Category: Books

A while ago, I griped about visiting a home libary holding several stories of matching leatherbound books, arrayed to display the wealth and culture of the owner. The pages were still uncut. The books weren’t for reading.
In fact, early generations of printed books in the Renaissance (mid-1400s) were produced and purchased for this purpose. Agents purchased copies of these new luxury items, produced with custom illustration, and bound identically in expensive leather with precious metal and jewels, to display the wealth of their noble, ecclesiastical, or merchant clients.
A century later, books were produced in print runs of 1000 or more, serving a growing audience of readers and scholars. Letters served as a very slow search engine — readers wrote their colleagues, asking where they might find the latest edition edition of a new classical translation or new scholarly text.
from Worldly Goods by Lisa Jardine, a history of the Renaissance through material culture.

I’ve had Rules for Radicals referred to me by several people and sources, on both sides of the political spectrum. It’s billed as a canonical work on political organizing.
Alinsky published the book in 1971, after over three decades of organizing in impoverished and powerless communities.
The political philosophy, from a leftist of Alinsky’s times, can be shredded any number of ways, and it’s not worth bothering.
What’s interesting about the book is the material on tactics.
The book gives interesting historical context for the confrontational, theatrical 60s activist tactics. I was always puzzled by the demonstrations and teach-ins among the left when I was in school. These rituals seemed unlikely to change anyone’s mind, and seemed more like excuses for the like-minded to party or commiserate. Michael Moore comes from the tradition of provocative activist theater — bother and confuse the powers that be, and they might notice and relent.
The communities Alinsky worked with had nothing, and the powers-that-were were not listening. Shock tactics worked at the time. The powers-that-were did notice, and did give in.
Alinsky himself makes the point that tactics need to change with the times, and expresses frustration that his followers borrowed his tactics, rather than his principles. By 1971, Alinsky notes, sit-ins had lost the power to shock and persuade, and calling cops “pigs” didn’t do anyone any good.
Many of Alinsky’s principles themselves are sensible. Communicate within the experience of the people you’re talking to. If they don’t have the experience, create the experience. Stay within the experience of your community, and work outside of the experience of your opponents. Build a group on multiple issues. Build tactics on the opportunities and choices in front of you.
But Alinsky’s experience is bounded by his work with the poor and powerless. He would come in, help a community solve some desperate problems, and then head on to the next battle. Once the unions, or an African-American community (name the group) gained power, the next step is to use that power. Alinsky never stayed long enough, it seems, to understand the set of tactics to use if you are more than powerless.
Perhaps you demonize the enemy if you’re fighting against the meat-packing plant that offers a perverse parody of health care. But if you use those tactics in neighborhood disputes, you may “win”, but your neighborhood loses.

Well, not quite, but the next best thing.
Below “add to shopping cart”, the menu adds: Available for in-store pickup now from: $49.99. Price may vary based on availability. Enter your zip code:
Best of both worlds. Find it on Amazon, buy at the closest Borders. Wonderful for a quick fix of the book you’ve been coveting.
I’ve used the store inventory database at Borders before, but the interface is godawful — it takes five clicks, two forms, and a lot of jumping around to get to the inventory search.
I’ve implored Bookpeople, the best local bookstore, to put their database online for years. I’d buy more from them if they did.

Read A Canticle for Leibowitz, after having it on the shelf for maybe a decade.
If you haven’t read it, it is an early and classic work of postapocalyptic science fiction, published in 1959. The main setting is a monastary, after civilization has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. The book has three sections: the first set in the dark ages, when the monks preserve without comprehension a record of a technical civilization; the second set in a renaissance period, when society is starting to develop secular scholarship and aggressive, imperialistic political leadership; the third section is set in a rebuilt, high-tech civilization on the verge of destroying the world once more with nuclear weapons.
I liked the book as a work of art — the book builds a compelling and grim set of future worlds. Through those worlds, it explores a conflict between religion and science.
In the dark ages, the actions of the church are absurd. The monks revere every scrap of evidence from the fallen world, including the grocery list of the “blessed Leibowitz”. Leibowitz was a low-level engineer who tried to preserve technical knowledge when angry mobs try to destroy the people and knowledge that led to civilization’s destruction. He becomes a saint of the order, and there’s a bureacratic and absurd process of canonizing the “saint”. A simple and ignorant monk makes an illuminated copy of an ordinary blueprint circuit diagram, adding gold leaf, scrolls, shields, and curlicues.
But the book’s underlying philosophy is very Catholic; redemption through suffering; the values of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Despite the absurdity of elements of religious belief and practice, the author sympathizes with the monks. In the section set in the dark ages, he sympathizes with the simple monk, who suffers for his actions in discovering and preserving the mysterious ancient texts. In the section set in the renaissance, the author sympathises with the scholarly abbot, who sees the secular scholar character as a victim of hubris and a sellout. In the section set in the renewed technical civilization, he again sympathises with the abbot, who sees a secular doctor practicing euthanasia on victims of lethal doses of radiation as the self-deluded agent of totalitarianism and suffering.
I realized why I’d never gotten through the novel before. The first section is almost entirely without love and compassion. The main character is a simple, innocent, and ignorant fellow who is treated cruelly most of the time. It is hard to identify with the characters and hard to watch the cruelty.
The second two sections have more complex main characters, and some compassion in the interaction among characters. So it becomes easier to read, though the book on the whole is quite grim.
Individual characters suffer and die, humanity suffers from fatal hubris, the vultures have a great time.

At a recent book exchange, I gave away a copy of The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature., by Philip Ball, an editor for Nature.
The book covers the structure and development of patterns in nature: bubbles, waves, animal and plant bodies, branching patterns in trees and rivers, convection patterns in boiling water on a scale of minutes and in the earth’s crust on a scale of millions of years.
The book has good, detailed explanations; history of the scientific concepts, and beautiful pictures. It doesn’t have enough math and computation for my taste, though. It seemed to me that a small amount of not-particurlarly advanced math or modeling would make the points more clearly. The book mentioned several times that the phenomena were modelled by cellular automata. I’d be curious to find out how. The book has references to the scientific papers, so one could look the works up in the original, should one have the time and/or skill.
It is a good complement to The Computational Beauty of Nature, which has overlapping subject matter, covers a narrower range of patterns, and explains the basic math behind the concepts.
I bought the book at “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, an independent bookstore in San Francisco. I’d never been there before, and it was very impressive that they had it in stock. Oxford University Press, paperback 2001. I definitely got the impression that the books were selected by humans rather than best-seller algorithms.

On the plane ride to and from Florida, I read “The Moor’s Last Sigh” by Salman Rushdie. It was a hyperlink tendril from some reading I was doing last fall about Andalusia.
The book is full sharp satire, rich description, verbal creativity, high drama. It’s an overstuffed saga of a Portugese-Christian-Jewish-Indian family of traders, artists and mobsters, set in Cochin and Bombay from the late 19th century to the late 20th.
The narrator and main character is nicknamed “The Moor”, after a legend that the family descends from Boabdil, the Moorish king who turned the keys to the last Moorish stronghold over to the Spanish.
Written while Rushdie was in hiding from the Ayatolla’s Fatwah, one of the novel’s themes is the passing away of a vibrant, crazily passionate diverse and mixed society, replaced by a world where the power of fanaticism is superseded only by the depth of corruption.
The darkness of the book’s plot is exceeded by the darkness of its characters.
The Moor was born with a crippled right hand, and suffers from a form of progeria in which he ages twice as quickly as normal people. His temperament is passive; he is almost always the pawn of clever and vicious people around him. His emotional landscape is full of shame and self-hatred.
The most dramatic character is the Moor’s mother, Aurora, an artist whose brilliance and love is often surpassed by her betrayals and cruelty. Over and over in the book, love turns into betrayal. Artistic gifts and true love don’t redeem very much.
Overall, the novel is hard to get through, because of the bleak emotional dynamic and the pacing. For a novel in which so many outrageous things happen, the novel is curiously static, like a nightmare. The pacing makes narrative sense given the denouement, which I won’t give away.
It was worth reading, but I am not sure whether or not to recommend it.

One of my favorite anecdotes in the book was about an errands marketplace.
A group of researchers in Eugene, Oregon experimented with a digital version of the community errands list; in which mobile devices negotiate about sharing tasks such as picking up dry cleaning, buying stamps at the post office, picking up a book at the library.
This is an academic research project, so it includes wearable computers using game-theory-based agent software to negotiate the exchange of tasks, using a system of points accounting for difficulty and distance.
The algorithm may be overkill; one can imagine a simpler, pub-sub, hackable version of this whereby people publish their errand list, and others can click off tasks. Perhaps with an Ebay-like reputation system and security levels if the group gets big enough. Might work for a block association or co-housing group or apartment building.