Tag: bookreviews

Travels with Herodotus (review: 3.5/5)

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travels with herodotus
“If reason ruled the world, would history even exist?”

On his first trip outside of Poland, an editor gave Ryszard Kapuściński a copy of Herodotus‘ The Histories (which I’ve never read or read much about, besides this recent New Yorker article). The book became his off-and-on companion for the rest of his career in journalism. Kapuściński re-narrates Herodotus journeys talking all the while about what it is to travel, to know the world, to try to learn and understand it all.

The book makes for a scattered memoir, but the sections about Herodotus’ work are pretty good. I really liked his way of humanizing all these long-dead people:

What sort of child is Herodotus?… Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

and later:

I imagined him approaching me as I stood at the edge of the sea, putting down his cane, shaking the sand out of his sandals, and falling at once into conversation. He was probably one of those chatterboxes who prey upon helpless listeners, who must have them, who indeed wither and cannot live without them; one of those unwearying and perpetually excited intermediaries, who see something, hear something, and must immediately pass it on to others, constitutionally incapable of keeping things even briefly to themselves.

And again, in writing about Xerxes after he flees the battle of Thermopylae:

And flee he does, abandoning the theater of war before the war’s end. He returns to Susa. He is thirty-something years old. He will be king of the Persians for another fifteen years, during which time he will occupy himself with expanding his palace in Persepolis. Perhaps he felt internally spent? Perhaps he suffered from depression? In any event, insofar as the world was concerned, he disappeared. The dreams of might, of ruling over everything and everyone, faded away.

Kapuściński went to some rough places (e.g. Maoist China, the heart of Africa at mid-century, etc.). Parallel to Herodotus, he has the occasional wondering digression into modern political absurdities. Here’s a bit about dictators and mobs and ruling over a populace without focus:

It is an interesting subject: superfluous people in the service of brute power… Their neighborhoods are populated in large part by an unformed, fluid element, lacking precise classification, without position, place or purpose. At any moment and for whatever reason, these people, to whom no one past attention, whom no one needs, can form into a crowd, a throng, a mob, which has an opinion about everything, has time for everything, and would like to participate in something, mean something.

All dictatorships take advantage of this idle magma. They don’t even need to maintain an expensive army of full-time policemen. It suffices to reach out to these people searching for some significance in life. Give them the sense that they can be of use, that someone is counting on them for something, that they have been noticed, that they have a purpose.

Yes we can? Then again, power makes for paranoia (interesting parallels here with “Tales of the Tyrant“):

What animated Xerxes: he wanted to have everything. No one opposed him, because one would have had to pay with one’s head for doing so. But in such an atmosphere of acquiescence, it takes only one dissenting voice for the ruler to feel anxiety, to hesitate.

There’s a lot to like here. I ended up skimming most of Kapuściński’s reminiscing, but it all moves pretty quickly and the Herodotus sections are worth it.

The New Kings of Nonfiction (review: 3/5)

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new kings of nonfiction
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:

I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one thing it would’ve made titling this collection a lot easier. Sometimes people use the phrase “literary nonfictioni” for work like this, but I’m a snob when it comes to that phrase. I think it’s for losers. It’s pretentious, for one thing, and it’s a bore. Which is to say, it’s exactly the opposite of the writing it’s trying to describe. Calling a piece of writing “literary nonfiction” is like daring you to read it.

Not only is it a pretty good collection, but almost all of them are available online, in their entirety. Someone is listening to my prayers. My comments on each, roughly listed from Must Read to Don’t Bother…

“Losing the War” is easily my favorite work in the book (made obvious by the dog-ears). And I tend to have severe World War II nausea, so I was surprised to like it so much. Lee Sandlin explores the “collective anxiety attack” of the war, the impressions of the war that Americans got through the weak, cheerful reporting from the frontlines, and how we remember and how we forget. Highly recommended.

In one of the better tales in the book, Michael Lewis wrote about “Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities.” Lebed, at 15 years old, was called out by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock market manipulation and doesn’t seem very much phased by it. Fun story.

Jack Hitt‘s “Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit” is another good one that covers ballooning litigation over the Stringfellow Acid Pit, a local dumping ground made to spur business. Naturally, with a name like that, you’re going to end up with a lawsuit. This one has 4,000 plaintiffs and doesn’t look to end anytime soon. Recommended.

Susan Orlean profiles a ten-year-old in “The American Man, Age Ten.” Interesting voice in this one.

Michael Pollan bought a cow and writes about its journey from birth to beef in “Power Steer.” And he touches on how our food chain all interconnects and the twin scourges of oil and cheap corn.

Though I’m not much for card games, I did like James McManus‘ story in “Fortune’s Smile.” McManus learns the ins and outs of no-limit hold’em and enters the World Series of Poker, and walks out with $250,000. A lot of the lingo flew over my head, but the spirit is right and the story is good.

“Tales of the Tyrant” is Mark Bowden‘s profile of Saddam Hussein. The scale of the vanity and self-delusion are incredible. It makes the guy a lot more human and a lot more disgusting. Pretty good read.

“Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy” is Chuck Klosterman‘s profile of Val Kilmer. I’d recommend it, keeping in mind what Ira Glass says about Klosterman in the introduction: When Klosterman does reporting, the superstructure of ideas and the aggressiveness with which he states those ideas are a big part of what makes the stories stand out.”

“Shapinsky’s Karma” [excerpt] by Lawrence Weschler follows an improbably cheerful, persistent Indian man who has found his calling in promoting the artwork of Harold Shapinksy, an undiscovered peer of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others, who is in his 80s at the time.

Bill Buford reports on hanging out with a bunch of rowdy Manchester United loyalists in “Among the Thugs.” It takes a while to warm up, but the later bits about group psychology and inevitable soccer mob violence are good (and downright scary).

“Host,” by David Foster Wallace, is the longest in the book (surprise!). It’s a profile of a conservative radio personality in California. I couldn’t get much into it, but I do like this bit from one of the many sidebars:

It’s hard to understand Fox News tags like “Fair and Balanced,” “No-Spin Zone,” and “We Report, You Decide” as anything but dark jokes, ones that delight the channel’s conservative audience precisely because their claims to objectivity so totally enrage liberals, whose own literal interpretation of the tag lines makes the left seems dim, humorless, and stodgy.

Dan Savage‘s “My Republican Journey” is about being homosexual and infiltrating a local Republican group. Eh.

“Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” is Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration of one woman’s social network. Not recommended.

“The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hot Spot” by Coco Henson Scales is okay, but feels out of place here and doesn’t measure up to the other writing in the book.

The Back of the Napkin (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

The Back of the Napkin
Dan Roam does a pretty good job with this one: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. One of Roam’s main arguments (sometimes belabored) is that we were all comfortable drawing when we were in kindergarten. Somehow we got frigid. We play visually dumb. We don’t need to.

Visual thinking is neglected, but luckily we’re hard-wired for it. When we see things, we instinctively begin to sort out the essentials and answer a few questions. We can’t help it:

  • who/what?
  • how much/many?
  • when?
  • where?
  • how?
  • why?

Visual thinking borrows from that natural process a bit more intentionally. It starts with looking (collecting & screening data), seeing (selecting & grouping), then imagining (reconfiguring, manipulating, analogizing), and finally showing (cleaning up, putting it all together). And, hey, what do you know… according to Roam’s model, the ways we see things and the questions we need to answer match up directly with the tools we have to show things:

  • who/what? = portraits
  • how much/many? = charts
  • when? = timelines
  • where? = maps
  • how? = flowcharts
  • why? = multi-variable plots

That’s one of the basic insights that’s really nice to be reminded of. We have specific tools to answer specific questions. Roam also has the SQVID, a framework that helps you figure out how to present the information in the most appropriate way for the intended audience, tracing your way through 5 choices:

Simple vs. elaborate
Quality vs. quantity
Vision vs. execution
Individual attributes vs. comparison
Delta (change) vs. status quo

And when you cross-reference the SQVID with the model, you get a codex that guides you to whatever pictures you need to make for the problems you need to solve. The acronyms and frameworks sound a bit confusing outside of the book, but Roam ties it together pretty nicely with lots of visuals throughout. And it’s actually kind of… practical. That doesn’t mean that the products of visual thinking are guaranteed to be easy or simple, no more than writing or talking about the ideas would be:

One of the most important virtues of visual thinking is its ability to clarify things so that the complex can be better understood, but that does not mean that all good visual thinking is about simplification. The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible—not by making it simple.

An obvious weakness for the book: it’s really hard to learn something like this from a book. You can learn about it. But it’s one of those things that you have to DO, and more examples are always helpful. The long case study that takes up the last 40% of the book lets you see the different frameworks in action, but it’s also kind of boring to read about the same fictional software company and its fictional competitors and fictional customers for 100 pages. I imagine this was a tough part of the book to write as well.

I’d still recommend it. Heaven knows it’s refreshingly different from most of the other books in the business section, and there’s some real meat in there.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

In 1800s America, Shakespeare productions had juggling and singing amidst the acts, and theatergoers would cheer the heroes, boo the villains, shout out lines along with the actors, even walk about on the stage. Opera divas would sing “Yankee Doodle,” “Home Sweet Home,” Irish ballads and other folk songs, and take requests from the audience. Orchestras would choose a few excerpts from Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and mix them in with popular reels, jigs, and other dance tunes. It was a different world:

GRAND CONCERT OF MUSIC…
An African Monkey
and several
CHINESE DOGS
Come One Come All

I dog-eared Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America more heavily than any book in recent memory. Lawrence Levine doesn’t argue that the old ways of interacting with art were necessarily better. But it is important to know that it was different. The book gives a whole different history and perspective on our inherited rituals, kind of like hearing a whole new arrangement of a familiar melody.

Levine opens the book with a focus on Shakespeare in American cultural life. Shakespeare was really popular. At home, in books (like Mark Twain’s parodies in Huckleberry Finn), on the road, in the theaters. Even the illiterate mountain man Jim Bridger knew it was worth hiring someone to read it to him enough that he could recite long passages.

In performance, this popularity and relevance made it fairly common for the actors to shorten or lengthen the monologues as they saw fit, and companies would commonly rewrite the endings. In a typical account from a local newspaper, when the audience disapproved, “Cabbages, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, a wreath of vegetables, a sack of flour and one of soot, and a dead goose, with other articles, simultaneously fell upon the stage.” What’s cool is not only that the audience was carrying vegetables to the show, but also that they knew Shakespeare well enough to know the difference when changes were made to voice their opinion. And audience and performers alike weren’t just mutely receiving the Greatness of Shakespeare, but participating and engaging with it.

Events like the Astor Place Riot in 1849 helped mark the growing division between the audiences for art (the Cultured and the Masses), and the “sacralization” of the works themselves. A lot of it was tied to the economics of the art industry. Amateur actors and musicians were gradually replaced with professional payrolls. Wealthy patrons became the primary financial support for the organizations, so the programming was less reliant on popular approval and ticket sales at the door. With the Masses weeded out, the new superstar conductors began to program entire works, instead of just excerpts.

And along with that came programs of behavioral control (dimming the lights, refusal to encore, training audiences in when to clap, etc.). Levine ties in “the taming of the audience” to a broader cultural change that separated public and private space, and public and private behavior. As art became more hierarchical, the classes weren’t attending the same types of performances or sharing the same spaces. The cultural institutions were active in “teaching their audiences to adjust to the new social imperatives, in urging them to separate public behavior from private feelings.” By the early 1900s,

the masterworks of the classic composers were to be performed in their entirety by highly trained musicians on programs free from the contamination of lesser works or lesser genres, free from the interference of audience or performer, free from the distractions of the mundane; audiences were to approach the masters and their works with proper respect and proper seriousness, for aesthetic and spiritual elevation rather than mere entertainment was the goal.

In other words, it changed to the modern, frosty atmosphere that lingers in performance halls and museums today. No more audience outrage, no more spontaneous celebrations. The groups were transformed “strove to concentrate on the music rather than the performance.” The orchestra plays, the audience receives. You see a similar transformation in museums and libraries at the same time. They change from the fantastic freak shows and cabinets of curiosity to sacred archives, filled with carefully curated items for preservation or quiet contemplation.

One really interesting bit that Levine touches on is how knowledge of these cultural manners (like knowing when to clap) helps classes distinguish themselves. In this way, knowledge becomes both a status symbol and a barrier to entry:

Thorsten Veblen constructed his concept of conspicuous consumption, he included not only the obvious material possessions but also the “immaterial” goods—“the knowledge of dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music… of the latest proprieties of dress, furniture, and equipage”; of the ancient “classics”—all of which constituted a conspicuous culture that helped confer legitimacy on the newly emergent groups. This helps explain the vogue during this period of manuals of etiquette, of private libraries and rare books, of European art and music displayed and performed in ornate—often neoclassical—museums and concert halls.

It’s a really fantastic book. Levine to close it out:

When the art forms that had constituted a shared culture for much of the nineteenth century became less accessible to large segments of the American people, millions of them satisfied their aesthetic cravings through a number of the new forms of expressive culture that were barred from high culture by the the very fact of their accessibility to the masses: the blues, jazz or jazz-derived music, musical comedy, photography, comic strips, movies, radio, popular comedians, all of which though relegated to the nether world culturally, in fact frequently contained much that was fresh, exciting, innovative, intellectually challenging, and highly imaginative. If there is a tragedy in this development, it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them.

Gemma Bovery (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Posy Simmonds originally wrote Gemma Bovery as a 100+ episode serial in The Guardian. The story is told with a cool mix of comics panels, splash illustrations, big chunks of text. It all mixes in together.
excerpt from Gemma Bovery

The narrator is a baker living in Normandy, who becomes obsessed with Gemma’s adultery as it happens and as it’s later revealed in her diaries. The story pokes a lot of fun at the stereotypes of the English and the French, and the absurdities of middle-class escapism. It’s dark, but not cynical. A lot of fun even though the impending doom is spelled out in the first page (and in its inspiration, Madame Bovary). There are some more samples on the publisher’s website.

Here’s a funny bit from an interview with Simmonds in the Comics Journal:

I would ask lots of French people, “Tell me the eight or 10 best things about France and then the things you like best about England.” They’d enthuse about le vin [wine], le fromage [cheese], le paysage [landscape], the fashion, the food, the roads, the culture, etc. in France… and when they got to England they would go, “Err, whiskey,” and they’d think very hard and go, “Harrods,” or they’d go, “London taxis,” and someone said, “Scaffolding, your scaffolding’s very good.”

Against Happiness (review: 2.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

Eric Wilson‘s book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy “challenges the recent happiness trend and celebrates the meditative virtues of melancholy.” He’s most successful when talking about the meditative virtues. The argument is simple: acknowledging the tragic, the struggle, the rain, and the inevitable decline of all things makes joy, success, the sun, and livelihood all the richer in the here and now.
Our manic urge to avoid mere discomfort keeps us from exploring these fuzzy edges, keeps us from knowing the whole. At our most important and emotional events like birth, death, and marriage, these edges become painfully, joyfully clear:

The tiny body quickly follows the head. A baby appears. You who have been watching are torn between weeping and laughing. You lament this infant’s tragic fall into the pain of time; you celebrate new life. While the baby cries in lamentation and celebration, you join it, with your tears washing over your ridiculous grin. You at this moment are two and one at once, melancholy and joyful, sorrowful and ebullient. You realize that the riches moments in life are these junctures where we realize, in our sinews, what is true all the time: the cosmos is a danced of joggled opposites, a jolted waltz.

The first quarter of the book, on challenging the happiness trend, should have been either much abridged or much expanded. It falls back on some tired excoriations of modern America (hitting all the right buzzwords: SUV, suburbs, McDonald’s, Botox, etc.), and ends up a little too thin and editorial. But later he does have some pretty interesting discussions of specific people, talking about the struggles of Colerige, Beethoven, and Keats, among others. On Beethoven:

Even though he clearly hates his inherited troubles—his melancholia, his gastric disorders, his hearing loss—he also acknowledges, though indirectly, that these very constraints are his muse. In rebelling against his “fate” by creating vital music, he actually transforms this same fate into an inspiration.

There are some funny parts, too, like talking about the strangeness of American Protestantism as a feel-good “happiness companies,” with “Jesus as some sort of blissed-out savior”.

Lastly, here are some works that Wilson referenced in his book that I also liked:

The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

I found The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 when I was out hiking a couple few weeks ago. An Appalachian Trail hiker left it behind, recommending to whoever came by. I snagged it.
Any anthology will have some hits and misses. At least, in contrast with my frustrating experience with Flash Fiction Forward, all of my favorites from this book are available online, and only two of those are behind paywalls. Score. These were the ones I especially liked:

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (review: 3/5)

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The title of Pierre Bayard‘s book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a bit misleading. Don’t get your hopes up for any on-the-ground tactics for escaping awkward conversation. Bayard spends a couple hundred pages, illustrated mostly with stories and examples from his specialty in French literature, talking about why you shouldn’t feel awkward in the first place.
Assuming “cultivation” is a worthy goal, you have to remember that “being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others.”

It boils down like this: There are a lot of books out there. You can’t read them all. As soon as you begin to read, you begin to forget what you’re reading. What you actually remember is incomplete, anyway, and the way you remember it changes. Lastly, the way we actually use our incomplete, mutable memories of books varies from time to time, place to place, person to person, conversation to conversation.

In the end, Bayard says, “what we talk about is not the books themselves, but the substitute objects we create for the occasion.” This makes me think of the idea of social objects in marketing.

Hugh MacLeod: “The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them.”

Compare Bayard: “The books themselves are not at stake; they have been replaced by other intermediary objects that have no content in themselves, and which are defined solely by the unstable social and psychological forces that bombard them.”

There’s also the interesting idea of ambiguity when these discussions come up:

Like words, books, in representing us, also deform what we are. In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambiguity and play.

Ambiguity and play comes out because most of our conversation isn’t about books per se, it’s about situating ourselves to each other. It’s about relating. This brings to mind a Chuck Klosterman essay on why we like the music we like:

When someone asks me what kind of music I like, he is (usually) attempting to use this information to deduce things about my personality… But here’s the problem: This premise is founded on the belief that the person you’re talking with consciously knows why he appreciates those specific things or harbors those specific feelings. It’s also predicated on the principle that you know why you like certain sounds or certain images, because that self-awareness is how we establish the internal relationship between a) what someone loves and b) who someone is.

Der Weg der Menschen (review: 3/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Frans Masereel’s book first appeared in 1964 under the title “Route des Hommes.” The 60 woodcuts in this book came forty years after the others I reviewed. From what I can piece together from the French and German sources that I can’t read, I think maybe it was connected with of some kind of exhibition or retrospective. Who knows.
The style is much more loose and slashing, not quite as tidy as the earlier works. Taking on a larger, broader story, the panels also become more thematic. There’s a lot more abstract icons embedded in the pictures. Panels are less explicitly connected to the ones on the previous pages. Characters don’t really carry over from scene to scene, but the ideas accrete and overlap over a series of page turns.

[update: images removed for copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. so it goes.]

Here’s the opening, with its huddled masses:
Later we get to the expressionist bits.
Sturm und drang. I love this one.
Masereel’s omnipresent, beckoning sun.
A rare pastoral scene.
The space age.

I’m out of Masereel books now, so this is the end of the Masereel Appreciation Festival. Previous installments included a tidbit from L’Idee, Masereel in Film, and selections from Die Stadt and Die Sonne.

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

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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 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.