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The first three reviews have been cut and pasted out of an electronic journal I keep (not a web journal), which accounts for their unusually informal tone.
Horizontal Society, by Lawrence M. Friedman
Direct from the journal: It's a description of trends in multi-culturalism etc. on national and international levels without a lot of prescriptions for what should be done. I think he's bought into the zero-sum thesis, but it's hard to tell. He says things like, you can't call Columbus a hero on one page and a genocidal asshole on the next. Why not? We do it all the time in conversation and editorializing on the subject. I know this is all about control of the schools, and he definitely understands that. But wouldn't the best propaganda for multi-culturalism be to say, "Explorer dude did thus and such in these years. In the ensuing centuries, people have had a number of strongly-held opinions over what that shit meant. When extremely unpopular poor people immigrated to the US of the same nationality, they revived him as a hero, a ticket to assimilation in the then-melting pot. Later, descendants of indigenous peoples spoke up against the crimes committed against their ancestors by explorer dude and those who came after. The re-interpretation of those acts will continue in the future and this description itself is a compromise between the conflicting beliefs and ideas of many people from many generations." Or, less obviously pro-multi-cultural, and more obviously an attempt to compromise, "Explorer dude did thus and such in these years. Descendants of his countrymen consider him a hero. Descendants of indigenous peoples protest the crimes he committed against their ancestors. Discuss. That's what we all do once a year anyway. Refer to your local paper for ideas." Either way, it seems easy to produce a textbook that doesn't go either direction (instead, favors multi-culturalism, and includes bullet points that can be used to appease various factions). I think he may have issues with consistency, but he was so low-key about his opinions that it was really hard to tell.
The Book on the Bookshelf, by Henry Petroski, was indeed an excellent survey of the history of the codex and its storage. The last section was a very detailed overview of stack systems and their impact on architecture initially from a lighting perspective and eventually from a load perspective. I've decided that if EFF and Lessig are not working with ALA to address issues with perfect copyright control in the absence of compulsory licensing schemes, they goddamn well should be. The ALA has a strong interest in reducing collection size through digitization and are known to be powerful defenders of basic freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I need to investigate this, along with the set of fundraising questions.
Petroski's book is both material/artifact/engineering history and social history based on contemporary pictorial evidence at its best. The stuff about chains was downright fascinating. And it's always nice to run across someone who is willing to come right out and say that most people acquire faster than they read their books. I'm trying to become an exception to that rule and it requires an unbelievable amount of discipline. His overview of possible organization schemes is the most complete I've ever seen. As always, I'm doing a hybrid version. Interesting that after years of adjustable shelving, I've gone with fixed consistent heights (which I should remember when I commission shelving). He didn't deal at all with the solid wood vs. plywood shelving issue, which I believe impacts shelf width. I personally prefer a 30-33" shelf length.
Unexpected, by Gabriela Salceda (but copyright Tomasita Ortiz), the first of the Pyramid Encanto novels I picked up at Barnes and Noble. It was surprisingly good. Some of the best sex in any romance novel I've read to date. A bit contrived, but fun. I missed some of the Spanish, but got a lot (what is cono? with a cedilla under the n). I recognized most of the TV show names (Sabado Gigante, Primer Impacto) but not all (Betty, la fea? I think a soap opera -- called a telenovela, but I may have the spelling wrong). I'm looking forward to the next one.
The constant cleaning was an important fixture of the book. To some degree, I would associate this with someone who lived alone, especially a grade school teacher. But to another degree, I wonder if this is first generation immigrant behavior. Whether it shows up in the next one should be informative. It was a helluva motivator to pick up a bit around here. The character cleaned partly out of neurosis and depression and indecision, but mostly because she really cared about the things she owned.
Fear Less: Real Truth About Risk, Safety, and Security in a Time of Terrorism, by Gavin de Becker
I enjoyed de Becker's first book, The Gift of Fear, recommended to me by my friend Katrina a couple years ago. I still haven't read his second book, but when this came out so closely on the heels of recent events, I was curious to see what I assumed had been a rush job by someone I have a lot of respect for.
It's thin. It has a bunch of appendices, some by other people including an essay by Chris Matthews of Hardball, not an inspiration for me, and one that amounts to a list of links to resources on the web, not often the kind of thing that ages well (altho that may be changing). All that aside, it is well-written and appropriately targeted. It contains a lot of good, detailed information designed to support the following. That the US was never as safe as we thought it was. That it is a lot less powerless now than we think it is. That individuals, citizens, residents, passengers on buses and airplanes are our most effective resource in preventing disasters. That the best response to most biochem attacks is (a) to get away from it and (b) take standard public health measures, since we often don't know what's accidental and what was malicious.
My biggest issue is with his suggestion for rendering planes less subject to catastrophic, suicidal hijack. He wants to beef up the cockpit door and eliminate inflight meal service. Yet at no point does he address the widespread problem of sleepy pilots. Flight attendants in and out with food, coffee and conversation are the main protection we have against those guys falling asleep and staying asleep. A lot of changes need to be made before I'm comfortable with any security solution that reduces human interaction with the inhabitants of the cockpit: pilots need to work shorter shifts and sleep on a more regular schedule. Pilots aren't going to like this, because it makes it hard to get home to their families. Airlines won't like it because it's going to look a lot less profitable. We won't get it done unless we inform the public and apply some pressure and that's going to scare the pants off of fliers, not something anyone wants to happen any more than already has. Closing and locking that cockpit door is a shitty idea. We're better off protecting it with more people. They don't have to be air marshals. He talks about a woman who recruits "Let's-Rollers" from her fellow passengers. We already do things to ensure that people seated in the exit row are prepared, able and willing to act in the event of an emergency. Why not do the same with the first two or three rows of the plane?
It's worth a read, altho at $20, you might try to get it at the library or borrow it from a friend. He's donating the profits, which is nice to see.
Head Over Heels, Susan Andersen
What a nice evening it has been. I listened to Jayne Ann Krentz speak at Third Place Books and then came home to Baked Chicken and finish this lovely novel. Andersen continues to improve. Like Krentz, a local romance author, I first read her Baby books, and have been slowly working through older reprints. Those were okay, but just nowhere near as good as she is now. The murder mystery is slender, at best, but the two romances developing in parallel with kids underfoot are handled well. I particularly liked the heroine returning home to discover the family owned bar is a neighborhood hangout, only partially occupied by grabby jerks.
Gotta Get Next to You, by Lynn Emery (but copyright Margaret Hubbard)
I think this is the first non-Arabesque romance novel I have read aimed at a black readership. The heroine is running a health clinic in Louisiana after divorce and a bit of burnout in Chicago. Intrigue associated with bad management before her arrival and possible pilfering while she's there ensues, along with a handsome private investigator. Family secrets provide slight additional interest. Close to 400 pages, and lacking the humor of Monica Jackson's novels, it was a bit of a slog through the third 100 pages. That said, more books like this would not be a bad thing. It's always good to see a competent female character, and this one isn't just described as being good at her job; we get to see a lot of her in action. The sex is okay, nothing too impressive. I'm not happy about the heroine starving herself through chunks of the book when she's stressed out about something, but I suppose there are worse things. I won't go looking for more by this author, but I won't necessarily pass something interesting up just because it's by her. I was impressed that she tackled a thorny subject (woman of interracial parentage who doesn't find out about it until she's older and is still working through what her relationship to her white relatives can and should be) and handled it in a believable way.
Perfect Match, by Hailey North
What a disappointment. I loooooved Dear Love Doctor, North's next book after this one, which shares some of the characters (Daffy in the background of this one is the heroine of the later book). Another lesson in the rule of don't-read-romance-novelists-work-backwards. Ah well. What's bad about this. I just didn't like the heroine, Lauren, the flake to end all flakes. Or, for that matter, the rest of the characters. Long-haired, magick-practicing Alistair. His button-down brother Oliver. Oliver's computer consultant Barbara. The mix-and-match foursome was an interesting twist, but I felt like Barbara, potentially the coolest of the four, was seriously short-changed. The only one in the crowd who seemed to have an great family background and to have actually purposefully and unambiguously chosen the course of her life and we don't learn a whole helluva a lot about her. I just don't believe that unhappy families are all different and happy families are all the same. There speaks someone from an unhappy family who never successfully learned to do better. One nice bit: Lauren is portrayed in some detail and very convincingly as what I call a "disconnected kinesthetic". She's a "feeler", rather than a thinker. But she's a klutz, and doesn't improve until she reconnects to her interior strengths and takes action based on that connection. That was handled really, really well.
Murder in the Gunroom, by H. Beam Piper
I picked this up a while back; it's another in a long line of books-to-read-and-pass-along. I'll loan it out to several people. I may or may not sell it. This is an Old Earth Books Facsimile. Piper's known primarily for the Little Fuzzy books the Ewoks are widely believed to be based (at least in part) on. He (Piper) didn't much care for those books. But then he was kind of a twit in a wide variety of ways.
The introductory essay, by L. Fred Ramsay, is excellent. I've read nearly everything else that was ever published that Piper wrote. I read the first two Fuzzy books (the ones published while Piper was alive) when I was in my early teens. For a while, Uller Uprising was my favorite, but I eventually got over that lapse of taste. In 2002, I'm afraid Piper is both too foolish, too bigoted and too narrow-minded for my tastes. His women are not uniformly awful -- there really are some likeable ones, if minor characters.
The language is pretty bad. Our hero, Jefferson Davis Rand (one presumes the last name is an homage to Ayn Rand, given the rest of Piper's politics), is described as "He looked hard and fit, like a man who could be a serviceable friend or a particularly unpleasant enemy. Women instinctively suspected that he would make a most satisfying lover." A bit later he's King Charles II in Brooks Brothers. Cocktail drinking, gun-toting, killer-in-self-defense, Jeff Rand is a gun geek and this novel is saturated with details of what were antique firearms when the novel was first published in 1953 and haven't been getting any younger since. Some nice details about fraud. I found it interesting that the companies involved in the merger agreement which sparks the first murder were likely fictional precursors of a huge New Jersey industry. All the commentary about Hayakawa and Korbyzscki (probably spelled that wrong) was sort of sad, when it would have been so much simpler to note that a lot of people were jumping to conclusions, often encouraged to do so by non-verbal lies on the part of Jeff Rand.
A bad novel. Bad, bad, bad. Don't read it as a mystery. Talky, boring and not real plausible. Novels like this one convince me that genre fiction has only improved in the last 50 years. (To think this was a Knopf Borzoi book.) Don't even bother as a Piper fan. But if you are into guns, this might be worth your time, if you can hold your nose through the stink of a lot of racial and ethnic epithets that don't pass muster today. For my money, if you want to read poorly written schlock from this era with a lot of offensive ideas, you might just as well go for Chester Himes.
Obsessed, by Susan Andersen
A straightforward violation of the earlier-books-are-worse rule for romance writers. This was great. Romance novels, as possibly you've noticed, are kinda formulaic. They meet. Sparks fly. Difficulties ensue. They struggle. They solve enough to commit to each other in some way. End of story, sometimes allowing for a sequel, in which further difficulties ensue, they struggle more, and solve enough to commit to each other in some additional way. This can be stretched out indefinitely, but why go there?
The problem is getting a 300-400 page novel out of "struggles ensue" without making the couple look so wildly incompatible they seem out of their gourd to even keep trying. No initial sparks justify their behavior. Etc. This is a difficulty I prefer to see overcome by having another story, a mystery, suspense, a puzzle, another romance, kids, whatever to deal with as well as the purely relationship tale of trauma. Obsessed's story is that of a serial rapist who becomes fascinated with our heroine (though she's not his preferred victim type). It isn't all that suspenseful (the internal narrative focus of romance novels and shifts of perspective to include that of pretty much everyone makes it hard to maintain much suspense), but that's okay, because it isn't so much a suspense story as it is the story of a cop (our hero), his buddies, a doctor (our heroine), her family, all of their interactions, also the grown-up victim of child abuse (the rapist) and a parade of other victims through the lives of the couple on stage. The story is found in The Issues.
In many ways, this is my favorite kind of romance. I like a well-developed moral universe. As with Monica Jackson's The Look of Love (body image issues), I am partial to both the set of issues chosen by Obsessed, and the take on those embodied by the author in the characters. The doctor (trauma specialty)/cop choice is a particularly effective one. Both are accustomed to dealing with the harrowing on a day to day basis. But their preferred coping mechanism (she to heal, he to apprehend and punish) is very different. They are presented on a level playing field, but their differences are not minimized, and the social repercussions of those differences are displayed somewhat effectively (hard to mix groups of friends, starting with the gun issue, and that's just a starting point). The meanderings of the tale cause each one to plausibly appreciate when the other's point of view is more valid than their own. Nicely executed. I may keep this one around.
Total Propaganda, by Alex Edelstein
I only read the first half. I couldn't take any more. I wouldn't take any more. Where to start.
First: word choice. Apotheosis, according to the websters I have handy, means "an exalted or glorified example". That's pretty hyperbolic. Edelstein reliably uses it at least once every ten pages. Hyperbole gets old when used that often. He should knock it off. Irony, according to the same websters, means an incongruity between what is expected and what is actual. Ironically, according to Edelstein, the top-rated TV shows are also the ones with the most references to casual sex. I don't find anything unexpected in that statement. That's the most extreme example, but it shows up in more defensible sentences throughout. A black rapper whose music described a (then) future that came to pass in the form of the Rodney King riots is described as "almost prescient". Well, if Edelstein's supporting evidence is accurate, there isn't anything almost about it.
I don't find anything insightful about his distinctions between oldprop and newprop. He's overly worshipful of film, television and advertising. He's overly harsh on political rhetoric. He's incoherent and his citation style is abominable. It's virtually impossible to figure out who he's quoting without following through to the original source (that is, the note doesn't convey the information, nor does the text). In some cases, he fails to mention names of individuals and organizations that would be informative, that he clearly had available. I don't know why, but I'm suspicious.
He also has a weird tendency to cite sources on opposing ends of the political spectrum (a liberal rag vs. a conservative rage) and act like it's a bunch of neutral people and the sequence is not political, but temporal. Whatever.
Sean points out a couple back-cover reviews that should have clued me in: "The always inventive author...", another reviewer compares the quality of analysis in the book to that which the author displays on television. Hmmm. Don't waste your time. Thanks be I bought it used.
Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, by Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter
A collection of previously published pieces, including an amicus brief. Primarily from the early to mid 90s, the issues revolve around: the Dworkin/MacKinnon in bed with the religious right to censor pornography; sexual identity politics in the era in of GLB/queer, before GLBT had become thoroughly entrenched; the various internal to the community disconnects -- between the academy and activitsts, between whites and those of color, between men and women, etc. Toss in a bit of the no-special-rights and no-promo-homo debates and I think that's a more or less complete set of what is covered.
I'm familiar with a lot of this stuff, since I was both adult and reasonably savvy when a lot of it was happening, but even so, some of it bordered on the incomprehensible (but then I always do glaze over when Deleuze or Lacan are mentioned; Bourdieu I at least used to like. Who knows what I would think if I reread him now). This isn't the best intro to the subject, but the authors are capable writers, clearly passionate about their various subjects and rally a bunch of good ideas. I picked it up used, and back to the used book store it will go, but I feel enriched by the few dollars and hours I spent on this book.
The Wizard's Dilemma, by Diane Duane
The most recent (2001) in the Wizards series, which other people have told me is going steadily downhill. I don't know. I liked the previous one, but I don't remember it well now. In this one, Nita confronts a combination of puberty and her mother's perhaps fatal brain tumor. The usual suspects are present. The Lone One tries to insert a wedge between her and her partner Kit, with some degree of success. The animal sidekicks are, this time, primarily doggie (unlike the two cat-wizard books that are tangential to this series). Dairene, the kid sister, is dealing with the decline of her own power.
It seemed like covering a lot of the same ground, one too many times for me. Then again, maybe it just reminded me about all the things I really hated about Josh Whedon killing Joyce last season in Buffy.
On the deaccesioning of Tom Raabe's Biblioholism
There's a one sentence review of this puppy back in 1995 when I read it the first time. I didn't realize it was still on the shelf, having survived countless purges in my efforts to reduce my library from under 3000 books to under 1000 books (or right around, anyway). Before I get rid of it, I'm going to say a little more about it.
First, and most annoying, is the poor quality of the history of books and biblioholism. Basbanes is, of course, a far superior source, but then so is Petroski, mentioned above. Second, and almost as annoying, is the snobbishness. Raabe has issues with the fast reader, which he pretends is associated with a failure to recall details fo books. But if that were really the issue, he wouldn't get distracted with the issue of speed. No, Raabe feels a bit inferior around the speedy consumer of text and is defensive about it. Obnoxious. Get over it. Third, really, just as annoying as the above, is his dislike of those who like genre fiction. What's the problem? I have yet to meet someone who reads genre fiction extensively (>12 a year) who doesn't also consume a certain number of more literary and/or informative books as well. The exclusively genre fiction reader tends to consume very few books at all in the course of a year. I say leave the poor fucks alone. They only get time to read on airplanes and busrides anyway.
Ignoring the bias issues, it's just a silly book. Lots of dumb little quizzes embedded in it, stuff about sneaking books into the house, dream bookstores and so on. But very little to nothing about organizational or indexing schemes, truly focussed collecting or purging strategies. His solutions to the disease invole total abstinence (which he rightly mocks), substitution (unlikely to improve anyone's life), finding someone to stop you (marriage), bookworms (something to destroy the books) or just giving in entirely. But if he'd spent any time at all on small collection strategies, he'd realize there are a whole lot of other ways to deal with this issue. Hell, if he'd read any of the Messies books, or Julie Morgenstern's books, or any of the simplify your life crap, he'd have a bunch of ideas to pass along.
Useless, dysfunctional waste of time. Buy anything by Basbanes instead. And go outside and play if you think you have a problem.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created: January 10, 2002 Modified: December 9, 2002