Chain Reading

Wow. I would not have thought it possible for a book to be this badly written. The novel is set in contemporary (say, 1990) Venice, but the characters are portrayed as if they came out of a 19th century romance. Think Lawrence Sanders meets Danielle Steele.

Kennedy and Chavez first met in LA in 1959 when Chavez was organizing urban Mexican workers and working to register voters. It was not until 1966 that they formed their friendship, when Kennedy came to California to investigate the conditions of farm laborers, whom Chavez was organizing as part of the National Farm Workers Association, later to become the United Farm Workers union. Kennedy went out on a political limb, offering his whole-hearted support for legislation to gain economic and political rights for migrant farm workers.

The Widow is an extraordinary little novel. Written in 1940 and published in 1942, it is a dark and intense gem. Like the very best Hitchcock movies, this novel conveys a sense of inevitability, tragedy waiting to happen.

The introduction by Paul Theroux mentions that The Widow was published in the same year as The Stranger by Albert Camus. The Stranger went on to become part of the modern canon; The Widow has been mostly ignored or forgotten. At the time of publication, Andre Gide thought The Widow was the better book, and Theroux agrees. Certainly the characters are better and more fully drawn in the Simenon novel. It is not an abstract study, but a kind of cinema verite.

This edition is one of the New York Review reprints and is very well worth reading.

Then We Came to the End is author Joshua Ferris' first novel. It takes place in a Chicago advertising agency during a year of layoffs. Written mostly in the first person plural, it is a darkly comic look at office life and the inter-personal politics of privileged office workers. I found it to be reminiscent of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, with its rich humor and underlying sense of foreboding. The writing is often lyrical, with long languorous sentences describing life in a cube farm, like an urban version of Garrison Keillor.

The characters are clearly drawn and, with one deliberate exception, believable. They might or might not remind you of people you have worked with, but they are certainly plausible office-mates. You get to know them well enough that you have sympathy with them, even with the obnoxious bastards (and there are a couple of those).

This is a very entertaining book.

Very Special Relativity is by far the best quasi-technical treatment of special relativity that I have found. The author, Sander Bais, uses Minkowski diagrams on nearly every facing page to illustrate the facts and apparent paradoxes of special relativity. He provides geometrical demonstrations ('proofs' in a very restricted sense) of time compression and space dilation.

Most importantly, the consistent use of Minkowski diagrams gives the reader a good handle to remember and reproduce the results of relativity theory.

This is an excellent book for anyone with a grasp of elementary Euclidean geometry who wishes to get a better understanding of the special theory of relativity.

The Canon is exactly what its subtitle says: a tour of the basics of science. Natalie Angier is a science writer; that is, a writer who is a knowledgeable observer of science and who is able to get scientists to explain things in terms the rest of us might understand. Her writing style is very light, loaded with enthusiasm, and a bit chatty at times. At first I found the chattiness to be slightly off-putting, but when I got to the chapters on material that I didn't know much about (molecular biology and chemistry), the light-hearted distractions were actually helpful in keeping me focused on the main points.

There are chapters on scientific method, the scale of things, basic physics, chemistry, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. I found that the less I knew about a subject the more I enjoyed the material. So the chemistry and molecular biology chapters really stood out. I had not really learned anything new about cellular biology since high school (except for inferred 'facts' from reading newspaper and magazine articles about new drugs or new viruses). So I found the chapter on molecular biology especially interesting. She devotes many pages to the busy activity inside every cell, ranging from protein synthesis to cell division to communication with other cells. This is really interesting stuff.

Highly recommended.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is a tutorial on one approach to 'close reading', intended to help aspiring writers learn from great writers and great writing. For those of us who are not aspiring writers, the book provides alternative ways of reading and thinking about what we've read.

Each chapter considers one aspect of writing, from word choice, to sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, details, gestures, and concludes with an extended essay on what can be learned from Checkhov, a writer that Prose considers to be an exemplar of the writer's craft. The book is pedagogical, reflecting Prose's experience as a teacher of writing and literature. She offers encouragement to the would-be writer, and emphasizes that although she offers many 'rules', the writers she uses in her examples very often break those rules to achieve particular artistic purposes.

The central idea of the book is the importance of detail. The big things, plot, ideas, Vision (capital V) don't matter as much as the details: the small gesture that sets the tone for a scene, the detail of clothing that indicates social class or era or character. Such details require careful observation (vision with small v) on the part of both the writer and the reader.

Prose provides an appendix with an extensive reading list of books by the authors that she cites as examples (and others, I think, unless I simply missed some of the references).

If you haven't read anything by Francine Prose you are missing out. I've read Gluttony, part of the Oxford/NYU Seven Deadly Sins series, Household Saints, the novel she is most well known for, and The Blue Angel, an updated take on the original 1930s era German film.

Before we moved to Seattle, when we were visiting Seattle only about once per year, one of my obligatory stops was Metzger's Maps, a store that sells all kinds of maps and map-related products. Street maps, highway maps, historical maps, globes, topographical maps, satellite photos, atlases, travel books with maps included, magnifiers, transparent rulers, ... I loved that store, and I love maps. I can spend many hours poring over a Tokyo subway map, or a map of Paris, or an atlas now long out of date, or a map of an imaginary place, or an imagined map of a real place.

So when I saw Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, I thought I was in for a real treat. A history of maps! An analysis in historical context of maps through history, showing how they represent not only places and geography and politics, but also serve to put forward a point of view, an agenda. This book should have been a delight. Somehow, though, Vincent Virga managed to write a boring and discursive book about maps or, rather, a boring and discursive book in which maps serve merely as foil and backdrop to another agenda.

Nothing could have rescued this book, but there are some obvious problems with the design and layout that would have made it at least tolerable. There are, to its credit, maps on nearly every page. But each map is accompanied by just a short description intended, I think, to link back to the surrounding ocean of text. Much better would have been to have a sidebar discussion of each map, set off with contrasting background color, perhaps, or a border, clearly linked to that map. Instead, the book simply refers to the map by plate number, and the map itself is seldom described in any detail but is simply used as an exemplar of some more general point that the author is trying to make.

Virga had the entire resources of the Library of Congress at his disposal. I found myself wondering whether the maps he selected were really the best available. I wondered whether Virga even likes maps, whether he enjoys them for their own sake.

There were so many missed opportunities in this book. There were some ancient maps, among the first maps created in a number of ancient civilizations. In some cases they are nearly incomprehensible, serving as a reminder that maps require interpretation, that they are an abstraction representing particular ways of viewing the world. And if those world views are distant enough from our own, the map itself can serve as a kind of meta-map into the thought processes of the culture in which the map was created. But to gain that understanding itself requires interpretation, which Virga fails to do.

Besides the dismal failure to properly treat the maps that he selected for this book, it is also instructive to think about the maps that he omitted. For example, it would have been useful and interesting to consider modern computer-generated maps of the internet. He does show a highly stylized map of major interconnects around the globe, but he completely ignores the many excellent recent examples of clever ways to represent dense networks. Similarly he offers no treatment whatsoever of maps whose region-sizes are proportional to some demographic measure, heat-maps, mind-maps, or any of the recent visualization methods that can be considered as maps.

This book is a disappointment.

This is a comprehensive history of the CIA from its beginnings at the end of WWII to the present day, written using only on-the-record sources, many of which, surprisingly, became declassified only in the past few years. Much of the history is familiar: the toppling of democratic governments and their replacement with right-wing dictatorships around the globe (Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile); the incompetence, alcoholism, and madness at the top of the organization (James Angleton, Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles); the interference in democratic elections in western Europe; the torture facilities going back to the 50s and still in operation today; the domestic spying under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

Still, this is really interesting, frightening, enraging stuff. Definitely worth a read.

Sullivan itemizes a few dozen ways in which we are being fleeced by corporate capitalism; the hidden fees, the surcharges, the rule changes that lead to big jumps in interest rates, the installation charges that were conveniently not mentioned until after the fact. And he provides a 'toolkit' of approaches for eliminating or reversing those charges. All very useful, I'm sure.

Maybe more useful would be if Congress would re-assume its responsibilities, which it relinquished under the Reagan administration, and re-pass the usury and consumer protection laws that were either gutted or that didn't keep up with the 'structural changes' that have occurred in American capitalism during and since Reagan.