Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

by Mary Wollstonecraft

I read about this in a zine, Hyena in Petticoats, about M.W. and the zine author's obsession with her. I suppose it helps that I used A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a major source for a college paper ("Teaching Madness," about the fate of well-educated young women in a society unprepared to accept them). Anyway, Wollstonecraft was a feminist pioneer, a real piece of work, and totally ahead of her time (and yet, being only human, she went a bit bonkers over a married man).

We think of Scandinavia as so civilized these days — maybe even more civilized, in some ways, than the rest of Europe and North America — so it's interesting to read an old-timey English woman's thoughts on traveling in what was then the wild, barbarian north. It's also quite interesting to consider how a generally progressive intellectual can still be so totally backwards in some ways. Makes one wonder what the future will find lacking in today's liberalism.

Cold: adventures in the world's frozen places

 by Bill Streever

I love this kind of book (literary nonfiction), but this particular one is only a moderately good example of the genre. Nothing in particular is wrong with the author's informative and evocative exploration of coldness, combining thorough knowledge with pleasant story-telling, but it just isn't cream of the crop. I'll give it a solid B-minus.


 

The Strangest Man: the hidden life of Paul Dirac, mystic of the atom

by Graham Farmelo

Somehow I got the idea that this guy, like Alan Turing, a tortured genius of the same era, was gay. I kept waiting through the whole book for the big reveal. He certainly was awkward enough with women. Alas, no dice.

This would be a tricky book to recommend. As a biography, it's well-written and holds the attention, even while being quite long. The author provides good insight into the unspoken and the strange, of which there's plenty in the life of a mathematical savant who surely would be diagnosed on the "autism spectrum" in modern day. You get a good sense of the history and politics of nuclear science around WWII, and the author consistently connects Dirac's early training in engineering and technical drafting to his uniquely visual and instinctual approach to subatomic physics, a realm of almost pure theory and maths. Unless you find all those things interesting, you'll likely have trouble slogging through; if you do, you'll be in hog heaven.


 

Atlas of Remote Islands: fifty islands I have never set foot on and never will

by Judith Schalansky

Holy-moly this book is awesome! I love to geek out over maps, but I'm often frustrated by the clutteredness of a lot of modern atlases, with so many roads especially but also too many small towns and other unimportant things. I probably shouldn't post this on the internet and let someone steal the idea, but I'd love to make an atlas that only shows the interesting stuff, just what's relevant to history or politics, exceptional geographical features, etc. — which is really just a way to introduce the description of this Atlas of Remote Islands as just nearly the exact oppposite of that idea, in some ways, and precisely the same in others, but correspondingly and contrastingly equally awesome in its own way(s). Each map provides a wealth of detail, but not every detail, and the details it does provide are somewhat estoric or anecdotal, and always delightfully interesting. You can tell the author really treasures maps and put a lot of that love into this book. If you dig maps, you need to read this book, and maybe even own it. The book itself as an object is beautifully designed, a true pleasure to hold and to read. It's on a very short list of books I'm actually interested in buying and keeping forever.


 

Makeshift Metropolis: ideas about cities

 by Witold Rybczynski

I've always thought the best part of Sim City is laying out the streets and water lines, deciding where to put the airport and the city hall. Did you know you can sort of cheat and make the game let you do all the building and landscaping you want without having to pay and without turning on the clock? I could do that for days and days.... I also have a thing for architecture and design in general, so I very much enjoyed this book about city planning. It's amazing how much historical overview and analysis, theory and practice, speculation and suggesting the author crams into a rather short book. Engaging and easy to understand, informative but not pedantic, this book is a real pleasure to read.

The author lives and teaches in Philadelphia, so it was additionally gratifying for me to read the many references to my home city's history, architecture and design (even the bad examples).


 

Free for All: oddballs, geeks, and gangstas in the public library

by Don Borchert

Having worked in a public library for 10 years, I entertained but not surprised by the shenanigans related by the author, himself a longtime library employee. I was more amazed by how different to mine were his library's circulation policies. Either way, it's a pleasant romp and a quick read, and you don't need to be a public employee to enjoy it.

Mirroring people: the new science of how we connect with others

by Marco Iacoboni

This book is very science-y but not too technical. Also, don't read this if non-lethal neurological animal experimentation will upset you.

It's about the discovery and study of "mirror neurons," which discovery has implications for the study of communication via facial expression; autism spectrum disorders; learning and cognition; physical coordination and proprioception; to name a few. Basically, in addition to the neurons that fire when you actually do something (move your hand, for example) you also have a set of mirror neurons that go off when you think about moving your hand or see someone else moving their hand. In a sense, these neurons allow you to practice mentally various movements. In terms of empathy, they are a step beyond simply imagining another person's feelings because your brain is actually physically pretending to have the same emotions by mentally mimicking the other person's facial expressions and body language.

More to it, of course, but that's kind of the nutshell version. Very interesting and not too long, so no need to be intimidated by the science-ness.

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters

by Louis Begley

Another book I didn't read in its entirety. I wanted to know more about the Dreyfus Affair (in which anti-Semitic prejudice led to a Jewish officer in the French military being convicted of treason in a sham trial and wrongfully imprisoned for many years), but I didn't realize the "why it matters" angle was going to relate the historical event to contemporary legal issues in the so-called war on terror. So the parts I read, about the incident itself, are actually more detailed than I needed, and the book lacks the larger historical perspective I wanted.

50 paintings you should know

by Kristina Lowis and Tamsin Pickeral

I grabbed this book because the host of my trivia night knows a lot of art history, so it sometimes comes up in the questions. I didn't read the whole thing, mostly scanned for names (of painters and of paintings) and tried to get a sense of the chronology. I was surprised not to find some paintings I'd expected, but I suppose it's pretty damn difficult paring the list down to 50, and not every famous painting could be included. Plus, some famous art is rather crap, and I imagine the authors included/exclued some less famous works that happen to be better exemplars of a style or movement or whatever. Final verdict: interesting but kind of dull for me.

The Sociopath Next Door: the ruthless versus the rest of us

by Martha Stout

I heard a bit of this book when a friend was playing it in her car. Intrigued, I ultimately decided to read the whole thing, in part because I'm convinced my brother is among the one in 25 people who have no conscience at all. I can't profess to know anything about the author's credentials and/or status in the scientific community, but she says she specializes in helping people recover from traumas and has counseled many people who have been damaged by their relationships with sociopaths. This book is an eye-opener, but I recommend taking it with a grain of salt. Psychiatry is a tricky business, and explaining it to a lay-person is particularly dicey, prone to over-simplification, exaggeration and over-generalization. A pretty quick read, totally worth if if you have mentally ill or just plain mean person in your life — which you almost certainly do if these statistics are accurate.

How to Become a Scandal: adventures in bad behavior

by Laura Kipnis

In college, I was never sure exactly what communications majors were studying. Then again, as someone who considered getting a graduate degree in semiotics, I'm no stranger to the vague, subjective and useless. Well, maybe not useless, but not practical. Cultural critique and analysis has its uses, but one can easily argue it's a luxury few can afford — a sort of First World problem or white male neurosis, if you will. In other words, right up my alley.

Anyway, I didn't realize until I was starting this book that I've also read another book by Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic, which I found to be very incisive and thought-provoking, in particular when she questions whose interest is really served by monogamy and the so-called nuclear family. With queers fighting for legal recognition of their families and straights divorcing in droves, one does wonder, or should.

Although not entirely without humor, that book is more serious than this newer one. In drolly reviewing four major meltdowns by public figures (or at least people who became public figures due to their extraordinary flame outs), the author explores related issues plaguing modern American life: media saturation, fame obsession, compulsive confession and a total absence of self-shaming. Funny and quick, I recommend it.

Sex at Dawn: the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality

by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

This is a very interesting and highly readable book with important things to say. It is not, however, an important book. I was disappointed, even when entertained, by the authors' flippancy. I'm sure the joshing tone was meant to make science more palatable to the masses, and it probably succeeds in that respect, but it has the unfortunate side-effect of providing fodder to their critics — those in the same field, as well as those who mistrust the whole enterprise of evolutionary psychology.

I don't want to get bogged down in that debate, so with as little judgement as I can manage, I'll tell you: this book uses comparative biology, cultural anthropology and other disciplines to speculate about the socio-sexual behavior of primitive (but, evolutionarily speaking, relatively recent) nomadic hunter-gatherer humans, and then shows how the behaviors for which we are evolutionarily suited are at odds with contemporary social and sexual mores and traditions. Chief among their conclusions, perhaps, is that humans are not evolved for monogamy, which might have some bearing on the number of marriages that end in divorce.

I'll leave it at that. If you want to know how and why they came to that conclusion, read the book.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake                     
      and
How Did You Get This Number

by Sloane Crosley

I never got around to writing up Cake, and now I've read the author's second book, which is in development to become a show on HBO. She worked in publishing before being published herself, so I'm sure she knew a thing or two to grease the skids, but stuff is pretty good. I'm not saying that her collections of humorous essays wouldn't have been published (or made into television shows) if she weren't an industry insider, just that they're not really the caliber of David Sedaris or Sara Barron. Or me, for that matter; I'm quite sure I could do better, even though I probably never will.

But, hey, if you like the short funny personal essay genre, go for it. You won't be truly dazzled, but you won't regret it.

Logicomix: an epic search for truth

by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou
with Alecos Papadatos (art) and Annie Di Donna (color)

Abso-frickin'-lutely amazing! But I'm afraid if I tell you what it's about, you probably will think it sounds really boring...

This graphic novel tells the life story of philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell, who sought a solid logical foundation for mathematics and instead discovered a paradox that demonstrates the impossibility of describing, or even locating, such a bedrock from within the system of math, set theory and formal logic. Amazing, right? I mean, have you ever asked yourself whether "the set of all sets that don't contain themselves" contains itself? Of course it doesn't, because if it did, then it wouldn't, in which case it would, because it couldn't... Perhaps there's a reason so many logicians go insane (or why the insane are attracted to the study of formal logic).

Just like Russell's paradox, this book is self-referential, with segments on how the authors and illustrators worked on constructing the story, discussion of the meaning of the story and of story-telling itself, and even an allegory of sorts relating to the Greek tragedy The Eumenides, the last play in the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus.

Yellow Dirt: an American story of a poisoned land and a people betrayed

by Judy Pasternak

Interesting, yes. Depressing, oh hell yes. Good book, though, and quite readable.

The author, an L.A. Times reporter, in this book expands her original series of articles investigating the still-lingering tragic effects of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation in the southwest United States. So, yeah, Native Americans... no big surprise they've been effed over, and effed over hard by our government, absolutely derelict in its duty (by treaty) to protect the welfare and interests of the Navajo. First, during the Manhattan Project, the government pretty much did the effing themselves, all but stealing ("renting") the mineral rights and then employing Navajo as miners with no protective equipment, and doing nothing to contain the spread of contaminated soil, dust and water. Then, of course (right?), the government skipped town and turned a blind eye for years to the general injustice and pollution in the first place and to the continuing misbehavior of the private companies that began competing for the precious resource with no thought to the people living on top of it (and in some very tragic cases, living in houses made of it).

Worst part? How recently this bullshit was hapenning (into the '80s for sure) and how little has really been done to redress the harm, even though more positive action has been taken in the last decade than in the previous 40 years of Kafka-esque bungling, evasion and disavowal/shirking of responsibility.

The Professor and the Madman: a tale of murder, insanity and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary

by Simon Winchester

Sounds like a really nerdy book, and I have admitted to being somewhat nerdy, but this book is surprisingly exciting. I really tore through it and had trouble putting it down when I needed to. Seriously, not dry or boring at all. The subtitle hints at the sort of intrigue that gives the book a bit of thriller-iness, but it's also quite interesting to read about the who's and how's and the sheer humungousness of the creation of the OED. And I really swear it's not boring! It's like a really good episode of Nova or History Detectives, with a dash of Poirot. Probably among the Top 10 literary nonfiction books I've ever read, I recommend it highly.

Secret Historian: the life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade 

by Justin Spring

I don't remember how I stumbled across Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-corner Punks, 1950-1965 by Samuel M. Steward, but I do remember the picture on the cover:





Um, how could I not read that?

Anyway, I think I heard the author of this exhaustive biography on Fresh Air and got interested in reading more about the unusual life of the real Professor Sparrow (his nom de needle during his tattooing years). I was pulled in right away and became excited to read about the fun, sexy times of a guy who kept a Stud File (including, in some cases, forensic "samples") with deets on every one of the many hundreds of dudes he hooked up with. Of course, he was also a writer of poetry, novels and erotica; a friend of Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein; a collaborator and chum of the infamous Kinsey; an artist; a compulsive collector and record-keeper; and a capable self-analyst.

The book is quite long for a bio of a non-famous person, and does drag just a bit in some places, but it really is quite engaging throughout. Perhaps not very easy to recommend to someone you don't know fairly well, but it is written so as not to be titillating and it is a fascinating glimpse into the largely undocumented demimonde of pre-Stonewall gay life.

Through the Language Glass: why the world looks different in other languages

by Guy Deutscher

I call shenanigans! After detailing the Sapir-Whorf debacle and cautioning against unfounded assumptions generally, and after the caveat that there is much we do not know about brain function and physiology, this linguist goes and says:

"[I]t becomes clear that when the brain has to decide whether two colors look the same or not, the circuits responsible for visual perception ask the language circuits for help in making decision, even if no speaking is involved. So for the first time, there is now direct neurophysiologic evidence that areas of the brain that are specifically responsible for name finding are involved with the processing of purely visual color information."

Now, I'm no neurophysiologist, but I know a thing or two. Even overlooking the weak "it becomes clear" excuse for an explanation, I immediately thought of at least one good reason that language areas of the brain would fire while a person is analyzing visual input about colors, and it has nothing at all to do with the visual circuits "asking for help" from the language circuits!

Anyway, now I've got that off my chest.... I really liked the first third of this book, in which the author talks about the mystery of the seeming absence of color descriptions in ancient texts, and runs through the history of color naming and color perception ideas (among others) in linguistic studies. I don't want to go into too much detail about the trail of breadcrumbs he's trying to lay out, but suffice it to say after an intriguing launch he started losing me halfway through, and by the end I was thoroughly disgusted and so ready for the book to be over.

Dreams from the Monster Factory: a tale of prison, redemption and one woman's fight to restore justice to all

by Sunny Schwartz with David Boodell

I have a weird and mostly unanalyzed fascination with prison. (Could it be a gay sort-of-fetish thing?) Anyway, this book doesn't have any sexy bits, like the HBO series Oz, but it's a pretty good read. The author worked in jails in San Francisco, bringing in educational opportunities, anger management classes, and other programs to prepare inmates to rejoin society. Sure, criminals are there to be punished not coddled, but since very nearly all of them will eventually be released, and given the very high rates of recidivism and re-incarceration, it makes sense to use the opportunity to help them. If they're just corralled and left to stew in their own juices, fighting with one another and still being criminals inside the jailhouse, they'll emerge even more bitter and screwed up, more violent and maladjusted. The strength and energy of the author's personality and odds-beating positivity make an engaging story of a subject that could easily be a real downer.

String Too Short to Be Saved

by Donald Hall

A co-worker once mentioned the tale of the guy who was cleaning out his grandparents' attic and found a small box neatly labeled "string too short to be saved" — because, even if it's too short to be saved, there's no sense throwing it out until you have a whole box of it, right? As someone with mild hoarding tendencies (but with moon in Virgo, so my shit would organized), I was intrigued, had occasion to tell other people and laugh about it, and mentioned it every now and then to my co-worker.

Though I'd thought the story might be apocryphal, I eventually got around to reading the book, which is a collection of reminiscences of the author's boyhood summers on his grandfather's farm in New Hampshire. The stories are old-fashioned in a sweet and comforting way, and the author's nostalgia (not without ambivalence) for the simple and rustic life rubbed off and gave me a sort of false nostalgia. I don't think he overly romanticized the older folks' vanishing way of life, but I can see how some people might find this book sappy. I rather enjoyed it, though; it was especially nice to read in the woods at the river's edge on a sunny afternoon.