We're posting
book reviews, mostly, but also Critical Pages on politics, society and
culture. If you're besotted by books, this may be the place for you.
The navigation links are over there on the far left. We're not finicky about how we post stuff on his home page, so fresh material
sometimes is in the lower section. (The photo up top was actually taken
outside in real snow. Our dauntless photographer went to a lot of trouble to
set it up outside on a rare day that had not only freshly fallen snow but
also bright sunshine, and we're really disappointed that it looks fake.)
The memoir, Angel at the
Fence,
by Herman Rosenblat, has been withdrawn from
publication by its publisher, Berkeley
Books, a part of the Penguin Group.
What made the memoir so engaging to early readers, including Oprah Winfrey,
was that Mr. Rosenblat claimed that as a young boy in a Nazi concentration
camp he met his future wife who, disguised as a Christian farm girl, used to
throw apples to him over the camp’s barbed wire fence. And, according to the
author, the pair met again twelve years after the war in Coney Island. None
of that is true. What’s particularly terrible in this instance is that Mr.
Rosenblat was indeed imprisoned in the Schlieben concentration camp and, in
fact, his future wife was hidden on a Christian farm, but it was 310 miles
away from the concentration camp. The author had embellished his story to
make it more interesting, more popular.
The New York Times quoted a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory as
saying, “There’s no need to embellish, no need to aggrandize. The facts are
horrible, and when you’re teaching about horrible stuff you just have to lay
out the facts.” Gabriel Sherman's fine extensive article about this matter
appeared in
The New Republic .
We read in Genesis that at one time there was only one
people and they all spoke the same language; that is, till the day
when
God noticed they were building a tower whose top would reach to heaven. Then
God, acting in his usual way, immediately confounded their speech so they
couldn’t understand one another and couldn’t cooperate on the tower, or on
anything else, and for good measure he scattered these multitudes and their
different languages over the face of the earth. John McWhorter believes only
part of this story. In his sparkling and knowledgeable book,
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, McWhorter
postulates that at the beginning of human time there was, in fact, one
people speaking only one language. He surmises Homo Sapiens arose in only
one place, probably Africa, and spread out from there. As to when our
ancestors began speaking, it may have been right at the start, 150,000 years
ago, or maybe 115,000 years later when our species really took off. If you
like reading and like language, then check out the lively story of the
development of that single language into the bewildering variety we see on
earth today, check out out our review of
The Power
of Babel.
Publishers Weekly, the magazine of the book industry, has named
Jeff Bezos, the man of the year for 2008. Jeff Bezos is not a
writer or publisher, but he is the world's most astonishing seller of book
-- the man founded
Amazon
It’s fair to say that most book sellers, whether they’re big
acreage stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders or cozy shops like your local
book store, all hate and fear the way Bezos does business. The smaller shops
are being devoured by the bigger stores, and the bigger stores are being
eaten by Amazon. Publishers have an ambivalent attitude toward Amazon.
Larger publishing houses use Amazon as a convenient way to distribute their
wares nationwide, day or night. Smaller independent presses find that the
hefty percent that Amazon takes from each sale reduces the publisher's meager profit
close to zero and, indeed, some small publishers —
though they must be on Amazon to maintain credibility —
loose money on every Amazon sale.
But Jeff Bezos most recent innovation, the one that book industry
executives, book sellers, readers and authors are all watching is the
Kindle. The Kindle is Amazon’s wireless reading device. It has what Amazon
calls “electronic paper” — “a sharp,
high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper.” Because it’s
wireless, the reader can be on any wireless network and order books directly
from Amazon and have them “auto-delivered” to the device in less than one
minute. Amazon says it has more than 215,000 such e-books available,
including more than 100 of the 112 current New York Times best
sellers. Thus far the Kindle is doing well; Amazon says it has sold more
than 40,000, and despite the $359 price tag the device is constantly out of
stock. We’ve come a long way since Gutenberg. Whether or not the book will
remain a bound sheaf of pages printed on paper or will change into a
hand-held electronic device still remains to be seen.
Wise up! Get smart about the market! You might
want
to take a look at The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit
Crises of 2008 and What it Means by George Soros. The author is an
immigrant self-made billionaire, a former hedge fund manager turned global
philanthropist — he knows what he's talking
about. Mostly he's talking common sense, which (alas!) makes him a rarity in
the world of finance. His radical beliefs that markets don't always tend
toward stability and that we never know enough to predict the future of
markets don't look so radical these days. After reading Soros's book you
might not always make a killing on the stock market, but you may be a little
wiser. Get a head start by clicking on
The
New Paradigm for Financial Markets
In the 1980s Chinese archaeologists exploring the southern rim of the Tarim Basin -- a vast inhospitable desert region, on
the outer edges of which are traces of the fabled Silk Road -- uncovered a
grave site at Cherchen containing several 3,500-year-old bodies. They were
far better preserved than anything ever recovered in Egypt, partially due to
the intensely dry air, but also because the graves had been cut into a salt
bed which speeded the process of desiccation. The bodies were dressed in
brightly colored garments What everyone noticed immediately was that these
bodies were clearly Caucasoid, not Chinese or Mongoloid. Moreover, the man
and one woman were well over six feet tall. Who were these people? Where had
they come from? How had they managed to live in this exceedingly daunting
environment? Check out our review by clicking on
The
Mummies of Urumchi.
“Talk to each other, for heaven’s sake!” you want to
scream at the smothered characters in
Home,
Marilynne Robinson’s
infuriating
new novel, as they hesitantly tiptoe around the walls surrounding all the
feelings, desires, and experiences that matter to them. You can get so
annoyed with everyone that you finally don’t care whether they arrive at any
resolutions or not. This is particularly frustrating because in Home,
Robinson has taken a second look at the people and stories that made up her
glorious and popular novel of three years ago,
Gilead.
Home has none of the light that illuminates Gilead, none of
the achingly felt love, none of the brilliant humor. In Gilead Ames
is capable of seeing himself as comic, foolish, envious, jealous, and
resentful, but the characters in Home are simply earnestly doughy.
They really deserve better.
About the stock market, Chicken Little was right. The sky is falling! The financial advisors and other talking heads on TV tell us that this is a good time to buy stocks. They say there's lots of bargains out there. Sure. And if you bought a bargain last week you've already lost money. There's no place to hide! We're all going to be hit by a pieces of falling sky! All of us. And that includes Cocky Locky, Henny Penny, Turkey Lurkey, and especially Foxy Loxy. If you don't believe Chicken Little, check out the authoritative Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/public/us.
Readers of historical fiction can justifiably accuse Robert Harris of
offering up a standard menu of beastly Roman dissipation and cruelty in his
novel, Pompeii. And only readers dulled by heavy medication could
possibly credit the ridiculous romance that Harris has tossed into his plot.
We all know that Vesuvius is going to blow its lid. It’s going to bury all
those rich merchants, wily whores, corrupt officials, miserable slaves,
burly gladiators, and scratching dogs. So why did our reviewer like this
book? Mostly, she says, because the hero of the tale, Marcus Attilius, is so
wonderfully unlikely. He’s an engineer—earnest, scientific, unimaginative,
humorless, and not in great shape physically. Then too, there’s the book’s
true heroine—not the anachronistic young Corelia (whose very contemporary
form of female feistiness made me think of Shrek’s bride-to-be), but the
monumental Aqua Augusta—that elegant marvel of Roman construction—the long,
sinuous aqueduct that carries fresh water from the mountains of Campania to
all the cities around the Bay of Naples. Read
Margaret Black's
review of Pompeii here.
Will Rogers used to say, "We'll be the first nation in the world
to go to the poor house in an automobile." Of course, he was saying
that back in the 1920s and 30s, and times have changed a lot since then. But
it does look as if the automobile, or maybe we should say General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler together, will be taking us to the poor house.
The American automobile manufacturer’s slow suicide
began long ago, at least as far back as Ralph Nader’s pioneering work,
Unsafe at Any Speed. His book came out in 1965 and focused on the auto
industry’s refusal to add safety features to their cars and their reluctance
to inform consumers about design flaws. General Motors responded to the book
by paying lawyers to defend their shoddy work and private investigators to
dig up dirt on Nader. Over the years since then the auto industry has
lobbied successfully to weaken fuel efficiency standards and to rig the
rules for calculating efficiency. Their death wish was to produce bloated,
air polluting gas guzzlers. For some years now they haven't produced the
kinds of cars that US consumers want to buy. Now the auto industry is on
life-support and is asking for your help.
Tom Friedman wrote an excellent piece for the New York
Times about this. Check out his
How to Fix a Flat
If you've ever wondered what shape the universe is in you should read
Robert Osserman's dazzling little book,
Poetry
of the Universe.
It's
easy to overlook this gem, since it's hidden under a rather sickly and
misleading title, and that's a shame. Osserman, a Stanford mathematician,
leads the reader on a fascinating trip through the cosmos or, to be precise,
he provides the reader with a series of maps. The author begins with the
story of Eratosthenes, the librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C.
who realized the earth was round and calculated its circumference.
Eratosthenes measured the angle of a noonday shadow on the summer solstice
and performed a very simple geometric calculation to arrive at his answer.
He came up with an amazingly accurate figure, the Alexandrian equivalent of
25,000 miles. With Osserman as the teacher you can do as well as
Eratosthenes, which is part of the charm of this book. There's plenty more
in this book, so check out our review.
Here's a fascinating true story about a pirate
who was also an anthropologist -- though the word wasn't current back then.
In
A
Pirate of Exquisite Mind, Diana and Michael Preston explore
Dampier’s fascinating life, which included three trips
around
the globe between 1674 and 1711 and produced a treasure trove of scientific
information (plus more than a thousand new words, including barbecue,
chopsticks). Dampier was at times a pirate and buccaneer. But at the same
time his meticulous hydrographic observations were indispensable to the
English Navy into the 1900s. Charles Darwin constantly referred to his
careful descriptions of flora and fauna. And few writers prior to the 20th
century matched Dampier’s dispassionate descriptions of newly encountered
peoples. His first book created a new kind of travel writing that made him
wildly popular with the reading public and inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Caruso and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Dampier was a pirate -- and
also a restless, curious, enormously intelligent and observant man who had
no patience with social hierarchy and no talent for human interaction, but
who was also unusually tolerant and open-minded for a man of his time.
Of history’s many vicious spectacles, few
match in sheer beastliness the 13th -century Albigensian Crusade, in which
Pope Innocent III incited a group of impoverished nobles from northern
France to extirpate the Cathar heresy that flourished along the
Mediterranean coast, especially in the region, now part of France, called
Languedoc. With
stupefying
brutality, this crew of greedy armored thugs, led by Simon de Montfort,
annihilated not only the heretics, but the independence and culture of a
land once famed for its troubadours and gracious songs of courtly love.
“While beyond the Loire and the Rhine noblemen were still stirred by epics
about the viscera dripping from Charlemagne’s sword,” says Stephen O’Shea in
his immensely readable tale,
The Perfect
Heresy, “their counterparts in the sunny south were learning to
count the ways. The ethos of amorous longing so much at odds with the mix of
rapine and piety that passed for normal behavior everywhere else, gave a
different cast to Languedoc’s life of the mind.”
How to understand the financial mess we're
in, or, watch the movie It's a Wonderful Life,
starring Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson as Jimmy Stewart.
I knew we were in trouble when Bear Stearns imploded, Lehman
Brothers
went bankrupt, AIG collapsed, Merrill Lynch got swallowed up and, in a wink,
Washington Mutual and Wachovia got gulped down, too. Yes, we were in a
financial crises. And it was equally clear that most of us didn’t understand
what was happening. Most understood the headlines all right, but the story
further down the page was baffling. But I didn’t know how desperately
ignorant we were until I heard talking heads on TV tell viewers the best way
to understand the crises was to watch the old movie, It’s a Wonderful
Life. If our best understanding of the mess we’re in comes from that
sappy film, then we’re running blindly toward the abyss.
Read the rest of this sharp, informative article and
you'll be the most knowledgeable kid on the block when it comes to the
global financial meltdown. It's easy. Just click on
Understanding the Financial Mess
Stamp out starving authors! Buy their books! Patronize your
local book store and they'll love you forever. If you don't have a local
book shop, or if Borders or Barnes & Noble frighten you, then try an online
book store. Like, well,
Amazon
A
few more insistent phrases we’ll be happy never to hear again. Ever.
First off, let's do away with the phrase perfect
storm. Sure it's
tempting to say Oh, it's a perfect storm!
whenever two or three bad things come together to produce a really truly
very bad situation, but let's not make it even worse by uttering that
overworked phrase yet again.
And while we're at it, we can throw away
between a rock and a hard place. Yup, we've heard that one too many
times and it gives us a headache.
Wall Street and Main Street. We’d like
never to see them again in the same sentence. Or the same paragraph. Or, for
that matter, on the same damn page.
Meltdown. Banks are in a meltdown.
International lending institutions are in a meltdown. Your retirement funds
are in a meltdown. Meltdown? You mean like what happens when the rate of
fission in a nuclear power plant become too fast the the rods overheat and
the core becomes so hot it melts down to China or explodes? Let’s dump meltdown, and while we’re at it we can forget
toxic securities, too.
(If you have a few phrases you'd like never to hear
again, send them in and we'll add them to our list.)
At this point on the page we suggest you stop looking at your
computer screen and look instead at the refreshing world outside.
The photo above was taken during one of the refreshing ice storms that
passed through here a while ago. We're not certain which ice storm it was,
there've been quite a few this winter. As soon as we get an even more
refreshing winter photo, we'll post it. Meanwhile, at least look up from
your computer screen and glance out your window. It will be good for your
eyes.
It's hard to believe that Andrew Hacker's book, Money: Who Has
How
Much and Why, came out over a decade ago. It's remarkably
current
today. America is not only the richest nation of its kind; it’s also the one
with the greatest inequality in the distribution of those riches. Hacker's
book is a compact and lucid account of the ways our society apportions its
riches. To see the review, click on
Money.
Visitors to CriticalPages are not the sort who read
only one kind of book. On the contrary, they apparently have
limitless curiosity about all kinds of writing.. In the photo above we have
a heap of books which have nothing in common —
except, of course, that each has its own unique interest. For a brief
description of each one, click
here.
Consider the quill pen and the laser as writing
tools. Our review of the selected letters of John and Abigail
Adams
got us thinking. If you came across a two-hundred-year-old letter
you'd be
able to read it. All you'd need is light and your own eyes. But what about
today's email? What about other digital documents? If you archive documents
on a CD, how long will the CD last? Assuming you store the CD carefully and
leave it alone, maybe 20 or 25 years before it deteriorates. No one knows
for sure, because although there are ways of faking the passage of time in a
laboratory, the actual passage of time may produce different results.
Click here to
continue
Stamp out starving authors! Buy their books! Patronize your
local book store and they'll love you forever. If you don't have a local
book shop, or if Borders or Barnes & Noble frighten you, then try an online
book store. Like, well,
Amazon