This past week, I committed a grave sin. I've done it before, but often for reasons having to do figuring out how to best expand the collection. This time, though, I just wanted to read it and we didn't have the book, so I ...
Well, I ... I ordered it from another university.
Okay, I'm kidding. Truth is, the availability of so many books from so many good universities is one of the Gallaudet University Library's many benefits, and I feel no real shame in taking full advantage of it. In this case, it was Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, a collection of Richard Feynman's personal letters, edited by his daughter.
If you don't know who Richard Feynman (pronounced FINE-man) is, shame on you. He was one of the most significant and well-respected physicists of his time, which actually comprised the majority of the 20th Century -- he was born in 1918 and died in 1988. He started out fairly young, earning his doctorate at Princeton and working at Los Alamos in his 20s, helping the military figure out how to build an atomic bomb during World War II, then moved on to figuring out the fundamentals of several very important aspects of quantum physics. He went on to become one of Caltech's most popular teachers, won a Nobel Prize for some of his work in 1965, and was one of the investigators of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.
It all sounds relatively pedestrian until you dig into the details of his life, which Perfectly Reasonable Deviations lets you do. For instance, he was also a widely-known bongo player. Mad about bongos, actually. He played them all over the world and once joked that people knew him better for his drumming than his physics. He had two great loves of his life; his first wife died in the 1940s of tuberculosis while he was working at Los Alamos, and he met (and married) his second wife on the spur of the moment in the 1960s and she was with him when he died in 1988, just shy of 70 years old. In the twenty years that separated both wives, though, it is said that he was very popular with the young ladies.
This might sound odd to you, but he was also one of the first scientist-celebrities. Albert Einstein made headlines, but this guy made movies. His Lectures on Physics sold millions of copies on tape and in print, and he had his own television miniseries, where he just stood there and talked about physics. People ate it up; he was a brilliant and engaging teacher who was able to explain some of the most exotic concepts known to modern science (at that time, anyway) to complete laymen. He was the first Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Neil deGrasse Tyson in terms of his recognizability, though much closer to Stephen Hawking in his contributions to quantum physics.
He also had a bit of a Mr. Wizard sensibility; he demonstrated to a Congressional hearing that the Challenger disaster was due in large part to frozen O-rings failing to protect the Shuttle from the superheated gases propelling it upward. How? By dropping a piece of O-ring material in a Styrofoam cup of ice water, then showing how the cold temperature made the O-ring return to its proper shape much more slowly than it should have, a vital characteristic when you don't want multibillion-dollar spacecraft exploding and people dying.
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations emphasizes his popular appeal quite a bit; it includes dozens of fan letters from a wide range of people, from car mechanics to British housewives, all thanking him for making it all perfectly clear to them and asking him questions one wouldn't expect to hear outside of a graduate-level physics course.
Of course, the larger message of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations is subtle: Although Feynman became busier and busier and more and more famous over the fifty-year period covered in the book, he answered almost every single letter personally, albeit occasionally with apologies for taking so much time to respond. His responses nevertheless show that he took the time to read them, think about them, and do his best to answer any questions that came up. And they certainly came up; he responded to questions about anything from the quirks of particle behavior to a father's worries about his science-loving son. The overall impression is one of a very smart, very funny guy who treated complete strangers with the utmost grace.
It's highly recommended if you're curious about the life and mind of one of modern science's seminal figures. No lab-coat-bedecked geek here!
And now, as another brilliant 20th-Century mind once said, on with the opera.
Did you know that Gallaudet University has had a library since 1864? We'll be celebrating our 150th birthday in 2014. One of the biggest advantages of our longevity is that we've had time to collect some truly interesting items, including the occasional 19th-Century specimen.
Those older books can be pretty fragile, though; we do have plenty of cool stuff dating from 1950 up to now. Let's take a look, starting with the magical stuff (literally) and moving to the just plain interesting:
A History of Magic and Experimental Science
This one kind of breaks the rule -- the first volume was published in 1923, but the last was published in 1958. The title constitutes an interesting juxtaposition, doesn't it? In general, this series of historical investigations covers the transition from superstition and magical thinking to the scientific method, starting with the Roman Empire (Volume 1, The first thirteen centuries of our era) and ending with the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment (Volume 8, The seventeenth century). It's a fascinating look at the history of our civilization and the foundations of the rationalism so venerated in some circles today.
The Magician, the Witch, and the Law
Another historical tome, this one focuses more specifically on medieval witchcraft and the effect it had on society and the legal code -- such as it was in a feudal age. It examines how magic in general influenced public thinking, analyzing public discourse and how leaders took advantage of the superstitious to achieve their own ends -- and how the witches and magicians of the time took advantage of this same credulity to achieve their own. It also goes into some detail about how medieval witchery clashed with the Inquisition and the tragic results.
Magic: A Reference Guide
Because I am hilarious like that, we'll wrap up the conjuration with a book on prestidigitation: stage magic. This book is a terrific look into how something that may appear on stage to be utterly unexplainable is actually totally rational; it's all a matter of manipulating objects, the audience, and the situation. It's a fascinating read!
How to Enjoy Ballet
I have no real interest in ballet or learning how to enjoy it, but isn't the title great? In all seriousness, ballet is one of the most difficult forms of dancing; it's highly reliant on a combination of technically-adept execution and aesthetic appeal. Not only are there specific moves, foot placements, and arm positions, but a dancer needs to be able to follow the music and transition from one position to another as smoothly and elegantly as possible. Like figure-skating, it's a much-misunderstood but extremely complex form of expression, and some people need help understanding it. This book is a great place to start!
Contemporary Hermeneutics
It's not the most welcoming of titles, I agree; "hermeneutics" is generally defined as the science of exegesis, particularly of spiritual writings. In this book, though, it's placed in an architectural context on a continuum from Pre-Classicism all the way up to Ecoism. It discusses how buildings are interpreted, often in terms of the prevailing beliefs of the time. For example, Thomas Jefferson's mansion in Virginia, Monticello, was designed in the Palladian tradition, which was heavily reliant on geometry, symmetry, and the designs of ancient Greek temples. That one of our founding fathers chose to build a house that resembled, in some ways, a three-thousand-year-old temple suggests that he saw some essential similarities between ancient Greek society and the civilization he was trying to build. It's a very fascinating book, especially when you get up into the incredible mishmash of architectural philosophies represented by early-20th-Century New York.
Soviet Economic Progress: Because of, or in Spite of, the Government
Part of the reason I find this book interesting is the perception I have of US-USSR relations around 1957, when this book was published. It just feels as though both countries were completely closed off to one another, their motives inscrutable to us, ours untrustworthy to them. Intellectually, though -- and partly because of this book -- I understand that that simply wasn't true. In fact, in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, reviewed above, there are several letters between Dr. Feynman and the Soviets as he repeatedly declines their invitations to participate in a symposium in Leningrad. There was plenty of information exchange between both countries, regardless of how hostile both governments were toward one another.
After Hamelin
This one's a lot newer; published in 2000, it's a novel about an old woman who tells a story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. If you're not familiar with the story, the town of Hamelin had a serious rat problem, and they hired the Pied Piper to use his magical pipe to lure all the rats away. However, when he was done, the town refused to pay him, so in revenge, he pulled out his pipe and took all the children away, and they were never seen again. That's the basic story as most people know it; in After Hamelin, the old woman reveals a new fact: one child stayed behind. The Pied Piper couldn't lure her away because she was deaf! Terrific book.
Face Reading
This is a cool book! It relies on the art of physiognomy: determining aspects of personality based on one's facial shape and features. It's an ancient Chinese art (one of many, it sometimes seems) known as siang mien. Your ears can predict your future (how does that work for deaf people, I wonder ... ), and various facial features can impute information about one's sexuality, success in relationships, and the outcome of each year of a person's life. There's some bona-fide medical stuff in there too: some diseases are indicated, first and foremost, by changes in facial characteristics, like the loss of eyebrow hair, changes in the shape of the nose, lip coloration, and the structure of the eye.
I think we'll stop here -- it's an interesting mishmash of stuff I've dug up. There are many more books like these throughout the collection; an hour's worth of browsing can yield some serious serendipity if you're after the weird and offbeat.
As a reminder: Next week, no post. I'll be at the big, giant ALA conference. The following week, you'll get an on-the-ground report from your friendly neighborhood librarian!
Question of the Week
The Library printer I was using jammed! What do I do?
The first thing you should do is tell the person who's working at the Service Desk so he or she can fix it. If you're really pressed for time, you can also switch to the other printer. That's why we have two; sometimes things don't work quite right with one, so we have the other one as a backup.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
New fiction
And our summer marches on!
I've been curious about Joe Hill's books for a few months now, so I checked out The Heart-Shaped Box and Horns and clipped through them in a single weekend; they're that quick and easy to read. They aren't small books, though -- they're full-fledged novels with really terrific characters and absorbing plots.
The Heart-Shaped Box was essentially Hill's debut novel, and it made major waves when it came out last year. This is because it's supremely creepy and doesn't spare any ultraviolence. An aging rock star named Judas Coyne -- a combination of Elvis, Mick Jagger, Ozzy Osbourne, and anyone from ZZ Top -- is a gothy sort who lives with a young lady half his age in a farmhouse somewhere in New York. He collects creepy things, like a human skull belonging to someone who was trepanned (a process where a hole is drilled in the skull of a live person to cure ills -- not as widely practiced these days), coffins, and a dead man's suit.
The dead man's suit, in particular, is the basic premise of the novel. The rock star's assistant gets an e-mail telling him about the suit, which is up for auction online, and of course, Coyne can't resist, especially when he finds out that there's a ghost attached.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be true. And it's done in a disturbing way that still makes me nervous. The night after he gets the suit (wrapped in a heart-shaped box, hence the title), he wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking he heard something. He walks down the hall, past an old man sitting in a rocking chair, goes downstairs and looks around a little bit, but nothing's out of order. He goes back up the stairs, walks past the old man sitting in the rocking chair, and goes into his room. Then something strikes him as odd, and he looks back into the hall, which has become very cold, but there's nothing -- and nobody -- there. And so it begins ...
Horns is a little more straightforward. It's less creepy and more of a surrealist revenge fantasy. This guy goes on a major bender, completely blacks out a full night, and wakes up the next morning in his own bed, much the worse for wear. He goes into the bathroom, glances at himself in the mirror, and discovers that he's grown a pair of small horns for no apparent reason. He discovers a few new talents he's picked up with the horns: first, nobody notices that he has horns -- and they always forget he was ever there after the conversation ends. Second, when he talks to people, the horns make them confess all of their most secret sins, and he can make them do things. Third, when he touches someone, he picks up their entire past, including some of the darkest things they've ever done. And snakes really, really like him.
Of course, I still haven't mentioned the most important part, other than the horns: His girlfriend was violently murdered a year previously, and he's the main suspect. All the evidence that might have cleared his name was destroyed in a mysterious fire, and his girlfriend was beloved by their hometown, so he's nearly universally hated. I was expecting this to be almost a mystery, the main character spending most of the novel trying to find the killer's name and then facing off with him in an apocalyptic showdown. However, he discovers the real murderer's name within the first couple of chapters, and the rest of the novel is concerned chiefly with hunting down and cornering the killer and exacting vengeance. All throughout the book, the horns keep growing and his skin begins to change ...
Well, read the book. It's a fantastic read, possibly (slightly) better than The Heart-Shaped Box.
Anyway,I've spent most of this week locked up in my office working on stuff, which I will explain more about later in the summer, I promise. I've also been planning for the American Library Association's big, giant annual conference, which is here in DC in a couple of weeks. I'm excited; I've been a bona-fide librarian for two years now and I'm finally going to the conference. I'll skip that week's post (Friday, June 25) and report to you all the following week! In the meantime, here's a list of fun new fiction that's come in over the last couple months to hold you over until I can focus on something more substantive!
The Infinities
A most decidedly unusual book, this novel tells the story of a dying mathematician (hence, the title -- partly) and his family, who are holding vigil over him on a hot summer afternoon. However, his family is not alone in participating in the end of his life; all around them are little gods, in the classical Greek sense (the other part of the title's meaning), who move around and through the family seen and unseen and wickedly stir up a seething cauldron of trouble.
Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal
The title takes things a bit literally; the author/narrator spends some time with the Hamburger King, one of the most influential businessmen on the planet, while he machinates his way through his empire, subordinates, friends, and relatives. Funny, eccentric, and highly satirical, this novel, translated from French, sort of makes you think about all the ways in which we all endure servitude and even, in some cases, enjoy it.
Beatrice and Virgil
Yann Martel, author of the bestselling Life of Pi, brings us another animal-themed novel; Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a howler monkey, are the centers of a play-within-a-novel written by a taxidermist. The main character is an author who seems rather similar to Martel, sucked into the taxidermist's bizarre inner life as he assists in writing the play.
Let the Great World Spin
The 1974 feat of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center, 110 stories up, becomes the focal point of several different Manhattan stories that intersect at the end of the novel. It's one of those books, but the author pulls it off with such grace you're guaranteed to be thinking about it for weeks afterward.
The November Criminals
This novel pulls off the triple distinction of being a funny stoner novel set in DC. A small-time drug dealer in high school decides to investigate his classmate's murder, but he has a weakness for his own product, which throws a few wrenches in his clever, clever plan. The book can be a little hard to follow, but that's just because the main character is stoned all the time, so is easily distracted by interesting tangents.
Dog Boy
One of those fascinating feral-child stories, a young Russian boy is abandoned by his mother, and he falls in with a pack of stray dogs, which enables him to survive for another two years. The author follows his progress from the hairless outsider of the pack to a trusted alpha dog until his capture by a scientist who hopes to make his name based on the young boy's life. Strange, but it's a wonderful read and avoids the drippy sentimentality one sometimes gets from boy-and-his-dog stories.
The Last Surgeon
A hospital thriller, this novel takes everyone in the operating room during a nastily-botched surgery and kills them off one by one. The survivors -- a nurse, a physician, and the last remaining surgeon -- have to team up and hunt down a hired killer who has a singular talent for making a murder resemble a suicide. Taut and suspenseful, this makes for great light reading.
The Sheen on the Silk
A fascinating historical novel that takes place in the late-13th-Century Byzantine Empire, this book follows Anna, who must investigate the circumstances under which her twin brother was exiled. He's innocent, but is the center of a mysterious conspiracy; Anna dresses up as a eunuch and spends much of the book maneuvering herself closer and closer to the central figures of the story.
Wench
Another historical novel, this one is set in antebellum America, at a resort in Ohio known for its clientele of rich white slave-owners with their slave-mistresses. The novel follows three women who are regulars at the resort and the upheaval in their lives following the arrival of a fourth, who does not hold back from wondering about freedom. That the resort is in Ohio, a free state, complicates matters, as does the fact that one of the slaves is in love with her master and thinks the feeling is mutual. It's a complicated, psychological book.
The Book of Spies
Ivan the Terrible is a legendary figure in Russian -- and indeed global -- history. What few people know is that he was an avid collector of books, one of many characteristics I share with him. Unfortunately, his collection was lost, and since he owned many rare, one-of-a-kind books, those stories were lost as well. Now they've begun to emerge, and are at the center of a sort of worldwide book club composed of a cabal of incredibly wealthy men. Then the CIA finds a link to a bank account associated with terrorism and gets involved ...
That takes care of this week. We got a fantastically good crop of books this year, and I'm very pleased with the results. Next week, we'll take a look at the rest of the collection and some of the more unusual books we have here.
Question of the Week
I saw a bunch of librarians cleaning out the VHS shelves. What's going on? Are you getting rid of all the movies?
We're clearing out the VHS shelves, but we're not getting rid of all the movies, just many of the videotapes. Part of it is because those things are old, rarely checked out, and obsolete. Most of them have degraded significantly since they arrived -- normal for VHS tapes -- and because the format is so outdated, most people end up watching them here in the Library, where there are still VCRs. Another part is just that our collection of Deaf DVDs is expanding, and they need room! That's the life of a library -- over time, some things elbow their way in and other things get pushed out. We're not getting rid of stuff, we're making room for new things. It's been an exciting summer so far!
I've been curious about Joe Hill's books for a few months now, so I checked out The Heart-Shaped Box and Horns and clipped through them in a single weekend; they're that quick and easy to read. They aren't small books, though -- they're full-fledged novels with really terrific characters and absorbing plots.
The Heart-Shaped Box was essentially Hill's debut novel, and it made major waves when it came out last year. This is because it's supremely creepy and doesn't spare any ultraviolence. An aging rock star named Judas Coyne -- a combination of Elvis, Mick Jagger, Ozzy Osbourne, and anyone from ZZ Top -- is a gothy sort who lives with a young lady half his age in a farmhouse somewhere in New York. He collects creepy things, like a human skull belonging to someone who was trepanned (a process where a hole is drilled in the skull of a live person to cure ills -- not as widely practiced these days), coffins, and a dead man's suit.
The dead man's suit, in particular, is the basic premise of the novel. The rock star's assistant gets an e-mail telling him about the suit, which is up for auction online, and of course, Coyne can't resist, especially when he finds out that there's a ghost attached.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be true. And it's done in a disturbing way that still makes me nervous. The night after he gets the suit (wrapped in a heart-shaped box, hence the title), he wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking he heard something. He walks down the hall, past an old man sitting in a rocking chair, goes downstairs and looks around a little bit, but nothing's out of order. He goes back up the stairs, walks past the old man sitting in the rocking chair, and goes into his room. Then something strikes him as odd, and he looks back into the hall, which has become very cold, but there's nothing -- and nobody -- there. And so it begins ...
Horns is a little more straightforward. It's less creepy and more of a surrealist revenge fantasy. This guy goes on a major bender, completely blacks out a full night, and wakes up the next morning in his own bed, much the worse for wear. He goes into the bathroom, glances at himself in the mirror, and discovers that he's grown a pair of small horns for no apparent reason. He discovers a few new talents he's picked up with the horns: first, nobody notices that he has horns -- and they always forget he was ever there after the conversation ends. Second, when he talks to people, the horns make them confess all of their most secret sins, and he can make them do things. Third, when he touches someone, he picks up their entire past, including some of the darkest things they've ever done. And snakes really, really like him.
Of course, I still haven't mentioned the most important part, other than the horns: His girlfriend was violently murdered a year previously, and he's the main suspect. All the evidence that might have cleared his name was destroyed in a mysterious fire, and his girlfriend was beloved by their hometown, so he's nearly universally hated. I was expecting this to be almost a mystery, the main character spending most of the novel trying to find the killer's name and then facing off with him in an apocalyptic showdown. However, he discovers the real murderer's name within the first couple of chapters, and the rest of the novel is concerned chiefly with hunting down and cornering the killer and exacting vengeance. All throughout the book, the horns keep growing and his skin begins to change ...
Well, read the book. It's a fantastic read, possibly (slightly) better than The Heart-Shaped Box.
Anyway,I've spent most of this week locked up in my office working on stuff, which I will explain more about later in the summer, I promise. I've also been planning for the American Library Association's big, giant annual conference, which is here in DC in a couple of weeks. I'm excited; I've been a bona-fide librarian for two years now and I'm finally going to the conference. I'll skip that week's post (Friday, June 25) and report to you all the following week! In the meantime, here's a list of fun new fiction that's come in over the last couple months to hold you over until I can focus on something more substantive!
The Infinities
A most decidedly unusual book, this novel tells the story of a dying mathematician (hence, the title -- partly) and his family, who are holding vigil over him on a hot summer afternoon. However, his family is not alone in participating in the end of his life; all around them are little gods, in the classical Greek sense (the other part of the title's meaning), who move around and through the family seen and unseen and wickedly stir up a seething cauldron of trouble.
Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal
The title takes things a bit literally; the author/narrator spends some time with the Hamburger King, one of the most influential businessmen on the planet, while he machinates his way through his empire, subordinates, friends, and relatives. Funny, eccentric, and highly satirical, this novel, translated from French, sort of makes you think about all the ways in which we all endure servitude and even, in some cases, enjoy it.
Beatrice and Virgil
Yann Martel, author of the bestselling Life of Pi, brings us another animal-themed novel; Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a howler monkey, are the centers of a play-within-a-novel written by a taxidermist. The main character is an author who seems rather similar to Martel, sucked into the taxidermist's bizarre inner life as he assists in writing the play.
Let the Great World Spin
The 1974 feat of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center, 110 stories up, becomes the focal point of several different Manhattan stories that intersect at the end of the novel. It's one of those books, but the author pulls it off with such grace you're guaranteed to be thinking about it for weeks afterward.
The November Criminals
This novel pulls off the triple distinction of being a funny stoner novel set in DC. A small-time drug dealer in high school decides to investigate his classmate's murder, but he has a weakness for his own product, which throws a few wrenches in his clever, clever plan. The book can be a little hard to follow, but that's just because the main character is stoned all the time, so is easily distracted by interesting tangents.
Dog Boy
One of those fascinating feral-child stories, a young Russian boy is abandoned by his mother, and he falls in with a pack of stray dogs, which enables him to survive for another two years. The author follows his progress from the hairless outsider of the pack to a trusted alpha dog until his capture by a scientist who hopes to make his name based on the young boy's life. Strange, but it's a wonderful read and avoids the drippy sentimentality one sometimes gets from boy-and-his-dog stories.
The Last Surgeon
A hospital thriller, this novel takes everyone in the operating room during a nastily-botched surgery and kills them off one by one. The survivors -- a nurse, a physician, and the last remaining surgeon -- have to team up and hunt down a hired killer who has a singular talent for making a murder resemble a suicide. Taut and suspenseful, this makes for great light reading.
The Sheen on the Silk
A fascinating historical novel that takes place in the late-13th-Century Byzantine Empire, this book follows Anna, who must investigate the circumstances under which her twin brother was exiled. He's innocent, but is the center of a mysterious conspiracy; Anna dresses up as a eunuch and spends much of the book maneuvering herself closer and closer to the central figures of the story.
Wench
Another historical novel, this one is set in antebellum America, at a resort in Ohio known for its clientele of rich white slave-owners with their slave-mistresses. The novel follows three women who are regulars at the resort and the upheaval in their lives following the arrival of a fourth, who does not hold back from wondering about freedom. That the resort is in Ohio, a free state, complicates matters, as does the fact that one of the slaves is in love with her master and thinks the feeling is mutual. It's a complicated, psychological book.
The Book of Spies
Ivan the Terrible is a legendary figure in Russian -- and indeed global -- history. What few people know is that he was an avid collector of books, one of many characteristics I share with him. Unfortunately, his collection was lost, and since he owned many rare, one-of-a-kind books, those stories were lost as well. Now they've begun to emerge, and are at the center of a sort of worldwide book club composed of a cabal of incredibly wealthy men. Then the CIA finds a link to a bank account associated with terrorism and gets involved ...
That takes care of this week. We got a fantastically good crop of books this year, and I'm very pleased with the results. Next week, we'll take a look at the rest of the collection and some of the more unusual books we have here.
Question of the Week
I saw a bunch of librarians cleaning out the VHS shelves. What's going on? Are you getting rid of all the movies?
We're clearing out the VHS shelves, but we're not getting rid of all the movies, just many of the videotapes. Part of it is because those things are old, rarely checked out, and obsolete. Most of them have degraded significantly since they arrived -- normal for VHS tapes -- and because the format is so outdated, most people end up watching them here in the Library, where there are still VCRs. Another part is just that our collection of Deaf DVDs is expanding, and they need room! That's the life of a library -- over time, some things elbow their way in and other things get pushed out. We're not getting rid of stuff, we're making room for new things. It's been an exciting summer so far!
Friday, June 4, 2010
An introduction to our e-books
Summer has arrived, hot and steamy! I remember a month ago, when the temperature just would not rise, wishing things'd heat up a little. Well, I got my wish, and in spades. It's barely June, and already I'm thinking about snow and how it maybe isn't so bad after all.
Haha! I'm kidding! Forget snow.
Let's jump right in. I finished up Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities this past week because I bought a book based on his work -- Tom Wolfe's America: Heroes, Pranksters, and Fools -- and it piqued my curiosity. Bonfire seemed pretty well-thumbed through, and it's one of those titles you're always hearing about, thinking it's something by Maugham or, yes, even Woolf, maybe mid-century or even further back.
Bonfire's actually set in Manhattan of the late 1980s or thereabouts. It follows a few interrelated threads, mostly characters whose lives brush up against a single crime. The perpetrator is a Wall Street bond trader in collusion with his bored-heiress mistress; he picks her up from the airport after one of her many Italian trips, gets lost in the Bronx, and is accosted by a pair of local youths, who happen to be black. They panic, peel out of there, and in the process accidentally hit one of the young men and put him in a coma. The entire book is about the thought processes of three specific people involved in the accident's aftermath: the bond trader wrestling with his guilt; the Bronx assistant district attorney in pursuit of fame; the tabloid reporter chasing after his next drink. Other major players come through all of their lives: the black community leader who stirs up a seething cauldron of race and oppression while covering sins of his own; the heiress from an impoverished background and her drive to fight for freedom; the racist mayor and his staff's hapless observations of all that's going on far below them.
It's a fairly epic story, although you get a little tired of how repetitive some of the characters are, especially where scenes of wealth and privilege are involved. Wolfe lays it on a little thick: two detectives come to visit the bond trader in his opulent Manhattan apartment and gape around at the place. The bond trader thinks they're impressed and a little intimidated at this display of his wealth. Their interrogation done, the two detectives go back to the Bronx and mock the excess over dripping sandwiches. It's constantly driven home to the reader: Manhattan and the Bronx are two different worlds; wealthy WASPs and the Irish/Italian/Puerto Rican/African Americans two different classes. Still, there are some funny moments; the assistant district attorney who's prosecuting the case has a crush on a young woman juror from another case, so takes her out to dinner and extols his own bravery in the face of overwhelming poverty and crime. At the end, they're about to part, and he wonders what's going through her head. Wolfe tells you: She's thinking that those Manhattan men are more trouble than they're worth; you have to listen to two or three hours of His Career before he pays for dinner.
The whole point of the book seems to be completely puncturing the egos of nearly every significant male character. The bond trader gets arrested and is no longer Master of the Universe; the assistant district attorney finds out that the muscles he's so proud of are actually mocked by the women he pursues; the tabloid reporter discovers that his success is more due to luck than any skill on his part -- of which he has none. Nearly all of the characters are despicable and pitiable in some way.
Enjoyable (possibly because of the sheer schadenfreude saturating the book), but it's hard to say that I'd read it again or recommend it to anyone else who doesn't have the patience to slog through dozens of pages of exposition, stream-of-consciousness, and the insides of people's heads.
Now that that's over with -- I hate writing reviews of books that only get as far as "enjoyable" in my mind -- let's turn to e-books. What have we got?
Something like 70,000 of them. To start with. They cover topics from ethnic relations and civilization (whatever that means -- I'll include an example of this topic below) to economics and church history. It's a dizzyingly diverse array of topics, and is a pretty strong argument for having e-books in general. Let's take a look at a quick cross-section:
Talons and teeth: County clerks and runners in the Qing Dynasty
China's one of the oldest continuous civilizations on Earth, and has been a major power in Asia for most of that time. However, this book argues that although the Chinese imperium and its high-level functionaries had great influence, they were far outweighed by people who carried things between county governments. It's like saying that bicycle couriers are more powerful than the President, for instance; this is because those clerks and runners knew full well what they were processing and carrying, and were subject to some truly outstanding corruption. However, little is known about these people; any information we have about them survives through records kept by the highest of the high officials, which suggests something important on its own.
The Singapore Puzzle
It's long been a truism among certain kinds of people that a high degree of personal liberty is essential to keeping the people happy and the state functioning properly. Singapore, however, defies this; one of the most authoritarian governments in the world, it is home to one of the most modern, most prosperous, most successful city-states on the planet. Why is this? Why are people okay with being told not to chew gum, or spit, or smoke in public? Why do corporations agree to work in such restrictive environments, in spite of the laissez-faire capitalism practiced (in comparison anyway) by most of the rest of the developed world?
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism
I found this one kind of spooky; it's a treatise on the history that exists between Afghanistan and the United States and its outgrowth into international terrorism -- written, rather presciently, in 2000. Even before September 11 occurred, there were warning signs and clashes between the U.S. government and Afghanistan-based terror groups, including Osama bin Laden, involving the first World Trade Center bombings and an incident in Nairobi that placed its imprimatur on relations between both countries. The chapter relating to a direct assault on America covers the history of cooperation between the US and groups in Afghanistan to throw off the Soviet Union concludes with this scary paragraph:
"Perhaps future governments, whether the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, or less powerful and influential nations, will take to heart this important lesson of late twentieth-century history: When you decide to go to war against your main enemy, take a good, long look at the people behind you whom you chose as your friends, allies or mercenary fighters. Look well to see whether these allies already have unsheathed their knives -- and are pointing them at your own back."
The Swedish Table
This is a pretty far-out cookbook; sort of traditional Swedish foods and customs. The recipes are making me hungry (I'm writing this just before lunch, so forgive me for this) -- for instance, Vegetable soup with prosciutto-filled "gnocchi," actually traditional salty potato dumplings called kroppkakor. Or gravlax-and-nasturtium sandwiches with mustard-dill sauce.
Lunch must wait. More to go ...
Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science
I was kind of hoping I'd come across this one. It's controversial! Those are the best books to have in a library, even if it's purely electronic in nature. The author argues that science is, by nature, heresy because it requires objective thinking. This is okay on its own -- we humans are instinctive, feeling creatures that believe in UFOs, ghosts, and angels -- but he takes it a little bit further by noting that of all the ancient civilizations, only Greece developed geometry and number theory. This leads to a set of arguments that assert that the Western world was solely responsible for the discovery of scientific thinking, and that science itself is not an intrinsic aspect of the evolution of civilizations. It's controversial mostly because it disregards quite a few other civilizations before and after the Greeks who independently developed mathematical systems and a logical infrastructure of their own.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Ever wondered about the guy in the deerhunter hat, a pipe in his mouth, and Watson in tow? Wonder no more. I've met people who struggle to get started on reading the Holmes stories because they're never sure which one to start with. I usually say, "They're all good," but that doesn't help them out much, so I steer them toward "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and hope for the best. In this case, there's a little less to worry about; there's a pretty good selection of nine short stories that are usually thought to express the quintessential Holmes, including classics like "The Red-Headed League," "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," and "A Scandal in Bohemia."
Cosmopolitanism in the Americas -- This is the one from "Civilization"!
North and South America, as a whole, represent a study in contrasts. The United States and Canada occupy the majority of North America, and they're places where it's difficult to find a culture that's remained in isolation for very long periods of time. We've pretty well hegemonized gigantic tracts of land, and have become relatively cosmopolitan as a result. Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, on the other hand, represent even larger swaths of people who have relatively little contact with the outside world; although some of the world's largest cities are located in the region (Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, for example), there are still plenty of pockets where the intrusion of the outside world is minimal and cultures, traditions, and norms haven't changed much. However, that's in the process of being turned on its head; what does it mean when the American style of urbanization begins to overtake the jungle? How does it affect the people?
Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power
With a title like that, you know it's got to be good, right? I know, right. The author traces the history of the notion of "intellectual property" back to the case of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. Mr. Whitney had a lousy life; after he took his new invention public, the designs were promptly stolen by local farmers, who then built their own cotton gins. Whitney then began to sue anyone and everyone who built cotton gins similar to, but not exactly like, his design, but it was a long, painful, and expensive struggle -- partly because it was so difficult to prove which came first and partly because precursor designs had already been in use outside the United States, so it wasn't easy for him to claim the cotton gin as his own invention. However, and this is a side to the issue that the author pays attention to, this sort of piracy has gone on for a long time and is one of the biggest contributors to innovation and technological advancement. It's the whole idea of "intellectual property" that's a relatively new thing, and the author explores the ways it's used to both promote innovation and suppress it in the pursuit of profit; most tragically, in the case of HIV drugs in Africa.
Again, as with our journals, this represents only a very tiny drop in the bucket. From the intricacies of ancient Chinese government to industrial thievery in the United States, there's something in nearly every topic; it's hard to think none of these books actually take up any room on the shelf!
Question of the Week
I checked out a book from another university, but I didn't realize they had a different due date. My book was due on May 31, a week after I got it, and now it's late. What gives with the one-week loan period?
It depends. If you're a student, you might be finishing up an Incomplete that's due on that date, and then you're no longer a currently-registered student if you haven't signed up for the summer. If you're a faculty or staff member, it may depend on when your contract expires or a host of other things.
Generally speaking we can solve the problem for you. But when we can't, it's time to go to the lending university and find out what their system thinks you're doing, and work it out as is appropriate. Just get in touch with us, and we'll get you all the contact information you need!
Haha! I'm kidding! Forget snow.
Let's jump right in. I finished up Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities this past week because I bought a book based on his work -- Tom Wolfe's America: Heroes, Pranksters, and Fools -- and it piqued my curiosity. Bonfire seemed pretty well-thumbed through, and it's one of those titles you're always hearing about, thinking it's something by Maugham or, yes, even Woolf, maybe mid-century or even further back.
Bonfire's actually set in Manhattan of the late 1980s or thereabouts. It follows a few interrelated threads, mostly characters whose lives brush up against a single crime. The perpetrator is a Wall Street bond trader in collusion with his bored-heiress mistress; he picks her up from the airport after one of her many Italian trips, gets lost in the Bronx, and is accosted by a pair of local youths, who happen to be black. They panic, peel out of there, and in the process accidentally hit one of the young men and put him in a coma. The entire book is about the thought processes of three specific people involved in the accident's aftermath: the bond trader wrestling with his guilt; the Bronx assistant district attorney in pursuit of fame; the tabloid reporter chasing after his next drink. Other major players come through all of their lives: the black community leader who stirs up a seething cauldron of race and oppression while covering sins of his own; the heiress from an impoverished background and her drive to fight for freedom; the racist mayor and his staff's hapless observations of all that's going on far below them.
It's a fairly epic story, although you get a little tired of how repetitive some of the characters are, especially where scenes of wealth and privilege are involved. Wolfe lays it on a little thick: two detectives come to visit the bond trader in his opulent Manhattan apartment and gape around at the place. The bond trader thinks they're impressed and a little intimidated at this display of his wealth. Their interrogation done, the two detectives go back to the Bronx and mock the excess over dripping sandwiches. It's constantly driven home to the reader: Manhattan and the Bronx are two different worlds; wealthy WASPs and the Irish/Italian/Puerto Rican/African Americans two different classes. Still, there are some funny moments; the assistant district attorney who's prosecuting the case has a crush on a young woman juror from another case, so takes her out to dinner and extols his own bravery in the face of overwhelming poverty and crime. At the end, they're about to part, and he wonders what's going through her head. Wolfe tells you: She's thinking that those Manhattan men are more trouble than they're worth; you have to listen to two or three hours of His Career before he pays for dinner.
The whole point of the book seems to be completely puncturing the egos of nearly every significant male character. The bond trader gets arrested and is no longer Master of the Universe; the assistant district attorney finds out that the muscles he's so proud of are actually mocked by the women he pursues; the tabloid reporter discovers that his success is more due to luck than any skill on his part -- of which he has none. Nearly all of the characters are despicable and pitiable in some way.
Enjoyable (possibly because of the sheer schadenfreude saturating the book), but it's hard to say that I'd read it again or recommend it to anyone else who doesn't have the patience to slog through dozens of pages of exposition, stream-of-consciousness, and the insides of people's heads.
Now that that's over with -- I hate writing reviews of books that only get as far as "enjoyable" in my mind -- let's turn to e-books. What have we got?
Something like 70,000 of them. To start with. They cover topics from ethnic relations and civilization (whatever that means -- I'll include an example of this topic below) to economics and church history. It's a dizzyingly diverse array of topics, and is a pretty strong argument for having e-books in general. Let's take a look at a quick cross-section:
Talons and teeth: County clerks and runners in the Qing Dynasty
China's one of the oldest continuous civilizations on Earth, and has been a major power in Asia for most of that time. However, this book argues that although the Chinese imperium and its high-level functionaries had great influence, they were far outweighed by people who carried things between county governments. It's like saying that bicycle couriers are more powerful than the President, for instance; this is because those clerks and runners knew full well what they were processing and carrying, and were subject to some truly outstanding corruption. However, little is known about these people; any information we have about them survives through records kept by the highest of the high officials, which suggests something important on its own.
The Singapore Puzzle
It's long been a truism among certain kinds of people that a high degree of personal liberty is essential to keeping the people happy and the state functioning properly. Singapore, however, defies this; one of the most authoritarian governments in the world, it is home to one of the most modern, most prosperous, most successful city-states on the planet. Why is this? Why are people okay with being told not to chew gum, or spit, or smoke in public? Why do corporations agree to work in such restrictive environments, in spite of the laissez-faire capitalism practiced (in comparison anyway) by most of the rest of the developed world?
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism
I found this one kind of spooky; it's a treatise on the history that exists between Afghanistan and the United States and its outgrowth into international terrorism -- written, rather presciently, in 2000. Even before September 11 occurred, there were warning signs and clashes between the U.S. government and Afghanistan-based terror groups, including Osama bin Laden, involving the first World Trade Center bombings and an incident in Nairobi that placed its imprimatur on relations between both countries. The chapter relating to a direct assault on America covers the history of cooperation between the US and groups in Afghanistan to throw off the Soviet Union concludes with this scary paragraph:
"Perhaps future governments, whether the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, or less powerful and influential nations, will take to heart this important lesson of late twentieth-century history: When you decide to go to war against your main enemy, take a good, long look at the people behind you whom you chose as your friends, allies or mercenary fighters. Look well to see whether these allies already have unsheathed their knives -- and are pointing them at your own back."
The Swedish Table
This is a pretty far-out cookbook; sort of traditional Swedish foods and customs. The recipes are making me hungry (I'm writing this just before lunch, so forgive me for this) -- for instance, Vegetable soup with prosciutto-filled "gnocchi," actually traditional salty potato dumplings called kroppkakor. Or gravlax-and-nasturtium sandwiches with mustard-dill sauce.
Lunch must wait. More to go ...
Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science
I was kind of hoping I'd come across this one. It's controversial! Those are the best books to have in a library, even if it's purely electronic in nature. The author argues that science is, by nature, heresy because it requires objective thinking. This is okay on its own -- we humans are instinctive, feeling creatures that believe in UFOs, ghosts, and angels -- but he takes it a little bit further by noting that of all the ancient civilizations, only Greece developed geometry and number theory. This leads to a set of arguments that assert that the Western world was solely responsible for the discovery of scientific thinking, and that science itself is not an intrinsic aspect of the evolution of civilizations. It's controversial mostly because it disregards quite a few other civilizations before and after the Greeks who independently developed mathematical systems and a logical infrastructure of their own.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Ever wondered about the guy in the deerhunter hat, a pipe in his mouth, and Watson in tow? Wonder no more. I've met people who struggle to get started on reading the Holmes stories because they're never sure which one to start with. I usually say, "They're all good," but that doesn't help them out much, so I steer them toward "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and hope for the best. In this case, there's a little less to worry about; there's a pretty good selection of nine short stories that are usually thought to express the quintessential Holmes, including classics like "The Red-Headed League," "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," and "A Scandal in Bohemia."
Cosmopolitanism in the Americas -- This is the one from "Civilization"!
North and South America, as a whole, represent a study in contrasts. The United States and Canada occupy the majority of North America, and they're places where it's difficult to find a culture that's remained in isolation for very long periods of time. We've pretty well hegemonized gigantic tracts of land, and have become relatively cosmopolitan as a result. Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, on the other hand, represent even larger swaths of people who have relatively little contact with the outside world; although some of the world's largest cities are located in the region (Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, for example), there are still plenty of pockets where the intrusion of the outside world is minimal and cultures, traditions, and norms haven't changed much. However, that's in the process of being turned on its head; what does it mean when the American style of urbanization begins to overtake the jungle? How does it affect the people?
Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power
With a title like that, you know it's got to be good, right? I know, right. The author traces the history of the notion of "intellectual property" back to the case of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. Mr. Whitney had a lousy life; after he took his new invention public, the designs were promptly stolen by local farmers, who then built their own cotton gins. Whitney then began to sue anyone and everyone who built cotton gins similar to, but not exactly like, his design, but it was a long, painful, and expensive struggle -- partly because it was so difficult to prove which came first and partly because precursor designs had already been in use outside the United States, so it wasn't easy for him to claim the cotton gin as his own invention. However, and this is a side to the issue that the author pays attention to, this sort of piracy has gone on for a long time and is one of the biggest contributors to innovation and technological advancement. It's the whole idea of "intellectual property" that's a relatively new thing, and the author explores the ways it's used to both promote innovation and suppress it in the pursuit of profit; most tragically, in the case of HIV drugs in Africa.
Again, as with our journals, this represents only a very tiny drop in the bucket. From the intricacies of ancient Chinese government to industrial thievery in the United States, there's something in nearly every topic; it's hard to think none of these books actually take up any room on the shelf!
Question of the Week
I checked out a book from another university, but I didn't realize they had a different due date. My book was due on May 31, a week after I got it, and now it's late. What gives with the one-week loan period?
It depends. If you're a student, you might be finishing up an Incomplete that's due on that date, and then you're no longer a currently-registered student if you haven't signed up for the summer. If you're a faculty or staff member, it may depend on when your contract expires or a host of other things.
Generally speaking we can solve the problem for you. But when we can't, it's time to go to the lending university and find out what their system thinks you're doing, and work it out as is appropriate. Just get in touch with us, and we'll get you all the contact information you need!
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