Okay, I have one more horror movie to review for the season, but first let's get to a book I recently finished, Action Philosophers, a non-fiction graphic novel providing biographies of forty philosophers, from Ancient Greece to the contemporary world. This book is awfully charming, with cartoony but detailed art from Ryan Dunlavey that adapts itself to each era and location--appearing Chinese for Confucius and Lao Tzu, for instance, or medieval Jewish for Spinoza. The art and dialogue (by writer Fred Van Lente) are clever and fast-paced to the point of hyperactivity, providing a wealth of information but also nearly non-stop humorous references to pop culture, history, other jokes from earlier in the book, even the authors themselves.
I think my favorite philosopher in the book is John Stuart Mill, presented in the style of Peanuts. J.S. Mill is Charlie Brown, with adorable little 19th century sideburns on his bald head, espousing his Utilitarianism to the other skeptical characters. His attempt to teach virtue to Snoopy, who keeps trying to steal the blanket of Jeremy Bentham (in the guise of Linus), is a particular highlight.
And yet, despite the pervading jokiness, the core of the book is serious. This is a real history of philosophy told through a biographic framework, clearly showing how each new era of philosophers have expanded, synthesized, or rejected the work of their predecessors. It starts with the pre-Socratics and ends with Jacques Derrida, and is fairly brilliant at cogently demonstrating in words and pictures even such difficult concepts as the analytic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In fact, I'm giving this book one of my coveted Shortcuts to Smartness awards! A Shortcut to Smartness book is one that "so expands your knowledge and understanding in so many areas that it is like a college course in and of itself," and I think that works here. It's graphic novel form would make this readable even for high school students, as it breaks down lots of highly complex ideas to a level that practically anyone could understand. And they would have a lot of fun in learning those ideas, too!
Showing posts with label Shortcuts to Smartness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shortcuts to Smartness. Show all posts
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Monday, May 28, 2018
What I'm Reading: Where They Ain't
Where They Ain't, by Burt Solomon, is an excellent look at baseball in the immedate pre-modern era, from 1894 to 1902. It observes this era through the lens of the Baltimore Orioles, who invented a new style of baseball that made them the most successful team of the 1890s, and when they broke up, whose key players and manager formed the core of many of the most successful teams of the early 1900s.
Baseball in the 1880s was a leisurely affair of getting a man or two and base and waiting for a big home run to score (a lot like the 1950s--and to an extent, today's game as well). But after the 1892 season, the National League (the only league at the time) moved the pitcher's mound back to 60 feet, six inches, from its previous distance of 50 feet, and also required the pitcher to keep one foot on the pitching rubber when pitching. That may not seem like much of a change, but it was just enough. That extra split second the ball takes to get to the plate was just enough to give a quick player the time to judge what part of the field he could hit the ball to, allowing more precise hitting. It was just enough to make it that much harder for a pitcher to field a bunt. And it was just enough extra time for a sneaky base stealer to successfully make it to second or third before the catcher could throw him out.
The four main players on the Orioles--"Wee" Willie Keeler, John McGraw, Hughie Jennings, and Joe Kelley--along with their manager, "Foxy" Ned Hanlon, were the first to recognize the kind of baseball the change allowed: a scrappy, fast-paced, hitting and running type of game (similar to the 1970s-80s game) they called "scientific baseball." And they rode that recognition to first place finishes from 1894-96, and second place finishes in 1897-98, behind the Boston Beaneaters (later the Boston Braves), who had largely adopted their methods.
Unfortunately, the National League, and after 1901, the American League, used Baltimore as a pawn in fairly baroque baseball politics, and the result was that the Orioles after the 1902 season moved to New York and became the Highlanders (later named the Yankees), with the team's personnel spread across the major leagues. John McGraw, the diminutive but fiercely-willed third baseman for the Orioles, became the manager of the New York Giants in 1902 where he was known as the "Little Napoleon" for his controlling but winning style. He won 10 National League pennants and three World Series with the Giants and still holds the National League record for most wins.
From 1899 to 1905, Ned Hanlon managed the Brooklyn Superbas (later the Dodgers), bringing Willie Keeler, Hughie Jennings, and Joe Kelley with him as the right fielder, shortstop, and pitcher, respectively. Hanlon, Keeler, Jennings, and Kelley led the Superbas to first place finishes in 1899-1900. Jennings also managed the Detroit Tigers from 1907-1920, where he coached Ty Cobb and led the Tigers to three American League champtionships and several other good seasons.
One idiosyncrasy of the book is that it adopts some of the conventions of the language and baseball lingo of the 1890s. For instance, at that time fans were known as "cranks" and pitchers were called "twirlers." Fine. I probably could have done without not capitalizing avenues and streets in street names, i.e. 21st street or Maryland avenue. But after a few pages, you get used to it, and it does help with the effect of placing you in the 1890s.
I really like the way Solomon interwove history and current events into the baseball story. For instance, he describes the way attendance dropped off in the 1898 season because of the Spanish-American War--who worried about baseball when American sons were fighting overseas? Or how in 1902, Willie Keeler went to St. Mary's Hospital in Brooklyn with a suspected shoulder fracture to take advantage of a brand new invention--an X-ray machine, which St. Mary's was one of the first hospitals in the world to possess.
And those are just two examples of many. It is for that reason that Where They Ain't receives one of my coveted Shortcuts to Smartness awards, for books that provide a whole education in and of themselves. (Congratulations, Burt Solomon!) In this book you learn not just about baseball history, but also American history, and the history of the cities of Baltimore and Brooklyn, and 1890s politics, and what makes a team work, and how to achieve success. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in any of those subjects.
Baseball in the 1880s was a leisurely affair of getting a man or two and base and waiting for a big home run to score (a lot like the 1950s--and to an extent, today's game as well). But after the 1892 season, the National League (the only league at the time) moved the pitcher's mound back to 60 feet, six inches, from its previous distance of 50 feet, and also required the pitcher to keep one foot on the pitching rubber when pitching. That may not seem like much of a change, but it was just enough. That extra split second the ball takes to get to the plate was just enough to give a quick player the time to judge what part of the field he could hit the ball to, allowing more precise hitting. It was just enough to make it that much harder for a pitcher to field a bunt. And it was just enough extra time for a sneaky base stealer to successfully make it to second or third before the catcher could throw him out.
The four main players on the Orioles--"Wee" Willie Keeler, John McGraw, Hughie Jennings, and Joe Kelley--along with their manager, "Foxy" Ned Hanlon, were the first to recognize the kind of baseball the change allowed: a scrappy, fast-paced, hitting and running type of game (similar to the 1970s-80s game) they called "scientific baseball." And they rode that recognition to first place finishes from 1894-96, and second place finishes in 1897-98, behind the Boston Beaneaters (later the Boston Braves), who had largely adopted their methods.
Unfortunately, the National League, and after 1901, the American League, used Baltimore as a pawn in fairly baroque baseball politics, and the result was that the Orioles after the 1902 season moved to New York and became the Highlanders (later named the Yankees), with the team's personnel spread across the major leagues. John McGraw, the diminutive but fiercely-willed third baseman for the Orioles, became the manager of the New York Giants in 1902 where he was known as the "Little Napoleon" for his controlling but winning style. He won 10 National League pennants and three World Series with the Giants and still holds the National League record for most wins.
From 1899 to 1905, Ned Hanlon managed the Brooklyn Superbas (later the Dodgers), bringing Willie Keeler, Hughie Jennings, and Joe Kelley with him as the right fielder, shortstop, and pitcher, respectively. Hanlon, Keeler, Jennings, and Kelley led the Superbas to first place finishes in 1899-1900. Jennings also managed the Detroit Tigers from 1907-1920, where he coached Ty Cobb and led the Tigers to three American League champtionships and several other good seasons.
One idiosyncrasy of the book is that it adopts some of the conventions of the language and baseball lingo of the 1890s. For instance, at that time fans were known as "cranks" and pitchers were called "twirlers." Fine. I probably could have done without not capitalizing avenues and streets in street names, i.e. 21st street or Maryland avenue. But after a few pages, you get used to it, and it does help with the effect of placing you in the 1890s.
I really like the way Solomon interwove history and current events into the baseball story. For instance, he describes the way attendance dropped off in the 1898 season because of the Spanish-American War--who worried about baseball when American sons were fighting overseas? Or how in 1902, Willie Keeler went to St. Mary's Hospital in Brooklyn with a suspected shoulder fracture to take advantage of a brand new invention--an X-ray machine, which St. Mary's was one of the first hospitals in the world to possess.
And those are just two examples of many. It is for that reason that Where They Ain't receives one of my coveted Shortcuts to Smartness awards, for books that provide a whole education in and of themselves. (Congratulations, Burt Solomon!) In this book you learn not just about baseball history, but also American history, and the history of the cities of Baltimore and Brooklyn, and 1890s politics, and what makes a team work, and how to achieve success. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in any of those subjects.
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
What I'm Reading: White Trash
No, White Trash is not the latest southern Gothic pulp romance; rather, as its subtitle reads, it's The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, a 2016 book by Nancy Isenberg.
In America we have a tendency to think of ourselves as a classless society, or at least one where anybody can move from the bottom to the top with hard work and maybe a little luck. In fact, Isenberg demonstrates that class has been more pervasive throughout American history than is usually thought, and that the lower classes are often kept that way through broad societal structures and social attitudes.
I think her analysis is especially strong in the antebellum South, where she shows that slavery not only kept blacks down, by force of law, but also kept lower-class whites in their place, because the best land was taken by the large plantation owners, with only marginal land left over for the small farmers. Moreover, even the low-wage labor--as farmhands, say, or domestic servants--that provided so much employment in the North was not available to Southern whites, since slaves did nearly all menial tasks (it's hard to compete with a wage of zero). Even if you wanted to work your way up from the bottom in the antebellum South, there was really no path for you to take, so the poor "white trash" stayed that way.
I also enjoyed and found convincing her view that class lines had already hardened in the early colonial period, when the proprietors of the English colonies imported so-called "waste people" from rural areas of the British isles to settle the dangerous frontiers, only for upper-class landowners to come in later, after the frontier had been tamed, and take the best land for themselves from "squatters" who often had no titles to places they had been living for years.
Amusing (to me anyway) that my own home state of North Carolina was looked down in the colonial period on by the other colonies as a giant wasteland of poor, uneducated whites, more interested in drinking, screwing, and lazing about than working the land. In comparison to the tobacco plantations and more established society of Virginia, and the fertile lands of South Carolina that also quickly developed into plantation society, North Carolina was cursed with a lot of land too sandy, swampy, or hilly to be easy to farm. Such land attracted only economically marginal people from the fringes of Virginia, leading to a vicious circle of poverty, poor land, and lack of respect.
The book contains fascinating anecdotes and analysis throughout. One thing I found really interesting was the evolution of phraseology for the poor impoverished white lower classes--for example, the terms squatters and crackers prevailed in the early 1800s, while mudsills was a popular term in the mid-19th century, but the ever-popular white trash was first used in 1821 and had achieved widespread use by the 1850s. There are tons of little explanations of this sort, regarding all sorts of historical social phenomena, in every chapter.
If there is one disappointment, it's the final chapter, when Isenberg takes her class analysis of American history and applies it to the current landscape, finding the existence of a persistent underclass in the United States to be a great injustice, and recommending a rather standard slate of Great Society-style interventions to change things. But--we've already tried your way, Ms. Isenberg, and it's led to the widespread dissolution of traditional family structures among the poorer classes, leading to firmer entrenchment of those class divisions than ever before! If Ms. Isenberg had no especially creative new solutions to recommend, better to have left this chapter out entirely.
Despite that last chapter, I'm awarding this book my coveted "Shortcuts to Smartness" award, for providing informative reviews of nearly every important in American history from an unusual and profound perspective. It struck me as more convincing and better-researched than the superficially similar People's History of the United States, the rather blinkered left-wing American history book from 1980 (Isenberg has citations, for one thing!). Isenberg's book might not be as easy to read as the People's History, a perpetual favorite among disaffected high school students, but its focus and research hold up a lot better. I'd recommend this for any student of American history who wants to know more about the important and under-researched issue of class.
In America we have a tendency to think of ourselves as a classless society, or at least one where anybody can move from the bottom to the top with hard work and maybe a little luck. In fact, Isenberg demonstrates that class has been more pervasive throughout American history than is usually thought, and that the lower classes are often kept that way through broad societal structures and social attitudes.
I think her analysis is especially strong in the antebellum South, where she shows that slavery not only kept blacks down, by force of law, but also kept lower-class whites in their place, because the best land was taken by the large plantation owners, with only marginal land left over for the small farmers. Moreover, even the low-wage labor--as farmhands, say, or domestic servants--that provided so much employment in the North was not available to Southern whites, since slaves did nearly all menial tasks (it's hard to compete with a wage of zero). Even if you wanted to work your way up from the bottom in the antebellum South, there was really no path for you to take, so the poor "white trash" stayed that way.
I also enjoyed and found convincing her view that class lines had already hardened in the early colonial period, when the proprietors of the English colonies imported so-called "waste people" from rural areas of the British isles to settle the dangerous frontiers, only for upper-class landowners to come in later, after the frontier had been tamed, and take the best land for themselves from "squatters" who often had no titles to places they had been living for years.
Amusing (to me anyway) that my own home state of North Carolina was looked down in the colonial period on by the other colonies as a giant wasteland of poor, uneducated whites, more interested in drinking, screwing, and lazing about than working the land. In comparison to the tobacco plantations and more established society of Virginia, and the fertile lands of South Carolina that also quickly developed into plantation society, North Carolina was cursed with a lot of land too sandy, swampy, or hilly to be easy to farm. Such land attracted only economically marginal people from the fringes of Virginia, leading to a vicious circle of poverty, poor land, and lack of respect.
The book contains fascinating anecdotes and analysis throughout. One thing I found really interesting was the evolution of phraseology for the poor impoverished white lower classes--for example, the terms squatters and crackers prevailed in the early 1800s, while mudsills was a popular term in the mid-19th century, but the ever-popular white trash was first used in 1821 and had achieved widespread use by the 1850s. There are tons of little explanations of this sort, regarding all sorts of historical social phenomena, in every chapter.
If there is one disappointment, it's the final chapter, when Isenberg takes her class analysis of American history and applies it to the current landscape, finding the existence of a persistent underclass in the United States to be a great injustice, and recommending a rather standard slate of Great Society-style interventions to change things. But--we've already tried your way, Ms. Isenberg, and it's led to the widespread dissolution of traditional family structures among the poorer classes, leading to firmer entrenchment of those class divisions than ever before! If Ms. Isenberg had no especially creative new solutions to recommend, better to have left this chapter out entirely.
Despite that last chapter, I'm awarding this book my coveted "Shortcuts to Smartness" award, for providing informative reviews of nearly every important in American history from an unusual and profound perspective. It struck me as more convincing and better-researched than the superficially similar People's History of the United States, the rather blinkered left-wing American history book from 1980 (Isenberg has citations, for one thing!). Isenberg's book might not be as easy to read as the People's History, a perpetual favorite among disaffected high school students, but its focus and research hold up a lot better. I'd recommend this for any student of American history who wants to know more about the important and under-researched issue of class.
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
What I'm Reading: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Wow. I'm finally done with The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence, i.e., Lawrence of Arabia. Yes, these are his memoirs, upon which the famous movie is based, and I feel like I've been reading them for months. I have been reading them for months. Too good to put down, too intimidating to pick up for reading before bed, I've read it only when I've had an unbroken block of 30-60 minutes.
Lawrence had studied archeology in college, I think, and had spent time on digs of crusader castles in Syria, where he perfected his Arabic and spent much time traveling around, familiarizing himself with the land and its people. When World War I broke out, he was a perfect prospect for joining British intelligence in Egypt. The British thought it might help their cause to encourage a rebellion among the Arabs against their Ottoman overlords in Turkey, who were allied with Germany, and sent Lawrence for the job.
Lawrence's first task was identifying which of old, doddering King Hussein's three sons would be a good leader for a rebellion, and found the ideal man in Prince Feisal, a calm, fair-minded, Turkish-educated natural leader of men. Together Lawrence and Feisal led a motley collection of Bedouin tribesman and local Arab peasants from Jeddah on the Red Sea coast up to, eventually, Damascus and the ultimate defeat of the Turks in Arab lands.
Lawrence himself becomes a legend in Arabia through the course of the book, a strange blue-eyed figure, a non-Muslim and a clean-shaven man, both great rarities in the desert, yet acting as a sheik and a military leader, with the authority and white robes of Mecca, and a gold Meccan dagger presented him by Prince Feisal himself. When he arrives in an area where he hasn't been before, the locals all come to see this odd sight firsthand, though of course they already know him by reputation. And he strives to live up to their expectations, living the same hard life as a Bedouin, and even going out of his way to learn words in local dialects and details of local clans, so that he can greet a stranger and ask him of his family on first meeting. Quite an incredible man!
I'm naming this book as one of my Shortcuts to Smartness, by which I mean a book that so expands your knowledge and understanding in so many areas it's like a college class in and of itself. But in this case, I'm also including a caveat, which is that this book is so huge and mighty, and much of the knowledge provided so esoteric--the different types of sand in the desert, how to coax a she-camel to travel when she is mourning a lost calf, the difference in what the English and the Arabs conceive of as hunger, and on and on--that it takes a reader truly willing to accompany Lawrence on his journey, including all the immensely interesting, though often lengthy, digressions.
In fact, if you think the movie is long, it is only the thin outer layer of the fruit. I think my favorite part is learning about how to feast in the Bedouin tradition, with goat and camel meat roasted and presented steaming (rude to wait until it cools--too bad for your fingers!), and an elaborate hierarchy of who gets to eat from the common dishes first, who eats second after the best parts are taken, and who gets the bones and other remains.
Or maybe the history of Auda, the old desert warrior who becomes a general in the Arab army, who has killed more than 70 Arabs with his own hands in his life, and so many Turks he doesn't even know (because who counts Turks?), and who describes to all who will listen the adventures of his life in the most heroic terms.
But these are just two of the many, many interesting descriptions and stories--hundreds, not dozens--sprinkled throughout the main narrative. This book may not be for all, but if you have the will, the desire, most of all the time, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is worth your attention.
Lawrence had studied archeology in college, I think, and had spent time on digs of crusader castles in Syria, where he perfected his Arabic and spent much time traveling around, familiarizing himself with the land and its people. When World War I broke out, he was a perfect prospect for joining British intelligence in Egypt. The British thought it might help their cause to encourage a rebellion among the Arabs against their Ottoman overlords in Turkey, who were allied with Germany, and sent Lawrence for the job.
Lawrence's first task was identifying which of old, doddering King Hussein's three sons would be a good leader for a rebellion, and found the ideal man in Prince Feisal, a calm, fair-minded, Turkish-educated natural leader of men. Together Lawrence and Feisal led a motley collection of Bedouin tribesman and local Arab peasants from Jeddah on the Red Sea coast up to, eventually, Damascus and the ultimate defeat of the Turks in Arab lands.
Lawrence himself becomes a legend in Arabia through the course of the book, a strange blue-eyed figure, a non-Muslim and a clean-shaven man, both great rarities in the desert, yet acting as a sheik and a military leader, with the authority and white robes of Mecca, and a gold Meccan dagger presented him by Prince Feisal himself. When he arrives in an area where he hasn't been before, the locals all come to see this odd sight firsthand, though of course they already know him by reputation. And he strives to live up to their expectations, living the same hard life as a Bedouin, and even going out of his way to learn words in local dialects and details of local clans, so that he can greet a stranger and ask him of his family on first meeting. Quite an incredible man!
I'm naming this book as one of my Shortcuts to Smartness, by which I mean a book that so expands your knowledge and understanding in so many areas it's like a college class in and of itself. But in this case, I'm also including a caveat, which is that this book is so huge and mighty, and much of the knowledge provided so esoteric--the different types of sand in the desert, how to coax a she-camel to travel when she is mourning a lost calf, the difference in what the English and the Arabs conceive of as hunger, and on and on--that it takes a reader truly willing to accompany Lawrence on his journey, including all the immensely interesting, though often lengthy, digressions.
In fact, if you think the movie is long, it is only the thin outer layer of the fruit. I think my favorite part is learning about how to feast in the Bedouin tradition, with goat and camel meat roasted and presented steaming (rude to wait until it cools--too bad for your fingers!), and an elaborate hierarchy of who gets to eat from the common dishes first, who eats second after the best parts are taken, and who gets the bones and other remains.
Or maybe the history of Auda, the old desert warrior who becomes a general in the Arab army, who has killed more than 70 Arabs with his own hands in his life, and so many Turks he doesn't even know (because who counts Turks?), and who describes to all who will listen the adventures of his life in the most heroic terms.
But these are just two of the many, many interesting descriptions and stories--hundreds, not dozens--sprinkled throughout the main narrative. This book may not be for all, but if you have the will, the desire, most of all the time, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is worth your attention.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
What I'm Reading: Moby-Dick
Call me Joshua. I've finally finished the journey. I started Moby-Dick last fall, read about half in a month, then put it down, intending to pick it up again after the New Year. In fact, I picked it up again in September and only just now reached the end. I've developed a theory during my reading of Moby-Dick that everyone who reads it comes to identify with Captain Ahab, with the reader's white whale being completing the book itself.
So was it worth it? Was it worth the weeks and months, the dense prose, the bizarre chapter-long digressions on the illustrations of whales in books or the comparisons of whales and dolphins, the obscure references requiring pages of explanatory notes, the whole trip from the north Atlantic to the Indian Ocean to the East Asian coast and then the final fateful encounter in the south Pacific?
Oh, God yes, it was worth it. For one thing, the prose is so beautiful, so biblical and epic. Here's one of my favorite passages, concerning a ship-boy, Pip, who's fallen overboard in the middle of a whale hunt and goes mad during his hours-long sojourn alone on the sea, before the ship comes by to pick him up:
The story's well-known enough, and the characters too, I think: obsessed Ahab, good-hearted and conscientious Starbuck, cheerfully cynical Stubb, brave and spiritually attuned Queequeg, and many, many others. What's less well-known is that reading this book is an education in itself, and for that I dub it one of my coveted Shortcuts to Smartness books. You see, not only do you get the famous story, you get everything you ever wanted to know about whales and whaling (and I mean everything), but also hundreds of details about geography, sailing, history, New England life in the 1850s, religion, the culture of South Pacific islanders, and on and on.
So do I recommend this to others? Oh, that's a tough one. I don't think any lover of literature should die without reading this, let's put it that way. As for whether you should read it now, that depends on how much time you have to devote to it, because this is one book that does not reward distraction. But if you're willing to make the commitment, Moby-Dick is truly one of the best books you'll ever read.
So was it worth it? Was it worth the weeks and months, the dense prose, the bizarre chapter-long digressions on the illustrations of whales in books or the comparisons of whales and dolphins, the obscure references requiring pages of explanatory notes, the whole trip from the north Atlantic to the Indian Ocean to the East Asian coast and then the final fateful encounter in the south Pacific?
Oh, God yes, it was worth it. For one thing, the prose is so beautiful, so biblical and epic. Here's one of my favorite passages, concerning a ship-boy, Pip, who's fallen overboard in the middle of a whale hunt and goes mad during his hours-long sojourn alone on the sea, before the ship comes by to pick him up:
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.That's writing right there. If you don't shiver when you reach the part about "God's foot upon the treadle of the loom" I'm not sure you're fit to read the English language.
The story's well-known enough, and the characters too, I think: obsessed Ahab, good-hearted and conscientious Starbuck, cheerfully cynical Stubb, brave and spiritually attuned Queequeg, and many, many others. What's less well-known is that reading this book is an education in itself, and for that I dub it one of my coveted Shortcuts to Smartness books. You see, not only do you get the famous story, you get everything you ever wanted to know about whales and whaling (and I mean everything), but also hundreds of details about geography, sailing, history, New England life in the 1850s, religion, the culture of South Pacific islanders, and on and on.
So do I recommend this to others? Oh, that's a tough one. I don't think any lover of literature should die without reading this, let's put it that way. As for whether you should read it now, that depends on how much time you have to devote to it, because this is one book that does not reward distraction. But if you're willing to make the commitment, Moby-Dick is truly one of the best books you'll ever read.
Monday, December 9, 2013
What I'm Reading: Cultural Amnesia
In an earlier post, I discussed a book I described as a "Shortcut to Smartness," by which I meant a book that so expands your knowledge and understanding in so many areas that it is like a college course in and of itself. Here I have another book that fits that description: Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James. James is a book and television critic who writes for various newspapers and magazines in Britain, as well as an essayist, novelist, poet, extensive world traveler, and general cultural commentator.
Cultural Amnesia is a collection of a hundred or so biographical sketches, mostly on political and cultural figures from the twentieth century--Albert Camus or Margaret Thatcher or Leon Trotsky, say--although there are entries as early as Tacitus. It is James's belief that Westerners today are so distracted by technology, fashion, and celebrity that we are losing touch with the humanist, democratic values that built our society, and in danger of forgetting the lessons taught to us by the wars and political catastrophes of the last century.
Despite that overall thrust, each essay is liable to go off on any number of tangents as James's exceedingly well-educated mind wends its way through its topic. One of the essays I read on this occasion, on Coco Chanel, French perfume maven and Nazi collaborator, included a discussion of how male children dress up in their mother's clothes, a comparison of the high-quality fabric in American soldiers' uniforms in World War II as opposed to their inferior counterparts in Britain and Australia, a paragraph or two on the greater shopping opportunities in the Soviet Union for ranking party members versus the average citizen, and concluded with a very wise discussion of the critical role played by small luxuries in everyday life and how communism denied those luxuries to its citizens.
And so each essay goes, with discussions of antique book sellers in Buenos Aires, the Marshall Plan, film noir from the 1940s, the aesthetic qualities of pornographic movies, how to talk a friend who's decided to write a novel out of it, the advantage of youth for a poet, why not to be embarrassed when you pronounce a hard word incorrectly, and on and on. But I hope this doesn't sound too difficult to read--it's not. Clive James himself is a somewhat intimidating figure, reading in five languages and referring to his personal encounters with many of the great figures of our age. I mean, I consider myself pretty well-read and I feel like my lifetime of reading is about what he gets through in six months. Yet his prose is easy and quite readable, and each entry is only five to ten pages and endlessly fascinating.
For those reasons, it's also a good book to pick up and put down. It came out in 2007, and since purchasing it I'll pick it up once a year or so and read half-a-dozen entries over the course of a week. This year, for example, I read the aforementioned Coco Chanel, Mao Tse-Tung, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Charles de Gaulle, Josef Goebbels, and Leszek Kolakowski. That's the right way to read it, I think. A couple familiar figures, a couple less familiar, and a couple I know only by name, if that.
Similar to Boswell's Life of Johnson, the first book in my "Shortcut to Smartness" series, I think this book would be perfect for a recent high school graduate before entering college. A summer reading through this book would give a freshman an incredible advantage in historical sense and familiarity with the important people and themes of recent history. But really, it would be good for anyone with intellectual curiosity and a love of dabbling in history, politics, and the arts, and its hard for me to recommend it highly enough to such a reader.
Cultural Amnesia is a collection of a hundred or so biographical sketches, mostly on political and cultural figures from the twentieth century--Albert Camus or Margaret Thatcher or Leon Trotsky, say--although there are entries as early as Tacitus. It is James's belief that Westerners today are so distracted by technology, fashion, and celebrity that we are losing touch with the humanist, democratic values that built our society, and in danger of forgetting the lessons taught to us by the wars and political catastrophes of the last century.
Despite that overall thrust, each essay is liable to go off on any number of tangents as James's exceedingly well-educated mind wends its way through its topic. One of the essays I read on this occasion, on Coco Chanel, French perfume maven and Nazi collaborator, included a discussion of how male children dress up in their mother's clothes, a comparison of the high-quality fabric in American soldiers' uniforms in World War II as opposed to their inferior counterparts in Britain and Australia, a paragraph or two on the greater shopping opportunities in the Soviet Union for ranking party members versus the average citizen, and concluded with a very wise discussion of the critical role played by small luxuries in everyday life and how communism denied those luxuries to its citizens.
And so each essay goes, with discussions of antique book sellers in Buenos Aires, the Marshall Plan, film noir from the 1940s, the aesthetic qualities of pornographic movies, how to talk a friend who's decided to write a novel out of it, the advantage of youth for a poet, why not to be embarrassed when you pronounce a hard word incorrectly, and on and on. But I hope this doesn't sound too difficult to read--it's not. Clive James himself is a somewhat intimidating figure, reading in five languages and referring to his personal encounters with many of the great figures of our age. I mean, I consider myself pretty well-read and I feel like my lifetime of reading is about what he gets through in six months. Yet his prose is easy and quite readable, and each entry is only five to ten pages and endlessly fascinating.
For those reasons, it's also a good book to pick up and put down. It came out in 2007, and since purchasing it I'll pick it up once a year or so and read half-a-dozen entries over the course of a week. This year, for example, I read the aforementioned Coco Chanel, Mao Tse-Tung, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Charles de Gaulle, Josef Goebbels, and Leszek Kolakowski. That's the right way to read it, I think. A couple familiar figures, a couple less familiar, and a couple I know only by name, if that.
Similar to Boswell's Life of Johnson, the first book in my "Shortcut to Smartness" series, I think this book would be perfect for a recent high school graduate before entering college. A summer reading through this book would give a freshman an incredible advantage in historical sense and familiarity with the important people and themes of recent history. But really, it would be good for anyone with intellectual curiosity and a love of dabbling in history, politics, and the arts, and its hard for me to recommend it highly enough to such a reader.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
What I'm Reading: The Life of Samuel Johnson
There's little I can say about James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson that hasn't been said before, and better. Thus, I won't attempt a real review, but I'll just put down some of my observations. It is simply the best biography and one of the most entertaining books in the English language. Along with Alexander Pope, Johnson was one of the two towering figures of 18th century literature. Unfortunately, he's not as well-remembered today as he might be, I think because his greatest achievement, writing the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, has been supplanted by the OED and Webster and others.
He was also a poet, an essayist (almost singlehandedly penning both the Rambler and the Idler, two magazines of the time), a literary historian, one of the foremost Latin scholars of his century, and possibly the best English conversationalist ever. That last point is especially made clear in Boswell's biography. Boswell, a wealthy member of the Scottish gentry, and probably Johnson's best friend for the final 30 years of his life, accompanied his friend to dinner parties and on excursions around London and the English countryside, all the while recording everything Johnson said throughout the day in his journal. Rarely a page goes by without one of Johnson's finely honed witticisms, trenchant observations of human life, or a funny or enlightening conversation with a companion.
And the companions Johnson had! Just off the top of my head, Joshua Reynolds (foremost English painter of the 18th century), Edmund Burke (famous conservative philosopher), Oliver Goldsmith (leading playright), and Edward Gibbon (wrote The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire) turn up with regularity. There are also cameos by King George III, Adam Smith, John Wesley, and dozens of others I can't remember at the moment.
That cast of characters is one reason this book is what I refer to as a "Shortcut to Smartness." By this, I mean a book that so expands your knowledge and understanding in so many areas that it is like a college course in and of itself. First, you learn everything about Samuel Johnson himself. Second, you learn a lot about all his famous friends. Third, you improve your grasp of 18th century British history, for many historical events are referenced. Fourth, more so than in most biographies, you learn about everyday life in the past, because the book covers not only the major events of Johnson's life but also the little day-to-day oddities and intersting happenings. Fifth, you become wiser about human nature and the best ways to live, for Johnson's insight can't help but sink in. (In the future on this blog, I'll talk about more books I think of as Shortcuts to Smartness.)
Now, Life of Johnson is a thick book, but don't be intimidated! This is my second time through, and it's taken me more than a year. But that's not at all because it's so difficult to read, but because I read twenty or thirty pages at a time and then put it aside for a few days. It's actually the perfect book to pick up and put down like that as so much of it is episodic--a few pages are devoted to, say, a visit to Johnson's alma mater, Oxford, or an evening meeting of the Literary Club, or Johnson's thoughts on the occasion of a friend whose son was hanged, etc.. But I always come back to it because it's so funny and wise. I think the perfect reader for this book would be an aspiring English or history major during the summer before college--it would give a student such an edge up on the competition in so many ways. But really, any adult who wants to learn about a witty, humane, learned man who had a huge impact on English letters would find Life of Johnson to be of interest.
He was also a poet, an essayist (almost singlehandedly penning both the Rambler and the Idler, two magazines of the time), a literary historian, one of the foremost Latin scholars of his century, and possibly the best English conversationalist ever. That last point is especially made clear in Boswell's biography. Boswell, a wealthy member of the Scottish gentry, and probably Johnson's best friend for the final 30 years of his life, accompanied his friend to dinner parties and on excursions around London and the English countryside, all the while recording everything Johnson said throughout the day in his journal. Rarely a page goes by without one of Johnson's finely honed witticisms, trenchant observations of human life, or a funny or enlightening conversation with a companion.
And the companions Johnson had! Just off the top of my head, Joshua Reynolds (foremost English painter of the 18th century), Edmund Burke (famous conservative philosopher), Oliver Goldsmith (leading playright), and Edward Gibbon (wrote The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire) turn up with regularity. There are also cameos by King George III, Adam Smith, John Wesley, and dozens of others I can't remember at the moment.
That cast of characters is one reason this book is what I refer to as a "Shortcut to Smartness." By this, I mean a book that so expands your knowledge and understanding in so many areas that it is like a college course in and of itself. First, you learn everything about Samuel Johnson himself. Second, you learn a lot about all his famous friends. Third, you improve your grasp of 18th century British history, for many historical events are referenced. Fourth, more so than in most biographies, you learn about everyday life in the past, because the book covers not only the major events of Johnson's life but also the little day-to-day oddities and intersting happenings. Fifth, you become wiser about human nature and the best ways to live, for Johnson's insight can't help but sink in. (In the future on this blog, I'll talk about more books I think of as Shortcuts to Smartness.)
Now, Life of Johnson is a thick book, but don't be intimidated! This is my second time through, and it's taken me more than a year. But that's not at all because it's so difficult to read, but because I read twenty or thirty pages at a time and then put it aside for a few days. It's actually the perfect book to pick up and put down like that as so much of it is episodic--a few pages are devoted to, say, a visit to Johnson's alma mater, Oxford, or an evening meeting of the Literary Club, or Johnson's thoughts on the occasion of a friend whose son was hanged, etc.. But I always come back to it because it's so funny and wise. I think the perfect reader for this book would be an aspiring English or history major during the summer before college--it would give a student such an edge up on the competition in so many ways. But really, any adult who wants to learn about a witty, humane, learned man who had a huge impact on English letters would find Life of Johnson to be of interest.
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