studies, Medieval monks in their libraries, etc.. How big are the books? How are they bound? How are they physically organized? How do they lay? A book is both a container of information and itself a piece of historical evidence. Pretty cool.
Brian Dettmer dissects books, as you can see in this gallery and another gallery. Pretty cool work. The technique is all scalpels and tweezers, only removing and digging deeper, never re-arranging. [via deeplinking]
The 4 Hour Workweek (review: 3/5)
Good book. I posted a while ago about my initial doubts and then how excited I became about this book as I began to read it. It all turned out fairly well, though I think the glow is gone.
Despite the hokey title, 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich seems to be pretty well grounded. It isn’t so much about the nuts and bolts of financial managment—you won’t find a lot of financial info about IRAs or 529 plans or whatever. It’s more about what author Tim Ferriss calls lifestyle design. Here’s how it boils down:
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Find ways to minimize interruptions and maximize time for what you want.
Don’t stay in a crappy job.
Don’t wait to retire—take mini-retirements along the way.
Start a business selling products online.
Outsource or automate most of the business.
Use currency arbitrage to live well elsewhere.
The business side all sounds easy enough—and he lays out the steps pretty clearly—but as with most of these schemes, the magic doesn’t happen until you… y’know… actually do the work. The sections on respecting and maximizing your productive time are solid, though. Those are the parts that got me the most excited, and probably the most worth re-visiting.
If I have one reservation, it’s Ferriss’ nonchalance about lying. It has to be at least a half-dozen times that he suggests prevaricating to some degree, whether it’s used to avoid interruptions, to work from home or elsewhere, or to take some other step towards the long-term goal in lifestyle design. I don’t mean to taint his character—I don’t think he’s dishonest—but to someone like me who prefers to just shoot straight, it seems like careless advice.
You can now buy the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List in one motherlode from Amazon.
Galileo’s sunspot illustrations
Back in the summer of 1612, Galileo did a series of daily observations of the sun. His illustrations were reproduced in his Letters on Sunspots of 1613. The work, part of an ongoing scientific battle with Christoph Scheiner, settled a lot of the contemporary debate on sunspots, killing the idea that the sun had minor satellites and proving our universe just a bit more imperfect.
My weekend project: I took those 35 drawings and put them into a big mosaic of sunspots.1 Sort of a comic strip approach. Not as dynamic as a movie, but then again I can’t frame a movie and mount it on my wall. If you’re so inclined, I also have a giant sunspot mosaic PDF to share with you—20 inches on a side. I had a ton of fun with this thing.
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1. The original scans came from the rare book collection of Owen Gingerich via The Galileo Project. Dr. Gingerich was also kind enough to spare a few minutes on the telephone. Great guy.
Cosmopolis (review: 1/5)
The only other book by Don DeLillo that I’ve read is White Noise, which I thought was rather fantastic. Cosmopolis, on the other hand, I didn’t like very much at all. From the review in the Guardian: “Overall, there’s a sense of gridlock. Which is apt thematically, but tough on the reader.” Have to agree.
In Believer Magazine, The Official Guide to Official Handbooks: The Rich Legacy of Putting Others in Their Cultural Place:
Americans love to believe that with the right wardrobe and vocabulary, anyone can become anything. We also love the righteousness and special insight that come with being an outsider, from being turned away from the clubs that matter. People donÄôt make their mark by writing books about how swimmingly they fit in at boarding school, or about how their blue-blooded family isnÄôt stocked with alcoholic lunatics. The Official Preppy Handbook (1980), along with lesser followers like The Official Slacker Handbook (1994) and The Hipster Handbook (2002), capitalizes on our ambivalence about exclusivity.
Seven Types of Ambiguity (review: 3.5/5)
Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is a rolling, interminable voyage through a literary version of modern life. Long, but worth seeing it through. The story is told from seven points of view, events mainly surrounding a character named Simon, who, depressed and still obsessed with a college ex-sweetheart, kidnaps her child while absently maintaining a lop-sided relationship with a hooker who’s been servicing the ex-sweetheart’s current husband for the past two years. Et cetera. But for all the antics, it isn’t soap opera. It’s built from a slow, discursive, minutely detailed remembrance. There are also extended tangents into topics like health care, poetry, and the science of blackjack.
A brief interview with William Gibson. Not a lot of new material, but I love this: “IÄôm a very pro-art kind of guy, but IÄôm not that visually literate. My inner redneck looks at something and says, ‘Oh, thatÄôs so cool.'”
There’s an Amazon interview with Douglas Wolk about his new book, Reading Comics, and another recent interview with Newsarama.
Octavo publishes old, significant books in digital form. I love me some rare books.
The Plot: The Secret Story of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (review:3/5)
A couple weeks ago I flipped through The Plot: The Secret Story of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the last graphic novel that Will Eisner created. This one covers a curious bit of history that I never knew. The topic of Eisner’s book is another book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a forgery, a book created ex nihilo and printed to promote antisemitic values. Eisner presents a historical account of its origins. Eisner’s artwork was steady and lively, not too different from any of his other work (but that’s not a bad thing). The story itself isn’t very dramatic or moving, but the facts are still compelling. Perhaps the best part of this book is that it exists. Yes, it’s wonderful to root out antisemitism, but mostly, I just thought it was refreshing to see a non-fiction graphic novel that isn’t a memoir of some sort.
Mark Larson 