NielsenGW's 2013 Reading List - Part II

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NielsenGW's 2013 Reading List - Part II

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1NielsenGW
Abr 30, 2013, 2:09 pm

Holy cow...I didn't think I'd ever need to break apart this year's list into multiple threads. But, since I've found the pleasures of NetGalley and e-books, I'm reading about 86% more books this year!

Chances are that the pace will fade a bit as the year goes on, but at least this new thread gives me a chance to parcel out the long lists better.

So...here we go: Part II

2NielsenGW
Editado: Dez 30, 2013, 4:24 pm

Books read in 2013 (by Dewey Decimal number):

000s -- General Knowledge:
001: Atlantis and the Silver City by Peter Daughtrey (Mar 23)
003: Complexity and the Arrow of Time by Lineweaver, Davies, and Ruse (Aug 20)
004: The App Generation by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis (Sep 29)
006: Numbersense by Kaiser Fung (Jun 4)
020: Foundations of Library and Information Science by Richard Rubin (Sep 27)
025: Essential Classification by Vanda Broughton (Nov 13)
027: Main Street Public Library by Wayne A. Wiegand (Feb 20)
028: 12 Books That Changed the World by Melvyn Bragg (Jul 20)
039: Too Much to Know by Ann M. Blair (Jul 26)
089: Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs by Theodora Lau (Jul 9)
098: Great Forgers and Famous Fakes by Charles Hamilton (Oct 26)

100s -- Philosophy and Psychology:
101: Wittgenstein's Beetle by Martin Cohen (Jun 12)
116: The Emergence of Everything by Harold Morowitz (Jun 21)
117: Complexity and Postmodernism by Paul Cilliers (Dec 12)
122: The Why of Things by Peter V. Rabins (May 13)
126: The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (Nov 29)
128: Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler (Sep 3)
133: America Bewitched by Owen Davies (Apr 9)
150: Freud for Beginners by Richard Appignanesi (Feb 2)
152: The Joy of Pain by Richard H. Smith (Apr 22)
153: Consciousness and the Social Brain by Michael S.A. Graziano
155: Designing the Creative Child by Amy F. Ogata (Apr 5)
160: Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte (Dec 5)
169: Surfaces and Essences by Hofstadter and Sander (Apr 3)
177: True Enough by Farhad Manjoo (Jul 5)
178: The Complete Book of Greed by M. Hirsch Goldberg (Jul 23)
179: Stay (Hecht) by Jennifer Hecht (Oct 15)
184: Symposium by Plato (Dec 30)
187: Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein (Mar 7)
199: The Invention of Africa by V. Y. Mudimbe (Jul 12)

3NielsenGW
Editado: Dez 27, 2013, 3:44 pm

Books read in 2013 (by Dewey Decimal section):

200s -- Religion:
201: Ecology and Religion by John Grim and Mary Tucker (Oct 4)
208: The Voice, the Word, the Books by F.E. Peters (Jan 6)
223: Job for Everyone by John Goldingay (May 8)
226: Mark by the Book by P.W. Smuts (Mar 28)
227: How to Like Paul Again by Conrad Gempf (May 31)
230: When Donkeys Talk by Tyler Blanski (Mar 6)
232: Zealot by Reza Aslan (Jun 23)
233: God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality by David H. Jensen (May 30)
234: One With Christ by Marcus P. Johnson (Jul 31)
241: The Decalogue through the Centuries edited by Jeffrey Greenman and Timothy Larsen (Feb 17)
242: Majestic and Wild by Murray Pura (Apr 19)
248: Silence: A Christian History by Diarmid MacCulloch (Oct 17)
253: The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good by Peter Greer (Jul 1)
260: A Gathering of Memories by Charles R. Pinches (Jan 7)
261: Hope After Faith by Jerry DeWitt (May 15)
263: Journey Into the Heart of God by Philip Pfatteicher (Sep 6)
266: By the Rivers of Water by Erskine Clarke (Sep 9)
269: A Shopkeeper's Millennium by Paul E. Johnson (Jan 27)
270: Why Cities Matter by Stephem Um and Justin Buzzard (Mar 3)
271: Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron (Apr 8)
278: On Earth as It Is in Heaven edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett (Jan 10)
280: The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline by Elesha Coffman (Mar 20)
284: Letters to Lutheran Pastors by Hermann Sasse (Mar 31)
285: Presbyterians and American Culture by Bradley J. Longfield (May 6)
286: Signs, Wonders, and a Baptist Preacher by Chad Norris (Mar 14)
287: William and Catherine by Cathy Le Feuvre (Nov 16)
294: The Easy Path by Gyumed Jampa (Apr 16)
296: Hanukkah in America by Dianne Ashton (Sep 15)
299: The EarthKeeper by Adam C. Hall (Apr 26)

300s -- Social Sciences:
300: How to Conduct Surveys by Arlene Fink (Mar 2)
303: Social Acceleration by Hartmut Rosa (Mar 13)
304: Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World by Paul Collier (Apr 10)
306: The Call of the Mall by Paco Underhill (Jan 26)
322: On Dissent by Ronald Collins and David Skover (Jun 14)
323: We Shall Not be Moved by M.J. O'Brien (Mar 10)
324: 1912 by James Chace (Oct 29)
328: The American Senate by Neil MacNeil and Richard Baker
330: Tropic of Hopes by Henry Knight (Aug 17)
331: Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Jayaraman (Mar 5)
332: Building Home by Eric John Abrahamson (Apr 4)
334: Food Co-Ops in America by Anne Meis Knupfer (Apr 15)
336: Austerity by Mark Blyth (Feb 27)
340: Rebels at the Bar by Jill Norgren (Mar 25)
341: Capital of the World by Charlene Mires (Feb 15)
346: The Democracy of Sound by Alex Sayf Cummings (Feb 25)
347: Out of Order by Sandra Day O'Connor (Feb 24)
361: Chasing Chaos by Jessica Alexander (Sep 23)
364: Skull in the Ashes by Peter Kaufman (Aug 16)
370: Youth, Education, and Marginality edited by Kate Tilleczek and H. Bruce Ferguson (Mar 21)
378: Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom (Feb 5)
385: Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen E. Ambrose
388: London Underground’s Strangest Tales by Iain Spragg (Jun 15)
390: All the Time in the World: A Book of Hours by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins (Oct 21)
393: American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney (Dec 27)
398: The Rotinonshonni by Brian Rice (Jun 18)

4NielsenGW
Editado: Dez 19, 2013, 12:58 pm

Books read in 2013 (by Dewey Decimal section):

400s -- Language:
400: Verbatim by Erin McKean (Jun 27)
401: Real Presences by George Steiner (Apr 7)
414: The Music of Everyday Speech by Ann Wennerstrom (Dec 18)
417: Holy Sh*t by Melissa Mohr (Feb 16)
418: After Babel by George Steiner (Jun 9)
420: The Prodigal Tongue by Mark Abley (Sep 14)
422: The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two by Anu Garg (Jul 21)
423: The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester (Aug 7)
428: Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams by David Grambs (Aug 23)
431: Elements of German by Elmer Antonsen (Jul 10)
450: La Bella Lingua by Dianne Hales (Jun 11)
470: Latin Alive by Joseph Solodow (Dec 2)
477: Ad Infinitum by Nicholas Ostler (Aug 11)
496: Language and Colonial Power by Johannes Fabian (Dec 6)
499: In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent (Jun 6)

500s -- Science:
500: Cosmic Apprentice by Dorion Sagan (May 1)
502: The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself by Marc Abrahams (Sep 20)
512: A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann (Aug 14)
514: The Colours of Infinity by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon (Jul 11)
516: Beautiful Geometry by Eli Maor and Eugen Jost (Oct 6)
520: The Story of Astronomy by Peter Aughton (Feb 3)
522: Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson (Aug 12)
523: The Pluto Files by Neil deGrasse Tyson (Oct 3)
530: Time Reborn by Lee Smolin (May 17)
536: Four Laws That Drive the Universe by Peter Atkins (Jul 18)
538: Fatal Attraction by Patricia Fara (Aug 26)
539: Cracking the Quantum Code of the Universe by John Moffatt (Dec 16)
546: The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (Jan 4)
547: The Double Helix by James Watson (Nov 14)
550: The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester (6 Nov)
555: Colliding Continents by Mike Searle (Apr 11)
557: Geologic History of Florida by Albert C. Hine (Apr 17)
565: Trilobite! by Richard Fortey (Jun 20)
567: How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner and James Gorman (Sep 21)
572: Brave Genius by Sean B. Carroll (Aug 24)
573: Unraveling Piltdown by John E. Walsh (Jan 23)
573: The Origin of Feces by David Waltner-Toews (May 7)
581: The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart (Jun 30)
582: Florida Wildflowers by Walter K. Taylor (Apr 18)
590: The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P. N. Shuker (Nov 1)
596: The Kingdom of Rarities by Eric Dinerstein (Feb 19)
597: American Alligator by Kelby Ouchley (Sep 2)
598: Imperial Dreams by Tim Gallagher (Mar 8)

5NielsenGW
Editado: Dez 17, 2013, 9:55 am

Books read in 2013 (by Dewey Decimal section):

600s -- Technology:
601: An Engineer's Alphabet by Henry Petroski (Dec 8)
610: One Doctor by Brendan Reilly (Sep 19)
611: Stiff by Mary Roach (Dec 3)
613: Wilderness Secrets Revealed by Andre-Francois Bourbeau (Apr 23)
615: Charlatan by Pope Brock (Feb 1)
617: The Knife Man by Wendy Moore (Sep 13)
622: Lost Mountain by Erik Reece (May 21)
623: Airship (Swinfield) by John Swinfield (Jun 16)
624: Engineers of Dreams by Henry Petroski (Dec 15)
630: One-Woman Farm by Jenna Woginrich (Sep 16)
636: The Medici Giraffe by Marina Belozerskaya (Aug 22)
637: The Science of Cheese by Michael Tunick (Nov 30)
639: Introduction to Restoration Ecology by Howell, Harrington, and Glass (Feb 22)
640: Pigs in Clover by Simon Dawson (May 9)
647: Life at the Marmont by Raymond Sarlot and Fred E. Basten (Apr 30)
657: More Than a Numbers Game by Thomas A. King (Jul 24)
659: Adland by Mark Tungate (Jul 29)
663: Fizz by Tristan Donovan (Oct 1)
666: Glass: A World History by Alan McFarlane and Gerry Martin (Jul 15)
674: The Pencil by Henry Petroski (Nov 23)
688: LEGO: A Love Story by Jonathan Bender (Jul 30)

700s -- Fine Arts:
700: Other Entertainment by Ned Rorem (Jul 14)
712: The Hermit in the Garden by Gordon Campbell (Feb 26)
727: The Flower of Empire by Tatiana Holway (Mar 18)
730: The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis by Harry & Albert Henderson (Mar 17)
735: Contemporary Public Sculpture by Harriet Senie (Mar 2)
740: The Civil War and American Art by Eleanor Jones Harvey (Feb 17)
741: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Jan 15)
746: The Improbable Return of Coco Chanel by Richard Parker (May 12)
751: The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti by Rafael Schachet (Aug 5)
759: The Judgment of Paris by Ross King (Feb 11)
778: Hidden Beauty by Norman Barker and Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue (Jun 4)
780: Mozart: A Life by Paul Johnson (Nov 19)
782: God Bless America by Sheryl Kaskowitz (Apr 24)
785: Roll With It by Matt Sakakeeny (Oct 7)
786: The Amazing Jimmi Mayes by Jimmi Mayes with V. C. Speek (Dec 4)
787: One Woman in a Hundred by Mary Sue Welsh (Mar 22)
788: Beyond a Love Supreme by Tony Whyton (Mar 11)
791: Marilyn: Norma Jeane by Gloria Steinem (Apr 28)
793: Of Dice and Men by David M. Ewalt (Apr 12)
794: The Turk by Tom Standage (Jan 8)
796: The Ghost Runner by Bill Jones (Mar 24)

6NielsenGW
Editado: Dez 26, 2013, 1:56 pm

Books read in 2013 (by Dewey Decimal section):

800s -- Literature:
801: On Moral Fiction by John Gardner (Apr 21)
809: This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges (Jan 24)
810: Ornithologies of Desire by Travis V. Mason (Mar 26)
812: Wit: A Play by Margaret Edson (Aug 8)
816: Letters from a Nut by Ted L. Nancy (Feb 2)
817: Dave Barry Slept Here by Dave Barry (Nov 18)
818: My Planet by Mary Roach (Apr 13)
820: Sacred Tears by Fred Kaplan (Apr 27)
822: Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life by Fintan O'Toole (Oct 16)
823: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Aug 25)
824: Thomas Carlyle: A Biography by Fred Kaplan (May 5)
827: The Foolish Dictionary by Gideon Wurdz (Aug 13)
833: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (Nov 17)
860: The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes by Steven Wagschal (Dec 10)
873: The Metamorphoses of Ovid by Ovid (Oct 25)
877: The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire by Kirk Freudenberg (Dec 23)
879: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century by Charles Homer Haskins (Jul 17)
883: The Iliad by Homer (Sep 1)

900s -- History and Geography:
909: The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan (Nov 4)
911: A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton (Oct 20)
914: In Turkey I Am Beautiful by Brendan Shanahan (Jun 2)
915: Brian on the Brahmaputra by David Fletcher (May 20)
917: Canada's Road by Mark Richardson (Mar 15)
932: The Shadow King by Jo Marchant (Mar 27)
938: A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities by J.C. McKeown (Mar 19)
941: The Land That Never Was by David Sinclair (Jan 31)
942: Faith and Treason by Antonia Fraser (Feb 14)
943: Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin C. Hett (May 3)
945: The Borgias: The Hidden History by G.J. Meyer (Apr 14)
949: Justinian's Flea by William Rosen (Oct 13)
951: Wealth and Power by Orville Schell and John Delury (May 11)
953: Qatar by Mehran Kamrava (Jul 8)
954: Curzon: Imperial Statesman by David Gilmour (Nov 11)
955: Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy (Aug 2)
956: Contested Land, Contested Memory by Jo Roberts (Jul 27)
966: Timbuktu by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle (May 27)
970: The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King (Aug 3)
971: The Nature of Empires and the Empires of Nature by Karl Hele (Jul 4)
974: The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto (Jan 20)
976: William F. Winter and the New Mississippi by Charles C. Bolton (Sep 4)
978: The Heart of Everything That Is by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin (Oct 5)
979: Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father by Steven Hackel (Aug 4)
980: Che on My Mind by Margaret Randall (Sep 7)

7NielsenGW
Editado: Abr 30, 2013, 2:28 pm

Book read in 2013 -- First Quarter:

January - 13 books read

Jan 4: The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
Jan 6: The Voice, the Word, the Books by F. E. Peters
Jan 7: A Gathering of Memories by Charles R. Pinches
Jan 8: The Turk by Tom Standage
Jan 10: On Earth as It Is in Heaven edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett
Jan 13: Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen E. Ambrose
Jan 15: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Jan 20: The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto
Jan 23: Unraveling Piltdown by John E. Walsh
Jan 24: This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges
Jan 26: The Call of the Mall by Paco Underhill
Jan 27: A Shopkeeper's Millennium by Paul E. Johnson
Jan 31: The Land That Never Was by David Sinclair

February - 18 books read

Feb 1: Charlatan by Pope Brock
Feb 2: Freud for Beginners by Richard Appignanesi
Feb 2: Letters from a Nut by Ted L. Nancy
Feb 3: The Story of Astronomy by Peter Aughton
Feb 5: Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Feb 11: The Judgment of Paris by Ross King
Feb 14: Faith and Treason by Antonia Fraser
Feb 15: Capital of the World by Charlene Mires
Feb 16: Holy Sh*t by Melissa Mohr
Feb 17: The Decalogue through the Centuries edited by Jeffrey Greeman and Timothy Larsen
Feb 18: The Civil War and American Art by Eleanor Jones Harvey
Feb 19: The Kingdom of Rarities by Eric Dinerstein
Feb 20: Main Street Public Library by Wayne A. Wiegand
Feb 22: Introduction to Restoration Ecology by Howell, Harrington, and Glass
Feb 24: Out of Order by Sandra Day O'Connor
Feb 25: The Democracy of Sound by Alex Sayf Cummings
Feb 26: The Hermit in the Garden by Gordon Campbell
Feb 27: Austerity by Marl Blyth

March - 25 books read

Mar 2: Contemporary Public Sculpture by Harriet Senie
Mar 2: How to Conduct Surveys by Arlene Fink
Mar 3: Why Cities Matter by Stephen Um and Justin Buzzard
Mar 5: Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Jayaraman
Mar 6: When Donkeys Talk by Tyler Blanski
Mar 7: Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein
Mar 8: Imperial Dreams by Tim Gallagher
Mar 10: We Shall Not Be Moved by M.J. O'Brien
Mar 11: Beyond a Love Supreme by Tony Whyton
Mar 13: Social Acceleration by Hartmut Rosa
Mar 14: Signs, Wonders, and a Baptist Preacher by Chad Norris
Mar 15: Canada's Road by Mark Richardson
Mar 17: The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis by Harry & Albert Henderson
Mar 18: The Flower of Empire by Tatiana Holway
Mar 19: A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities by J.C. McKeown
Mar 20: The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline by Elesha Coffman
Mar 21: Youth, Education, and Marginality edited by Kate Tilleczek and H. Bruce Ferguson
Mar 22: One Woman in a Hundred by Mary Sue Welsh
Mar 23: Atlantis and the Silver City by Peter Daughtrey
Mar 24: The Ghost Runner by Bill Jones
Mar 25: Rebels at the Bar by Jill Norgren
Mar 26: Ornithologies of Desire by Travis V. Mason
Mar 27: The Shadow King by Jo Marchant
Mar 28: Mark by the Book by P.W. Smuts
Mar 31: Letters to Lutheran Pastors by Hermann Sasse

8NielsenGW
Editado: Jun 30, 2013, 2:08 pm

Book read in 2013 -- Second Quarter:

April - 26 books read

Apr 3: Surfaces and Essences by Hofstadter and Sander
Apr 4: Building Home by Eric John Abrahamson
Apr 5: Designing the Creative Child by Amy F. Ogata
Apr 7: Real Presences by George Steiner
Apr 8: Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron
Apr 9: America Bewitched by Owen Davies
Apr 10: Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World by Paul Collier
Apr 11: Colliding Continents by Mike Searle
Apr 12: Of Dice and Men by David Ewalt
Apr 13: My Planet by Mary Roach
Apr 14: The Borgias: The Hidden History by G.J. Meyer
Apr 15: Food Co-Ops in America by Anne Meis Knupfer
Apr 16: The Easy Path by Gyumed Jampa
Apr 17: Geologic History of Florida by Albert C. Hine
Apr 18: Florida Wildflowers by Walter K. Taylor
Apr 19: Majestic and Wild by Murray Pura
Apr 20: The American Senate by Neil MacNeil and Richard Baker
Apr 21: On Moral Fiction by John Gardner
Apr 22: The Joy of Pain by Richard H. Smith
Apr 23: Wilderness Secrets Revealed by Andre-Francois Bourbeau
Apr 24: God Bless America by Sheryl Kaskowitz
Apr 25: Consciousness and the Social Brain by Michael S.A. Graziano
Apr 26: The EarthKeeper by Adam C. Hall
Apr 27: Sacred Tears by Fred Kaplan
Apr 28: Marilyn: Norma Jeane by Gloria Steinem
Apr 30: Life at the Marmont by Raymond Sarlot and Fred E. Basten

May - 17 books read

May 1: Cosmic Apprentice by Dorion Sagan
May 3: Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin C. Hett
May 5: Thomas Carlyle: A Biography by Fred Kaplan
May 6: Presbyterians and American Culture by Bradley J. Longfield
May 7: The Origin of Feces by David Waltner-Toews
May 8: Job for Everyone by John Goldingay
May 9: Pigs in Clover by Simon Dawson
May 11: Wealth and Power by Orville Schell and John Delury
May 12: The Improbable Return of Coco Chanel by Richard Parker
May 13: The Why of Things by Peter V. Rabins
May 15: Hope After Faith by Jerry DeWitt
May 17: Time Reborn by Lee Smolin
May 20: Brian on the Brahmaputra by David Fletcher
May 21: Lost Mountain by Erik Reece
May 27: Timbuktu by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle
May 30: God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality by David H. Jensen
May 31: How to Like Paul Again by Conrad Gempf

June - 16 books read

Jun 2: In Turkey I Am Beautiful by Brendan Shanahan
Jun 4: Numbersense by Kaiser Fung
Jun 5: Hidden Beauty by Norman Barker and Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue
Jun 6: In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent
Jun 9: After Babel by George Steiner
Jun 11: La Bella Lingua by Dianne Hales
Jun 12: Wittgenstein's Beetle by Martin Cohen
Jun 14: On Dissent by Ronald Collins and David Skover
Jun 15: London Underground’s Strangest Tales by Iain Spragg
Jun 16: Airship by John Swinfield
Jun 18: The Rotinonshonni by Brian Rice
Jun 20: Trilobite! by Richard Fortey
Jun 21: The Emergence of Everything by Harold Morowitz
Jun 23: Zealot by Reza Aslan
Jun 27: Verbatim by Erin McKean
Jun 30: The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart

9NielsenGW
Editado: Out 3, 2013, 2:52 pm

Books read in 2013 -- Third Quarter:

July - 21 books read
Jul 1: The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good by Peter Greer
Jul 4: The Nature of Empires and the Empires of Nature by Karl Hele
Jul 5: True Enough by Farhad Manjoo
Jul 8: Qatar by Mehran Kamrava
Jul 9: Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs by Theodora Lau
Jul 10: Elements of German by Elmer Antonsen
Jul 11: The Colours of Infinity by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon
Jul 12: The Invention of Africa by V. Y. Mudimbe
Jul 14: Other Entertainment by Ned Rorem
Jul 15: Glass: A World History by Alan McFarlane and Gerry Martin
Jul 17: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century by Charles Homer Haskins
Jul 18: Four Laws That Drive the Universe by Peter Atkins
Jul 20: 12 Books That Changed the World by Melvyn Bragg
Jul 21: The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two by Anu Garg
Jul 23: The Complete Book of Greed by M. Hirsch Goldberg
Jul 24: More Than a Numbers Game by Thomas A. King
Jul 26: Too Much to Know by Ann M. Blair
Jul 27: Contested Land, Contested Memory by Jo Roberts
Jul 29: Adland by Mark Tungate
Jul 30: LEGO: A Love Story by Jonathan Bender
Jul 31: One With Christ by Marcus P. Johnson

August - 18 books read

Aug 2: Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy
Aug 3: The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King
Aug 4: Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father by Steven Hackel
Aug 5: The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti by Rafael Schachter
Aug 7: The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
Aug 8: Wit: A Play by Margaret Edson
Aug 11: Ad Infinitum by Nicholas Ostler
Aug 12: Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson
Aug 13: The Foolish Dictionary by Gideon Wurdz
Aug 14: A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann
Aug 16: Skull in the Ashes by Peter Kaufman
Aug 17: Tropic of Hopes by Henry Knight
Aug 20: Complexity and the Arrow of Time by Lineweaver, Davies, and Ruse
Aug 22: The Medici Giraffe by Marina Belozerskaya
Aug 23: Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams by David Grambs
Aug 24: Brave Genius by Sean B. Carroll
Aug 25: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Aug 26: Fatal Attraction by Patricia Fara

September - 17 books read

Sep 1: The Iliad by Homer
Sep 2: American Alligator by Kelby Ouchley
Sep 3: Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler
Sep 4: William F. Winter and the New Mississippi by Charles C. Bolton
Sep 6: Journey Into the Heart of God by Philip Pfatteicher
Sep 7: Che on My Mind by Margaret Randall
Sep 9: By the Rivers of Water by Erskine Clarke
Sep 13: The Knife Man by Wendy Moore
Sep 14: The Prodigal Tongue by Mark Abley
Sep 15: Hanukkah in America by Dianne Ashton
Sep 16: One-Woman Farm by Jenna Woginrich
Sep 19: One Doctor by Brendan Reilly
Sep 20: The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself by Marc Abrahams
Sep 21: How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner and James Gorman
Sep 23: Chasing Chaos by Jessica Alexander
Sep 27: Foundations of Library and Information Science by Richard Rubin
Sep 29: The App Generation by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis

10NielsenGW
Editado: Dez 30, 2013, 4:25 pm

Books read in 2013 -- Fourth Quarter:

October - 15 books read

Oct 1: Fizz by Tristan Donovan
Oct 3: The Pluto Files by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Oct 4: Ecology and Religion by John Grim and Mary Tucker
Oct 5: The Heart of Everything That Is by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
Oct 6: Beautiful Geometry by Eli Maor and Eugen Jost
Oct 7: Roll With It by Matt Sakakeeny
Oct 13: Justinian's Flea by William Rosen
Oct 15: Stay (Hecht) by Jennifer Hecht
Oct 16: Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life by Fintan O'Toole
Oct 17: Silence: A Christian History by Diarmid MacCulloch
Oct 20: A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton
Oct 21: All the Time in the World: A Book of Hours by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins
Oct 25: The Metamorphoses of Ovid by Ovid
Oct 26: Great Forgers and Famous Fakes by Charles Hamilton
Oct 29: 1912 by James Chace

November - 13 books read

Nov 1: The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P. N. Shuker
Nov 4: The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan
Nov 6: The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester
Nov 11: Curzon: Imperial Statesman by David Gilmour
Nov 13: Essential Classification by Vanda Broughton
Nov 14: The Double Helix by James Watson
Nov 16: William and Catherine by Cathy Le Feuvre
Nov 17: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Nov 18: Dave Barry Slept Here by Dave Barry
Nov 19: Mozart: A Life by Paul Johnson
Nov 23: The Pencil by Henry Petroski
Nov 29: The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett
Nov 30: The Science of Cheese by Michael Tunick

December - 14 books read

Dec 2: Latin Alive by Joseph Solodow
Dec 3: Stiff by Mary Roach
Dec 4: The Amazing Jimmi Mayes by Jimmi Mayes with V.C. Speek
Dec 5: Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte
Dec 6: Language and Colonial Power by Johannes Fabian
Dec 8: An Engineer's Alphabet by Henry Petroski
Dec 10: The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes by Steven Wagschal
Dec 12: Complexity and Postmodernism by Paul Cilliers
Dec 15: Engineers of Dreams by Henry Petroski
Dec 16: Cracking the Quantum Code of the Universe by John Moffatt
Dec 18: The Music of Everyday Speech by Ann Wennerstrom
Dec 23: The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire by Kirk Freudenberg
Dec 27: American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney
Dec 30: Symposium by Plato

11NanaCC
Abr 30, 2013, 2:22 pm

That is an amazing list!

12NielsenGW
Abr 30, 2013, 2:32 pm

Also, the seven latest approvals from NetGalley:

* The Why of Things: Causality in Science, Medicine, and Life by Peter V. Rabins (DDC 122)
* Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor's Journey from Belief to Atheism by Jerry DeWitt (DDC 261)
* The Improbable Return of Coco Chanel: As Witnessed by Her Assistant, Richard Parker (Volume 1) by Richard Parker (DDC 746)
* Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature by Fred Kaplan (DDC 820 -- already reviewed)
* Thomas Carlyle: A Biography by Fred Kaplan (DDC 824)
* Brian on the Brahmaputra: (With Sujan in the Sundarbans) by David Fletcher (DDC 915)
* Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century by Orville Schell (DDC 951)

13NielsenGW
Maio 1, 2013, 4:47 pm



May 1: Sagan, Dorion. Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science. (DDC 500)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science

Dorion Sagan’s Cosmic Apprentice is a scientific mugging. He takes everything you think you know about science and turns it on its head, tying together classic observations and modern revelations in such a way as to make ensure that you will question everything. He scoops up the whole world of modern science, including hallucinogenic research, bacterial genomics, the significance of dust, and the nature of scientific revolutions, squeezes them for all they’re worth.

Sagan’s mission is to show that everything is simultaneously connected and questionable. He focuses his time on scientists conducting research far outside the mainstream. These people are not kooks per se, but they are definitely not your run-of-the-mill pipette-wielding chemists or biologists. They are seeking to integrate whole systems of thought, systems that range from the microscopic to the cosmologic. He quotes research from far too many people to count.

There’s also a lot of cognitive science in here as well. How do we think about discovery? About failure? About thinking itself? These are both neurological and philosophic questions. An interesting motif that recurs in the chapters, however, is the notion of the free will in a world of interconnected systems. Given that everything in the universe is the result of billions of years of motion and reaction, what makes humanity so special that it doesn’t have to obey these laws? Each one of us may believe that we are unique and autonomous, but we are subject to the same processes that govern the ocean or the ant colony. We are at the mercy of our chemicals and invading bacteria. The feature that supposedly separates us from the rest of the universe is our self-perception. The problem occurs when we try to devise a test to prove or disprove free will.

It’s these intersections of science and philosophy that make this interesting. Sagan eagerly demonstrates ability to synthesize, or at least correlate, information from very disparate fields of study. This book is like reading Bill Bryson on acid. I liked it a lot, but next time, I’ll read it much slower. It’s just a lot to take in at once. If you have the stomach and can handle the ride, though. this one is well worth it.

14NielsenGW
Maio 3, 2013, 2:39 pm



May 3: Hett, Benjamin Carter. Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery. (337 p.; finished 3 May 2013)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 940: History of Europe
• 943: History of Germany and neighboring Central European countries
• 943.08: 1866 to present
• 943.086: Period of the Third Reich, 1933-1945

We’ve long since passed the point where everyone thinks World War II started in 1941. That’s just when the US declared war. Most students get the modern version that has the war starting in 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland. China and Japan had been fighting since 1937, but now both sides of world were at war. But few, however, can pinpoint its ideological roots. Why did Germany invade? What led the German state to believe it could conquer Europe? While these questions are still being debated, there is an interesting occurrence which basically led to the formation of the Nazi state: the Reichstag fire of 1933. Benjamin Hett’s Burning the Reichstag studies the events and politics surrounding this fateful event.

During the evening of February 27, 1933, a fire erupted in the Reichstag, the German seat of government. It took a few hours to get under control, but eventually it was extinguished. Adolf Hitler, the newly-elected Chancellor of Germany was notified and he immediately blamed the Communists for trying to overthrow parliament. At the time, the Nazi party controlled only a third of the seats in parliament, about twice as many as the Communists. Hitler was already in the middle of proceedings to dissolve parliament and hold new elections (in an effort to increase Nazi seats). The fire allowed to him issue the Reichstag Fire Decree which effectively suspended civil liberties for Germans citizens. The ensuing elections and political bonds formed thereafter gave him power to pass the Enabling Act, giving direct and dictatorial power to the Chancellor. All this from one fire.

While the man responsible, Marinus van der Lubbe, was indeed a Communist and is historically believed to have done the deed, there is conflicting evidence as to whether it was part of a conspiracy on the part of the Communist party to start a coup or whether this was the Nazi machine’s first plot to gain control of the country. He may have been goaded into doing so by the Nazis in an effort to frame the Communists. Hett’s narrative of the events and the social climate, including the trial involving van der Lubbe and his supposed Bulgarian Communist co-conspirators, proves to be a very interesting read. Some of the more enticing bits are concerning the author himself, who writes about corresponding with the few people remaining who were actually involved in the fire and looking through the notes of past researchers. He proves that history is not just about what’s in the past, but that it’s still evolving, still seeking its own truth. It gets a little convoluted in places when he tries to parse out all the political connections and machinations, but his details are myriad and much-needed (he literally gives a minute-by-minute account of the night of the fire reconstructed from trail transcripts and police reports). All in all, this was a well-researched and thought-provoking book.

15NielsenGW
Editado: Maio 4, 2013, 9:44 pm

Took some time off reading my latest tome to gather new NetGalley approvals and head out to the thrift store for some new books:

NetGalley:

* The Iliad by Homer, translated by Barry Powell (DDC 883)
* William F. Winter and the New Mississippi by Charles C. Bolton (DDC 976)
* Che on My Mind by Margaret Randall (DDC 980)

From the store (all books for a future project):

* Saul Bellow. Humboldt's Gift -- Winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize; nominated for the 1976 National Book Award
* E. L. Doctorow. Billy Bathgate -- Winner of the 1989 National Book Critic's Circle Award and the 1990 Faulkner/PEN Award; nominated for the 1989 National Book Award and the 1990 Pulitzer Prize
* Grade, Chaim. Rabbis and Wives -- Nominated for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize
* MacDonald, Ann-Marie. The Way the Crow Flies -- Nominated for the 2003 Scotiabank Giller Prize
* O'Connor, Edwin. All in the Family -- Nominated for the 1967 National Book Award
* Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose -- Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize
* Walker, Alice. The Color Purple -- Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the 1983 National Book Award; nominated for the 1982 National Book Critic's Circle Award

16mkboylan
Maio 5, 2013, 12:45 am

oooohhh read Che first! I want to hear about it.

wait........WHAT future project?

17NielsenGW
Maio 5, 2013, 4:46 pm

Sorry Merrikay, but I try to read approvals in order I receive them. Otherwise, I would keep relegating somewhat duller books to the end of the line. Don't worry, though, I only have a three-week backlog to get through.

As for my next project, I've decided to tackle all the award-winning fiction I've been avoiding over the years. Since I'm a completist, I can't just read some of the winner and not the others, so I've devised a project to keep me busy ad infinitum. I've chosen ten book awards and will read all books that either won or were nominated/shortlisted for the award. The awards I've chosen are:

* The Man Booker Prize
* The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
* The Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel
* The National Book Critic's Circle Award for Fiction
* The National Book Award for Fiction
* The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
* The Orange/Women's Prize for Fiction
* The Faulkner/PEN Award for Fiction
* The Scotiabank Giller Prize
* The James Tait Black Memorial Prize

There are probably better or more diverse awards out there, but I had to make a cutoff somewhere. These ten awards comprise 1,421 unique titles so far, so I have to start gathering them now when I see them at sales and such. It should be a lot of fun.

18NanaCC
Maio 5, 2013, 6:19 pm

I like the sound of that project!

19mkboylan
Maio 5, 2013, 11:14 pm

When are you going to start that project? Will you do them simultaneously with the Dewey?

20NielsenGW
Maio 5, 2013, 11:32 pm

Unfortunately, no. I've leaving everything else until after the Dewey project (due to finish sometime in 2017). I figure the next four years will give me plenty of time to gather at least a few hundred of these titles as a starting point.

21NielsenGW
Maio 5, 2013, 11:32 pm



May 5: Kaplan, Fred. Thomas Carlyle: A Biography. (DDC 824.8)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 820: British literature
• 824: British essays
• 824.8: Victorian period, 1837-1899

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a man always in revolution. He revolted against the religion of the day, against the industrialist and capitalist social structure, and against the idea that a lifelong marriage should be intensely and continuously happy. He was an ardent Calvinist, but struggled with many accepted religious truths. He championed the introduction of German Romantic literature to the British and penned a masterful history of the French Revolution. He was irascible and crotchety, but many flocked to his ideas. Fred Kaplan’s Thomas Carlyle is a unique and thorough biography of this ideological pioneer.

Fred Kaplan’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of Carlyle is as researched as it is long. At 600 pages, it covers the entirety of the life of the noted Scottish essayist and philosopher. While it incorporates a great deal of his correspondence and others’ notes on Carlyle, Kaplan tends to stay away from literary analyses of Carlyle’s writings. Very few other details are spared, however, as Kaplan does a very good job of fleshing out this long-dead thinker. This is a 30th anniversary re-issue of the work, but I think it would hold up against modern biographies. A splendid and absorbing book.

22mkboylan
Maio 6, 2013, 2:52 pm

"a man always in revolution" my kind of guy. very exhausting tho.

23NielsenGW
Maio 6, 2013, 5:09 pm



May 6: Longfield, Bradley J. Presbyterians and American Culture: A History. (203 p.; finished 6 May 2013)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 280: Christian denominations
• 285: Presbyterian churches, Reformed churches centered in America, Congregational churches, or Puritanism
• 285.1: Presbyterian churches of United States origin

Bradley J. Longfield’s Presbyterians and American Culture is a deep dive into the formation and metamorphosis of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. While mildly scholarly in tone, it traces the formation of the church in America to the First Presbytery of 1706 and then to the modern day formation of the Presbyterian Church of the United States in 1983. Between those dates, the church has split and re-combined many times, and each iteration gave birth to a new tradition of Presbyterianism in the United States, each with their own set of guiding principles and beliefs.

Presbyterianism is generally considered an Old World religion, adhering closely to the Calvinist tradition. In the US, concentrations of Presbyterians can be found in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Presbyterian culture, much like the other mainline Protestant denominations had an interesting effect on the social fabric of America and vice versa. America’s struggle with the issue of slavery in the 19th century lead to a fracture of the church that took decades to heal. Longfield’s tapestry of each of the divisions of the church and their eventual recombination provides a lens through which we can look at American history. If you’re a student of American religious history or want to know more about the Presbyterian church, then this book is just right for you.

24NielsenGW
Maio 7, 2013, 11:54 pm



May 7: Waltner-Toews, David. The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society. (DDC 573.49)

Warning: This review will contain the word shit as it fully encompasses the subject of the text. If that offends, feel free to skip this one; if not, read on.

David Waltner-Toews, in The Origin of Feces, dives face-first into the subject of excrement. While at heart an epidemiologist, he found that a fair number of epidemics are caused by parasites, bacteria, or toxins from feces entering the water table and infecting humans. Shit, in all it forms, is infectious, but causes massive ecological change in many positive ways. Birds process seeds and deposit them far afield so that plants can move across the landscape. Plants process energy and essentially “poop” out oxygen for us to breathe. Even the lowly dung beetle, while rolling about balls of shit all day, helps to recycle larger piles of scat into the soil for re-nitrogenation.

The trick with looking at shit on an ecological scale is to understand that it both harmful and helpful. In some ways, the large-scale breeding of livestock is leading to a global increase in excrement, and the world is having trouble processing all of it. While many good can come from animal waste (think musk and ambergris), many of the methods we use to deal with it cause imbalance in the larger ecosystem of the planet. Toews investigates some of the local methods for dealing with waste issues and how they have either succeeded or failed. This book would make a great companion piece for either Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map or W. Hodding Carter’s Flushed. All in all, it will make you give a shit—and that just the author’s hoping for.

25mkboylan
Maio 8, 2013, 12:14 am

OR - Everybody Poops

Actually, that does sound kind of interesting.

26SassyLassy
Maio 8, 2013, 10:07 am

The problems of dealing with animal waste are enormous. I could write on this at length, but will refrain (thanks from everyone) and only mention that in a wonderful example of bafflegab, the processes of dealing with the waste are referred to as nutrient management.

Waltner-Toews is a well respected writer and former academic, both a vet and a PhD, as well as a poet. I think I will have to read this book. Interesting to see it reviewed with a mention of The Ghost Map, which I am currently reading.

I once had a very unusual summer job analyzing seed content from the outhouses at an archaeologic dig, to see what people were eating, based on class status. Amazing what we can learn from such places!

27NielsenGW
Maio 8, 2013, 5:53 pm



May 8: Goldingay, John. Job for Everyone. (DDC 223.1077)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 220: The Bible
• 223: Poetics books of the Old Testament
• 223.1: Job
• 223.1077: Commentary with text

Job is a man of faith. He has a loving family, a thriving farm, and the respect of his community. One day, Satan declares that the only reason Job is happy and faithful is because God protects him and brings him prosperity. He says that if that protection was gone, Job would no longer have faith in God. Satan proposes an experiment: remove all the prosperity, all the riches, and his family and let us see his true faith. The only rule: Satan can do whatever we wants to Job, but he cannot kill him. John Goldingay’s Job for Everyone is pleasant explication of this metaphoric and heavy tale.

This book is not an exegesis or a catechism or a dense work of theology, but rather a learned man’s introspective look at the life of Job. While Goldingay is a Biblical scholar, his attempt to make the book of Job more accessible works well. It’s a commentary, so you get a chunk of the text, then the author’s explanations and reflection after each one. He ties events in Job’s tale to stories from his own life (probably not as severe, though, as plagues, boils, and the destruction of his family). What emerges is a useful and complex understanding of Job’s story. If you’re reading the Bible and looking for a companion piece for this section, then this book should work very well.

28NielsenGW
Maio 9, 2013, 4:08 pm



May 9: Dawson, Simon. Pigs in Clover: Or How I Accidentally Fell in Love with the Good Life. (DDC 640.92)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 640: Home economics and family living
• +.092: Biography

One drunken New Year’s Eve, Simon Dawson was tricked into an agreement. He didn’t know what it was until his morning hangover. He had agreed with his wife to sell everything they owned in London, move to Exmoor (in Devonshire) and start a farm. He was not amused, but decided to go along with it because his wife was very unhappy with her job as a city solicitor. As a real estate agent, Simon was pretty well set and happy in London. But away they went—just to try it out for a while. That was 11 years ago, and Dawson’s Pigs in Clover is a wonderful book about the journey.

They have to learn everything about farming, from raising chickens, pigs, sheep, and horses to fixing enclosures to clearing land to selling their goods at market. Along the way, they deal with the lives and deaths of their livestock, the almost monthly near-death experiences around the farm (including a rather cringe-inducing testicular electrocution incident), and the ebb and flow (mostly ebb) of money while living away from the big city and their family. Dawson’s observations are sweet, tender, nerve-racking, hilarious, and all the other adjectives you can think of. He deals with puckish piglets, headstrong horses, and darling ducklings. There’s almost too much going in this one to do it justice in a review.

Sufficed to say, their adventures are thoroughly readable and often very touching. Through most of this book, I had a big grin on my face as he encounters just about all the possible pitfalls of trying to become truly self-sufficient. You will, though, have to be a little versed in your Britishisms to read this one. After a couple of chapters, however, Dawson becomes like an old friend walking you through his life. If you’re a bit squeamish about just how the sausage is made, then you can just glaze over the bits about his moral back-and-forth on dispatching animals for food. Although, from his description, I can almost believe that home-raised meat tastes that much better. All in all, a delightful and cheery book.

29NanaCC
Maio 9, 2013, 9:55 pm

I think there are times when we would all lke to get away and get to a quieter lifestyle. But my ideal wouldn't involve pigs and sausage.

30NielsenGW
Maio 10, 2013, 8:28 am

Just logged a whole new batch of books:

From NetGalley:

* Numbersense: How to Use Big Data to Your Advantage by Kaiser Fung (DDC 006)
* God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality by David H. Jensen (DDC 233)
* Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans by Matt Sakakeeny (DDC 785)
* In Turkey I am Beautiful: Between Chaos and Madness in a Strange Land by Brendan Shanahan (DDC 914)

From other sources:

* Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs, 2nd Ed. by Theodora Lau (DDC 089)
* Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments by Martin Cohen (DDC 101)
* The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (DDC 114)
* The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex by Harold Morowitz (DDC 116)
* The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul by Douglas Hofstadter (DDC 126)
* Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal (DDC 171)
* Three Spanish Philosophers by Jose F. Mora (DDC 196)
* God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory by Niall Shanks (DDC 213)
* Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession by Robert C. Fuller (DDC 236)

31JDHomrighausen
Maio 10, 2013, 11:11 am

You have the most random/wide-ranging reading tastes of everyone I know on LT. It's interesting to watch. Have you ever been in the habit of zooming in on one subject?

32NielsenGW
Maio 10, 2013, 1:35 pm

Why thank you! I pride myself on being pretty diversified, but you've hit upon the downside of that already. Looking back through my reads over the last 4 years, I've never spent a lot of time in one particular area. There were moments when I read three or four in the same general area in a row, but then I veer off to satisfy some other nonfiction whim of mine. It's a bit like having academic ADD. :)

That's probably why I chose the DDC Challenge--it allows me to keep reading same way I've been doing, but with a larger goal behind it.

In other news, a buddy of mine just sent me a massive cache of PDF books that he's getting rid of. There's bound to be some in there that fill in some of my gaps. Cheers!

33mkboylan
Maio 10, 2013, 1:44 pm

ooooo yahoo! tell us what you got!

34NielsenGW
Maio 10, 2013, 2:30 pm

I'm just about halfway through the cache, but here's what I've decided to catalogue so far:

* Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century by Ryan K. Smith (DDC 246)
* The Roots of Endurance: Invincible Perseverance in the Lives of John Newton, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce by John Piper (DDC 283)
* In Search of Zarathustra: Across Iran and Central Asia to Find the World's First Prophet by Paul Kriwaczek (DDC 295)
* Datapedia of the United States 1790-2005: America Year by Year by George T. Kurian (DDC 317)
* globalization: n. the irrational fear that someone in China will take your job by Bruce C.N. Greenwald (DDC 337)
* Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan by Bruce Feiler (DDC 373)
* German: Biography of a Language by Ruth Sanders (DDC 430)
* Elements of German: Phonology and Morphology by Elmer H. Antonsen (DDC 431)
* La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language by Dianne Hales (DDC 450)
* The Origins of the Rumanians: The Early History of the Rumanian Language by Andre Dunay (DDC 459)
* A Brief History of the Spanish Language by David A. Pharies (DDC 460)
* Portuguese Syntax: New Comparative Studies by Joao Costa (DDC 469)
* Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages by Joseph B. Solodow (DDC 470)
* Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 by Sumathi Ramaswamy (DDC 494)
* Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938 by Johannes Fabian (DDC 496)
* The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist by Reviel Netz (DDC 532)
* Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life by Steven Shapin (DDC 533)
* Light Years and Time Travel: An Exploration of Mankind's Enduring Fascination With Light by Brian Clegg (DDC 535)

There's a ton more, but they're in sections I already have and cataloguing them all would eat up a lot of time. I'll see if I can't get to the rest by tomorrow.

35mkboylan
Maio 10, 2013, 2:35 pm

Wilberforce' roots of endurance has GOT to be interesting. I've always wondered how he stuck it out so long.

Passions of the tongue and La bella lingua also sound interesting to me. Enjoy.

36NielsenGW
Maio 11, 2013, 11:32 am

I love a day where I can catalog new books, while listening to another book. Here's the rest of the haul:

* Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (DDC 005)
* From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America by Beth L. Bailey (DDC 392)
* The Four Laws That Drive the Universe by Peter Atkins (DDC 536)
* Vanity, Vitality, and Virility: The Science behind the Products You Love to Buy by John Emsley (DDC 543)
* Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet by Jim Bell (DDC 559)
* Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould (DDC 560)
* An Engineer's Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession by Henry Petroski (DDC 601)
* Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America by Henry Petroski (DDC 624)
* More Than a Numbers Game: A Brief History of Accounting by Thomas A. King (DDC 657)
* Glass: A World History by Alan Macfarlane (DDC 666)
* The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski (DDC 674)
* Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West by Ken Worpole (DDC 718)
* Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life by Mitchell Whitelaw (DDC 776)
* The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes by Steven Wagschal (DDC 860)
* The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire by Kirk Freudenberg (DDC 877)
* The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century by Charles H. Haskins (DDC 879)
* Honor Among Thieves: Captain Kidd, Henry Every, and the Pirate Democracy in the Indian Ocean by Jan Rogozinski (DDC 969)
* Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle by Ingrid Betancourt (DDC 986)
* Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 by Emilia Viotti da Costa (DDC 988)
* The Falklands War 1982 by Duncan Anderson (DDC 997)

37NanaCC
Maio 11, 2013, 3:08 pm

Amazing list! What are you listening to? Is it for your challenge?

38NielsenGW
Maio 11, 2013, 4:20 pm

You'll see, or rather read, in a few hours (it's for the challenge).

39NielsenGW
Maio 11, 2013, 6:01 pm



May 11: Schell, Oliver and John Delury. Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century. (496 p.; finished 11 May 2013)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 950: History of Asia, the Orient, and the Far East
• 951: History of China and adjacent areas
• 951.05: 20th century

It’s mildly sad that the signing of the Unequal Treaties at the end of the First Opium War in 1842 signaled China’s entrance into the modern era. China’s cultural heritage had been one of self-sufficiency, technological innovation, and dynastic coherence. Rebellion after rebellion ended the 365-year rule of the Qing dynasty. After that the fledgling Republic of China struggled to become the power it once was, at least in the eyes of the West. Oliver Schell’s and John Delury Wealth and Power trace the cultural, political, and social history of China through the last two centuries to show how the nation has come to the stature it has today.

The author’s interesting strategy for chronicling the expansive history of China is through the eyes of various scholars, generals, and political leaders. They start with government secretary and scholar Wei Yuan, who identified China’s interactions with the West as a threat and wrote extensively on the Opium Wars. Then Feng Guifen argues for synthesizing Confucianism with Western industrialization ideals in the late 19th century. After the fall of the Qing and the death of the Empress Dowager Cixi, there are predictable forays into the ideals of General Chiang Kai-shek (leader of China through World War II), Mao Zedong (communist revolutionary), and Deng Xiaoping, who tried to move the country towards a more moderate market economy. The history ends with the human rights activism of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo.

There is almost no way to write a short history of any part of China’s history. The philosophical and political schools and the traditions which inform them are myriad. Sufficed to say, this book does a very good job of balancing Eastern and Western perspectives. If you’re looking for a crash course in modern Chinese history, then this one is a good place to start. The organization is pretty decent, and the flow optimal. All in all, a very good book.

40mkboylan
Maio 11, 2013, 6:13 pm

The new show on HBO, Vice, did an interesting piece on China and their real estate bust last night. Showed brand new empty neighborhoods. Well, no longer brand new, but never lived in.

This must have been interesting.

41NielsenGW
Maio 11, 2013, 6:17 pm

I think this will just about do it for new acquisitions today:

* Conflict Management for Libraries: Strategies for a Positive, Productive Workplace by Jack G. Montgomery (DDC 023)
* Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair (DDC 039)
* Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders by Jamie Whyte (DDC 160)
* Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole by Stephen Law (DDC 165)
* True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo (DDC 177)
* The Music of Pythagoras: How an Ancient Brotherhood Cracked the Code of the Universe and Lit the Path from Antiquity to Outer Space by Kitty Ferguson (DDC 182)
* Plato: The Man and His Work by A.E. Taylor (DDC 184)
* The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge by V.Y. Mudimbe (DDC 199)
* Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners by Nancy T. Ammerman (DDC 206)
* The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart (DDC 211)
* For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose (DDC 382)
* Japanese and Other Altaic Languages by Roy A. Miller (DDC 490)
* In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius by Arika Okrent (DDC 499)
* The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse by Jennifer Ouellette (DDC 515)
* The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould (DDC 575)
* Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (DDC 611)
* Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft by Dard Hunter (DDC 676)
* The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands by Nicholas Clapp (DDC 939)

42mkboylan
Maio 11, 2013, 6:18 pm

http://hbo.vice.com/ Here's a link if you want to see pics. Episode 6 Segment 1 - still available On Demand I think.

43mkboylan
Maio 11, 2013, 6:22 pm

OOO if Crimes Against Logic is any good let me know. I have nothing for 160 or actually, for the 100s. The reviews don't look very good.

44NielsenGW
Maio 11, 2013, 6:24 pm

Interesting -- it speaks to two intriguing questions, whether or not the Chinese people actually enjoy and endure the whims of the government and the economy they are trying to develop, and just why they thought that a replica of Paris (one of the most decadent of Western locales) was appropriate.

45mkboylan
Maio 11, 2013, 6:26 pm

Yes, that is talked about in the segment. Paris in China?! Weird.

46NielsenGW
Maio 12, 2013, 6:09 pm



May 12: Parker, Richard. The Improbable Return of Coco Chanel: As Witnessed by her Assistant, Richard Parker (Volume 1). (124 p.; finished 12 May 2013)

Richard Parker served as the creative and design assistant to the legendary Coco Chanel for many years during her resurgence as the creative director of the Chanel Perfumes showroom in New York. Decades before, she had changed the fashion world for the better by debuting what is known today as the little black dress. She moved fashion design out of the eccentric showrooms of the male designers and onto the streets where everyone could have access (even if they couldn’t afford it). As her assistant, Parker became privy to more details than the general public and seeks to set the record straight on a few matters in The Improbable Return of Coco Chanel.

Parker’s prose, somehow both gossipy and authoritarian, has very little in the way of supporting documentation. Other than his seemingly prodigious memory, there are absolutely no footnotes or citations in this text. He asks us to trust that he knows the real motivations and life story of the vaunted designer, but he ends up just as misleading as those he accuses of spreading falsehoods about Coco. To be sure, there are some splendid details here on the construction of the iconic New York Chanel showroom and the creation of the signature Chanel perfume. But I think it’s a bit reaching to tag Coco Chanel with the propagation of the flapper movement, the liberation of women from totalitarian clothing styles, and the single voice championing the use of costume jewelry as accessories. She had a lot of good ideas and designs, but Parker’s near-constant deification of his subject makes this one a little bit annoying. Read on if you’re building a library of Coco Chanel material or can see past the author’s halo effect. Otherwise, there are better ones out there.

47NielsenGW
Maio 13, 2013, 5:10 pm



May 13: Rabins, Peter V. The Why of Things: Causality in Science, Medicine, and Life. (DDC 122)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 120: Epistemology
• 122: Causation

Peter Rabins’s The Why of Things tries to get to the philosophical root of everything. He’s not trying to find a single underlying cause for all actions and entities in the universe, but rather develop a system of thought that helps the thinker come to useful and fundamental conclusions about observable phenomena (and even some unobservable phenomena). Rabins’s system involves thinking about the world using three different facets and then breaking them down into different subfacets. Looking at things as a model, you have categorical, probalistic, and emergent models; using differing types of logic, there are empirical, empathic, and ecclesiastic logics; and using differing levels of analysis, we find predisposing causes, precipitating causes, programmatic causes, and purposive causes. All these would take far too long to explain here, though.

Each of these lines of thought and investigation lead to a new way of framing the question. Using these models, Rabins takes the reader through their many different applications, including the discovery, spread, and analysis of the HIV/AIDS virus, the publication of the theory of plate tectonics, and even an investigation into the causal explanation of human aggression and grief. The writing here is not inspiring or elevated, but rather seeks to educate. It’s not as heady as some philosophy textbooks, but does have that feel throughout. I halfway expected there to be thought exercises at the end of each chapter at points. The author does, however, show how parts of the world connect and spur causal relationships as well as how many complex systems can be seen as analogous. This one is not for everybody, but if you’re looking to learn how to better reason things out through logic and comparative analysis, then this one may be for you.

48dchaikin
Maio 13, 2013, 8:46 pm

Just finished reading maybe 12 or more of your reviews, which is enough information to prevent me from commenting on any of them. Very entertained by the idea of the DDC challenge as a form of academic ADD. Anyway, enjoyed reading here.

49mkboylan
Maio 13, 2013, 9:42 pm

Dan - made me laugh "prevent me from commenting".

I also love the academic ADD. Priceless!

50JDHomrighausen
Maio 14, 2013, 1:43 am

It seems your friend was very interested in intellectual/cultural history and linguistics. As a classics major I am curious about Latin Alive.

My reading habits tend to be very narrowly constrained to religion, philosophy, and psychology. If you follow my 13 in 13 challenge you'll see that science is one of my categories. That was the only way to make myself read something scientific. (Including A Brief History of Time, which my brother has been telling me to read for about four years now.) It will only be worse when I get to graduate school, I'm sure...

51SassyLassy
Maio 14, 2013, 9:12 am

Thought you might like to see the current interpretation of Chanel, one of the costumes at the Metropolitan's Costume Institute current exhibit PUNK: Chaos to Couture. This is by Karl Lagerfeld for House of Chanel from the March 2011 issue of Vogue

52NielsenGW
Maio 14, 2013, 10:58 am

This reinforces statements about Lagerfeld in Parker's book. He bemoans the fact that Karl deviated in many ways from Chanel's classic, understated elegance. When talking about Christian Dior, Chanel was known to say "He does not dress women; he upholsters them." Looks like Lagerfeld did the same thing. Interesting nonetheless, though.

53NielsenGW
Maio 15, 2013, 5:20 pm



May 15: DeWitt, Jerry. Hope After Faith: An Ex-Pastor’s Journey from Belief to Atheism. (DDC 261.21092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 260: Christian organizations, social work, and worship
• 261: Social theology and interreligious relations and attitudes
• 261.2: Christianity and other systems of belief
• 261.21: Christianity and irreligion
• +092: Biography

Jerry DeWitt was a man of faith. The “was” is critical part in this book. For 25 years, he spent his life preaching, pastoring, and ministering to congregations in Louisiana and Iowa. Raised in the Pentecostal church, he grew up believing that he was destined to become one of the great pastors he’d seen on television. He spent his youth connecting with his religion and the Bible so that he could become such a preacher. And for a while, that worked. Until, one day, it all came crashing down. DeWitt’s Hope After Faith is a hard look at what happens to a person who decides that faith isn’t the answer for him.

While DeWitt’s early ministries were by no means blessed—he spent many seasons working menial jobs just to pay the bills—he saw it all as a step to a higher calling. But each person he met on his journey left him disappointed. From the revival preachers who seemed to want just a little too much money to the preachers who seemed to build churches around themselves and not Jesus, he found that he could not only reconcile his faith with the faith of others, but he also could not reconcile his faith against all the damaged lives he encountered along the way. One day, after a quarter-century of preaching, he realized that he had no answer for a woman whose brother had been seriously injured. That day, his faith failed him and he became an atheist.

DeWitt’s personal philosophy is one that espouses morality without theology, basically a secular humanism. On his journey, unfortunately, he loses his job, his house, and his family. He actually credits his eventual conversion to atheism to both his experiences and the writings of Christopher Hitchens, Dan Barker, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. His journey is sad and sometimes delusional, but DeWitt’s memoir is intensely genuine. Usually spiritual crises strengthen one’s faith, but is this case, they changed it entirely. While I wouldn’t necessarily want to read this one over and over, it was intriguing to read about one man’s journey with such raw, tragic, but ultimately rewarding experiences.

54mkboylan
Maio 15, 2013, 7:26 pm

Sounds VERY interesting.

55NielsenGW
Maio 17, 2013, 8:28 am



May 17: Smolin, Lee. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. (DDC 530.12)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 530: Physics
• 530.1: Theories and mathematical physics
• 530.12: Quantum mechanics

Time is both everywhere and nowhere. It is force we deal with everyday in a metaphysical sense as well as a phantom object. In the physics world, it has no real definition aside from what other theories and variables give it. After Einstein’s theories, it became relative; what was perceived as a certain time to one person could be different to another. Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn seeks to wrestle the relative and vanishing concept of time away from the quantum mechanical model and give it a physical presence in the universe. He wants to make time real.

Separating space and time, and making time real in the process, is a very heady goal. There’s a reason it’s always referred to as “space-time.” They are inextricably linked. While I liked all the interesting new physics Smolin discussed, I’m not entirely sure he accomplished his goal with the clarity he wanted. Metaphysics and philosophy tend to creep into his argument and thus create flaws in his quest to quantify time as a legitimate, whole, and distinct entity. A lot of the standard physics theories tend to break down when trying to isolate time in a concrete sense. That being said, Smolin’s history of physics was engaging and slightly more refreshing than the rote stuff you get from other texts. And this book will get you thinking about the larger concepts of the universe, which is never a bad thing. It has kind of a physics class feel to it as his illustrations look like they were drawn with a dry-erase marker (I liked that). If you’re interested in a different perspective on contemporary quantum physics, then dive right in—if you have the time, of course.

56mkboylan
Maio 17, 2013, 9:23 am

Sounds interesting!

57NielsenGW
Maio 22, 2013, 9:13 pm

On vacation -- no time for formal reviews (yet). Finished so far:

* Brian on the Brahmaputra by David Fletcher (May 21)
* Lost Mountain by Erik Reece (May 22)

58dchaikin
Maio 27, 2013, 9:59 pm

Interesting about DeWitt. I wonder about his followers response. Enjoyed your review of Time Reborn. Enjoy your vacation.

59NielsenGW
Editado: Maio 28, 2013, 11:08 am

Got a ton of new books while on vacation. I hit just about every booksale in Northeast Ohio and Mid-Michigan. I have a few reviews to post, but that'll have to wait until after I catch on the backlog at work.

Nonfiction:
* Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach (DDC 612)
* Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach (DDC 612)
* Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia by Erik Reece (DDC 622)
* The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky (DDC 946)
* Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold by Marq de Villiers (DDC 966)

Fiction:
* Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: Nominated for the 1958 National Book Award
* The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich: Nominated for the 1986 National Book Critic's Circle Award
* The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow: Nominated for the 1972 NationaL Book Award
* The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk: Winner of the 1952 Pulitzer Prize; nominated for the 1952 National Book Award
* The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen: Winner of the 2001 National Book Award and the 2001 James Black Tait Prize; nominated for the 2001 National Book Critic's Circle Award, the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Award
* Damascus Gate by Robert Stone: Nominated for the 1998 National Book Award
* A Death in the Family by James Agee: Winner of the 1958 Pulitzer Prize; nominated for the 1958 National Book Award
* Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard: Winner of the 1984 James Black Tait Prize; nominated for the 1984 Man Booker Prize
* Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick: Nominated for the 2012 Orange/Women's Prize
* The Ghost Road by Pat Barker: Winner of the 1995 Man Booker Prize; nominated for the 1995 Whitbread/Costa Prize
* In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez: Nominated for the 1994 National Book Critic's Circle Award
* March by Geraldine Brooks: Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize
* The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee: Nominated for the 1988 National Book Critic's Circle Award
* Nice Work by David Lodge: Nominated for the 1998 Man Booker Prize
* The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch: Nominated for the 1999 National Book Critic's Circle Award
* No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy: Nominated for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Award
* Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow: Winner of the 1975 National Book Critic's Circle Award
* Restless by William Boyd: Winner of the 2006 Whitbread/Costa Prize
* Rites of Passage by William Golding: Winner of the 1980 Man Booker Prize
* The Road Home by Rose Tremain: Winner of the 2008 Orange Women's Prize; nominated for the 2007 Whitbread/Costa Prize
* Room by Emma Donoghue: Nominated for the 2010 Man Booker Prize and the 2011 Orange Women's Prize
* The Sea by John Banville: Winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize
* A Separate Peace by John Knowles: Nominated for the 1961 National Book Award
* Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie: Nominated for the 2005 Whitbread/Costa Prize and the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Award
* The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx: Winner of the 1993 National Book Award and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize; nominated for the 1993 National Book Critic's Circle Award
* Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson: Winner of the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award
* Strangers by Anita Brookner: Nominated for the 2009 James Black Tait Prize
* Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener: Winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize
* Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden: Winner of the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize
* Vanished by Mary McGarry Morris: Nominated for the 1988 National Book Award and the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Prize
* War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk: Nominated for the 1981 National Book Award

60NanaCC
Maio 28, 2013, 11:06 am

You have quite a few great books on that list that I have either read, or want to read. I look forward to your reviews, although I am guessing most are going to wait until your DD Challenge is finished.

61dchaikin
Maio 28, 2013, 1:29 pm

A lot of good stuff there. Empire of the Sun jumps out at me, that's a favorite of mine - movie and book (I saw the movie first...by over 20 years...)

62NielsenGW
Maio 28, 2013, 4:22 pm



May 20: Fletcher, David. Brian on the Brahmaputra. (DDC 915.416)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 910: Geography and travel
• 915: Geography of and travel in Asia
• 915.4: India
• 915.41: Northeastern India
• 915.416: Far northeast of India

In Brian on the Brahmaputra, David Fletcher delivers an unusual travelogue of India. Through the characters of Brian and Sandra (husband and wife), we explore the social, culinary, and natural landscape of northeast India. It is a true day-by-day account of a group of middle-aged British nature enthusiasts on an excursion to a newly-opened area of India. They travel up the Brahmaputra river through an area of India nestled between China, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Along the way, they share interesting stories, observe several new species of birds and mammals, and generally soak in the Indian countryside.

The use of the third-person in this book is a bit weird, but it may serve to both distance the author from the writing and reduce the inherent egoism that comes with first-person travel narratives. With many books like this, you can get the feeling that the author is getting privileged access or uses the writing to push a social or political agenda. Fletcher’s writing is more along the lines of what a friend would tell you after travelling abroad. Brian has definite opinions about his surroundings, but the experiences are the most important things here. You do have to get used his slightly cynical voice, however. After that, it makes for quite a delightful and quirky journey through India.

63mkboylan
Maio 28, 2013, 10:18 pm

62 - actually sounds pretty interesting to me. I actually like a little cynicism when I'm feeling cranky myself.

Looks like you really hit the jackpot at those sales.

64NielsenGW
Maio 28, 2013, 11:10 pm



May 21: Reece, Erik. Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness—Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia. (DDC 622.2920974)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 620: Engineering
• 622: Mining and related operations
• 622.2: Excavation techniques
• 622.29: Surface and underwater mining
• 622.292: Surface mining
• +0974: Northeatern United States

Erik Reece’s Lost Mountain is a no-holds-barred vilification of current mountaintop removal coal mining practices. He follows the course of several businesses who purchase and re-sell the permit to strip mine Lost Mountain in Eastern Kentucky from September 2003 to September 2004. Along the way, he reports on past court cases involving mining companies, how the law is bent to accommodate mining practices, and whether there are real, useful, sustainable ways to extract coal from mountains.

His clandestine tracking of coal mining operations gives the reader a different perspective on the industry and while his rhetoric is decidedly anti-business, he is not totally against the idea of collecting coal for power. The problem is that the book is overwhelmingly sad. From a month-by-month discussion of how Lost Mountain is basically removed from the map to vignette after vignette of families and communities that do not have the money or the methods to fight back while groundwater is poisoned and homes are flooded by mining runoff, this will get your invective juices flowing.

The book itself reads fast (I blew through it in an afternoon at the bookstore) but it lingers with you for much longer. It has echoes of Carson’s Silent Spring and many of the eco-conservation books that followed. Even if they support current practices, anybody who cares about how businesses interact with their surrounding environment and communities should read this one.

65NielsenGW
Maio 29, 2013, 10:56 am



May 27: De Villiers, Marq & Sheila Hirtle. Timbuktu: The Sahara’s Fabled City of Gold (DDC 966.23)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 960: History of Africa
• 966: History of West Africa and offshore islands
• 966.2: History of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger
• 966.23: History of Mali

For many around the world, the mention of Timbuktu conjures images of a far-off land so remote that very few have even been there. Even the well-traveled have never been there. Many still consider it a mythical place. But for the 54,000 people who still live there, in a town mainly constructed from mud bricks, the city holds a rich place in the history of West Africa and Mali in particular. It was a part of the great Saharan trade routes, visited by the medieval explorers Leo Africanus and Shabeni, and ruled by the wondrous Mansa Musa during the 14th century. Marq de Villiers’s and Sheila Hirtle’s Timbuktu is a rich journey into this long-forgotten place.

No one really knows exactly how Timbuktu came to be or how it was named. Some say it is a Songhai construction meaning the “Wall of Butu.” Others propose it derives from the Berber timbouctou, meaning “a place covered by small dunes.” Others still point to a Zenaga phrase meaning “a hidden place.” In any case, the town of Timbuktu occupies a central place in the Malian countryside, having been a part of the Malian Empire since the early 1300s with the coronation of Musa I. Since then, with each new regime or leader, Timbuktu has absorbed a new culture and identity. Under Musa I, it became a center of learning and attracted many medieval scholars. Each one brought tales of the city to their homelands, and thus, the mystique of Timbuktu grew.

I read this one while on vacation and it was like a vacation in a vacation. De Villiers’s and Hirtle’s text is rich, expansive, beautiful, and a little sad all at the same time. While the city may not be much to look at today, they make it seem like the only place on Earth worth visiting. Their travels take them across Mali to learn and trade stories with other scholars. Each one offers a new and exciting piece of the puzzle of Timbuktu’s history and current place in the African landscape. While the luster of the city may have dimmed over the years, the stories have not. Any lover of medieval or African history will find this book thoroughly enjoyable.

66SassyLassy
Maio 29, 2013, 11:26 am

>64 NielsenGW: Read an article in Mother Jones March/April 2011 along the same lines. I've added Lost Mountain to the list. It's amazing what happens to communities in this part of the world. I love to get the invective juices flowing and this sounds like the perfect book to accommodate that.

I thought I did well with book buying on my weekend trip to the city, but was limited by what I could carry on the subway. Congrats on a successful expedition. You've got a real range there.

67NielsenGW
Editado: Out 2, 2013, 11:30 am

That is precisely the reason why, when I travel, I bring an extra suitcase. I never know what I'll find at any given destination. This time there was plenty of room in the car for my newly-acquired loot.

68NielsenGW
Maio 30, 2013, 1:07 pm



May 30: Jensen, David H. God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality. (DDC 233.5)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 230: Christianity
• 233: Humankind
• 233.5: Nature

David Jensen’s God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality is a genuine breath of fresh air in the discussion of how human sexuality, Christianity, ethics, and morality all intertwine. After years as a theologian and professor, he comes to a unique understanding on the matter. On the whole, his belief is that consensual, positive sex is a continual affirmation of one’s faith and relationship. His theology dismisses the old vilification of homosexual acts, but rather seeks to make the reader understand that is context, and not individual acts, that determines whether each act is honorable.

If a consensual sex act is joyous, intimate, faith-affirming, and legal, then Jensen seems to have no strong objection to it. Most endearing of all is his admission that the Bible, while still the preeminent guidebook for Christian faith, is mildly outdated on many matters of human sexuality. Jensen combines Biblical theology with writing of Church fathers, theologians, and contemporary philosophers to come to a modern interpretation of classical theology. This new theology comes to understand and delineate the motivations of celibacy, singleness, premarital sex, and marital sex inside their own contexts and offers the reader a new way of thinking about each one. The writing does tend to get a bit graphic at times, but you have to remember that you did choose to read a book about human sexuality, and this one may be one of the better books out there for this. A thought-provoking and enlightening read.

69NielsenGW
Maio 31, 2013, 10:55 am



May 31: Gempf, Conrad. How to Like Paul Again: The Apostle You Never Knew. (DDC 227.06)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 220: The Bible
• 227: Epistles
• 227.06: Exegesis

The Apostle Paul is cranky, cranky man. Those who read the Bible tend to get hung up on Paul and his polemics on how exactly one should conduct one’s life. He has rules and arguments for everything. But many of the wonderful turns of phrase that we use nowadays come from translations of Paul’s writing. Conrad Gempf’s How to Like Paul Again offers readers and Biblical students a second chance to understand Paul’s context as well as his content. In the end, we become better for it.

Gempf covers the books of Galatians, Corinthians, and Philemon and uses the Book of Acts to begin our understanding of Paul. He was a Roman Jew who had a vision of Jesus, and then became a hard-nosed advocate for Christian living. While this is a gross over-simplification, Gempf teaches the reader how to approach the character of Paul and how to read each book in its context. One must remember that a lot of these books are actually letters and must be read as such. They address particular concerns, give clues to past events, and allow for a different perspective than other books of the Bible. These books are not divinely-inspired poetry, but rather very specific responses to events happening to and around Paul.

Gempf’s journey through the three book is fairly thorough, but never dry. He wants to speak to the reader as one would speak to a friend and guide them through the passages with fun and fresh metaphors. This book reads fairly quickly and makes for a refreshing read. Most Biblical exegeses can get convoluted with exact meanings of ancient translations and integrate far too much theology. In this case, however, this book is designed for an intermediate reader of the Bible who wants to undertake a four to seven week study course in the books of Paul. There are discussion questions and plans for how the reader should structure their reading. All in all, I found this book very helpful in getting a slightly deeper understanding of the New Testament. A quick and fun read.

70JDHomrighausen
Maio 31, 2013, 11:27 am

> 59

What a good haul! I hope you like the Ayn Rand book. I swore off her when I was 16, but I do remember loving her novels even if I felt more egotistical afterwards.

71mkboylan
Maio 31, 2013, 7:34 pm

Poor Paul. He can use all the help he can get. He does make me smile tho.

72NielsenGW
Jun 3, 2013, 9:54 am



Jun 2: Shanahan, Brendan. In Turkey I Am Beautiful: Between Chaos and Madness in a Strange Land. (DDC 914.961)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 910: Geography and travel
• 914: Geography of and travel in Europe
• 914.9: Geography of and travel in other parts of Europe
• 914.96: Balkan Peninsula
• 914.961: Turkey in Europe

“Istanbul was sad but never grim,” Brendan Shanahan writes in In Turkey I am Beautiful. This is the general sentiment of his travelogue around Turkey. While he spends a lot of his time hanging around with his friends who run a carpet store in Istanbul, he does make it out to the eastern cities. He tours the usual spots—Istanbul, Antioch, Adana—but we also get urban vistas of concrete near the Soviet border, quaint villages in the Turkish countryside, dalliances with lawlessness on the Armenian border, and a serious look at the customs and traditions of the Turkish people. He reports on the struggle within most Turkish people of whether Turkey is a part of Europe or Asia. Geographically (and for the Dewey), it’s in Europe, but many Turks don’t feel European. He writes with the usual cynicism of a well-seasoned, Western travel writer, but his personal relationships with the people he tells us about round out Shanahan’s humanity and the tone of the book.

As a military dependent, our family was stationed in Turkey in the mid-1990’s and this book helped bring back a lot of memories, especially his description of Adana (the nearest big city to the air base). I remember hearing a lot about the Kurdish struggle and the growth of the PKK (a group that protests, sometimes violently, against the current government in order to further Kurdish communist aims). Being a foodie at heart, though, I found his descriptions of local delights as well as the tea to be the most evocative. If you haven’t been to Turkey, this book is a really good place to start learning about the politics and the people. If you have, then this one should work as a pleasant reminder of days past. A poignant and enjoyable book.

73akeela
Jun 3, 2013, 10:05 am

Enjoyed your reviews on the Mali and Turkish reads, Nielsen. I am currently reading a non-fiction title based in Mali and am enjoying the exact landscape you describe albeit in contemporary Mali.

74avidmom
Jun 3, 2013, 11:16 am

I'm adding How to Like Paul Again to the wishlist, even if I've never not liked Paul. One of the goals I set for myself this year was to read the entire NT and am falling way short of that goal. Maybe this will be a great nudge.

How interesting that you can bring your personal experience to In Turkey I Am Beautiful!

75NielsenGW
Jun 3, 2013, 11:20 am

If you're hitting the New Testament as a year-end goal, you may want to try to do same thing you did with Team of Rivals, and do book-by-book reviews. Gempf's book would make a really good companion to the Pauline epistles. I also have a goal of one day reading the entire Bible, but too many other projects keep getting in the way. Best of luck, though!

76mkboylan
Jun 3, 2013, 2:58 pm

Oh yes In Turkey I Am Beautiful going on the wish list!

77avidmom
Jun 3, 2013, 3:07 pm

>75 NielsenGW: That is a great idea!
I also have a goal of one day reading the entire Bible, but too many other projects keep getting in the way.
Same here!

78NielsenGW
Jun 4, 2013, 4:48 pm



Jun 4: Fung, Kaiser. Numbersense: How to Use Big Data to Your Advantage. (DDC 006.312)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 000s: Computer science, Information, and General Works
• 000: Computer science, knowledge, and systems
• 006: Special computer methods
• 006.3: Artificial intelligence
• 006.31: Machine learning
• 006.312: Data mining

Have you ever read a news report of a new study or statistic and felt instantly skeptical of the findings? These days, information is everywhere, but if you don’t know how to interpret it or at least read it properly, it can become twisted to support many different theories. Kaiser Fung’s Numbersense is an attempt to teach readers just how to mine large sets of data for relevant, true, and reality-based conclusions. While it may not be completely relevant to your life, it does offer a new way of looking at the world.

Fung takes examples from current events and stories to show how data is presented to the public and just how it is derived and manipulated. He looks at the following models:

• Law schools, and statistical manipulations used to increase their national rankings
• BMI calculations, and how differing measures can lead to different health findings
• The Groupon phenomenon, and how it actually hurts local businesses
• Internet marketing initiatives, and how false positives lead to more spam
• Unemployment rates, and how seasonality can skew the public’s perception of the economy
• The Consumer Price Index, and how averaging disparate entities can cause miscalculations
• Fantasy Football Leagues, and how balance beats flash on the fantasy field

In each of these examples, Fung delves deep into the data to find interesting areas where the common perception can be skewed by how the data is analyzed. The weird thing I kept thinking was if Fung thinks that most data presented is skewed or flawed in some way, how are we to trust him? Isn’t he also presenting seemingly authoritative data? Throughout the book, he touts the quality of “numbersense” (constantly presented in small caps in the text). It’s almost as if he’s trying to sell a new weight loss system or tax program. In the end, though, his examples do lead to new ways of looking at data. This is indeed the era of Big Data; learning how to understand it not a bad skill to have. This book will definitely be of interest to analysts and skeptics, but anyone looking to peek behind the statistical curtain will get something out of it. A curious and quick read.

79NielsenGW
Jun 5, 2013, 10:53 am



Jun 5: Barker, Norman and Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue, eds. Hidden Beauty: Exploring the Aesthetics of Medical Science. (DDC 778.9)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 700: Fine Arts and Recreation
• 770: Photography, computer art, film, and video
• 778: Specific fields and special kinds of photography
• 778.9: Photography of specific subjects

The human body is a wondrous thing. This collection of trillions of atoms, combining with billions of bacteria, fungi, and other microscopic life forms, gives each person their space in the universe. Every piece has a function and each piece works with every other piece, giving every person an almost infinite internal universe. But most of the time, we hardly notice. We take it for granted that every organ is working as planned and there when we need it. Norman Barker and Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue, in Hidden Beauty, reveal what lies beneath the surface to show each person’s unique, medical landscape.

The book journeys through each major functional area of the body from the head to the chest and so on down the body, even giving disease and photos of scientific research their own section. Each picture is a rich, high-definition look into areas we hardly ever see. The computer-generated images are not as good as the actual photography, but they still have a tinge of beauty nonetheless. My two favorite pictures were the complete human cerebrospinal nervous system (laid out to mimic the human form) and a diaphanous close-up of a placenta. While I can’t give you a sample (for fear of violating some sort of copyright law), you can see a gallery of some of the included photographs on the editor's website. Any photo nut or lover of science should pick this one up.

80avidmom
Jun 5, 2013, 11:20 am

>79 NielsenGW: Wow. Thanks for sharing the link! I'm going to have to look for this one.

81NielsenGW
Editado: Jun 6, 2013, 5:21 pm

O, the joy of NetGalley -- here's the latest ARCs:

* The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World by Howard Gardner (DDC 004)
* Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler (DDC 128)
* The Spiritual Danger Of Doing Good by Peter Greer (DDC 253)
* Hanukkah in America: A History by Dianne Ashton (DDC 296)
* London Underground's Strangest Tales: Extraordinary but True Stories by Iain Spragg (DDC 388)
* Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize by Sean B. Carroll (DDC 572)
* One Woman Farm: My Life Shared with Sheep, Pigs, Chickens, Goats, and a Fine Fiddle by Jenna Woginrich (DDC 630)
* The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti by Rafael Schacter (DDC 751)
* Hidden Beauty: Exploring the Aesthetics of Medical Science by Norman Barker and Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue (DDC 778 -- already reviewed)

At this rate, I may never get to the books on my shelves!

82mkboylan
Jun 6, 2013, 5:02 pm

Oh oh oh the graffiti one!

83NielsenGW
Jun 6, 2013, 5:15 pm

Sorry Merrikay, not until early August. I've been chided by NetGalley publishers not to review new books more than a month before their publication. But rest assured, I'll get to it.

84NielsenGW
Jun 6, 2013, 5:20 pm



Jun 6: Okrent, Arika. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (DDC 499.99)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 490: Other languages
• 499: Non-Austronesian languages of Oceania, Austronesian languages, miscellaneous languages
• 499.9: Hurrian languages
• 499.99: Afrihili (Artificial languages)

I have been waiting to read this one ever since I first heard of it—a book devoted to all the languages that have been created by other people. Everyday languages are organic: they have no real inventor but time and culture. These things shape the way we talk about the world and express ourselves. But someone had to sit down and invent Esperanto, to compose Klingon, to shape the way that Loglan works. These languages were created for many reason, but the main one seems to be so that people of different nationalities and cultures could finally communicate with one another. Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages explores the rich history of those people who tried (and ultimately failed) to create a single language that all of humanity could use. And along the way, she reveals what little truth in contained in language, and how that reflects on us as language’s users.

Over the last nine hundred years, approximately nine hundred language have been artificially created. They come in bursts, though. After Hildegard von Bingen composed Lingua Ignota in the twelfth century, it was three hundred years before Muhyi-I Gulseni created Balaibalan. The last two centuries have been the heyday for language creation, with some 470 documented new languages. Okrent’s tour through language creation hits the highlights, from Wilkin’s Philosophical Language (1668) to Schleyer’s Volapuk (1879) to Zamenhof’s incredibly popular Esperanto (1887) and even to the modern-day tussles over Klingon.

Her investigations of these languages talk about whether language can ever truly represent ideas, how we perceive and classify the physical and metaphysical world, and if the rules of spoken language can ever really be made simple. Many languages, once invented and released into the “wild,” change radically, serving the needs of the speakers rather than the rulebooks of the inventors (much to the chagrin of the inventors). James Cooke Brown lost control of Loglan much like C. K. Bliss could not tolerate the changes made to his Blissymbolics.

As a language nut, I really enjoyed this book. Okrent’s joyful attitude towards language and grammar speaks to her background as a linguist. She whole-heartedly immerses herself in contemporary artificial languages, hoping to find one that both fun to learn and follows more rules than the others. What she does find, however, are groups of people so enamored with the communities that new languages create, that sometimes it doesn’t really matter if you can’t understand each other. Simply the act of trying to communicate is all you need to bring people together. And perhaps also a dictionary. A quick and fun book.

85NanaCC
Jun 6, 2013, 8:23 pm

Your DDC takes you to so many interesting thoughts and places. It is always enjoyable to see what you come up with next.

86NielsenGW
Jun 9, 2013, 5:39 pm



Jun 9: Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. (DDC 418)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 410: Linguistics
• 418: Standard usage and applied linguistics

All speech is an act of translation. We need to transmit the ideas in our head to another person, and so must translate the thought into words. This act of translation forms the fundamental basis for how people interrelate. But what if the two people do not speak the same language? The translation has to be translated again in order to get the recipient to understand. It is these two translations that interest George Steiner in After Babel.

This book is not for the timid. He looks at the history of translation, the fundamental basic of language, and how and why translations succeed or fail. He incorporates Chomskyan linguistics and an in-depth interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (that the structure of a language affects the way the language-speaker conceptualizes the world). Since he sees translation as inherently artistic, he does not spend a lot of time trying to break down its mechanics. The language in this book is a bit stilted, but Steiner gets his points across. If you’re not a student of linguistics, some of his assertions can be challenging (at least I thought it was). I wish I had more to say, but all in all, I thought he did an excellent job of encapsulating the field. A dense but informative book.

87rebeccanyc
Jun 9, 2013, 6:38 pm

I actually own that book, but it's been on the TBR for years! I think it will stay that way a little longer, but it still sounds intriguing.

88JDHomrighausen
Jun 9, 2013, 7:40 pm

> 86, 87

It's on my shelf too, and will get more and more interesting and revalant the more I dive into bible translation. Thanks for the motivation!

89mkboylan
Jun 9, 2013, 8:27 pm

I'd love to know what that book says but not enough to read it!
My friend did a little research project on her own daughter's language issues, construction, etc. because my friend is Filippino, her husband is Vietnamese, her Filippino parents live next door and her husband's Vietnamese parents are also next door on the other side of their house and the child is being raised in California with lots of involvement of all. It's just all so interesting, isn,t it? I continue to be surprised about language issues, definitions, and mostly whether or not different cultures even HAVE words for things that I have words for. Thanks for the review.

90NielsenGW
Jun 10, 2013, 8:34 am

Picked up a few new books this weekend:

* Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz (DDC 133)
* The First Principles: A Return to Humanity's Shared Traditions by Don Foy (DDC 148)
* Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society by Bill Bryson (DDC 506)
* Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey (DDC 565)
* LEGO: A Love Story by Jonathan Bender (DDC 688)
* The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824 by Harvey Sachs (DDC 784)

91mkboylan
Jun 10, 2013, 9:57 am

Had to go to Amazon to check out First Principles. I look forward to reading your review. I hit our big library warehouse booksale yesterday and picked up three Gandhis for my collection and a few other things. Checked out math and science but found nothing.

92avidmom
Jun 10, 2013, 3:33 pm

LEGO: A Love Story! Can't wait to hear about that one!

93baswood
Jun 10, 2013, 5:07 pm

# 92 VER is missing from the title.

94NielsenGW
Jun 11, 2013, 11:00 am



Jun 11: Hales, Dianne. La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language. (DDC 450)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 450: Italian, Sardinian, Dalmatian, Romanian, and Rhaeto-Romanic languages

Italian really is one of the world’s most enchanting languages. Dianne Hales’s La Bella Lingua takes the reader on a sumptuous journey through the words of Michelangelo, Dante, and Verdi. Although Italian only has about a third of the words that English has, their meanings are more precise and more elegant. Each word becomes a story. Take “furbo” for example. It means a small deception, but a furbetto is a small child who gains through deception, a furbastro makes money through trickery, and a furbizia is a clever use of deception in language. Only Italian could pull off these hidden layers.

Hales writes about her immersion in Italian language and culture like someone who wishes they’d been born there. The Italian language tells the story of its speakers and its nation. Shaped through its folklore and metaphors, Italians can speak of someone who is “piu tondo dell’O di Giotto” (rounder than Giotto’s O, or slow on the uptake) or someone who doesn’t know his “Galateo” (a historical guide on etiquette written in 1558 and still used a model of behavior). Every syllable becomes a world with new and exciting characters.

Hales writes with wit, verve, and childlike glee. She shapes the history of the language around the stories if Italy’s cultural institutions—its food, its art, and its music. While some of her travels seem a bit showy (she gets tickets to Milan’s La Scala and chats with Roberto Benigni), her conversations with Italian friends illustrate the core of the language. It’s meant as a way for the Italian people to continue to share their pride in their nation and history as well as their absolute love for the Italian way of life. While reading this book, I found myself almost constantly saying the Italian words and phrases out loud to hear them come off the page. By the end, you want to learn the whole language, to wrap it around you, so “cominciamo”—let’s get started.

95mkboylan
Editado: Jun 11, 2013, 1:33 pm

Oh that sounds really good. I just couldn't imagine what a book about a foreign language could be like. Meaning, I couldn't imagine what I could read in that Dewey category. I'm going to want this one.

96NielsenGW
Jun 12, 2013, 4:50 pm



Jun 12: Cohen, Martin. Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments. (DDC 101)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 101: Theory of philosophy

One of the classic items in the philosopher’s toolbox is the thought experiment. The person conceives of a scenario or a universe, proposes a problem, and engages another person with its implications or meaning. While they may seem simple, thought experiments have rules (or at least guidelines). They should be simple, internally consistent, complete, and conceivable. Martin Cohen, in Wittgenstein’s Beetle, takes the reader through 26 such experiments to help us get a handle on the nature of the universe, the laws of physics, and even the meaning of language.

The book’s 26 experiments are a fun alphabetic tour of philosophy and science—A for Alice’s Acceleration, B for Bernard’s Body-Exchange, and so on. This has the simple effect of keeping our attention on each experiment and not letting them blend together into a hazy mess. He lays out the experiment as originally thought out and invites the reader to a supplementary discussion of each one. Each experiment’s logical implications and revelations are at least mildly interesting. My favorite was at J (for Jules Henri Poincare’s look into alternate geometries):

“Imagine a gaseous world made up of gaseous beings. They exist near the center of the world and as such, expand to occupy a decent amount of space. Surrounding the world is a vacuum whose temperature measures absolute zero but they don’t know it (this is important). One day, they decide to get a fix on exactly how large their planet is, and so begin slowly measuring the distance to the outer edge with a gaseous measuring device (also important). As they slowly make their way to the edge, they get colder and colder, steadily approaching absolute zero, and thereby shrinking along the way (as gases tend to do). Upon getting infinitesimally closer to the edge, they get infinitely small and therefore never reach it. So they give up and go back towards the center (and re-expand to their original size). They relay to the rest of the planet that their world is infinitely large because they never reached the edge.” The implication here is that measurement is relative and based on perception.

While the scenario is wildly fantastic, it still helps inform our understanding of the universe. The other experiments in this book are just as informative. Cohen’s collection is designed to give you nuggets of thought to chew on for a while, then pass along to another one. He incorporates a lot of the original source material (or at least a good translation), but keeps the writing crisp and slightly witty. For those wishing to dip a toe into philosophy, this would as good a place as any to start. A quick and informative book.

97NielsenGW
Jun 13, 2013, 7:57 am

New books this week:

From NetGalley:

* On Dissent: Its Meaning in America by Ronald K.L. Collins (DDC 322)
* Skull in the Ashes: Murder, a Gold Rush Manhunt, and the Birth of Circumstantial Evidence in America by Peter Kaufman (DDC 364)
* The Rotinonshonni: A Traditional Iroquoian History Through the Eyes of Teharonhia:wako and Sawiskera by Brian Rice (DDC 398)
* Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father by Steven W. Hackel (DDC 979)

From Library Genesis:

* Experimental Philosophy by Joshua Knobe (DDC 107)
* Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems by Paul Cilliers (DDC 117)
* The Force of Reason and the Logic of Force by Richard A. Lee (DDC 118)
* The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis by Ann Wennerstrom (DDC 414)
* Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language by Scott K. Liddell (DDC 419)
* Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell by John Walmsley (DDC 429)
* The Colours of Infinity: The Beauty and Power of Fractals by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon (DDC 514)
* Principles of Numerical Analysis by Alston S. Householder (DDC 518)

98NielsenGW
Jun 14, 2013, 2:08 pm



Jun 14: Collins, Ronald K.L. and David M. Skover. On Dissent: Its Meaning in America. (DDC 322.40973)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 300: Social Sciences
• 320: Political science
• 322: Relation of state to organized groups and their members
• 322.4: Political action groups
• +0973: United States

Ronald Collins and David Skover want to get to the bottom of this thing we call dissent. Every day, thousands of people across the United States are actively showing their displeasure with some act of local or federal government or with a business they think is running counter to their beliefs. They dissent because they need to. On Dissent is a in-depth look at the fundamental basics of dissent, how it’s effective, and how exactly it fits into the social and legal landscape.

The authors’ investigation into the concept of dissent is interesting in that no one has really looked into it before. We have all seen or heard dissenting opinions. From Supreme Court justices to Martin Luther’s famous 95 theses to small bands of picketers, these people are the embodiment of dissent. For starters, Collins and Skover require that dissent be intentional, critical, and public. Without any one of these facets, it is either innocent, innocuous, or unknown. They explore many nuanced situations where one could convey dissent and how those situations stack up against prevailing opinions and legal definitions. At its core, this book is a look at the political process and opposition (on many levels) through the eyes of a lawyer. Each facet of dissent is parsed and dissected until a true meaning appears.

The weird thing about this but is that the language is decidedly unfun, but the subject matter is interesting nonetheless. As a reader, I kept waiting for the next layer of dissent to be explored, and the authors did not disappoint. The methodology employed was vigorous and precise. There were no wasted words, no superfluous digressions, no dead-ends. Even the many quotes from outside thinkers sprinkled in the text helped to build a richer understanding of dissent. If you’re at all interested in the political process and the legacy of dissenters, this book may very well be for you. An illuminating read.

99NielsenGW
Editado: Jun 15, 2013, 10:38 pm



Jun 15: Spragg, Iain. London Underground’s Strangest Tales: Extraordinary But True Stories. (176 p.; finished 15 Jun 2013)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 300: Social Sciences
• 380: Commerce, communications, and transport
• 388: Transportation and ground transportation
• 388.4: Local transportation
• 388.42: Local rail transit systems
• +09421: Greater London

Ever since it opened in 1863, the London Underground has helped to transport billions of travelers all over Greater London. Iain Spagg’s London Underground’s Strangest Tales provides a chronological collection of tidbits, asides, and goofball stories to help tell a different story of the train line’s history. While many of the chapters are interesting, coincidental, or historical, they aren’t really strange. Don’t get me wrong, the information presented here is fun and useful for a lot of trivia contests (like, for instance, only two people have ever been transported on the Tube on their way to be buried: Prime Minister William Gladstone and philanthropist Thomas Barnado). The writing is jovial and breezy and you can whiz through this book in a few hours, but don’t expect to be regaled with tales of intrigue and sensationalism. A quick and fun book.

100mkboylan
Jun 15, 2013, 10:35 pm

Oh man you are killing my TBR list! That's good tho if I'm doing the Dewey, right? I love that underground subway stuff.

101NielsenGW
Jun 16, 2013, 8:48 pm



Jun 16: Swinfield, John. Airship: Design, Development, and Disaster. (DDC 623.74309041)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 620: Engineering
• 623: Military and nautical engineering
• 623.7: Communications, vehicles, sanitations and related topics
• 623.74: Vehicles
• 623.743: Airships (dirigibles)
• +09041: Early 20th Century

John Swinfield’s Airship is a wonderful exploration of the history of airships, dirigibles, and zeppelins as they were beginning to become a fixture in history. While there is a large gray area between when a flying vessel goes from a hot-air balloon to an airship, the qualifying characteristic seems to be the inclusion of an engine to power propellers and guide the vehicle properly. William Bland’s 1851 flight with a steam engine and twin propellers fits the bill. And from there, things only got bigger and more dangerous.

Many different models were tried and abandoned in the late 19th century, but after the Wright Brothers mastered powered flight, many companies throughout Europe though they had the answer to sustained dirigible flight were vying to monopolize the airship market. Combine this with the military’s fervent interest in incorporating airship technology into their forces and you get a recipe for a veritable arms race. In an interesting parallel to the space race of the 1960’s, the airship race was one to find out who could make their vessels faster, lighter, and bigger. World War I saw the use of airships in armed campaigns on both sides of the fighting. Germany used zeppelins to bomb London and British blimps were used as scouts to find German submarines and mines. The golden age of airships, of course, ends with the highly memorable Hindenburg disaster of 1937.

Swinfield’s writing is as close to exhaustive as one can get on the topic. He details the politics, construction, and service records for just about every airship built in the early 20th century. There are commercial blimps, fighter vessels, and now blimps over major sporting events. Enthusiasts of early war air vehicles will find an immense amount of information here. Luckily for us, too, the information is also interesting. There’s good stuff in this one for historians as well as aeronautic engineering buffs; this conpendium includes a sizable list of airship teminology as well as a handy catalogue of all those involved in the early days of blimp construction. A longish but thorough book.

102NielsenGW
Jun 18, 2013, 4:26 pm



Jun 18: Rice, Brian. The Rotinonshonni: A Traditional Iroquoian History Through the Eyes of Teharonhia:wako and Sawiskera. (DDC 398.20899755)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 300: Social Sciences
• 390: Customs, etiquette, and folklore
• 398: Folklore
• 398.2: Folk literature
• 398.208: Groups of people
• 398.2089: Ethnic and national groups
• 398.208997: Indians of North America
• 398.20899755: Iroquois Indians

The Iroquois, or “the People of the Longhouse” and comprise the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Tuscarora nations. In Canada, they live near Brantford, Ontario and are known as the Rotinonshonni. Brian Rice’s The Rotinonshonni is a vast undertaking—to collect, understand, and translate the complete folklore of a people and preserve it for the ages. As a member of Mohawk nation, he has spent the last fifteen years traveling to their historic sites, listening to elders tell the Creation Story and the Kayeneren:howa (“The Great Way of Peace”), the days-long recitation of the history of the Rotinonshonni.

This is the fundamental canon of the Rotinonshonni people and understandably carries a lot of spiritual weight. It tells the story of Rotinonshonni from the myths of the Sky World to the history of the Peacemaker and Ayenwatha (now remembered as Hiawatha) as they encountered French and British travelers. It is a rich tale and almost relentless in its gravitas. The language is naturally stilted because many concepts in the Rotinonshonni languages do not have a direct English translation. That being said, it is a collection worth telling and listening to. A dense but enlightening book.

103NielsenGW
Jun 20, 2013, 5:00 pm



Jun 20: Fortey, Richard. Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution. (DDC 565.39)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 560: Paleontology and paleozoology
• 565: Fossil Arthropoda
• 565.3: Crustaceans and Trilobita
• 565.39: Trilobita

Hundreds of millions of years ago, a special creature travelled through the world’s oceans. Covered in an calcite chitin exoskeleton, they were first discovered by Reverend Edward Lhwyd in 1698, and from there the fascination grew. To date, some 17,000 species have been described. Sadly, though, there are no extant species of trilobite and we only have the fossil record to go by. The closest we have is the horseshoe crab. Richard Fortey’s Trilobite takes us through the history, taxonomy, and science of the wondrous trilobite.

The art of finding of trilobites in the wild is equal parts geological prowess, immeasurable patience, and scientific fortitude. Fortey’s early experiences with trilobite investigation left him at the mercy of a microscope and thousands of tiny rock-drilling needles. Fortey’s writing is both scholarly and jovial, and he includes a fair number of pictures to show off the anatomy and diversity of trilobite species. Luckily, so many trilobite specimens have been found around the world, there is a great deal of information to be gleaned on how they lived.

Fortey makes you feel like you should rush out to the nearest mountain and starting hammering away (gingerly, though, you don’t want to break them) to find an ancient creature locked in the rocks. He is genuinely excited to share his collected experiences with the reader, and he wisely keeps his erudition at a decent level. If you’re an amateur scientist or simply a natural history nut (like me), then this one from the London Natural History Museum’s foremost paleontologist is well worth it.

104NielsenGW
Jun 21, 2013, 3:48 pm



Jun 21: Morowitz, Harold J. The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. (DDC 116)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 110: Metaphysics
• 116: Change

As soon as human beings became self-aware, they became universe-aware as well. While we seek to understand our place and our origins as individuals, we also have a need to explain the origin of all life and the universe as a whole. These are not easy questions, as they involves elements of many field of science and philosophy. Harold Morowitz, in The Emergence of Everything, lays out a fundamental structure for getting to the root of some of these questions by peering into the fields of cosmology, biology, physics, chemistry, and ultimately, theology.

The question here is one of emergence. Morowitz discusses the emergence of the universe from the Big Bang, the emergence of stars and planets, of life on planets, and of human beings in the ancient past and the upcoming future. How does one account for the emergence of complex life when also trying to boil the laws of the universe into a few simple equations? At what point does the whole become more than the sum of its parts? This book goes through the 26 stages of emergence in the known universe, starting with the primordium (the pre-Big Bang speck of all matter) through the formation of planets to the emergence of life then to the evolution of mammals and humans and finally with the emergence of language, philosophy, science, and religion. It’s the investigation of these points on the continuum of emergence that makes this book interesting.

Morowitz’s writing is necessarily heady, but still reads fairly quickly. He ultimately falls back on the concept of God (which is a little dismaying) to explain the spark of emergence, but his discussion of the formation of the universe and life are still deeply rooted in science. This book blends the conversation between philosophy and science pretty well. Another plus is that each chapter has a list of suggested reading at the end so that the reader can follow up on specific topics of interest. A complex and intriguing book.

105rebeccanyc
Jun 21, 2013, 5:00 pm

I am not sure if I would ever read the book about the Iroquois, but it was fascinating to learn about them.

106NielsenGW
Jun 23, 2013, 5:46 pm



Jun 23: Aslan, Reza. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. (DDC 232)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 230: Christian theology
• 232: Jesus Christ and his family (Christology)

There is a curious line in Josephus’ The Antiquities of the Jews. It reads: “…so he (Ananus, high priest of Judea) assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others…” This is one of the few non-Biblical passages that give credence to the existence of an historical Jesus, and indeed, most historians are on board with the existence of a person named Jesus who lived and preached to Jews in Galilee and Judea. But what else can be gleaned from the historical record? And does this information change the way historians should view the life of Jesus? Reza Aslan’s believes so, and traces the life, teachings, and even his political agenda in Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

Aslan finds, in a very close reading of the Biblical and historical source material, that a different picture of Jesus emerges. He places Jesus in the historical context of the age. First century BCE Jews rebelled against their Roman leaders, especially as they began to denigrate the holiness of the Temple of Jerusalem by appointing unqualified high priests. Those who advocated for a separate nation for the Jews became known as Zealots. Aslan’s contention is that Jesus’s activities and sayings point to him being more a part of this movement that previously thought. Only after his crucifixion did he change the way in people believed and worshipped.

This book was interesting, but not in the way I thought it would be. While there is a good discussion on the life of Jesus, there is also a lot more on the history of ancient Judea and political movements of the day. Those who do not normally study in this era will pick a great deal of contextual information on Biblical history. Also, Aslan’s commentary on translation leads one to believe that the Biblical sources are not as cut and dry as they would seem to be. A curious and engaging book.

107mkboylan
Jun 23, 2013, 6:50 pm

That sounds pretty interesting to me, especially about the political movements of the day. I would like to know about that. I have Jesus Before Christianity on deck for that Dewey section, but still.....

108NielsenGW
Jun 24, 2013, 1:56 pm

New books in the library:

* Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (DDC 188)
* By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey by Erskine Clarke (DDC 266)
* Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869-1929 by Henry Knight (DDC 330)
* 20 Years at Hull-House by Jane Addams (DDC 361)
* Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind by Richard Fortey (DDC 595)
* American Alligator: Ancient Predator in the Modern World by Kelby Ouchley (DDC 597)
* Airship: Design, Development and Disaster by John Swinfield (DDC 623 -- already reviewed)
* Italy's Foreign and Colonial Policy: A Selection from the Speeches Delivered in the Italian Parliament by Tommaso Tittoni (DDC 855)
* The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King (DDC 970)
* The Nature of Empires and the Empires of Nature: Indigenous Peoples and the Great Lakes Environment by Karl S. Hele (DDC 971)
* The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury (DDC 978)

109mkboylan
Jun 24, 2013, 2:43 pm

ooooh those last three interest me. Enjoy!

110NielsenGW
Jun 25, 2013, 2:26 pm

Awww man! Just found out that Russell Shorto (of Island at the Center of the World fame) is putting out a new book on the history of Amsterdam and it's available on NetGalley!

111rebeccanyc
Jun 25, 2013, 3:20 pm

I loved The Island at the Center of the World, so I'll probably look for the new one, but of course I have a special affection for books about New York City. I can see why Shorto's interest in the Dutch history of NYC would lead him to an interest in Amsterdam.

112JDHomrighausen
Jun 25, 2013, 6:40 pm

> 106

Aslan came to speak at my school a few months ago. He is an alum, one of our most well-known (along with Khaled Hosseini) and in fact learned Greek with my Greek professor (he majored in classics). Apparently he was all set to apply top grad schools for New Testament studies when a mentor took him aside and said he should study Islam instead. Apparently Aslan has returned to his first fascination!

Still, there are so many historical biographies of Jesus out there; do you think this one adds anything new?

113NielsenGW
Jun 25, 2013, 8:54 pm

For me, yes, seeing as how I know very little about him. I did, however, enjoy hearing about the historical Jesus in the context of the politics of the day. Most histories of the day are broard-strokes, but this one was much more nuanced than expected.

114NielsenGW
Jun 27, 2013, 8:30 pm



Jun 27: McKean, Erin, ed. Verbatim: From the Bawdy to the Sublime, the Best Writing on Language for Word Lovers, Grammar Mavens, and Armchair Linguists. (DDC 400)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language

Erin McKean’s collection of articles and essays from Verbatim is a fun expedition into linguistics and language history. McKean brings together writings from the periodical’s 37-year history. There’s almost too much here to do it justice. In the 56 presented essays, writers bounce ideas, trade barbs, and peel away the layers of words and ideas. Here’s some fun bits from this collection:

• An almost complete collection of derogatory Britishisms,
• A quick foray into the language of science fiction fan fiction
• A compendium of Japanese onomatopoeia
• An odd look at “tosspot” words—verb-noun combination words
• A fun history at the language of the so-called “Wicked” Bibles.

This book gives the reader digestible nuggets of writing on many of language’s vagaries. I’m a language nut, so I had a lot of fun with many of the entries, but it may be a bit like a a twelve-course meal when all you want is a nibble. Read this one in little chunks and you’ll learn a lot of new language trivia. An encyclopedic and fun volume.

115NielsenGW
Jun 30, 2013, 2:10 pm



Jun 30: Stewart, Amy. The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks. (DDC 581.632)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 580: Plants
• 581: Specific topics in the natural history of plants
• 581.6: Miscellaneous nontaxonomic kinds of plants
• 581.63: Beneficial plants
• 581.632: Edible plants

In almost everything you drink, a plant is involved—especially the tasty, alcoholic kinds of drinks. Gin? Comes from juniper and sometimes contains bay leaves. Midas Touch beer? Saffron is involved, as well as Muscat and barley. Kahlua gets some of its flavor from vanilla flowers. Plants dominate the alcohol-making process. Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist lists every plant, flower, tree, herb, spice, fruit, and nut involved in almost any liquor imaginable.

Stewart explores the world of drinking from a purely botanical perspective. She provides details on the breeding history of certain plants, how their biochemistry provides flavor and structure to the end product, and its history in the use of drink-making. Also included are several classic drink recipes. The pure amount of information in here is staggering. This is another of those “nugget” reads—check in, grab a few choice bits, and then check out. It gets a little overwhelming when you try to consume it all in one sitting. To be fair, Stewart does keep the writing light and understandable, and her regular digressions into plant care or biographical history break up the fear of reading entry after entry. I enjoyed this book for the fact that she explored very little-known liqueurs, including Lillet, Fernet, and several other obscure bottling. Even a liquor expert will still find a few things they didn’t know before. A thick but still informative book.

116NielsenGW
Jul 1, 2013, 2:31 pm



Jul 1: Greer, Peter with Anna Haggard. The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good. (DDC 253.2)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 250: Christian pastoral practice and religious orders
• 253: Pastoral office and work (Pastoral theology)
• 253.2: Pastoral theology concerning life and person

Sadly, even when you do good deeds there is a possibility that you will be doing them for the wrong reasons. Even if it’s for the right reasons, the good you do may come at the detriment of other areas in your life. Peter Greer (with the help of Anna Haggard) writes about his experiences running non-profits in The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good and along the way, he discovers how to live a more meaningful, honest, and spiritual life all while trying to make the world a better place.

Greer lays out facets of doing good that can lead to personal and spiritual danger. One should not justify moral lapses in the course of trying to accomplish great deed; these small lapses will lead to bigger ones later on. One should always be mindful to balance good deeds with good relationships; do not sacrifice your marriage or friendships because you’re devoting yourself to a good cause. One should not bask in the pride of doing good deeds; this approach only serves to alienate others. On and on he goes. Each chapter focuses on a different perspective of how doing good can actually interfere with a fulfilling life. All of Greer’s lessons come from a Christian perspective and incorporate Biblical passage to help explain the struggles of doing good.

The best thing about this book is that all the writing comes from a place of truth. Greer’s honest appraisal of his life and works leads give him a good place to start when talking about hubris, philanthropy, and altruism. He has made almost every misstep listed in this slim volume, but with the help of his family, his friends, and his faith, he strives to better himself while also bettering the world. This makes for a pretty effective spiritual gut-check. If you’re looking for a helping hand while also helping others, then this book should fit the bill.

117mkboylan
Jul 2, 2013, 7:43 pm

Well I certainly find that last one to be an interesting topic. I have thought about it a lot. I guess I tend to think whenever I do a good deed it is for a selfish reason; it makes me feel good. I think I'd like to check this one out.

118NielsenGW
Jul 4, 2013, 3:57 pm



Jul 4: Hele, Karl S., ed. The Nature of Empires and the Empires of Nature: Indigenous Peoples and the Great Lakes Environment. (DDC 971.300497)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 970: History of North America
• 971: History of Canada
• 971.3: History of the province of Ontario
• 971.3004: Ethnic and national groups
• 971.300497: Native American peoples

Karl Hele’s Nature of Empire and the Empires of Nature is a collection of eco-historical essays on the indigenous peoples of Ontario, Canada. Originally delivered as talks during a conference in Canada, these essays focus on how empires seek to control the environments of their colonies and, more importantly, the ramifications of the British colonial rule on the First Nations of Canada. While many of the chapters digress and discuss other indigenous populations, such as the Aborigines of Australia and the peoples of the Central Africa, the focus is on Canadian history. They look at how indigenous Canadian culture, education, and attitudes toward nature have been shaped by world events.

The authors also look at ways that the both the First Nations and newly-minted Canadians can reconnect with their environment through place-based education. While some of the essays deal with very specific Canadian events, such as the effects of the uranium industry on the Serpent River First Nation, the broad theme of Native American history and the environment does make for an interesting lens through which to view events of the past. The tone of this book is scholarly for sure but the subject matter should interest a lot of people. A dense but informative read.

119mkboylan
Jul 4, 2013, 7:26 pm

Well that sounds great - I'm interested in learning more about indigeneous people in countries other than my own. The "dense" part tho? Not sure.

120NielsenGW
Jul 5, 2013, 4:47 pm



Jul 5: Manjoo, Farhad. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. (DDC 177.3)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 170: Ethics (Moral philosophy)
• 177: Ethics of social relations
• 177.3: Truthfulness, lying, slander, and flattery

Information is all around us. From the Internet to 24-hour news networks to experts to neighbors, every place you look, there is someone with information. But what transforms information into fact, and what exactly are facts? How do we interpret them? How do we separate “Fact” from “fact”? When does truth become Truth? Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough explores the delicate areas between facts and truth to help us see how we deal with new information and ideas that challenge our beliefs.

Manjoo plods through many areas of selective truth: the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections, the 9/11 attacks, and the Kennedy assassination. Each of these events is ingrained enough in our collective memory that everybody thinks they have a hold of the truth of each event. But, then, why are there still pockets of individuals who contradict the collective memory? How does their version of the event shape ours? Manjoo incorporates many elements of social and cognitive psychology (such as naïve realism, selective perception, and weak dissonance) to show how new information interacts with personal ideas and beliefs.

He also looks at broadcast news and media presentation and how presenting information with the je ne sais quoi of truth is enough to make it believable. There’s the usual digressions into Steve Colbert’s truthiness campaign and James Frey’s fictional autobiography. The problem with all this talk of half-truths and almost-lies is that it seems to the reader that nothing can be trusted. Every picture in the newspaper could be manipulated; each news account could be potential propaganda. This book makes the reader feel as they’ve been catapulted down the rabbit hole with no hope of escape. Luckily, it’s a quick tidy volume that doesn’t get too bogged down with itself. The trick here is to think critically and trust your judgment when it comes to information. All in all, an interesting read.

121NielsenGW
Jul 7, 2013, 7:19 pm

Had some money burning a hole in my pocket, so I hit the nearest Half-Price Books looking for treasures. Here's what I came home with:

DDC Challenge:

* The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians by Bruce Lincoln (DDC 957)
* The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith (DDC 960)

Favored Fictions Project:

* Jacobson, Howard. The Finkler Question: Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Brize
* McCarthy, Cormac. The Road: Winner of the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; nominated for the 2006 National Book Critic's Circle Award
* Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels: Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize
* Styron, William. Sophie's Choice: Winner of the 1980 National Book Award; nominated for the 1979 National Book Critic's Circle Award
* Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist: Winner of the 1985 National Book Critic's Circle Award; nominated for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize
* Updike, John. The Centaur: Winner of the 1964 National Book Award
* Wolff, Tobias. Old School: Nominated for the 2003 National Book Critic's Circle Award and the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award
* Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road: Nominated for the 1962 National Book Award

122NanaCC
Jul 7, 2013, 9:09 pm

Some great picks!

123SassyLassy
Jul 8, 2013, 10:13 am

>103 NielsenGW: Meant to say that I enjoyed your review of Trilobite and the cover is beautiful.
Newfoundland has many of these fossils by river beds and they are often referenced in art.

Here's one from a collection: http://www.christinekoch.com/exhibitions/obsession/pages/024_24.htm (follow the arrows in the link for more)

124NielsenGW
Jul 8, 2013, 11:04 am

With so many different trilobite species/patterns to choose from, they would no doubt make for some very creative art pieces. Thanks for the link.

125NielsenGW
Jul 8, 2013, 2:57 pm



Jul 8: Kamrava, Mehran. Qatar: Small State, Big Politics. (174 p.; finished 8 Jul 2013)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 950: History of Asia
• 953: History of the Arabian Peninsula and adjacent areas
• 953.6: Persian Gulf States
• 953.63: Qatar

Qatar is a small, peninsular country on the Arabian coast. Inhabited by under 2 million people, it has grown immensely in the wake of the Middle East oil boom, and is now a big player on both the political and economic landscape of the region. Mehran Kamrava’s Qatar details the multi-faceted history of the country since it gained independence in 1971. It’s a short book and covers the modern history of the peninsula, the somewhat complicated politics of the region, and the events that led to Qatar’s massive economic growth.

I learned a great deal about the small powerhouse that is Qatar. There’s a lot of names and dates to remember, but the overall message is that Qatar is poised for a good future of political and social stability as well as economic growth. If Qatar can continue its current political trend and learn to survive without depending so heavily on oil revenues, then this message will bear out. The beneficial political landscape in Qatar is mainly due to a lack of severe religious splitting amongst the people as well as a large population of expatriates tempering potential nationalist tendencies. The leaders also go a decent job of maintaining diplomatic relationships with many different countries even under times of duress.

One of the main flaws of this book is that the author keeps telling you what he’s going to tell you. The book would be a bit shorter if he just got to the point sometimes. At times this book reads like a long infomercial for the country, but Kamrava makes sure to address a few of Qatar’s flaws as well. There’s a bit of animosity for the United States’ involvement in the region, but it isn’t pervasive in the writing. All in all, it was an interesting read about a much-overlooked country.

126mkboylan
Jul 8, 2013, 9:27 pm

Oh Half-Price Books! Be still my heart! Sounds like you came out a winner.

123 I also love that pic!

127NielsenGW
Jul 9, 2013, 2:07 pm



Jul 9: Lau, Theodora with Kenneth and Laura Lau. Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs, 2nd Ed. (DDC 089.951)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 000: Computer Science, Knowledge, and General Works
• 080: General collections (Quotations)
• 089: General collections in Italic, Hellenic, or other languages
• +951: Chinese

The Lau family has brought together many, many Chinese proverbs in a slim volume entitled Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs. This short book organizes Chinese traditional sayings into thematic categories arranged alphabetically from those on ability to those on worry. There’s not much more to say here. It’s well put together and dutifully decorated. Some of the more obscure sayings have a small explanatory passage afterwards to help those confused by the proverb. Other than that, it’s a quick little missive you can enjoy in small bites or read in an hour or two. Here are a few of my favorite proverbs:

• On discretion: Think before you speak, and do not speak all that you think.
• On courtesy: Keeping company with the wicked is like living in a fish market: one becomes used to the foul odor.
• On contentment: Laughter is the music of one’s soul. One is never really poor if he can afford to laugh.
• On knowledge: By filling one’s head instead of one’s pocket, one cannot be robbed.
• On strategy: Do not hit the fly that lands on the tiger’s head.

128NanaCC
Jul 9, 2013, 2:38 pm

Love your favorite proverbs!

129detailmuse
Jul 9, 2013, 3:51 pm

Catching waaay up here, terrific reviews! I get dizzy at the speed and variety of your acquisitions and reading. So many that I’d be interested in, if article-length, so the exposure through your reviews is great. As book-length, I’m all in for The Origin of Feces, Pigs in Clover, Hidden Beauty and In the Land of Invented Languages, thankyouverymuch.

>123 SassyLassy: Sassy I want a print of that image :)

130SassyLassy
Jul 9, 2013, 4:06 pm

>129 detailmuse: No problem... just follow the link to her website! I have three of her prints, but none of the trilobites. Her studio is terrific.

131NielsenGW
Jul 10, 2013, 3:38 pm



Jul 10: Antonsen, Elmer H. Elements of German: Phonology and Morphology. (DDC 431)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 430: German and related languages
• 431: Writing systems, phonology, and phonetics of standard German

Elmer Antonsen’s Elements of German is a crash course on the phonology of spoken German. Phonology consists of breaking down a language into tiny sounds and categorizing each type of pronunciation. Each different way a “g” can be vocalized has a separate symbolic representation. Each different “n” has another set and so on. Antonsen’s categorization (and attempted standardization) of spoken German will make you very aware of how your mouth and your tongue is positioned. There are bilabial fricatives (to make the “Pf” sound), voiceless alveolar affricates (the “ts” in tsetse), palatal nasal sounds (the second “n” in niño), as well as numerous other types of vocalizations (don’t worry, he lists them all).

This book relies heavily on an understanding of the International Phonetic Alphabet, so he spends a lot of time teaching the reader about phonemes on a general level before heading in German speech. These lessons are here to help the reader speak German so that native speakers will be able to understand them, but the problem comes when you actually get there and everyone has their own dialect or non-standard accent.

After the phonetic sections, there is a compendium on the general morphology of the German language. This involves learning how the language is constructed, from gendered suffixes to standard verb conjugation to subject-verb agreement. Into this he incorporates the earlier understanding of phonetics to ensure the reader pronounces everything correctly.

This is definitely not a book for a casual reader. If you’re learning German, this would make a decent companion piece to ensure that you don’t sound completely off-base when talking with native speakers. There are even small appendixes with speaking lessons to help novices along in their studies. This was not my favorite book, but since I know a bit of German, it was nice to cozy up with the language again. The writing is no-nonsense and thankfully to the point. A short, terse, and dry read.

132avidmom
Jul 10, 2013, 10:06 pm

German was the only foreign language in my little high school. I wanted to take Spanish or French, but that was it. I did actually get to use one of the 3 or four sentences I learned in German class once. It made that whole year of 9th grade torture worth it.

133NielsenGW
Editado: Jul 12, 2013, 9:08 am



Jul 11: Lesmoir-Gordon, Nigel, ed. The Colours of Infinity: The Beauty and Power of Fractals. (DDC 514.742)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 510: Mathematics
• 514: Topology
• 514.7: Analytic topology
• 514.74: Global analysis
• 514.742: Fractals

Fractals are both recent and timeless. They have only existed in mathematical literature for the last hundred or so years, but nature has had them from its first day. Fractal patterns exist in snowflakes, in trees, in mountain ridges, in coastlines, and even in broccoli. Although the word “fractal” was coined in 1975 by the famed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, work was being done in fractional and recursional geometry around the time of the invention of calculus. Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon’s The Colours of Infinity is collection of essays that explores the mathematical, physical, and imaginative boundaries of fractals and what this means for our understanding of the world today.

In short, a fractal is a figure created by infinitely modifying a line or shape according to a particular rule. In the commonly seen Sierpinski triangle, the base triangle is divided into four smaller ones. Each of those is divided in the same way, and so on, until you get an infinite array of smaller and smaller triangles. The famous Mandelbrot set is even more wondrous.



All the points in the body of the set can be contained by a simple, short equation (Z ↔ z*z + c), but you can set the visual boundaries as tight or as large as you want to. Eventually, you will always finds a copy of the original image inside itself. The rest of the set has infinite possibilities to explore, and each of the writers in this volume expound upon their experiences with fractals. If you’re a math nut, then you’ll really enjoy this one; if not, it still has a lot of pretty pictures. A very quirky read.

134SassyLassy
Jul 12, 2013, 9:32 am

Sounds fascinating. Did he mention the use graphic and fibre artists make of fractals?

135NielsenGW
Jul 12, 2013, 10:01 am

Indeed - there were bits about the use of fractal equations in landscape and 3D rendering (including a nod to a use in Star Trek II), as well as image projection techniques. It was all rather intriguing.

136rebeccanyc
Jul 12, 2013, 10:08 am

My sweetie, who is definitely NOT a mathematician, got interested in fractals after seeing a show on public television about them. We have yet to find the right book for him to learn more about them; this sounds lovely, but not the book for him.

137NielsenGW
Jul 12, 2013, 10:18 am

Unfortunately, the only way to accurately describe a fractal is through mathematics, but I would try John Briggs's Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos. It's more artsy than math-y.

138mkboylan
Jul 12, 2013, 11:06 am

My daughter gave me this iPAD I am typing on as a gift. My almost son-in-law had put an app on that was just fractals over and over -pics.

139rebeccanyc
Jul 12, 2013, 2:50 pm

Thanks for the recommendation!

140NielsenGW
Jul 12, 2013, 3:24 pm



Jul 12: Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. (DDC 199.6)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 190: Modern Western and other non-Eastern philosophy
• 199: Modern Western philosophy in other geographic areas
• 199.6: Africa

V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa is an exploration in the philosophical landscape of the Africa continent through centuries of colonization. At least, that’s what I hoped it would be. Instead, it’s two hundred pages of name-dropping, Foucault-quoting, Levi-Strauss-loving madness. It’s a mish-mash of contemporary thinkers quoted in context with figures from Africa’s past. This book is dense and wholly un-fun. He spends way too much time criticizing Eurocentric portrayals of African thinking and not enough time actually writing about African thinkers. There is far too much academic jargon as well. It seems that the only intended audience for this book is the author himself. I would have rather read a book with chapters for the dominant cultures in Africa and how they envisioned thought, knowledge, and the universe. There is little bit of that here, but Mudimbe can’t seem to get out of his own head sometimes. To be fair, though, the bibliography is chock full of diverse sources if you want to dig deeper into the subject. Unfortunately, the only reason I can see to read this is if you are in an African philosophy course or writing a dissertation. Other than that, you’re on your own.

141NielsenGW
Jul 14, 2013, 8:03 pm



Jul 14: Rorem, Ned. Other Entertainment: Collected Pieces. (DDC 700.904)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 700: Fine Arts
• 700.9: Historical, geographic, or persons treatment in the arts
• +04: Special topics

Ned Rorem has had a celebrated career as a composer and a diarist, but he has also contributed many pieces to contemporary publications reviewing books, the lives of famous artists, and his experiences in the art community. Other Entertainment is a collection of such pieces ranging from 1978 to 1995. In it, Rorem discusses—among other things—his views on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, the Frenchness of Jean Cocteau, an overview of American opera, and even small vignettes on those who passed in his lifetime (including Aaron Copland).

These pieces, while originally published in 1996, seem better than some of the book reviews being done today. The tone is all at once dignified, jocular, breezy, and learned. It’s hard to maintain such a voice for very long, but Rorem’s essays were very pleasureable to read, especially since I didn’t really know a lot about some of his subjects. This seems almost like the kind of book you would read to prep for a dinner party; you could trot out many of the opinions in the book without seeming too pompous. The other thing that surprised me was that I thought the world didn’t have any more diarists. I figured Samuel Pepys was the last real famous person to have a published diary. I guess you learn something new every day. A quaint and intriguing read.

142NielsenGW
Jul 15, 2013, 5:16 pm



Jul 15: McFarlane, Alan and Gerry Martin. Glass: A World History. (203 p.; finished 15 Jul 2013)

If you really think about it, without the invention of glass, civilization would be stuck in a technological rut. There would be no magnifying glass, no telescope, no spectacles, or no mirrors. We have no glass apparatus to conduct experiments nor any way to comfortably view the environment outside a building. Glass invades nearly every aspect of our lives. Even now, I am looking through a pair of corrective lenses at an image on a computer screen (two panes of glass). Alan McFarlane’s and Gerry Martin’s Glass is a historical and philosophical look at how the invention of glass shaped human history and how glass helped us view the world.

The authors break up glass inventions into five loose categories: mirrors, panes, prisms, beads, and vessels. Each of these types of glass works are traced through history and they even incorporate many, many examples of non-Western glass technologies. This is where a lot of scientific histories fail. Rather than confine the history of scientific experimentation to a linear progression from the Greeks to the Dark Ages to the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, McFarlane and Martin attempt to piece together the fragmented history from around the world. Their exploration leads to interesting questions about the nature of science, invention, and philosophy. To talk about glass, you must first discuss the science of glass, and then the science of science.

The authors’ attempt to leave no stone unturned is refreshing and that makes this “object biography” better than some others I’ve read before. The writing moves along at a steady clip and they don’t get too bogged down in any one particular area. If you’re a science history person, than this one would make a great addition to your library. The nuance given here to the history of glass and the nature of human curiosity is stunning. A quick but illuminating read.

143mkboylan
Jul 16, 2013, 12:05 pm

My fav line: the nuance given here to the history of glass and the nature of human curiosity is stunning. That alone makes me want to read it.

144NielsenGW
Jul 17, 2013, 4:19 pm



Jul 17: Haskins, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. (DDC 879.09)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 870: Literatures of Italic and Latin languages
• 879: Literatures of other Italic languages
• +09: History, geography, or treatment of persons

If you believe many people who talk about the Dark Ages, then apparently nothing happened in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 BCE and the Italian Renaissance of the 14th century. There was Charlemagne and a few crusades, but, you know, not much happened. This is clearly facetious. Monasteries thrived and kingdoms grew and fell. The peoples and states of Europe dispersed and re-structured. The Carolingian Period saw a massive upswing in educational policies and the Crusades connected the Eastern and Western cultures (albeit very violently). Those who returned brought back tales and knowledge which sparked an intellectual fire throughout Europe. Charles Homer Haskins’s The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century is an investigation of a small facet of that connection: he tracks the influx of re-discovered Latin manuscripts into monasteries and shows how these literatures shaped the way that clergy and layman alike wrote about their world.

Haskins starts his history in the middle of the 11th century to lay the groundwork for the changes in literary interactions later on. Monasteries of the Middle Ages were places where individual manuscripts were lovingly collected, dutifully catalogued, and painstakingly copied by hand to preserve them for their members (almost like modern libraries). While most of the time, their efforts were spent on copying the Bible and works of the early church fathers, other works crept in. Cicero’s speeches, Martial’s epigrams, and Virgil’s Aeneid became mainstays of the few larger libraries. The author discusses how knowledge of these texts helped to inform their studies of more liturgical works. There was even a bit of backlash from stubborn church leaders who thought that their flock should not be exposed to non-Christian literature (luckily, level heads prevailed). In the end, this “new” literature helps to create new forms of writing, including Goliardic poetry and the epic chronicles of the Middle Ages. These eventually inspire later masters, including Petrarch and Dante, to compose their seminal works.

One of the downfalls of this book is perhaps the obscurity of the people the author talks about. There is precious little information on the writers of the day, so some of the names come out of nowhere. We do get the famous folks—William of Ockham, the Venerable Bede, and even Roger Bacon—but many others are mentioned. Haskins has clearly done his homework. I got a little bit delirious after reading about every library and who interacted with which Latin work. Also, since this was originally written 90 years ago, the author assumes you’re up to snuff with your Latin skills, and so, never bothers to translate his excerpts. If you’re an avid historian, there’s a ton of good info here, but get your dictionaries ready because the author makes you work for it. My favorite aspect of this book was knowing how all the great literature of ancient Rome was accepted and preserved. Without the collectors of the Middle Ages, the world would have lost a lot of its literary tradition. A thick but rewarding history.

145NielsenGW
Jul 18, 2013, 4:05 pm



Jul 18: Atkins, Peter. Four Laws That Drive the Universe. (DDC 536.71)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 530: Physics
• 536: Heat
• 536.7: Thermodynamics
• 536.71: Theories

Peter Atkins’s Four Laws That Drive the Universe is a exploration of the fundamental concepts that make up the current laws of thermodynamics. There are four laws, and their purpose is to define the nature of heat, energy, and entropy in the universe as follows:

• Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics: If two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in equilibrium with each other. This defines the concept of temperature and allows for empirical measurements of systems.

• First Law of Thermodynamics: The increase in internal energy of a body is equal to the heat supplied to the body minus work done by the body. This allows for the principle that there must be a conservation of heat and energy in the universe as well as defines both the performance of work and heat as a form of energy transfer

• Second Law of Thermodynamics: Isolated systems not in a state thermal equilibrium will spontaneously evolve towards such a state. This eliminates the possibility of perpetual motion machines and infinite energy creation.

• Third Law of Thermodynamics: The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches zero. This eliminates the possibility of ever reaching absolute zero (on the Kelvin scale) and places in every system some residual entropy that can never be removed.

These four laws govern all heat and energy transfers in the universe and Atkins details the fundamental forces and molecular concepts behind each one, progressing from simple examples to more complex analogies. His goal is to educate the reader, and that being done, go no further. It’s a slim book, but Atkins’s tone is dry and perfunctory. He spends no extra time on frivolous examples, and does only a middling well job of explaining the highly technical subject of thermodynamics. In an effort not to confuse words or ideas, he is constantly parsing concepts into its exact language, some of which can be above the layman’s head. To be truthful, I had a bit of a time keeping up. That being said, if you’re already familiar with basic physics, then this would be a decent guide to the field of thermodynamics. A short but technical volume.

146NielsenGW
Jul 19, 2013, 2:41 pm

Got a bunch of new books over the last few weeks:

* Complexity and the Arrow of Time by Charles H. Lineweaver (DDC 003)
* One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation by Marcus Peter Johnson (DDC 234)
* All the Time in the World: A Book of Hours by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins (DDC 390)
* Adland: A Global History of Advertising by Mark Tungate (DDC 659)
* Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World by Tristan Donovan (DDC 663)
* The Amazing Jimmi Mayes: Sideman to the Stars by Jimmi Mayes (DDC 786)
* A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton (DDC 911)
* Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel's Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe by Jo Roberts (DDC 956)
* A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century by Luis Alberto Romero (DDC 982)

147NielsenGW
Jul 20, 2013, 2:51 pm



Jul 20: Bragg, Melvyn. 12 Books That Changed the World. (DDC 028)

Think about all the books you’ve read in your lifetime. Can you name just twelve that have truly changed your life? Which twelve books would make your list? Melvyn Bragg has an even harder task at hand. He has to pick twelve books that have not just changed his life, but the lives of the all the people on the planet. His 12 Books That Changed the World is a speculative look into just which tomes would make the list.

His picks are presented in a weird order, but in order of publication, they are:
• 1215: Magna Carta
• 1611: The King James Bible
• 1623: William Shakespeare’s The First Folio
• 1687: Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica
• 1769: Richard Arkwright’s Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine
• 1776: Adam Smith’s An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
• 1789: William Wilberforce’s On the Abolition of the Slave Trade
• 1792: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• 1839-1855: Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity
• 1859: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
• 1863: The Rule Book of Association Football
• 1918: Marie Stopes’s Married Love

The first thing you’ll notice that these are all British books, and two aren’t even books. The Wilberforce entry is a printed speech and Arkwright’s patent is a pamphlet at best. But still, Bragg does make an interesting case for their global effect. The Magna Carta set primitive democracy in motion, Shakespeare’s works expanded the English vocabulary and imagination, and Newton, Faraday, and Darwin brought science experiment and theory out of the realm of the gentleman philosopher and gave humanity robust theories of how the natural world and the universe worked.

Bragg’s writing is not the best I’ve encountered: he’s a bit stuffy and in need of some editing. Nonetheless, the history behind the authors, books, and their publication was interesting. Each publication is indicative of its age, and the philosophical impact of each choice is pretty clear. You could probably give this task to a hundred different writers and get back a hundred different lists, but each book that’s published changes the world in some infinitesimal way (for better or for worse) and that’s what makes Bragg’s list worth checking out. Each selection he makes gives the reader a moment to think about their own “distinguished dozen.” An engaging and thoughtful book.

148NanaCC
Jul 20, 2013, 2:55 pm

That is indeed an interesting list, and it does lead to some thought about what might have been included to change the makeup.

149mkboylan
Jul 20, 2013, 6:37 pm

Oh Adland!!! Can,t wait for that review.

150NielsenGW
Jul 21, 2013, 3:12 pm



Jul 21: Garg, Anu. The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words. (DDC 422)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 420: English and Old English
• 422: Etymology of standard English

Languages are wonderful things. They are fluid, foreign, and fantastic. The English language is an amalgamation of everything it has come into contact with, including itself. Words have been borrowed from other languages, re-translated, shifted over time, and even re-combined to add new nuance and new history. Anu Garg’s The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two is a look into the nooks and crannies of the English language to show some of the more amazing stories behind some of its most interesting words.

There’s no real structure to this book (much like the English language itself). Each chapter is a different gathering of fun words that have crept their way into the langue. There are words from Dickens’s books, a chapter on insults, a chapter on obscure words, a chapter on measurements, and even a chapter showing the etymological relatedness of seemingly disparate words. Here are some of my favorites:

• Dord: a word that sprang into existence when a dictionary copyeditor mistakenly crushed together an entry which read “D or d” (both designations for density)
• Millihelen: the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship (since Helen herself launched a thousand ships)
• Deipnosophist: A good conversationalist at meals
• Illeist: One who refers to himself in the third person

Garg doesn’t cover a lot of new ground here, but the information is interesting nonetheless. His writing is breezy and the word categories he puts together are fun. If you’re a book-hungry philologist, then this is another one to add to your bookshelves. Garg’s compilation will make for a good afternoon of reading. A short and entertaining book.

151NielsenGW
Jul 23, 2013, 4:27 pm



Jul 23: Goldberg, M. Hirsch. The Complete Book of Greed: The Strange and Amazing History of Human Excess. (DDC 178)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and psychology
• 170: Ethics
• 178: Ethics of consumption

It seems like greed is an undeniable quality of being human. Many of us can temper greed with other moral niceties, but the talented few let their greed run unabated. Many Americans can probably rattle off a dozen noted millionaires and billionaires before they can name the presidents (although, sometimes, they are the same people). The Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Gateses of the world are known by their wealth, business acumen, and sometimes their philanthropy. M. Hirsch Goldberg’s The Complete Book of Greed is a whimsical look at the history of human monetary greediness and how it has shaped—and been shaped by—history.

Goldberg catalogs the lives of all the famous (and infamous) rich people in history. We get Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos, Adnan Khashoggi, Lee Iacocca, Mrs. Astor, Donald Trump, and even Warren Buffett. The book is a bit dated, so we don’t get to hear about the modern Silicon Valley millionaires or outlandish sports figures, but the history is still interesting. There are bits on the history of money and spending, how spending culture has grown over the last century, and the lengths that people have gone in order to acquire more money for themselves.

There are times while reading this book that the reader is left to think that rich are made to be mocked. From their purchases of $100 million derelict yachts, thousands upon thousands of shoes, and entire islands, we get to pass judgment on them because they have chosen to set themselves so far apart from the rest of their fellow people. While Goldberg does manage to bring together a sizable compendium of stories concerning the very rich, we only ever get one perspective. Indeed, there are those whose sizable gains were ill-gotten and those who parlayed shady business deals into wealth, but many of the planet’s rich men and women inherited their money (no real fault there) or earned it. Goldberg tries repeatedly to burden the reader with outlandish tales to bolster a rather simple premise, but the truth is rarely that simple. This book does make one think, though, about the nature of greed and how we approach the “problem” of having too much money. It wasn’t my favorite, but it did look at philosophy from a completely different angle. For that, it might be worth a few bucks.

152NielsenGW
Jul 24, 2013, 4:20 pm



Jul 24: King, Thomas A. More Than a Numbers Game: A Brief History of Accounting. (DDC 657.0973)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 650: Management and auxiliary services
• 657: Accounting
• +0973: United States

You would be hard pressed to come up with a more soporific subject than that of accounting. Through no real fault of their own accountants are seen as the mousy, super-introverts of the world, subject to all kinds of negative portrayals in books and film. The truth is, nowadays, accountants keep the world afloat. World markets are propped up or deflated through the work of accounting. Investors, both big and small, need the work of accountants to decide where their money will go. Accounting in the U.S. specifically has had quite a storied past and Thomas King’s More Than a Numbers Game seeks to warm more people up to the field.

Instead of a perfect linear history of American accounting practices, King divides the field into areas of work. So, there’s a chapter on standards, on debts, on taxes, on options, and so forth. Each one of these gets a mini-history to show landmark changes, court decisions, and laws passed in each area. King tries desperately to make this interesting and, for small pockets it is, but on the whole, it’s a little dry. You have to have a bit of lingo under your belt already before going into this one or you’ll be lost when he starts in on capital depreciation, equity markets, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. There’s a good deal of history here and folks going into the field will find this one a welcome addition to their shelves, but I’m glad that it ended when it did. Anything more than a brief history of accounting would have left me reeling.

153NielsenGW
Jul 26, 2013, 4:16 pm



Jul 26: Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. (DDC 039.71094)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 000: Computer science, information, and general works
• 030: Encyclopedias and books of facts
• 039: General encyclopedic works in other languages
• 039.71: General encyclopedia works in Latin
• +094: Europe

Today, the world doesn’t think too much on how information is stored for the future. We have encyclopedias and web depositories and information on every smartphone around the world for those who need info on a moment’s notice. A thousand year ago, getting and storing information was a much different task. Manuscript after manuscript had to be consulted, minute information gleaned from faraway sources to create each new volume. While it’s generally agreed upon that there were more books around than previously thought, information was still a rare thing. In the two centuries before the invention of the printing press, there was a interesting rush of activity in trying to pull together the world’s knowledge into a single source. Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know brings to light many of the historical efforts to manage information before the invention of the Internet.

This book is absolutely exploding with information on pre-modern attempts to codify information. It’s a bit dry, but the history and illustrations are worth it. From the early florilegia to 18th century dictionaries and encyclopedias, the timeline of information management is intriguing to say the least. Blair spends a long time on how note-taking affected information gathering. Almost no historical manuscript is devoid of notations or marginalia. These scribble give us insight into not only the perspective of the reader but also the orthography of the day. People even built special cabinets to store their notes on other sources. As literature became more affordable (after the printing press), catalogs of available books circulated to help guide readers to the proper books. Some intrepid souls even compiled their own bibliographies and concordances to help them keep track of their own information.

Blair’s writing is thick with history, and so, this one doesn’t read as fast as others. But none of it is extraneous. She is dutiful in both her research and her details. I’m a sucker for anything that has to do with ancient manuscripts and library practices, so I liked it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. The parts I found most interesting were the lengths people went through to make sure they had all their information organized. You know you have a bit too much time on your hands when you make your own Biblical concordances. Luckily, reference book printers came along and helped everyone out. A thick but informative read.

154NielsenGW
Jul 27, 2013, 7:13 pm



Jul 27: Roberts, Jo. Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe. (DDC 956.04)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and geography
• 950: History of Asia
• 956: History of the Middle East and the Near East
• 956.04: 1945-1980

Palestinians call it the “Nakba,” the catastrophe; to Israelis, it is the Day of Independence—the day that three-quarters of a million Palestinians were uprooted from their homes to make way for a mandated state of Israel. The Jewish population, who had been repeatedly kicked out every safe place in history, were given a land, a government, and a voice. Jo Roberts’s Contested Land, Contested Memory is an intricate look over the perilous decades that followed the creation of Israel using both regular historical documents as well as personal interviews and local reporting.

Nearly every decade (and sometimes every year) since the founding of the Israeli nation, one side began warring with the other. Roberts’s account makes sure to balance the perspectives of both sides, but unfortunately, both sides have sad tales to tell. This is decidely not a “happy fun times” book, but you will gain a lot of history insight surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict. You can read this one in a day, but it will stay with you for a while. This book is further proof that history is not a collection of facts and figures, but rather a living continuum of experiences, actions, and people. Every day in the Middle East is a new opportunity to either strengthen or degrade relations between the parties. Let us hope the pains of the past inform their future. A tragic but informative read.

155mkboylan
Jul 27, 2013, 7:40 pm

I know I always say this, but this really sounds especially interesting, to hear these things from this point in time.

156NielsenGW
Jul 29, 2013, 3:15 pm



Jul 29: Tungate, Mark. Adland: A Global History of Advertising. (DDC 659.109)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 650: Management and auxiliary services
• 659: Advertising and public relation
• 659.1: Advertising
• +09: General history

No matter where you look—unless you live in a cabin in the woods without newspaper delivery, television service, or the Internet—you will find some form of advertising. Ever since the first person decided to sell one thing to another person, manufacturers have sought the best avenues for getting the word out about their product. The first print advertisement appeared in 1849 (for service that more accurately measures one’s head for hat-fitting purposes, of all things) and from there, everything snowballed. Mark Tungate’s Adland is a mesmerizing look at the history of advertising from the first major British agencies to the influences of Eastern advertisers to today’s Internet pioneers.

The history of advertising is almost too immense to consider writing a single book about it. Almost every product you use has been advertised somewhere (there are still a few products out there that have never been advertised, though). Tungate’s books doesn’t go through every campaign in the world, but rather outlines the great campaigns and the lives of their creators and the agencies that supported them. He lays out the history of advertising as a ebbing and flowing sea where ideas are born, wash away, and are reborn. Ideas and products come and go, but the sustaining force is the creativity of the advertisers. Many of history’s great writers and actors got their start in advertising, including Alien director Ridley Scott.

For those who watch Mad Men, this book will reveal a lot of the behind the scenes history of great advertisements. One thing this book suffered from, however, was a disturbing lack of illustrations. If you’re going to talk about historical advertising campaigns, it would do to have a look at the actual ads. This may be the only I’ve ever wanted to see ads in my entire life. Tungate’s research is undoubtedly thorough, and maybe even too much so. He blasts through so many agencies and figures that it’s a little difficult to keep track of them all. That being said, it’s detailed and interesting and will get you thinking about the components of advertising and how that world interacts with your own. A delightful read.

157NanaCC
Jul 29, 2013, 3:28 pm

My daughter & SIL were/are in advertising, and their kids who are 4 and 7 are very brand aware. As an example, they count Jeeps on the way to and from school; or when we walk through a parking lot, they will point them out to me. I often wonder if all kids do that at that age, or have they picked it up through osmosis of some sort... :)

158detailmuse
Jul 29, 2013, 4:44 pm

>156 NielsenGW: there are still a few products out there that have never been advertised
Interesting! Does Tungate name them? Is it because their sales don't need advertising support or some other reason?

159NielsenGW
Jul 29, 2013, 4:56 pm

Not explicitly, no. He does mention that Benettton, interestingly enough, never advertised for the first 17 years of its existence, though.

Some companies like the word of mouth mystique. For instance, Huy Fong (makers of a famous sriracha sauce) never advertises its wares. There's also an urban legend out there that candy corn has never been advertised.

160JDHomrighausen
Jul 29, 2013, 7:34 pm

I always enjoy your reviews. Especially eying the book on information management. yet the reigning scholarly lexicon of Biblical Hebrew, "BHS," was done a century ago; it's amazing to think how much has changed since then. But despite the archaic page-flipping book format, their work still stands the test of time. Something to think about.

161NielsenGW
Jul 30, 2013, 2:11 pm



Jul 30: Bender, Jonathan. LEGO: A Love Story. (DDC 688.725)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 680: Manufacture of products for specific use
• 688: Other final products and packaging technology
• 688.7: Recreational equipment
• 688.72: Toys
• 688.725: Educational toys

Like most kids in the US, I had LEGO bricks. I would spend whole weekends designing elaborate houses and scenes, just to tear it down and start again. Jonathan Bender’s LEGO: A Love Story captures the same energy and glee that children first have when playing with LEGO. His re-introduction to the world of toy brickwork follows the same pattern of most current-day AFOLs (adult fans of LEGO), with the discovery of a long-forgotten bin of bricks. You can’t help but play with them once found. Most adults who build with LEGO bricks have a period when they’ve put them away but never got rid of them. Now, with wholesalers of individual pieces, collector’s sets, and conventions devoted to LEGO products, the company has made an interesting resurgence.

At first, you think the book’s going to be just another tale of a guy experiencing an existential crisis and finding solace in the toys of his past, but he sidesteps the cliché and finds real meaning and also a lot fun through LEGO. It’s a sweet tale. He parallels this recapturing of his youth with the ups and downs of trying to conceive a child with his wife. There is a gentle interplay of maturity and childlike glee over LEGO. This book reminded me a lot of David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men in that the author starts with a hobby and quickly delves into the history, nuance, and community behind a single product. Every community has its elements of contention, and the AFOLs are no different. There are battles over superior designs, issues of purity (don’t mention MEGA bloks to a LEGO fan), and opinions over the direction of LEGO Group.

If you’ve played with LEGO, this book will conjure up memories faster than Proust’s madeleines. With every set he mentioned, I found myself tromping through Amazon to find out more about it (don’t worry—I didn’t get any). Luckily, my nephews are just about at LEGO age, so I see a large collection in their future. Bender’s enthusiasm for his subject as well as his honesty make this one a pleasure to read. I heartily recommend it.

162detailmuse
Jul 30, 2013, 3:58 pm

>159 NielsenGW: thanks Gerard. Adland goes onto the wishlist though I agree in wishing it were illustrated. I've had Peter Mayle's Up the Agency forever, and should have read it long ago ... before I noticed the poor ratings!

163avidmom
Jul 31, 2013, 1:05 am

Nice review of Lego: A Love Story. My kids never lacked for Lego blocks; we even had a Lego board game.

Did you know there's a Lego movie coming out?! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPnY2NjSjrg

164NanaCC
Jul 31, 2013, 7:59 am

I admit that I am one of those geeky adults who buy Lego kits for my grandchildren so that I can play too. I remember as a kid we had these building sets that let you build houses. The bricks were white and quite small. I think the sets had windows and doors. It was a very long time ago, so my recollection is a bit fuzzy. The book sounds like fun.

165mkboylan
Jul 31, 2013, 10:15 am

Careful tho, if you step on one you will be crippled for life!

166NielsenGW
Editado: Jul 31, 2013, 1:35 pm

That is so true -- which is why I'm sending them to my sister's kids! :)

167NielsenGW
Jul 31, 2013, 4:20 pm



Jul 31: Johnson, Marcus Peter. One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation. (DDC 234)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 230: Christianity and Christian theology
• 234: Salvation, soteriology, and grace

Marcus Johnson’s One with Christ is a philosophical text on how the life, deeds, works, and belief in Jesus Christ the Savior intermingle with the believer’s salvation. Soteriology—a subject completely new to me before this—is the study of salvation in a religious context. Johnson’s discussions of salvation exist in the Calvinist tradition and deals with the manner in which the Christian is spiritually joined with the Christ. This is not a easy or fun book to get through, but the author’s arguments offer a new perspective on an old dilemma. Johnson discusses the nuances of transubstantiation, the sacraments, church mysteries, and theology all under the context of personal salvation. It’s a religious philosophy book, so it’s a bit dense. The prose is scholarly but not overly righteous. I don’t see this one having a lot of mainstream popularity, but those looking for a deeper understanding of salvation and sin can give it a go. It will definitely get you thinking.

168NielsenGW
Ago 2, 2013, 2:12 pm



Aug 2: Axworthy, Michael. Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic. (DDC 955.054)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and geography
• 950: History of Asia
• 955: History of Iran
• 955.05: 1906-2005
• 955.054: 1979-2005

In Revolutionary Iran, Michael Axworthy makes a wonderful observation: “Iranian history can be seen as a microcosm of human history as a whole: empires, revolutions, invasions, art, architecture, warriors, conquerors, great thinkers, great writers and poets, holy men and lawgivers, charismatic leaders and the blackest villains.” I whole-heartedly agree with this statement. Iran (and the Middle East) has been a focal point for civilization in all its good and bad forms for the last ten millennia. With the Iranian revolution of 1979, however, we see the nation of Iran enter into a new era, one where the traditions and battles of the past come head-to-head with the beliefs of its people and the pressures of a global society. Axworthy’s modern history of Iran is a thick, educated, and brilliant look into this often-misunderstood country.

Axworthy allows his readers their misconceptions, though. His aim is not to belittle the reader but to re-inform. He concentrates on Iran’s pivotal moments during the last 35 years—the Islamic traditions that inform its past, the 1979 Revolution, the ensuing war, Reconstruction under the Ayatollah, the Reform Era under Khatami, and the current administration headed up by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His history is tight but filled with rich detail about the shifts in the political, religious, and social landscape of the country. If you’re looking for an excellent history of modern Iran, then go no further. Be warned, though, this is not a book you should read straight through. It’s best to read small bits, reflect, look at the today’s Iran, and then go back for more. It may be too soon to tell where the nation of Iran is headed, but at least we can see where it came from. This may be one of those rare books that change the way you look at a country.

169NielsenGW
Ago 3, 2013, 8:50 pm



Aug 3: King, Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. (DDC 970.00497)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 970: History of North America
• 970.004: Ethnic and national groups
• 970.00497: American native peoples

If you’re looking for a blunt collection of thoughts on the course of the history of North American Indians, then look no further than Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian. King, a member of the Cherokee Nation, tackles the history of the American Indian from the point of view of a novelist, and so this isn’t as stringent a history book as one might hope for. But that doesn’t prevent him from presenting a chronicle of how Native Indian history and North American history have intertwined. It’s interesting and insightful but clearly opinionated. In any case, however, King’s prose is fun, witty, and also challenging to hear.

This history includes perspectives from both American and Canadian tribes, and learning more about the native peoples of Canada was very refreshing. We so often hear the plight of Native Americans that we forget about those who were living elsewhere on the continent. The only thing that this book lacks is adequate source documentation or footnotes for his information. King gladly states that he isn’t out to write a scholarly or complete history, but a few citations wouldn’t hurt his cause. A pleasant but slightly biased read.

170NielsenGW
Ago 5, 2013, 10:06 am



Aug 4: Hackel, Steven W. Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father. (DDC 979.402092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 970: History of North American
• 979: Great Basin and Pacific Slope regions of the United States
• 979.4: California
• 979.402: Spanish period, 1769-1822
• +092: Biography

If you ask long-time Californians about the important people in the history of the state, you will invariably come across Junipero Serra. Interestingly, I had never heard of him before reading this book, but now it’s hard to imagine what the state of California would be if not for the efforts of this interesting Mallorcan Franciscan. Born in 1713, he eventually came to found missions at San Diego, San Francisco, and many more around California. He even collected donations to aid General Washington’s revolutionary cause. Steven Hackel’s Junipero Serra chronicles his life is a way that is both scholarly and readily accessible to the public.

Born Miquel Joseph Serra in Petra, Mallorca, he was the namesake of a brother who died in infancy. His family was too poor to survive as it was, so young Miquel was shipped off to a Franciscan monastery so that his sister would have a better chance at a bigger dowry. Once there, he took the name Junipero in honor of Saint Juniper, a companion of St. Francis of Assisi. He quickly rose to great heights, mastering theology, Latin, and philosophy. In 1749, he sailed to Mexico City to teach the catechism to the local Native American tribes. This begins his long and storied history in the early United States. Serra was a man of great faith to wanted to share his beliefs with all those he encountered, oftentimes walking hundreds of miles to confirm the newly-baptized. Interestingly enough, the Mission San Juan Capistrano is the currently both the oldest standing building in California and the last extant building where Serra performed church rites.

While the life of Serra is certainly engaging, this book covers other areas as well. There is a decent history of the island of Mallorca, the Franciscans in Spanish territories, and the Native American’s reaction of European proselytizing. Hackel dutifully bridges the gap between a solid history text and an interesting biography. While some historians may not like Serra’s interactions with the native peoples of North America (preaching to Native Americans forcibly captured by Spanish soldiers), they happened and the they give us insight into the motivations and actions our ancestors. If you’re at all interested in the history early California, do not pass this one up. An intriguing and well-researched history.

171mkboylan
Ago 5, 2013, 1:12 pm

Ah those California traditions of making mission models in grade school and visiting missions.

172detailmuse
Ago 5, 2013, 4:30 pm

Thanks for reviewing The Inconvenient Indian -- I'm looking for a history and will take a look at this one, though the fiction and bias you mention give me pause.

173NielsenGW
Ago 5, 2013, 4:40 pm



Aug 5: Schachter, Rafael. The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti. (DDC 751.73)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 700: Fine Art
• 750: Painting and paintings
• 751: Painting techniques, procedures, apparatus, equipment, materials, or forms
• 751.7: Specific forms
• 751.73: Murals and frescoes

Say what you will about street art, it isn’t going anywhere. It can be galling or beautiful. It can inspire passers-by or simply blend into the scenery. The original print for the Obama Hope campaign was spawned from a piece of street art. Rafael’s World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti is a massive undertaking—an attempt to collect evidence of and write intelligently about a style of art that is meant to fade away or be seen as vandalistic or even puerile. With very few exceptions, there are no photographs of the artists in this book. Instead, the art speaks for itself alongside modest short essays detailing some small details of the artist’s life and a quick explanation of their motivations and styles.

Schachter gives street art a potency and a voice. This volume goes beyond your standard Banksy stuff and tries to catalogue a wide variety of artists, styles, locations, and media. Europe and North American artists get the bulk of the space, but there is still quite a bit of representation from other parts of the world of street art. The hope is that the reader will look around their environments more carefully and find what is meant for public consumption. Most serious street art has a message, but many times we cannot ask the artist directly for fear of exposing them to the authorities. Some of my personal favorites include the geometrics wall designs of Eltono and the absolutely stunning animal murals by Dal East. There is an entire world of street art: it is up to us to open our eyes and seek it out. A stunning and picturesque book.

174mkboylan
Ago 5, 2013, 5:01 pm

You find the best stuff! I would love that I think. My favorite street art is in Belfast. It was when I took a Native American Art course as an undergrad that I finally realized the influence of funding sources on art which lead to more appreciation of street art.

I took a small workshop on gang grafitti years ago which was interesting. Altho, a short while later I was walking down the street with a colleague who had also attended and when I pointed to a wall and said "I know I'm supposed to be able to interpret that but I can't remember," she beat on her chest and replied "this is mine!"

Turk 182, an old movie, is one of my all-time favs on the topic. Timothy Hutton stars.

Thanks for the great review.

175dchaikin
Ago 5, 2013, 9:35 pm

Interesting on street art, and California, and the Native American History, Iran and...

I'm catching up from a ways back, covering about 50 reviews. I think most of my favorite reviews fall in the History and Geography categories. But then I added Too Much To Know onto my wishlist. The most fascinating thing here to me is that you mention Edward Lhwyd, an obscure name I just recently discovered and am very curious about...a 17th-century antiquarian, a very early geologist and collector of Welsh folklore. But, finding a decent book on him that is actually available is not so easy. I had no idea he is credited with the first recorded find of a trilobite.

176dchaikin
Ago 5, 2013, 9:43 pm

Merrikay, your mention of Turk 182 sparked some long forgotten memories.

177rebeccanyc
Ago 6, 2013, 7:53 am

I never heard of the movie Turk 182, but one of the first graffiti artist to start spraying his name on subway trains, etc., in NYC was Taki 183 (or some number like that). I think this was back in the 70s, and his name, or tag, sticks in my mind.

178avidmom
Ago 6, 2013, 11:49 am

>171 mkboylan: I'm glad I didn't go to grade school here merrikay!

Great reviews of Street Art and the one on Junipero Serra. I've been to Mission San Juan Capistrano; it's a gorgeous spot.

179NielsenGW
Editado: Ago 6, 2013, 2:38 pm

Glad everyone liked the street art book. After reading it, I had to go run some errands and was rather disappointed to see that my town is relatively devoid of graffiti. Guess we need some more disaffected youth...

I looked into whether Turk 182 was available on Amazon Video, but alas, I guess there isn't enough support to make it streamable.

175>The wikipedia article for Edward Lhuyd offers up a half-dozen decent looking books on the man. He falls into that odd group of gentlemen-scientists that cropped up around England in the 18th century. They apparently had a lot of free time of their hands and just started digging things up.

180JDHomrighausen
Ago 6, 2013, 3:00 pm

Enjoyed the Juniperro Serra review. I'm an avid fan of the missions, having been to seven of them. Some day I will get in my car and drive through all the others.

181NielsenGW
Ago 7, 2013, 4:26 pm



Aug 7: Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. (DDC 423.092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 420: English and Old English
• 423: Dictionaries of Standard English
• +092: Biography

One of the most productive relationships in the history of modern dictionary making began with a murder. On February 17, 1872, William Chester Minor, an ex-patriated Civil war surgeon, in a schizophrenic rage, gunned down George Merritt in London’s Lambeth slum. He was tried, found not guilty by reason of insanity, and sent to Broadmoor Asylum. It was there that he found a measure of mental solace in a most unusual endeavor. Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman details what happened next.

In the late 19th century, there was a push to create a wondrous new reference book: a complete historical dictionary of the English language. It would use written works as its basis for both spelling and usage. This “New English Dictionary” was a gargantuan task. After a few fits and starts with different editors, James Murray became the project’s caretaker and secured the Oxford University Press as its publisher in 1878. He put out a call to readers and amateur word sleuths across the country to send in interesting, different, and obscure usages of words and their sources. In just four years’ time, he had 3.5 million quotation slips.

Minor, sitting alone at Broadmoor, came upon the public appeal through the booksellers he regularly ordered from and began to catalog everything he could find. He kept a dutiful organization system, sending in thousands of quotations over the course of his life. Minor and Murray met in person only once, and there are no notes from that day, but the work each did for the preservation of language cannot be dismissed. With Minor’s help (and the help of many others), the dictionary was issued in full in 1928.

This is one of my favorite books ever. It would be on my Desert Island Top Ten list. Sure, Winchester is a little stingy with the footnotes and there’s no index, but that’s not his style. He’s out to prove that history is replete with interesting tales of people who contributed to society in major and unusual ways. Minor eventually deteriorated mentally and physically, but his work is worthy of celebration. His indefatigable efforts helped make the OED into a powerhouse in the dictionary community. Winchester’s prose is breezy and charming. There are probably only a few people in the world who can make lexicography exciting, and he’s one of them. If you get a chance, check this one out. You won’t regret it.

182avidmom
Ago 7, 2013, 7:34 pm

You certainly have convinced me!

183NanaCC
Ago 7, 2013, 9:33 pm

Another for the wish list!

184NielsenGW
Ago 8, 2013, 11:02 am



Aug 8: Edson, Margaret. Wit: A Play. (85 p.; finished 8 Aug 2013)

Margaret Edson’s Wit is an earnest look at how terminal illness affects one’s perspective. Dr. Vivian Bearing, a respected professor and scholar of the works of John Donne, is diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer and has to undergo intense chemotherapy if there is to be any recovery. Her doctor is of course very clinical in his treatment of her, and his protégé is a former student (making for very awkward encounters). During the course of her treatment, Bearing gets sicker and more introspective. The play focuses on Bearing’s assessment of her life and learning as she deals with her imminent death.

Edson’s integration of Donne’s metaphysical poetics is interesting as it transforms the audience from simple spectators to students in Bearing’s classroom. We get a lesson in literature as she receives a lesson in life. Bearing’s life has been in the pursuit of learning, truth, and wisdom, but not companionship, so the only people left to guide her through the treatment are the staff of the hospital. At the risk of engaging in too much wordplay, Bearing’s life has too much bearing and not enough distraction. The vignettes we get of her past show that she was offered the choice to expand her horizons beyond literature but stuck with her studies. In the end, the good professor lets a bit of the outside world in as the cancer takes over.

Edson’s writing is interesting in that it breaks a lot of supposed rules about play-writing. Bearing is constantly breaking the fourth wall, there is overlapping dialogue, and there are no real scene or act breaks. That being said, it is a engaging piece of modern literature and a heck of a debut play. Wit still remains Edson’s only written work and she seems content in keeping it that way. I don’t have a lot of other plays sitting around the house to compare it to, but I liked it. It probably works a bit better on stage, but it wasn’t heavy-handed or hokey. All in all, a decent read.

185JDHomrighausen
Ago 8, 2013, 11:59 am

> 181

I listened to a lecture Winchester gave on the OED. You're right, it's fascinating! I got a copy of the OED as my high school graduation gift.

186NielsenGW
Ago 8, 2013, 3:47 pm

He's a big fan of the OED (there's a "companion" book he wrote called The Meaning of Everything to with the one I read). Nice to see I'm not the only person with a private copy of the full OED (there's actually 140 others here on LT with it besides you and me). I got it as a college graduation present and it's always fun to just thumb through it on occasion.

187NielsenGW
Ago 12, 2013, 3:09 pm



Aug 11: Ostler, Nicholas. Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. (DDC 477)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 470: Italic and Latin languages
• 477: Old, Postclassical, and Vulgar Latin

Nicholas Ostler’s Ad Infinitum is a monumental effort to catalog the travels and metamorphosis of the Latin language throughout European history. Latin changed in varying degrees based on the peoples it met on its journey, but the modern family of European languages all trace their roots back to a single language from a once-small area in Central Italy known as Latium. While there are times when he gets bogged down in the minutiae of word transformations and grammatical construction, his thesis is that the language survived through a combination of early Roman acculturation and the swift expansion of the Catholic Church. There is an interesting interplay that always seems to happen between a language and the lives of the language’s speakers. Language, culture, and history all seem to effect each other and make for a “three body problem” when discussing any of these facets. Latin is no different. This is, however, a very intriguing read for language lovers.

188NielsenGW
Ago 13, 2013, 4:31 pm



Aug 12: Johnson, George. Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. (DDC 522.0904)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 520: Astronomy and allied sciences
• 522: Techniques, procedures, apparatus, equipment, and materials
• +0904: 20th Century

In the early days of the 20th century, astronomy was tedious and manual. To understand what was out in the heavens, scientists used photographic plates attached to telescopes, exposed them to the night sky, and then pored over the resulting images to catalog new stars and nebulae. The sadder part of this endeavor is that the cataloging of celestial bodies on photo plates was seen as menial labor and left for groups of “human computers” to do. These groups usually consisted of brilliant women who were terrific at mathematics and physics, but were hired for dimes on the dollar simply because of their gender. George Johnson’s Miss Leavitt’s Stars is the tale of one computer who went on make a revolutionary discovery that changed the way we view the universe.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born on Independence Day, 1868. She was most likely a precocious child, and went on to attend Oberlin College and later Radcliffe to get her degree. She became interested in astronomy and went to work for Edward Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory to study variable stars. The stars were called variable for the simple reason that their brightness changed over time. After fifteen years and working through the images for over 1,700 stars, she made a simple but startling discovery. The intensity of a star’s brightness was directly related to how long the star stayed bright. Using this information about variable stars, or Cepheids, she was able to determine their distance from Earth, and from there, the distance of other galaxies from Earth. These measurements lead directly to the discovery that the universe is expanding from a some central point that wasn’t the Milky Way, giving credence to what we now call the Big Bang Theory.

Johnson’s little book on such a big discovery was fun and enlightening (if you’ll pardon the pun). There’s not a lot of background information on Leavitt, so the biography here is thin. Johnson supplements that with the history of astronomical photography, the story of Edward Pickering (and his harem of human computers), and the ramifications of Leavitt’s discovery. It’s one of the great shames of history that she died before she could be formally nominated for the Nobel Prize that she so richly deserved, but those that benefitted from her research were always keen to credit her work accordingly. A quick and informative read.

189NielsenGW
Ago 14, 2013, 3:44 pm



Aug 13: Wurdz, Gideon. The Foolish Dictionary. (DDC 827)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 820: English and Old English literatures
• 827: English humor and satire

In the same vein as Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary and other humorous compilations, Gideon Wurdz’s Foolish Dictionary is collection of witty definitions and word origins for the masses. Gideon Wurdz (read as “giddy on words”) is the pseudonym of Charles Wayland Towne, who wrote a few others like this, including Foolish Finance and Foolish Etiquette. His quick quips are pretty lame as far as modern humor goes, but many of the entries are good for a chuckle or two even if his faux etymologies are a bit strained. Of greater interest with this book was the experience of reading a volume that was over 100 years old and to see the marginalia and the illustrations of the day.

Here are a few excerpts from the dictionary for your perusal:
• Diary: An honest autobiography; makes for a good keepsake but a bad give-away
• Hotel: A place where a quest gives up good dollars for bad quarters
• Sailor: A man who makes his living on water but doesn’t touch it once on shore
• Tips: Wages we pay other people’s hired help

Included at the end are small pieces on the postal service, Greek mythology, and jabs at American holidays. It’s a quick book to rifle through and add a bit of old-timey lightness to your day. As an added bonus, it’s in the public domain so you can get it for free. If you’ve got a bit of time and a nostalgic bent, pick it up and have a good time.

190mkboylan
Ago 14, 2013, 11:01 pm

Foolish sounds fun.

191NielsenGW
Ago 15, 2013, 10:44 am



Aug 14: Beckmann, Petr. A History of Pi (DDC 512.924)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 510: Mathematics
• 512: Algebra
• 512.9: Foundations of algebra
• 512.92: Algebraic operations
• 512.924: Approximation, ratio, and proportion

Pi is an amazing, irrational, and indispensable tool in the mathematical and scientific world. Nature loves a curve, and it takes pi to measure them. At its core, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius. It is a strange quirk of the universe that it takes a little more than three radii to completely measure the circumference. And it’s the “little more” part that has been vexing mathematicians for the last ten thousand years. Petr Beckmann’s A History of Pi (originally written in 1971) is a unique look at the social, scientific, and mathematical history of this strange constant.

Ostensibly this book is about the evolution of how pi is conceived and used in mathematics and science, and indeed, you’ll get that. The author traces calculations from the dawn of Homo sapiens to the modern day computational methods. There’s the standard Egypt to Aristotle to Newton to Euler to computer timeline (with a good foray into Chinese mathematics included) with plenty of illustrations and geometrics proofs to satisfy the numerically minded.

But then the wheels fall off the wagon. Amid all these wonderful proofs and historical oddities, the author can’t seem to go a single chapter without slighting some nationality, historical figure, or group of peoples. You have to watch out for his unapologetic stance towards just about everybody. He calls out Aristotle for his dullness, the Romans for their engineering backwards-ness, and the Egyptians for their politics. You’ll come for the math, but you’ll stay for the rants. They actually make this book worth reading. It’s as if Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh decided to write a book about the history of the circle. Beckmann’s Eastern European bluntness is all at once refreshing, hilarious, and a bit outdated. It may offend a few people, but it does serve to break up the dryness of pure math history. If you can stomach a little Archie Bunker-style look into the uses of pi, then this book will make for a hum-dinger of a read.

192avidmom
Ago 15, 2013, 12:54 pm

It’s as if Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh decided to write a book about the history of the circle.

LOL!

I'll be thinking of that sentence all day.

193JDHomrighausen
Editado: Ago 15, 2013, 2:12 pm

It must take a lot of talent to make math interesting and popular. I'm impressed.

194NielsenGW
Ago 16, 2013, 3:08 pm



Aug 16: Kaufman, Peter. Skull in the Ashes: Murder, a Gold Rush Manhunt, and the Birth of Circumstantial Evidence. (227 p.; finished 16 Aug 2013)

On the night of February 3, 1897 in Walford, Iowa, a fire broke out. Frank Novak’s general store was ablaze and everybody thought he was trapped inside. Instead, a night guard, one Edward Murray, was inside and Novak had fled the scene. No evidence could be found of how the building caught fire, why Murray was inside and unable to get out, or what part if anything Novak played in the act. It was left to county prosecutor M. J. Tobin and his hired detectives to chase down the fleeing suspect and get some answers. Peter Kaufman’s Skull in the Ashes tells the tale of how they went about the arrest and trial of Novak and how exactly circumstantial evidence could be used in a trial.

The cast of characters here includes Frank Novak, the American-born son of Bohemian immigrants trying to make a name for himself in small-town Iowa; Edward Murray, the unsuspecting clerk who had a penchant for both the drink and helping out people in town; M. J. Tobin, the newly-minted prosecutor who spent months piecing together the events leading up to and following the fire; “Red” Perrin, a rough-and-tumble old school detective who chased down Novak all the way into the heart of the Alaskan wilderness after he flees town; and Tom Milner, the wily defense attorney who tries everything under the sun to protect and free his client. I’ll try not to spoil too many of the details, but let’s just say justice prevails.

The story is compelling and full of twists and turns. Luckily, newspaper and historical accounts of the day have survived and Kaufman does a very good of threading all the information together. He tries desperately to be impartial, but you can tell he already knows how the story will end up and that bleeds into the writing a little bit. Even knowing the outcome somewhat, it was still pretty entertaining. Novak’s machinations while being chased down, tried, and sentenced make one grateful for a diverse and (mostly) impartial legal system. Luckily, this story doesn’t suffer from the burden of being over told; its 200 or so pages are just enough to get everyone’s story out there. It works well as a true-crime legal drama without being overly dramatic. A pleasant read.

195NanaCC
Ago 16, 2013, 5:51 pm

Skull in the Ashes sounds very interesting.

196NielsenGW
Ago 21, 2013, 10:24 am



Aug 17: Knight, Henry. Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869-1929. (DDC 330.9759)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 300: Social Sciences
• 330: Economics
• 330.9: History
• +759: Florida

After the Civil War, the United States tried many different methods to re-unify its broken landscape and bolster the economy. While the gold rushes of the 1840s and 1850s helped to pull people to the hills of California, that particular strategy was wearing thin during the antebellum years. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 changed things, however. Folks could go from coast to coast in a matter of days, not weeks or months. Travels guides and boosterism became the main method for garnering interest in the two coastal states of California and Florida. Henry Knight’s Tropic of Hopes investigates the history and outcomes of the promotion of these two states.

There was an interesting and tangled web of motivations and history involved in settling California and Florida. These states were seen as large waste space where Americans could move and terraform the land to their wishes. Large swaths of the states could be “upcycled” into agricultural paradises to grow exotic (and possibly costly) produce. But, of course, this came in direct contention with environmental concerns. Secondly, the states were sold as semi-tropic wonderlands where bliss and sunshine intermingled. On the flip side, these advertisements were implicitly colonialist by saying that the American tropics were better because they didn’t have pesky island natives dotting the landscape. Each aspect of selling California and Florida folded into the political and social landscape of the time and this continued until 1929 (when the economic boom time came to a sudden halt).

Knight’s writing is academic first and historical second, but not truly intended for the amateur reader. It is largely an economic history, so it’s naturally a bit dry. There are a ton of resources in the bibliography for further reading and the author does his best to cover all the bases here. It’s not the first book I would run to, but it was definitely interesting to think about the affect of boosterism on the social landscape and how the states became defined in the American psyche. This would make a good addition for those interested in small-scale histories or economic trends.

197NielsenGW
Ago 21, 2013, 4:21 pm



Aug 20: Lineweaver, Charles H., Paul C. W. Davies, and Michael Ruse, eds. Complexity and the Arrow of Time. (DDC 003)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 000: Computer Science, Knowledge, and General Works
• 003: Systems

Everywhere you look there exists complexity. Nature, our lives, the universe, the environment, economics, politics, sociology—all of it is incredibly complex. But, can we talk about complexity? Is complexity too complex to discuss? It the risk of sounding like a metaphysical junkie, the answer to that is both simple and complex. Charles Lineweaver, along with Paul Davies and Michael Ruse, bring together some perspectives on the question (and maybe the answers) of complexity in Complexity and the Arrow of Time. Along the way, we get a series of answers from a cosmological, biological, and even a philosophical point of view.

First off, I’m not even going to act like I knew about everything that was going on in this book. I’m lucky if I understood even one-third of the ideas being bandied about, but that small percentage was still enough to keep me interested. David Wolpert and David Krakauer go little overboard on the equations and theories in their sections, but they try to look at evolution and complexity from a purely mathematical perspective. Eric Chaisson tries to unify complexity across the sciences by defining complexity as a measurement of energy usage; celestial bodies become more complex over time as they burn through energy, biological entities require more energy as complexity increases, and humans through history have required more energy as their technologies have grown increasingly complex. Michael Ruse looks at complexity as described by Darwinian theory and debates whether the analogy of complexity to success to dominance is really true.

All these essays (and quite a few more) helped to create a picture of complexity on many levels. Interestingly enough, there is an underlying urge to simplify complexity. When greeted with the utter chaos of quantum theory and biological systems, there is an impetus to organize, but it always eludes us. This collection is at least a nudge in the right direction when we start talking about complexity at a macroscopic level. A heady but still intriguing read.

198NielsenGW
Ago 23, 2013, 9:14 am



Aug 22: Belozerskaya, Marina. The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power. (DDC 636)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 630: Agriculture and related technologies
• 636: Animal husbandry

Human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom share an interesting and symbiotic relationship. People have shaped the history of animals and certain animals have shaped the history of humanity. Marina Belozerskaya’s The Medici Giraffe attempts to bring together seven stories of historic animals to show a timeline of important beasts. Starting with Ptolemy’s war elephants and ending with the historic agreement between the China and the U.S. on the gifting of two rare panda bears to the National Zoo, we see that people are drawn to the exotic. You won’t find simple tales of animal breeding and care here, but rather a portfolio of complicated relationships with the animal kingdom.

Many times while reading this one, though, I felt like the animals were playing second fiddle. For instance, in the chapter on the mass slaughter of exotic animals in the Roman circuses, I don’t think it actually mattered what animals were involved. The story really centered around the social attitudes and actions of a civilization and not the animals. That being said, these make for interesting vignettes that you can come back to after a while. My favorite chapter still tends to be the one on the black swans of Josephine Bonaparte. If you’re an ardent animal lover, however, consider this a warning that a not insignificant percentage of this book is about the neglect and maltreatment of animals at the hands of humans and how that went to show (in some weird way) just how powerful leaders of the day were. On the technical side, Belozerskaya’s writing is fluid and competent but somehow left me a bit underwhelmed. An interesting but not incredible book.

199NielsenGW
Ago 26, 2013, 1:31 pm

It's a crying shame when you have so much free time on a weekend that you read three books and get backed up on reviews. :)

More to follow...

200NielsenGW
Ago 26, 2013, 3:40 pm



Aug 23: Grambs, David. Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams: Words to Describe Life's Indescribable People. (DDC 428.1)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 420: English and Old English
• 428: Standard English usage and applied linguistics
• 428.1: English language spellers

This is another one of those “look at this interesting list of archaic, rare, or foreign words for things” books. David Grambs’s Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams is a collection of terms of different types of people we meet in the course of our lives. This book got me thinking in that while you’ll forget a lot of these words while out in public, when you read the list, you’ll invariably call to mind people who fit the definitions provided. I’ll just spoil for you the definitions of the title terms (you’ll have to read the rest):

• Dimbox: one skilled at smoothing over disputes
• Epopt: an initiate into a secret society
• Quidam: one who is unknown, someone referred to as "what's-his-name"

Also included are terms for ladies with faint mustaches, folks who can’t keep their hands to themselves, over-achievers in the philanthropy department, and pitiable folks whose house has just burned down. It’s breezy, whimsical, and tightly written. If you’ve got a free afternoon and are a word nut, then add this to your collection—it’s worth the money.

201NielsenGW
Ago 26, 2013, 4:23 pm



Aug 24: Carroll, Sean B. Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize. (DDC 572.8092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 570: Biology
• 572: Biochemistry
• 572.8: Biochemical genetics
• +092: Biography

Two unlikely fellows became friends during World War II. One, a writer whose athletic career was sidelined by a nasty bout with tuberculosis, and the other, a scientist trying to figure his life out, got caught up in the war effort on the side of the French Resistance. Sean B. Carroll’s Brave Genius tells the tales of Jacques Monod and Albert Camus from the perspective of the war. Each helped to defend their fellow countrymen without ever donning a military uniform. Luckily, they survived. Without them, the world would have a little less rich.

This dual biography provides insight into the celebrated work of Monod and Camus. Each won a Nobel Prize (Monod in 1965 and Camus in 1957) and each one’s work affected the worldviews of the other. Camus’s long-held beliefs in a godless, absurd universe and Monod’s pioneering efforts in the world of molecular biology both show incredible faith in reason and science. Their friendship throughout the war kept them on the course of resistance in the face of constant threats of death.

The only issue I have with the book is that it runs very long in places. In trying to present a complete context for the two subjects, Carroll paints, I think, too big a picture. You get the lead up to the war, and an explanation of mRNA, bits and pieces about various initiatives around Europe, and many other chunks of information. There’s a lot of details that could have easily been left out while still telling the fascinating tale of the two resistance fighters. The writing’s not bad—there’s just a lot of it. That being said, Carroll did quite a bit of research tracking down former operatives and getting into previously-closed archives. A dense and rich book.

202NielsenGW
Editado: Ago 27, 2013, 3:55 pm



Aug 25: Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (DDC 823.8)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 820: British and Old English literatures
• 823: British fiction
• 823.8: 1837-1899

Sherlock Holmes is one of the many iconic figures in literature. So much so that he has migrated into movies and television as well. Appearing first in 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spent forty years crafting the persona of Holmes along with his trusty sidekick Dr. John Watson. The mysteries span four full-length novels and 56 short stories. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes covers 12 stories originally published in Strand magazine from July 1891 to June 1892.

There is not much else I can add to the volumes and volumes of words written about Sherlock and his genius, but sufficed to say that these were great fun to finally read. The writing is a little aged, but Watson’s tone as the narrator keeps things moving along nicely. As a fan of the current BBC series, it was very interesting to see the source material for so many of the episodes. Holmes is just as acerbic and maniacal in the stories as one would expect, but the reader can’t help but cheer him on when the going gets tough. A classic, enjoyable read.

203NielsenGW
Ago 28, 2013, 8:55 am



Aug 26: Fara, Patricia. Fatal Attraction: Magnetic Mysteries of the Enlightenment. (DDC 538)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 530: Physics
• 538: Magnetism

Patricia Fara’s Fatal Attraction covers the lives and work of Edmond Halley, Gowin Knight, and Franz Mesmer. Each contributed in significant ways to the world’s understanding of physics and magnetism. Enlightenment science was a bawdy, haphazard, and thrilling investigation into the world around them. You needed a fair amount of capital to buy equipment and run scientific experiments, so many of the first scientists were titled gentlemen. These folks paved the way for every scientist that came after them, and while some of their theories may have been a bit off the mark, they did what every scientist does: they asked a question of the universe and then set about trying to find the answer.

Halley was one of a number of Enlightenment polymaths who had a hand in just about every scientific field. He used Kepler’s law of planetary motion to calculate the orbit of the now-eponymous comet, built the diving bell, calculated better actuarial tables for selling life annuities, and even tried to figure out the source of atmospheric trade winds and monsoons. Fara’s attention is focused on his work on the magnetic compass. He sailed with the Royal Navy in order to collect global measurements of terrestrial magnetism. Gowin Knight, perhaps the least known of the subjects, was the first principal librarian of the British Museum and discovered a process for creating strongly magnetized steel, which was used in the creation of better compasses.

Lastly, Franz Mesmer, along with popularizing a form of hypnosis (called mesmerism), used magnetism as a form of therapy to help people with a wide variety of ailments. He used interesting and convoluted setups to supposedly channel magnetic power into the bodies of his patients, creating a form of energy called animal magnetism. While his medical findings were debunked, his work on magnetism did contribute important new findings to the field.

This was not an exceptional book, but does contain a fair amount of fun information. The sections rambled a bit, sometimes digressing too far from the main subjects, but any investigation into the history of science leads to a lot of hopping around from person to subject to person and so forth. It reads quick and holds the attention dutifully. If you’re looking for a good introductory book in this field, there are many other worse choices you could make. A light and educational read.

204avidmom
Ago 30, 2013, 11:09 am

Great reviews!
>202 NielsenGW: I love the new BBC "Sherlock" too. Season 3 can't show up fast enough!

205NielsenGW
Set 2, 2013, 12:46 pm



Sep 1: Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Barry B. Powell. (570 p.; finished 1 Sep 2013)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 880: Classical and modern Greek literatures
• 883: Classical Greek epic poetry and fiction
• 883.01: Ancient period

Among the first extant works of mankind is Homer’s Iliad. Dating back almost 2,800 years and comprising over 15,000 lines, it stands as a testament to the human imagination. It is a recounting of the famous Trojan war but really only takes place during a few weeks at the end of the war. Through flashbacks and stories within the story, we get the entire magnitude of the struggle. Agamemnon rails against Achilles, Paris duels with Menelaus, Troy is sacked, and the death of Achilles, while untold, is still a tragic affair. Being an epic poem, it has everything under the sun packed into it lines—love, war, trickery, gods, life, and death.

I haven’t read multiple translations of this work, so I can’t speak to Powell’s ability as a translator. His text, however, is a bit monotonous, a bit stilted, and not as poetic as I expected it to be. Of more interest and use are all the supplementary materials provided. There is a good history of the work, plenty of maps, an introduction to Greek poetry, and even a pronunciation dictionary at the end so you can be sure you’re hearing everything correctly. All that helped out a lot as the actual text takes some effort to get through. Readers of Greek mythology probably already have a copy somewhere on their shelves, but this new translation does make for a good introduction to the genre.

206NielsenGW
Set 3, 2013, 11:23 am

After being a good sport and tagging along with the missus to some local craft shows on Saturday, I was released to find good deals at the bookstore. Here's what I came back with:

* Foulds, Adam. The Quickening Maze: Nominated for the 2009 Man Booker Prize
* Robinson, Marianne. Home: Winner of the 2009 Orange/Women's Prize; nominated for the 2008 National Book Critic's Circle Award, the 2008 National Book Award, and the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
* Suri, Manil. The Death of Vishnu: Nominated for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award
* Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence: Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize

207mkboylan
Set 3, 2013, 11:24 am

You were well rewarded indeed!

208NanaCC
Set 3, 2013, 11:41 am

Nice picks at the bookstore. I loved The Age of Innocence.

209NielsenGW
Set 4, 2013, 8:25 am



Sep 2: Ouchley, Kelby. American Alligator: Ancient Predator in the Modern World. (DDC 597.984)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 590: Zoology
• 597: Cold-blooded vertebrates
• 597.9: Reptilia
• 597.98: Crocodilia
• 597.984: Alligatoridae

Kelby Ouchley’s American Alligator covers the evolution, biology, habitat, and behavior of the American alligator. Alligator mississippiensis, as it is known to the scientific crowd, lives in the southeastern coastal states (although it can get as far north as Arkansas) and hold an important place in the natural food chain. While human hunters have sought to reduce their numbers, there are approximately 4-5 million alligators in the United States. Ouchley walks the reader through the natural history and interesting science behind this misunderstood reptile. American alligators—much like actual Americans—have an incredibly diverse diet, feeding on animals as small as whirligig beetles and apple snails and as large as farm cattle and deer. The first part is devoted to the science of the alligator and the second part concerns human interaction, including folklore, hunting laws, and painful encounters. This book reads like a decent National Geographic special or a Discover Channel show (without all the needless sensationalism, though). If you’re a budding zoologist or even have a passing interest in reptiles or biodiversity, this is a nice quick book to wet your beak on.

210NielsenGW
Set 5, 2013, 8:37 am



Sep 3: Scheffler, Samuel. Death and the Afterlife. (DDC 128.5)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 120: Epistemology
• 128: Humankind
• 128.5: Human death

One of the headiest question that you can ask is: what happens after we die? Is there a place or perspective where our consciousnesses go to live on in another form? Or is this it? Are we doomed to a single existence in a single body? And, moreover, how do our answers to these questions affect the way in which we go about our lives? Noted philosopher Samuel Scheffler was asked to deliver the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California at Berkeley and engage in a conversation about what it meant to envision an afterlife. In Death and the Afterlife, his lectures and the commentaries of other philosophers investigate the nature of catastrophic events, the value of the preservation of life, and the values that an afterlife brings with it.

Scheffler’s first scenario involves the reader imagining that they knew that humanity, through some cataclysmic event, was going to be wiped out thirty days after their death. How much would that knowledge effect the reader’s life and choices? Would everyday actions and experiences be enhanced knowing that the end is nigh? How would this affect what you value? Scheffler’s “afterlife” is the totality of life continuing after an individual’s death, not a spiritual one. We take it for granted that other people will continue to live after we die and that humanity has a nearly infinite future. Can we even comprehend a end to humanity since we’ve been inundated with the knowledge that the actual Solar system will last for another 4ish billion years? The concept of a potential afterlife is embedded so deep into our other constructs (justice, morality, creativity, etc.) that without it, the world becomes a very different place. His second deals with a world where the reader never dies. Can one still lead a value-laden life without the fear of death?

The commentaries on these lectures from Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Seana Shiffrin, and Niko Kolodny further tackle the complex, implied meaning of an afterlife. Since these are direct responses, there’s a bit of nitpicking and word-parsing here, but the overall back-and-forth is interesting. The philosophies are inherently egoistic as they involve how important or value-driven the decisions of the “I” are in the face of either imminent death or immortality. The conjectures the contributors draw are still worthwhile nonetheless and lead the reader to a few different perspectives on how we think about death and the afterlife. A thought-provoking book.

211avidmom
Set 5, 2013, 8:33 pm

Alligator mississippiensis,
"mississippiensis" - Love, love that word!

Death and the Afterlife.
That's always an interesting thing to think about.

212dchaikin
Editado: Set 5, 2013, 9:59 pm

Those are interesting questions in Death and the Afterlife.

Catching up on several reviews. Fatal Attraction is aligned with my current reading theme...but I've yet to hear anything really good about Patrica Fara. Cool that you fit the Iliad in. I recently read that it should be interpreted as a preservation of Mycenaean values, and therefore in conflict with Classical Greek values.

Tell me you did not really read all of Sherlock Holmes as one of three books in a single weekend...(or the entire Iliad in two days...)

213NielsenGW
Set 6, 2013, 12:00 am

For me, Patricia Fara is the poor man's Dava Sobel. Sobel's writing has an elegance that a lot of modern science books are missing these days.

As far as the Iliad goes, I had my copy of The Odyssey lined up, but when I was able to get an advance copy of this new translation, I figured it was worth a shot. While the reviews came out within a few days, I finished Fatal Attraction last Monday and The Iliad on Sunday. Normally, I get through about 200-225 pages a day, but this one bogged down my pace.

The Sherlock Holmes book was a 270-page compilation of 12 individual short stories, so it's a lot shorter than one would think. Knocking that one out on a lazy Sunday afternoon was easy-peasy. Totally worth it and a lot of fun.

214dchaikin
Set 6, 2013, 12:46 am

I would love to be able to read 200 pages a day. Impressive.

215NielsenGW
Set 6, 2013, 10:52 am



Sep 4: Bolton, Charles C. William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography. (DDC 976.2063092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 970: History of North America
• 976: History of the South Central United States
• 976.2: Mississippi
• 976.206: 1865 to present
• 976.2063: 1945-1999
• +092: Biography

Charles Bolton’s William F. Winter and the New Mississippi looks at the life and times of William F. Winter, governor of Mississippi from 1980 to 1984 and supporter of a racially-integrated South. He was a proto-typical “honest” politician who seemed to legitimately care about the welfare of all Mississippians and not just those who looked like himself. He moved through the standard ladder of local politics, from State representative to State Treasurer to Lieutenant Governor to the Governorship, but it did not come without obstacles and heartbreak. As a politician during the 70s, he suffered the backlash of the public’s reaction to the Nixon scandal: he was considered as untrustworthy as everyone else. Nevertheless, he persevered and tried to change the nation’s image of Mississippi.

For many decades, Mississippi was seen as the lone holdout in a nation that was trying to become whole again after the Civil War. The Jim Crow “Dark Ages” may have dissipated elsewhere, but Mississippi had to be dragged into the post-Civil Right Act era. William Winter was a large part of its eventual re-integration. He was a sea of calm in torrent of racial tensions and tried to defuse potentially disastrous situations with rhetoric rather than riotous behavior. His brand of politics was a gentle change from the previous era of thumpers, yellers, and muckrakers.

For the most part, Bolton’s research is diverse and balanced, but one of the problems of a biography of a still-living person is one of appearance. Is the whole truth in there, or has the subject exercised some level of control over the content? Can we completely trust the text? Winter is still working as a lawyer, trying with reason, compassion, and cooperation to slowly better the lives of Mississippians, and Bolton openly states that he had a hand in crafting the story, but ultimately ironing out discrepancies in various accounts was left to the author. Unfortunately, the tale isn’t terribly exciting as it catalogs events and laws that Winter had a part in; he did good deeds, but those were mainly limited to delivering a vote when necessary and dutifully serving his state. If you’re interested in post-War Southern politics, then here’s one for you.

216mkboylan
Set 6, 2013, 1:03 pm

I especially appreciate your last paragraph.

217NielsenGW
Set 9, 2013, 1:07 pm

Good grief -- football season starts up and I immediately get behind in reviews. Luckily, I've started a longer book, so I have a bit of a buffer to catch up with. More to follow...

218NielsenGW
Set 9, 2013, 1:25 pm



Sep 6: Pfatteicher, Philip H. Journey Into the Heart of God: Living the Liturgical Year. (DDC 263.9)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 260: Christian social and ecclesiastical theory
• 263: Days, times, places of religious observance
• 263.9: Church year and other days and times

Philip Pfatteicher’s Journey Into the Heart of God is a look at the how truly observing the liturgical can bring one closer to one’s Christian faith. The liturgical year is the calendar of events that leads up to and includes the holy days. For Christianity, this runs through the cycle of Advent, Christmas, Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time. Each season is broken down further into seasons where different aspects of Christianity are observed and explored.

The Advent and Christmas seasons of course look more into the birth of Christ and how the ending and beginning of the calendar year tie in with the cycles of faith that Christians experience and the Lenten section deals with the sacrifices and absolutions that come with that faith. The author does well to incorporate not just Biblical texts, but also different writings to further his metaphors, including hymns and passages from Church leaders. We walks the reader through how each verse and teaching can help to better understand the message of the Church throughout the year. Each day of each season has its own verses and lessons. Pfatteicher’s prose is slightly lofty but so are his goals. He wants the reader to grow their faith by getting both closer to the Bible and closer to God. For those looking for a more introspective and organized connection to their faith, this book offers a lot towards that aim.

219NielsenGW
Set 10, 2013, 11:29 am



Sep 7: Randall, Margaret. Che on My Mind. (DDC 980.035092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 980: History of South America
• 980.03: 1830-1999
• 980.035: 1950-1959
• +092: Biography

Margaret Randall’s Che on My Mind is a history of South America, citizen rebellion, and deep-felt loss. Randall moved to Mexico in the early 1960s for a change in scenery from the McCarthyism still brewing in the US, married a Mexican poet, and became enamored with the culture there. While she gets to Cuba only after Che Guevara is assassinated, her relationship with Che’s sister and her own past inform her story. It is a story of reflection, of revolution, and of redemption.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s journey started as an academic and a doctor. During the 1940s and 1950s, he journeyed around South America touring the countryside, helping the disadvantaged, and seeing firsthand how the lower classes lived. He took part in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état, the Cuban Revolution, and even the Simba Rebellion in the Congo. But, after each struggle to change the world, he had to become more elusive, more guerilla-like. His death in 1967 was a critical blow to revolutionary activities across the region.

There is a bit of problem here of subject deification. Randall openly decries US-style democracy and believe that full Marxist revolution is the only way to political and social liberation. Her source material is, however, useful and insightful. She gathers together reminisces, letters, and creative writing from the revolutionary period to show the atmosphere of the time. Her own subjective injections work with prose as a whole, but definitely move this book out of the arena of true academic histories. She looks at both Che’s life and how other writers have placed Che’s life in the context of the region, and for that combined perspective, this one was a very interesting read.

220NielsenGW
Set 11, 2013, 10:47 am



Sep 9: Clarke, Erskine. By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. (DDC 266.5092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 260: Christian social and ecclesiastical theory
• 266: Missions
• 266.5: Presbyterian Church missions
• +092: Biography

Slavery was a way of life in early 19th-century Georgia. While the wholesale importation of slaves from Africa was officially banned by law by 1807, the subjugation of existing blacks in the South was still legal. The different layers of culture, status, and race blended to create a complicated atmosphere. Erskine Clarke’s By the Rivers of Water details the lives of plantation owners turned missionaries John Leighton and Jane Bayard Wilson to West Africa and how their journey to help others offers new perspective on an old problem.

The Wilsons left the shores of Georgia in November 1834 to establish some of the most influential missionaries on the continent. In their eighteen years in Africa, they built schools, fought the slave trade institution, beat back colonial invaders, and translated the Bible into native languages. John and Jane were both brought up in the Southern slave-owning tradition, but their inability to reconcile owning slaves and the teachings of their faith led them to fight against the prevailing culture.

Aside from the lives of the Wilsons, we also get insight into the fledgling Protestant mission culture, the lives of the Gullah, stories of freed American blacks travelling back to Africa (and creating a new kind of class differential there) as well as bits of the European scramble for African colonies, Grebo and Mpongwe history, and a different side of the American Civil War. The tone is rich, and Clarke’s description of foreign landscapes is among the best I’ve read. His prose easily invites the reader into the narrative even when the story is not so easy to stomach. While the main focus on the missionary work, the background history into Gullah culture gives a voice to a people that have been forgotten for too long. A dense and interesting read.

221NielsenGW
Set 17, 2013, 10:36 am

Been busy, busy, busy -- and I'm behind on reviews. Hopefully, I can bang them out today.

222NielsenGW
Set 17, 2013, 12:38 pm



Sep 13: Moore, Wendy. The Knife Man: Blood, Body-Snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery. (DDC 617.092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 610: Medicine
• 617: Miscellaneous branches of medicine and surgery
• +092: Biography

In the middle of the 18th century, surgery was still a gruesome practice. Bloodletting and induced vomiting were standard procedures for all manners of ailments. But, like in all the sciences, one practitioner decided to upend convention and actually study the field from the ground up, asking basic questions and looking for observable phenomena. Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man chronicles the life of John Hunter, a doctor from rural Scotland who would almost single-handedly set right the world of surgery and change medicine for the better.

Hunter’s life (1728 – 1793) was full of fun and fantastical experiences. When most people just took the teachings of Galen at face value, he studied the anatomy of corpses dug from graveyards (a crime in those days) to further his understanding. He prepared his own specimens (which his brother then profited from) for teaching classes. His laboratory inspired the famous tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He even acquired the skeleton of the seven-foot-seven Irish giant Charles Byrne to learn more about it. He worked with Edward Jenner (inventor of the small pox vaccine), compiled the first study of the human fetal development, and woefully used himself as a guinea pig for research on venereal diseases. Needless to say, the man did a lot to contribute to his field.

Moore’s writing is breezy, filled with fun anecdotes, and interesting to boot. The book may seem daunting when you first pick it up, but it reads quickly. She includes a fair amount of background history and science to flesh out the biography. Hunter seems very deserving of his statue in Leicester Square after reading this one. A thick but delightful book.

223NielsenGW
Set 17, 2013, 1:02 pm



Sep 14: Abley, Mark. The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English. (DDC 420.9)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 420: English and Old English
• 420.9: History of the English language

If you perk up your ears for a bit, you will notice that English is not the language it once was. Odd terms, new phrases, and foreign invasions are changing English from the inside out. The explosion of the Internet and small-scale news have given localisms a chance to flourish on a global scale. It took the word “teenager” roughly sixty years to become mainstream, but now noob and lol are commonplace after only a decade of use. Mark Abley’s The Prodigal Tongue traces the historical journey of the English and project many possible changes the language could take.

Right now, English and its many variations are swarming around world, threatening to become the universal language. It’s already the official language of pilots, the World Bank, and even OPEC. But this comes at a cost to the language itself. In its ambition to become the lingua franca of the world, the world affects it in many small and large ways. Each new country that takes on English changes it to suit their purposes, and Abley shows us how this affects both the speakers and speech. Singapore English is an odd mish-mash of local dialects and general English terms. Japanese English, while sometime mocked when egregious mistranslations occur, is creating a row because it is displacing traditional kanji writing. The Spanglish of Southern California is leading to new debates about whether the United States should decree English as the official language.

Abley’s gusto for new words and Englishes is almost childlike and Zen at the same time. He is not one of those linguists who cry out for purity and put down neologisms. Every time he sees a new construction, it is a chance to investigate in what ways the language is changing and what that means on a larger scale. If you are a native English speaker, there are times when you may get a little defensive when Abley proposes that all English variations are both valid and good, but his overall feeling is that each new English offers a way for use to communicate with those we haven’t been able to before. And that can’t be too bad of a thing. A very engaging read.

224rebeccanyc
Set 17, 2013, 6:11 pm

Sounds interesting. I read a fascinating book by Mark Abley about "threatened" languages (of which English is not one!), called Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages.

225Mr.Durick
Set 17, 2013, 6:43 pm

I suppose a linguist can be anybody with an actual interest in language, but the field that exists as a field comprises people who report language as is rather than as hoped for. You can look for prescriptivists elsewhere with greater hope of success.

Robert

226NielsenGW
Set 18, 2013, 9:59 am



Sep 15: Ashton, Dianne. Hanukkah in America: A History. (DDC 296.4350973)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 290: Other religions
• 296: Judaism
• 296.4: Traditions, rite, and public services
• 296.43: Festivals, holy days, and fasts
• 296.435: Hanukkah
• +0973: United States

Hanukkah is one of the oldest religious observances still extant and celebrates the re-dedication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean revolts during the 2nd century BCE. It begins on the 25th day of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar and continues for eight nights and days. For almost two thousand years, it was a solemn occasion replete with songs, rituals, and reflection. But, like all things, when Jewish populations increased in the United States, it became a much more diverse and interesting event. Dianne Ashton’s Hanukkah in America is a look at how changes in America’s social landscape intertwined with and transformed Hanukkah forever.

Ashton’s book covers the history and philosophy of the holiday before getting to the matter at hand. Starting around the middle of the 19th century, we see Hanukkah stay in the background as Jewish communities were starting to form in the US. Still viewed as consummately foreign, it took a while before Jews were given equal footing with their Catholic and Protestant counterparts. The proliferation of new American holidays (with new rituals) in the late 19th century gave Jewish leaders a chance to evaluate their own calendar and how they celebrated their holidays. American commercialism and pageantry transformed the holiday into a gift-giving occasion, and American democracy and pluralism welcomed Hanukkah into military services, television specials, and schools. In the end, Ashton argues that while American Hanukkah celebrations are markedly different than their Old World versions, it exists as a unique vehicle for reflection on American history and family bonds.

Knowing very little about Hanukkah and Jewish history, I found this book was very interesting and ripe with information. Ashton’s prose is dutiful and bring together many scholarly, secular, and popular sources. There is an interesting three-sided relationship between American values, democracy, and cultural holidays. The very nature of the country leaves its stamp on everything it comes into contact with, sometimes bad and sometimes good. If you’re interested in Jewish cultural history, then this book would be a very good place to start.

227NielsenGW
Set 18, 2013, 10:46 am



Sep 16: Woginrich, Jenna. One-Woman Farm: My Life Shared with Sheep, Pigs, Chickens, Goats, and a Fine Fiddle. (DDC 630.974749)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 630: Agriculture and related technologies
• +974749: Washington County, New York, United States

One day, while listening to a friend wax contently about life on his farm in the Hudson Valley, Jenna Woginrich became jealous. She wanted that life, filled with cold mornings, broken fences, herding chickens, and baling hay. She wanted her life to have more seasons and less weekends. She wanted a dog at her side and a horse under saddle. In One-Woman Farm, she recounts how she did just that and gives us a year in the life of a New York State farmer.

The book is a simple one: a recounting from October to October of the life a homestead farmer. She runs Cold Antler Farm in Washington County, New York. There are a few goats, some sheep, a clutch of rabbits, chickens, a few dogs, and some pigs. Each day brings new joys, new pains, and new cycles of life. She keeps a keen eye on the calendar for the best days to breed sheep, plant new crops, order hay, and press cider. Woginrich and her fellow farmers band together to ensure that everyone (as long as they work hard and contribute well) makes it through each season. She learns to make goat cheese, play the fiddle, and simplify her life.

While Woginrich’s writing is indeed poetic, it’s the illustrations by Emma Dibben that make the book truly stand out. Each page is like a scrapbook of design and story-telling. While I wouldn’t go so far as to compare the writing to William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost, you can definitely tell she grew up in that style of reading. Maybe it’s the rhythm of farming or the natural beauty of working outdoors, but the text is just beautiful. She takes the reader through each season, encountering interesting problems and laughable situations, and in the end, she makes ends meet and marches from day to day. It’s clear she has a few outside sources of income, but that just pays the bills—it’s the farm that truly sustains her. A absolutely wonderful book.

228rebeccanyc
Set 18, 2013, 11:27 am

Interesting about Hanukkah, because my understanding has been that it wasn't a major Jewish holiday (not mentioned in the Torah but celebrating later history) until it started competing with Christmas in the US.

229NielsenGW
Set 20, 2013, 8:37 am



Sep 19: Reilly, Brendan. One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine. (DDC 610.695)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 610: Medicine
• 610.6: Organizations, management, group practice, medical personnel and relationships
• 610.69: Medical personnel and relationships
• 610.695: Physicians

Medicine is simultaneously one of the most rewarding and heart-breaking fields to work in. Every day, millions of physicians are tasked with managing the livelihoods of countless injured or sick patients. They can have an infinite number of backgrounds and come in with a dizzying array of issues. In relatively little time, they have to assess their patient, diagnose them, and pursue a course of treatment that takes many factors into account. I do not envy them one bit, but neither do I bemoan their profession or their pay. Brendan Reilly’s One Doctor gives us a peek into a two-week window of the life of a primary care physician and his team at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Dr. Reilly, normally a hospital administrator, is on a two-week rotation at New York Presbyterian. He readily admits that he is a dinosaur in the field of medicine, a 60ish internist. Nowadays many doctors are pushed to become specialists (because, apparently, that’s where the money is). He tries to get a complete picture of each patient and then use an entire body of symptoms to diagnose and treat. The members of his training team are each on their way to different fields, but still try to learn from each other. In many ways this book is like an episode of House but without all the drug use and incessant snarkiness. While some of the cases presented are easily worked, many involve a complicated mixture of testing, medical history, and personal experience.

Reilly’s tales cover the entirety of the human condition. There is sadness, relief, joy, bewilderment, life, and, yes, death. When you treat a person for the first time, everything they’ve ever gone through has brought them to that moment, and the doctor has to comb through all that to properly treat them. The author also goes into details about how modern hospitals and health care regulations have shaped the field of medicine and how that affects patients. Luckily, he a scientist at heart and all this statistics and assertions are supported by bibliographic notes. Like everyone else, he is frustrated at the current condition of medicine, one that values money over mankind, but in the end, he tries his hardest to treat everyone fairly and respectfully. I found this book to be very illuminating and not overly schlocky. It’s a bit thick, but you’ll get absorbed in each case fairly quickly. An enlighening read.

230avidmom
Set 20, 2013, 10:56 am

that one's going on the wishlist! thanks for the review.

231mkboylan
Set 22, 2013, 7:19 pm

Man you really have a knack for finding great books in every darn category!

232NielsenGW
Set 25, 2013, 11:18 pm



Sep 20: Abrahams, Marc. The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself—And Other True Stories of the World’s Most Bizarre Research and the Ig Nobel Prizes. (DDC 502)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 502: Miscellany (General science)

Every year (and every day, sometimes), landmark research is published and the results amaze, shock, or comfort the world. Cures and vaccines and psychological insights are gleaned from meticulous scientific research. But not all science is groundbreaking and world-changing; sometimes it’s just one person or a small group looking into the unlit areas of the world. They prod and examine the natural world for even the most esoteric knowledge, hoping that one day, it will be understand in a much larger context. And even for these off-the-beaten-path researchers, there are yearly awards—the Ig Nobels. Marc Abrahams The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself is a collection of the most delightful, most disconcerting, and most distinguished winners from the last 22 years.

The Ig Nobels are meant to award research and events that first “make you laugh, and then make you think.” Not all science is serious nor is it immediately useful, but it’s still science. Every year, the Ig Nobels, awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research, gather together the awardees at a small auditorium where paper airplanes fly and a sweet little girl annoys recipients to get them off the stage if they stay longer than a minute. The books details the stories behind the awards and anecdotes from the researcher’s trip to the ceremony. From this collection, here are some of my favorites:

• Physics (2001): David Schmidt, for his partial solution on why shower curtains billow inward
• Interdisciplinary Research (2003): Stefano Ghirlanda, Liseolette Jansson, and Magnus Enquist, for a study on chickens’ preference for beautiful humans
• Biology (1997): T. Yagyu et al., for a study measuring brain waves while chewing different flavor of gum
• Medicine (1992): F. Kanda et al., for a study into the components of the chemicals that cause foot malodor

Each study looks at the natural world from a perspective previously un-investigated and gives a small piece of the puzzle. While there are many who would argue that this research is frivolous and expensive, most undirected research usually is. And many of the world’s great discoveries were found when no one was looking for them. This was a great book for a quick read into some of the fringe science being done in the world, and some of it is a bit satirical: for example, the Ig Nobel in Peace is usually given to a group who do their best to foment unrest or ignore civil problems. All in all, though, a pretty interesting book.

233NielsenGW
Set 26, 2013, 8:01 am

Well, the birthday gift cards have been tabulated and the latest set of new books is in:

* Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac: 8,888 Questions in 365 Days by Ken Jennings (DDC 030)
* Guinness World Records 2014 (DDC 032)
* Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Flynn (DDC 142)
* The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God by Jonathan Kirsch (DDC 272)
* The Diligent: Worlds Of The Slave Trade by Robert Harms (DDC 380)
* Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon by Lesley Adkins (DDC 492)
* Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood (DDC 525)
* Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering by Henry Petroski (DDC 620)
* The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art by Hugh Howard (DDC 757)
* The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis by Vassilis Vassilikos (DDC 889)
* Attila: The Barbarian King Who Challenged Rome by John Man (DDC 936)
* The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca by Tahir Shah (DDC 964)

234mkboylan
Set 26, 2013, 10:07 am

...and the celebration continues!

235NielsenGW
Set 27, 2013, 11:32 am

Hooooly shenanigans! NetGalley let me read OUP's new book on cheese!
The Science of Cheese by Michael Tunick (DDC 637)!



The only bad thing is that I have to wait until November to review it. Boo...

236NielsenGW
Out 1, 2013, 3:31 pm

OK -- so I was rather apathetic before about the whole "government shutdown" thing, but when it interferes with my ability to catalog books, that's where I draw the line!

Of all things, the Library of Congress website is down until further notice. Yeesh...

237mkboylan
Out 1, 2013, 8:05 pm

oh my that IS a problem, although perhaps the only one.

238NielsenGW
Out 2, 2013, 8:46 am

Alright -- I gotta get my act together and post five reviews today to catch up. Here goes nothing...

239NielsenGW
Out 2, 2013, 8:58 am



Sep 21: Horner, Jack and James Gorman. How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution. (DDC 567.9)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 560: Paleontology
• 567: Fossil cold-blooded vertebrates and fishes
• 567.9: Reptilia

The study of dinosaur fossils has reached unprecedented heights and complexity. DNA can be extracted from tiny bits of bone and molecular biology is starting to unlock more and more pieces of the ancient past. Jack Horner, distinguished paleontologist and winner of a MacArthur Genius grant, along with James Gorman, bring together the fields of paleontology, paleobiology, paleobotany (and all the other paleo-s) with modern science to make a case for the creation of a living, breathing dinosaur. How to Build a Dinosaur is a look into the science involved as well as the scientists behind the discoveries leading the way.

Horner and Gorman’s thesis is that a chicken egg or fetus can be successfully manipulated in such a way as to hatch a dinosaur. Genes can be spliced, dormant sequences can be reactivated, and evolutionary changes can be undone. Once all the detritus has cleared, what would be in front of you could nominally be called a dinosaur. Since birds evolved from these ancient lizards, it makes sense to start with them and work backwards. The authors explore the science of evolutionary development to show what it can do and what implications this has on modern species.

I really enjoyed this book. This is science told by someone who is truly passionate about it. He starts with a problem and gathers together better minds to help solve it. Along the way, we hear the back stories of many scientists (and even a few fun anecdotes) about how they learned to love their fields. Granted, there are bits that could be cut to make the book tighter, but I think the rambling bits add color to what would have been a rather rote tour of the field. Horner’s infectious love of paleontology is apparent, and the book is richer for it. An informative and fun read.

240NielsenGW
Out 2, 2013, 10:39 am



Sep 23: Alexander, Jessica. Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid. (DDC 361.25092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 300: Social Sciences
• 360: Social problems and services
• 361: Social problems and social welfare in general
• 361.2: Social action
• 361.25: Action within established social framework
• +092: Biography

There’s almost no place on the planet that isn’t in need of some form of aid. From African refugees to Middle East conflict survivors to the countless homeless in the United States, humanitarian aid is a constant necessity. Doing what is necessary is oftentimes daunting and exhausting. Jessica Alexander, in Chasing Chaos, describes a decade in the field and what existing on both sides of the fence has taught her about the world and herself. She’s been to Darfur, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Haiti. She’s been on the front lines watching over a camp and in an NGO office coordinating relief from afar. Her unabashed description of living conditions in the undeveloped world as well as her candid assessment of her own life may inject a twinge of guilt in those who are fortunate enough to afford food and water. She understands the culture shock of coming back to her home after living in a tent for months at a time. Alexander’s tone is conversational and quick. If you’re looking for true ways to get involved in relief efforts, she offers up a few avenues. She also does a decent job of laying out the intricate politics and social landscapes of the countries currently in need of aid as well as the dangers she faced in many locations. All in all, this was a heady and rewarding book.

241mkboylan
Out 2, 2013, 11:06 am

I want both of those! Stop posting! You're killing my wish list! Seriously tho, I won't even have to search for Dewey books - I can just be a copy cat. May sound boring to copy but I like the books you choose.

242NielsenGW
Out 2, 2013, 1:47 pm



Sep 27: Rubin, Richard. Foundations of Library and Information Science, 2nd Edition. (DDC 020.0973)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 000: Computer Science, Information, and General Works
• 020: Library and information sciences
• +0973: United States

First of all, yes, this is a textbook, so it already loses points for excitement and story-telling. But, aside from that, if you want to learn the complete basics of library science, then Richard Rubin’s Foundations of Library and Information Science is a great start. I had the opportunity to study under Dr. Rubin at Kent State, so this book reminded me of that time a great deal. Reading it straight through in less than a week is not advised, however. It’s meant to be sampled and discussed over the course of three or four months. It gives a comprehensive history of all kinds of libraries (public, special, school, etc.) and their service to the public as well as new avenues (at least new in 2004) of growth, research, and technology. FRBR and massive online databases had finally matured somewhat, so an interesting amount of the material covers those. It’s a little dry, and the author tries to break up the monotony with a few jokes here and there, but it’s the passion of the author that stands out. Passages on the ethics and morals of libraries and librarians speak volume about where we are as a society and how information should be handled. If this is the textbook for your class, then you will have all the information you need about the field. A thick, educational book.

243NielsenGW
Out 2, 2013, 1:47 pm

241> There! That should stop your wishlist cold in its tracks. :)

244NielsenGW
Out 2, 2013, 3:55 pm



Sep 29: Gardner, Howard and Katie Davis. The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World. (DDC 004.6780835)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 000: Computer Science, Information, and General Works
• 004: Data processing and computer science
• 004.6: Interfacing and communications
• 004.67: Wide-area networks
• 004.678: Internet
• +0835: Young people twelve to twenty

First came the telephone, then the television, then the Internet, and now the app. Apps are designed to make a task simpler, a search faster, or a day timelier. But what happens when apps pervade a society? At what level to automated programs change the people using them? Young people today between the ages of 15 and 25 have a hard time recalling a world without electronic devices, without smartphones, or without the Internet. Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, in The App Generation, tackle the subject and along the way, learn about the fundamental social and moral landscape of a generation raised in the digital age.

Gardner and Davis focus their attention on what they call the three I’s: identity, intimacy, and imagination. In the digital world, identity is fully customizable and can be carefully constructed by what the user posts in online forums and image galleries. Intimacy is gauged by how users interact or nurture their social connections online. Lastly, imagination is just that, but it is also measured by how different relationships and creations are viewed online. Their research integrates psychological, sociological, and philosophical studies to get at just how apps are interacting with individuals and even society as a whole. Many different angles are taken in their investigation, including focus groups and online messages.

For the most past, the authors get at what they are looking for: a better picture of how the current generation views the world through apps and what that means for the future of society. There a few times when a one-off comment is seen as an indicator for a whole group, but the discussion of the “app attitude” is fun and pertinent. While I was drawn more to the comments from individual Internet content creators, the dual fields of computer science and psychology definitely keep this book in the academics’ arena. It reads fairly quickly and has a good amount of statistics about today’s app users. An interesting but not outstanding book.

245bragan
Out 3, 2013, 10:46 am

Your reviews are, indeed, bad for the wishlist! How to Build a Dinosaur is now on mine, and I'm eying The App Generation contemplatively.

>237 mkboylan:: It's definitely affecting some of us. If this thing doesn't get resolved in the near future... Well, it might at least have a beneficial effect on my TBR Pile, as I could find myself with a lot more time to read and a lot less money to spend buying books. But I'd much rather not have the help. :)

246mkboylan
Out 3, 2013, 11:15 am

245 - I wish those furloughed employees (is that you?) would storm the Bastille. you know......while I sit here comfortably and read about revolution while I drink my mocha?

The Gardner sounds interesting alright.

247bragan
Out 3, 2013, 11:24 am

>246 mkboylan:: I'm not a government employee, but my organization is dependent on NSF funds we're not getting until the government is open for business again, so we're limping along on the dregs of last year's budget until that runs out. Supposedly, they're going to tell us tomorrow whether to bother coming in on Monday. If not, I might just be up for a bit of Bastille-storming.

248NielsenGW
Out 3, 2013, 2:58 pm



Oct 1: Donovan, Tristan. Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World. (DDC 663.62)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 660: Chemical engineering and related technologies
• 663: Beverage technology
• 663.6: Nonalcoholic beverages
• 663.62: Carbonated and mineralized beverages

Ever since Jean Jacob Schweppe started charging a nominal fee for his sparkling mineral water in the 1780s, the paying public has never been able to get enough soda. Mix together a flavoring agent and some carbonated water and you have yourself a tasty (and potentially profitable) treat. In the beginning, sodas were marketed as cure-alls for whatever ailed you. In Fizz, Tristan Donovan compiles a well-written history of the creation, marketing, and consumption of sodas. Starting with Joseph Priestley’s experiments with adding carbon dioxide to water and ending with the complex science behind Red Bull, we get the full range of soda and soda-esque beverages throughout history. There are the classic Pemberton’s Coca-Cola versus Thomson’s Moxie versus Bradham’s Pepsi wars, and the ascension of sodas during both Prohibition and the World Wars, but Donovan goes deeper to look at soda’s impact on global trade, domestic food laws, and the social landscape. There’s also a fair amount on the almost-constant corporate espionage between Coke and Pepsi. The bibliography is decent and thorough, the writing fluid, and the story mildly compelling. A good and interesting read.

249NielsenGW
Out 7, 2013, 11:04 am



Oct 3: Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. (DDC 523.4922)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 520: Astronomy
• 523: Specific celestial bodies and phenomena
• 523.4: Planets, asteroids, and trans-Neptunian objects of the Solar system
• 523.49: Trans-Neptunian objects
• 523.492: Kuiper belt objects
• 523.4922: Pluto

Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Pluto Files claims to chronicle the history of the “planet” Pluto and it mostly accomplishes this feat. His history of the discovery of the last planet is a little thin, but there may not be much more to tell. Clyde Tombaugh discovered it while chasing Percival Lowell’s dream of a distant Planet X. Clyde’s find wound its way into the hearts and minds of many a schoolchild, but now there is a debate raging as to whether Pluto is really a planet at all. The bulk of Tyson’s story in confined to the last decade, when his new post as Director of Hayden Planetarium put him in charge of a new addition to the building. He decided, with the help of other scientists and a public panel on Pluto, to group planets into distinct characteristic groups: Terrestrial Planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), Gas Giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) and Kuiper Belt Objects (Pluto included). Then all hell broke loose. The Museum, a trusted institution, had neglected to count Pluto in the number of planets that everyone had grown up learning about. The debate included almost every astrophysicist alive, the International Astronomical Union, and even third-graders. In the end, the Tyson’s treatise is more about the definition of the word “planet” than the question surrounding the properties of Pluto. And while the IAU has formally created a definition, most of the scientists involved are more concerned about cataloging the properties and new knowledge about Pluto than about what to call it.

All in all, the prose is succinct and even humorous at times. There are lengthy discussions and a fair amount of back-and-forth, bringing the opinions of many major astronomers (including Bill Nye the Science Guy). At times, the constant quotations can get a little cumbersome, causing the flow of the text to be interrupted, but Tyson competently balances the scientific questions with his own experience in the debate. There are moments, however, when his discussion of his involvement in the uproar seems more like a diatribe on his mistreatment by the press and the scientific community. One might assume (and rightly so) that Tyson was trying to get the final word in on the whole hoopla. I would have liked to see more celestial diagrams and less political cartoons. An interesting addition to the text are three appendices devoted to the lyrics of songs directed concerned with the status of Pluto (as if one song wasn’t enough). This book would be appropriate for beginners to get a quick background on the debate or amateur lovers of astronomy.

250avidmom
Out 7, 2013, 12:15 pm

Great review of The Pluto Files. It sounds like DeGrasse is a fairly decent writer. His other book Space Chronicles has been on my list for more than a year now. There are songs about Pluto?!?!

251mkboylan
Out 7, 2013, 12:28 pm

Great review!

252NielsenGW
Out 7, 2013, 3:17 pm



Oct 4: Grim, John and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Ecology and Religion. (DDC 201.77)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 201: Religious mythology, general classes of religion, interreligious relations and attitudes, and social theology
• 201.7: Attitudes of religion towards social issues
• 201.77: Environment

How one views their religion has a relationship with how one views the environment in which they live. Since many religions have tenets on how to relate to members of society, they already teach basic values of respect and reciprocation, but authors John Grin and Mary Tucker take these teachings on step further. They postulate that each major religion contains parallel teaching that allow the adherent to form a relationship with nature. In Ecology and Religion, they expound on the theory that each major world religion gives the reader a piece of a larger way of connecting to nature.

Grim and Tucker establish four major tenets for a religious ecology—orienting, grounding, nurturing, and transforming. Orienting fixes the self in relationship with celestial bodies; grounding fixes the self in a community with nature; nurturing is self-explanatory; and transforming changes the self into a deeper human being. These draw on the major biocultural elements of air, earth, water, and fire respectively. The authors propose that each major world religion (or group of religions) belongs to each of these tenets. Christianity offers a way for the reader to orient themselves to the cosmos. Confucianism grounds the believer in their community. The vast array of indigenous religions emphasize nurturing the environment. Lastly, Hinduism relies on the continuous transformation of the self into a greater being. Each of these offer a way to interact with nature and insure a safe and viable ecological future.

The book is set up in many ways like a textbook, with distinct sections on each religion and questions for reflection or discussion at the end. But, the clear Jungian mythology informing the whole book was, in the end, just too much for me. While the authors are clearly very well-read and bring in a ton of different religious texts in one place, the whole thing seemed a bit too touchy-feely for me. While I do agree that each religion informs each other religion, the authors seem to want the reader to create a strange hybrid religious ecology that is both part of and separate from all the others. The entire thing is a bit of a stretch, but one can’t fault them for trying. It’s a rather odd book, but still interesting just the same.

253NielsenGW
Out 8, 2013, 4:16 pm



Oct 5: Drury, Bob and Tom Clavin. The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend. (DDC 978.0049752)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 970: History of North America
• 978: History of the Western United States
• 978.00497: History of American Native peoples (Great Plains)
• 978.0049752: Siouan Indians

Bob Drury and Tom Clavin come together in The Heart of Everything That Is to tell the tale of a forgotten man. Red Cloud, a member of the Oglala Lakota peoples, was born near the Platte River in 1821. In the beginning, he was trained as a superb warrior, fighting against other nations, namely the Pawnee and the Crow. But then gunfire came across the Great Plains. Gold rushers, homesteaders, and the US military blazed trails into the newly created states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa. But, when settlers threatened to rob the Powder River Country in Wyoming and Montana of its resources and new forts emerged with new enemies, Red Cloud, with the help of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, fought back. The nation had just ended the Civil War the previous year, but was again at odds with people in its own borders.

The authors’ telling of Red Cloud’s War, including the Fetterman massacre, and the Great Sioux War after that is rich and thoroughly engaging. You can’t help but be drawn in by a history of the American West. Many of the events recounted here inspired great tales like Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. It’s very hard to believe that few full biographies have been written about Red Cloud. At his height, he controlled territory stretching from Iowa to Idaho and from Southern Canada to Oklahoma. Drury and Clavin are unflinching in their depictions of military engagements, tactics, and outcomes. Both sides fought their hardest for their cause, but in the end, nation-building triumphed over nation-saving. The legacy of the American Indian is limited to a few great figures, but it’s nice to see one of them get their day in the sun. A sweeping and magnificent read.

254mkboylan
Out 8, 2013, 7:27 pm

I don't remember knowing anything about Red Cloud. Glad to find this.

255JDHomrighausen
Out 9, 2013, 10:39 am

As for Ecology and Religion, I was struck by this sentence: "The authors propose that each major world religion (or group of religions) belongs to each of these tenets." I'm not so sure of that fact. Although I am a Christian, I don't think Christianity does the orienting and grounding part very well. We have to stretch to find parts of our tradition that make us treat animals ethically, for example. Much Catholic environmental praxis is wrapped up in concerns for environmental social justice - that the poor bear the brunt of environmental damage while the rich do the damage.

I think Buddhism, for example, does the grounding part much better. Buddhism extends the moral community to not just all humans but "all sentient beings," which in the system of reincarnation have been and will be humans at one point. So Buddhism has a much more obvious praxis for preventing animal cruelty - hence Buddhists who have the luxury are often vegetarian.

I saw Mary Tucker speak at a conference. She is a tall woman with a deep voice, and cuts quite a presence on stage.

256NielsenGW
Out 18, 2013, 4:43 pm



Oct 6: Maor, Eli and Eugen Jost. Beautiful Geometry. (DDC 516)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 510: Mathematics
• 516: Geometry

If you want to love, or even like, geometry again, then this book might just do it. Beautiful Geometry pairs Maor’s elegant proofs with Jost’s vivid illustrations to help the layman understand geometry. They start with the basics—point, lines, and shapes—and work their way to Euclid, then prime geometry, infinite series, the golden ratio, experimentation with pi, parabolic geometry, and even fractals and epicycloids. There’s a fair amount of history on famous geometers and how they arrived at their discoveries. At the very least, if the proofs bore you, you can always marvel at the visuals. They’re worth the cost of admission. A quick and pretty book.

257NielsenGW
Out 18, 2013, 4:50 pm



Oct 7: Sakakeeny, Matt. Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans. (DDC 785.0650976335)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 700: Fine Arts
• 780: Music
• 785: Ensembles with only instrument per part
• 785.065: Jazz ensembles
• +0976335: Orleans Parish, Louisiana, United States

Perhaps one of the best known cultural products of New Orleans outside of beignets and Mardi Gras is the jazz ensemble. Countless aspiring musicians gather there to truly understand the music and their craft. Matt Sakakeeny’s Roll With It travels alongside these ensembles in Post-Katrina New Orleans and tries to get inside the culture that pervades the city. He follows three different bands—Hot 8, Rebirth, and The Soul Rebels—as they deal with everyday issues and continue to raise the caliber of jazz music. A lot of the narrative focuses on jazz funeral processions and their impact on the social landscape, and while death forms an unnerving backdrop to the story, it’s the lives of the artists that make it interesting. Sakakeeny has quite bit to say about race relations in Louisiana and jazz culture, but mostly it’s the music and the stories that kept me reading on. You can actually find a lot of videos of the three bands online and occasionally I lifted my head from the text to indulge in the music. Also, throughout the book are art pieces by Willie Birch depicting his perspective on the musicians and the city. The book as a whole feels like a field report from an embedded journalist, but I think it helps bring the reader closer to the stories. A very well done book.

258NielsenGW
Out 18, 2013, 4:59 pm



Oct 13: Rosen, William. Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire. (DDC 949.5013)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 940: History of Europe and Western Europe
• 949: History of other parts of Europe
• 949.5: History of Greece
• 949.501: Early history to 717 AD
• 949.5013: Early Byzantine period, 323 AD to 171 AD

When boats arrived in Constantinople from Egypt in 541 AD, they weren’t carrying just exotic foods and trinkets. Rats and fleas from the lower holds scrambled into the new landscape, and with them came the plague. The disease swept through port cities, leaving corpses riddled with black buboes in its wake. At its peak, ten thousand people a day died in Constantinople. William Rosen’s Justinian’s Flea takes a look at the damage this microscopic agent caused to humans and how that affected history for centuries to come.

William Rosen is a great editor in his own right, but when he writes, his real talent comes out. Deftly combining history, medicine, sociology, and religion, Rosen posits that a major factor in the demise of the Roman Empire was the convergence between the first outbreak of bubonic plague and the weakened state of the Roman army. The book starts off slow, with a complete history of the empire between Diocletian and Justinian, then gets really good with an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the plague virus. A slowish but ultimately rewarding read.

259NielsenGW
Out 18, 2013, 5:06 pm



Oct 15: Hecht, Jennifer M. Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. (DDC 179.7)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 170: Ethics
• 179: Other ethical norms
• 179.7: Respect and disrespect for human life

Suicide is by no means an easy topic to discuss. Throughout history, art, and literature, real people and fictional characters have chosen to end their own life in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Jennifer Hecht’s main premise in her book on the history of the topic is that one should stay. Stay and work through the pain, the depression, the anger. Stay with those that love you. Stay because we need you. Hecht traces the history of recorded suicides back to ancient Rome and looks at historical and modern arguments surrounding the act. It uses key historical suicides to clarify the responses and the philosophies concerning suicide.

While many mythological suicides were seen as heroic and even necessary, Socrates railed against it but Plato deemed some suicides to be not entirely contemptible. From there we get the Romans’ view, early Christian writings, Renaissance philosophies, secular defenses of suicide, and then more modern approaches to the topic. Modern community-based thinking tends to condemn suicide as it damages the social landscape. The work then shifts to modern suicide behavior and the social science behind mitigation strategies, looking into suicide clusters and cultural beliefs.

One of the odd things about this book is its strict Western perspective. While Hecht discusses the stances taken on suicide through history, there really isn’t much of a global view. This is definitely not a whimsical weekend read, but rather a book heavy with reflection and philosophy. Hecht tightly packages the history and philosophies, and in the end, voraciously advocates against suicide as a means to an end. You can tell she has personal experience with the subject, and that’s OK, because almost everyone has. All in all, this was a deep and purposeful book.

260mkboylan
Out 19, 2013, 11:55 am

"Stay and work through it"

I had a student who was working on legislation in California to legalize euthanasia, which is different, but he said that when it was legalized in Holland (I think it was Holland) that the suicide rate went down because it was regulated and treatment was required. Often the treatment worked (treatment for depression). Don't know if this is true or if I have the right country but still, an interesting thought.

Where you been?

261NielsenGW
Out 20, 2013, 9:41 am

I've been really busy at work (which is where I usually write my reviews), so they've been backing up on me. I've still got four more to write to catch up. Hopefully, I'll get back on a more regular schedule.

262JDHomrighausen
Out 20, 2013, 4:30 pm

> 261

You keep mentioning this cushy job with lots of downtown. What kind of job do you have? I was thinking maybe you were in Congress, you would have just had a two week vacation...

The suicide book looks really interesting. To me suicide and the feelings of depression, desperation, and despondency underlying it are the most palpable presence of anything demonic I have experienced. (Not me - I'm naturally upbeat - but in loved ones.)

263NielsenGW
Out 21, 2013, 9:25 am

I'm reporting analyst with a company in the healthcare industry. Most days, I come in and rattle off my reports in about 30 minutes or so and sit around waiting for new requests to come in. I have a few meetings here and there, but it's often dead time. Granted, since I support 30-40 projects at any given time, it tends to be a famine or flood situation. Invariably, many projects will ask for something at the same time, so then my days get very busy. Since I prioritize reading over reviewing in the evenings, I get backlogged on reviews pretty easily.

264NielsenGW
Out 21, 2013, 4:26 pm



Oct 16: O’Toole, Fintan. Shakespeare is Hard, But So Is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearean Tragedy. (DDC 822.33)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 820: English and Old English literatures
• 822: English drama
• 822.3: Drama of the Elizabethan Period, 1558-1625
• 822.33: William Shakespeare

I’m a firm believer that if you are a reader of English, you need to get at least one Shakespeare play under your belt as an adult. High schools trot out Shakespeare and try to make students understand it, but they’re basically brain damaged until the age of 25 (talk to any neuroscientist, they’re with me on this). If you’ve read one and don’t enjoy it, well, that’s fine by me, but don’t immediately dismiss the idea altogether. Fintan O’Toole’s Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life is an ardent attempt to get people who would normally write off Shakespeare as oblique and antiquated to approach it in terms that they’ll understand.

O’Toole’s commentary on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth tries to get away from the longstanding art of using classical literary theory and Aristotelian devices as analytical starting points. Instead, he see the plays as struggles between competing worldviews, and if one understands either the struggle or the perspectives, then the plays become a little easier to interpret. Granted, his explanations can get a little convoluted and overreaching, but he conveys his point with passion and wit. This book makes for a good companion piece after finishing each play. While I would have liked a few of the comedies thrown into the mix, the tragedies are usually headier for Shakespeare newcomers. A quick and engaging read.

265NielsenGW
Out 21, 2013, 4:38 pm



Oct 17: MacCulloch, Diarmid. Silence: A Christian History.(DDC 248.46)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 240: Christian practices and observances
• 248: Christian experience, practice, and life
• 248.4: Christian life and practice
• 248.46: Individual observances

One of the most powerful social forces is silence. A silent man before a crowd speaks volumes without opening his mouth. Silence is powerful in that it forces the listener to be still within themselves, to not desperately fill the moment with words. In an age where media of all sorts constantly surrounds us, it is nice to gain a little perspective and be silent. Diarmid MacCulloch’s Silence is a look at the use of silence in the history of Christianity.

There are myriad references to silence in the Bible and the Tanakh and MacCulloch begins his study there. But even while this is a Christian history, the temptation to dip into Greek philosophy is too great. The fact that the early Church fathers used Greek texts brings in new levels of complexity when discussing cases of silence. The Old Testament, with a mild emphasis on pre-Christ Judaism, revels in episodes of silence in both its stories and its rituals. The New Testament bring with it both the interpretation of the silences of Jesus and Paul’s rebuke of “noisy Christians.” In the Middle Ages, monastic silence became a way of life and a means of self-reflection and each of the Reformations brought a new meaning to silence.

This book is rich in Church history and analysis, and MacCulloch should be commended for his efforts. While many episodes of Christian silence are moments of stoicism and prayer, MacCulloch does not shy away from silence in the heated topics of homosexuality, gender inequality, and child abuse. While silence can be powerful, breaking a long silence can be just as effective. MacCulloch’s investigation of silence as a part of Christian history is as splendid as it is encompassing. A dense but rich book.

266mkboylan
Out 21, 2013, 10:50 pm

Silence sounds fascinating and the Shakespeare is such a great title it would be hard to resist!

267NielsenGW
Out 22, 2013, 4:21 pm



Oct 20: Brotton, Jerry. A History of the World in Twelve Maps. (DDC 911)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 910: Geography and travel
• 911: Historical geography

Maps serve two functions. They give you information—where people have been, places people have mapped, and the names given to those places. They also give you a destination, they let the heart roam over distant lands, and hope for an adventurous future. This information and hope have driven human history in more ways than we think. Beginning with a cuneiform clay tablet found in the site of the ancient city of Sippar in Babylonia, maps exist as an interesting window into how a civilization (or at least the mapmaker) views the world. In the 15th century, when the technology and means caught up to the desire to explore, the edges of the maps begin to be filled in and mankind got a truer picture of the world it inhabits. Jerry Brotton’s History of the World in Twelve Maps is a look at the world by investigating maps created at key points in history and what those maps say about the humans making them.

The twelve maps that Brotton uses range from Ptolemy’s map conceived around 150 CE up through the maps created by Google Earth. Each map encompasses a trait of the age. For instance, Gerard Mercator’s 1569 world map embodies the tolerance of Dutch explorers, the Cassini family’s 1793 map of France tells just as much about the nationalism at play as it does about the mapmaking of the day, and the Peters Projection of 1973 starts to incorporate the equality movement into cartography. There’s just as much history as there is geography in this book, and it’s a delightfully full book. Brotton’s inclusion of different projections, mapping methods, and illustrations is quite appreciated. Believe it or not, there are books on geography out there without maps, and they can be incredibly frustrating. Brotton’s research is pretty wide-ranging and inclusive, so you can easily move your way to other sources if you want to. All in all, this was a very good book with a ton of information.

268NielsenGW
Out 22, 2013, 4:27 pm



Oct 21: Jenkins, Jessica Kerwin. All the Time in the World: A Book of Hours. (DDC 390)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 300: Social Science
• 390: Customs, etiquette, and folklore

Jessica Kerwin Jenkins’s All the Time in the World is a delightful collection of historical anecdotes, asides, and trivia arranged like a traditional book of hours. Historically, a book of hours was an ordered collection of prayers, rituals, and devotionals to be learned and practiced at regulated times of the day and certain days of years. While each book was different and unique to its owner, it allowed the reader to incorporate elements of monasticism into their religious lives.

Jenkins’s book takes that format and spins it. There are chapters and sections for each month and specific times of the day, ranging from 6 AM to 5 AM the next day. At each time, she gives a peek into historical events that center around that time. For instance, at 8 AM, she details the awakening and dressing ceremony of Louis XIV of France (which happened at 8 AM each day during his reign). At 3:51 PM, she tells the story of how Nellie Bly arrived at Jersey City (at that precise time) and beat Phileas Fogg’s fictional record of circling the globe in eighty days (she did it in just over 72 days). At 11 PM, there’s the tale of the first reading of Howl by Allen Ginsberg (just after 11 PM) and how that made its mark on literary culture.

Each snippet is fun and they make the book very quick to read. There’s a bit of historical whiplash that comes with reading vignette after vignette, but the overall effect is quite dazzling. You realize that history is not just a broad, sweeping beast, but rather a collection of individual moments, and those moments can happen at any time of the day. These collections of historical trinkets are fast becoming my favorite type of book as they remind me of my favorite magazine: mental_floss. Like so many other books in this style, the reader can take small bites and come back for more whenever they like. A very fun book.

269mkboylan
Out 22, 2013, 10:14 pm

Those both sound really excellent. Who knew all of these topics would be so wonderful?

270NielsenGW
Out 23, 2013, 8:54 am

There are indeed some absolutely fun ones out there to read. I'm especially looking forward to my book on the history of snowmen (DDC 736). With a bit of effort, almost any subject can be readable.

271NielsenGW
Out 23, 2013, 8:56 am

On a side note, it's nice to be finally caught up on reviews. And the ARC stack has dwindled down to just four volumes. So now, I get to relax and dust off some books from the home shelves until Thanksgiving.

272NielsenGW
Editado: Out 29, 2013, 9:57 am



Oct 25: Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. (DDC 873.01)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 870: Latin and Italic literatures
• 873: Latin epic poetry and fiction
• 873.01: Latin fiction of the Roman period

To fully investigate the entirety of Greek and Roman mythology would take a lifetime. Luckily, Ovid did all the heavy lifting two thousand years ago. Every mythological figure you can think of is in here—from Jupiter to Perseus to Jason to Pygmalion to Romulus. Ovid’s history start at the creation of the universe and goes up to the Caesars of Rome and paints the chronology as a series of changes. In fact, the first lines have the poet saying “My soul would sing of metamorphoses.” Also playing a heavy part is the role of the love god Amor, who is constantly affecting the course of history.

I can in no way speak to whether this is a faithful or true translation of Ovid’s work, but I can say that Mandelbaum’s translation is eminently readable and flows well. In some ways, I don’t care if the translation is good or not. It’s the story that matters. Many works of literature and art created since this reference these gods and goddesses, and it was nice to get back to the source material. It’s in Chaucer, in Dante, in Shakespeare, and even in modern jazz (see Patricia Barber and Branford Marsalis). This one may take a while, but it’s well worth the effort. A truly epic book.

273NielsenGW
Out 29, 2013, 9:57 am



Oct 26: Hamilton, Charles. Great Forgers and Famous Fakes: The Manuscript Forgers of American and How They Duped the Experts. (DDC 098.3)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 000: Computer Science, Knowledge, and General Works
• 090: Manuscripts, rare books, or other rare printed materials
• 098: Prohibited works, forgeries, and hoaxes
• 098.3: Forgeries and hoaxes

There are innumerable people in this world who are just looking to make a quick buck, no matter the ethics or consequences. In the literary world, there are those who try to sell stolen rarities that they’ve pilfered from museums and private collections. Others still, simply create them from thin air. Thousands of autographs and letters are “found” every year and released onto the market. For every ne’er-do-well, however, there is somebody trying to call them out for it. For a while, the one of the world’s best authenticators was Charles Hamilton. He recounts some of his more interesting cases in Great Forgers and Famous Fakes.

Hamilton’s whirlwind tour of almost every known famous forger in history is thoroughly entertaining (if you’re into that sort of thing). At times, he seems a bit pompous and conceited, but I guess that comes with dealing with all forms of deceit and fakery (even jailing a few of them). The book has an incredible number of illustrative examples and comparisons between authentic and forged writing samples and signatures. He takes the reader through accounts of faked Frost poems, presidential autographs, and other tales of chicanery. He’s not perfect, though: one forger did manage to slip one past him. All in all, this book makes for a nice, light weekend read.

274NielsenGW
Out 30, 2013, 11:06 pm



Oct 29: Chace, James. 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election That Changed the Country. (DDC 324.9730912)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 300: Social Science
• 320: Political science, politics, and government
• 324: The political process
• 324.9: History and geographical treatment of elections
• 324.973: Campaigns in the United States
• 324.9730912: U.S. Presidential election of 1912

In 1912, the political landscape of the United States was fracturing at the party level. President William Taft, the conservative republican incumbent, had only ever wanted to be on the Supreme Court, but was hand-picked by his progressive predecessor Theodore Roosevelt for the nation’s top office. Two years before, a political disagreement between the two led to internal strife in the GOP. The split led Roosevelt to run from his own party, the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party. Meanwhile, the Democratic Convention saw New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson emerge as the candidate after 46 ballots. Lastly, the Socialist candidate Eugene Debs joined the fray. James Chace’s 1912 is a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Chace's comprehensive account of the election of 1912 between the title characters is interesting in its own right. While the stage contains many, many more characters (each of which get their own mini-biographies in the book), these four are the ones that everyone remembers (although Debs may be a bit of a stretch). Interestingly enough, Wilson managed to win the Electoral College without a majority of the popular vote. The book is not as exciting as one would hope, and the story is communicated with only a modicum of elegance (which is probably as much as can be conveyed in a book about an election). Political scholars should explore this account, but I found it to be slightly wanting in some areas. A middling-well book.

275dchaikin
Out 30, 2013, 11:06 pm

I enjoyed catching up while watching the World Series. Nice that you slipped Ovid in midst of all the newer nonfiction.

276NielsenGW
Out 31, 2013, 10:57 am

Yeah, every now and again I have to squeeze in some classics to meet the Dewey's demands. They're fun, but definitely require a bit more effort.

277NielsenGW
Out 31, 2013, 10:58 am

Picked up three new books over the last couple of weeks:

* Lamaze: An International History by Paula Michaels (DDC 618)
* Mozart: A Life by Paul Johnson (DDC 780)
* Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris by Eric Jager (DDC 944)

278NielsenGW
Nov 2, 2013, 11:23 am



Nov 1: Shuker, Karl P. N. The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals: The Beasts That Hide From Man. (DDC 590)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 590: Zoological sciences

Karl P. N. Shuker is a scientist, but also a little bit of a nut. Whereas mainstream science is concerned with exploring and finding new animals in a blind, happenstance manner, Shuker starts with the position that folklore and cultural tales about “monsters” are based in fact and these creatures can be found in the wild. In The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals, he recounts his travels around the world, looking for the animals that have pervaded ancient texts and modern fears.

Shuker, luckily, stops himself from going too far off the deep end by trying to explain away a lot of the features of these animals as simple adaptations of known specimens, postulating that the Mongolian Death Worm is really a poisonous snake or that Sea Serpents are really just undiscovered giant eels. The tricky thing with this book is just where the line between scientific inquiry stops and bogus monster tracking begins. But I suppose that’s the charm of Shuker’s search. He legitimately believes that we can’t just summarily write off the legends of certain civilizations because they don’t fit in the modern world. He understands that his searches may bother or even alienate other scientists, but the few that do join him make the hunts worth it. Whether he’s after the hairy lizard of New Guinea or the man-eating tree of Madagascar, the science and the source material make for an interesting combination. The book is entertaining and a great many will learn a lot about zoology and animal behavior, but ultimately it lends credence to the idea that dragons and monsters could be real, which diminishes any real power it could have.

279mkboylan
Nov 3, 2013, 5:06 pm

That sounds wonderful!

280rebeccanyc
Nov 4, 2013, 7:47 am

Speaking of sea monsters, here's an article from yesterday's New York Times about the oarfish, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/science/earth/oarfish-offer-chance-to-study-an....

281NielsenGW
Nov 4, 2013, 3:24 pm

Nice! I like the idea of new science just washing up on shore. Those fish are particularly hard to wrangle, too.

282NielsenGW
Nov 4, 2013, 6:10 pm



Nov 4: Rogan, Eugene. The Arabs: A History. (DDC 909.04927)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 909: General works of world history
• 909.04: History with respect to ethnics and national groups
• +927: Arab and Maltese peoples

Eugene Rogan’s history of the Arabs is all at once expansive, exhausting, and exhilarating. It’s not easy to take a group of people whose history stretches back more than a millennium and package it for the general reading public. His history starts with the clash between Ottoman Sultan Selim I and Mamluk Sultan Qansuh in the early 16th century. Selim I emerged victorious and integrated Syria, Egypt, and most of the Arabian Peninsula into the Ottoman Empire. From there, we go to Egypt and outward to North Africa, then to the Middle East empires, and finally into Arab nationalism and the modern political situation. Over half the book is given to history after World War II, with modern events getting more thorough coverage. The Arabs is a sweeping book and helps the reader better understand their place in the world and how it got there in the first place. Rogan tries desperately to be a dispassionate observer, but in some situations, he cannot help but show a little bias. In many ways, this says more about the historian than the history, but the book is written well and covers a lot of territory, and so I enjoyed it just the same.

283NielsenGW
Nov 7, 2013, 8:47 am



Nov 6: Winchester, Simon. The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. (DDC 550.92)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 550: General works on earth science
• +92: Biography

The world is an ever-shifting, ever-changing place. Millions upon millions of years of plate tectonics, volcanic eruptions, and eroding forces have brought to the earth its current form. Only recently have we been able to figure out just how it happened. In many ways, we owe a lot of our current geological knowledge to a coal mine surveyor from Oxfordshire, William Smith. Simon Winchester’s The Map That Changed the World is look into a the life and work of a man whose debts landed him in jail, but whose work has left us indebted to him.

William Smith, born in 1769, was a bright boy and quickly became a land surveyor, working for estate holders and canal companies. One day, while working for a coal company, he came upon the realization that certain rock strata existed in the same places all throughout the country. And if you inspected closer, you would find the fossils from a certain rock layer in that same layer on the other side of the country. He collected fossils and rock samples from all over Britain in an effort to support his hypothesis. In 1815, he published a vibrant, perfect 8.5-foot by 6-foot map of the country, showing all the geological features and rock strata. Unfortunately for him, he was neither a gentleman nor a member of the Geological Society, so his work was seen as amateur and consequently plagiarized and profited from by those who had the means to do so. Luckily, a rich benefactor, Sir John Johnstone, recognized his scientific worth and championed his cause and by 1831 he was admitted into the Geological Society of London and awarded the first Wollaston Medal, becoming the father of English geology.

There are some who are not partial to Simon Winchester’s flowery prose and decidedly British approach to scholarship and history, but not me. He could write about the history of paint drying techniques and I would give him the benefit of the doubt. He pulls together the scant details of Smith’s life with gusto and panache. To flesh out some of the sparser bits, Winchester goes on an expedition around Britain to experience the geology for himself. The work of William Smith deserves to be honored and now the Geological Society gives out an award in his name every year. I really enjoyed this one and hope more people discover the scientists who have toiled throughout history. Without them, the world would indeed be a much different place. A pleasant read.

284C4RO
Nov 11, 2013, 5:12 am

I do enjoy your thread and that Winchester one is one of the few books I've also read that you've covered. I pick up more than a few recommendations from the thoughtful reviews you make!

285NielsenGW
Nov 12, 2013, 11:26 am



Nov 11: Gilmour, David. Curzon: Imperial Statesman. (DDC 954.0355092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 900: History and Geography
• 950: History of Asia
• 954: History of South Asia and India
• 954.03: Period of British rule, 1785-1947
• 954.035: Period of control by crown, 1858-1947
• 954.0355: Governorships of 9th Earl of Elgin and Marquis of Curzon, 1894-1905
• +092: Biography

George Nathanial Curzon, the Most Honorable 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, was indeed a very interesting fellow. He was the oldest son of Alfred Curzon, 4th Baron Scarsdale, and educated at Eton and Balliol. While his father considered it a waste of time, he ventured off the homestead and explored Russia and most of Central and Southeast Asia. His explorations of the Amu Darya (Oxus River) granted him admission into the Royal Geographic Society. His travels and extensive knowledge of the geography and politics of India led to his appointment as Viceroy of India in 1899. Even with his aristocratic upbringing, he strived to earn the loyalty and respect of his subjects, and even took efforts to ensure a proper restoration of the Taj Mahal. After returning to England, he became the Chancellor of Oxford, sat in the House of Lords, and became Foreign Secretary. Unfortunately, he was passed over for the post of Prime Minister in 1923 and died just a few years later.

Gilmour’s writing is stiff at first but ultimately smoothes out. This book is as impressive as it is long. While Curzon is not a well known British figure in the United States, Great Britain and India celebrate his legacy and it was nice to get a glimpse of India under colonial rule. Curzon could have been a better Prime Minister than Stanley Baldwin, but the politics of the day were stacked against members of the House of Lords. In the end, he was a intriguing part of the intertwined history of Great Britain and India. Gilmour’s biography is, for the most part, balanced and sourced well. He defers greatly to others who have approached the subject before him, but thankfully had access to more complete resources and the advantage of a wider historical lens. A daunting but very interesting read.

286SassyLassy
Nov 12, 2013, 12:03 pm

He could write about the history of paint drying techniques and I would give him the benefit of the doubt. Well said! I haven't read this particular Winchester, but I've enjoyed the ones I have read. I do like the history of science, so will look for this.

287mkboylan
Nov 12, 2013, 2:38 pm

Does sound interesting and would fix another hole in my history, but I'm into trash this week instead of daunting!

288NielsenGW
Nov 30, 2013, 11:53 am

I have quite a few reviews to get to, but first: new books.
Back from Thanksgiving vacation. Went to New Orleans first and hit evey book store in the French Quarter. Here's what I brought home:

Dewey Project:
* Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake. The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (DDC 235)

Favored Fictions:
* Amis, Martin. The Information: Nominated for the 1995 Whitbread Prize
* Barnes, Julian. Arthur & George: Nominated for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
* Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending: Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize; Nominated for the 2001 Whitbread Prize
* Barthelme, Frederick. Elroy Nights: Nominated for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award
* Bowering, Marilyn. Visible Worlds: Nominated for the 1999 Orange Prize
* Brady, Joan. Theory of War: Winner of the 1993 Whitbread Prize
* Ford, Richard. Independence Day: Winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award; Nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award
* Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love: Winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; Nominated for the 1989 National Book Award and the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award
* Mo, Timothy. Sour Sweet: Nominated for the 1982 Man Booker Prize
* Roth, Philip. Everyman: Winner of the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Prize

Just Because:
* Corson, Trevor. The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice
* Hahne, Elsa. The Gravy: In the Kitchen with New Orleans Musicians
* Stephens, Penny Italian (Cookshelf)

289mkboylan
Nov 30, 2013, 1:11 pm

Ah I used to SO enjoy seeing Matthew Fox irritate the Vatican.

Now I think I might rather know about sushi.

290NielsenGW
Dez 3, 2013, 3:19 pm



Nov 13: Broughton, Vanda. Essential Classification. (DDC 025.47)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 000: Computer Science, Knowledge, and General Works
• 020: Library and information science
• 025: Operations of libraries, archives, and information centers
• 025.4: Subject analysis and control
• 025.47: Subject indexing

Every book in every library carries a small tag. That single tag helps to both define the subject matter of the text and arrange the book in the library. Often no bigger than a postage stamp, it is one of most defining characteristics of a library book. Before that tag can be placed, however, a librarian has to determine the subject of the book and how to classify it in the library’s system. Vanda Broughton’s Essential Classification is your local librarian’s best friend when it comes to the ins and outs of book classification.

Broughton’s guidebook to classification does not contain every meaning of every piece of the classifications schemes used around the world, but she does guide the reader to their general use. She goes through the Library of Congress Classification, the Dewey Decimal Classification, and even the Universal Decimal Classification. But beyond that, Broughton goes into the management of classification systems, how to establish good authority control from the get-go, and what goes into the building of a good catalog. This is a technical handbook, so it’s not meant for a straight read-through, but if you’re a librarian looking for a good grasp of cataloguing, you should not be without this book. I used it during my schooling and I encourage beginning librarians to do the same.

291NielsenGW
Dez 3, 2013, 4:11 pm



Nov 14: Watson, James. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of Structure of DNA. (DDC 547.596)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 540: Chemistry
• 547: Organic chemistry
• 547.5: Cyclic compounds
• 547.59: Heterocyclic compounds
• 547.596: Fused heterocyclic compounds

Before 1952, no knew what DNA looked like. Isolated chemically in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher, no one had been able to come up with its definitive structure. But a single X-ray diffraction image taken by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling in May 1952 changed all that. Known as Photo 51, it gave James Watson and Francis Crick insight into how the molecule was arranged. Watson’s The Double Helix gives his perspective on the research, discovery, publication, and aftermath of the discovery that some would define as the greatest of the 20th century.

One thing to note about this book is that the original text was written in 1968, six years after Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for their work on nucleic acids, and ten years after Rosalind Franklin died. It is written from the perspective whose beliefs in science are wild and enthusiastic and whose attitudes towards women and society were stuck in the 1940s. Writing a first-hand account of a scientific discovery may seem vainglorious, but it does give some insight into the scientific process and how information from different sources can be used to further new research. While there are some who agree that Franklin should have received more acclaim, all the work that came from the King’s College lab in London have furthered science in ways not even Watson could not have foreseen. One would do well to pair this book with something a little more objective to get a better sense of the history of the discovery. Other than that, it was still a fun read.

292rebeccanyc
Dez 3, 2013, 7:41 pm

I read The Double Helix back in the early 70s as well as (in a college class) Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene. I knew people who knew him back then and apparently he was quite a self-centered jerk, especially with respect to women.

293C4RO
Dez 4, 2013, 4:36 am

> 291/292 James Watson has made various on-record controversial (racist, sexist and generally awful) comments that prove beyond doubt he's a nasty piece of work. It's a great shame. There are a small selection of them on his wikipedia entry.

294NielsenGW
Dez 4, 2013, 9:49 am



Nov 16: Le Feuvre, Cathy. William and Catherine: The Love Story of the Founders of The Salvation Army, Told Through Their Letters. (DDC 287.96092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 200: Religion
• 280: Dominations and sects of the Christian Church
• 287: Methodist and related churches
• 287.9: Churches related to Methodism
• 287.96: Salvation Army
• +092: Biography

In 1852, a young man in London wrote a letter to a particularly striking woman he saw in his congregation. Catherine Mumford was a woman who knew from the beginning that the man she would agree to marry would be deeply religious, abstain from alcohol, and be a man of sense. William Booth was a Methodist preacher in Clapham, and when the two met, a deep love formed. Cathy Le Feuvre’s William and Catherine covers the letters exchanged between the two starting in 1852 until Catherine’s death in 1890. In those 38 years, the couple married, matured, created a family, suffered setbacks and loss, and eventually changed the world with a new Christian Mission, one that would be named The Salvation Army.

To be sure, Le Feuvre gets a little flowery in trying to frame a descriptive narrative around the letters, so much so that sometime she doesn’t let the letters speak for themselves. As someone unfamiliar with the beginnings of the Salvation Army, it was nice, however, to get a little background on all the people who came in and out of the Booths’ lives. One of the more interesting phenomena that occurred after the founding of the Salvation Army was the formation of several rebel “armies” around England, including the Skeleton Army and the Red Nose army who sought to push back against Booth tirades against alcohol. There’s a bunch of wonderful details about Victorian life, including religious organizations and the social landscape in 19th century England. Her sources could use a little work, though, so the reader should be careful not to use this for serious research. Booth and his family tried their best to make their world a better place, and for that reason, this was a very interesting volume.

295NielsenGW
Dez 4, 2013, 2:27 pm



Nov 17: Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader. (DDC 833.914)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 830: Literatures of Germanic languages
• 833: German fiction
• 833.9: Authors born from 1900 to present
• 833.91: Authors born from 1900 to 1990
• 833.914: Authors born from 1945 to 1990

While suffering from hepatitis at the age of fifteen, Michael Berg gets ill in the streets of Bern. Hanna, a woman twice his age, finds him and helps him compose himself in order to get home safely. From there starts a wild, tortuous, and sad love affair that haunts both Michael and the reader. Hanna and Michael spend countless hours together, and she encourages him to read to her as much as possible. One day, though, she disappears without a trace. When he finds her years later, she is standing trial as a former guard at a Nazi concentration camp, and the repercussions of this profession drive the second half of the book. Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is a look the nuances of societal shame versus legal guilt and the affect that has on post-WWII German youth.

I don’t want to give too much away, but Schlink hits all the bildungsroman milestones without being overly telegraphed. His touching approach to the complexity surrounding the Holocaust, the concentration camps, and their workers is about as deft as one could hope for. It feels in many ways like a young adult novel, but never condescends to the reader. Oddly enough, the shame of being a Nazi guard is second only to an even greater shame (which I won’t reveal here). It reads fast, but stays with you for a while. If you’ve a free afternoon, give this one a read.

296NielsenGW
Dez 5, 2013, 9:32 am



Nov 18: Barry, Dave. Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States. (DDC 817.0973)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 810: American literature in English
• 817: American humor and satire in English
• +09: With respect to history
• +73: United States

When I was a kid, Dave Barry was just about the funniest writer I knew. My mother got me hooked, and while his style and wit have fallen off in recent years, I find it hard not to go back to him for a chuckle or two. Because most of his classic writing was for a weekly newspaper column, it’s a bit dated but funny nonetheless. In Dave Barry Slept Here, he takes a look at American history in a way that only he can, with eye toward potential exploding animals, the absolute importance of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, and acts of Congress that would also make good names for a rock band.

One of the best lines in the book has to be the following: “Notable achievements of the Millard Fillmore administration: The Earth did not crash into the sun.” For some reason, this line has stuck with me since I read this nearly two decades ago, and every time someone mentions Fillmore, I have to suppress a small smile. This book isn’t nearly as satirical as the Daily Show’s send up of American history, but rather depends on mildly corny (but still funny) reinterpretations of historical events. You won’t need more than a day to breeze through this one, but it will be a day well spent. It’s twisted and witty and lot of fun.

297mkboylan
Dez 5, 2013, 10:01 am

The Reader goes on the list - sounds fascinating. Anyone seen the movie?

298NielsenGW
Editado: Dez 6, 2013, 8:40 am

Haven't seen the movie. I know that Kate Winslet plays Hanna and won an Oscar for it, so it can't be that bad.

299NielsenGW
Dez 6, 2013, 8:41 am



Nov 19: Johnson, Paul. Mozart: A Life. (DDC 780.92)

Paul Johnson’s new biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is certifiably adjective-y. It’s short, sweet, inspiring, exasperating, jam-packed, opinionated, whimsical (at times), terse, and fun. For the most part, it’s a straightforward chronology of Mozart’s life and work. He only lived for 35 years (1756-1791), but produced the most interesting, most complex, most wonderful pieces of classical music in history. Starting at age five, he composed over 600 works, ranging from masses to concertos to operas to choral pieces to symphonies and everything in between.

One of the more amazing aspects of Mozart’s compositional history was his need to understand instruments from the inside out. He would learn everything about an instrument’s construction, then learn to play it, then learn which individual instruments were better than others and appropriate them for his orchestra, and then compose with only those instruments in mind. When he learned the violin, he quickly wrote five stunning concertos. When the clarinet was being perfected in the late 1700s, he sought out the best player and composed an intriguing concerto before his death. And so on and so forth.

Johnson’s biography is dutiful and has a lot of information, but at times is too chockablock with information to really get a fully fleshed out sense of the man behind the music. He does a great job, however, of trying to set some of the record straight with regards to previous tales of tragic hubris and indebtedness. It’s clear that Johnson has a great love of classical music and tries very hard to not use a lot of jargon. This book made we want to go out and immediately get tickets to a symphony (but sadly, I have more books to read). If you’re at all interesting about Mozart, this will be a very good place to start. A quick, concise, and engaging read.

300NielsenGW
Dez 9, 2013, 9:25 am



Nov 23: Petroski, Henry. The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. (DDC 674.88)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 670: Manufacturing
• 674: Lumber processing, wood products, and cork
• 674.8: Wood products
• 674.88: Other products

I’m quite convinced that Henry Petroski could write about the engineering or manufacturing of anything and it would an order of magnitude better than expected. He’s authored books about bookshelves, the toothpick, and engineering projects that I would have expected to be ho-hum or dryasdust, but he always surprises me. In The Pencil, he takes on the titular subject and discusses not only the history of the object, but the mindset, engineering, and technology involved in crafting such a simple tool.

The Romans started with a tool known as a penicillum, or a pencil brush, but true pencils with lead/graphite cores are not documented in history until 1565 when an illustration shows up in a book on fossils by Konrad Gesner. Before the classic yellow #2 came into existence in 1890, there were all types of pencil designs. A massive graphite deposit discovered in Seathwaite, England lead to an acceleration in pencil design. Cheap pencils were just thick shards of graphite sharpened and wrapped with string, but by the early 1600s, wood casings were the norm.

All this begs the question: how does one actually make a pencil? Most processes are essentially the same. Take a piece of wood that is the general size and shape you want your finished product to be, cut a rut into which the writing substance can be fitted, then glue a wood cap on it to seal it together. You can then trim, re-shape, and paint the pencil to your liking after that. The process has been relatively unchanged since the Renaissance. Pencil variability and personal likes and dislikes come from the type of wood used, the shape of the pencil, and the quality of the graphite core.

It could be argued that Petroski’s history of the pencil could stand a bit of trimming, but all the engineering, biographical, and historical tangents were a lot of fun for me. If you want a straight history of the pencil, then you can just read the Wikipedia article and be done with it, but for a truly immersive and fully contextual account of the pencil and its place in history, read this one. It’s a bit hefty, but if you stick with it, you’ll get a lot out of it. He makes the reader slightly more aware of the little things, and I began to wonder about the manufacture of many other tiny quotidian objects in my life. That, I think, is the mark of a good author. A very interesting read.

301JDHomrighausen
Dez 9, 2013, 11:46 am

Catching up now - really enjoyed your thoughts on Silence: A Christian History and the Mandelbaum translation of Ovid. I have that translation too and now I want to read it.

Does Johnson discuss the Amadeus movie? Is his Mozart's characterization in it fair?

302NielsenGW
Dez 9, 2013, 2:10 pm

From what I can remember, I don't think Johnson even mentions the film. He only has about 150 pages to get through the bio, so he doesn't really spend a lot of time on extra matters. He does, however, counter-argue some of the characterizations of given by Mozart's more salacious biographers.

303NielsenGW
Editado: Dez 9, 2013, 3:38 pm



Nov 29: Hofstadter, Douglas R. and Daniel C. Dennett. The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. (DDC 126)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 120: Epistemology, causation, and humankind
• 126: The self

Neither Douglas Hofstadter nor Daniel Dennett are easy writers to read quickly. Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Hofstadter’s Surfaces and Essences are two of the most demanding books I’ve picked up in the recent past. Luckily, in The Mind’s I, an effort that combines both their talents, they find a way to better let their readers in. This book looks at the philosophical concept of the self—how a mind views itself—through the writings of other people. Hofstadter and Dennett use historic and imaginative accounts written by Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Turing, Richard Dawkins, and many others as points of reflection from which they can get into their intended philosophical discussions. This helps accomplish two very interesting goals: pointing the reader towards other authors they might not have known before and helping the reader through some of the more complex thought experiments surrounding the concept of the self. All throughout the book there are smatterings of philosophy, fiction, physics, and even free will. They manage to steer clear of the more tautological loops that philosophy sometimes falls in to, and in the end, arrange a very good book that makes the reader think deeply without straining themselves. An intense but intriguing read.

304NielsenGW
Dez 10, 2013, 9:28 am



Nov 30: Tunick, Michael H. The Science of Cheese. (DDC 637.3)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 630: Agriculture and related technologies
• 637: Processing dairy and related products
• 637.3: Cheese processing

Cheese has existed in some form or another since the eighth millennium BCE. Over the last ten thousand years, the technique has been the same. Separate the curd (milk solids) from the whey (remaining liquids) and form into a block to eat. How you separate the two, what kind of milk you start with, and what you do to the curd after separation govern the cheese you get. There are cows cheeses, sheep cheese, goat cheese, yak cheeses, stained cheeses, blue cheeses, stretched cheeses, and even brined cheeses. Michael Tunick’s The Science of Cheese is exactly that—a look at the all the wonderful and intricate science behind the making of a single piece of cheese.

A word to the wise: this book is a woefully science-heavy. There are no tours of cheese countries, no tasting notes, and no luxurious food passages. Tunick goes through all the chemicals, processes, techniques, facts, and figures that make up the world cheese making industry. He does, however, talk about a lot of cheeses, how they’re made, and the history behind certain techniques. You learn about caseins (milk proteins), ketones, curd processing, and everything in between. Here’s a couple of fun facts to whet your appetite:

• Limburger cheese smells like feet because the bacteria used in the smear-rinse of the cheese is in the same genus as one that causes the odor (Brevibacterium linens on the cheeses, B. epidermidis on the feet).
• The wonderful, brown crispy patches on broiled cheese come from Maillard reactions, which involves the amino acids and sugars in the cheese.
• Swiss cheeses are actually classified by the size of the hole, ranging from tiny (“partridge eye”) to large (“walnut”).

This book is a fun excursion into the chemistry surrounding cheese. Its near total ubiquity makes it another one of those things that people tend not to think too much about, but there are myriad scientists, testers, and artisans all trying to ensure that what they make is both tasty and safe. A technical but interesting book.

305SassyLassy
Dez 10, 2013, 10:32 am

Cheese making is something I would like to learn. Earlier this fall I had checked out a five day course at a regional university with a huge agriculture programme, thinking it would be a fun week away. It was $2100 plus 13% tax for five days, so I decided against it. I could probably take the academic semester course for less, but it's too far away for commuting. All this is a long way of saying that maybe it would be easier to read the book. It would be like being back in school again.

306NielsenGW
Dez 10, 2013, 10:37 am

Good grief, that's quite a lot of money. Maybe there's a local farmer or artisan who'd be happy to teach you.

307NielsenGW
Dez 10, 2013, 4:59 pm



Dec 2: Solodow, Joseph B. Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages. (DDC 470.9)

Latin gets a bad reputation for being a boring language long past its expiration date, but one of the things many people forget to remember is that English owes a lot of its existence to Latin. Joseph Solodow’s Latin Alive is a look at the history, grammar, usage, and repercussions that the Latin language brings to bear on the present. Solodow does very well to show how Latin wasn’t just a language, but rather a way of life for most of Europe. Latin is a dense language but only so far at it was meant to be compact; each word, and even each inflection of word, imparts some meaning to the whole. Nope, no filler here.

To be sure, Solodow’s text tries to be first a textbook and then a treatise on Roman history, but the two get intertwined many times. A beginner in Latin may indeed pick up a few new things here and veterans can get a little more from the historical asides. This book shows how Latin works in everyday prose, in written poetry, and even how it absorbed tricks from other languages over the years (much like English and many other languages). For a language book, this one actually clipped along rather well. The author’s intent is not to shove memorization tables down the reader’s throat, but to give the language a context for natural discussion and dissection. If you’re looking to learn Latin, you could do a lot worse than this one.

308NielsenGW
Dez 11, 2013, 11:16 am



Dec 3: Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. (DDC 611)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 610: Medicine
• 611: Human anatomy, cytology, and histology

One of the most common question children (and even adults) ask is: what happens to us after we die? While many are looking for more spiritual and existential answer, Mary Roach decided to look at the question from a pure biological and materialistic standpoint. What happens to a human body after the functioning has ceased? In Stiff, she explores all the venues where human cadavers make an appearance. From embalmers to medical schools to mechanical researchers to even biological composters, Roach goes off in search of answers to very real and pressing questions. Is there space for all our dead bodies? What and how can we learn from dead bodies?

This one is easily one my favorite books I’ve read. Roach is inveterate, witty, curious (almost to a fault), engaging, and playful with her subject matter. She knows that there are some out there who may not be able to handle the idea of corpses, body farms, and decomposition, but her approach is that of a wide-eyed student. I think more people need the curiosity she displays. This is her first book, so you can tell she’s working out some stylistic kinks here, but it’s fun to read all the same. If you’ll at all interested in human anatomy or are a fan of CSI-type shows, then this will be a good one for you. A quick but exciting read.

309NielsenGW
Dez 11, 2013, 4:35 pm



Dec 4: Mayes, Jimmi with V. C. Speek. The Amazing Jimmi Mayes: Sideman to the Stars. (DDC 786.9092)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 700: Fine Arts and Recreation
• 780: Music
• 786: Keyboard, mechanical, electrophonic, and percussion instruments
• 786.9: Drums and devices used for percussive effects
• +092: Biography

Jimmi Mayes is one of those great touring and studio musicians that no one has heard of. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article. But in 1960, at the age of 18, he was taken on the road to play with almost all of the great blues and soul artists of America. You can hear his work on the tracks of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, James Brown, Martha Reeves, The Flamingos, Little Richard, The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, and even Jimi Hendrix. While his heyday was in the 60s and 70s, he still tours occasionally and helps new people find the blues music he hold so dear.

Mayes writes with a sincerity and an enthusiasm that can only come from decades of experience and love for his craft. I imagine if you were sitting with him on a lazy Sunday afternoon, this is exactly how he would sound. The book is a little bit self-aggrandizing, but I’m OK with that. Mayes has earned the credit he writes about. He’s made it through crippling depression and physical pain, and if his story doesn’t make you feel the blues, then nothing will. Reading this one made me load up some of the classic songs he was a part of and spend a day with the music, and it was time well spent. A swift and interesting read.

310dchaikin
Dez 11, 2013, 9:50 pm

So many books here. Lots of good stuff. The Mind's Eye sounds terrific. Great review of The Reader back up there. It caught part of the movie once, and could not figure out what was going on, but now it makes sense.

311NielsenGW
Dez 12, 2013, 10:51 am



Dec 5: Whyte, Jamie. Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. (DDC 160)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 160: Logic

All around us are statements, phrases, and bon mots which simply serve to obscure logic. Jamie Whyte’s Crimes Against Logic serves as a oasis of hope is a desert of slick dissimulation. Whyte’s main goal is to expose the devices that people use to turn a dubious argument or perspective into one that might be more believable. Many of these fall into categories of logical fallacy, such as the Authority Fallacy or False Equivalency or the Motive Fallacy (among many others). Along with these traps, there are also techniques, such as using jargon, weasel words, or hooray words that throw the listener or the reader off-kilter. This is not to say that everyone and everything is out to pull the wool over your eyes, but there are areas where language is deliberately couched. After reading this, it’s next to impossible to listen to a news broadcast or read an article without seeing all the hidden ways that facts are manipulated to fit the audience or the agenda. Pair this one with Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough and you’ll never trust anyone ever. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. A quick, eye-opening read.

312NielsenGW
Dez 13, 2013, 3:50 pm



Dec 6: Fabian, Johannes. Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938. (DDC 496.392096751)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 490: Other languages
• 496: African languages
• 496.3: Niger-Congo languages
• 496.39: Bantu languages
• 496.392: Swahili language
• +096751: Democratic Republic of the Congo

Africa is a continent with hundreds upon hundreds of different languages and dialects. In even one small part—the area that makes up the Democratic Republic of the Congo—listeners can hear an estimated 240 different languages. So how did Swahili (or KiSwahili), a language spoken primarily my people on the Eastern part of Africa become one of its four recognized national languages? Johannes Fabian’s Language and Colonial Power is an exploration of the intersection of history, power, language, and communication.

The Congo Free State was established in 1885 as the only colony claimed by Belgium in the Scramble for Africa. Their main reason for its colonization was the procurement of rubber for the growing vehicle industry. The Belgians, speaking mainly French, ran the military infrastructure called the “Force Publique,” which enforces colonial rule and penalties for not meeting harvest quotas. Around this time, language books were being published helping French speakers communicate with Swahili speakers. With a less than nuanced understanding of all the languages in Africa, colonists used this guide to help them interact with all the indigenous peoples in the Congo. Since those in power used the language, the language become more powerful. While there was some work being done to help differentiate dialects of Swahili and the other languages in the Bantu family, Katanga Swahili stuck around as the main sphere of influence.

Fabian’s book, while a little dated, is purely academic. There’s a lot here on the history of language guidebooks and comparative linguistics, so be prepared for that. He tracks down linguists and written evidence of the movements, shifts, and entrenchment of the Swahili language throughout the Congo Basin. One of the more interesting points he makes is that there is no real written record of Swahili before the colonists arrive. For better or for worse, no native speaker had really thought to construct an entire dictionary of the language before then. Even the way we see it today, in Roman script, is a colonial construct. Early Swahili was written in an Arabic script. The language as people encountered it at the turn of the 20th century, in the form of guidebooks, translation texts, and wordlists, was already heavily influenced by European perspectives. Today, Swahili sits alongside Longala, Kikongo, and Tshiluba as the main language of the land, but like many other languages throughout time, has evolved into what we see and hear today. This book is very dense with linguistic history and historiography, but if you’re a budding African linguist, it should definitely make your list.

313NielsenGW
Dez 13, 2013, 4:24 pm



Dec 8: Petroski, Henry. An Engineer’s Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession. (DDC 601)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 601: Philosophy and theory of technology

Henry Petroski’s Engineer’s Alphabet is a book only an engineer could love. He basically runs through the entire field, culling together an alphabetic list of terms, phrases, and lists that embody the field. In it, you get an interesting idea of the world that engineers inhabit. From asphalt cookies to engineer fight songs to the patent system to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and everything in between, there’s a whole panoply of fun and interesting entries covering the entire history of engineering. Here are few of my favorites:

• Two U.S. Presidents have associated with engineering: Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.
• Glenn L. Martin Hall, one of the engineering buildings at the University of Maryland, was built to look like a slide rule when viewed from above.
• Murphy’s Law was the rule of thumb of Captain Ed Murphy, an aircraft engineer.
• Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a British engineer responsible for the Great Western Railway as well as the ship instrumental in laying the first transatlantic cable, ranked above Princess Diana and William Shakespeare in a 2002 poll to list the greatest Britons in history.

This one isn’t a quick book, but it did have its fair share of witty asides and intriguing tidbits. If you have a friend or relative who’s in the field, this one would make a fine addition their library.

314rebeccanyc
Dez 13, 2013, 5:02 pm

Interesting about Swahili.

315mkboylan
Dez 14, 2013, 6:37 pm

I always enjoy your choices and reviews but I don't think I want to know any more about cheese! I love it and am afraid this book would ruin it for me. Although I do think I will move Stiff up on the pile. Crimes alo sounds intriguing.

316NielsenGW
Dez 15, 2013, 10:12 pm

Got an early Christmas present from the missus:

* Garden Gnomes: A History by Twigs Way (DDC 717)

She knows me too well...

317NielsenGW
Dez 16, 2013, 10:21 am



Dec 10: Wagschal, Steven. The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes. (DDC 860.9)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 860: Literatures of Spanish and Portuguese languages
• 860.9: History and criticism

Spanish literature from the 16th and 17th century is some of the most intriguing, most fun, and most exciting that has ever been written. New techniques, new philosophies, and new cultures all combined to form works that revitalized the populace and helped to expand imaginative writing. Steven Wagschal’s Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes focuses on a few writers of this timeframe and how they interpreted both the cultural and emotional landscape of the region. His main focus is on the titular emotion of jealousy. Jealousy in Spain was different from that in other regions in Europe. It was a widely-varied, highly refined topic, so much so that Lope de Vega (1562-1635) wrote six whole plays with jealousy in the title. Oddly enough, Wagschal uses philosophical frameworks from Descartes and Freud to examine the Spanish works. He does, however, wisely incorporate the works of Valencian scholar Juan Vives as well. While Wagschal’s theses are varied, they do take into account the beginning of Spain’s decline as an empire, new humanist teachings, and a more detailed reading of the works of Cervantes, Vega, and Luis de Gongora y Argote.

It’s been a while since I’ve read any serious lit-crit, but this one was a good way back into the field. Wagschal’s writing is crisp and insightful without being drowned in jargon. He does a good job in parsing out the various shades of jealousy during this period of Spanish writing. If you’re a fan at all of Cervantes and his works, then this one might form a sort of companion piece to get deeper into the field. For me, I had not heard of either Vega or Gongora, so it was quite an immersive and educational experience. It’s probably not on the top anyone’s to-be-read list, but it’s one of those books that will give you back the effort you put into it.

318NielsenGW
Dez 16, 2013, 4:09 pm



Dec 12: Cilliers, Paul. Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. (DDC 117)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 110: Metaphysics
• 117: Structure

Paul Cilliers’s Complexity and Postmodernism lies at the intriguing intersection of philosophy and science. It has long been theorized that the rules and equations that govern scientific processes and physical models could also pertain to complex, philosophical structures. One of the interesting notions of the postmodern school of thought is that there is the possibility to get away from traditional notions of order and morality, a way to escape structured thought. Complexity, on the other hand, deals with the notion that all the parts of a system are indelibly tied to each other, preventing the system from collapse. Complexity seems to evade understanding, but you don’t have to understand a system for it to still work.

Cilliers’s discussion of these two notions helps the reader parse through some of the thick language regarding modern systems of thought to get a better understanding of the modern world. He starts by approaching the world of complex systems the way a computer scientist would approach a algorithm. There are rule sets and patterns, and most things fall inside those two buckets to varying degrees. To that process, he adds a layer of postmodern thought that allows for a richer, relativistic understanding of complex systems. From there, he fleshes out a system of what he calls “connectionist” thought, which can be likened to a neural network or a self-defining language.

The more I think about the world today, the more this system of thought seems to work. Many of the forces in our world are interconnected in a large complex system. World economies, social forces, religious theology, and many other structures have both internal complexity and fit inside a large framework. While this book is relatively short, it isn’t a very easy read, and there were large sections during I just dutifully went along with the text. But there were some interesting nuggets of thought that I’ll take to the next book. A short but dense book.

319NielsenGW
Dez 17, 2013, 9:56 am



Dec 15: Petroski, Henry. Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America. (DDC 624.20973)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 600: Technology
• 620: Engineering and applied operations
• 624: Civil engineering
• 624.2: Bridges
• +0973: United States

Many of the major cities in the U.S. got their start as big port cities. Ships could sail in, deposit goods, and flood the local economy with raw materials and other goods. They were ports because a bay or river brought the ship. And because there was water, there was a need for bridges. Bridges as an architectural or engineering feature have been around since the Romans, but new materials in the 19th century allowed for better, stronger, longer bridges to be built. In the United States, there are several iconic bridges—The Golden Gate Bridge, The Brooklyn Bridge, The George Washington Bridge—whose conception and completion are due in large part to the engineers who first thought them up. Henry Petroski’s Engineers of Dreams is an ode to these thinkers and builders, the men who decided to cross a river and leave their mark on the American landscape.

Petroski’s book covers the lives and works of five civil engineers—James B. Eads, Theodore Cooper, Gustav Lindenthal, Othmar Ammann, and David B. Steinman—who created many of the great bridges of America. Their biographies tell the tale of an America looking to grow by leaps and bounds. There are times when the new bridges collapsed or other tragedies struck, but in the end, the bridges were built and the landscape was connected in new ways. There is a great deal of engineering history here, but the biographies are a tad formulaic. To be fair, though, I went in for the engineering info. As an added bonus, there are a good number of structural photographs and design illustrations to go along with the text. Petroski is clearly passionate this subject and this history reads rather briskly for a treatise on structural design. All in all, an excellent book on the history of American bridge design.

320NielsenGW
Dez 17, 2013, 4:18 pm



Dec 16: Moffatt, John. Cracking the Quantum Code of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs Boson. (DDC 539.721)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 500: Science
• 530: Physics
• 539: Modern physics
• 539.7: Atomic and nuclear physics
• 539.72: Particle physics and ionizing radiation
• 539.721: Specific kinds of subatomic particles

John Moffatt’s Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe is a history of particle up to the discovery of the Higgs boson. First theorized in 1964, it took nearly 50 years and a $9 billion particle accelerator to generate enough particle collisions and data to verify its existence. From what I understood (and I don’t claim to have understood everything in this book), Higgs particles are associated with Higgs fields, which are the very reason fundamental particles have mass and why the weak force and weaker than the electromagnetic force. On July 4, 2012, researchers at CERN announced that they had enough proof of its existence. At a mass of 125 GeV, it had all the properties that had been mathematically constructed a half-century earlier. And science finally had another piece of its puzzle.

Moffatt’s book is incredibly detailed and science-laden. Like I said before, a fair amount of this material went right over my head. Incredibly, there are no diagrams, no illustrations, no offset equations to help him flesh out his history of the discovery. One would think there would be at least one table of all the subatomic particles or some graph of the data coming out of CERN. What it does have, however, is a thorough history of the physics and math leading up to the discovery, even theories that set out to disprove the particle’s existence. If you’re a particle physicist or training to be one, then you definitely need to have this book. If not, you’re not going to find much here to hang your hat on. I liked it, but then again, I’m kind of a nut for these things. All in all, a dense, dense book.

321NielsenGW
Dez 19, 2013, 12:59 pm



Dec 18: Wennerstrom, Ann. The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse. (DDC 414.6)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 400: Language
• 410: Linguistics
• 414: Phonology and phonetics of standard forms of language
• 414.6: Suprasegmental features

Ann Wennerstrom’s premise is a simple one: you need to properly hear a language to understand it. Languages have a tone, a pitch, and a musicality that is crucial to its analysis. This musicality is called a language’s prosody. Don’t worry if you’re already feeling drowned in technical jargon. Wennerstrom’s Music of Everyday Speech does a decent (if not terrific) job of helping the lay person understand her particular brand of linguistic analysis. She uses stress charts, vocal recordings, and scientific analysis to get at the heart of our language. Because the book is written in English, her results are limited to the English language, but it is interesting nonetheless. Her findings help support her theory that prosody helps to organize language almost as much as grammatical rules. She also brings in other contributors to help break up any potential monotony. One of these contributors (Heidi Riggenbach) takes a look at a person’s efforts in a second language and how their prosody is affected by their fluency in the language. This one’s a fairly dense that could easily get too tedious/boring for the average reader. I recommend it only if you’re in the field.

322mkboylan
Dez 19, 2013, 1:03 pm

That's so intriguing.

323rebeccanyc
Dez 19, 2013, 5:39 pm

Yes, it is interesting; my friend who's a musician says he learns languages by hearing them.

325NielsenGW
Dez 26, 2013, 1:58 pm



Dec 23: Freudenberg, Kirk. The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire. (DDC 877.010937)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 800: Literature
• 870: Latin and Italic literatures
• 877: Latin humor and satire
• 877.01: Philosophy and theory of Latin humor and satire
• +0937: Italian Peninsula or adjacent territories to 476 CE

Satire as we know it was popularized first with the ancient Romans. The satirist Lucilius, writing in the 2nd century BCE, is usually credited as the earliest writer in the genre. Kirk Freudenberg’s Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire cover the length and breadth of the field with articles that discuss the origin of Roman satire, it affect on the social landscape of ancient Rome, and how the genre affected later and current English writing. While each of the authors’ take on Roman satire was interesting, you definitely need to have a bit of actual Roman satire for it to really sink in. This book is a decent supplement to the writing of Ennius, Horace’s satires, Persius’s stoicisms, Juvenal, Seneca, and even Julian and Boethius. It is good to know, however, that satire has survived to the present day. Without it, we wouldn’t have so many great movies today poking fun at all of society’s little cracks. A thick and interesting read.

326NielsenGW
Dez 27, 2013, 3:50 pm



Dec 27: Sweeney, Kate. American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning. (DDC 393)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 300: Social Sciences
• 390: Customs and etiquette
• 393: Death customs

Every 14 seconds, some one dies in the United States. But how do we mourn those deaths? How do current mourning practices compare to those of the past? And what do new innovations and practices in the funerary industry have to say about the social landscape of the country? Kate Sweeney’s American Afterlife looks at all these facets of the American funerary, burial, and death services to get a picture of how we deal with the loss of a loved one.

Her book covers many unique aspects of the death business, from different methods of burial and remembrance to urn sellers to memorial photographers and more. Sweeney’s book is much like Mary Roach’s Stiff but without any of the humor. Her voyeuristic in-roads into the America death industry are eye-opening but fall a bit short of ground-breaking. The writing is good, but overall, I wanted more, something that address some greater realities about mourning and mourners. If you’re interested in some of the newer aspects of the funerary business, such as turning loved ones into coral reefs or buying your own urn or the legality of roadside memorials, then you’ll get some answers here. For anything else, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

327NielsenGW
Dez 30, 2013, 4:26 pm



Dec 30: Plato. Symposium. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. (DDC 184)

Dewey Breakdown:
• 100: Philosophy and Psychology
• 180: Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• 184: Platonic philosophy

Plato’s Symposium is essentially a love story. The general outline is that a group of Greek thinkers are gathered together to a symposium by the poet Agathon to celebrate his recent victory in a dramatic competition. Phaedrus (an aristocrat), Pausanius (some sort of lawyer), Eryximachus (a doctor), Aristophanes (a comedian), Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades (a statesman) then take turns discussing the nature and types of love. They each offer valid perspectives on the topic while trying to surpass each other in the quality of their rhetoric (and trying to ward off a hangover from the previous night’s drinking). Socrates gets the upper hand quickly by undermining—piece-by-piece—each of their arguments about the nature of Love.

Along with each of the speeches we get small insights into how gatherings were conducted in ancient Greece, and how different members of the social fabric interacted (it’s also nice to see that the methods for curing hiccups hasn’t changed in the last 3,000 years). Plato, being a student of Socrates, gives him a better part in the exchange than the others there, but I’m not sure I would want to attend a gathering with the man. The way he employs his Socratic dialogue easily paints him as being “that guy.” Nobody wants to be “that guy.” As far as the writing, Benjamin Jowett’s (1817-1893) translation of Plato’s treatise was published in the late 19th century and still holds up rather well. It’s only flowery in the intro (which takes up a third of this book), but then settles down when you get to the good stuff. All in all, not bad but not riveting either.

328dchaikin
Dez 30, 2013, 6:42 pm

The way he employs his Socratic dialogue easily paints him as being “that guy.” Nobody wants to be “that guy.”

Such a fun line for describing Socrates.