This Week at the Library (2 July)

Posted on July 2, 2012 by smellincoffee

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy….

Well, not quite. At the moment we’re experiencing a heat wave, and in 110-degree heat, the livin’ is anything but easy. After nine o’clock the  soaring temperature makes it impossible to do anything outside, and unless you have a soundly insulated house, the inside isn’t too much easier. What I wouldn’t give for a cool thundershower…

This Wednesday, on the Fourth of July, we in the United States observe Independence Day. I’ve been marking the occasions in my own fashion by orienting my reading. I began with Joseph Ellis’ Founding Brothers, an excellent bit of history I’ve already commented on, and will soon finish The Good Citizen, a collection of essays on the meaning of citizenship. I’ve also been reading from an anthology of letters, speeches, and related documents penned by the “founding fathers”, called Our Sacred Honor. Expect comments on that to follow in the next day or so.

I’m also half-tempted to tack on The Glorious Fourth to this week’s reading, in light of the recent revival of my interest in the American Civil War. The title refers to 4 July 1863, a date that sealed the fate of the ill-born southern confederacy. On that day, Lee’s shattered army was driven in retreat from Gettysburg, a battle that marked the turning point of the war. On the same day, in the west, the city of Vicksburg fell after a long siege to General Grant’s army — giving the Union complete command of the Mississippi and dividing the south in two. I say half-tempted, I’m somewhat leery about committing to it in light of the fact that it will soon be time for my Bastille Day reading. The first book, Alistair Horne’s The Age of Napoleon, has already arrived in the post. The French reads seem like a lot of fun, and I could use some levity. Lately my reading has tended toward the serious. Although I’m currently nibbling on A People’s History of the Civil War, which some kind soul donated to the library last week and which I immediately checked out, I may save it for later — for as interesting as it is, by Abraham Lincoln’s beard it is also grim. I need some light reading, something heartening — so I’ll be looking for some science reads. Science’s wonders are always refreshing for my spirits.

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“I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatsoever. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” – Thomas Jefferson,  as quoted in Founding Brothers

“Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect, and were we to love none who had imperfections, this world would be a desart for our love. All we can do is make the best of our friends, love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way what is bad.” – Thomas Jefferson, as quoted in Our Sacred Honor

“Eventually Americans will learn that the fast and hectic pace of urban life is not due to modernity but to bad urban planning. Life is so badly staged in our time […].  […] If people more fully understood that many of their problems either neither of their own making nor amenable to self-help but stemmed from the ‘mess that is man-made America’, personal problems would become political issues.”  – Roy Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

“Meanwhile, the Right is in this incredibly contradictory position. It has positioned itself as the champion of the pain that people feel because of the ethos of selfishness and materialism. Paradoxically the Right is the champion of the ethos of ethos of selfishness and materialism in the world of work. With regard to the economy, the Right claims that everybody ought to pursue their own individual self-interest, that every corporation ought to pursue their own self-interest, and that no moral responsibility ought to be imposed upon them. In other words, the Right is totally opposed to any government, collective or social movement that restricts the self-interest of corporations or tells them that they ought to be morally or socially responsible. The same Right that articulates this ethos […] simultaneously positions itself as the force concerned about the pain that people feel when they bring that every ethos home.”  – Michael Lerner, “The Crisis of Values in America: its Manipulation by the Right and its Invisibility to the Left”. From The Good Citizen.

In the nineteenth century, the reigning public philosophy was what he calls a republican political theory in which liberty depends on sharing in self-government and sharing “require[d] a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character that self-government requires.” […] As corporations increased in power, a new public philosophy emerged, what Sandel terms the neutralized liberal approach to freedom, or the “procedural republic”. The central idea of that philosophy is that government should not affirm, through its policies or laws, any particular conception of the good life; instead it should provide a neutral framework of rights within people can choose their own values and ends.  Rather than liberty depending on “our capacity as citizens to share in the shaping the forces that govern our collective destiny,” it now depended on our capacity as persons to choose our values and ends for ourselves.   – Barbara Christian, “The Crime of Innocence”. From The Good Citizen.

“Incessant and excessive promotion of the individual and the idea that the good life is an individual accomplishment discourages collective effort, discounts collective effort, and obscures the fact that many good and necessary things can only result from collective effort.” – Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

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The Green Metropolis

Posted on June 30, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
© 2009 David Owen
357 pages

Green is probably not the word that comes to mind at the mention of Manhattan, but to David Owen, few places on Earth are as environmentally friendly as the heart of New York City. Its towering skyscrapers and elevated train lines are in fact the very image of verdant. Such a contention is at the heart of Owen’s surprising take on sustainability and environmentalism, his approach as practical as it is counter-intuitive. Owen uses the lens of economy to reveal weaknesses of conventional environmental thinking while demonstrating that the most practical solution to making the most of our energy reserves is to live more intelligently together – in cities.
Owen establishes his work’s prevailing theme early on, declaring, “Sustainability is a context, not a gadget or a technology.”  All of our efforts to be environmentally responsible, to greenwash our lives, are insubstantive when examined against the way we routinely waste energy on a day to day basis, living as we do spread out in suburbs and making virtually every trip in a car. It’s not the Hummer’s gas mileage that makes it an environmental disaster, Owen writes, but the fact that owning a car encourages us to drive it all the time. In fact, he views the rising popularity of SmartCars as a disaster waiting to happen, because such efficient machines will only encourage us to drive more, putting delaying the real change we need to make…which is driving less, living closer, and moving out of our sprawling ranch homes and McMansions into something more sensibly-sized.  
Green Metropolis is a smartly-constructed book. After putting forth his premise, Owen establishes why adaptive thinking on our parts is required. In “Liquid Civilization”, he points out that the entirety of the global economy and our lives is based on burning oil or converting it into products like ever-ubiquitous plastics. Until the mid-20th century, however, only a fraction of the Earth’s population demanded the use of those oils –Europe, the United States, and their colonies, or the “western world”.  Resources were thus relatively abundant, and we have been positively spoiled by the surfeit, so much to the point that we have invented dozens of brands of disposable cups, spoons, forks, and plates that are meant to be thrown away after one use…presumably, because we can’t be bothered to wash a dish. But the days of plenty are over. Now the entire world is demanding a once exclusive lifestyle, and over a century of chronic use has sharply reduced available supplies of oil and natural gas. Unfortunately, the Chinese and Indians seem intent on  making the same mistakes that Americans did in regard to transforming their urban landscapes to make full use of the car, expanding the reaches of the automobile and ever-deepening their dependence on and use of, oil.
The Green Metropolis‘ argument’s primary strength is that its proposed solution is both simple and fundamental. It doesn’t require us to do anything we weren’t doing already until a temporary bout of prosperity made us lose our collective minds — people have lived in cities for thousands of years. City-dwellers don’t make an effort to be “green”: they simply live the way they’re use to living. Efficiency is built into the fabric of the place, and that makes the eco-urbanist argument especially appealing to me because I’ve started to suspect that human beings are too short-sighted to put up a meaningful fight in any other way. This approach to environmentalism doesn’t require Constant Vigilance, which I suspect is an impossibility — it only requires us to return to our senses. Not only this, but returning to proper urbanism will provide immediate, short-term results, which are apparently the only thing we grasp. Restructure the suburbs — make them walkable, increase density — and we can add value to the urban landscape  and to our lives. We can free ourselves from fiscal disaster and chronic stress. The problem is motivating ourselves to start making the move.
The Green Metropolis not only makes a strong argument, but it leaves us with room for thought, challenging us to reconsider the way we live in terms of this kind of efficiency. Two areas where Owen especially provoked me were in traffic and food. We might believe that buying local food is more energy efficient, but the sad fact is that the big-box boxs have local grocers beat. I have seen this argument offered by Brian Dunning of Skeptoid as well, who did demonstrate to my satisfaction that a tomato from the supermarket is more “Green” than one from a local farm. However, I still buy from the farmer’s market, because the issue of food is more complicated than energy efficiency:  I prefer supporting local economies, for instance, and have an aversion to food products that are more ‘product’ than food. After considering Owen and Dunning, I can’t completely condemn the US food market, but neither can I condone it. We have much to consider, and the answers are not simple.
Related:
Suburban Nation, Andres Duany et. al
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
Your Prius Won’t Save You, David Owen
Interview with David Owen on his book, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse


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Founding Brothers

Posted on June 30, 2012 by smellincoffee

Founding Brothers:  the Revolutionary Generation

© 2000
288 pages



Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us, and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand and made a happy port. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams)

The Founding Fathers loom over Americans all of our lives: their portraits hang in our schoolrooms; their likenesses adorn our money. They are a peculiarity: an elite who created a democracy. The same set of men dreamed the American Revolution into being in Boston, fought for it at Trenton and Yorktown, struggled to bring its fruit to bear in Philadelphia, and finally attempted to steer the new ship of state onto a right course in Washington as one after the other assumed the presidency. Joseph Ellis’ eminently entertaining Founding Brothers focuses on how the interactions between these men as friends and rivals shaped the fate of a new nation, telling their story in six pieces.
Interestingly, Ellis opens the book by killing one of the central characters in his drama, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton perished in a duel against Aaron Burr (as anyone who saw a particular “Got Milk?” commercial in the 1990s will remember vividly), but Ellis doesn’t take us to the misty ridge that is the site of their ritual just for kicks. He digs into the history of Hamilton and Burr’s feud, which – while it became personal – originated from their varying political beliefs, between the Federalists who desired a strong national government and the anti-Federalists (“Republicans”) who despised the idea. Ellis thus establishes early on that the modern penchant for looking back to “the Founders’ intention” is futile, because the Founders were rarely of one mind on any issue. In “The Silence”, two Quakers surprise Congress by asking them to consider the issue of slavery – an issue which they wanted to pointedly avoid. The blaze of debate raged for days thereafter, seeing every argument southerners would cite throughout the early 19th century put into field. They were not blind to the hypocrisy of hailing victory and maintaining slavery, but somehow they found justification – in believing that slavery was a doomed enterprise and would die naturally if left alone, or in arguments from ‘economic necessity’. Throughout the book, these men argue about the meaning of the Revolution, and the ambiguities built in to the Constitution itself become clear. It was not meant to decide what kind of nation the United States was to be – only to give it its start.  The Founders’ own uncertainties and passionate disagreements are a central theme.
Although Ellis introduces the founders as an American pantheon, and refers to them (lightly) as demigods throughout, Founding Brothers somehow keeps these men on their pedestals while simultaneously freeing them from being simple marble idols to be admired from afar. In their fraililities and passions, they are manifestly human, and Ellis’ background allows us to step into their minds, to not only sense their emotions and understand their thinking, but to grasp why they were the men they were.  This matures into a strangely intimate piece for a history book, especially in the final sections which focus on the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – first political allies, then foes, then tired old friends who write letter after letter to one another with the attitude that “we two ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to one another”. This is a beautifully effective way to close out the book, not only because their dynamic is particularly touching but because it allows the reader to linger on the unfinished legacy of the Revolution, to seek an answer for themselves as to what it means.

Founding Brothers is a  finely crafted book, a genuine pleasure to read and to consider.
Related:
Founding Rivals: Madison and Monroe and the Election that Saved a Nation, Chris DeRose
Washington’s Secret War, Thomas Fleming

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The Great Stagnation

Posted on June 29, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate all the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better
© 2011 Tyler Cowen
110 pages
In The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen takes a long view of human economic history,  asserting that the explosive growth that followed the Industrial Revolution has tapered off and been reversed not because of human mistakes, but because the particular situations which allowed for rapid, expansive growth no longer exist,. These conditions are the “low-hanging fruit” of human history. In the United States, this fruit existed in part in the sheer bounty of resources and land the early Republic had access to, and the drastic, rocketing climbs in production that establishing transportation and communication networks allowed. But now we are in the era of diminishing returns: adding extra roads doesn’t contribute to our economic strength the way the early interstate system did.  The same goes for consumer goods: while early appliances may have revolutionized the way people lived, saving them hours of work and energy, a new washer today can only be a marginal improvement over yesterday’s. The global economy responded to industrialism like a flame roaring in response to gasoline thrown upon it, but now that gas, that low-hanging fruit, is gone. We can no longer experience the industrial boons of yesteryear, and our new service economy, increasingly dominated by healthcare and education,  can only marginally add more value…if any.  However, we have continued to live as though the fruit were still available  The economic crisis, Cowen maintains, was fundamentally an issue of our thinking we were richer than we are.
Cowen says all this and more in just under a hundred pages, and he presents his own low-hanging fruit —  the kind that Tantalus was offered, the kind that seemed so enticing but ever escaped his grasp. Cowen presents a fundamentally insightful idea here,  but he speaks throughout the book in generalizations.This is frustrating not just because it robs the book’s big idea of its potential, but because the generalizations Cowen makes sometimes sweep over the issues. He champions the “Reagan Revolution” and its deregulation as reviving the American economy from the 1970s slowdown, ignoring the fact that the absence of oversight allowed and encouraged banks to make risky loans of the kind that led in part to the fiscal fiasco of late 2007. But Cowen absents governments, corporations, and so on of responsibility in this matter, because the key to prosperity in his view is technology, and at the moment we’re just waiting for some new breakthrough to ignite a new era of low-hanging fruit. In the meantime, he says, we should just sit tight and..wait.  His chief advice is to raise the social status of scientists to encourage interest and enthusiasm in science, and thus hasten the coming of the next breakthrough.  While there may be potential in that — I look forward to reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Space Chronicles, which in part views a new space race as a solution to our economic  sluggishness — ultimately the casual approach Cowen takes to the  book is disappointing.
Related:

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Teaser Tuesday (26 June)

Posted on June 26, 2012 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event where we share excerpts from our current reads. Play along at Should Be Reading!

How, then, did they do it? Why is it that Alfred North Whitehead was probably right to observe that there were only two known instances in Western history when the leadership of an emerging, imperial power performed as well, in retrospect, as anyone could reasonably expect? (The first was Rome under Caesar Augustus and the second was the United States in the late eighteenth century.) Why is it that there is a core of truth to the distinctive iconography of the American Revolution, which does not depict dramatic scenes of mass slaughter, but, instead, a gallery of well-dressed personalities in classic poses?

p. 16, Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation, Joseph Ellis

When affluent Americans think about ‘going green’, they tend to focus on enhancements to their own consumption rather than on subtractions from it: buying a new, more fuel-efficient car (rather than driving less or taking the bus), building a new kitchen full of eco-friendly gadgets and exotic building materials (rather than deciding not to add yet another underused room to their house), replacing their old windows with high-tech new ones (rather than caulking air leaks, drawing the curtains during the day, and turning the air-conditioning down or off) and eating better-tasting chickens, tomatoes, and eggs.

p. 297-298, The Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability.

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The Great Good Place

Posted on June 24, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and the Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
© 1989 Ray Oldenburg
336 pages

In Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant wrote that man is not willingly a political animal, that we do not love society so much as we fear solitude.  As much as I love Durant’s work — the grandness of his historical approach and the rich eloquence of the language with which he expressed it — here I must disagree with him. We are social creatures at our roots: to borrow from Augustine, we are made for each other, and our hearts are restless until we find companionship together. Such is the lesson of Roy Oldenburg’s magnificent The Great Good Place, which examines the important role of social centers in human lives, discusses the consequences of their decline in the United States today, attempts to account for why they are struggling, and appeals for their resurrection. It is a timely and momentous work.

I’ve long been tangentially familiar with the phrase, “the third place”, which refers to common gathering places for people in their communities, a place apart from home and work (the first and second places in our lives). But here is that phrase’s origin. Oldenburg begins by establishing what the third place is: a site that attracts people and allows for spontaneous meetings between friends and strangers. These places have been ubiquitous in urban environments throughout human history…at least, until the  late 1940s when the United States decided to try a different approach to urban planning, creating ‘sprawls that no longer deserve the the dignity of of being called a city’*.  Oldenburg’s opening chapters document the third place’s vital role in creating a sense of community, in fostering political cohesion and providing a platform for civic engagement. But not only that – they’re fun. People like to spend time together, and giving them a place to do it makes society better and improves our quality of life.After establishing this, Oldenburg then moves on some specific examples:  English and Austrian coffee houses,  French cafes and bistros, American taverns, and main streets. (Although the cover refers to barbershops and salons as third places, the best in his view have been these “watering holes”.)  This is a book strongly reminiscent of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: the Decline and Revival of American Community, but while Putnam examined the disintegration of American public life at large, Oldenburg zooms in to everyday life.

If the third place is so important, so vital to healthy personal and national life, how have we allowed ours to be destroyed? Hindsight is always perfect vision: in this case, third places are so normal to the human experience that we take them for granted, and only their loss makes us realize their importance. While third places can be destroyed by the short-sightedness of business owners who discourage “loitering” and convert attractive sitting places into yet more display areas, ultimately the problem is foundational: America’s urban landscape is atrocious; “badly staged”, in Oldenburg’s words. Time and again he scolds planners for creating municipalities where no one can walk anywhere, of building pod after pod of “nothing neighborhoods”, of abandoning the diverse density of cities for suburbia’s lifeless homogeneity.

The Great Good Place is a fascinating combination of sociology and history with a lot of insight. The loss of third places goes beyond people not having a place to have a drink together. One of the consequences Oldenburg explores is that as community life fades as an alternative, people are forced to look for solace on their own, by  attempting to buy happiness in the stores — and the more they focus on themselves, the less inclined they are to seek connections with other people and the more miserable they are. The fascinating link between alienation and advertising is one of the many gems found in here.

Books like these are why I read in the first place. This isn’t a subject of mere academic interest: this is a book that tells us something important about ourselves, with ideas that can change our lives and help Americans concerned about the United States’ declining health begin to recover from it.  Although the absence of any mention of the internet might date it (a book like this published today would have to address social networking sites), it’s never more timely. Ten years after Oldenburg published this, the New Urbanism movement took off — and reaffirming and reestablishing community life is at the heart of it. As America’s urban pattern is forced to change in recognition of suburban’s fiscal failure, I hope when we begin building we keep Oldenburg’s insights in mind, and build third places.

I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Related:

  • Bowling Alone: the Decline and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam
  • Suburban Nation, Andres Duany et. al

* A  turn of phrase borrowed from Robert Bellah. Source: “The Ethics of Polarization in the United States and the World,” The Good Citizen.

* A  turn of phrase borrowed from Robert Bellah. Source: “The Ethics of Polarization in the United States and the World,” The Good Citizen.

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Something from the Oven

Posted on June 24, 2012 by smellincoffee
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
306 pages
© 2004 Laura Shaprio
     The latter half of the 20th century saw the United States convulsed with social change. Millions of women and blacks who found their role temporarily elevated during the Second World War, when they were called upon to serve in uniform and in the factories, could not simply return to being second-class citizens after war’s end. In Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in the 1950s, Laura Shapiro covers the beginnings of women’s liberation and the feminist movement in the context of America’s changing food market, bookending the text with the question: do women like to cook?
            Initial previews led me to believe this book’s subject was the changing food market itself:  an industry that had to meet the demand for food that could be safely shipped around the world to follow the Allied armies found itself at war’s end with a lot of output and nowhere to sell it  — unless the civilian market could be expanded considerably.  To do that, advertisers had to convince women to accept their TV trays as dinner, and their new confections as real food. They urged women to reconsider what cooking meant as a craft when women were already beginning to question what cooking and homemaking meant to their lives in general. What did it mean to be a woman?
            Women were not altogether excited to adopt the new foodstuffs. Despite food magazines’ almost-triumphant declaration that old-fashioned cooking was dead, defeated by Scientific Progress,  those same magazines’ letters reveal that women were still looking for traditional recipes. They added the novel products in sparingly, as substitutes for the “real thing”. It was not until the mid-to late fifties when another generation of women came of age – women who, as children, ate the new processed foods without judgment and regarded them as normal – that the substitutes started gaining more traction and replacing the ‘real thing’ in regular use.  Similarly, women reappraising their own role in the home did so at first only reluctantly, until the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminnine Mystique spotlighted the “problem with no name” – and gave women the courage to start speaking  more stridently.  Shapiro sees women as coming of age in this period, and their changing relationship with food reflected this. Cooking would not define their lives, but they would also not be patronized to by businesses which attempt to reduce their role in the house to that of simply warming up product from the grocery store.  Cooking was a skill to take pride in, and ultimately women triumph in Shapiro’s narrative by becoming the arbiters of both how to incorporate novelty and tradition, and of their own fates.
             Something from the Oven is a bit like gazing through near-transparent stained glass. The food market is certainly an interesting lens to view the birth of feminism through, but unlike a telescope, here the lens — like stained glass — is visible, and sometimes it got in the way of the focus on women. This is a book about women and feminism, but culinary marketing and food culture sometimes overshadow the main subject, so the essential point of the book never comes into sharp focus despite appearing very interesting. It’s fascinating, yet frustrating.
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This Week at the Library (24 June)

Posted on June 24, 2012 by smellincoffee

To some, the summertime may be a period of activity. In the deep south, however, being out and about from June to August will send you to the hospital. Summer is a time for sitting on the porch sipping lemonade and fanning yourself, because it’s too hot to do anything else: temperatures stay into the 90s until after nine at night. I stayed active throughout the winter, but this summer heat just makes me wilt. So I adapt by waking up earlier and spending the late afternoon resting, not walking.  That leaves more time for reading.

When it comes to books, I’m a big eater: I’ll wolf one down, but I sometimes wonder if I’m not diminishing my experience by approaching them so ravenously. In the last couple of weeks I have practiced deliberation, turning the occasional practice of writing down particular quotations and facts in my journal into a regular habit. The idea is to create further opportunity for reflection.  I’ve also been using the journal to write down books I hear about which sound interesting, which only  intensifies my ambitions: there are so many books out there, so many ideas to be considered and connected together! Just the other night I fell into a veritable gold mine of books using Amazon’s “related titles” section: two titles in the pit were Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and  Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, by Jean Twenge.

Both at the library and in my personal reading, I’m gearing up for the Fourth of July. My personal reading for the occasion will be The Good Citizen, a collection of essays on the meaning of citizenship; Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis; and possibly Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice from the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches, an anthology prepared by William J. Bennett.  I have two displays planned to put out this week: a dozen or so titles on the American Revolution, the war, and the early constitutional period, and a larger one devoted to the United States in general. Most of it will be feel-good stuff: the Fourth is a celebratory occasion, after all, and  my theme for the last month has been on environmentalism, ecology, politics, and the future. It’s tended to be a little grim, so I’m looking forward to the lighter mood to come. Once the display is up I’ll post some of the more interesting titles here.  The small display will be replacing my “See the Stars” astronomical display, which I put up mostly to attract interest in the transit of Venus. As it turns out, the day of the transit was marked here by overcast skies.

Finally, at some point in the last week or so, an update from blogger reset my labels gadgets so that no labels were selected to appear in the drop-down menus. I thought the code might need updating, but it turned out to be a simple matter of my simply needing to re-select the various labels for the appropriate list. I don’t know if the problem is entirely resolved, as Books by Category keeps disappearing. I wonder if perhaps I have too many labels.

Pending reviews: The Great, Good Place by Roy Oldenburg, and Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in the 1950s by Laura Shapiro.

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Top Ten Books I’ll Be Reading this Summer

Posted on June 19, 2012 by smellincoffee

As the mercury begins to persistently hit the high nineties, the Broke and the Bookish inquire: what are your summer reading plans?

1. For starters, I intend to keep reading Bernard Cornwell’s Starbuck Chronicles,  his military-adventure novels set in the American Civil War. Although the protagonist is weaker than most of Cornwell’s, Starbuck is supported by a lively crew of characters and I have no doubt that he’ll grow through the books.

2. The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen just arrived in the post. The subtitle: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Get Better.  I heard it discussed at length on a podcast, though I’m a trifle disappointed in its size: when I received the package in the mail I thought it was my Mills Brothers CD.

3. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, Laura Shapiro.  Amazon suggested this one to me, and the preview ensnared my interest. Ever since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan I’ve found an appetite for books relating to food.

4. Star Trek DTI: Forgotten History, Christopher L. Bennett. Second in Bennett’s Department of Temporal Investigations series, the action is set in the original series era and stars that beautiful icon of the franchise, James Kirk’s Enterprise.  Also, Star Trek Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night, David R. George III. First in a new trilogy featuring the Federation’s new foe, Plagues of Night features a much-longed-for return to Deep Space Nine.

5. The Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, David Owen.  Part of my on-going reading in urbanism, energy, and transportation.

6. The Seven Wonders, Steven Saylor. Gordianus the Finder returns….as a teenager on the cusp of manhood, on a journey around the world (to Romans, at least) to visit the seven great wonders of antiquity, only one of which stands today.

7. 1493: Discovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann. The sequel to his astonishing 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, this one tackles the beginnings of the global marketplace.

8.  The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners that Shape Who We Are Today, Rob Dunn.  We’re all hosts to untold numbers of lifeforms…a veritable ecosystem on two legs, as it were.

9. Independence Day reading.  Around the Fourth of July, I like to read something with an appropriate theme. This year I’ve got Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis in mind.

10. Bastille Day reading.  I also like to have a French-themed reading in the middle of July, but I haven’t decided what this year’s shall be. Alistair Horne is an option, but his Seven Ages of Paris left me wanting: it was not quite as brilliant as La Belle France had me worked up to anticipate.  Another possibility is Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, a novel of the Great War, supposedly France’s All Quiet on the Western Front.  On the other hand, I spent my morning sipping coffee and reading reviews for Bringing up Bébé, an American woman’s discovery of parenting in France, which I find oddly fascinating. I suppose it depends on my mood when I go to make my purchases…

These will do for starters, anyway! How about yourself?

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Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Posted on June 16, 2012 by smellincoffee

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why America Needs a Green Evolution: And How it Can Renew America
© 2006 Thomas Friedman
438 pages

   The world is changing. Regardless of the consoling reassurances of corporations, industries, and the silk-tongued politicians who lobby on their behalf, our environment is deteriorating – and that loss is driven by our actions as a global society.  Our comfortable and relatively carefree days are numbered. But the changes to come need not be our undoing. The challenges of the future may indeed be a boon, forcing us to work hard to meet them, fueling innovation and creating new sources of strength. Such is the premise of Hot, Flat, and Crowded, a thought-provoking work of interest to anyone concerned about the future or the health of their respective nation, or the human enterprise in general.

            Friedman begins by establishing the conditions – hot, flat, and crowded. Global warming is a fact, not media myth or political hyperbole. His account illustrates amply that even minor changes in temperature can cause drastic changes in the weather, spurring on calamitous flood/famine patterns and making the environment as a whole more chaotic, wrecking havoc on our ecological systems. We need those systems to make sense, because we have ever-more people to feed. We are already seven billion strong, but our task isn’t limited to simply feeding those billions. As the developing world continues to mature, more people in the old ‘third world’ are demanding the lifestyle of the first. (“Flat” refers to the elimination of barriers between various populations; the idea is that free trade agreements, globalization, and the Internet are putting more people on even ground.)  And they should get it, says Friedman: it’s simply not fair to deny them the same opportunities the west has enjoyed for the last century and a half.  So how on Earth are we going to meet those ‘needs’?

            Well, we need to figure that out. We need ideas, because our current approach isn’t cutting it. We’re still thinking like 19th century industrialists, but the old ways are defunct. The resources aren’t there to support them, and even if they were, we can’t absorb the damage anymore. Green has gone global: even coal is billing itself as “clean”. But green adverts don’t mean a thing: we’re not putting in an effort, Friedman says, we’re having a party. We have to change the way we live on a fundamental level, not just be content with throwing a can in the recycling bin instead of the trash and patting ourselves on the back. One idea Friedman proposes is an ‘energy internet’, interlinking all of our devices which require electricity, and having them coordinated by a home computer which itself is integrated with the computer system of the power company, so that usage can be managed to minimize waste.

 Today the global economy is slowing down: even China’s momentous growth is finally feeling friction. Some fear that forcing companies to limit themselves in order to maintain the environment will cause stagnation, even depression…but Friedman also demonstrates how ‘going green’ can make companies more financially resilient –  more efficient and stable – as well as competitive, for the company that finds a better way of doing things will  vault over their rivals.  Even so, Friedman acknowledges that we have done a poor job of helping these new companies get their start. Despite already having an easy time of it – abundant resources, little regulation – the old coal and oil companies enjoy comfortable subsidies to boot.  There’s nothing to be gained in propping them up,  especially when those financial resources could be put to work building a future. Friedman speaks for the need for strong, visionary leaders who are willing to face up to the impressive challenges of the future, and his account gives some reason for hope, as it is sprinkled with stories of political and business leaders who have revolutionized their sphere of influence.


Hot, Flat, and Crowded commends itself, but not without reservation. These are ideas everyone needs to consider, at least those who are contemplating being alive within the next few decade. Young people considering their future career plans or just settling into the responsibilities of adulthood and considering civic engagement are the ideal audience here: the “Millennial” have their work cut out for them, and Friedman makes a great many fundamentally good points. In “If It Isn’t Boring, It Isn’t Green”, for instance, he drives home the idea that sustainability has to be foundational, so much the background for what we do that we take it for granted. Right now green is just garnish — decor to entice us to buy one brand of bottled water instead of another. He advocates for “cradle to cradle” manufacturing, for instance, an idea also mentioned in Cheap: the High Cost of Discount Culture as the polar opposite of our current approach, which is to produce useless garbage (broken fiberboard bookshelves from Wal-Mart) from useful raw materials.Cradle to cradle manufacturing consists of making products which can be completely broken down and either reused by the part, or biodegradable to the point that their materials can break down and be reused atomically. Waste must be eliminated, not lessened. Similarly, Friedman suggests improving what we’ve got when we can: instead of throwing money at projects we hope might work, let’s first devote it toward maximizing the value of what we have. It reminded me of what the town of Littleton, Colorado has accomplished with its “economic gardening” approach.This last idea is especially key, because the amount of work Friedman is suggesting will consume an enormous amount of capital — capital we may no longer have, given the crisis of 2008. Friedman is writing for a popular audience, so naturally he hopes to offer hard ideas with a soft coating to help them go down easier, but the idea that China and India will be able to convert to “western” style consumerism simply isn’t believable to me. By 2050, our energy consumption alone is expected to double. That is a staggering prediction (by the Shell Energy Group).  Something’s got to give.

The great limitation of Hot, Flat, and Crowded is that Friedman still believes we change the outcome by altering what we consume. He praises new cars, for instance, which get better gas mileage, but ignores the fact that marginal improvements in efficiency don’t matter when the entire system is broken. Beyond Friedman lies the American landscape, a nation of parking lots and freeways in which everyone must drive.  Fuel efficiency is a band-aid on a bullet wound. However, the economic gardening approach which Friedman advocates can be used to transform suburban sprawl into communities with economic and social value.  Supposedly his later book, That Used to be Us, addresses transportation matters. If so, I look forward to reading it. In the meantime, I’m still glad to have found this. For its weaknesses, it seems a good starting point for people concerned about the shape of the human future here on planet Earth. The need for a revolution is also a good rallying point for Americans of all political persuasions, whether they are concerned by fiscal or social health. In this age of polarization, Americans need to find common ground in matters like this.

Related:
At One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future. Paul and Barbara Ehrlich
Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, David Owen 


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