Books in the News

Posted on June 4, 2012 by smellincoffee
Every so often I see news articles which touch on subjects I’ve been reading about; I used to link to them in weekly review posts from time to time, but I may start doing it in this format.

Financially struggling schools nationwide are increasing the volume of advertising that children see in the halls, at football games and even on their report cards.
School administrators say that with a public unwilling to adequately fund K-12 education, they’re obligated to find new ways to keep teachers in classrooms.
“We know that we can’t continue to only look at ways to cut, we also need to be innovative about the assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue,” says Trinette Marquis, a spokeswoman for the 28,000-student Twin Rivers Unified School District in McClellan, Calif.


For Asphalt Nation  and Suburban Nation:
States eye new motorist taxes: miles you drive could cost you (USA Today)

States are looking for new ways of taxing motorists as they seek to pay for highway and bridge repair and improvements without relying on the per-gallon gasoline tax widely viewed as all but obsolete.
Among the leading ideas: Taxing drivers for how many miles they travel rather than how much gasoline they buy. Minnesota and Oregon already are testing technology to keep track of mileage. Other states, including Washington and Nevada, are preparing similar projects.
The efforts are being prompted by the fact that gasoline taxes no longer provide enough money to pay for roads and bridges — especially when Congress and many state legislatures are reluctant to increase taxes imposed on each gallon. The federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon hasn’t been raised in nearly two decades.

For The Shallows
Some caution texting is ruining art of conversation, Martha Irvine

Statistics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that, these days, many people with cell phones prefer texting over a phone call. It’s not always young people, though the data indicate that the younger you are, the more likely you are to prefer texting.And that’s creating a communication divide, of sorts – the talkers vs. the texters.Some would argue that it’s no big deal. What difference should it make how we communicate, as long as we do so?But many experts say the most successful communicators will, of course, have the ability to do both, talk or text, and know the most appropriate times to use those skills. And they fear that more of us are losing our ability to have – or at least are avoiding – the traditional face-to-face conversations that are vital in the workplace and personal relationships.“It is an art that’s becoming as valuable as good writing,” says Janet Sternberg, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York who is also a linguist.

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The Witch of Hebron

Posted on June 3, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Witch of Hebron
© 2010 James Howard Kunstler
334 pages

The future isn’t what it used to be. When the oil wells ran dry, the global economy and every nation built on petroleum collapsed. This is the dawn of a new age, one centered on self-sustaining towns with a close relationship to the soil — a world made by hand, where most of the population works in agriculture and the few which don’t are busy turning the resources that remain into usable goods; they are carpenters, cobblers,  James Howard Kunstler’s original novel in this world established the conditions and allowed us to visit the town of Union Grove as it slowly began rebuilding itself again in a most eventful summer. The Witch of Hebron begins in the early fall and culminates in Halloween, a fitting setting given the eerie tone of the book. The central character of The Witch of Hebron is Jasper Copeland, son of the town doctor, who flees after an act of  revenge that ends in death. Outside the confines of Union Grove, darkness awaits, hiding desperate poverty and grotesque individuals. Jasper starts off as a boy on the cusp of adolescence, and what little innocence he could call his own is ripped away when he is coerced into becoming the protege of a highwayman who refers to himself as an Honorable Bandit and insists on singing a ballad about himself to all his victims. The citizens of Union Grove are still trying to find themselves, adjusting slowly to their new environment. The adults have seen everything they took for granted destroyed; the rules seem to be broken. Anything might be possible — they cannot tell what beauties or horrors the future might hold.  Although Kunstler is not a man given toward the supernatural, it permeates this new world. Even the skeptical have been so shaken by all they have witnessed that they wonder if maybe there aren’t such things as devils and witches:  the industrialized world is dead, and with it the scientific thinking it encouraged. Kunstler develops their uncertainties and plays them to full advantage: the reader is left to sort through the ambiguities. Is this is a fantasy, or are Brother Jobe and the witch playing within the same rules as today’s mentalists, phone psychics, and witch doctors?

Even without the supernatural element, The Witch of Hebron‘s setting is unsettling, a mix of the old and new — the 18th century seems to have been reborn against the decaying background of the 20th. Characters’ dangerous journeys through the woods take place not on old dirt pig-trails, but heavily damaged country highways. One flaw in Kunstler’s world-building is that he resurrects too much of the old too quickly, particularly the language of occupations which have only recently been reborn: characters who are our contemporaries, living in the same world we live in now, are suddenly talking about sutleries and haberdasheries.  While these artisans would revive, would they refer to themselves in antiquidated ways? Would the new shoemaker not call himself a shoemaker, and not a cobbler? At least the town doctor does his own surgeries and isn’t recommending people to the barber in Old West style.  Perhaps it’s Kunstler’s way of emphasizing the divide between the world we’re expecting the future to become, and the world it might turn out to be.  Peak oil and the collapse of modern civilization are matters which Kunstler almost seems to anticipate with relish: they are the destruction of everything he despises, and that destruction will allow a better world to be created. But this isn’t wish-fulfillment: while his imagined world has its pleasures, the entire book is smeared with blood. It is a violent and disturbing world.

While the plot is a little thin (it’s more a season in the town’s life with a little journeys giving a thread of consistency), the setting continues to fascinate me.  Kunstler’s next work is nonfiction (Too Much Magic), but his third World Made by Hand novel should take place in the winter.

Related:
World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler
The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler
Lucifer’s Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

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Why We Get Sick

Posted on June 2, 2012 by smellincoffee

Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine
© 1994 Randolph M. Nesse, M.D; George C. Wiliams, Ph.D.
290 pages

Years ago I read an exceptional book on evolution by David Sloan Wilson. I say exceptional because it advocated for freeing evolution from being mere natural history: instead, Wilson argued that we should use it to understand all matters biological, including medicine. He used as his example the case of morning sickness in pregnancies, revealing research that illustrated that far from being a problem to be solved, morning sickness is an adaptive behavior which protects fetuses from foods that might be toxic to them in their highly vulnerable state. This application of evolution floored me, and so you can imagine my delight to discover an entire book on the subject, Why We Get Sick.

For the most part, Why We Get Sick fulfills my anticipation, though its authors are writing mostly to introduce the concept of evolution-informed medicine to the public. Though they share the insights that research with this focus have revealed already,  in any more instances they can only offer speculation, as Darwinian medicine is still quite new. The book covers general health, and explains the science of injuries, nutrition, and sickness. They establish early on that the Darwinian model can help us understand a given disease’s ultimate root, and avoid prolonging it in our clumsy efforts to dispels the symptoms. Often symptoms of a disease are actually the products of our own immune system, and if we disrupt those defenses the disease itself is given free reign. Fevers, for instance, are one of our body’s ways of disrupting an infection. It doesn’t matter to our genes if it makes us uncomfortable: they’re more concerned with killing the invaders. But the invaders have their own defenses, and they adapt a lot more quickly than we do — another reason some diseases to be here to stay, like the flu. The existence of multiple flu strains and our constant attempts to find new ways to kill them are evolution in action, the ongoing biological arms race.  Other physical ailments are hangovers of evolution, like our back problems and heel spurs;  walking upright on two feet is something our bodies are still getting used to. We haven’t even started adapting to novel environments, another element of disease: we have bodies accustomed to hardship now living in a world of abundant, cheap food and easy living. Little wonder we struggle with obesity and problems of physical inactivity. And then there are the genetic diseases and strangely adaptive byproducts of mental illnesses…

Why We Get Sick is compact, dense, and brimming with information: the authors are writing to introduce people to the viewpoint,  so there’s lot of enticing speculation. If one section doesn’t catch your interest, rest assured another will. I for one am quite excited about this novel approach to medicine, and if health or evolution are of any interest to you, this intersection of the two should prove fascinating.

Related:

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Suburban Nation

Posted on June 2, 2012 by smellincoffee

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
© 2000, 2010 Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
294 pages

Compare a modern American city to its European counterparts, or even an older American city, and the contrast is striking: American cities seem to have fallen apart, spewing their innards cross the landscape. Indeed, America has taken a radically abnormal approach to urbanism in the last fifty years, building out instead of up. Even while the city centers have been left to fall apart, ‘greater metropolitan areas’ – the mats of low-density sprawl surrounding those decaying centers – have grown. Why have Americans chosen to live this way, and what are the consequences? Suburban Nation is a citizen’s guide to understanding the new American landscape, a guide to what makes communities function, and a primer for setting our urban areas to rights again.

Duany and Zyberk, a team of urban planners, begin by breaking sprawl down into its five constituent parts. While traditional cities freely mix various kinds of buildings together – shops on a ground floor, apartments or offices above –  the suburban model separates  uses into separate pods. Anyone who lives in the United States can identify them; housing developments, commercial strips, office parks, and industrial parks.  These pods have no  direct connections to one another: navigating from one to the other necessitates traveling on a   ‘collector’ road, which is almost always congested because it is the sole carrier of traffic the pods are too widely spaced apart to make walking feasible or train transit efficient. Municipal buildings are the final element of sprawl, and like the rest are strictly separated and isolated except by cars.

Suburban Nation includes large, wide margins to the side of the text, making the book squarish instead of  rectangular. The authors use those margins for photographs, specifically sets of paragraphs, comparing traditional urban approaches to the new methods favored by modern planners. The contrast is potent, illustrating how wasteful and ugly suburban sprawl can be. But why has it become so popular?  The answer draws on numerous elements of American culture and history: the fact that most American cities came into being during the industrial age, and so Americans tend to associate them with the abuses of that period;  the coming of the automobile just as people were wanting to move away from the cities, the availability of wide open land for people to expand into, and government policies which saw in outward growth a foundation for the American economy – as in the Great Depression, when highway construction was used to put people to work. These elements each influence the other: people’s aversion to living near factories was the genesis of zoning codes, which segregated residential and industrial areas; the availability of automobiles allowed those zones to be far apart; and the generous government subsidies supporting the expansion of roads made such networks feasible. After World War 2, the FHA’s policies encouraged growth outside the cities, offering loans to families who wanted to buy new single-family homes but refusing any to people who wanted to move inside the cities. Banks followed suit.

            We left the cities in pursuit of a dream – a home of our own, far from the noise and pollution of the city. But if there’s a constant in history, it’s that no action is without unintended consequences. Not only did Americans manage to destroy their cities in a manner of decades (with the same money that Europeans were using to rebuild theirs), but suburbia has proven a fiscal nightmare. Its low densities don’t provide the tax base needed to maintain its infrastructure, and the widespread sprawl mires people in traffic, not only forcing everyone to drive everywhere but do so at a snail’s pace, wasting both time and gasoline. In addition, suburban sprawl fails to produce that vital element of human society, a community. There is no coherence in these suburban wastes, no ‘place’ for a community to coalesce around. Instead, people live apart from one another, and when they venture into society they only do so as part of a mass of strangers, either on the collector roads or in the big box stores.

            Since the mid-1990s, criticism of suburbia has been building steadily. As municipalies and states face budget crises and the threat of insolvency, more people are realizing the pattern of development we’ve been pursuing is no longer a viable option. Duany and Plater-Zyberk also offer steps we may take in getting a handle on these problems. There are ways we can redevelop some existing suburbs and make them livable, for instance, but the 60s-era zoning laws that make proper cities illegal need to be scrapped, as with subsidies which encouraged all that sprawl. Although restoring America’s urban fabric seems a vast undertaking, it is doable, and necessary.

Suburban Nation  is the comprehensive book on America’s landscape, and consequently a fundamental book for understanding many of our problems — civic, economic, and social. Its ideal audience is the average American citizen; though Duany and Plater-Zyberk are urban planners by profession, the third author Jeff Speck served to introduce planning concepts in layman’s terms — and even if the text didn’t make a particular idea clear, the illustrations do that amply.  This is in short a most excellent book. I doubt it will be rivaled by any others, but  there are more works in this genre (like Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier) which I intend to read in the future.

Related:

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So Sexy So Soon

Posted on May 30, 2012 by smellincoffee

So Sexy So Soon:  the New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids
© 2008 Diane E. Levine, Jean Kilbourne
226 pages

For me, the filthiest show on television is Toddlers and Tiaras. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned: I’m generally repulsed by the stereotypical idea of ‘sexiness’ in western culture — provocative clothes, made-up faces, and posed behavior. What attracts me to a woman is more an internal matter: I like character, strength, and self-respect. Perhaps I dislike the idea of sexiness because it’s only about sex, missing the real substance of human relationships altogether. In any case, as objectionable as I find sexiness in general, to see children attempting to invoke it is outright horrifying. Although parents and guardians tend to be protective of their children and have always worried about the declining morality of the younger generation, since time began, surely today’s problems are extreme enough to not be dismissed as the simple historical pessimism of the old.  We live in a world in which Victoria’s Secret markets g-strings to little girls, where the toys are hookers, and top 40 stations play songs like “I’m Sexy and I Know It”. This is a far cry from Aristotle kvetching about rebellious teenagers.  So Sexy So Soon is similar to Consuming Kids in that it examines the effects of advertising upon children. However, it is much more narrowly focused (on premature sexualization) and written with a greater emphasis on helping parents address the problem, primarily through communication.

The authors are not prudes: they acknowledge from the start that human beings are sexual creatures from the moment of our births. There is nothing the matter with sex or children being curious about the differences between men and women: has any generation of tykes not wondered where babies come from, or played the equivalent of “doctor”? The essential point of So Sexy so Soon is that advertisers are using sex to sell products. They’re not interested in educating children about sex, let alone guiding them towards sexual responsibility. Their only concern is manipulating children into thinking sexy is a concept they should be concerned about, and to realize it they must buy these products or listen to this music or wear this makeup. So what if kids grow up with warped attitudes toward sex, gender roles, and their own self-worth?  So what if little  children, in the process of trying to emulate adults, start talking about oral sex and grinding against one another?  Sex sells — even to kids.

Levine and Kilbourne both write with an eye toward helping parents. While moderating the home environment is crucial, they stress communication. At least one of the authors specializes in parent-child communication, and she advocates asking open-ended questions to find out what kids know, and letting them know that if they’re confused about the barrage of messages they receive through television, music, and the Internet, that they can express that confusion with an adult without being judged. Children are the victims of premature sexuality, not its creators. Political action is also necessary: marketers and companies must take responsibility, because the tide of garbage they produce in their quest to maximize profits is overwhelming parents, setting their children against them. That tide has been building since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan  deregulated child-targeted advertising. The same agency which allowed the problem to transpire should be held accountable for fixing it.

So Sexy So Soon is of eminent interest to parents; both it and Consuming Kids are eye-opening works that detail the problems of childhood advertising. I would read them together.

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Traffic

Posted on May 30, 2012 by smellincoffee

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
© 2008 Tom Vanderbilt
402 pages

 Take a brain adapted to move a bit over a hundred pounds of flesh at speeds under 20 miles per hour, and have it instead try to move several tons of metal through an environment which didn’t exist a hundred years ago, at speeds hitherto unimaginable. What happens? Well, we’ve only had a few decades to see, but so far the introduction of cars as the predominant form of transport has produced interesting results, like congestion and road rage. In Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do,  Tom Vanderbilt examines the psychology of driving, and learns some lessons about being human on the way.

Traffic is a dense book, more a survey than a piece with a specific point to make. There are nine chapters, each with a general theme — “How Traffic Messes With Our Heads”, “Why You’re Not as Good a Driver As You Think You Are” — and content spans the gamut from trivial to potent. Driving is such an expressly different experience than our brains evolved to take in that Vanderbilt believes  we find it difficult to be ‘human’ behind the wheel. Although driving seems like simply an act of moving around, we’re detached from the experience and from each other; drivers can’t communicate with one another beyond some simplistic forms of expression (the horn and the finger).  It’s also a tremendously complicated procedure: road systems are complex physical objects even without factoring in interacting with hundreds of other drivers, and we are expected to be able to respond to more stimuli per minute than nature would have ever expected to throw our way. On the potent side, this work could help concerned citizens create more sensible transit policies:  there’s an entire chapter on how the expansion of roads simply leads to the expansion of congestion. Traffic always swells to match the volume of roads available, so building more roads will only create more congestion. Creating a safer system can happen by making it appear more dangerous, by removing traffic lights, signs, and even road striping.  Humans seem to operate with a particular risk threshold, and when the environment becomes “safer” (thanks to lights, stripes, and so on), we drive more recklessly. This is why roundabouts are safer than four-way cross intersections regulated by traffic lights; when people are forced to take responsibility for themselves and use intelligence to navigate their environment, they pay more attention and accidents fall dramatically.  Counter-intuitive revelations abound in Traffic: bikers may be better off not wearing helmets, because cars take less care when passing a helmeted biker. Often we can arrive at a destination more quickly by slowing down and interrupting globs of congestion.

All told, an interesting book. While it may suffer from the generalized subject, there are some gems in here for  those interested in the subject.

Related:
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay

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Consuming Kids

Posted on May 29, 2012 by smellincoffee

Consuming Kids: the Hostile Takeover of Childhood
© 2004 Susan Linn
288 pages

To some, children are the joy of our lives; a refreshing source of curiosity, energy, youth, and joy. To others, they are nothing but grist for the mill. In Consuming Kids, child psychologist Susan Linn reveals the scope and consequences of the increasing commercialization of childhood, which effects more than just parents. It is a profoundly disturbing book; were I a parent its revelations would horrify me. But it demands to be read.
Consuming Kids opens at a conference in which children are the focus — or rather, the target, because this is a marketing conference, where the latest psychological insights into the minds of children are put to good use. “Teenagers are socially anxious; build on that.” These marketeers are family scientists as well: they cite a study about the importance of the Nag Factor, wherein the ‘pester power’ of children is tapped to manipulate parents into taking the kids to a given restaurant or frequenting a particular store. (That same study featured in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and provoked my interest in this subject.) Linn is a psychologist by profession: she cares for children and is sickened by the way that studies done with good intentions — to understand children’s motivations — are being perverted to use by companies which essentially profit by targeting vulnerabilities, like the aforementioned anxiety of teenagers or the fact that children cannot tell the difference between an advertisement and a factual program, let alone think critically about the content of said ads.
Linn devotes the bulk of the book to examining the consequences of child-targeting advertising: the promotion of consumerism among children, the idea that things will make them happy; the sinister way that they are conditioned to favor certain brands through cartoon figures and “role model” spokespersons like Ronald McDonald;  the rise of childhood obesity amid the expansion of advertising of candy and processed food to kids;  the use of violence and sex to capture attention; the rise of childhood addiction to alcohol and tobacco,  and the corruption of the public sphere, from PBS to the schoolroom. (The latter section makes this  work of interest to everyone, not just parents.)
I’ve read other works with a bone to pick with advertising of one kind or another, but I rarely enjoy them and never review them because prior reads have been so sloppily done; they consist mainly of one person idly complaining for paragraph after paragraph. This is certainly not the case with Linn, who tempers her passion with professionalism and focus. Her introduction immediately shares her sense of unease with the reader, and then she develops her many substantial criticisms. Hers is a convincing argument, not a rant, and it ends with impressive sections evaluating what our response should be. After examining advertising’s relationship to free speech, she then points out that this is a particularly nonpartisan issue. It doesn’t fit neatly into a party box: this kind of marketing has negative consequences for everyone save the firms targeting the kiddies. She then ends with a chapter detailing what we can do at home, in the community, in schools, in the marketplace, and as members of polities both large (the nation) and small (the city).
Consuming Kids is a magnificent piece of work; I would only fault it for being slightly dated with regards to references to advertising through the Internet and social media; most of Linn’s concern is advertising through television and the schools. Otherwise, she’s golden, offering a comprehensive criticism that is both passionate and moderate in tone. Highly recommended to parents and anyone concerned about the welfare of children and society.
Related:
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
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A History of the World in Six Glasses

Posted on May 24, 2012 by smellincoffee

A History of the World in Six Glasses
© 2006 Tom Standage
311 pages

A toast to human enterprise! Pick your poison — beer, wine, rum, tea, coffee, or Coca-Cola. Three are alcoholic, three are caffienated: all were the stuff of empires, and the story of those empires is one Tom Standage is intent on telling. He begins with beer and wine in Mesopotamia and Egypt and moves to wine in Greece and Rome. The focus then shifts to Europe and the rum-fueled Age of Discovery that saw European nations expand across the world and remake it in their image. While distilled spirits ran the high seas, the intellectual minds of Europe stayed keen with coffee from Arabia. British and American imperialism are charted through Asian tea and Coca-Cola, respectively.

The result is light popular history that succeeds based on the author’s lively tone and the perspective, which takes the lofty subject of World History and brings it down to the tavern table, supplying readers with both interesting tales about their beverage of choice as well as a greater appreciation for the role those drinks played in world history; some of the connections Standage reveals surprised even me. The importance of each drink varies; some are material, like the beer which was tied to agriculture, the basis of society, and the tea which drove British foreign policy and led to the opium wars. In the case of wine and coffee, the relevance is more ethereal: Standage champions wine-wet symposiums as an instrument of Greek excellence.  The section on Coca-Cola is an odd duck, the only one to mention a brand name. Perhaps this is because Coca-Cola succeeded like no other brand,  but it still sits oddly, and its chapters almost read like history with product placement. Standage is delightful to read, but his narrative isn’t quite as thorough as I might have liked.There’s no mention given to Coca-Cola’s connection to the spread of fast food restaurants, for instance, though I had no idea how instrumental the Second World War was to its success.

Light, but fun; I’ll probably be trying Standage’s similar work, An Edible History of Humanity.

Related:
The Coffee Trader, David Liss
Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, Wayne Curtis

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Five Years of Reading

Posted on May 24, 2012 by smellincoffee

This Week at the Library is now five years old!  On May 21st, 2007, I began writing about my weekly visits to the library as a way to keep my mind active while I waited to start university in the fall. At first I did it strictly to write and interact with my bookish friends in the real world, but as the years have passed the main audience consists of people I’ve never met! I never expected such a thing.  I’ve been looking forward to this post for a few months now, but the actual day caught me offguard. This Monday marked the five years in full, and I remember speaking with one of my coworkers at the library about our book blogs; I mentioned to her that I would be celebrating an anniversary of sorts “sometime this week”.

I’m not altogether sure how to commemorate five years of blogging. Part of me — the part that posts pie charts at the end of every year — wants to go back and produce a full count of every single book I’ve read and break everything down into genres for my own amusement, but frankly I think that might be a little crazy on my part. Considering that I read at least over a hundred books a year, I assume the count is in the area of 600-800; the blog itself has over a thousand posts. I’d also venture to guess that nonfiction holds a slight edge over fiction.

The journey thus far has certainly been rewarding. Taking time to reflect on books in reviews or comments allows me to appreciate them all the more, especially as I read multiple books on the same subject and draw connections between titles. I’ve also made a few friends in the blogging community!  Of course, the blog has changed through the course of these five years — first migrating from MySpace to Blogger, then changing from a weekly review to a series of individual posts. In the past couple of years I’ve also taken to participating in various little games like Top Ten Tuesdays, Teaser Tuesday, and Booking through Thursday. Also, in the beginning most of my books actually came from me wandering around in the library and looking for items on the shelves. These days I get a lot of reccommendations from bloggers commments or reviews,  and Amazon’s “Related” section has been a boon.

To wrap things up, a list of the fifty books I remember most from this span. These are the books which have really stuck with me. For the sake of space, I’m not going to gab about all of them, but feel free to ask questions in the comments.

1. The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling. I never wanted to read this series! “It’s too popular,” I said, and fantasy wasn’t a genre of much interest to me. But I had a half-dozen friends who insisted I try at least the first book, and so help me if succumbing to peer pressure wasn’t one of the best things I did in this case.  I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for the first time in August 2007, and within a couple of months I had finished the series…only to re-read it again that Christmas. Harry’s move to Hogwarts coincided with my move to university, a similar experience for both of us.

2.  The  works of Francis and Joseph Gies (social histories set in the middle ages; most notable book for me was Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel about scientific and technological advance in the epoch.)

3. The Know-It All and The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs.
4. Universe on a T-Shirt, Dan Falk; Theories for Everything, various authors
5. Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade (anthropology)
6. The Earth’s Children series, Jean M. Auel. Ice-age historical fiction about Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Lots of details about life in those days, not to mention awkward passages consisting of caveman sex.
7. The Stand, Stephen King
8. A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut.  I’ve read Vonnegut every year since finding this first book.
9. Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan. I got into Sagan in 2006; his Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and Demon-Haunted World are favorites.
10. The Assault on Reason, Al Gore. Improbably, this book made me think criticially about the media for the first time.
11. The Influence of Air Power Upon History, Walter J. Boyne. I’ve never actually read this book in full, but most of my university papers cite it as a primary source. I can’t very well not mention it: we spent many a weekend together, Boyne and I..
12. The Hundred Years War: England in France,  Desmond Seward. A primary source in a couple of papers, not to mention very enjoyable reading.
13. The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. I remember reading this during Thanksgiving 2007. Those who know me know how  influential it has been on my life, igniting my interest in Stoicism.
14. Harry Turtledove. I’d read Turtledove before moving to university, but a neighbor had his entire Southern Victory set in his dorm room, and as we became friends he let me borrow them. I’ve been reading Turtledove’s alternate histories ever since.
15. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer. A novel about a boy who ages in reverse; haunting.
16. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
17. The Blood of Flowers, Anita Amirrezvani .
18. The Origin of Species | Darwin’s Ghost | Evolution for Everyone.
19.  Building a Bridge to the 19th Century, Technopoly, Amusing Ourselves to Death; Neil Postman.
20.  The Art of Living, Sharon Lebell. This built on my interest in Stoicism that started with The Meditations, and deepened it. I’ve since read other titles in the theme, like Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, and William Irvine’s The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.
21. A Life of Her Own, Emile Carles (related: Red Emma Speaks and The Communist Manifesto)
***22***.  Isaac Asimov.  2007 was the Year of Asimov for me:  I read his short story collections and novels obsessively. I’ve since moved on to his nonfiction, and have an entire bookcase devoted to nothing but Asimov’s works. He has charmed me utterly.
23. Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen
24. Robert Harris (Fatherland, Pompeii, Cicero trilogy)
25. The Art of Happiness, Tenzin Gyatsao
26. The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton
27. God’s Problem, Bart Ehrman
28. Howard Zinn
29. Erich Fromm
30. In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed, Carl Honore
31. Steven Saylor’s Roma sub Rosa series
31. Greg Iles’ The Quiet Game
32. Max Barry (Syrup, Company, Jennifer Government)
33. The Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket
34. Walden, Henry David Thoreau;  Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
35. Lamb, Christopher Moore. Moore in general is deucedly funny.
36. The Iron Heel; The Sea-Wolf, Jack London.
37. The Horatio Hornblower series, C.S. Forester
38.  The Destiny Trilogy, David Mack
39. 1491: New Revelations about the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann.  An absolute staggering read, revealing how complex native societies were before their populations were reduced so drastically — 90% — by diseases from Europe. Mann described the American wilderness as widowed, not virgin, and opened my eyes to how dramatically societies had changed the landscape of the Americas before their downfall.
40.  Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese
41. The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
42. African Exodus,  Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie
43. Bernard Cornwell.  If 2007 was the Year of Asimov, 2011 was the Year of Cornwell.
44. Weapons of Satire, Mark Twain
45.  The Revolutionist,  Robert Littell
46. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee;  The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner
47. Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community,  Robert Putnam
48. The Story of Civilization series, Will Durant
49.  Asphalt Nation, Fast Food Nation, and Suburban Nation
50. …the best is yet to come?

It pains me to leave so many other good books unlisted, but these are the fifty authors and titles which have made the deepest impact so far. Honorable mention goes to Tom Holland’s history books, since I just remembered him and I don’t know who to delete to make room for him. And Sudhir Venkatesh! How could I forget Gang Leader for a Day? Oh, and Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee —

…I’d better stop before I get carried away.  To those who have been with me these last five years, thanks for the conversations we’ve had both here and on your blogs. I anticipate more such conversations in the future:  I don’t see wrapping this little hobby up any time soon, and I’ve got a great big list of interesting books to read in the future. Happy reading, everyone!

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

The Shallows

Posted on May 23, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains
© 2010 Nicholas Carr
276 pages

How many tabs do you have open right now? Neil Postman thought we were undoing ourselves with a distracting and busy fusion of information and entertainment back in the mid-1980s when he penned several works on technology and society. As Nicholas Carr demonstrates in this curious blend of science and cultural criticism, Postman’s fears hadn’t begun to be realized  At least since the 1990s, people have referred to the Internet as an information superhighway, but the metaphor is no longer apt; it is inadequate to describe the tide of information that sweeps over us any time we visit a website, and the idea of that tide being directed in a way comparable to a highway is simply false. Websites today brim with energy; they are positively alive with interactive features and an abundance of links to other sections of the site. We do not even need to sit down in front of a desktop computer to be touched by all this activity; it reaches out and grabs at our attention through cellphones, tablets, and now sunshades. We can praise the internet for allowing access to so much information at once, but how are our brains responding to it?  Carr argues that while we view the rise of the internet as progressive, in an important way we are reverting.

He builds his argument in three stages; first, introducing readers to the ways that technology can alter our thinking. He uses the rise of print culture as his primary example, demonstrating how it allowed for the growth of a rich intellectual tradition. As we became readers, we became thinkers, spending long hour processing the dense amount of information in a given text, mulling over it in our minds — considering implications and incorporating the ideas into our very minds. Neil Postman covered the cultural aspects of this, but Carr complements it with neurology, catching readers up to speed on neuroplasticity.Our brains never stop changing: throughout our lives, our actions inform our brains where to invest its limited resources; as we practice new skills, like music or using computers, we become better at them. The catch is that those mental resources are limited: as we grow in one area, we will tend to shrink in another. Brainspace dedicated to older skills that we no longer use shrinks. That is the essential problem Carr is concerned with: as we grow accustomed to dealing with the internet’s wealth of bite-sized chunks of information, we’re losing that deep-reading ability. That ability was an anomaly in human history; it allowed us to concentrate and digest fully a given set of information; now, we are regressing, losing that refined focus. In addition, we are growing ever more dependent on the internet to store information, to memorize for us. In regards to trivia, esoteric, or other information which we only need occasionally, this is a bonus; it allows our brain to concentrate on more important matters. But we stand in danger of  not being able to rely on ourselves to retain working knowledge; how many of us know our friends’ phone numbers anymore?

Carr is not a pessimist with regards to the internet, but he does believe we may be losing something vital in our zeal to be ever-connected. He closes by advocating for a more moderate approach: by all means, let us use the internet’s interconnectivity to our advantage, but at the same time he urges us to strive to focus on maintaining old skills of memory and reflection.

Carr definitely offers food for thought. Barring some world-changing disaster, the Internet is here to stay. I do not see the trend toward interconnectivity tapering off, let alone stopping. It will continue to change our lives, and as we use it, it will continue to shape our minds and behavior. We should be mindful of the dynamic which exists between us and our tool use, conscience that our brains are being rewired with every use. Ultimately individuals will have to determine how comfortable they are relating to that network. The Shallows is important to consider, though I would recommend Postman’s works for the media-mind connection. There are numerous other works about the role of the internet in our lives which I personally intend on reading, like Sherry Turkel’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powell.

Related:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
Technopoly, Neil Postman
The Shallows review at Technology Liberation Front

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